The Sabbath World (21 page)

Luther was horrified, in part because he knew that his teachings shared some of the blame, and he and his fellow reformers promptly distanced themselves from the rebellion by aligning with the persecutory authorities—even with Catholic princes and monarchs—as they arrested and killed every religious radical they could find. But the excitement had spread and could not be quashed. Instead, it went underground.

It was at this point that the Reformation split in two. One half
cast its lot with the worldly authorities, advocated careful meliorist reforms, and eschewed anything that smacked too openly of anarchy or heresy. This was the so-called Magisterial Reformation of Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin. The other half, the Radical Reformation, was largely (though not entirely) made up of groups that concluded that the quest for political power had been misguided and withdrew from the world. This quietist attitude toward reform was one part savvy and one part principle. Many of the founders of these separatist sects had good reason to disappear, since they had helped either to instigate or to fight the Peasants’ War and were now being arrested and executed. But some of them came up with a novel—and very modern-sounding—argument for their quietism. They began to promote what they called the Free Church. They argued that the Church had grown corrupt when it acquired absolute power—when Constantine converted and the papacy began and church married state. If the Church were a true church of Christ, it had to be made up of true believers, and “therefore could not be coterminous with the physical boundaries of any one state or group of states,” as historian Daniel Liechty puts it.

These proto-church-state separatists were called—by their enemies—Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, because they held that Christianity, being a voluntary faith, ought not to be forced on infants through baptism. Only adults old enough to choose to join a Christian community were to be baptized; hence they rebaptized their first members, though later Anabaptists were baptized only when they came of age, usually at thirty. (The Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Europe were the direct precursors of the Anabaptists of twenty-first-century America, that is to say, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Hutterites.) Two other groups to emerge during the Radical Reformation were the Socinians and the Unitarians. These eschewed the doctrine of the Trinity—the creed that God was made up of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and some among them even denied that Christ had been divine. Many in all of these sects were pacifists; some were communists, believing that wealth should be
shared and property held in common; a few had female leaders. In manner of living, the Anabaptists and Unitarians were spare and ascetic. In style of worship, they strove to be biblical.

The key fact about the Radical Reformation, though, for our purposes anyway, was that when the sectarians read the Scriptures, they accepted no limits on their interpretive freedom. It was a common Reformation belief that Christianity had taken a wrong turn somewhere, usually with the papacy. All Protestants read Scripture for clues as to where and when that wrong turn came, no matter where this line of inquiry might lead. But the Anabaptists, appalled at the slaughter of the peasants, disgusted by Luther’s support for it, alienated from Catholic and Protestant institutions alike, countenanced no check on the free play of their inquiries and refused to stop the search for a purer Christianity. Anabaptism spread most quickly among peasants and other people with little education, but its founders were learned men and original thinkers, and had become radicals in part because they had a passion for theological inquiry and were not afraid to cross the line into heresy. It was not long before someone came up with the notion that the fall of the Church should be traced all the way back to Christianity’s break with Mosaic Law, and someone else traced it back to the abolition of the Saturday Sabbath.

Saturday Sabbatarianism made its first appearance, at least during the Reformation (scattered outbreaks of it had occurred before), in Silesia and Moravia—today parts of Poland and the Czech Republic—in the late 1520s, the innovation of two young intellectuals whose Anabaptist activities got them chased out of Germany and Austria. Oswald Glaidt was a former Franciscan monk and follower of Hans Hut, a millenarian who even after the slaughter of the peasants preached that the political authorities should be killed preparatory to the Second Coming of Christ. Andreas Fischer was less colorful but more systematic, and probably more influential. Together they formulated the theory and congregational practice of Saturday Sabbath worship. The Saturday Sabbath, they said, had been good enough for the patriarchs, as well as Moses, Jesus, and the apostles; therefore the Saturday Sabbath was good enough for all Christians. The Catholic
Church had upheld the command to refrain from work as moral, not ceremonial, and therefore binding on Christians, but decreed that the choice of day was ceremonial and therefore superseded, and that the Sabbath had mutated into the Lord’s Day on the authority of the Church. Luther and Calvin also viewed the Fourth Commandment as only half binding, but since they refused to recognize the authority of the Church they considered one day to be as good as any other for resting (though Sunday would do fine). Luther said that although Sabbath rest was commanded, it should be wholly spiritual, not legalistic—that is, it ought not conform to rules and laws. Calvin denied that Sunday rest was commanded but considered it worth keeping because it was a social good, insofar as it promoted communal worship and general piety and gave servants a rest. Glaidt and Fischer, however, advanced the thesis that both parts of the Fourth Commandment—rest and Saturday observance—were moral and remained in force. The Sabbath, they said, would shed its rules and become purely spiritual only after Christ’s resurrection.

It is hard for the modern mind to grasp how life-threatening such abstruse distinctions could be. When Luther learned what Glaidt and Fischer were preaching, he was furious. His reforms had already been tarnished by the Peasants’ War. The last thing he wanted to hear was that Protestants had revived a ritual that reeked of Jewishness. In 1538, he wrote a treatise titled “Against the Sabbatarians” in which he called them “unlearned,” “foolish” “apes,” and “Judaizers.” If they start keeping the Sabbath, he declared, the next thing they’ll want is circumcision. (As Luther sputters and fumes his way through this essay, he mixes up the Judaizers with actual Jews. Early in his career, Luther had defended the freedom and dignity of Jews, whose refusal to convert he called a reasonable response to the nonsensical hash of Catholic doctrine; but when the Jews failed to convert upon hearing him, he decided they were hateful after all. “Against the Sabbatarians” is the first of many anti-Jewish works by Luther.) Calvin, for his part, said the Sabbatarians “went thrice as far as the Jews in the gross and carnal superstition of sabbatism.”

Everything about the Sabbatarian Anabaptists seemed designed to
outrage Luther in particular. Fischer, for instance, rejected Luther’s distinction between Law and Gospel: “Christ did not come to abolish the Law but rather to give the believer power, through the Holy Spirit, to uphold it,” as Liechty puts it. Fischer believed that what had led the church astray was its decision to replace the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday. Fischer, writes Liechty, “located the fall of the church exactly at the point where the church was cut off from its Judaic roots”; that was the moment, as far as Fischer was concerned, when the church stopped being the church.”

About a year after Luther published “Against the Sabbatarians”—though not demonstrably as a result of it—Fischer was captured and killed by a Slovakian administrator loyal to the Hapsburg king of Austria, Ferdinand I, a Roman Catholic and harsh persecutor of Anabaptists. Five years later, Glaidt, who by then had probably abandoned his Sabbatarianism and joined a different Anabaptist group, the Hutterites, was taken to Vienna to be drowned in the Danube.

I
NTELLECTUALLY
, the Reformation was an exercise in nostalgia. Methodologically, it involved the rejection of texts from the recent Christian past—the abominations of the Church, as many reformers put it—in favor of texts dating back to a time when faith was believed to have been unperverted. Religiously, all this led back to Judaism. Reformation scholars (including Luther, at first) understood that if they were to cull lost meanings out of old books, they had to read them in the original, and if they were to disseminate those meanings, they had to retranslate the books and produce new commentaries that reflected their findings. To accomplish all this, they had to improve their Greek and Hebrew. Greek had enjoyed a revival during the Renaissance, but few Christian theologians in the early sixteenth century knew Hebrew. From whom would they learn it? From Jews and from Jewish sources, of course. Almost every serious Christian Hebraist found and cultivated a rabbi to be his instructor.

Modern scholars have only recently begun to appreciate the influence
of Christian Hebraism on the Reformation. For one thing, until this century, few scholars of the period had the skills in Hebrew and rabbinics to understand it. For another, almost all sixteenth-century inquiries into Hebrew texts had the taint of controversy and were downplayed by later thinkers. Any Hebraist could be smeared at any time as a Judaizer, no matter how committed he was to Christian doctrine or how personally anti-Jewish (opposed to Judaism as a theological system) or anti-Semitic (opposed to Jews as a people). For this was still a time of expulsion, taxation, and ghettoization of Jews, when Jews still occasioned intense religious hatred and visceral social loathing. More pertinently, it was a time when Protestants felt vulnerable to the Catholic charge that they were backsliding into Judaism.

Worse, some Christian Hebraists went beyond learning Hebrew and began reading rabbinic writings, even borrowing from them. Scholars who felt they should be reading the Bible in its proper historical context, not through the filter of Christian supersessionism, looked to rabbinic texts for help interpreting biblical passages in light of their “plain,” or historical, meanings, rather than their allegorical or typological meanings, that is, the way the verses were said to prefigure the Christ story. Other Christian Hebraists studied Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, in search of support for mystical Christian doctrines. But some Christian Hebraists who turned to rabbinic or mystical texts to elucidate Christian doctrine found that their studies did the opposite. They undermined core Christian tenets.

The best-known Christian Hebraic heretic was the sixteenth-century Spaniard Michael Servetus, who pointed out that mention of the Trinity could be found neither in the Bible nor in the writings of the early fathers. (It became doctrine at the Council of Nicaea in 325
C.E.)
He made his point in a manner guaranteed to offend. Noting the absurdity of the claim that one is three and three is one, he declared, “Not only Mohammedans and Hebrews but the very beasts of the field would make fun of us if they could grasp our fantastical notion.” Servetus exploited his knowledge of Hebrew to redefine the triune as three modes of
expressing
divinity, rather than
incarnating
it; he based this theological construct on the fact that the Old Testament
uses several different names for God. The Catholic Church, Luther, and Calvin all recoiled at Servetus’s gleeful and very Jewish-sounding debunking of the Trinity, which remained for them a mystery central to Christian faith. Servetus was burned twice—once in effigy by Catholics, the second time in the flesh by the officials of the city of Geneva, who had been pressed into action by Calvin.

Anabaptist Sabbatarianism had its fullest and longest-lasting flowering in Transylvania, where, not coincidentally, Servetus-style anti-Trinitarianism caught on with a vengeance. The rise, survival, and fall of the Transylvanian
Szombatosok
(Saturday people) is one of the most baroque episodes of sabbatizing in history, complete with freethinking religious intellectuals, Judaizing diplomats, court intrigues, harsh persecutions, forced conversions, secret rituals, and, finally, the Holocaust. Their story illustrates how the Hebraist logic led straight to Old Testament monotheism and biblical Judaism; it also affords a glimpse of that logic’s appeal not just to elites but to common folk, whose Sabbatarianism probably had less to do with sympathy for the Jews than with the desire to defy their capricious and intolerant religious and political leaders.

Nowadays we think of Transylvania as a land dark with vampires and old castles, but in the late sixteenth century it was a country alive with ideas and unusually open to religious experimentation. Transylvania was a part of Hungary and the Hapsburg Empire, but by the sixteenth century, as a result of complicated politicking among Hapsburg princes, the Ottoman Empire, and Hungarian nobles, the region enjoyed the protection—though not the direct rule—of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman I, a man indifferent to the squabbles that had half of Europe trying to murder or excommunicate the other half. This put Transylvania beyond the reach of both the Church and the Magisterial Reformation. A highly diverse ethnic population also forced Transylvanians to cultivate the art of relatively peaceful coexistence.

Absence of censorship allowed the print industry to flourish and theologies to ramify. The Diet passed the first law in the West mandating religious toleration for different Christian denominations (Judaism and Islam remained forbidden). Lutheranism replaced Catholicism
as the country’s dominant religion, then was overtaken by the Calvinist Reformed Church. Francis David, the minister generally credited with founding Transylvanian Unitarianism, began as a Lutheran, became the leader of Transylvania’s Calvinists, and then found himself questioning the Trinity. A debate was organized between David and the Calvinists.

It lasted ten days and has been called “the greatest debate in the entire history of Unitarianism.” David argued the case for the doctrine of the Unity of God—that is, he maintained that the one God took precedence over the “persons” of God, a position that clearly threatened the divinity of Christ. By the ninth day everyone was tired and wanted to go home, so King John Sigismund of Transylvania adjourned the debate and called for another one. The second time around, David’s opponent made so many nasty personal attacks on him that the king threatened to send the man home. In the end, King John sided with neither camp, but gave orders that the Unitarians not be interfered with. The Unitarians interpreted this as a victory and developed a rallying cry:
Egy as Isten
, “God is one!” By 1571, the king had converted to Unitarianism and passed a law recognizing the denomination as one of Transylvania’s four religions, along with Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism.