Reforming Christian Peace and Peacemaking
On the last day of October, 1517, a German priest named Martin Luther (1483-1546) nailed a piece of paper on the door of the local church. Like most of his contemporaries, later commentators harp about what was written on and done about it, which was indeed of immense historical importance, including a condemnation of indulgences and the admonition: “Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,’ and there is no peace!”19 But the social significance of Luther’s non-violent form of protest is for the most part ignored.
Those who ignored it blindly carried out the wars between religious reformers and conservatives that ravaged Europe for centuries afterwards, deeply damaging the already diminished peacemaking powers of Christianity. Those who saw the value of its non-violence prototyped major modern peace movements including civil disobedience, conscientious objecting, anti-war protesting and pacifism by drawing on both biblical and more recent religious traditions.Critiques of Church militarism occurred in Bohemia contemporaneously to Italy, France and England, where radical returns to apostolic pacifism were proposed and practiced by two protestant vanguards. Their efforts signal another shift in Christian peace and peacemaking from medieval theocentric to modern homocentric worldviews within religious frameworks, initiating an indicative though highly inconsistent slippage between Protestantism as a religious movement and anti-war protesting as a peace movement. Jan Hus (1370-1415), born in poverty, worked his way to a degree from the University of Prague and became a professor and preacher. Influenced by writings of English Church reformer, biblical translator and proto-protestant John Wycliffe (1320-1384), Hus rejected two papal prerogatives for which he was burned at the stake as a heretic: using armed forces in Christ’s name and raising funds through indulgences to support them.
Unlike the strict pacifist and anti-war stances of most of Wycliffe’s followers and Hus himself, Hussites took up arms in revolts against both Church and State. Their violent victories, all invalidated in time, thus betrayed the non-violent spirit of Hus’ lifework: in essence, that religious institutions and their officials exist for the benefit of humanity, not the other way around, and so should not condone or participate in acts of violence. Peter Chelcicky (1390-1460) shared Hus’ spirit but articulated it even more radically: “The man of violence,” whether of a religious or secular calling, “unlawfully enjoys and holds what is not his own.”20 In Spiritual Warfare and The Triple Division of Society, he criticized Church, State and the upper classes for precluding peace by oppressing the poor and conducting what he considered devil’s works of war with profit as a primary motive. “The executioner who kills” on command “is as much a wrong-doer as the criminal who is killed.”21 Only communal egalitarianism on pacifist apostolic models, he contended, can promote and preserve peace. Practicing what he preached, he lived and died among his peasant farmer peers. Seven centuries later, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy would draw upon Chelcicky’s humanistic Christian views on pacifism in forming his own, in turn informing Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.Within a generation, similar movements to reform or secede from the Catholic Church were rampant across Europe, prompting reactionaries to use both spiritual and physical violence against them. Some reformers reciprocated, others chose non-violent means of reaching their ends, sometimes under the same banner. Sixteenth-century Anabaptists are examples of these contradicting tendencies, named after their rejection of infant baptism as an involuntary and so invalid entry into Christendom, and practice of voluntary baptism as adults. At one end militant Anabaptist leaders like Thomas Munster (1490-1525) were beheaded for leading lower classes of the Holy Roman Empire in what is miscalled the Peasant’s Revolt, an economically motivated anticlerical rebellion of all classes except the highest.
His aim was to overthrow Church and State to establish a peaceful theocratic society based on communal equality by any means necessary, which in the event killed 100,000 people without the desired results, the deadliest European uprising until then. At the scale’s other end were pacifist Anabaptists like Conrad Grebel (1498-1526), who pleaded with Munster to “use neither the worldly sword nor engage in war” while comparing them to plagues.22 Breaking with the leading moderate reformer Ulrich Zwingli over his dependence on Zurich’s city council for change, Grebel founded a radical group, the Swiss Brethren. Advocating resistance to war and oppression by civil disobedience, they refused to bear arms, hold public office and take oaths in court or elsewhere, as asserted in the seven-article Schleitheim Confession. Brethren were persecuted after the civil wars they may have sparked but in no way supported; Grebel escaped, only to die of the plague. Anabaptism soon spread to Poland, where Marcin Czechowic (1532-1613) defended its pacifism in his Christian Dialogues, arguing that the only weapons Christ used and Christians need are love, hope, patience and prayer. In Hapsburg, Wilhelm Reublin (1480-1559) protested against taxes for war, calling such funds “blood money” and debunking the “difference between slaying with our own hands and strengthening and directing someone else when we give him our money to slay in our stead.”23 A Reublin follower, Jacob Hutter, started a pacifist protestant sect on Utopian principles, for which he also was burned at the stake, rejecting even defense weaponry in the name of peace and unity. Hutterites fled Catholic persecution from Tyrol to Moravia, where they were persecuted by militant Husserites instead. Today’s worldwide Anabaptist churches are mostly of pacifist persuasions, a reminder that even religious group survival still depends on peace.Two other Protestant churches took root in pacifist grounds, Mennonite and Quaker.
Menno Simons (1496-1561), the former’s founder, was born a peasant, became a Catholic priest in Friesland (now a Dutch province), but turned to Anabaptism when his brother was killed for being one. He renounced the priesthood, taking up a life of poverty and peripatetic preaching with his family. His passion for peace distinguished his from other Anabaptist strands and his rapidly growing, radical pacifist followers became known as Mennonites, many of whom were killed for harboring him. Without refusing government service as did the Brethren, they rejected all inhumane punishments and warfare whether on behalf of Church or State: “Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed... But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed.”24 In 1572, during war against Spain, Dutch Mennonites refused to participate and excommunicated those who did. They did raise funds for William the Silent, who united Dutch provinces, won the war and in gratitude granted all Mennonites full exemption from military service, the first early modern law to sanction conscientious objecting, reconfirmed by his successor. Mennonite efforts to reform Christianity by returning to its pacifist roots show that although likeminded Protestants preceded religious warmongers through whose conflicts and resolutions nation-states emerged (discussed in the next chapter) they cannot be considered their precursors.George Fox (1624-1691) followed a trajectory similar to Simmons in England. Born of a weaver and church warden, he somehow learned to read and write as a shoemaker’s apprentice. By age nineteen, he began to receive revelations or what he called “openings,” in which God told him Catholics and Protestants could be reconciled if they renounced violence. For the rest of his life, he traveled the British Isles and American colonies to debate his doctrine with priests, preach it to the poor, and convince the rich and powerful of its validity: “I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were.”25 During the English Civil War (1642-1651) he was jailed for his views, where he was offered a military command on account of his popularity and leadership skills.
In refusing, Fox said he “lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars,” remaining in jail.26 He wrote letters to Oliver Cromwell, war leader and Lord Protector of England’s only republican state, pleading for peace as for his life: “I was sent of God to stand as a witness against all violence, and against the works of darkness; and to turn people from darkness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fighting, to the peaceable gospel.”27 Cromwell asked to meet him and was so impressed that he wished they could talk more often; Fox was released, but they never did.By this time, the pacifist Society of Friends he founded had become a popular movement called Quakerism, from their “quaking” in the peaceful omnipresence of God. In 1660, when the monarchy was restored, Fox was jailed yet again. Fearing his followers would be persecuted, he and eleven prominent Quakers signed “A Declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers, against all plotters and fighters in the world,” opening with:
Our principle is, and our practice have always been, to seek peace and ensue it and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare and doing that which tends to the peace of all.... All bloody principles and practices, we, as to our own particulars, do utterly deny, with all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.28
Although the Declaration failed to prevent persecutions, it remains among the most quoted pacifist testaments. Quakers were systematically killed or incarcerated in subsequent years, including their up-and-coming upper-class leader, William Penn. Like Fox, after imprisonment Penn preached across the Atlantic, foreshadowing how both Protestant and Catholic Churches became instrumental forces abroad in the coming centuries, a topic to be revisited in Chapter 7’s treatment of colonial and imperial peace and peacemaking.