Beeson Podcast, Episode 357 David C. Steinmetz September 12, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Well, on today's Beeson Podcast, you have a treat because we're reaching back into our archives, and we're picking out a lecture that was given by the late Dr. David C. Steinmetz here at Beeson Divinity School in 1995. Dr. Steinmetz was one of the great historians of the reformation of our whole era. We're going to listen to an introduction by of him by my colleague, Dr. Frank Thielman. Dr. Thielman was a student at Duke Divinity School when David Steinmetz taught there and had occasion to overhear him lecturing. I, myself, came to know David Steinmetz. He was my teacher for a brief time and good friend over the years and one of the great, great teachers I've ever had in my life. You're going to love this lecture. It's called The Reformation as a Whole. He takes an overarching, synoptic view of the whole reformation. It's so appropriate for this year when we're commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Let's go to Hodges Chapel back in 1995 and hear this scintillating lecture by Dr. David Steinmetz, introduced by Frank Thielman. Frank Thielman: Some 12 years ago, I began my graduate program at Duke University. I can well remember laboring in the basement of the Divinity School library over some esoteric problem in New Testament studies, reading some tome or trying to figure out some difficulty and, in the midst of trying to do that, thinking, "I need a break." This happened on one occasion. I would emerge from the bowels of the library, go up into the halls of the Divinity School, and check my box. Right next to the place where the student boxes were located was a lecture hall that Dr. Steinmetz frequently used as a place to teach his classes. More than once I paused there, having checked my mail, and listened to Dr. Steinmetz's lecture because they were so scintillating. He was known throughout the Divinity School as the best lecturer on the Divinity School faculty. His classes were always packed. Since that's not true, necessarily, of all great scholars, it's wonderful that Dr. Steinmetz is here with us. He is not only a great scholar, a scintillating lecturer, but as many of my colleagues in the Divinity School knew, he was also a wonderful teacher too. Many of them made a point of taking his courses. Dr. Steinmetz, thank you for being with us, and welcome again. David Steinmetz: Thank you very much. I'm going to do something rather different from what I did on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I tried to look at the Reformation by focusing on biblical exegesis and attempting to understand Luther and Calvin better by looking at what they did on a very small scale. Today, I want to step back from the Reformation and try to look at it as a whole and to say something in general about the shape of the Reformation as I understand it. Someone asked at the luncheon yesterday about whether Wesley ever comments on the Jacob story that I talked about on Tuesday, and I mentioned to him, but I couldn't think, for the life of me ... I mean I can only remember names of people if they're dead, and I have difficulty remembering anything else. But the hymn that I had in mind was, "Come O thou Traveler unknown, whom still I hold but cannot see. My company before is gone, and I am left alone with Thee. With Thee all night I mean to stay, and wrestle till the break of day." If you don't know this hymn, let me recommend it to you. It's important to remember that the Reformation began as an intra-Catholic debate. All of the first generation of Protestant Reformers, and most of the second, had been baptized and educated as Catholics. Their criticisms of the Catholic church and its theology were based not on what they had read in Protestant manuals of theology but on what they had experienced as children raised in traditionally Catholic homes and educated in traditionally Catholic schools. When, in 1518, in Heidelberg at a disputation sponsored by Luther's own order, The Hermits of St. Augustine, the Alsatian Dominican Martin Bucer was persuaded to accept Luther's critique of late scholastic theology. Neither he nor Luther had any reason to suspect that the new theology they espoused would eventually force them outside the medieval Catholic church. In 1518, the hope was for renewal in head and members, not schism. Even Catholics who rejected the early Reformation as a movement that threatened to go too far felt the force of many Protestant criticisms of Catholic faith and practice and attempted to accommodate some of those criticisms within the framework of medieval Christianity. The support of the doctrine of double justice at Regensburg and Trent by such prominent Catholic churchmen as Gasparo Cardinal Contarini, Reginald Cardinal Pole, and Girolamo Cardinal Seripando is one example of a serious attempt by Catholic theologians to accommodate Protestant teaching concerning a certitude of salvation within a more traditional Catholic doctrine of grace. Eventually of course, it doesn't happen immediately, but eventually the lines between the confessions hardened. Faced with a stark choice between competing visions of Christianity, a large number, though never a majority, of European Catholics born between 1480 and 1510 voluntarily abandoned the church in which they had been raised in order to align themselves with one or another of the new reform movements. The new Protestants included in their number, former Friars like Bernardino Ochino and Conrad Pelikan. Secular priests like Huldrych Zwingli and Balthazar Holdmeyer. Monks likes Michael Sadler and John Hooper. Bishops like Hermann von Vet and Gion Laske. Nuns like Marie Don Tierre and Katarina von Bora and lay people like Lazarus Spengler and John Calvin, in this case both of them lawyers. Even if one allows for conversions that were wholly political or merely frivolous, a defection of this sort from the western Catholic church was unprecedented. Nothing could compare with it in geographical breadth or sociological range, certainly not the Hussite revolution of the 15th century that was it's nearest historic analog. How does one account for the shift in allegiance? The answer of course is complicated. There are psychological, sociological, political, economic, gender, and ideological factors that enter into important human decisions and that certainly entered into the decisions of the first generations of converts to Protestantism. The notion that every action has an adequate and sufficient cause is itself inadequate to explain human actions, which may have several overlapping adequate and sufficient causes. Human decisions are, as we've grown accustomed to say, overdetermined. In human affairs we deal with the surplus in motivation that complicates and sometimes defies tidy historical explanation. In this lecture I want to examine only the intellectual aspect of the Reformation. I think the aspect will be most interesting to people who are preparing for the ministry. One ought not to define the intellectual appeal of the Reformation too narrowly as though the Reformation were a philosophical movement like the Frankfurt school, with a body of theory comprehensible to only a small group of highly trained theoreticians and critics. Luther was no Habermas and the new theology that he advocated was not restricted to an elite initiated into abstract, intellectual puzzles. The main lines of Reformation theology were comprehensible to a broad range of Catholic laity who understood all too well what issues were being addressed by the advocates of the new learning. What was at stake in the Reformation was not truth as such, but what 16th century Europeans regarded as saving truth. Protestants did not come with the new metaphysic or epistemology. They did not offer fresh insights into the nature of the ancient intellect or the intention and remission of forms. They addressed the ancient questions at the heart of Christian faith and worship. Does baptism wash away original sin? Is Christ present in the Eucharist? Does the priest have authority to pardon mortal sin? Experts answered these questions on a higher level of complexity than ordinary lay people understood, but they were not questions in which ordinary lay people had no interest. In some respects, the Protestant Reformation was not terribly original. Most of the questions the Protestant reformers asked and answered were traditional questions that had been asked and answered before. In giving their answers, Protestant theologians called upon a wide range of traditional Christian sources. The Bible, early Christian writers, especially Augustine and John Chrysostom, two favorites. Medieval mystics from Bernard of Clairvaux to the author of the Theologia Deutsch. Biblical commentators like Nicholas of Lyra and Haimo of Auxerre. The Codex of Cannon Law cited negatively by Luther who mistrusted all lawyers. We now know that he went to law school for about six weeks, and somewhat more positively by Zwingli and Calvin. Calvin of course was a doctor of civil law. As well as scholastic doctors from Peter Lombard to Thomas Aquinas. There's even a large group of reformed theologians who I think have to be looked upon as Thomistic. What set the Protestant message off from medieval Catholic tradition was not the uniqueness of its questions or the newness of its sources. What set it off was the angle of vision from which those traditional sources were read and evaluated. The Christian past was not so much rejected by the Protestant reformers as refashioned in the light of a different and competing vision of its development and continuing significance. What elements in the Protestant angle of vision were particularly appealing to new converts. High on the list of elements in the Protestant vision of Christianity was its appeal to Christian antiquity. There is of course nothing in the 16th century less revolutionary and more traditional than an appeal to the past. Sixteenth century Christians, both Protestant and Catholic shared a strong cultural assumption that what was older is better than what is new. We don't share that assumption much any longer. You don't have to say "new and improved." All you have to say is "new." And we know you mean improved. That assumption applied not only to religion, but civic and cultural relations, art and architecture, law and custom, economic and agricultural practices. In short, the whole range of activities and beliefs that gives human society it's character. The modern notion that new things are generally better and ought in a well ordered society to supplant what is older was on the whole, an idea that had not yet found a home in 16th century Europe. The cultural bias was in favor of what was sound, tested, ancient, rooted in the collective experience of generations. An appeal to Christian antiquity had been a strong motif in reform movements throughout the middle ages. When the mendicant orders were founded, that is the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Augustinians, their apologist could point to what they regarded as a more ancient form of the religious life than the Cloister. They were founded in competition with the Monastic orders like the Benedictines and they wanted to argue that their form of life was older than the Benedictine even though they were a new movement. Namely, the pattern was the circle of disciples around Jesus who had abandoned their small properties in order to follow a leader who had nowhere to lay his head. The monks had very large establishments in which to lay your head, but the Mendicants had nothing. The Mendicants called such a life of poverty an itinerant preaching, the vita apostolica. Who can forget the picture of Saint Francis of Assisi striping himself of his possessions in order to marry the widow, Lady Poverty and to take for his Cloister the highways of the world. Nudus Nudum Christum Sequence, naked following the naked Christ. It was an old Monastic motto but now the Mendicants made it theirs. I mean after all the question they ask is "How can you really say you really follow Jesus when you don't follow his injunction to hate father and mother? How can you say you're a Christian if you have possessions? You must sell all and give to the poor. Only naked do you follow the naked Christ." When the Christian humanists suggested that scholars ought to return ad fontes to the oldest and best manuscripts of the ancient Christian and Pagan writings rather than rely on as earlier scholars had, on later translations and adaptations, they were stating as the philological principal, a theme deeply embedded in Christian consciousness. The water of a stream is purist near its source. Like a mountain spring, Christian antiquity represents a purer form of Christianity than its contemporary manifestations. If this is true, then the cry of Christian reformers must always lead back to the past, to the purer form of ancient Christianity that can serve as norm and inspiration for the reform of church and society in the present. The Protestant form of appeal to the past rested on the conviction that many so called ancient traditions of the Catholic church were not ancient at all, but represented innovations introduced into Catholic life and thought at a later, often a much later stage of the church's history. Like old English customs that cannot on closer inspection be traced back beyond the reign of Queen Victoria, the church promulgated as ancient, customs and ideas that could not be traced in unbroken succession to a period earlier than say, the pontificate of Gregory VII or to codification of Cannon Law by promulgation, or the Introduction of Scholastic Theology by Peter Lombard to mention three possible turning points suggested by different Protestant authors. When the Bishop of Carpentras, Jacopo Sadoleto, accused Calvin and the reformers of Geneva of introducing innovations and novelties into the communities they reformed, Calvin turned Sadoleto's argument on its head. The Catholic claimed antiquity argued Calvin was a formal claim without material substance. The Catholic church was riddled with innovations. Introduced over centuries of inattention and theological laxity. By submitting themselves to Scripture and the writings of the ancient fathers, the Protestant communities were purging themselves of such unwanted innovations and returning to a more ancient and therefore pure form of ecclesiastical life and thought. The Protestants justify themselves by saying we are going for antiquity. It's important to point out that the Protestant reformers did not think the church had died. There may have been some scattered Sectarians who hinted darkly at the demise of true Christianity in the Middle Ages, but such a notion was repudiated by the larger bodies of Lutheran and reformed Christians. God had remained faithful to his promise. The gospel had been preached and heard by faithful souls from the time of the apostles until the present day, even in a church that in recent centuries had proven to be unreformed and resistant to change. If it was no longer obvious to the naked eye that the church of Rome was still the body of Christ, one could nevertheless be assured that even this church contained vestigia ecclesiae, traces of the true church. Now the idea of vestigia ecclesiae is picked up by the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century is a way of talking about Protestants but the image is very different. What Calvin has in mind is a place like my mother-in-law's attic, which was stuffed with all manner of things. Old trunks with letters, old clothing, wedding dresses, pots and pans that were not really in good order, but hadn't been fixed and no one intended to fix them but no one could bring themselves to throw them away. And so the attic was just crowded with stuff. But in that crowded attic there was some valuable things. So what Calvin has in mind in the Catholic church is an attic crowded with stuff, some of which is worth keeping, but a lot of which is junk that should be taken out and burned. The Catholic image is of a giant stadium, a giant football stadium and there in the middle of the stadium, the Protestants are gathered around a little fire and they're trying to keep warm as the wind howls down from the empty bleachers and they sit there with just a few things that they managed to save. They have a Bible, they have Christian martyrs, they have baptism, just a few things, instead of the richness that the Catholic church offers, the Protestants only have little traces of the church. Just a few things they managed to scrape out and that they managed to preserve. It was our idea first, but we're all using it. The goal of the reformers was not to supplant a dead or dying church with a new Christianity, as though God had written Ichabod over ___ Christendom and repudiated his covenant. The goal of the reformers was a reformed Catholic church built upon the foundation of the prophets and apostles, purged of the medieval innovations that had distorted the Gospel, subordinate to the authority of Scripture and the ancient Christian writers, and continuous with what was best in the old church. As they saw it, it was this evangelical church, this reformed and chastened church that was the church Catholic. It was the innovators in Rome who could no longer pretend to be genuinely Catholic and whose claim to be custodians of a greater and unbroken tradition was patently false. What the Protestants thought they offered was a genuine antiquity. One that stretched back to Peter and Paul and not merely to end ___gration. The slogan by which this reform has been described, though it's not a slogan so far as I know the Protestant reformers themselves used, was sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. While it is true that the reformers were at first optimistic it would be possible to teach and preach a theology that was wholly biblical, they rarely intended to exclude theological sources that were not biblical. Sola Scriptura generally meant prima Scriptura, Scripture first, Scripture as the final source and norm by which all theological sources and arguments were to be judged. Not Scripture as the sole source of theological wisdom. The Reformation was almost as much an argument over the writings of early Christian fathers as it was an argument over the meaning of Scripture. Typical of the level of interest in early Christian authors, even among reformers who did not edit or translate ancient Christian writings are Luther's marginal annotations on Augustine and Jerome. Calvin's marginal annotations on a Latin edition of Christendom and so forth. Even internal Protestant controversies like the bitter dispute over the Lord's Supper between John Calvin and the Lutheran theologian, Tilemann Heshusius often had a very large patristic component in them. Augustine, Augustine, whose got the right Augustine? In short, the Protestant appeal to antiquity included the early Christian writers as well as the Bible even if the Protestant reformers felt the patristic teaching could always be judged and rejected in the light of the clear and unchangeable teaching of Scripture. A second element in the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was its program for the reform and renewal of theology. It began with a renewed attack on Aristotle and on philosophical theology. Older attacks on Aristotle had centered on his epistemology, which was difficult to harmonize with Augustine's doctrine of illumination, or on his metaphysics, which contradicted the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing. Aristotle thought the world was always there, therefore to talk about creation was nonsensical. The Protestant attack on Aristotle was more a theological than philosophical. The problem with Aristotle was not that he believed in the eternity of the world, though he did, or the mortality of the human soul, though he did, when you're dead you're dead. But that his philosophical vocabulary was not well adapted for theological use. Grace cannot be understood as habits and acts and the Aristotelian notion that the repetition of good acts makes the man or woman who performs them righteous turned Saint Paul on his head. Theology deals with God in his relationship of judgment and grace towards sinners and with sinners in their relationship of faith and faithlessness toward God. Therefore, the proper vocabulary of grace is relational rather than metaphysical. One does not become a theologian with Aristotle, cried Luther, but only without him. In his early lectures on Romans, Luther had reacted against the unremitting empiricism of Aristotle by insisting in a brief meditation on Romans 8:19 beginning with the words "For the expectation of the creature." He had insisted that the essence of a thing is not what it is, what it is in qualities, but what it longs for. Two years earlier in his lectures on the psalms, he had insisted that the Bible, in the Bible, the word substance refers not to the quiddity of a thing, the what-ness of a thing, but what stands under and supports it. The substance of a human being therefore is defined by the foundation on which he or she rests. So that a rich man may in fact have as the substance of his life, riches because that's the thing on which his life depends. Just as in academic life where riches are not common, it may be indeed our learning and quick wits that are the foundation on which we rest. We are who we are by what we trust and desire. What we trust and desire determines who we are. In other words, the vocabulary of the philosophers obscures willy-nilly the intention of the Bible, which defines human beings not by their quiddities and qualities, but by their faith and hope. No philosophical description of human beings resting as it does on what can be seen and measured can reach the profundity of biblical anthropology that rest upon invisible relationships. The most important thing about a human being is what that human being trusts, loves, and expects. Human beings are defined by things that cannot be seen. Things that in the nature of the case can only be hoped for. What then, for early Protestants is a human being? A human being is not a rational soul individuated by body. It's also not a featherless ___. A human being is a creature who trusts either the true God or an idol. On this question, Aristotle can offer no useful insights. Early Protestants were determined to substitute biblical language and categories for philosophical. Luther's career from 1515 to 1518 was marked by a struggle to find a new vocabulary for theology to replace the technical vocabulary he had learned at Erfurt and Wittenberg. By and large the first generation of Protestants laid aside the technical vocabulary of late scholasticism and the definitions one could find in handbooks such as Johannes ___, Vocabularius de Teologia. Their aim was to restate theology in the fresh language of the Bible, rather than what they regarded as the stale definitions of the schoolman. Even Calvin in a burst of exegetical optimism that I must say he later regretted. Even Calvin attempted to state the doctrine of the Trinity in biblical language without recourse to the technical philosophical vocabulary used by the early church. You can't do it, so don't try. It was only after he tried and failed that he conceded the usefulness of some philosophical language in theological discourse. They wanted to get rid of Aristotle but they couldn't altogether. A second characteristic of the Protestant reform of theology was its unremitting war on what it regarded as theological Pelagianism. The notion that human salvation rests heavily on good works. I think it's one of the ironies of our time that Protestants who began as opponents of Pelagianism are now probably its chief advocates. For Catholic theologians who participated in the Thomistic revival of the early 16th century are who had been raised in the more or less moderate Augustinian consensus that marked most medieval theology, this complaint of the early Protestant seemed genuinely puzzling. Especially when it was accompanied by such un-Augustinian Protestant teaching as the denial of all human merit. Augustine didn't nigh merit or the doctor the imputation of Christ righteousness. Calvin said, Luther said too bad Luther didn't teach that more clearly. Well he didn't teach it more clearly 'cause he didn't teach it at all. He taught the non-imputation of sin, but he never taught the imputation of righteousness. Jean Daganais, who was a theologian at the Sorbonne, says it very nicely, I think. Jean Daganais spoke for many Catholic theologians when he observed in the preface to his 1529 Commentary on Romans. He just puzzled by what he's being charged with by the Protestants. And so he writes these wonderful lines, "I judge there are no persons among us who are called Christians who do not believe in Christ and do not think ourselves to be saved and justified by him." Nevertheless, there was in the late Middle Ages, a wide range of options on questions of grace as recent scholarship has shown. In the 14th century, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, protested against what he regarded as Pelagian tendencies in theology of his own day in a famous treatise, De causa Dei contra Pelagium (On the case of God against the Pelagians). One has only to compare the uncompromisingly Augustinian theology of grace of Gregory of Rimini, who dies 1358, with the semi-Pelagian theology of Gabriel Beil, who dies in 1495, to see how wide arrange of options was taught in late medieval Catholic universities. In the 16th century, Cardinal Sadoleto, whom I mentioned earlier, Cardinal Sadoleto's Commentary on Romans was condemned as Pelagian, but by whom? It was condemned as Pelagian by the Sorbonne, the Catholic theological faculty, and censured at Rome by the papal theologians, to a Pelagian. Much to the embarrassment of the Cardinal, who moved heaven and earth to get the censure lifted. Even Marino Grimani, the Cardinal Archbishop of Venice and the patriarch of Aquileia could be accused of flirting with Pelagianism, though he liked Protestants, could be accused of flirting with Pelagianism when he suggested in his Romans commentary (1542) that predestination was based on God's foreknowledge of a good use of human free will, thereby rejecting the semi-Pelagian notion of predestination based on God's foreknowledge of a good use of grace, which is what Lombard teaches, and the Augustinian notion of predestination based on God's good pleasure alone. With the exception of the radical reformers who feared the Manicheans more than the Pelagians, early Protestants combated what they regarded as modern Pelagianism by stressing predestination, the bondage of the human will, justification by faith alone. The first two doctrines, predestination and the bondage of the human will, had been stressed by strongly Augustinian reformers in the past and came as no surprise to Catholic opponents of the Reformation. But the third doctrine, justification by faith alone, took Catholic defenders of the old way off balance. Even Cardinal Sadoleto in his eloquent letter to Geneva urging its return to the Catholic faith, assumed that by faith, Protestants meant only to suggest an intellectual assent to true doctrine. What Sadoleto calls credulitas. In other words, to be justified by right belief. Now we have to confess there are Protestants who teach that. That if you got your doctrines right, and you can prove it by appeal to the ___, you are a Christian. Protestants, if theological orthodoxy were the only criterion for salvation, objected Sadoleto, then even the devils, all of whom are impeccably orthodox, would be saved. There are no heretical devils, they know the truth and are all orthodox. It doesn't do them any good however. What Protestants meant by faith, of course, was something quite different. They meant fiducia, they meant a daring confidence in God, a trust in promises that could not be verified but that rested on the full faith and credit of a God who could not lie. Believers were not justified because they assented to saving truth, they were justified because they placed themselves unreservedly in the hands of a merciful God. The Protestant pattern for justification by faith alone was the figure of Abraham as interpreted by Paul in Romans 4. Abraham was not justified by his circumcision, by his good works, including the binding and offering of Isaac, a good work much praised in the Bible, or his obedience to a mosaic law that had not yet been written, but he was justified by his faith in God's promise. So too, Christians in every age are justified by a gift of God to which they make no contribution but, which they receive gratefully by faith alone. The good works that flow from a life of grace and Protestants like Catholics expect it to be morally improved by grace, should be offered to the neighbor as the fruit of living faith rather than to God as a condign merit. Only by denying the doctrine of human merit and affirming the doctrine of justification by faith alone, argued early Protestants, could the dangers of Pelagianism be avoided and the Augustinian doctrine of salvation by grace alone be affirmed. A third element in the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was the force of its new theology of the Word of God. Now you gotta stick with me on this one. The Reformation was not just a movement dedicated to the study of the Bible, though it did study the Bible and insisted mirabile dictu, that ordinary parish ministers ought to learn Greek and Hebrew. I say this as a comfort to you if you're wondering why you're doing this now. The Bible was not, it was ... the Reformation not a movement dedicated just to the study of the Bible, it was a movement dedicated to the spoken Word of God. I was gonna say in the Free Church chapel, you couldn't make it more clear how important the spoken word is to you. Just look where I'm standing. It was not the Word of God written but the Word of God preached that formed the center of renewed Christianity as early Protestants conceived it. Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich wrote in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1666, “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God”. Think about that, [praedicante verbum Dei est verbum Dei – not, praedicante verbum Dei significat verbum Dei]. It doesn't signify the Word of God, it’s not a witness to the Word of God. The preaching of the word of God is the word of God. He was speaking of a broad ecumenical front of early Protestantism, Lutheran as well as reformed. The Protestant emphasis on the spoken word had of course some parallels in late medieval thought. Recent scholarship has shown how important was the spoken word in the rhetorical traditions of Italian civic humanism. The humanists understood that human beings are more than calculating reason as scholastic theologians seem to assume. To be human is to have a will and emotions as well as intellect, and many humanists therefore looked upon the spoken word as an instrument to move human beings to inspire them to action and thereby to shape public policy. I mean if you're as old as I am and you heard speeches by Adolf Hitler and by Winston Churchill, then you know just exactly how important the spoken word is. The Mendicant Orders of course had always laid heavy emphasis on the spoken word in preaching and teaching. Preach the word was as much in Dominican or Augustinian or Franciscan slogan as it was Lutheran or Reformed. Well one not ought to make too much of the relationship of early Protestantism to the Mendicant Orders. Still a good number of early converts to Protestantism come from Mendicant Orders, including of course Martin Luther, OESA; Robert Barnes, OESA; Martin Bucer, OP; Bernadino Ochino, OFMCOP. In fact, Ochino was a general of the Capuchins. John Bale O. Carme becomes an Irish Bishop of Austria, I think is known as Bilious Bale for his temperament but he becomes Protestant and Conrad Pelikan, one of the great commentators on the Old Testament, OFM. Equally important was as a late medieval parallel was a renewed emphasis on preaching in the free imperial cities. The laity in several late medieval cities in the Holy Roman Empire had laid aside funds to pay for leutpriester, a priest whose principal function was to preach on Sundays and feast days. Leaving all of the ordinary liturgical services to the parochial clergy. The most famous leutpriester in the 16th century was the preacher in Strasburg, John Geiler of Kaisersberg who died before the Reformation began. John Geiler used to preach for two hours. On Sunday, he preached on the lesson for one hour, and then he preached on a theme for the second. So if you’re ever in homiletic’s class and wonder whether or not you should give an exegetical sermon or a sermon on a theme, Geiler gave you both every Sunday. Preach for two hours, took an hour glass with him to the pulpit, preach for an hour, then turned it over and preached for the second hour. But there was no Super Bowl to go to and Geiler was very eloquent and so people came and stayed for the whole two hours. Why not? The most famous leutpriester to identify himself with the Reformation was the Swiss preacher Huldrych Zwingli. Like the humanists, these publicly funded preachers laid emphasis on the spoken word. Like the Mendicants, they laid emphasis on the spoken word of God, and yet there were differences. However important the priest's word was to the Mendicants and the late medieval princes of the pulpit, it was still ancillary to the sacraments. In the nature of the case, the sermon could be nothing more than an invitation to baptism, to penance, to the Eucharist, where alone saving grace was dispensed. It was not the preacher in the pulpit however eloquent, but the priest at the altar, however inarticulate, who stood at the center of medieval worship. It was not by the foolishness of preaching but by the word joined to the elements of bread and wine and water that God saved the faithful of every generation. The sermon moves sinners to the sacraments but is not itself a sacrament. That is still Catholic understanding of preaching. For Protestants there was one means of grace, the voice of the living God. This voice spoke once by prophets and apostles and now speaks again in the proclamation of the church. Preaching became for the reformers a third sacrament, coordinate with baptism and the Eucharist and largely replacing the sacrament of penance. The power of the keys, the power of to bind and loose from sin was exercised through the preaching of the Gospel. No sacramental power as such was thought by them to reside in ordination or ecclesiastical offices. Office bearers were authorized by the word they carried. Preachers had no authority that was not the authority of the Gospel they preached. It was through the preached word that God justifies sinners and pardoned sins, even the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist were redefined as the visible word of God. It's very important to bear this in mind: you did not move to Christ because you sat in a corner reading a book. It was a living proclamation of the church that called you. As Luther liked to point out, Christianity is not a scribal religion. I mean the Reformation does not take place in the reading room of a library, okay? It takes place in the world where the voice of God sounds again. In the face of this radical theology of the Word of God, the old hierarchical distinctions of potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis simply collapsed for early Protestants. There is no order higher than the order of the preacher of the Word of God. There is no jurisdiction greater than the jurisdiction exercised by the pastor of a local congregation. Baptists will be happy to know that. Apostolic succession is succession in Apostolic teaching. Christians in the present are linked to the first generation of apostles, not by an unbroken succession of bishops, but by an unbroken succession of preachers of apostolic doctrine. Protestant ministers are not priests forever after the Oorder of Melchizedek, that is a priesthood that belongs to ___. Protestant ministers belong to an ordo praedicatorum, an order of preachers that stretches from the patriarchs to the present. For them it is the pulpit, not the altar, that is the Throne of God, and the sermon, not the Eucharist, that is the ladder that links heaven and earth. Now I want to say something very brief as a fourth point and then a quick conclusion. The fourth and final element in the intellectual appeal of the Reformation was the ideological support it provided for institutional reform. Catholics and Protestants shared a wide area of agreement over abuses in the late medieval church, even though they differed over the best way of performing them. One could take as an example the question of clerical marriage. I take that because that's still a very living problem for the modern Catholic church. Although priests in the Eastern Orthodox churches were permitted to marry, that is to say, marry before ordination, but if you're married you cannot be a bishop because all bishops are monks. And priests in the western Catholic churches had married in the earlier Middle Ages in England until the Norman Invasion. The ban on clerical marriage, however, was total by the 16th century. Unfortunately, many clerics, how many is unclear, supposition is that in some dioceses it was as much as a third of the parochial clergy found themselves in the position I'm about to describe, but we don't know for certain. Many clerics found themselves unable or unwilling to live up to the lofty rhetoric of clerical celibacy. The Archbishop of York, this is a particularly ripe example, the Archbishop of York, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, had an illegitimate son, Thomas Winter, whose existence he did not deny. Indeed, while his son was still a schoolboy, Wolsey made him Dean of Wells, Provost of Beverly, Archdeacon of York, Archdeacon of Richmond, Chancellor of Salisbury, Prebendary of Wells, York, Salisbury, Lincoln and Southwell, Rector of Rugby in Yorkshire and of Saint Matthews Ipswich. And of course, because he was a minor, he couldn't handle all the money involved and so daddy took care of it. In central Europe, clerics who found the celibate life too demanding were permitted to live in a sexual relationship with a housekeeper contingent on the payment of an annual tax to the bishop. Heinrich Bullinger the Protestant reformer of Zurich was the child of such an informal clerical family. His father was a priest, mother a housekeeper. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that such arrangements were given quasi-official sanction, the housekeeper was still regarded by the towns people as the priest's whore. Canonically the priest and his unofficial wife were living in a state of mortal sin. In a particularly poignant exchange of documents, Huldrych Zwingli, who had slept with a young woman in a former parish, she was the daughter of a barber, he claimed that she initiated it. At any rate, Huldrych certainly petitioned his Ordinary Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg of Constance for permission to marry. Now Hugo von Hohenlandenberg was very reluctant to let his priests have this kind of relationship though he was very close to the widow of someone. So at any rate, the application of Zwingli was denied, even though many knew Zwingli was already secretly married to a widow, Anna Reinhardt, he actually lived with her before he married her, then he married her and he never did get permission to marry. Protestants attempted to correct the problem of clerical celibacy by denying the theoretical foundations on which it stood. Protestant theologians attacked the celibate ethic with its distinction between commands and councils and it's preference for virginity over matrimony. They insisted that celibacy was a charism, a gift given to some, but denied to others, and therefore could not be made a general law. They authorized clerical marriage and encouraged the integration of the pastor into normal family life. In place of saints who were models of sexual self-denial and asceticism, the Protestant substituted the ministers family as a model of the Christian home and that's still in effect I'm sorry to tell you. The clergy expect your family to be, I mean the lay people expect your family to be a model. They also expect you to live on the salary of a celibate. There were, of course, difficulties. Upstanding middle class families were not always willing to marry their daughters to former priests and permit them to inherit the bed so lately occupied by the priest's whore. But the trend was in any case, clear. The attack on the theoretical foundations of clerical celibacy allowed the Protestants to replace an off again on again institution of clerical celibacy with a married order of ministers whose marriage and family life were integral to their ministry. The Protestants ended the embarrassment of the erratic enforcement of clerical celibacy by abolishing the institution. Protestants did other things too. If the Protestants hadn't made a single religious point, you could say what the Protestants did was they revised the divorce laws and changed the forbidden degree so you could marry cousins you didn't used to be able to marry. And you could get a real divorce that permitted remarriage. It was a liberal movement socially speaking. Things do not always work out exactly as planned. By mid-century, the Protestants who had hoped to replace philosophical with biblical theology found themselves forced to return to philosophy as an essential tool for the writing of protestant theology. There were questions that cried for an answer that could not be answered on the basis of exegesis alone. Moreover, Catholic theologians did not yield Scripture or the early Christian fathers to the Protestants to the father without a fight. Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, who had made a name for himself as a philosopher and interpreter of Thomas Aquinas, dropped his philosophical studies in order to write a series of biblical commentaries that would demonstrate to Protestant and Catholic alike that the literal sense of the Bible supports Catholic doctrine. Domingo DeSoto at Salamanca and Ambrosia Katarina Spoletus at Rome, similarly attempted to show that Protestants had misread Paul. By mid-century, a permanent self-perpetuating Pprotestant culture had developed. The older ex-Catholic leadership of former priests, nuns, friars, and monks were slowly replaced by new leadership that had never attended mass, much less said one, and by a lady that had never confessed its sins to a priest, gone on pilgrimage, invoked patron saints, made a binding vow, or purchased an indulgence. I'm assuming the Baptists don't do that today either. Riddagshausen, Wienhausen and Gandersheim were no longer cloisters to them, but schools or evangelical communities for women. By the time the century was over, the Protestants had not only transformed formally Catholic universities like Rostock and Leipzig into centers of Protestant intellectual life, but it founded new universities like Helmstedt and Geisen that had no memory of a Catholic past. While protestants continued to write anti-Catholic polemics, their treatises lacked the passion and sense of betrayal of the polemics written by the first generation. Protestants were permanent outsiders with their own fixed institutions, parishes, confessions, catechisms and settled sense of identity. They harbored no illusions about reunion and felt no twinges of nostalgia for a church that had never been their home. Unlike their grandparents, they cherished no hope for an evangelical Reformation of the Catholic church and settled into a mode of permanent opposition. In all these respects, the third generation of Protestants differed from the first. The Reformation began as an argument among Catholic insiders. It continued as an argument between Catholics and former Catholics, until well past the middle of the century. The transformation of a movement led by former Catholics into a movement led by traditional Protestants took two generations to effect. Unless we understand the Catholic background, context and character of the early Protestant Reformation we shall inevitably misunderstand it. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Hubmaier, Hooper and Melanchthon were not Protestants in the way Flacius, Ames, Turrettini, Perkins, Valabius and Spener were. In the nature of the case they could not be. Let's close this lecture with prayer. O Lord, you lead your people by mysterious ways in paths of faithfulness. Help us to exercise our ministry in the light of your past mighty acts and in expectation that as you have lead the church in the past, so you will lead us in clear paths into our future. This we ask in Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. Announcer: You've been listening to Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aide and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.