King Frederik was friendly to the movement and protected the Protestant preachers. Already in 1523, he broke the Danish Church’s connection with the pope, but he did not interfere with Catholic doctrine and religious practice and left the bishops in possession of their estates. After Frederik’s death in 1533, the bishops were reluctant to elect his eldest son Christian to succeed him, because he was, even more than his father, a convinced Protestant. This resulted in a postponement of the election to the next year, but before it could take place, a civil war broke out, usually referred to as the “Count’s War,” after the commander of the rebel forces, Count Christoffer of Oldenburg, a distant relative of the royal house. The rebels did not represent a Catholic reaction, but on the contrary were staunchly Protestant, with Copenhagen and Malmö as their main strongholds and Lübeck, led by a radical weaver who had replaced the merchant aristocracy as the town’s ruler, as their main ally. Their aim was to reinstate the captive Christian II—who had also converted to Protestantism—as king. The rebellion thus had elements of a social revolution.
Reformation
Merkezi Gücü Olmayan Protestanlığın Misyonerlikte Gecikmesi
Generally, Protestantism is a cheap religion, but foreign missions cannot be carried out on a shoestring. They need training, support, supply networks, and a flow of talented people. Above all, they need institutions able to commit to such things for decades on end. Committed individuals such as Baldaeus, Candidius, Junius, Campanius, Mayhew, Eliot, and von Welz were all very well, but without sustained continuity nothing would be achieved. The Catholic Church’s religious orders could provide all of these things, but in the seventeenth century no Protestant institutions could. This was one sour legacy of early Protestantism’s Faustian bargain with the state. The princes’ seizure of church property during the Reformation robbed Protestantism of the institutional potential to propagate itself, and instead condemned it to merely maintaining a parochial network.
Hristiyan Misyonerlerin Dini Yaymak için Yahudiliği Yok Etmeyi Hedeflemesi
Calvinists had other theological problems, however. Many of them, especially in New England, shared a distinctive view of how the world would end. First, popery would be destroyed and the Jews would convert en masse to Christianity. Only then would the heathen be converted. Mission to non-Christian peoples was not wrong, but it was premature. As Roger Williams, one of the founders of Rhode Island, put it, “God’s great business between Christ . . . and Antichrist” must be resolved before any other missions could be undertaken. In the meantime, at best, a few stray individuals could be saved from the general destruction. Williams himself doubted even that was possible. Some missionaries, including Campanius in New Sweden and Eliot in New England, found a way around this problem. Based on some dubious similarities of ritual and language, they convinced themselves that the Native Americans were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. It was a quixotic theory, but if the Indians were in fact Jews, then perhaps their conversion would truly mark the beginning of the end-time. That would make mission not only acceptable but urgent. The fact that missionaries had to embrace such a far-fetched theory shows that the theological obstacles were real.
Kalvinist Kaderciliğin Misyonerliği Yavaşlatması
Most Calvinists, by contrast, believed that the Great Commission was still in force. It is often assumed that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination impeded missionary work: Why bother preaching to the heathen when their fate is foreordained, so you can do nothing either to save or to imperil their souls? In fact, however, most Calvinists believed that they were obliged to spread the Gospel as a simple duty, regardless of whether or not conversions would result. So predestination did not prevent missionary projects, but it might have taken the wind out of them.
Modern Belçika ve Hollanda’nın Ortaya Çıkışı
The story would be repeated in the Netherlands, where in 1566 a sudden cessation of persecution let loose an upsurge of Protestant sympathy. Protestants called it the “Wonderyear,” but prematurely. A swift crackdown gave way to a grinding eighty-year war between the Dutch and their Spanish Catholic rulers, splitting the Netherlands into a Spanish-ruled Catholic south and an independent Protestant north: the origin of the divide between the modern kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands.
Fransa’da Kanlı Bartholomew Günü
the king decided he could no longer remain above the fray. Instead, he tried to eliminate the Protestant leadership at a stroke. Before dawn on Sunday, August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, royal soldiers murdered the wounded man and several other Protestant dignitaries in their beds. It was intended as a surgical strike, but the people of Paris could read the signals. Crying, “The king wills it,” Catholic mobs set out on an unprecedented orgy of destruction. In three days, some three thousand Protestants were killed, along with any Catholics who defended them. Over the following month, this massacre was echoed in a dozen French cities with histories of bitter interreligious tension; perhaps a further six thousand died.11 The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the defining moment of the French religious wars. It was not exactly premeditated, nor did the perpetrators try to disown it. Pope Gregory XIII struck a medal in celebration of the massacre and commissioned commemorative frescoes. And not without reason: the massacre achieved something that individual trials and executions could not. It broke the bravado of Protestantism’s martyr complex. The scale and speed of the killing dazed Protestants, who now questioned whether God was really on their side.
İskoçya’da Protestan Devrimi
The transformation of England into a Protestant state, and the distraction of the French, gave the Scottish Protestants their opportunity to launch an attack on the Catholic Church and government. By the end of 1559 the country had crumbled into open conflict, in which the Catholic party, aided by the French soldiers still occupying the land, soon gained the upper hand. The Protestants were rescued in 1560 by Elizabeth of England, who sent a large army and navy to their aid. This, together with atrocities committed by the French, convinced many waverers that the Reformation was the better and more viable cause. At this critical moment, the dynastic dice rolled again, and Mary of Guise died of dropsy. Leaderless, her party surrendered and the French sailed home, after which the English army promptly withdrew, leaving a Protestant government in control of the land. All the damage that the 1540s had done to Anglo-Scottish relations had now been repaired, as the new Scottish regime looked on the English Crown as its greatest benefactor and ally.