Beyond Reformation

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, October 5, 2008

About this sermon

I have heard many people say that Unitarian Universalists are not Judeo-Christian, and that may be true now of us as individuals – many of us do not consider ourselves either Jews or Christians.  But for anyone to say that our traditions are not Judeo-Christian is simply historically inaccurate, and we should know better, we should know more about those that came before us, we should remember our history.  And today’s sermon is an attempt to facilitate that process of learning.

Today we reach back into 15^th-century Europe, which was a time of great upheaval in European society.  The threads of our religious tradition are woven through that century’s people and events;  even portions of our 21^st Century worldview spring from the innovative thought of our forebears that lived during that tumultuous time.  But the teasing-out of these roots leaves us in a peculiar predicament:  for this is necessarily a Euro-centric task, a masculo-centric task, a Christo-centric task.  Because the world was smaller then, we will need to speak almost exclusively of the European world, and because of the social structures of that era and area, we will need to speak almost exclusively of men and almost exclusively of Christians.  While this may be offensive to our preferred habits of inclusivity, it’s the only way to get at an understanding of the times and places involved.

Today I hope to explore some preliminary history before touching on the early Reformation begun by Martin Luther.  Eventually, in a series of sermons on this same topic, we will discuss Luther more fully and then move through the Swiss Reformed movements of Huldrich Zwingli and John Calvin, and then on to the Radical Reformation as exemplified by people like Servetus, Castellio, and Socinus;  the Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Anti-Trinitarians – the Radical Reformers who pushed at the edges of the wider Reform movement and who were the real forebears of our own way of doing religion, our own way of thinking about ourselves, and our own way of engaging the world around us. 

In the framework of this history, I will use Sebastian Castellio as a central figure, not solely as a convenience, but more because of his recent resurrection as a person of great importance to our movement and to the larger movement of liberal religion generally.

Castellio Looks Back

As Sebastian Castellio surveyed his life from the vantage point of the last months of 1563, he must have been torn.  Certainly he had matured in his thought and theology since his early days as rector of John Calvin’s new college in Geneva.  Surely he could be proud that he had stepped up to confront John Calvin after Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in 1553 for spreading heresies.  Undoubtedly, he must have known he had a long list of disciples all around Europe, people who looked to his ideas and opinions for sustenance in their daily struggles with church, state, life. 

But he also must have believed that there was much more to do:  the Reform of the Church had gone terribly awry under the leadership of the magisterial reformers Martin Luther, Huldrich Zwingli, and John Calvin.  True reform would have to be left up to all the others who had spoken out against the injustices and godlessness of the Church – Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed – all the others who were still alive, that is, since both the Romans and the Magisterium had a proclivity for hounding their detractors into an early grave.  Indeed, Castellio, at 54, was long-lived compared to those who had preached a gospel other than that approved by the state and had written so freely of their disagreements with those in positions of high power in the Church.

The world was changing;  there was no denying that.  One had to look back a hundred years, all the way back to the fifth century, to find such cataclysms in European history.  It was in the fifth century that the Empire of Rome had collapsed and left in its place an amalgam of civil and military rites and rules that imposed order through private contractual bonds, leaving political power in the hands of the lords of small fiefdoms as well as in the hierarchy of the broader Church. 

If the early Middle Ages had been a time of preservation of those political and economic traditions, the high Middle Ages were a time of self-discovery and redefinition to some small extent.  But more recently, events had posed unprecedented challenges as Western Europe walked through the valley of the shadow of death:  Famine arose in the early 14^th Century, and then the Hundred Years War between England and France introduced modern methods and weaponry (gunpowder and artillery) to the killing fields. 

Peasant revolts had become more frequent as had plagues of varying virulence.  The Black Death devastated Europe from 1347 to 1350, killing perhaps 30 to 60% of the population, leaving the economies of the region in shambles and seriously diminishing the power of the Church.  In 1347, as the story ran, Mongols had lain siege to the Crimean port city of Caffa and, when their own comrades had taken ill and died in large numbers, they had the bright idea to catapult the rotting corpses over the walls, spreading disease to those inside.  As the escapees fled into the mainland, they dragged the disease with them.  (Later stories attribute the spread to rats or flees aboard ships – which is not nearly as colorful a story.) 

The Church over the last two centuries had experienced its own inner struggles.  In the 14^th century, riots and unrest in the city of Rome forced the removal of the Holy See to the town of Avignon in the south of France.  From 1378 to 1417, the papacy was claimed by two, then three, different popes simultaneously.

Things were a mess.

The theology of the Middle Ages had been considerably influenced by the thought and writings of St. Augustine.  The neo-Platonist Augustine had written, “In this was my sin, that not in God but in his creatures, in myself and others, did I seek pleasure, honors, and truth.”  For Augustine, Adam’s unique characteristic had been an ability not to sin (posse non peccare), an ability to live an ordered life and to choose his actions, to subject his will to the will of God.  For prelapsarian humanity (that’s the couple of people in existence before the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden – a historical event in the minds of these folks), even sexual intercourse occurred without lust, so ordered were Man (and Woman) to rational choice and to the will of God.

After the Fall, humanity (that’s the rest of us) became enslaved to lust, unable to control our choices by rationality, “not able not to sin” (non posse non peccare).  Augustine thought pleasure in anything other than God was sinful and his reference to sexual passion as disgraceful was obviously accessible to an extremely broad audience, with lustful acts a clear example of the domination of humanity’s higher faculties by its lower ones.  (If you look around, you might see it’s still happening – both lustful acts, and the condemnation of such…)

Convinced of the healing properties and power of the sacraments, Augustine came to a belief in the healing power tangibly present in the sacraments as administered by the Church:  baptism, communion, confession, penance, and the others.  Through faith, the will could be healed, thence self-control – and, therefore, order – was restored.  Sacramentally-conveyed grace and a high doctrine of church authority remained a legacy of Augustinian thought.

 

In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the mysticism of the Middle Ages gave over to the high period of Scholasticism, a method of bringing the writings of the Early Church Fathers into conversation with Aristotle, thus attempting to reconcile Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy.

The grace of baptism was believed to clear away the baptized’s responsibility for original sin, and the grace of penance inoculated the believer against any ongoing propensity to sin.  But how could this grace be present in the brokenness of the human soul?  Where others saw only outside sources of this grace, the 13^th-century Dominican Scholastic theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas saw salvific love as natural to the human soul, saw it as a creation of the infinite divine within the finitude of humanity, saw grace, in other words, as a truly human trait.

In Aristotelian terms, however, this trait was not substantial, but accidental.  A substantial form, such as human reason, was of the essence of a thing, whereas an accidental form, such as a person’s physical feature or ability – while no less real – was not of its essence, but rather a peripheral trait not central to its definition.

As Scholasticism had begun to wane, a debate had raged between the adherents of realism (the particular as example of the universal) as exemplified by Plato and Augustine, and advocates of nominalism (a concentration on the particular amid the unimportance of the universal).  Nominalists include William of Ockham and David Hume.  Where some saw scholasticism as the means to an end, others saw it as pointless and pedantic, full of endless circular arguments of no consequence.

Anti-clericalism

As the Church fell on difficult financial times near the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Leo X approved a novel fund-raising scheme:  penitents were promised relief from their time in Purgatory for their purchase of indulgences, a kind of “get-out-of-purgatory-free” card.  To sell these indulgences, religious relics would be placed on display once a year and the faithful would be charged admission to the viewings.  Proceeds from the vast sales were used, among other things, to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  The Dominican priest Johann Tetzel was the chief salesman in Northern Germany.

Originally, indulgences had been gifts of money given to charity as thanks for personal forgiveness.  By the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, the Church had appropriated this charitable giving as a way of filling its own coffers, and thus putting salvation up for sale in the theological bargain.  This cynical activity on the part of the papacy coupled with the indiscretions of many clergy (neglecting pastoral duties, not showing up for work – again, if you look around, some of these things may still be an issue among my ministerial colleagues…) led to widespread anti-clericalism amongst the laity and even a few calls for reform amongst those clerics with a conscience.

Luther’s Reform

Martin Luther’s reform began inauspiciously enough.  His famous, if apocryphal, action of nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg chapel on October 31, 1517, was only a minor part of a small controversy among the few theological faculty at the out-of-the-way seminary of Wittenberg in northern Germany.  The argument apparently began when Luther said that the scholastics misunderstood both scripture and Augustine.  The Wittenberg seminary’s new Thomian-trained dean, Andreas Carlstadt, protested, and Luther told him he should consult the works of Augustine directly.  Doing so, Carlstadt quickly shifted his theology from Aquinas to Augustine and, a few months before Luther, nailed his own theses to the chapel door.  (This was a common form of communication at the time, posting one’s arguments on what must have been the tattered wood of the church doorway.)  Carlstadt immediately became a supporter of Luther, even accompanying him to the Leipzig disputation in 1519.  He would go on, on Christmas Day of 1521, to offer the first Protestant communion ever:  without vestments, without the language of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice or God’s violent demands for it, without the elevation of the elements, but rather a Communion ritual based in the remembrance of God’s new covenant in Christ, and with both bread and wine served to all communicants.  By 1523, Carlstadt had split with Luther over the importance and place of ethics in religious practice.

In short order, the minor argument in Wittenberg had become a major attack on te sale of indulgences and there fore on the structure and grounding of the whole church.  Salvation was at stake – could it be had through the church, or must it come from somewhere else?  Luther’s answer was justification by faith through grace.

Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith through grace (with its corollary “the priesthood of all believers,” a precursor to our own “ministry of all souls”) was not only a critique of the sale of indulgences and the associated squishiness of theology, but it forever removed the need for the intercession of the Church in matters of forgiveness and salvation.  Each of us, Luther said, had a shot at an unmediated experience of the divine.  But how is it possible for a sinner – which Luther asserted that we all are - to enter into a relationship with a righteous God? 

A return to an older theology of forgiveness, justification by faith alone meant that, through the grace of God, forgiveness was available to all, regardless of social standing or ability to pay, even regardless of the amount or nature of good works performed.  God’s forgiveness was given to all believers, not through the auspices of the Church, but through grace alone – obviously a problem for the entrenched clerical power brokers within the Church, for the princes relying on the Church to keep order, and for the moneyed interests of society, especially the banking house of the Fuggers of Augsburg, official bank of the Church of Rome.  [“exclusive rights to hold all Vatican deposits… priceless!”]

 

We will talk more about Luther and about Calvin and about the Radical Reformers of the 16^th Century in the next sermon of this series, possibly next month.  Giving so much time and attention to any such subject, the question arises: Why do we care?  Why do we care what a few ancient scholars and obtuse theologians and condemned heretics said and did centuries ago? 

And the answer is:  because our way of doing religion in this church tradition, indeed, our way of thinking in the West, come directly out of and through the experiences of these people. While the reforms of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin critiqued the monolithic power of the Roman church, redressed the abuses found within its hierarchy and practice, and stopped there, the radicals reached even further to demolish the structures of authority of the Church and society and politics, leaving us with a sense of individualism that became the Western sense of ‘self,’ and bequeathing us the authority to decide for ourselves. 

And for that, we must remember and be grateful.

 

So may it be.