LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1998, Page 323

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS

equally true, false, or useful, because this violates the very core of clear
Scriptural teaching (Is. 44:6-11, 24; John 14:6; Acts 4:10-12; Phil. 2:9-11).
Second, Christian faith has many implications for life in this world, not
only for life in the next (Rom. 12:1-2; 14:7~9; 1 Cor. 5:9-10; Gal. 2:20;
5:16-25; Eph. 4:17-5:20; Phil. 3:17~21; Col. 1:10-12; 3:1-17; 1 Peter 1:13-16).
As a result, since Christians are bound to confess that Jesus is their Lord
also in this world, and not only in the next, the early Christians simply could
not perform the perfunctory ritual! required by Roman imperial law in
which the emperor's divinity (or, more precisely, earthly sovereignty) was
proclaimed.'* Thus, early Christians were considered threats to the estab-
lished social order and, whenever the Roman authorities insisted upon the
traditional sacrifices, Christians were persecuted—sometimes violently.

A revolutionary change in the treatment of Christians occurred when,
in response to a vision, Constantine vowed to conquer under the sign of
the cross. After he was victorious and had become Roman emperor, Chris-
tianity eventually became the officially established religion of his empire.
While many good things resulted from the unfettered preaching of the
Gospel under Constantinian rule, it also opened the door to extensive cor-
ruption of the church’s life. Few politically ambitious people had been
interested in the church when it was persecuted, but that changed quickly
when it was officially endorsed. Furthermore, the doctrinal debate that had
always existed to some degree within the church now became a political
problem for emperors wishing to use the church as a unifying cultural
force. The result, therefore, was a mixing of spiritual and temporal con-
cerms—a confusion of spiritual and temporal authority—which was to
afflict the church’s history ever after.

The greatest expansion of the church's involvement with government
came with the collapse of the Roman Empire, when the church literaily
stepped in to hold European civilization together. The great church father
Augustine had approved of using civil power in service to the church by a
ruler who was a Christian, but nevertheless refused to make such an exer-
cise of civil power a proper concern of the church. Theologians and popes
after Augustine were not so careful. The medieval church became preoc-
cupied with its legal and ecclesiastical structure. There were never-ending
battles with emperors and kings regarding issues of jurisdiction and sov-
ereignty, with popes using the spiritual power of excommunication to
force the political compliance of civil rulers. One of the most dramatic
moments in the history of the western church came when the Holy Roman
Emperor Henry IV knelt in the snow at Canossa in 1077. The pope had pro-
hibited lay control over the placing of clergy in the church (particularly the

“Scharlemann, 36: “The member of the church could not in good conscience rendet to
the state what properly belongs only to God. His faith, expressed most briefly in the formu-
la Jesus is Lord,’ ran head on into the pagan insistence that ‘Caesar is Lord.’ ”

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The conciliar theory of church government involved two fundamental
distinctions. First, there was a distinction between that church headed by
the Roman pope and the universal church headed only by Christ. Second,
there was a distinction between the letter of church law and its spirit, or
true intention, which was always to serve good and not evil. Conciliar the-
orists, and Protestant reformers after them, often appealed to fairness, jus-
tice and equity when arguing against specific actions of the pope. Popes
were to feed the sheep and not run them over a cliff. Thus, papal injunc-
tions could be evaluated according to the common benefit of all.'¢

While the Roman papacy emerged from the turmoil surrounding the
Council of Constance with the upper hand, it was a hollow triumph. The
Popes had to deal realistically with the rising power of the national monar-
chies. By doing so, however, the papacy itself was viewed increasingly as
just another temporal power. Its spiritual authority was compromised. As
abuses and church taxes multiplied, it was hardly surprising that the late
15th and early 16th centuries saw the development of intense resentment
against Rome, especially in Germany. And it was, in fact, in Germany that
the raging fire of reformation was ignited.

C. The Protestant Reformation

Luther is reported once to have said:

I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did noth-

ing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip

and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or

emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did

everything.”

Luther’s faith in God’s Word did not mean, however, that there was no
political dimension to the working out of God’s purpose or that Luther
devoted no time to politics.

The spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation was Luther's post-
ing of 95 theses against indulgences on the door of the Wittenberg castle
church. The recently invented printing press, however, quickly made
Luther's academic debate a matter of public controversy. Within four
years, spurred by enormous popular response, Luther proceeded from the
more narrow matter of indulgences to a wholesale reformation of the doc-
trine and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, while Luther may

* thid., 162-63.

* Martin Luther, “Eight Sermons at Wittenberg” (1522), Luther's Works, American Edi-
thon {hereafter LW] (Philadelphia: Fortress Press and St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
1958-67), 51:77

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investiture of bishops) and, by securing the forgiveness of Pope Gregory
VIL, the emperor was also securing the imperial power that had been jeop-
ardized by his excommunication.

The high-water mark of papal power probably was achieved by Inno-
cent IIT (1198-1216), who considered himself set between God and man,
lower than God but higher than man, judging all and being judged by no
one. Innocent III intervened in the imperial election of 1202, forced a
humiliating oath of loyalty from King John of England in 1213, and made
both the inquisition and the crusades effective weapons against internal
religious dissent. Indeed, Innocent HI and his successors waged so effec-
tive a campaign against the Holy Roman emperors, who unwisely
attempted to dominate southern Italy and Sicily, that Germany was left
politically fragmented until the 19th century.

With the revival of Roman law and Aristotelian philosophy in the 12th
century, however, also came attempts to limit the power of the pope.
French attempts to subordinate the power of Pope Boniface VIII
(1294-1303) to that of King Philip IV triggered one of the most serious con-
frontations of church and state in the Middle Ages, from which the papa-
cy (forced to move to Avignon, France) never really recovered. The secu-
lar ruler, it was argued, received his authority from the citizenry as a
whole, rather than from the church. The teaching of Marsilius of Padua (ca.
1290-1343) also challenged traditional support for the papacy. Marsilius
saw authority invested by God in the people who, in turn, empowered the
king to nule their temporal lives and the pope to direct their spiritual lives.

The most serious medieval attempt to limit papal power was “concil-
iar theory,” which provided religious and legal justifications for the inde-
pendent power of church councils. When the Council of Constance met
between 1414 and 1417, a schism had existed in the church for 36 years.
There were three duly elected popes—one in Rome, one in Avignon, and
one in Pisa—each supported by his own college of cardinals and political
allies. After months of bickering, the council passed a resolution declaring
itself to be the supreme authority within the church. While this assertion of
conciliar power was short-lived (almost half a century), it did constitute a
genuine experiment in representative church government. Calvinists later
“appealed directly to Constance and its more radical successor, the Coun-
cil of Basel, as models of the people’s right to enforce standards of conduct
on both religious and political leaders.” Indeed, a political lesson later was
to be drawn from this ecclesiastical crisis: “Lower magistrates and parlia-
ments, mindful of the welfare of the larger political community, should
resist rulers whose tyranny posed a danger to the body politic."

“Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Inteltectual and Religious History of
Late Medirval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 156-57.

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have concentrated on the church, the fate of that reformation depended
largely on princely politics within the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed,
Luther’s very survival depended on the protection given him by his prince,
Elector Frederick of Saxony.

That Luther was not burned at the stake as John Hus had been 100
years previously (although Luther seems to have expected it) was due to
the fact that Frederick did not enforce the condemnation of Luther in the
Edict of Worms (May 26, 1521). Instead, he secreted Luther in the Wart-
burg castle. The Saxon Elector’s resistance to pope and emperor seems to
have been grounded in two principles. First, he apparently regarded the
Edict of Worms as unconstitutional:

It had been drafted by Imperial councillors as early as B May, but its
presentation was delayed until so many princes had departed from
Worms that it was passed only by a rump Diet. Some of the most power-
ful princes of the empire challenged its legality and held themselves not to
be bound by its terms. From 1521 there was an energetic campaign to have
it rescinded. ... The failure of the Edict of Worms was largely the failure of
German political authorities to enforce it.'*

Second, influenced by the Renaissance ideal of the Christian prince, Frederick
simply would not defer all judgment on theological questions to the church:
What is remarkable is Frederick’s readiness to assume responsibility:
He refused to allow the case to pass to Rome. He sought the opinion of
Erasmus. The latter's declaration that Luther had only sinned against the
privileges of the papacy and of monks must have strengthened his resolve.
Later, Frederick attacked the burning of Luther's books and remarked that
Luther himself had protested that he would do everything ‘consistent with
the name of Christian.’ Frederick was determined to be the judge of this. ...
In short, Frederick chose to judge what was true or false in matters of doc-
trine. Later he was happy to propose the standard by which others should
judge. He called this the office of a Christian prince.”
One of the major political realities of the Protestant Reformation was the
new readiness of civil authorities to adjudicate ecclesiastica! questions.
Because of military threats from the Turks and other distractions,
Emperor Charlies V did not seriously address this resistance to the Edict of
Worms until after the Protestant movements had grown enormously. Even
though he turned his attention to it in earnest in 1530 (at the Diet of Augs-
burg), Charles did not actually take military action against the Protestants

“RW. Scribner, “Politics and the Institutionalization of Reform in Germany,” in The
New Cambridge Modern: History, vol. 2, The Reformation 1520-1559, 2nd ed., ed. G. R. Eltron
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 172-73.

John Stephens, The italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and Artistic Change
before the Reformation (New York: Longman, 1990), 210.

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