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Confirmation and Christian Fellowship: Martin Bucer on Commitment to the Church

1995; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3167905

1755-2613

Amy Nelson Burnett,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

During the last years of his ministry in Strasbourg, the Protestant reformer Martin Bucer and his fellow pastors introduced a new procedure for the exercise of church discipline, the voluntary enrollment of their parishioners in “Christian fellowships.” The parish structures created in Strasbourg have been regarded as forerunners of Pietist conventicles ever since the late seventeenth century, when Philip Jakob Spener justified his own Pietist assemblies by publishing a memorandum in which Bucer had defended the “Christian fellowships.” In the twentieth century, Gustav Anrich brought the attempt to establish “Christian fellowships” to the attention of scholars in his publication of an abridged version of Bucer's initial proposal. Anrich's student, Werner Bellardi, wrote the standard study of the movement's origin, development, and eventual disappearance on the basis of documents preserved in the Strasbourg archives. In their discussions of the movement, both Anrich and Bellardi were led astray by their assumption that Bucer originally intended to form conventicles of believers within the city's official church. In fact, those enrolled in “Christian fellowships” did not begin meeting together until the autumn of 1547, almost a year after Bucer first proposed the enrollment procedure.