Beyond Reformation, Part Deux

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, November 16, 2008

Who are we?

When last we left the story of the 16^th century reformers, we were talking about Martin Luther.  As you may recall, Luther’s reform began when he nailed his ninety-five theses to a chapel door in 1517.  We said this was initially only a small controversy among the few theological faculty at the out-of-the-way seminary of Wittenberg in northern Germany. Perhaps that little war of words between professors would have outgrown its humble origins anyway, but the fact that Johannes Gutenberg had introduced the printing press to Europe fifty years earlier didn’t help keep the lid on.  The little spat quickly became a large argument and then a cataclysm that changed European society forever.

You may remember that Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith was not only a critique of the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences (those sort of “get-out-of-purgatory-free” cards) but it forever removed the need for the intercession of The Church in matters of forgiveness and salvation.

Justification by faith meant that 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 granted to all believers, not through the auspices of the Church, but directly through God’s gift of grace alone. 

If faith is righteousness or right relationship to God, and humans are broken at the very core of their being, then righteousness and brokenness must co-exist within humanity.  From our own perspective, we are knowingly sinners; from God’s perspective, we are unknowingly righteous, thus giving us hope.  As Luther wrote,

“It is just like a man who is sick, and who believes the doctor who promises his full recovery.  In the meantime, he obeys the doctor’s orders in the hope of the promised recovery, and abstains from those things which he has been told to lay off, so that he may in no way hinder the promised return to health…  Now is this person sick or well?  In fact, he is both sick and well at the same time.  He is sick in reality – but he is well on account of the sure promise of the doctor, whom he trusts, and who reckons him as already being cured…  So he is at one and the same time both a sinner and righteous.  He is a sinner in reality, but righteous by the… promise of God that he will continue to deliver him from sin until… completely cured...  So he is entirely healthy in hope, but a sinner in reality.”

For most earlier medieval theologians, love rather than faith formed the pathway to salvation:  fides caritate formata (faith formed through acts of love).  But for Luther, the principle religious problem had become the transformation from a state of doubt and uncertainty to a state of confidence in words and promises that lacked immediate verification.  In other words, our deepest question was about trust:  not whether or not one was inwardly and outwardly righteous, but whether God was truthful in God’s judgment of human nature and destiny.” For Luther, the central religious problem of Protestantism became the questionable certitude of salvation – not the rationality of faith; not even the proof of God’s existence; but the trustworthiness of God’s word.  (Of course, for Luther, God revealed God’s self through God’s word in scripture.)  Can we trust God?  That was the question for our direct forebears, the puritans in this country, as well.

Luther strove through his thought to lessen the violence of 16^th-century existence.  Like other first-generation reformers, Luther permitted individuals to resist persecution only passively.  Two years before the outbreak of the Great Peasants’ War, Luther changed course and spoke against insurrection as a remedy for social grievance:  “No insurrection is ever right, no matter how right the cause it seeks to promote.” While Luther continued to speak to the righteousness of the magistrates’ and princes’ opposition to the higher authority of the emperor, he began belatedly to disdain the same methods when used by the common man, a fact that would have implications in the peasant uprisings soon to sweep Germany.

 

In contrast to Luther and his northern German attempt to reform individuals through the reform of the doctrines of the Church, the Reformed tradition begun in the Swiss cantons by Huldrych Zwingli was more interested in reforming church and society by focusing on the moral consequences of the Gospel.  Christ, for Zwingli and the Swiss, was a moral example, present in memory in the Eucharistic Supper and making moral demands of humanity in Scripture, whereas for Luther and his followers Christ was a continual personal presence within each believer. 

Zwingli longed to throw off the chains of the tyrannical – as he saw them – elements within the Roman church, and was willing to take up the sword to do so.  For the 16^th-century dissenter, no ecclesiastical ceremony symbolized the presumption and tyranny of the church so perfectly as the baptism of infants.  Initially, in the late 1510’s and early 1520’s, Zwingli struggled with his budding objection to infant baptism.  Like Erasmus, the Dutch Christian humanist, Zwingli denied the doctrine of original sin and therefore saw no point in baptizing babies if they carried no inherent sinfulness which needed to be forgiven.  But by 1524, Zwingli had begun to see baptism not as insurance against eternal damnation, but rather as a ritual of inclusion in the Christian church community, roughly equivalent to the Old Testament practice of circumcision, though admittedly less painful and bloody, and in fact more inclusive because both males and females were baptized.  As Zwinglian thought evolved toward a mingling of church and state, baptism became an act of loyalty to both the church community and the city-state community; in Zwingli’s case, of the religio-political entity of Zurich.  Thus, because of the heretical affront to both church and state, whole extended families would be expelled outside the city gates if parents declined to have any of their children baptized. (child blessing next week…)

Zwinglians broke more radically with the liturgy and worship of the Roman Church than did Lutherans.  While Lutherans retained much of the music and the ceremony of the traditional Church, Zwinglians simplified liturgies and even eliminated music in some cases.  Where Lutheran sacraments were still said to convey grace, Zwinglian sacrament became simply memorial and symbolic, remembering the sacrifice of Christ and symbolically pointing the pious toward a higher realm. 

Zwingli’s reforms would finally outlast him.  He considered himself a warrior for Christ;  in fact, he would die on the battlefield in 1531, not for Christ but his hometown Zurich in a simple dispute among the warring Swiss cities.

 

Both Luther’s and Zwingli’s theological pronouncements had the effect of lending support to the legitimate grievances of the mass of peasants in northern Europe, and lifting up the possibility of achieving the aspirations of the working classes through force of arms.  The masses of common folk were already unhappy with the increasing pressures applied by the princes and principalities:  reductions in peasants’ access to firewood and hunting, increases in their taxes, the lengthening of their times of service, and the tightening of their bonds of servitude.  With little recourse through other means, small groups with complaints began to coalesce into larger groups with demands and to look toward reform of the entire manorial system.  In the end they were overcome by superior power, but as the peasants made moves toward autonomy, they unknowingly ushered in an ecclesia of self-contained congregation-communities: “co-incident with the parish, co-terminus with the village,” a locally-oriented definition of the term, “congregation,” that would in time stand over and against the Roman model of the Church Universal, one large body directed by and beholden to Rome.

Though his French father had pushed him toward the priesthood, John Calvin entered university to study law and language, and while there broke with the Roman church for reasons he liked to keep to himself.  Forced in 1534 to flee Paris after joining a nascent movement to reform the church there, Calvin passed through Geneva and was invited by William Farel to stay and begin reforms in that city.  Soon tossed from Geneva as well, he was called to Strasbourg as pastor of a congregation of Huguenots.  In Strasbourg, he fell under the influence of Martin Bucer and quickly became an advocate of combining ecclesial and political reform in what he believed to be a New Testament vein.  Also during this time in Strasbourg, Mssr. Calvin fell under an influence of a different sort, and married his new bride, Idelette.

In 1541, Calvin accepted an invitation from the citizens of Geneva to return and institute the program of reform he had in mind:  first, to reestablish the moral legitimacy of the church, once it had been reformed to his liking;  and, second, to promote the well-being of individuals, their families, and their communities.  Part of his social program was the founding of the College of Geneva, and Sebastian Castellio was quickly installed as rector – at it turned out, in spite of the reservations of Calvin.  Thus the beginning of a difficult and long-standing relationship between the Magisterium of Geneva and a so-called radical who would become a key founder of liberal Christianity and liberal religion in general.

If Martin Luther happened to be an original thinker who unwittingly spawned a reformation movement, John Calvin became the great systematizer of that movement rather than an innovator of new doctrinal constructions.  Calvin’s greatest theological legacy would be his commitment to the absolute sovereignty of God, especially in the area of the doctrines of predestination and election.

Predestinarian questions have to do with ideas of freedom:  the Creator’s freedom vs. creaturely freedom.   Perhaps, on the one hand, freedom on either side is unchecked:  either humanity is totally free to exercise its will, or God is totally free to control human will and decision-making, leaving no room for human freedom.  On the other hand, perhaps the two freedoms are intrinsically linked:  individual choice is not determined by the will of God but created by God.  The free will of humanity exists because of its creation by God, not free in an absolute sense, then, but at least un-coerced rather than either un-caused or rigidly controlled.

Scripture, said Calvin, teaches both the sovereign control of God and the freedom of human decisions.  Against the pastoral incompatibility of his reading, Calvin stood firm:  through an eternal act of God, he said, the future of every person in creation has already been determined, preordained by the Creator to be saved or damned, and through no willful act of their own can they hope to alter the outcome of their lives. The reprobate cannot hope to clear themselves of the stain of sin, and their so-often questionable behavior affirms their status;  the elect cannot be anything other than saved, and their exemplary behavior makes their status visible to all.

If the followers of Calvin came to uphold this doctrine of double predestination, many Lutherans continued to hold to a view of single predestination:  in other words, desiring the salvation of all human beings including the fallen, God had sent his only begotten Son to die on the cross to atone for the sins of the world.  Those God had saved were eternally predestined to life in Christ;  those who were condemned had been eternally predestined to act out their fallen will.  Even if there were contradictions in this line of thought, Luther proclaimed it the driving narrative of scripture and never attempted to systematize it, just accepted that we were all going one way or another, and that God knew what God was doing when God set it all up this way.

 

It would take a recalcitrant disciple of Calvinism named Jacob Arminius to finally stand up for free will and declare that God does not so much choose who will become a believer and who will be saved, but rather infallibly predicts what might happen in creation.  As a consequence, our direct forebears in this country were called Arminians - Christian Humanists who rejected both the doctrine of original sin and the Calvinist doctrine of the depravity of human nature.

I think that should be quite enough background to let us get on to those of our forebears who opposed Luther and Calvin and the Roman church of the 16^th century.  We’ll talk more about the unorthodoxy of the Radical Reformers in subsequent sermons over the next few months:  we’ll look at Michael Servetus, who was burned at the stake by Calvin for speaking out against the Trinity;  Francis David, who preached the unity of God so convincingly that he converted an entire kingdom to Unitarianism and religious tolerance;  and Faustus Socinus, the father of Polish Unitarianism who built a system of thriving churches only to see them destroyed by the darker forces within orthodoxy.

So who are we? 

We are people with a proud legacy of unorthodoxy: 

We like to say that we don’t take any authority at its word without testing it ourselves. 

We like to say that we stand up against the powers that be and speak out for the truth as we know it.

We don’t like to say that we are descendants of the Major Reformers; they don’t like to claim us either, I suspect.  But too often we fall into a sort of predestinarian thought: when things are going badly, we begin to believe that we are so broken that we will never do anything right again.  Even worse, when things are going pretty well, we begin to think so much of ourselves that we think we can do everything for ourselves.  Neither are true, of course. 

As we exercise our free will and make our choices, we do so in relationship:  to other people, to the world, to that which is larger than ourselves - whether we always recognize it or not.

And this leaves us, as usual, not with answers but with questions, like those in the earlier reading from Victoria Safford when she writes:

 “Who am I?” inevitably leads to a deeper (question), “Whose am I?” — because there is no identity outside of relationship.  You can’t be a person by yourself.  To ask “Whose am I?” is to extend the question far beyond the little self-absorbed self, and wonder:  Who needs you?  Who loves you?  To whom are you accountable?  To whom do you answer?  Whose life is altered by your choices?  With whose life, whose lives, is your own all bound up, inextricably, in obvious or invisible ways?

 

As history unfolds before us, I wish you all the best on your journeys.

So may it be.