On 31st October, 1517, a momentous event took place in the life of the church. It didn’t seem like it at the time and in fact the then Pope, Leo X, dismissed the event, even a year later, as the work of ‘a drunken German. He will feel different when he is sober’ and ‘The whole row is due to the envy of the monks’.

It was of course the day Martin Luther, professor of Biblical Studies at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, nailed to the church door his 95 Theses, 95 reasons why indulgences were wrong. Luther wasn’t trying to split the church, but in his moderate dissertation, he opened the floodgates of thought in a Europe-wide wildfire of university and religious excitement. One obscure monk from an unknown university had stirred up all Europe.

This didn’t happen overnight. The seeds of renewal were being sown 100 years before in a recognised understanding that the Catholic Church was corrupt, negligent in ministry, ignorant of scripture, sexually immoral and prone to absenteeism among its clergy of all ranks. Certainly, contemporary accounts portray the church in a dreadful state, but we must remember that contemporaries may not be telling all the truth, but colouring it to fit their own agendas.

Corruption is one thing but official sanction of corruption is quite another. The heart of the rotten condition of the Catholic Church lay in the papal protection and promotion of abuses. Vice hits the headlines today and virtue goes unsung.

There were men and women of great piety in the 15th century. We recall Geert Goode (1340-84), a Dutchman who gave up luxury when he found Christ in 1374 and devoted himself to practical piety. He was one of the leaders of a movement known as the Devotio Moderna (‘the modern way of serving God’), which emphasised personal devotion, social involvement and education.

A more recognisable name to us from this movement will be the slightly later Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471) the author of Imitation of Christ, the best devotional handbook of the Middle Ages and still not out of print. It had 4 chapters:
- Some thoughts to help with the spiritual life
- Some advice on the inner life
- Spiritual comfort
- A reverent recommendation to Holy Communion.

Why was it so helpful and popular: because it is searching, scriptural and Christ centred. Let me quote from it:
‘If a man knows what it is to love Jesus, and to disregard himself for the sake of Jesus, then he is really blessed. We have to abandon all we love for the one we love, for Jesus wants us to love him only above all other things. The love of creatures is fickle and unreliable, but the love of Jesus is trustworthy and enduring. The man who clings to created things will fall with them when they fall, but a man who embraces Jesus will be upheld for ever. It is Jesus whom you must love and keep to be your friend; when all else fades away, he will not leave you, nor let you perish at the end. Whether you will or no, you must one day leave everything behind. Keep yourself close to Jesus in life as well as death; commit yourself to his faithfulness, for he only can help you when everything else will fail.’
(Lion Handbook p.357, para 1).

The last great and greatest perhaps of these forerunners of the Reformation was Desiderus Erasmus (1467-1536). He was a friend of John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s (d. 1519) and Sir Thomas More (d.1535). Erasmus began as a monk, but was later ordained in 1492. He traveled widely and wrote extensively, with particular emphasis on ridiculing monasticism and scholasticism, and using satire to express his contempt for the corruption of Rome. His most important contribution was an epoch-making edition of the Greek NT – the first ever printed.

So despite these great men, the Catholic Church was still ripe to hear and respond to the abuses so flagrant within its systems. And other outward forces contributed to this situation. Europe felt under threat from plague - several outbreaks in the 14th and 15th centuries – and from the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, driving all before it, so it seemed, in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe.

The great discoveries of this period extended knowledge and promoted further discovery. Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus found America, Da Gama reached India by sea, Magellan sailed round the world. It was an age of great fervent, matched by the growth of nationhood, particularly in Spain, France and England, a nationhood that began to assert itself as independent of not dependent on papal supremacy.

Another change in the wind was the Renaissance, not that everyone woke up one morning and said ‘Let’s have a Renaissance’. Renaissance is a 19th Century term actually, used to describe the Popes of this period who were great patrons of the arts. It describes the re-birth or revival of classical Greek and Roman civilization in the arts, politics and culture. It began in Italy and spread from there.

The forerunners of the Renaissance were not the artists but the scholars, who styled themselves as humanists, who sought to style their life on what they read of the classical texts. Now a number of people were involved in this movement but basically they experienced a love of the classical texts that inspired their very lives. It gave rise to a polarization in the church between those who believed in the authority of the church and those who put the cult of original texts first – seeking out the authority of established antiquity. This of course developed in theology as a search for authority grounded in scripture, rather than tradition.

The humanists began a Europe wide search for old manuscripts, plundering the libraries of the monasteries and digging out their Latin treasures. As time went by they also sought out their Greek treasures as well. Very few people in the West understood Greek and this search for ancient manuscripts encouraged its learning and the appointment of Greeks to universities in Europe.

All this searching led to a more critical study of the NT, originally written in Greek, and comparison with the Latin Vulgate Bible – the standard version of the medieval Catholic Church – such comparisons not always being favourable to the Latin. A new understanding of NT writings and the early Church Fathers was gathered as well. It was an extraordinary period of openness to learning – a forerunner of the modern age in a way.

Philosophically there was a major shift as well. The West had only ever known of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and had based its thinking on his but all this searching for ancient Greek manuscripts led to the re-discovery of Plato – never forgotten in the East but missing from the West. Neo-Platonism (as this revival in Platonic thought in the context of Christianity is known) invaded the art and poetry of Florence, where it had its first influence.

This learning spread across Europe as peace and security gave opportunities for travel and the 15th century saw the founding of 2 dozen more universities, among them: Alcalá, Bordeaux, Louvain, St Andrews, Tubingen, Uppsala and Wittenberg. These and other university institutions developed some of the greatest non-monastic libraries, such as the ones at the Vatican in Rome, the Laurentian in Florence and the Bodleian in Oxford.

Thee libraries developed because books became more frequent. Let’s be honest, Europeans would never have got beyond quill and ink if the Chinese had not invented printing, using handcut wooden blocks as early as the late 9th century. For Europe, printing arrived in 1445 through Johan Gutenberg, a pioneer of moveable metal type at Mainz in Germany, and significantly the first known book to the be published in the Christian world was the Bible in 1456.

Mainz remained the secret centre for printing until 1462 when the city was attacked, plundered and the printers scattered. Within 20 years, printing was all over Europe. When you think about, printing was a momentous discovery, for good and evil in our world. Life would never be the same again. The writings of the Reformers were spread as never would have happened with quill and ink. A comparatively wide audience could be reached in weeks.

So the seeds of the Reformation were planted: the corruption of the Catholic Church, the excitement at new learning and world-wide discoveries, the new learning through Latin and Greek manuscripts, the increasing willingness to question and discuss long-held traditions and the arrival of the printing press to disseminate the new teaching.

Reformation and beginning
On 31st October, 1517, Martin Luther nailed to the Church door at Wittenberg (it was the public notice board for the town, not just an odd thing to do) his 95 Theses. Martin Luther was professor of Biblical Studies at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, and his 95 Theses gave 95 reasons why indulgences were wrong. Indulgences were a papal tool by which to forgive people. If you had sinned badly you could ask the church for remission, for Church had given itself the right to forgive sins. To forgive you, it offered you an indulgence: “A grant of the remission of temporal punishment still due to sin after sacramental absolution” (OED).

Originally a good thing because it was the way the church showed forgiveness had happened and the sinner knew he or she had been forgiven. But in the world of the papacy where human sinfulness was rampant and material gain was necessary, indulgences by the end of the 15th century were common currency. The Popes used them to raise money for the building of the new Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome. An indulgence could be bought whether the sinner was truly penitent or not, and as medieval people had a real fear of the period of punishment in purgatory – the Catholic Church taught that, before they reached heaven, they would need to be cleansed of all sins committed in their mortal life. They didn’t fear hell because they knew that provided they were forgiven and blessed by a priest before death they would go via purgatory to heaven. It was all quite carefully calculated: the relics at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, where Luther nailed his 95 Theses, were reckoned to earn remission of 1,902,202 years and 270 days! How ever did they know?

Luther wasn’t against indulgences in the proper sense – the merciful release of a penitent sinner from a penance imposed earlier by a priest – but he, among others, was against the scandal of this so-called ‘holy trade’, the selling of indulgences to whomever paid.

Before we go back to look at his 95 Theses in detail, let’s look at Martin Luther. He was born in 1483 in Eisleben and studied law at the University of Erfurt. In 1505, he joined the Augustinian monks after taking a dramatic vow during a thunderstorm. He was ordained in 1507 and went to teach moral theology at the University of Wittenberg. In 1510-11, he visited Rome on business and was horrified at the corruption and sexual immorality he saw there. In 1512 he returned to Wittenberg and was made professor of Biblical Studies. His visit to Rome probably precipitated his spiritual crisis that lasted till his famous 95 Theses.

You see Luther had diagnosed Europe’s problem as the same as his own. Though he faithfully obeyed his order and was punctilious in his spiritual observances, he never felt the pardon and peace of God. He found himself no nearer to God. He began to see that the way of a monk was merely a long discipline of religious duty and effort. Mysticism was an attempt to climb up to heaven. Theology was little more than speculation about God.

In all these things, Luther found one basic error. Ultimately they trusted in a man’s own ability to get him near to God, or at least take him near enough for God to accept him. Luther realised that it was not a matter of God being far from humanity, and humanity having to strive to reach him, but the reverse. God in Christ had come all the way to find humanity. This was not a new truth, but a truth overlaid by centuries of church teaching. Luther and all the Reformers never rejected the Orthodox creeds of the church. They were not innovators, as Rome declared, but renovators.

Luther wrote of his struggles to reach God and of his discovery of this greatest truth: the all-sufficient grace of God: This he explained at the Diet of Worms in 1520, when he was brought before the church authorities and the secular authorities of Emperor Charles V:
“Your Imperial Majesty and Your Lordships demand a simple answer. Here it is, plain and unvarnished. Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture or (since I put no trust in the unsupported authority of pope or of councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contradicted themselves) by manifest reasoning I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s word, I cannot and will not recant anything. For to act against our conscience is neither safe for us, nor open to us. On this I take my stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen…” Martin Luther
(Lion Handbook, p.364).

Reformation and understanding
From Luther’s personal rediscovery of the direct and personal relationship between Christ and a believer came the three great principles of the Reformation.

1) God’s word of authority
The Reformers saw the Bible as an account of God’s dealing with humanity in history and they believed that God still spoke to humanity through the words of the prophets and apostles. God’s written word in the Bible became therefore the Living Word, though which God spoke to them and declared his heart and intentions for humanity. Humans could express God’s truths in non-Biblical ways (cp. the Creeds of the Church) but what was expressed had to be biblical truth.

The RC Church and the Reformers both believed in the authority of scripture, but the RC Church believed that tradition was an equal source of faith and guidance about faith. That RC tradition was expressed in the popes and councils of the church, who together were the only permissible interpreters of the Bible.

Add to all this, the Bible was in Latin and hardly ever read, even by the clergy, so hardly anyone knew what it really said or meant (this is all too much like liberal theologians of today). The Reformers encouraged the printing and distribution of vernacular Bibles, based on the latest Hebrew and Greek translations. Luther translated the Bible into German by 1534. The French had their own Bible by 1530 (the Antwerp Bible), but was replaced later by the Geneva Bible of 1580. In England, Tyndale produced a NT (1525) but a full Bible waited until Miles Coverdale (1535), whose Bible together with the later Matthew Bible were merged into the Great Bible of 1539, which Henry VIII declared to be made available in all churches – look for a small ring in ancient churches to which this Bible was attached by a chain. By the way, a Danish Bible was first produced by King Christian III in 1550 and revised by and named after subsequent kings, which shows how much the Danish reformation was controlled by the state – a subject to which we will return later.

Now all this reading of the Bible was good and the Reformers encouraged people to study and notice how far the RC church’s teaching had departed from scripture. Thus they rejected the authority of the Pope the merit of good works, indulgences, the mediation of the Virgin Mary and the saints, all sacraments not instituted by Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, the view of the mass as a sacrifice, purgatory, prayers for the dead, private confession to a priest, celibacy of the clergy, the use of Latin in the services and all paraphernalia that expressed these ideas: holy water, shrines, chantries, wonder-working images, rosaries, paternoster stones, images and candles.

2) By grace alone
The second principle of the Reformation was ‘Justification by faith alone’ – salvation by the free and undeserved grace of God. From this new life proceeded the fruit of the Spirit in loving acts. Now the RC church did not deny justification by faith and believed that a person was saved by Christ, but also laid stress on the merits of good works in that justification. Protestants didn’t disapprove of good works, but denied their value as a condition of justification. Good works for the reformers were to be seen as a product or evidence of justification.

3) Every believer a priest (‘the priesthood of all believers’)
The Reformers saw no evidence for priestly mediation in the early church or in scripture. Thus they taught that there were no longer two levels of Christian, spiritual and lay. There was one gospel, one justification by faith, one status before God common to all men and women, clergy and laity. People were called to different occupations, but each Christian was under obligation to read scripture daily and take part in the government and public affairs of both society and church. Thus, the Reformation paved the way for the democratic states of Europe and North America. Church order changed as well, though the Anglican and Lutheran expressions maintained much of the outward structure – Bishops, priests, etc., the Calvinists of Geneva broke from all such structures and from them developed the Free Church models of today.

Reformation and Luther
Almost single-handedly Luther was the engine of the Reformation in Germany. His 1517 paper stirred up quite a controversy, though the RC church was slow to respond, not seeing him as a threat. In December 1517, two months later the Archbishop of Mainz complained to Rome about Luther, but faced with opposition Luther’s stand became more firm. He refused to recant and in July 1519, during a disputation with Eck, his sharpest opponent, Luther denied the supremacy of the Pope and the infallibility of the general councils. He also burned the papal bull (special papal order) which threatened his excommunication. Excommunication finally came in 1521 at the Diet of Worms (Diet meaning Council), where he declared his refusal to recant on the grounds that nothing he stood for was refuted by scripture.

For his own protection he was whisked away by Frederick of Saxony and there he devoted his energies to translating the Bible into German. He published numerous other books, which fired the imagination of ordinary people across Europe. He published accounts of his debates with the RC authorities so people could see for themselves the truth of his arguments.

In 1529, at the Diet of Speyer, the Emperor Charles V tried to curb Luther’s movement by force, but some of the princes of the German states stood up in ‘protest’, and the Reformation found itself with the title ‘Protestant’. What had been a desire to reform the Catholic Church now became a separate movement. The next year, 1530, at the Diet of Augsburg, Luther put forward the beliefs of the new movement. It was a cool and non-controversial explanation peace-seeking, comprehensive, Catholic and conservative, but it split Europe in two: RC and the rest, made up of Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia, Zwinglians and Calvinists in Switzerland, Holland, France and Scotland, and Anglicans in England.

Reformation and other key players
Luther’s ideas sparked other leaders. When Luther died in 1546, his successor was Philip Melancthon. He had met Luther back in 1518 and was really his great assistant from thereon. He supported Luther in 1519, in 1521 and in 1530, where he wrote the Augsburg Confession, which remains to this day the chief statement of faith of the Lutheran churches. He was perhaps too concerned for reunion with Rome and was accused of conceding matters of doctrine to Rome all too easily. In a way he had a greater influence on the Lutheran church than Luther himself.

The first Swiss reformer was Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531). He was a priest before 1516 and chaplain to the Swiss mercenary forces. He was deeply influenced by Erasmus, whom he met in 1515, but in 1518 he was made minister of the Great Minster in Zurich and with the city council he set about reforming the church there. In 1522, he secretly married Anna Meyer, who bore him 4 children. He regularly won debates against Catholic theologians and in 1528 the local Swiss cantons joined the reform movement of Zurich. Zwingli died in the Battle of Kappel (1531), when the 5 Catholic Swiss cantons sent an army against Zurich.

Perhaps the greatest name we have heard of will be John Calvin, born in 1509 in Picardy, France, but sought exile in Geneva and against his will rose to leadership of the Geneva church, which he systematised in the Reformed tradition. He had been a good student at Orleans, Bourges and Paris and it was at the latter that in 1533 he encountered Luther’s writings and had his own conversion experience. He broke with Catholicism and went to Geneva where in 1536 he published his first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion – a brief and clear defence of the Reformation beliefs.

He was actually thrown out of Geneva by the Genevans who did not take kindly to his reformed church, but in 1541 he was invited back. He reformed the city’s laws, brought everyone under the moral authority of the church and preached daily. He worked hard at developing and systematising Christian beliefs, with numerous works of theology and Biblical commentary. His influence thus spread far and wide and remains to this day. Some of his final words were written down for us:
“I have lived amidst extraordinary struggles here; I have been saluted in mockery at night, before my door, by fifty or sixty shots from arquebuses. Think how that would terrify a poor timid scholar such as I am…Then, later, I was hunted out of this town and went to Strasbourg…I was recalled, but I had no less trouble than before in trying to do my official duty…Whilst I am nothing, yet I know that I have prevented many disturbances that would otherwise have occurred in Geneva…God has given me the power to write…I have written nothing in hatred…but always I have faithfully attempted what I believed to be for the glory of God.” John Calvin
(Lion Handbook, p.381).

Reformation and spread
The Reformation spread country by country, mostly because the Reformation required the secular ruler’s explicit or at least implicit acquiesce to succeed. This just shows how much the church relied on the secular authorities for its mission and organisation. In fact, the secular rulers were often less interested in whether they were Catholics or Protestants and more interested in whether they were increasing their independence from someone else.

Hence in Germany the Lutheran Reformation succeeded because certain German princes got behind it and protected its leaders. In the battles that followed, literal battles as well, that waged between the Emperor and the German princes seeking more autonomy, it was finally agreed in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg that the ruler would determine the religion: ‘whose the rule, his the religion’. The dividing line across German speaking Europe has remained constant since then.

The reformation in France had no such political support and so struggled. It was the Geneva church that gave it its strength, but in the difficult political climate – Protestants were shamelessly massacred in 1572 on St. Bartholomew’s Day – the nature of their Reformation was more political than just religious. Great hope was raised when the Protestant Henry IV succeeded to the throne in 1589, but the Catholics united with Spain and promised to plunge France into bloodshed if he did not become a Catholic. So to preserve peace and his throne, Henry IV did that, but by the Edict of Nantes of 1598 he granted Protestantism legal recognition and protection.

In the Low Countries, similarly the move was part of the shaking off of foreign control – the Emperor Charles V and his successor Philip II. Under William the Silent the northern provinces formed their own confederation in 1584 and managed eventually to break from Rome and Spanish control.

In Scandinavia, Sweden quickly adopted the Lutheran faith as they threw out Danish rule in 1523 and asserted their independence. Denmark was more confused as there had been patchy Lutheran preaching in the 1520s and a Danish Bible published in 1524, but it was not until King Christian III became king in 1536 that the transfer was completed. He stripped the bishops of their lands and transferred the church’s wealth to the state. He invited Luther to send helpers and Bugenhagen, Luther’s envoy, crowned the king and set up a new line of 7 superintendents, breaking the line of Bishops.

In England well you know most of it already I guess. Yes, the Church of England began with divorce and had the English monarch as its head. Henry remained a Catholic at heart and reform was slow. Under his son, Edward VI it proceeded apace, led by Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who introduced a new prayer book in 1549 and a more Protestant version in 1552. All his work was undone under Queen Mary, who had remained a Catholic and who married Philip II of Spain, an arch Catholic. She brought back the Catholic Church in every aspect and vigorously persecuted Protestants. Many fled to the continent and waited hopefully for Elizabeth I. She faced considerable difficulties between competing forms of Protestantism, never mind the outward threat of Spain or France. Eventually Elizabeth I, confident of her crown, replaced Catholics with Reformers, restored the 39 Articles and Cranmer’s Prayer Book, and kept the episcopacy and the liturgy. A sort of typically Anglican compromise – the ethos of Anglicanism perhaps?

Scotland had its reformation under John Knox (1505-72) who preached a Lutheran gospel to start with, was taken prisoner by the French and became a galley slave. When freed he went to Geneva and studied under Calvin. Greatly influenced, he returned to Scotland and fearlessly attacked the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, got the Scottish nobility on his side and set up the Scottish church on a Presbyterian model.

Protestantism in the 16th century seemed to be carrying all before it. How would the Catholic Church respond?

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Rome Responds

You will recall Leo X’s initial response to Luther’s 95 Theses: the work of ‘a drunken German. He will feel different when he is sober’ and ‘The whole row is due to the envy of the monks’. He gave little thought to Luther, feeing it to be a storm in a teacup, but he also lacked the leadership necessary for any genuine response.

But within the RC Church there were those who sought reformation from within, who knew that all was not well with the Church and that something needed to happen. This is not dissimilar to the renewals that had taken place over the Middle Ages, each time the church grew more corrupt so eventually God would renew it. At the same time that Luther was posting his 95 Theses, there gathered an informal society in Rome called the Oratory of Divine Love. Few of its members wanted radical reform, but they did want to promote Christian love and morals throughout the Church. Many of its members were to become influential in the RC church as the 16th century progressed.

Catholic Reformation and its leaders
A key player on the Catholic side was one Ignatius Loyola, born in Spain in 1491. He was a professional soldier whose career ended with a leg wound in 1521. While convalescing he read various works on the lives of the saints and on Christ and so resolved to follow Christ. He studied for 10 years at various Spanish universities and then joined with 6 friends in 1535 in Paris in a vow of poverty, celibacy and pilgrimage to Jerusalem (the latter never came off). So began what became known as the Society of Jesus, whose members vowed total obedience to the Pope and whose actions made them the storm troopers of the Catholic Reformation. The Society was given papal approval by Pope Paul III in 1540 and it spread rapidly winning Protestants back to the Catholic faith and in reaching the heathen in far off lands.

Pope Paul III (1534-49) was probably the key reforming pope. His predecessor, Clement VII, tried but was ever thwarted by the machinations of the French and Spanish rulers. Typical of his problems was that when Henry VIII sought his permission to divorce Catherine of Aragon, Clement VII at the time was under siege by Emperor Charles V, who also happened to be Catherine’s nephew. Clement VII could neither grant Henry’s request nor deny Charles’s desires – and Charles just happened to have his troops outside the walls of Rome!

Catholic Reformation and reform
Paul III took many positive steps to correct abuses: he appointed reformers to the College of Cardinals (among whom were a number of that Oratory of Divine Love), he set up a Papal Reform Commission (and put into practice, despite opposition, some of its recommendations) and he called the Council of Trent (perhaps the most important Catholic council between Nicaea [325] and Vatican II [1962-65]).

The Papal Reform Commission reduced papal bureaucracy, stopped the selling of spiritual favours and stopped the selling of church appointments.

More effective was the Council of Trent. Trent is a small town in Northern Italy and just finding a place acceptable to everyone was nearly impossible. In the end Trent was in Spanish held territory, juts over the border from French territory, so the French weren’t too happy and were underrepresented at the Council meetings. I say meetings because there were actually three sessions: 1545-47, 1551-52 and 1562-63, of which the last was the most effective.

The Council re-affirmed medieval Catholic Orthodoxy, re-affirmed the place of the 7 sacraments (baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination and matrimony), re-affirmed the celibacy of the clergy, the doctrine of purgatory and the correct role of indulgences. It increased by default the power of the papacy as it required the Pope to enforce the Council’s resolution. But above all it was a resounding success for Catholicism and it was influential right upto Vatican II (1962-65).

Another area of life that took on a new lease was the Inquisition – correctly called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. This had existed for several centuries but not really effectively except when the secular ruler agreed with the church’s aims. Now it was revived in 1542 and used to great effect in Catholic countries to root out any Protestant dissent. Its main leader was Cardinal Caraffa, another member of that Oratory of Divine Love and later to become Pope Paul IV. The Inquisition did commonly use torture and terror to obtain confessions and if the death penalty was required, the convicted heretic was handed over to the civil authorities for execution, as canon law forbade churchmen to shed blood.

Associated with the Inquisition was the idea of a list of prohibited books. The first such banned list was in 1559 under Pope Paul IV. It was extensive and named books, parts of books and authors and printers. The list was revised and re-issued in 1564 and that list banned upwards of ¾ of all printed books. Actually it was a bit of a failure then and continued as such until it was abolished in 1966.

Catholic Reformation and the division of Europe
By the second half of the 16th century, Europe settled down to uneasy co-existence. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) settled Germany between the Protestant kingdoms and the Catholic kingdoms. France had to wait till the Edict of Nantes (1598) which allowed Protestants to live safely. It was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685 and French Protestants sought refuge in England, Switzerland or America.

This uneasy peace fell apart in Europe in 1618. What had happened was that the Catholics had grown stronger due to the Counter-Reformation and Ferdinand II, Emperor and King of Bohemia, refused to recognise the Calvinist faith – it had not been part of the Peace of Augsburg. When a group of Calvinists in Bohemia sought recognition for their faith, he denied it, they rebelled and his Bohemian nobles rose in revolt both to protect this group and to seek recognition of Calvinism. They deposed Ferdinand II and offered the crown to a Calvinist ruler, the Elector of the Palatinate.

His acceptance of the crown set off the fighting between Calvinists and Catholics and soon the Lutherans had joined and before long the Danes, Swedes and even the French had a go. Actually King Gustav II of Sweden was the most successful Protestant commander. Sweden entered the war to protect its interest in a resurgent Catholic Poland, which had a good claim to the Swedish throne and Gustav needed to stop that. Also the Emperor’s Catholic armies were victorious throughout Germany and there was the fear that with Poland now Catholic again, Scandinavia would be pressed too to return to Rome.

Gustav entered Germany in 1630 and in an extraordinary display of military prowess and brilliance he completely destroyed the Emperor’s forces and seemed at one point being elected Emperor in his own right with Ferdinand II being deposed. But in the closing campaigns of 1632, Gustav, though victorious, was also killed. Swedish dominance ended, but he had saved Protestant Germany.

The Thirty Years War dragged on sporadically afterwards until in 1648 it ended with the Treaty of Westphalia. Curiously, the Treaty returned the situation to that of about 1529 when the German princes had originally stood up in protest, but it left Germany physically, economically and socially devastated. It was the last religious war. It started as a religious war with political overtones but ended as a political war with religious overtones – a precursor to the modern era.

Catholic Reformation and its results
There are four main results flowing from the Catholic counter-reformation, most still having a profound effect even today. The Catholic Church, faced with the strength of Protestantism had to check what it was about and so it defined itself once more and in so doing not only clearly stood against Protestantism but also re-affirmed its historic traditional faith. It also succeeded in stopping the rot: France, Spain, Italy and Southern Germany remained firm to the Catholic faith. It also regained a missionary emphasis and won back Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, as well as developed an overseas missionary thrust through the empires of Spain, Portugal and France, but reaching beyond such territories as far as China and Japan.

One further result of the Reformation for which both Protestants and Catholics must take shared blame is the end of a common European cultural heritage. The North and the South of Europe went their own way and the difference remains to this day.

1650-1789

What about the next 140 years? 1789 is deliberately chosen as it marked the French Revolution, a major turning point in the relationship of state and church. But before we consider that let’s look at the various churches and countries.

Reformation and the Russian Orthodox Church
Well, to start with there was no reformation here. It did not affect the Russian church. However, in the period from 1500 to 1789, it was not all quiet. Once again, the church and state pondered their relationship and considered what might be the most appropriate way of working together. Or who was top dog? Of course, in this debate, we must not forget the influence that the Russian church received from its spiritual ancestors. The Orthodox Church had always granted final power to Christ’s ruler on earth, the Emperor in Constantinople. This ethos naturally affected the Russian church which again saw the secular authority as having final say over the church.

It was clearly defined when the Patriarch of Constantinople, a Greek, appointed the Patriarch of Moscow, until this period also a Greek, and then such appointment needed the approval of the secular rulers, the pagan Mongol Khan. All very bizarre, till you think of our Prime Minister appointing Bishops!

So the big debate in the 16th century was over this key relationship. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1454, the Patriarch there lost influence and the spiritual authority of Orthodoxy was assumed by Moscow, as the self-styled Third Rome. The church at this very point had the chance to be independent of the state with the expectation of being quite poor, or it could allow itself to live under the secular ruler’s authority with the expectation of being very rich. What would you do? Seek riches – quite.

The then self-styled Czar – Russian for Caesar – in the 16th century granted large tracts of land to the church and over time, the Orthodox Church’s ownership extended to ?rd of the land. The Patriarch even by the early 17th century was so grand that he was almost co-sovereign with the Czar – working as one for the rule of Russia. Ultimately the Czars felt threatened enough to put a stop to this and removed the Patriarch from such political circles. Nevertheless, the Church was clearly allied to the fortunes of the ruling Czar.

Naturally there arose opponents to all this wealth and secular power, the Zealots of the Faith. Their opposition included a push for liturgical reform, but the state and the church turned against them and persecuted them into non-existence. The Czars also in the 17th century sought to reign in further the power of the Patriarch, who to strengthen his own base had begun to encourage the adoption of Greek liturgy, rather than the Russian vernacular.

There was a big split in the church and the then Czar, Peter the Great, removed the Patriarch in 1721 and called what was later known as the Holy Synod. It was nothing more than a Board of Bishops and Peter the Great rearranged it as the equivalent of a Department of State, with responsibility for overseeing church affairs.

The Czars did encourage the church leaders to see the Russian Orthodox Church as the protector of all Orthodox Christians, most of whom were under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1683 had reached the gates of Vienna. This was not a religious thing nor an anti-Catholic thing, but a political thing. It gave the Russians the excuse they needed to interfere in the life of those subjects and to extend their borders southwards, ever looking for ice free ports. Such matters concerned the major powers right upto WW1.

Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church
After the turmoil of the Reformation and the successes of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church settled down. It continued its missionary thrust overseas, especially where it was supported and encouraged by the secular Catholic rulers, but in Europe, after initial hopes of winning over some states, such as England – even as late as 1685 under James II, a staunch Catholic, but was booted out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for a Protestant ruler.

Reformation and Northern European Protestants
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) mentioned earlier was a long lasting settlement. Lutheran churches continued mostly to live under the secular rulers’ warm encouragement or at worst indifference, becoming offshoots of the state, with clergy being paid by the state through general taxation.

Calvinist churches were more independent and thus caused more consternation for secular rulers. In Switzerland, the church thrived in its semi-democratic canton style federation. In Scotland, the Church of Scotland was the main church and established as such, though the Church of England tried to set up an episcopally led church. That was never a success and to this day remains a small province in Anglican terms. In the Low Countries, the Dutch Reformed Church continued but got itself stuck into great debates over theological matters – really who was morally strict and who was morally lenient. Its worship was of course taken to South Africa with the Boers, where the Dutch Reformed Church was established.

In all this happy state, people naturally found the church going soft and across Northern Europe there was a revival through pietism. Pietists stressed new birth through conversion, personal faith and real Christian experience. It propagated itself through house churches, Bible studies and hymn writing. It also encouraged a more serious side to the Christian faith as revealed in the Puritans, puritanical being an appropriate description of Puritanism.

In the 18th century, there was a new Christian movement founded on similar lines to the pietists: the Moravian Christians. They had been scattered and persecuted with the Thirty Years War, but slowly over the next 50 years they re-grouped and in 1722 were granted a parcel of land on the estate of Count von Zinzendorff (1700-60). He was destined for high public service but when after university he went on a tour of Europe, he was most moved by Domenico Feti’s Ecco Homo painting of Christ wearing the crown of thorns and with the inscription, “All this I did for you. What are you doing for me?”

Thus he left behind ideas of high office and gave some land to the Moravians, pledging himself with them in the evangelisation of the world. After a profound Pentecost experience in 1727, Zinzendorff became aware that his missionary ideals would be best met through the Moravian Brethren. He emerged as their leader and travelled extensively, preaching, teaching, writing hymns and liturgy. He was a pioneer of ecumenism, using the term in its modern sense, but his ecumenical goals are still unachieved. The Moravians did influence the English Revival of the 18th century.

Reformation and the English-speaking world
In England, after the Elizabethan settlement, things settled down. Well not really, as the Calvinists still pressed for reform to the Anglican Church – still too Catholic in their minds. Such pressure combined with political pressure against the centralising and authoritarian Stuarts, especially Charles I, led eventually to Parliament being quite Calvinist and the King’s party being quite Catholic. Civil War erupted in 1640 and the result was a triumph for Calvinism and Puritanism. The Anglican Church ceased as puritan ministers replaced Anglican ones – actually it was sometimes the same person, making a quick personal judgement.

But by the 18th century, the Church of England was in a bad shape. It was seen as a feather bedding place for useless sons of the gentry, obtaining a nice sinecure and living like the landed gentry, far removed from the general populace and any real Christian commitment. Just think of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. As such, national cynicism abounded and immorality and indifference grew. England was ripe for revival.

It came from a number of sources. Certainly the Moravians had some influence and also the revival that occurred in the American colonies. There the church had originally been very strong, the first settlers fleeing persecution in Europe and eager to set up their own New Jerusalem, so to speak. The Mayflower pilgrims of 1620 were joined by others, but their original zeal flagged as peace, security and wealth blunted the cutting edge of the church and Christian life. The American church moved from a strict church covenant membership to the notorious Half Way Covenant, which allowed children of uncommitted parents to be received into baptism, and then it allowed baptism for any who had not had a scandalous life. A Presbyterian Synod in 1679 discussed aspects of reform but nothing happened other than jealous ministers bemoaning the worsening situation. By the 1730s, a Boston minister was able to say, “Alas, as though nothing but the most amazing thunders and lightenings, and the most terrible earthquakes could awaken us, we are at this time fallen into as dead a sleep as ever.”

People called for revival and in 1734 it came in Northampton, New England, not up the road. It occurred under Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), a most intelligent son of a minister, who eventually was appointed to Northampton which under his preaching came under what was called the Great Awakening. He writes of its effects in great detail: (Lion Handbook, p.439).

Stirred up in this awakening was an Englishman called George Whitfield, often forgotten about but just as influential as John Wesley. Whitfield was born in Gloucester in 1714 and was associated with the Wesley brothers at Oxford. In the 1730s he realised his gift for open-air evangelism and was used mightily by God. His Calvinism broke with Wesley’s Arminianism (a difference between the place of free will and predestination in our lives). He toured America and England, winning many to Christ but preferred to leave the founding of churches to others.

In the meantime, his former Oxford colleague was also keen to serve the Gospel, and the real spiritual awakening of John Wesley was on 24th May, 1738 when his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ during the reading of Luther’s Preface to the Letter to the Romans at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London. Both he and his brother, Charles, the great hymn writer, producing over 7000 sacred songs and poems, worked together in their preaching ministry.

Charles’ hymns with John’s preaching transformed many lives. The hymns gave theological foundation to the converts of the preaching. Both were ordained Anglican ministers and had no desire to leave the Anglican Church but the Church of England was only too keen to leave them. Invited to preach in the Parish Church of Luton one January, John Wesley arrived to discover that the vicar so disapproved that all the church’s windows had been removed as a discourager to attendance. It failed, the church was packed.

His followers were the ones who founded the Methodist Church. The Church of England though was touched by the Wesleyan Revival; beginning in Cornwall, there was a spiritual revival in the Anglican Church which led to a recognised party in Anglicanism – Anglican Evangelicals, who sought to work within the established Church. This Anglican Evangelicalism was the foundation of the 19th century social reform movements, but owes much to its early adherents of James Hervey, William Romaine, John Newton and Isaac watts.

Reformation and Revival
These necessary revivals following the stagnation of the Reformation church led once more to an emphasis on NT Christianity and reformed clergy. Mission increasingly followed as empires were built and extended overseas, with the founding of the Baptist Missionary Union, the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In 1769, the Sunday school movement was started by a Methodist, Hannah Ball, and then developed and popularised by an Anglican, Robert Raikes. They marked the step towards free education for all in England.

Above all this period sees the expansion of Christianity from its European base to becoming a world-wide movement. Only stagnating faith could stop it now and what do you think happened? Find out next week.