If the Reformation never happened?

[smead2942]

What if the Protestant “Reformation” never happened? I’ve had some conflicting feelings about this. Would the Catholic Church continue to be the only Church? Despite the schism and heresy that arose from the Reformation, is the Catholic Church better off (i.e. was a “purge” needed at the time)? Had Martin Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII & friends not created their respective sects, would others have done it regardless?

Food for thought.

 

[PaulfromIowa]

There would still be schismatic groups. Schism always been an issue. The difference with the Protestant Reformation was the number of political leaders supporting it, generally for secular rather than theological reasons. The reforms of the Counter-Reformation were needed and many would have happened eventually.

Note the different problems the Eastern Orthodox had. Constantinople and all of the Orthodox countries except Russia fell under Muslim rule. National churches survived, sometimes under great persecution. Look how few Greek Orthodox (or Greek Catholics) are left today, when Greek speakers were, for centuries, the majority of Christians.

 

[Johann_du_Toit]

Sadly there would still have been other Heretical movements, just like the Arians, Montanists, Donatists, Waldensians and the Albigensians (or Cathars) who were in many respects the predecessors of the Protestants like Luther and Calvin. PaulfromIowa is correct to note that the main distinguishing factor was the Protestants had political leaders willing to give them support, without which they likely would not have endured-but they would have had successors maybe a few hundred years after them trying to do the exact same thing they did.

 

[smead2942]

That political backing thing is a good point!

 

[Contarini]

What if the Protestant “Reformation” never happened? I’ve had some conflicting feelings about this. Would the Catholic Church continue to be the only Church? Despite the schism and heresy that arose from the Reformation, is the Catholic Church better off (i.e. was a “purge” needed at the time)? Had Martin Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII & friends not created their respective sects, would others have done it regardless?

Food for thought.

I can think of possible worlds in which the Reformation as we know it never happened which would be better than ours, and others that would be much worse.

There were at least three different things that came together to make up what we call the “Reformation”:

1. The political (but theologically driven and justified) push by civil rulers to extend their authority over the Church in their dominions, as part of the process leading to the rise of what we now think of as nation-states
2. The broad desire for a reform along the lines of what Berndt Hamm calls “the concentration of norms” (Normative Zentrierung). That is to say, a refocus on things that were fundamentally important to Christianity, hopefully leading to greater unity. (That’s right–late medieval people thought of Christianity in their day as being overly divided and chaotic, for the most part, and one of the major forces driving the Reformation was a desire for greater unity, ironic as this is in hindsight.)
3. The particular theological convictions of one wacky Augustinian friar, obviously tapping into anxieties and concerns of many of his contemporaries, and also lighting the gunpowder barrels that I’ve described under the first two headings.

Of these, the first two were broad historical movements and something was going to change due to them. So some kind of “Reformation” was inevitable. However, without Luther, it probably would have taken a more moralistic, less doctrinal, and perhaps less permanent form. The conviction that “Rome” had perverted the Gospel crystallized all the other concerns and still gives many Protestants reason to look askance at reunion.

On the other hand, I would not want to live in a world in which Luther had not existed or had not articulated his basic ideas in his inimitable, pungent way. So the ideal world would be one in which Luther, while remaining pugnacious and weird, had enough humility and gentleness to avoid creating a permanent schism.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, and this is only one example of that obvious truth!

Edwin

 

[on_the_hill]

It would have happened anyway at some point. I don’t think Luther was the first to split. Weren’t the Moravians ahead of him?

 

[smead2942]

It would have happened anyway at some point. I don’t think Luther was the first to split. Weren’t the Moravians ahead of him?

Perhaps, but they’re obsolete anymore. Out of the 7,000,000,000 people on Earth, 0.01% of them are Moravian, whereas 20% are Catholic. While the Moravian Church was the first “protestant” church, Lutheranism was the straw that broke the camel’s back as Contarini pointed out.

 

[JonNC]

Perhaps, but they’re obsolete anymore. Out of the 7,000,000,000 people on Earth, 0.01% of them are Moravian, whereas 20% are Catholic. While the Moravian Church was the first “protestant” church, Lutheranism was the straw that broke the camel’s back as Contarini pointed out.

I think the folks in places such as Bethlehem, Pa would be surprised to hear of this obsolescence.

Jon

 

[on_the_hill]

I think the folks in places such as Bethlehem, Pa would be surprised to hear of this obsolescence.

Jon

Lancaster, too.

 

[Frank22]

What if the Protestant “Reformation” never happened? I’ve had some conflicting feelings about this. Would the Catholic Church continue to be the only Church? Despite the schism and heresy that arose from the Reformation, is the Catholic Church better off (i.e. was a “purge” needed at the time)? Had Martin Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII & friends not created their respective sects, would others have done it regardless?

Food for thought.

As a Reformer, Luther was heavily indebted to the Ottoman Empire, which, with its slews of incursions into Christian lands, forced the Church to allocate its resources into dealing with external threats and thereby focus less attention on internal ones. Had Catholic theologians responded early and quelled the Protestant heresy before it engendered “Romish” prejudices among much of Europe’s population, it’s very likely that Protestantism would have died out in much the same way Monophysitism did.

Although Calvin, Zwingli, and Beza possessed an extraordinary knowledge of Latin, they and their ilk were far from the most competent heretics in Church history–Antoine Arnauld, “The Great,” Cornelius Jansen, and Blaise Pascal were of superior erudition and furnished more powerful arguments to buttress their heresies than the most distinguished of Reformers.