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Reformation Church History

Transcript - CH502 Reformation Church History © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 02 of 24CH502

Intellectual Setting: The Renaissance

Reformation Church History

This is lecture 2 in the series on Reformation Church History. In our last lecture we were looking at some of the background elements to the Reformation. We first looked at the political setting of the Reformation and then began to look at the religious setting of the Reformation. Today I want to go on looking at that religious setting to the Reformation and to one aspect of the papacy’s exercise of control in the life of the church and that in relation to the sacrament of penance.

As you remember, the medieval church at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had defined seven sacraments for the life of the church, and in the life of the church as a whole, the sacrament of penance became one of the most important. Most of the sacraments could be administered only once—baptism, confirmation, holy orders, marriage—those four sacraments were administered only once. Extreme unction or the last rites of the church could be administered more than once but were not used frequently in a given life, and therefore it was primarily penance and the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, that were the sacraments of regular Christian experience. And the sacrament of penance was important because it was the preparation for the reception of the Eucharist. The sacrament of penance took away sin and its penalties and made one fit to receive the grace available in the Lord’s Supper.

The Fourth Lateran Council had ruled that every Christian must do penance before Easter once a year; that is, penance had become mandatory minimally once a year, and Catholics to this day will speak of their Easter duty, the duty of going to receive the sacrament of penance and to receive the sacrament of the Mass.

The form of the sacrament of penance had two basic parts. There was the part to be performed by the penitent and the part to be performed by the priest. The penitent had three obligations. The first element of the penitent’s obligation was known as the contritio cordis or the contrition of the heart. The penitent had to

W. Robert Godfrey, PhDExperience: President,

Westminster Seminary California



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come to the priest with sincere sorrow in his heart for his sins. The medieval theologians had said that the penitent does not have to come with perfect sorrow; they regarded that as an obligation too great for most Christians to acquire, but it had to be a genuine sorrow, a genuine recognition that the penitent was a sinner, that he had offended God. He had to be sorry for offending God. He had to be sorry for sinning and had to seek forgiveness. So that was the first element in the penitent’s responsibility.

The second element was the confessio oris, the confession by the mouth; that is, the penitent had to declare as fully and completely as he could what his sins were to the priest. He had to declare orally what his sins were. The theory of this practice was that it allowed the priest to understand the seriousness of the sins. It allowed the priest to impose the proper satisfaction to be performed by the penitent, and it allowed the priest to provide whatever spiritual counsel was possible and necessary in face of the particular sins.

After making his oral confession and hearing from the priest what his satisfaction was, then the third responsibility of the penitent was to perform that satisfaction, the satisfaction operis, the satisfaction of work. That is, the penitent had to demonstrate the sincerity of his penance and had to offer to God some particular work to help satisfy for his sin. That satisfaction was imposed by the priest, and the full sacrament of penance and its forgiving mercy was not received until the penitent had in fact performed that work. The satisfaction was usually understood as being several things on the part of the church. Primarily it consisted either of prayers, certain particular prayers, often the Ava Maria or the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer to be offered as part of satisfaction, or it could involve fasting, the giving up of certain foods or activities as a sign of sorrow, and third, there would be the obligation of almsgiving. And depending on how serious the priest judged the sins to be, so serious would the satisfaction become.

The intention of the church originally had been to provide a personal, private time for a penitent to get spiritual nurture and counsel and to be relieved of the guilt and punishment for his sins, and so it represented one of the most intimate and important spiritual moments of the life of the medieval Christian. What began to corrupt this practice markedly was a series of practices introduced and allowed by the papacy. The first of these changes came to be known as the indulgence. The indulgence was the opportunity to substitute one penalty for another. For example, it originated really again in an intention of the church to provide a



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spiritual benefit to the people. If the priest felt that a very serious sin had been committed and therefore a very extreme satisfaction might be required, and yet the person obligated to offer this satisfaction was not able to do so because of health perhaps, the church in its mercy would allow a substitution. This allowing of a substitution of one penalty for another was called an indulgence, and what it often amounted to was a reduction in the penalty or satisfaction that was required. And often it was a matter of giving of money rather than performing some more strenuous activity. As I say, the origin of this was to make life better for the penitent, but the effect of this often was in fact to give the church an opportunity to make money and to begin to concentrate money into its own hands.

Pope Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century made use of the idea of a general indulgence by saying that during certain times, certain years, pilgrims to Rome could receive a general indulgence, that is, a removal of all penalties for their sins and therefore have the benefit of the sacrament of penance to cover all of their sins if they went through the proper stages, which included a confession of the sins, a pilgrimage to Rome, and payment of a certain amount of money according to their ability to pay. Many people responded eagerly to this opportunity and were not bothered by what was really becoming a rather externalized and commercialized use of the sacrament. Boniface had intended this to be a rather rare occurrence in the church and in fact had declared that general jubilees, jubilee years would held only every one hundred years. But some of his successors saw the opportunity to make money in this fashion as too great and held jubilee years much more frequently.

One of the Renaissance popes saw an opportunity significantly to increase the market for this general indulgence. As any good marketing man knows, one can increase one’s profit tremendously if one can only increase one’s field of sales. And so Pope Sixtus IV, who reigned from 1471 to 1484, declared that in the future the general indulgence could be applied not only to the living but also to the dead. And if you add all the dead to all of the living, you have greatly increased your market potential. So Sixtus declared that now a general indulgence could be extended to the dead who had not made adequate use of the sacrament of penance in their own lives and were therefore in purgatory.

The doctrine of purgatory had developed in the Middle Ages as a place where Christian went after their death if they were not



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completely right with God, if there was still some penalty for their sins due to God, and purgatory therefore became a place of purging. The medieval ideal was very much that only acceptable people could appear before God, and even if the Christian were basically acceptable, if his sins had been forgiven by the blood of Christ, nonetheless, if all of the penalty and punishment for that sin had not been fully paid for through the sacrament of penance, then there had to be suffering in purgatory before one could enter heaven. All the souls in purgatory were assured of getting into heaven one day, but the suffering in purgatory was great, and therefore living Christians became very concerned about their family members who had gone before and were eager when this opportunity was presented to make use of a way of delivering loved ones from the sufferings of purgatory. Sixtus offered this general indulgence, this plenary indulgence, for the dead at a fee, a fee that therefore was intended to add to the coffers of the church.

It’s important to bear in mind again the dates of Sixtus IV. He reigned from 1471 to 1484. This is only some forty to fifty years before Luther comes on the scene. That means that the practice, the corruption of the sacrament of penance in relation to the dead was quite an innovation in Luther’s day. It was a relative newcomer, and that’s part of the reason that Luther felt he had a right as a theologian to continue to question the papal ideas of the indulgence.

The extension of the general indulgence was used by popes after Sixtus IV, including Julius II; as we said, he wanted to use it to raise money for building improvements in Rome and for Saint Peter’s Cathedral. You might bear in mind that when you look at Saint Peter’s Cathedral and admire its beauty, that it was built by this general indulgence and by precisely the kind of corrupt practices that Luther would later criticize in Tetzel, the indulgence seller in much of Germany.

Common people frequently misunderstood the exact nature of the indulgence. The indulgence technically did not promise the forgiveness of sins, did not promise that people could sin in the future without any care or regard; the indulgence technically promised only that one would not have to fulfill the full obligation of satisfaction in the sacrament of penance. One was still supposed to experience contrition and confession for one’s sin, but frequently the common people didn’t understand that and believed that in buying an indulgence, they had bought



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the forgiveness of their sins—not only past sins but future sins as well. This kind of spiritual corruption caused a lot of complaints, a lot of calls for reform before Martin Luther ever came along, and is an expression of one of the ways in which the life and piety of the church were becoming commercialized and externalized. The intimate sacrament of penance was becoming primarily, at least for many, a way of making money in the church.

Having looked a little bit at the way in which the papacy made use of one of the sacraments of the church for its financial well-being, we might move on to a more general question about the condition of piety in the church in this period. And this question really is, Was the church a living, vital spiritual body or was it really a corrupt, declining, weak spiritual body? One group of historians has argued that the church really was in decline—theology was in decline, piety was in decline—and therefore Martin Luther represented a revival of piety in dark and rather desperate days. This point of view has been promoted in recent decades, particularly by some Roman Catholic theologians, who in their effort to appreciate Martin Luther have said in effect, Luther came along when the church was in a very bad way, and even though Luther went too far, nonetheless, he had some very real things to complain about, and it’s understandable that a lot of people responded to him. In the relatively ecumenical period in which we live, a number of Roman Catholic theologians are saying most of what Martin Luther said was right, particularly in his criticisms of the corruption of the church, and he was a real prophet in his day and helped the church back to a vital and living piety.

Another school of thought, however, says that although it is true that the piety of the church had become externalized in many ways, and that certain members of the church indeed were corrupt and commercial, that in fact the piety of the church was in many ways very vital, that many people seemed to be relatively satisfied with this externalized piety, that many people were involved in pilgrimages and in visiting relics and in endowing chapels for prayers for the dead, and that although we might not approve of all of the piety in the late medieval church, there was a lot of piety present, a lot of vitality to the piety, and indeed this other point of view says that you can’t even say that all that piety was externalized. In fact, there seems to be some evidence that there was a lot of effort devoted to trying to make piety internalized, and in fact this school of thought says one of the things that characterizes the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth



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century is an effort increasingly to impose on the laity some of the practices and ideals of the monastic community. And these people have argued that there was a lot of effort to make piety more internal and the concern that this group expresses about that kind of piety is that what it really did was to add greatly to the burdens on the laity. That is to say piety was vital and the laity in a number of areas were quite concerned about issues of piety, but what they were being taught by a lot of people in the church left them with a kind of piety that was so difficult to fulfill as to make them increasingly frustrated under the burdens and requirements of their religion.

One way to see how that sense of burden was increased is to look at one of the catechetical writings of the period. A monk by the name of Dietrich Kolde prepared a catechism, and this catechism is summarized extensively in Steven Ozment’s book The Reformation of the Cities [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980], where you can consult it if you would like further information. But in that catechism Kolde is posing some questions for self-examination or for a priest’s examination of the lay member of the church, and what we see when we look at it is a form of examination which becomes very pointed, very internal, and very difficult to fulfill adequately.

The catechism begins with the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the traditional elements of a catechism. We will see that is true not only of medieval catechisms but also of Reformation catechisms. And then follow what are called in catechisms the five commandments of the church which state the church’s basic expectations; namely, devout attendance every Sunday at Mass, confession of all sins, reception of the sacrament at least once a year, fasting during particular days of the year, avoidance of those who are excommunicated, seeking spiritual cures for physical illness (since these generally come from sin, it says). Then come even more particular religious requirements, particularly relating to self-examination. Article 5 of the catechism brings forth the six prerequisites for the forgiveness of all one’s sins, which include not doubting God’s mercy, remembering God’s righteousness and severity so that we might not sin in a presumptuous manner, not to delay conversion until the hour of death, not to reserve any mortal sin to oneself (that is, to confess it), to hate no man, to love all men, and to believe correctly as a good Christian.



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Article 6 then talks about seven things that assure one that he’s a friend of God in good standing: namely, a feeling of oppression and sadness for having angered God by a lifetime of sinning, procurement of a good and learned father confessor so one may always have the opportunity to confess one’s sins, the devout performance of what the father confessor orders, the resolution never again to commit a mortal sin even when worldly goods could be secured thereby, eager attendance at sermons, thorough searching of one’s conscience and frequent consultation with good and learned men for spiritual guidance, and constant and sincere prayer for the forgiveness of forgotten sins and preservation from unwitting sins.

Article 7 presents a prescription for a good life, citing religious exercises that are to be done once or twice a day until they become habitual. For example, each morning one should awake and pray this prayer: “Oh dear God, how I waste my time. How timid and slow I am. How I must burn in purgatory for my laziness. During the night, all spiritual souls have sung God’s praise, and I’ve overslept. There’s been great joy in heaven, and I have given no thought to it. There’s been great lamentation in purgatory, and I have not prayed for those who groan there. Many have died during the night, yet God has spared me.” Then, says the catechism, you should spring from your bed, concentrate on making up for your neglect, and thank God for Christ’s sufferings for your sins.

Article 8 talks about how one should behave during Mass. Article 9 talks about what one should think about during meal time. . . . And so it goes on and on and on and on and on. Laying down things that individually may have some spiritual value and yet taken as a whole are implying to the layman that because he’s not devoting every waking hour and moment to religious exercises, he is failing as a Christian. And again we see how much of this is oriented to the kind of piety that was true in the monastery. It might be appropriate to the monk to arise and say how timid he’d been, how he should have spent all night in prayer, but for the layman who had to arise to a full day’s manual labor to support his family to assume that somehow sleep is sinful presents a great burden.

Or take for another example the advice of attaining a good and learned father confessor. That may be very good spiritual advice, but in fact the number of father confessors available to the average Christian was very limited. To find a good and learned one was impossible for most Christians, and so the effect of this



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piety, while vital, while containing some good spiritual insights, while counterbalancing some of the externalization and the commercialization of the piety of the church, nonetheless laid a burden upon the Christian conscience which became almost unbearable.

Ozment in The Reformation in the Cities goes on to note how with the coming of the Reformation, one of the slogans of the Reformation to which there was the greatest response among many people was the slogan “rhe freedom of the Christian,” the notion that the Christian by faith is freed from this burdensome piety that left one constantly in doubt about one’s relationship to God and, in fact, left one with the feeling that one couldn’t be rightly related to God because one was such a constant failure.

I hope that sketches at least to some extent the religious background to the Reformation. The growing doubts that would have arisen in many European minds about the authority of the papacy because of its own moral corruption and political ambition, and the kind of burdensome piety that increasingly was present in Europe on the eve of the Reformation.

Having looked then a little bit at the political, social, and economic background to the Reformation and to the religious background to the Reformation, I want to look at one other key background matter before we come to the Reformation itself, and that is what we can call perhaps the intellectual or cultural background to the Reformation. And under this heading, I want to concentrate particularly on the Renaissance.

The word renaissance is derived from the word rebirth, and the Renaissance saw itself as a cultural movement of rebirth, particularly the rebirth of the learning and civilization of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. This was a movement that began in the late fourteenth century that blossomed in the fifteenth century and was coming to full fruit and maturity in the sixteenth century. It was a movement that began largely in Italy and was a movement that Paul Oskar Kristeller has argued was primarily an educational reform movement. That is, it began among many people who felt that the Middle Ages had lost some of the great heritage of Western civilization, that the Middle Ages in fact in its scholasticism, in its use of Latin had become in many ways barbarous. It was a reaction that said that the Middle Ages had become a culture too focused on the rational and the logical and therefore had lost something of the rhetorical, had lost something



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of the beauty of language, had lost a real understanding of how civilization at its best is a wedding of wisdom with eloquence, and so the Renaissance as a movement said in order to recapture the rhetorical foundations of our civilization, in order to recapture the beauty and the eloquence of our civilization, we need to go back. We need to go back behind the Middle Ages. We need to go, as they often said, ad fontes—to the sources. We need to go to the sources of our civilization, which they felt were to be found in Roman and Greek antiquity.

The first impulse of the Reformation was to seek Roman antiquity and to revive a beautiful, classical use of the Latin language, and so in many ways Cicero became the inspirer of the first element of the Reformation, and many began to believe that one must recapture the style of Cicero down to quite minute points if one wants to be a true Latinist. It is certainly the case that by a study of Cicero and the great Roman writers of the ancient world, there was a great change made in the kind of Latin that was written. Latin once again became a much more beautiful, varied means of expression, as Renaissance writers felt that language ought to appeal not only to the mind but also to the emotions and the will of man. There was a great stress then on the form as well as the content of learning.

And as Latin and Roman civilization were recovered, there was a push then also to recover Greek civilization. They became aware of how much the Romans themselves recognized a dependence upon the Greeks and so there was a push to recover the Greek language, which had been nearly lost in the medieval West, and to recover at the same time Greek literature. And so Renaissance truly educated men were men who could not only read and write Latin beautifully, but by the middle of the fifteenth century were men who could read and write Greek beautifully. This revival of Greek was aided and encouraged by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, which brought an end to Byzantine Empire and caused many Greek scholars to flee to the West with their books and with their knowledge and helped encourage that growth of Greek learning and Greek knowledge in the West.

Other Renaissance men later in the fifteenth century began to recognize that if one wanted to recapture the fullness of the background of Western civilization, one ought to also study Hebrew literature, and so by the later fifteenth century, a knowledge of Hebrew was also becoming a desirable element in the education of a well-educated person. And by the early sixteenth century then,



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the Renaissance ideal was to be a man of three languages—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—and many Renaissance people mastered not only the ability to read but also to write those languages beautifully.

Vernacular languages had some interest to some of the Renaissance people, but the primary focus was upon Latin as the universal language of scholars, and Greek and Hebrew as keys to unlocking the treasures of Western civilization. And so we can see how much this Renaissance culture, this Renaissance learning that was emerging had an impact upon the training and education of learned people. It had an impact on art as well, as we see a great revival of classical themes in the Renaissance, but we don’t have time to look at that side of things.

What we’re interested in is the way in which this recaptured literature of the ancient world began to affect the thinking of educated Europeans, because the revival of education, a revival of the knowledge of Greek and Latin antiquity, led people to study not only the pagan ancient writers but also to recapture some of the best church fathers, both the Greek and Latin fathers, and enable people for the first time to read extensively in the writings of the Fathers, and not only in the writings of the Ffathers, but also to be able to read the Bible in the original languages. For most of the Middle Ages, theologians were entirely dependent upon Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, a translation that in terms of which the day in which it was done was not a bad translation, but it was not a perfect translation and at many points cut one off from an ability to get the full meaning of the text. And now people were able to get back to the Bible, to get back to the Fathers and the history of the church, and to begin to raise questions as to whether the medieval inheritance accurately reflected what the Bible and the Fathers in fact taught.

Most of the Reformers were trained as Renaissance humanists before they were converted to the Reformation. All of the great leaders of the Reformation, with the exception of Luther, were primarily trained as Renaissance thinkers, and Luther, although primarily trained as a medieval scholastic theologian, was also well-educated in the Renaissance. And so the Renaissance provides an absolutely crucial background to our understanding of the character of the Reformation because the Renaissance believed that we need to get back to the sources, and that was carried over into the Reformation in terms of the call back to the Bible. The Renaissance also believed in the power of the eloquent



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word, whether written or spoken, and the Reformation would very much take up that theme to talk about the power of the preached word in the life of the church.

The rise of Renaissance studies did not go unchallenged in the life of the church. There still were many scholastic theologians around who treasured the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages, who treasured the old approach to learning, who saw in the Renaissance a challenge to their influence and to the strength of Christianity in their day, and it led to conflict. One of the most noted conflicts, which is very illuminating as part of the background of the Reformation, was associated with the work of Johannes Reuchlin.

Reuchlin lived from 1455 to 1522. He is remembered in part because he was the great-uncle of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s right-hand man, but in his own day, he was a celebrated Renaissance humanist who is interested in the humane studies of the past, and he devoted his attention particularly to the study of Hebrew. He produced a Hebrew grammar known as the Rudimentis Hebraica, and it was the first reliable Hebrew grammar ever produced by a Christian scholar. He himself had been educated in the classics in connection with the Brethren of the Common Life, who taught as an introduction to education some of the safe classics as they sought the past. He had also been exposed to the flowering Renaissance culture of Italy and had actually studied with Facino and Pico, two of the leading Renaissance thinkers of that day, and through the influence in part of Pico, he became fascinated with the Jewish tradition, with Jewish mysticism, with the Kabbalah, a Jewish text claiming to contain oral tradition from the time of Moses. And Reuchlin, therefore, devoted himself to a study of the Hebrew language, a study of the Hebrew Bible, and a study of Jewish literature more generally as a source he felt that could be important to the developing Renaissance civilization.

These studies brought him into conflict with a Jew by the name of Pfefferkorn who had converted to Christianity. In his conversion, Pfefferkorn argued in 1506 that all Hebrew books should be confiscated because they contained blasphemies against Christ, and he maintained that even in the mystical Hebrew literature and in the Kabbalah there were hidden blasphemies, and therefore Christians ought not to study this work, that this kind of Jewish literature was dangerous to the faith, that it was heretical, and that such a study should cease. Reuchlin came out publicly opposing Pfefferkorn on this and insisted that there was value for



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Christians in the study of Jewish literature and that this should not be stopped.

The issue came before the theological faculty at the University of Cologne, a theological faculty dominated by Dominicans who were still enthusiastic about the old scholasticism, and therefore not surprisingly they backed up Pfefferkorn and saw this as an opportunity to slap down the pride and arrogance of the Renaissance thinkers. Other theological faculties were drawn into the debate. In 1512 the theological faculties at Erfurt, Mainz, and Leuven supported what Cologne had ruled and also ruled against Reuchlin. By 1514 the debate had reached a point where Reuchlin was charged with heresy, which was a very dangerous business indeed, potentially life-threatening, but he was acquitted by a local ecclesiastical court. This led the theological faculty at Cologne to appeal the ruling to Rome, and the case dragged on until 1520. In 1520 Rome formally condemned Reuchlin and ordered him to recant, that is, to repent of his previous teaching and to recognize that these Jewish works should not be studied. Reuchlin went along with that recantation and died two years later.

But in the course of this debate, before the formal condemnation in 1520, many Renaissance humanists saw this as a most important battle between the old learning and the new learning, between what they saw as the barbarous, outmoded, old-fashioned, reactionary learning of the scholastics, and the new, valid, useful learning of the Renaissance, and therefore many leaped to Reuchlin’s defense. Many wrote him letters of testimony declaring their support and their admiration for his learning and for his wisdom, and in 1513 Reuchlin published these letters under the title of Epistolae Clarorum Virorum, “The Letters of Famous Men.” These letters of famous men were offered in defense of Reuchlin and his position to the public.

Other Renaissance leaders felt that even stronger defensive measures were needed, and they published a bitterly satirical work under the title of Epistolae Obscurorum Viorum, “The Letters of Obscure Men.” The nature of this satire was that on the surface it was letters of testimony sent to support the theological faculty at Cologne, and so on the surface of this satire, these letters were attacking Reuchlin and defending the old learning, But, in fact, these letters written by two humanists, Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten, and published in several editions between 1515 and 1517, were bitter satire showing how lazy, how corrupt, and how ignorant the defenders of the old ways were. The effect



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of this “Letters of Obscure Men” was to set Europe laughing at the very eve of the Reformation at the theologians who would be called upon by Rome to defend the old church. And so the effect of the Renaissance was not only to give the tools of learning necessary for the Reformation (namely, the knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and a knowledge of the ancient church fathers), and not only a culture that prized of the beautifully spoken word (which would be crucial to the rise of sermons among Protestants as a major influence), but they also held the old learning, the old ways, the old scholastics up to ridicule, and so further led to an undermining of confidence in the church and in its traditional form of ministry.

We ought to look at one other Renaissance figure who illustrates a good deal of what happened in that age and how the Renaissance provided a background to the Reformation in the work of Desiderius Erasmus, wholived from 1469 to 1536. Erasmus was born in the Netherlands near Rotterdam. He was educated also among the Brethren of the Common Life. He studied in Paris and in England and then from 1506 to 1509 had opportunity to study in Italy, and therefore he too was exposed to some of the best minds of the Renaissance of his day. He had tremendous native ability of his own, a great ability with language. He came from a very obscure background. He may have well been illegitimate as a child, which made him in his later life somewhat defensive, somewhat concerned about his own position, which gave him sometimes a kind of petty and arrogant mood in some of his letters. But he had a great deal of ability and a great concern for the life of the church. Erasmus was convinced that the Renaissance should be marshaled to the moral improvement of the church. And in his little book Enchiridion, which he wrote in 1501, he wrote about how the real life of Christianity was to be found in the study of the Scriptures and in following Christ and in the simple piety that would minimize ceremonies, and so there was an earnest moral concern in Erasmus to see the life of the church improved.

At the same time that he could speak quite positively about the life of church, he could also write very satirically. In 1509 he wrote the Praise of Folly, which was presented as a statement about how folly rules the world and how everyone comes to serve folly, particularly people like lawyers and theologians and bishops, and here again, he could use his satirical abilities to get people laughing at so much that he saw as wrong and external and formalized in the church. He probably also wrote the satire, Julius Exclusus, “Julius Excluded” that we’ve talked about. . . .


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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But he contributed very much positively to the coming of the Reformation through his critical scholarly work. He produced scholarly editions of many of the church fathers, particularly Jerome, his favorite church father, whom he saw to publication in nine volumes, and he also edited the works of Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and the early Renaissance thinker, Lorenzo Valla. In all of these works, Erasmus was trying to present to the church what he saw as the wisdom, the moral insight, and character of the church fathers. And Erasmus, like all of the Renaissance workers, was tremendously aided in the sixteenth century by the invention of printing, which enabled books to be distributed far and wide.

Erasmus’s greatest contribution, however, was his critical edition of the New Testament in Greek with a new Latin translation. He produced that critical Greek text in 1516, and it was one of the ways that solidified his reputation as a great scholar and indeed the prince of the humanists in northern Europe in his day. It is not an accident that Erasmus’s Greek New Testament appeared in 1516, just the year before Martin Luther became a public reformer in his criticism of the indulgences. The availability of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament and a new Latin translation made it much easier for thoughtful, educated Europeans to begin to ask questions about what the church taught and whether church teaching was like what they found in the New Testament, so that in the availability of the church to have printed New Testaments in Greek, to know the Greek language, and to study the Greek language, and to ask questions about the history of the church as it could be answered from the writings of the church fathers, Erasmus and the other church leaders provided an invaluable background to the Reformation. Erasmus himself never became a Protestant. He was annoyed by the extremes that Protestants went to. He would offer criticism of the Protestant cause. We’ll return to that later when we look at the Reformation itself. But much of the work that Erasmus and the other humanists did provided a vital background to the Reformation. In fact, it was said that Luther hatched the egg that Erasmus laid, and there’s a fair amount of truth to that statement.

I think we’ll conclude the lecture there and carry on with a look at Martin Luther himself and the beginnings of the Reformation next time.

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