ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 12 CH2 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1 800 825 7234 * * * * * 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 * * * * >> 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 the Diet of Worms. But for now, it's another example of how people in the late Middle Ages can be very critical of the Pope and the Papacy and, in fact, assert other powers as 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 * * * *