The church is sometimes referred to as catholic because it embraces the whole of human experience. It possesses perfectly all doctrines concerning either invisible and visible things that human beings need to know; it provides a cure for all kinds of sin, either of body or soul; it produces all virtues and good works, and partakes of all spiritual gifts. ~ Herman Bavinck
There is a scene in the 2003 movie Luther staring Joseph Fiennes as the eponymous Augustinian monk in which a single mother with a disabled daughter brings to Fr. Martin a piece of paper she received from a Dominican preacher whose sermon she had attended. She had paid a great deal of money for it—more than she could afford, in fact—but she believed it would allow her and her daughter to spend less time in Purgatory. To her dismay and his grief, it fell to Luther to tell her that the paper did nothing for them with God because the gifts of God cannot be bought. Instead, she should turn to God in faith, trust his Word to her, pray, and use her money to care for her daughter.
Lest you think the film is overselling the abuse to which poor Germans like this woman were subjected by the late medieval Roman church, consider this excerpt from a sermon given by Johan Tetzel, a Dominican preacher who traveled through Germany and sold indulgences in order to finance the many building projects, art collections, and political ambitions of the Roman pontiff:
Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.’ Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter, ‘We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little? You let us lie in flames so that we only slowly come to the promised glory.’
It was this abuse, more than anything else, which drove much of the early adoption of the Reformation in Germany—a place where poor peasants had been used as the personal ATMs of rich Italian nobles serving as popes and archbishops for centuries. Poor Germans were tired of this treatment. And, indeed, many moral reformers (Erasmus of Rotterdam amongst them) had been condemning it for decades.
Then along came this Augustinian monk with a theological argument to supplement the moral critique. A Reformation was born. Writing to a friend after hearing Luther at the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518, still another Dominican monk, this one being Martin Bucer, observed that Luther was the theological fulfillment of the Erasmian call for moral reform. It was not long after this that Bucer left the Dominican order and became a Protestant preacher himself, integrating more than anyone else of his day the moral and theological claims of the Protestant Reformation.
Yet when you probe the moral abuses more closely and consider the theological arguments of Luther, a further thing becomes apparent, one that is perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive. The Reformation which shattered the institutional catholicity of the western church was itself an attempt to restore a more proper and authentic catholicity to her which had been gradually lost over time by the Roman church.
The problem, I think, begins here: In the world of late medieval Europe, a world of terrible sanitation and health practices where outbreaks of plague could destroy a town's population, the ordinary people of Europe became deeply concerned with death. They wanted to die well, and quite understandably wanted to die in a state of grace so that their fate after death would be good.
Yet the way they sought to go about this was actually quite methodical, almost having the sensibility of what is often critiqued in modernity as "technique." It tended to reduce the church's life down to the dispensing of goods that, if used properly, would assure one was in a state of grace. The piety of church leaders became a matter of small concern. Moreover, due to the quite understandable fear that pervaded the laity, the inevitably immoral clerics that rose to power found it quite easy to manipulate and extort the fearful laity in order to grow their own wealth. And so late medieval piety amongst the laity acquired a highly rote nature and as the specific characteristics of it were often defined by unscrupulous clerics, the practical outcome of that piety was the enriching of the church at the expense of the people.
On rare occasions, of course, clerics would overreach and create a crisis largely made possible and facilitated by the very anxiety they helped to stoke. This, for example, is why it was such a crisis when the church seemed to have two or even three popes simultaneously: Each of the would-be pontiffs would promptly excommunicate the other would-be pontiffs and now a eucharistic and existential crisis was set off because none of the laity knew if the means of grace being given to them in their local church were valid or not.
As the church's explicit goal was diminished more and more to the question of dying well and as the church's clergy became increasingly corrupt for obvious reasons, the catholicity of the Roman church properly understood was lost, for catholicity is not chiefly about organizational or institutional unity as a guarantee of mechanical effectiveness for the saving of souls. Rather, it is about the universality of the Gospel—the fact that God calls all people to repent and be baptized, that God plans to restore all that has been wrecked by sin.
In the late medieval world, the true Catholicity of the Church was overshadowed by exclusion and limitation. Access to God was gained only through Rome, only through the priest, the eucharist was received only in part, only monks were called to be holy, and so on. The Reformation restored the whole gospel for the whole church. Organizational catholicity flows out of this prior catholicity which is founded on the free proclamation of the Gospel, a Gospel whose scope is universal or... catholic. It is also a Gospel which, it must be said, explicitly contradicted the salvation factory mentality dominant in the late medieval church.
Robert Farrar Capon writes of this well in his book Between Noon and Three, saying that,
The Reformation was a time when men went blind-staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, 200-proof grace — of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture that would convince anyone that God saves us single-handed. The Word of the Gospel, after all those centuries of believers trying to lift themselves into heaven by worrying about the perfection of their own bootstraps, suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free even before they started . . . Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super-spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.
Elsewhere in his work, Capon connects this recovery of "200-proof grace" with a revival of catholicity in the church as the church once again discovered its life as the beloved people of God united in the world and also placed in it by God, given the calling to preach that Gospel and disciple all peoples.
A third voice we might consider, then, as we seek to understand the Reformation Day as a triumph of catholicity, however ironic that might seem to some, is that of the early 20th century Dutch Calvinist, Herman Bavinck.
In an essay on catholic Christianity, Bavinck says that an authentically catholic faith is not simply referring to a unified and universal church, but also refers to a church whose message is universal in its scope and breadth; there is nothing of life in God's world that is left out of the catholic church's care and concern, nor is there any part of the created order left unaddressed by God's Word, unchanged by God's action in the world:
While the world is thoroughly corrupted by sin, it is precisely this sinful world that is the object of God's love. In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting its sins (2 Cor. 5:19). Jesus, who came to the world not to condemn it but to save it (John 3:16,17; 12:47), is the light (John 1:12), the life (John 6:33), the Savior of the world (John 4:14). Jesus is the atoning sacrifice not only for our sins but for the sins of the whole world (I John 2:2). In Christ all things are reconciled to God (Col. 1:20), and under him brought together in unity (Eph. 1:10). The world, created fry the Son (John 1:3), is also created/or him as its heir (Col. 1:16, Heb. 1:2). The kingdoms of this world shall eventually become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15). Anew heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells is coming (2 Peter 3:13).
It is impossible to express the thoroughgoing universalism of the Christian faith in words more powerful and beautiful than these. Christianity knows no boundaries beyond those which God himself has in his good pleasure established; no boundaries of race or age, class, or status, nationality, or language. Sin has corrupted much; in fact, everything. The guilt of human sin is immeasurable; the pollution that always accompanies it penetrates every structure of humanity and the world. Nonetheless sin does not dominate and corrupt without God's abundant grace in Christ triumphing even more (Rom. 5:15-20).
The blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, it is able to restore everything. We need not, indeed we must not, despair of anyone or anything. The Gospel is a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person but also for humanity, for the family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.
It is this catholicity as identified by Bavinck that was so often unrealized or even rejected by the late medieval church. It was in order to recover this catholicity that we needed a reformation. Indeed, you can even see the need in the sacrament that was ostensibly at the center of late medieval church life: the Mass. By the late medieval era, the church was denying both elements to virtually all the laity—save some in Bohemia who had secured access to both the bread and wine as part of the settlement of the wars that arose in the years after the church's murder of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus.
Not only was the church denying both elements to the laity, but the church's theology of the eucharist was itself a failure of catholicity in as much as it implicitly declared that God could not possibly make himself present to his people in actual bread and wine; for God to unite himself to his people he had to first obliterate the bread and wine so that it could be replaced in its essence by Jesus's own body and blood. Far from being a repudiation of the physical world, the Reformation teachings, including its teachings on the Eucharist, are a vindication of God's creation, for it was the reformers and particular Bucer and Calvin who reminded us that God first brought about our union with him by taking on our flesh and so it is not at all surprising that he now unites us to himself by offering himself to us in actual bread and actual wine. The created realities of bread and wine are fit instruments of the Spirit uniting us to the gloried body of the crucified savior ascended.
So as you consider this Reformation Day, you should not mourn the Reformation, though you might mourn that many in the western church did not heed its call. You can also mourn the ways in which the reformers and their children have themselves sometimes fallen short of their own standards.
Even so, we can rejoice that, as Luther said, "if we truly believe that Christ is our Savior, then we have a God of love, and to see God in faith is to look upon his friendly heart." And, we might add, to look upon that friendly heart not merely in church as we hear his word preached, but through all of his creation, as we find and encounter him in it, for, as Eugene Peterson said, our God plays in ten thousand places, and in each of them he is "making his blessings known far as the curse is found." In all of them we find the same Lord, who we come to through the same faith, and who washes us with the same baptism and brings us into the same one holy catholic church.
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
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