I’ve read Eck’s Enchiridion. It helps me understand why the Protestants were so successful.
For the most part, Luther’s ‘success’ was not because people understood and believed his doctrinal teachings. Furthermore, I hope that you are not inferring that Protestantism in general, with its uncountable number of competing and conflicting communions has been a ‘success’. Doctrinally it has been, let’s say – ‘less than successful’ in terms of the theological confusion it has fostered.
He tries, for instance, to defend the practice of “annates” based on the tithes that the Levites paid to the priests in the OT. I don’t know what these “four centuries of abuse” would be, since I haven’t read anything too terrible about Eck by a Protestant historian. Certainly nothing like the way Catholics until recently wrote about Luther, or the way Protestants wrote about the Church as an institution and about Popes and clergy and religious as representatives of the institution. But really the remark is irrelevant–Reformation scholarship until the 20th century, and to a great extent until after WWII, was captive to confessional polemic.
Apparently Fife is aware of negative Protestant characterizations of Eck that you are not.
I don’t think Eck was some kind of moral monster, but he seems to me to have been a man of the establishment–very intelligent but highly conventional, and more obviously committed to the Church as an institution than to the grace of God in Christ.
Edwin, what is it in the historic record, or on this thread which prompted the subject of Eck being (or not) some kind of moral monster? How did THAT come to your mind? But since you brought it up, in a thread about Martin Luther (of all things) - from your studies of the actions and writings of the two men, which do you think had a stronger Christian moral compass, or had a better ‘informed’ Christian conscience? I only ask because you brought it up.
Of course the historical record speaks of Eck’s intellectual gifts and his educational achievements, which by the way are much more impressive than Luther’s, as you well know. The reason that Protestantism has not been favorable towards Eck over the years is because it was Eck who defeated Luther in the Leipzig Debate, probably the most important debate in Christian history.
I would bet that not one in a hundred Protestant adults has ever even heard of the Leipzig Debate, but I would also bet that IF there was any way to represent Luther as having won at Leipzig, every Protestant 4th grader would have learned about Leipzig.
You say that Eck was highly ‘conventional’. Is that an attribute that should be criticized in a Theologian or praised? It seems to me that ‘originality of Theology’ is MUCH more ‘desirable’ in Protestantism than it is in the Church that Christ founded. This is not to say that there is no place for the development of doctrine in the Church, but it must be done WITHIN boundaries, the boundaries that are established by the rightfully authority of the Church. Luther refused to stay within those boundaries and the result has been doctrinal anarchy.
For some reason I am reminded of a former colleague. He was extremely creative, a real ‘outside the box’ kind of thinker. I would use the term ‘idiot savant’ but it would be going too far. If you had something that needed to be done and you were looking for ‘out there’ ideas, he was the man you went to. He could come up with a hundred really amazing ideas, but the problem was that he had absolutely NO IDEA which of them were good and which of them were awful. In terms of how those ideas would intersect with reality – he was absolutely clueless. Needless to say he did not exactly rise through the ranks and has never really been ‘in charge’ of anything. The reason is that his judgment cannot be trusted.
It seems to me that this story is appropriate for this thread. Martin Luther was an ‘original theological thinker’, but not one who was AT ALL loyal to the teachings of the Church and not one who was enough of a Systematic Theologian to know how one radical doctrine related to another. He knew that his teachings were in opposition to that of the Fathers, but somehow that did not deter him. Remember that he wasn’t exactly thrilled when people used HIS model of authority to challenge his own. He provided the ‘model’ for the Revolt of authority for others to emulate, we now have how many independent denominations?
‘Originality’ is to be admired up to a certain point, but in terms of the Christian Gospel, the individual does NOT get to determine where that point is, unless you want to achieve the kind of doctrinal disunity that we see in Protestantism. Luther’s original teaching, for about the first 7 years or so of his Revolt, was that the individual had the authority to ‘judge’ doctrine and preaching and, even Councils. When that produced the results that he should have anticipated, and was warned against, THEN he decided that HE was the authority to be obeyed.
