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Ausgabe:

1982

Spalte:

441-443

Kategorie:

Kirchengeschichte: Reformationszeit

Autor/Hrsg.:

Nijenhuis, Willem

Titel/Untertitel:

Adrianus Saravia 1982

Rezensent:

Cross, Claire

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441

Theologische Literaturzeitung 107. Jahrgang 1982 Nr. 6

442

alten Adam und hilft, durch Martern und Leiden schneller an das
Ziel der Taufe zu gelangen (S. 159). Luther stimmt daher 1521 auch
der Aufhebung der Ordensgelübde durch Melanchthon und Karlstadt
wegen der nicht möglichen Erfüllung zu, sucht aber selbst nach einer
sich auf die Schrift gründenden Lösung. Diese teilt er am 9. September
1521 Melanchthon (S. 38) mit: „Es gilt zu beweisen, daß das
Gelübde bereits vom Augenblick der Ablegung an ungültig war, weil
ihm ein der evangelischen Freiheit widerstreitender Gesetzescharakter
unterlegt wurde. Gelübde an sich ... stehen nicht im Widerspruch
zur evangelischen Freiheit. Im Gegenteil, die evangelische
Freiheit bestärkt sie sogar. Gelübde jedoch, die in einer der evangelischen
Freiheit widerstreitenden Gesinnung abgelegt wurden, sind
gottlos und verwerflich" (S. 160). Es gibt also nur zwei Möglichkeiten
: Entweder wird diese Art der Gelübde aufgegeben oder sie
werden im Geiste der evangelischen Freiheit erneuert.

Diese Erkenntnis Luthers zieht sjch dann bis zu seinem Tode durch
zahlreiche seiner Schriften, die von Stamm alle sorgfältig im einzelnen
analysiert werden. Hier liegt auch die Stärke der Arbeit, die
diese Einzelheiten aus dem ,ganzen' Luther erstmals so zusammenstellt
und belegt, wobei die jeweils fehlende Zeilenzählung bei den
vielen WA-Stellen allerdings eine Nachprüfung und Weiterarbeit
erschwert. .

Schon Lohse - ähnlich andere evangelische Forscher - hatte
a. a. O. S. 367 festgestellt, „... daß ein Leben als Mönch auch von
Luthers theologischer Position aus nicht unmöglich ist. Luther hat
vielmehr wiederholt in De votis monasticis daraufhingewiesen, daß
man sich an das Mönchsleben binden darf. Sein scharfes
Verwerfungsurteil . . . hat er ausdrücklich nur auf diejenigen Gelübde
bezogen, die .außerhalb des Glaubens' geschehen sind, dabei aber
hinzugefügt, daß man die in falscher Meinung abgegebenen Gelübde
nun in der rechten Gesinnung erneuern und dann auch beobachten
dürfe."

Hat man diesen Satz im Ohr, erweist sich die Schlußfolgerung von
Stamm S. 162 wohl doch als zu hoch gestochen: „Die von der Lutherdeutung
bis auf den heutigen Tag vorgetragene Interpretation, Luther.
habe das Ordenswesen als solches abgelehnt und ihm durch die Aufhebung
der ewigen Bindung der Gelübde den Todesstoß versetzt,
erweist sich somit als Fehlinterpretation."

Zustimmen muß man Stamm, daß tatsächlich das Gegenteil richtig
>st. Luther hat zwar das Ordensleben seiner Zeit, das entartet und nur
auf Verdienste aus war, abgelehnt, nicht aber das Ordensleben an
sich, ein Gott wohlgefälliges Ordensleben im Geiste der Gerechtigkeit
Gottes. Dies verschärft herausgearbeitet und mit entsprechenden
Belegen sorgfältig untermauert zu haben, ist das Verdienst der Arbeit
Stamms.

Berlin Hans-Ulrich Delius

Nijenhuis,Willem: Adrianus Aravia (c. 1532-1613). Dutch Calvinist,
first Reformed defender of the English episcopal Church order on
thebasisoftheius divinum. Leiden: Brill 1980. XXI, 404 S. gr. 8° =
Studies in the History of Christian Thought. XXI. Lw. hfl 104.-.

Saravia has previously been known to ecclesiastical historians, if
known at all, as the first Protestant controversialist in England to
affirm divine right episcopacy. In this detailed study of his life and
Writings Professor Nijenhuis now explains the seeming paradox of a
Calvinist Dutchman's Intervention in a dispute over church order
which eventually split the English church in the seventeenth Century.
Born in Artois of a Spanish father and Netherlands mother Saravia
subsequently added to his diverse cultural inheritance by acquiring
English as well as Dutch nationality. As a young man he joined the
Franciscans at-St Omer, but left the friary on his conversion to
Calvinism in 1557, and, on the accession of a Protestant queen, took
rehjge in England from the persecution raging in the Netherlands.
Although based in England for the next twenty years, holding in

succession the relatively minor posts of schoolmaster first in Guern-
sey and then in Southampton, he retained close links with the Calvinist
churches in the southern Netherlands and chose a Walloon Protestant
for his wife. In 1578 he moved his family back to the Netherlands
and ministered for a time to the Calvinist church in Ghent until
the approach of the Spanish armies caused him to flee north to
Leiden. There he served both in the local church and in the newly
founded university, becoming rector magnißcus in 1585 and 1586.
Saravia might well have remained a professor in Leiden for the rest of
his life had not his over assiduous cultivation of Leicester, then
governor general of the Netherlands, aroused the suspicions of the
city Council. In November 1587 he was summarily dismissed from his
university post for alleged complicity in a plot to overthrow the town
government, and once more escaped to England. Düring this second
and final exile Saravia obtained the recognition he had sought but not
achieved in his earlier years. While maintaining his London contacts
he gained a series of well endowed country benefices in addition to a
prebend in Gloucester cathedral which he later resigned for one in
Canterbury where he resided, combining his cathedral duties with
preaching in the Walloon church, until his death in 1613. From
Canterbury he co-operated in the King James translation of the Bible,
and opened a friendship with his near neighbour, Richard Hooker.
He died leaving possessions valued at considerably more than a
thousand pounds, the sort of fortune that only the most senior English
churchmen at this period could hope to amass.

Saravia's De diversis minislrorum Evangelii gradibus, in which he
set out the revolutionary claim of episcopacy iure divino, appeared in
London in 1590. Dedicated to three of the most important men in the
Elizabethan church and State, Whitgift, Hatton and Burghley, it
quite clearly formed part of the governmental onslaught upon
presbyterianism which had lost its chief protector on Leicester's
death. Yet while embroiled in the very English dispute over the
nature of church government Saravia prirnarily wrote as a first
gencration Calvinist against what he considered to be Genevan
excesses. Because Beza had asserted the divine right of presbytery,
Saravia retaliated with a counter-claim for divine right episcopacy, a
step which the more cautious English churchmen had consciously
refrained from taking. Saravia directed his attack against presbyterian
church government, regarding equality in the church as much against
divine order as equality in the State. Until his dying day, however, he
remained an orthodox Calvinist in theology, in this respect having no
influence at all upon the new theological thinking beginning to
develop around Andrewes and Overall in the early seventeenth
Century which eventually gained ascendancy in the church in the
reign of Charles L Indeed, all Saravia's published works seem to have
been directly inspired by his experiences in the Netherlands, and
he wrote at least as much for a continental as for an English reader-
ship. His resentment at the equality of ministers enforced in Dutch
classes led him to assert the divine institution of episcopacy which,
significantly, his colleague, Richard Hooker, did not espouse. Saravia
's reaction against political tendencies within second generation
Calvinism was equally extreme. Recoiling in horror from theories of
tyrannicide, in De imperandi authoritate et chhstiana obedientia
(1593) he enunciated a very un-English view of monarchy which
placed the king above the law and approached a caesaropapism
which would not have offended Henry VIII. Essentially a backward-
looking thinker, a passionate advocate of hierarchy in both church
and State, his defence of episcopacy has conferred upon him a
posthumous reputation which he did not attain in his own life time. It
may be no aecident that the Protestant Sir Francis Knollys, the arch-
foe of establishment clericalism, reserved his fire not for Saravia but
for Richard Bancroft.

In this careful biography Professor Nijenhuis has assembled
information on Saravia's often obscure activities in the Netherlands
and in England. His major contribution lies in his discussion of
Saravia's writings where for the first time his thought is placed in its