Wars of religion and toleration

The Paris massacre and the Edict of Nantes

By the middle of the sixteenth century the Reformed faith had spread among the nobles and townspeople of France, whose Reformed Christians were called Huguenots, and from 1562 Catholics and Huguenots fought a series of wars. Both sides were cruel. Huguenots smashed the images in churches, and in 1567, in the southern city of Nîmes, they killed dozens of Catholic priests and townsmen.

On 18 August 1572 the Protestant Henry of Navarre married the king's sister Marguerite in Paris, and the Huguenot leaders came to the city for the wedding. Four days later their leader, Admiral Coligny, was shot and wounded, and the royal court resolved to do away with the Huguenot leaders. Before dawn on 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, Coligny was murdered, and the people of Paris began killing their Huguenot neighbours, men, women and children. The massacre spread to other cities for weeks; thousands died in Paris alone, and historians' estimates for all of France vary widely. In Rome Pope Gregory XIII received the news as the defeat of a rebel plot and had a hymn of thanksgiving sung.

Henry of Navarre survived, became king as Henry IV in 1589 and embraced the Catholic faith in 1593. In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, which kept Catholicism as the religion of the realm but gave the Huguenots freedom of conscience and public worship in named places Henry IV, The Edict of Nantes. But Louis XIV, after quartering soldiers in Huguenot homes to force them to convert, revoked the edict in 1685. A great many Huguenots fled to the Netherlands, England and Prussia, and as far as the southern tip of Africa.

The Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia

In the German lands the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had made the ruler's religion the religion of his land, but only for Lutherans and Catholics. In May 1618 in Prague, Protestant nobles of Bohemia, afraid of losing their freedoms under a Catholic Habsburg king, threw the emperor's officials out of a castle window; the officials survived. The war that began there spread across the Empire for thirty years. Protestant princes fought the Catholic emperor and his princes, and Denmark and then, in 1630, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden joined the Protestant side. In 1631 an army on the emperor's side stormed the Protestant city of Magdeburg, and historians reckon that most of its people died.

This was not a war of faith alone. France, governed by the Catholic Cardinal Richelieu, paid Protestant Sweden from 1631 and in 1635 went to war itself against the Habsburgs. Armies plundered wherever they marched, and hunger and plague followed them. Historians agree that the population of the German lands fell sharply in these years, though their estimates of the loss differ, most often between a fifth and a third. During the war Martin Rinkart, a pastor in Saxony, wrote the hymn Nun danket alle Gott, still sung in English as Now thank we all our God.

The Peace of Westphalia, concluded at Osnabrück and Münster in October 1648, extended the rule that the ruler's religion is the land's to the Reformed churches as well, and gave subjects of another faith than their ruler's some freedom of private worship The Peace of Westphalia. But the ruler still chose the faith of his land, and those outside the three churches had no place in it. It was less a confession of freedom of conscience than a settlement among states worn out by war.

Those who suffered on every side, and freedom of conscience

The Anabaptists were persecuted by Catholics, Lutherans and the Reformed alike (see Zurich, Geneva and Scotland). Some of them seized the city of Münster by force in 1534, but most, as Article 6 of the Schleitheim Confession of 1527 taught, took up no sword and endured Schleitheim Confession.

Toleration grew along several roads. First, states worn out by war agreed for peace's sake to bear with more than one faith, and others called for freedom out of Christian conviction. Thomas Helwys, who in 1612 gathered near London the first Baptist church on English soil, argued that same year in A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity that the earthly power may not punish anyone for religion, be they heretics, Turks or Jews. In the copy he sent to James I he wrote by hand that the king was a mortal man and not God, with no power over his subjects' souls; he died in prison around 1616.

Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, was sentenced to banishment from Massachusetts in 1635, among other things for teaching that magistrates must not punish people in matters of faith; the next year he founded Providence as a refuge for those troubled for conscience' sake, and there he helped to found the first Baptist church in America. In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, published in London in 1644, he argued that persecution for conscience is against the mind of Christ, and that liberty of conscience is owed even to Jews and pagans.

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1677 confesses with the Westminster Confession that "God alone is Lord of the Conscience" 21.2, but leaves out Westminster's clause allowing the civil magistrate to proceed against erroneous opinions Westminster Confession 20.4. Enlightenment thinkers called for toleration too. In 1689 John Locke argued in A Letter Concerning Toleration that the state exists to protect civil goods and that force cannot produce true religion, the mind's inward persuasion; yet he left out of toleration atheists and those owing allegiance to a foreign prince, usually read as Catholics. Writers such as Voltaire sharply attacked the churches for the cruelties done in religion's name, and the churches had something to learn even from that criticism. England's Act of Toleration of 1689 gave Protestants outside the Church of England freedom to worship, but not Catholics or those who denied the Trinity.

What Christians confess today

Several churches have since confessed killing for the faith as sin. On the Day of Pardon in March 2000 Pope John Paul II confessed violence used in the service of truth and sins against the unity of Christians, and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation. Earlier, in 1965, the Second Vatican Council taught in Dignitatis Humanae that religious freedom belongs to every person by human dignity, so that no one may be coerced in matters of faith. In 2010 the Lutheran World Federation confessed the persecution of Anabaptists by sixteenth-century Lutherans and asked God and the Mennonites for forgiveness Lutheran World Federation, Action on the Legacy of Lutheran Persecution of Anabaptists.

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matthew 5:9), and told us to love even our enemies:

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Matthew 5:44-45

Wesley's comment is, "Repay love in thought, word, and deed, to those who hate you, and show it both in word and deed" Wesley. Paul writes, "If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone" (Romans 12:18), and asks who we are to judge someone else's servant (Romans 14:4).

The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

2 Corinthians 10:4

Faith and prayer belong to the Christian's armour too, Wesley notes, yet "the word of God seems to be here chiefly intended" Wesley. To hold the truth firmly and to leave another's conscience to God do not contradict each other. Christians are persecuted for their faith in many places today. To guard for others the freedom we ask for ourselves, and to spread the gospel by the word and by love, not the sword, is what this history teaches. The next lesson, Puritans and Pietists, turns to those in England and Germany who sought a life shaped by the word.

Practice