After studying the Reformation for over four decades, I’ve found myself alongside many other historians in pulling down one great Protestant myth: all you needed to do was put a little finger on the structure of the medieval Western Church, and it would fall over and collapse. Not so: the old religion satisfied most people and satisfied consumer demand. So how did Protestant Reformers destroy an institution which was powerful, strong and self-confident? Only the power of ideas could have had such a dramatic result.
The Reformation was not caused by social and economic forces, or by nationalism but by big ideas about death, salvation, the afterlife. This seized the friar Martin Luther, inspired so many people in Europe, and brought that strong structure down. It was not the religiously indifferent who became Protestants, but those who like Luther, had believed passionately in the old Church’s road to salvation, and were then convinced that they had been cheated. White-hot Catholics became white-hot Protestants. Because Luther’s struggle involved an attack on the power which the Church claimed to help people in gaining their salvation, it became a power struggle in a much wider sense.
More remarkable still was that behind the thoughts of Luther, Calvin and all the other Reformers who called themselves Protestant, were the thoughts of two men centuries before: first the Apostle Paul of Tarsus, and then the African theologian of the fourth century, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (don’t mix him up with the other Augustine, of Canterbury).
You cannot overestimate Augustine’s importance to western Christianity.
You cannot overestimate Augustine’s importance to western Christianity. At first sight it is a puzzle that Augustine was so tangled in the Protestant Reformation, because he was equally important for Catholics. One very fine American historian of the Reformation, B.B. Warfield, said words to the effect that the sixteenth-century Reformation was a battle in the mind of fourth-century Augustine. Catholics listened to one part of what Augustine said, mainly about the Church and its authority, while Protestants listened to another part about what he had called grace: the gift of God which brings salvation to individual humans. Both Catholics and Protestants were right, because both Church and grace mattered to Augustine. You can see why the Church should matter, because Augustine became a bishop of the Universal church, and brooded a great deal about what that might mean. Why should his thought on grace pull in a different direction?
To understand that, you need to go behind Augustine to Paul of Tarsus four centuries before his own time. Augustine read Paul, especially his letters to Churches in Rome and Galatia, and saw a picture of an all-powerful God, contrasted with a humanity utterly fallen, utterly corrupt, worthy of nothing but punishment because humans had disobeyed their creator. Augustine trained his thought on this frightening doctrine like training the sun through a magnifying glass onto paper until it bursts into flame. Augustine called human beings “a lump of perdition.” There is nothing that people like you and me can do for our own salvation. You need God to do it all.
Luther just said what Augustine had said before him. That became subversive because Luther saw the church of his day telling people they could do things for their salvation. He had believed in that idea, and now he thought it was a confidence trick, a cheat. He made Augustine’s message so loud and clear that he ignored Church leaders who told him to be obedient and forget the implications of Augustine’s views on grace. It was not just some abstract argument, because it affected everyone’s being and their eternal happiness. This life is very short, and in the Christian scheme of things, the afterlife is very long – eternal, actually. Heaven and Hell beckon. There is only one chance to go through the right entrance when you die.
But the medieval Western Church suggested something more complicated, and more comforting. God might provide an extended chance to achieve purity and atone for sin: the state known as Purgatory, a tough preparation for Heaven. Purgatory had only one exit, but it was best not to linger there too long. You might influence God’s decision to speed up your journey through Purgatory, with the help of all the power which God had given his Church: the power of prayer being the most powerful gift of all. The highest form of prayer in Christian practice is the piece of theatre which re-enacts Christ’s last supper with his disciples.
The Western Church called this re-enacted meal, the Mass. It told the faithful that the more Masses they directed towards prayer for the dead in Purgatory, the more God would be induced to show mercy for salvation. Only clergy could preside at the Mass and had the power to make it more than a meal. Thus when Luther denied Purgatory, he was attacking the power of the clergy and of the Church. He said that they had set out to con the faithful people of God. What a complex tangle of consequences! All because of ideas: ideas which led to practical action, and much of that action angry and cruel on both sides. Though remember this Reformation five centuries later, we may forget that it was an argument literally about life and death.
Featured image credit: Notre Dame by RCbass. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
Please I urgently need this book “A Conversation of the Reformation” Which was launched by Seventh Day Adventist commemorating Martin Luther 500th years.