Attitudes Toward War and Peace in the Early-Sixteenth-Century Reformation: The Magisterial and Radical Reformers

This article examines how the magisterial and radical reformers of the early sixteenth century thought about war, political authority, and soldiering. Both Luther and Calvin held that all vocations, including the magistrate's and the soldier's, carry equal dignity before God, and both worked within a two-kingdom framework. Both also drew on the just war tradition while innovating within it. Luther limited just cause to defense, rejected crusading and religious war, and defended conscientious objection and resistance to unjust authority, yet said little about conduct in war. Calvin gave unusual weight to last resort and right intention, allowed wars to defend allies and armed resistance to tyrants through representative bodies, and linked natural law to Scripture. The Anabaptists, shaped by persecution, took a different path. They oscillated between revolutionary violence, as at Münster, and pacifist separation. Hubmaier was a rare exception who supported the magistrate's sword. The Schleitheim Confession called the sword “ordained by God” for magistrates but “outside the perfection of Christ” for believers. Menno Simons grounded Anabaptist nonresistance in the Sermon on the Mount. The article concludes that the era broke with medieval tradition on the sword and set up a Reformed-Anabaptist divide over war that persists today.