Protestant Reformation Studies

Held by GCTS Charlotte campus library reference collection

Held by GCTS Hamilton campus library - can be requested by Charlotte students

Huldrych Zwingli was widely known as a humanist and admirer of Erasmus when he came to Zurich from Glarus and Einsiedeln in 1519. The stages of the Zwinglian Reformation there were marked by the attack on compulsory fasting, images in churches and the doctrine of purgatory, culminating in the rejection of the sacrificial nature of the mass. Like Luther, Zwingli accepted sola scripture as the only criterion by which religious beliefs were to be judged, but he parted company with Luther on the central issue of the nature of the eucharist. Their confrontation at Marburg failed to bring about agreement. A further important challenge came from the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism, military service, oaths and payment of tithe. Zwingli's many verbal and written discussions with them and his relations with Grebel, Mentz, Blaurock and Hubmaier form part of the story.

Held by GCTS Hamilton campus library - can be requested by Charlotte students

Much of the emerging protestantism of the sixteenth century produced a Reformation in conscious opposition to formal philosophy. Nevertheless, sectors of the Reformation produced a spiritualizing form of Platonism in the drive for correct devotion. Out of an understandable fear of idolatry or displacement of the uniquely redemptive place of Christ, Christian piety moved away from the senses and the material world - freshly uncovered in the Reformation. This volume argues, however, that in the quest for restoring "true religion", sectors of the Protestant tradition impugned too severely the material components of prior Christian devotion. Larry Harwood argues that a similar spiritualizing tendency can be found in other Christian traditions, but that its applicability to the particulars of the Christian religion is nevertheless questionable. Moreover, in that quest of a spiritualizing Protestant "true religion", the Christian God could shade toward the conceptual god of the philosophers, with devotees construed as rationalist philosophers. Part of the paradoxical result was to propel the Protestant devotee toward a denuded worship for material worshipers of the Christian God who became flesh.