The Protestant Reformation was a religious, political, and cultural movement in sixteenth-century Europe that brought into question many beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church. Reformers protested Catholic orthodoxy and doctrine that they deemed unbiblical—such as selling indulgences and clerical offices. The evidence of corruption in the church’s hierarchy caused the Reformation to enact new ways of thinking in the hope that reform might take place and to address the pressing issues of the church. Catholicism, however, did not accept the reorganization, which caused conflict and schism. In Poland, Hungary, and France, for instance, Martin Luther’s reformed followers suffered intense persecution from the papacy. Further, the Netherlands Lutheran Church began with former Dutch Augustinian monks who became Luther’s disciples, some of whom the Catholics martyred for their new beliefs (Swihart 1960, 263–68).
Motivated by the glory of God, John Calvin played a crucial role in the spiritual reawakening of Europe with a passion for the church and the pastorate and a desire to see the kingdom of Christ restored in Europe. To this end he established the Academy of Geneva to educate pastor-missionaries who upon graduation went forth with confidence to teach others throughout Europe and abroad. The result was that Calvinism came to dominate most of the thinking of northwestern Europe. Moreover, conveyed by Reformers from England, France, Germany, and Holland to the ends of the earth, Calvin’s teachings consequently formed the substance of much of contemporary Western culture (Reid 1955, 21).
Despite the suppressing efforts of the Catholic Church, the Protestant ideas of Luther and Calvin spread throughout much of northern and central Europe. Ignited in the minds of the Reformed ministers and laity, these new ideas resulted in a movement of Protestant expansion. In this chapter, we will consider the work of Calvin and Luther and their successes and struggles in spreading the reformed message throughout Europe.
Predecessors of the Reformation
Leading up to the sixteenth century, France’s involvement in wars with the Italian states drained the country’s resources, resulting in heavy taxation of the common people. The government used the church structure to boost its economic straits. In the Concordat of 1516, Pope Leo X endowed King Francis I of France with the authority to appoint bishops, abbots, and priors in the church in France, which in turn profited the Crown through payment of political favors. These bénéfices had little to do with religious zeal, spiritual worthiness, or service to the church. In fact, the church could appoint a bishop to more than one region, which led to nonresidential privileges. In Brittany at this time, for example, not one priest out of fifty parishes occupied his church (Neale 1943, 13).
In the midst of this spiritual apathy, some called for reform. In 1507 the son of Cardinal Guillaume Briçonnet, also named Guillaume Briçonnet, succeeded his father as abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Près. As the leader of the monastery, he successfully reformed moral abuses, enforced discipline among the monks, and inspired learning in his clergy. Later, as bishop of Meaux, he continued his improvements. “He supported the French translation of the Bible by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, a fellow reformer, and the promotion of vernacular biblical preaching” (Benedetto 2008, 104). He also developed the “Meaux Group” of Reformers, which included Lefèvre d’Étaples. This group supported individual study of the Bible and a return to early church theology. King Francis I eventually sent Briçonnet to Pope Leo X in Rome, where his support of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and other Reformers caused consternation with the pope. Opposition from the monarchy, Parliament, and leaders of the Sorbonne University in Paris eventually forced Briçonnet to recant his support of the Reformation and combat the preachers he had once sponsored (Baird 1896, 81).
Persecution ensued at Meaux, where church authorities arrested fourteen men for conducting a home Bible study and burned them at the stake for heresy (Winters 1938, 16). Guillaume Farel, a disciple of Lefèvre, escaped the town, going first to Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where the city accepted the Reformers’ message. He then went to his home region in the Alps of southeastern France, where he met with Waldensian leaders and convinced many to join the Reformation. Finally, Farel traveled to Geneva, where his preaching again influenced the city leaders to adopt Reformed ways, as well as challenged John Calvin, a young French refugee.
John Calvin and Missions
On All Saints Day in 1533, Nicolas Cop, the rector of the University of Paris, gave a sermon on the First Beatitude, interwoven with the Reformers’ message of forgiveness of sin and eternal life as gifts of God’s grace only through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Opposition arose against the sermon and the preacher, which led to Cop and his writer, John Calvin, fleeing Paris.
Calvin was born at Noyon in the northern French province of Picardy in 1509. He attended the University of Paris at fourteen (at the same time as Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier). He began studying law at nineteen and had a conversion experience at twenty-four years of age. Subsequent to the persecution following Cop’s sermon, Calvin escaped to Basel, Switzerland, where, in 1536, he published The Institutes of the Christian Religion (in Latin), which explained his Protestant beliefs to the king of France, Francis I. From Basel, Calvin’s path tacked its way to Geneva (en route to Strasbourg), where William Farel persuaded him to stay and pastor the Church of Saint Pierre to help create a model reformed city. Calvin spent the rest of his life in Geneva (except from 1538 to 1540, when he married and ministered to French refugees in Strasbourg) until his death in 1564.
Calvin arrived in Geneva in 1536, during a chaotic period in the life of the city of thirteen thousand people (Terry 1994, 78). It was free from papal political and episcopal control and as such had experienced a time of political, educational, and religious decline before becoming a refuge for Protestants. Half of its inhabitants were refugees, yet Geneva had no police (McNeill 1954, 193). “Genevan authorities could rely on the public fear of scandals to ensure that laws were kept most of the time,” together with the fear of God’s wrath on their city (Monter 1967, 101). Because of the city’s chaotic state, Calvin was able to help politically reconstruct the new Geneva, although this work was not without challenges, including his expulsion from the city and the plague epidemic of 1538–1542. Calvin desired to structure the church and the state into true Protestantism. For instance, he helped the city write Christian guidelines on business ethics, charging interest, and establishing industries.
Calvin believed in the importance of reform through means of preaching repentance and belief to the church and the city. Through a prayerful synthesis of theology and evangelism, he reached his goal. As C. George Fry states, “A lifetime of theological labor and biblical preaching saw a sensual, secular city reformed. From an approximation of Babel, Geneva was changed into an anticipation of the New Jerusalem” (1970, 60). Christopher Elwood concurs: “[Calvin] transformed this border city on the edge of the Alps into what one observer called a Protestant Rome. It became, that is, the center of a vital movement and ministry on behalf of a new vision of the church” (2002, 139–40). For example, Calvin formed the Genevan Consistory, a governing body that monitored the spiritual life of the people. The Consistory expected the citizens of Geneva to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed in their national language, instead of Latin, to demonstrate their understanding of the faith. In this way, Calvin hoped that the hearts of the people of God would transmit the true reformation to others.
With this sentiment to convey God to the masses, Calvin founded an institution of higher learning. The Academy of Geneva was an important contributor to the Reformed mission movement. According to Calvin, as long “as this objective was not realized, no permanence was assured for the work of reform” (McNeill 1954, 192). In 1557 Calvin entreated the city council for land and a building, and two years later he conducted the inaugural service. With the establishment of the Academy of Geneva, “Calvin had achieved his task: he had secured the future of Geneva making it at once a church, a school, and a fortress. It was the first stronghold of liberty in modern times” (McNeill 1954, 196).
The academy’s aim was to make the church educationally self-perpetuating, and as such, it established a school for children run by Antoine Saunier. The city ordinances of 1541 spoke “of the need to raise seed for the time to come, in order not to leave the Church a desert to our children and an obligation to prepare youth for the ministry and civil government” (McNeill 1954, 132). The opening of the academy gave permanence and stability to the Reformed mission that it previously did not possess. Without such an institution, the Reformation may have died with its Reformers.
The school began with an enrollment of 162 students, mainly young Frenchmen, yet in six years the numbers had increased tenfold. In the first four years, out of 160 students, 13 were Swiss (3 from Geneva), 10 Dutch, 10 German, 13 Italian, and 114 French (G. Lewis 1994, 49–50). For these students, “the purpose of the academy was mainly preparation for the ministry, with law and medicine as secondary interests” (McNeill 1954, 194). This institution trained them to understand and propagate Calvin’s teachings. The academy divided the pupils according to their location within the four sectors of the city, and each sector arranged into seven grades. In the style of a Renaissance school, they studied French, Latin, and New Testament Greek, along with the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero, and rhetoric and dialectic from classical texts. In addition, the students sang psalms in French daily for one hour, beginning at eleven in the morning (McNeill 1954, 194).
Knowledgeable in theology and preaching, the alumni of the academy, many of whom had come from various parts of Europe, returned to their homelands to share the Reformers’ message and affect their societies. “The establishment of education in Geneva . . . [was] the beginning of a hugely successful missionary undertaking” (Elwood 2002, 140). The first five years of the academy “were the great years of the Academy’s contribution to the missionary effort, which had been in full swing since 1556” (G. Lewis 1994, 51). W. Stanford Reid observes, “Those who graduated went forth, convinced of their position, to teach others, the result being that Calvinism came to dominate most of the thinking of northwestern Europe and was carried by the Dutch, the English, the Scots, the Germans, and the French to the far places of the earth, with the consequence that today it lies, to a large extent, at the basis of western culture” (1955, 21).
Calvin believed that once leaders grasped a proper appreciation of the truth, they then could train those in their churches, who in turn would continue to spread the Reformed doctrines. He wrote, “The biblical faith must be put into words so that people can know and confess what they experience, so they can teach and minister to others” (Calvin 2001, 22). To this end, the Reformer wrote the Geneva Catechism (1542), in addition to numerous tracts, pamphlets, and scriptural commentaries, which he printed in Geneva and distributed throughout Europe, especially in France. Calvin also wrote letters to other Reformed leaders and royalty to communicate and encourage unity in the cause of the Reformation.
Calvin’s Motivation for Missions and Beliefs
Motivated by the glory of God, Calvin played a crucial role in the spiritual reawakening of Europe with a passion for the church and the pastorate and a desire to see the kingdom of Christ restored in Europe. Rather than the normal tendency to regard the happiness of humanity as the central point of mission, Calvinism emphasized the furtherance of God’s glory, together with the notion that the lordship of Christ extends to every part of human life and the created world. Kingdom values were to be applied in every area of life, which is why in Geneva Calvin designed a sewer system, inaugurated a financial fund to help poor refugees, composed the laws of the city, and supported a weaving industry to enhance the people’s welfare.
Calvin believed that God is able and willing, by virtue of his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, to do whatever he desires with his creation. Humanity is completely sinful, and, by God’s grace, he predestines people to salvation based not on their worthiness but by the kind intentions of his will. Jesus’s death was only for those predestined, and hence God regenerates the individual so that he or she chooses to follow him always in eternal salvation. Some theologians argue that Calvin’s view of God’s sovereignty discourages missions, and in fact, God’s predestination of specific persons necessitates that human missionary endeavors are unnecessary.
Contrary to that view, Calvin focused his teaching on affirming that God called and equipped people to join him in his work while underscoring that, first and foremost, missions was about the work of God and not of humanity. “God alone can cause sinners to respond to the gospel’s call” (R. Greenway 2000, 155–56). Predestination does not make the preaching of the gospel unnecessary; indeed, it makes preaching more important as a means to save those who are predestined.
Charles Chaney identifies four principles of Calvin’s philosophy of missions: the calling of the gentiles, the progress of the kingdom, the gathering of the church, and personal Christian responsibility (1964, 25–33). Regarding the last principle, Calvin believed that after the ascension of Christ, the gospel was to spread throughout the world via the preaching of God’s word. He understood that this expansion of the church was accomplished using the apostles, yet believers should continue the work “until the gospel [has] reached the farthest bounds of the earth” (Chaney 1964, 28).
Calvin believed that Christians should disclose their faith since the act of evangelizing expresses their gratitude to God for sparing them, God commands it, and it leads to compassion for others who need salvation. For example, Calvin, in his Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, encourages believers to desire the salvation of the world based on their understanding of God’s deliverance in their lives. His exposition of Isaiah 12:4 states,
Hence, it is evident what is the desire, which ought to be cherished among all the godly. It is that the goodness of God may be made known to all, that all may join in the same worship of God. We ought especially to be inflamed with this desire, after having been delivered from some alarming danger, and most of all after having been delivered from the tyranny of the devil and from everlasting death. (1999, 403)
Again, in his commentary on Micah 2:1–4, Calvin maintains, “The Kingdom of Christ was only begun in the world when God commanded the gospel to be everywhere proclaimed and . . . at this day its course is not as yet complete” (Beaver 1973, 56–57). In other words, the apostles did not complete the Great Commission, and Christians still have the responsibility to preach the gospel.
Furthermore, in Calvin’s notes on 1 Timothy 2:4 he states, “There is no people and no rank in the world that is excluded from salvation, because God wishes that the gospel should be proclaimed to all without exception” (1970, 12:2, 172). Not that everyone will obtain salvation, yet certain people from various parts of the world will receive Christ’s redemption. Finally, in Calvin’s comments on Ezekiel 18:23, he proclaims, “God certainly desires nothing more than for those who are perishing and rushing toward death to return to the way of safety. This is why the gospel is today proclaimed throughout the world, for God wished to testify to all ages that he is greatly inclined to pity” (1963, 402). God desires humanity to accept salvation and by his election ensures that some will do so.
Methods of Missions
Preaching and Teaching
Calvin taught at the Geneva Academy and preached at the Church of Saint Pierre with the desire to help people express their worship of God, find personal salvation, and live their days as worthy of Christ. He preached in his church twice on Sundays and once every day on alternate weeks. These opportunities to teach and preach became a powerful factor in the conversion of individuals and the changing of social customs in the Geneva community.
Writings
During the early days of the Reformation, the Protestant churches needed organization in dogma and practice, since they were structurally and doctrinally loose and heavily persecuted by the Catholic Church. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion provided this stability as the Reformed movement spread. The work was first published in 1536, and Calvin revised it three times in the next twenty-four years. What began as a six-chapter booklet ended as four volumes with eighty chapters.
In this publication, Calvin teaches his understanding of the biblical topics of sin, redemption, faith, God’s will, and his dealing with humanity, in an attempt to return to first-century teaching. In his missional statement he makes known his motivations: “These were my reasons for publishing The Institutes: first, that I might vindicate from unjust affront my brethren whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord; and next, that some sorrow and anxiety should move foreign peoples, since the same suffering threatened many” (Walker 2005, 108).
Calvin also wrote against the beliefs of the Catholic Church, such as the veneration of relics, in the satire Admonition, Showing the Advantage Which Christendom Might Derive from an Inventory of Relics (1543): “For it [the Catholic Church] clearly is a hundred times more corrupt than it was in the times of Gregory and Bernard [former popes], though even then it greatly displeased those holy men” (Calvin 1960, 2:1141).
In other writings Calvin encourages believers to pray for those not following Christ, that they would attain faith. He maintains that a proper understanding of God’s sovereignty will encourage the church to prayer even if there are few results. God promised that the church’s work would not be in vain. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, his teaching on “hallowed be thy name” in the Lord’s Prayer expounds, “We [the church] are bidden to request that [God] subdue the whole race of mankind to reverence [His name]” (1960, vol. 2, book 3, chap. 20, section 41). In simpler terms, he viewed the Lord’s Prayer as a petition to God for the salvation of the world.
Ecclesiology
In addition to teaching, preaching, and writing, Calvin was also a successful evangelist. Fry writes of him: “While it has been traditional to consider Calvin a master theologian, an excellent church administrator, an ardent professor, and a powerful author, it has been less common to recognize him as one of the major modern evangelists. Yet, together with Martin Luther and John Wesley, Calvin stands out as one of the most successful evangelists in modern church history” (1970, 3).
Calvin believed in the invisible church, where only God knew the membership. Yet he felt there was a need for the visible church with its observable membership and activity. He considered the church as missions’ structure and therefore sent out pastors rather than evangelists of missions. He believed that church preaching was the means of hearing the gospel. This contrasts with much of contemporary evangelism. “Calvin was more intentional [than Luther] in encouraging mission. In some areas Calvinism became the religion of the state; in other areas local churches were established amidst persecution. Pastors were trained in Geneva and sent as missionaries; many were martyred” (P. Pierson 2000a, 814).
Missions to France
Among the refugees in Geneva, many were Catholics from France. The majority of Huguenots, French Protestants influenced by Calvin’s teachings, fled after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had permitted the basic rights and religious toleration of the French Reformers. Approximately one hundred thousand refugees left France during this time (Rothrock 1979, 178–79). In Geneva, Calvin trained immigrants at his academy in ethics, homiletics, and theology and sent them back to France as pastor-missionaries (“the gatekeepers of the kingdom”) as early as 1555. Calvin believed that for proper gospel proclamation, trained ministers needed to establish churches. Carl D. Stevens writes, “Calvin’s interest was not the sending of men into France to preach the gospel to anyone who might listen; rather, Calvin’s intention was to restore the church in France as a gospel-preaching institution” (1992, 201).
Between 1555 and 1562, the Geneva Reformers sent 142 men to France. These men caused such a stir that in 1558 Calvinist (Huguenot) minister Jean Macar of Paris wrote in a letter to Calvin, “The fire is lit in all parts of the kingdom and all the water in the sea will not suffice to extinguish it” (De Jong 1995, 8). The missionaries of Geneva created such an impact that King Henry II of France in 1559 described Geneva as “the cause of all France’s misfortunes,” declaring “guilty of high treason all who [had] any relation whatever with Geneva,” and stating that he “would have no ease until [Geneva had] been reduced to impotence” (De Jong 1995, 9). This was not an empty threat, and many suffered under the ruling. The Reformed pastors in France were in such danger that the Genevan Consistory agreed not to keep records of the missionary activity in France.
The Reformation message of Luther first reached the French universities and influenced the professors, private tutors, and students, followed by other professional people such as doctors, lawyers, and notaries. The lower classes were conservative and more resistant to change. The next group influenced by the new message was the lower clergy and friars, many of whom were already moving away from papal control. Finally, many of the noble women, spiritually attuned and tired of rampant immorality, followed the Huguenot movement and encouraged their husbands (who desired freedom from the oppression of both state and church) to join also, which provided protection for the small Reformed congregations (Neale 1943, 24–27).
Although heavily persecuted, these Reformers proclaimed their faith, and the Protestant church grew from five underground groups in 1555 to nearly one hundred by 1559, when it held its first national synod in Paris. In only three more years the growth of the Huguenot movement bourgeoned to 2,150 churches through the efforts of the 142 missionaries (Laman 1989, 59). It is estimated that in 1562 there were nearly three million members of the French Reformed churches, with half of the French nobility committed to Calvinism (Haykin 2001, 42). As George A. Rothrock explains, “They constituted, of course, a tiny minority in a population of fifteen or sixteen million people, but in the face of intensifying repression their simple survival was a considerable achievement” (1979, 40).
Missionary correspondence of this period discovered by Peter Wilcox confirms the rapid church growth: in Bergerac the church had grown to between four and five thousand people, in Montpelier the church had an attendance of five to six thousand members, and in Toulouse the Reformed church attracted eight to nine thousand people (1993, 689–95). “Calvin didn’t just plant fledging churches; he planted mega churches that in turn planted more churches” (James 2001).
Many French cities, including Annonay, Bourges, Grenoble, La Rochelle, Mâcon, Orleans, and Toulouse, had received Huguenot missionaries (De Félice 1851, 43). The movement also took root in Lyons and southern France, with their close proximity to Geneva; in the east at Metz near the Reformed center of Strasbourg; and in Brittany and Normandy on the west coast, as they connected with international trade in England and the Netherlands. In Metz the two foremost proponents of the French Huguenot movement, François Lambert and Jean Châtellain, were former Catholic priests who saw the need of reform in the church (Winters 1938, 51).
Martin Luther and Missions
Another powerful Reformer was Martin Luther of Germany. Born November 10, 1483, Luther (the son of a copper miner) was an educated theologian from Eisleben, Saxony, who dedicated his life to the purposes of God. His revolutionary teachings irreversibly changed the religious and social fabric of Europe. As a result, Lutheranism came to dominate most of the thinking of northern Europe and was carried by the Danes, the Finns, the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Swedes to the far places of the earth; consequently, it became one of the pillars of Western civilization.
In the midst of a fierce electrical storm, Luther called on the name of Saint Anne (the patron saint of miners), bargaining for his life in exchange for the existence of a monk. After his survival, he entered the Augustinian order as a friar on July 17, 1505, devoting himself to fasting, long hours of prayer and vigil, pilgrimage, and confession. Luther was not satisfied as a monk, however, and described his time in the monastery as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul” (Kittelson 1986, 78–79). On April 4, 1507, Luther was ordained to the priesthood, yet he still found no peace in his tortured soul. In 1508 Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s superior, sent Luther to teach theology at the monastery at Wittenberg. It was through the reading and teaching of God’s word at this time that Luther developed his Reformed theology and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses, a Latin document stating his grievances with the Catholic Church, on the Wittenberg church door. Thus began a radical spiritual journey of rejecting the papacy and Catholicism that ripped Europe into political and theological pieces.
Luther’s Rejection of Monasticism
Because of Luther’s rejection of Catholic monasticism, Lutheranism was devoid of a vehicle for missions. Kenneth Scott Latourette argues that in the newly formed Protestantism, Luther, in forsaking monasticism, lost a valuable form of missionary expansion. The slow start of Protestant missions resulted from their lack of a committed community, such as the monks, who were the “ready-to-hand machinery” for propagating the faith (1975, 92). James A. Scherer, a Lutheran missiologist, agrees with this assessment, acknowledging that Luther’s teaching of Scripture needed real-life practice: there was a disconnection between Luther’s missions theology and praxis. In other words, the absence of mission practice can be attributed largely to Luther’s rejection of monasticism and its accompanying framework for cross-cultural outreach, and no replacement mission structure for early Protestant missions existed (1982, 3).
The reality of the situation concerning Luther was that he rejected European monasticism because of what he viewed as its exaggerated emphasis on spiritual superiority and works righteousness, as well as begging and almsgiving (Bainton 1952, 246–47). Regarding the dangers of religious professionalism and embracing elitist perfectionism, he writes:
If the monasteries do not serve this purpose (turning out learned men and chaste women, etc.) it is better to let them go to ruin or to tear them down than to keep them. Their blasphemous services, invented by men, should not be considered something better than the ordinary Christian life and the offices and positions ordained by God. For all such notions are contrary to the first, chief article of the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ. (Smalcald Articles of 1537, WA 50:212, cited in Lindquist 1990, 50)
The former Augustinian monk further disapproved of monasticism because it threatened biblical salvation by moving the source of holiness away from the cross to the religious life and established structures that substituted faith in Christ with the works of the religious rule and vows. Luther continues,
This is the chief abomination: we had to deny the grace of God and put our trust and hope in our holy monkery and not in the pure mercy of Christ, as we had promised and begun to do in Christian Baptism. For relying on works in order thereby to be justified and sanctified is in reality denying God’s grace, as St. Paul clearly says (Gal. 5:4): “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the Law, ye are fallen from grace.” (WA 38:159, cited in Lindquist 1990, 51)
Luther was an advocate of Christian action, which was exemplified in the spread of Lutheranism in early sixteenth-century Germany and other regions. “Luther was never forgetful of the Gospel’s universal goal, and so he declared that, ‘It is necessary always to proceed to those to whom no preaching has been done in order that the number [of Christians] may become greater’” (Koschade 1965, 235). The lack of mission-sending institutions, such as monasteries, was not a reflection of the missional situation. Scherer asserts, “God needs no special missions agencies to accomplish his purposes. He is able to make use of persecution, the dispersion of believers, the travels of merchants, the captivity of believing soldiers, and the acts of rulers to bring about universal witness” (1994, 21). Although Luther rejected monasticism, the methods mentioned by Scherer played a large role in the organization’s successful progress throughout northern Europe.
Luther’s Mission Theology
Luther believed that preaching was the missional purpose of the church and that preaching renewal of the gospel inside the church itself would propel the believing community into the world. The duty of every Christian was to teach the Scriptures to those who had not heard. He taught that all Christians were to be missionaries as they lived for their neighbor in consideration of his or her needs. Luther used the following metaphor to describe his mission theology: “As if one threw a stone into the water; the stone causes ripples, circles, and streams round about it; and the ripples always roll them farther and farther; one drives the other until they come to the shore. Although the water becomes calm in the center, the ripples do not rest but keep on flowing” (Elert 1962, 392–93). In simpler terms, each believer placed within a circle of non-Christians should “preach to the erring heathen and must teach the Gospel because brotherly love makes it his duty to do so” (Lindquist 1990, 48).
All believers were compelled to do good works according to their faith in Christ; they were to use their gifts to serve the kingdom of God wherever they found themselves, whether as carpenters, farmers, homemakers, poets, or preachers. Luther moved the concept of “vocation” from the cloister to the workshop (Bainton 1952, 246). All Christ-followers were to serve with their gifts in whatever capacity they could.
The ministry of the gospel belonged first to Christ and then to all believers in the church. Luther asserts, “The gospel itself equips and impels the whole church into the whole world” (Lindquist 1990, 57). For Luther mission was for the church and was the essential task of the church.
We must also go to those to whom Christ has hitherto not been proclaimed. We must teach the people who have not known Christ, so that they, too, may be brought to the spiritual kingdom of Christ.
Martin Luther (Porter 1974, 124)
The German theologian alleged that Christians needed to rely on the guidance and power of God to spread the gospel, which necessitated only obedience and a willingness to serve. The growth of God’s kingdom was divinely controlled. Humans were powerless without God’s Spirit to do his work through them. “For Luther, mission is always the work of the triune God—missio Dei—and its goal and outcome is the coming of the kingdom of God” (Scherer 1994, 18). Luther believed that although the apostles began missions, the church was to continue and include the whole world as its responsibility. God was unfolding his mission purposes, and Christians should spread the gospel among non-Christian people.
Luther had a theology of mission and called others to be involved in the missio Dei. The real issue beyond these facts is how Luther’s views on mission played out in his life and the lives of his followers. The evidence of missionaries from Wittenberg, publications that spread the gospel, music, and missions work among the Scandinavian peoples, Jews, and Muslims all attest to Luther’s heart for missions.
Luther was involved in training young men for Christian ministry and dispersing them from the university at Wittenberg. Conversion of the unsaved was paramount for Luther, and he was convinced that the universities would play an important role in this goal (Coates 1969, 603). At Wittenberg, Luther emphasized knowing true doctrine and at the same time took a personal interest in the students, knowing that on leaving the university they would face many hostile forces. His mentoring of students even included finding their first and subsequent positions.
Between 1520 and 1560, approximately five thousand of the sixteen thousand at Wittenberg were from nations other than Germany, making the university an important center for mission training (Bunkowske 1985, 170). Through his teaching at the university, Luther promoted a renewed interest in the gospel, and his mentorees carried the Reformation teachings of their mentor to their home regions. This was especially true of Scandinavia, which, similar to Germany, wanted to discard Rome’s dominance. The influence of Wittenberg missionaries in this region was profound and played a large role in the spread of Lutheranism. These missionaries were proof that Luther’s mission theology was more than concepts: it led to a successful and flourishing cross-cultural movement (Gallagher 2005a, 131–32).
Scandinavian Distress
The complex and turbulent history of medieval Scandinavia was a key component in the propagation of the Reformation. From 1397 to 1523, the royal Union of Kalmar united Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Throughout its history, power struggles peppered this northern region, so much so that by the beginning of the sixteenth century the union was on the verge of collapse. Against this background of political volatility and insecurity the Protestant Reformation flourished in Scandinavia.
EXPANSION IN DENMARK
In the early sixteenth century Denmark was undergoing economic and social change, with the expansion of the merchant classes in the towns and the nobility seeking to secure and expand their aristocratic power. By 1518 Luther’s influence had reached the courts of Denmark, where Wolfgang von Utenhof, a Wittenberg graduate, tutored the future king, Christian III. Intrigued by his tutor’s witness to Reformation ideas, the young prince attended the Diet of Worms in 1521 and heard Luther’s defense before Emperor Charles V (Grell 1995, 14).
Frederik I (r. 1523–1533), father of Christian III, began his reign with Reformation rumblings on the rise. Influenced by Lutheran teaching, the new king declined to interfere with the “preaching of God’s word,” even though at his coronation he had promised the Danish hierarchy that he would deal with heretics: “[We will] not allow any heretics, disciples of Luther or others to preach and teach, either openly or secretly, against God, the faith of the Holy Church, the holiest father, the Pope, or the Catholic Church, but where they are found in this kingdom, we promise to punish them on life and property” (Grell 1992, 104).
The city of Viborg in Jutland became the center of the Danish Lutheran Reformation under the direction of Hans Tausen (a former member of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and a graduate of Wittenberg) and Jørgen Jensen Sadolin. In 1526 they formed a school to train Protestant preachers. To evade growing pressure from the Catholic bishops, Frederik I appointed Tausen that same year as his personal court chaplain. Also in 1526 and 1527, a council of nobles in Odense, Denmark, officially severed relations with the papacy. Under the rule of Frederik, religion became a matter of personal conscience, with Lutherans permitted to preach “the word of God.” Beginning in 1527 the king closed Franciscan houses and monasteries in twenty-eight towns and sporadically offered small stipends to retiring monks. Tausen’s preaching at Saint Nicholas Church in Copenhagen and a printing press established at Viborg in 1528 aided the dissemination of Protestant views throughout the nation. In the meantime, due to skillful propaganda, King Frederik weakened the power of the Catholic Church and averted a religious war.
Frederik permitted his eldest son, Christian III, to establish over sixty Lutheran parishes around Haderslev and Tönning. Two German Wittenberg theologians, Eberhard Weidensee and John Wendt, were leaders in this Protestant movement, creating the first Lutheran church diocese in Scandinavia in 1528 (modeled after Wittenberg). The ministers pledged allegiance to Christian, the Duke of Schleswig.
In Copenhagen and Skåneland (present-day Sweden), another Lutheran awakening occurred through the influence of Paul Helie (a Carmelite provincial who taught biblical humanism at the University of Copenhagen) and his students Peder Laurentsen, Claus Mortensøn, Christian Pedersen, and Frans Vormordsen. The first Danish version of the New Testament appeared in 1524, followed by a plethora of other Bible translations and theological literature from Malmø in Skåneland, one of the first cities in Scandinavia to convert (1527–1529). In 1528 Mortensøn produced the first Danish hymnal for church use, including translations of a number of Luther’s hymns (Dunkley 1948, 45). Moreover, the publication of the first Danish Bible based on the Wittenberg Bible of 1545 occurred in 1550.
By 1530 the reform movement had established itself in the majority of towns and cities throughout Denmark. At the Diet of Copenhagen that same year, the Lutheran pastors presented “Forty Three Articles,” which outlined their Protestant beliefs. These articles became immensely popular with the people, and when Frederik died in 1533 most of Denmark was Lutheran (Skarsten 1985, 31–32). The full realization of a Lutheran national church, however, occurred in 1537, after Christian III won the civil war with the Catholic nobles (1534–1536). He then removed the Catholic bishops from office and nationalized the monasteries, even though many Catholic priests continued their ministry as Lutherans. As the supreme head of the church, Christian III appointed Luther’s pastor, John Bugenhagen, to lead the ecclesiastical reorganization for two years (1537–1539). This task included modeling the University of Copenhagen after Wittenberg and placing national education in the hands of the church, supervised by the Lutheran bishops and the king’s pastor.
As Christian III corresponded with Luther and other Wittenberg Reformers, especially Peder Palladius (a Wittenberg graduate who became the first Lutheran bishop of Zeeland), Danish Lutheran theology aligned with Wittenberg. Tausen, who became bishop of Ribe in Jutland, drafted the first Lutheran church ordinance in 1537 and adopted Philipp Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession of 1530 as normative for Danish Lutheran theology (Gritsch 2002, 50–52).
EXPANSION IN FINLAND
Under Swedish political authority, Lutheranism influenced Finland. The Swedish authorities dissolved Catholic churches and promoted vernacular services so that sermons could fulfill their purpose. This led to a disruption in education that detrimentally affected the training of clergy, and as the academic language moved from Latin to Swedish, Finnish was bypassed. In spite of this predicament, in 1548 Mikael Agricola published a Finnish New Testament, which he had begun as a student at Wittenberg. Not until 1583 was the first Finnish hymnal produced (Wuorinen 1965, 65). Christian II, who converted to Lutheranism while in exile in the Netherlands after visiting Wittenberg, supported the national importance of the Bible, sermons, and hymns in the vernacular. He directed the first two publications of the Danish New Testament, in 1524 and again five years later in 1529.
EXPANSION IN ICELAND
Iceland was under Danish domination and content to stay Catholic. Slowly and reluctantly, the Icelandic people accepted Lutheranism in the 1530s in this remote outpost of the Danish monarch with resultant Catholic uprisings and ecclesial reforms by Christian III. Despite the turbulent beginnings of Protestantism in Iceland, the emphasis on the word of God became compelling in the lives of the people through the efforts of bishops Guđbrandur þorklasson and Jón Vídalín and the hymns of Séra Hallgrímur Pétursson (Fell 1999, 2). An Icelandic translation of the New Testament published in Denmark in 1540 assisted in the revitalization of the indigenous language in the midst of Danish supremacy. A complete translation of the Bible produced in Iceland followed in 1584 and within five years the first Icelandic hymnal as well.
EXPANSION IN NORWAY
Although Norway was politically under the dominance of Denmark and therefore its allegiance to Lutheranism, Norway presented its loyalty to Frederik I of Denmark as conditional on the king allowing Catholicism to remain the Norwegian ecclesial authority. Yet the agreement was not upheld, and Lutheran ministers arrived in the late 1520s with Christian III officially declaring Norway Lutheran in 1537 (Wilson 1903, 307–8).
There were few trained clergy, which resulted in a mixture of styles in services and ministry, a situation exacerbated by a lack of Norwegian literature. The Danes finally produced a Norwegian catechism in 1541, but the sparse number of copies meant many churches went without. The first Norwegian printing press was not operational until 1644; in the following years, the spread of Lutheranism accelerated. When the first vernacular hymnal for the Lutheran churches of Norway was published in 1569, it contained only Danish and Latin compositions, yet “congregational singing [was] the most appealing feature in the new order” (Larsen 1948, 271).
EXPANSION IN SWEDEN
There were strong cultural and economic ties between Germany and Sweden in the early sixteenth century, which contributed to the flow of Protestant ideas. German merchants first introduced Lutheranism to the German colony in Sweden, with Nicholas Stecker, a Wittenberg graduate, becoming their first Lutheran minister in 1524 (Senn 1997, 401–2). Other Wittenberg graduates followed into the courts of King Gustav Vasa, namely Laurentius Andreae and the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. The influence of these three men infected the nation with the Protestant message. It was amid economic and nationalistic malaise that the spark of the Swedish Reformation originated and spread, fanned by Luther’s Wittenberg students.
Olaus Petri and his younger brother, Laurentius, were educated in a Carmelite monastery in Örebro (their place of birth), and in 1516 Olaus went to Wittenberg to study for his master’s degree. There he witnessed the events that unfolded after Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the cathedral door, and in 1518 he returned to Strängnäs, Sweden, to teach at the cathedral school.
In 1524 King Gustav Vasa invited Olaus Petri to be the secretary of Stockholm and preach at Storkyrkan (in the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas), with his brother Laurentius as the king’s counselor, and Laurentius Andreae, who had studied canon law in Rome, as his principal advisor. Andreae became the political engineer of the king’s Reformation ideas, Laurentius Petri the conductor of ecclesiastical transformation, and Olaus the propagator of the Protestant message, or, as Altman Swihart contends, the “intellectual leader of the Reformation in Sweden” (1960, 224–38). Stirred by the polemical writings of Olaus Petri against the doctrines of the Catholic Church, a Riksdag (parliament of nobles) gathered at Västerås in 1527 and agreed with King Vasa (after his tears and threats of resignation) to establish a Swedish Lutheran Church modeled after the Wittenberg reform. The king then pressured Petrus Magni, the Catholic bishop of Västeras, to appoint three other bishops without papal consent; he also installed Laurentius Petri as a professor of theology at the University of Uppsala in 1527 and then four years later as the archbishop of Uppsala.
The work of Andreae and the Petri brothers continued to influence the nation with the Protestant message. Together they published the New Testament in Swedish in 1526; in 1531 Olaus printed a manual for a Swedish Mass and five years later a Swedish translation of the Old Testament. In addition, Olaus edited vernacular hymnals because he believed that they were edifying and instructive, and “expressed the prayer of the heart” (Bergendoff 1928, 160), even though Latin hymnals continued to be published. In 1541 Laurentius Petri translated the entire Bible into Swedish, and its use in every parish influenced religious education (Woodward 1910, 205–66).
Throughout these reforms, the popular cause of Protestantism was strongest in Stockholm. The king had contended with repeated agrarian uprisings before 1540, as the people, sponsored by the Catholic priests, objected to excessive royal taxes (to pay for the war with Denmark) and supported traditional Catholicism. Plagued by constant financial troubles, King Vasa readily appropriated Franciscan and Dominican monasteries for secular use at places such as Viborg to buttress the national treasury to pay for defense expenses; in so doing, he also inadvertently facilitated the reform movement (Te Brake 1998, 54–55). During this time of disorder, one of the students of German nobility at Wittenberg was Georg Norman, whom Luther had sent as a tutor to the Swedish prince Eric. Between 1539 and 1544 German Lutheran views held sway in Sweden because of Norman’s ministry to the prince. After Vasa died in 1560, subsequent royal political intrigues hindered the complete formation of Protestantism for the next forty-five years. A full Protestant church order finally occurred in 1571, whereby Laurentius Petri defined the practice of the church, followed by a complete embrace of Lutheran theology in 1593 (Gritsch 2002, 52–53).
Publications and Missions
Luther’s German translation of the Bible became the example as other European nations considered translating the Scriptures into their languages. He published some 350 works and 3,000 letters to people throughout Europe. In particular, his Large and Small Catechisms have been extremely influential, even to the present day. In addition, Luther’s speeches, sermons, and hymns in the vernacular set a standard for others to follow. Due to all the different forms Luther used to reach people, Ji Won Yong has claimed that Luther was a missionary to Germany and the rest of the world (1996, 148).
Among their congregations, Lutheran laity and ministers promoted Luther’s publications, which raised awareness of missions. With large numbers of people promoting Luther’s message, his teaching spread effectively and rapidly.
Music and Missions
The cathedral school at Magdeburg, which Luther attended for one year in his youth in 1497, developed his love for choral singing. Four years later, he began attending the University of Erfurt, where he studied music theory and learned to play the flute. Later, at the Augustinian monastery in the early sixteenth century, Luther formed his theology of music following Augustinian thought. For Luther, music expressed biblical truths in service to theology but was secondary to Scripture. The vernacular sermon was of primary importance (Guicharrousse 1995, 20–27, 67–68). Nonetheless, he believed that music, as a gift from God, should be used to adore God and share biblical truth, whether the style was traditional rural, urban, or humanist.
Within his [Luther’s] lifetime his hymns became a national possession, so that his enemies said he had destroyed more souls by them than by all speeches and other writings.
Eva Mary Grew (1938, 72)
Despite popular music’s questionable morality, Luther adapted it to serve theological purposes. “After all, the gift of language combined with the gift of song was only given to man to let him know that he should praise God with both words and music, namely, by proclaiming [the word of God] through music and by providing sweet melodies with words” (Luther 1965, 323–24). Luther reorganized the musical sections of the Reformed order of service, believing that worship was both an outward and an inward expression achieved by truly appreciating the benefits of God (Luther 1884, 296). The vernacular communicated biblical truth throughout the service in both sermon and song. Modified chants avoided obscuring the words with music, different pitch tones indicated various speakers within the song, and altered chorales reflected his appreciation of the Netherlands’ polyphonic music—all molded to suit his theological purposes (Bainton 1950, 341–42).
Luther’s most significant contribution to church music was in the area of congregational singing. Since all believers are priests unto Christ, all followers need to participate in corporate song. For Luther, “all of the music of worship—including the hymnody—was in reality the song of the royal priesthood confessing and proclaiming to the world the good news of God in Christ” (Schalk 1983, 133). Luther himself wrote thirty-six hymns: fifteen metrical renditions of biblical passages, ten adaptations from Latin hymns, six modified German hymns, and five originals (Grew 1938, 72). These hymns were sermons set to music, with the notes giving life to the text (Grindel 2006, 179). Luther aimed “to make German Psalms for the people, i.e., spiritual songs so that the word of God even by means of song may live among the people” (Luther 1965, 221). Luther’s use of music was just one more way he spread the Protestant message to others. This missional tactic of creating vernacular worship music spread to many other countries, drawing in and passing on Reformed ideas.
Even with the backdrop of theological, social, and political chaos, Lutheranism and Calvinism flourished in Europe during the sixteenth century. Luther’s message swept through Scandinavia, promoted by former Wittenberg students carrying Luther’s writings, Bible translations, and hymns. Parallel to this expansion was the spread of Calvin’s Protestant gospel. Similar to Luther, Calvin distributed his message during a time of intense difficulty for Protestant churches. Much energy was concentrated on survival of the fledging Protestant movement via organizing church governance, establishing theological doctrine, and training pastors. The immediate pressing need was for the church and its message to be safely established. Even so, preaching Reformation doctrine in Catholic regions inevitably ensured the death sentence.
In such a milieu of violence and unrest, we could possibly excuse Calvin or Luther if they neglected evangelism or missions. The immense social pressures and difficulties, however, did not immobilize the evangelistic efforts of the Reformers and their followers. In addition, the consequence of their efforts was far more than reforming the thinking of established believers. In light of the situation of the world around them, their missionary activity and that of their colleagues was remarkable. Even though both Luther and Calvin never traveled much farther than their homeland, their message infectiously spread throughout Europe and beyond to the corners of the world, bringing tens of thousands of new believers to Christ.