This chapter explores popular and learned manifestations of an increasingly difficult neutral position at the height of the Reformation in Germany, in order to underscore and reassess the prevalence of third forces in sixteenth-century religion. The first two sections examine experiences of ambivalent change, at the scale of territorial Reformations and at the scale of personal and local histories. The remaining sections review sixteenth-century attempts to theorize a middle-ground position. Those attempts challenge the historian to integrate marginal, unconventional viewpoints into an otherwise “confessional” intellectual milieu.