Faith Fights: The Reformation

Hi, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as we continue our series,
Faith Fights, a look at some of the controversies and disagreements that have
been a part of our history as a Christian family,
both historically and increasingly
through the series as we move toward modern evolutions of disagreements as well.
Yeah, we’re glad to have our conversation with you again.
Hope in the midst of this there’s
been some connections beyond just the history and theology into some of our own experience.
And I think if you have lived on the Reformed side of the fence,
whether that’s been somewhere
like the Presbyterian Church or the Reformed Church in America or something like that,
then this is not going to be a new topic to you,
I would suspect.
As we look at the Reformation,
we look a little bit at its history of the controversies that were present in it,
some of the fights that really swelled around it.
And as we lay some background for that,
I think it’s worth pointing out that the Reformation is in many ways not just one
thing.
You can’t pin it on one idea or really even necessarily one person that you may be able
to push back on me on that.
Luther is clearly the linchpin in sort of starving the avalanche.
But there’s a lot of weight and energy that’s happening that leads up to the point where
what we call the Reformation becomes possible,
some of that political, cultural,
and even technological.
And I think what is really fascinating is as you look back upon
the Reformation, what we’re going to find is all of these streams in a moment converge.
And what comes out the other side is really a dizzying number of sort of smaller tributaries
of both theological traditions and leadership,
as we’re going to find when we talk a little bit about John Calvin.
So I think the Reformation is a really fascinating topic.
I do think though,
Clint, I wonder if you agree with this,
that sometimes the Reformation gets talked about
as if it itself is a thing.
And there’s some historical reason that we do that.
But the Reformation has a lot of reformations plural in it.
And I find it interesting for
that fact because those Reformation get taken up by different groups and they go in radically different directions.
I think that’s fair,
Michael.
I think Reformation is the big label that we use
to characterize all of those various disagreements and disputes that happen
over that hundred-ish year period.
And each one is unique,
and many of them are very different from one another,
and depending on where they happened, how they happened.
But the impetus that
runs through, the theme that runs through all of them is religious in nature.
They all have something to do, at least at their outset,
with trying to be the church.
And some of that is about belief,
and some of that is about practice.
And really,
both of those things are joined tightly together.
But during this period that we look back and call the Reformation,
we see
a tremendous amount of controversy.
And we will, for purposes of our conversation today,
a lot of this is going to be historical.
I would say that most of the issues that we undertook
in the Reformation have been largely cleaned up.
I would think that it would be a hard case to make
that many Christians are still fighting most of those.
I think most of those are done and over
with.
However, I do want to suggest maybe near the end of our conversation that the Reformation has
some implications to church disagreement and denominational fights that we continue to struggle with.
So to get in, Michael,
you mentioned him,
Martin Luther.
Let’s go to that moment in time.
Historically, it gets talked about as October 31,
1517.
Martin Luther, a young monk at the time,
has been struggling with the church of his day.
He has 95 theses that challenge the current
practices of the church.
He posts them, being fairly bold and up front,
posts them on the cathedral door, Wittgenstein,
Germany.
And that really is…
There was a lot of smoldering out
there, but that’s the spark that essentially gets the blaze going.
Yeah, and you’ve got to remember that that is a significant act to post upon the door of
the sanctuary these different,
essentially, judgments of the ways that the church is no longer being faithful.
And the response is,
as you would expect to an act like that,
relatively quick and relatively swift,
as Luther begins to gain notoriety,
he is receiving notoriety both positive
and negative because he really lights the match that gets thrown and ignites a far larger fire.
And what we find pretty quickly is that Luther gets caught up in letter writing and correspondence
with people all over,
not just in Germany,
but in Europe at large.
And he very quickly begins to
deal with some of the church’s hierarchy that is beginning to sort of bring down the hammer on Luther.
And it’s within those interactions that we begin to see some of those 95 theses begin to
get boiled down into some more distinct sort of theological strains.
Though there’s 95 theses,
there’s not 95, you know, sort of core principles that Luther is against.
That gets narrowed down
over time and history.
But that becomes the starting point.
And it is difficult,
I think, for us
who have never lived in something probably even remotely similar to appreciate that in this time and place.
Church and state are very much not separate entities.
There is a great deal of
overlap between the power of the church and the power of the government.
And one of the things,
as Martin Luther attempts to challenge the church,
he does so from a position of very little power.
And so he gets against him a great deal of momentum very quickly.
He becomes public enemy
number one very quickly as he begins to suggest that the church is abusing its power,
that the church fundraising practices,
that perhaps the pope should not have final authority in matters
of Scripture, that Scripture should be over the pope,
not the other way around,
as was taught in
the Catholic Church of that day.
And it does not take long before Martin Luther is within the
church circles, at least,
a very wanted man, a hated man.
And I would say from that perspective,
a dangerous man.
He is seen very quickly to be a threat not only to the well-being of the church,
but to really its very nature.
And I think those of us who live on the Protestant side of the fence
would have to say the church’s power base as well.
Yeah, because what we’re talking about right here is authority.
Luther questions what is the authority of the faith.
And the church that he
becomes a pastor in has a very clearly defined hierarchy of authority.
And it ends up with the
sort of lineage of Peter is the theological conception that comes from the Roman Catholic Church.
And so because of that lineage,
because of the hierarchical authority of the church,
ultimately its people higher up the chain that make decisions about what is and isn’t inside
the fold of the Christian faith,
what the proper interpretation of Scripture is.
But Luther famously wants to reframe that.
And Luther says that we’ve gotten away from the authority of the
Scriptures themselves to be able to influence the life and the faith of the people of God.
And Luther makes the case that not only have we gone away from the principle that Scripture should
critique us instead of the Pope defining the authoritative readings of Scripture,
but Luther says we’ve gone so far away from that principle that essentially we have humans making
ex-fiat kinds of proclamations and rules which are more about their own best interest and more
about their own socio-political kinds of control and authority themselves than the authority
of God to speak through God’s own word by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And so in making that fundamental critique,
Luther wants to sort of shine a light on the question of who is in charge ultimately.
And Luther, after teasing us out in lots of different ways,
ultimately wants to land
firmly on the principle that God and God alone is capable of leading the life and the future
of God’s church.
And so therefore God is the one who has authority.
But that may seem almost
common sensical, especially if you do come from a Protestant circle,
but you have to recognize how
radically different that is from the system in which Luther operates.
He lives in a time and in
the world in which the matters of faith that need decided have humans that decide them and once
they’re decided it’s decision done.
So to claim that the authority is something spiritual and
theological and scriptural as opposed to human and logical and political is a
radical departure from what was considered the normative practice of his day.
Luther was convinced that the path to church office was a fairly attainable way to a good deal
of wealth and power.
And Luther looked at many of the men following that path in his day and
felt that they were abusing it,
that they were taking advantage of the very ones that they were supposed to shepherd.
They were taking advantage of them financially.
They were taking advantage
of them spiritually, morally,
and that the church had lapsed into kind of a laziness where it was
content was simply doing weekly mass,
fulfilling the sacraments and the rituals,
and staying on the good side of the king or the ruler so that they could make a lot of money.
And in fact, some of the ways they were making money,
Luther found very offensive and called them out.
And so, again,
Luther kicks a hornet’s nest in this initial outing.
He’s excommunicated.
He’s threatened.
Attempts are made on his life.
He has to go into a period of hiding.
He
is saved essentially by a political friend of his who hides him in a castle for a while.
He has to then be on trial.
Luther faces a great deal of conflict in the midst of all of this as
he’s trying simultaneously to write,
to get his theology,
his thought out there.
Luther is,
he is a man of intellect.
He’s also a man of significant backbone.
He’s calling the Pope names.
He’s insulting his enemies.
He’s writing tracks about how essentially they are idiots.
He’s using pretty salty language in most of those writings.
And he is a very interesting man.
He’s a very intense man.
He’s a very courageous man.
And one thing I think people don’t understand,
you know, we live in the Protestant Reformation side of the fence.
So we tend to think that the
Reformation is about fighting with the Catholics,
which is true.
But most people don’t realize that
Luther’s also fighting with a whole other group of people who came with him but wanted to go even further.
The group called the Anabaptists,
other groups who were,
to use pretty hard,
troubling language, were more conservative than Luther and wanted to be even less Catholic and less structured.
And Luther’s also fighting with them about how wrong they are.
And he’s using the same tactics.
So he really finds himself kind of a man in the middle.
And essentially, he’s fighting with everybody.
Yeah, very much.
Luther does find himself somewhat trapped in the middle of the ideas.
And what’s really fascinating about Luther is that there’s some period of his life where it seems reasonable,
this is debated, but it seems reasonable,
that he had hoped for the Reformation
to reform his church,
the Catholic Church, that we miss that throughout history,
there have been many
Reformations, many times where the church had a significant leader stand up and point to an
inadequacy of practice or thought.
And the Catholic Church changed radically over the years to meet
some of those moments of sort of prophetic justice,
times when the church didn’t measure up.
And
there seems to be some reasonably that maybe Luther thought the same would happen,
that he would point these things out.
There would be a response.
Of course, nobody points out the error
and the failing and expects that all of the response is going to be positive and welcome.
But yet as history turns,
that’s not how it goes.
The church doesn’t rally behind Luther.
Ultimately, they don’t say, “Yeah, you’re right, our bad, we need to make some changes here.” Ultimately,
it actually swells very quickly.
And what is fascinating is as Luther is having this
happen and he begins to debate with the Catholic Church,
this I think, as you’ve already said,
this is what we think of as the Reformation.
What we miss is that simultaneously,
Luther is over here having conversations with other people like Zwingli about theological issues that they want to say,
“Hey, listen,
if we’re going to change our understanding of where we receive our theological
authority from the Pope and from the hierarchy,
and we’re going to move it to Scripture,
then we have a hard conversation about some of this other stuff that isn’t in Scripture,
or that when we
read Scripture, it reads very differently to us than the practices that we have here.” And Luther
finds himself in this very hybrid position where he wants to say, “Yes,
Scripture does speak against
these practices.” But Luther,
to some extent, doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the
bathwater.
There’s some understandings of theology.
There’s some practices of the church that Luther wants to say,
“Yeah, that stuff isn’t good,
but we shouldn’t throw this out.
There’s meaning and value here.” And there are people on the other side of him that say,
“No, Luther, you’re wrong about that.
If the church needs to be reformed,
that Reformation needs to swing way farther than
what you’re willing to admit.” And so while Luther sort of fending off these charges and this fight
with the Catholic Church,
which is not just,
by the way, theological, it’s also political in a
lot of different kings and kingdoms aligning with their own sort of economic interests in the
midst of this.
It’s very complicated.
In the midst of that,
Luther’s also sparring with the people
on the other side saying, “Hey, guys,
the Reformation shouldn’t take us all the way to
anarchy,” which is some of the claims that he made about those churches.
Right.
And we perhaps later on look back and we want to talk about the Reformation as a contained
thing.
And, Michael, you started this conversation by pointing out that it is really more the case
that there are several Reformations happening at the same time.
Now, they’re traveling similar ground.
There’s lots of similar themes too that become important,
and many of those are geographical
as Anglicanism begins to build in England and Protestantism hits,
for our purposes, two very important locations,
Scotland and Switzerland.
And the names there,
John Knox and John Calvin, as they pick up these ideas,
as they sort of enter the fray.
And Calvin
is a contemporary just a little bit later than Luther.
He’s in Switzerland.
He has a towering
intellect.
He’s trained as a lawyer.
He’s very logical.
He’s very intelligent.
And as he begins
to apply himself to these new ideas or these developing ideas to try and now rebuild some
fences, if we are tearing down some Catholic theology,
then the vacuum in that is what do we
now have.
And as Calvin goes to work very methodically to put those walls back in place,
we really there discover the outline of what we call Presbyterianism that is going to more
appropriately grow up in Scotland.
But John Knox in Scotland is deeply influenced by John Calvin
in Switzerland.
In fact, they study together and Knox is very much a Calvinist.
So we trace our
heritage through Knox.
But really, if we’re going to look to where we got most of what we believe,
we have to go to a man called John Calvin.
He writes his sort of seminal workbooks in 1536,
the Institutes of the Christian Faith,
still being used.
I used them in a college class.
They’re still being taught in seminary classes,
at least examined in seminary classes.
And that’s really the path for those of us who now call ourselves Presbyterian,
that reformation that begins in Germany and then flares over into these other places.
And the work that Calvin does in
Switzerland becomes essential for who we end up understanding ourselves to be.
I think it’s a really helpful metaphor that you give us there,
Clint, with the idea of defenses.
And I think we miss the real existential crisis that the Reformation created for the church.
Because as you critique the hierarchy of the traditional Roman church,
what both the Roman
church anticipated or believed about that.
And also, I think what actually did happen was a
breakdown of the understanding of what is church,
what constitutes a church.
If you were to find the
fundamental building block of church,
what is it?
And Calvin begins to build for us a new sort of
core foundation of this is church.
Church is these practices,
these sacraments, these particular sort of forms of fellowship and learning.
And what’s interesting is,
if you sort of compare
and contrast the Roman Catholic Church that’s being critiqued by Luther,
and that’s in some ways
being reimagined by Calvin in his writings,
is one that relies very much on the ordering of power
throughout the system of the institutionalized church.
And when you look at Calvin,
that power gets vested far closer to the ground,
to the local people,
to the people who are actually gathering in their sanctuary.
And these individuals,
therefore,
if they are going to have real authority
in the practicing and worshiping of Jesus Christ in their own place,
they need to be educated,
they need to be trained,
they need to live within a system that is orderly so that one person can’t
steer the ship away from the rest of the body.
There needs to be checks and balances built in,
and because of that new,
both institutional,
but Calvin would argue theological need,
there needs to be a new way to understand how all of this gets knit together.
And if you read the Institutes’ Clint,
this seminal work that John Calvin wrote,
you’re going to find it’s going
to be a lot of dry references to different debates that were being had,
theological arguments, but if you’re going to boil it down and summarize it,
what you’re going to find is Calvin’s trying
to answer the question,
what should the church be if it isn’t this?
And if you read it that way,
it’s an incredibly fascinating look at what is really a work of towering intellect.
He’s creating connections to scripture,
which he’s doing, by the way, in multiple languages.
And he’s not only
connecting scripture to practice,
he’s doing that with a lawyer’s eye.
So there’s institutional
expectations about,
well, this is really maybe the most efficient way to do this so that we can be a
theologically resonant.
It’s really a fascinating and masterful work.
A few weeks ago,
we looked in this series at some of the arguments and conversations that were happening in that very early church
when they tried to cement what they believed about Jesus,
His nature, His work.
And there’s a sense in which, Michael,
1500,
1300 years later,
that the church really undertakes that process again.
The idea from Calvin and others was not to dismantle the Catholic Church,
but to point out
what they understood to be the air and possibly hypocrisy in it,
and rebuild something that was
closer to what God intended for the community of faith to be.
And you can argue that they did or
didn’t do that well,
but that was the intent.
Calvin very much envisioned not a church where
anything goes, but a different way of implementing structure,
a different set of fundamental
theological beliefs.
For instance,
in the Catholic Church of their day,
most people were not
encouraged to read the scripture.
In fact, most people couldn’t.
They were often not translated.
The scripture was considered so sacred that it was often not translated.
And this meant the clergy alone had access to the scripture and really to the interpretation and direction of scripture.
Calvin, Luther, and others argued very strenuously that that was wrong,
that the Word of
God should be in the hands of every Christian in their language,
and that they should be helped to
read it if need be.
Now, that didn’t mean that Calvin thought whatever everyone thought about
scripture was fine.
He did not.
He had very specific ideas on what it meant,
but he believed that every believer should have access to the Word.
And this is a practical change,
something that happens slowly over time in this reimagining,
reforming of what the church is going
to look like for a new day and age.
And that comes with lots of hardship because historically,
the Catholic Church had lived with the authority and power to say what is and isn’t acceptable,
what is and isn’t church,
who is and isn’t saved.
And Calvin, Luther, Knox, and others came along
and said, “No, you don’t have that authority.
That authority belongs to God.” And it left them with
this monumental task of building a new thing,
which on the whole goes pretty well,
especially
more so in some areas than others.
But on the whole,
these men do remarkable things in the pursuit of that goal.
Yeah, I think what you bring up there,
Clint, is a really helpful reminder that
fundamentally what the Reformers,
I think, kind of found out.
I’m not sure that this was their
starting premise, but as the arguments unfolded,
as the conflicts really heated up,
what they discovered was that what they were fighting over wasn’t just the stuff that the church did,
but they were actually fighting over how we should understand who God is.
And ultimately, what they began, what Luther,
what Calvin, what others began to argue,
was that the Catholic
Church had begun to practice that it was the stuff that you did that resulted in God’s attitude and
relationship to you and to the people,
that somehow our actions ourselves were impacting
our ability to have faith.
And this has a long history of people going on pilgrimages and people
being promised, “If you do this thing,
God will do this for you,” because people in the church were speaking for God.
And these individuals ended up saying, “No,
ultimately,
God is the only one who
saves,” that we are all in desperate need of God’s grace.
These become key words in the reading of
Scripture, particularly the reading of Romans,
this idea that God does all of the work of salvation,
that God doesn’t need our help,
and that we are saved by grace, God’s gift,
free gift to us.
And the ultimate critique that became solidified,
and though there were so many things disagreed with in
the Reformation and all the sort of tributaries that come out of it, Clint,
I’d say that most of
these reformers, if not all, would agree with the premise that God is the ultimate authority,
and it is God’s authority that was being usurped by the Roman Church.
So if there is a Reformation capital
or the big shift away,
that was one of the fundamental critiques being made,
is that God’s authority is chief and above all,
and it is our reliance by grace through faith that God would
work that authority in our lives to salvation.
It probably shouldn’t be surprising,
but it might be surprising the scope of, for our purposes,
arguments.
It is easy to understand Reformation
as some major knockdown dragouts over the authority of the pope,
over the structure of
the church, the power of cardinals and priests,
et cetera, whether clergy should get married.
But I think, Michael, maybe what is missed in that is that when you kind of untie those ropes,
it became a time where Christians really found themselves arguing about really just about everything.
Should you have pictures of Jesus in church?
Should you have an organ?
Is it okay to
sing songs that started as secular work?
Is it okay to sing songs that aren’t Psalms?
Is it okay to hang artwork in the sanctuary?
Is it okay to translate a Bible?
Is it not okay?
Who should do that?
It became, should clergy be paid?
How do they get called?
How do they get trained?
It just became a time where everything was a kind of battle,
and really remarkably that these men were able,
Calvin, Luther,
Knox,
were able to hold their own in those days.
And again,
Calvin, like Luther, is not simply arguing with the Catholics.
He’s arguing now with everyone who is saying,
“Oh, well, we should do it our way,
and we should do it our way.” And it is a little bit like the feel
we have in the New Testament where Paul is arguing with other groups of Christians who are saying,
“Well, we can do this,” or,
“We don’t have to do that.” And Paul is arguing from Scripture and from
his intellect and his experience,
“No, this is the vision that the church should adapt, and
that really becomes the case.” And it’s amazing,
though it was significantly,
significantly conflictual.
I mean, there were at moments armies involved,
there were kings involved,
there were countries at war with one another or war within the country over these issues.
And it was a time where we did,
in many ways, not much but argue for nearly a century.
Yeah, that’s right, Clint.
And we miss the real emotional force of that and the real danger of that,
which the Catholics in that day used to great success,
quite frankly, in painting the Reformers as essentially rebels and brigands,
people who were out trying to cause chaos and disorder.
Well, you might know the word Protestant means the ones who protest,
the ones who complain.
Yeah, and we miss the fact that these people who were finding themselves on the other side of the
theological fence became those on the other side of the family fence.
I mean, there were entire families split up.
This came to blows in some cases where people who made what they would call
a conversion to Protestantism would become this significant shift.
And we, as those who have
buildings with different names on them,
and some go to this building and some go to this building,
miss what happens when the church is literally asking some questions of fundamental things.
Like what instruments should be in the sanctuary?
We maybe might sort of draw upon our own
experience of should there be trap sets in the sanctuary or should you have guitars in the
sanctuary?
Some of those kind of worship wars kinds of things.
But this is more fundamental
than that.
It’s not what do you prefer.
It’s what is right worship?
If we are going to move away
from this form of worship,
what is the right way to do it?
And out of that,
there’s disputes about pretty much everything that you can imagine.
Should there be one preacher?
Should the people in the congregation be allowed to preach?
Should there be baptism of infants?
Should there not?
What language should the scriptures be read in?
Things that maybe now we would take for granted
were not taken for granted there.
And I do think, Clint,
towards your larger point there,
what these early Protestant leaders do is they don’t necessarily create uniformity,
but they create a theological institutional system that begins to create order for these
things to be dealt with in.
They provide sort of a rebuttal to this argument being made that these are just rebels.
They’re disorderly.
They’re bringing chaos.
And they’re creating systems
of order so that these topics could be given voice,
so that they could be discussed in a way
that the Spirit of God could lead,
but that there also would be some checks and balances on the
system.
And in doing so,
they create a unique,
very sort of hybrid path forward for churches
that were moving away from a highly ordered system to keep this new system from becoming
a complete disordered mess.
Yeah, let’s talk for a minute,
Michael, about the upsides and downsides
of this period, this thing that happens that we call reformation.
I think as those who live
on one of the branches from this tree that grew,
we, of course, are going to look back and say
that we very much admire and appreciate the work of these men who are willing to take these stands,
sometimes at great personal risk,
sometimes literally risking their life in order to pursue
what they understood to be faith and faithfulness in their time and place.
I think one of the
scripture and truth can be trusted to find its way to the surface,
that as the church inevitably
fights its human tendency to serve itself,
there can be trusted a movement will come and our ability
to understand or appreciate the revelation of new truth so that when someone challenges,
when someone stands and says,
“Hey,
this group of people is not being treated fairly and that
should not happen in Jesus’ name,” that this isn’t right,
that this isn’t right.
And our idea,
inherent in reformation, that we can go to the scripture together,
we can challenge one another with new ideas and new thoughts,
and that ultimately God’s truth
will be trusted,
will be able to lead us and guide us if we’re willing to listen and to submit.
Yeah, that’s well said.
And what’s underneath that,
Clint, is the recognition that the reformers are
really, if you boil it down,
making the case that we need to recognize that God desires to act
through all Christians in the life and worship of a church,
that we can’t trust the people at the
top of the system to be able to always provide authoritative leadership and guidance towards
what God wants us to do.
And there’s a reason why the early Protestants and those who follow after
them emphasize so heavily education,
namely the ability to read the scriptures,
and the real
significance of passing on theological teaching to those who are not in formal clergy kinds of positions.
The Catholic Church didn’t see much merit in having parishioners come in and teaching classes about theology,
about grace,
faith.
It’s not to say that education didn’t happen,
but it is to say that the Protestants had a kind of zealous effort towards that end.
And the reason for that was because of this core belief that they had that God could speak truth,
but that God would
do it through God’s people.
And God’s people weren’t just the clergy and paid sort of Christian leadership.
They were the people who lived and worked in their communities and came and worshiped
on Sundays and who would have real leadership responsibilities in their places.
And to a Presbyterian today,
that’s an obvious statement because we have systems and structures and ways
for the people of God to serve and to lead in their congregations.
But the way that we got there
was first that premise that those people should have that authority.
And then these Reformation
leaders helped us get to the place where we would have systems and structures for them to be able to do that rightly.
I think the Reformation frames for us a pretty strong view of discipleship,
the idea that Christians should do more than go to weekly mass,
that Christians should study at
home, that they should pray with their families,
that they should be leaders,
that we use this
phrase that grew out of the Reformation,
the priesthood of all believers, that each Christian
is called to at some level live out that priestly function.
All Christians should be
pursuing knowledge of the Scripture,
should be able even perhaps to preach,
not necessarily as a profession, but should be able to communicate their beliefs, their ideas.
And this becomes important to us.
And so I think one of the great things that we benefit from out of the Reformation
as Protestants is those very ideas,
the idea that Scripture can be trusted,
that God is at work to lead and guide even in difficult times,
and that the church as a whole
is more than the hierarchy and structure with which it tries to live out its life,
but that it is one equal in standing before God from the highest officer to the newest member.
And those are important themes that continue to be with us as we’ve moved out from those beginnings.
Yeah, but that very thing begins to point us towards some of the things that the Reformation
creates that become problems for the church.
And it’s easy to see if you just consider it.
On one hand, the strength of the Reformation is that it says,
it reminds us that all Christians
are called to be disciples.
We’re called to learn,
to grow, to be able to read Scripture,
to be able to know theology,
the weakness or temptation of the Reformation.
And some people did indeed interpret the Reformation this way,
that everyone is unto themselves the sole
interpreter of what Scripture means,
that if it means it to me,
that’s what it means.
And so, while the Reformers were trying to move us away from a system in which one Pope made all decisions,
they did not intend to move us into a system where everyone was their own Pope,
where every person made their own authoritative decisions and their reading of Scripture
was what was right and everyone else was wrong.
They believed very firmly in what you’ve already said,
Clint, that it was God’s voice and God’s will and God’s spirit that would be worked in the church,
the body,
the community.
And we can even see today,
there are some individuals who
are tempted by this idea,
“Well, I’m a Christian,
but I don’t go to church.
I don’t participate in
worship with others because they disagree with me or because it makes me uncomfortable.” There’s lots of reasons.
But the Reformers, especially those first, second, third generation Reformers,
they couldn’t have understood what it would mean to be an individual Christian who didn’t worship
with others, who didn’t read Scripture with others.
There was this real sense that God’s
will would happen in us as a community.
And one of the weaknesses of the Reformation is it gave
some people this idea that there are such things as superhero Christians who were Popes unto themselves.
When you remove the very clear authority vested in a person or even a group of people,
it does create a kind of vacuum.
And in trying to fill it without repeating it,
the Reformation leaders struggled to capture the same kind of structure,
the same kind of
limitations that I think the Catholic Church had in its day and in many ways continues to have.
And one of our unfortunate legacies as Reformation Christians is that while the Catholic Church
still functions reasonably similarly to its historic patterns,
we now have about 5,000
various denominations and groups that can trace themselves back to that split.
So while they in some ways stayed a major branch,
we became a forest.
And in doing so,
we have had a very difficult time.
Though we celebrate unity and though we talk about it a lot,
we have had a very hard time living that out.
For instance, in the American Church,
you will not find a denomination that does not have in its history a split or multiple splits,
as do the Presbyterians,
the Baptists, the Methodists, the Lutherans, you name it.
We have struggled in the aftermath of Reformation to find a way to,
in moments of disagreement,
come together and stay together.
And we have instead followed that pattern,
which we see in
the Reformation of people going off and kind of doing their own thing.
And it has been a painful
pattern that we have enacted time and time again in the Western Church.
Yeah, and that actually finds its way all the way into the writings of these reformers,
that they were aware of the problem that was being created.
And in fact, they were writing some
things to try to address it.
But the reality is we have seen that play out with a kind of
view of history that,
of course, they had no access to.
And so we have to confront the reality,
that as we seek to be faithful to God’s authority through the Scriptures,
that we tend to
find ourselves in danger of putting ourselves in positions of power that we need to be careful of.
And that temptation that we have as humans to advance ourselves selfishly tends to lead to division.
And those who stand on this side of the Reformation,
some would point to some of
those divisions and say good,
some would say bad.
And that’s sort of part of the problem,
is that it creates this sort of interpretive field.
But another thing that you’re going to find
as we look back at the Reformation,
and I wonder,
depending upon where you’ve learned about
Reformation, if you learned about it in Church Sunday School,
if you learned about it in a history class,
there is this idea,
at least in common history,
that the Reformation marked a turning
point away from sort of medieval thought into some level of what we might call modern thought.
And that with the Reformation comes not just new religious ideas,
but new access and ideas in
areas of philosophy and ethics and ultimately science.
And there’s some history that looks to
the time preceding the Reformation as dark ages.
In fact, some have called medieval times dark,
both mentally,
both philosophically, both in terms of theology and sociology,
the way that people lived.
And then time after the Reformation or closer to our time is sort of opening up this
more modern enlightened era.
And what’s interesting is I think if we read history that way,
we miss some of the wisdom that the Roman Catholic Church has passed on.
And we’ve talked about this
in different contexts, sermons and classes, Clint.
There’s some things that the reformers
threw out of the practice and worshipping life of congregations that maybe looking back,
we were a little too harsh on.
Things like confession of sin.
We said, “You only confess sin to the one who
forgives you,” and that’s God,
and that’s not another person.
But there are some cases in which
some of the wisdom of the Church continues to have some insight.
We look back on that now and say, “Yeah,
there was maybe some good in that.” And I think it’s worth noting that while as those who
have sought to be reformed according to the Word of God and God’s leadership,
that it’s worth pointing out that there’s also good things to learn from our brothers and sisters in the faith
on the other side.
And there’s been historically some division left from the Reformation that I
think we might be wise to try to read more generously as we look back.
I suppose that one of the things that time allows us,
Michael, is an opportunity to see
that our own fathers and mothers in the faith didn’t get it all right either.
And as we
live with the ideas that became the Reformation and then became the Presbyterian Church,
we can see the gaps where we didn’t have it all figured out either.
And I suppose a few hundred years later,
what that allows everyone to do is to say, “Okay,
we all had some parts right.
We all had some parts wrong.” And if we can come back to the table with mutual
respect, if we can have some of those things,
those conversations, we can find a mutual respect, a mutual understanding.
It doesn’t mean that we will ever agree on some of the fundamental differences.
But what it means,
what it does mean,
is that we don’t have to stand apart.
And I would say that without the Reformation,
this is a difficult place to get to.
Eventually, we are able to say,
“This way of being Christian and being faithful works for you,
and this way of being Christian and faithful works for us.” And we don’t have to see them as
incompatible, though we may see them as significantly different.
There are things that a Catholic and a Presbyterian are never going to agree on,
but if they follow Christ
together, they can partner and they can work around those differences for the most part.
That’s not always possible,
but I think there is a spirit of working together,
a spirit of oneness that is able to transcend some of those historical differences.
You know, Clint, I wonder if those who joined us might have some interest in,
just very briefly as we near the end of the conversation,
what do we as Protestants do
with the reality of the continuing Catholic Church?
We know the Reformation happened,
but we also know that there’s still a pope who says things in a Catholic Church that
meets in our own town for worship.
What would you say are really the lingering differences
that remain there, and how should the Protestant consider that other side of the Christian faith
that we so famously fought with those hundred years ago,
those several hundred years ago?
Yeah,
I would be surprised if most Christians in the American context have not had an opportunity to
befriend Catholics who don’t have people in your circle who are Catholic.
There was a time where
that wouldn’t have been the case,
but in this day and age,
I suspect we probably all don’t find
ourselves divided by that line in a way that may have been true.
You know, fundamentally,
structurally, the Catholic Church is very different than the Presbyterian Church with
bishops, with cardinals.
Obviously, the clergy thing,
non-married clergy, those are going to be different.
A closed communion table versus an open communion table,
you know,
and then maybe just some general differences that Catholics…
I’m always surprised when I go to Catholic funerals,
which is funerals or weddings and probably more so funerals,
the way that I experience
Catholic worship.
I’m not there on Saturdays or Sundays,
you know, it’s not my tradition.
I’m always surprised,
both, I think,
positively and negatively,
how having been to a number of
Catholic services for funerals,
regardless of the circumstance,
they put a trust and an anchor in the liturgy.
They’re going to do the same thing.
If it’s a child that dies,
if it’s a 90-year-old,
if it’s an accident,
if it’s an illness,
that those funerals are going to be, by and large,
very, very similar because they have,
for thousands of years,
trusted that order of service,
they’re going to do mass,
they’re going to have communion.
And that seems odd to Protestants,
because we don’t put that same level of importance on the liturgy.
We’re not liturgical in the same
sense that the Catholic Church is liturgical.
And I think maybe that would be the largest
difference.
If you take a Presbyterian,
if you take somebody from First Press and you send them
to a Catholic Church,
maybe one thing that might surprise them is the similarity of experience
across various Catholic Churches.
But I think they may be surprised how much of it is scripted,
how much of it is written,
how much of it is out of a book or an order of service.
And that has become increasingly less true,
decreasingly true, for Presbyterians, but remains pretty true for Catholics. Yeah, and once again, we have hundreds of years of hindsight that help us here,
but historians do write about how the Reformation did move the Catholic Church.
There were reformations with a small R that happened within the Catholic Church following
that time.
And even within maybe what we might call our own era in the ’60s,
the Catholic Church made some significant and sweeping changes,
which have transformed much of the worship of certainly the worldwide church,
definitely the American Church,
such that you would not say in any way
that the Catholic worship and Protestant worship now are the same or even similar.
But what you would say is the readings of Scripture in the same language,
music that reflects the congregation
that is offering worship.
These things have begun to look far more similar than what they ever have in the past.
And so while Luther did not succeed in changing the church from the inside,
I do think it’s fair to say that Luther did succeed in changing the church from the outside.
And from those who live now in the faith from that vantage,
I think it’s helpful for us to practice a little
bit of humility and to look at brothers and sisters in the faith on the other side of that
argument and seek to live as Christ lived with the same kind of generosity and grace,
while also recognizing the true substantial differences that do exist between those bodies.
And I don’t want to
underplay those differences do exist,
both in what we believe and how we practice.
And we seek to
try to practice humility and trust in the one who we believe guides us.
I think that we’re all better off if we learn from one another.
When I was in seminary,
we had a Catholic brother,
a man who lived in a monastery,
come and teach workshops on prayer,
because the Catholic church has this beautiful history of giving a ton of thought and experience
to the mechanics and modes and methods of prayer,
and very deep spiritual language through
the monasteries and the Catholic brotherhoods and sisterhoods.
And those kind of partnerships,
if we can remember that we all have things to learn from one another,
I think we can largely
put the differences aside when we’re able.
There will be some things that are very hard for us to
agree on, and we just have to live with those.
But I think if we cannot let those few things get in the way,
we have a lot that we can learn from one another.
And it seems to me that we’ve moved
that direction since the Reformation.
There is a kind of coming back together that seems to be
happening, and I think all are made better for it.
Well, if you’re going to talk about faith fights,
the Reformation is a big heavy hitter in the fights
that we have to talk about.
So big conversation today.
Thanks for being with us.
Yeah, absolutely.
We’ll continue next week.
We appreciate you hanging in there as always.
If you have any questions,
if there’s something that we didn’t make clear,
we’d sure like to try,
so let us know and we’ll do our best.