Stories # 14
Recap
The Reformation (1517-1648)
Martin Luther
IN THE summer of 1520 a document bearing an impressive seal circulated throughout Germany in search of a remote figure. “Arise, O Lord,” the writing began, “and judge Thy cause. A wild boar has invaded Thy vineyard.”
The document, a papal bull—named after the seal, or bulla—took three months to reach Martin Luther, the wild boar. Long before it arrived in Wittenberg where Luther was teaching, he knew its contents. Forty-one of his beliefs were condemned as “heretical, or scandalous, or false, or offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds, or repugnant to Catholic truth.” The bull called on Luther to repent and repudiate his errors or face the dreadful consequences.
Luther received his copy on the tenth of October. At the end of his sixty-day period of grace, he led a throng of eager students outside Wittenberg and burned copies of the Canon Law and the works of some medieval theologians. Perhaps as an afterthought Luther added a copy of the bull condemning him. That was his answer. “They have burned my books,” he said, “I burn theirs.” Those flames in early December, 1520, were a fit symbol of the defiance of the pope raging throughout Germany.
The Church of the popes no longer hurls anathemas at Protestants, and Lutherans no longer burn Catholic books, but the divisions of Christians in western Christianity remain. Behind today’s differences between Catholics and Protestants lie the events of the age of Luther, a period of church history we call The Reformation (1517–1648).
For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
Luther’s attack on papal authority
All too often, zealous preachers of indulgences made them appear to be a sort of magic—as though a good deed, especially a contribution, automatically got its reward, regardless of the condition of the doer’s soul. Sorrow for sin was completely and conveniently overlooked. That troubled Luther deeply.
Fallout
Luther’s greatest contribution to history, however, was not political. It was religious. He took four basic Catholic concerns and offered invigorating new answers. To the question how is a person saved, Luther replied: not by works but by faith alone. To the question where does religious authority lie, he answered: not in the visible institution called the Roman church but in the Word of God found in the Bible. To the question—what is the church?—he responded: the whole community of Christian believers, since all are priests before God. And to the question—what is the essence of Christian living?—he replied: serving God in any useful calling, whether ordained or lay. To this day any classical description of Protestantism must echo those central truths.
The Age of Reason and Revival (1648-1789)
The spirit of reform broke out with surprising intensity in the sixteenth century, giving birth to Protestantism and shattering the papal leadership of western Christendom. Four major traditions marked early Protestantism: Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Anglican. After a generation, the Church of Rome itself, led by the Jesuits, recovered its moral fervor. Bloody struggles between Catholics and Protestants followed, and Europe was ravaged by war before it became obvious that western Christendom was permanently divided and a few pioneers pointed toward a new way: the denominational concept of the church.
A few weeks before he died Ben responded to an inquiry by President Ezra Stiles of Yale concerning his religious faith. Said Franklin: “As to Jesus of Nazareth,… I have … some doubts as to his Divinity, tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence … of making his doctrines more respected and better observed.”
Something of the American spirit is there. It is the spirit of Franklin’s time, the Age of Reason (1648–1789). Questions of dogma seemed unimportant, hardly worth fretting about. What was immensely more important was behavior. Do our beliefs make us more tolerant, more respectful of those who differ with us, more responsive to the true spirit of Jesus?
If that hatred of religious bigotry, coupled with a devotion to tolerance of all religious opinions, has a familiar ring, it is because the attitudes of the Age of Reason are not a thing of the past. They live on today in the values of the Western world.
The Age of the Reformation proved again that faith and power are a potent brew. As long as Christians had access to power, they used it to compel conformity to the truth: Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. So men died for their faith, tens of thousands of them. Until something general but very deep in man awoke to revolt.
The Renaissance
historians call the Renaissance. The word means “rebirth” and refers to the recovery of the values of classical Greek and Roman civilization expressed in literature, politics and the arts.
Christianity could scarcely escape the fallout from this intellectual revolution. For 1,200 years Augustine’s ideas had ruled Christendom. Man was an enslaved sinner, who needed above all else the supernatural grace of God. To insure the availability of this grace through the Christian Church, God had ordained the powers of the state, to protect truth and punish error.
But now intellectuals were arguing something else: Man is no sinner. He is a reasonable creature. He needs the grace of God less than common sense.
Christians found themselves in two contrasting climates. At first, during the closing years of the seventeenth century, some believers, especially in England, tried to harmonize reason and faith. They argued that Christianity is totally reasonable but some truths come by reason and some by revelation. Some things, like the existence of God, come by observing the heavens; while other things, like the resurrection of Christ, come by the witness of Scripture.
In time, however, after the beginning
In time, however, after the beginning of the eighteenth century, the climate changed. In France, confidence in reason soared and Christians found that many intellectuals dismissed all appeals to revealed Scripture as superstitious nonsense. The climate was obviously more hostile.
The eventual rejection of deism, however, did not restore Christianity to a central place in Western culture. The negative work of the Age of Reason endured. Modern culture—its art, its education, its politics—was freed from formal Christian influence. Men made a deliberate attempt to organize a religiously neutral civilization. This meant that faith had to be confined to the home and the heart. That is what we find today in modern secular societies.
This leaves Christians with a basic problem in the modern era: How far can believers go in trying, as citizens, to get the state to enforce Christian standards of conduct? Or if Christians give up the idea of enforcing Christian behavior, then what norm of conduct should they, as citizens, try to make an obligation for everyone?
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.