Download ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 12

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY
CHURCH HISTORY 02
May 27, 2005
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This is being provided in a rough-draft format.
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>> Going back to the text of the 95 Theses, the power
of the Pope seems to be a major issue. How could Luther
be so critical of the Pope? His attitude seems so contrary
to what I picture of people from the time. I thought every
Christian at this time simply obeyed the Pope. Was Luther
alone in his criticism?
>> That's a really important question, Paul. So I hope
you'll be patient with a little longer answer. Um, first
of all, Luther could hardly have been alone in his criticism
or really nobody would have paid attention to him. Part
of the reason that Luther was so successful in promoting
reform was that many other people had paved the way for the
kinds of things Luther was saying. Now, to understand
that, and especially what happened in the late Middle Ages,
we need to back up even farther and talk about how the Popes
came to be so powerful, what kind of power they actually
had, and how people responded to it.
The Medieval Papacy, you could argue, begins, really,
with Gregory VII. He was the first Pope to try to actually
control much of the church. We talk about the Gregorian
reform of the 11th Century as one of the important Medieval
movements. The Gregorian reform is named for Gregory VII.
And what Gregory wanted to do, especially, was to exercise
control over those people who held office in the church,
and especially high office, like the bishops.
So Gregory began to claim the right to appoint bishops
to their seats. Now, you might wonder if the Pope hadn't
been doing that, who had been doing it? And it was the
nobility who had been appointing bishops, and especially
the emperor appointed the important bishops in the empire.
So this was an argument between the Pope and the emperor
about control over these higher offices in the church.
This dispute eventually ended with a compromise where
the Pope had the right to appoint a person to office and
give him the right to carry out pastoral duties, and the
emperor or a king or another official would give the bishop
the lands and the secular power that went with the office.
The whole issue, however, pointed out two things. First
of all, that the Medieval Popes were going to try to
exercise greater control than bishops of Rome had in
previous centuries, and it also shows the extent to which
papal power and secular power became intertwined and were
often at odds with each other.
We see that again with perhaps the most powerful of the
Medieval Popes, Innocent III. Innocent reigned from 1198
to 1216 and is generally agreed to be the pinnacle of papal
power in the Middle Ages. Innocent began to extend his
thinking beyond the church and attempted, in several ways,
to control secular politics as well as appointments within
the church.
Subsequent Popes weren't as successful as Innocent.
And though they tried to use the same formulas Innocent had
used, although they claimed the same powers Innocent had
claimed, they simply weren't able to do what Innocent had
done.
Part of the problem was that the kings of Europe were
becoming more and more independent and were more concerned
about asserting their rights over against both the emperor
and the Pope. This is what happened to Boniface VIII, most
famous for issuing the papal bull Unum Sanctum in 1302.
This is the papal bull that Lutherans love to quote against
the Catholic church because in itm Boniface said "It's
necessary for salvation for every human creature to be
subject to the Roman pontiff."
But why Boniface said that had more to do with politics
than with theology. He had been in a dispute, primarily
with the king of France, regarding the king's right to tax
the clergy. The king of France said he had every right to
tax the clergy within France. Boniface said no, they are
more my subjects than yours. They're beyond your power.
You have no right to tax them.
It came to be a tremendous issue throughout Europe. And
Boniface ultimately lost. Very few people believed what
he had to say in Unum Sanctum, and it was really the kings
of Europe who succeeded in the 14th into the 15th Centuries
in asserting their power over against the Papacy.
So we find at this time, in the 1300s and the 1400s, a
number of movements coming on the scene that are very
critical of papal power, are critical of the traditional
ways of thinking about the Papacy; and very often, along
with that, are arguing for reform.
I'm going to mention a few of those now, just to give
you an idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about and to
help you understand what the background was to Luther's own
criticism of the Papacy.
The first group that became critical of papal power might
surprise you a little bit. It was the Franciscan order.
Francis, whose order was approved by Innocent III in 1216,
Francis wanted to form a group of men who would live as he
felt Christ and the apostles lived. And for Francis, that
meant wandering around the countryside preaching and
living in absolute poverty. The Franciscans were to beg
for what they needed to live life each day.
Poverty was so important to the Franciscan order that
a portion of the order resisted all attempts by Franciscan
superiors and ultimately by the Popes to make the
Franciscans look more like other monastic orders. In
other words, to endow them with property, to settle the
friars in certain convents and to give them more for their
way of life than they would have by begging.
Well, as I said, a number of the Franciscan friars
resisted these attempts to make them look like other monks.
They insisted on a literal interpretation of the absolute
poverty that Francis had required. And this led them
ultimately to question papal authority, at least the
authority of the Popes who ruled against them.
Ironically, the Franciscans are probably the
originators of the idea of papal infallibility because
there were a couple of Popes who had ruled in their favor
on apostolic poverty, ruling that no one had the right to
force these Franciscans to be anything but absolutely poor.
Later Popes tried to change those rulings; and as I said,
tried to force the Franciscans to settle down a little bit.
And so Franciscans began to argue that the Popes were
infallible in their rulings so that these Popes who later
ruled against them would have to abide by the rulings of
their predecessors.
The point is: The Franciscans raise a lot of issues
about what power the Popes actually had, what was the Pope's
authority to judge in matters like the Franciscan order?
Another group that we've already talked about that
becomes critical of papal power is the humanists. And,
again, this is not across the board. Remember, we find
humanists of varying stripes and in different camps. But
humanists were very influential in questioning some of the
more extreme claims to papal power and especially in
questioning the historical basis for those claims.
The most famous example of this was Lorenzo Valla, who
in the 15th Century proved that this document called The
Donation of Constantine was a forgery. The Donation of
Constantine had been used by the Popes throughout the
Middle Ages as a sort of rhetorical buttress of their claims
to power. The Donation of Constantine was a document that
purported to explain how, when the emperor Constantine
moved the capital of the empire from Rome to
Constantinople, he left the bishop of Rome, the Pope, in
charge of the empire in the west; and, in fact, gave the
Pope the Imperial regalia, the imperial vestments to wear.
A number of people throughout the Middle Ages questioned
the authenticity of this text. But in the 15th Century,
this humanist Lorenzo Valla proved beyond a doubt that it
was a forgery, and he proved it in classic humanist fashion,
by looking at the language, looking at the Latin of the
document, and demonstrating that a document that was
written when this purported to be written simply would not
have used this language.
Now, again, in kind of a wonderful historical irony,
Valla ended his career working for the Papacy. So
apparently not all the Popes took this criticism that
personally. But it points out, again, that it's not simply
a matter of the Pope commanding and people obeying
throughout the Middle Ages, and especially in the later
Middle Ages.
There are two other examples of this criticism of the
Pope that I want to raise that maybe are a little more
significant than what comes from the Franciscans and from
the humanists: The first is conciliarism; the second
is mysticism. So conciliarism first.
Conciliarism arose as a response to a schism in the
church involving the Papacy. In the late 14th Century, the
Popes who had been living in Avignon in France for much of
that Century returned to Rome. But shortly after they
returned to Rome, there was a disputed election. One Pope
died and another was elected. And following that
election, the French cardinals decided that the election
hadn't been valid. They left Rome, elected their own Pope
and moved back to Avignon.
So the Christian church was left with two Popes and
having to make the decision which one they thought was
genuine, which one they thought was legitimate. France
supported the Pope in Avignon. Others supported the Roman
Pope. So western Christendom was split between these two
papal obediences.
There were a number of solutions to this schism proposed.
The one that finally took hold and proved successful was
conciliarism. That is the idea that a general council of
the church, a meeting of church leaders and secular
authorities, was superior to the Pope. And that claim was
important for the purpose of deposing these rival Popes and
then electing a successor.
There was an unsuccessful general council held in Pisa
in 1409. I say unsuccessful because although Pisa deposed
both the Roman Pope and the Pope in Avignon and elected a
third, most people didn't recognize the results of that
council, and it really only added a third Pope to the
crisis.
The issue was finally resolved by another council, this
one held in Constance, beginning in 1414. And here the
council asserted the idea that its judgment was superior
to the Pope. All three Popes were deposed in various ways
and another Pope was elected. Constance ended with this
Pope firmly in place; and, yet, it had planted the idea that
the Pope was not the ultimate authority even in the church,
that a general council was superior even to the Pope.
Now, throughout the 15th Century, the Popes fought that
idea in various ways. There were other councils that were
held, less successfully than Constance; and in 1460, the
Popes finally decreed conciliarism heretical. But that
didn't keep the conciliar idea from being there in people's
minds, especially in the holy Roman Empire. And this
becomes very important later for understanding the course
of Luther's trial and for his appearance before the emperor
at
of
of
as
the Diet of Worms. But for now, it's another example
how people in the late Middle Ages can be very critical
the Pope and the Papacy and, in fact, assert other powers
being equal to or superior to it.
A final example of that, in a completely different
direction, is mysticism. Now, I don't want to get bogged
down here in a definition of mysticism. It's rather hard
to define. And it isn't a single movement in the sense that
conciliarism is. But the fact is there are these people
throughout church history who attempt to experience the
presence of God in ways other than those mediated by the
church. And mysticism generally became a very significant
movement in the later Middle Ages, embracing a number of
different people, a number of different ideas about how
they might actually experience the presence of God.
For our purposes today, the point is simply this: These
people were not satisfied with simply doing what the church
told them to do. They thought there must be more to being
a Christian than having the priest tell you to obey the Ten
Commandments. There must be more to being a Christian than
being told that you received grace by being present at Mass
and things like that.
So, mysticism, in a sense, attacks papal authority from
the other end than conciliarism does. It's saying that the
church is there. The church has the sacraments, but
there's more to it than that. And mystics don't
necessarily deny the sacraments, but they believe that
there is something else to be experienced, there is
something else for Christians to have in their relationship
with God. And this, too, is going to be a very important
background idea for understanding how people throughout
Europe respond to what Luther has to say.
* * * * *
This is being provided in a rough-draft format.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is
provided in Order to facilitate communication
accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of
the proceedings
* * * *