The Importance of the Reformation

foreign looking at the Reformation in an effort to understand the context of the importance of Lutheran Calvin now in some ways it goes without saying that the Reformation was important most people are aware that because of Luther and his immediate successors that the fabric of the western church was ripped and that we now have two large groups on the one hand the Catholic Church and on the other hand the Protestant church some of us already love the subject we have a certain gravitational pull to the personality of someone like Luther as he stands there before the emperor saying here I stand and we certainly appreciate his love of the Gospel with Calvin we can appreciate all kinds of things the clarity of his thinking the formation of the genevan church and the influence frankly internationally of the reformed movement over areas like Scotland England France the Netherlands and all the way into the new world in America others of us know that it's an important period of time but we're not quite sure what happened there we know some of the stories some of the slogans we know some of what happened but it still remains something of a mystery for us and I always start any discussion with the Reformation with the simple question just what in the world happened back there because if you look at it around the time of 1517 with Luther posting the 95 Theses and all the controversy that erupted after it you went from a single western church to now the formation of several of the most magisterial and important denominational Trends in the entirety of the western world just about any group that we can think of in evangelicalism or protestantism has direct links all the way back to this fight and we're going to talk about some of these links over time but it needs to be said now so much of the denominational variety that we talk about today exists because of the Reformation even relatively newer denominations by name and even the more recent non-denominational movement itself is driven by the Reformation the Reformation doesn't really cause denominations but it is the context of it because it removes the papacy as the organizing principle of the church and therefore groups are able to collect themselves however they wish whether it's a congregational government or denominational government and I think if we're going to talk about the importance of the Reformation we can look at really a couple of things that are the most important features of the changes wrought by the Reformation we're going to set theology aside for a second and we're going to talk about some of the cultural changes that happened if you were to go back in time and be there just prior to the Reformation the entire fabric of your life was saturated and influenced by the Catholic way of life it almost goes without saying but we need to at least highlight this clergy anyone in Ministry prior to Luther was ideally celibate and while some broke their vows out of lust or out of sin it can be difficult to get your mind around monasticism was everywhere priests Bishops the hierarchy of the clergy also the pattern of day in and day out life was entirely Catholic in general the average worker for example in the Middle Ages had 30 days of holidays now I know that sounds pretty awesome but a holiday is a holy day that is to say it's part of the liturgical calendar day in and day out life festivals pilgrimages all of the things that were part and parcel to the medieval way of life were affecting day in and day out life of even the average farmer the life of penance and confession concerns about purgatory where the state of our souls is these kinds of things was just simply the fabric of life and so attempting to understand one of the major importances of the Reformation we have to look at the sociological impact there are dramatic changes pastors by and large become married in protestantism almost always congregations become less focused on the hierarchy and more focused on a more holistic culture of the priesthood of all believers and we're going to talk about what the priest of all believers means in a later lecture and more importantly without the concept of confession and Penance and works for salvation without this concept of Merit that was the backbone of the Catholic view of salvation the varic idea of the Christian life itself changes suddenly the goal isn't to save one's soul but to rest in the comfort of the work of Christ and there have been all kinds of ways to understand the impact of the Reformation we're not going to go into all of them but there is one in particular that needs to be cited here because it's always talked about and that is the Weber thesis Max Weber was a sociologist and his main concern was in correcting the modern assumption that religion is irrelevant to socioeconomic life and so a lot of Weber's work argues that religion actually drives change culturally and for a lot of us now that seems patently obvious but in his day it was at least somewhat denied if not outright seen as a falsity and one of Weber's main contentions is that their Reformation dramatically shaped the way men and women worked in fact he goes so far as to say that the Reformation caused capitalism and his argument is essentially that with the collapsing of the Sacred secular distinction the average worker is then freed up to do his or her work for the glory of God they don't have to consider dropping everything leaving their forms behind and going and being a monk in order to achieve Assurance of salvation and he argues that that puts a real privilege on work work is now seen as a glory to God just the average Craftsman for example now we're not going to the Weber thesis right now we'll talk about it a bit along the way there are some problems with it there are some problems of it historically he gets the Middle Ages pretty wrong along the way in his historical account but we're not going to beat him up the importance of it though is that Weber introduces into the conversation of the modern world is an appreciation for the fact that the Reformation just wasn't a theological movement it was an entire cultural movement it changed just about everything another place that we can talk about the importance of the Reformation is the rise in the formation of Nations in the impact of religion Protestant versus Catholic on these nations is going to be staggeringly important for at least a century if not for two or three centuries thereafter if you just look at a map of Europe obviously prior to the Reformation all of these countries are Catholic after the Reformation though we see a number of countries that through varying degrees of conflict and overturning of the Catholic Church what we see happen is Nations moving to be autonomous and in some cases to be fully Protestant now there is nothing in this day and age like the separation of church and state all of these countries all of these nations still even if they become fully Protestant believe in a more or less amalgam or an entanglement between church and state but what we do see is the rise of a belief that the political order does not need to be answerable to the pope but rather it is its own entity its own autonomous region within the secular or temporal world and the dramatic change in Nations is not irrelevant to the concept of the Reformation itself take England for example now Henry VII as he enacts the Reformation has not a Protestant bone in his body if there is any Anglican ever who is Catholic without a pope it's Henry VIII he wants a lot of the traditional rights he still likes the seven sacraments he actually wrote A Treatise against Luther called on the seven sacraments he hated Luther wished he could have gotten his hands on him and strangled him himself in some ways but Henry's fight with the Pope over his attempt to having a divorce from Catherine of Aragon led to a rupturing of England that gave rise to all the things that we know about England from that point on Henry has himself declared head of the church he is now temporarily over the Church of England itself a fact by the way that still stands to this day the current Queen Queen Elizabeth is still considered to be head of the church she's now known by a different name governor of the church but it functionally is the same thing if you ever go live in England on Christmas Day the queen actually delivers a sermon believe it or not exercising her role as the head or the governor of the church look at Scotland which had a very devout Catholic leadership and through essentially something like a palace coup eventually overthrew that government and established itself through the work of John Knox and others as a Protestant Nation Germany is even more important than France both these countries move in a Protestant Direction but not entirely and if you take Germany just as an example you have cities in villages and regions that effectively become a religious Civil War within the nation and so this region might be Protestant in the region next to it might be Catholic and the tension of what was formerly a United Society at least in terms of culture now being divided in hating and having challenges against the theologies of that group or this group led to some of the more dramatic cultural and National changes throughout Europe after college for example I lived in the city of Munster in Germany and I studied at the University there I was in the theology faculty there and one of the more striking things that was told to me about the city even down until today is that after the Reformation the city of Munster was by and large essentially split down the middle it was half Catholic in half Lutheran or as they say Evangelical evangelicia and it was a striking reality because I remember being a part of the evangelicia theology faculty being essentially in the Protestant wing and noticing that right next door was a Catholic wing and they had both been established from the University and this is University that has a long history and here even woven into the fabric of the University is this division between Catholic theology faculties on the one hand and Protestant factors in the other and that's just the tip of the iceberg you go to France France enacted some of the bloodiest pogroms against Protestants in the entirety of the post-reformation era France was a nation that very nearly gave in to the Protestant impulse but the king and eventually the Queen Mother put it down with aggression leading eventually to the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the murder frankly of thousands upon thousands of Calvinists and all this tension and all these fights and all these skirmishes give rise to what we call the wars of religion in the wars of religion are essentially Nation upon nation and Community upon Community going to war over various reasons but the colonel in all of them is Protestants versus Catholics if you look today at the context of the Netherlands what used to be called the lowlands today you'll see that there are actually two countries there Belgium and the Netherlands the fact is is in the Reformation era those two nations were one and because of the reformation and because of the Protestant influence in the fact that the region was owned by the very Catholic Emperor Holy Roman emperor of Europe meant that the country went essentially into Civil War and it was ripped in half and from that point on eventually the development of Belgium on the one hand and the Netherlands on the other meant that the reformations impact on that region was significant culturally as well as politically well all these wars the wars of religion themselves culminate in the 30 Years War from 1618 to 1648 and during this war somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 percent of the entire population of Europe was killed in fact it was by some estimations the bloodiest war the single largest loss of life until World War One and so the impact and the importance of the Reformation is significant it gives rise to the context and the capacity of Nations that go to war with one another what else well next we have something like the enlightenment I think in most students mind they see the Reformation in the Renaissance in these periods as somehow shrink wrapped and compartmentalized away from the enlightenment but if you look at the dates the enlightenment really gets going truthfully gets going within the context of the post-reformation world it arises in particular during these wars of religion and there are all kinds of debates on this some see the enlightenment as a product of the Reformation itself this has at times been a Catholic allegation that Protestants destroyed the fabric of the church and gave privilege for people to think for themselves in a manner of speaking or to think their own theology to not appeal to Authority and that that sort of formed the kernel intellectually of the Enlightenment now there's lots of reasons to doubt this conclusion usually something as important as a big Movement Like The Enlightenment does not get going because of one single cause still Protestants have to understand that some of the early impulses of the Enlightenment and some of the early Enlightenment thinkers were in fact Protestant that for whatever reason they embarked on this belief that rationalism empiricism is the way forward to determine truth and everything else in this world now of course Enlightenment does not get going with a real antagonism to religion per se but over time that unalloyed rationalism does certainly take root and it begins to Foster this belief that religion is the enemy of rationalism or good thinking or science next and certainly not least is the development of confessions and the Theology of the Reformation itself one of the things that we're going to look at in a course like this where we're looking at Lutheran Calvin side by side is we're going to notice some of the sometimes subtle sometimes not so subtle differences between their theologies and these differences of theology has become woven into the confessional Matrix of Lutheranism on the one hand and the reformed movement on the other now the reformed movement is not synonymous with the thinking of Calvin it's more complex and it has as I like to say A Band of Brothers who are the intellectual forerunners and developers of the reformed tradition but still the division on certain key issues between Lutheranism on the one hand and the reformed movement on the other has a significant impact on the development of protestantism in general particularly in the New World and itself in the development of evangelicalism to this day repeatedly for example there are pastors and groups in ministries and non-profits and all these things that get into tussles and fights and sometimes skirmishes really significant ones over doctrinal points of division that frankly go all the way back to this reformed Lutheran split take one this is an example should Christians after they have converted after they have rested in the work of Christ should Christians use the law in order to encourage themselves to sanctification this is known as the third use of the law problem which we'll get into very explicitly in a later lecture well how many groups how many pastors how many fights have Arisen over the issue of do I rest only in the work of Christ and Care significantly less if at all for sanctification issues or do I need to use the law after my conversion to strive for sanctification we might say strive for obedience so many fights on that all go back to the Reformation there are differences of sacramentology different views of the Lord's Supper is it a physical eating or is it a spiritual eating or is it just simply a memorial service where we think about the death of Christ what about baptism do we baptize infants or do we baptize believers church polity is it a bishopric system a Diocesan system as we see in certain Nations is it an elder sonatal form of government as we see in certain forms of presbyterianism is it congregational like we see in Baptist and in non-denominational churches these fights all come out of the Reformation these issues these debates and I could go on belabor in this point but it needs to be said right now the importance in the impact of the Reformation hits on all levels of a person in other words it hits them who they are as Citizens depending on what nation they're a part of depending on what region within that nation that they're a part of it hits them personally there are countless stories of peasants and lay folk who come to church one day to discover their Protestant in all of the warp and the Woof of their Christian existence of confession of the Eucharist of veneration of the Saints and of Mary is suddenly expunged that is no small change but above all in really the importance of the focus that I'm gonna have at least by the end of this course is the theological changes in the proliferation of discussion of the Biblical teaching is so important for the Reformation is so dependent on the reformation and is so driven by the Reformation that's so much of what we consider today to be good biblical research is a product of that flourishing of biblical engagement take for example the study of Hebrew now there's a lot of things that are made about the Renaissance study of Hebrew that people were really in-depthly studying Hebrew but the fact of the matter is is they were not doing it very well if you go back and look at a first edition of the earliest Hebrew grammars really all they had was a very short grammatical instruction maybe 15 20 pages and the rest was word root studies not exactly a deep engagement but what the Reformation brings just as an example just in terms of its impact is reformers and Protestants are so concerned to delve into scripture that they find themselves doing things like discovering and unpacking and working for the first time in Aramaic there's actually a man who was Jewish originally who had converted to Christianity who eventually makes his way to England and is there at the University of Cambridge where he is looking at these texts that he begins to parse out that Aramaic is its own thing Hebrew itself takes it dramatic Leap Forward not for its own sake but for the sake of the fact that the Christians of the Protestant traditions in particular strove incessantly to understand the scriptures in their original and so the flourishing of this theological conversation is born out of that biblical engagement and so it stands to reason that all of these issues that we still feel pressures on today debates sometimes that we are aware of the controversy but sometimes not aware of the categories that are being fought over very frequently have their origin back here in the Reformation and so the importance of the Reformation really Stands Tall amongst the periods of History it is one of the most pivotal times in the change of the western world now to conclude I want to give you three categories of how we sort of break up the reformation and there are other ways to do this one of the more popular newer ways to engage with Reformation is to just look at it country by country and this tactic is born mostly of the fear and it's a good one and it's a real fear to not read the Reformation as one monolithic experience that happens across all nations it simply is not the Reformation is experienced differently in England and in Scotland and in Germany and France and in the Swiss regions but setting aside the geographical Focus simply for the sake of time in space there is a traditional way of organizing the main branches of the Reformation movements theologically that have really stood the test of time they're a bit over simplistic and they certainly Prejudice both Scholars and students a little too much but if we just understand that these are artificial brackets that are used to understand the branches of the Reformation movement then they're actually a bit helpful for the student who's first coming to this in the three movements as historians have noted them or the magisterial Reformation the radical Reformation and the counter slash Catholic Reformation now let me tell you what all three of these are when referring to the magisterial Reformation Scholars mean by that the reformers who got connected and really ingrained into society itself in almost every case these groups were bound up in the politics of their day that's actually what the word magistrio refers to here that these are the reformers who were either partners with the rulers of their lands or their regions or at times they were opposed in in opposition to these regimes so we can think for example of Luther or Calvin or cranmer where John Knox in Scotland or the huguenots in France each of these groups have a core conviction of protestantism in their theology and to greater or lesser extents they were involved in the politics of their day Luther very much was a supporter and in many ways he cultivated relationships with the princes and the nobility one of his earliest treatises in fact was called to the Christian ability and he called on them to reform the Church in lieu of the Pope himself backing reform Calvin and Geneva himself was similarly though at times very much at odds with certain factions within Geneva was nevertheless established in Christendom motif of the intermingling of politics and the church so that's the magisterial Reformation they are the big ticket folks they're the people that many recognize and they are the forerunners of so much of the later denominationalism that comes out of protestantism there's another group though that are equally Protestant and they are a group that we refer to as the radical Reformation no radical here does not mean that they are Fringe Rogue element folks now some are some have really strange views here there but by and large what we mean by the radical information is simply the group that would not toe the line with the government and we could see this for example in zwingli Zurich where zvingly trying to enact some reforms had to slow the pace of his change to accommodate the city council and there were a number in Zurich at the time who felt that that was a compromise and they challenged this and they said that you are not far enough you're in bed with the politicians and that group became the first of what we would call the anabaptists in the anabaptists or the classic reformational movement of the radical wing now this course isn't going to be on them it's not going to be on the radicals per se but they are an important part of the Reformation in some ways they are critical both of the Catholic church and the magisterial reformers the third category that we use has two names one that is now out of date and not used at all by historians and the other that is new and that is the counter or the Catholic Reformation now in previous generations all of the reform movements from within Catholicism was referred to by the title The counter-reformation and this refers to the post-reformation efforts by those within the Catholic Church who agreed with some of the principles of the critique by Protestants of the Catholic Church and this was the effort by some within this Catholic Church to fix those problems now the name counter-affirmation has fallen out of Vogue for a lot of reasons but the more important reason that it's no longer used is because it sounds as if the Catholic church only cared about reform as a counter or as an aggressive stance against protestantism now at times some of the Catholic stances after the Reformation are significantly anti-protestant they're taken almost with barbs to try to stick it to the Protestants in some ways but to refer to all of the reforms within Catholicism after the Reformation is simply a counter to the Reformation essentially makes us prejudiced against the motivation of those within Catholicism to affect change and so increasingly historians have referred to the Catholic Reformation to Simply referring to the Catholic Church's efforts for reform and within the broader sub-branch of the Catholic Reformation there are evidences of both the traditional view of the counter-reformation where they're going against protestantism but also of real internal change that is done without much care or concern about the Protestant church at all it's cleaning their own house putting their own house in order so when we look at these three branches these are the majority sort of brackets for understanding the movement theologically of the Reformation so in this course as we're looking at Lutheran Calvin what we're looking at is two of the major figures within the Majesty or Reformation okay that's it for this lecture coming up next we're going to dive into Luther we're going to start with this young life look at where he came from his backdrop and we're going to start looking at the man who in many ways caused the entire Reformation himself ha