A Brief tour of Reformation Conditionalism

When John Calvin wrote the Orléans draft of his first book, Psychopannychia, in 1534, one wonders how much direct exposure he had, if any, with the radical reformation wing of the Anabaptists.¹  Calvin says that “pious persons invited and even urged” him to pick up his pen to refute “that absurd dogma” that he dearly hoped would remain confined to “a party whose camp and weapons and stratagems I {he} was scarcely acquainted with”.

Maybe Calvin was concerned with a particular strain of Huguenots in France when he wrote “they are circulating follies in a kind of tracts, which I have never happened to see. I have only received some notes from a friend, who had taken down what he had cursorily heard from their lips, or collected by some other means”. Or maybe Calvin was fighting a less than visible group scattered over time by mentioning that this “cancer… originated with some Arabs, who maintain that the soul dies with the body and that both rise at the Day of Judgement”.

Both seem likely, seeing as Calvin noticed ancient sparks that had “lay smouldering for some ages… being stirred up by some dregs of Anabaptists, spread abroad far and wide, have kindled their torches” and Calvin viewed his work as the rain of the Lord which would extinguish these fires.²

Calvin had a habit of broad-brushing, as we will see as we go on. Not that this is necessarily bad, but at times he connects different people to one another who may only have the loosest of association. Such is the case in Psychopannychia. Calvin addresses his book to “the nefarious herd of Anabaptists, from whose fountain this noxious stream did first flow”³  Yet later, Calvin seems to have Michael Servetus in mind when he makes an allusion to some who would  “sooner admit anything than its(soul) real existence, maintaining that it is merely a vital power which is derived from arterial spirit on the action of the lungs, and being unable to exist without body, perishes along with the body, and vanishes away and become evanescent till the period when the whole man shall be raised again”.⁴

F. Bruce Gordon writes, “It is difficult not to share the bewilderment of Calvin’s contemporaries over his choice of topics. Why would a young man, in danger of persecution for his beliefs, put quill to paper on the subject of the immortality of the soul? Without a doubt, the question was significant, even fashionable and had occupied theologians and philosophers of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Even more curiously, Calvin claimed to be attacking the teachings of ‘Anabaptists’, who taught the false doctrine that the soul goes to sleep at the moment of physical death. In truth, neither the doctrine of the immortality of the soul nor the Anabaptists were his primary concern. He had in mind someone else from his Paris days; the medical student Michael Servetus, a Spanish humanist, theologian and medical doctor who travelled through Europe during the 1520s and 1530s spreading a mixture of brilliant and heretical ideas.⁵

Sola Scriptura was the cry of the times heard throughout Europe and Michael Servetus was no exception. Only it was his interpretations that got him in so much trouble. Simply stated, he didn’t see a clear declaration of the Trinity in Scriptures and wrote the books De Erroribus Trinitatibus and Dialogues Concerning the Trinity, which effectively cause an international infuriation.

To weather the backlash, Servetus then went underground by assuming an alias; Michel de Villeneuve and served as Professor of Anatomy and was appointed physician to the Archbishop of Lyon. During this exile period Dr. Villeneuve was doing some pioneering work in the field of blood circulation and its oxygenation.⁶  Servetus’ explanation that “The vital spirit has its origin in the left ventricle of the heart, and the lungs contribute mostly to its production”⁷ would be the basis for the quote above regarding the ‘mere vital power derived from arterial spirit and lung action’ that Calvin correctly realized was a denial of a self existent soul.⁸

Servetus wasn’t the only theologian to reject the soul’s activity apart from a living body. The idea was actually quite in vogue at the time. Martin Luther boldly declared that “the notion of the soul’s immortality and endless monstrosities belongs on the Roman dunghill of decretals;”⁹

Luther thought of the soul as being in a state akin to sleep post mortem: “For just as one who falls asleep and reaches morning unexpectedly when he awakes, without knowing what has happened to him, so we shall suddenly rise on the last day without knowing how we have come into death and through death. We shall sleep, until He comes and knocks on the little grave and says, Doctor Martin, get up! Then I shall rise in a moment and be happy with Him forever.”¹⁰

Tucking in souls into some sort of divine bassinets didn’t sit well with Calvin, who saw a “repugnant error in not issuing departed souls white robes immediately but rather assigning to them cribs to nap in.”¹¹

Also William Tyndale wrote a famously sarcastic, yet poignant treatise in response to Thomas More’s objections “And ye, in putting them {the departed souls} in heaven, hell and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection…And again, if the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good a case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the resurrection?”¹² Tyndale, at one point seems to be addressing the Apostle Paul himself; ” ‘Nay Paul, thou art unlearned; go to Master More, and learn a new way. We be not most miserable, though we rise not again; for our souls go to heaven as soon as we be dead, and are there in as great joy as Christ that is risen again.’ And I marvel that Paul had not comforted the Thessalonians with that doctrine, if he had wished it, that the souls of their dead had been in joy; as he did with the resurrection, that their dead should rise again. If the souls be in heaven, in as great glory as the angels, after your doctrine, show me what should be of the resurrection?”¹³

Many modern conditionalists raise the same concern that Tyndale raised all those years ago; that Greek philosophy permeated Christianity to such an extent as to drastically change the church’s view of personal eschatology. “ The heathen philosophers… did put that the souls did ever live. And the pope joineth the spiritual doctrine of Christ and fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the Spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man. And because the fleshly minded pope consenteth unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupteth the Scripture to establish it. If the soul be in heaven, tell me what cause is there for the resurrection?”¹⁴

While on the other side, Traditionalists will say that Conditionalists make too much of Greek philosophical influence and accuse them of vilifying Plato in particular and using him as their favourite whipping boy. But the influence of Plato on Calvin is real, especially in regard to the nature of the soul and the Conditionalists may have some legitimate traction. In the Institutes, Calvin praises Plato as “the soberest and most religious of them all”¹⁵ and directs his readers that “It were vain to seek a definition of the soul from philosophers, not one of whom, with the exception of Plato, distinctly maintains its immortality”¹⁶

Calvin didn’t go so far as to adopt Plato’s view of the transmigration of  souls or a sort of pre-existent life of the soul which pre-contained all of what we would ever learn and that the act of learning was merely remembering what the soul previously knew. To quote Calvin “This led Plato to adopt the erroneous idea, that such knowledge was nothing but recollection”¹⁷ Although at times Calvin echoes the Platonic trend of elevating the soul to a level that devalues the physical body as not only unnecessary but also a somehow unnatural restriction.”Therefore, so long as we dwell in the prison of the body, we must constantly struggle with the vices of our corrupt nature, and so with our natural disposition. Plato sometimes says, that the life of the philosopher is to meditate on death.”¹⁸

In the Institutes, Calvin recognizes the dualist’s dilemma of death being a result of God’s hostility towards sin while simultaneously being liberation. Calvin explains Christ’s agonizing over His fate in Gethsemane like this: “How shamefully effeminate would it have been to be so excruciated by fear of an ordinary death as to sweat drops of blood”¹⁹ and that “Christ had fiercer and more arduous struggle than with ordinary death”²⁰

His Platonic dualism led Calvin to conclusions on the atonement that most modern Christians would view as strange, namely, that in order to provide a complete redemption, Christ’s soul had an important task; to suffer eternal death in hell.  As he explains; “Had not His soul shared in the punishment, He would have been a Redeemer of bodies only”²¹

Calvin says that we have to be mindful of what death entailed for Christ; “Here we must not omit the descent to hell, which was of no little importance to the accomplishment of redemption”²²

That in hell “Not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but that there was a greater and more excellent price – that He bore in His soul the tortures of condemned and ruined man” (( ibid, book 2, ch.16 p.10 )) Calvin summarizes: “Hence there is nothing strange in its being said that He descended to hell, seeing He endured the death which is inflicted on the wicked by an angry God.”²³ because ultimately it is “that to this descent we owe our exemption from death”²⁴

Personally, I think Calvin was consistent in that he followed his dualist views to their logical conclusion; that in order for Christ to obtain complete redemption, He would have had to suffer death in both body and soul. Only, I respectfully disagree with Calvin as to what the second death entails.

Joining forces with Luther was a Wittenberg University professor named Andreas Karlstadt, who originally followed a track similar to Luther’s but would later take him on his own way towards the Anabaptist movement of South Germany and Switzerland. On a trip to Rome, Karlstadt became dismayed at practices he viewed as corrupt, just as Luther had; and with the plea to “turn your eyes and ears towards the Scriptures”, nailed his 151 theses to the Castle Church just as Luther subsequently would with his own 95 theses and would later stand alongside Luther in debate with Johan Eck. “It may also have been significant that Luther’s college and fellow soul sleeper, Andreas Karlstadt, had been a student at Sienna, thereby risking exposure to the philosophy of Pomponazzi”²⁵

Pietro Pomponazzi maintained that the ‘intellective soul’ is the same as the ‘sensitive soul’ and is therefore mortal. In death, it becomes deprived of body upon which it depends for its object. Accordingly it can no longer act and must perish with the body.²⁶

Pomponazzi’s influence aside, Karlstadt and Luther’s ideas on soul sleep were no too far apart from each other. While both men believed that there were no grounds for an inherent, natural immortality of a self existent soul, their eschatological views allowed for a certain amount of obfuscation. Luther declared from the pulpit “that the soul sleeps until God at the Last Judgement awakens both body and soul.”²⁷  Karlstadt however, didn’t reject purgatory outright, but rather sought to redefine it as spiritual or alchemical rather than material. While Karlstadt’s early authorial career begins with an outright jettisoning of purgatory’s existence and rejection of any post mortem purification²⁸ his position undergoes modifications to a point where he develops a ‘spiritual purgatory’. This purgatory isn’t a mudroom before entering hell that one should fear and amass indulgences against, but a type of foyer before heaven where loved ones are securely in Christ, where only God Himself can ‘spiritually purify’ the  “napping, not dead, but sleeping.”²⁹³⁰ With this booklet Karlstadt was the first Protestant, preceding even Luther, to openly defend the idea of soul sleep.³¹

While Karlstadt was on his path to becoming “a father of Baptist theology” according to historian author George Huntston Williams³² his brother in law, Gerhard Westerburg was on his way to becoming an Anabaptist. Westerburg had earned the nickname of Dr. Purgatory when he had published a pamphlet entitled Purgatory and the State of the Different Souls. Westerburg’s career path was certainly colourful, having been present for the Wittenberg movement, having authored the Frankfurt Articles averting disaster and having received believer’s baptism at the Münster kingdom fiasco, he eventually finished as a Reformed pastor. While Westerburg served to popularize the polemics debate on purgatory, his writings don’t reflect many original theories but try to find a palatable flavour between the Roman Catholics and the Reformers. Lack of clarity was the result.

Ever the persistent promoter, Westerburg came to Zurich to find a printer for his and Karlstadt’s pamphlets. Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, who were noteworthy figures of the Swiss radical reformation, helped Westerburg publish several tracts, some of which were written on the subject of purgatory.³³ Grebel writes in a letter, that Westerburg stayed with them for six days and makes implications to having read Westerburg’s material.³⁴  What is less likely is that Grebel and Manz had thought out all the theological implications of soul sleep to its conclusion, seeing as their deaths were so soon forthcoming.

The Zurich radicals didn’t elaborate, expound or theologically analyze the afterlife, but instead their views on personal eschatology were seen as bleeding through the pages of their letters and tracts because of their ecclesiastical eschatology. Their community mindedness formed their end-times view. A global, communal meeting of Christ at the Parousia would by implication require soul sleep. The resurrection of the dead is the goal of Christianity and is to be performed by Christ, all in one singular event. For Anabaptists the resurrection is the great and wonderful hope of Christianity and the final eschatological moment of the final manifestation.³⁵

During this time, Ulrich Zwingli was pastor at Zurich and was heading a reformation of his own. Zwingli and Grebel began as collaborators, as is evident by a letter co-authored by the two, with the latter, serving as harsh polemist.³⁶  Grebel writes against the Church’s “bulls, anathemas and ffear-basedfaith. All these are vanquished by the gospel word. That leads, will lead, to everlasting life. Ducit perpetuoque victa ducet It leads and shall lead to perpetual living.³⁷  In that letter we catch a fuzzy glimpse of Grebel’s leanings, which would later become more defined as Christian mortalism.

In a letter to his friend, Grebel expresses concern that a mutual friend and schoolmaster is resisting Reformation changes by adhering to what he sees as the questionable doctrine of purgatory.  “There is nothing else that you ought to know from me, except that I grieve that Benedict, your bishop, has departed to purgatory, as they call it, or rather as they wickedly contrive and dogmatically defend”³⁸ Grebel predicts that truth will prevail and their friend will ‘vomit up this doctrine of abomination’

Felix Manz’s short life kept his literary output to a minimum, none of which deals directly with the afterlife. His prison letter converted to hymn is the most telling. Manz’s opening stanza praises God who made him “wise enough to escape eternal death” and continues to express his love for Christ’s righteousness which “without it nothing survives” neither “here or there.” The hymn closes with a warning to “study Adam’s fall” when he “took the serpent’s advice, disobeyed God and had death come upon him. So it will be to those who withstand Christ.” Manz follows the reformation impulse to stay with Biblical language and in a middle stanza uses the term “ewigen Pein” as per the Froschauer translation of Matthew 25:46. But there is a history of looser translations meant to capture the essence. The Anabaptist Hymnal renders it “their hope of heaven refused”³⁹  A Mennonite translation from Hymnal: A Worship Book emphasizes that Christ frees us from “death’s dread might”.⁴⁰ and my Anabaptist friend and author, Peter Hoover, retells it as if Manz is warning us that ; “those that do not carry the love of Christ nor understand his words, will come to no good end. Their wages are eternal death.”⁴¹

If all this sounds suppositional and inconclusive to us today, it was certainly clear to Zwingli who sought to contain the spread of Anabaptist teaching. Zwingli would push back saying that “The Anabaptists teach that the dead sleep, both body and soul, until the day of judgement, because they do not know that ‘sleeping’ is used by the Hebrews for ‘dying’. Then they do not consider that the soul is a spirit, which, so far from being able to sleep or die, is nothing but the animating principle of all that breathes, whether that gross and sensation-possessing spirit that quickens and raises up the body, or that celestial spirit that sojourns in the body.”⁴²

Personal references to Grebel, who had recently died, are peppered within Zwingli’s refutations. These references provide us with not only Zwingli’s views but they also tell us, in form of contrast, something of Grebel’s views about personal eschatology.  Zwingli writes of “their head in hell” and several times calls Grebel “a shade”⁴³ and a “ghost”⁴⁴ “now among the shades on the Phelgethon”, one of the mythical fire-rivers of Hades.  Interestingly, these images are drawn from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and from his book The Phaedo.⁴⁵

The Swiss Anabaptists would find their new leader in Michael Sattler, who was to write the Schleitheim Articles which would serve to unify and embolden the Anabaptist movement, before his subsequent gruesome martyrdom. Sattler was burned at the stake for heading a rebellion, even though the Schleitheim Articles promote pacifism. His views on the afterlife were also of concern because they devalued Mary from blessed mediatrix to the ranks of the sleeping. Sattler would explain at his trial “ that she is a mediatrix and advocatrix, of this the scriptures know nothing”⁴⁶ Sattler grants that she has “given birth to God”- but adds “according to the flesh” – but Mary cannot intercede for us since she awaits judgement. Only Jesus can intercede for us with the Father, likewise, the saints are to be honoured as “blessed” but the true saints are those who are living in obedience. Sattler’s reply brings out several interesting points.  Important are Sattler’s assertions that Mary and the saints cannot intercede, since they are not yet ascended, and that Christ alone can intercede for us. This assertion destroys the rationale on which rested the entire edifice of Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin and on which rested also indulgences, prayers for the dead, and appeals to the saints, which had formed such an important part of Sattler’s life as a monk. It appears that Sattler came to hold the doctrine of psychopannychism, or sleep of the soul, rather than the traditional Catholic view. Catholic theology taught that on death, souls proceed directly to heaven, hell, or purgatory, according to the merits of each individual. This meant that the church universal included the living and the dead as active members. The Blessed Virgin and the saints could be entreated through prayer intercede for the living and the dead, and further, the suffering of those in purgatory could be alleviated by acts of penance done specifically on their behalf. Thus Michael Sattler’s statement that all mortals, no matter how holy, do not arrive in heaven prior to judgement and the resurrection undermines a central rationale for the penitential system and takes away one of the primary ‘works’ traditionally done by monks, the intercession for the dead.⁴⁷

Sattler’s death didn’t yield the results his executioners hoped for. Anabaptist expansion once again drew the attention of John Calvin, who countered with penning Briève Instruction, in which says “colour and resolve were added to their doctrine by the death of this guy of theirs they call Michael.”⁴⁸ In Briève Instruction, Calvin agrees with much of Sattler’s Schleitheim Articles, seeing as both Calvin and the Articles are very much about pious living, but he does reiterate that the Anabaptist teach that “ they argue that an immortal soul has lost its immortality through sin”⁴⁹

Calvin did allow slight wiggle room by conceding that “… should one church happen to hold that the soul when separated from the body is forthwith transported to heaven, and another, without venturing to determine the place, simply think that it lives in God, and should such diversity be without contention and obstinacy, why should they be divided?”⁵⁰  But he would stop short of offering that charity to proponents of psychopannychism.

Conclusions.

If you have followed with me this far, let me point out the obvious; that we are all hopeless history nerds.

If I had to point out anything else about the time of European Reformation, it would be that soul sleep was held by a wide variety of theologians who were each in their own right committed to Sola Scriptura. Ulrich Zwingli who continuously asserted that the early Anabaptists taught “at death souls do not immediately enter heaven, purgatory or somewhere worse but ‘sleep’ until the resurrection of the whole person, body and soul, at Christ’s return”⁵¹ really didn’t have much of an effect on stemming the tide of psychopannychism, because as history records that during the 1550s that “ many who became Anabaptists also believed that the soul is not naturally immortal but “sleeps” between death and the final resurrection. Some affirmed, further, that only the righteous would be resurrected, while the unrighteous would simply remain dead. Many denied hell. The Venice Synod affirmed soul sleep and rejected hell.”⁵²

The distinction of formidable opponent of conditional immortality belongs to John Calvin, who on three major occasions took pen to paper in refutation. Calvin had great effect on French, English and German/Swiss theology for hundreds of years. His views stem from a Platonic dualism; and therefore Plato’s influence cannot be understated because Calvin’s influence cannot be understated. There is much work being done today on human anthropology in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind, and surprisingly we find ourselves gradually, increasingly aligning with the thoughts of Michael Servetus, who was thought to be bringing in a mixture of brilliant and heretical ideas.

References

1.  Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, Jean Calvin. Une Vie [↩]
2.  Psychopannychia, Introduction [↩]
3. ibid kindle location 98 [↩]
4.  ibid kindle loc. 152 [↩]
5.  F. Bruce Gordon, Calvin p.43 [↩]
6. Servetus and the Circulation of Blood, Sergio Baches Opi [↩]
7. Christianismi Restitutio p. 69 [↩]
8.  Psychopannychia, kindle location 152 [↩]
9.  Assertion of all the articles of M Luther condemned by the latest Bull of Leo X, article 27 [↩]
10.  Dr. T.A. Kantonen The Christian Hope, 1594 p.37 [↩]
11.  Briève Instruction, 1544, p.138 [↩]
12. William Tyndale,An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue [↩]
13.  ibid [↩]
14.  ibid [↩]
15. Institutes of Christian Religion book 1, chapter 5, paragraph 12 [↩]
16.  ibid, book1, ch.15 p.6 [↩]
17. ibid, book2, ch.2  p.14 [↩]
18.  ibid, book3, ch.3 p. 20 [↩]
19. ibid, book 2, ch.16 p.12 [↩]
20.  ibid, book 2, ch.16 p. 12 [↩]
21.  ibid, book 2, ch.16 p. 12 [↩]
22.  ibid, book 2, ch.16 p.8 [↩]
23. ibid, book 2, ch.16 p.10 [↩]
24.  ibid, book 2, ch.16 p.11 [↩]
25.  Richard Sugg The Smoke of the Soul, ch.7 [↩]
26.  Gergely Juhàsz, Resurrection or Immortality of the Soul? [↩]
27. Fastenpostille 1525 [↩]
28. Lutheri Melanch.Carolostadii &c. propositiones, Basel 1522 [↩]
29.  die Abgeschiedenen schlummern, sie sind nicht tot, sondern schlafen [↩]
30.  Andreas Karlstadt, Ein Sermon vom stand der Christglaubigen seelen, 1523 [↩]
31.  Gergley M. Juhàsz ,Translating Resurrection, p.183 [↩]
32. George Huntston Williams,The Radical Reformation 3^rd Edition p.195 [↩]
33. ibid, p.198 [↩]
34. Letter to Vadian 14 October 1525 [↩]
35.  Claude Bacher,1996, Les Éschatologies Anabaptistes de la Haute Vallée Rhéanne, Avec les Réformateurs,(1524-1535) Leurs Prolongements Parmi les Frères Suisse, p.372 [↩]
36. efense Called Archeteles [↩]
37. Zwingli-Grebel Reply to the Bishop’s Admonition. Zurich, August 22-23, 1522 [↩]
38. Grebel to Vadian Zurich, June 17, 1523 [↩]
39. David Augsburger, All Praise to Jesus Christ Our Lord [↩]
40. Hymnal: A Worship Book [↩]
41.  I Will Stay With Christ, Rocky Cape Christian Community [↩]
42.  Tricks of the Catabaptist, Appendix,1527 [↩]
43. umbras: resident of hell [↩]
44. larvis: the spirit of one who has died and is no longer a resident of earth [↩]
45.  Phaedo, kindle location 162 [↩]
46. Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyr’s Mirror [↩]
47.  C. Arnold Snyder, The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler [↩]
48. Briève Instruction, pour armer tous bons fidèles contre les erreurs de la secte commune des Anabaptistes. Par M. Jehan Calvin, 1544. Éditeur Jehan Girard, 1544. Original : Austrian National Library, Vienna. P.188 [↩]
49.  ibid p.163 [↩]
50. Institutes book 4, ch.1, p.12 [↩]
51. Thomas N. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive, p.518 [↩]
52.  ibid p. 42 [↩]

About

Lerman is a theologically curious guy from the pews, who admits conditionalism has had a simplifying effect. He is married to his high school sweetheart and they have a son and a daughter. He resides in Canada.

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