PROPHECY AND THE ESCHATON IN LUTHERAN GERMANY, 1530-1630

My study is concerned with the way Lutheran expectations of the Second Advent and the end of the world affected German thought up into the period of the Thirty Years' War. Lutheranism was the only major confession of the Reformation period to give a clear, virtually doctrinal sanction to the powerful sense of eschatological expectancy that characterized the later Middle Ages. Neither Calvin or Zwingli shared fully in Luther's conviction that the Day of Judgment was imminent in a realistic historical sense, and though many radical reformers and revolutionaries of the early sixteenth century hoped to witness the historical fulfillment of the Kingdom of God, after about 1535 these groups disappeared from the limelight. Luther's view of history was essentially pessimistic, but his expectation of Christ's return was no less intense than that of the radicals. Moreover, in the decades after his death the sense of expectancy became even more pervasive in Germany, where his followers felt threatened by a Catholic Church bent on reconquest and by a militant, expanding Calvinism.;Already in the first decades of the seventeenth century the excesses of innumerable self-appointed prophets were causing this expectancy to undermine itself. But ironically the process was greatly hastened by the Thirty Years' War; that holocaust brought a quick end to the last great age of eschatological hope in Germany. The increasingly radical prophetic interpretations sparked by the conflict were now opposed by the full weight of a Lutheran establishment which held up a standard but lifeless eschatology. While the loss of outward hope could be compensated by a mystical turn inward, it also brought with it a heightened tension between German ideals and the reality of history. And this tension helps to explain the paradoxical combination of acquiescence and revulsion with which Germans have characteristically faced the forces of modernity.;Meanwhile, though, the spread of printing, the influx of Renaissance ideas, and the passage of time itself were all contributing to the gradual transformation of vague inherited expectations into explicit convictions about objective future events. Evidence from history and the natural world was used more and more during the late sixteenth century to complement and support Biblical prophecies of the Last Days. Astrologers, like preachers and theologians, were generally convinced that universal changes were soon to occur, and their forecasts were sought most eagerly in Germany. Mathematics and other non-theological tools were used with growing boldness in a desperate effort to seek out answers to the mysteries of the Last Days. Such tendencies seem to have reached a peak in the decades around 1600, when new and heretical prophetic schemes began to multiply quickly, drawing bitter condemnation from the leaders of an increasingly cautious Lutheran establishment. But despite their aversion to occultism, chiliasm, visionary prophecy and specific prediction, even the strictest Lutherans in the early seventeenth century still shared in the common sense of expectation that gave rise to these heterodox forms. In a German atmosphere so tense and confused, it is not surprising to find whisperings about secret societies like the Rosicrucians, together with rumors of a new and final world-reformation.