Academic literature on the topic 'Bern Disputation, Bern, Switzerland, 1528'

How to Come up for a Decision: Procedure or Negotiation? The Disputations in Cities in the 1520s The disputations held in imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire during the 1520 s, facing the turmoils caused by the reformation, served – like a stage play – to showcase and communicate the decision to implement Reformation that had already been made in advance. Usually, this is the judgement on the so called “Religionsgespräche”. Although this view shows up even in contemporary statements, the article argues, that a differentiated analysis of the various actors, their interests and possibilities to influence the events opens up a clearer perspective on what happened and why it happened. Using the sociological distinction of procedure and negotiation, this article shows, that the disputation had to keep the balance between reglemented procedure and more liberal negotiation to produce an accepted and also binding result for their community. Examples from the disputations of Zürich (1523), Kaufbeuren, Memmingen, Nürnberg (1525) and Bern (1528) allow this article to illustrate different ways of how this balancing on a razor’s edge could be done. The conclusion develops a general model of how the cities used disputations to try to deal with the religious turmoil while facing stiff opposition from local clerics and scholars, the papal church and the emperor.

Given the relative paucity of treatments relating to both the 1532 and 1538 Bern Gespräche, alongside a growing historiography which has offered a clearer understanding of the backdrop around which these two debates were held, the focus of this research project will be to provide a comparative analysis of the recorded dialogues from the debates at Bern. This ecclesiologically focused comparison aims to discern whether the debate relating to the nature of the church at the 1538 session was merely a redundant exercise and continuation of the earlier 1532 disputation or whether the latter debate offered anything substantively new to the ongoing religious dialogue between these two groups. Furthermore, all of the respective views on the nature of the church manifest in these debates will be examined in light of the preceding Anabaptist/Reformed dialogue of the period to determine their place contextually. Having embarked upon the aforementioned goals several conclusions may be definitively drawn. First, the major ecclesiological suppositions expressed by both the Anabaptist and Reformed participants at the 1538 debate were, in fact, retained using the same core theological elements employed by their predecessors at the 1532 debate. Yet, despite this striking similarity, the independent nature of these debates must also be acknowledged. This may primarily be found in that both groups expressed their retained ecclesiologies with notable variation in things such as language, argumentative content, biblical corroboration, and illustrative evidence. Finally, both the similar and independent nature of these events will be shown to have been largely derived from the Anabaptist/Reformed dialogue already begun as the Swiss Brethren movement emerged from under Zwingli’s reform efforts in Zürich. Each of these conclusions should help to paint a more accurate portrait of not only what was accomplished through these debates, but where each stands contextually during the period.

Through the second half of the 1520s, cities and territories began to institutionalize reforms to the Lord’s Supper. Luther’s German Mass was influential in central and northern Germany, while the communion liturgies of Zurich and Basel were important as sacramentarian models. Church ordinances also contained sections on the Lord’s Supper, with the most important being the Instruction to the Visitors of Saxony and Bugenhagen’s Braunschweig ordinance. The Bern Disputation of 1528 generated a number of publications by both sacramentarians and Catholics; so, too, did the events leading to Basel’s abolition of the mass. The leaders of both parties could not reach agreement on the Lord’s Supper at the Marburg Colloquy, but the articles adopted there marked the emergence of a new source of collective authority: a confession of faith that defined orthodoxy.