The Intellectual
Appeal of the Reformation
By David C.
Steinmetz
It is important to
remember that the Reformation began as an intra-Catholic debate. All of the
first generation of Protestant reformers and most of the second had been
baptized and educated as Catholics. Their criticisms of the Catholic Church and
its theology were based, not on what they had read in Protestant manuals of
theology, but on what they had experienced as children raised in traditionally
Catholic homes and educated in traditionally Catholic schools. When, in 1518 in Heidelberg at a disputation sponsored
by Luther's own order, the Hermits of St. Augustine, the Alsatian Dominican,
Martin Bucer, was persuaded to accept Luther's critique of late scholastic
theology, neither he nor Luther had any reason to suspect that the new theology
they espoused would eventually force them outside the medieval church. In 1518,
the hope was for renewal "in head and members," not schism.
Even Catholics who
rejected the early Reformation as a movement that threatened to go too far felt
the force of many Protestant criticisms of Catholic faith and practice and
attempted to accommodate some of those criticisms within the framework of
medieval Catholic orthodoxy. The support of the doctrine of double justice at Regensburg and Trent
by such prominent churchmen as Gasparo Cardinal Contarini, Reginald Cardinal
Pole, and Girolamo Cardinal Seripando is one example of a serious attempt by
Catholic theologians to accommodate Protestant teaching concerning certitude of
salvation within a more traditional Catholic doctrine of grace.1
Eventually, of
course, the lines between the confessions hardened. Faced with a stark choice
between competing visions of Christianity, a large number (though never a
majority) of European Catholics born between 1480 and 15 10 voluntarily
abandoned the Church in which they had been raised in order to ally themselves
with one or another of the new reform movements. The new Protestants included
in their number former friars such as Bernardino Ochino and Conrad Pellikan,
secular priests such as Huldrych Zwingli and Balthasar Hubmaier, monks such as
Michael Sattler and John Hooper, Archbishops such as Hermann von Wied and
Thomas Cranmer, nuns such as Marie Dentiere and Katherina von Bora, and laypeople
such as Lazarus Spengler and John Calvin. Even if one allows for conversions
that were wholly political or merely frivolous, a defection of this sort from
the western Church was unprecedented. Nothing could compare with it in
geographical breadth or sociological range, certainly not the Hussite
revolution of the fifteenth century that was its nearest historical analogue.
How does one account for this shift in allegiance?
The answer, of
course, is complicated. There are psychological, sociological, political,
economic, gender, and ideological factors that enter into important human
decisions and that certainly entered into the decisions of first generation
converts to Protestantism. The notion that every action has an adequate and
sufficient cause is itself inadequate to explain human actions, which may have
several overlapping adequate and sufficient causes. Human decisions are, as we
have grown accustomed to say, overdetermined. In human affairs, we deal with a
surplus of motivation that complicates and sometimes defies tidy historical
explanation.
In this essay, I
examine only the intellectual appeal of the Reformation. One ought not to
define the intellectual appeal of the Reformation too narrowly, as though the
Reformation were a philosophical movement like the Frankfurt
school with a body of theory comprehensible only to a small group of highly
trained theoreticians and critics. Luther was no Habermas, and the new theology
he advocated was not restricted to an elite initiated into abstract intellectual
puzzles.2 The main lines of Reformation theology were comprehensible to a broad
range of the laity, who understood all too well what issues were being
addressed by the advocates of the new learning.
What was at stake in
the Reformation was not truth as such, but what sixteenth-century Europeans
regarded as saving truth. Protestants did not come with a new metaphysic or
epistemology. They did not offer fresh insights into the nature of the agent
intellect or the intention and remission of forms. They addressed the ancient
questions at the heart of Christian faith and worship: Does baptism wash away
original sin? Is Christ present in the eucharist? Does a priest have the
authority to pardon mortal sin? Experts answered these questions on a higher level
of complexity than ordinary laypeople understood, but they were not questions
in which ordinary laypeople had no interest.
In some respects,
the Protestant Reformation was not terribly original.3 Most of the questions
the Protestant reformers asked and answered were traditional questions that had
been asked and answered before.4 In
giving their answers, Protestant theologians called upon a wide range of
traditional Christian sources: the Bible, early Christian writers (especially
Augustine and John Chrysostom), medieval mystics from Bernard of Clairvaux to
the author of the Theologia Deutsch, biblical commentators such as Nicholas of
Lyra and Haymo of Auxerre, the codex of canon law (cited negatively by Luther,
who distrusted all lawyers, and somewhat more positively by Zwingli and
Calvin), as well as scholastic doctors from Peter Lombard to Thomas Aquinas.
What set the Protestant message off from medieval tradition was not the
uniqueness of its questions or the newness of its sources.5 What set it off was
the angle of vision from which those traditional sources were read and
evaluated. The Christian past was not so much rejected by the Protestant
reformers as refashioned in the light of a different and competing vision of
its development and continuing significance.
What elements in the
Protestant angle of vision were particularly appealing to its new converts?
THE CLAIM TO
ANTIQUITY
High on the list of
elements in the Protestant vision of Christianity was its appeal to Christian
antiquity.6 There is, of course, nothing in the sixteenth century less
revolutionary and more traditional than an appeal to the past.
Sixteenth-century Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, shared a strong
cultural assumption that what is older is better than what is new. That
assumption applied not only to religion but to civic and cultural relations,
art and architecture, law and custom, economic and agricultural practices-in
short, to the whole range of activities and beliefs that gives human society
its character. The modern notion that new things are generally better and ought
in a well-ordered society to supplant what is older was, on the whole, an idea
that had not yet found a home in sixteenth-century Europe .
The cultural bias was in favor of what was sound, tested, ancient, and rooted
in the collective experience of generations.7
An appeal to
Christian antiquity had been a strong motif in reform movements throughout the
Middle Ages. When the mendicant orders were founded-the Franciscans,
Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinianstheir apologists could point to what
they regarded as a more ancient form of the religious life than the cloister:
namely, the circle of disciples around Jesus, who had abandoned their small
properties in order to follow a leader who had nowhere to lay his head. The
mendicants called such a life of poverty and itinerant preaching the vita
apostolica. Who can forget the picture of St. Francis of Assisi stripping himself of his possessions
in order to marry the widow, Lady Poverty, and to take for his cloister the
highways of the world?
When the Christian
humanists suggested that scholars ought to return ad fontes, to the oldest and
best manuscripts of ancient Christian and pagan writings, rather than rely, as
earlier scholars had, on later translations or adaptations, they were stating
as a philological principle a theme deeply embedded in Christian consciousness;
the water of a stream is purest near its source. Like a mountain spring,
Christian antiquity represents a purer form of Christianity than its
contemporary manifestations. If this is true, then the cry of Christian
reformers must always be: "Back to the past," to the purer form of
ancient Christianity that can serve as norm and inspiration for the reform of
church and society in the present.
The Protestant form
of the appeal to the past rested on the conviction that many so-called ancient
traditions of the Catholic Church were not ancient at all, but represented
innovations introduced into Catholic life and thought at a later, often a much
later, stage of the Church's history. Like old English customs that cannot on
closer inspection be traced back beyond the reign of Queen Victoria, the Church
promulgated as ancient customs and ideas that could not be traced in unbroken
succession to a period earlier than, say, the pontificate of Gregory VII, the
codification of canon law by Gratian, or the introduction of scholastic
theology by Peter Lombard (to mention three possible turning points suggested
by different Protestant authors).
When the bishop of
Carpentras, Jacopo Cardinal Sadoleto, accused Calvin and the reformers of Geneva of introducing
innovations and novelties into the communities they reformed, Calvin turned
Sadoleto's argument on its head.8 The Catholic claim to antiquity, argued
Calvin, was a formal claim without material substance. The Catholic Church was
riddled with innovations introduced over centuries of inattention and
theological laxity. By submitting themselves to Scripture and the writings of
the ancient fathers, the Protestant communities were purging themselves of such
unwanted innovations and returning to a more ancient and therefore purer form
of ecclesiastical life and thought.
It is important to
point out that the Protestant reformers did not think the church had died. There
may have been some scattered sectarians who hinted darkly at the demise of true
Christianity in the Middle Ages, but such a notion was repudiated by the larger
bodies of Lutheran and Reformed Christians. God had remained faithful to God's
promise. The gospel had been preached and heard by faithful souls from the time
of the apostles until the present day, even in a church that in recent
centuries had proven to be unreformed and resistant to change. If it was no
longer obvious to the naked eye that the Church of Rome was still the body of
Christ, one could nevertheless be assured that even this church contained
vestigia ecclesiae, traces of the true church.9
The goal of the
reformers was not to supplant a dead or dying church with a new Christianity,
as though God had written Ichabod over a moribund Christendom and repudiated
God's covenant. The goal of the reformers was a reformed Catholic Church, built
upon the foundation of the prophets and apostles, purged of the medieval
innovations that had distorted the gospel, subordinate to the authority of
Scripture and the ancient Christian writers, and continuous with what was best
in the old Church. As they saw it, it was this evangelical church, this
reformed and chastened church, that was the church Catholic. It was the
innovators in Rome
who could no longer pretend to be genuinely Catholic and whose claim to be the
custodians of a greater and unbroken tradition was patently false. What the
Protestants thought they offered was a genuine antiquity, one that stretched
back to Peter and Paul and not merely to Anselm and Gratian.
The slogan under
which later Protestants described this hunger for antiquity was the battle cry
sola scriptura, Scripture alone! While it is true that the reformers were at
first optimistic that it would be possible to teach and preach a theology that
was wholly biblical, they rarely intended to exclude theological sources that
were nonbiblical. They were not so much interested in sola scriptura as in
scriptura valde prima, Scripture as the final source and norm by which all
theological sources and arguments were to be judged, not Scripture as the sole
source of theological wisdom.
The Reformation was
almost as much an argument over the writings of the early Christian fathers as
it was an argument over the meaning of Scripture. Typical of the level of
interest in early Christian authors, even among reformers who did not edit or
translate ancient Christian writings, are Luther's marginal annotations on
Augustine and Jerome and Calvin's marginal annotations on a Latin edition of
Chrysostom.10 Even internal Protestant controversies, such as the bitter
dispute over the eucharist between John Calvin and the Lutheran theologian
Tileman Hesshusen, often had a large patristic component in them." In
short, the Protestant appeal to antiquity included the early Christian writers
as well as the Bible, even if the Protestant reformers felt that patristic
teaching could always be judged and rejected in the light of the clear and
unchangeable teaching of Scripture.
THE RENEWAL OF
THEOLOGY
A second element in
the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was its program for the reform and
renewal of theology. It began with a renewed attack on Aristotle and on
philosophical theology. Older attacks on Aristotle had centered on his
epistemology, which was difficult to harmonize with Augustine's doctrine of
illumination, or on his metaphysics, which contradicted the Christian doctrine
of creation from nothing.
The Protestant
attack on Aristotle was more theological than philosophical. The problem with
Aristotle was not that he believed in the eternity of the world or the
mortality of the human soul, but that his philosophical vocabulary was not well
adapted for theological use. Grace cannot be understood as habits and acts, and
the Aristotelian notion that the repetition of good acts makes the man or woman
who performs them righteous turns St.
Paul on his head. Theology deals with God in God's
relationship of judgment and grace toward sinners and with sinners in their
relationship of faith and faithlessness toward God. Therefore, the proper
vocabulary of grace is relational rather than metaphysical. One does not become
a theologian with Aristotle, cried Luther, but only without him! 12
In his early
lectures on Romans, Luther had reacted against the unremitting empiricism of
Aristotle by insisting in a brief meditation on Romans 8:19 ("for the
expectation of the creature") that the essence of a thing is not what it
is (quiddities and qualities), but what it longs for.13 Two years earlier in
his lectures on the Psalms, he had insisted that in the Bible the word
"substance" refers not to the quiddity of a thing, but to what
"stands under and supports it." The substance of a human being,
therefore, is defined by the foundation on which he or she rests. 14 Who we are
is determined by what we trust and desire.
In other words, the
vocabulary of the philosophers obscures, willy-nilly, the intention of the
Bible, which defines human beings not by their quiddities and qualities, but by
their faith and hope. No philosophical description of human beings, resting as
it does on what can be seen and measured, can reach the profundity of biblical
anthropology that rests upon invisible relationships. The most important thing
about a human being is what that human being trusts, loves, and expects. Human
beings are defined by things that cannot be seen, things that in the nature of
the case can only be objects of hope. What, then, for the early Protestants is
a human being? A human being is not a rational soul individuated by a body, but
a creature who trusts either the true God or an idol. On this question,
Aristotle can offer no useful insights.
Early Protestants
were determined to substitute biblical language and categories for philosophical.
Luther's career from 1515 to 1518 was marked by a struggle to find a new
vocabulary for theology to replace the technical vocabulary he had learned at Erfurt and Wittenberg .
By and large, the first generation of Protestants laid aside the technical
vocabulary of late scholasticism and the definitions one could find in
reference books such as Johannes Altenstaig's Vocabularius Theologie. Their aim
was to restate theology in the fresh language of the Bible rather than in what
they regarded as the stale definitions of the schoolmen. Even Calvin, in a
burst of exegetical optimism, attempted to state the doctrine of the Trinity in
biblical language without recourse to the technical philosophical vocabulary
used by the early church. It was only after he tried and failed that he
conceded the usefulness of some philosophical language in theological
discourse.15
A second
characteristic of the Protestant reform of theology was its unremitting war on
what it regarded as theological Pelagianism, the notion that human salvation
rests heavily on good works. For Catholic theologians who participated in the
Thomistic revival of the early sixteenth century or who had been raised in the
more or less moderate Augustinian consensus that marked most medieval theology,
this complaint of the early Protestants seemed genuinely puzzling, especially
when it was accompanied by such un-Augustinian Protestant teaching as the
denial of all human merit or the doctrine of the imputation of Christ's
righteousness. Jean de Gagney spoke for many Catholic theologians when he
observed in the preface to his 1529 commentary on Romans: "I judge there
are no persons among us who are called Christians, who do not believe in Christ
and do not think ourselves to be saved and justified by him.16
Nevertheless, there
was in the late Middle Ages a wide range of options on questions of grace, as
recent scholarship has shown. In the fourteenth century, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, protested against what he regarded as the
Pelagian tendencies in the theology of his own day in a famous treatise, De
causa Dei contra Pelagianos. 17 One has only to compare the uncompromisingly
Augustinian theology of grace of Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) with the
semi-Pelagian theology of Gabriel Biel (d. 1495) to see how wide a range of
options was taught in late medieval universities.
In the sixteenth
century, Cardinal Sadoleto's commentary on Romans was condemned as Pelagian by
the Sorbonne and censured at Rome, much to the embarrassment of the cardinal,
who moved heaven and earth to have the censure lifted.18 Even Marino Grimani,
the Cardinal-Archbishop of Venice and the Patriarch of Aquileia, could be
accused of flirting with Pelagianism when he suggested in his Romans commentary
of 1542 that predestination was based on God's foreknowledge of a good use of
human free will (thereby rejecting the semi-Pelagian notion of predestination
based on God's foreknowledge of a good use of grace and the Augustinian notion
of predestination based on God's good pleasure alone).19
With the exception
of the radical reformers, who feared the Manicheans more than the Pelagians,
early Protestants combated what they regarded as modern Pelagianism by
stressing predestination, the bondage of the human will, and justification by
faith alone. The first two doctrines, predestination and the bondage of the
fallen human will, had been stressed by strongly Augustinian reformers in the
past and came as no surprise to Catholic opponents of the Reformation. But the
third doctrine, justification by faith alone, took Catholic defenders of the
old way off balance.20
Even Cardinal
Sadoleto in his eloquent letter to Geneva
urging its return to the Catholic faith assumed that by faith Protestants meant
only to suggest an intellectual assent to true doctrine (what Sadoleto called
credulitas). If theological orthodoxy were the only criterion for salvation,
objected Sadoleto, then even the devils (all of whom are impeccably orthodox)
would be saved. What the Protestants meant by faith, of course, was something
quite different.21 They meant fiducia, a daring confidence in God, a trust in
promises that could not be verified but that rested on the full faith and
credit of a God who could not lie. Believers were not justified because they
assented to saving truth; they were justified because they placed themselves
unreservedly in the hands of a merciful God.
The Protestant
pattern for justification by faith alone was the figure of Abraham as
interpreted by Paul in Romans 4.22 Abraham was not justified by his
circumcision, his good works (including the binding and offering of Isaac), or
his obedience to a Mosaic law that had not yet been written, but by his faith
in God's promises. So, too, Christians in every age are justified by a gift of
God to which they make no contribution but which they receive gratefully by
faith alone. The good works that flow from a life of grace (and Protestants
like Catholics expected to be morally improved by grace) should be offered to
the neighbor as the fruit of living faith rather than to God as a condign
merit. Only by denying the doctrine of human merit and affirming the doctrine
of justification by faith alone, argued early Protestants, could the dangers of
Pelagianism be avoided and the Augustinian doctrine of salvation by grace alone
be affirmed.
PREACHING THE WORD
OF GOD
A third element in
the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was the force of its new theology of
the word of God. The Reformation was not just a movement dedicated to the study
of the Bible; it was a movement dedicated to the spoken word of God. It was not
the word of God written, but the word of God preached that formed the center of
a renewed Christianity as early Protestants conceived it. When Heinrich
Bullinger of Zurich
wrote in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, "The preaching of the
word of God is the word of God," he was speaking for a broad ecumenical
front of early Protestantism, Lutheran as well as Reformed.23
The Protestant
emphasis on the spoken word had, of course, some parallels in late medieval
thought. Recent scholarship has shown how important was the spoken word in the
rhetorical traditions of Italian civic humanism. The humanists understood that
human beings are more than calculating reason, as scholastic theology seemed to
assume. To be human is to have a will and emotions as well as an intellect.
Many humanists, therefore, looked upon the spoken word as an instrument to move
human beings, to inspire them to action, and thereby to shape public policy.24
The mendicant orders,
of course, had always laid heavy emphasis on the spoken word in preaching and
teaching. "Preach the word," was as much a Dominican or Augustinian
slogan as it was Lutheran or Reformed. While one ought not to make too much of
the relationship of early Protestantism to the mendicant orders, still a good
number of early converts to Protestantism came from mendicant orders, including
Robert Barnes, O.E.S.A., Martin Bucer, O.P., Bernardino Ochino, O.ftM.Cap.,
John Bale, O.Carm., and Conrad Pellikan, O.F.M.
Equally important as
a late medieval parallel was the renewed emphasis on preaching in the Free
Imperial Cities. The laity in several late medieval cities in the Holy Roman
Empire had laid aside funds to pay for a Leutpriester, a priest whose principal
function was to preach on Sundays and feast days, leaving the ordinary
liturgical services to the parochial clergy. The most famous Leutpriester in
the sixteenth century was the preacher in Strasbourg ,
John Geiler of Kaysersberg, who died before the Reformation began.25 The most
famous Leutpriester to identify himself with the Reformation was the Swiss
preacher, Huldrych Zwingli. Like the humanists, these publicly funded preachers
laid emphasis on the spoken word; like the mendicants, they laid emphasis on the
spoken word of God.
And yet there were
differences. However important the preached word was to the mendicants and the
late medieval princes of the pulpit, it was still ancillary to the sacraments.
The sermon could be nothing more than an invitation to baptism, penance, and
eucharist, where alone saving grace was dispensed. It was not the preacher in
the pulpit, however eloquent, but the priest at the altar, however
inarticulate, who stood at the center of medieval worship.26 It was not by the
foolishness of preaching, but by the word joined to the elements of bread and
wine and water that God saved the faithful of every generation. The sermon
moves sinners to the sacraments but is not itself a sacrament.
For Protestants,
there was one means of grace, the voice of the living God. This voice once
spoke by the prophets and apostles and now speaks again in the proclamation of
the church. Preaching became for the reformers a third sacrament, coordinate
with baptism and the eucharist and largely replacing the sacrament of penance.
The power of the keys, the power to bind and loose from sin, was exercised
through the preaching of the gospel. No sacramental power as such was thought
by them to reside in ordination or in ecclesiastical offices. Office bearers were
authorized by the word they carried. They had no authority that was not the
authority of the gospel they preached. It was through the preached word that
God justifies sinners and pardons sin. Even the sacraments of baptism and
eucharist were redefined as the visible word of God.
In the face of this
radical theology of the word of God, the old hierarchical distinctions of
potestas ordinis and potestas iurisdictionis, of priestly order and ecclesial
government, simply collapsed for early Protestants. There is no order higher
than the order of the preacher of the word of God; there is no jurisdiction
greater than jurisdiction exercised by the pastor of a local congregation.
Apostolic succession is succession in apostolic teaching. Christians in the
present are linked to the first generation of apostles, not by an unbroken
succession of bishops, but by an unbroken succession of preachers of apostolic
doctrine. Protestant ministers are not priests forever after the order of
Melchizedek. That is a priesthood that belongs to Christ alone. Protestant
ministers belong to an ordo praedicatorum, an order of preachers that stretches
from the patriarchs to the present. For them it is the pulpit, not the altar,
that is the throne of God and the sermon, not the eucharist, that is the ladder
that links heaven and earth.
THEOLOGICAL SUPPORT
FOR INSTITUTIONAL REFORM
The fourth and final
element in the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was the ideological
support it provided for institutional reform. Catholics and Protestants shared
a wide area of agreement over abuses in the late medieval church, even though
they differed over the best way to reform them. One can take as an example the
question of clerical marriage.27
Although priests in
the eastern Orthodox churches were permitted to marry prior to ordination, and
priests in western churches had married in the earlier Middle Ages (in England
until the Norman invasion), the ban on clerical marriage was total by the
sixteenth century.28 Unfortunately, many clerics (how many is unclear) found
themselves unable or unwilling to live up to the lofty rhetoric of clerical
celibacy. The Archbishop of York, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, had an illegitimate
son, Thomas Wynter, whose existence he did not deny. Indeed, while his son was
still a schoolboy, Wolsey made him Dean of Wells, Provost of Beverly,
Archdeacon of York, Archdeacon of Richmond, Chancellor of Salisbury, Prebendary
of Wells, York , Salisbury ,
Lincoln , and Southwell, and rector of Rudby in
Yorkshire and of St. Matthew's, Ipswich .
In central Europe,
clerics who found the celibate life too demanding were permitted to live in a
sexual relationship with a housekeeper, contingent on the payment of an annual
tax to the bishop.29 Heinrich Bullinger, the Protestant reformer of Zurich, was
the child of such an informal clerical family. Nevertheless, in spite of the
fact that such arrangements were given a quasi-official sanction, the
housekeeper was still regarded by the townspeople as the priest's whore.
Canonically, the priest and his unofficial wife were living in a state of
mortal sin. In a particularly poignant exchange of documents, Huldrych Zwingli,
who had slept with a young woman in a former parish, petitioned his ordinary,
Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg of Constance ,
for permission to marry.30 The application of Zwingli was, of course, denied,
even though many knew Zwingli was already secretly married to a widow, Anna
Reinhart.31
Protestants
attempted to correct the problem of clerical celibacy by denying the
theoretical foundation on which it stood. Protestant theologians attacked the
celibate ethic with its distinction between commands and counsels and its
preference for virginity over matrimony. They insisted that celibacy was a
charism, a gift given to some but denied to others, and therefore could not be
made a general law. They authorized clerical marriage and encouraged the
integration of the pastor into normal family life. In place of saints who were
models of sexual self-denial and asceticism, the Protestants substituted the
minister's family as a model of the Christian home.
There were, of
course, difficulties. Upstanding middle-class families were not always willing
to marry their daughters to former priests and permit them to inherit the beds
so lately occupied by the priest's whore. But the trend was, in any case,
clear. The attack on the theoretical foundations of clerical celibacy allowed
the Protestants to replace an off-again, onagain institution of clerical
celibacy with a married order of ministers, whose marriage and family life were
integral to their ministry. The Protestants ended the embarrassment of the
erratic enforcement of clerical celibacy by abolishing the institution.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION
OF PROTESTANTISM
Things do not always
work out exactly as planned. By mid-century, the Protestants who had hoped to
replace philosophical with biblical theology found themselves forced to return
to philosophy as an essential tool for the writing of Protestant theology.
There were questions that cried out for an answer that could not be answered on
the basis of exegesis alone.
Moreover, Catholic
theologians did not yield Scripture or the early Christian fathers to the
Protestants without a fight. Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, who had made a
name for himself as a philosopher and interpreter of Thomas Aquinas, dropped
his philosophical studies in order to write a series of biblical commentaries
that would demonstrate to Protestants and Catholics alike that the literal
sense of the Bible supports Catholic theology. Domingo de
Soto at Salamanca and Ambrosius
Catherinus Politus at Rome
similarly attempted to show that Protestants had misread Paul.32
By mid-century, a
permanent self-perpetuating Protestant culture had developed. The older
ex-Catholic leadership of former priests, nuns, friars, and monks was slowly
replaced by a new leadership that had never attended mass, much less said one,
and by a laity that had never confessed its sins to a priest, gone on
pilgrimage, invoked patron saints, made a binding vow, or purchased an
indulgence. Riddagshausen, Wienhausen, and Gandersheim were no longer cloisters
to them, but schools or evangelical communities for women. By the time the
century was over, the Protestants had not only transformed formerly Catholic
universities such as Rostock and Leipzig into centers of Protestant intellectual life, but
had founded new universities such as Helmstedt and Giessen that had no memory of a Catholic
past.
While Protestants
continued to write anti-Catholic polemics, their treatises lacked the passion
and sense of betrayal of the polemics written by the first generation.
Protestants were permanent outsiders with their own fixed institutions,
parishes, confessions, catechisms, and settled sense of identity. They harbored
no illusions about reunion and felt no twinges of nostalgia for a church that
had never been their home. Unlike their grandparents, they cherished no hope
for an evangelical reformation of the Catholic Church and settled into a mode
of permanent opposition.33 In
all these respects, the third generation of Protestants differed from the
first. The Reformation began as an argument among Catholic insiders; it
continued as an argument between Catholics and former Catholics until well past
the middle of the century. The transformation of a movement led by former
Catholics into a movement led by traditional Protestants took two generations
to effect. Unless we understand the Catholic background, context, and character
of the early Protestant Reformation, we shall inevitably misunderstand it.
Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Hubmaier, Hooper, and Melanchthon were not Protestants
in the way Voetius, Ames ,
Turrettini, Perkins, Wollebius, and Spener were. In the nature of the case,
they could not be.
Endnotes
1 Representative
of this group is Cardinal Contarini, whose defense of double justice is
available in a critical edition edited by Friedrich Honermann, Gasparo
Contarini: Gegenreformatorische Schriften (1530
c .-1542) (Munster: Aschendorff, 1923), 23-34.
2 Although the
former priests, friars, and monks who formed the core of the urban Protestant
leadership constituted an elite group, the issues that interested them
interested nonelites as well and were therefore capable of widespread public
discussion and debate. When the early reformers denounced publicly in sermons
and pamphlets the defenders of the old church who accused them of heresy, they
were joined in their protest by a substantial group of politically active
laity. Recent studies have shown that a disproportionately large number of
these early Protestant leaders had studied theology at a university rather than
canon law and had even earned advanced degrees. On these issues and related
questions, see the discussion by Euan Cameron, The European Reformation
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 390-6
3 One of the
surprising conclusions from the study of sixteenth-century exegesis is how
difficult it is to identify confessional biases in biblical commentaries. See,
for example, the observation of Kenneth Hagen in Hebrews Commenting from
Erasmus to Beze, 1516-1598 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981), 98:
"Denominational lines of interpretation are virtually non-existent."
4 For example,
Denis the Carthusian in the fifteenth century discusses the question whether
anyone could be justified by faith alone in the context of his exegesis of
Romans 4. Generally speaking, the answer is no, since sinners (including
Abraham) are saved by the faith that works through love. However, an exception
must be made for men and women who do not have an opportunity to work or the
time or place to act. The example Denis offers is the thief on the cross. See
Denis the Carthusian, In ones bead Pauli epistolas commentaria (Cologne : Peter Quentel,
1545), fol. lOv. The Protestants offer as normative what Denis regarded as
exceptional.
5 Luther
emphasizes in the Smalcaldic Articles (1537) that the Lutherans have no quarrel
with Catholics over the doctrine of the Trinity or the person of Christ. See the "Schmalkaldische Artikel,
prima pars," Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche,
2d ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1952), 415:
"Concerning these articles, there is no controversy between us and our
adversaries. . ."
6 See, for
example, John Jewel, who appeals to "ancient bishops" and "the old
catholic fathers," in An Apology of the Church of England
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1963), 17.
7 See in this
connection the valuable anthology by Gerald Strauss, ed., Manifestations of
Discontent in Germany
on the Eve of the Reformation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972).
8 John Calvin,
Opera selecta, 1:437-89. Sadoleto's text is printed in his Opera quae extant
omnia, vol. 4 (Verona ,
1737-1738). For further discussion of this question, see David C. Steinmetz,
"Luther and Calvin on Church and Tradition," Luther in Context
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 85-97. See also John C. Olin,
ed., John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto: A Reformation Debate (New York: Harper
& Row, 1966).
9 On this
question, see John Calvin, Institutes IV ii. 11.
10 Calvin's
annotations have been particularly well studied. In this connection, see Alexandre Ganoczy and
Klaus Muller, Calvins handschriftliche Annotationen zu Chrysostomus: Ein
Beitrag zur Hermeneutik Calvins (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1981). Cf.
David C. Steinmetz, "Calvin and the Patristic Exegesis of Paul," in
The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1990): 100-18.
11 David C.
Steinmetz, "Calvin and His Lutheran Critics," The Lutheran Quarterly
4 (1990), 179-94.
12 Martin Luther,
"Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam," Luthers Werke in
Auswahl, ed. Otto Clemen (Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1912-1913), 5:323:
"43. It is an error to say that `one does not become a theologian without
Aristotle.'; 44. No, rather one does not become a theologian unless that
happens without Aristotle."
13 Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
(Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus, 1883-), 56:371-2.
14 On this
question, see David C. Steinmetz, Luther and Staupitz: An Essay in the
Intellectual Origins of the Protestant Reformation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1980), 61-2.
15 For Calvin's
defense of the technical language of the early Christian writers, see
Institutes I.xiii.3-6.
16 Jean de Gagney,
Brevissima et facillima in omnes divi Pauli epistolas scholia (Paris : Martin Durand,
1529), Argumentum.
17 Gordon Leff,
Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Cambridge : Cambridge University
Press, 1957; Heiko A. Oberman, Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine: A Fourteenth-Century
Augustinian (Utrecht :
Kemink, 1958).
18 Richard M.
Douglass, Jacopo Sadoleto, 1477-1547: Humanist and Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1959), 86-93.
19 Marino Grimani,
In epistolam Pauli ad Romanos et ad Galatas, commentarii (Venice : Aldus, 1542), 71v: "I said that
God foreknew, even predestined, from eternity those who would use well their
own freedom of mind . . ." Cf. 72v: "And so God predestined those
whom he foreknew would make a good use of their free will.. . "
20 John Eck
concedes that justification is by faith but denies that the Bible anywhere
asserts that it is by faith alone: "We confess the just live by faith. For
it is faith that is the foundation of a spiritual edifice, for it is `the
substance of things hoped for.' But because a heretic assumes `by faith alone,'
he lacerates and falsifies the text that nowhere says the just lives by faith
alone" (Johannes Eck, Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum et
alios hostes ecclesiae (1525-1543), ed. Pierre Fraenkel (Munster : Aschendorff, 1979), 97-8.
21 It is clear
that the bishops of Trent
did not repeat Sadoleto's mistake. See Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion
symbolorum: 802.
22 David C.
Steinmetz, "Calvin and Abraham: The Interpretation of Romans 4 in the Sixteenth Century," Church
History 57 (1988), 443-55; "Abraham and the Reformation: The Controversy
over Pauline Interpretation in the Early Sixteenth Century," Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 10, ed. G. M. Masters (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984), 94-114.
23 Wilhelm Niesel, ed., Bekenntnisschriften and
Kirchenordnungen der nach Gottes Wort reformierten Kirche (Zollikon-Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag, 1938), 223: "The preaching of the word of God is the
word of God."
24 On the education
of the orator, see Jean-Claude Margolin, Humanism in Europe
at the Time of the Renaissance (Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press, 1989), 61-3.
25 For the career
and thought of Geiler, see E. Jane Dempsey Douglass, Justification in Late
Medieval Preaching: A Study of John Geiler of Keisersberg (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1966).
26 Geiler
attempted to argue for the primacy of preaching, but without great success. See
ibid., 82-91.
27 For a defense
of celibacy against Protestant criticisms of the institution, see Eck,
Enchiridion, 222-30.
28 The Second
Lateran Council of 1139 pronounced the marriage of clerics in major orders
invalid.
29 Steven E.
Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975),
58-61. Following Oskar Vasella, Ozment notes: "Clerical marriage would
have been a great financial loss to the bishop of Constance ."
30 Zwingli
explains his brief affair with the daughter of a barber in Einsiedeln in a
letter to Heinrich Utinger in Zurich
dated December 5, 1518. See
Huldreich Zwinglis Sdmtliche Werke, vol. 7, ed. E. Egli, G. Finsler, and W.
Kohler (Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1911), 110-3. The bishop
himself was known to be intimate with the widow of the former burgomaster of Constance . See Cameron, European Reformation, 44.
32 Domingo de Soto , O.P., In
epistolam divi Pauli. ad Romanos commentarii (Antwerp: Jan Steelsius, 1550), 5:
"Therefore, we are justified not by faith alone (as they falsely preach)
but by faith working through love . . ."; Ambrosius Catherinus Politus,
O.P., Commentarius in omnes divi Pauli et alias septem canonicas epistolas
(Venice: Vincent Valgrisi, 1551), a2: "For if we regard the [Pauline]
exegetes of our age (who today are a large number), by far the greater part of
them are heretics.. . "
33 Richard A.
Muller, in Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. I (Grand Rapids: Baker,
1987), 15-52, argues that the discursive, polemical theology of the early
reformers, aimed at the reform of abuses in the life and thought of the
medieval Catholic Church, was replaced by a more sophisticated, dialectical
theology, aimed at protecting and establishing the Protestant churches.
David C.
Steinmetz is Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity
School
Source: Theology Today, January 2001.
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