The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church: c. 1540-1620 (review)

The coming of the Reformation notoriously opened a Pandora's box of debate and dispute. The appeal to sola Scriptura was an appeal to texts that could be differently interpreted and raised the vexed questions of the status of matters not in fact included in the Scriptures, and of the guide by which the Scriptures should be interpreted. Once the warmth of the common cause of opposition to the established Roman church faded, independent scrutiny of the Scriptures by those soon to be generally denominated Protestants split them into bitterly warring factions. All the old interpretations that had been condemned as heretical in the early days of the church – Nestorianism, Arianism, Pelaganism and the like – re-emerged. The printing press enabled scholars to print interpretations of all sorts from the most traditional to the radical, condemned by the majority as next to Mohammedanism, and the ensuing debates have kept academic theologians gainfully employed for the last four hundred years. Mere historians who lack this background need a guide through the maze of multi-directional disputes, and this Taplin provides with care and scholarship.

Most of the Protestant churches sought to have their creed accepted as orthodoxy within the Reformed communities, that is, their views were to become the new establishment dogmas. The tyranny of the papacy was to be replaced by a reforming constraint of consciences. The ability to impose subscription to a common set of beliefs, however, depended on the relationship of the particular church with the local government. In a Protestant state, the church could hope for coherent support for a particular interpretation. Those who dissented, the doctrinally heterodox, ended with the old label of heretic, imposed without sympathy by the new Protestant ministers.

Those converted to an anti-catholic belief in a catholic state had no single church to structure their theology so that their beliefs remained fluid and were particularly prone to extremes. Threatened by the Roman church courts, Italian reformers in particular were often driven into exile, taking with them the remnants of their community, their particular liturgy and their leading thinkers. They were not readily absorbed into the city and church to which they fled. Permission to have their own community and their own preacher depended on the goodwill of the authorities, hostility in the cities to migrants who might take over some of the work of the existing guilds was rife and the migrants position always precarious. Therefore, the story of these migrants, few as they often were, is a critical issue not only in the history of the Reformation but in the wider history of race and state.

Taplin provides a clear narrative of the chronological developments of such relationships. He has focused his interpretation on the specific relationship between the Zurich church, founded by Zwingli and established by Bullinger, and the Italian Reformers, many of them distinguished divines with a humanist background, who sought refuge in the lands of the Swiss confederacy, particularly Locarno. He has painstakingly studied the mass of letters and the theological texts that the various participants produced, and has drawn out a classical story of disagreement eventually degenerating into dislike and opposition but eventually restored to a more ecumenical relationship.

The impressive network of letter writers centred on Bullinger had initially led to at least a limited degree of missionary work by the Zurich divines in Italy, and Bullinger was a man prepared to be flexible to some degree where nice points of interpretation were concerned. More fundamental issues such as the immortality of the soul and the relationship of the Trinity were less negotiable. Taplin elucidates the nature of the differences between the Zurich and the Italian divines who struggled to reformulate such old issues as the relationship of Christ's human and divine natures and the virginity of Mary. He argues that the basically conservative Zurich church sought to preserve continuity with past traditions, and imposed restrictions...