Restoring Christ's Church: John a Lasco and the Forma ac ratio (review)

Johannes à Lasco, as international humanists and Protestant communities knew him in their efforts to cope with the pronunciation of the Polish surname Łaski, was one of the most interesting defectors from the pre Reformation clerical elite. Nephew of a namesake who had been Primate of Poland, he was in younger days a student, admirer, and eventual financial supporter of Erasmus; after years of creative exile in England and Germany, he became at last the man most likely to turn Poland toward a future of Reformed Protestantism. When he died in 1560, no one among Polish Protestants was capable of taking on his unifying role, and Poland's Protestant moment passed within a century. Circumstances combined everywhere in his career to rob him of the chance to mold the long-term futures of the various churches in which he was involved; yet out of his experience as superintendent of the "Stranger Church" of French and Dutch refugees in the London of Edward VI, he published in 1555 an important template for a Reformed Church polity, his Forma ac ratio tota ecclesiastici ministerii, in peregrinorum, potissimum vero Germanorum Ecclesia (The structure and complete system of the ecclesiastical ministry in the Stranger Church, particularly the Dutch Church). The work dealt with what à Lasco regarded as the three marks of the true Church: true preaching of the Gospel, right administration of the sacraments, and discipline, and this feature of his book was significant in itself. Whereas John Calvin (against his mentor Martin Bucer) only looked for two marks, true preaching and true sacraments, à Lasco's addition of discipline was widely adopted among Reformed theologians; this may be reckoned the most significant long-term effect of the Forma.

The book offered an alternative Reformed model to that of Geneva in other ways: one element in its setting out a fourfold pattern of ministry was a single superintendent, in a remolding of episcopacy (à Lasco fulfilled this role first in East Friesland, then in London). In counterpoint to the superintendency, à Lasco envisaged the election of ministers and the exercise of congregational discipline as involving more active participation from the laity than Calvin found appropriate. Springer traces such influences in his penultimate chapter: first among various refugee congregations in Germany during the brief but formative exile from Queen Mary Tudor's England, then in à Lasco's former superintendency charge of Emden. As far as Emden is concerned, Springer argues that the consequent ecclesiastical structures provided enough strength to resist Lutheran takeover in Emden and assert the town's autonomy against a Lutheranizing territorial ruler. The Polish Reformed Church also looked to his work, though conditions of Polish society meant that lay activism was restricted to the (admittedly large) caste of gentry or Szlachta. Most interesting were the early influences in the Scottish Church, which, like à Lasco, made discipline a third mark of the Church, and in its early years tried to establish an effective Reformed superintendency. But in Scotland, as among the French Huguenots, early interest in the ecclesiology of the Forma gave way to patterns set in Geneva. À Lasco's eucharistic theology, inclining more to the perspectives on eucharistic symbol adopted by Zurich theologians than those of Calvin and Beza, proved widely congenial, but that is probably as much thanks to Zurich as to him.

Springer's text still feels quite close to the doctoral thesis that was its origin. It is unhappily replete with inconsistencies of usage, misspellings of proper names, place-names, and titles, some of them repeated—and it is a pity that it does not reproduce Polish diacriticals. This is not the only recent volume from the respected St. Andrews Studies series to be badly underedited. Students of the period should read it in conjunction with Judith Becker's study with similar scope, Gemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht: Johannes a Lascos Kirchenordnung für London (1555) und die reformierte Konfessionsbildung (Leiden, 2007).