AND
ntre the different Radical reform currents predominated the position that faith could not be imposed or defended by force, but the conducive was to use persuasion so that people, voluntarily, became the path of Christ. The attempts to reach the sky by assault, making possible through the armed insurrection the new Jerusalem, as in the cases of Tomás Müntzer in the War of the Peasants (1524-1525) and the Anabautist kingdom in the city of Münster (1534-1535), were disqualified at the same time that they were developed by Anabautistas of the construction of the construction of peace.
The dissidents of the official church of Zurich, headed by Ulrico Zwinglio, contravening the ordinances of the magistrates, decided to put into practice on January 21, 1525 the voluntary baptism of believers and reject that of infants. The action cost them to begin to suffer harassment, persecutions, imprisonments and/or exile for not sticking to the official/state church symbiosis. What happened in Zurich also took place in other places in Europe.
The so -called Anabautistas (renamers) for their adversaries contained in favor of freedom of conscience and faced the repression unleashed against them and justified by theologians, both Catholics and Protestants, who argued to be defending the Christian faith by fighting the heretics. The libertarians were a minority, but enough to record a road that could not be uprooted, which fructified slowly but growing. They began to fight for the freedom of beliefs more than 150 years before John Locke, author of Letter about tolerance (1689), will develop its argument by justifying the coexistence of different religious creeds in the same territory.
Bernard Cotrett affirms that Neither the word nor the concept
Tolerance “existed in the 16th century […]. Tolerance was born around 1680 at the dawn of the Enlightenment; It is inserted into a singular space, that of Northwest Europe, England and Provinces-Unidas. Finally, it is a particular man, John Locke ”( Calvin, strength and weakness , p. 196). Like Cotrett, other historians have left out of their historiographic record to those who, long before Locke, from their reading and understanding of the Bible found grilled to defend the voluntary nature by assuming a belief and the legitimacy of the same against the predominance of the territorial churches.
In the 16th century, the general tendency between Catholic rulers, as Protestants of the different aspects that were formalized in different territories, was to establish in their domains the principle of Cuius Regio, Eius Religio (The religion of the place is according to the ruling’s religion). In that vision, “the prince – not the bishop – has the final authority on the church of his territory, given that he has the right to impose unity on religion matters, using force if necessary,” John D. Roth, Anabautist/Mennonite historian, notes.
Given the generalized panorama of intolerance as a religious and political regime, advocate for tolerance as a personal/group virtue, since it could not go further and establish it in legal instruments, it was a countercurrent of the social, religious and political framework prevailing in the 16th century. The predominant mentality excluded from society those who were not folded to the symbiosis state-church official. In this context, voices and arguments were raised to defend an extravagant idea: that believers and citizens could internalize the value of treating with respect to those who did not share the same religious creed. It was Tolerance [como una actitud] intellectual and emotional towards the diversity and values of others, tempered by the desire for harmony and concord and a will that does not long to impose on others of different thinking
(José C. Nieto, The Renaissance and the other Spain; Socio -Spiritual Cultural Visionp. 150).
David Joris, a radical refugee in Basel, where he covered up his identity under the name of Jan van Brugge to be safe from his persecutors, the treaty wrote in 1554 How much damage does persecutions do the world . Here, a paragraph in which he called the authorities to cease to chase those who considered heretics: Your sword should not be in charge of teaching theology. Otherwise, if theologians get their teaching with weapons, the same can rightly claim the doctor: that you defend him with your weapons of the opinions of other doctors; The same will claim the dialectic, the speaker and the other arts. But if you cannot treat these arts with iron, nor theology, since she resides in the words and in the spirit no less than the others. And if a good doctor can protect his doctrine sufficiently with his science without the help of the magistrate, why couldn’t a theologian do the same? Christ could, the apostles could and who mimic them
.
Radical reformers such as David Joris without systematically argued in favor of tolerance, were not thinkers dedicated to intellectual task, but believers under persecution, they practically argued about respect for the diversity and rights of minorities.
