China’s official policy toward religious groups had not changed. Since the 1980s churches had been required to register with the federal government. Many refused to do so; they considered cooperating with state demands equivalent to making the government the head of the church, a role that belongs only to Jesus. For much of the previous thirty years, churches that didn’t register operated mostly unmolested. In more recent years, though, officials began enforcing existing policies more aggressively.
From 1562 to 1598 France suffered a series of civil wars between Roman Catholics and French Calvinists (or Huguenots). When both parties reached the point of exhaustion, they agreed to a territorial compromise in the royal Edict of Nantes (1598). The Huguenots gained religious freedom and political control of certain parts of the country, while Roman Catholicism remained the official religion of the realm and in the greater portion of the nation.
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In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were “established” churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory, whether devout or totally uninterested, as members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Doctrinally they were different; structurally they were very similar.
In 1220 the Dominican mission and lifestyle gained official approval. The new preaching order that we know as Dominicans was called mendicant, meaning “begging,” and the term friar (or brother) distinguished them from monks because, unlike monks, they went forth to live among people to preach and teach. Just as monastic houses had once arisen to minister in the countryside, so the mendicant friars now emerged to meet the spiritual needs of townspeople.
After successfully repulsing the Muslim armies in their second major attack on Constantinople (717–18), Leo openly declared his opposition to icons for the first time. An angry mob murdered the official who was sent to replace the icon of Christ with a cross over the Bronze Gate. Whole sections of the empire rebelled vigorously. Mosaics were gouged from the walls; icons were daubed with whitewash. Leo secured the retirement of the patriarch of Constantinople and the consecration of a new one who favored Leo’s views. The iconoclasts (or image breakers) wanted to replace the religious icons with the traditional Christian symbols of the cross, the Book (Bible), and the elements of the Lord’s Supper. These objects alone, they insisted, should be considered holy.
"All men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ ... An ‘extraordinary’ man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity)."
