Wolfgang Musculus

Wolfgang Musculus' Loci Communes (Common Places) of 1560 places the administration of the church under the authority of the secular magistrate, emphasizing that the secular government is in charge of even the most internal of church matters , like the appointment of pastors, the supervision of church discipline, the administration of church property, and the enforcement of ecclesiastical ordinances.

According to Helmut Kressner's viewpoint Musculus' understanding about the secular government's authority over church affairs was formed by the controversy between the Bernese Magistrate and the theologians of Geneva. James Thomas Ford's research points to the fact, that many of Musculus' arguments that appears in the Loci Communes have already been used in other tracts in which Musculus exhorted the Augsburg Council to establish the Reformation in the city in the 1530s.

The goal of this paper is to present these common arguments, discuss what they are based on, and examine what kind of role the early church and the Church Fathers played in Musculus' justification of the state's involvement in church matters.

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

The historical debate concerning the translation, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain." Calvin suggested the traditional translation may be wrong, and his colleague Beza offered a syntactical rationale. For 200 years many accepted this rethinking, but in the nineteenth century, it fell from favor. This paper reexamines the merits of Calvin's innovation.

The article discusses a theological debate on church discipline between Calvinist pastors living in the French speaking territory of Pays de Vaud and the Zwinglian City-state of Berne from the mid-1530s to 1560. From 1536 Pays de Vaud belonged to the Bernese protestant administration but consisted primarily of French refugee pastors allegiant to Calvin and his ideas. They Calvinists of Pays de Vaud questioned the civil magistrate's right to interfere into church affairs especially into the practice of church discipline, such as exclusion from the Lord's Supper and excom-munication from the congregation. According to the Zwinglian establishment of Berne the right for exclusion and excommunication belonged to the civil magistrates. In the Calvinists' view the appropriate administrator of the exclusion and excommunication was the Genevian-type consistory, consisting of both clerical and civilian elected members. Noteworthy significance can be attributed to the events in the Pays de Vaud. On the one hand, banished from Bernese territory most of the Calvinist pastors of Vaud were sent to reinforce the French underground evangelical movement. The Calvinists' failure in the Pays de Vaud turned Calvin's attention to France by which the Calvinism became a world phenomenon. On the other hand, from this struggle emerged a theological justification for the state's supremacy over church affairs, namely by Wolfgang Musculus' De Magistratibus. Interestingly, this justification played a more important role in later times than in the actual controversy: Thomas Erastus, the builder of the territorial state– church of the Palatinate, John Withgift, the archbishop of Canterbury and the protector of Tudor-Absolutism against the Puritans, and the Dutch Remonstrants all were influenced by the teaching of Musculus. The goal of this paper is to present how the two controversial sides regulated its church affairs and, in addition, to show the highpoint of the debate between Calvin's Vaudois adherers and the Bernese Magistrate for the government of the church, especially for the right of excommunication.

This study takes its point of departure in the doctrine of the covenant as it appears in the theology of the prominent second-generation reformer, Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563), who is perhaps the earliest Reformed theologian to give the topic of the covenant a separate and distinct treatment in a collection of theological commonplaces. Musculus’ covenantal teaching is characterized by an important distinction between general and special covenants and is rooted in his exegetical work on the book of Genesis. Where Musculus’ Loci communes evidence an anti-speculative, soteriologically-focused, and pastorally-driven approach, his exegesis is intended to provide fulsome guidance in the study of Scripture. This examination of Musculus’ views on covenant and related doctrines is followed by thematically-related explorations of questions of causality and metaphysics, concluding with considerations related to law and social order. By focusing on Musculus’ theology as found both in his Loci communes, as well as in his extensive and voluminous exegetical work, and in comparison and dialogue with a host of antecedent and contemporary figures, this book is the first full-scale study to place Musculus’ theology within its broader intellectual context. Musculus’ positions with respect to doctrines connected to covenant, causality, and law embodies the eclecticism of Reformed reception of medieval traditions, and the final section of this study places Musculus within the later development of Reformed orthodoxy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finding that Wolfgang Musculus is a significant and often-overlooked figure worthy of further consideration.

The Turks Supporting the Protestants? News on the Reformation in Ottoman Hungary from Melanchthon to Bullinger
Although scholars have long studied the letters of Protestant preachers dating from the first decades of the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, no academic consensus has emerged concerning the interpretation of these documents. This paper approaches the sources from a new perspective, examining how the information they originally sought to convey went through various iterations in the forms of verbal messages and private letters, copies and extracts, until they were ultimately disseminated in print form. The study also analyses how the content and message were transformed in the process. The analysis reveals that sharp criticisms of the Ottomans were blunted while optimistic assessments of the situation tended to receive greater emphasis. Moreover, by the time the documents in this chain of communication reached their final form, reports from non-occupied Hungary had become merged with news from Ottoman Hungary; the success of the Transylvanian Saxon Reformation, for instance, was explained as an achievement owing to the benevolence of the Ottoman authorities. An endpoint in the chain of communication described above was an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1546 which provides an illustrative example of the way such enthusiastic reports were combined. Using the new perspective of this study, it becomes possible to identify the underlying sources of the final text. Consequently, the report of Paulus Thurius (between 1556–1558), whose realistic voice was not suitable for the expectations of readers familiar with idealised reports, was only printed after the disenchantment in the wake of the Long Turkish War (1591–1606).

Gregory of Nazianzus’ fortune in the West is the object of a series of recent studies that are trying to investigate the ways, the intents and the environments in which the author was read and translated. The aim of this contribution is to examine the
Latin translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ oration 2, made by the Protestant scholar Wolfgang Musculus for the Opera Omnia published in 1550 in Basel. This translation is a useful device for understanding, on the one hand, the polemical intent of the translator, convinced that is necessary to win over the Catholic adversaries on the ground of the Fathers, and on the other, the humanistic effort of the translator, capable of a good, but not brilliant, rendition of a rhetorical and complex
text. Oration 2 is one of the few of Gregory’s orations translated by Musculus: probably the theme, the figure of the good priest, and the evaluation of the situation of the Church, seemed similar to and consonant with Musculus’ vision. Is it still
useful to translate the Fathers for a Protestant scholar? The answer seems to be yes, according to this translation: the high moral standards proposed by Gregory in an elevated manner, the struggle for truth necessary for a good Christian, the pure
doctrine, compatible with Protestant war cries, were all appealing characteristics that deserved the effort of a translation.