Research

Part II

When the Protestant Reformers appealed to history in support of their religious position, the Catholic Church found itself confronted with the challenge of justifying by historical evidence its own claim to being the true church. The classic statement by the Reformers of their historic position was put forth by Flacius and his associates in the Magdeburg Centuries. Its ringing denunciation of Catholic history as a process of falling away from truth made this work a potent weapon in the hands of the Protestants. The influence it exerted is shown by the reaction of a Catholic episcopal councilor at Augsburg at the time the Centuries appeared:

"Among all the numberless and highly damaging works of the heretics o£ our time, none has come to light comparable in perniciousness and destructiveness with this one church history." 1

The Catholic answer to the challenge of the Centuries is found in a monumental twelve-volume history entitled Annales Ecdesiastici ("Ecclesiastical Annals"), the lifework of Caesar Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607). By both train ing and position Baronius was well fitted to write a history of Catholicism. Early in life he devoted himself to historical study. Later he was appointed librarian of the Vatican, and was confessor to Pope Clement VIII. In 1605, except for the opposition of Philip II of Spain, whose territory in Sicily, Baronius had claimed for the Papacy, he probably would have been elected pope. With extensive, hithertountouched sources at his service in the Vatican Library, Baronius produced a work that has stood as a primary model for all subsequent Catholic church historians. Although some of his historical statements have since been found in error and have been corrected, his basic philosophy has remained. It can be taken as representative of the Roman Catholic view of the place of the church in history. The work of Baronius stands in the field of history as the counterpart of the works of Ribera, Bellarmine, and Alcazar in the field of prophetic interpretation. The latter sought by propounding new interpretations of prophecy to deflect from Catholicism the stigma of being called Anti-christ.

Baronius turned his efforts to disproving similar accusations from history. As a mark of the esteem of the Papacy for his work, in 1745 he was beatified with the title of "venerable" by Pope Benedict XIV. In contrast to the Protestant principle that true doctrine is the criterion of God's church throughout the centuries, Baronius' Annals take the institutional church as their center. He saw the Roman Church as the visible expression of absolute truth. This left, consequently, no place for the idea of a "falling away" in its history. His philosophy followed that of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the Angelic Doctor of medieval Scholasticism, whose leader ship among Catholic teachers was established by the Council of Trent (1545-63) during the Catholic Counter Reformation. Aquinas emphasized the importance of human free will in the historical process. He believed absolute truth and the ultimate purpose of creation to be revealed by God through the church, but he felt that man's reaction to divine truth and purpose was dependent upon his own willingness to follow. In this light even the private lives of unwholesome occupants of the papal chair could be considered independently from the integrity of the church. Baronius was too good a historian not to recognize excesses and declines in Catholic history, but these he saw as the "abomination of desolation" foretold by Christ. He admitted that there had been unworthy occupants of the papal throne, but he considered them as occasional misfortunes, which in no way damaged the integrity of the institution itself. He even held these unhappy situations forth as evidences of the divine authority of the church, for in the end it had always emerged triumphant. He reminded his readers of Christ, who, though sleeping, was still with His disciples in the boat as they were tossed about on stormy Galilee. So throughout the vicissitudes of the centuries Christ was to be found only in the church.2

Baronius' work covered only to the end of the twelfth century. Consequently, it touches on the Reformers' philosophy of history rather than on the movement itself. Subsequent Catho lic historians have not deviated from the general outline laid down by Baronius. Applying to the Roman Church Christ's promise that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," they have championed the idea of its indefectibility that the Church of Rome can never become corrupt in faith and morals, nor lose its position as the true church. Other churches may fall away, but the Roman Church, never.3 With this premise their only logical conclusion is that the Reformation marks a defection from the church of God.

Continuing this line of thought, Catholic historians have sought to account for the Reformation by emphasizing its nonspiritual and antispiritual causes. The Reformers saw their move ment as the restoration of true religion, but Catholic historians have seen it as a revolt stemming from worldly conditions.

A typical enumeration of such causes of the Reformation is made by Father J. P. Kirsch in The Catholic Encyclopedia* He lists five general situations that set the stage for the rise of Protestantism. The first factor mentioned is the worldliness that showed itself in many high places in the church during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A second cause is seen in the personal lives of many of the clergy, who turned their energies toward secular pursuits rather than to the good of the church. Coupled with this were a widespread immorality and an indifference toward religion among the laity.

A third cause of the Reformation is given as the weakness of papal authority in the fou teenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. This low period in papal power was demonstrated by the impotent, French-dominated popes at Avignon, by the Great Schism, and by the inroads of Humanism on the See of Rome. A fourth factor in the defection from Catholicism is found in the rising nationalism of the late Middle Ages. Ecclesiastical authority impinged on so many phases of secular medieval life that when national governments began to assert themselves in the control of secular matters, a clash between church and state was almost inevitable. A fifth condition held responsible for the Reformation is the neopaganism of the Renaissance, and Humanism, which taught men to look for their ideals in ancient Greece and Rome rather than in the church. Catholic his torians feel that such factors as these ripened Europe for religious revolt. In their view the Reformers took advantage of the religious, social, economic, and political ferment of the times to bring about their own accession to ecclesiastical leadership. Thus to Catholic thinking, the Protestant Reformation was a negative movement not the Reformation, but the Protestant Revolt.

The Secular Viewpoint

Today this concept of the Reformation as primarily a revolt is popular not only among Catholics but also among liberal Protestants and historians who identify themselves with no religion. Their attitude, however, has arisen from a viewpoint quite different from the Catholic. The roots of this modern, non-Catholic view of the Reformation are found in the thinking of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the period known as the Enlightenment. As scientists became convinced that nature operated in accord with definite laws rather than by the immediate instigation of the super natural, men came more and more to feel that history too was a purely mundane affair, and that its vicissitudes were the result of natural causes in which God if He existed at all was not involved. As applied to the rise of Protestantism, this view meant that that movement was to be accounted for entirely as the offspring of its environment and the conditions that preceded it. Two of the greatest historical thinkers of the eighteenth century, Gibbon in England and Montesquieu in France, gave their influence to this opinion. In the nineteenth century this type of rationalistic historical thinking made new strides among the Germans, who developed the science of historical method to a high degree. Such scholars as Albrecht Ritschl and Leopold von Ranke, though religious men themselves, promoted what is called the secular, or profane, view of Christian history. They held the admirable ideal of making history as exact a science as possible, but their method was to discard all evidence that cannot be evaluated objectively. The spirit of Ranke's famous dictum, that history should be written "as it actually was," was expressed by another Ger man historian, Wilhelm von Humboldt, thus:

"The work of the historian is to portray what has happened. The more purely and completely he succeeds in this, the more perfectly has he fulfilled his duty. Simple portrayal is at once the first, inescapable requirement of his business, and the highest that he dares to undertake." 5 Such a method meant that the historian was only to record, not to interpret the past. The significance of this for religious history is ex pressed by Ernst Troeltzsch, who himself wrote an important work on the Reformation: "Every history is tied to general historical methods, and the theological pseudo-history which governs interpretation of things here by laws and hypotheses other than those outside of Christian limits, is condemned by its endless subterfuges and prevarications." 6

Much can be said in defense of an objective method for secular history, but to apply the same principles to religious history is insufficient, for it ignores the most important element involved the work of the Spirit of God. The only man who can write adequately of religious things is the one who has experienced them, and by virtue of that experience he cannot be coldly objective.

In accordance with this secular method, modern church historians have frequently declined to view the Reformation from the stand points of truth and error. Instead of seeking to reveal God's reaching down into the human sphere, these historians have chosen rather to trace the efforts of man to reach up to God. Eschewing as too subjective any attempt at discovering God's hand in history, they have followed the footsteps of political and social historians in limiting themselves to the study of purely mundane processes of cause and effect as revealed in the records of the past. This has led them to consider church history from a point of view distinctly this-worldly.

As a result, it has become common to refer to the Protestant Reformation as the Protestant Revolution, and to reserve the term "Reformation" for the concurrent Catholic reinvigoration. Such terminology is favored by Catholic writers, and has come to have wide currency in contemporary thought. Many modern secular writers propound much the same reasons for the Reformation as do Catholic writers with out, of course, passing judgment on its rightness or wrongness. This is particularly true of textbooks used in schools and colleges. The following statement from one widely used college text is an example:

"With the end of the eighteenth century, the religious life of Europe had been beset by almost continuous strife and uncertainty for three hundred years. This was only part of the general adjustment being made in European life and thought as me dieval ideas and institutions gave way to those of the modern age." 7 "This movement has often been called the Reformation, but that term is not quite accurate. There had been periods of 'reform' in the Church before, as we have seen, and another was to occur as a result of the forces released by Luther. But the significant action of Luther and his followers was more than reformation; it was a religious revolt." 8

Preserved Smith, an eminent American historian and teacher, expresses this opinion even more forcefully: "The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Social Revolution, was but the consequence of the operation of antecedent changes in environment and habit, intellectual and economic. . . . "All the great religious innovations of Luther and his followers can be explained as an attempt to readjust faith to the new culture, partly intellectual, partly social, that had gradually developed during the later Middle Ages." 9

The ecumenical movement has been another factor in popularizing this view. Corning from within liberal Protestantism itself, it minimizes the importance of doctrine as a criterion of the true church of Christ; thus it does away with the theological raison d'etre of the Reformation. The complaints that liberal Christians today raise against Catholicism are no longer doctrinal, but rather matters of interchurch and church-state relationships. Characteristically one well-known churchman has written:

 "And what disturbs the Protestants most is that the hierarchy, here in our own country, just as in other countries, is a tight and inaccessible directorate. The whole theory of exclusive prestige and prerogative which Rome claims in Christendom makes the Roman Catholic cardinals, arch bishops, and bishops refuse to sit down in frank and democratic conference with Protestant leaders. . . . Roman Catholicism, according to its own view, is not a part of that larger and unstereotyped fellowship of the Spirit which includes Christians of different names within the Church of Christ." 10

Some thinkers, realizing that the secular view of the Reformation leaves a negative movement, have sought to find positive justification for it on other grounds than those taken by the Reformers. Thus Edward Maslin Hulme, formerly of Stanford University, writes:

"The deepest significance of the Revolution lies, not in its negative element, nor in the facts that it gave birth to new dogmas and organized new churches, but in its deepening of the religious sentiment, ... in its increasing in the hearts of men the desire to be in harmony with God." 11

Paul Tillich, of Union Theological Seminary, has likewise tried to find justification for the Reformation outside the traditional lines of thinking. He is pessimistic regarding the out look for Protestantism: it will soon come to its end. Nevertheless, he justifies its existence not so much because of its specific doctrines but rather because of its "prophetic protest against every conditioned thing that makes an unconditional claim for itself."

One of the broadest and most recent estimates is that by Roland H. Bainton: "The Reformation was a religious revival. Its attempt was to give man a new assurance in the presence of God and a new motivation in the moral life. . . . The Reformation at once rent and bound. The external unities were shattered, but the Christian consciousness of Europe was renewed. The Catholic Church itself was stimulated to carry through with accelerated pace the work already initiated by Ximenes. If there is still surviving any consciousness of Christian culture in the West, the Reformation of the sixteenth century is one of those periodic renewals to which it is due." 11

In attempting a comparative evaluation of the Protestant, Catholic, and secular views of the Reformation, one must recognize that they each are based upon wholly different assumptions. For the evangelical Protestant, Biblical doctrine is basic: departure from it is apostasy, and return to it is reformation. For the Catholic, institutional continuity is the hall mark of God's true church: conformity to the traditions of the institution is obedience, and departure from them is revolt. For the secular historian, the truth or untruth of a church is not an issue: he refuses to sit as judge on such a question. He contents himself with recording the impact of political, social, and economic forces upon the church as a mundane institution. When the question of divine truth is thus disregarded, the rise of Protestantism can frankly be seen as little more than a revolution against one of the most majestic institutions of history, and the renovation of Catholicism during the sixteenth century does indeed be come the Reformation.

It becomes increasingly clear, then, that the modern empirical approach to the history of the Reformation—laudable as it may be for its scientific attempt to reconstruct history objectively, "as it actually was"—in reality takes away from Protestantism its claim to being a reformation, and relegates it to the status of a revolt. It is not meant by this that the concept of Protestantism as a true reform must rest upon a biased or dishonest interpretation of historical sources. The Protestant historian agrees that secular conditions loom large in the background of the Reformation. God's movements do enter the world in "the fulness of time," when the world is prepared. The Reformers did ride the current of their times. The evangelical historian has no quarrel with a thorough and honest study of the records; he must be as anxious as any other to determine what actually happened in the past, but at the same time he must insist upon measuring the meaning of the past by a standard commensurate with his own convictions. Otherwise, the Protestant Reformation does indeed remain a negative, anti-Catholic movement. But to the historian who takes the full view, who bases his standard of truth on Scripture, and opens his eyes to the hand of God in history, the Reformation was a positive movement and a true reform "through the immeasurable goodness of God."