Reformation Thought. Alister E. McGrath

they were widely used to gain access to the most reliable text of this important writer.

      Erasmus of Rotterdam produced the first published text of the Greek New Testament in 1516. (A rival scholarly edition, developed by scholars at the Spanish university of Alcalá, was ready to print by this time, but was not actually published until 1522.) Entitled Novum Instrumentum omne, Erasmus’ work had three main sections: the original Greek text of the New Testament; a new Latin translation of this Greek text, which corrected inadequate existing translations, especially the Vulgate (see pp. 119–20); and finally, an extended commentary on the text, in the form of annotations. Despite some problems, Erasmus’ Greek text was widely respected, and came to be known as “the received text (Latin: textus receptus).”

      The work was widely used by those sympathetic to the cause of the Reformation. For the reformers – especially Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg – the religious ideas of the Reformation drew largely on the Bible and Augustine. The advent of printing, linked with increasingly effective bookselling methods, meant that accurate and reliable texts of both these sources were widely available, thus facilitating both the initial development and the subsequent spread of these ideas. Most of the great vernacular translations of the New Testament of the early Reformation period – such as William Tyndale’s English translation of 1526 – were based on Erasmus’ Greek text.

The importance of printing in spreading the ideas of the Reformation cannot be overstated. Surveys of the personal book collections of French bourgeois families point to the religious implications of this trend. Jacques Lefèvre’s French translation of the New Testament (1523), pointedly addressed “to all Christian men and women,” along with his French translation of the Psalter of 1524, were read widely throughout France and were even distributed free of charge within the reforming diocese of Meaux. Copies of these works, along with the New Testament commentaries of Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Lefèvre himself, are frequently to be found jostling for space on the shelves of bourgeois libraries in the late 1520s.

      Most printing presses were located within cities. Recent studies have noted a correlation between the presence of a printing press in a city and its attitude toward the Reformation. If a city had a printing press or publishing house in place by 1500, it was much more likely to have adopted the core ideas of the Reformation by 1600. It has long been known that the Reformation seems to have had some particular appeal to urban populations. So, was this solely due to the presence of printing presses and publishers in urban contexts, or were there other factors of importance?

      The Urban Context of the Reformation

      The cities of Europe played an important role in the development of the Reformation. The northern European Reformation emerged largely in the self-governing cities of this region, such as Basle and Strasbourg. In Germany, more than fifty of the sixty-five autonomous “Imperial Cities” responded positively to the Reformation, with only five choosing to ignore it altogether. In Switzerland, the Reformation originated in an urban context (Zurich), and spread through a process of public debate within Confederate cities such as Berne and Basle and other centers – such as Geneva and St. Gallen – linked to these cities by treaty obligations. French Protestantism began as a predominantly urban movement, with its roots in major cities such as Lyons, Orléans, Paris, Poitiers, and Rouen.

      It is becoming increasingly clear that the success or failure of the Reformation in these cities was dependent in part upon political and social factors. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the city councils of the imperial cities had managed to gain a substantial degree of independence. In effect, each city seems to have regarded itself as a miniature state, with the city council functioning as a government and the remainder of the inhabitants as subjects.

      The growth in the size and importance of the cities of Germany is one of the more significant elements in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century history. It is now thought that about one tenth of the population of the Holy Roman Empire then lived in cities, ranging in size from about fifty thousand inhabitants in the case of Nuremberg to around two thousand inhabitants in most other cases. An extended food crisis, linked with the ravages of the Black Death, led to an agrarian crisis. Wheat prices dropped alarmingly in the period 1450–1520, leading to rural depopulation as agricultural workers migrated to the cities in the hope of finding food and employment. Denied access both to the trade guilds and to the city councils, discontent grew within this new urban proletariat.

The early sixteenth century thus witnessed growing social unrest in many cities, as demands for broader-based and more representative government gained momentum. In many cases, the demands for religious reform became entangled with a growing clamor for social change, so that religious and social change came to be seen as interconnected. Economic, social, and political factors help explain why the Reformation succeeded, for example, in Nuremberg and Strasbourg, yet failed in Erfurt.

      A number of theories have been advanced to explain the particular appeal of the Reformation to the populations of the great cities of western Europe. Three theories advanced during the 1970s tried to identify the reason for this appeal to urban populations. The German church historian Berndt Moeller argued that the urban sense of community had been disrupted in the fifteenth century, through growing social tension within the cities and an increasing tendency to rely upon external political bodies, such as the imperial government or the papal curia.¹ By adopting the Lutheran Reformation, Moeller suggested, such cities were able to restore a sense of communal identity, including the notion of a common religious community binding inhabitants together in a shared religious life. Significantly, Moeller drew attention to the social implications of Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (see pp. 183–5), which broke down certain traditional distinctions within urban society and encouraged a sense of communal unity.

      A second explanation was advanced by the American cultural historian Thomas A. Brady, based largely upon his analysis of the city of Strasbourg.² Brady argued that the decision to adopt Protestantism at Strasbourg was the outcome of a class struggle, in which a ruling coalition of patricians and merchants believed that their social position could be maintained only through alignment with the Reformation. The urban oligarchs thus introduced the Reformation as a subtle means of preserving their vested interests, which were threatened by a popular protest movement. A similar situation, Brady suggested, existed in many other cities.

      A third explanation of the appeal of the Reformation to sixteenth-century urban communities centers on the doctrine of justification by faith (an idea explored in detail in Chapter 7). The American church historian Steven Ozment argued that the popular appeal of Protestantism derived from its doctrine of justification by faith, which offered relief from the psychological pressure of the late medieval penitential system and an associated “semi-Pelagian” doctrine of justification.³ As the weight of this psychological burden was greatest and most evident in urban communities, he argued, it was within such communities that Protestantism found its greatest popular support.

      Ozment argued that Moeller had vastly exaggerated the differences between Luther and the theologians of the southwest. The early reformers shared a common message, which could be summarized as the liberation of individual believers from the psychological burdens imposed by late medieval religion. Whatever their differences, the magisterial reformers – such as Bucer, Zwingli, and Luther – shared a common concern to proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith through grace, thereby eliminating the theological necessity of and diminishing the popular concern for indulgences, purgatory, invocation of the saints, and so forth. The pressure for social change is thus, according to Ozment, the outcome, not the cause, of the new religious ideas of the age.

Each of these theories is significant, and together they have provided an important stimulus to the more detailed study of the development of urban Protestantism in the first phase of the Reformation. Equally, each has been shown to have obvious weaknesses, as one might expect from ambitious global theories. For example, in the case of Geneva, as we shall see, the social tensions which eventually resulted in alignment with the Protestant city of Berne and adoption of the Zwinglian Reformation did not arise