Germany During the Reformation
Lutheranism after Luther
Melanchthon
Luther died in 1546. Philip Melanchthon
was then the leading figure until his death in 1560. During these years the main challenge lay in fending off imperial pressure towards Catholicism, and avoiding breaches internally over doctrine and practice.
The Battle of Mühlberg in 1547 was a complete defeat for the Protestants. Maurice went over to Charles and received Saxony as his reward. He himself had no strong religious beliefs and was mainly concerned with ruling. Melanchthon because his chief spiritual advisor and together they tried to find a settlement that would not disrupt the duchy. The limitations of secular power can be seen clearly here. An Interim specific to Saxony was issued at the end of 1547, yet it had almost no effect. Religious practices went on, essentially Lutheran in character, despite the imperial victory and the supposedly Catholic Maurice.
The attempts to reach accomodation, more than anything else, revealed deep splits within the Lutheran community. Melanchthon always favored negotiation and compromise, but others condemned him for it. Even Luther had criticized him for being too pliant.
It will help to illustrate the two approaches with a specific controversy. The history of the Reformation is filled with such controversies, many of which to our eyes seem arid and pointless, arguments over trivialities. The Adiaphoristic controversy was exactly concerning what was trivial and what was not.
The term is Greek: adiaphora means things that are unimportant, or not central. From early on, Luther had declared that certain matters were central—the doctrine of justification by faith, for example—while others derived not from the Gospel but from human tradition. Matters such as church organization, for example, could be adjusted according to time and place.
In 1549, Flacius Illyricus published De veris et falsis adiophoris, an essay on what things truly were "indifferent" and what were not. Flacius himself was a hard-liner who had fled to Magdeburg rather than comply with the Augsburg or the Leipzig Interim. Melanchthon replied to the pamphlet, and two parties coalesced: the "Philippists"--those identified with Melanchthon and others who had a wider view of what were matters indifferent--and the "Gnesiolutherans" or those who refused to compromise on much of anything, either in the direction of the Calvinists or the Catholics. Wittenberg was the leading university of the Philippists; the newly-founded University of Jena (1548) became the headquarters of the Gnesiolutherans.
Other points of hot debate in teh 1550s were the extent and implications of free will, and of the role of good works in salvation. Given the political situation at mid-century, these quarrels tended to be reflected at the state level, leading to disunity among the Lutheran princes, though it never went so far as armed conflict between them as it had among the Hussites a century before. Even so, in the wake of a concord at Frankfurt in 1558, Duke John Frederick of Saxony in 1559 issued a decree anathematizing anyone who deviated from the Concord, which was aimed directly at the Philippists. It was never effectively enforced, but it indicates the seriousness of the divisions.
This, you will note, comes after the Peace of Augsburg (1555), usually regarded as a victory for Protestantism and an end of religious conflict in Germany. This is the agreement that yielded the formula cuius regio, cuius religio. This was certainly a victory for princely independence, and was a defeat for Charles V's ambitions to assert imperial authority, but it by no means guaranteed religious victory to the Lutherans, as is borne out by the controversies described above. More importantly, the Peace of Augsburg ignored the Calvinists, who would soon become a major new force in Germany.
Politically, religion continued to affect the course of events. One colorful instance even touched on the imperial succession.
Wilhelm von Grumbach was one of the militant Lutherans. He had engineered the assassination of the Catholic bishop of Würzburg in 1553(?). He conceived of a scheme by which John Frederick of Saxony would become emperor with Swedish support and with help from Protestants in Holland and France. He was supported in the scheme by a farmer boy-turned prophet by the name of Tausendschün (it's a kind of flower), who received convenient visions from angels directing a rebellion. The scheme was discovered and John Frederick was imprisoned for life.
This was the highly-charged atmosphere of the 1550s. When Emperor Ferdinand died, his son Maximilian succeeded, but not without drama. The Protestant princes tried to band together to wrest away the imperial succession from the Habsburgs, but the divisions were too deep. Maximilian was actually quite sympathetic to the modern Lutherans, but he emphasized his Catholicism and was duly elected by the Catholic majority.
Meanwhile, the religious debates escalated in tone. John Frederick, deposed and imprisoned, was succeeded by his brother John William, a moderate Lutheran. Moderation does not imply toleration, however, and the new duke relentlessly pursued Flacius, who continued to be the prominent spokesman for the Gnesiolutherans. As the extremists debated, they became more extreme. One fellow, Wigand, declared that "he who is not a zealot does not love Christ." This was the position arrived at later by the Puritans in England, as well: that the only true Christian was the militant zealot.
The moderate Lutherans reacted immoderately. They labelled all Lutherans who held extreme views as crypto-Calvinists and therefore outside the protection of the various religious settlements. It was easy for them to portray true Lutheranism as the one genuinely national German Church, while both Catholicism and Calvinism were foreign. Particularly with regard to the Eucharist, Lutherans found themselves closer to the Catholic than to the Calvinist position, and this influenced the course of politics as well as religious debate. Over and over again, the Philippists were able to achieve agreements with the Catholics. They were never able to do so with the Calvinists. Not that they tried very hard.
Neither did they reach agreement with the Swiss Reformed, which church was very influential in southwest Germany. This went all the way back to the split between Luther and Zwingli, was continued with Bullinger and others, and was finalized in 1549 when the Swiss and the Calvinists signed an agreement, the Consensus Tigurinus. Clearly, to the Lutherans, the Swiss Reformed had to be rejected as merely another type of Calvinism.
Concord
The first steps can be traced to James Andreae, at the University of Tübingen, in the Duchy of Württemberg. Its Duke Christopher was a devout Lutheran and an advocate for some kind of agreement among the various Lutheran factions. Andreae published six sermons on this theme in 1573. They attracted notice and support, and were turned into the Swabian Concord, agreed to in Lower Saxony, despite the name. A similar initiative in 1576 produced the Formula of Maulbronn for the Duchy of Saxony. Later that same year, the two documents were merged into a single one: the Formula of Torgau.
The final document is known as the Formula of Concord, published in 1580 and edited by Andreae. It is in two parts: the initial Concord, and a much longer document elaborating on the points, known as the Solida Declaratio. A Latin edition was published in 1584.
The Formula of Concord is essentially the constitution of the German Lutheran Church. It's a long document, but at the core of it is still the Augsburg Confession of 1530. It was at once attacked by the Calvinists, but it increasingly became the foundation on which Lutherans chose to stand: the controversies of thirty years and more had forced them to define a common ground in the face of common enemies. Lutheranism was solidly German and included Scandinavia. Even when it later extended into the New World, it was most successful in German communities.