God's Story: A Student Guide to Church History (7 page)

There was also a close connection between this anxiety and fear of death and the sense of guilt. Death implied God’s judgment and judgment brought a sinner face to face with God’s holiness and wrath. Some travelled from town to town whipping themselves with leather scourges in hopes of atoning for their sins and for the sins of others. The Roman Catholic Church fueled the fear of hell through pamphlets and drawings and the priests exploited these fears by speaking of what hell was like so as to raise funds for their immoral escapades and lavish living.

Out of fear, many turned to visions and superstitious stories for comfort. During this time, a significant population turned to witchcraft! In fact, by 1484, there were so many witches that Pope Innocent VIII began an Inquisition to stamp out any witchcraft in Europe. This started a scary “witch hunt,” which subjected countless women (especially single women) to unspeakable torture and execution. By the early 1600s, some 30,000 women were executed for witchcraft!

Relatively few, of course, turned their quest for spiritual things toward witchcraft and false spirituality. Most sought an intimate fellowship with the triune God and
mysticism
became a popular form of individual spirituality. One type of mysticism emphasized the human will’s conformity to the will of God through successive stages of purgation of sin, illumination by the Spirit, and contemplation on holy texts. Thomas à Kempis’ (1380-1471)
The Imitation of Christ
is a popular example of this strand of mysticism.

Another type of mysticism believed each individual shared a spark of the divine and had the possibility of full union with God himself. This mystical union with God was achieved by letting go of one’s self, a detachment from the worldly desires. Both of these types of mysticism tended to discredit the hierarchy of the church. Moreover, church leaders seemed too worldly, too man-centered.

One of the major issues leading to the Protestant Reformation had to do with the extent of the church’s authority. The pope’s laws often interfered with the local kings and lords of various lands across Europe. The problem that many of these local rulers had was that, while they wanted to limit Pope’s authority, they also wanted the pope to
manage
the churches within their lands.

Moreover, the question arose: who should judge certain “sins” if those sins infringed on
both
church and state? Over time, the pope’s actual power began to wane before the power of local kings. As more and more local kings appointed their own bishops and priests, those bishops and priests would be loyal—not to the pope—but to the king who appointed them and provided their income!

At one point, the pope became ruler of the Italian army, which defeated other local rulers in northern Italy and Europe—the people of which were members of the Roman Catholic Church and who were paying their tithe money to the Roman Catholic Church. Oftentimes, the pope was more Italian than church! Most popes and cardinals were Italian, which began to seem suspicious in an age of increasing sovereign states. In fact, from 1400-1978 only two popes were
not
Italian and one of those only ruled for two years! The question arose: what was the value of a pope’s excommunication against a king resisting aggression by the pope’s army? It became a lose-lose situation.

Another issue related to church authority had to do with how people became priests or bishops. The Church accepted payment for offices or positions (called simony). Some church officials were showing favoritism toward relatives in procuring positions rather than objective evaluation and qualification (called nepotism). All of these factors together weakened the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church’s authority. But these certainly weren’t the only ones.

At the time, the Church expected regular contributions from all their subjects from across Europe, but those subjects didn’t see how their money was being used for good purposes. All they saw was abuse: simony, nepotism, scandal, murder, drunkards, theft, lavish living, clergy concubines, etc. and no accountability or discipline!

This last point is key. The church didn’t discipline its own ministers, which was scandalous in the eyes of the people. During this time, too, many lay people faced excommunication if they didn’t pay their contribution to the church! Because of this, monastic communities—pledged to poverty—became very popular. Clergy abuse by 1500 wasn’t really any worse than in 1300, but more people became aware of it. By 1500, the church began to outspend itself and desperately needed money for the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. How did the church raise money? Indulgences.

An indulgence—a remission of sin granted when the sinner pays a certain amount of money to the church—was one of a number of non-biblical duties pushed on the people; others being pilgrimages, superstitious relics, prayers to the Virgin Mary, and Masses.

To generate money, the church needed to increase awareness of the peoples’ guilt before a God of wrath so that they would do
anything
—preferably pay a sum of money!—to “pay” for their sins. This led to a ceaseless effort to earn merit before God! Once a sinner confessed his sin, he still needed to pay for an indulgence or do works of penance to earn merit as a way of paying for that sin.

Another stream leading into the Reformation River were the voices of several pre-Reformers or “morning stars” of the Reformation, particularly, John Wycliffe (1320-1384) and John Huss (c.1372-1415). An English theologian and lay preacher, Wycliffe took the lead in translating the Scriptures from the Latin Vulgate into English, now known as the
Wycliffe Bible
. Though brought up on charges several times, he always seemed to escape the penalties of the state (including execution). He suffered a stroke and died in 1384.

John Huss, inspired by Wycliffe’s teach-ings, became a Bohemian Reformer and preacher in Prague. Both Wycliffe and Huss opposed the church hierarchy of their day, pointing out its many abuses and scandals. Huss believed there to be many people—even the pope himself—who were simply part of the visible, external church while not being a part of the true (“invisible”) church, which is God’s elect. Wycliffe and Huss both emphasized preaching, studying the Scriptures, and eliminating clerical abuses.

The Roman Catholic Church condemned both men. In 1415 Huss was burned at the stake and, in 1428, Wycliffe’s bones were exhumed and burned as well.

Like a faster-moving current of water, several other pre-reformation streams started to gain momentum. One of these was the use of the printing press, invented by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450s. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would later say that the three greatest inventions of “recent history” were gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and printing.

It must be remembered that, at the time, books were extremely expensive because they had to be written by hand. The printing press changed that forever. Gutenberg printed the Bible in 1454 and by 1500 there were some 250 print shops across Europe. Over 100 editions of the Bible were released between 1457 and 1500. Later, at the spark of the Reformation—during the three-year span from 1517 to 1520—Martin Luther’s writings sold more than 300,000 copies, attesting to the ground swell of popularity. By the time of Luther’s death in 1546, there was an estimated half a million copies of the Bible in circulation! As a result of the printing press, more and more people became literate and many began reading and writing.

In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Muslims and the Greek-speaking theologians were forced to leave the East, many being dispersed throughout Europe. Significantly, they brought with them vast amounts of ancient Greek literature, including Greek manuscripts and texts of the New Testament.

In Europe, the humanist movement was taking off, especially among intellectuals. Humanism (not the secular humanism of today!) was a way of learning based upon the recovery of classical sources of Roman, Greek, and Christian literature. Their motto:
Ad fonts
, which meant “back to the sources.” Rather than taking the church’s word for it, more and more people wanted to see the ancient and biblical texts for themselves, as many could now read thanks to the printing press.

As a result, they affirmed that Scripture, not the pope, was the final authority. The famous example of this came when a man named Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) came upon the word
metanoia
in Matthew 4:17 from the Greek New Testament. He compared it to Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation—the standard version of the Roman Catholic Church at the time—which rendered the word, “do penance.” As noted earlier, the practice of penance was a system of meriting righteousness before God by doing good works. Valla challenged this translation, insisting that the word should be translated
repentance
, not “do penance.” Repentance, Valla argued, referred to a genuine change of heart and mind rather than the ritual performance required by the sacrament of penance.

When Erasmus (1466-1536), the most well known humanist, issued his 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament, he incorporated Valla’s translation of
metanoia
over Jerome’s. Martin Luther, in turn, used Erasmus’ translation of “repentance” in his Ninety-five Theses, which sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517. It was said, as early as 1520, “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” Erasmus later replied that Luther’s chicks were a different kind of bird!

Erasmus was the
New York Times
bestseller of his day. Everybody was reading Erasmus. His witty, humorous, scholarly, and piercing critiques of the church and its abuses hit home with the masses across Europe. Erasmus articulated in print what everyone was thinking, but had a hard time verbalizing—his words resonated with public opinion. He not only lowered the reputation of popes, cardinals, and bishops, but also of the Roman Catholic theologians, weakening the foundations of their theology and authority.

Greek, Hebrew, and Latin became popular and were incorporated into the universities and seminaries across Europe. It became so popular that, in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition condemned the study of these ancient texts because it was bringing more and more suspicion upon the theological foundation of the Roman Catholic Church!

With the newly-invented printing press, the humanists could now publish their works inexpensively and distribute them on a large scale. They even went back to the early Church Fathers—St. Augustine of Hippo in particular—and re-discovered their wisdom and insight. You could say that the 15
^th
to 17
^th
centuries were kind of an “Augustinian Renaissance.” In fact, Martin Luther became an Augustinian monk and John Calvin quotes him more than any other author in his famous
Institutes of the Christian Religion
!

All told, the humanists revived learning. The new learning revived suspicions of church order and tradition. These suspicions led to opposition. The only thing needed was for someone to come along—from the inside—who would lead reform. From local pubs across Europe to the universities, the call to reform the church seeped into popular songs, poetry, pubs, drinking ditties, and even university lectures. On the eve of the Reformation, by 1500, there was certainly not unity within the Church; it was, what one historian has called, a “pregnant plurality.”

1. Can you imagine living through the
   horrifying events surrounding the Bubonic
   Plague? Would the threat of catching disease
   encourage you or discourage you in caring
   or the sick?
   
2. What are three or four of the “streams”
   mentioned in this chapter that converged
   into the Reformation River? Do any stand out
   as especially significant?
   
3. What do you think the impact of the printing
   press was on changing a whole population’s
   perception on an issue? Would the Internet
   and social media have some of the same
   effects today?
   

T
he Protestant Reformation was a series of theological, political, and church-related movements during the 16
^th
century that eventually formed a split from the Roman Catholic Church. While there are a number of differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, by and large Protestant churches are those committed (1) to the authority of Scripture over tradition and the teaching of the church, (2) to justification by faith alone rather than works, and (3) the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.