James Rutz writes, “A funny thing happened on the way to the Millennium: In the fourth century, the Church’s wheels fell off…Just after 300 A.D., the church made the biggest blunder in its history and crashed…the final straw came in 313, when Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan, officially tolerating the Church and ending persecutions…by 400, just 87 years later, the Roman Empire had gone from being less than four per cent Christian to eighty per cent Christian…with no conversions! All the major problems of the Church today—other than sin—can be traced back 1700 years, to when the church became an audience.” [1]
During the Dark Ages from the late 300’s to the 1300’s the Church became more and more religious and institutionalized, out of which sprang the Roman Catholic Church with its Pope, Mariology and like doctrines and tradition. The epitome of the Dark Ages was a Church that no longer resembled in any point that which was exploded onto the world scene on the Day of Pentecost. “The newborn church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ. The young Church, like all young creatures, is appealing in its simplicity and single-heartedness. Here we are seeing the Church in its first youth, valiant and unspoiled—a body of ordinary men and women joined in an unconquerable fellowship never before seen on this earth.”
The Church of the Dark Ages was no longer the Body of Christ, but the place of power struggles, politics, oppression, and financial gain at the expense of the common believer centering in the following abuses:
Misuse of the Word
“It is also unquestionable that a knowledge of the Scriptures in the vernacular [common language], especially by uneducated men and women was always deemed a sign of heretical tendency. ‘The third cause of heresy’, says an Austrian inquisitor, writing about the end of the thirteenth century, ‘is that they translate the Old and New Testaments into the vulgar tongue; and so they learn and teach. I have heard and seen a certain clown who repeated the Book of Job word for word, and several who know the New Testament perfectly.’ A survey of the evidence seem to lead to the conclusion that the rulers of the mediaeval Church regarded knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures with grave suspicion…” [3]
Misuse of Power
“Nay it is you who are mistaken when in supposing that the Lord sets tyrants over his people to rule them at pleasure, when He bestowed so much authority on those whom He sent to promulgate the gospel. Your error lies here, viz., in no reflecting that their power, before they were furnished with it, was circumscribed with certain limits. We admit, therefore, that…pastors are to be heard just like Christ Himself, but they must be pastors who execute the office entrusted to them. And this office, we maintain, is not presumptuously to introduce whatever their own pleasure has rashly devise…we maintain that the Roman Pontiff [Pope], with his whole herd of pseudo-bishops, who have seized the pastor’s office, are ravenous wolves, whose only study has hitherto been to scatter and trample down the kingdom of Christ, filling it with ruin and devastation. Nor are we the first to make the complaint…for iniquity has reached its height, and now these shadowy prelates [church leaders], by whom you think the Church stands or perishes, and by whom we say she has been cruelly torn and mutilated, and brought to the very brink of destruction, can neither bear their vices nor the cure of them.” [4]
Misuse of Money
“Under your most distinguished name, papal indulgences are offered across the land for the construction of St. Peter. Now, I do not so much complain about the quacking of the preachers…but I bewail the gross misunderstanding among the people which comes from these preachers and which they spread everywhere among the common men. Evidently the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are then assured of their salvation. They are likewise convinced that souls escape from purgatory as soon as they have placed a contribution into the chest. Further, they assume that the grace obtained through these indulgences is so completely effective that there is no sin of such magnitude that it cannot be forgiven—even if (as they say) someone should rape the Mother of God…finally, they believe that man is freed from every penalty and guilt by these indulgences. O great God! The souls committed to your care, excellent father, are thus directed to death… This is why I entered the disputation; that is, I have provoked all the people, the great, the average, the mediocre, to hate me thoroughly, at least as much as could be engineered and accomplished by these men who have such great zeal for money (oh, no, I should have said for souls!). Since these ‘lovely’ people cannot refute what I have said, they arm themselves with the greatest cunning and pretend that I violated papal authority by my theses.” [5]
“The preachers, by daily sermons, or hymns, and processions, urged the people, with extravagant laudations of the Pope’s bull, to purchase letters of indulgences for their own benefit, and at the same time played upon their sympathies for departed relatives and friends whom they might release from their sufferings in purgatory ‘as soon as the penny tinkles in the box.’” [6]
“The confused and vague theology of forgiveness of the late medieval period lent weight to the suggestion that it was possible to purchase the forgiveness of sins and procure the remission of ‘purgatorial penalties’ through the purchase of indulgences. In other words, the eternal penalties resulting from sinful actions could be reduced, if not eliminated, by payment of an appropriate sum of money to the appropriate ecclesiastical figure. Thus Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg manage to accumulate a remission of purgatorial penalties reckoned to total 39, 245,120 years…The power and the income of much of the ecclesiastical establishment and its patrons were actually linked with the continuance of such practices and beliefs.” [7]
Misuse of People
All of the above leads to the abuse and misuse of the people in the Church. One of the great rallying cries of the Reformation was ‘the priesthood of all the believers’ which taught that it was not only a special class of people who had access to God, but all those who were believers. “One has to insult and antagonize the Devil to make him produce one Scripture passage through which it can be proven that the ordained clergy alone are called priests…just as I previously scoffed in my book.” [8]
Martin Luther
Into this crooked and internally ‘bent’ system called Church God sent forth Martin Luther. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, a monk himself, nailed 95 theses to his seminary door hoping to initiate dialogue regarding the issues contained therein. Instead the First Reformation was ignited centering around the truth ‘the just shall live by faith’. This phrase became the rallying cry for the First Reformation placing into question the system of indulgences and the various other means that the Catholic Church had established for people to relate rightly to God.
While the First Reformation soon became a far-reaching movement and reality of diverse nature, the primary historical figures driving it were Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli. Luther was the most outspoken and spent the majority of his life hiding from legal authorities as he wrote reformation literature.
[1] James Rutz. The Open Church (The SeedSowers, Auburn, MA: 1992), p. 8, 11.
[2] J. B. Phillips. The Young Church In Action, (The MacMillan Company, NY: 1957), p. vii.
[3] T. M. Lindsay. History of the Reformation, Vol. 1, (T & T Clark, Edinburgh: 1906), p. 148.
[4] John Calvin [Ed, John Olin]. A Reformation Debate, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1966), pp. 75-78.
[5] Martin Luther. Luther’s Works, Vol. 1., (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), pp. 44ff, and 68ff.
[6] Phillip Schaff. History of the Christian Church, Vol. 7, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1888), p. 152.
[7] Alister McGrath. Reformation Thought, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1988), p. 103.
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