The Reformation and History

It is always a very happy privilege to speak about our Protestant heritage. One of the perplexing questions for multitudes in our time has been, who am I? That is one question that I never had to answer. The answer was given to me by the family, the community, and the church into which I was born. And even if I had not grown to find this identity very pleasant, I would have been hard put, at least in the first 20-odd years of my life, to have done anything about it. There were no other options in society. I did have the option of perhaps leaving the Presbyterian church, but that would have been exceedingly difficult to have done. and becoming a Baptist or a Methodist, but that was the extent of the options that was open to me. I’ve always been aware that I was very much a Protestant, and as well as a Presbyterian.

This sense of identity, however, has been diminishing among people in our society. And today, we are born into a society that does not hand to us an identity as a society into which I was born and into which most of you were born. Persons today are born into a very mobile, pluralistic, secular, mass media-dominated society in which traditions are exceedingly difficult to maintain. And therefore, it is increasingly important for us, I think to ask, who are we? And in particular, who are we as Christian folks? You have to have an identity. You cannot live without an identity or simply you will be diffused in all directions. Your life will become chaotic and its impact will be very little on society as well as a sense of fulfillment will not be very great for any of us individually.

When I began my ministry, it had become customary in society to have Reformation Sundays, and many cities celebrated important Reformation days when the whole Protestant community, including sometimes the Baptists, who have been somewhat ambiguous about being Protestant, So of course they are that, whatever they may want to say, and they are that as their best historians point out, incidentally one of the most promising young Reformation historians and theologians in this country teaches at Southern Baptist Seminary, Timothy George. I only wish he taught at Union Seminary. So the Baptists in their better moments know that they are Protestant, but as some of you a while. They have been reluctant at times to claim this. And one has the suspicion that many Baptists are losing their identity with the serious consequences for the life of that particular denomination.

I remember participating in a Reformation Day service in Mobile, Alabama when Government Street Church, some of you know, a tremendous sanctuary was packed full. This happened over against an aggressive Roman Catholicism. These Protestants gathered at Government Street because Bishop Tulin in Mobile was very obnoxious and very aggressive in asserting the power of the Catholic Church. It’s almost, it’s hard to relive those days. Now, a person who was making a study of a newspaper in Auburn, Alabama wrote a brief article on the time when I was minister in the Auburn Presbyterian Church because the editor of that paper was a member and an elder in the church. And she sent me a copy of what she had turned in and one comment she had in the paper was He is remembered as being anti-catholic Well, I thought you know that couldn’t be true I don’t think of myself as anti-catholic, but then I began to think well, I suspect I distributed two to three thousand copies of the night old federal council pamphlet, If I Marry a Roman Catholic, since our church was located in a academic community.

And I counseled a number of students, especially young Presbyterian women who were courting Catholic football players about the perils of such a marriage. And I probably was a fact in breaking up the possibility of some of those marriages with persons whose names you would know if I called them. I also, again, think some more, and I thought if I didn’t give out in the thousands, but I certainly distributed by the hundreds copies of the old Christian century pamphlet, Can Catholicism Win America? Now, in retrospect, that seems an absurd question and the people at the Christian Century are embarrassed about it. Now it’s a new series of editors and I remember Martin Marty once telling me that he was totally free to agree with the Catholics or disagree but that some of his older editors back a few years ago who were on the Christian Century staff when they produced that series of articles, Can Catholicism Win America?

Were no longer free. they now had a bad conscience about what they had written about Catholicism, and therefore they had to approve everything that Catholicism did. Well, I remember a conversation in 1959 with Paul Monea at Yale University, in which he was saying to me that no one can anticipate the changes that are going to happen in Roman Catholicism in the next few years. And I remember telling him that I saw no evidence of this, And he said, well, your problem is you haven’t been in Geneva, as I have, and you haven’t heard what’s happening in Europe. All I knew was that in 1950, the pope had declared as a dogma necessary for salvation that the Virgin Mary body had been assumed into heaven without corruption. Now, if any doctrine challenged Protestants, and if any doctrine, because there is not one’s shred of evidence of this doctrine in the New Testament or even in the very early church.

And if any doctrine should challenge the Enlightenment humanist spirit of the age, it would be the doctrine of the assumption of the Virgin Mary. And I hear that there was a conversation a few months before it was proclaimed when Paul Tillich had declared that the Pope wouldn’t dare proclaim the doctrine of the assumption of the Virgin Mary, but he did. And he also gave the encyclical Humanae generis, which outlawed all the liberal Catholics and resulted in many of them being moved from choice positions in Europe to monasteries in the outpost of Christendom. But, Vatican II happened, And the Catholic Church radically changed. I remember being at a conference on Vatican II at Notre Dame at the end of that conference and I was asking a professor at Catholic University if the changes were for good.

And he said, yes, of course they’re for good because no one can control the distribution of slick paper magazines. And if he was speaking today, he would say no one can control who turns on the television sets. and therefore you cannot isolate Catholic seminarians and Catholic laypeople from what’s happening in the world. When the Catholics lost the ball was when they allowed Catholics to join the Rotary Club and eat lunch side by side with Presbyterian elders, and this was a very corrupting thing. They now had a different attitude toward the priest. If you read the Richmond newspapers, you feel people like Phil Bagley, a former mayor of Richmond saying things about Bishop Russell that even the most recalcitrant Presbyterian elders would not say in public about the ministers whom they dislike.

Now this is something absolutely new and absolutely unpredictable, it seems to me, in time past. So instead of Catholicism being perched, as it were, in 1945, 1950, as though it were going to take over the United States, the Catholics are in as bad shape, or almost in as bad shape, as mainline Protestant churches are, in terms of holding their people with a radical decline in church attendance and in loyalty to the church, which is something very new something is likely to continue. So you do not have really the stimulant of an aggressive Catholicism as you did in the 40s and 50s to call on us to have Reformation Day Sundays. I remember the first Reformation sermon I preached on what it means to be a Protestant and we had a Roman Catholic singing in the choir in the Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and when the service was over, she was weeping, and I felt very badly about it, but not badly enough to repent.

Well, listen, you know something very different now in what is happening, but the Protestant services, the celebration of the celebration of Protestantism is beginning to decline radically after Vatican II. You have very few Protestant Reformation Day Sundays, particularly community-wide. They’re not regarded as kosher and proper in an ecumenical age, and yet in the last three or four years they seem to be returning. I am speaking at a Reformation Day service in three churches this fall. One in a community service in Florence, Alabama. The others were services in particular churches. But this is something new for me in recent years. There is a recovery of a sense of our Protestant heritage. If Protestantism is not endangered by Roman Catholicism, it is endangered by the religious malaise, the humanistic culture, the secular culture in which we live.

There has been a radical decline of Protestants in our society. According to Gallup in 1947, 69 out of every hundred Americans, declared that they were Protestant. Today, or in 1982, according to Gallup, this had declined to 58 or 59 percent. More than that, there is a neglect of the Protestant heritage in our society, a neglect that has been spawned in part by the cult of ethnic groups in our particular day. One of the finest editorials that I’ve read recently was published in the Washington Post when you had the celebration of the Statue of Liberty. the direction of the son of an Italian immigrant, Mr. I. Koa. The editorial was written by Georgian Gaia, and she said that she felt left out of this celebration, that as a Protestant there was really no place for her in the celebration of the Statue of Liberty as this program had been arranged. and she did not accuse anyone of deliberately leaving out the Protestant immigrant to this country, but she suggested that it was a very serious fact.

She went on to say, somewhat indirectly, but nevertheless with sufficient clarity that those who run could read and understand that this nation had been established by Protestant immigrants and that it was doubtful if its particular character could be maintained when this Protestant heritage was lost. We even capitulate to that in the church. I had to spare writing letters to editors but I did make contact with the editor of the survey in which they published an article on a Protestant Irish church in New Hampshire. The, incidentally, parenthetically, I’ll say here that I enjoyed writing Senator Kennedy and Senator Monahan and reminding them that the historically most significant Irish vote in America and also the numerically largest Irish vote in America was not this Catholic Irish but the Protestant Irish fact that is frequently forgotten in our textbooks and certainly in contemporary politics.

The fact is that it was the Protestant Irish who established the Presbyterian Church and contributed a great deal to the establishment of this nation, not the Catholic Irish, but the Presbyterian, I mean the origin of the nation and the establishment of its institutions. The Presbyterian Survey, which is supposed to represent all things good, the Presbyterian had this article on the Scotch-Irish Church in New Hampshire. And they said that they would like to, the Scotch Irish who settled in New Hampshire would like to have settled in Boston. And they said they arrived in Boston, but said of course, Catholic Boston would not allow the Protestant Irish to settle there and moved them on to New Hampshire. I wrote them back and I told them I found this absolutely incredible, that the Irish didn’t get to Boston until sometime in the middle of the 19th century, and that in the 18th century when these Protestant Irish arrived in Boston, this was the center of Calvinism, one of the great centers of Calvinism in all the world.

Well, when the Presbyterians forget their own heritage and forget that Boston until the latter half of the 19th century was a stronghold of the Calvinist form of Protestantism, are we in a very serious way in the life of the church in remembering our own heritage? It simply means that those who are responsible for the Presbyterian Church do not know very much about Presbyterian history or our identity as Presbyterians. Michael Novak, who is a Catholic, who when I first knew him was studying for the priesthood, and now is a commentator in his reply to the bishops’ letter on economics suggested that the bishops ought to take a look at the fact that Catholics live better in the United States than Catholics have ever lived in the whole history of the Catholic Church.

And secondly, that they ought to ask themselves, why is it that the Catholics live so much better in Protestant America than they do in Catholic Italy or Catholic Poland or Catholic Ireland or Catholic Latin America. I would say it took a great deal of courage for a person who is a Catholic to raise that question and put it to the Catholic bishops and ask why is it that the economic situation is so much better in Protestant America than it is in any Catholic country they can name. He said this would have been a better pursuit for them than the road they took in the pamphlet on economic life. George Ann Guy’s point was that if the United States had been settled by Irish Catholics or Italian Catholics or Polish Catholics or by Spanish Catholics, it would be a radically different society economically, politically, and socially from what it is.

And her point was, why is it that I as a Protestant was omitted from the celebration of the Statue of Liberty. Well we need to reclaim this Protestant heritage and we are doing something about it. In 1983 we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther and that was even celebrated on the campus of Notre Dame University and no very few people came to the panel discussions which they had. No one could been on that campus without knowing that Notre Dame was celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther. Every hallway in the library was filled with Protestant memorabilia. I submit that as a remarkable change in the Catholic Church. There are also signs that we ourselves are recovering our heritage, and I would like to take a few moments here to speak about the recovery of our Calvinistic heritage.

I do not believe there is ever better time since the Reformation when Calvin was being studied as Calvin is being studied today. I attended the last of August the International Congress on Calvin Research in Debrecen, Hungary. This is largely a European organization and And the Hungarian church was very eager for this Congress, Calvinist research, researching Calvin, to meet in Debrecen at the Great Center of the Reform Community in Hungary, a provincial capital a few miles from the Russian border. And there were about 90 people at this conference, but the opening ceremony was a church gathering in which there must have been at least 1,200 people who sang and who prayed with deep and ardent devotion. I couldn’t understand a word that was being said, so I watched the congregation.

Here were people in whose face was etched the agony of the years, whose clothing revealed a certain economic moderation or even poverty. But they sang with vigor. They prayed with vigor. This obviously a very important service. 1200 people, the church was absolutely packed, and in the galleries, in every one of the galleries, there was a policeman, a secret police, a policeman in civilian clothes, on the pulpit there was a police, and on the front seat there were representatives of state to see what was going on. Here, in this repressive society, at least repressive in the Eastern Bloc, but here in this very repressive society, by any standard we know, was the vigorous celebration of the Reformed heritage. And this International Congress on Calvinist Research, which has no funding amount to anything, voluntary organization of European scholars, thriving today in a period when there is not much external support.

Incidentally, one of the very remarkable young women in our church, Elsie McKee, who grew up on the mission field in the Congo, is one of the most respected members of this society and is in Geneva now, editing the French sermons John Calvin. No other American in history has been invited by French-speaking people in Geneva to come to Geneva and edit the sermons of John Calvin, as is this very remarkable young woman, Elsie McKee, who is a member of our church. In the United States, you have the Calvin Studies Society that was formed by Louis Battle, who died shortly after its formation, but we still exist. No centered in Grand Rapids, and the people in Grand Rapids do not believe that the Reformed community exists outside of Grand Rapids, or at least not outside of its influence.

I say that somewhat facetiously, but also very seriously because I think it’s a serious matter. A recent book published by edited by David Wells on Reformed theology in America, and it systematically excludes the Presbyterian Church USA, systematically excludes it. It has a chapter on Princeton theology, but no Princeton theologians, a division on Princeton theology, but no Princeton people were asked to contribute to it. It has a section on Southern Presbyterian, Southern Reformed theology in the South, but no member of the Presbyterian Church USA was asked to contribute to it. Now When I raised some questions about that, they said we don’t see any evidence that in the leadership of the Presbyterian Church USA there’s any interest in Reformed theology.

Now that’s the negative side and if anybody can suggest anything in the bureaucracy of the Presbyterian Church USA that indicates an interest in Reformed theology in recent years, I’d be glad to listen to them. I haven’t seen it. And at Princeton Seminary there’s very little memory of the glorious days of Reformed theology there. Certainly that’s true at Columbia Seminary, and I won’t comment on Union Seminary. So they could say you have forfeited the heritage, but the Grand Rapids people and the people associated with that, the PCA, the Westminster Theological Seminary people, the Gordon Connell people, the Fuller people, have deliberately excluded the Presbyterian Church USA from this reformed heritage and we ought not to allow them to do it.

But within our own church, some of us, and yeah I have to speak directly because I’m one of the ones who does it, organized a Davidson colloquium on Calvinist theology which is done for three years and it gets larger groups every year and the papers that are presented there have been in great demand. We’re now putting together the papers given last January, but we sold out of all the booklets papers given in the previous two years. McGill University, one of the really great universities of America devoted an entire week in October, the first of October, to the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the Reformation in Geneva, because the university He was publicly on record as saying that the Canadian society, North American society, Western civilization would be different from what it is if there had not been this reformation in Geneva 450 years ago.

Not only here, but elsewhere. The Institutes of the Christian Religion have been translated into Korean, and there is As an institute for the study, for the financial study of Calvin in Korea, it cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the world. The Japanese have translated the institutes into Japanese, and next year they are going to have an Asian conference on Calvin studies to be held in Japan. In South Africa, you have now some of the most vigorous Calvinist studies taking place. Europeans don’t go to South Africa. If they do, they’re warned by the hierarchy in the church that they’ll never again be given a place in the leadership of the church if they go, but Europeans do not have some defied, incidentally. Brian Armstrong, one great previous year and elder, recently read a paper in South Africa on Calvin’s theology, but European theologians go there.

And there is a very vigorous center for Calvin’s studies in South Africa that’s equal to anything else in the world. The Rutherford House in Edinburgh is bringing out a new edition of Calvin’s Commentaries. Some sections, we need it to have it in more modern English, but when Calvin’s Commentaries were translated in the middle of the 19th century. The translators of the Old Testament commentaries did not seem to think that it was appropriate to include all the paragraphs. Calvin was a very plain-spoken person, and he did not use euphemistic terms in reference to bodily functions or to a great many other things that happened in society. And Victorian translators thought that these were not appropriate for Victorian readers, so they omitted them.

You can read them now in the new translation. That’s one of the points that they were making. The Media Center is bringing out a new edition that Calvin Theological Seminary is bringing out a new edition of the 1936 Institutes. The Westminster Press is publishing an English translation of one of the better books on Calvin, The Young Calvin, by Ganoczy, a Roman Catholic scholar. And one book that I look forward to with a great deal of enthusiasm is a biography of Calvin by William Bouwsma, former president of the American Historical Association, former chairman of the Department of History at the University of California, and a very remarkable human being who tries to put Calvin in his historical context and make him a genuine human being, and therefore, Bouwsma hopes more believable by contemporary persons.

Bouwsma is convinced that Calvin had great doubts, that he had to struggle with doubt all of his life, and that he overcame doubt. Well, not many, only a careful Renaissance historian could have picked that up in Calvin’s writings. And Bouwsma believes that what Calvin puts in the third person, he’s frequently speaking about himself. There’s also been a tremendous revival of Zwingli and Bullinger studies, the Reformation in Geneva. One of the papers given at Debrecen was by a Zurich scholar, the head of the Institute for Reformation Studies in Zurich, Fritz Büsser. He began his career writing a book on Calvin, Calvin’s judgment concerning himself. But he was absolutely convinced that Henry Bullinger was a greater theologian than Calvin and what an influence to American Puritan society more than Calvin did.

Well, I think this is highly dubious, but there’s no question that Bullinger was a great theologian, and one of the great things we need today is a modern English edition of Bullinger’s Decades, the 50 sermons that the Elizabethan church required ministers in that church to read. Now, if you have ministers who are not theologians themselves, it may be better to give them sermons and tell them that to read them and tell people who wrote them so they will not be guilty of plagiarism, and you guarantee the quality of the preaching in that way, and that’s what the Elizabethan church did. There had been this tremendous revival of Zwingli, and I put the bibliography that you have, the most recent theology of Zwingli, by Stephens, reported last year on Locher’s book who interprets Zwingli in a Barthian way, and Potter’s great biography of Zwingli.

The more I read Zwingli, the more I know that Zwingli influenced the Church of which I am a part, and the more Zwingli I know I am, which is what some of my friends tell me is my problem, but I’m glad to have Büsser saying that this is a virtue. Stevens. Karl Barth, in his last work, said, if someone calls me a neo Zwinglian, I shall not object, sure, Barthians. But Barth said it, and there it is in the last work that he published. We’ll be about a church when we read more about Zwingli than we currently do, and about Bullinger. Now, let us turn to how the Reformation is understood. A very remarkable recent book on the Reformation, published by A.G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought. A.G. Dickens is one of the newer group of Reformation historians.

You have a very remarkable group of Reformation historians who have differences but who are all united by the fact that the Reformation must be put in its social, historical, and political context. Moeller in Germany, Ozment in the United States, Monter in the United States, they think of themselves as social historians and the whole group of people who have tried to put the Reformation in its historical perspective. They’ve gone into places like Nuremberg and Strasbourg and Lyon in France and really studied what happened in those towns which people became Protestant and why they became Protestant in terms of the actual historical record and all of that’s very good. This is a school out of which Dickens comes and he published at the end of his life this historiography how the Reformation has to be understood.

It’s a very interesting book and I would like to read one of his conclusions about the Reformation. He says, yet as we progressed, that is in the study of how the Reformation has been interpreted, Yet, as we progressed, we saw our subject in another and more important role as a window on the West, a major point of access to the developing Western mind through the last five centuries. We embraced the Reformation as something greater than a complex of events with related sequels. Broadly and deeply understood, its historiography could become one of the brightest search lights exploring all subsequent period. And here’s the main point. By any reckoning, the Reformation has proved a giant among the great international movements of modern time.

We had been examining no mere ideology excogitated by a few individuals, but a surviving, pervasive, and seemingly immortal force. As a complex of ideals, the Reformation has triumphantly survive the so-called Reformation period without fading into a mere academic ghost. So long as people look back on the Western tradition, they will be compelled to study both the movement and its historiography with purposes and methods far transcending those of the historical textbook. Why did the Reformation attain this stature? Not so much because it arose with a great man, but rather for the reverse reason, that it was never swallowed up by a single personality or even a personally conceived ideology. Luther would never have become a Protestant pope. He specifically denounced the idea of a Lutheran cult, such as some of his modern worshippers have threatened to create. limited to saints or intellectuals the Reformation has been an historical experience although in greatly varied degrees by millions of men and women for good or ill it induced countless for good or ill it induced countless humble people to think for themselves and make decisions which as they supposed would determine their future in this world and the life to come.

In the end many let others think for them. Protestant churches frequently become authoritarian churches or Catholic churches where the church does the thinking for you and tells you what to think. But the experience nevertheless passed into popular as well as educated minds in the Western world, so that in each succeeding age it has proved an ingredient, a catalyst. Although the movement started as a dispute over doctrine and authority in Western Catholicism, each generation sought to enlarge and diversify its issues according to the development needs of the day. Eluding the pure philosophers it that has yielded more of its inwardness to historians, most of all to those who investigated with mangled sympathy and detachment its multifarious and perplexing legacies.

This is a slowly evolving kaleidoscope through which we appeared through the preceding chapters. That’s on page 323, 324 of Dickens’ book of Dickens’ book on how the Reformation has been interpreted in history. The Reformation, whether we, whatever one may agree with it or not, is a part of our past that has shaped our society, our culture, and in particular, shaped the United States of America. The United States of America would be a radically different country from what it is if the Reformation had not happened, and if the people who gave American life its shape in colonial America and in the early 19th century had not been heirs of the Protestant Reformation, it was a people’s movement. It was a religion of the people, to which we’ll come back in just a few moments.

Let me say briefly that the Reformation has been written down in history from the very beginning. The first major history of the Reformation was by a lay diplomat and jurist, Sleidan, S-L-E-I-D-A-N, who dates 1506 to 1566, and he wrote as a contemporary. And he gives a rather remarkably balanced view of what was actually taking place. And then of course there were the histories by those who were participants, Henrik Bullinger in Zurich for example, Myconius in Basel, Theodore Beza in some measure in Geneva, all wrote the history and they They wrote it from their particular perspective. And Philip Melanchthon. And Melanchthon liked to say that a historian’s task is to ask, what’s God doing in this history? Melanchthon was absolutely convinced that the Reformation was the work of God, and one should ask what God is doing.

Well, later historians didn’t do that. Neither did Sleidan, who was Melanchthon’s contemporary, do that. But, from the very beginning, it’s been interpreted, usually in partisan ways, the early histories were frequently highly partisan. Cochlaeus, for example, the Roman Catholic, wrote some very bitter history of Luther, which served to shape Roman Catholic thinking for a long time. a great deal. Well, one book I cannot skip and that is Fox’s history of the martyrs. I think it’s very important to recall that book which was written in Puritan Elizabethan England. It was more than simply a book of the martyrs as it came to be called. It was really intended of the history of the church and Fox believed that the martyrs of the Protestant Reformation belonged with the martyrs of the early church.

Martyrdom was something special. Kselman, a European, has spoken about the martyrs, and in his book you have something of the martyr complex. If you really want to be a super-dupe Christian, you aspire to be a martyr. Well, there’s something of that in Fox. Fox believed that history, the church’s history is really in five periods, the apostolic period, then the days when you embrace the Gentiles, then the radical corruption of the church in the late medieval period, then the revival of the church by Wycliffe and Huss and the Reformation looking forward to the Age of Christ. He believed, and some exaggerated it, that Great Britain had a great, I mean Britain had a great role in the plan of God, that God had elected Britain to spread Christianity around the world.

Now that carried to this United States, and many who came here and who read Fox came with the conviction that they came to the United States not simply as settlers but in some sense of the representatives of the Lord God. Now it has been fashionable to depreciate that. If the 19th century believed that the United States of America, if many Protestants in the 19th century were tempted to believe the United States of America was the representation of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the world, and so was Great Britain to spread the Gospel. That was defective to be sure, but I’m not so sure it is as bad as the temptation and the bureaucratic leadership of the church today to regard Ronald Reagan as a great Satan, and the United States of America as a the great enemy of the proclamation of the gospel in the world.

The truth is somewhere in between, and if I had to choose between people like Barbara Green on the Washington office and Fox and this book of martyrs, I would, there’s no question which I would choose. I’d choose Fox rather than the bureaucratic leadership of the church at the present time. But you don’t have to choose between either one. But there was something great about that. And Fox, it’s great to be a martyr in the cause of God, which is spreading Christianity around the world. And you had the enthusiasm of college groups in those days who spoke of the evangelization of the world in this generation. Now we say we are really not in the business of evangelizing the world. We’re in partnership with churches, though I was just talking to David Barrett, the author of the Christian World Encyclopedia, and he points out that there are 300 cities in the world of over 100,000 population in which there is not a single confessing Christian.

And that one-third of the world has not heard the gospel of Christ. Barrett puts it, three groups, one-third of the world’s Christian, at least in some way, one-third of the world has heard the gospel of Christ, one-third has not heard the gospel of Christ. And this is occurring at a time when we are retrenching our missionary effort on deliberate purpose. It’s worth talking about Fox’s book of the modest, and I would like to suggest that excellent book by Gordon Rupp, and I can’t give you the exact title of that book, but it’s about five great books and one that have influenced and shaped the Protestant spirit and life of one of those books of Pilgrim’s Progress. Another of those books is Fox’s Book of the Martyrs. And if you have, I think, highly dubious to have that as a morning service, if you’re Protestant, you’re supposed to be explicating the Word of God.

But if you want to convey something of the ethos of Protestantism, Fox’s book of the martyrs would not be such a bad book to present to people, partly because it’s so strange and to our modern way of thinking. But it’s shaped a good bit of the culture out of which we have come and the culture which has shaped us. Moving on very rapidly, among modern interpretations of the Reformation. None is more distinctive than that of the Marxists. Well, I can’t go immediately to Marx. You have a tremendous number of great interpretations in the 19th century by people like T.M. Lindsay, who was published in 1906, the history of the Reformation. Lindsey knew that the Reformation grew out of the religious life of the people, and he knew that it was essentially a religious movement.

I partly came up on Lindsay’s history of the Reformation, but it’s still one of the great books, though it is now 80 years old. Well, I ought not to forget about these great books that are somewhat old, in some ways much better than modern books. But the newest form of interpretation of the Reformation were the Marxists. Actually, Karl Marx had very little to say about Martin Luther, but he did comment that the reformer overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it with bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith and authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from the outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from change because he had changed the heart.

Now, some of us would say that’s a good thing. But as far as Marx was concerned, that was a bad thing. Luther had gotten a reformation started, but a revolution started, but not the real revolution. As far as Marx saw it, Protestantism amounted to the emancipation of the princes from the later pokes and the whole of their priestly clique, but the true emancipation of the future would see the transformation of priestly Germans, religious Germans, into men. A far more sensitive and more extensive interpretation, one which dealt with the data of the Reformation was carried on by Friedrich Engels, E-N-G-E-L-S, Marx’s associate, and his great study was the Peasants’ War. For the Marxists, the great thing was the Peasants’ War. was the first Marxist historian in his great historical work was the study of the Peasants’ War.

The Marxists have never forgiven Luther for refusing to identify the gospel with the cause of the Peasants. I can’t say much more on that except that has been a prevailing theme. The Marxists have all centered their attention upon the Peasants’ War and upon Luther’s repudiation of the peasants cause in the end, though in early days he was identified with it, and the Marxists always have tried to rehabilitate Müntzer, M-U-N-Z-E-R, whom out over the U. One of the few books written by a Russian on the Reformation was Smirin, S-M-I-R-I-N, who pictured Müntzer as an inspired and advanced leader of the oppressed masses, a man for whom religion was not a matter of genuine commitment but an necessary means of communicating his real message to a people who knew no other language.

They recognized in Müntzer and others real social reformers who had to use religious language because the people couldn’t understand anything else. It’s somewhat like recent biographers of Reinhold Niebuhr. It’s very difficult for a secularist to believe that Reinhold Niebuhr believed in God. As a reviewer of the, as Richard Neuhaus said, it would be a good thing if some of the contemporary biographers of Niebuhr would just entertain the possibility that Niebuhr actually did believe in God. that his theology and his political ethic comes, I mean his political ethic comes from his theology. But you have the same thing with the attempt to explain Müntzer in economic terms as primary concern economic. What the Marxists were attempting to say as a contemporary Marxist in terms of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the Peasants War in 1975, Max Steinmetz, a German Marxist said, described Luther’s thought as the theological expression of the economic and political struggle of the bourgeoisie and the masses of people against the Church of the Pope which was governed by Rome and which hampered any social progress.

The doctrine of free grace was the theological counterpart of the bourgeois desire for a cheap church where they could make money out of the church. Well, for the Marxists, even those who recognized multiple causation of historical events. Economic factors bred the Reformation. Now don’t I think it’d do any good to deny that economic factors did contribute just as nationalistic factors did. Catholicism won many brownie points because it succeeded in identifying Catholicism with the nationalism of the Irish and with the nationalism of the Poles. It is also true that Protestantism was attractive to certain people who were democratic in England or in France or with the democratic regimes in Germany. And one of the things that recent studies have indicated is that the cities like the urban theology of Zwingli, what some called Urban Theology, Wingley’s Theology, Bunger’s Theology, was more attractive to the cities, as was Calvin’s, than was the theology of Luther, who was more medieval and more rural and less humanist than either Calvin.

Certainly economic political considerations do shape our history, but theology also shapes history, and you get the counterpart of that Max Weber in the Protestant ethic in the 19th century in which he insisted that Protestant attitudes and convictions were essential ingredients in the development of the capitalist society in northern Europe. Well, I think there’s a great deal of truth in that. You have these materialistic explanations, then you have the explanations of a social scientist over against these materialists, but the social scientists were not simply concerned with sociology and politics. They were also psychologists, and you have the psychological explanations of Luther. Early Owens, by writer, a Catholic who used psychology to discredit Luther, Oskar Pfister, P-F-I-S-T-E-R, a Freudian in Switzerland who wrote about Calvin and others.

And then more recently in this country, Erik Erikson’s book, which is the best known, his study of young Luther, or rather his description of Luther in psychological terms. I don’t think anybody believes Erikson ever spent much time studying the sources of Luther’s life, but he applied his psychoanalytic method to Luther, which raised some interesting questions.