I<\/span>n an essay on the Brandenburg Calvinist pastor John Bergius, Bodo Nischan observes that \u201c<\/span>Unlike most Protestants and Catholics at the time, Bergius did not think that a ruler should impose his religion on his subjects. True faith, he argued, could never be forced on people,\u201d and he charged that Protestant attempts to impose a single faith repeated \u201cthe error of the Spanish in America and the Catholics in the empire who were trying to convert people by force.\u201d <\/p>\n Rather than imposing a confession or prayer book, \u201ca ruler who wants to reform his church must proceed slowly, persuading by Christian love and the logic of his arguments rather than by force and violence.\u201d He has to be patient with \u201cthose who do not see their errors lest he offend their consciences and thereby cause additional divisions \u2018that are often worse than the error he set out to correct.\u2019\u201d He advocated what has been called a policy of \u201cconvergence\u201d \u2013 patience, with the hope that a religious consensus will emerge.<\/p>\n In his view, it was a political reversion to a Papalist tyranny: \u201cNot long ago, Bergius complained, everybody was yearning for greater spiritual freedom from the pope and the emperor; now, even subjects presumed to dictate their ruler\u2019s religion. Instead of being loyal to their prince, they attack him and commit lese majeste<\/em> by appealing to foreign rulers such as the king of Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n Bergius didn\u2019t deny that a ruler is responsible for defending the truth faith. But he didn\u2019t believe that the \u201ctrue faith\u201d was confined to one set of articles or one confession. For both theological and political reasons, \u201cA ruler therefore could tolerate different churches in his realm, indeed for the sake of peace and stability had to tolerate two churches as closely related as the Lutheran and Reformed.\u201d<\/p>\n (Nischan, \u201cCalvinism, the Thirty Years\u2019 War, and the Beginning of Absolutism in Brandenburg: The Political Thought of John Bergius,\u201d Central European History<\/em>, 15:3 [Sep., 1982]: 203\u2013223.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an essay on the Brandenburg Calvinist pastor John Bergius, Bodo Nischan observes that \u201cUnlike most Protestants and Catholics at the time, Bergius did not think that a ruler should impose his religion on his subjects. True faith, he argued, could never be forced on people,\u201d and he charged that Protestant attempts to impose a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1365,423,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-and-state","category-protestantism","category-toleration"],"yoast_head":"\n