原书及其作者：牛津通识读本系列丛书，或者“A Very Short Introduction series”，一个非常高质量的学科入门读本系列。16到17世纪左右，这段宗教改革的故事从近乎偏执于原教旨的圣经解读出发，最终却落在了催生多元社会的终点上。
Chapter 3 Politics
P60
Many Westerners find refusal or inability to distinguish between religion and politics (such as in parts of the contemporary Islamic world) both baffling and menacing. The Reformation is central to the story of how politics and religion began to come apart in European society, yet at the same time it witnessed the flowering of more intense and explicit synthesis between them.
宗教改革带来了政教分离原则，但是在一个新的维度上也见宗教和政治更加强烈鲜明的相互影响。
P61
But the Reformation supplied it with a new impetus, and with new, potentially corrosive, challenges. For what was the appropriate response to a state power professing the ‘wrong’ religion? The emerging and competing identities of the Reformation era were from the outset enmeshed in vital ways with political processes, making relations between states, and between rulers and subjects, more explicitly ideological than they had ever been. The Reformation was, in fact, the first great era of ideological politics, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, ideology meant religion.
宗教改革也带来了第一波身份政治的时代，基于宗教认同。
Church-making and state-building
P61
The religious map of divided Western Christendom was fundamentally decided – in a universal extension of the German principle of cuius regio, eius religio – by the wishes of the powers-that-be.
宗教改革年代，关于一个国家信奉哪个教派，而民众又自处的故事纷复繁杂，看起来好像非常激动人心，但其实从较高层次来总结规律，情况竟然如此简单：在地统治者信了什么，国民多半就信什么，而统治者常常基于部分政治考量来决定自己信什么教。
P63
Across Western and Central Europe in the later Middle Ages, secular rulers were consolidating and centralizing their authority, and interfering ever more directly in the running of the Church in their territories. The papal aspiration for universal spiritual monarchy, with the pontiff directly controlling the Church throughout Europe, and dictating terms to kings and emperors, peaked in the 12th century, and was more or less defunct by the beginning of the sixteenth. …… The repudiation of that residual power and influence is sometimes seen as part of a natural progression towards national autonomy and maturity on the part of European states.
主要的政治考量就在于这本书没怎么涉及的，欧洲在16世纪崛起的“民族国家”概念（nation-state），世俗政权集中和加强权力。
从12世纪到16世纪前，教皇控制政治的野望在宗教改革就逐渐输给了世俗政权了，因此在宗教改革的年代，很多教皇对于自己的权力就显得更为审慎克制，留下的权力真空
结合路德思想里维护世俗统治者（pro-ruler）的倾向，就使得政治版图松散的德国境内的太子党（princelings）成为了宗教改革的最大支持者。对内收管教会组织，对上向皇帝要求更多自治，接手了教会威权的同时也接手了教会的财富。
P64
Beyond a certain point, cynicism abut human motivation risks becoming a form of naivety. It is implausible that the rulers who steered their territories towards the Reformation all did so entirely on the basis of cold political calculation.
但宗教改革不论如何说，首先是一场宗教运动，单纯把改革年代的动态归因于纯粹政治考量很多时候往往就成了另一种幼稚。
P66
Confessional (from the Latin confessio, to acknowledge) here refers to the various confessions of faith, or statements of defined doctrine, which were drawn up as the religious divisions in Europe hardened and clarified from the mid-16th century. Members of the rival confessions were increasingly expected to identify culturally and politically with their church’s teachings, and to know what those teachings were. Lutherans rallied around the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the 1580 Book of Concord. The Reformed had the so-called Helvetic Confessions of 1536 and 1566, and the formulas of Calvinist orthodoxy from the 1619 Synod of Dort; Catholics, the decrees of Trent.
发展到后期，统治者的个人喜好、宗教建构、国族建构逐渐融为一体，学者把这种趋势叫做 “confessionalization（忏悔化？找不到中文译法）”，词根（confessio）的意思是某种信仰告白或明确教义的声明。这个进程意即鼓励自己下辖的民众更多更深入的了解和认同自己所在国族的宗教教义，同时倾向于打压持不同宗教认同的人。
P66-68
Counter-intuitively to our modern expectations, religion is here an agent of modernization, helping to create more uniform and obedient societies, suffused with a sense of patriotic and pious identification with the Lutheran, Calvinist, or Roman Catholic motherland. …… The desired outcome was ‘social discipline’: having internalized their faith, Christians of varying stripes would become model subjects, less given to the riotous, licentious, or superstitious behaviour that caused concern to superiors.
对于现代人来说有点反直觉的是，在这个世俗权力壮大的过程中，宗教力量很多时候成其为现代化的先驱。宗教带来归属和认同，从最细致的基础层面凝聚人心，和公序良俗相互维系，并且提供一只兼具社会认知与理念素质的基层队伍——以神职人员的形式，推动社会进步。
Wars of Religion
P69
The Reformation was an era of fairly unremitting ideological warfare in Europe, perhaps the first in which states fought each other for reasons other than territorial aggrandizement, or the honour and glory of their sovereigns. …… It would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify a 16th- or 17th-century conflict that was fought for purely religious reasons, uncontaminated by political, economic, or dynastic considerations. But religious rivalry produced conflicts within and between states that were more prolonged, bloody, and embittered than they would otherwise have been.
既非领土扩张，也非为了君主荣耀，宗教改革年代充满了无休无止的意识形态战争。即使不是为了纯粹的宗教原因而起战事，宗教也常使矛盾更加激化和持久，意识形态对立让人野蛮残忍。
P71
There is a real irony here, for virtually no one regarded religious toleration as a positive good in itself. But if religious dissidents could not be eliminated, compromise was the price of peace, and toleration was an unforeseen outcome of war.
但是军事冲突最终也无法“解决”异教和异端的问题（false belief），反而是无尽的冲突和倾轧让所有人都更加固执。
既然如此，外交、条约和妥协被意外的引进宗教纷争之间，将世俗政治和私人信仰分开的思想也开始出现。即使在当时，没有人觉得宗教宽容是什么好事。
Paths to resistance
P71
If grudging official acceptance of religious minorities was a messy, pragmatic, and unexpected consequence of religious conflict, the Reformation also challenged the established status of political authority in more direct and self-conscious ways. The defiance of rulers by subjects of a different religious persuasion was a political fact on the ground, but the defiers wanted to feel legally and ethically justified in the steps they were taking. The result was another momentous development: an unprecedented theorizing of the limits of political obedience, and the articulation of fully fledged theories of subaltern resistance.
在更加有意识的程度上，宗教改革促进了关于服从政权统治的界限到底在哪的讨论（the limits of political obedience），以及一系列如何进退有度的表达抗拒和下级反对上级的理论发展。
P72
Lutheran theologians produced an ingenious amalgam of doctrines of political obligation and constitutional theory. All rulers had an inescapable duty to protect and preserve true religion; at the same time, the German princes were jointly responsible with the emperor for the good order of the empire. If he failed in his duty to uphold true religion, acting as a tool of the anti-christian pope, then he could legitimately be resisted. This was not a recipe for anarchy, but a narrowly defined set of circumstances under which ‘inferior magistrates’ might call the superior magistrate to account. …… A trio of refugees from Mary Tudor’s England, Christopher Goodman, John Knox, and John Ponet, broke spectacularly from the notion that even ungodly rulers were (in the formula of St Paul) ‘ordained of God’, and concluded that wicked rulers could be overthrown or even killed – the doctrine of tyrannicide.
各色新教流派都开发出了自己和所在地政治相宜的理论，认为如果统治者是令国民不满的（在时代背景下，即宗教认同问题），下级推翻上级是有合法性的。
到了加尔文主义这里，这种理论进一步升级，打破了以往认为君权皆由神授的观点，认为特定情况下，即使是弑君也是可以有合法性的，并且出现了被付诸实践的例子。
当然，不同激进和严重程度的政治动乱在天主教世界里也不少见，甚至一度让谋杀暴君的理论和实践成为天主教特色。
P75
After the upheavals of the wars of religion subsided, the immediate outcome of the Reformation was probably to enhance and entrench political authority. With a few notable exceptions (such as England and the Netherlands), ‘absolutism’ was the order of the day for later 17th-century European states, with representative assemblies in decline and the untrammelled exercise of monarchical power presented as a positive good. Resistance theories went out of fashion, as the product of a violent and divisive recent past. But the formulation of considered justifications of political non-compliance, based on a contractual element in the three-way relationship between ruler, ruled, and God, was of considerable significance for the future. Their originators aimed not, of course, at the establishment of democracy, or political liberty for its own sake, but at the extirpation of ‘idolatry’ and ‘heresy’. Nonetheless, these works would exert influence on the revolutionaries of the 18th century, American and French, and thus play a part in the inauguration of a new and very different political world.
动荡年代过去后，抵抗理论逐渐淡化，君主专制被视为一种好处。但是关于人、神、统治者之间的契约、契约破碎和反抗，以及政治不服从的理论和正当性，的思考和实践却为一个政治自由、民主的新世界开创埋下了种子。
参考文献
Marshall, P. (2009). The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-923131-7