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But corruption brings weakness, and political leaders—kings, dukes, electors—see an opportunity to gain more independence from Rome. Whereas in earlier days Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, had knelt for 3 days in the snow seeking the forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, now a mere elector, Friedrich the Wise, will grant the heretic Luther sanctuary in his Wartburg Castle. Whereas Huss and Savonarola died early and painful deaths, Luther will die a natural death at the ripe old age of 62.

The Renaissance will bring a love of learning that begins to spread beyond the wealthy, and literacy rates will begin to rise. Scholars will begin to write in languages the masses can read. Soon more and more people are realizing that the Church and its own Bible are not saying the same things.

Can the Church be reformed?

There have been reforms before, a notable one under Gregory VII and at points along the way with church councils, most recently at Constance in Germany, after the embarrassment and disaster of the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy” in Avignon, France. But reforms have made mostly surface changes, and temporary ones at that. Now the corruption runs too deep, the money is too great, and the power structures are too deeply entrenched.

If change will come, it will shake the world itself and bring a new beginning.

And it will come. It will upend the ecclesiastical world by bringing to the forefront 3 significant ideas:

• The authority of Scripture rather than the church
• The central importance of faith rather than mechanical works
• Direct access to God for the person in the pew

And when Reformation comes, it will come because, in the providence of God, it is spurred on by two divinely orchestrated developments:

• The renaissance of interest in classical ideas and languages, which will lead, among other things, to the rediscovery of the Greek New Testament; and
• The printing press, which will explode the spread of these ideas

And out of all this ferment will spring a renewed understanding of the gospel:

• that we are indeed sinful, and that no church can forgive our sin;
• that God himself, in the person of Christ, has completely paid the penalty for our sin through his death on the cross, and has removed his own wrath against us;
• that faith, not works, appropriates Christ’s work to us as individuals and makes us the very sons and daughters of God;
• and that, wonder of wonders, the righteousness of Christ himself is given to us, freely and abundantly, so that now God sees his believing children through Christ-colored glasses.

The Church tried Law, and it only led to lawlessness. The Reformation reintroduces the masses to Grace, God’s grace, which is truly greater than all our sin.

Interestingly, the discovery of the New World, by Columbus, in 1492 will providentially provide a place for a few Protestants to seek greater freedom of worship—and everyone reading this today has benefited from that.

All of this is one part, a significant part, of the story God is telling. He won’t let his images languish in ignorance and sin. He will rescue them. Further, he will not let you languish either. He will pursue you; he will break down barriers between you and him; he will draw you to himself.

And then he will make you part of the story he’s telling, till all is ready and done.

That’s who he is.

Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

Part 1 | Part 2

As the wealthy rise higher in the circles of power and influence, they can get the pope to appoint their sons—legitimate or illegitimate—to other church offices, if the price is right. King James V of Scotland, grandfather of the more famous King James, got his illegitimate sons appointed abbots; there’s a good living in that, after all. In about 20 years, in 1513, Leo X will become pope, saying, “Let us enjoy the papacy.” One observer said that Leo “would have been a good pope, if only he had been religious.” A Catholic historian described Leo’s court as filled with “extravagant expenditure in card-playing, theatres and all manner of worldly amusements. … The iniquity of Rome exceeded that of the ecclesiastical princes of Germany.”

And with organizational cynicism comes moral cynicism. If you’re powerful enough, you’ll be rich. And if you’re rich enough, you can do anything you want and simply buy forgiveness.

More than 200 years before Leo X, Dante had put popes in the lowest circle of hell. And now, 20 years before Leo X, in 1492, the very month Columbus sets sail for the Indies, Rodrigo Borgia becomes pope under the name Alexander VI. His corruption and immorality seem unending. He appoints his relatives cardinals, including an illegitimate son, and he appoints another son, aged 16, as archbishop of Valencia. He readily acknowledges other sons and daughters; his daughter Lucretia Borgia is the embodiment of immorality and corruption. He has several mistresses, including the sister of a cardinal. He appoints wealthy men as cardinals in return for huge sums of money. He sponsors orgies in the Vatican itself. To him, nothing is sacred. And he is the pope, the vicar of Christ, the servant of the servants of God.

After Alexander, Pope Julius II will turn the papacy into a military power, enriching the church through acquisition of lands and political intrigue.

So the leaders have given up being seriously religious. With their riches they buy forgiveness—they call that indulgences—and many of them just quit trying to be the right kind of person. In his History of the Christian Church, Philip Schaff writes,

“The story ran that a Saxon knight went to Tetzel and offered him 10 thaler for a sin he had in mind to commit. Tetzel replied that he had full power from the pope to grant such an indulgence, but that it was worth 80 thaler. The knight paid the amount, but some time later waylaid Tetzel and took all his indulgence-moneys from him. To Tetzel’s complaints the robber replied that thereafter he must not be so quick in giving indulgence from sins not yet committed.”

Once the indulgence money starts pouring in, the church is not inclined to discourage it. Under Leo X and his successors, the indulgence money helps build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Perhaps the worst of it is that power brings arrogance, and arrogance brings tyranny. The church will tolerate no rivals; its people must conform. Heretics are dealt with harshly, as an example to others who might get unapproved ideas.

John Huss, the preacher of Prague around 1400, argues, among other things, that a church leader who is in mortal sin has no authority from God. He is promised safe conduct to the Council of Constance and then nearly starved in prison before being called to the cathedral at 6 am, expecting to offer his defense. No defense is allowed; after waiting outside for several hours, he enters the cathedral to hear his condemnation read. No one present objects. Huss says, “I commit myself to the most gracious Lord Jesus” before he is escorted to the public square, chained to a stake, and burned to death.

Beginning just a few years ago in 1478, the infamous Spanish Inquisition will condemn alleged heretics at will, with or without proof, burn them alive, and take their property to enrich the inquisitors and their friends.

Savonarola, the popular preacher of righteousness in Florence, calls out the corruption of the Roman church and Pope Alexander in particular. The pope orders him tortured, hanged, and his body burned and the ashes thrown in the river.

Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

Part 4

Part 1

The church is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside; there are huge brownish columns holding up the arched ceiling, which seems to reach all the way to the Milky Way itself. There are stained-glass windows, some with pictures in them, and there are statues of people in places around the building, but you don’t know much about the stories behind them, because you can’t read, and even if you could, your family couldn’t afford to buy a book. Until about 50 years ago, all books were copied by hand, and only churches or monasteries or very, very rich people had even one. Now books are being printed on machines, but they’re still very expensive, and you’ve never even seen one.

So you’d like to know about God, but you can’t read, and at church they speak a language you don’t understand. So you ask your father and mother, but they don’t understand the church language, and they can’t read either, so that’s that.

It occurs to you that if the church is the only way you can get to God, they ought to make it easier to find out how. They have the paintings, but they hardly ever talk about them, and the homilies are all about saying prayers and doing things, most of which you can’t afford to do.

Is that what God is like? Does he only like rich people? Is there no way you can get to him?

You wouldn’t know this, but the problems go a lot deeper than you’ve observed, and the situation is seemingly beyond reformation.

For centuries now, church scholars have been focused on highly impractical speculations—such as, famously, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Philosophy has overwhelmed theology, and the sheep have been fumbled in the process. Little of what comes from the scholars is of any practical use. There is certainly nothing resembling the gospel.

The church has tried to make salvation simple for the poor illiterate peasants, so it’s reduced the way to God down to some simple, objective, countable things: you tell them what you’ve done wrong, and then they tell you how to be forgiven: you say memorized prayers, you do a list of mechanical things the priest tells you to do, you give money to various church-related causes. And when you do enough of the things, you’ll be forgiven. The church seems more interested in the quantity of your works than their quality.

But here’s the problem. You keep doing wrong things—in fact, you do the wrong things faster than you can do enough good things to make up for them, and you just get further and further behind.

Even worse, the leadership realizes this, because they see it in their own lives too. Even though the good things are fairly simple to do—anybody can say 100 Hail Marys or Our Fathers—they don’t change your heart, and you keep going back to the dark side, and you keep falling behind, and eventually it’s all just pointless.

For centuries the church has held pretty much all the power, and as someone’s going to say someday, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Rich people see the church’s power as more important than its forgiveness or even its access to God, and they become unremittingly cynical. They buy positions in the church—for a healthy fee, you can become a bishop, or an archbishop, or even a cardinal! In fact, you can buy several offices at once, and be bishop in multiple cities at the same time! Of course, that means that the bishop isn’t going to be in most of his cities most of the time, and that’s a recipe for bad administration and further corruption.

And with their riches they buy all the things they want—lands, castles, servants, clothing, jewels, amusements. Cardinal Wolsey was said to march in procession followed by a train of 500 servants.

Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

Part 3 | Part 4

Tomorrow, October 31, is a landmark holiday in our culture: Halloween. But it is another holiday as well: it’s the anniversary of the day that the Reformer Martin Luther nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany, an act viewed by many as the official start of the Protestant Reformation.

Some years ago I was asked to speak in my university’s chapel about the reasons for the Reformation. I’d like to take four posts to share what I presented there.

—–

The year is 1492. You live in central Europe, near the center of the Holy Roman Empire, in the area that will someday be called Germany. This is your life.

Your city, Frankfurt, is large, prosperous, and growing. It’s becoming a trade center, and the rich are developing fortunes. There are lots of people, but only two kinds, rich and poor. The rich own the land, and the poor live on it and do the best they can. There are lots more poor people than rich ones, so you’re poor. Your father is a cobbler; he makes shoes. And someday you’ll be a cobbler too, because that’s how life is; you work with your hands, and you learn a trade from someone willing to teach you, and your father is the closest teacher at hand. So you’ll be a cobbler, like him.

School? That’s funny. Hardly anyone goes to school. Oh, the children of rich people do—or at least some of them do, those who show some aptitude for learning. Many wealthy families want one of their sons to be a priest or a monk, and they’ll choose one to learn what he can in a monastery or an abbey. If the rich man is associated with the new banking industry here in northern Europe, his sons might learn to read and cipher so they can go into that. But you? No, school’s not in the cards. You’ll help your father in his shop, and you’ll learn his trade. You’ll make enough money at that to support a wife and children with food and other very basic needs.

Your schedule is pretty much ruled by the sun. When it rises, and the roosters crow, you get up, break your fast, and get to work. When it goes down, you fall into bed and sleep the deep sleep of the weary. Day after day, week after week, the ritual is the same.

Sometimes at night, when you can’t sleep, you look up at the sky. It’s quite a sight. There’s no light at night, of course, except the glimmer of a few torches here and there, and the night sky is a wonder. Thousands of stars—thousands of them—blanket the sky, with many of them clustered in a band. There are so many of them, and they are so close together, that it looks like a path of milk that stretches from the northeast to the south. A milky way. What a sight. And some of the stars are brighter than the others, and oddly, they change positions as the nights progress. People have given them names: Venus, Mars, Jupiter. You don’t know why they move among the other stars—the wise ones call them “wandering stars”—but you love to watch them parade along the Milky Way at night.

And you wonder who made them. God? Who is he? What is he like? Does he know about you? Does he care? Does he want to be friends? How can you find out?

There are churches in your town. The biggest one, St. Bartholomew’s, is right in the center of the city. It’s a very important church; the kings have been crowned there for more than 100 years, and everyone in the city is very proud of it. Its tower is almost 300 feet tall, and you can see it from anywhere in the city. It’s beautiful.

Your family goes to mass there on Sundays; your father says that you have to because God likes you better if you do. You think the mass is boring—it’s mostly in some language you can’t understand. It’s a long ways from where you sit to the front where the priest stands, but you can tell that he talks for a while—your father calls it a “homily”—and sometimes that’s in your language, but it’s so far away, and the church echoes so much, that it’s hard to make out much of what he says. Sometimes you hear him talking about giving alms to the poor, but you don’t have any alms. You guess that means you’re poor, but nobody ever gives your family any alms, either. And sometimes he talks about going on a pilgrimage to see holy places, but your father says there isn’t any money for that either, so the homilies don’t seem to say much to you. There’s a choir that sings in a kind of a chant, and you like that part, and then the priest says something in the other language, the one you don’t understand. It sounds like “hocus pocus,” and he holds something up with both his hands, and somebody rings a bell, and then everybody goes up to the front, row by row, for what your father calls the eucharist, but again, it’s all in a language you can’t understand, and when you ask your father to explain, he says he doesn’t really understand it either. You ask him to ask the priest, and he says he did, but the priest can’t read, so he can’t explain much. But it’s all very important, so your whole family goes every Sunday.

To be continued …

Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4