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The ‘Godly Community’ in the Theory and Practice of the European Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Euan Cameron
Euan Cameron*
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
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Extract

It is now a truism to say that the European Reformation of the sixteenth century brought into being a religion of the word. It arose in literate and learned debate; it was fomented by the printing of written propaganda; it defined itself according to written formulae, including creeds, confessions, and catechisms. It is perhaps almost as generally accepted, and certainly as true, that the ‘Word’ as envisaged by the Reformers was a doctrine based on reasoning and logic, logically expressed, and meant to be understood in an intellectually coherent way. This trait in the aims of the Reformers emerged most obviously when they set about writing catechisms and pieces of pastoral instruction. In his Formula Missae seu Communìonis of 1523, Luther required that

Let [the pastor] not admit the applicants unless they can give a reason for their faith and can answer questions about what the Lord’s Supper is, what its benefits are, and what they expect to derive from it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 23: Voluntary Religion , 1986 , pp. 131 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1986

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References

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2 Latin Epistle to Luther’s Shorter Catechism, in Luther, Opera (Wittenberg 1554) 5 fol 647r.

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41 Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning pp. 160-1; for other similar remarks by Luther see S.C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 69 pt 8 (1979) pp. 53-4.

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77 Ibid. I p. 221.

78 In my The Reformation of the Heretics (Oxford 1984) pp. 257-60.

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