The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  It was because they began to read Scripture—really to read it, every day, compulsively, in a desperate search for forgotten or obscured truths—that ordinary Christians experienced the lure of the Sabbath in the sixteenth century. And they began to read Scripture because, all of a sudden, they could. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, a poster advertising a sermon in which he planned to advance ninety-five theses against the Catholic Church’s trade in indulgences—forgiveness for sins, procured for a small sum—the printing press had existed for less than seventy years. (In Europe, anyway—new scholarship places its invention a generation earlier in Korea.) Printed matter was a novelty, though posters, pamphlets, and broadsheets had begun to sprout on city walls and street corners. Luther’s attack on the Church may have been the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation, but the kindling that caught and spread the fire was the fly sheets on which he had his theses printed and distributed throughout Germany. It took only two weeks for his views, which did not seem shocking to his fellow professors, to reach minds far removed from Wittenberg University and therefore less accustomed to sharp theological disputation.

  Luther’s outsized influence stemmed from his prescient grasp of the power of print. His Ninety-five Theses soon became a flood of tracts and pamphlets, written by him and by like-minded theologians and rebutted by their opponents. Luther wrote nearly as fast as the presses printed, supplementing his sermons and catechisms and broadsides with a new and soon-to-be-definitive translation of the Latin Bible into German. According to one estimate, one-third of all the books sold in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were written by Luther. “Printing,” he declared, “is God’s ultimate and greatest gift. Indeed through printing God wants the whole world, to the ends of the earth, to know the roots of true religion and wants to transmit it in every language. Printing is the last flicker of the flame which glows before the end of the world.”

  The marriage of print and religious polemic did not, in fact, herald the end of the world, but it did bring about something almost as revolutionary: “a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody’s reach,” in the words of the great French social historian Lucien Febvre. In Germany, literacy rates had doubled by the end of the century. Those who could not read found people to read to them. One study of a mining community in the Tyrol in the 1560s has groups of miners following a popular preacher from house to church to house on Sundays to hear him read from the Bible and preach out loud. In France, people reading forbidden books were prosecuted harshly, often by being burned at the stake. As a result, there are court records to tell us who they were: carpenters, barrel-makers, weavers, tailors, nail-makers, porters, pewter workers, leather workers, and furriers; respectable tradesmen as well as wandering journeymen; curates, students, schoolmasters, and doctors. And then there were the wives, sisters, and daughters of these men, some of whom were also burned at the stake.

  To understand why reading became a mass phenomenon, you have to try to feel what these new readers felt. Religious reform, to them, was no remote technical matter. Attacking Church customs—indulgences, the saying of Masses for the dead, Latin liturgy, purgatory, celibacy, clerical immunity from civil taxes and laws, and traditional ceremonies and festivals—was a way of tackling the most pressing issues in any society in any era, which are: Who’s in charge? Who gets to control the allocation of time and resources? What kind of regime should govern, and according to which code? Saying that the Church and its spokesmen should not dictate Christian practice and that individuals should determine their own devotional activities was to buck centuries of centralized authority. Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura—Scripture alone—reflected the fact that all religious laws that could be traced back to the Church and only to the Church had lost all legitimacy, at least in his eyes. If they were null and void, what code was there to follow but Scripture?

  The Church had pushed the Bible so far to the margins of the religious experience that it wasn’t even taught in most seminaries. Now people could read the Bible in their own vernacular languages, rather than struggle through it in Latin—and few had had the skills even to do that. Now they could interpret the text in the privacy of their homes and churches. And they could come up with their own original scriptural justifications for just about every aspect of life. Christ wouldn’t have wanted things to be like this! That runs contrary to the Ten Commandments!

  The consequences of translating the Bible, printing it, and putting it in everyone’s hands cannot be overstated. People encountering God’s word in their own languages felt, as if for the first time, pride in those languages, and in their own cultures. They were able to filter God’s truths through familiar idioms, which made them more intimately their own. They could read the tale of nation-building in the Old Testament and imagine themselves as part of a distinct nation, with its own destiny, rather than as, say, subjects of the Hapsburg or Holy Roman Empires. The Bible also raised for its readers questions of social organization. Hardly a political order dreamed up in the subsequent hundred years failed to have scriptural warrant behind it. By the seventeenth century, as the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger writes, “there were biblical royalists, biblical republicans, biblical regicides, biblical patriarchalists and defenders of the old order, biblical economic revolutionaries and deniers of private property, biblical French imperialists, biblical English patriots, and their biblical Scottish counterparts.”

  But no period was as radical as the first decade of the Reformation. Groups mushroomed overnight, joyously predicting the end of days. Iconoclastic mobs mauled statues of the Virgin Mary. Charismatic women cultivated followings, and, though women’s thoughts had until then almost never found their way onto printing presses, these women went so far as to publish them. Evangelists renounced their clerical positions and moved to the countryside to preach a new social order to peasants. The ferment of the early Reformation came to a head in 1524, when uprisings swept across Europe in the massive upheaval called the Peasants’ War. Inspired by the evangelists’ preaching, peasants revolted against landlords, some of whom happened to be rich monasteries, and miners struck against kings. Princes and mayors and kings quashed the disturbances only through the application of extreme force, and rebels were slaughtered throughout the continent.

  Luther was horrified, in part because he knew that his teachings shared some of the blame, and he and his fellow reformers promptly distanced themselves from the rebellion by aligning with the persecutory authorities—even with Catholic princes and monarchs—as they arrested and killed every religious radical they could find. But the excitement had spread and could not be quashed. Instead, it went underground.

  It was at this point that the Reformation split in two. One half cast its lot with the worldly authorities, advocated careful meliorist reforms, and eschewed anything that smacked too openly of anarchy or heresy. This was the so-called Magisterial Reformation of Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin. The other half, the Radical Reformation, was largely (though not entirely) made up of groups that concluded that the quest for political power had been misguided and withdrew from the world. This quietist attitude toward reform was one part savvy and one part principle. Many of the founders of these separatist sects had good reason to disappear, since they had helped either to instigate or to fight the Peasants’ War and were now being arrested and executed. But some of them came up with a novel—and very modern-sounding—argument for their quietism. They began to promote what they called the Free Church. They argued that the Church had grown corrupt when it acquired absolute power—when Constantine converted and the papacy began and church married state. If the Church were a true church of Christ, it had to be made up of true believers, and “therefore could not be coterminous with the physical boundaries of any one state or group of states,” as historian Daniel Liechty puts it.

  These proto-church-state separatists were called—by their enemies—Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, b
ecause they held that Christianity, being a voluntary faith, ought not to be forced on infants through baptism. Only adults old enough to choose to join a Christian community were to be baptized; hence they rebaptized their first members, though later Anabaptists were baptized only when they came of age, usually at thirty. (The Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Europe were the direct precursors of the Anabaptists of twenty-first-century America, that is to say, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Hutterites.) Two other groups to emerge during the Radical Reformation were the Socinians and the Unitarians. These eschewed the doctrine of the Trinity—the creed that God was made up of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and some among them even denied that Christ had been divine. Many in all of these sects were pacifists; some were communists, believing that wealth should be shared and property held in common; a few had female leaders. In manner of living, the Anabaptists and Unitarians were spare and ascetic. In style of worship, they strove to be biblical.

  The key fact about the Radical Reformation, though, for our purposes anyway, was that when the sectarians read the Scriptures, they accepted no limits on their interpretive freedom. It was a common Reformation belief that Christianity had taken a wrong turn somewhere, usually with the papacy. All Protestants read Scripture for clues as to where and when that wrong turn came, no matter where this line of inquiry might lead. But the Anabaptists, appalled at the slaughter of the peasants, disgusted by Luther’s support for it, alienated from Catholic and Protestant institutions alike, countenanced no check on the free play of their inquiries and refused to stop the search for a purer Christianity. Anabaptism spread most quickly among peasants and other people with little education, but its founders were learned men and original thinkers, and had become radicals in part because they had a passion for theological inquiry and were not afraid to cross the line into heresy. It was not long before someone came up with the notion that the fall of the Church should be traced all the way back to Christianity’s break with Mosaic Law, and someone else traced it back to the abolition of the Saturday Sabbath.

  Saturday Sabbatarianism made its first appearance, at least during the Reformation (scattered outbreaks of it had occurred before), in Silesia and Moravia—today parts of Poland and the Czech Republic—in the late 1520s, the innovation of two young intellectuals whose Anabaptist activities got them chased out of Germany and Austria. Oswald Glaidt was a former Franciscan monk and follower of Hans Hut, a millenarian who even after the slaughter of the peasants preached that the political authorities should be killed preparatory to the Second Coming of Christ. Andreas Fischer was less colorful but more systematic, and probably more influential. Together they formulated the theory and congregational practice of Saturday Sabbath worship. The Saturday Sabbath, they said, had been good enough for the patriarchs, as well as Moses, Jesus, and the apostles; therefore the Saturday Sabbath was good enough for all Christians. The Catholic Church had upheld the command to refrain from work as moral, not ceremonial, and therefore binding on Christians, but decreed that the choice of day was ceremonial and therefore superseded, and that the Sabbath had mutated into the Lord’s Day on the authority of the Church. Luther and Calvin also viewed the Fourth Commandment as only half binding, but since they refused to recognize the authority of the Church they considered one day to be as good as any other for resting (though Sunday would do fine). Luther said that although Sabbath rest was commanded, it should be wholly spiritual, not legalistic—that is, it ought not conform to rules and laws. Calvin denied that Sunday rest was commanded but considered it worth keeping because it was a social good, insofar as it promoted communal worship and general piety and gave servants a rest. Glaidt and Fischer, however, advanced the thesis that both parts of the Fourth Commandment—rest and Saturday observance—were moral and remained in force. The Sabbath, they said, would shed its rules and become purely spiritual only after Christ’s resurrection.

  It is hard for the modern mind to grasp how life-threatening such abstruse distinctions could be. When Luther learned what Glaidt and Fischer were preaching, he was furious. His reforms had already been tarnished by the Peasants’ War. The last thing he wanted to hear was that Protestants had revived a ritual that reeked of Jewishness. In 1538, he wrote a treatise titled “Against the Sabbatarians” in which he called them “unlearned,” “foolish” “apes,” and “Judaizers.” If they start keeping the Sabbath, he declared, the next thing they’ll want is circumcision. (As Luther sputters and fumes his way through this essay, he mixes up the Judaizers with actual Jews. Early in his career, Luther had defended the freedom and dignity of Jews, whose refusal to convert he called a reasonable response to the nonsensical hash of Catholic doctrine; but when the Jews failed to convert upon hearing him, he decided they were hateful after all. “Against the Sabbatarians” is the first of many anti-Jewish works by Luther.) Calvin, for his part, said the Sabbatarians “went thrice as far as the Jews in the gross and carnal superstition of sabbatism.”

  Everything about the Sabbatarian Anabaptists seemed designed to outrage Luther in particular. Fischer, for instance, rejected Luther’s distinction between Law and Gospel: “Christ did not come to abolish the Law but rather to give the believer power, through the Holy Spirit, to uphold it,” as Liechty puts it. Fischer believed that what had led the church astray was its decision to replace the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday. Fischer, writes Liechty, “located the fall of the church exactly at the point where the church was cut off from its Judaic roots”; that was the moment, as far as Fischer was concerned, when the church stopped being the church.”

  About a year after Luther published “Against the Sabbatarians”—though not demonstrably as a result of it—Fischer was captured and killed by a Slovakian administrator loyal to the Hapsburg king of Austria, Ferdinand I, a Roman Catholic and harsh persecutor of Anabaptists. Five years later, Glaidt, who by then had probably abandoned his Sabbatarianism and joined a different Anabaptist group, the Hutterites, was taken to Vienna to be drowned in the Danube.

  3.

  INTELLECTUALLY, the Reformation was an exercise in nostalgia. Methodologically, it involved the rejection of texts from the recent Christian past—the abominations of the Church, as many reformers put it—in favor of texts dating back to a time when faith was believed to have been unperverted. Religiously, all this led back to Judaism. Reformation scholars (including Luther, at first) understood that if they were to cull lost meanings out of old books, they had to read them in the original, and if they were to disseminate those meanings, they had to retranslate the books and produce new commentaries that reflected their findings. To accomplish all this, they had to improve their Greek and Hebrew. Greek had enjoyed a revival during the Renaissance, but few Christian theologians in the early sixteenth century knew Hebrew. From whom would they learn it? From Jews and from Jewish sources, of course. Almost every serious Christian Hebraist found and cultivated a rabbi to be his instructor.

  Modern scholars have only recently begun to appreciate the influence of Christian Hebraism on the Reformation. For one thing, until this century, few scholars of the period had the skills in Hebrew and rabbinics to understand it. For another, almost all sixteenth-century inquiries into Hebrew texts had the taint of controversy and were downplayed by later thinkers. Any Hebraist could be smeared at any time as a Judaizer, no matter how committed he was to Christian doctrine or how personally anti-Jewish (opposed to Judaism as a theological system) or anti-Semitic (opposed to Jews as a people). For this was still a time of expulsion, taxation, and ghettoization of Jews, when Jews still occasioned intense religious hatred and visceral social loathing. More pertinently, it was a time when Protestants felt vulnerable to the Catholic charge that they were backsliding into Judaism.

  Worse, some Christian Hebraists went beyond learning Hebrew and began reading rabbinic writings, even borrowing from them. Scholars who felt they should be reading the Bible in its proper historical context, not through the filter of Christian super
sessionism, looked to rabbinic texts for help interpreting biblical passages in light of their “plain,” or historical, meanings, rather than their allegorical or typological meanings, that is, the way the verses were said to prefigure the Christ story. Other Christian Hebraists studied Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, in search of support for mystical Christian doctrines. But some Christian Hebraists who turned to rabbinic or mystical texts to elucidate Christian doctrine found that their studies did the opposite. They undermined core Christian tenets.

  The best-known Christian Hebraic heretic was the sixteenth-century Spaniard Michael Servetus, who pointed out that mention of the Trinity could be found neither in the Bible nor in the writings of the early fathers. (It became doctrine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E.) He made his point in a manner guaranteed to offend. Noting the absurdity of the claim that one is three and three is one, he declared, “Not only Mohammedans and Hebrews but the very beasts of the field would make fun of us if they could grasp our fantastical notion.” Servetus exploited his knowledge of Hebrew to redefine the triune as three modes of expressing divinity, rather than incarnating it; he based this theological construct on the fact that the Old Testament uses several different names for God. The Catholic Church, Luther, and Calvin all recoiled at Servetus’s gleeful and very Jewish-sounding debunking of the Trinity, which remained for them a mystery central to Christian faith. Servetus was burned twice—once in effigy by Catholics, the second time in the flesh by the officials of the city of Geneva, who had been pressed into action by Calvin.