Protestants And Mysticism In Reformation Europe

Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, edited by Ronald K. Rittgers and Vincent Evener, is a research handbook on the Protestant reception of mysticism, from the beginnings of the Reformation through the mid-seventeenth century.

"Superstition" is one of the most fought over terms in the history of early modern popular culture, especially religious culture, and is also one of the most difficult to define. This volume offers a novel approach to the issue, based upon national and regional studies, and examinations of attitudes to prophets, ghosts, saints, and demonology, alongside an analysis of Catholic responses to the Reformation and the apparent presence of "superstition" in the reformed churches. It challenges the assumptions that Catholic piety was innately superstitious, while Protestantism was rational, and suggests that the early modern concept of "superstition" needs more careful treatment by historians.

Enemies of the Cross examines how suffering and truth were aligned in the divisive debates of the early Reformation. Vincent Evener explores how Martin Luther, along with his first intra-Reformation critics, offered "true" suffering as a crucible that would allow believers to distinguish the truth or falsehood of doctrine, teachers, and their own experiences. To use suffering in this way, however, reformers also needed to teach Christians to recognize false suffering and the false teachers who hid under its mantle. This book contends that these arguments, which became an enduring part of the Lutheran and radical traditions, were nourished by the reception of a daring late-medieval mystical tradition the post-Eckhartian which depicted annihilation of the self as the way to union with God. The first intra-Reformation dissenters, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, have frequently been depicted as champions of medieval mystical views over and against the non-mystical Luther. Evener counters this depiction by showing how Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer developed their shared mystical tradition in diverse directions, while remaining united in the conviction that sinful self-assertion prevented human beings from receiving truth and living in union with God. He argues that Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer each represented a different form of ecclesial-political dissent shaped by a mystical understanding of how Christians were united to God through the destruction of self-assertion. Enemies of the Cross draws on seldom-used sources and proposes new concepts of "revaluation" and "relocation" to describe how Protestants and radicals brought medieval mystical teachings into new frameworks that rejected spiritual hierarchy.

"The present book argues that Martin Luther and his first allies and intra-Reformation critics (Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer) appealed to suffering to teach Christians to distinguish between true and false doctrine, teachers, and experiences. In so doing, they developed and deployed categories of false suffering, in which suffering was received or simply feigned in ways that hardened rather than demolished self-assertion. These ideas were nourished by the reception of teachings about annihilation of the self and union with God received from post-Eckhartian mysticism. Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer developed this mystical inheritance in different directions, each of which intended to shape Christians for differing forms of ecclesial-political dissent: Luther redefined union with God as a union through faith and the Word, and he counselled Christians to endure persecution as divine work under contraries; Karlstadt described union with God as "sinking into the divine will," and he upheld this union as a post-mortem goal that required, here and now, constant self-accusation and improvement on the part of the individual and the community; Müntzer looked for God to possess souls according to the created order, making Christians into actors for the execution of God's will on the earthly plane. The democratization of mysticism that so many scholars have attributed to these reformers' teachings involved a delimitation: mysticism joined to Reformation teaching was used to identify false experiences, false teachers, and ultimately false Christianity"--

The first survey to utilise the approaches of the new cultural history in analysing how Reformation Europe came about.

This work provides a comprehensive and multi-facetted account of the Reformation in eastern and central Europe, drawing on extensive archival research carried out by Continental and British scholars. Across a broad thematic, temporal and geographical range, the contributors examine the cultural impact of the Reformation in Eastern Europe, the encounters between different confessions, and the blend of religious and political pressures which shaped the path of Reformation in these lands. By making the fruits of their research accessible to a wider audience, the contributors hope to emphasise the important role of eastern and central Europe on the early modern European scene.