Doing Theology with the Reformers

Gerald L. Bray

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830865833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Reformation was a time of tremendous upheaval, renewal, and vitality in the life of the church. The challenge to maintain and develop faithful Christian belief and practice in the midst of great disruption was reflected in the theology of the sixteenth century.In this volume, which serves as a companion to IVP Academic's Reformation Commentary on Scripture, theologian and church historian Gerald L. Bray immerses readers in the world of Reformation theology. He introduces the range of theological debates as Catholics and Protestants from a diversity of traditions—Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist—disputed the essentials of the faith, from the authority of Scripture and the nature of salvation to the definition of the church, the efficacy of the sacraments, and the place of good works in the Christian life.Readers will find that understanding how the Reformers engaged in the theological discipline can aid us in doing theology today.

ONE

THE EDUCATION OF A REFORMER

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A CHANGING WORLD

The late fifteenth century was a time of great social and intellectual ferment in western Europe. Many significant changes had occurred over the millennium since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, but by 1500 there was a growing feeling that a fundamentally new era in human history was dawning. In 1453 the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which had struggled on for centuries, finally succumbed to the Ottoman Turks, who then conquered most of the Balkan Peninsula and were soon poised to threaten both Germany and Italy. As Muslims, the Turks were an existential danger to the Christian countries of Europe, and fear of them was widespread. Meanwhile, at the other end of the continent, the dwindling remnants of Muslim rule in Spain were in their death throes. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile united their two crowns and allowed them to pool their resources for the final push toward the south. It took a number of years, but on January 2, 1492, the last emir of Granada surrendered to the forces of Christian Spain.

That event gave an ambitious Genoese sea captain his chance. Christopher Columbus had been trying to convince the Portuguese to finance an expedition to the west, where he believed there was a sea route to India that would bypass the Ottoman Empire, but the Portuguese were preoccupied with their own expeditions down the coast of Africa and were not interested. Prompted by the fall of Granada, Columbus made his appeal to Queen Isabella, who in the euphoria of the moment was prepared to indulge Columbus’s fantasies. The rest, as we know, is history. Within a few years, both Spain and Portugal were carving out worldwide colonial empires—the first stage of what we now call globalization. As Christian kingdoms, they were concerned to preach the gospel as they went, and the papacy was involved in their expansion from the start. Missions to the heathen made their appearance on every continent, and there was a real sense that the evangelization of the entire world was at hand, despite the ever-present Turkish menace.

The consequences of this expansion were dramatic. Having been peripheral and quite poor by European standards, Spain suddenly became fabulously wealthy and found itself as the arbiter of Europe’s destiny. In the year Columbus sailed, a Spaniard was elected pope (thanks to the influence that Spanish money could buy) and in 1519 the king of Spain was elected Holy Roman emperor—the head of what was then the largest European state, covering Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, with much else besides. In economic terms, the influx of huge quantities of American gold and silver caused rampant inflation, which transformed the prospects of most Europeans. New products were also introduced, most notably the potato, which rapidly became a staple of the European diet. Its nutritional qualities improved people’s health at a time when mortality rates were still very high, which led to a population boom that further unsettled the traditional way of life. But returning Spanish soldiers also introduced strange new diseases like syphilis, which heightened the risk inherent in sexual intercourse and provided moralists with an excellent topic for frightening hearers.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas, Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a month short of his ninth birthday. We do not know when he first heard of the new discovery, but it is safe to say that its effects were sinking in during his adolescent years. The impact of this can only be imagined. Whatever Luther had learned about the world as a boy suddenly had to be modified or discarded in light of recent events. For the first time, nations and countries not mentioned in the Bible came into view and had to be reckoned with. Were the American Indians (as the Spaniards dubbed them) fully human? If they were, why were they not mentioned in the genealogies found in the Old Testament? What about Africans and Asians, many of whom had developed religions and civilizations completely foreign to the Christian world? These and similar questions plagued the Iberian nations for decades, and although these previously unknown people were eventually recognized as humans created in the image and likeness of God and had also fallen thanks to the sin of Adam, it took some time for them to be evangelized and even longer for them to be integrated fully into the life of the church. It is true that progress was made and some Africans became bishops in the Portuguese colonies within a generation of their conversion, but on the whole this vast expansion of the Christian world passed by most Europeans.

For Martin Luther and his contemporaries, Europe remained the center of the universe, and the Reformation, when it came, would be worked out there rather than anywhere else. But the Protestants’ lack of global vision was not true of their Catholic opponents. The missionary priests who fought the Lutherans in Germany belonged to the same religious orders, and on occasion were even the same people, as those who were bringing the message of Christ to the heathen around the world. For them it was all part of a single gospel mission, and many did not hesitate to accuse Luther of being the tool of the devil, whose purpose was to split the church apart in the moment of its greatest triumph.

The need to deal with Luther’s rebellion was more urgent than we might assume from our vantage point, because even as he was preaching his message to the Germans, the Ottoman Turks were taking control of Hungary and laying siege to Vienna. There was a very real possibility that the whole of Europe would fall to the forces of Islam, which were making a fresh attempt to secure world domination. Would the ultimate beneficiary of Luther’s revolt turn out to be Islam, in the form of the Ottoman Empire? Many people feared that it would, and not without reason.

The new learning. While all this was happening, another development of equal importance was taking place—the invention of printing, which coincided almost exactly with the fall of Constantinople. In the mid-1450s a German printer named Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, enabling him to produce multiple copies of the same material. As with all new technologies, this was initially an expensive and laborious process, but by 1500 it had caught on, and the ancient tradition of manuscript production had all but died out. The great advantage of printing was that it enabled an infinite number of people to read exactly the same text. Manuscripts, as those who study them know, are almost never identical in every detail, even when they are meant to be copies of one another. Human error inevitably creeps in, which is often reproduced as further copies are made, making the latter version considerably worse than the first. Printed books might contain errors of course, and most do, but at least the misprints are all the same. Printing gave the scholarly world a ready-made platform for discussion and an objective basis for research that it had not previously enjoyed. It was an information revolution that would quickly transform the intellectual climate of Europe, opening new avenues of thought and challenging the accepted verities of medieval life.

By making scholarly works more accessible, printing also fueled an unprecedented demand for knowledge. Scholars ransacked libraries, many of them monastic, for manuscripts that they could publish, and the discovery of different copies of the same works produced the science of textual criticism that still exists today. There was little point in disseminating a text if it was not the best one available, and printing made comparisons between different versions relatively easy. Scholars were able to eliminate inferior editions and propose corrections based on the evidence of other manuscript traditions. Although perfection would never be attained, standards were vastly improved, and in this respect Luther’s generation could justly claim to have been better educated than any that had gone before it.

A by-product of the printing revolution was an increased output of books written in the European vernaculars. When manuscripts had been the only form of writing, the few people who possessed them mostly knew Latin. Although it was no longer spoken in daily life, Latin retained its prestige in the church and in the schools of the time, and anyone who wanted to be educated had to learn it. This created a common world of discourse in which priests in Bohemia, for example, could easily read and interact with the writings of John Wyclif (1328–1384) and his followers in England, which they did. So much so, in fact, that some Wycliffite writings have been preserved only in Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) because the English copies have been lost. Martin Luther learned Latin as a boy and used it throughout his academic career, as did all his contemporaries. They constituted what later came to be called the “republic of letters,” an intellectual fraternity that spanned the European continent and paid little attention to national boundaries. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was equally at home in Paris, Cambridge, and Basel, whether anyone in those places understood his native Dutch or not. He would never have dreamed of using his mother tongue to communicate—all his efforts were poured into purifying scholarly Latin so that those who mastered it could speak to one another with an elegance that harked back to the glory days of ancient Rome.

But try as they might, Erasmus and his colleagues could not revive Latin as the spoken language of Europe. Instead, ordinary people increasingly demanded literature in the languages they used and could easily understand. But these vernacular tongues were not properly standardized and lacked technical vocabulary for discussing subjects like theology. Only slowly and sometimes accidentally did the languages of modern Europe emerge as sophisticated vehicles of thought. The process began when the great poet Dante Alighieri used his local Tuscan dialect as the basis for his great epic poem, The Divine Comedy, which became the touchstone for creating what we now call Italian. Elsewhere, scholars and writers in different royal courts did much the same for their own languages. Spanish thus arose out of Castilian, French out of Parisian, and English out of the variety of it spoken in London and the Thames Valley.

The development of a standard German language was more difficult because the country lacked a political center that could impose its will on the rest. In the end, Luther’s translation of the Bible into his own Saxon dialect laid the foundations for the modern literary language, but it was not universally successful. In the Netherlands a different standard emerged, creating what we now call Dutch, which was able to resist the pull of Luther’s Bible. The same thing happened in Switzerland, but only orally, so that today the Swiss Germans speak several dialectical forms of the language but write in the standard one—a confusing situation for foreigners but a living example of the complications that using the vernacular could cause in the sixteenth century.

This situation reminds us that the Protestant reformers found themselves caught between two worlds. As preachers they naturally preferred the vernaculars, which they helped to establish as worthy rivals to Latin. But as scholars they used Latin to reach an international audience. For example, when William Tyndale (1494–1536) went to Wittenberg about 1524 to study under Luther, he had no need to learn German and probably did not do so. Likewise, when Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) invited men like Martin Bucer (1491–1551) and Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) to come to England, they did not have to bother learning English, because everybody in Oxford and Cambridge could follow them in Latin. Even when translations of the Bible and prayers were produced for public worship, Latin versions were also on hand for use in the universities and anywhere else where it might have been appropriate. The Reformers were interested in promoting their mother tongues not for their own sake but only in order to communicate the gospel to people in a language they could understand. If that language happened to be Latin, so be it.

This universal bilingualism of the scholarly world must be understood if we are to make sense of the Reformers’ writings. What they composed in their own languages was principally intended for domestic consumption by a popular audience. Their Latin works were meant for other scholars and for an international clientele. John Calvin (1509–1564), for example, wrote his Institutes in both French and Latin, but it was the latter that circulated more widely and must be regarded as the “official” text, although modern researchers also consult the French versions when clarifying his thought. Similarly, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England come in two forms—the Latin, which is official, and the English, which is a translation. Where the two differ, the Latin text that prevails, though few modern readers are aware of that.1

Today anyone writing in Latin would be thinking in his mother tongue and trying to find a Latin equivalent for whatever he wanted to say, but in the sixteenth century it was usually the opposite. The Reformers thought in Latin, at least when discussing theology, and tried to produce vernacular equivalents, some of which were more successful than others. For example, the Latin word reconciliatio was rendered in English as “atonement” (“at-one-ment”), which is now standard English, though the word is no longer synonymous with reconciliation. This can cause traps for the unwary. For example, there is a legal maxim stating that “a gentleman is known by his habitus.” Sometimes habitus gets translated as “behavior,” which is what a modern person is likely to think, but in fact it means that he is known by his clothing. This is because in the sixteenth century, sumptuary laws prescribed what different classes of people could and could not wear. How they behaved was far less important.

Translation problems of this kind abound and were sometimes disputed even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly when it came to biblical terms. For example, should ecclesia be rendered as “church/kirk” or as “congregation”? Both are possible, and the difference between church and kirk adds an element of dialect usage that is still alive in some quarters. Is presbyter a priest or an elder? Can episcopus be translated as “bishop,” or should some more neutral term be found, like “overseer”? The Latin iustitia can be either “justice” or “righteousness” in English, and sometimes the choice is decided along confessional lines—Protestants prefer righteousness and Catholics justice, probably because it is more Latinate. But the two words are not synonymous, and in reality both must be used according to the context, with the risk that the dimension emphasized by the other English word will be lost in translation. Most notorious of all is paenitentia, which can be penance, repentance, or penitence according to context and/or taste. It is not always clear what the original author intended, particularly when the true meaning of paenitentia was being debated. The Latin preserves the ambiguity between an outward act versus an inward change of heart, which the English has to resolve by using different words. This means that when we are translating a sixteenth-century document it is sometimes hard to tell which of the various English words captures the author’s intended sense most accurately.

How the Protestant Reformation was connected to these developments is controversial. Did the emerging modern world create the conditions that produced the Reformation, or did the Reformation lead to changes that destroyed medieval civilization and ushered in the new era? The question gets even more complicated when we factor in the Renaissance, which was in full flower when Luther began to preach church reform. Was he a product of the new learning (or “humanism,” as it was known), or did he oppose it? Did the Reformation ride the wave of intellectual progress symbolized by the invention of printing, or was it in some sense a reaction against it? It is hard to argue that the Reformation brought about the great changes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries on its own, because by the time it progressed, those changes were already in full swing. Yet it is equally hard to doubt that they had a considerable impact on the spread and acceptance of Luther’s message.

One of Luther’s contemporaries, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), made discoveries that helped shatter the prevailing ancient Greek scientific worldview. Luther did not know Copernicus and was unaware of his discoveries, not least because he kept them secret and nobody knew them until after his death. Although Copernicus had nothing to do with the Reformation, and the early Reformers were likely not sympathetic to him, his discoveries made it easier for them to exploit the discomfiture they caused the Roman Catholic Church. At that time it accepted the scientific ideas of the ancient Greeks (particularly those of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen) and based its own official doctrines on them, most notably the belief that in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. That doctrine made sense only in an Aristotelian universe, where everything was analyzed according to its (variable) form and (invariable) substance. To destroy that way of thinking was to remove the basis for a teaching that lay at the heart of medieval devotion and practice.

The Catholic Church found it impossible to come to terms with this new learning, and even a century later it was still resisting the discoveries of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), whose unjust sufferings have become the stuff of legend. Protestants did not find it any easier to adjust to the new learning, but they were not held back by a church authority claiming infallibility in doctrinal matters, allowing them to manage a smoother transition from the medieval to the modern way of thinking. The Reformation and the emergence of modern science were parallel developments involving different people. It is misleading to claim that one directly influenced the other, but it is fair to say that both overturned the traditional worldview, which paved the way for a new type of Christianity.2

The political scene. The interconnectedness of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Education of a Reformer
• 2 The Sources of Theological Authority
• 3 The Interpretation of the Bible
• 4 The Work of the Holy Spirit
• 5 The Godly Commonwealth
• 6 The Emergence of Confessional Theology
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Also from InterVarsity Press
• Notes
• Praise for Doing Theology with the Reformers
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright