Calls for reformation within the church occurred over several centuries and produced a complex series of events that challenged the authority of the church hierarchy. Calls for reformation began with the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteen centuries and continued with Wycliffe, Hus, and the Brethren of the Common Life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1517, he called into question certain practices of the church and sought to change them. Initially his actions were not meant to divide the church but to rid it of the practices that many in the church felt were doctrinally contrary to the tenets of the New Testament. What many define as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 may be more correctly viewed as a step (although the major one) in a centuries-long process that eventually led to the irrevocable separation of the Western church into its Catholic and Protestant branches.[1]
Martin Luther
Luther (1483-1546) received a Master’s degree from the University of Erfurt. Subsequently, he began studying law but changed to theology. In 1507, he was ordained a priest and began tutoring in the university at Wittenberg. He was transferred back to Erfurt in 1509. During a trip to Rome in 1511, Luther observed the low state of religious and moral convictions of the church in Rome at the time, and his opposition to church hierarchy grew. Although he remained a loyal Catholic, Luther concluded that the road to salvation was best gained by fleeing the world. He began living the acetic life of a monk in a monastery and attempted to earn salvation by his good works. Try as he might he remained oppressed by a sense of his utter sinfulness and separation from God. Sitting in his monk’s cell near the end of 1512, Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans. He read Romans 1:17, “The righteous will live by faith.” He pondered those words for a few moments and then was astounded by the magnitude of their meaning. He was overwhelmed with joy as he realized he was saved by faith and not works.[2] The crushing burden of sin and separation from God had been lifted.
Between the time of his conversion in 1512 and the ninety-five theses nailed to the Wittenberg door on October 31, 1517, Luther continued ponder the many abuses in the church and preached and spoke against them. According to one authorized history of the Catholic Church, it was not Luther’s intent to leave the church, and “…much of what Luther believed and taught was authentic Catholic doctrine that had been distorted by abuses and incorrect practices.”[3]
The recent development of the printing press made it possible for Luther’s theses to be quickly known throughout Germany. Within four weeks they had been translated into many languages and carried to every country in western Europe. As a consequence, the sale of indulgences was almost completely stopped. Over the next three years Catholic officials made numerous efforts to silence Luther. But the war of words continued unabated between Luther and his followers and those defending the Catholic Church and papal authority. In 1519, theologian Johannes Eck challenged Luther to a debate in Leipzig, Germany. Although the debaters were evenly matched in learning and speaking ability, Eck eventually forced Luther to admit that some of the teachings of John Hus had been unjustly condemned by the Council of Constance.[4] As you may recall, Hus had been burned at the stake by the church 104 years earlier because he had strongly opposed the sale of indulgences and taught many ideas that became central teachings of the Reformation.[5] Luther now stood openly with Hus who had been officially condemned as a heretic by the church. At this point the reconciliation between Luther and the Roman Catholic Church was impossible.[6] In 1520, Luther published three treatises which rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and the popes as well as the sacraments of the church with the exception of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and repentance. Luther was excommunicated in 1521 because he would not retract his statements regarding the Catholic Church’s dependence on good works and the practice of selling indulgences to gain remission of sin and salvation.[7]
In Roman Catholic orthodoxy, there are seven sacraments (ceremonies or rituals). Protestants embrace both the Lord’s Supper and water baptism as ordinances of the church but differ significantly with Roman Catholics as to their meaning and practice. Luther, and like most Protestants since the Reformation, did not reject the need for penance (repentance), but he rejected the Catholic doctrine that penance was dependent on its sacramental elements. For Protestants, this disagreement stands at the heart of the Reformation as found in Romans 1:17 along with the scriptures alone as the source of the church’s authority.
In Luther’s day the sacrament of penance was the center of controversy with regard to Catholic practices. The heart of penance was the priestly act of absolution (forgiveness) which was the pardoning of sins and release from eternal punishment for those sins. Absolution involved three requirements of the penitent sinner: contrition, confession to a priest, and satisfaction. The priest would decide what the penitent must do to receive satisfaction such as saying a number of prayers, giving alms, fasting, or pilgrimage to some shrine. In time the church permitted the penitent to make payment of a sum of money and receive a document call an indulgence that would release him from other penalties required for satisfaction.[8]
The practice of indulgences began at the end of the eleventh century when Pope Urban II permitted a penitent to join a crusade to the Holy Land as a substitute for any other penance required of the priests. By the end of the thirteenth century indulgences were granted to secular rulers for political reasons. By 1400, the sale of indulgences was a common practice in many local churches, and many indulgences were being sold for trivial sums for almost any occasion or merely given away. During Luther’s time, indulgences were being trafficked in a scandalous manner throughout the church. In his original ninety-five theses, Luther did not attack the indulgences granted by the church but the manner of abuses connected with their sale.[9]
Pope Leo X ruled the church from 1513-1521. Leo X assumed the papacy only two years after Luther traveled to Rome and within months after his conversion in late 1512. Leo X was deeply consumed with the paganizing culture of the Renaissance. Although he lived a blameless moral life, he was exceedingly worldly and had little interest in religion. His greatest interest was building the magnificent St. Peter’s Church at the Vatican in Rome. Because of its huge cost, the pope raised the necessary funds by the sale of indulgences on an unprecedented scale.[10] Four years after Leo X’s ascension to the papacy, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg which became the match that ignited the flames of the Protestant Reformation.
The writings of the Protestant Reformers addressed many of the failings of the universal church up to that point in history. Luther may have struck the match, but many other reformers had contributed much of the kindling that aided in spreading the flames of Protestantism. Even though there was a general consensus of the church’s authority centered on “the Bible alone,” the various reformers had different ideas on charting the way forward with regard to the finer points of interpreting scriptures as they related to doctrinal matters. It must be remembered that the reformers had been a part of the Catholic Church, and its doctrines and practices were not quickly, easily, or entirely abandoned. Also, most priests and the people were exceptionally ignorant of the Bible. The reform leaders faced the daunting task of both organizing the church and educating the Protestant faithful in their respective countries.
Luther did not believe that he and his followers had left the church. Rather, his efforts were meant to reform the church, and these efforts were quickly implemented in 1521. Luther’s first task was to translate the Bible into the German language which he completed in March 1522. He also began preparing training materials for children, developed a new hymnbook, and eventually guided the church in its statement of faith called the Augsburg Confession in 1530.[11]
Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin
Less than two months after Luther’s birth, Ulrich Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484, in Wildhaus, the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Zwingli developed his ideas for reform of the church independent of Luther’s influence. Inspired by Luther, Zwingli attacked indulgences in 1518 and soon church reform spread throughout Switzerland. A key difference between Luther and Zwingli lay in the idea of the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli believed the Supper was only a memorial ceremony in which the bread and the wine were symbols while Luther clung to the Catholic tradition that the body of Christ is actually present in the bread and wine. Meeting in 1529, Zwingli and Luther could not come to an agreement. Following Zwingli’s death in 1531, Protestants in Switzerland and southern Germany began following the teachings of John Calvin.[12]
Born in 1509 near Paris in northern France, John Calvin was twenty-six years younger than Luther and Zwingli. Although Calvin had studied for both the law and theology, he eventually chose the life of a scholar in Paris. In 1533, while at the university, he heard a speech by the university’s rector that mirrored the reform ideas of Erasmus and Luther. Rumors circulated that Calvin had written the speech, and he had to flee for his life. By 1535, Calvin had settled in Basel, Switzerland, and in 1536 wrote Institutes of the Christian Religion which has been called the Reformation’s greatest presentation of evangelical truth.[13]
With regard to the doctrine of predestination, Luther and Calvin were in agreement. This doctrine states that God has from eternity chosen those who are to inherit eternal life. The form of worship followed by the Catholic Church was retained by Luther except where expressly forbidden by the Bible, but Calvin departed from the Catholic form of worship in all ways as far as possible. With regard to relations with the state, Luther allowed the state to have many powers over the church. Calvin denied that the state had any power over the church. Rather, the church was to have power over the state. Both men believed education was very important and that the people should be well-grounded in the Bible and doctrinal matters. Although salvation by faith alone was a foundational doctrine for both Luther and Calvin, Luther placed the emphasis on the salvation of man by faith while Calvin believed the heart of the church stood on the doctrine of predestination which was focused on the glory of God. [14]
In spite of their differences, there were four fundamental elements common to all the reformers of the Reformation era. The reformers stressed the priesthood of all believers by which they meant that the believer gained salvation through Christ alone and not through the church or offices of the priest. In all questions of faith and morals, the Bible was the supreme and final authority. Also, the reformers looked back to the spirit and practices of the Apostolic Church as described in the New Testament as the model for church operation. This led to the view that the “church” was the community of believers and not the hierarchy of church officials and church government.
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The church had traveled a seemingly incomprehensible path through 1500 years of persecution, victories, corruption, triumphs, and tragedies. Along the way the universal church had accumulated an inordinate amount of wealth, excess doctrinal baggage, and a large measure of worldliness. But in spite of the faults and corruption within the church, the sustaining inerrant truth of the New Testament and its doctrines was the church’s life preserver to which it clung, however tenuously, for a millennium and a half. The Reformation was a time of casting off of much of the church’s excesses, failures, and worldliness, but it would be a painful and imperfect parting for both Catholic and Protestant churches. Satan used the church’s distractions and disruptions to thrust into its breaches the humanistic dregs of the waning Renaissance of the sixteenth century and the ascending humanism of the era of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to further his efforts to destroy the church of Jesus Christ. To this we turn our attention in the coming chapters and set the stage for a look at the new American Church.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 157.
[2] Ibid., pp. 160-163.
[3] Alan Schreck, Ph.D., The Compact History of the Catholic Church, (Cincinnati, Ohio: Servant Books, 2009), pp. 73-74.
[4] Kuiper, pp. 165, 169-174.
[5] Ibid., pp. 145-146.
[6] Ibid., pp. 172-173.
[7] Schreck, pp. 73-74.
[8] Kuiper, pp. 158-159.
[9] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 233.
[10] Kuiper, p. 231.
[11] Ibid., pp. 184-185.
[12] Ibid., pp. 187-189.
[13] Ibid., pp. 189-191.
[14] Ibid., pp. 200-201.
