Protestant apologetics against Catholicism seem in our day to be dominated by the assumption that arguing from historical and theological discontinuity is simply “the” Protestant way of doing things. Many of the “top names” in Protestant apologetics tell a story about the 16th century reformation which I believe gives away the store to the Catholics–who are, if nothing else, unembarassed by the history of the Church and claim it all as their own. By contrast, the typical Protestant story about Church history is founded upon embarassment–embarassment about the “dirtiness” of the pre-Protestant era Church, and a concomitant willingness to embrace all manner of arguments which seek to distance the Protestant reformation itself, and we as its heirs, from the majority of what had come before.I believe that this way of looking at the Protestant reformation is the historiographical equivalent of the very much un-reformational theological approach to the Scriptures which takes the distinction between Old and New Testaments and hardens it into a division across which very little can transfer and even less is really “relevant” to our lives today. In this post I would like to tell a different story about the Protestant reformation, a story not driven by the assumptions of perfectionism to embrace discontinuity and cut ourselves off from the bulk of God’s dealings with His saints in history.
I’ll begin the story by asking the question “What was the Reformation?”

The nearly uniform view of much of today’s Protestant apologetics about our reformation is that it was a Modern phenomenon–Modern in the sense that it represented a fairly drastic break from the largest part of what had come before, and that it willfully desired to chart entirely new directions. But, significantly, these “new” directions were really the most ancient directions, namely the “plain” truths of the Gospel and the church which are found in a “normal” reading of “just” (sola) the New Testament. This theme of recovering without remainder the purity of the primitive Church is the common thread that can today often be found weaving together radical Baptist and semi-Presbyterian elements into a coterie of reductionistic theology (i.e., “Reformed Theology=TULIP”) and even worse historiography (i.e., “Once upon a time there were this great uniform mass of the Dark Ages, and then came the light of the Reformation.”)

Now it’s easy to see where this story comes from, even aside from analyses of the Modern notion that the ancestors were “stupid” and that we have managed to transcend them because we have “grown up” and become “rational.” It’s easy to see where this emphasis on the “restoration” of something that had been lost comes from, because the Protestant reformers do evidence a good bit of “primitive Church” rhetoric. For instance, in Calvin’s polemic against the papacy he often speaks of how the papacy had gone off the rails and “subverted” the “original” pattern of the Church, etc. But the interesting thing about this type of rhetoric is that it’s not actually a Modern development, not actually some kind of unprecedented form of argument that is somehow more “reasonable” than the arguments of the “papists” who presumably rely upon “traditions of men” instead of “the plain” word of God. In reality, people had been talking about recovering the primitive Church for centuries before Calvin. In fact, much of the ecclesiological controversy throughout the central and high Middle Ages features the theme of recovering the primitive church, or in their natural Latin terminology, the ecclesia primitiva. Pope Gregory VII’s letters are full of this sort of appeal to an ancient, uncorrupted, pristine order which his eleventh century opponents have shamefully subverted in the name of un-apostolic traditions. Interestingly, given Modern Protestant slurs on the Medieval Church, Gregory even talks about recovering “the Gospel” after a period of darkness and decrepitude.

Other issues are susceptible to the same analysis, and tend to yield the plausible conclusion that the Protestant reformers were far and away children of the Medieval Church. For instance, the critiques of relics and saint cults. This wasn’t new, either. Four centuries before Calvin Guibert of Nogent wrote an intriguing little tract called “On the Saints and their Relics”, in which he lamented the fact that many bishops were not instructing their congregations properly regarding the theology of the saints and the practice of relic veneration, and were therefore allowing a great deal of error, and sometimes even open superstition, to creep into their churches. Or again, take concepts of “authority” and whether it is ever proper to resist it. This complex of issues is really at the heart of the maxim “sola Scriptura“, for when one sets the Protestant reformation in the context of the previous several centuries, a quite different picture emerges than the one that Modern Protestants present as their self-portrait. In my opinion, the Medieval-context picture makes a lot more sense out of the reformers than the Modern Protestant picture does.

Take one of Protestantism’s main battlecries, “sola Scriptura.” This was created as a battlecry precisely because throughout the later Middle Ages theologians and other authorities were forced through various controversies to refine the concepts of “authority” and “resistance” in dialogue with the Scriptures and the theological commonplaces which they had received from the Church Fathers. Particularly important in this regard were the terrible disputes between the Church and the Empire, and their corollary disputes about the power of the pope relative to other powers in the society. As the Middle Ages wore on the popes gravitated almost inexorably toward the theory that their power (potestas) was totally unaccountable to anyone on earth, but only to God in the afterlife. As one might expect, resistance constantly arose to this principle, because the legacy about “authority” that Western Christians had received from the patristic age was pluriform. That is, the legacy concerning “authority” had multiple strands, not all of them compatible with each other. On the basis of the pluriformity of concepts Catholics as diverse as Pope Gregory I and Thomas Aquinas had argued, respectively, that (1) an inferior could never question a superior because on the terms of Romans 13 that was “rebellion”, but (2) that inferiors could question superiors when the activities of the latter seriously threatened the stability and health of the whole society which the superiors were supposed to be guarding under God.

Because of such disagreements (and the refinements which came out of the controversies), by the time the Western Schism occurred (1378-1418) the trajectory that would lead to the Protestant reformation was virtually set in stone. I would argue, in fact, that it was largely because the papacy refused to heed reasonable, intra-tradition criticisms of its monarchical extremism but instead preferred to set the whole world on fire so long as it could continue to maintain a “divine right” of absolutely unaccountable rulership that the Protestant reformation happened. I argue this way on the basis of a serious reading of the controversies of the 15th century, which I do not believe can be separated from those in the 16th and 17th. Throughout the 15th century especially the battles over the power of the pope became intractable. Matters were certainly not helped by the long succession of digustingly evil (or else just plain clueless) popes who so persistently failed to carry out their basic spiritual duties that resistance to their claims becomes the only option for large swaths of Christendom. And significantly, given earlier precedents based upon the pluriformity of the tradition, the resistance took place on the basis of the long-standing idea of “lex rex“–the law is the king, not the king is the law.

Hence, like a number of later Medieval theologians, including Aquinas (who was, of course, writing in a far different context than Luther), we hear the Protestant reformers arguing that the power of rulers is not absolute under God, but is always accountable to a standard outside of themselves. In the reformers this principle often took the form: “The decrees of the pope are subject to the Divine Word, and not the Divine Word to the decrees of the pope.” In other words, “sola” Scriptura was essentially the idea that the pope, with his army of canon lawyers dedicated to the principle of maintaining absolute papal sovereignty and unaccountability, was not the final, unquestionable arbiter of the meaning of the lex. Scripture was, as the Medieval Church generally recognized, the ultimate authority for establishing doctrine. But because God has ordained His Church to minister His Word, the ultimate authority of Scripture is normally mediated through the ministerial activities of the Church. That is, by implication, the ultimate authority of the Word is not mediated through the self-proclaimed authority of private individuals, or even of individual ministers claiming an autonomous right to resist–that is a right which is not connected to much larger lines of resistance over long periods of time, all normal procedures of resistance having first been exhausted without positive result.

I believe that to correctly understand the battlecry sola Scriptura it must be set in the large, deep context of the long-running Medieval debates about authority in the Church and Christian society. This means, in turn, that since those debates resolved themselves into an epic struggle between the autonomy of the absolute monarchy concept of the papacy and the equity-based theonomy of conciliarism, sola Scriptura must be set particularly in the context of Medieval conciliarism. This would certainly explain such interesting facts of Protestant confessional teaching such as the very carefully balanced language of WCF 31, Chapter 2 of the Second Helvetic Confession, and Article of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Thus: WCF 31 explicitly gives Church councils the right of deciding controversies of religion and cases of conscience, provided that their decrees are “consonant with the Word of God.” SHC 2 claims that arguments about religion are not to be urged “only” with the decrees of fathers and councils. Article 21 of the Thirty-Nine Articles says that decrees of Councils are valid insofar only as they are “declared to be taken out of the Holy Scriptures.”

What do such statements mean? Typically we Protestants take such statements and draw dichotomies from them: councils have erred but Scripture does not err, therefore we will never rely on councils but only on Scripture. But such thinking is, I believe, in direct contradiction to the historical situations in which the Confessions were drawn up–particularly the historical situation of the epic struggles in the 15th century between papalism and conciliarism which led directly to the Protestant reformation in the 16th. The conciliarists themselves, good catholics all, certainly believed that the authority of the Scriptures, and not some kind of naked appeal to the authority of the Church, was final. However, being good catholics all, they did not attempt to remove the “final” authority of the Scriptures from their ministerial application by the God-ordained authorities of the Church. It is quite simply not enough to claim that the Scriptures are the “final” authority, for someone has to apply that authority to real life situations. It is all well and good for today’s Presbyterians, for instance, to cite Chapter I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Confession, which say that the final rule of interpretation of the Scriptures is the Scriptures themselves and that the supreme judge of controversies is the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures, but again it must be asked what does such language mean? I suggest that it means this: when arguing about controversies of doctrine it is not correct to argue merely from the decrees of councils–that is, it is not correct to say, e.g., “This controversy has been solved by the authority of the Council of Chalcedon, so no more debate is possible.” Rather, it is correct to say, e.g., “As the Council of Chalcedon correctly argued, the Holy Scriptures teach this answer to the controversy, and since the Scriptures have spoken and been applied by the God-ordained authorities, the matter is concluded.” By this means it can be seen that the final judge of controversies is, in fact, the Scriptures and that positions are not being argued “only” from the authority of councils.

But similarly someone will naturally ask “What of Luther’s protest at the Diet of Worms, where he passionately thunders that he will not be convinced by the decrees of Councils since they have erred and contradicted themselves?” This is quite well explained, I believe, by grasping that the great tragedy of the 15th century battles was the fact that after a brief triumph of councils over the papacy, the papacy managed to reinvigorate itself and at last to actually take over the conciliar mechanism and make it a mere tool of continuing the same old policy of absolute unaccountability. The stark difference between, say, the Council of Constance in 1414 and the Fifth Lateran Council just a hundred years later speaks volumes about what had happened to the conciliarist program in the hands of radical papalists. When one then turns and sets the protests of Luther against councils in its natural context–the context of the widespread bitter resistance to the papalist hijacking of the conciliarist program, by which resistance Luther had been deeply affected–I think it becomes implausible to read Luther’s “Here I stand” speech at Worms in any way other than the exhausted protest of wide swaths of Christendom, none of which could any longer believe that the papacy and its armies of lawyers and doctors at all cared about the law, but instead cared only for maintaining their own power at any cost. Why does Luther burn the canon law in response to Leo X’s Exsurge Domine? Simple: the pope does not truly respect the law (but thinks himself its sovereign, unaccountable master), so why not graphically demonstrate the uselessness of appealing to the law against the autonomy of the pope?

Such a reading of our confessional language and of Luther’s actions makes perfect sense when the natural historical context of the confessions and Luther’s actions–indeed, of the entire Protestant reformation itself–is observed and taken to heart. But incredibly, we have it seems, in our very Modern obsession with getting “theology” (particularly “soteriology”) right via the correct mechanism of abstract hermeneutics and exegesis, and fully regardless of the actual situations in which we live and move and have our being, simply eliminated the historical resources and the tools to properly evaluate the activities of our own fathers!

I believe that it is drastically incorrect to portray our fathers as historically and theologically-innovative revolutionaries standing up bravely for a “the Truth” or a “the Gospel” that is totally disconnected from previous history and tradition, relying instead upon “just” (sola) Scripture in the purportedly “plain” reading which we have derived from “mere” and / or “scientific” hermeneutics. In fact, ecclesiologically speaking, when he started writing in earnest against the popes Luther himself was mostly just repeating the arguments of good catholic theologians such as Pierre D’Ailly and Jean Gerson and Nicholas of Cusa and Wessel Gansfort (themselves relying on much larger, and much older sources). Luther was no self-grounding point of authority as we too often portray him as being, and the roots of his resistance go far, far deeper than the usual heroes with which we associate him, namely Wycliffe and Huss. And significantly, because the papalists who trotted out onto the field to fight Luther very early in the game were largely a bunch of rigidly dogmatic alarmists (Cajetan, Eck, Prieras, Emser, etc.), what should have been an intelligent, but spirited intra-Church debate over issues that truly had not been settled got magnified into two Life-or-Death-for-All-of-Christian-Society positions, neither of which contains all the resources needed for a resolution. The conflict blossomed throughout the first half of the 16th century, reaching several points where it was almost resolved, but tragically fell apart at the last second. Then at last the Council of Trent arrived on the scene, supposedly fulfilling the then 150 year-old clamoring for a General Council to fix the problems of Christendom, but because for various reasons that Council wound up being run by papalist fanatics like Giovanni Caraffa, things continued to spin out of control. The split that finally, disastrously occurred in the time of Trent led then to the terrible Wars of Religion and the onset of an “Enlightenment” whose forces, gathering their strength for some time under the aegis of the thinly-veiled secularist form of the Renaissance, could no longer be restrained by Christendom because Christendom had worn itself out in a fratricidal frenzy.

The point of all this is that there were clear historical and theological precedents for the critiques the reformers made. The reformers were not men who, like many of our apologetical luminaries today, went out and got themselves seminary educated (complete with a quantum-mechanics level understanding of the workings of Greek participles and prepositions) and then sat down at their desks, learned to pretend to be able to consciously divorce their minds from all linguistic and cultural factors which had made them what they were, and then “just” exegeted the “plain” Scriptures without anything being “added” to the text–resulting in a neat package of wonderfully “clear” biblical insight that happened to exhibit a (nearly) one-to-one correspondence with the uncontaminated purity of the primitive Church. Why do we find Calvin approvingly citing the excellent evangelical qualities of Bernard of Clairvaux? Why does he claim, following the ancient tradition originating with Gregory I, bishop of Rome from 590-604, that the first four General Councils were full of nothing but the pure doctrine of the Scriptures? Why do so many of the Protestant reformers’s arguments sound like many Medieval precedents? Simple. Because the Protestant reformation was not what the Modern Evangelical worldview claims it was.

No indeed, the Protestant reformers were not Moderns in the sense that the Evangelical Modernists think they were. On the contrary, the reformers thought like Medievals, they acted like Medievals, and they need to be analyzed as Medievals. This means sometimes they challenge us, their self-proclaimed heirs, in ways that make us extremely uncomfortable. It is not a faithful approach to their work to do as many Protestant apologists today do in proclaiming that the reformers were simply not “consistent” with their “principles” all of the time. This seems a very self-serving, not to mention silly, thing to say, for nobody is “consistent” in the way that certain party spirits of our day talk about “consistency”. For instance, a certain fringe element of Reformed Baptists of which I am aware repeatedly makes this argument about “consistency”, but just as repeatedly misses the very simple fact that they themselves are on their own criteria “inconsistent” because they hold “Calvinistic soteriology” while being complete “Arminians” on the level of ecclesiology and sociology. It is far better to place the Protestant reformers in their own natural context, and evaluate their arguments in that context rather than in the wish-fulfillment contexts generated by later sectarian agendas which purport to “finish” the reformation by turning it into a program of radicalism which its own originators simply would not have recognized as being in continuity with their own aims.

We return to an earlier point: the type of rhetoric that is all over the pages of the Reformers is really not that amazing–much less can it serve as the very foundation of the types of drastic discontinuity-driven worldview that the Modern Protestant Discontinuity argument presents. Trying to squeeze the reformers into the reductionistic molds provided by such Modern “Anabaptistic” revisionists as Leonard Verduin (i.e., The Reformers and Their Stepchildren) leads only to distortion of their message, and in fact also creates the lion’s share of the apologetic arguments that Catholics bring against the Protestant cause. To me it seems that because the worldview of the Modern Protestant sect-mindset is literally centered upon a tiny handful of abstract issues, it doesn’t have the resources to handle significant discussion about Big Picture Stuff. All that matters to this type of religion are radicalizations of legitimate reformation questions. For instance, the legitimate reformation question “How can I be righteous before a holy God?” is answered with an appeal to a “sola” fide that has been construed with such an exquisite fanaticism about “works” that it reads baptism as a “work” and winds up lopping off even the reformers! Or again the legitimate reformation question “Where is the final authority in the Christian life?” is first conflated with the peculiarly Modern question “How can I have epistemic certainty and a God’s-eye view of Truth?”, which is then answered by a peculiarly Modern appeal to proper mechanistic hermeneutics as construed with a fanaticism that lops off all of Church history prior to the late Renaissance period. In fact, Church history gets rearranged into what amounts to a massive exercise in florilegia (a Medieval compilation of proof texts). This occurs, I think, in large part because the 17th century tactic of creating an over-arching controlling Mythology of The Pure Originary Point Purely Recovered And Purely Maintained Only By Our Group demands that anything which does not conform to the most simplistic reading of the most simplistic point (the Originary Point) is simply out of bounds.

Whatever may be said for “primitive church” arguments in the Middle Ages, in the hands of Modern Protestant sectarians such arguments become merely a justification for spiritual immaturity. Such arguments amount to an appeal to simplistically discount all that happened after the Originary Point, and to opt to spend our whole lives trying to emulate, or rather, to repristinate, the Uncontaminated Originary Point. It amounts to a vision for always remaining a spiritual child, never growing up, always hanging on to the most simple, the most unadorned, the most immature, concept of religion. And because of the immaturity of such a religion, literally the whole world is at stake in these debates. Because the world is too small, such an attitude can’t handle criticism, can’t substantively respond. Like the rationalistic defense that a certain type of Evangelicalism has constructed for biblical inerrancy, to admit that they have erred at one point is to admit that possibly they have erred at all points, and therefore nothing they believe is truly “certain.” And for Modernistic Protestants (as for all Modernists generally speaking), that is simply unacceptable.

A great deal of trouble in today’s Protestant world comes down to different ways of answering the question “What was the Reformation?” How we answer that question, the story we tell when we are prompted to explain ourselves, determines how we will live and whether or not we have anything to say to other bodies of Christians who do not believe as we do, and very often use the massive weaknesses of our own typical self-portrait against us to great effect.