In my last post, I covered chapter 2 of Brad Gregory’s book, The Unintended Reformation, in which he traced a historical line from the Reformation to the 19th century that showed how the Reformer’s rejection of the entirety of Church Tradition, and their adherence to “Sola Scriptura,” actually had the unintended consequence of leading to the credo of the Modern Age, “Sola Ratio.”
In chapter 3, Gregory once again traces a historical line from the Reformation to the Modern Age. In this chapter, though, Gregory shows yet another unintended consequence of the Reformation: the ever increasing power of the secular state. So, once again, let’s take it point by point.
Step #1: The Medieval Christian Worldview
The Medieval Christian worldview obviously did not have any kind of notion of “separation of Church and State.” With that, I have to just make one quick side comment: chances are, when you just read the previous description of the Medieval world, upon reading “there was no separation of Church and State,” your initial reaction was something like, “Oh my gosh! How horrible! That sounds like something out of the Taliban!”
Well, that knee-jerk reaction that just assumes that any and all mixing of “religion” with “public society” is brutal and bad, shows how deeply ingrained the modern, secular worldview is within our society. Of course it is—it is the very worldview that defines the modern world, complete with all its assumptions that the “Church” and “State” have to be separate, because when they’re not, you have a Christian Taliban running the country.
Well, that being said, it might surprise you that in Medieval Europe, there was no “Christian Taliban” running wild. Of course, just like every society throughout time, there was violence, and problems, and constant conflict on some level. But, for all its clear faults, the Catholic Church played an extremely positive and pivotal role in Europe during the Middle Ages: it essentially rebuilt Europe out of the ruins of the old pagan world that had collapsed under its own weight.
The Catholic Church, because it was pretty much the only organization left standing after Western Europe collapsed, became the de facto center for administration, and the Pope, originally a religious leader of the Church of Rome, became a de facto political leader who helped restructure and rebuild Europe. A key step in that process was to evangelize the pagan rulers of Europe and try to get them to stop fighting with each other. Once rulers became Christians, the Catholic Church was able to then guide them in building a more civil and Christian society.
Now, this is not to say that everything was great, and that every pope was a paragon of Christian virtue. Quite the opposite—there was a lot of corruption, to be sure. Nevertheless, while many popes were living it up in Rome, thousands of unnamed monks and priests worked in anonymity throughout Europe, slowly, over centuries, shaping that culture to reflect more Christ-like values. Consequently, as Gregory points out, for Medieval society, the Gospel was not just “religion,” it was the heart and soul of their society that taught people to live in their society in a certain way. The heads of state were Christian, and it was impressed upon them that they had a duty before God to rule their realms in a Christ-like way.
Step #2: Papal Corruption, and Appeals to “Secular” Leaders
The ultimate failure of the Medieval world, though, was that the more the Church got involved in the day to day politics of Europe, the more it became corrupt. As Gregory said, “by the fourteenth century, the more the church lengthened its bureaucratic reach and influence, the less did it look like the kingdom” (139). And indeed, that really was the main reason that led to the Reformation: Luther was horrified that a corrupt and immoral man like Pope Leo X would dare censure him for simply trying to properly interpret Scripture.
Well, as soon as the Catholic Church started bearing down on Luther, he had to go somewhere for help—and that somewhere was to the local rulers of the various realms around Germany. It was, after all, Friedrich of Saxony who sheltered Luther after Leo X excommunicated him in 1521. Eventually, in his attempt to combat the Pope, Luther and his fellow Reformers made constant appeals to the nobility throughout Europe, and sure enough, a number of nobles were won over to the Reformers’ cause.
Now, this wasn’t always done out of pure and godly reasons. Another guy named Niccolo Machiavelli had written a little book entitled The Prince in 1513 that encouraged rulers to feign piety in order to gain political power. And this is pretty much what ended up happening: the Reformers needed protection from the Pope, so they appealed to local nobles, who were all too happy to offer their protection to Lutherans, Calvinists, and once this starting happening, Catholics had to appeal to local rulers as well, and so yes, political leaders even offered their protection to Catholics too.
This was a monumental turn of events. As Gregory points out, once this happened, church leaders—be they Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic—couldn’t really dictate to the secular authorities anymore what was to be considered proper or moral: tick your protector off, and he might just turn back to Catholicism, and you’ll be in trouble. As Gregory states, pretty soon, “Churches were entirely subordinate and dependent institutions” (154).
Step #3: It’s All About That Basic Doctrine (No Treble)!
So what was the distinguishing feature between Catholics and Lutherans…and Calvinists, etc.? Doctrine, of course. As the Reformers where churning out publications challenging Catholic doctrine on virtually everything, and most notably “faith vs. works,” the Catholic Church called for the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in which it clarified its own position on a variety of doctrinal issues, and further drawing lines in the stand between the various strands of Reformation thinking.
What this meant is that almost overnight “what one mentally adhered to” became defined as “belief,” and “how one lived your life” was just seen as the consequence of that aforementioned “belief.” Is that confusing? Let me try to simply it:
- Before the Reformation, “Christian belief” was synonymous with “Christian faith,” and the Christian faith was seen as an indivisible union of (a) what you thought and (b) how you acted.
- After the Reformation, “Christian faith” became defined as solely in terms of (a) what you thought about certain theological claims, and that was considered “Christian belief,” whereas (b) how you acted was a different matter. How you acted was a consequence and reflection of your “Christian faith/belief—what you thought;” it wasn’t seen as an actual part of your Christian faith itself, or at least not as important as “believing” (i.e. holding mental adherence to) the correct doctrines.
Step #4: The Wars of Religion
With that now in place, the logical outgrowth was for political leaders to go to war with each other over matters of “faith”—i.e. over differences on specific points of doctrine, because after all, getting your doctrine absolutely correct was considered much more important than, let’s say, loving your enemies and praying for them! How could Calvinists accept Anabaptists as Christian brothers when the Anabaptists were advocating adult baptism? Clearly, there’s only one thing you can do with people like that: execute them by…you guessed it…drowning.
These “Wars of Religion” lasted for over a century. Quite honestly, I doubt very much that these political rulers who engaged in these wars really were doing it because they had deep convictions over baptism, or any other doctrinal point. Think Machiavelli here: use religion to gain political power. And that’s what many of these political rulers did: they took advantage of the religious schisms, and even promoted them, as a means to gain more power for themselves.
Step #5: The Enlightenment, and the Idea of Separation of Church and State
During this time, there was a philosopher in England named Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), famous for his book, Leviathan—a work that argued for the necessity of an absolute secular government to enforce the social contract who would exercise full power over all religious institutions. There’s more to it than just that, but it will do for now. Gregory points out that Hobbes had rejected the idea (that had been at the heart of Medieval society for centuries) “that a ruler’s principal obligation was to protect and promote God’s truth as the foundation that made possible shared Christian life in fidelity to Jesus’s commands” (162).
Hey, that might have been fine and dandy when there was a unified Catholic worldview throughout Europe, but thanks to the Reformation, there was no longer any commonly accepted understanding of Christian truth—and for the past 100 years, countless people throughout Europe had been slaughtered because of it. Therefore, Hobbes’ reaction was understandable: “Get religion out of politics!”
Eventually, when it came to the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, many of the Founders were thoroughly Enlightenment thinkers in this regard. Yes, many were Christians, some were Deists, but virtually all of them wanted a clean break from all the religiously-inspired political violence that had plagued Europe for the previous 200 years. And so, thus came the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Genius: the government won’t officially endorse or promote Catholicism, or Lutheranism, or Calvinism, or Baptists, or anything else; and at the same time it won’t prohibit any exercise of religious faith—as long as everyone can agree on the secular laws to run society, religion can be just something between you and your priest or pastor at your local church.
Well, technically, that’s not totally right. The First Amendment was clear: the federal government couldn’t endorse or prohibit any religion; but individual state governments could affiliate themselves with any denomination they chose. Over time, that went away as well, and “religion” became more and more a solely private affair…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
The point here is that what the Founding Fathers did was essentially find the answer to the problem that had been plaguing Europe for 200 years: Sola Scriptura had led to institutionalized confessional regimes, which had led to the “wars of religion.” The Constitutional answer was, “Let’s just not have our government promote any one confession—let’s have a purely secular and pluralistic State…that way, leaders won’t be killing each other (as well as mass amounts of people) over religious differences!”
Given everything that had happened, that was a pretty ingenious idea. That’s enough for now, though. I’ll finish chapter 3 of The Unintended Reformation tomorrow. That First Amendment really was ingenious…but there are problems with it. That’s for tomorrow.
