Christian Magistrate and Territorial Church: Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation (review)

When this book was first published twenty-five years ago, Johannes Brenz was a relatively neglected figure in the history of the German Reformation. Estes’s book was the first to draw the attention of an English-speaking audience to the importance of the Swabian reformer for the organization of the Lutheran churches in southwestern Germany. In the intervening years, scholarship on Brenz and the publication of critical editions of Brenz’s works and of the church ordinances he wrote have supported Estes’s contention that Brenz deserves to be far better known.

In his preface Estes justifies this second, revised edition not only because it takes account of recent work on Brenz but also because as a paperback it can be more easily used by teachers and students who want to learn more about the Reformation outside of Luther’s immediate sphere of influence. While only specialists might care whether the original text is updated, the book is especially well-suited for the latter goal. The only comparable text for students is John Witte’s recent Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation, but Witte is more concerned with legal theory and developments in Saxony and Hesse. Estes’s concentration on the theological justification for and the institutional development of the territorial church in southwestern Germany therefore functions as a nice counterpoint to Witte. Christian Magistrate gives students a solid understanding of the issues that not only Brenz but all of the south German reformers faced as they created institutional structures for their reformed churches.

Estes’s book approaches Brenz’s career topically rather than chronologically, which makes it easy to assign chapters for classroom discussion. There is some overlap in the content of these chapters, but the author has done his best to minimize repetition — and when introducing students to a new concept, repetition is not necessarily a bad thing. A brief biographical chapter gives an overview of Brenz’s long and productive career. The second chapter sets the stage for evaluating Brenz’s organizational activities at both a theoretical-theological and a practical level. Here Estes summarizes Luther’s early statements about the role of secular authorities in supporting the church, which would strongly influence Brenz’s views of the magistrate’s cura religionis. He also describes the actual assumption of control over the church by many German princes in the decades before the Reformation.

The next two chapters look at Brenz’s contribution to the process of institutionalizing evangelical reforms from the theoretical and practical side respectively. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of Brenz’s understanding of the magistrate’s cura religionis through three stages. During the 1520s Brenz largely followed Luther’s separation of the secular and spiritual realms, although he attributed a somewhat more positive role to the magistrate in church affairs than the Wittenberg reformer did. Beginning around 1530, Brenz began to rethink his ideas, both in reaction to practical questions and under the influence of Philipp Melanchthon. His mature position, expressed in works from the 1540s and 1550s, emphasized more strongly the magistrate’s responsibility to serve the church. Chapter 4 then describes how Brenz put his theoretical understanding into practice in the memoranda, recommendations, and church ordinances that he wrote over the first part of his career, starting with those intended for his home church of Schwäbisch Hall in the 1520s and reaching their pinnacle in the series of ordinances issued for the Duchy of Württemberg in the 1550s.

The final two chapters look at specific questions concerning the magistrate’s role in the church. Chapter 5 describes Brenz’s proposals to introduce a system of church discipline, which show a remarkable consistency despite increasing elaboration from their earliest expression in 1527 to the Württemberg ordinances of the early 1550s. The final chapter returns to the more theoretical...