History, Department of
Title
Generational Conflict in the Late Reformation: The Basel Paroxysm
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
September 2001
Abstract
It would be tempting to consider the outbreak of the Reformation
as an episode of generational conflict, the ramifications of
which continued during the next several generations of the sixteenth
century. This article, however, focuses instead on a more
limited instance of generational conflict, both temporally and geographically.
Moreover, it looks not at the first generation of reformers
but at their successors—-or, more precisely, at their
successors’ successors—-at a time of transition from the second to
the third generation of Protestant clergy.
The “Basel Paroxysm,” a conflict over the Lord’s Supper that
shook the Basel church in 1570/71, illustrates the generation gap
between the witnesses of the first Eucharistic controversy of the
1520s and those who grew up after the second controversy had
broken out in the early 1550s. On one side of the conflict, Simon
Sulzer, the leader of Basel’s church, invoked the irenical spirit of
Martin Bucer, his teacher, in an effort to maintain peace within
the city’s church. On the other side, a young pastor named Heinrich
Erzberger claimed to be the true spiritual heir of Johann
Oecolampadius, Ulrich Zwingli’s colleague and the founder of Basel’s church. The arguments that the two parties advanced, and
the eventual outcome of the Paroxysm, reveal the importance of
generational change and the depth of generational conflict a half
century after the Reformation.
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Published in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxii:2 (Autumn, 2001), 217–242. Copyright © 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Used by permission.