The Protestant Reformation and Work

foreign we're going to be looking at the Reformation understanding of work and we're going to explore the ways in which the Protestant reformers shaped and adapted to the new Protestant world by addressing usually indirectly the concept of the average day in and day out work life of the vast majority of people in this world and I think a good place to begin is with the common caricature of the Reformation understanding of work some of you may have heard or read this sort of basic understanding of the Protestant view of work and it goes like this the assumption is is that the ancient Church in by extension the medieval Church samel got off the rails in their understanding of the distinction between sacred and secular the most common allegation is that from Aristotle you get this distinction between the contemplative life and the act of life Aristotle does talk about this in his Nick of McKeon ethics he talks about the two forms of work one being active that is in his day and age those who work with their hands those who are Craftsmen those who don't work in the life of the Mind as Aristotle did an Aristotle more or less describes that form of life as slavery as somehow being bound to the need to work and he holds up this idea that there's this contemplative life the life he lives frankly which is superior and the popular understanding is is that that kind of Greco-Roman understanding of work somehow seeped into the bloodstream of the church there are people like eusebius of caesarea who talks about two forms of life the perfect life and the permitted life and he seems to suggest that those who work in spiritual means are somehow living the perfect life those who devote themselves to prayer and study in teaching and that there is what he calls the permitted life of those who work in every other sphere of life now that's not quite the Aristotelian distinction he's actually not necessarily speaking down to the concept of work though there is something about this idea of being permitted to work which is somewhat lesser at least in terms of the tone of it the great synthesizer of this two approach to life person of course was Augustine like so many other doctrines Augustine formed and shaped the language that the majority of the church would use thereafter and Augustine talked about the distinction between the contemplative life and not the permitted life or the inferior life but what he called the act of life those who are active in the world and those who were contemplative now that word contemplative in Modern English usage might be a bit misunderstood what Augustine is not saying is that contemplative people are simply mystical or that they spend all their time just sort of thinking deep thoughts only rather he puts all this into a context of those who are active in things that are higher and those who are active in things that are of God's world but are not the spiritual things and this is very typical for Augustine whether it's from his platonism or just simply from his instincts from his reading of scripture Augustine always talks about the Inward and the outward life and when he looks at work versus spiritual matters he does tend to distinguish that in the same way there are higher callings of the contemplative life his life for example and then there is the act of Life those who are out in the world well all these things are certainly facts Aristotle eusebius and Augustine certainly said all these things where things tend to go awry though is how most people understand the medieval application of this and it's important to get this just right because we really cannot understand what the reformers are saying about work until we know what it is they're critiquing and the common assumption is that the Medieval World was somehow relatively harshly divided between the secular and the sacred that the church somehow fostered this idea that there's the sacred World which is the superior world again sort of taking from Augustine and others and that the pastors and the priests and the Bishops live in that world in the superior world and again the common misconception is that the secular world the world of work is itself inferior in cell when we jump to the Reformation the application that usually comes out of this is that people say that the reformers somehow exploded this distinction between sacred and secular that they somehow Sanctified and sacralized the secular world and it's often alleged that Luther and Calvin and others but particularly Luther refer to quote the secular world as a sacred calling and it depends on who you ask but there are all kinds of conclusions that are drawn from this sort of one-two move from the medieval to the Reformation conception of this thing some see the reformers is doing a good thing based on this they see the sacred secular distinction as a problem they see the denigration of work in the world as somehow out of step with the Biblical teaching and so often there's an Applause that comes with the Protestant understanding of work and another piece that's usually wrapped up in this is a certain conception of the priesthood of all believers it's sometimes said that what Luther and others do is they elevate the priesthood of all believers in an effort to destroy the sacred secular distinction and to kind of collapse everything into itself and therefore many popular modern commentators believe what the reformers achieve is uh sanctifying again or a sacralizing of work now that General Arc that General pattern is again relatively common there are however a number of problems with it that we want to clarify and get right if we're going to really understand the Protestant understanding of the difference in the understanding of work between the Medieval World and the Reformation world and the problems are really threefold first and foremost the issue in the Reformation was never not in one sense was it ever the problem of the distinction between the sacred and the secular that distinction between sacred and secular that harsh distinction and the church's problems with it are a product of the Enlightenment they're not a product of the Medieval World it's the enlightenment that wants to sort of radically separate secular things from sacred in the medieval and the Reformation world the word secular if it was used was actually not a bad connotation the cyclum in Latin just simply means the world itself it means creation it doesn't have this pejorative tone of being in the world as somehow being in this sort of post-christian pagan Enlightenment world where the church is sort of to resolve itself only to spiritual matters on Sundays so that distinction is a problem it's not actually the issue the sacred secular problem is never raised by Protestant reformers in the 16th century secondly the understanding of the priesthood of all believers in this typical story is actually false in fact I often find that the understanding of the priesthood of all believers concept is probably one of the most misunderstood issues in the Reformation in today's world it's often believed that the priesthood of all believers means essentially the egalitarianism of all forms of calling or work that pastoral responsibilities are really no different than working in the workplace or that anyone because they're appreciative of all believers really can kind of be their own pastor the problem with this is again not a single reformer ever said this more importantly not a single reformer ever referred to something called the priesthood of all believers the priests of all believers is a later connotation of the kinds of things that the reformers were talking about and I'm going to get into what the priests of all believers is in just a minute but just for right now the issue is when Luther is talking about the elevation and his support for the worker and the Craftsman he doesn't achieve that by discussing the priesthood of all believers either by the name or even in concept and thirdly and lastly the problem with this typical Arc from the medieval denigration of work to the Reformation elevation of work is that it simply misunderstands what the Catholic church is trying to do in the Middle Ages the Catholic church again is not trying to separate lading clergy in this harsh distinction in the fullest sense and they're not trying to say that the priests are the only ones who are of importance per se there are actually very few debates and fights on this Grand scale philosophically about the distinction between clergy and laity that distinction has been there since the ancient church and I think there are biblical grounds to say that there is a distinction between some ordained office and those who are part of the church we can think for example of Paul saying that those who want to lead in the congregations should take care because they will be held to a higher account and while we certainly don't want to read Paul here as saying that the priests or the pastors are better we do see a distinction here Paul also gives all kinds of structures and qualifications for those who are going to be in the ordained roles in the churches so you see some sort of Distinction here and that's just the tip of the iceberg in other words the issue is not the distinction between clergy and laity or between those who work in the church or in spiritual matters and those who work in the quote secular world because if there's one characteristic of the medieval Church in particular it's not that they distinguished and separated a sphere of the secular world in the spiritual world rather the medieval Catholic move is to believe that the Catholic church has Authority and influence over all of it there are all kinds of Concepts that allowed them to say this one of the more important ones was this idea of the two swords that there is a sword of the world or the political regimes I.E everyday life and then there's the sword of the church or the spiritual sword and again and again and again particularly when you get into the high Middle Ages say roughly 1300 and Beyond the church repeatedly says that its Authority is over both so again far from distinguishing sacred and secular the Catholic church is kind of squashing it all into the sort of monad that its Spiritual Authority is so great that it actually has jurisdiction over temporal matters or over political or laylife even over that of Kings okay so what's going on here how do we understand the medieval understanding of work and the Reformation critique of it and the positive views of the Reformation on work well the key missing factor in the traditional sort of narrative of the medieval view of work is the concept of Merit in other words what's missing is the medieval understanding of salvation and when you bring that to bear on this problem you'll understand better what the reformers are really ticked off about because it's not the issue of sacred secular it's the issue of spiritual power over the souls of everyone in Europe that even affects where their Eternal destination is whether it is in purgatory or Heaven so let me give you just a two-minute synopsis of the medieval understanding of Salvation and we confront that extrapolate where they go with work in the Medieval World there is a consensus about salvation not a overall Proclamation by a pope or a council but a consensus the Catholic Church actually does not rule officially on the subject of justification until the Council of Trent long after the Reformation is underway but there is a consensus in the Middle Ages and an application of principles to Salvation that becomes relatively the norm up until the Reformation and the view goes like this medieval Catholic world you are born and then within seven days you are baptized in in the Medieval World baptism actually is a regenerative process meaning at baptism in the Catholic system you receive the Holy Spirit it is not the promise of salvation but rather salvation itself in a manner of speaking or at least the beginning of the Journey of Salvation in the Catholic system original sin is wiped away at baptism and the Holy Spirit comes into the infant and regenerates it and in the medieval system the belief is that from that baptism the person enters what they call a state of grace and that State of Grace means that again original sin is washed away and that the person is now pristine before the Lord I jokingly refer to this as the car coming out of the car wash everything is washed off everything has been scrubbed clean the soul in the State of Grace is in a state of perfection you might say they're not in an eschatological sense of the Resurrection but in terms of the sins they've been washed clean and now the person is in a state of grace well throughout the Catholic life of course they still believe that you sin and you sin quite a lot the Medieval World had a lot of views on how much you send which we can't go into but when a Catholic person sins again to keep the car wash and algae going the car drives through some muddy water splashes onto it and now it's dirty again and in the medieval journey of the Christian Life the goal of the Christian the responsibility of the Christian is to take care of the ongoing washing of the inward self as it continues to sin so sin corrupts and the person has to deal with it and the way a person deals with it is through Merit it's through the sacrificial system the sacramental system in other words it's through confession and it's through certain amounts of penance and the ideal is is that a person let's say commits a sin let's say they get angry or they have lust well what a Christian in the medieval world has to do is they have to go to a priest and this is important the power of the church is supreme on this a person is not able simply to confess either to one another and they may not simply only confess to Christ the only way to receive forgiveness in a washing of that sin is to go specifically to a priest so the power of the church is supreme log that away because that is the key here in understanding the Reformation understanding of work so the person confesses the priest then absolves the person and then the priest gives the repentance Center a number of penances to enact it could be things like Hail Marys giving alms to the church it could be all kinds of different things saying the rosary at times it's going on pilgrimage Etc and the Christian's participation in these penances is the thing that restores the soul to the State of Grace so again look at this middle piece here essentially what you have is a loop of the Christian Life and the goal of the Catholic is to stay as much as possible in the state of grace and so the life of the Catholic is constant amounts of confession and Penance confession and Penance now what do you do if you don't have enough confession well if you're a completely backslidden Catholic and you've walked away and you've done no confession and you've hardened your heart it is within the realm of possibility in fact it's very likely that you have lost your salvation you have so corrupted yourself and so lost the original spark in the original pristine nature of your post-baptismal self that in the end you've sort of pushed yourself out of the church for those who are at least trying to make an effort to the end of being in the State of Grace the sins that are left over the sins that were unconfessed or that did not receive Penance or a sufficient Penance those get taken care of in purgatory I always remind students Purgatory is not an alternative version of hell Purgatory goes up I always say not down Purgatory is the last step of the purgation of the last Penance of the Soul before it can enter into heaven itself now fully embraced in a state of grace now we don't have time to go into all this all the ins and outs Etc but this system is the backdrop of the Christian Life in Merit again plays a vital role in the medieval understanding of the Christian Life and it's that issue not the sacred secular distinction but the issue of Merit that forces and drives so many medieval people to discuss the distinction between the act of life and the contemplative life or the life in the world and the life outside of the world maybe in a monastery or in the priesthood and here's the thing the medieval Church did not understand the distinction between sacred and secular as an issue of good and better callings but rather the distinction between sacred and secular was an issue of Merit the church in essence was saying if you want to really take care of all these sins and the average person the average layperson in the Middle Ages did not confess all that much it was actually quite an ordeal there are actually regulations that are put forth in the Middle Ages calling for Christians to at least confess once a year which is an indication that they were not doing so very often if you're a farm around the Villages or if you're a Craftsman finding time to give up on your work day to go simply confess and do all these things is not an easy task and so what the church says is if you really have anxiety about the sinfulness of your heart and the need for penance the only place to do that is in the context of the contemplative spiritual life and in that sense the medieval church will say the contemplative spiritual life is the better life because it is the life that is sort of saturated with this model of penance and striving for the state of grace in other words the issue primarily for the medieval world is not work itself but Salvation with a restoration of the soul and the reduction of the time one would have to spend in purgatory you can say this in Luther's life whatever he has is Crisis whenever he's worried the man who is going to be a lawyer having a keg party before he goes off to law school decides in the midst of a thunderstorm that his sinful heart needs to be reckoned with and so he gives up everything and goes into the contemplative life of a monk then the rest they say is history well fast forward to the Reformation all the pieces that were there before are still there this idea of the priesthood of all believers and this idea of the calling to the world or to the spiritual life and it should go without saying that the Reformation almost fundamentally was driven by the debate and the attempt to overthrow this medieval system of works and state of grace and Purgatory Etc that is Luther's main charge is that all of this work of pennants Etc is simply Works righteousness warmed over even if the medieval Church would believe that it's augustinian that they would say that it's Grace that the infant didn't do any Works before it was baptized and received the Holy Spirit and therefore everything after his grace Luther pummels this and he says just because you start with Grace and in with work still makes it a workspace system and so the priesthood of all believers and this idea of calling to vocation is barbed at the issue of Merit and Penance so when Luther talks about the priesthood of all believers and again he doesn't call it the priesthood of all believers but in two of his earliest Works to the Christian nobility and on the Babylonian captivity of the church Luther does take up the issue in quotes from first Peter 2 9 that talks about all of the congregation as being a royal priesthood and Luther's comments here about the priesthood of all believers is not about how there is no understanding of ordination and all laity or just as good as pastors but rather he Jabs this in the eye of the medieval church and he says you have had power over our souls you believed and that power is abhorrent and an abomination in other words Luther says I don't have to go to the priest in order to save my soul through this process of confession and Penance he says I need to confess to my Lord Christ and his application of First Peter is that we are all priests meaning we can all administer the comfort and the nourishment and the edification of comfort to our fellow brothers and sisters on the issue of the security of their own Souls in other words the application of the priesthood of all believers in the Protestant church is if I turn to my neighbor at some point or a friend in the church who is going through a time of doubt about his or her salvation and I comfort them and I say look Christ died for your sins all this concern while important to discuss the ongoing Christian walk nevertheless Christ has paid for it all and if the person I'm talking to received some comfort that is the process of the priesthood of all believers that we don't have to then go to a priest and he absolves the person who is in doubt over some crisis of sin in their life in other words it's an issue of power not sacred secular and as a result when the Reformation gets going and as its theology becomes sort of unfurled the issue is that the Protestant church has now destroyed this power of the Catholic Church Over The Souls of people and it's rendered irrelevant the person's ability to sort of earn their way Luther himself says you don't have to be a monk anymore to have assurance you don't have to leave something behind to do something better in the hope that Jesus will notice you more and therefore this is the Protestant understanding of work without that Merit pennant system and without the authority of the church over the souls of laity suddenly all of their callings and all of the things that are doing in this world because they are grounded in the work of Christ have value in meaning where they are now Luther kept a sacred secular distinction in the traditional sins he knew that there was a difference between ordination and work in the church and the spiritual life and the work in the world of Craftsmen and laborers and work but what he now says is none of us are saving our souls so I have a particular calling to be a pastor Luther might say but a banker or a Craftsman or a farmer has a calling where they are there is no pressure to drop everything leave it and go do ministry in order to save oneself and Luther uses this one word volcazio and the word is very often talked about as a calling the word in Latin just simply means calling and of course this is the etymological root of where we get the word vocation which is a word that is now pretty slippery we can talk about vocational training as job training as in the world or we can talk about the vocation of ministry well this sort of mushy use of the word vocation actually comes directly from Luther in the Medieval World the word vocation simply met the calling out of the world of the seculum into the life of the contemplative life in order for Assurance of one's salvation it was either that you were called out to be saved and to enact this life of penance Luther though turns around says no we're all called we're not called to save ourselves Christ has done all the work but we're called to live in the Glorious reign of justification by faith alone and because we have now been put all on the same footing of undeserved Merit we all have vocacios now we all have callings to take the sort of punch of this it would be a bit like saying well the word ordination right now only means ordination for Ministry if you talk about someone being ordained there's always something of there being sort of set apart usually through a ceremony of laying on of hands to the office and the ministry of the church well if I were to take that word and talk about someone being ordained to work you're now ordained to be a banker ordained to be in the marketplace that is kind of the punch of Luther's rhetoric here he's taking a word that used to only mean being called to save oneself in the monastery let's say and he's now referring it to everybody and he's spun the the internal meaning of it to mean not that you're called to try to save oneself but that you are now called to try to live in the Light of Christ so to recap this one issue of the idea of the Protestant elevation or the sacralizing of the work after the Reformation what we need to see is that it's not an issue of sacred secular again that's a post-enlightenment modern concern but rather it's an issue of Merit it's an issue of seeing that all people are called by God to work and that work and toil is actually a gift of God it's pre-fall work has been sullied it has become tedium at times to our physical bodies into our souls but it is not itself the problem the sin is the problem and given the Reformation understanding of Salvation and justification since sin is wrapped up entirely in the personal work of Christ and we are not to somehow enact or participate in our own salvation in the end we all have callings what we do what our skill sets are as we would say today what our talents are gifts of God and we are freed from the burden of guilt of having to decide do I need to give up what I know is my talent and my calling and my giftedness and for most of us that's in the marketplace or for the sake of saving myself do I need to give that up and enter the contemplative life and for Luther and Calvin and all the reformers the answer is no you are called to where you are and Christ is the one who saves your soul now I want to transition just briefly and discuss another relatively popular misconception about the development of work ever since Max Weber's concept of the Protestant work ethic there has been all kinds of talk about what the Protestant Reformation affected in the world and his contention it rests on a lot of the misconceptions that I was talking about earlier this idea of sacred secular Etc in his contention roughly is that the Reformation was a positive force that because it's sacralized the work of the world it therefore freed people up to develop as he would say into a capitalistic entrepreneurial spirit and I'm not going to debate The Vapor thesis it's not my point here but I want to at least get some of the facts straight of what medieval work was like and what happened to the Reformation some of the changes in tone that are frankly I haven't seen anywhere else in the literature or in the writings out there again the problem here is a misunderstanding of the Middle Ages too often I think Monty Python sort of resides in our heads when we think about the Middle Ages we tend to believe that the world is sort of this dank dark place I'm sure at some point you've heard all of the canards that are out there that the medieval farmer only bathed once a year or all medieval people for that matter that one was supposed to die by the age of 30 that your teeth had sort of rotted and fall down of your head that everyone lived in pain and Agony and misery and then all we have is Monty Python sort of Lampoons is an opportunity to bring out your debt at some point there are all kinds of Concepts and comments about medieval work life I've read everything from that the medieval peasant Works 16 to 18 hours a day that they work non-stop that they toiled and worked themselves into a grave that they lived in essentially dirt houses with no floor and very little for a roof and there's all kinds of social misconceptions as well that everyone was sort of angry and fathers beat everyone from their wives to their children to their neighbors most of this again comes from the enlightenment the sort of Volt's hair understanding of the Dark Ages in the Middle Ages let me actually sort of spin that around because it's actually the quite the opposite when we look at what happened in the Middle Ages to what happened after the Reformation in terms of the Pastoral commitment to the work life the average medieval person lived quite well at least in terms of the context of their own day now there's all kinds of things that we enjoy in the modern world health and those kinds of things we're certainly on a very low threshold compared to what we're used to but the average person in the Middle Ages actually wasn't all that overworked it's actually one of the more popular misconceptions if you just look at the way work life occurred in the Middle Ages they actually worked a lot less than we did in fact in most cases they worked about half as much as we do in the area of Spain in the 14th century for example the average peasant now peasant doesn't mean homeless person it just means average worker farmer that kind of thing well in Spain the average peasant worked five months out of the year in France it was about that as well the people who are the Workaholics in the Middle Ages were very often the English depending on what century we're talking about and in the English World they worked probably on average 150 to 175 days out of the year medieval life was very prone to days off let's just put it that way now how can they do this well the issue is is what was giving them opportunity to take time off and the answer is the Catholic church was in France for example these were the days that the Catholic Church mandated to the secular government as times off for the average worker in France it was you got every Sunday off the worker was also afforded 90 days of rest and there were 38 holidays mandatory holidays of all kinds and I can't get into it but if you just go to the medieval Liturgical Calendar anytime you see a name that you don't understand a Saints Day or a rogation these kinds of things no work was happening during that time there were also festivals and Church events and a rotation of life that required no work one of the ones that has sort of Fallen away that people often comment on is the required ales that would happen during certain important times in a family life in an ale is seven straight days of partying and one of the more important ones is if you had a marriage if you had a marriage it was required not that hard for peasants to say yes to this I guess but it was assumed that you had a bride ale which is yes where we get the name Bridal and a bride ale meant seven days of a marriage Feast there was a funeral if someone in your family died and lots of people did die in the Middle Ages an entire week was taken off but what about the work day itself if it's 175 days out of the year at the max what are they doing on these days are they working 18 hours a day the answer is no all the actual data we have if you look at it in the Middle Ages the average workday was seven and a half hours now it often started from Sun up and it often ended at dusk but you have to remember this is a pre-electricity age and I see all kinds of misapplications of this you hear comments about well the peasant was up at dark and went straight to work and they worked until the evening kinda um they didn't go on no sleep and just think about it if you're in a home with no lights it starts to get dark you can keep a fire going and stay up for some time but by and large Middle Ages people went to bed early sometimes seven eight nine PM if you go to bed seven eight nine PM you're gonna get up early you're going to get up in the dawn hours but the peasant might be technically working from that time until the end of the day but the day was broken up by all kinds of breaks you would work a little bit in the morning and then you'd go have a long leisurely breakfast then go back to work and then you'd have a morning break at some point a long one you didn't go have lunch then you take a nap very often it was very common to take naps in this day you didn't go back to work then there'd be an afternoon break and then you go back to work you need to work until dusk not exactly the back-breaking schedule that we have come to believe from the Middle Ages essentially what the peasants had worked out particularly those who were serfs those who were bondsmen to their lord and they were sort of bound to the land was they worked as hard as they could to make sure that they had only to work on specific times most of the literature in most of the historical actual consensus is that the medieval life was actually slightly better than ours if you take out the issues of health and hospitals and other things that we're very much used to and I could go on with all these myths but needless to say the medieval peasant wasn't over taxed and overworked in fact because of the liturgical calendar and because of the structure of medieval Catholic life they had a great deal of time off what changes in the Reformation well what changes in the Reformation is not so much a focus on the vocation itself that really amps up the Protestant value of work rather what begins to happen particularly in England and other reformed influenced areas but as well as in Lutheran areas is you don't have Protestants excoriating the idea of the Sacred secular distinction but you have the excoriating laziness and I'll give you this one example there's a man by the name of Pilkington he was Bishop of Durham in 1570. he was a devout Protestant he was one of the sort of leading edges of the Protestant movement in the Reformation of England and this is the Elizabethan time and he's promoted a bishop as a reformist Protestant Bishop and as she writes a couple of paragraphs on the average work person and he lays out almost all of these things that I just described to you and his problem is that all these people are lazy they just simply want their time off they simply want to take these holidays and do their penances and these things and he's concerned that all this liturgical time off is focused on again the life of Merit and he says we're just letting people sort of have time off and sort of slack off and he says this isn't how Christians act because work is valued we ought to actually do it we shouldn't just sit back and try for a time off and that is really a microcosm of the Protestant move it's not again sacred secular but it's saying if we're all resting on the Merit of Christ and we're all called to do different things and simply trying to find diamond we can have as much time off as possible simply is a wasting of the talent that God has given us now I will add one little caveat which is I do think the modern world is plagued by hyper overwork tension and exhaustion I do think personally that these are plagues befouling our modern world and if you go from the Industrial Revolution until now it's going down a little bit from 60 to 70 hours a week with very little breaks but it's going back up the average work in America is significantly higher than it was even just a couple of decades ago to just put it in context the average modern American now works more hours before July 31 than a medieval peasant would work in their entire year and while certainly the Medieval World was sort of slothful in some ways at least at certain levels the counterbalancer that has been a problem and people have noted that while there are good things from the Protestants to crying slothfulness and saying get back to work there's also the problem of focusing too much on work and not on enjoying family friends our neighbors and our health in the end the Protestants can be said to have affected our modern understanding of work in any number of ways but we have to understand exactly what they were changing from the Medieval World to the Reformation world I think the better we know the medieval world and what its context was the more we can spot the real significant changes that the Protestants wrought for the betterment and for the change of the Protestant World thereafter thank you thank you