The German Reformation
Edited by C. Scott Dixon
The posting of the ninety-five theses on 31st October 1517 is now held to be one of the defining moments of European history, just as the Reformation movement which developed out of Luther's initial protest is thought to be one of the crucial stages in the evolution of western culture and society. Historians often refer to the Reformation movement as the start of a new era, a turn from Europe's medieval past to the modern age. Luther launched a revolution against the church when he attacked the clergy, the monasteries, and the Pope, whom he termed the "destroyer of Christianity" and the Antichrist. Other reformers followed the suit, drawing on the revolutionary spirit of anticlericalism animating the people of the northern and central Europe, from the nobles to the peasants, the burgers to the knights. At the same time, evangelical phamphleteers elevated the Reformation principle of sola scriptura to a war cry against the human fables papal bulls, spritless laws, and Imperial mandates of traditional Catholic Europe.
The reformation doctrine of justification, to be distinguished from the Catholic inheritance, had to project an entirely new understanding of the relationship between sinful man and a righteous God. In the medieval church, like the later Reformation church, justification was related to the idea of being made righteous. In the medieval church, however, the believer was an active subject before God, he could participate in his salvation. It was a complicated theory, but in essence the church claimed that justification was expressed when man was made righteous and his soul was transformed through the quality of God's grace. God's forgiveness of sins and justification of man is made possible by the granting of grace to man and by his subsequent good works and freedom from acts of mortal sin; these aspects of his nature then also become the condition of his sanctification after death. Thus the process whereby man becomes righteous, justified before God, was subject to reasons and preconditions.
The life of man is always marked in one way or another by sin. Sin dividing man from God, excludes the love of God, is a human fault that can be remedied through the obedience to the law. The reformers, however, thought that the original sin of rebellion against God was not a human fault that could be cancelled out, but was the perverse and basic tendency of the whole person until death. Throughout his life, the Christian remains incapable of love for God and his neighbor, trapped in a self-centered way of life, lacking even the roots of humanity. Since man is guilty before God and owes total righteousness and selfless love throughout his life, the reality and possibility of God's grace can have no foundation based in man.
The Reformation doctrine of justification, in contrast, was unconditional. The sinner had an outright promise of unconditional salvation. There was nothing that could be done, no reasons given or preconditions that had to be met. Christ had already made us righteous in the sight of God with his saving death. Salvation was no longer dependent on merit, but rather guaranteed by the righteousness of Christ. Righteousness was not a state that could be acquired, as Catholicism taught, but a condition which exists beyond ourselves in Christ (extra nos). And that is why Luther's famous insight speaks of justification through faith alone. To quote Luther: 'God has laid it down that man is to be saved not by the law but by Christ.' The new relationship in which grace justifies us means that God sees man in the light of Christ's righteousness, and allows it to stand for the righteousness of sinners. Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin, express this understanding of justification in terms of the relation by speaking of the imputation to us of righteousness (reputation, imputatio), and by describing the righteousness of Christ imputed to the sinner as a righteousness that is external and alien to mankind (iustitia aliena, externa). 'Righteousness' is the acknowledgement of the sinner before the judgement seat of God in the face of accusations against him from all sides, including his own heart. The phrase by Zwingli of 'simul iustus et peccator' means a just man and at the same time a sinner. Since the Reformation thinking justification is the unconditional acceptance of the sinner, for Christ's sake and not because of any previous, present or future quality in his life and morals, and is always founded outside us in God himself -- justification acquires an eschatological meaning in the Reformation that is foreign to it in Catholic theology.
The certainty of salvation means the certainty of being safe in Christ is the source of all peace, calm, joy and consolation of a Christian life. Every reformation doctrine of justification is essentially a doctrine of freedom. Christ frees the sinner's conscience from the accusation and condemnatory curse of disobedience to the law shown by Jesus Christ -- he can obey the law 'freely and cheerfully'. The concept of by faith alone (sola fide) derives from rejecting reliance on good works and from its close connection with the word of the Gospel. Faith is not located on man's active virtue or a work, instead, it is a purely receptive mode, a gift of the holy spirit (grace is a divine gift), and also means that the sinner's attention is directed away from himself, away from any condition on which his own salvation depends, and shelters in the righteousness of Christ. This is the confidence of the believer: he is sure that in faith he is taken outside himself, away from the necessity of proving himself to God in works, and instead is taken into the righteousness of Christ.
The eschatological final validity of justification corresponds exactly to the supremacy of this faith, divorced from all virtues and morality. Not faith, but the quality of grace through love determines the specific order of being of the justified; the quality of that grace 'forms' faith. Only such a quality authenticates faith and its validity in justification, and only active love makes possible the mankind acceptable in salvation.
Reformation theology insists that all is given to faith and faith alone. It is justifying, saving faith: fides iustificans et salvifica. Man is led from his moral subjective existence into the final validity of the righteousness of Christ, in which he is preserved for salvation -- outside himself, where God looks graciously on him. Faith derives its justifying form not from internal love but through the external righteousness of Christ, to which it is bound in trust. The medieval fides caritate formata is replaced by the Reformation fides Christo formata, the faith that lives in Christ. The reformers see the fact that faith is also extremely active, operating through love and its works, in a different context. That activity is not a matter of doing good works in order to acquire justification and salvation; it derives from salvation that has already been received. When Paul says that faith worketh through love (Galatia 5:6), Luther explains that he is speaking not of becoming just, but of the life of the just. Fieri et agere is one thing, esse et facere another, as boys learn verbum passivum and verbum activum at school. The sphere in which faith is active in love does not (as in scholaticism), constitute its justifying nature; faith is justified only passively, in that the sinner is accepted into salvation in advance of any good works he may perform. Every reformation doctrine of justification distinguishes in this way between the passive and active nature of faith, between its soteriology and its ethics.
With this new understanding, centuries of Catholic belief were cast off.
The Reformation doctrine of justification represented a radical conceptual break with the medieval theological tradition, but also it reflected, in part, a common intellectual and social trend. The need for a direct or a centered relationship with God was just as strong, but in Catholicism there was no route to salvation other than the one offered by the church. The believer had to participate in the complex and perpetual cycle of salvation preserved by catholic dogma. The reformation doctrine of justification broke with the relative complexity of the medieval church and offered the faithful a focus or a center to their faith. Christ was now the center of the faith, salvation was in Christ and his Word. The Luther's notion of the Priesthood of All Believers, a theological principle which necessarily put the common man on equal terms with the clerical state.
In the German lands, as in France, the Swiss cantons, the Netherlands, and in other parts of central and eastern Europe, the Reformation first took hold in the cities and surrounding towns. To claim that the Reformation was first experienced as an "urban event' is now a commonplace of modern historiography. The urban setting was the natural location for the reception and dissemination of Reformation ideas, for that is where the reformers first held their sermons, the evangelical authors first published their pamphlets, and the message was first diffused. Public life in the 16th century was civic life. This was especially true for the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, where civic culture had reached a high stage of development. The evangelical movement had spread to the cities and towns, the people were acting on the message they were hearing, and the Word was transformed into collective action. Urban culture had turned a debate between churchmen into a social revolution. That is why the story of the Reformation's legacy to the western world begins in the Swiss and German cities.
On the eve of the Peasants' War of 1525 Nuremberg;s artisans and laborers were demanding the removal of the Catholic clergymen and the appointment of evangelical preachers in their stead. They insisted that the Word of god should lead to a reform of the church, and that its message of brotherly love should serve as the moral norm for social relations. In more practical terms, they refused to render tithes, they called for a reduction in the fees and dues paid to the city, and they petitioned for the right to participate in government. Religious demands had thus been shaped by the political environment, a process the Nuremberg city council acknowledged with some unease in June 1524 when it called attention to the 'malicious letters and notes that have been posted in the churches and the squares here in the city. As the Imperial diets met in Nuremberg from 1522 to 1524, the governing council could only stand by and watch as the Reformation took hold in the cities. Emperor Charles V had already issued the Edict of Worms in 1521 in an effort to outlaw and suppress Lutheran teachings, claiming that Luther's ideas led to nothing else but unrest, division, was, murder, robbery and pillaging and in general the destruction of the Christian commonwealth, but despite constant Imperial insistence, the city authorities were unable to enforce the edict. By this stage, support for the reform movement had become too powerful and widespread among the commoners.
Luther's religious protest had created a new political dynamic in the German lands. Domestically, urban councils had begun to implement changes and adapt the reform movement to their systems of rule, externally, city politics, tolerant if not fully supportive of the evangelical movement, now ran counter to the politics of Charles V, a man who still thought in terms of Catholic empire. Urban culture, bound to the religious principles and the social energy of the Reformation, turned its back on the vision of empire. Rather than look to the Catholic Emperor, the cities sought to defend a common religion in confessional unions and military alliances. For the first time in German history, cities joined together with territorial princes in defence of a common cause.
In 1727, the chapter of Salzburg elected a new archbishop, Firmian. Educated as a Jesuit, Firmian had little tolerance for other Christian denominations, and he soon decided to rootout the Protestant homesteads scattered throughout the alpine districts of his archdiocese. Faced with this threat, the Protestants, most of whom were rather modest cattle farmers, submitted a petition to the corpus evangelicorum (represented Protestant interests at the Imperial diets) and detailed how Catholic bullying had become a part of their daily lives. Firmian then stepped up his efforts, on 11th November 1731 the archdiocese issued a emigration edict designed to extirpate and uproot these unruly, seditious, and rebellious folk wholly and henceforth. This edict set in motion one of the most famous events in the confessional history of Europe, the expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants (1731-2). Thousands of alpine residents had to pack up their belongings and leave their land of generations on account of their religion. The emigrants were not long without a home, however, for the Protestant Elector of Bradenburg, Frederick William, had heard of this and offered a formal patent of invitation to them to settle in Prussian Lithuania. The Salzburg Protestants were the people characterized by integrity, independence, and moral probity. They were a people of the book, living together in pious households built on thrift, hard work, loyalty, and faith. The expulsion of such people, could only be the work of a godless ruler in a godless land. Protestants did not miss the chance to make parallels with the exodus of the Israelites. The Salzburg emigration took place 200 years after the Reformation.
Medieval Christians had a very active style of piety, and whenever it was possible to manipulate or personalize Catholic forms of worship they were quick to set their stamp. Witness the spread and popularity of the Corpus Christi processions in the late medieval period, the localization of the Virgin Mary as a figure of devotion, to the cult of the saints. Where they were able, the people of medieval Europe took the Catholic church to their hearts and shaped it in their image. This was one of the main problems facing the reformers of the 16th century. It was a greater task to make people forget their religion of centuries. If medieval religion was steeped in ritual and imagery, Protestantism was a religion of the book. Luther and the other reformers stressed the efficacy of God's Word and the saving power of the faith. Beyond belief, there was nothing that could be done, no ritual or observance, to secure salvation. In place of the superstitious practices of the Catholic church, the reformers set out to create a Christian community bound by understanding and faith. There was no room for trust in false religion practices or doubt in the power of belief. The Reformation removed this ambiguity by taking the 'magical' elements out of Christian religion, eliminating the ideas that religious ritual had any automatic efficacy, that material objects could be endowed with any sort of sacred power, and that human actions could have a supernatural effect.
In Protestanism, sacramentals, along with many of the other traditional protective remedies of the Catholic church, had been reduced in number. Protestant pastors constantly denounced the efficacy of sacramentals as tools of worship, and went so far as to condemn their use as superstitious and irreligious. As a consequence, the Protestant faithful became much more aware of their helplessness before God, as well as man's vulnerability in the sacred order. The Protestant faithful were much more likely to see a relationship between moral disorder and the processes of the natural world than their Catholic ancestors.
The posting of the ninety-five theses on 31st October 1517 is now held to be one of the defining moments of European history, just as the Reformation movement which developed out of Luther's initial protest is thought to be one of the crucial stages in the evolution of western culture and society. Historians often refer to the Reformation movement as the start of a new era, a turn from Europe's medieval past to the modern age. Luther launched a revolution against the church when he attacked the clergy, the monasteries, and the Pope, whom he termed the "destroyer of Christianity" and the Antichrist. Other reformers followed the suit, drawing on the revolutionary spirit of anticlericalism animating the people of the northern and central Europe, from the nobles to the peasants, the burgers to the knights. At the same time, evangelical phamphleteers elevated the Reformation principle of sola scriptura to a war cry against the human fables papal bulls, spritless laws, and Imperial mandates of traditional Catholic Europe.
The reformation doctrine of justification, to be distinguished from the Catholic inheritance, had to project an entirely new understanding of the relationship between sinful man and a righteous God. In the medieval church, like the later Reformation church, justification was related to the idea of being made righteous. In the medieval church, however, the believer was an active subject before God, he could participate in his salvation. It was a complicated theory, but in essence the church claimed that justification was expressed when man was made righteous and his soul was transformed through the quality of God's grace. God's forgiveness of sins and justification of man is made possible by the granting of grace to man and by his subsequent good works and freedom from acts of mortal sin; these aspects of his nature then also become the condition of his sanctification after death. Thus the process whereby man becomes righteous, justified before God, was subject to reasons and preconditions.
The life of man is always marked in one way or another by sin. Sin dividing man from God, excludes the love of God, is a human fault that can be remedied through the obedience to the law. The reformers, however, thought that the original sin of rebellion against God was not a human fault that could be cancelled out, but was the perverse and basic tendency of the whole person until death. Throughout his life, the Christian remains incapable of love for God and his neighbor, trapped in a self-centered way of life, lacking even the roots of humanity. Since man is guilty before God and owes total righteousness and selfless love throughout his life, the reality and possibility of God's grace can have no foundation based in man.
The Reformation doctrine of justification, in contrast, was unconditional. The sinner had an outright promise of unconditional salvation. There was nothing that could be done, no reasons given or preconditions that had to be met. Christ had already made us righteous in the sight of God with his saving death. Salvation was no longer dependent on merit, but rather guaranteed by the righteousness of Christ. Righteousness was not a state that could be acquired, as Catholicism taught, but a condition which exists beyond ourselves in Christ (extra nos). And that is why Luther's famous insight speaks of justification through faith alone. To quote Luther: 'God has laid it down that man is to be saved not by the law but by Christ.' The new relationship in which grace justifies us means that God sees man in the light of Christ's righteousness, and allows it to stand for the righteousness of sinners. Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin, express this understanding of justification in terms of the relation by speaking of the imputation to us of righteousness (reputation, imputatio), and by describing the righteousness of Christ imputed to the sinner as a righteousness that is external and alien to mankind (iustitia aliena, externa). 'Righteousness' is the acknowledgement of the sinner before the judgement seat of God in the face of accusations against him from all sides, including his own heart. The phrase by Zwingli of 'simul iustus et peccator' means a just man and at the same time a sinner. Since the Reformation thinking justification is the unconditional acceptance of the sinner, for Christ's sake and not because of any previous, present or future quality in his life and morals, and is always founded outside us in God himself -- justification acquires an eschatological meaning in the Reformation that is foreign to it in Catholic theology.
The certainty of salvation means the certainty of being safe in Christ is the source of all peace, calm, joy and consolation of a Christian life. Every reformation doctrine of justification is essentially a doctrine of freedom. Christ frees the sinner's conscience from the accusation and condemnatory curse of disobedience to the law shown by Jesus Christ -- he can obey the law 'freely and cheerfully'. The concept of by faith alone (sola fide) derives from rejecting reliance on good works and from its close connection with the word of the Gospel. Faith is not located on man's active virtue or a work, instead, it is a purely receptive mode, a gift of the holy spirit (grace is a divine gift), and also means that the sinner's attention is directed away from himself, away from any condition on which his own salvation depends, and shelters in the righteousness of Christ. This is the confidence of the believer: he is sure that in faith he is taken outside himself, away from the necessity of proving himself to God in works, and instead is taken into the righteousness of Christ.
The eschatological final validity of justification corresponds exactly to the supremacy of this faith, divorced from all virtues and morality. Not faith, but the quality of grace through love determines the specific order of being of the justified; the quality of that grace 'forms' faith. Only such a quality authenticates faith and its validity in justification, and only active love makes possible the mankind acceptable in salvation.
Reformation theology insists that all is given to faith and faith alone. It is justifying, saving faith: fides iustificans et salvifica. Man is led from his moral subjective existence into the final validity of the righteousness of Christ, in which he is preserved for salvation -- outside himself, where God looks graciously on him. Faith derives its justifying form not from internal love but through the external righteousness of Christ, to which it is bound in trust. The medieval fides caritate formata is replaced by the Reformation fides Christo formata, the faith that lives in Christ. The reformers see the fact that faith is also extremely active, operating through love and its works, in a different context. That activity is not a matter of doing good works in order to acquire justification and salvation; it derives from salvation that has already been received. When Paul says that faith worketh through love (Galatia 5:6), Luther explains that he is speaking not of becoming just, but of the life of the just. Fieri et agere is one thing, esse et facere another, as boys learn verbum passivum and verbum activum at school. The sphere in which faith is active in love does not (as in scholaticism), constitute its justifying nature; faith is justified only passively, in that the sinner is accepted into salvation in advance of any good works he may perform. Every reformation doctrine of justification distinguishes in this way between the passive and active nature of faith, between its soteriology and its ethics.
With this new understanding, centuries of Catholic belief were cast off.
The Reformation doctrine of justification represented a radical conceptual break with the medieval theological tradition, but also it reflected, in part, a common intellectual and social trend. The need for a direct or a centered relationship with God was just as strong, but in Catholicism there was no route to salvation other than the one offered by the church. The believer had to participate in the complex and perpetual cycle of salvation preserved by catholic dogma. The reformation doctrine of justification broke with the relative complexity of the medieval church and offered the faithful a focus or a center to their faith. Christ was now the center of the faith, salvation was in Christ and his Word. The Luther's notion of the Priesthood of All Believers, a theological principle which necessarily put the common man on equal terms with the clerical state.
In the German lands, as in France, the Swiss cantons, the Netherlands, and in other parts of central and eastern Europe, the Reformation first took hold in the cities and surrounding towns. To claim that the Reformation was first experienced as an "urban event' is now a commonplace of modern historiography. The urban setting was the natural location for the reception and dissemination of Reformation ideas, for that is where the reformers first held their sermons, the evangelical authors first published their pamphlets, and the message was first diffused. Public life in the 16th century was civic life. This was especially true for the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, where civic culture had reached a high stage of development. The evangelical movement had spread to the cities and towns, the people were acting on the message they were hearing, and the Word was transformed into collective action. Urban culture had turned a debate between churchmen into a social revolution. That is why the story of the Reformation's legacy to the western world begins in the Swiss and German cities.
On the eve of the Peasants' War of 1525 Nuremberg;s artisans and laborers were demanding the removal of the Catholic clergymen and the appointment of evangelical preachers in their stead. They insisted that the Word of god should lead to a reform of the church, and that its message of brotherly love should serve as the moral norm for social relations. In more practical terms, they refused to render tithes, they called for a reduction in the fees and dues paid to the city, and they petitioned for the right to participate in government. Religious demands had thus been shaped by the political environment, a process the Nuremberg city council acknowledged with some unease in June 1524 when it called attention to the 'malicious letters and notes that have been posted in the churches and the squares here in the city. As the Imperial diets met in Nuremberg from 1522 to 1524, the governing council could only stand by and watch as the Reformation took hold in the cities. Emperor Charles V had already issued the Edict of Worms in 1521 in an effort to outlaw and suppress Lutheran teachings, claiming that Luther's ideas led to nothing else but unrest, division, was, murder, robbery and pillaging and in general the destruction of the Christian commonwealth, but despite constant Imperial insistence, the city authorities were unable to enforce the edict. By this stage, support for the reform movement had become too powerful and widespread among the commoners.
Luther's religious protest had created a new political dynamic in the German lands. Domestically, urban councils had begun to implement changes and adapt the reform movement to their systems of rule, externally, city politics, tolerant if not fully supportive of the evangelical movement, now ran counter to the politics of Charles V, a man who still thought in terms of Catholic empire. Urban culture, bound to the religious principles and the social energy of the Reformation, turned its back on the vision of empire. Rather than look to the Catholic Emperor, the cities sought to defend a common religion in confessional unions and military alliances. For the first time in German history, cities joined together with territorial princes in defence of a common cause.
In 1727, the chapter of Salzburg elected a new archbishop, Firmian. Educated as a Jesuit, Firmian had little tolerance for other Christian denominations, and he soon decided to rootout the Protestant homesteads scattered throughout the alpine districts of his archdiocese. Faced with this threat, the Protestants, most of whom were rather modest cattle farmers, submitted a petition to the corpus evangelicorum (represented Protestant interests at the Imperial diets) and detailed how Catholic bullying had become a part of their daily lives. Firmian then stepped up his efforts, on 11th November 1731 the archdiocese issued a emigration edict designed to extirpate and uproot these unruly, seditious, and rebellious folk wholly and henceforth. This edict set in motion one of the most famous events in the confessional history of Europe, the expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants (1731-2). Thousands of alpine residents had to pack up their belongings and leave their land of generations on account of their religion. The emigrants were not long without a home, however, for the Protestant Elector of Bradenburg, Frederick William, had heard of this and offered a formal patent of invitation to them to settle in Prussian Lithuania. The Salzburg Protestants were the people characterized by integrity, independence, and moral probity. They were a people of the book, living together in pious households built on thrift, hard work, loyalty, and faith. The expulsion of such people, could only be the work of a godless ruler in a godless land. Protestants did not miss the chance to make parallels with the exodus of the Israelites. The Salzburg emigration took place 200 years after the Reformation.
Medieval Christians had a very active style of piety, and whenever it was possible to manipulate or personalize Catholic forms of worship they were quick to set their stamp. Witness the spread and popularity of the Corpus Christi processions in the late medieval period, the localization of the Virgin Mary as a figure of devotion, to the cult of the saints. Where they were able, the people of medieval Europe took the Catholic church to their hearts and shaped it in their image. This was one of the main problems facing the reformers of the 16th century. It was a greater task to make people forget their religion of centuries. If medieval religion was steeped in ritual and imagery, Protestantism was a religion of the book. Luther and the other reformers stressed the efficacy of God's Word and the saving power of the faith. Beyond belief, there was nothing that could be done, no ritual or observance, to secure salvation. In place of the superstitious practices of the Catholic church, the reformers set out to create a Christian community bound by understanding and faith. There was no room for trust in false religion practices or doubt in the power of belief. The Reformation removed this ambiguity by taking the 'magical' elements out of Christian religion, eliminating the ideas that religious ritual had any automatic efficacy, that material objects could be endowed with any sort of sacred power, and that human actions could have a supernatural effect.
In Protestanism, sacramentals, along with many of the other traditional protective remedies of the Catholic church, had been reduced in number. Protestant pastors constantly denounced the efficacy of sacramentals as tools of worship, and went so far as to condemn their use as superstitious and irreligious. As a consequence, the Protestant faithful became much more aware of their helplessness before God, as well as man's vulnerability in the sacred order. The Protestant faithful were much more likely to see a relationship between moral disorder and the processes of the natural world than their Catholic ancestors.
Comments
Post a Comment