Filling the void

From Acts to Martin Luther's 95 Theses in 10 minutes or less

One thing that unifies all Protestants — we read the Bible! So newly Christian me (age 23) now read with vigor. The Gospels were wonderful — Jesus is a great teacher, just not only a great teacher. Paul’s letters were pretty dense. The Old Testament was interesting but esoteric. Revelation was downright weird. But for a history buff, the book of Acts was an eye-opener. The Church had real power. The apostles made the lame walk. They cured blindness. They raised the dead! I wanted to know how my church was connected to that church from the book of Acts. This is what I gleaned over the coming few years…

Jesus was eternally part of God from the beginning of time, but He was took the form of a man, becoming literally God on Earth (the word “incarnation” was unknown to me). Despite his perfect life and sinlessness, he was executed, thus paying the penalty for me and all sinners. He was resurrected and appeared to his followers many times. These apostles were given the power of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, forming the Church. Despite persecution by both Jewish and Roman authorities, the Church grew through teaching and miracles until branches of it existed in most parts of the Roman empire.

That ought to sound familiar; it’s the book of Acts.

The Church grew over a few centuries until the pagan Roman emperor decided to co-opt the Christian religion instead of fight it. Constantine’s conversion enabled the Church to spread rapidly via the institutions of the Roman Empire. This newfound power made the bishop of Rome a spiritual quasi-emperor (Pope) over all Christians, whose religious edicts now bore the force of law and were backed by Roman military might. The church thus lost the preaching of Jesus (“take up your cross and follow Me” or “the meek shall inherit the Earth”) and became a wealthy, prideful, and corrupt Imperial bureaucracy.

Let me apologize profusely for the offense that causes to any Catholics or Orthodox readers — none is intended. For Protestants though, this should still sound familiar. Your church may color it differently (many denominations claim hidden evidence for their origin in the Patristic era) but the outline is the same.

After the barbarians conquered Rome, the Catholic church (as it now called itself) continued to bloat with ever more arcane and complex rituals, ever asserting itself as a secular kingdom at some times. Like the Pharisees before, it taught that salvation was earned by your actions. Desperate for money to support increasingly lavish lifestyles, the Popes sold bishoprics to noble families during the Middle Ages. They even sold Papal indulgences, allowing you (or even your deceased relatives) to supposedly get into Heaven regardless of behavior.

For a young monk named Martin Luther, selling access to Heaven was a bridge too far. He courageously broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1519, preaching that salvation was by “faith alone” in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and that “scripture alone” was the definitive guide to Christian life. He was called a Protestant because he was protesting the corruption of Rome. Like the early church 1500 years before, the Protestants grew rapidly in the face of intense Catholic persecution, yet further evidence that the Holy Spirit was with them. Despite some differences in practice, the modern Protestant denominations share Luther’s basic conviction and comprise the true Body of Christ in the world today.

For the visually inclined…

This very a-historical picture was the mental architecture connecting my church to the book of Acts. Whether it represents the view of most American Protestants is beyond my pay grade, but recent surveys (2003, 2019) of theological and historical knowledge among American Christians makes that rather likely.

A more accurate history

The Reformation was actually far more complex. It really had 3 pieces:

• Magisterial Reformers — the majors: Lutherans and Calvinists

• Radical Reformers — thought Luther & Calvin were too tame

• King Henry VIII — the English (Anglican / Episcopalian) church

15th century European air was saturated with church reform, and not just from irate theologians and resentful peasants. The nobility got into the act as well. From The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory, which this post will refer to repeatedly:

“Tired of prelates making the church worse instead of better, significant numbers of secular authorities at every level used their power to oversee ecclesiastical reforms in their respective regions… Kings appointed bishops and abbots within the territories they governed, and some, such as Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, founders of the Spanish Inquisition, were major patrons of Observant religious houses. Territorial princes in the Holy Roman Empire, including Emperor Sigismund (r. 1433-1437) himself, began reforming the church on their own terms, because so few aristocratic prince-bishops evinced significant interest or initiative. City councils in the free imperial cities took charge of ecclesiastical life in their towns... They increasingly excluded bishops from the very cities in which their sees were located, thereby diminishing episcopal influence over urban religious life. Civic authorities regularly funded preacherships, appointed pastors to vacancies, and regulated monastic houses within the walls of their cities to the extent they could. Although far from all secular authorities were diligent and devout, to an unprecedented degree they were controlling the church.”

It was in this environment that Luther tacked up his 95 Theses. While previous medieval would-be reformers met sometimes gruesome ends as heretics, the increasing secular control over religious life gave Luther both theological and physical space. Local princes provided both Luther and Calvin a military that could protect them from Catholic persecution and a legal infrastructure to enforce their religious edicts. Sounds familiar? It mirrors the relationship of the early Catholic church to the Roman Empire 1200 years before. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

“The reformers’ rejection of the Roman church left them entirely dependent on secular authorities for protection, beginning with Friederich of Saxony’s sheltering of Luther after the latter’s excommunication by Leo X and [Holy Roman] imperial condemnation by Charles V in early 1521. Simply put, no Protestant regime was even possible save through dependence on secular rulers, without whom those who rejected the Roman church would presumably have been crushed by Counter Reformation ecclesiastical and secular authorities, just as medieval heretics had been. Protestant reformers and ecclesiastical leaders could seek to persuade and might sometimes secure significant influence through their moral auctoritas [authority] and alliances, but never were they in a position to force the political hand that fed them.”

Just like Constantine converted and then protected of the 4th century Catholic Church, Friedrich converted and protected the embryonic Lutheran church.

The English path originated not with a church reformer seeking protection from a prince, but with a prince (King Henry VIII) seeking church reforms directly. The outcome in England was the same though, a new church (with a striking liturgical similarity to the old church) protected from the Pope by a local monarch and indirectly (directly in Henry’s case) under the control of that monarch.

This is what separated the Magisterial reformation (which got secular protection) from the Radical reformation (which did not). Why not? They questioned far more than just institutional church corruption.

“Some anti-Roman Christians in the mid-1520’s went much further, seeking the abolition of existing social and political relationships and their reconfiguration along egalitarian, fraternal lines inspired by scripture. The point of the Gospel was… to rouse sinfully complacent Christians to actually heed Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Mt 10:34)… The most widespread of the commoners’ reform grievances in the early German Reformation, the Twelve Articles in February of 1525, denounced the feudal rights of lords over their serfs, ‘insofar as Christ redeemed and purchased all of us with the precious shedding of his blood, shepherds as well as those of the highest rank, without exception. Therefore with the scripture it is established that we are and shall be free.’ Thomas Müntzer, a former ally turned hostile opponent of Luther, elaborated on such notions in ways that went well beyond these and other lists of grievances, as did Nuremburg printer Hans Hergot.”

It should be obvious why the radical reformers were unable to attract princely support; their agenda was nothing short of the complete dismemberment of Medieval political structures.

“Preached to laypeople, ‘the Gospel’ ignited a firestorm of anticlericalism in the towns and villages of the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland... Sparked at least in part by such ideas, the German Peasants War of 1524-1526 was the largest series of popular uprisings in Western Europe before the French Revolution, involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary villagers and small-town dwellers before it was forcibly suppressed. It simply was [sic] the Reformation in its most widespread, visibly manifest, earnest early form. Secular leaders drew the obvious conclusion: biblical ideas could be dangerously subversive.”

After crushing the German peasants’ revolt, ecclesiastical reform would never again be permitted to threaten the secular power structure. Secular leaders and their magisterial reformer vassals persecuted or exiled anyone with more radical interpretations of Scripture. “Sola scriptura” now had limits.

A truer picture of Medieval church reform is messier.

It was 500 years ago… who cares?

The historical record illustrates a core problem that remains with us today: competing truth claims — that’s academic-ese for heresy.

Gnosticism (2nd century) was a set of competing truth claims put down by the early church as heretical. Arianism (4th century) was a competing truth claim squashed at the Council of Nicaea as heretical. 5th century… 11th century… wash, rinse, repeat. Governance by papal / ecumenical council and consistent purging of heresies paid real dividends.

The church around 1500 exhibited an identifiable unity of doctrine, liturgical, devotional, and institutional terms across Latin Christendom from Ireland to Poland, Scandinavia to Spain… The gulf between the church’s prescriptions and the practices of its members — from clerical avarice in high places to lay superstition along the unlearned — inspired countless calls to close the gap, from Catherine of Sienna in the 1370s to Erasmus in the 1510s. But the church’s prescriptions, based on its truth claims, were a given.

Putting down repeated heresies was possible because there was a single authority (the Catholic Church) which defined the truth claims for all European Christians. Disagreement about this precise authority (Papal supremacy) which was the most significant competing truth claim prior to the Reformation. It caused the Great Schism in the 11th century, and each side excommunicated the other as heretics. But Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity were geographically separated. There were no Medieval European towns where residents choose their church based on competing doctrines of the Trinity, salvation, papal authority, Eucharistic presence, or free will — the entire idea of “choosing a church” would have been ludicrous in 1518. Within a decade, armed German peasants would be demanding the right to do exactly that.

To see why we have so many denominations, go back to Luther’s two basic premises:

• sola fide (faith alone) — Salvation comes not from actions on your part, but by grace from God, through faith in Jesus as his Son.

• sola scriptura (scripture alone) — The Bible is the authoritative guide for Christian living, intended to be read and understood by all individuals.
  
  (Full TULIP Calvinists will cringe at those summaries, but just bear with me.)

If salvation is by faith (sola fide), not by sacraments administered from ecclesiastical authorities, does church attendance matter? Now that you can read the Bible for yourself (sola scriptura), you don’t need the priest to read and interpret it for you. Scriptural interpretation, and the truth claims it implies, rapidly becomes (and became) a free-for-all. In the 15th century, competing truth claims were suppressed as heretical; in the 16th century the heretics would find a few friends and start a competing church. And we Protestants have been doing it ever since, over both the substantive (is Christ really present in the bread?) and the trivial (the baptistry drapes should be blue, not purple!)

John Milton (Paradise Lost author) would summarize the results of Luther’s and his own beliefs succinctly just 100 years later:

“Every true Christian, able to give a reason of his faith, hath the word of God before him, the promised Holy Spirit, and the mind of Christ within him.” ¹

By such a standard, truly nothing can be condemned heretical. In 1650, Milton prefigures the most postmodern of epithets: “if it feels good, do it.”

This problem of adjudicating among competing truth claims remains as unresolved today as it was in 1520 because the theological framework of sola scriptura and sola fide renders it unresolvable. So how is a Protestant to know what truth is? Can we possibly come to a better agreement? That will be the topic of my next post.

---

Note: All of my book links go to GoodReads, not Amazon. This is intentional. Amazon is a far too powerful and increasingly censorious company. I use Bookshop.org or Thriftbooks.com or GoodwillBooks.com, but in the interest of no one thinking I’m trying to parley my links into revenue, I link to GoodReads.

1. John Milton, A Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes