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benjohnson
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Our Orthodox friends may have a slight disagreement with you there. Some of them think Latin is too modern. I know my church feels that the reformation restored us back to original doctrines.
When Christianity Goes Wrong.. Why Christ's Church Needs a Hierarchy
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Contarini
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They may feel that way, but it isn’t true. The best you can say is that the Reformation recaptured some themes of earlier Christianity that had been lost or downplayed, while simultaneously rejecting other ideas and practices that did come down from early Christianity–that it highlighted some aspects of Scripture that hadn’t been emphasized enough, while losing sight of others.
But I don’t think any serious historian (for what it’s worth, I have a Ph.D. in church history focusing on the Reformation, so I count myself as a serious historian, though certainly not a very eminent one!) would be willing to say that the Reformation “restored us back to original doctrines.” Similarly, no serious historian would say that Catholicism in 1500 was simply identical with New Testament Christianity. On both sides the issues are more nuanced than that.
To my mind, the losses of the Reformation (in terms of fidelity to “original” Christianity, insofar as we can discover that) were considerably greater than its gains. There certainly were gains, but I’m really not sure how many of them had to do with going back to “original doctrines.” The Reformation was a dynamic reinterpretation of Christianity in the cultural context of 16th-century Europe. Of course it claimed to be going back to “original sources”–that’s what reinterpretations of a religious tradition do. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. In a Catholic context, done with fidelity to the continuity of the tradition, it’s called “ressourcement”–going back to the sources to renew the present. Folks like Erasmus were trying to do it before Luther came on the scene. But by making a radical break with the tradition (and contrary to what some folks in the Protestant theological world will tell you, sometimes even misrepresenting the work of my own doctoral advisor, David Steinmetz, to support their point, the Reformers did make a radical break with the tradition), the Reformers went well beyond legitimate ressourcement. And thus they made the task of legitimate ressourcement much harder.
Edwin
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Nicea325
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Edwin,
Specifically in what form or aspect did the Reformation “restored us back to** original doctrines**?”
Thanks!
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prodigalson2011
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I think you misread him. He said that no reputable historian would claim that it did.
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Contarini
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benjohnson
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I should have been much more qualified in my statement, but if you could let me explain my reasoning.
I tend to look the reformation though it’s role of stripping away the layers of intercession and getting back to a simpler relationship with god. I my mind, that seems more like the early church. My impression is that the early church didn’t have significant hierarchic structure.
For example - after Jesus gave his body and blood in the upper room, I don’t think the apostles had a roaring debate about the message and “accidents, particles, co-mingling,Transubstantiation” - I bet they were overjoyed with the “True body and blood” of their savior. Lutherans feel that Jesus’s instructions were sufficient, and to this day we view his sacrifice as a mystery of faith.
That’s mainly what I mean about going back closer to the origin.
Now granted, the reformers introduced much novelty - but the initial intent was to reform the church away from modern abuses. As you know, things got messy.
As a Lutheran, I don’t account for the novelties that followed in subsequent protestant sects, just at Catholics don’t have to account for Lutherans.
…
As my Greek Orthodox friend likes to chide me and say " Ah… the reformer. Keep refoming and you’ll find yourself in my church
" In my best pseudo-German I say “Too many Icons!”
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Contarini
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Depends how early and depends what you mean. Ignatius thinks that submission to a local bishop is pretty darn important; Irenaeus thinks apostolic succession of bishops is pretty darn important; and Cyprian thinks that being part of a worldwide fellowship of bishops is absolutely essential. And those three aspects are the essentials of Catholic hierarchy. Sure there’s a lot of “chrome” like the College of Cardinals and archepiscopal provinces and so on, not to mention the unity-compromising developments in later Catholicism like “sui juris churches” and “personal prelatures.” But in terms of hierarchy, the key Protestant controversial claims were that
- Ordination does not confer an indelible character; it’s simply the appointment of certain people to carry out functions that in principle anyone could carry out by virtue of baptism;
- Apostolic succession is simply succession in teaching; a true bishop is anyone who carries out the functions of a bishop;
- The bishop of Rome has no divinely given role; and
- The Church as a hierarchical structure has no authority over the state, and on the contrary ought to be subject to civil authorities in all “external” matters.
But you go on to address something that has no necessary connection to hierarchy at all, that I can see. . . .
Yes, but that’s a bit of a straw man. They didn’t have a roaring debate about the Trinity either. Doctrinal technicalities arise as a result of heresy. To quote Louis Bouyer, “they are the scars left on the body of truth by the errors over which it has been triumphant.”
Now personally, I have trouble understanding what’s wrong with the Lutheran view. I am not persuaded by the argument that it involves idolatry (some Catholics have tried to convince me that if the substance of bread and wine remain, then worshiping Christ in the Sacrament would involve worshiping bread and wine, which is idolatry). I can’t get very excited about the issue on one side or another, which I suppose itself puts me closer to your side! (I’m even somewhat sympathetic to the Calvinist/Wesleyan “spiritual presence” view as a possibly legitimate interpretation of real presence, which horrifies confessional Lutherans! I think that the Wittenberg Concord of 1536 wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, although I disagree sharply with the Calvinists in their rejection of Eucharistic adoration as idolatrous.)
But I don’t think the mere fact that the NT doesn’t develop these technicalities is an argument against them, any more than it’s an argument against the Nicene homoousios. The question is whether the technicality is necessary to preserve the revealed truth. And I’m willing to give the historic Church the benefit of the doubt on that kind of thing, as long as allowance is made for the likelihood that many folks who reject the technicality really aren’t rejecting the essential truth (just as many “Semi-Arians” in the fourth century turned out not to be heretics at all, but simply folks who were a bit uncomfortable with a novel and unbiblical technical term, and desirous of maintaining the proper distinction between the Son and the Father).
Yes, but you could do that in any point of doctrine simply by getting rid of development. You could get back “closer to the origin” by scrapping the Nicene Creed in favor of second-century Logos Christology, for instance.
Initial intent of whom? Erasmus, sure. Luther, I’m not so sure. Luther was mostly concerned, initially, with what he thought was wrong with late scholastic soteriology. The whole indulgence thing was a bit of a side issue for him–it just made him famous and gave him a platform from which to proclaim his developing (and increasingly radical) soteriology.
Fair enough. I had missed/not noticed that you were Lutheran.
Edwin
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benjohnson
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Thank you Edwin for your amazing posts, I’ll be certain to read your writings. I get the feeling that I would gladly pay for them in book form.
I think the Lutheran aversion to hierarchy should be softened - certainly overreaction can be more troubling than the initial wrong. In my opinion, one particular American Lutheran synod could quite a bit of top-down leadership, but sadly it’s probably too late for them.
I ruminated quite a bit on this, and I honestly can’t think of an ideal Church structure, save for Christ leading us. A perusal of other religions yields no ideal system, and honestly makes me glad for the Catholic system and my own.
Even more curious, is that even if we found an ideal system, would it be compatible with our secular free society. And more difficult for me, I wonder if I would have enough humility to yield to a such a system.
I think the Lutheran aversion to hierarchy should be softened - certainly overreaction can be more troubling than the initial wrong. In my opinion, one particular American Lutheran synod could quite a bit of top-down leadership, but sadly it’s probably too late for them.
I ruminated quite a bit on this, and I honestly can’t think of an ideal Church structure, save for Christ leading us. A perusal of other religions yields no ideal system, and honestly makes me glad for the Catholic system and my own.
Even more curious, is that even if we found an ideal system, would it be compatible with our secular free society. And more difficult for me, I wonder if I would have enough humility to yield to a such a system.
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Nicea325
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Oops! Sorry,but I sort of zipped through information and obviously misundertood -sorry.Nicea,
It didn’t. That’s what I just said.
Edwin
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Sixpence
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Well, these are a few countries that are at least 85% Protestant. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Tuvalu. I don’t really think there’s much there for any of them on grounds of abusing religious freedom. Of course, much of this rests on the phrase “insofar as they get the chance.” When there’s so many different types of Protestants, it has a tendency to exclude any one group from having unrestricted power to abuse in the first place.
And to a certain extent- now that the wars of religion are long over- we may have something of a calming influence on the Catholic Church as well.
Then it would behoove us to withhold such temptation from one another rather than invest certain individuals with complete, unrestricted power, would it not? It’s not necessarily “less unity” and “more fragmented” just because we decide to be smart with checks and balances, limited powers, and so forth.
This is true, everyone does it to some extent. I don’t think the Eastern Orthodox could do this as much as Catholics, though, at least not collectively. The Greek Orthodox, for example, have no interest in whitewashing the history of the Russian Orthodox or vice versa. While in union with each another, these are churches that will still call one another to the carpet for something that happened centuries ago and which Western Christians are only dimly aware of. When there is some diversity within a particular union, the diverse groups can act in such a way that they take some of the whitewash off each other.
It’s a little bit more of that calming influence.
I suppose you’re right. I probably do have a tendency to see the narrow, right-wing version as that which is strongly recommended by Catholic authority, and I may sometimes look at some of the better historical scholarship as if it were more marginal.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “complete freedom” or if that’s even happening somewhere, but the first line I would want to focus on drawing would be freedom from coercion. Countries are constantly being rated by various analysts according to their levels of religious freedom (which do tend to be specific and nuanced), and I’m not sure that any or all of them would quite know precisely what this intrinsically incoherent concept entails, nor would it be likely to significantly inform portions of their analysis.
My point is this. Predominantly Christian countries prior to the Reformation did not tend to do a very good job with religious freedom. And when you compare pre-Schism Europe to medieval Europe, they did some things even worse. I believe it is historically accurate to say that one of the hard, bitterly won fruits of the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion was an overall improvement in the way that both church and state authority are exercised, along with an overall improvement in the protection of religious liberties. For pretty much all countries and all people that were somehow involved in the process. So I’m basically trying to look to some of the good in the Reformation rather than call it a deformation of Christianity that only ruined things for everyone.
Overestimated by W. H. Drummond, D.D., and Dr. R. Willis. Drummond’s title reads “The Life of Michael Servetus, Who Was Entrapped, Imprisoned, and Burned by John Calvin.”
The order of events went in this way. Calvin and Servetus engaged in sharp doctrinal disputes, much of which was by letter. A man from Geneva named Willian Trie had a relative in Lyons- a Catholic- whose attention was brought to the writings of Servetus. This man, Arneys, believed Servetus was more appalling than any Protestant he’d ever seen and forwarded the letter from his relative to the Inquisition in Lyons, and on the authority of Cardinal Tournon, Servetus was arrested. He escaped after three days, but was tried in his absence. Largely on the basis of the letters he’d sent to Calvin- which he gladly submitted for the record- it was on June 17, 1552, that the Inquisition sentenced him to a very specific death: Burn slowly until he is a cinder.
A month later, Servetus showed up in Geneva. As I recall, he simply showed up at one of Calvin’s sermons and was arrested at the end of it. The Council at Geneva was opposed to Calvin at that particular time, and Calvin was unable to stop them from agreeing with the judgment that was passed a month earlier in Lyons wrt the type of execution. He was certainly in favor of capital punishment in lieu of recantation, and in this he was quite wrong. But it’s also wrong to characterize Calvin as the sole judge, jury, and executioner. The main reason for him being so intimately involved is that Servetus trusted him, or at least liked him enough to put special effort into getting him on his side.
Servetus was sentenced to death by the Geneva council on October 26. The final stage of deliberation lasted three days, involving a “greater council” and a “lesser council.” The lesser council was unanimous in concluding that Servetus should be burned alive slowly, and a majority of the greater council agreed.
It did take three hundred and fifty years, but in 1903, an “expiatory monument” was erected. It indicates support for Calvin on the whole, “yet condemning an error which was that of his age,” and goes on in support of the liberty of conscience.
A lot of people were willing to kill him for what he wrote. Calvin may have had the most direct link to the letters that Servetus wrote, but Servetus easily dies without the specific involvement of Calvin. And while he technically may have made some difference in the time and place of death, he’s not unique in this- the same could easily be said of Trie, Arneys, and Tournon. If the Catholics who initially captured him had held Servetus as they intended, Calvin’s name would be much less prominent in all of this- which would be a bit more fair in the overall assessment. It might have been unfair to someone else instead, but we don’t really know who that would be. Maybe Tournon. As is, we do know that if people are unfair, it will be to Calvin.
I’m not suggesting that Catholics in America today want to execute people or expel them from the country. I’m suggesting that some of them have demonized every aspect of the Reformation, and this can lead them to believe that superimposing Catholic ideals from the Reformation era and before is a favorable course of action to what is being done now when in reality, the way it’s done in America now is better than the way it was done in either Geneva or Lyons in the 16th century.
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Contarini
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I don’t know about Tuvalu. The Scandinavian countries have not, as far as I know, been lethal in maintaining their religious monopoly (Lutherans as a whole have been slower to kill for their faith than other Christians), but certainly have a history of religious repression, back when they took their Christian identity seriously as more than a vague expression of cultural heritage. Ask any knowledgeable member of the Evangelical Free Church, the Swedish Covenant Church, the small Laestadian Lutheran groups, or the Baptist General Conference why their ancestors came to North America, and you will learn more about this. No dispute that there’s a difference of degree in how religious repression has been carried out. But the Scandinavian Lutheran churches certainly did try to maintain a religious monopoly for centuries.
Indeed. And your point is?
And I wonder how much of Pope Benedict’s theological writing you have read? It seems to me that people have been caricaturing and misrepresenting him personally for years, long before he became Pope.
I worry about the present swing toward the right within Catholicism. But the impulses behind it are a lot more nuanced than many folks think–just as the “Spirit of Vatican II” had/has a lot more to be said for it than its conservative critics allowed on the basis of some of its sillier manifestations.
For whom? Coercion to do what, or not to do what?
There’s a debate in Georgia right now as to whether the KKK should be allowed to take part in an “Adopt-A-Highway” program, for instance.
The Reformation, in the short run at least, made things much, much worse. Voices advocating greater tolerance, such as those of Erasmus, were silenced. (In fact, Erasmus had to backtrack from many of his positions as a result of the Reformation, and bitterly blamed the Protestants for making life harder for him and other Catholic reformers. In one rather funny passage, he reminisced nostalgically about the good old days before the Reformation when it was possible to spit at theologians
.)Sure, the eventual consequences of the religious conflict included religious toleration–largely as a result of the rise of the secular state and early capitalism, so that people killed each other over power and money instead of religion (for reasons I find rather baffling, some people seem to think that this was a substantive change for the better).
No dispute that there were good effects from the Reformation.
It is impossible to find anything at all that was not overestimated by some nineteenth-century polemical historian. Why is this even news?
No dispute from me that Calvin did not want the painful duty of bringing about Servetus’ death–he said in one of his letters that he hoped Servetus wouldn’t come to Geneva. But when Servetus did, Calvin did not flinch from the said painful duty.
I’m not sure liking or even trust had much to do with it. What makes you think that Servetus was trying to get Calvin on his side when he came to Geneva? More likely he was curious and foolhardy, I think.
I can easily imagine that Servetus, like a lot of the more radical Reformers, had trouble understanding just how much the more moderate Reformers adhered to the norms of historic, Catholic Christianity. The typical pattern in the Reformation was that the more radical folks would expect the more moderate ones to come along to the radicals’ way of thinking in time, assuming that the radical position was simply the logical result of the moderates’ tentative steps. You see this in Zwingli’s attitude to Luther, and the Anabaptists’ attitude to Zwingli. Hubmaier, for instance, went to Zurich much as Servetus went to Geneva, and while Zwingli didn’t kill him, he did imprison and torture him.
I don’t see that unfairness enters into it, except for some of the sillier propagandists (Dave Hunt, for instance, to name a contemporary figure). What most folks of my acquaintance derive from the Servetus affair is the conclusion that Calvin shared in the basic attitude to heretics held by the Catholic Church–he just didn’t think that he and other mainstream Protestants were heretics. I see nothing unfair in this. If Servetus hadn’t been so foolish as to go to Geneva and get himself caught, we would perhaps think more highly of Calvin than he deserves, since Calvin’s willingness to kill Servetus would never have had a chance to be demonstrated in practice!
In many ways, yes. But not across the board in all respects.
Edwin
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