Reformation Apocalypticism: Münster’s Monster or Christian Nationalism

Reformation Apocalypticism: Münster’s Monster

THE YEAR IS 1530. Protestant thought sweeps like a tornado across a European terrain that has altered little for a thousand years. Caught in the storm, the influential town of Strasbourg (now in France) is gripped by the same fears rampaging through Germany and the Netherlands. The stage is set for revolution. Melchoir Hoffman, a furrier, mounts the pulpit to preach another of his fiery apocalyptic sermons. The New Revelation is about to be unleashed...

most agree Melchoir Hoffman’s preaching was the most significant factor in launching the radical wing of the Reformation. His emphasis on a literal millennial reign of Jesus Christ on earth gripped the imagination of the Anabaptist movement...

Matthys proclaimed he was none other than Enoch, the second witness of the Book of Revelation. With a flowing black beard, the tall, gaunt figure was now the bearer of prophetic authority. Doubters were confronted with threats and intimidation. Those failing to embrace the second Enoch would be cast into hell with the devil and his angels... 

If the reign of Christ was to begin, spiritual corruption from Roman Catholics and Lutherans (and all others failing to embrace Anabaptist doctrine) must be purged from the city. Dissenters should be executed...

Matthys now had the city in his grasp, controlling even the flow of information. All books except the Scriptures were burned in the cathedral square... 

 On Easter Sunday 1534, Matthys descended on Bishop Waldeck like one of the apocalyptic four horsemen—but the ride was short. The bishop’s armed guards came to his defense. Matthys was stabbed with a pike, then decapitated. His head was hoisted on a pole for the citizens lining the city walls to observe.

Obbe Philips, a follower of Hoffman who rejected Matthys’s violence, wrote of Matthys, “He was so violent that even his enemies … were terrified of him, and finally in a tumult, they became too powerful for him, they were so incensed that they did not just kill him … but hacked and chopped him into little pieces.”

The faithful remnant was undeterred. Jan van Leyden picked up the mantle, anointed himself king, and began his messianic reign by running naked through Münster in wild religious ecstasy. He appointed 12 men in charge of the affairs of the city, instigating a reign of terror and wild innovations including polygamy. He indulged himself in excesses while subjecting the citizens to austerity. The new millennial kingdom was to be short lived.

The Weight of History

On May 25, 1535, the bishop’s army broke into Münster and quickly captured the city. Killing lasted for two days. When the bodies were finally piled in the cathedral square, the stench was overwhelming. Bernhard Rothman probably perished in the assault, and van Leyden and Knipperdolling were captured, tortured and put to death. The hopes for a New Jerusalem ended in a debacle. 

Lutheran and Calvinist pessimism about human attempts to establish a Kingdom of God was reinforced.

 Even today they generally continue their suspicion of all forms of both pre- and postmillennialism. The events in Münster had simply been too monstrous.  is this what Christian Nationalism looks like?

Anabaptism is a Christian movement which traces its origins to the Radical Reformation. The movement is generally seen as an offshoot of Protestantism.

Anabaptists require that baptismal candidates be able to make a confession of faith that is freely chosen and so reject the baptism of infants.

 Most Anabaptists adhere to a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount which precludes taking oaths, participating in military actions, and participating in civil government.

Protestant fundamentalists regard the Bible as foundational for faith, and believe that if the Bible were found to be flawed, Christianity would collapse. They therefore also feel concerned at the prospect of more than one meaning to a biblical passage, for their foundation would then seem more like shifting sand than solid rock.

 While they believe they base Christian faith on Scripture, in practice they base it on reason, or a particular deductive and inductive process by which they require Scripture to pass stringent rational and empirical assessments (Harris 2000).

 Their position stems from an epistemological anxiety that we cannot know anything of Christ or God if we cannot first be sure that the Bible is (factually) reliable.(Harriet A. Harris, “Fundamentalism(s),” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 834.)

The colonists’ reasons for migration were varied, but John Winthrop’s leadership gave the movement a unified vision and a sense of Christian mission. As the Arabella neared Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop enunciated his vision in his famous lay sermon

 “A Modell of Christian Charity.” 

He compared the Puritan journey from England with Israel’s exodus from Egypt. They were escaping a land where a godless state governed the church and where the sins of centuries dominated the people’s thinking and way of life.

 They would build a new England in the New World—the Promised Land. Their success or failure would depend upon whether they were faithful to God’s covenant. Winthrop saw the Puritan migration to the New World as a chance to build a society governed by God’s true people and God’s principles for holy living. Might not New England become the very kingdom of God?

In support of Winthrop’s vision, the civil magistrates attempted to maintain both moral purity and theological conformity among the people. This led to the civil government’s domination of the New England church, one of the very reasons they had left England.

 The demand for theological conformity also led to the exiling of a number of well-known figures, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Despite the eventual failure of Winthrop’s “kingdom experiment,” his belief that America had a moral and spiritual mission to the world endures to this day in American political thought.(M.R. Norton, “Winthrop, John,” ed. J.D. Douglas and Philip W. Comfort, Who’s Who in Christian History (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992), 730–731.)

Several American colonies followed the European example of having an established church, but when the new nation gained independence, none had sufficient power to become the dominant national religion.

 This contributed to the provisions for religious liberty and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

 Both as cause and effect, it provided for the denominational pattern of tolerance and freedom for every religious group as long as it does not subvert the state or violate the rights of others.

 Immigrants from nations with established Anglican, Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran or Orthodox churches were no longer part of a dominant national religion but of only a minority religious body coexisting with hundreds of others. Since there was no established “church,” “sects” could not be defined as splinters from it.(Daniel G. Reid et al., Dictionary of Christianity in America (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990).)

  Presbyterian General Assembly, Philadelphia was the chosen city was ironic: it was the cradle both of American Presbyterianism (being the location of the first presbytery in 1706 and the site of the first General Assembly in 1789) and of the nation (in which city both the Declaration of Independence, 1776, and the Constitution, 1789, were adopted). It was also quite a patriotic city and made it difficult to resist patriotic demands on the 1861 General Assembly to issue a strongly pro-Union statement.

Hodge made it abundantly clear in his writing and in the debate on the floor of the General Assembly over the Gardiner Spring Resolutions that he was a fervent Lincoln supporter and an ardent Union man. Nevertheless, because he firmly believed that the Gardiner Spring Resolutions decided a political question, something no assembly should do, Hodge, and those who joined him in protest, put it like this:

 We make this protest, not because we do not acknowledge loyalty to our country to be a moral and religious duty, according to the word of God, which requires us to be subject to the powers that be; nor because we deny the right of the Assembly to enjoin that, and all other like duties, on the ministers and churches under its care-

 but because we deny the right of the General Assembly to decide the political question, to what government the allegiance of Presbyterians as citizens is due, and its rights to make that decision a condition of membership in our Church.  

As for the demands of the 1865 General Assembly exceeding those of the civil government itself, that is startlingly true. Hodge wrote,

 The United States authorities require of those who participated in the rebellion, no expression of contrition, no renunciation of political theories, no avowal of approbation of the measures of the government for the preservation of the Union and abrogation of slavery, but the simple promise of obedience to the laws and allegiance to the government.

This is another indication that the ecclesiastical sphere was as politicized, if not more so, than the civil one. Hodge concluded,

 “It seems rather incongruous that a church court should assume to be more loyal than the government which it desires to support.”

Alan D. Strange, Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, and the Spiritual Mission of the Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 62,84–85.

Theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw in the rise of Hitler’s Germany a counterfeit eschatology that could not be opposed by the “God-consciousness” kingdom of Protestant liberalism.

 Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” was a thinly veiled pagan reinterpretation of the “thousand-year reign” of Christ pictured in the Apocalypse. In the Barmen Declaration of 1934, Barth opposed the

“German Christian” movement that sought to co-opt Christian churches for the Nazi state.

(Russell D. Moore, “Personal and Cosmic Eschatology,” in A Theology for the Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2014),689- 690.)

Numerous scholars have traced Calvin’s political ideas. Among the various evaluations, Douglas Kelly identifies the “sober Calvinian assessment of fallen man’s propensity to seize, increase, and abuse power for personal ends rather than for the welfare of the many.” He further explains:

 “Governmental principles for consent of the governed, and separation and balance of powers are all logical consequences of a most serious and Calvinian view of the biblical doctrine of the fall of man.”

David W. Hall, “Calvin on Human Government and the State,” in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, ed. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback, The Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 411–412.