Lutheran church organization and confessionalization

The 1525 revolution was but one of several upheavals worrying German rulers. Three years earlier a group of imperial knights led by Franz von Sickingen had declared a feud against the archbishop of Trier, claiming to derive from scripture their right to despoil Roman Catholic prelates. The ensuing “Knights’ War” was quickly crushed. But about the same time a disturbance broke out in Wittenberg where, during Luther’s exile in the Wartburg, a group of reforming spiritualist activists forced the city council to abolish many traditional Catholic practices. Upset by this rash move, Luther intervened to reverse it. But this incident and the knights’ attack caused consternation among the heads of government, who feared loss of control. Their anxiety was deepened by the spread from Switzerland in the mid-1520s of Anabaptism, a radical religious movement whose most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. The events of 1525 thus strengthened a growing resolution that firm structures and clear doctrines were needed to reassert authority in a situation of drift.

The foreign entanglements of the Habsburgs, champions of Catholicism in Germany, helped free Lutheran states to act on this resolution. Far from seeing to the execution of the 1521 edict against Luther, Charles V left his brother Ferdinand in charge of imperial affairs and departed from Germany after the Worms diet to deal with the many problems besetting his far-flung interests. The most perilous of these was the war with France, which implicated the emperor in a constantly shifting balance of alliances with other powers and in a seesaw of military actions in which sometimes Charles had the upper hand and sometimes Francis I did. Charles’s victory at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 led to the formation of a coalition against him (the so-called “Holy League of Cognac”), intended to forestall Habsburg hegemony in Europe (a scenario to be replayed many times in the following two centuries). In 1526, therefore, Charles was in no position to dictate to the German estates on the Lutheran matter. Within a year, however, the situation turned in his favour. Spanish troops captured and plundered Rome in 1527, and by 1529 Charles was dominant once more, though it had become clear that neither warring party could bring the other to its knees. At the same time a potentially fatal danger loomed in the east where the Turks, under Süleyman I (the Magnificent), began to aim their path of conquest at the Balkans and Hungary. The death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 put Ferdinand in line for the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns, thereby exposing the already overextended Habsburgs on a new front. By 1529 the Turks were moving toward Buda (now part of Budapest), which they captured in September of that year, and Vienna. Facing these perils, Charles concluded peace with France, sealing his triumph in the west with his coronation as emperor at Bologna, Italy. He then returned to Germany.

These events formed the larger political context in which Lutheran church organization took place. Forced to solicit military aid from the estates in 1526, Ferdinand postponed implementation of the Worms edict, accepting a declaration by the Diet of Speyer of that year to the effect that every estate “will, with its subjects, act, live, and govern in matters touching the Worms edict in a way each can justify before God and his Imperial Majesty.” This declaration gave Lutheran rulers the signal to proceed with their intended legal, administrative, financial, and liturgical reforms, and the years following 1526 saw the construction in every Lutheran territory of what amounted to a state church, headed by the ruling prince.

In 1529 this process was interrupted when, following the emperor’s military successes, Ferdinand demanded at a diet, also held in Speyer, that, pending a general council to decide the religious issue, Lutherans and other religious dissenters should end their separation. (It was the “protest” of a number of princes and cities against this abrogation of the earlier Speyer decree that attached to the followers of Luther and other Reformation theologians the name “Protestants.”) By then Protestants were no longer a united party. Luther and Zwingli had met at Marburg in 1529 in an attempt to iron out differences, but they could not agree on the question of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. While a few Lutheran princes prepared for military action, a compromise-minded group led by the humanist Philipp Melanchthon, who dreaded the prospect of fragmentation within Protestantism, drew up a moderate outline of Lutheran positions. These were presented for discussion at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, which was attended by the emperor. The Augsburg Confession, which became a fundamental statement of Lutheran belief, assumed that reconciliation with the Catholics was still possible. This view was shared by Charles, who was pushing the pope toward the summoning of a general council to mend the religious split. Negotiations among theologians and politicians, however, came to nothing, and the end result was that, with the Augsburg Confession rejected by Catholic theologians, Lutheranism was outlawed again. The militant Protestant faction, led by Philip, landgrave of Hesse, now established a formal organization of resistance, the Schmalkaldic League (1531), and the empire moved toward armed conflict as Lutherans became not just a political party but a military force as well.

About this time much more rigid standards of religious orthodoxy and conformity were imposed. This development has been called “confessionalization,” a concept used by some historians to define developments in the empire during the mid-16th century. Confessionalization completed the process, under way since the late Middle Ages, of meshing religious and church politics with the objectives of the state. Central to this process was the institution of a territorial religion that was based on an authorized declaration of doctrines (a “Confession”) binding on all subjects and implemented by an established church responsible to the ruler (or, in city states, to the magistrates). Tending toward exclusiveness and therefore intolerance, this system contributed to the warlike turn taken by events after 1530. More important in the long run, confessionalism promoted a social drive, also long under way, toward the inculcation of discipline and order in public and private as well as in religious and civic affairs. Through catechisms, schooling, family and welfare legislation, norms for work, and standards for personal life, state and church attempted to restructure society in accordance with the goals of what has since been called the Protestant temperament. Success was slow in coming and never more than partial. But there is no doubt that, through the confessional process, Protestantism left a deep imprint on the German character.