The doctrine of a clear line separating the inward and outward inclined many of Luther’s followers toward pietism and provided political liberalism with one of its most productive and enduring fictions. The separation of church and state was possible only if one assumed that the state could occupy itself with “the body, goods and outward, earthly matters” without ruling over the soul—or rather, that “taxes, duties, honor, and fear” (among many other things Luther mentions) had nothing to do with virtue.47
Calvin and the Puritans accepted the need for the distinction but argued that “Christ’s spiritual rule establishes in us some beginnings of the celestial kingdom.” Civil government could not yet be fully dissolved in the spiritual life of a Christian community, but it could—and should—be as godly as the saints’ pursuit of righteousness would allow. Members could not be expected to abandon their “houses and brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and children,” but they could be asked to make their families as open, transparent, rule-bound, churchlike, and church-dependent as possible (ultimately constituting the primary unit of a godly commonwealth). They could not be counted on not to be angry with their brothers or commit adultery in their hearts, but they could be expected to demonstrate ceaseless self-restraint indicative of inner discipline. They could not be trusted not to let up occasionally in their efforts at self-observation, but they could be urged to monitor each other by means of formal surveillance and mutual admonition. Politics was a matter of public piety, which was a matter of laborious self-improvement, which was a matter of active participation in moral-political self-government (by means of attending endless meetings, sermons, votes, and debates, while also “keeping diligent watch, both by day and by night, each in his own place, of all comings and goings”). Official regulations reinforced self-generated activism: under Calvin’s prodding, Geneva’s magistrate not only banned gambling, dancing, begging, swearing, indecent singing, game-playing on Sundays, and the owning of unlicensed books and popish objects of any kind, but also prescribed attendance at Sunday sermons, the religious instruction of children and servants, the number of courses at public banquets, the proper attire of artisans and their families, the number of rings to be worn on various occasions, and the kinds of ornaments and hairstyles compatible with Christian decorum (silver belts and buckles were permitted, but silver chains, bracelets, collars, embroidery, necklaces, and tiaras were not).48
Those who could not be reformed through participation or even excommunication were to be turned over to the secular authorities for appropriate punishment. Some might ask if magistrates could “be dutiful to God and shed blood at the same time.” Calvin thought that they could. “If we understand that when magistrates inflict punishments, it is not any act of their own, but only the execution of God’s [own] judgments, we will not be inhibited by any scruple on this score.” Christians who steadfastly resisted sanctification had no place in a Christian commonwealth. As Calvin’s friend Guillaume de Trie wrote of the antitrinitarian Miguel Servetus, Christendom should be “purged of such filth” (Servetus was burned at the stake). And as the Oxford Puritan Francis Cheynell told the House of Commons in May 1643, “these are purging times; let all the malignant humors be purged out of the ecclesiastical and political body.”49
For most Calvinists, purging was a last resort and a sign of defeat. Their duty in an imperfect world was to do battle for the souls of the unrighteous, to touch their hearts with persuasive speech, and to teach self-discipline through godly discipline. But there were other reformers—“reformers” in the original sense of “going back to the source”—who stood for a universal purge, expected the Second Coming, and believed, on very good evidence, that Jesus had preached a life of sectarian equality and prophesied a violent apocalypse on the eve of a great feast for the hungry.
According to the radical German preacher Thomas Müntzer, the violent apocalypse and the great feast for the hungry were one and the same thing. Christ’s warriors were the plowmen; the Antichrist’s servants were the lords; and the end of time was now. The only way to receive the Holy Spirit was to follow Jesus along the path of poverty and suffering, and the only ones who understood the meaning of poverty and suffering were those who suffered on account of their poverty. “The stone, torn from the mountain without hands, has become mighty. The poor laymen and peasants see it more sharply than you do,” he told the Duke of Saxony (the same one to whom Luther had addressed his letter on secular authority). The kingdom of heaven was for those with nothing but their chains to lose.50
There was but one way to enter. According to Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was prefigured in the story about a man who sowed good seed and told his servants to begin the harvest by burning the weeds:
“The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.”
“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”51
Müntzer had ears, and he heard. “At the harvest-time one must pluck the weeds out of God’s vineyard,” he wrote, “but the angels who are sharpening their sickles for that work are no other than the earnest servants of God.” The problem, as foretold in Jesus’s parable, was that most servants of God had ears but did not hear. They were first by virtue of being last, but, like all the biblical proletarians from Moses’s Israelites to Jesus’s heavenly army, they needed to be awakened, instructed, and disciplined. “In truth, many of them will have to be roused, so that with the greatest possible zeal and with passionate earnestness they may sweep Christendom clean of ungodly rulers.” Müntzer’s role was to show the way. “The Living God is sharpening his scythe in me, so that later I can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers.” In May 1525, a large army of poor laymen and peasants followed him to Frankenhausen, where his promise to catch the enemy’s cannonballs in the sleeves of his cloak seemed to be confirmed by the sudden appearance of a rainbow. In the ensuing massacre, about five thousand rebels were killed. Müntzer was found hiding in a cellar, forced to confess under torture, and beheaded in the camp of the princes. Luther found his confession to be “a piece of devilish, hardened, obduracy.” 52
Müntzer was the most articulate advocate of popular millenarianism since Jesus and the first popular millenarian to turn the fantasy of brutal retribution into an explicit and consistently argued program of class warfare. Like Jesus, however, he was not a successful proselytizer and never got the chance to live in a field free of red poppies and blue cornflowers. The first Christian millenarians to turn the City of Man into the City of God were the Anabaptists of Münster. Anabaptists (“re-baptizers”) were programmatically radical because of their rejection of infant baptism. For the early Christians, baptism was a rite of induction into the sect—an act of purification symbolizing repentance of sins, acceptance of Christ, and entry into the community of believers. If the Protestants wanted to return to the days of the early Christians (and they all claimed they did), and if they believed, with Peter, that they were “a royal priesthood” (and therefore, according to Luther, “all equally priests”)—then they could no longer acquiesce in the baptism of those who were incapable of understanding the Word. This sounded reasonable until one stopped to think of the implications, as most Protestants did. The prohibition of infant baptism meant that one could not be born into a community of faith—that there could be, in effect, no such thing as a church coterminous with society. Four hundred years later, Ernst Troeltsch would base his distinction between a church and a sect on this very point: a church is an institution one is born into. The Anabaptists were determined, above all else, to remain a sect—a group of believers radically opposed to the corrupt world, dedicated to the dispossessed, and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism.53