Profiles of Radical Reformers: Biographical Sketches from Thomas Muntzer to Paracelsus

Michael Power is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This collection of 21 biographical glimpses of sixteenth century Protestant radicals is long overdue and most welcomed by North American historians of the Reformation. It dovetails with the current emergence of a free church historiography that has loosened itself from the corrosive confessional debates of the last three centuries. Each portrait is well written and very readable, and each demonstrates that high standard of excellence which results from careful scholarship and the objectivity and patience it takes to be both critically and sympathetically insightful. Now that the smoke has sufficiently risen from the sectarian battlefield of the continental Reformation, we can see more clearly and with greater acuity the various theological camps which together, but sometimes in bitter opposition to one another, eventually overturned the religious monopoly of Roman Catholicism. Profiles of Radical Reformers concentrates exclusively on the lesser known figures of the Reformation whose careers were largely spent outside of, or in opposition to, the state-supported Magisterial Reformation led by Luther, Zwingli, and later Calvin.

In his superb introduction, without which the book would be far less intelligible for the uninitiated, Hans-Jurgen Goertz is careful to point out the many problems associated with trying to define the word “radical.” It means more than the attempt to re-describe the substance of Christianity by virtue of an unprecedented reliance upon the Scriptures and an outright rejection of Catholic tradition concerning the role of the papacy and the hierarchy. It also means more than an abrupt and decisive departure from the immediate past. The radical reformers sought to rehabilitate the primitive apostolic church of the second century by interiorizing the Word of God, by rejecting pedobaptism, by refusing to take oaths, and by separating themselves from a world dominated by evil. They wanted to separate the church from the state, while at the same time to reform both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. Many of them lived in an atmosphere permeated by eschatological warnings and predictions. Ultimately, they worked for the transformation of all human relationships. Radicalness, then, is “primarily a heuristic model which requires that each personality or movement be investigated with respect to his or its own standard of radicalness.”

This model includes critics of Luther and his Wittenberg Reformation, the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, a wide range of Anabaptist thinkers, Spiritualists, and even Rationalists, some of whom were outrageous anti-Trinitarians. There are entries for Jakob Hutter and Menno Simons, whose influence on the Hutterite movement and the Mennonite Brethren, respectively, is still with us today; for Thomas Muntzer, who best symbolizes the powerful forces of anti-clericalism and late medieval mysticism; and for Caspar von Schwenckfeld, the Silesian nobleman and lay preacher, and Michael Servetus, the Spanish heretic. The profile of Michael Sattler the Anabaptist is one of the best that the book has to offer.

Unfortunately, the English Protestants during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, and the Socinians in Poland are completely ignored. Their absence makes the volume less than complete. What the book really needs is a detailed map showing the extent of the Radical Reformation in relation to the mainstream efforts of a Luther on a Zwingli. Lastly, Goertz and many of the contributors could have said substantially more about Catholic reaction to the radicals, and definitely something about the fact that many of these radicals began their careers as Catholic priests.