Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
Defining Lutheranism
View through CrossRef
Modern scholarship on theories of religion, and on the early Reformation, has grappled with the problem of how to define a movement such as Lutheranism. What did King Sigismund I of Poland and his subjects, in their own day, perceive Lutheranism to be? This chapter uses language analysis of a diverse and large corpus of sources from across the Polish monarchy to answer that question. Among Catholics, Lutheranism was only weakly identified as a heresy, and medieval anti-heretical rhetoric rarely deployed against it. Lutheranism was, instead, read as an epidemic of familiar forms of irreligiosity—e.g. sacrilege. It was principally characterized as a threat to peace, unity, and community (in town, kingdom, Christendom)—its actual doctrines of only minimal interest. The King’s Lutheran subjects, by contrast, defined themselves insistently with reference to the doctrine of ‘sola fide’.
Title: Defining Lutheranism
Description:
Modern scholarship on theories of religion, and on the early Reformation, has grappled with the problem of how to define a movement such as Lutheranism.
What did King Sigismund I of Poland and his subjects, in their own day, perceive Lutheranism to be? This chapter uses language analysis of a diverse and large corpus of sources from across the Polish monarchy to answer that question.
Among Catholics, Lutheranism was only weakly identified as a heresy, and medieval anti-heretical rhetoric rarely deployed against it.
Lutheranism was, instead, read as an epidemic of familiar forms of irreligiosity—e.
g.
sacrilege.
It was principally characterized as a threat to peace, unity, and community (in town, kingdom, Christendom)—its actual doctrines of only minimal interest.
The King’s Lutheran subjects, by contrast, defined themselves insistently with reference to the doctrine of ‘sola fide’.
Related Results
Historical Dictionary of Lutheranism
Historical Dictionary of Lutheranism
The Reformation of the 16th century was a complex and multifaceted political, social, cultural, and religious process. Most historians agree, however, that in the framework of this...
Leipzig, Saxony, and Lutheran Orthodoxy
Leipzig, Saxony, and Lutheran Orthodoxy
This chapter examines the dominance of Lutheran orthodoxy in Leipzig from the beginning of the German Reformation to the nineteenth century. Lutheran orthodoxy was an older, more C...
Other Lutherans
Other Lutherans
A collection of essays voicing “nontraditional” perspectives in Lutheran theology emerging from and for the Global South on a variety of studies and topics.
Tradi...
Drama in Danzig
Drama in Danzig
Royal Prussia was the most urbanized part of Sigismund I’s monarchy, its Hanseatic ports profoundly affected by Luther’s message from 1518. This chapter traces the Polish Crown’s r...
Hollow Law?
Hollow Law?
In the ‘core’ lands of the Polish Crown (korona), the chief instrument of King Sigismund’s Reformation policy was the anti-Lutheran edict. He issued eleven such edicts (1520–40), a...
Ana Mauad on Bán and Ellis
Ana Mauad on Bán and Ellis
This essay asks whether the world could be (or could become) its own imagined community in the 21st century. Thinking with and through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Mau...