What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church

by Gavin Ortlund

What must be grasped is that Hus’s execution was not a violation of medieval Roman Catholic theology, but its expression. This sounds shocking to modern ears, but it is true to history. The medieval Roman Catholic Church claimed the authority to exterminate heretics, and to do so through the secular authority, over which she claimed jurisdiction.36 Boniface VIII’s 1302 bull Unam Sanctam, for example, distinguished between the “temporal sword” (wielded by the secular authority) and the “spiritual sword” (wielded by the church), insisting that the temporal is subject to the spiritual: Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest. However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other and temporal authority, subjected to spiritual power.37