"Those Persistent Lutherans": the Survival of Wesel's Minority Lutheran Community, 1578-1612

This essay analyzes the various strategies Lutherans in the German city of Wesel pursued in securing their status as a minority church during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through petitioning their magistrates, securing competent clergy, and obtaining support from their Lutheran Diaspora and a variety of external political authorities, the Lutherans eventually achieved their goals of public worship in their own church as part of the klevish Lutheran synod.

The Moribund Moralist: Ethical Lessons in Calvin's Commentary On Joshua

Calvin's final commentary, an exposition of the book of Joshua, reflects both Calvin's immersion in and dialogue with the exegctical and theological tradition, as well as his concern with the image and identity of Reformed believers, and especially the Huguenots of France. Prominent in this commentary is Calvin's wrestling with moral issues that arise in the text. Calvin's scrupulous treatment of these moral problems reflects his concern to depict Reformed believers as people who are loyal and obedient to the authorities and to the law, and as people who are truthful and avoid deception and duplicity. It also reflects his concern that his coreligionists actually strive to live up to that image. On occasion Calvin's treatment of these moral issues ends in an unresolved tension — a tension that reflects the moral and political ambiguities that French Reformed believers faced at the beginning of the Wars of Religion in France.

The Spiritual Gospel? Christ and Human Nature in Calvin's Commentary On John

This essay examines three passages in Calvin's commentary on John (1553) in order to trace how Calvin steers away from traditional reflections on Christ's two natures in such a way as to open the door for discussions of human nature. His anthropologically-focused reading of the Fourth Gospel transforms traditional notions of what makes John so unique and special. At the same time, Calvin's approach can be seen as a culmination of a trend in Johannine interpretation introduced by Lutheran exegetes and, simultaneously, can be understood as sharing key emphases of Reformed interpreters of John.

Preaching Practice: Reformed Students' Sermons

This contribution assesses the ways in which Reformed theology students in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries learned how to preach. Based on Genevan and French sources, as well as a training manual for pastors by Andreas Hyperius, the author argues that although the sermon stood at the center of Reformed worship, the training in homiletics given to future pastors was rather haphazard. Consistency of preparation was also hampered by disputes between various church authorities over the oversight of candidates, and by the candidates' own emphasis on form over substance in their sermons, particularly in the early seventeenth century.

Humanitas as Discriminating Factor in the Educational Writings of Erasmus and Luther

Between 1520 and 1530 Desiderius Erasmus published several treatises on education in which he provides practical advice about subjects worthy of study and the ideological assumptions which support it. Drawing special attention to his understanding of the natural capabilities of humanity, this article seeks to illustrate the relation between one of Erasmus's theological premises and his promotion of classical culture. During the same period Martin Luther wrote three influential educational tracts and also engaged Erasmus in a debate over the freedom of the will, which forced both the Christian humanist and the Wittenberg reformer to express clearly their understandings of humanity in its natural state. A comparison of their divergent theological positions reveals a fundamental difference in their views of education and its value. Whereas Erasmus justifies the study of ancient secular authors by means of his positive notion of humanitas, Luther subordinates education to the theological rediscoveries of the Wittenberg reformation. The article concludes that further comparative studies of various theological presuppositions and the educational programs they support will advance the understanding of the connections between the ideals and the realities of schooling in sixteenth-century Europe.

Preaching Scripture Under Pressure in Tridentine Italy: a Case Study of Gabriele Fiamma

As the forces of Catholic reform brought bishops back to their dioceses in sixteenth-century Italy, the act of preaching came to denote very different activities for mendicants preaching to the elite and for secular clerics first learning to preach to the uneducated. One preacher, however, the Augustinian Gabriele Fiamma, demonstrates that this gulf was not unbridgeable. Fiamma wrote both extremely ornate sermons and simple guides for secular clerics, even though he himself was not a bishop at the time. In addition, he continued to make the teaching of Scripture central to both kinds of preaching. Fiamma's decisions demonstrate that preachers, as conveyers of orthodox doctrine and religious education, not only remained central to Catholic identity in the post-Tridentine era but helped to reinforce that identity by embracing different Catholic audiences within their purview.

"Anyone Who Can Read May Be a Preacher"1: Sixteenth-Century Roots of the Collegiants

Collegiantism arose in Dutch Remonstrant circles after the Synod of Dordt outlawed the Remonstrants (1619) and their leaders had been sent into exile. It offered a "church" for all, "run" by laymen without a clergy and hailed the freedom to "prophesy." Collegiantism was intended, paradoxically, to give concrete form to a "non-church," an "invisible church" of all "unpartisan" believers, one that brought believers together without binding them or passing judgment. The structural roots of Collegiantism lead to Sebastian Franck's anti-sacerdotalism and his definition of the true church as a "free, non-sectarian, party-less Christianity"; to Sebastian Castellio's rationalism, his deconstruction of the notion of heresy, and his dogmatic minimalism; to Jacob Acontius's advocacy of free prophecy in church for congregants and his insistence that possession of a monopoly of truth renders a church spiritually lazy; and to Dirck Coornhert. The latter's championship of free investigation, ideas on fairness and struggle against the ruling orthodoxy, and especially his draft for a non-partisan church, all came to fruition in the early Collegiants, who thus crafted a "confessional identity" that was not dogmatically defined but that would fill itself, due to its very nature, with radical content.