In the early 16th century on the eve of the Reformation an anonymously published tract called "Julius Exclusus" became a publishing sensation. The pamphlet was an imagined account of what happened when Pope Julius II, sometimes called "the warrior pope," ascended to Heaven and attempted to enter through the Pearly Gates after addressing St Peter.
Though he never claimed it, it is highly probable the author was the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus had been present in Bologna when Julius led his armies in like a conquering general. For Erasmus, a man captivated by the moral vision of the Bible and scornful of ritualistic accretions that built up and obscured that moral clarity, the sight of a pope astride a horse like some conquering pagan of forgotten days was something he never forgot.
The plot of "Julius Exclusus" is easy enough to explain: Julius appears at the Heavenly Gates, accompanied by a "genius" who is a kind of comedic character who accompanied Julius through life, and demands admission. Peter refuses him. Eventually Julius departs in a rage to gather an army to storm the gates, just as he had done in life. But that rather under-sells the hilarity of the thing.
For example, when Julius arrives at the gates he is baffled by the lock and can't figure out which key to use. His genius reminds him that he has the keys to Heaven and Hell because he is, after all, their of St Peter. But Julius laments that he only has the key of power and has misplaced all his other keys.
Then when Peter demands to know if Julius was holy, Julius replies that he was constantly being called "most holy" by his many subjects:
PETER: If you were triply great, greater even than Hermes Trismegistus, you still wouldn't get in here unless you were supremely good, that is, holy.
JULIUS: Well, if it comes down to comparative holiness, you've got some nerve to keep me waiting outside here when for all these centuries you've only been called "holy," whereas nobody ever called me anything but "most holy." I have six thousand bulls to prove it.
GENIUS: That's what he said, bulls!
JULIUS: -in which I am not only named "Lord most holy," but addressed as "your holiness," so that whatever I chose to do.
GENIUS: -Even when he was drunk.
JULIUS: -people used to say that the holiness of the most holy lord Julius had done it.
Then:
JULIUS: But now, open the door, I tell you.
PETER: And I won't do a thing, I tell you, unless you give me a full account of your merits.
JULIUS: What merits?
PETER: Let me explain the idea. Did you distinguish yourself in theology?
JULIUS: Not at all. I had no time for it, being continually engaged in warfare. Besides, there are plenty of priests to do that sort of work.
PETER: Then by the holiness of your life you gained many souls for Christ? GENIUS: Many more for hell, I'd say.
PETER: You performed miracles?
JULIUS: You're talking old-fashioned nonsense.
PETER: You prayed earnestly and constantly?
JULIUS: This is pure foolishness.
PETER: You subdued the lusts of the flesh with fasts and long vigils?
GENIUS: Enough of this, please; with this line of questioning, you're just wasting your time.
Later, in explaining his "merits" Julius lists out his many political accomplishments both en route to the papacy and after obtaining it, including his "innovative" (read: deeply corrupt) ways to raise funds for the Vatican and his successful military campaigns that wrested Italian cities from his political rivals and brought them under the sway of the church.
The thing that Erasmus was attacking, then, is a tendency amongst Christian leaders to be indifferent toward the ordinary means of grace and the ordinary markers of Christian piety and to instead focus their energies and resolve on acquiring political power and influence. Due to this boredom, they had no interest in the struggles of the Christian life and went looking for struggle and adversity elsewhere—and they found it in politics. And so the name of Christ became divorced from any theological content and instead became a political banner under which one conquered.
Note here that Erasmus is not a Radical. He does not reject the idea of Christian monarchs or Christian commonwealths. He does not hold that the only true Christian community is the local church. There would be Christians during this era who made all those claims. But Erasmus was not in their number. He was in many respects quite an ordinary son of the Roman church and remained so till his death, even as he continued to contend for the moral renewal of the church.
What Erasmus did was loudly reject the idea that there existed a class of professional Christians who can care nothing about church life or piety, focusing instead on the acquisition of political power in ways divorced from basic Christian moral norms. Christian commonwealths are fine, but if they are to be Christian then there must be some sense in which their public life is governed by Christian morals and norms. If basic Christian morality is entirely absent from one's public character and living, then Erasmus would see that person as not really being Christian. Rather, such a person would be more like Julius II, the "pestiferous maximus," who became so lost in his sin that he would try to tear down the walls of New Jerusalem with an army, just as he had done in Bologna and Venice.
It is this corruption and indifference to the simple teachings of the Gospel that played no small part in sparking the Reformation in Europe, an event we celebrate on this Reformation Day. The European church was decadent and corrupt. Bishoprics were constantly on sale and conferred political power more than any sort of ecclesial gravitas, or rather conferred political power because that was regarded as the chief function of ecclesial gravitas. It was a utilitarian Christianity, one broadly divorced from the practice of the faith amongst either the clergy or the laity.
The laity of Europe frequently lacked even the most basic Christian knowledge—which is why much of what the Reformers did on the local level consisted of simply teaching their parishioners the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Decalogue in their own language and teaching them what it meant for their lives. (You can see this emphasis in the records of the consistory of Calvin's Geneva, in Luther's notion of the rule of faith, and even in the confirmation standards in the Book of Common Prayer.)
The clergy, meanwhile, were either spiritually indifferent politicians or worse. And the hierarchy of the church was entirely useless to address the problem because the hierarchy itself was the problem. If the pope wasn't a boastful warrior seeking to subdue his enemies, like Julius, he was a lustful lech looking to bed women, like Julius's predecessor, or a venal, greedy aesthete, like Julius's successor.
Against all this corruption, all this greed, all this indifference to the ordinary practices of Christian piety, the Reformers said "nein!" They sought to return to the center of the church's life the clear preaching of the Gospel and along with it the accessibility of the Sacraments and the clear teaching of Christian character and conduct. The much-debated "third mark" of the church actually originated in Bucer's insistence that the church aid her members in the practices of Christian discipline, by which he meant the totality of Christian discipleship, not merely juridical expressions of ecclesial authority in the face of unrepentant sin as in what we now refer to as "church discipline."
These reformational emphases should land on our ears with all the subtlety of Martin Luther addressing one of his rivals, for today we are little different. Consider these events, all of which took place in just the past two weeks:
In just the past couple of days, a number of Protestant media personalities, several of whom purport to be ministers, have debated the proper handling of a congregant in the church of one of the purported ministers sharing a horrific anti-Semitic meme. (Deliberations regarding this problem are ongoing as I write this, because apparently it is a very difficult problem to address—or at least it is for those professing Christian content producers who have spent years searing their consciences while ignoring the repeated warnings of their brothers and sisters.) Once again the most basic elements of Christian faith and practice have been misplaced by ministers and professional Christians who have seemingly become bored with the ordinary ministry of Word and Sacrament.
The Roman church, meanwhile, has proven chronically incapable of bringing its European bishops to heel, despite their frequent and high-handed defiance of church teaching. Indeed, that church has spent much of its time in recent years debating the notion of "synodality." This is an idea whose chief purpose seems to be creating space for heterodox European clerics to do as they please in defiance of the traditional teachings of the Church. Or perhaps to circumvent the problem through "decentralizing" ecclesial authority in the Roman church, thereby clearing the way for them to follow the Protestant Mainline and endorse any number of sub-Christian ideas and philosophies in their constant search for "relevance."
One of that church's sons, meanwhile, has this week published nine thousand words about spending a great deal of money to fly to Mexico, stay at a resort for several days, and experiment with hallucinogenic drugs.
Finally, the head of the global Anglican communion announced in the past two weeks that he has now rejected historic Christian teaching on marriage—and his arguments for doing so are not any better than those recently put forward by others.
We are, in short, desperately in need of the same sort of renewal that symbolically began across Europe on this day over five centuries ago. We need a renewal of piety and of teaching, a return to the basics of church life. We need a return to our first love, as John wrote long ago in his Apocalypse. Many in the western church heard and responded to the call for renewal when it came five centuries ago. It remains to be seen if we will have such a response in our own day of similar corruption and decadence.
