The medieval church: Good, Bad and Confusing

Erasmus (1467-1536)
God uses ordinary people, people are often reluctant.
Erasmus was a bridge to the reformation. Erasmus was a Dutchman, an illegitimate son of a monk and a nun. There were two children and the parents died while they were quite young. They were brought up by people who belonged to the “Brethren of the common Life.”
This was at the time of the Renaissance, which literally means “new birth” and it was a time when people were looking for their roots, looking back into antiquity.
They are looking back into Greek and Latin writings and studying the original sources.
The Turks invade Constantinople and suddenly all the ancient documents are available for study.
The Brethren of the Common Life
Now Erasmus was brought up in the Brethren of the Common Life wasn’t a monastic order but simple communities that committed themselves to living as close to the teachings of Jesus as they could. There were about 200 of these communities in the Rheinlands and the Netherlands.
One of the things that they did, was to give themselves to the study of ancient languages and particularly to the translation of ancient documents. This was through the Renaisance influence and obviously included the study and translation of the scriptures from the ancient Greek and Hebrew. They would also be reading and translating the works of the early church fathers like Ambrosius, Augustine, Origen etc.
The early church fathers were themselves grapping with truths. One of the things they grapped with in the first centuries was the relationship of Jesus with the Father. For us, this is very simple, we have a Bible, we read it and are in faith.
When the gospel went to the Greeks, who were of a polytheistic background, a Trinitarian Godhead smacks of polythesiticism for a Greek. How do you explain the trinity? One person – three gods? Three gods – three persons? One God – three persons?
At the time of the early church there were all kinds of heresies going around that were trying to grapple with the truth.
At the end of the 2nd century there was a heresy which was called modialistic monarchism. (One person revealed in three ways). We see the father in some things, Jesus in other and the Holy Spirit in the church.
It is not easy to fathom. Then comes the Greek influence, because they had a different creational tradition. The world was created by rivalling Gods battling against one another. For them material was inherently evil and only spirit was good.
When it comes to us, mankind, we have an evil body but a holy spirit. Redemption is actually our spirit escaping from an evil body. When the gospel went to the Greeks, they had to grapple with this question, how could Jesus come to this world and become material if material was evil? God can not have taken on an evil body. So they get round it saying, God came in the appearance of a man – not really as a man, just in the appearance of a man.
Other opinions said, no he was adopted at baptism. The Spirit came on him and adopted him for the period of his ministry. When he was crucified, the Spirit departed from him so that it wasn’t God who was crucified.
So they are grappling with these truths. It is when you begin to grapple with the truth that you begin to understand some of the difficulties we are facing, because the Bible is a book of revelation not a book of logic.
What the Greeks are bringing is logic not revelation.
Erasmus was bored with all these kinds of discussions. He wanted the church to be reformed, but only practice and morality. He became a priest and studied catholic theology, canon law and the decisions of the councils. But he wasn’t really interested, What he wanted to do was to make the word of God available for the people so that they could read it in their own language. So he gave himself to the study of ancient documents particularly to the scriptures.
He was what we would call the leading humanist of his day.
Erasmus gave himself to the translation of scripture. He translated it from Greek into Latin in a proper way. What he in effect did was to expose the irregularities of the Jerome (Vulgate) translation. He put a tool into the hands of the reformers that they needed for study. This was particularly interesting for Luther, Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli.
Erasmus had a real fear of sickness and in those days there was a lot of it around. Erasmus became very popular, but as soon as there was a wiff of sickness, he was off on his travels. So he travelled to the courts and universities of Europe. He went and spread his teaching. He put into the hands of lots of people the ability to see for themselves what the early church taught.
He was also a satirist. He wrote an essay called “In praise of folly”. He wrote it in just six days. It’s a take off of the church, of the cardinals and popes and their excesses and immorality. It was done in satirical form and was very funny. But what it did was to articulate for the common people, what they were feeling and it made them very anti-church. The church began to realise that Erasmus wasn’t doing them a favour. So he got blamed for the works of Luther and the like. The church began to blame him and in fact one monk said, “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.”
His 1516 translation was his main contribution. He said, “I want the farmer, the tailor and even the Turk to read the scripture in his own tongue.” He was much like Luther in that. In fact they had a lot of similarities.
The difference was this: He wanted to reform the church in practices and morals and Luther said, you have got to put the axe at the root.
You have got to get back to truth, to doctrine. They fell out after Luther was excommunicated.
The big issue at the reformation was TRUTH. Is the church the ultimate authority or it is scripture?
Sadly, Erasmus died a disillusioned lonely man because he wouldn’t break with the mother church and join in the reformation, but the Catholics didn’t really want him any more either.
But he was the bridge between the medieval church and the reformation.

Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Martin Luther was born in 1483. He was the son of a well to do peasant. His father was a common man, who was ambitious. He worked in the copper mines and he saved his money and in the end he owned several copper mines.
He married into a pretty well to family, in terms of well educated. His wife’s brothers were lawyers or doctors.
It’s the time of the universities. Not as we have today, but they were growing. A teacher would gather a group of students and teach them. They didn’t have a geographical base but they started to compete against one another.
Luther was born at this time and grew up at this time.It was possible to have a good education but it would cost. His father would give him a good education and this would be his pension plan was that Luther would be a lawyer and provide for him and his mother.
In terms of education, it was strict. They worked very long hours. His education was on the basis of reward and punishment.That is, if you got it right, you wouldn’t be beaten (reward) but if you got it wrong, you were beaten. According to Luther’s testimony, he got it wrong many times and it wasn’t seldom that he was beaten up to 15 times a day!
Part of their education was logic and disputations. They learned to debate and they learned logic and reason.
He was a good scholar and a fine musician too. And he said that music was God’s fairest gift to man.
He was destined for a career in law. He was studying law. What changed it all was that in 1505, he was struck by lightning. Different stories surround this incident. Some relate that he was with a friend who died. He cried out to St Anne, who was the saint who looked after the weather (and the miners too!). He said something like this: “If you save me, I will serve God for the rest of my life.” True to his word, he went straight from there to the Augustinian monastery. He didn’t see his father for a whole year, who was angry that his pension plan had just gone to wrack and ruin.
In those days, the highest way that you could serve God was become monk or a nun, because you gave up all worldliness and escaping the world was viewed as the highest calling. He gave himself to prayer and fasting.
Luther went through times of joy and he enjoyed the discipline and the fastings, because he thought he was getting right with God. However there were also times of despair, because he thought he was so far from God. He would sit in his cell and beat his body.
Johann von Staupitz was his spiritual father and a great encourager. He encouraged Luther to study Augustine and the church fathers. He had not read the Bible at this time. He had once seen one – chained to a lectern and had only looked at it for a short time.
After a year in the monastery, he was allowed to serve the mass. It was All Saints’ Day. He nearly fainted. He could hardly imagine that he was holding deity in his hands. “Who am I to hold such deity for I am but a pig!”
Every day, he would go to confession and spend hours there. Staupitz would get annoyed at him sometimes and tell him to go and do something worthy of confession.
In 1510, he was chosen as a delegate for his order to go to Rome. He was quite excited about this and thought that he would be able to find peace with God at the centre of Christianity. The Holy Father is there and this is the ultimate experience for him.
However he experienced Rome as hell of earth. It was full of brothels for priests and totally immoral. The were lots of drunkenness and Luther was shocked. He bought an indulgence for his grandfather, who he hoped would leave purgatory. Again, he was so shocked at the peddlers who were selling the indulgences.
After receiving his degree he was asked to go to Wittenberg as professor for New Testament theology. Staupitz encouraged him. He himself had been there as a lecturer.
Going to Wittenberg would give Luther the chance to study the Bible, which he did, aided by Erasmus books.
The great dread of his life was meeting God. God was a God of wrath, anger, very strict and who give us impossible standards to live up to and when we can’t live up to them, punishes us for it.
God was a God whom he hated. He knew he had to earn grace, but he just couldn’t. “If ever a monk could get into heaven by monkery, then I would get there.”
We all have a pilgrimage that we have to go through. There are issues that we have to work through and think about. Luther had to teach others the scriptures.
As he was reading through the Bible he was struck by two passages:
Psalm 22 The Cry of Dereliction “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
He could understand why God would forsook him, a sinner. But why would he forsake his own son? Slowly he realised that he had done it for Luther’s sake. The Holy Spirit hat begun to work and was bringing revelation.
The second passage:
Romans 1:17 “The just shall live by faith.”
After he experienced his breakthrough, he began to teach this to the church. He was now very happy as professor and as the pastor of a local church.

Indulgences
The Catholic teaching on Justification
On the Cross our original sin was dealt with. At baptism I receive forgiveness of my original sin. I receive a certain amount of grace for that. After that I need more grace for the sins that I accumulate. I take the sacraments that become effective if they are ministered by a priest.
For the backlog of my sins, I have to spend time in purgatory.
If you have unresolved sin (unconfessed sin) then you are in trouble.
People are collecting relics because that will help them. The Elector of Saxony, Friedrich the Wise, was reported to have collected relics worth 1900000 years purgatory!
People were writing in their wills that a chanting priest was to be employed to pray for them, when they died. Side chapels were put into churches – chancelleries - , where prayer for the dead could be offered.
The people volunteered for the crusades because plenary indulgence was offered.
All these things are denying people salvation.
Luther, who couldn’t find any peace in the works and sacraments of the church, discovered that only at the cross all sin is forgiven.
We are not in trouble if we have unresolved sin… everything is dependent upon Jesus.
Luther was preaching salvation to his church and he was very happy doing so too.
Pope Leo X loved the Renaissance. This time had its own special style of architecture. He wanted to leave a legacy for the church when he died and he decided that he would rebuild St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This was going to cost a lot of money that he did not have.
„Through this grace help will surely come to departed souls, and the construction of the church of St. Peter will be abundantly promoted at the same time.“
Thus read part of an instruction, issued in Germany in the early sixteenth century, which was to trigger radical change in the profession church. „This grace“ was the sale of indulgences.
The Pope at the time badly needed money both to support his lavish lifestyle and to further the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. Pushing the sale of indulgences was how the cash was raised. Devout church people were encouraged to believe that by the making of a cash payment their dead relatives could be instantly released from the supposed torments of purgatory into heavenly bliss.
He had a friend, the Archbishop of Mainz. He had borrowed money to buy some of he 18 bishoprics that he had. He’d borrowed the money from the Foggers who were bankers and had now recalled the loan.
Both of these men were in financial difficulties. So the pope appointed Johann Tetzel to sell some indulgences. Tetzel was an indulgence seller (broker) and he knew how to make a good sale. He would get a commission and the pope and the archbishop would split the proceeds between them.
Because Friedrich of Saxony himself had many relics, he wouldn’t allow Tetzel into his principality to peddle the indulgences.
People therefore went over the border and bought from Tetzel in the neighbouring states. On returning to Wittenberg, Luther’s parishioners explained to him that they had obtained the forgiveness of sins. Luther asked how that had happened and they produced their indulgences. Of course Luther explained to them that the paper was worthless, it had not eternal value. Only Christ can give a remission of sin.
He preached a sermon entitled “Grace and the Indulgence”. This was written down and over two years had 20 editions. It was translated into every European language and circulation throughout Europe.
This put a block on the sale of indulgences and Rome got to hear about it. “Who’s this little drunk German monk?” they asked and would have to deal with it. How did they deal with it? Normally, they would summon a person like Luther to Rome and when he got there he would either have to recant or they would kill him.
In the summer of 1520 a document bearing an impressive seal circulated throughout Germany in search of a remote figure. ”Arise,o Lord,” the writing began, ”and judge Thy cause. A wild boar has invaded Thy vineyard.”
The document, a papal bull – named after the seal, or bulla – took three months to reach Martin Luther, the wild boar. Long before it arrived in Wittenberg where Luther was teaching, he knew its contents. Forty-one of his beliefs were condemned as “heretical or scandalous, or false, or offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds, or repugnant to Catholic truth.” The bull called on Luther to repent and repudiate his errors of face the dreadful consequences.
Luther received his copy on the tenth of October. At the end of his sixty day period of grace, he led a throng of eager students outside Wittenberg and burned copies of the Canon Law and the works of some medieval theologians. Perhaps as an afterthought Luther added a copy of the bull condemning him. That was his answer. “They have burned my books,” he said,” I burn theirs!” Those flames in early December,1520,were fit symbol of the defiance of the pope raging throughout Germany.
However Friedrich didn’t want to lose his infamous lecturer. Luther’s fame was good for Friedrich’s university. He reminded the Emperor Charles V that his grandfather had decreed that a German dare not be tried on Italian soil, he must be tried on German soil.
But he must appear. He attended three diets in all. The leading clergy and nobility of the land were gathered there to hear him.
Luther was pretty certain that he would not survive these meetings. He went disguised because he thought it might be safer. However many people had read his writings and he was recognised. He was exulted as their hero and people started to accompany him on his long journeys. They got in step behind him and marched with their scythes and clubs. This put a fright into the Romans as they had underestimated the popularity of Luther.
On approaching his third appearance at a diet in the town of Worms, his friends beg him not to go. However he is adamant that he is going.“ Were each of the slates on the roof a devil, still I would go.” He is reported to have said. When he gets there, he is quite sickly and in no condition to address the diet. The nobility and clergy are quite disgusted at this.
He is given a day to compose himself. This is just what he does. He gets into the presence of God, deals with the devil and strengthens himself.
His opponents had not expected such a fortified person to appear before them. They only want to hear from him one thing, and that is that he revokes all the things he has been teaching and writing. He does say, that if they can show him from scripture the error of his ways, then he will indeed recant. From this standpoint, he cannot move.
Luther is condemned, excommunicated, his writings are to be burned and he is to be arrested.
However, Friedrich has his officers dress up in uniforms of the imperial guard and they arrest Luther and take him to the Wartburg Castle were he is in safety.
He dresses himself in other clothes (discarding his identity as a monk) and takes on the identity of the Junker Jörg. During the time at the Wartburg he makes a collection of thought and writings about what the Reformation stands for and begins to write to the German nobility. He says that it is now time to rid themselves from the Roman oppression and exploitation. This can only happen though through the gospel. He urges them to open their territories for the gospel.
He also begins to translate the New Testament into German. This is a lively translation into the language of the people.
He is safe in the Wartburg but not happy. He hates the isolation and longs to be back among people. News from Wittenberg reaches him and he decides to show himself again.
Luther and the Bible
Both Luther and Erasmus wanted people to read the Bible. Luther started to work on the Bible during his stay in the Wartburg. He worked on it for the rest of his life. It wasn’t just one translation but a life time of revision.
He surrounded himself with Greek scholars with whom he had regular consultation. He met with them every two weeks up to his death.
He went to great pains to have the Bible put into a language that was understood by everyone. He did much to unify he German language.
Others had also translated the Bible into the vernacular but they did not have the Greek-Hebrew text and they had to write everything by hand.
Others had also tried to break with Rome, but now the time had come.
Why didn’t the Romans send an army to Saxony?
As far as the military was concerned, they were otherwise occupied with the invasion of the Turks. This was the sovereignty of God!
What was happening in Wittenberg?
Luther believed in doing things slowly. “The word does it all.” Was one of his favourite expressions. He was cautious and this earned him the nickname “Dr.Pussyfoot”. (Carlstadt)
But he did maintain, that you cannot ask people to go against their conscience. If people don’t want to drink wine, then don’t force them. Teach them and show them. Their conscience has to be informed and their mind renewed. Study the word and inform them.
With unprecedented power and courage Luther had brought to light the Scripture truths as to the individual salvation of the sinner by faith, but failed when he might have shown the way to return to Scripture in all things, including its teaching as to the Church. He had taught:”I say it a hundred thousand times, God will have no forced service.” “No one can or ought to be forced to belive.” In 1526 he had written: “The right kind of evangelical order cannot be exhibited among all sorts of people, but those who are seriously determined to be Christians and confess the Gospel with hand and month,must enroll themselves by name and meet apart, in one house, for prayer, for reading, to baptise, to take the Sacrament, and exercise othe Christian works. With such order it would be possible for those who did not behave in a christian manner to be known, reproved, restored, or excluded, according to the rule of Christ (Matt.18:15).Here also they could, in common, subscribe alms, which would be willingly given and distributed among the poor, according to the example of Paul.(2.Cor.9:1-12). Here it would not be necessary to have much or fine singing. Here a short and simple way of baptism and the Sacrament could be practised, and all would be according to the Word and in love…” After much hesitation he came at last to oppose any attempt to put into practice what he had so excellently portrayed.
Friedrich, the Elector of Saxony was his great supporter and in the end he got rid of his relics.
Instead of the mass being central it was now the gospel. The mass reminds us of our sinfulness, the gospel reminds us of grace.
Luther loved to preach. He spoke to everyday people and they loved him. He was full of sarcasm and humour. The services were in German and not in Latin. This was radical.
He allowed monks and nuns to revoke their vows, if they wanted to. He never forced anyone to go against their conscience.
He appointed travelling pastors to go through the province to teach and preach to the people and to expel immoral catholic priests.
He translated the liturgies into German, revised them and even wrote some new ones so that the people could learn as they went through the services.
He also sought permission from other protectorates to enter their territory to have the gospel preached. He had little alternative to do this.
The church though never became the church that he believed in. We could and do criticise him for this. However it looks like his destiny was to show the world the doctrine of justification by faith and to break with the past.
He influenced all the reformers including the Anabaptists.

Marriage
Luther never wanted to get married.“ Why make a woman a bride one day and a widow the next?” was his saying. There were many attempts to take his life.
He was involved in smuggling 12 nuns out of a convent. They had put them into beer barrels that were being used to transport herrings. These poor ladies had travelled for three days in these barrels.
He had got husbands for 11 of them but Catherine von Bora at 28 was a little bit too old for marriage. So a friend suggested that Luther marry her.
He did. And they had a wonderful marriage with six children. She was a real Proverbs 31 wife. She was very industrious.
In the monastery that they lived in, they had 47 rooms and they were nearly always full with guests. Catherine looked after them all.

Controversies
Luther had a controversy with Ulrich Zwingli (Zurich) about communion. It was about the issue of transubstantiation.
Luther still believed that God was present in the bread and the wine. Zwingli believed that it was on bread and wine. There was disunity among the reformers and disunity always weakens. They also published things against one another.
Weak man
He was a reluctant man and sometimes arrogant, sometimes dogmatic. He was sometimes quite weak as well.
Towards the end of his life, he was interviewed. People were wondering whether he would recant, but he died in faith. The Catholics acclaimed him to be the son of the devil, saying the devil had raped his mother.

The Peasants’ Revolt 1525
1. Causes
a. Luther stood before the decision to have a church of believers or a National Church. He decided to have a National Church. Unspiritual elements came into a spiritual movement. Luther’s writings were misunderstood.
b.The peasants are enslaved in serfdom and want their freedom.
2. Luther’s Statement
a. Writing: ”An exhortation to peace, addressed to the peasants of Schwabia.”
b. He travels and personally addresses the peasants in Saxony but to no avail.
3. The peasants use violent methods 1524/25
The leaders are Florian Geyer, Götz von Berlichingen, Thomas Münzer
a. Thomas Münzer is a great preacher of the Reformation (he propagates believers’ baptism and wants the true Christian to come together. Unfortunately, he’s too extreme. He puts personal revelation of the Spirit over the Bible. He become a revolutionary.
In Frankenhausen, he obstructs the peace negotiations that the besieged peasants are engaged in and calls them to arms.
b. The Peasants’ defeat: Mai 1525
The army of knights that the princes have got together defeat the peasants. Thomas Münzer recants under the pain of torture and he is executed. Bitter and bloody revenge is taken and even women and children are not spared.
c. Luther’s Paper (a virulent pamphlet) : “Against the Thievish and Murderous Hordes of Peasants” appears too late. He calls on the princes to “knock down, strangle, and stab … and think nothing so venomous, pernicious, or Satanic as an insurgent.” The people have pity on the peasants, who were so cruelly mishandled by the victors. In his writing “A hard pamphlet against the articles of the peasants”, he addresses the vengeance driven princes.
4. The peasants’ revolt collapses
In 1525 the revolt collapses. The nobles and princes crushed the revolt at a cost of an estimated 100,000 peasant lives. The surviving peasants considered Luther a false prophet. Many of them returned to Catholicism or turned to more radical forms of the Reformation.
Luther maintained that man is equal before God, but is also stressed that this is only true in the spiritual realm. Through his teaching about the two kingdoms he supported the feudal system and disappointed the peasants who had had hope in Luther, believing they would find help.
Luther continued to preach and teach the Bible in Wittenberg, but even sympathetic biographers have found it hard to justify some of the actions of his declining years. Time once put it like this, “He endorsed the bigamous marriage of his supporter Philip of Hesse. He denounced reformers who disagreed with him in terms that he had once reserved for the papacy. His statements about the Jews would sound excessive on the tongue of a Hitler.” Biographer Roland Bainton says that by the time of his death in 1546, Luther was “an irascible old man, petulant, peevish, unrestrained, and at times positively coarse.
Fortunately, the personal defects of an ageing rebel do not in any way detract from the grandeur of his achievement, which ultimately transformed not only Christianity but all of Western civilization.