Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

The second weapon in the papal arsenal was the interdict. While excommunication was aimed at individuals, the interdict fell upon whole nations. It suspended all public worship and, with the exception of baptism and extreme unction, it withdrew the sacraments from the lands of disobedient rulers. Pope Innocent III successfull...

Now, in the age of the grand cathedral, crusaders from Western Europe attempted to expel the Muslims from the Holy Land. Historians have attributed numerous motives to the crusaders beyond their religious fervor. Did they seek adventure in these strange foreign lands? Would they find personal gain or spiritual advantage? While few contemporary Christians would defend the idea of the crusades or its most gross offenses, we must not overlook a simple reality. The Christians sought to counter Islam’s remarkable military conquest and preserve their geographic strongholds from being overrun. By the eighth century, one half of all Christians lived under Islamic rule. All the great and colorful figures of this era were caught up in this consuming cause, from Peter the Hermit, who enflamed the First Crusade, to the saintly Louis IX, King of France, who inspired the Sixth and Seventh.

Some of our men . . . cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. . . . It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon [where] . . . men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.

In 1187 Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, brought fresh and vigorous leadership to the Muslims. When Jerusalem fell to the infidels, Christians with some reluctance responded to the cry for the Third Crusade (1189). Its leaders were three of the most famous medieval kings: Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, and Philip Augustus of France. Frederick was drowned in Asia Minor; and, after many quarrels with Richard, Philip returned home. Saladin and Richard remained the chief protagonists.

Unfortunately the popes never held two basic truths that we must never forget: Christianity’s highest satisfactions are not guaranteed by possession of special places, and the sword is never God’s way to extend Christ’s church. This fault assured the religious collapse of the whole structure.

The curriculum of the cathedral school was limited to grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—the seven liberal arts, so called because in ancient Rome their study had been reserved for liberi, freemen.

For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.

The overall thrust for Aristotle was not to separate two unfitting dimensions (the conceptual and material), but was to discover and admire how the best thinking integrated or fit with the material world by God’s special design.

His life work was to insist that good thinking never leads the learner away from God’s truth. The truth that God reveals surpasses the truth we can achieve by reasoning, but they never contradict. As the popular saying goes, “All truth is God’s truth.

Aquinas followed Peter Lombard who had written the standard textbook for theology, in holding to seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, the Lord’s Supper, penance, extreme unction, marriage, and ordination.

As the Roman Church had for centuries, Aquinas held that it is a true sacrifice, continuing that of Christ on the cross, and predisposing God to be gracious to those for whom it was offered. In the Supper the essence or genuine being of the bread and wine are changed miraculously into the actual body and blood of Christ while the exterior remains unchanged. Thomas gives the classic presentation of this doctrine known as transubstantiation.

But where is the one pure church? Is it in the papal palace in Rome? Is it in the blood of crusading armies or in the sale of indulgences to the poor? What if the one pure church is in none of these, but is in fact in the hungry who find bread, the naked who are clothed, and the stranger who finds rest? What if the kingdom of heaven does belong to the poor in spirit? That was the question Lady Poverty raised.

One of the earliest voices against the worldliness of the Catholic Church was Arnold, an abbot at Brescia, a town in northern Italy. In a series of sermons at Brescia, Arnold insisted that clerical vice was a result of the church’s attempt to control the world. He urged the church to surrender its property and secular dominion to the state and return to the poverty and simplicity of the early church. The true church and its ministers, he said, should shun wealth, for wealth and power nullify salvation.

As he gained a few followers, Waldo sent them out two by two, after the apostolic pattern, into villages and marketplaces, to teach and explain the Scriptures. They called themselves the “Poor in Spirit.” We know them as Waldenses.

Six and three-quarter centuries later, Pope Paul VI echoed Boniface’s words in announcing that 1975 would be another Holy Year. The “gift of the Plenary Indulgence” were Paul’s words. And as in the first Holy Year Rome threw open her arms to the throngs who came.

Boniface VIII (1294–1303), the founder of the Holy Years, had a flair for pomp and circumstance. Several times he appeared before the pilgrims in imperial robes crying “I am Caesar. I am emperor.” According to reports his papal crown contained forty-eight rubies, seventy-two sapphires, forty-five emeralds, and sixty-six large pearls. He could afford to be generous with pardons for spiritual pilgrims. At the Church of St. Paul, according to one chronicler, generous celebrants kept two priests busy night and day “raking together infinite money.

Europe was slowly moving away from its feudal past. Land was less important; hard cash was the new thing. Increasingly, men at the top of the medieval power structure realized that they had to command everlarger sources of revenue. This, in turn, required a broader authority to tax. The struggle between the church and the brash national monarchies of England and France touched off the turmoil of the fourteenth century. Edward I ruled in England; Philip the Fair in France. Both were strong and self-assured and at odds with each other over lands in France still under English control. To finance their costly campaigns, Edward and Philip hit upon the same solution: tax the clergy within their realms. But, in the pope’s view, church revenues were exempt from compulsory assessments and taxable only by the church. In 1296 Boniface VIII had issued Clericis laicos, a document threatening excommunication for any lay ruler who taxed the clergy and any churchman who paid those taxes without papal consent. But Edward and Philip were a new breed of secular monarch, unimpressed by threats from Rome. Edward’s retort was to decree that if the clergy did not pay, they would be stripped of all legal protection and their extensive properties would be seized by the king’s sheriffs. Phillip’s answer was to place a complete embargo on the export of all gold, silver, and jewels from his domains, thus depriving the papal treasury of a major source of revenue from church collections in France. Face...

Several months later Boniface issued Unam sanctam, the most extreme assertion of papal power in all church history. This time Boniface made his meaning unmistakable. “It is altogether necessary,” he declared, “for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” The king’s countermove was no less drastic. He prepared to have Boniface deposed on the ground that his election had been illegal. To execute this plan he chose William of Nogaret, a shrewd lawyer who was helping Philip build the foundations of his nation.

Thus, with Urban ruling from Rome and Clement from Avignon, the murky chapter in papal history called the Great Schism of the papacy begins. It lasted for thirty-nine years. Each pope had his own College of Cardinals, thereby insuring the papal succession of its own choice. Each pope claimed to be the true Vicar of Christ, with the power to excommunicate those who did not acknowledge him.

France went with Clement; Italy with Urban. The empire went with Urban; so did England. Scotland went with Clement. But within each country minorities existed. Tumults and riots broke out. Property was burned and crusades were preached. A house divided against itself could not stand.

Two brave souls—John Wyclif, an Englishman, and John Hus, a Czech—dared to toy with the idea that the Christian church was something other than a visible organization on earth headed by the pope. They paid dearly for even raising the possibility, but they saw clearly that the hour had come for judgment to fall upon the house of God.

The long-range significance of Wyclif’s teaching on dominion lies in its link with the Reformation. It was the English Reformer’s way of emphasizing the spiritual freedom of the righteous man. He is a possessor of “a dominion founded on grace”: “God gives no lordship to His servants without first giving Himself to them.

This doctrine of “dominion founded in grace” proved to be only the first of Wyclif’s thunderbolts. The decisive year of his reforming career was 1378, the date of the Great Schism in the papacy. Faced with the comic-tragedy of one pope in Rome excommunicating another pope in Avignon, Wyclif became more radical in his assessment of the church and its need for reform.

In a steady stream of charges Wyclif showed how far the papacy had departed from the simple faith and practice of Christ and his disciples. “Christ is truth,” he wrote, “the pope is the principle of falsehood. Christ lived in poverty, the pope labors for worldly magnificence. Christ refused temporal dominion, the pope seeks it.

The standard Wyclif used to judge the Roman Church was the teachings of Scripture. “Neither the testimony of Augustine nor Jerome,” he said, “nor any other saint should be accepted except in so far as it was based upon Scripture.” “Christ’s law,” he held, “is best and enough, and other laws men should not take, but as branches of God’s law.

In all of his puritan outcry, Wyclif aroused no hostility like that sparked by his attack upon the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation. In the summer of 1380 he published twelve arguments against the idea that the bread and wine of Holy Communion were transformed into the physical body and blood of Christ. He asserts that the early church held that the consecrated elements of bread and wine were efficacious symbols of Christ’s body and blood. Hence, Christ is present in the elements sacramentally, not materially. The end of the sacrament is the presence of Christ in the soul.

draw me, weak as I am, after Thyself, for if Thou dost not draw us we cannot follow Thee. Strengthen my spirit, that it may be willing. If the flesh is weak, let Thy grace precede us; come between and follow, for without Thee we cannot go for Thy sake to cruel death. Give me a fearless heart, a right faith, a firm hope, a perfect love, that for Thy sake I may lay down my life with patience and joy. Amen.

“God is my witness that the evidence against me is false. I have never thought nor preached except with the one intention of winning men, if possible, from their sins. In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught, and preached; today I will gladly die.

During an eighteen-day debate in 1519 with theologian John Eck at Leipzig, Luther blurted out, “A council may sometimes err. Neither the church nor the pope can establish articles of faith. These must come from Scripture.” Thus Luther had moved from his first conviction—that salvation was by faith in Christ alone—to a second: that the Scriptures, not popes or councils, are the standard for Christian faith and behavior.

“Good works do not make a man good,” he said, “but a good man does good works.

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” he told the court. “I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither honest nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.

Disguised as a minor nobleman, Junker George, the Reformer stayed for nearly a year; during the time, he translated the New Testament into German, an important first step toward reshaping public and private worship in Germany.

All, however, was not well in Germany. During 1524 Luther revealed how much he had surrendered in gaining the support of the German princes. Encouraged by the Reformer’s concept of the freedom of a Christian man, which they applied to economic and social spheres, the German peasants revolted against their lords. Long ground down by the nobles, the peasants included in their twelve demands abolition of serfdom—unless it could be justified from the gospel—and relief from the excessive services demanded of them. At first Luther recognized the justice of the peasants’ complaints, but when they turned to violence against established authority, he lashed out against them. In a virulent pamphlet, Against the Thievish and Murderous Hordes of Peasants, Luther called on the princes to “knock down, strangle, and stab . . . and think nothing so venomous, pernicious, or Satanic as an insurgent.” In 1525 the princes and nobles crushed the revolt at a cost of an estimated one hundred thousand peasant lives. The surviving peasants considered Luther a false prophet. Many of them returned to Catholicism or turned to more radical forms of the Reformation.

After Augsburg Luther continued to preach and teach the Bible in Wittenberg, but even sympathetic biographers have found it hard to justify some of the actions of his declining years. As Time once put it, “He endorsed the bigamous marriage of his supporter, Prince Philip of Hesse. He denounced reformers who disagreed with him in terms that he had once reserved for the papacy. His statements about the Jews would sound excessive on the tongue of a Hitler.” By the time of his death in 1546, says biographer Roland Bainton, Luther was “an irascible old man, petulant, peevish, unrestrained, and at times positively coarse.” Fortunately, the personal defects of an aging rebel do not in any way detract from the grandeur of his achievement, which ultimately transformed not only Christianity but all of Western civilization.

Luther’s greatest contribution to history, however, was not political. It was religious. He took four basic Catholic concerns and offered invigorating new answers. To the question, how is a person saved? Luther replied, “not by works but by faith alone.” To the question, where does religious authority lie? he answered, “not in the visible institution called the Roman church but in the Word of God found in the Bible.” To the question, what is the church? he responded, “the whole community of Christian believers, since all are priests before God.” And to the question, what is the essence of Christian living? he replied, “serving God in any useful calling, whether ordained or lay.” To this day any classical description of Protestantism must echo those central truths.

George Blaurock, a former priest, stepped over to Conrad Grebel and asked him for baptism in the apostolic fashion: upon confession of personal faith in Jesus Christ. Grebel baptized him on the spot and Blaurock proceeded to baptize the others. Thus Anabaptism, another important expression of the Protestant Reformation, was born.

Today the direct descendants of the Anabaptists are the Mennonites and the Hutterites. Americans probably think of them as bearded farmers and their bonnet-covered wives driving their horses and buggies across some Pennsylvania or Iowa countryside. No automobiles; no buttons; no zippers. In fact only one section of the Mennonites, the Old Order Amish, holds tenaciously to the old ways. The majority of Mennonites looks like any other Americans and consume their share of energy like the rest of us.

So the distant relatives of the Anabaptists today include the Baptists, the Quakers and, in one sense, the Congregationalists. In fact, in their belief in the separation of church and state the Anabaptists proved to be forerunners of practically all modern Protestants.

Like the Benedictine monks of an earlier day, the Anabaptists demonstrate that those who live most devoutly for the world to come are often in the best position to change the present.

Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously.

As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea.

Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society.

The radicals found their best opportunities to preach in Switzerland, the Rhineland, and Holland. By mid-century three groups appeared in German-speaking Europe: (1) the Swiss Brethren, led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz at Zurich; (2) the Hutterite brethren in Moravia; and (3) the Mennonites in the Netherlands and North Germany.

In one important respect Zwingli followed the Bible even more stringently than did Luther. The Wittenberger would allow whatever the Bible did not prohibit; Zwingli rejected whatever the Bible did not prescribe. For this reason the reformation in Zurich tended to strip away more traditional symbols of the Roman church: candles, statues, music, and pictures. Later, in England, men called this spirit Puritanism.

In the fall of 1524, when Grebel’s wife gave birth to a son, all the theories faced the test of action. Would the baby be baptized? The Grebels refused, and other parents followed their example. To deal with the crisis, the City Council of Zurich arranged a public debate on the question for January 17, 1525. After hearing arguments on both sides of the issue, representatives of the people declared Zwingli and his disciples the winners. As a result the council warned all parents who had neglected to have their children baptized to do so within a week or face banishment from Zurich.

Finally, the Zurich council lost all patience. On March 7, 1526, it decided that anyone found re-baptizing would be put to death by drowning.

Within a year, on January 5, 1527, Felix Manz became the first Anabaptist martyr. The Zurich authorities drowned him in the Limmat, which flows through the city. Within four years the radical movement in and around Zurich was practically eradicated.

My dearest child, the true love of God strengthen you in virtue, you who are yet so young, and whom I must leave in this wicked, evil, perverse world. Oh, that it had pleased the Lord that I might have brought you up, but it seems that it is not the Lord’s will . . . . Be not ashamed of us; it is the way which the prophets and the apostles went. Your dear father demonstrated with his blood that it is the genuine faith, and I also hope to attest the same with my blood, though flesh and blood must remain on the posts and on the stake, well knowing that we shall meet hereafter.

A conservative Lutheran group was at first strong there. But then new immigrants, who were apostles of a strange figure called Jan Matthijs, led to fanaticism among those in power. Many looked for the creation of the Lord’s earthly kingdom in Munster. Church historians call such views chiliasm, meaning belief in a thousand-year earthly kingdom of Christ.

When the bishop of the region massed his troops to besiege the city, these Anabaptists uncharacteristically defended themselves by arms. As the siege progressed, the more extreme leaders gained control of the city. In the summer of 1534 a former innkeeper, Jan of Leiden, seized the powers of government and ruled as an absolute despot. Claiming new revelations from God, Jan introduced the Old Testament practice of polygamy and by September took the title “King David.” With his harem “King David” lived in splendor, yet by a strange cunning he maintained morale in the city in spite of widespread hunger. He was able to keep the bishop’s army at bay until June 24, 1535. The fall of the city brought an end to David’s reign. But for centuries thereafter Europeans, upon hearing “Anabaptist,” thought of the Munster rebellion. It stood for wild-eyed religious fanaticism.