A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

he loathed the presence of Aristotle in scholastic theological discussion, and he came to despise the nominalist idea of a salvation contract between God and humanity which Gabriel Biel had pioneered (see

When Luther turned to Romans, at the heart of his presentation of the message of salvation was the doctrine of predestination: ‘whoever hates sin is already outside sin and belongs to the elect’.

text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: ‘the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written “he who through faith is righteous shall live”’. In this sentence, the words ‘righteousness/righteous’ were in the Vulgate’s Latin ‘justitia/justus’: hence the word justification.7 In Latin that literally means making someone righteous, but in Luther’s understanding – in a literally crucial difference – it rather meant declaring someone to be righteous.

Since the word justitia is linked so closely with faith, as in Romans 1.17, we see how Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul’s closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel.

After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous God’s fury against his sinfulness.

he said that he had come to hate this God who had given laws in the Old Testament which could not be kept and which thus held humankind back from salvation. The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by God himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology.

He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority.

Finally in 1520 Luther found himself excommunicated, cut off by the Pope from the fellowship of the whole Church. He publicly burned the bull of excommunication in Wittenberg,

He had accepted his total sinfulness. This gave him a paradoxical sense of his own rightness, and if the Pope was telling him that he was wrong in proclaiming God’s cause, that must mean that the Pope was God’s enemy.

Above all, God’s Eucharist had been turned to a Mass which falsely claimed to be a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice once offered on the Cross.

kept a passionate sense of the presence of the Lord’s body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Georg Rörer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.

has humanity retained free will to respond to God’s offer of grace?

Erasmus emphasized that the initiative in grace was with God. After that, however, he sought to avoid a dogmatic single formula on grace; for him this was Luther’s chief fault.

Luther set out a pitiless message that human beings could expect nothing but condemnation, and had nothing to offer God to merit salvation:

In 1525 large areas of central Europe were convulsed by revolts against princes and Church leaders: the Bauernkrieg, often misleadingly translated into English as the ‘Peasants’ War’, but better rendered the ‘Farmers’ War’

Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, ‘Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from God’. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. Many humanist scholars now drew back from

Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church, and Albrecht of newly ‘ducal’ Prussia, who had already sounded out Luther in a face-to-face meeting in Wittenberg in late 1523, institutionalized this during summer 1525, creating the first evangelical princely Church in Europe.

Zürich became home to another variety of evangelical Reformation which had little more than an indirect debt to Luther, and whose chief reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, created a rebellion against Rome with very different priorities. Certainly at the heart of it was a proclamation of the freedom of a Christian to receive salvation by faith through grace,

Now not Rome but Zürich city council would decide Church law, using as their reference point the true sacred law laid down in scripture.

the magistrates of Zürich could hold disputations to decide the nature of the Eucharist, just as they might make directions for navigation on Lake Zürich or make arrangements for sewage disposal.

Often Reformed Protestantism has been called ‘Calvinism’,

There has never been any imposed uniformity among the Reformed family.

there were two contrasting ways of numbering the Commandments, and that the system to which Augustine of Hippo had long ago given his authority conveniently downplayed the command against images.

Now Zürichers started pulling down images from churches and from the roadside. This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never enthused Swiss society.

First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Mass itself was banned in the city. Until that latter moment, astonishingly, Zürich still remained in communion with its traditional ally the Pope,

destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: it suggested that images had some power, and in fact they had none. What could be wrong with beautiful pictures of God’s mother

the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other all the rest – including the Anglican Communion.

‘zum Ansehen, zum Zeugnis, zum Gedächtnis, zum Zeichen’ (‘for recognition, for witness, for commemoration, for a sign’).

Where Luther had contrasted law (bad) and Gospel (good), Zürich now contrasted law (good) and idolatry (bad).

Zwingli, a thoroughgoing humanist in his education and a deep admirer of Erasmus, emphasized the spirit against the flesh.

Luther, he thought, was being crudely literal-minded to flourish Christ’s statement at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body … this is my blood’, as meaning that bread and wine in some sense became the body and blood of Christ.

When Luther had jettisoned the idea of the Mass as sacrifice and the doctrine of transubstantiation, why could the obstinate Wittenberger not see that it was illogical to maintain any notion of physical presence in eucharistic bread and wine? Jesus Christ could hardly be on the communion table when Christians know that he is sitting at the right hand of God (this argument pioneered by Karlstadt may seem crass now, but it became a firm favourite with Reformed Christians).

The Eucharist could indeed be a sacrifice, but one of faith and thankfulness by a Christian to God, a way of remembering what Jesus had done for humanity on the Cross, and all the Gospel promises which followed on from it in scripture. And what was true for the Eucharist must be true for the other biblical sacrament, baptism.

The Eucharist was the community meeting in love, baptism was the community extending a welcome.

when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants,

Zwingli said that the sacraments were pledges of faith by Christian believers who had already received God’s gift of saving faith, surely Christian baptism ought to be a conscious act of faith by the person baptized – ‘believers’ baptism’. Clearly babies could not make such an act, so baptism ought to be reserved for adults.

Because the radicals sought to give a new and genuine baptism to those who had been baptized as infants, their enemies called them in cod-Greek ‘rebaptizers’ or Anabaptists.

Zwingli was appalled at this logical deduction from his own theology, because it contradicted another axiom of his thought, that the Church of Zürich embraced the whole city of Zürich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers.

The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society.

In the end, the besiegers breached the defences in 1535 and Münster Anabaptists were sadistically suppressed. Radicalism thereafter turned from militancy to quiet escapes from ordinary society,

Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church’s doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine’s seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214–15),

Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a ‘paper Pope’, and affirmed that God spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through ‘inner light’.

From the mid-sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the Lower Austrian nobility, and of the inhabitants in the Habsburg capital Vienna, were avowed Lutherans, despite all Habsburg efforts to obstruct this growth, and Lutheranism quietly consolidated itself elsewhere.

The early Reformation gained a curious sort of victory in England, where the murderously opinionated monarch Henry VIII found an alliance with Reformers useful during his eccentric marital adventures.

Henry, increasingly convinced that the Pope was God’s enemy as well as England’s in denying him his annulment, conceived the idea of repudiating papal jurisdiction.

used the organizing skills of a newly recruited royal minister, Thomas Cromwell, to secure legislation in his Parliament enacting a break with Rome.

Among them was Cromwell, who was working closely with another new recruit, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, appointed in 1533 to formalize Henry’s annulment and new marriage.

was William Tyndale, one of the geniuses of the English Reformation; after Henry’s agents secured his kidnap while he was in exile in Antwerp, he was strangled at the stake before his corpse was burned near Brussels. He bequeathed the English nothing less than the first translation of the New Testament and Pentateuch in their own language since the by then archaic version of the Lollards 150 years before.

He understood that English might actually be closer than Latin to Hebrew in its rhythms and driving narrative force, and the results coruscate with life and energy