Sword & Trowel 2018: Issue 1
bloody persecution that was heaped upon them by Roman Catholic and Protestant authorities. He said, ‘It is not right, and I deeply regret it, that such pitiable people should be so mis- erably murdered, burned, and cruelly put to death. Everyone should be per- mitted to believe whatever he pleases. If he believes wrongly, he will have punishment enough in the everlast- ing fire of hell. Why should they be tortured in this life also?’ With typi- cal rough wit, Luther quipped that if false teachers must be punished by death, then the hangman becomes the best theologian. Why then did Luther’s progressive
convictions about religious liberty not find their way into the fabric of orthodox Protestantism in the 16th
century? Partly because Luther himself ultimately held back from ap- plying those convictions fully to the situation of Germany as he perceived it after the shock of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. A significant number of Anabaptists had taken an active part in this great lower-class rebellion, perverting Luther’s message (as he saw it) into a social gospel of political salvation by armed revolution. Such religious teachers were dangerous to the outward peace of society, Luther felt, and should be punished by the state, although with banishment rather than death. The trouble was how to distin- guish between one Anabaptist and another. In the widespread fear and panic aroused by the Peasants’ Re- volt, every Anabaptist was seen as a violent enemy of the state, and all suffered, the innocent many for the crimes of the fanatical few. Moreover,
the majority of Protestant govern- ments were not so lenient as Luther; if he counselled banishment, they of- ten preferred to inflict death. We have only to think of the execution by drowning of Anabaptists in Zwingli’s Zurich. Finally, Luther did come to think that blasphemy should be severely punished by a Christian state, and it proved all but impossible in practice to draw a line between blasphemy and heresy. Were all heresies not blas- phemous? Luther’s idealism about religious liberty therefore ran into the sand of 16th
century religious politics.
It was left to a later generation of Protestants, notably Congregation- alists and Baptists in England, to rekindle that original fire of freedom so nobly ignited by Luther at the out- set of the Reformation. It may be of interest to note that
the greatest pioneer of religious lib- erty among English Protestants was John Foxe, author of the famous Book of Martyrs. Nowhere did the seed of freedom planted by Luther blos- som more fruitfully than in one of the greatest architects of the English Reformation. Sickened by the cruel- ties visited on English Protestants by the reactionary Catholic regime of Queen Mary Tudor in the mid- 1550s, Foxe not only chronicled those martyrdoms, but conceived an enduring hatred for all religious per- secution, no matter by whom or on whom it was inflicted. When English Protestants under Queen Elizabeth I began persecuting English Catholics, Foxe protested vigorously. He was repulsed by this Protestant shedding of Catholic
Great Advances Sown by the Reformation page 25
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