A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The first of these three drew on the ancient tensions between pope and emperor to proclaim that the pope was the enemy not just of the empire but of all Christendom. As imperialist spokesmen had long maintained (see p. 558), he was Antichrist, but furthermore, so was the whole apparatus of his Church. The Babylonian Captivity addressed itself in Latin to those inside that apparatus, seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. 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. Luther performed something of a balancing act when he spoke of the Mass: he 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. The third book explored the problem of its title: how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? Luther, never afraid of paradox, boldly gave an answer answerless: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’13 The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom God had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity.