Reformation History Tour, May 23 to June 5, 2016

I will be leading a Reformation History Tour next year. We'll be seeing 6 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and visiting four countries. I'll be teaching Reformation history and theology, and we'll have local guides in Prague, Wittenberg, Eisleben, Eisenach and the Wartburg Castle, .... For more information, check out the page on my ministry website. It's going to be a great trip!

Castle Church, Wittenberg, where Luther nailed up the 95 Theses

It's John Calvin's 505th birthday

John Calvin is probably best known for his ideas on predestination, though most people don't really get him right on that. In honor of his birthday, I decided to post the explanation of predestination and the controversy surrounding it from The Reformation for Armchair Theologians. Enjoy:

Predestination 

To understand this controversy, we need to define predestination and see why it is important. The idea behind predestination is that our salvation depends on God and not on ourselves. Although there are a number of passages in Scripture that talk about it (e.g. Rom. 8:29ff or Eph. 1), it didn’t become a major subject in theology until the fourth century. A British monk named Pelagius had argued that our salvation depended entirely on the choices we make; both original sin and substitutionary atonement are false, according to Pelagius, since neither Adam’s guilt, nor ours, nor the merits of Christ can be imputed to another person. You are on your own before God. Some people in the church were heavily influenced by Pelagius, but others rejected his ideas. The most important of the latter was St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine thought Pelagius’s ideas were not only false, but downright dangerous. Christ is the author of our salvation—it depends on what He has done, not what we have done. As a result, the decision about salvation is in God’s hands, not ours. And this is a good thing, since none of us deserves to be saved on the basis of our own merits. We have all sinned, and as a result, no one deserves blessings from God—salvation is a result of us getting what we don’t deserve, not what we do.

At this point, we need to distinguish between two different versions of the doctrine of predestination. Single predestination argues that God chooses some people for salvation, and judges others according to their own merits. Of course, that means they’ll be damned since no one measures up to God’s infinite standard of holiness. Double predestination, on the other hand, argues that God has a plan for everyone’s life—for some, it’s heaven, for others, it’s hell. God chooses everyone to either fly or fry; He doesn’t just leave us to our fate. This is a more severe version of the doctrine than singe predestination, though there’s no practical difference between the two in terms of the fate of those not chosen for salvation. There’s some dispute about Augustine’s views. Most scholars argue that he held to single predestination, others are equally sure he held to double predestination.

Whatever Augustine’s views, he won, and Pelagianism was declared a heresy. Between Augustine’s day and the sixteenth century, many variations of the doctrine of salvation emerged, with differing degrees of emphasis on human contributions to salvation. Pelagianism was out, but then there’s semi-Pelagianism, semi-Augustinianism, Augustinianism, hyper-Augustinianism, .... Catholic theology generally fell somewhere between Pelagianism and Augustinianism.

Luther, as an Augustinian monk, obviously was familiar with the history of the debate. And with his “New Theology,” he adamantly rejected even a hint of Pelagianism: we are saved by grace—God’s undeserved favor—and grace alone, and that comes from faith and faith alone. But faith itself is a gift of God, it doesn’t come from our actions or decisions. Period. But what this means is that God makes the decisions—if our salvation depended on our decision or on our responding to God in faith, then that decision or response would become the work which saves us, an idea Luther adamantly rejected. As a result, Luther recognized the need for predestination. It is a logical consequence of sola gratia and sola fide, and besides, it’s a good scriptural term. But Luther wasn’t willing to go any further than that. He believed that Scripture taught predestination, but he didn’t think it told us how it worked. So he simply said it happened and left it at that.

Calvin, on the other hand, thought that Scripture taught double predestination. At the same time, he didn’t think that it was an issue most people needed to deal with. Calvin was more interested in preaching the fundamentals of the faith and applying Scripture to life than in teaching about predestination, particularly because the discussion would likely distract from more important issues. So Calvin taught predestination in his theological works and biblical commentaries, but not from the pulpit. He simply didn’t want to focus on it in his public ministry. Unfortunately, he wasn’t given the chance to leave it in the background.

The Bolsec Controversy

Jerome Bolsec was a former monk and Catholic theologian who had converted to Protestantism and moved to Geneva. He was working as the personal physician of one of the nobles who lived outside the city and had become familiar with Calvin and his writings. He didn’t like Calvin personally and was irked by his ideas on predestination. So Bolsec took it upon himself to cause problems for Calvin with predestination as a wedge issue. His plan was simple. Calvin had too many things to do to attend the congregations (adult Bible studies), so Bolsec decided to go to one of them, and when the pastor asked if there were any questions, he would launch into his attack whether the passage being studied had any connection to predestination at all. Word would spread from there, and Calvin would never be able to get the lid on it; he’d be discredited, and Geneva would get rid of him. It was an ingenious plan, except for one slight miscalculation. Calvin was free that evening and showed up at the congregation. When Bolsec finished his presentation—remember, he had come gunning for bear—all eyes turned to Calvin to see how he would respond. Now keep in mind that Calvin had no formal theological training, and further that he was caught flat-footed by Bolsec. Despite this, he launched into a well reasoned, well argued, and well presented case, citing from memory extensive passages of Scripture and the church fathers verbatim. His presentation was so convincing that when it was over, one of the magistrates promptly arrested Bolsec for heresy.

Calvin was furious with Bolsec, not simply because he disagreed with Calvin on predestination, but because of the underhanded way he went about his attack. As a result, Calvin was out for blood at the trial. Bolsec was in fact convicted, but the Council overruled Calvin and argued that Bolsec’s heresy wasn’t sufficiently grave to warrant his execution. He was banished, though, and made his way to France. After starting a number of controversies in the Reformed churches there, he converted back to Catholicism and wrote a libelous (and fictitious) biography of Calvin that became a staple of anti-Calvin propaganda.

Bolsec did succeed in one part of his program, however: he made Calvin’s views on predestination a very public issue. Lutherans, who never really trusted Calvin because of his views on the Lord’s Supper, quickly picked up on it and began attacking Calvin as a heretic. Ironically enough these attacks soon led the Lutherans themselves to abandon predestination altogether, forgetting the fact that Luther himself accepted it. Calvin couldn’t let these challenges go unanswered, of course, and thus he ended up spending a considerable amount of energy defending his views on a doctrine he didn’t particularly want to focus on in his public ministry.

Misappropriating the Reformation 2 and 3: Sola Gratia and Sola Scriptura

The remaining articles in the series on Misappropriating the Reformation are up at the Colson Center. They cover sola gratia and sola scriptura.

In honor of Reformation Day

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, inadvertantly starting the Protestant Reformation. The following excerpt from my book The Reformation for Armchair Theologians, which I also published last year on this date, explains what all this was about:

To understand the events leading to this break, we must travel south to Rome, where Pope Leo X was building St. Peter’s Basilica. Like any of us faced with financing new construction, Leo approached his bankers for a loan. The Medici bank of Florence, which was owned by Leo’s family, had been the papal bank for some time, though by Leo’s day it had been replaced by the Fugger bank, centered in Augsburg, Germany. The Fugger bank had been founded relatively recently, but it rose rapidly to become the largest bank in the world due to the same silver boom in Germany that had led to the establishment of the University of Wittenberg and the relative prosperity of the Luther family. Jacob Fugger, the head of the bank, approved the loan, but this left Leo with the problem of figuring out how to pay it back. Leo decided that the best approach to handling that problem was to sell off some of the assets in his treasury, specifically, the Treasury of Merits of which he was the custodian. In other words, Leo decided to hold an indulgence sale.

So, what are indulgences? To understand that, we need to know something about Roman Catholic conceptions of sin. According to Catholic theology, every sin you commit results in both eternal and temporal penalties. Eternal penalties affect your relationship with God; they are spiritual and deal with your status in eternity, that is, whether you go to Heaven or Hell. But since a sin against God is also a crime against your neighbor, sins must also be punished in this life, hence the temporal penalties, which are paid in time. When you confess your sins to a priest and he absolves you, that absolution takes away the eternal penalty due to your sins, but leaves the temporal untouched. He then assigns you a penance (a good work) that you can perform that pays the temporal penalty. This may be saying prayers, going on a pilgrimage, etc. These penalties could be pretty hefty; for example, knights fighting at the battle of Hastings in 1066, in a campaign that had been blessed by the Pope, were required to do 10 years of penance for every person they killed in the battle. And this didn't even touch other battles the knight fought in or any extra-curricular activities he might have indulged in. If you die with your temporal debt unpaid, the remainder has to be paid in time in the afterlife, so you go to Purgatory, a doctrine developed in the twelfth century to deal with the problems associated with unpaid temporal penalties. After your temporal penalty is completely paid in Purgatory, then you go to Heaven.

So how do you avoid languishing in Purgatory for who knows how long? There are a couple of possibilities. You could endow a monastery or a church and get priests to say Mass or monks to pray for you. If you pay the expenses, the credit for the time and the Masses goes to your account. This may seem odd, but think of it like this: if you get a speeding ticket, the town doesn't really care if you pay it or someone else does; it just wants its money. The same logic applies here. As long as your temporal debt is paid by someone, it counts. Going on pilgrimage is another good option. Not only do you get credit for the time you spend on the road, but the shrine you're visiting itself conveys a certain number of years of penance depending on its importance.

This is where indulgences came in, particularly in connection with armed, fighting pilgrimages, or as we call them, Crusades. To try to drum up troops to free the Holy Land, the Pope had promised certain unspecified spiritual benefits to all who fought for the faith; the Church then needed to figure out exactly what these benefits were. The doctrines outlined above were elaborated to a large extent to answer this question. The Church eventually decided that going on a Crusade would remit the entire temporal penalty due to sins that had been confessed to a priest and absolved. But since not everyone could go on Crusade—women, the sick, the aged, etc.—and not everyone who wanted to go on Crusade could afford it, it was decided that if you paid the way for someone else to go on Crusade, you would receive the benefits of Crusading yourself. These benefits would be paid to you out of the Treasury of Merits, the collection of good works performed by Christ and the saints above and beyond what was necessary for their own salvation. The Pope was the custodian of this Treasury and could call a Crusade and authorize a withdrawal for the participants. (Not all the Crusades were to the Holy Land: the Reconquistà which drove the Muslims out of Spain actually began before the Crusades proper, and other Crusades were called against the Albigensians in France, pagans in the Baltic, the Hussites in Bohemia, and even the Pope's political rivals.) With the end of the Crusades, the practice of selling indulgences, as these crusading benefits were called, continued. Some were limited indulgences, which paid only for a specific period of time, say, 10 years of penance. Others were plenary indulgences, which paid the whole penalty. Leo's indulgence sale was the latter type.

Leo, of course, was not going to go out hawking indulgences on the streets. The man who was reputed to have said, "God gave us the papacy; let us enjoy it!" was not about to turn himself into a salesman. Instead, he let it be known that for a fee, he would authorize other ecclesiastical authorities to sell plenary indulgences themselves. One person who bought into the scheme was Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, in the Holy Roman Empire. Albrecht wasn’t about to peddle indulgences on the corner any more than the Pope was, so he sub-contracted the indulgences sale to the Dominicans, an order of friars founded in the 13th century to supply the Church with preachers and expert theologians. The Dominicans would sell the indulgences and take a cut of the profits; the rest would go to Albrecht to recoup the money he had paid Leo to hold the indulgence sale; Leo used Albrecht’s money to help pay back the loan he had gotten from the Fugger bank to build St. Peter’s Basilica.

Unfortunately, the Dominicans were not above twisting the theology of indulgences to make more sales. One of them, Johan Tetzel by name, was a master of the hard sell and was generally the sort of person who gave used car salesmen a bad name. He literally would tell his listeners that his indulgences were so good that even if you had violated the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, this would get you off the hook. He told people repentance wasn't necessary for the indulgences to work and that it was a virtual ticket to Heaven regardless of what you had done or would do. And when he couldn’t get any more sales from that, he ratcheted things up a bit more. If you are not worried about yourself, what about your dearly departed mother languishing perhaps for thousands of years in Purgatory? Were you to spend but a few coins on an indulgence, she would be released to go directly into Heaven. After going on about this for a while, Tetzel would end with a little jingle: "As soon as the coin in the coin box rings, another soul from Purgatory springs!" (It rhymes in German, too.) There was no mention that indulgences applied only to sins already committed, confessed to a priest and absolved, only to the temporal penalties due to such sins, etc.

The Indulgence Controversy and the 95 Theses

This indulgence sale upset many people. Among them was Elector Frederick the Wise, the prince of Electoral Saxony and one of the people who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. He opposed the indulgence sale for two basic reasons. First, it meant that money his people were producing in Saxony was being sent out of the country to Mainz and ultimately to Rome, thereby hurting the prosperity of Electoral Saxony. In fact, Frederick suspected the whole thing was a scam designed to enrich Italy at the expense of Germany. Second, in addition to using his revenues from silver mining to build the University of Wittenberg, he had also spent a great deal of it purchasing relics; in fact, he had one of the largest relic collections ever assembled. People went on pilgrimages to view these relics—further enriching Saxony's coffers—and Frederick was afraid that the indulgence sale would hurt business. So Frederick simply banned the Dominicans from his territories; Tetzel and company were forbidden to set foot in Saxony, and thus the indulgence sale had none of the negative consequences that Frederick feared.

This wasn't the end of the matter, however. The University of Wittenberg had picked up a star theologian from the University of Erfurt, an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther. He had begun work as a Bachelor lecturer at Wittenberg, then completed his doctorate in theology a few years later. Luther was very proud of that doctorate, and always referred to himself as Herr Dr. Luther. Luther had  new approach to theology based on the insights he gained from his Tower Experience; he and his students had converted the rest of the theological faculty at Wittenberg to his way of thinking. And like Frederick, Luther was also upset about the indulgence sale, though more for theological reasons, and thus he decided to back up his prince by doing what theologians did in the sixteenth century: he challenged the Dominicans to a debate. Debates were the standard academic exercise of the period, more or less like a combination of term papers and exams today. The protocol involved first writing a list of propositions, or theses, in Latin (the language of academia), which the debater was willing to defend against either specified individuals or all comers. He then posted the theses along with information on the time and place of the debate on the University bulletin board. In theological debates, the theses also had to be sent to the person's spiritual superior to be checked for heresy. Luther wrote a series of theses against the abuses of this indulgence sale—ninety-five of them, to be exact—and posted them on the University bulletin board, the church door at Wittenberg. This has often been portrayed as a great act of defiance, as Luther boldly challenging the corruption of the Church. Actually, it was more like an act of conformity. All Luther was doing was following standard procedures for debate in an attempt to defend what he thought was good church doctrine against the abuses of the Dominicans. Although the debate never took place (remember, the Dominicans couldn't enter Saxony), two things came together to make the 95 Theses an enormously controversial event.

First, following standard procedures, Luther sent a copy of the theses to his spiritual superior, who happened to be Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. Second, some of Luther's students got hold of the theses, thought, "this is really hot stuff," and sent them off to a printer AFTER TRANSLATING THEM INTO GERMAN. Much to everyone's surprise, the 95 Theses became a runaway best seller, with translations following into most European languages. Despite the best efforts of professors since then, this was the only time in history that an academic exercise has generated such an incredible volume of sales. Luther thus unexpectedly found himself at the center of an international controversy over indulgences.

Misappropriating the Reformation: Sola Fide

The first of three articles on the Reformation and American Evangelicalism is up at the Colson Center. This one deals with one of the three core "sola" statements of the Protestant Reformation: sola fide, that is, that we are saved by faith alone. But the question is, what does that really mean, and do American Evangelicals understand the historic and biblical meanings of that phrase? The article can be found here.