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By Root 1075 0

clarity when debating complex issues. Polemic about the nature of the true church, or of its opponents, was often couched in terms of anti-popery, and the language of anti-popery was used to mark the boundaries of acceptable belief and practice. What popery might mean in any particular context was highly contestable, of course – it was the opposite of truly Christian belief and practice, but if people differed on what true belief and practice were, they automatically identified popery differently too. The Pope, in this view, was the agent of the Antichrist, or even actually the Antichrist – the promoter of practices and beliefs inimical to the salvation of good Christians. The control exercised by the Bishop of Rome over the church was the equivalent of the Babylonish captivity of the Israelites. Complex debates about scriptural justification for particular elements of belief and practice, about the authenticity of the tradition that they represented, or about the effects of political compromise on the promotion of reform, might easily dissolve into shouting matches about popery and the Antichrist.18

This radical simplification could raise the issues to apocalyptic levels since it was often said that these battles corresponded to the battles in the biblical last days: the triumph of reformation over popery would, it was hoped, lead to the reign of Christ and the saints. Obviously, the radicalism, and simplicity, of this rhetoric made the negotiation of a harmonious consensus difficult. The clarity of the polemic was a contrast to the complexity of the identity problem to which it related; the certainties it offered were perhaps comforts in the face of the anxieties generated by that complexity. Popery was an important discourse within Protestantism precisely because the boundary between the purified church and the corrupt Roman Catholic church was both crucial and indistinct.

These arguments about reformation raised questions about how churches should be governed and about the relationship with secular authorities which would protect these churches. On both of these crucial questions, however, the reformers” message was pragmatic, and therefore a little ambiguous. Calvin’s first, and most influential, publication was the Institutes, which was the first statement of Protestant belief to discuss civil government at length. This interest in the relationship between religious and secular authority was a product of the experience of the second generation of religious reformers, who were frequently men forced into exile by the hostility of their own rulers to reform. In exile in Geneva, Calvin oversaw the establishment of a Presbyterian ecclesiastical organization, which was often catering to the needs of an exile community. This stood alongside a secular authority, membership of which was not open to refugees. The refugee experience therefore fostered, in practice and theory, parallel systems of religious and secular government: two kingdoms, in fact. Secular and religious affairs were separated, and placed in the hands of different kinds of authority. Pushed to an extreme position, this might suggest that secular rulers had no role in religious affairs.19 Most monarchs were very suspicious of ‘two kingdoms’ theory, for obvious reasons.

Although Calvin had developed an influential argument about the appropriate constitution of the church, and its relationship with civil authority, that was not the essence of the Reformation message, even for Calvin. Calvin had distinguished four functions for the clergy – doctors, ministers, elders and deacons – but these four functions were not associated with any particular form. Doctors ensured the purity of doctrine, ministers preached, elders oversaw discipline and deacons gave an example of Christian charity. All four functions could be identified in scripture, but there was no clear prescription as to how to allocate these disparate functions in actual offices.20 There was no necessary assumption that in following Calvin’s teaching in other political contexts it was necessary to establish