Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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