HIST 102 #5 - Zwingli and the Radical Reformation

Hello, welcome back to Western Civilization 102. Our lecture series for these topics. Today, we have a very interesting topic. Dr. Price will go more in-depth with a very pivotal, pivotal figure in Western civilization, and his name, of course, is Martin Luther.

Now, Martin Luther, as we will discover, is extremely important because of what he creates, what he begins, I guess you could say, with the Protestant Reformation. Now, in previous lectures, Dr. Robinson has discussed the Catholic Church doctrines. Dr. Robinson mentioned how can you be saved? And that's according to the church, you have to have faith and good works. Do good works, and then you could be saved. Dr. Robinson also mentioned that there are the different sacraments that kind of stay with you throughout your whole life, communion and baptism, and even extreme unction, that's when the priest gives you the last rite. So, these different sacraments, I've mentioned only a few, but they will kind of go with us throughout our whole lives, as Dr. Robinson mentioned in one of his lectures.

So, now, if you can kind of touch back a little bit on that knowledge, we will see that not everyone, um, feels comfortable doing everything that the church is saying to do. Not everyone feels like that this will work, that they will be saved, of course. And the man of the hour, at least this hour, of course, is Martin Luther. Dr. Price will take you back and and explain how Martin Luther comes to his conclusions that will, of course, differ from the Catholic Church doctrine. It is extremely interesting that, you know, Martin Luther actually was a monk, and he kept asking himself the question, what must I do to be saved? I don't feel good. I don't feel like I'm being saved. I know I have faith, and yeah, I did good works, but I just still don't feel it. And so he's tormenting himself, as we will discover in this upcoming lecture, but he's tormenting himself, um, trying to answer that question. And eventually, he does answer it after much soul searching and reading of the Bible.

Martin Luther will determine that you only need faith, justification by faith alone, that you can read the Bible yourself, that, um, he did believe in some of the sacraments. He didn't believe in all of them, okay? But he does keep a few of the church sacraments. He does still believe in communion, and he does still believe in baptism, infant, of course, not adult. That's another lecture, another story that involves a radical part of the Reformation. I know it's crazy, adult baptism, radical, but there, that's the case. But Martin Luther believed in communion like the church did, and he also believed in baptism, infant. But Martin Luther's communion is not going to, um, there will be differences. In fact, the issue of communion that, as you know, you'll see throughout the upcoming lectures, even Protestants have problems with, um, the definition of communion, what it really means. We already know that with the church doctrine, it means it's called transubstantiation. The bread and the wine are being transformed into the body and the blood of Christ. That changes with the Protestant Reformation.

And another interesting thing about Luther is that, you know, he, of course, was a monk, but he ends up marrying a nun. He broke up one of a group of nuns and he married them all off, and there was one left, the last one to be married off, and he took her, married her, and seemed to be very happy, as all accounts. So he married, had kids, um, and managed to live a natural life, a healthy life. There were a few times in there during his lifetime that it looked a little iffy for Martin Luther, that he could have been executed, as others were. You've heard in past lectures that a man named Huss was given safe passage by the church to attend the Council of Constance, and he was captured, arrested, and burned at the stake. So, you know, Martin Luther, when he, he posted called his 95 Theses, it's his opinions on what he believed is necessary for salvation and everything else like that. And now that we have writing and pamphlets and books, they spread his ideas, spread all over Europe. The church is not very happy with Martin Luther, not very happy at all.

So again, I find it extremely, um, fortunate for Luther that he managed to die a natural death. He can, of course, thank his ruler in Saxony, his name was Frederick the Wise, for at one point taking Luther and hiding him. He actually hid out because the church was not happy. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was not happy with Luther as well, because Charles V had a lot of different territories in Europe, vast number of territories, and they were all different. Charles V felt that the church was the glue, the glue that would hold all of his territories together. And, uh, so he's not happy with Martin Luther and these new ideas that are coming out here. But, you know, Charles V, as you will find out in Dr. Price's lecture, he's a bit busy. He has lots of things happening, um, that he has to deal with. He has to deal with France. There were problems with France. There was a threat from the Ottoman Empire, you've heard of the Ottoman Empire, kind of centered in present-day Turkey. So he had to deal with that as well. Basically, Charles V had too much on his plate, and Luther, that was very fortunate for Luther.

Um, Luther is extremely important because it doesn't end with Luther. We will, uh, in future lectures, we'll discuss other Protestant reformers and how they differ and are the same at times with Luther. Discuss men like Ulrich Zwingli, um, of Switzerland, and John Calvin, originally in France, he goes to Switzerland and reorganizes the City of Geneva. Calvin, of course, is very influential to the United States, to America, because he influences a group in England known as the Puritans. The Puritans, of course, the Puritans will end up settling in Massachusetts Bay, um, and of course, North American history, very important religiously to the Protestant Reformation. There's definitely a tie. All right, well, let's find out more about Martin Luther and what he believed and and what happened in this period.

Last time, Dr. Robinson talked about Martin Luther and the religious Reformation that he began in the town of Wittenberg in the Holy Roman Empire in 1517. Now, Luther's Reformation would undergo some serious change and development even during his own lifetime. What had begun essentially as a revolution in Christian doctrine would become a political and social revolution, and would continue to develop and evolve religiously as well over the next few decades. In fact, we could say it continues to evolve today. Uh, basically, once Luther had opened the the Pandora's box of religious innovation and ended the Roman Catholic Church's control and hegemony over religion in Western Europe, religious innovation, religious change, religious development would continue. And since religion was the social and political glue that held the West together, it was inevitable that social change would follow upon religious change.

The Protestant Reformation had some interesting social consequences almost from the very beginning of Luther's ministry. The most interesting one occurred in the 1520s. From the beginning, Lutheranism in Germany had been a popular movement among various levels of German society. But even though a lot of people from a lot of different levels of German society followed Luther, they certainly did not all understand what Luther was trying to say. In 1524, peasants in Southwestern Germany were inspired by Luther's writings about Christians being free. Luther had argued that Christians were free in their own hearts, and these peasants decided that Luther meant that they should also be free of their feudal obligations to pay dues and work for their lords. And these peasants staged a revolt. The revolts spread very rapidly into Central Germany, and as it did, it became increasingly violent. The peasants not only demanded the end of their feudal obligations, but they killed their lords, they killed their lord's families, they burned their houses down, they killed monks, they raided monasteries, they, they did enormous damage as this peasants revolt, or The Peasants' War, as the Germans call it, spread.

Now, in fairness, I need to point out that not all historians agree as to the causes of this war. Historians disagree as to whether this controversy was primarily based on religion or primarily based on a growing tension, social tension within Germany itself, between the the peasant classes and the the the leading classes, between the the middle class and some parts of Germany and the upper class. Some historians like to like to regard this as essentially beginning as a class warfare revolt, and they call it sort of the last war of the mid of the late Middle Ages. But I think nevertheless, we have to agree that this war from 1524 to 25 was heavily influenced by the rhetoric of Luther's Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church. And this, the rhetoric of the Reformation, uh, was probably, along with the underlying economic tensions of the time, tended to stimulate the revolt and tended to to sort of lead more and more peasants into becoming involved in this revolt. The Peasants' Revolt would not have begun in Germany, certainly, had the peasants been happy with their lot, but the ideas and tensions that accompanied the Reformation in Germany stimulated the revolt to happen when it did.

Peasant uprisings had been occurring all over Europe before the Reformation, and especially in southern Germany, but none had been as dreadful, none had been as violent as this one. At its height in the spring and summer of 1525, the Peasant Revolt spread into the southern and western and central areas of what is today modern Germany, plus into neighboring France and Switzerland and Austria. Historians estimate that as many as 300,000 peasant rebels were involved in it, 300,000. Uh, it was Europe's largest and most widespread peasant revolt until the French Revolution in 1789.

The Peasant Revolt eventually began to approach Wittenberg, where Luther still lived and taught. Luther had been sympathetic to the peasants' demands in the past, but he still believed that people ought to know their place in society, and he still believed that the peasants should maintain order, should be at peace, should fulfill their feudal obligations. As the peasants moved toward Wittenberg, Luther became more and more angry, more and more fearful, and he wrote a startling pamphlet in reaction to the peasants' revolt. And this pamphlet is called, great title, Against the Murdering Hordes of Peasants. It's a pretty remarkable pamphlet. He called upon the German nobility to simply kill, wipe out the rebellious peasants. He appealed to the nobles to be quote, both judge and executioner. He ordered the nobles to quote, knock down, strangle, and stab the peasants until they were white from the face of the earth. He even went on to say, such wonderful times are these that one prince can get to heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer. Wow.

Now, you might be saying at the moment, wait a minute, I thought that Luther said that nobody could get into heaven through works, they could only get into heaven through faith, and certainly wiping out peasants is a fair amount of work. Um, but one of the characteristics of Luther's thought throughout his books and pamphlets is inconsistency. Luther often made arguments that seemed inconsistent with his earlier works. Indeed, that's one of the, one of the drawbacks of Martin Luther's works, is he often made arguments that never quite took him as far as he needed to go, and he often made arguments that were as, as emotional as they were reasonable, as emotional as they were logical. And this is a case right here. This is one time when he didn't think very much at all.

In 1525, the princes and nobles regained their composure, and they put down the peasants' revolt with incredible savagery. In fact, they did precisely what Luther asked them to do. In one great battle, they wiped out almost all of the peasants. When the peasants realized that they had had lost, they tried to surrender, and the German Knights tore them to pieces. Into the peasant revolt. Now, that pamphlet that Luther wrote against the murdering hordes of peasants would would essentially end Lutheranism in Germany as a popular movement. That pamphlet seemed to show that Luther was somebody who wished to preserve the status quo, preserve the political order, had no desire to see a better life for the common people. It indicated that Luther was cited firmly with the upper classes, with the leading classes in Germany, and was less interested in the plight of the poor. As a result, later German peasants would be drawn to other Protestant movements like Calvinism and something we're going to talk about in a few minutes called Anabaptism, not the same as as the Baptist, it's called the Anabaptists.

On the other hand, the German princes loved Luther. Not only had he declared in his writings that they should be the head of the church in their territory, as well as the head of the state, but now he also designated them as the upholders of of order, the upholders of social and political justice. The people were no longer enthusiastic Lutherans, but Luther's works, especially the murdering hordes of peasants pamphlet, drew even more North German princes into the Lutheran fold. As a result, in Germany, after 1525, the conflict between Catholicism and Lutheranism ceased to be a struggle for the hearts and minds of the common people, and more and more became a political battle, uh, between Lutheran and Catholic princes.

Now, let's turn our attention to the spread of Protestantism that resulted from Luther's reforms. After Luther published the books that contained his basic ideas in 1520, a lot of German people liked his ideas and became followers of the Lutheran movement, became in essence Protestants. The reasons they liked Luther's ideas were, of course, not always the same. Some folks became Lutherans, and I think it's okay to use the term Lutheran at this point, because they thought he was right. They read his books, and they were convinced that salvation came from faith and not from the good works that were stressed by the Roman Catholic Church. They read his books, they understood his theology, and they decided that Luther was right and the Catholic Church was wrong. So, some become Lutherans out of profound religious convictions. Others like Luther because he defied authority. Luther was a pretty earthy guy. His writings were not well-constructed arguments, often the case. They were full of all sorts of insults leveled at the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman clergy, and especially the Pope. He called the Roman Catholic Church a licentious den of thieves and said that Rome outdid Sodom and Babylon in its immorality and evil. He called the Popes, the Popes all kinds of names, the nicest of which is devils. That was a fairly mild one that he used. Just like today, a lot of people admired that kind of rhetoric, that kind of emotion, that kind of, let's face it, anger, and so they joined the Lutheran movement.

Now, as part of this defiance of authority, people also liked what Luther said about freedom. Some of them misconstrued it, misinterpreted it. In in one of his main books, which was entitled The Freedom of a Christian, Luther explained that a Christian was spiritually free, spiritually free, no matter what his social status, no matter what his lot in life, no matter who he was or where he was. Um, now, some people, as I've said earlier, believe that this meant that people should be politically free or people should be economically free, and this was certainly not what Luther was trying to say. What Luther was saying is people should be spiritually free. That is, they are free to worship, they are free to commune with God in in the way that they want to do that. Uh, these, again, we've looked at the German peasants and their response to Luther's, Luther's pamphlet, Freedom of a Christian, and this misinterpretation, as we've already seen, would cause some serious problems down the road, not only in Germany but for other areas of the West as well.

Other folks liked Luther's attacks on the wealth of the church. Now, not only did the church pay no taxes, it collected enormous taxes all over the West, and a lot of people thought that while many Christians went hungry, many Christians were in need, the church was far too rich and far too possessive of its own wealth to help its own people. It had strayed away from the original Christian message of of help, the original Christian idea of of doing for others, and the original Christian idea of spirituality rather than secularity. That is, many people complained that the Roman Catholic Church was far too secular and no longer spiritual enough.

Well, a lot of powerful figures, princes and folks like that in Germany, really liked the idea that Luther said that the the prince should be responsible for the church in his state, that essentially the prince would be the leader of the church rather than the the clergy or a hierarchy, bishops and archbishops and so forth. Um, we should remember that tithing, that is paying a tax to the Roman Church, was a matter of giving 10% of your wealth to the to the Roman Catholic Church every year. In the 1500s, tithing was not a voluntary activity. Every person who made an income was required to pay this tax. And and, uh, what this essentially meant was that in the various little principalities of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, uh, these princes looked at all the wealth of the church in their lands and all of the wealth that the Catholic Church took from their state every year with a certain amount of apprehension and fear. These princes in Northern Germany began to say to themselves, you know, if I were to become a Lutheran, as the head of the church in my state, I can collect that tithe, I can collect that church tax that the Catholic Church is now collecting and literally taking out of the country, and I can use it for religious purposes. I'll be able to control the church wealth in my own lands and not have to watch those taxes go to Rome, not have to watch a fairly large amount of the land in my principality become the property of the church. I can use some of those resources for my own needs and for the needs of the realm. And in fact, many Lutheran princes believed that this was the case. A prince could use money that would have gone to Rome to establish schools, an orphanage, and alms houses for increasing, uh, at home to help the poor and needy and to support the needs of the state.

German princes also saw the potential for increasing their political power through control of the church in their territory. They regarded the Roman Catholic Church as an outside influence, essentially a foreign influence within their lands, and they realized that Lutheranism gave them the opportunity to control the church and to control the messages that the church sent out to the people of their state. As a result, Lutheranism became a favored choice among many German princes, especially in the northern, uh, part of the Holy Roman Empire, the northern states of the Holy Roman Empire. These northern states were, were in many ways different from the southern part of Germany. The northern states were more heavily involved in trade, they were more heavily involved in economic activity, they were generally wealthier than the southern states of the of the Holy Roman Empire. The southern principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, uh, these, uh, leaders from these states were tired of sending an awful lot of their money out to be used to pay for Italian competitors, to to pay for Italian artists and craftsmen. These German princes in the north were pretty savvy about about trade and merchant activity, and they were tired of watching a great deal of the capital within their state, the disposable money, being sent south to be used, lavished on Northern Italy, which were essentially their trade part, their trade competitors. And so these, these folks who led, or these princes in places like Saxony or Hamburg in the north, believed that as Lutheran princes, they could use the use the money that the church had originally brought in, that they would now be bringing in as leaders in the church, for to promote greater prosperity and to support their own principalities.

Finally, we also have to admit that a lot of Germans just liked Luther's verbal abuses of Italians. Germans and Italians had been natural, especially the North Italians, had been natural competitors since the the 1200s, 11 and 1200s, and and Luther, in some of his pamphlets that he wrote in 1520, blasted the Italians, especially in one called A Letter to the German Nobility. Luther called on the German princes to take over the church in Germany and kick out all of the Italians who were robbing poor Germans to send money to Italian Popes.

Now, Lutheranism and Lutheran theology spread quite quickly throughout the northern part of the Holy Roman Empire, Germany, and from there it spread fairly quickly into Denmark and then into Sweden, into areas of Scandinavia. It never really took hold in southern Germany to the degree that it did in the North. It stimulated though, even their lively debates and often, I should say, deadly debates over the nature of Christianity, and quickly found individual supporters all over Europe.

Now, one of the basic principles of Lutheranism and and indeed one of the basic principles of Protestantism in general is the idea that religious authority rests in the Bible. In the Catholic Church, if you have a question about about doctrine, if you have a question about your religion, well, you go to your priest, and if your priest can't answer it, then he goes to the bishop, and the bishop can't answer it, he goes to the Archbishop, and if the Archbishop can't answer it, he goes to the Pope. We assume if the Pope can't answer it, he he goes to God. In the, there is essentially a hegemony, that is a a layer of of authority within the Roman Catholic Church, and if you have a question, you go through that layer of authority. Luther and later Protestants say, if you have a question, the appropriate place for you to go to answer that question is the Bible, the scripture.

Now, one of the first things that Luther does, one of the most important things that he does, is he takes the Vulgate Bible, which is that was at the time the Latin Bible used in Roman Catholicism, and he translates it into German. European Protestants began to use the vernacular Bibles, that is Bibles not written in Latin, but Bibles written in their own native language. So they didn't have to be extremely well educated, they didn't have to be a member of the educated elite that spoke Latin. Now, every German, and later every Frenchman, as the Bible, an Englishman, as the Bible's translated into other languages, Swedish, Danish, first German, English, French, these folks can now go to the Bible and read the scripture in their own language for the first time. The Bible became for Protestants the authoritative answer to all questions.

Now, as I said before, Luther himself translated the New Testament into German in 1521. This German New Testament became a 16th century bestseller, and it wouldn't be long before the Bible was translated into other vernacular languages as well. You can probably guess that it also wouldn't be long before people began to read the Bible on their own, and as often as not, individuals would begin to come up with some ideas that weren't the same as Luther's. In other words, the opportunity for everybody to read the scripture and interpret it for themselves made it not only possible, but extremely likely that all kinds of different people would come up with different ideas about how to interpret God's word and how religion should work, how the Christian religion should work. In other words, from the beginning, Protestantism began to split into different movements based on other people's interpretations of scripture.

The first non-Lutheran Protestant movement was that of a Swiss preacher named Ulrich Zwingli. Say that again, Ulrich Zwingli, which began really fast, in fact, by 1521, within a year after Luther had published those books. Now, who was Ulrich Zwingli? He was a Catholic priest who lived in the Swiss city of Zurich. He had been a chaplain for Swiss soldiers, and he was quite a biblical scholar. He read Luther's 95 Theses, remember that's the the arguments against indulgences that gets the whole thing going, with some fascination. He followed Luther's debates with Johann Eck and other other Roman Catholic, uh, clergymen. When Martin Luther published his pamphlets in 1520, Zwingli was so impressed by the new theology, by Luther's ideas, that he converted his congregation over to Lutheranism. He transformed his congregation in Zurich from a Roman Catholic Church to the Lutheran Church. He also began to correspond, write letters back and forth with Martin Luther, but quite soon the two began to realize that there was a fair amount of difference in their ideas about Christianity. And I want to talk about three of those important differences.

Now, number one, Zwingli became more and more convinced of the correctness of the doctrine of predestination. What's predestination? Predestination is the idea that God has already chosen who will be saved, who will go to heaven, and who will be damned, who will go to hell, long before the world was even created. Predestination means that there's really nothing anybody can do about their lot. The the notion of of who's going to be saved and who's going to be damned has already been made by God, and if you're, pardon the expression, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Now, we're going to talk a lot more about predestination when we talk about John Calvin down the road. So, for now, just write it down that, um, Zwingli believed in predestination, and write C lecture on John Calvin, which is going to be a later lecture, and and that way we can we can pass it by right now and move on to some other stuff.

Now, the notion of predestination scared the heck out of Luther. He disliked it intensely. It was a logical conclusion that Luther should have come to once he got on the road to saying that man is saved through faith alone. If none of us is deserving of salvation, if man is saved only through faith, if the best thing we can do is have faith that we are saved, then the logical next step in this argument is the notion that God's already decided who's to be saved and who's not. After all, he is omnipotent and omnipresent, he's omniscient, he knows everything, he is everywhere at all times, he is all-powerful. But it's a place Luther didn't want to go. It's scary. We're going to talk more about that when we talk about Calvin. Uh, so Luther simply avoided taking that logical step and said, man is saved through faith alone. So that's the first thing. Zwingli believes in predestination, somewhere that Luther doesn't want to go.

Number two, Zwingli believed so much in the religious authority that rested in scripture that he believed that church services should be exclusively devoted to reading and explaining the Bible. There shouldn't be anything that took the congregation's mind off of the study of the scripture. And so Zwingli destroyed all the statues, he broke all the stained glass windows, he even removed the organ from the church. He didn't want any singing to detract from hearing the word of God. Well, Luther liked him, he liked music, heck, he even wrote some hymns, and he thought that Zwingli was going way too far with this business.

Now, the third and the most important differences between Luther and Zwingli was a difference over the nature of the communion, that is the Eucharist. In the Catholic Church, the communion is based on the doctrine of transubstantiation, the notion that a miracle takes place during communion in which the wine and wafer are are essentially transformed into the the the the blood and body of Jesus Christ. Luther didn't like the idea of transubstantiation, he found it appalling, but he still believed that Christ was present in the communion. Characteristically, Luther refused to speculate on just how this was supposed to work, but he was content to say that he believed that the presence of Christ in the communion was miraculous and therefore it defied explanation. Now, Catholic Church believes a miracle takes place, wine, wine and and wafer are changed into the blood and body of Jesus Christ. Lutherans believe that Christ is present in the communion, but they're a little vague as to how. Zwingli believed that communion wasn't a miracle at all, uh, but only a Thanksgiving service in commemoration of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ. Zwingli believed that communion was an opportunity to renew the the covenant of the congregation with God, but he denied that any miracle took place at all.

Well, so now there are three very important, very basic problems, uh, between the Zwinglians and the Lutherans. In, uh, in 1529, Zwingli and Luther met in the city of Marburg in the German Lutheran state of Hesse to resolve these differences. The meeting was organized by the the ruler of Hesse, a fellow by the name of Prince of of Prince Philip the First. He was, it was attended by a number of Protestant leaders. Philip hoped that he could resolve all these various differences and unite the the Protestant Church cause together. And at first, the discussions were pretty successful. Protestant leaders were able to find common ground on 14 points of theology and doctrine. But then the discussion came around to the nature of the communion, and they fell apart. Luther and Zwingli began to argue vehemently. It turned into a shouting contest. The discussion quickly degenerated further with these two great church leaders, Luther and Zwingli, shouting Bible passages at each other at the top of their voices. Uh, Luther cited the famous passage in Corinthians, "This is my body, this is my blood," to show that there was a indeed a relationship, a presence in the communion. Uh, Zwingli focused on the Gospel of John, in which Christ says, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever," which is essentially a metaphor, bread being the gospel, the truth, and whoever accepts Jesus will be saved. In other words, what, what Zwingli is saying is it's just a metaphor, it's not an actual miracle. The debate just got out of hand. Finally, Zwingli shouted, "No, no, you must change your tune. John 6 will break your neck." It got really quiet in the room, and Luther coldly replied, "Our necks do not break so easily. Remember, you are in Hesse now, and not in Switzerland." It was essentially a threat. And that's the point when the debates broke up, and Zwingli returned to Switzerland, and Luther returned to Wittenberg.

Well, you might be saying to yourself at this point, you know, it's funny, I, I, I don't remember a Zwinglian church anywhere in the Protestant movement. And there's a good reason for that. In 1530, Zwingli decided that God wanted him to spread Protestantism by force throughout Switzerland. He, he got the city of Zurich to wage war on all of its Catholic neighbors, and in 1531, he was defeated by a combined Catholic army. He was captured, executed, his body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered to the winds so that he would not be, his tomb wouldn't be a place for people to to go and remember him. And that was pretty much the end of Zwinglianism. But before Zwingli and his church disappeared, a number of spin-offs would be created in Switzerland, some of which are even still around today. The most important of those is called the Anabaptist movement. Anabaptist, not the Baptist, they come from a different religious tradition, but the Anabaptist movement. So we need to talk about them for a little while.

The Anabaptists emerged as an independent Protestant movement pretty much the same way that the Zwinglians did. Its leaders read the Bible and found stuff in it that tended to disagree with Zwingli. A number of the members of Zwingli's church came to the conclusion after reading the Bible that there is no biblical authority for infant baptism. There's nothing in the New Testament that says anybody was baptizing infants, and in fact, it's, it's quite true, infants were baptized in the Middle Ages so that they would receive baptism before they perhaps died because infant mortality was so high. So these folks went to Zwingli and they said, we think you're doing it wrong. We think that infant baptism is not valid. We think that every adult Christian should make the choice to be re-baptized. And that's where the word Anabaptist comes from. Well, Zwingli liked infant baptism, and he tried to argue with these folks that infant baptism was okay. They kept insisting, it ain't in the Bible, so it isn't okay. So in the best tradition of religious toleration and understanding, Zwingli had them expelled from Zurich. They wandered into southern and western Germany and into Alpine Switzerland. They picked up a lot of followers. They also picked up additional ideas from the Bible and and further developed and further broke up some of these ideas. I think you'll probably agree were a little goofy, but I'll talk about them.

One of the Psalms says that we should shout the Lord's praises from the rooftops. So some of these Anabaptists did so literally in parts of Alpine Germany and Switzerland. Houses are built with flat places on the roof so that family members can go up to the roof and shout the Lord's praises from them. Matthew 18 in the New Testament says that no one can enter heaven except as a little child. Some Anabaptists would dress up in diapers and drink from baby bottles because they interpreted the scripture as, uh, not metaphorical, but as absolute. So they decided that they would, they would, they would dress in diapers and act like babies because that was the only way they could get into heaven. Some young men tried to convince young women that they could not get into heaven as virgins because to get into heaven, you must give up quote, all that you hold most dear. We can probably feel free to question the honesty and sincerity of the motives of these young men. One fellow even copied Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament, by putting hot coal on his tongue so that he could declare that he had unclean lips. Unfortunately, after he put a red hot coal on his tongue, he found that he couldn't really declare much of anything.

Now, these acts were pretty silly, but others got some of these Anabaptist Protestant sects into an awful lot of trouble. The most serious, the most difficult, was that some of these folks read the passage of Matthew that says, "swear not at all," and they interpreted the passage to mean that they could not take any loyalty oath to any worldly entity. They could not take any loyalty oath to any worldly entity. Now, what that means is they couldn't sign a loyalty oath, they couldn't pledge allegiance to a ruler or state, they couldn't give give testimony in court because they couldn't swear the oath to tell the truth, they couldn't do any of that stuff. They couldn't pledge to pay off their debts because that requires essentially a pledge which is an oath that says that you will pay your debts. Um, even a credit card slip has to be signed with a pledge before you pay it. They couldn't take an oath to bear arms in defense of the state. As a result of this, many of them were tried for treason as well as heresy all over Europe, because the Anabaptist movement very quickly spread all the way from Switzerland up into Holland, across Germany, and into France. Anabaptists were were pushed all over Europe, and a favorite form of execution for these folks when they when they were convicted was drowning. After all, the state said, if you want to be baptized again, we'll, by golly, we'll baptize you permanently. Yeah.

The Anabaptists were persecuted throughout Europe, but they certainly didn't disappear. They still exist, especially in the United States, where there are two large groups of Anabaptists who live mostly in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. One is the Mennonites, who are very numerous in Ohio, and the other one, the more conservative group that we tend to see more about, are called the Amish. Sometimes they're called the Pennsylvania Dutch, really should be Pennsylvania Deutsch, Pennsylvania Germans. The Amish are very numerous in Western Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and they're the ones who resist technology. They they don't wear buttons, oh, they don't use zippers because zippers are too new fashion. They don't wear buttons, they, they don't drive cars, and and these, these Amish are the ones who resist modern technology, and they are a fairly substantial group of folks in the Midwest and western Pennsylvania.

So what's, what's it all mean? The Protestant Reformation spread through Europe, and as it spread, the ideas of the Reformation developed into a number of different denominations of Protestantism, and that development would continue even down to today. We might say, and the differences that create new and different Protestant sects are based on individuals reading the Bible and coming up with their own interpretation, their own conclusions. What Protestant Christianity in the mid-1500s needed was for somebody to come along to resolve some of those issues and produce a well-argued exposition of on Protestant doctrine and Protestant organization. And as we're going to see in a couple of lectures, this would happen, and the person who would make it happen was a Frenchman by the name of John Calvin. But before we talk about Calvin in this course, Dr. Robinson will take up another Reformation in the West in the next lecture, and it is called the English Reformation.

Well, uh, seems to me that, um, that religious piece of Augsburg definitely was a win for the Protestant Reformation, since it recognized Luther's religion, or Lutheranism, as you could call it. We've just discovered that from Dr. Price's lecture, it's now a legal religion. Now, that's Lutheranism, and as pointed out, not Calvinism. There were differences between the two, not all Protestant reformers are the same. And also, it stated that each German prince or state could decide what religion it wanted. Definite win, even for the princes, for them to be able to choose whether they will go with the church or with Lutheranism. That was extremely important. Okay, well, our next lecture discusses another Protestant reformer by the name of Zwingli. Until next time.