Frank Worbs

The year 2017 saw the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, from which the beginning of the Protestant Reformation is usually dated. The occasion was commemorated worldwide, even in Switzerland, although reluctantly.
The reason for dragging feet was that the Reformation in Switzerland, although influenced by brother Martin in Wittenburg just to the north, soon went its own way. Nor was there a single personality or event that set the process in motion. There was Zwingli in Zurich, Oeculampad in Basel, and—a bit later—Calvin and his colleagues in Geneva. The Reformed church in Aargau had a further problem: The lack of any one figure of the stature of these others. Instead, the Reformation took hold in different congregations at different times. Some places went over to the Reformation only to be recatholicized after the second battle of Kappel in 1531.
The cantonal church of Aargau decided to make a virtue out of this. It commissioned a historian to search the archives to document various personalities and events. The results were shared with fourteen authors who were invited to pick an incident and treat it in any way they chose. The result, edited by Frank Worbs, until recently the church’s chief press officer, appeared in this volume. Most are narratives, but there are two poems and a play.
I enjoyed reading all of them. There is a healthy lack of self-congratulation or triumphalism. Instead, we read graphic depictions of the turmoil brought on by iconoclasm and the persecution of those who saw things differently.
One story, by Michel Mettler, stood out by its futuristic style. Two online activists meet an old man in a trailer park. He’s only identified as Ulrych, but it’s probably not wrong to take him as Zwingli. He wants to hire the activists to patch into sleeping brains via the biometric fitness port people have been outfitted with, then implant a message: Our minds are equipped with the power of self-reflection. Unfortunately, people have forgotten this, having been distracted by consumption and entertainment.
Mettler’s tale suggests that the last word has not yet been said on the importance of the Reformation.… (meer)