Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

„Consensus‟ of Sendormir called for an avoidance of dissension and an acceptance of the
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. By the Consensus it was agreed to accept the orthodoxy
of the Protestant traditions present at the Synod, Lutheran, Calvinist and Brethren, even to
exchanging pulpits and to accepting their differences in discipline and worship. Frequent
intercommunion and attendance at one another‟s synods were advocated. 44
These influences tended to loosen the ties of the Church and State and led eventually to the
situation we face in the West in the 21 st Century, that of the almost complete secularisation
of society It can be argued that these loosening of the ties of State and Church were
providential in that today’s ecumenical activities are so much freer without them.
Soon the entire Roman Church system came under attack, as the Renaissance influence of
free enquiry brought scholars to re-examine the historical claims of the Papacy to supremacy,
and as the Scriptures were studied in their original languages of Hebrew and Greek.
Erasmus‟s Greek text of the New Testament appeared in 1516 and Archbishop Ximenes‟s
polyglot translation in 1522, though it had been prepared earlier. The invention of the
moveable-type printing press in Europe around the 1450s rapidly spread both scholarly
treatises and polemical woodcuts throughout Christendom. These publications criticised
abuses of the Church and created what were perceived by the Church to be new and
dangerous teachings.
In his 95 theses of 1517, Luther protested at, among other things, the way indulgences were
being sold as remedies for guilt, when only true contrition and a real act of repentance (as in
the sacrament of penance) could bring God‟s forgiveness. While the main Reformers (Calvin,
Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, etc) rejected some aspects of sacramentalism, for example the
doctrine of transubstantiation, they did not reject the concept of sacraments altogether.
For Calvin, in the Lord‟s Supper Christ was both represented and presented to the partaker.
Other more radical Reformers, the Anabaptists in particular, tended to remove the
sacramentalist element from their expressions of the Christian faith. For them there was no
„real presence‟ of Christ in the Holy Communion. Somewhat confusingly, they came to be
known as Sacramentarians.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch scholar and one of the earliest of the
Reformation period to call for a coming together of the two conflicting sections of
Christendom. He was the foremost humanist scholar of the age and, although ordained as a
priest in 1492, he strongly criticized monasticism and the clerical abuses of the day.
In trying to steer a middle course between what he saw as the extremes in Protestantism and
the Catholic church, he came to be rejected by both sides. The times were calling for a
dogmatism that Erasmus‟s irenical spirit deplored. He visited England and taught theology at
Cambridge University for a time, and was friendly both with the Protestant divines like John
Colet, a leading Biblical scholar, and Thomas More, the Chancellor of England who was
executed for his opposition to Henry VIII‟s rejection of the Pope‟s authority. In one tract
44 Slosser, G J, Christian Unity, its history and challenger in all communions, in all lands, Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd, London, 1929, pp 36-37.
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