Inspired by Thomas Cartwright, the Puritans of the Bay Colony fashioned the civil commonwealth according to the framework of the church. Only the elect could vote and rule in the commonwealth. The church would not govern, but it would prepare the “instruments both to rule and to choose rulers.” Biblical law was the primary law for ordering both church and state.
The colony prospered; thus it seemed evident that God was blessing Puritan performance. As a result the leadership could not take kindly to those who publicly criticized their basic program. Hence Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1638 were banished from the colony even though they could declare their experience of the work of grace. More troublesome than these dissenters were persons such as Mary Dyer. She and other Quakers who returned again and again after being punished and banished were finally hanged. It was difficult for the state to keep the church pure.
Fearing that the Westminster Assembly, established by the Parliament to reform the church, would impose a new form of church government on them, churches from the four Puritan colonies—Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven—met in a voluntary synod in 1648. They adopted the Cambridge Platform, in which the congregational form of church government was worked out in detail. The standard for church membership came into question when it was found that numbers of second-generation residents could not testify to the experience of grace in their lives. This resulted in the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662 that permitted baptized, moral, and orthodox persons to share in the privileges of church membership except for partaking of communion.
Late in the 17th century it was apparent to all that the ideal commonwealth was not being maintained. Ministers pointed to wars with the Native Americans and other problems as signs of God’s judgment. Another sign of the failure of the commonwealth and God’s displeasure was the appearance of what many people thought were witches. The Salem witch trials and hangings took place in 1692 during a period of declining confidence in the old ideal. Other colonies
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven were not the only variations on the main theme of realizing the holy commonwealth in America. Roger Williams and the other founders of Rhode Island must also be regarded as Puritans with the “one principle, that every one should have liberty to worship God according to the light of their consciences.” William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania represented the Quaker variation of the Puritan experiment. When Penn became owner of this vast tract of land, he saw it as a mandate from God to form an ideal commonwealth. In New Jersey, Puritans from the New Haven colony who were dissatisfied with the Half-Way Convenant sought to reestablish the pristine Puritan community at Newark. Maryland, which had been established under Roman Catholic auspices, soon had a strong Puritan majority among its settlers. Indeed, there was no colony in which Puritan influence was not strong, and one estimate identifies 85 percent of the churches in the original 13 colonies as Puritan in spirit. The expansion of the Reformation in Europe
By the middle of the 16th century, Lutheranism had spread into the various principalities and kingdoms of northern Europe. The duchy of Württemberg, after the restoration of Duke Ulrich, adopted reform in 1534; its outstanding reformer was Johannes Brenz and its great centre Tübingen. Brandenburg, and its capital Berlin, embraced reform in 1539, and in that same year ducal Saxony, until then vehemently Catholic, changed sides. Elisabeth of Braunschweig also converted in 1539, but only after much turbulence did her faith prevail in the land. Albert of Prussia, whose wife was Danish and who was a member of the Polish Diet and grand master of the Teutonic Order, took a stand that was very significant for the north. He secularized the order and in 1525 acknowledged himself a Lutheran. In Scandinavia Denmark toyed with breaking with Rome as early as the 1520s, but it was not until 1539 that the Danish church became a national church with the king as the head and the clergy as leaders in matters of faith. Norway followed Denmark. The Diet of Västerås (1527) officially declared what had for some time been true, namely, that Sweden was an evangelical state. The outstanding Swedish reformers were the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. Finland, under Swedish rule, followed suit. The reformer there was Mikael Agricola, called “the father of written Finnish.” The Baltic states of Livonia and Estonia were officially Lutheran in 1554. Austria under the Habsburgs provided no state support for the evangelical movement, which nevertheless gained adherents. In Moravia, as noted earlier, the Hutterites established their colonies under tolerant magnates.
The reform movement also spread into eastern Europe. Poland, though remaining predominantly Roman Catholic, acquired a large Protestant minority in the late 16th century, when the Danzig area and its German Lutheran population came under Polish control, and when a large contingent of the Bohemian Brethren migrated to Poland after the Habsburg ruler attempted their extermination. Several Polish nobles adopted their pacifism and wore only swords made of wood. In 1570 the anti-Trinitarian Socinians, named after their leader Faustus Socinus, flocked from Italy to Poland where they received asylum, perhaps merely because they were Italian, from the Italian queen of Poland, Bona Sforza. They flourished in Poland until dispersed by the Counter-Reformation and survived in small groups until the 19th century. Much more extensive was the Calvinist influx not only into Poland but into the whole of eastern Europe. This variety of Protestantism appealed to those of non-German stock because it was not German and no longer markedly French, as well as because of its revolutionary temper and republican sentiments. The Compact of Warsaw (1573) called the Pax Dissidentium (“The Peace of Those Who Differ”), granted toleration to Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Bohemian Brethren, but not to the Socinians.
In Hungary, the Turkish victory at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 brought about a division of the land into three sections, with the northwest ruled by the Habsburg Ferdinand, the eastern province of Transylvania under Zápolya, and the area of Buda under the Turks. Even before this date Lutheran ideas had made slight inroads in the German and Magyar sections of Hungary. Although Roman Catholicism would predominate among the Hungarian population, Calvinism made gains, and the anti-Trinitarians found a permanent home in Transylvania. The weakness of the government and the diversity of religion in this whole area made for a large degree of toleration.
On the other hand, the Reformation gained no lasting hold in Spain or Italy. In Spain this was primarily the result of the conflicts of the previous century, when Christians strove to achieve political, cultural, and religious unification by converting or expelling the unbelievers—the Jews and the Moors. The Inquisition was introduced in 1482 to root out all remnants of Jewish practice among the Marranos, the Jewish converts to Christianity. The non-Christian Jews were expelled in 1492. Then Granada fell and the same process was applied to the Moriscos, the Moorish converts, and the unconverted Moors, after a century, also were expelled. Because the process had thus far been successful, the pressures were relaxed, and Spain enjoyed a decade of Erasmian liberalism in the 1520s. But with the infiltration of Lutheranism, the machinery of repression again was brought into force.
In Italy sectarian and heretical movements had proliferated throughout the Middle Ages. But one by one they had been crushed or absorbed by the church. Furthermore, the Reformation failed to take hold in Italy because of the tradition of moral preaching by the friars. Another consideration was that the new religious orders—the Capuchins, Theatines, and Jesuits—tapped into currents of popular spirituality while gaining papal favour. The new orders became a mighty force in counteracting Protestant infiltration, which nevertheless did take place. Venice was a centre, with its branch house of the Lutheran banking family of Fugger, and so was Lucca. At Naples the Spanish mystic Valdés, though not a Protestant, expounded a Catholic reformist piety, and some of his followers were attracted to the movements coming from beyond the Alps. Calvinism gained a hold, but the Roman Inquisition, as above noted, was established in 1542, and those with Protestant leanings either made cloisters of their own hearts, went to the stake, or crossed the mountains into permanent exile. Ironically, the most radical theological views of the Reformation were those propounded by the Spanish and Italian anti-Trinitarians. Roland H. Bainton James C. Spalding Martin E. Marty Protestant renewal and the rise of the denominations The setting for renewal Survival of a mystical tradition