When I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt, I studied with quite a few Lutherans. I remember having a conversation with one woman preparing for Lutheran ministry. We were discussing what we’d be writing our papers about in a certain class – a class that had nothing to do with the Reformation. She ticked off her potential topics. Every one of them was the subject of the class filtered through the thought of Martin Luther.
Well, I thought. That’s….boring.
How tedious and narrow to have the thought of one man set the parameters for your faith.
And when you actually read Luther – as opposed to read about him – when you read, say, his Commentary on Galatians or his On the Freedom of a Christian – the fixation becomes even more pronounced.
No works. Faith. GOT IT.
Luther’s reading of faith, for whatever reason – his reaction to abuses and skewed spirituality that he encountered and formed him, his own character – was singular, single-minded, oriented in his own present moment rather than in the deeper broader history of the Church, obsessive and binary to the extreme.
Partly because his theology was based on a reading of Paul that might not be accurate, to say the least, a reading that had a deep and destructive impact on Scripture scholarship in the 19th and early 20th century, as, especially German New Testament scholars ran with then-deeply rooted assumptions about Judaism during the time of Jesus that have, in the past decades, shown to be mistaken.
An alternative history of Christianity – of the visible Church – might look something like this. It might offer us a Luther-influenced branch of Augustinians that had an energizing impact on late German medieval Christianity and perhaps beyond, one which inspired a new look at Scripture in the life of the Church, a broader and deeper understanding of evangelical and perhaps a take on personal spirituality that places trust in the power of Christ’s forgiveness and mercy at the center. We have Franciscans, Cistercians, Dominicans, Jesuits, Redemptorists, Thomists and Eastern Catholics. Perhaps we’d have Martinians, too. Perhaps.
But events and personalities and other factors took history in a completely different direction, a direction, very quickly, of chaos, confusion and disunity. Perhaps the best thing that a person confused about the different messages they’re hearing about the Reformation can do is to read an objective history of the first three or four decades of the Reformation, and see how quickly these movements went to battle against each other and how complex this moment in time really was. Know that Luther had violent, strong words for Papists, yes, but just as strong words for Anabaptists – his major challengers – too.
Luther was deeply wrong about many aspects of theology and philosophy and his movement was a tragic, narrow, skewing of Christianity. That is not suggest reform was not needed. The Church is always in need of reform. That is not to suggest that his opponents acted with prudence or justice. That is not to say anything about the level of faith or “Christianity” in various Christian denominations today. That is not to say that millions do not meet and know Christ outside the visible Catholic Church. They do.
Much less am I saying anything about followers of the Reformation and its churches – their faith, their character, whatever. That’s silly, so let’s head that off right now. I know straight-up pagans who are far better people than I am – nicer, more generous – so it’s not hard for me acknowledge the goodness and good faith of anyone.
But hey. Luther was still wrong. I can’t think of anything of theological or spiritual substance that he was right about that wasn’t already part of the Church’s experience. Christ’s garment shouldn’t be torn. So I’m not celebrating.
Some other Catholic grousing that might interest you.
Luther – father of political liberty…or…?
“The establishment of the Lutheran territorial Church under the supervision and control of the prince,” observed Christopher Dawson, “involved a thoroughgoing reconstruction of society, to the benefit of the prince, who thus acquired a patriarchal religious authority that was almost absolute.” Heinrich Rommen ironically noted, “all that the pope claimed for the liberty of the Church is now claimed by the absolute king.” No doubt, this is what John Neville Figgis had in mind when he said, “Had there been no Luther there could never have been a Louis XIV.” These results flowed from premises taken from one area (theological) and applied to another (political). Luther was not aiming at absolutism; if anything, he was trying to counter what he saw as absolutism in the Church. He did not seem to consider that his metaphysical undermining of the Church’s authority and the abandonment of natural law would ultimately clear the path to absolute political authority. Such may not have been his intention, but such was the result. With the obliteration of natural law and the segregation of religious faith, the public arena was open not only to Luther’s Christian prince, but to Machiavelli’s amoral one. As faith diminished under the pressures of secularism, it became more Machiavelli’s prince than Luther’s who prevailed in the public arena.
Catholic response to these events was shockingly slow and feeble. Luther could not be silenced merely by issuing a papal decree. Church spokesmen were overmatched in debates with Evangelicals. Significant numbers of clergy and religious changed sides. (Most of the early Reformers had been Catholic priests.) Above all, Catholics lost the propaganda war. Art, songs, broadsheets, pamphlets, plays, and planned public blasphemies cleverly attacked the Church as the Great Whore of Babylon and the Pope as Anti-Christ.
Rome let more than 30 years elapse between Luther’s initial challenge and the first meeting of the Council of Trent. It took three sessions spread out over 18 years (1545-63) to complete its work, which defined Catholicism until Vatican II (1962-65). The decrees of Trent did clarify doctrine and curb abuses. It upheld Scripture and Tradition as the twin sources of Revelation, as interpreted by the Church, not individuals. Its decrees on Original Sin, justification, and merit from good works condemned Reformers’ teachings. It also defined the seven sacraments, defended the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confirmed devotional practices, and tightened clerical discipline.
By the time the Council of Trent closed in 1563, no return to the old order of Christendom was possible. Rulers in England, Scandinavia, and swaths of the Holy Roman Empire had broken with Rome and taken all their people with them—willingly or otherwise. Although Evangelicals, now called “Protestants,” were established throughout northern and western Europe, their churches were vulnerable to dissent over rival readings of Scripture.
Religion had become dangerously entangled with politics, nationalism, and class rivalries. From the German Peasants’ revolt in 1525 to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, Europe by ravaged by local and international conflicts that claimed millions of lives. (Green against Orange in Northern Ireland is the last fading ember of that conflagration.) Generations of religious violence yielded grudging tolerance and spiritual apathy.
“Nominalism” may seem like nothing more than an obscure, probably irrelevant philosophical term, but it’s really important to understand when thinking about the Reformation. Carl Olson breaks it down:
Heiko A. Oberman, a leading Luther scholar (and admirer), admitted in Luther: Man between God and the Devil that “Martin Luther was a nominalist; there is no doubt about that.” Fr. Louis Bouyer, a former Lutheran pastor and theologian, stated in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism that this connection to Ockham’s nominalism is the key to the “negative elements” of the Reformation:
No phrase reveals so clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than Luther’s saying that Ockham was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther, brought up on his system, was never able to think outside the framework it imposed, while this, it is only too evident, makes the mystery that lies at the root of Christian teaching either inconceivable or absurd.
That “mystery” is divinization: the Catholic doctrine that God’s grace — his supernatural life — can infuse man and heal his wounded nature, especially through the sacraments. This belief was abhorrent to Luther, who believed such communion between God and man impossible, even blasphemous. Justification, Luther taught, was not an inner change but a juridical or forensic reality, outward only and imputed by Christ. The justified man is still as sinful as before, but he is “cloaked” in Christ’s righteousness…..
….”Classical Protestant soteriology” refers generally to the teachings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their followers about the nature and means of salvation. Classical Protestantism emphasizes the salvation of man by a personal act of faith in response to God’s divine (and essentially external) favor, while Catholic soteriology emphasizes the divinization of man by the infusion of God’s grace, or supernatural life, especially through the sacraments. In Catholic doctrine, as articulated by the Council of Trent, justification and sanctification are distinct but intimately bound together in the process of salvation. In classical Protestantism they are separated, sometimes to the point where the two have little to do with each other: Justification is a matter of legal standing with God while sanctification is the subsequent inner work of the Holy Spirit. While Catholicism recognizes the primacy of faith, it also emphasizes the need for good works done by grace in the “working out” of salvation. Classical Protestantism stressed the doctrine of sola fide (“faith alone”), which denied that good works, no matter their source, had anything to do with justification.
Oh, hey, since it’s Halloween, let’s bring that into it, too. From
Fr. Steve Grunow:
I think that the association of Halloween with paganism has much more to do with the Protestant Reformation than anything else. The Protestant reformers were concerned about the practices of medieval Christianity that to them seemed contrary to what they believed the Church should be. They knew that these practices had clear precedents in the history of the Church, but insisted that they represented a corruption of the original form of Christianity that had become degraded over time. The degradation was explained as a regression into cultural forms that the Protestants described as pagan.
I realize popular religiosity is a complex phenomenon and the Church in Europe did intentionally assimilate many cultural practices that were more ancient than it’s own practices, but it did so selectively and with a keen sense of discernment. The end result was not simply that a veneer of Christianity was placed on top of an ancient pagan ethos, but that a new cultural matrix was created, one that was Christian to its core. It is a gross mischaracterization and oversimplification to assert that you can just scratch the surface of medieval Christianity and what rises up is paganism.
And yet this perception endures in contemporary culture. You see it, for example, in works of fiction like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which appropriates ideas from a lot of spurious, pseudo scholarship that permeated British intellectual culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unfortunately, this has become a standard and widely accepted narrative of how Europe became Christian. It is a modern myth born of the prejudices and propaganda of the Protestant reformation that mutated into the secular critique of Catholicism. As an ideological construct it represents the simultaneous fascination and aversion to Medieval culture in general and Catholicism in particular. The reality is far more complex and interesting.
Protestantism was and is proposing what its adherents believe to be an alternative to Catholicism. This means that Protestantism will distinguish itself from the forms and styles of religious life that preceded their own culture and that this culture will be presented as a purified form of Christian faith and practice. One argument that is advanced to justify Protestant distinctiveness is that the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church are pagan.
Me on the impact of the Reformation on women.
Brand Luther – really good book.
From my review:
An interesting side point. Luther’s works were immensely popular and millions were printed and sold over just the span of a few years. His theological and political arguments, his Bible translations, his catechisms and his works for the laity were the bread and butter of German printers for decades. One gets the impression from histories of the Luther movement that the Catholic response to all of this was characterized by not much more than ineptitude and short-sightedness. There may have been some of that, but what stands out from Brand Luther is the sheer marketing force and ingenuity that Luther exerted. He saw right away that if his cause was to succeed and if his life was to be preserved, he had to take this beyond academic circles to the popular arena. Therefore, he wrote in German rather than only in Latin, and he wrote works specifically directed at laypeople. This is what the Catholic side could not or would not understand. And, to come back around the printers – Pettegree points out that it got to a point at which Catholic writers had plenty of responses to Luther ready to roll, but printers were uninterested in taking them on because they didn’t sell.
As I was reading Brand Luther, I toyed with a slightly different take on this early period of the Reformation and the fire it spread – and so quickly- through German lands at the time. There are countless reasons for this wildfire: the authentic appeal of Luther’s ideas of “freedom” from Roman Catholic religious ritual and spiritual sensibilities, real, scandalous and problematic Catholic corruption, the support of secular rulers, disdain of Rome as a foreign power, and the new technology. It’s all there. But what struck me in the reading was, honestly, the titillating, profitable appeal of scandal and taboo-breaking. When I read Luther’s best-selling bold, cocky, profane and dismissive invectives against almost every aspect of Catholic life that every person reading him would have grown up knowing and holding as sacred, and contemplate the violent, scatological images of clergy and religious practices that were printed and distributed by the thousands, it doesn’t seem like a culture in which there is calm-truth seeking happening. It feels frantic, taboo-shattering, dam-bursting and addictively scandalous. And that, as we know, will always, always sell.
PS: One of the more bizarre claims you’ll hear these days, even from Catholic sources, is that “Luther didn’t intend to split off from the Catholic Church. He just wanted to reform it. ” As if he would have been satisfied if his suggestions had been taken into account at the parish council meeting.
Well, you might want to read his suggestions – not only the 95 Theses, but say, the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. No, Luther didn’t envision or intend a multiplicity of churches calling themselves “Christian” – in that sense that’s correct. He did not intend to “split off from the Catholic Church.”
He wanted to replace it. He did not even see the Catholic Church of his day as legitimately Christian. Those who didn’t follow him and his version of “the Gospel” were unbelievers, akin to those Jews, you know. In his mind his was re-rooting the authentic Christian Church in the true Gospel. The problem being, of course, that right away, some other fellows came along who thought Martin was wrong, and no they didn’t want to split off from what he said was the Gospel, they just wanted to reform and….