The Word of God and the End of Politics

One of the most radical aspects of Reformation theology was the way it dissolved existing distinctions between natural and spiritual, temporal and ecclesiastical, even between individual virtue and the common good. These distinctions had been crucial to the articulation of a sphere of political thought in the opening years of the sixteenth century. Protestant political thought had a distinctive character because the Reformers tended to reject the idea that politics could be a separate discipline, geared towards temporal or natural flourishing. Protestants were not uninterested in the mechanisms by which human communities could be defended or preserved, but they analysed those mechanisms in the light of their wider theological agenda. The Reformation movement soon splintered into a number of different churches and groups, but most of these groups shared the same commitment to magistracy as an instrument of God, legitimate and authoritative insofar as it followed God’s law. This chapter focuses primarily on the political thought of figures associated with the larger Protestant groups, especially Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon in Germany, and Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin in the Swiss cantons. It outlines the theories of resistance developed as Protestantism came under threat and shows how these reflected and developed Reformation principles.

Engaging Art to Teach Theology

Visual art is an often-neglected resource in the theology classroom. This essay argues that it is essential to include visual and material resources in theological education in order to present a more robust and accurate understanding of theology as it has been not only written, but also lived. Art can be incorporated into lectures and assignments in order to complement or complicate what students find in theological texts. After outlining some of the basic principles of using art to teach theology, this essay provides one such example that could be applied to a lesson on Reformation theology. It concludes with annotated bibliographies on print and digital resources.

Conclusion

This conclusion considers the hermeneutical implications of the finding that Vermigli’s work is metaphysically complex with a view to what it means for understanding the Reformation more broadly. It argues that the metaphysical complexity underlying Reformation theology helps to make sense of radically diverging contemporary readings of reformers like Luther and Calvin. It moreover contends that if the Reformation was not characterised by a univocal metaphysics only, it becomes problematic to hold a line of argument which makes of the Reformation a motor of modernity, while predicating modernity on univocal structures of being. Finally, it argues that it is historically and philosophically significant that Vermigli’s work, and Reformation theology more broadly, sustains an unresolved tension by oscillating between a participatory and a univocal metaphysical model.

Metaphysics in the Reformation

Because the magisterial reformers largely rejected metaphysical discourses, is often assumed that the Protestant Reformation had no metaphysics. However, if metaphysics is understood as the ontological relationship between God and the world, how could any theological work not be at least implicitly metaphysical? This book argues that the avowedly anti-metaphysical stance of many reformers is itself a metaphysical position, and that teasing out the implicit metaphysics in their worldviews is both possible and worthwhile despite – or even because of – their insistent denials that they have any such thing. Metaphysics in the Reformation proposes a novel methodology for studying the implied metaphysics of the Reformation, focussing on implied structures of being and causality. It then applies this methodology to the under-researched work of Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562). Analysing four main areas of Vermigli’s theology – his anthropology, his soteriology, his doctrine of the Eucharist, and his political theology – the book argues that in his theology, Vermigli simultaneously inhabits two different metaphysical models of the relationship between God and the world. The book contends that by extension, this holds true of Reformation theology more generally.

An Infinity of Relics: Erasmus and the Copious Rhetoric of John Calvin's Traité des reliques

John Calvin's “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe's fraudulent relics. Yet, theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while for Catholics prayer's intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in Calvin's humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus's satirical or devotional works, but to his rhetorical theory of copia. The “Traité” amasses a copia, an abundance, of fakes, burying the cult of relics in its own contradictions. Fusing rhetoric and proof, this mass juxtaposition subjects sacred presence to noncontradiction, patrolling vital confessional borders in Reformation theology.

The Theological Mediation

This chapter examines late modern reappropriations of the classical theology of the cross. In continuity with medieval and Reformation theology, these hold that Christ’s suffering was a divinely willed redemptive act, in vicarious satisfaction for human sin. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, emphasizes election and covenant. The theme of divine kenosis, found in nineteenth century German an English thinkers, is taken up into Orthodox trinitarian soteriology by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, with strong attention to Patristic dogma. Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses Christ’s “descent into hell” as the central symbol of the divine entry into the lost human condition. Jürgen Moltmann sees the suffering of God as the only possible theological response to the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust.

The Marian Dimension

Chapter Ten investigates the influence of these events on the Reformation dispute over the proper understanding of the Virgin Mary within Christianity. Vos and van den Esschen were executed on the eve of the festival of Mary’s Visitation and it did not take long for the rumour to spread that at the last moment, they recanted, a turn of heart attributed to Mary’s miraculous intervention and a demonstration of her agency as a saint. Aware of the dangers posed by an overly aggressive critique of Marian piety, supporters of Reformation theology responded in gentle and subtle ways. This chapter offers an example of how these events became embedded in a broader Reformation debate about sainthood and the role of Mary within Christianity.