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May 10 - May 18, 2022
what seemed to fuel the cult was the way in which Christ became an increasingly daunting figure in the public mind through the Middle Ages. More and more, the risen and ascended Christ was seen as the Doomsday Judge, all-terrible in his holiness. Who could approach him? Surely he’d listen to his mother. And so, as Christ receded into heaven, Mary became the mediator
The official line was that Mary and the saints were to be venerated, not worshipped; but on the ground that was much too subtle a distinction for people who were not being taught. All too often the army of saints was treated as a pantheon of gods, and their relics treated as magical talismans of power.
The very fact that services were in Latin, a language the people did not know, betrays the reality that teaching was not really a priority.
Such were most Christians on the eve of the Reformation: devoted, and devoted to the improvement, but not the overthrow, of their religion. This was not a society looking for radical change, only a clearing-up of acknowledged abuses.
The base of the great statue of Hus in Prague reads, ‘Great is the truth, and it prevails’; certainly, Hus and his message had a future.
Excited by the prospect of the rebirth (or ‘renaissance’) of classical culture, Petrarch’s followers, who began to be known as ‘humanists’, believed that they could end the ‘Dark’ or ‘Middle’ Age in their own day. ‘Ad fontes!’ (‘To the sources!’) was their battle-cry as they laid siege to the ignorance of their day with the beautiful weapons of classical literature and culture. It was unfortunate for papal Rome, for it was in the darkness of that Middle Age that she had grown, and the light of the new learning would not be kind to her.
Over the following months he became increasingly clear that, if Rome held the pope to be an authority above Scripture, she could never be reformed by God’s word. The pope’s word would always trump God’s. In that case, the reign of the antichrist there was sealed, and it was no longer the church of God but the synagogue of Satan.
Luther himself was clear that his breakthrough did not come to him until nearly two years after the ninety-five theses. It would be the end-point of a long and painful journey.
Yet Luther saw the problem is in our hearts: self-love shapes the very grain of our desires. As a result, our ‘best’ can be nothing more than self-love.
The Freedom of a Christian
This is the sin of the world: that it does not believe on Christ. Not that there is no sin against the law besides this; but that this is the real chief sin, which condemns the whole world even if it could be charged with no other sin.
Zwingli set about the creation of a school for preachers. The first stage was a grammar school for boys, to get them literate. After that, the next stage was a theological college. There the students were, as Zwingli put it, ‘given the gift of tongues’ (the knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) and taught how to ‘prophesy’ (preach). With their days spent in Bible study and lectures in theology, a whole generation of pastors and missionaries arose who were well trained in the knowledge of the Bible. Out of the study times came commentaries on many books of the Bible, as well as a complete
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Calvin
while pitifully weak in body and naturally retiring by temperament, he was dauntingly strong in both mind and will. A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.
Geneva officially allied herself to the Reformation. The city’s motto had been Post tenebras spero lucem (‘After darkness I hope for light’), but in commemoration of the event, coins were now struck with a new motto: Post tenebras lux (‘After darkness, light’); for now, they declared, they had found what once they had hoped for.
keenest subject of controversy between us’. The way Calvin argues here is very revealing: ‘Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished.’ In the Reformation mind-set, salvation is a gift of God’s grace alone (sola gratia), found, not in any pope or Mass, but in Christ alone (solus Christus), and received by simple faith alone (sola fide). And we can know this for certain only through Scripture (sola Scriptura).
‘to God alone be the glory’ (soli Deo gloria),
1618–19, a synod of Reformed theologians met in Dordt (or Dordrecht) to deal finally with the Remonstrance. In response to its five points they produced their ‘Five Articles against the Remonstrants’, later put into the appropriately Dutch acronym ‘TULIP’: T Total depravity. Meaning not that we are as sinful as we possibly could be, but that sin has so comprehensively affected us that we have no ability to do anything towards our own salvation. U Unconditional election. Meaning that God unconditionally chooses some people for salvation and others for damnation, and does not base that decision
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Among Mary’s most famous victims were the old Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer; the famous preacher and Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer; and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. In 1555, Ridley and Latimer were burned together, back to back, at the end of Broad Street in Oxford. Latimer, aged about eighty, was the first to die, shouting through the flames: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Unfortunately for Ridley the wood had been badly laid around him so that
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Five months later Thomas Cranmer was burned on the same spot. The old archbishop and architect of so much of the English Reformation, now nearly seventy, had, under extreme duress, renounced his Protestantism. It was a triumph for Mary’s reign. Despite his recantation, however, he was such an embodiment of the Reformation that it was decided he should be burned in any case. It was a decision that would more than undo Mary’s victory, for when the day came, Cranmer refused to read out his recantation. Instead he stated boldly that he was indeed a Protestant, though a cowardly one for forsaking
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Simply put, a reformation driven more by theology looks quite unlike a reformation driven more by politics.
as we look at the history of the Reformation, we are forced to ask: are there beliefs worth dying for? All those martyrs suffered for nothing if what they died for was either untrue or irrelevant. They might, of course, have been mistaken (and each side of the Reformation divide would have agreed that the other side’s martyrs were mistaken), but their fates demand more than flippant dismissal.
for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many, and so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. To break out of that suffocating scheme and achieve any substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude, that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura).
means we cannot simply enrol the Reformation into the cause of ‘progress’. For, if anything, the Reformers were not after progress but regress: they were never mesmerized by novelty as we are, nor impatient of what was old, just because it was old; instead, their intent was to unearth original, old Christianity, a Christianity that had been buried under centuries of human tradition.
