Last time we saw that the
Roman Catholic Church had become rich, powerful, and corrupt in Medieval
Europe. Perhaps the greatest corruption
of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the sale of indulgences.
According to Roman Catholic
doctrine people may be saved and not go to hell when they die, but they still
may not be quite good enough to go heaven, so they end up in an in between
place called purgatory. People could get
their dead relatives out of purgatory by praying, doing good deeds, or by
donating money in exchange for a piece of paper called an indulgence. Lest you
think that I am missing a nuance here, a seller of indulgences in Germany named
Johann Tetzel sang the jingle, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings the
soul from purgatory springs.”
This upset a German monk and
Bible scholar named Martin Luther.
Luther became convinced from the Bible, which he believed was the only
basis for belief rather than human made tradition, (Sola Scriptura) that we are
saved by God’s grace alone (Sola Gratia) through faith alone. (Sola Fide) In other words, purgatory and indulgences are
not in the Bible but were made up by the church; we go to heaven not by giving
money, or by anything else we do, but by God’s grace when we put our faith in
Jesus Christ.
On October 31st
1517 Luther nailed his “95 Theses” (a list of 95 grievances against the Roman
Catholic Church) to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany
seeking to open the debate on these issues and reform the church. It is important to remember that Luther, and
the other reformers, for the most part, were not seeking to start a new church
but simply to reform the church.
This was not to be,
however. In 1520 the Pope excommunicated
Martin Luther and a new church family, which we now know as Lutherans was born.
In 1519 Ulrich Zwingli, a
Catholic priest who had come to similar conclusions as Luther, began a
reformation in Switzerland. Many
churches in Switzerland became independent from Rome just as the Lutherans in
Germany had. Leadership of the Swiss
reformation was later taken over by John Calvin. What then came to be known as the Calvinist
or Reformed Church spread particularly to Holland and later Scotland and is the
origin of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches of today.
While Lutherans and
Calvinist sought to replace the Catholic Church as the official church in the
countries in which they lived, there was another, totally different, way of
being Christian emerging in these areas; these people were known as
Anabaptists. Anabaptists, which means
re-baptizers, rejected infant baptism in favor of believer’s baptism and also reject the intermixing of
church and state. Anabaptists are usually
pacifists, and some live in intentional communities and practice a plain and
simple lifestyle and manner of dress.
Modern Anabaptists include the Amish, the Hutterites, the Mennonites,
and many Brethren groups.
There was also a Reformation in England and we will pick that up next
time.
