If you've been at St. Mary's long enough or have ever been on Follow the New Men's blog, you've found here heard him use the phrase ecclesia, semperia, reframanda, that the church is always in need of reform. And indeed this is very true. That the church is the new Israel, but it turns out that the new Israel shares something very important in common with the old Israel, and that is it's made up of people.
And as such, that the hallmark of the new covenant is very much similar to that of the old covenant, and that is the continual cycle of infidelity, repentance and reform. You just think of the book of Judges of Israel sinning, whip-hunting and God-sending help. And so what always happens though is that when Israel and now the church is in most in need of help, with things are most dire, God always sends a hero to rescue them. And so whether it was Judges and then later prophets and then now in the new covenant, this takes the form of saints.
And the best example of this, you think of St. Francis of Assisi and God telling him to go and rebuild his church. So when the church needs help, God sends saints to help rebuild it. Now this brings up a very important topic, and that is when talking about the Protestant Reformation, we always use the phrase the Protestant Reformation, and the biggest reason why is because we use textbooks written by Protestants or at least coming out of the Protestant worldview.
So the question is, can we really call it a Reformation? And the answer to that is absolutely not. And the reason why is that to reform something needs to take given materials and to reshape them into how they truly should be. Or that's why, like I said, it's to rebuild a structure.
God didn't say to Martin Luther, care down my church and start anew. He said, not to Martin Luther, to St. Francis. Care down my church and start anew.
He said rebuild it. That Luther and the other Protestant, quote, reformers, they did not seek to rebuild the church but to tear the part brick by brick and completely start anew. And that is why it is much more accurately described as the Protestant rebellion and the Protestant Reformation. In that reform, in another hallmark, if you want to look at true contrast of reformers of looking at St.
Francis and Martin Luther, that reform is by first and foremost a work of humility. And that there's a reason why saints, often when they are right, and sometimes the church authorities or bishop might be wrong, and they always accept with humility the fact that God will never punish you for being silent and being wonged, but He does punish you for pride. So reform is a work of humility and that is why it's a work of saints because true reform, first and foremost, is to understand that reform only happens in God's time and in God's way. While rebellion is first and foremost a work of pride of saying, my will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Now, before we get into the cause of our Reformation, we can talk about contributing factors of when we say that the church is always in need of reform, that one way of understanding the church is that it sort of goes up and down, up and down, bad times and good, and it did turn out that the end of the 1400s, the beginning of the 16th century around 1500 was a particularly low time. It was not a great time in the church, and there's several reasons especially. First and foremost was the leftover aftermath of the black play. So you think of the black death, the bibonic play that had struck Europe in the end of the 1300s and kept coming back over and over.
And then when you couple this, there was a series of wars that also took place, the 100 years war between England and France, the great civil war in England, the wars of the roses, that all those three things together ended up killing a third of the entire population of Europe. But a disproportionate amount of those that died were clergy because if you think about it, the clergy is the ones that are going and giving last rights to the plague victims, so that by the time you get to 1500, two thirds of the entire clergy of Europe had died. So in order to refill those numbers, the church had to let unworthy men into the priesthood lower their standards, and that's when my wife joked to enter a Martin Luther, but I really hope there's no Lutherans here. Anyway, that's just a joke.
Anyway, so they had to lower their standards, but by the time you get to 1500, there's a much different set of clergy than there were in back in the 1200s. That there are many examples of bad priests. However, there's also a lot of good priests in Europe too. That's one thing that's easy to forget is that just because things were not great at this time, there was also a lot of really good monasteries, there were a lot of very saintly men and women, there were actually very good popes.
Things were not all bad. But like I said, there's still lots of bad stuff. The church was still reeling from the scandals, the papal scandals of the Middle Ages, think of the Avignon papacy when the pope lived in France for a while, the great schism when you had anti-pokes, the claiming to be popes, and both of these caused a whole lot of money problems for the papacy, which caused other scandals. And then on top of this, while the Renaissance, think of the Renaissance in the late 1400s, an interesting thing of someone that teaches history, taught history, that really bothers me and it's probably shouldn't be going to side notes when I'm trying to get through this, is that history always gets broken up into these artificial timelines, and it is always kind of funny how all the good stuff that happens at the late end of the late Middle Ages, always gets all the Renaissance, and all the bad stuff gets called the Middle Ages.
So for instance, I figured Giotto lived at the same time as the Black Death, but he goes to the Renaissance and the Black Death gets stuck in the Middle Ages. But anyway, during this time, one of the things that did happen was that the pope who is a temporal ruler as well as a spiritual one, and is still to this day, that is a nature of the office, that there was a tendency from different popes to focus a little too much on the temporal matters and neglect their spiritual matters, because the fact the pope was the ruler of Central Italy, and so focusing on the rule of Central Italy, sometimes you get so wrapped up that they would neglect spiritual matters, and the greatest example of this is we've ever seen the movie of agony and ecstasy, where you have pope Julius II, and he knows the warrior pope was even leading his own armies. Now one last thing that was a major contributing factor, and this goes back into some of the scandals with money and everything, is that even though Kaelin Loff forbids it, there's another practice that kept creeping back into the works throughout history, even though the church kept condemning over and over, and that's the practice of having what's called multiple benefits, or a priest having more than one parish, or a bishop more than one diceys. And so what had happened at by the time you had to 1500s, there was a lot of examples of this, and sometimes the benefits is when even being the same country, so that you have a bishop of a diceys and never even visits that diceys in his life, or a priest who's pastor of a parish and never visits there.
You can imagine how you're not going to have a faithful that's going to know their faith very well, and this is good. So that's more than anything, one of the reasons why Protestantism will spread so much, not necessarily cause for it to happen. Now, so we can see that by 1500, the beginning of the 16th century, reform was needed, but what was the shape of that reform would take when God raised up a saint like he had done in the past, what will happen? And so that brings us to the cause, that the cause of reformation is pretty simple, and that there's a lot of historical events that have complicated causes, the reformation does not, and it's simply Martin Luther.
Now, Martin Luther, give a little background about him, he was an Augustinian monk who had become a priest, not necessarily so much out of a sense of calling, but in order to escape his abusive parents, and in order to offend them, and actually the story of when he decided to become a priest was he was out in the field, there was a lagging storm, he thought he was going to die, and he yelled out for Saint Anne to help him, and if she did he'd become a priest. So he did. Now, Luther was from the working class of Northern Germany, his father was a very passionate man who actually had to flee one town because his father murdered somebody in a rage, and the language is always used to describe Martin Luther, as though he's called him fisted, that's the adjective that's always used, he's just sort of a working man's man, and you can see this especially in his language, which is very craft and vulgar, that Martin Luther is a very interesting fellow, very intelligent, but he talks like a sailor. And there's a reason why, as I decide that when I do pick up these quotes from Martin Luther, and not just cherry picking quotes, it is actually very difficult to find quotes from Luther that do not involve some sort of vulgarity or profanity, that's just how he spoke.
Now, whoops, Bill and coffee, that's not good. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right. The other thing about his parents, speaking from Northern Germany, is that they had very much, they had a background of being involved in the occult, and that's why tales of hog goblins in Impsen, which is frequently making it into the writings of Martin Luther, and sort of mixing this with Christian spirituality, and that the probably, if you want, the number one thing to explain Martin Luther is that he truly believed that, and he's supposed to physical attacks from the devil, that he believed that he was literally involved in a moral struggle with the devil incarnate, and then later on he's going to come to believe that the Pope is the anti-Christ of the End Times. Now, these physical attacks were very strange, and if you look at Luther's accounts, when I said that they involve profanity, I apologize, that in these accounts, supposedly the devil would throw shite at him, and that he would throw it back, and that ultimately it quoted from Martin Luther that the only way he could always get the devil to go away was to throw him in my anus where he belongs.
And I've always thought that a great Monty Python sketch would be to have Martin Luther being examined by Seagman Freud. Anyway, that would be pretty good. Now, so, but to think he really believed that these physical attacks, this was very, he was not being flippant, he was very sincere in these things, like they might have been crass, and to be perfectly fair, on, like I said, the profanity, Sir Thomas Moore enjoyed the bathroom humor quite a bit too in his writing, so it's not just Martin Luther, that was the time. But anyway, so while lacking in class, he was very intelligent, and so he was bright, and he became the head of the theology faculty at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, and initially he was a very strong supporter of the papacy, and in fact, in a letter to the Pope, he expressed his desire to, quote, be the most brutal murderer on the books we have, and to, quote, kill all who even by a syllable refused submission to the Pope.
I mean, that's, he just, it made a passion, that's how he speaks. And while he was saying these things, he was busy having panic attacks, fearing the fires of hell and doubting his own salvation, and so part of it was, the reason of this was to prove to his father and to himself that he could be a priest. He tried to practice religious life perfectly, and he was, his confessor, was always telling him, hey, you know what, you can't practice religious life perfectly, and that he needed to trust in God's mercy in the forgiveness offered through the crucified Christ, and yet to slight this Luther, just fear God terribly. And so he ignored the advice of his confessor, and he started taking on severe penances, even though he was told not to, he was trying to pile on many good works in order to earn his salvation, even though his confessor kept telling him you can't do that.
And so during his panic attacks, also, very strangely, he had this terrible fear of God, so much so that he could not look at a crucifix, he tried to avoid saying mass and to avoid being the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. And then one day, while using the facilities, he had his breakthrough with his revelation, in that what he called, quote, the knowledge that the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower. And I can't make this stuff up, that's why his reason is more, I'm using then, fiction. Now, so from this reading of St.
Paul's Epistles, Luther came to the conclusion that God offered salvation to those who simply believed and trusted in his mercy apart from the sacraments in the Church. Now, this brings us to what exactly Luther's heresy was. That Luther misread how sometimes Paul uses salvation in a broad sense to mean the entire process of being made holy, which includes both justification as well as sanctification. And sometimes though, Paul uses it in a narrower sense, just meaning the moment of justification or the moment of God being accepted by God.
Now, ultimately, the heart of what Luther denied was baptismal regeneration, the removal of original sin and baptism, and the idea of the impartation of sanctifying grace of God's life residing in the soul, because he did not believe that original sin was washed away. He thought man's sinner, he therefore didn't think that man could begin that process of becoming holier of sanctification here on earth. And the reason of this is he didn't feel like he was becoming holier. He didn't feel like he was being sanctified.
He didn't feel the presence of Christ. And so he allowed his feelings to dictate his theology. And so because of this, is why Luther tried to separate justification and sanctification, which the Catholic Church has always taught one in the same process, is why he ended up separating faith and works. This is why when prophets talk about faith, or you say by works, that the whole argument isn't even the language of the Catholic Church.
That we know you're saved by sanctifying grace and from that comes, justification and sanctification, that there's one process that goes together. It's apples and oranges. So instead, he thought of forgiveness instead of something transformative that changes the human person. So he thought of it as something purely external and legal, or the word for it is forensic.
Whereby, like I said, he denied the Catholic understanding that grace actually changes our souls and by our participation in the life of the holy tree that resides in us. So Luther did not believe that grace, like I said, changes a man, but rather just covers up his wickedness. This is why his famous analogy was he described man as a don't heal covered in snow. Though he didn't use the phrase don't heal.
And anyway, he also denied free will. And this is part of a result of his understanding of grace, and this forensic external understanding of grace, that there's important consequences. This is when you say ideas have consequences, there's important consequences with that idea of grace. That first of all, in his rush to uphold his stark view of man and grace, he had to end up removing man's free will because the idea of man having free will, and thus being able to cooperate with God's grace, diminishes the sovereignty of God, this ties in a little bit back with Islam like we talked about last week.
And it also that he believed that it flies in the face of his understanding of what he called the totally depraved human person who can do no good things. So if the reason we believe that man's free will is able to cooperate with grace is because God gives us the grace to be able to cooperate to begin with. But he did not believe that original sin was washed away, so he said you're still totally evil. So how can you cooperate with grace if you're totally evil?
That makes no sense. That's why he had to go. So as a phrase that is often used, grace is free but is not cheap. But when this is a second consequence of his view of grace, is that when Luther's view of grace, when it makes no demands upon human person, that it does just that and that it cheapens grace.
And so this is where another Luther quote, this one does not have quite as colorful as a language. I guess it does. And this is what he means by when he says, be a sinner and sin on bravely, but have a stronger faith in rejoicing Christ, who is the victor of sin, death in the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice.
Sin must be committed. Do you, at ought to be sufficient that you acknowledge the lamb that takes away the sin of the world. The sin can not tear you away from him even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders. So there is no demand of trying to reform the human person.
It's well, and so grace becomes cheap. Furthermore, that if a result of this idea is that if God does not give man the grace for sanctification here on earth, then therefore all of the channels of the Catholic Church speaks of all the channels of that grace become completely irrelevant. So this is how his understanding of grace is going to result in his rejection of the church. Because if there is no grace, sanctification, you don't, like I said, you don't need the means of that grace.
So thus go sacraments, thus ultimately go to sacraments, and thus even goes to church, which you've added to call the universal sacrament of salvation. Now up into this point, this was just the idea that Luther was privately developing. He had not begun to publicly teach these ideas until we get to 15, 17, and important day in history on Halloween, October 31st, is an interesting side note, Reformation Day, which I know I shouldn't waste time with these, but anyway, that's my brother's birthday. He was the first person I came away to become a Catholic, so we always thought it very ironic that he did so.
But then also I remember when I was in grad school at Clemson, I had a little radio alarm clock, and the only station that got was Bob Jones radio. And so I remember being woken up at five in the morning on October 31st, to a blaring voice, yelling Happy Reformation Day, and it was not fun. Anyway, what was going on in 1517 was that the church was preaching an indulgence for the building of New St. Peter's Basilica.
Now the way about indulgences, which being St. Mary is probably every single one you know, but I'll say it anyway, is that an indulgence or the remittance of the temporal punishment due to sin, such as one suffers in purgatory, in order to receive such indulgence, one has to do three things. They have to first be truly repentant and receive absolution in the sacrament of penance, because for the forgiveness of the temporal punishment of sin doesn't do you much good if you haven't first been forgiven of the eternal punishment due to sin. But then second, one has to pray for the intentions of the Holy Father, and third, they have to perform a specified Holy Act.
Now historically, one of the holy acts that people would perform is the giving of money for the building of churches. So in order to build St. Peter's, the church was offering an indulgence whereby people performed those three things and gave money for the work, they could receive some of that temporal, that forgiveness of the temporal punishment. Now what had happened though, and we said there weren't a lot of clergy that weren't that good of clergy, that as they were going around and preaching as indulgence, some of them forgot to mention the first two parts and made it sound as if you just gave money, you could get your, you were your relatives out of purgatory, such as the famous quote from Johann Tetsseld, he always makes the history books, Wind Copper, Coin, and Cofer rings the soul from purgatory springs.
Now, so when Luther heard of one of these indulgence preachers, not Tetsseld, another guy that never gets named, coming to Wittenberg, he took the opportunity to nail his 95 thesis on October 31st, 1517, his 95 points of debate about indulgences, so two of the church doors in Wittenberg, and this was actually a common practice when you want to have a public debate, he wrote him in Latin, he nailed him to the door. Now it's important now because most of them, of his 95 points of debate, are not too bad, he goes through it, he's pointing out the bad ways that indulgences are being preached, but then he goes on even further and to argue that not only against how they're being preached, but against the whole practice of indulgences to begin with. Going back to his forensics of grace, he rejected the idea that the pope even had the power to begin with, and that they were even necessary to begin with. Now, some of them are also, and this is going to be a common theme, appeared to German nationalism, because you have to remember there was no country of Germany back then, it was a bunch of artificial little areas, this is a new idea that was starting at this time, the idea of nationalism, and he appealed to it by also complaining in them about how much money was being taken from Germany to that foreign guy down in Rome.
And that he pointed out that the pope he said would not be doing so if he knew how the Germans were, and that the Germans had for a long time been very resentful of ties having to go to the church and therefore out of the country down to Rome. And this would not have been a big deal except he then took the 95, because no one actually had attention to it, but then he took the 95 thesis, translated it into German, and basically started mailing them all across the country when he printed them on the new invention, the printing press. So, this is when his idea starts to spread, and it starts to be a big deal. The church was very slow in responding, and the biggest reason why the church was slow in responding was that Luther had a very powerful protector named the Prince-elector of Saxony, the area where he lived, named Frederick III, and the pope.
So, political reasons didn't want to make Frederick III Luther's protector angry. So, it took a long time trying to investigate the process, and so finally what they ended up doing was they sent a very educated cardinal and cardinal Tajitian to go talk with Martin Luther to try to convince him to recant his teachings. And in this conversation, Luther, who had already begun to reject the authority of the pope, tried to appeal above the pope's head he thought to an ecumenical council. He said, can't you call an ecumenical council to decide if I am right, because he still at least believed that an ecumenical council was infallible, even though he didn't believe that the pope was infallible at this point.
And so, Tajitian left, then around a year later, the next year they sent another theologian to go talk with him this time, a guy named Johann Eck. And during this conversation, Johann Eck pointed out to Luther that hey, we don't need another ecumenical council to talk about this, because the last ecumenical council, the council of Constance, already addressed your whole idea of salvation by faith alone when it was preached by the heretic Johann Huss in Bavaria. So, it's all your ideas have already been condemned. So Luther asked for a break in the discussion, he left, came back a little bit while later, and he had a new revelation that not only could pope be in her air, but also ecumenical councils.
And so, his doctrine of solace could pour out was invented to defend his doctrine of solofevac. And this goes back to the humility versus pride thing at the beginning. Now, didn't really hide my coffee stain, but anyway. Now so, this is what Luther officially went from being a reformer of the church to actually denying the authority of the church.
And so, and once he reached his conclusion, Martin Luther is never going to turn back. He's going to actually, he will have terrible struggles with that. He's going to doubt himself at different times, but he will never turn back from it. Which brings us to the next theme.
And so, after this debate, Luther, his attacks on the pope became more and more violent, because this is when he started to think of the pope more and more as the Antichrist of the End Times. And Luther had a very powerful and persuasive prose style and used it to the best of his advantage. And so, what happened this the next year, he published in German a revolutionary treatise called an appeal to the German nobility. That in many ways is probably the most important work in which he used a popular prose style that was charged with eloquence.
And in this appeal, Luther called on the princes of the, the princes of Germany to reform the church. He said that they did not have to wait for the clergy to do so, since one of his beliefs was that because it was his rejection, with his view of grace and his view of the sacraments, therefore, and of the church, is he said that all people are equally priests. And therefore, since all men are equally priests, and all men are equally able to interpret the Bible for themselves, because when by rejecting the authority of the church, he was claiming that all men can interpret the Bible for themselves equally. Not only did he make more subjectivism and more relativism, his basic prose and doctrine, an idea that would come back to, but this allowed Luther to subvert any sense of restraint that the secular princes had felt in attacking the clergy or the pope.
So the great, one of the great triumphs of the Catholic church in history was curbing the martial spirit of Europe. And this, I won't stop myself from going into too much of a side note, even though I wanted to, that so curbing the martial spirit of Europe, that the church turned the Gothic, barbarian, lawyer into the Frankish knight, that who would actually lay down arms at the side of an unarmed priest, there's a reason actually at the height of the Middle Ages that battles, if you wonder why 100 years war took 100 years, that at the height of the Middle Ages, wars could actually only be fought Monday through Wednesday during weeks of ordinary time. That was because you can't fight on Friday because that was, when Christ died on the cross, you can't fight on Thursday because that's the last supper, you can't fight on Saturdays, you're preparing a mass of next day, you can't fight on Sunday, obviously. You can't fight during all those other different liturgical seasons, so people literally only fought Monday through Wednesday during ordinary time.
And because, like I said, they're knights, we're submitting to the church, to the unarmed gospel. Now, however, this wash away with Luther arguing that the church, there's nothing special about the clergy, that all people are equally priests. So in his words, and here's his quote, that from it, that the true antichrist is sitting in the temple of God and is reigning in Rome, that in purple Babylon and that the Roman curia is the synagogue of Satan. There will be no remedy left, except for the emperor's kings and princes, girt about with force of arms should attack these pests of the world and settle them out in no longer by words but by sword.
Why do we not attack in arms these masters of perdition, these cardinals, these pokes, and all the sink of the Roman Sodom, which have corrupted the church of God and washed our hands and their blood? To Luther, the state was above the church because the state in his opinion was founded on scripture and the church wasn't. So this alone, this teaching alone is what's going to be responsible for the spread and survival of Protestantism and the promise of confiscated wealth from the church in the name of German nationalism, which a lot of princes are going to love this idea of becoming Protestant because it gives them the opportunity to take all of the wealth of the church and their lands and the church did have a lot of wealth. And so this is why the great Erasmus was partly correct when he stated, Luther, quote, Lutheranism has but two objects at heart, money and women.
This may not have been entirely true of Luther who had this view of his battle with the devil, but it was certainly true of many of his followers. And in Luther, this is another important point. We also see the historical northern German view of blood and iron of mic-making right and inevitable conclusion from the supremacy of the nation state over the church. And more than this, we see a repeated current in German history, and by this I mean northern German, that Germany is not in actually one place.
There are very different places. Bavaria is very different than Prussia. This is northern Germany, the history of Prussia where a lot of the worst things of Germany come from. And that we see anyway, this repeated current in northern German history especially, a barbarian yearning for a radical moral freedom, recognizing only the authority of the state or the barbarian chief then or the great man of the Uber mention.
This is what Rudyard Kipling called in his poem, The Recessional, Germany's Heathen Heart, putting its trust in reeking tube and iron shard. Then Luther gave voice to German nationalism that presages that of Ottawa in the 19th century in his culture war against the Catholic Church, the man who unified Germany, who was a big about Lutheran, and also even presages the national socialist deification of the German evoke. It was, could go into that idea more, but I'll try to restrain myself. So, but anyway, I'm still moving slowly against Luther.
It was not until the next year of 1520 that Pope Louis X actually took action against Luther and that he issued the bull ex-surgery dominee, which just translates as rise of the Lord from the first line, rise of the Lord and defend your own cause. In which he condemned many of Luther's teachings and he still, though, ever gave him 60 days from when he received the ball to recant and before getting excommunicated. So yeah, 60 days recant. So, what would Luther's answers be?
Two months later, it came. On December 10th in 1520, the deadlines was recantation. Luther and a bunch of students from his university and professors, they were at the gates of Wittenberg, having a good old-fashioned, friendly book-burning into which they were casting many of the works of medieval scholastic theology. And a little side note about this is that the reason why they were doing this is that Luther was educated in the school of what's called nominalism and this is something that we started to talk about last week when we talked about Islam and their understanding of God, it was nominalist in that he was influenced by a very famous philosopher, history guy named William of Occum, who's famous for his phrase of what's called Occum's razor.
And anyway, what this idea is, is this the non-was what they do is they deny the idea of God having an eternal divine essence, an eternal divine nature. Instead of the classic Catholic, Thomistic understanding, Thomistic has in St. Thomas Aquinas who developed this fully, the idea of goodness, truth, and beauty being relative reflections about superlative nature. Non-was believed that to say that God has a nature by which he is bound would somehow limit his sovereignty.
So the Thomistic understanding of the church is that God's will is a product of his rational nature and thus God only calls things good that are substantially good, while the non-was would argue that God's will is utterly unconstrained. So God is pure will, such that God is free to call good whatever he desires to call good without any limited principle. So morality does not reflect God's eternal nature, but is simply decided by the will of God who I said before is himself pure unconstrained will. And thus if God had willed differently, then morality could have been different.
So for instance, to the non-list, good is just a word, this is where the name comes from, the name, it's just a name that we give, so yeah, it's just a name that we give to God's commands. So things are good just because God said so, not because they reflect anything in his eternal nature. And so therefore if God has decided to tomorrow that evil is good and good is evil, then who we'd argue. And so we discussed this last week and not only does this understanding of God entirely under mind the whole concept of absolute truth, but also has other important consequences.
For instance, if God does not have eternal nature that is reflected in the created order, that's when we talk about science, how we know science because by looking at creation it reflects that eternal nature of God, then philosophy and the use of reason to try to understand God are completely useless. Therefore non-list would say that God created the world, but the world does not reveal God. Then therefore the only things that we can know about God and what God chooses to directly reveal to us in sacred scripture and he only revealed things that are necessary for salvation, otherwise God is completely hidden. So this is why Luther, the idea of scholastic theology, which is trying to use reason to understand God, this is why they would be burning in the bonfire and this is the context by which Luther famously called reason the whole of the devil.
So finally though after throwing the scholastic theology in, Luther took the poops, paper bottle and he threw in the fire as well. And so that was his answer, he would not recant. So Luther was excommunicated. And there's a myth of history that the church would burn heretics, the church never burnt a single heretic, what they would do is they would excommunicate them and as it turns out being excommunicans is illegal in most of the countries in the Middle Ages, so the government is who would punish people for being excommunicated.
So he was turned over to the civil authorities. In Luther's Prince, the Elector of Frederick in his region, he obviously wasn't going to do anything about it. So the new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German states was a young man named Charles V, the grandson of famous Ferdinand of Isabelle Spain, one of the most powerful Catholic monarchs of all time, Charles V. He came over to Germany to look into this matter since it was happening his lands.
And so at a famous meeting of basically what's called the imperial diet which is an advisory body to the emperor and they met in verms. And so the famous diet of verms, Charles invited Luther to come and state his positions so that he could investigate the matter. And so Luther came, he appeared before the diet and only on the condition that Charles told him, granted him safe conduct, he said that I'll let you leave and safety as well, even if I do guilty. And so famously though Luther came and he refused to recant anything and he famously said I neither can nor will recant anything, but is neither safe nor right to act against one's conscience.
And according to the Lutheran tradition he also added, here I stand, I can do no other, God help me, amen. And then he threw up his arms like a victorious knight and left the hall. And so the young emperor did condemn him as heresy and by that in the sentence of death, but he kept to his word and he let him go. And when he was gone, Frederick's men that came and they actually kidnapped him for his own good and they brought him back to one of Frederick's castles at Wartburg where he famously spent a year in hiding where he had spent a year.
And in that year he had bouts of heavy drinking with doubt and guilt and not knowing if he had done the right thing. But one of the things that he famously did was he also translated the Bible into German and it's actually becoming the standard, this translation of the German language that for instance Italy and Germany, both not naturally one country and Italy when it came time to choose a language. They just took the language of that Dante used for writing the Divine Comedy, even though that's not the language that's spoken ever in Italy. And Germany likewise they used the language of Luther in his translation of the Bible.
But one of the things he also did was he famously, or actually not very famously, changed some of the passages of the Bible to expand on his own doctrines. For instance, in Romans 3, 28 he added the words alone after the word faith, who had been saying, because there's an interesting fact that the actual Bible, not Luther's version, the phrase faith alone is only ever used once and that's in the book of James when it says man is not saved by faith alone. Now, during this time however, in workberg, his old city of Wittenberg was inter-religious uproar. That inspired by Luther's idea of his ideas of the priesthood of all believers and having to be able to interpret the Bible equally for themselves, it turns out everyone started interpreting in different ways, taking this idea and running with it.
So the end result was the priests were there, were all getting married, you had monks and friars abandoning their cloisters, Martin Luther himself actually ended up giving in his bow of celibacy, married a nun that helps muggle out of a convent, stained glass windows were being smashed at the Franciscan convent and there was complete mayhem. And then on Christmas day, 1521, one of Luther's associates, a guy named Karlstott in street clothes and wearing no vestments, even though he'd been a priest, he said Mass in German and he also invited everyone to come up and take the bread in their hands and drink from the cup. And then two days later, taking his ideas even further, these other guys that claimed that they were dripping the Bible for themselves, who called themselves a prophet from a nearby town as Vikau, they claimed that God spoke to them directly and that God said that all men should not own private property, but they need to own everything in common. So if Luther's goal was to restore primitive Christianity, that's exactly what he got.
And at the early church, there's the history of innumerable heresies contending with the one true apostolic faith that people across Europe, like I said, took Luther's idea of every individual Christian could interpret the Bible for himself and just as well as the Pope recommended. Councils may reign with it. So the result is that you have a splintering of Protestantism from the very beginning. Now and also you have the beginning of relativism and the idea because of the idea that rather than truth being something external and absolute to which we can form ourselves, rather that we tailor and make our own truth in our own image.
And this is why this is one of the most important legacies of Martin Luther, the beginning of relativism of every man making truth for himself that's going to take off and become the hallmark of the modern world. And so when Luther saw these things going on, it went way too far for even him. He actually came back to Wittenberg, dressed back in his old habit. He actually restored mass being sent in Latin again.
And part of this reason we'll get back to him, he was a bit of a sentimentalist. He didn't like the accidents of the church even though he didn't like the substance of the church. But anyway, he came back and he gave his very bitter condemnation against all these things that everyone was doing. And part of this was that Luther recognized that from his own idea that you did still need an authority as a standard of truth.
So what he did was he ultimately just replaced himself with the authority of the church to admit. So that with his famous quote, when he said that to the people, when he said that I was the first whom God entrusted in this matter, I was the one whom he first revealed, I was where the church would be preached to you. Therefore, you have done wrong in starting such a piece of work without having first consulted me. And so when the peasants also, when they go too far and they start revolting at all of all of his ideas all across Germany, he decided that that was too much.
And so he wrote one of the famous works called Against the Fieving murderous hordes of peasants where he called upon those same German princes that he had asked to reform the church to brutally use their swords to put down the mass of the great unwashed that were daring to interpret the scriptures for themselves. And like I said, compared to the other reformers that start to take Luther's ideas on Jonathan, Luther was downright traditional. And that is because like I said, he was a sentimentalist. He liked stained glass.
He liked a lot of the accents of the church. He said mass in German, but he stood, but he still said a very high mass. He wasn't a mass at that point. But he especially loved music.
He had beautiful music and being sick if you notice St. Mary's, even everyone's all seen, Luther and him's because he worked beautiful music. But there was no theological reason for any of these things because if he didn't believe that grace could actually be here on earth, then why have those instruments of grace is ultimately just because he liked them. Now however, moving on from Martin Luther to our only slide on John Calvin, like he was second because I particularly liked this slide, can't see in the back, says, Calvinism is really more like a daisy.
You know, God loves you. He loves you not. The pun off the famous Calvinist tulip. Now, anyway, John Calvin, who was French, was very much not a sentimentalist.
He came a little bit after Luther. He was a cold, calculating lawyer. He was not a theologian by profession. He was a lawyer by profession.
That's important. But in many ways, what he did was he took the ideas of Luther and he's going to follow it to them to their logical, cold, harded conclusions. And for the most part, now we're not going to go through and talk about all the teachings, but one thing that came up last week was about how many parallels there are between the ideas of John Calvin, between Calvinism and Islam. And it's not that Calvin is ever directly in contact necessarily with the theology of Islam, but Islam was, the ideas came from certain, theoretical ideas.
And those ideas were not just particular to that part of the world. They spread and they transmitted over here and over here and so by, so, but there is a very strange parallels between his ideas and those of Islam. We're going to go through and point out several different ways. So for instance, Calvin, he adopted Luther's idea of grace and is, and openly also adopted Luther's denial of free will.
But Calvin took it even a little bit further in expanding the Islamic idea of double predestination. And this is what he's most famous for. They got great, some men, not just to bring them to heaven, but equally he creates some men solely for the purpose of sending them to hell. That like with Islam, all evil is actually accomplished through the active will of God.
So that's an important thing, that it's not just the moral will of God that God lets evil things happen to protect men's free will as he will, according to his doctrine, because he doesn't believe that if man has free will, it diminishes the sovereignty of God, evil happens because God actively wills it to happen, therefore making God ultimately responsible for evil. That's the first important way that his doctrine is the same as Islam. And actually, this is the only way that he does not entirely follow Luther's logical conclusion going with this, is that Luther, he also didn't believe in free will, but he at least was logical when he talked about the consequences of that for man, in that he admitted that, hey, if man does not have free will, you can't entirely be hell responsible for your sin. However, Calvin follows the Islamic idea that God would punish man for the actions that God made man do to begin with.
That even though God made you do it, you're still responsible and still repunished for it. Yeah. And so, that's why actually the, it's going to say, it's interesting that the man who sins on boldly, let's call it Luther, says in Luther or in Wittenberg, would have been condemned to death in Geneva or another way of putting it, is that Luther erases the sin and Calvin's answer is just to erase the sinner. Now like the Islam, also Calvin also thought that there needed to be a union of church and state.
And so one of the primary purposes of the state he taught was to enforce a Calvinist morality. And so he actually found the Bible a code of law is much in the same way that Muslims find in the Qur'an a code of laws. So that when he took over Geneva, he actually took the Morat Calvinist interpretation of the rules of the Bible and he made that illegal code of Geneva, much in the way that Sharia takes the precepts of Islam and makes up the legal code in different Islamic countries. So therefore, the city that issued laws that governed every detail of the persons of the personal lives of the citizens, it was very harsh.
They ended up executing them like 58 people, they exiled another 78, and hundreds of them were imprisoned. And furthermore, akin to Islam and the idea where Muhammad is exulted as the supreme example of conduct by which everyone is a follower, they had a similar idea in codes of personality in Geneva where they actually made it illegal to speak against Calvin or his book, the Institute of Christian Religion which were made, sorry, they were made official laws of the city where this law was actually declared that his book was holy doctrine, which no man may speak against. And you could be sentenced to death or exile for speaking against his book. So this is interesting thing, there is this recognition that there has to be this external authority for the interpretation of scripture, just like Luther, they reject the Pope and the church and they just take that of a fallible human being in place there instead.
And lastly, like with Islam, there's also the extreme iconoclasm, the rejection of images of within Islam. The Calvin, he took his grim view of the physical world, just like the Muslims, and therefore, like Luther, he didn't see physical things as a channel of grace, and therefore to him they're just distractions from the divine, and therefore to the Calvinists like the Muslim, all material representations of the supernatural are by nature idolatry. And so he followed that idea of Luther, just natural conclusion, and that's why you go to places like Geneva or other reformist cities in Switzerland and you can still go see the scars in the old churches where you can see where they wit the stained glass windows out, there's literally scars in the building from when they chop down the statues because physical images, distractions, it is by nature idolatry to them. So like I said, there's not necessarily that he came into contact with Islam with their definite parallels.
Now, the last thing right here for the night is that if you think about it, the Protestant rebellion truly was the greatest catastrophe to follow upon Europe since the fall of Rome in 410, or the sacking of Roman 410, specifically happened in that year. And the great Catholic historian, Hallard Bellock, argued that it was essentially the exact same battle being fought again. And therefore, one of the most interesting things is that when the dust settles on the wars of religion that will happen after the reformation, that Catholic Europe and Protestant Europe, that the borders once again follow exactly the borders of the Roman Empire. And it even goes into the Holy Roman Empire that even actually even follows by county the trench line of the barbarian Germanic tribes and the Roman areas.
And so that the countries that become Protestant are all the countries that really where the Roman Christian civilization had never fully taken root, that they had settled much shorter history of Christianity and civilization, which civilization traditionally, the history of Europe has been defined by the Catholic Church. So that's why when you look at Scandinavia, northern Germany, parts of Switzerland, parts of the Netherlands, Scotland, England's going to be the only exception, but England's not going to naturally become Protestant. It's going to be forced against their will, which we'll get to next week. And so this is important, and like I said, it's many ways that a new barbarian assault on a room, and that's why Luther did preach very much a battlefield, barbarian creed, you know, sacraments, no priests, just simple faith, and you don't need anything else.
And the first barbarian assault resulted in what's known to history as the Dark Ages, a period that took hundreds of years to overcome, and this latter assault, which is going to start the period in history called the Durnity, it results into what Charles Colson calls the New Dark Ages. And this second Dark Ages is a, this time, it's a Dark Ages of Ideas, and which is going to be far more dangerous of the two, and is going to have much more lasting and dire consequences that the Church and the world are still having a hard time overcoming.