Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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church‟s teachings nor its assertions of right religious practice. 12 Nor were its doctrines changed when some territorial princes and city councils in the Holy Roman Empire began wresting away from their respective bishops jurisdictional control over many ecclesiastical affairs. 13 By contrast, to reject the church‟s truth claims was to reject its authority as the caretaker of God‟s saving truth, the means of eternal salvation legitimated with biblical reference for more than a millennium to its establishment by Jesus himself. A rejection of the Roman church‟s truth claims is precisely what happened in the Reformation, and is what distinguishes its leaders from the many late medieval reformers who sought to inspire more members of the clergy and laity to live up to the Roman church‟s teachings. The reformers who beginning in the early 1520s came to deny that the established church remained the church established by Jesus spurned many traditional teachings of medieval Christianity. Their repudiation was not based primarily on the church‟s rampant abuses, the sinfulness of many of its members, or entrenched obstacles to reform. All of these problems had been obvious to conscientious clerical reformers and other open-eyed Christians for well over a century. The real point of the Reformation was that Roman Catholicism was a perverted form of Christianity even at its best, even if all of its members had been self-consciously following all of the Roman 12 On the concordats and the character of jurisdictionally “national” or “regional” churches in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, see Van Engen, “The Church in the Fifteenth Century,” in Handbook, ed. <strong>Brad</strong>y et al., vol. 1, pp. 318-319; Cameron, European Reformation, pp. 53-55; Oakley, Western Church, pp. 72-74; Du Boulay, Germany, pp. 187-195. 13 Francis Rapp, Réformes et Réformation à Strasbourg: Eglise et Société dans de Diocèse de Strasbourg (1450-1525) (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1974), pp. 410-419; Manfred Schulze, Fürsten und Reformation: Geistliche Reformpolitik weltlicher Fürsten vor der Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991); Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 18-21; William <strong>Brad</strong>ford Smith, Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 1300-1630 (Rochester, N. Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2008), pp. 17-58. Nor did the expulsion of bishops as civic rulers betoken changes in doctrine or proper religious practice. See J. Jeffrey Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City: The Episcopus exclusus in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999). 6
church‟s teachings and enacting all of its permitted practices. Institutional abuses and immorality were seen as symptomatic signs of a flawed foundation, namely false and dangerous doctrines. 14 The established church itself was teaching errors and lies as if they were truths. This was the rotten root that had to be torn up and the Gospel planted in its place. And because the church had pressed into every nook and cranny of politics, social life, economic activity, and culture—in myriad ways, according to anti-Roman reformers, distorting them all—it looked like the apocalypse was nigh. 15 Already in the early 1490s Savonarola had preached as much in Florence, his admonitory prophecies seemingly confirmed when Charles VIII of France invaded the Italian peninsula in 1494. 16 Even as the storm of God‟s wrath gathered strength, the Reformation, according to its protagonists, would be Christendom‟s urgent, eleventh-hour rescue and recovery mission. Once the scales fell from long-clouded eyes in the early Reformation, the errors of a stubbornly self-interested, papist church had to be rejected in light of God‟s truth. This meant comparing latter-day doctrines, practices, and institutions with the one genuine 14 Referring to major Lutheran and Reformed Protestant theologians from the 1520s-1540s, Cameron rightly notes “the essential novelty and destructive power of the reformers‟ beliefs about human salvation” and “the devastating force of their logic”: “At every critical point they challenged, redefined, and rearranged the very building-blocks of medieval belief: sin, law, faith, justification, the Church, in explicit defiance not only of the „Occamist school‟, but of a much broader medieval consensus.” Cameron, European Reformation, pp. 111-167, 191-193, quotations on 192, 111. 15 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 59-74; Walter Klaassen, Living at the End of the Ages: Apocalyptic Expectation in the Radical Reformation (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992). On medieval apocalypticism, see Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), and Curtis V. Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998); and on apocalyptic preaching in Italy in the early sixteenth century, see Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and the People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 89-120. 16 Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Hamm, “Between Severity and Mercy. Three Models of Pre-Reformation Urban Reform Preaching: Savonarola—Staupitz—Geiler,” in idem, Reformation of Faith, ed. Bast, pp. 50-87 at 55-65. 7
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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