Church History II - Lesson 3

03 Church History 2

The following lecture is provided by Biblical Training. The speaker is Dr. Gerald Bray. More information is available at www.biblicaltraining.org. ...resentment is that they would go around the villages taking young boys, if the boys looked, you know, healthy, enrolling them in the army, forcibly converting them to Islam at the age of, you know, six or seven or something like that, and then using them as special troops, you know, to go back and restore order, if that is the word, in their home areas, you see, the areas where they originally came from, in other words, to attack Christians in whatever way possible.

So this was a particularly cruel way of behaving. They also made it impossible for any Christian to own land. You had to be a Muslim in order to own land.

And this remained the case as long as Turkey dominated Southeastern Europe. So until the 19th century, when there were sort of nationalistic uprisings and so on, and the Turks were thrown out, only Muslims were allowed to own land. Now one of the things that, of course, affects us today is the fact that one area of Southeastern Europe which was not affected by peasant uprisings in the 19th century was the territory which we now call Bosnia, here in the middle, because Bosnia, instead of having a nationalistic revolution, which would have got rid of the Muslim landowner class, instead was taken over by Austria-Hungary in 1878, and the Muslim upper class was allowed to stay.

They stayed in place. You see, there was no peasant uprising. With the result, of course, that they're still there.

And, I mean, the trouble in Bosnia, you see, is largely caused by this, that the Muslim element, which is about a third of the population, has traditionally been the dominant group, and they have not treated the Orthodox or the Catholic peasants terribly well over the centuries. And so, of course, now is the hour of revenge, you could say, from that. So you have to bear that in mind when you come across this, the long-term influence of this Turkish invasion.

Anyhow, the conquest of Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453, led to an exodus of scholars, Greek scholars, to Italy, because Italy was the nearest place to go, and the arrival in Italy of Greek learning on a large scale for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. And this created an intellectual revolution, which we today call the Renaissance. Now, from the religious point of view, the most important thing about this was that the Renaissance challenged papal authority.

It challenged it from several points of view. First of all, the recovery of the Greek language, knowledge of the Greek language, reminded people that the New Testament had not originally been written in Latin. Now, to you and me, this, of course, is obvious, but for a long time in the Middle Ages, people did not, I mean, they knew in some sort of distant part of their mind that this was the case, but they had no access to the original Greek and they didn't bother trying to get it particularly.

So the reappearance of Greek was quite a dramatic thing. And of course, as people began to study the Greek of the New Testament and also Hebrew, they started taking an interest in Hebrew as well, they discovered that in many cases, the Hebrew and Greek texts of the scriptures were different from the Latin translation to which they had been accustomed over the centuries. Now, this is a very complicated subject because the Greek text, if we just stick with the New Testament, the Hebrew text is slightly different, but the Greek text of the New Testament, which was used in 15th century Italy, which they had brought from Byzantium, from Constantinople in the 15th century, was in fact a text which over the centuries had been interpolated, corrupted, changed in little ways, of course, but it was a very late text.

The only advantage it had was that it was in Greek, which was the original language of the New Testament. So in that case, in that sense, it was closer to the original. But the Latin translation which was used in the West had been done by Jerome in the 4th century using, of course, the best texts available to him.

And Jerome had texts of the New Testament which he could consult, which we no longer have, you see, older than any text which is now available to us. And so there are places where Jerome is actually more accurate in his translation, because he's translating from a much earlier text than was the case with the 15th century Greek version. Now, I'll give you some examples of that in a minute, but just so you get the idea of it first.

But in the 15th century, at the beginning of the Renaissance, people didn't see it that way. They didn't have a sense of textual criticism and all this kind of thing. That was a 19th century development.

And they thought, well, Greek is the original language. The Greek text must therefore be superior to the Latin. We are going to translate now from the Greek and ignore the Latin, and if they disagree, the Latin will be wrong.

And so, of course, there was this massive revolt among the scholarly establishment against the authority of the Roman Church, which insisted on the correctness of the Latin translation, which it used for official purposes. You see, this is so that there's that challenge to begin with. Now, this came to fruition, or came to a crisis, in 1516, when Erasmus, the great scholar of the Renaissance, published his edition of the New Testament.

His Greek edition. And this was the edition which, after it was revised and slightly changed and so on, eventually became what is now known as the Textus Receptus, that is to say the received text of the Greek New Testament, coming down from Constantinople through the Renaissance and through the scholars of that time. That's the origin of the Textus Receptus.

The most famous English translation which is based on this is the authorised version, or King James Version, of 1611. And it is there that you will find the readings which are typical of the Textus Receptus and which are different in modern translations in some cases. A famous example, peace on earth, goodwill to all men, in the King James, becomes peace on earth to men of goodwill in modern translations.

And that is in fact what Jerome had in his Latin text. So there is an example of where Jerome was actually more accurate than the scholars of the Renaissance. Just as a matter of fact, we have to understand this because it's a complicated business.

However, in principle, even though it didn't always work out very well in practice, in principle, using the original text and not a translation is obviously superior, it is a better idea. And so the scholars were fighting for this, they were fighting for authenticity. Let's get back to the true sources.

Another thing which happened as a result of this was that people began to look into documents which had lain around in archives for a long time and nobody really questioned where they came from or what they meant or anything like that. And there was one scholar of very great importance in this field, a man by the name of Lorenzo Valla, who parted around the Vatican archives looking for different things. And Valla managed to prove that some of the documents on which the papal claims were based were in fact false.

These are now known as the false decretals. What these were were a series of documents supposedly written by the Emperor Constantine when he left Rome for Constantinople, giving the Bishop of Rome at that time, the person that we call the Pope, the right to rule in his place. And the Popes of the Middle Ages claimed the right to rule, sorry, the false decretals, claimed the right to rule not only over Rome but over the whole of Western Europe on the basis of what was known as the Donation of Constantine.

You see, that was the official title. And Valla demonstrated about 1450 that this was a forgery. Now, modern scholarship has shown that this forgery must have been made probably shortly after the time of Charlemagne, sometime in the 9th century, about 850, something like that.

But of course, when it was discovered, this knocked a hole into the prestige of the papacy because all of a sudden it was found out that the basis on which it was claiming all its authority was in fact false. Is that civil and religious authority? Yes, yes, both, yeah. So you see that they had based all of this on a false series of documents.

There were several documents, but... Do we still have these? Oh yes, sure, yeah. You can buy the copies, translations, and so on. Yeah, they exist.

Did it come from forgery? No, no. Probably, well, we don't know who forged it, but it was probably forged by some monk working in the Vatican or working at Rome at the time. I mean, you see, what happened in the Middle Ages, I mean, we think, of course, that forgery is a terrible thing.

But in the Middle Ages, and again, you must remember documents got lost very frequently. You see, this was the basis of it. I mean, people would lose things, I mean, inevitably.

And there was no very safe way of keeping things for over a long period of time. So probably about sometime after 800, people said, well, there must have been such a document at some point, you see. This must have been there, and everybody agreed that it must have been there, and nobody knew quite where it was.

So somebody said, well, it's got lost, we'll sit down and write it again. You know, I mean, to us this sounds very odd, but if you say, for example, I don't know, you know, you must have had a birth certificate, but you lost it. Well, of course, there'd be a way of finding it, I mean, obviously now, or getting a copy.

But let's say there wasn't, you know, I mean, there was just no system around to do this. I mean, nobody's going to question the fact that you were born. You must have, you know, you must have been, you must have come from somewhere.

So, you know, you might as well sit down and just write one. All you need is a piece of paper, after all. I mean, nobody cares, do they, really? I know in the early church it seems like there's a really, really dim view of that kind of thing.

Oh, in the early church, that's a different matter. Because, you see, the early church was in Roman society, which was highly organized. And so, I mean, there were ways of preserving things, but I'm talking now about the Middle Ages, you know, when things got lost.

And people were aware that lots of things had got lost. But you don't think it was more, I mean, it's just hard to see someone doing that in their intent, kind of being innocent. It seems like, I mean, like, it seems like they're sitting around going, you know, we need something to be able to consolidate our power.

Sure, yeah. Well, of course, I mean, yes, I mean, there are different factors that work, you know. I think the real thing is that we ask ourselves, how could it have been, you know, that such a thing would have carried so much weight for such a long time? And this was the way it happened.

I mean, these false decretals are, of course, very famous, and therefore everybody sort of, you know, puts a lot of weight on these. But in fact, this was a common practice in the Middle Ages, because it's basically how a non-literate society copes with the need for writing when it arises. You see, most of the people, most of the time, don't really need a document for anything.

But then all of a sudden, somebody wants something for some strange reason, and so you have to produce it. You know, and you drag out of the cupboard something with letters on and think, well, this must be it. You know what I mean? It's a bit like that.

And so it was part of the general breakdown of civil government and society in Western Europe that people got into the habit of accepting this kind of thing in a way that we wouldn't do it, do so today. I mean, I suppose it's, again, all I can think of is, you know, if all kinds of documents got lost in a fire or something like that, you know, and you had to prove possession of your property or something, I mean, people would have to accept some other way of proving it. You see what I mean? It's a bit like, a bit of that kind.

Which is not to say that it was right to do it. I mean, that's a different matter. But you can kind of understand how it all happened within that context and not blame them too much.

But anyway, the important point is that Waller proved that it was a forgery. And the Greeks, of course, coming from Constantinople, knew it was a forgery because they knew nothing like that had ever happened. So, you know, this kind of, as I say, knocked the papacy and its prestige.

It didn't destroy the papacy's power, but it kind of made people sit up and realize, at least the intellectuals, sit up and realize, hey, what's going on here? And that was, of course, a very important thing. Now, the next thing that happened in the 15th century that we have to think about is the beginning of worldwide expansion. I mean, in the 15th century, the known world, as far as European civilization was concerned, was really more or less what you see on this map and maybe a little bit off to the east.

But people wouldn't go much further than that or even know about much else than that. However, beginning early in the 15th century, sometime around 1415, 1420, the Portuguese here on the west coast of Iberia began to explore down the coast of Africa, looking for a way to India that would avoid having to go overland through what was becoming Turkey, through hostile territory. And they believed that they could sail down around the bottom of Africa and eventually sort of get to India that way.

You see, that was the idea. And so year after year, they would send expeditions down the coast of Africa and they, of course, met African tribes and so on and had quite a lot to do with them, one way or another. And this exploration sort of went on privately, quietly, on the western shores of Europe at that time.

Not many people knew much about it. But what sort of changed matters were other events in the Iberian Peninsula. At the beginning of the 15th century, there were five kingdoms in this area.

Portugal was one. We've already talked about that. That's more or less stayed the same.

Moving east in the highland, the sort of plateau area of the central peninsula, was the kingdom of Castile, as we call it in English, Castilea in Spanish, but Castile in English. Then up here in the Pyrenees, 90% on the Spanish side but 10% on the French side, was the little kingdom of Navarre. I'm not going to have a lot to say about Navarre today, but I want you to keep it in mind because we'll come back to that later.

Over here on the east coast, around Barcelona, with its capital of Barcelona, was the kingdom of Aragon. And then in the south, down here, the last remnants of the Arabic kingdom, the kingdom of Granada. Portugal, as I say, was expanding west, south, over the sea.

It was a maritime power. Aragon here, Barcelona, was expanding east, across the Mediterranean. They captured the Balearic Islands here, Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, and they were gradually building an empire this way.

Castile was in the middle, the poorest but also the largest in terms of land area and so on, of the Spanish kingdoms. And in the year 1479, the male line of Castile ran out. In other words, there was no male heir to the throne.

Instead, the heiress was a young girl whom we call Isabella, but it's known as Isabel in Spanish. It doesn't matter, but I'll call her Isabella because that's the way we call her normally in English. Isabella had to marry.

And of course, she was a rich heiress. I mean, Castile was a poor country, but as the queen, she was a rich heiress and so on, and she needed a husband. And of course, she couldn't come to Bicen in those days, so she had to sort of look closer to home, you see.

Where was she going to find her man? And there were really one of two possibilities. Two people were after her for different reasons. One was the king of Portugal.

The king of Portugal wanted to marry Isabella because he felt that if he married her and joined her kingdom to his, he would not have to worry so much about invasion from the rear. You see, that was the advantage from his point of view. But of course, Isabella realized, and her counsellors realized even more, that if she married the king of Portugal, she would be expected to move to Portugal, and that would have been the end of Castile as a separate kingdom.

I mean, there would be no question of the king of Portugal moving into Castile. What would he be doing there? So Castile would suffer, so they believed, from such a union. So they were not terribly thrilled about this prospect, although, of course, they recognized it as a possibility.

The other suitor was Ferdinand of Aragon. Aragon was also a very rich kingdom, maritime kingdom, and Ferdinand no doubt wanted Castile also, in order to protect his rear, in a sense. But Barcelona was not really a very good place for a capital because it was too close to France.

You see, and the French could invade easily. And so the chances were that if Ferdinand married Isabella, Ferdinand would move to Castile, or at least he could be persuaded to spend a lot of his time in Castile, and therefore Castile was a lot happier with that arrangement. And so, in that year, Ferdinand and Isabella married each other, and bringing Castile and Aragon together to form the nucleus of the modern Spanish state.

Now, Isabella was very pious, of course, and one of the things that she made Ferdinand promise when they got married was that he was going to finish off the crusade, get rid of the Arabs in Granada, which they proceeded to do. But they did it in a very piecemeal and slow fashion, and it actually took about ten years for the Kingdom of Granada to be finally conquered. It was conquered eventually in 1492.

It surrendered on the 6th of January in that year. Now, 1492, as you know, was going to be a very important year from many points of view. Isabella, who was flush with victory at this point, and very thankful to God, decided that she had to do something to show her gratitude for all that God had done to her.

And the first thing she thought of, the most pious thing she could imagine, was to expel the Jews from Spain. Because after all, what do we want Jews around for? You know, they're not Christians, they're just sort of damaging the reputation of the country, etc. So she threw the Jews out in 1492, and they sort of had to go, and they spread more or less all over Europe.

Quite a lot of them went to Turkey, surprisingly, where they were made welcome. And they lived there. Well, some of them still do.

These are the origin of the so-called Sephardi Jews. Sepharad is the Hebrew word for Spain. And if you come across today, there are two types of Jews.

As you know, Sephardis and Ashkenazis. Ashkenazis, Germany. So the Yiddish-speaking New York type of Jew is probably Ashkenazi.

And the Sephardis are the Mediterranean types, you know, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. And so this is where they come from, the Sephardi community was expelled from Spain in 1492. Isabella wanted to get rid of the Muslims as well, but she had to wait a little while because it was too fresh.

You see, they'd just won the victory and so on. They couldn't quite get rid of the Muslims as easily as that. But within a generation or so, the Muslims were expelled as well.

Now what this meant for Spain, of course, is that an awful lot of people suddenly became Christian. Because when you expel people in that way or at that level, and the French were going to find this later on when they tried to expel the Huguenots, you see, the French Protestants, a similar kind of thing, is that some people, of course, go because they have enough money or they have enough get-up-and-go or they're too committed to their religion or whatever it is, and they actually go. But an awful lot of other people don't go.

You know, they adapt to the new circumstances. And if professing conversion to Christianity was what you had to do in order to keep your house, your garden, your business, your shop, etc., etc., then an awful lot of people did that. And Spain suddenly became full of what are known as new Christians.

In other words, people who, you know, converted in order to avoid expulsion. But as inevitably happens in circumstances of this kind, these conversions were suspect. It's very difficult to say, you know, who was sincere and who was not, but, I mean, let's face it, the chances are that if you have a huge community of people who are more or less forced to convert, the sincerity is going to be doubtful.

And it was believed that these converted Jews and Muslims, because they were both, were in fact practicing Jewish and Muslim rights personally, notably circumcision, in their own home, sort of thing, without anybody else watching. And, in a sense, deceiving the government by this, you see, in living in this way. This, in turn, meant that an institution which had not been widely used previously suddenly came into its own, and this was the Inquisition, as it is called.

The Inquisition was initially, it was Europe-wide, it existed in every European country, and its main purpose was to root out witches and, you know, people who sort of did things they shouldn't do in churches and this kind of thing. Great deal of harm either, you know. I mean, it wasn't much to talk about in most places, although, inevitably, there were always one or two cases of extreme zeal on the part of some Inquisitor or other.

But, generally speaking, we don't hear much about the Inquisition in most European countries. Spain was different. The Spanish Inquisition, in fact, was so different that today, when we talk about the Inquisition, Spain is the country you think of.

A lot of people think the Inquisition existed only in Spain, you know, which is not true. But, certainly, the Spanish Inquisition is the one that has become famous, and it has become famous for this reason, that it was used as a way of ferreting out insincere new Christians. And this was a terrible time in Spanish history, that purity of blood became, you know, something which you had to prove, you had to demonstrate.

You didn't have any Jewish ancestors. It was really the forerunner of Hitler in this way. It's hard to believe, but, you know, that's the way it was.

So Spain turned to this rather nasty way of doing things at this point, and Spanish Catholicism, I suppose we'd have to call it now, became a very narrow and very intolerant form of religion, which, of course, it remained for many centuries. I mean, you have to remember this. It was a long-term development.

However, as we also know, 1492 was the year when Christopher Columbus, who was an Italian from Genoa, got fed up hanging around the court of Portugal. He'd gone to Portugal asking for money from the Portuguese king in order to mount an expedition to find India, and Columbus was a bit of a genius because he said, well, rather than try and sail around the Horn of Africa, you know, I mean, you've tried that for years and haven't got anywhere. The world is, after all, round, which was a new concept, I suppose, to the king of Portugal, but never mind.

You know, if you sail west, you'll hit India. And this was sort of treated politely as a joke, you know. Yes, oh, yes, well, you know, fine, yes.

Sorry, we haven't got any money to finance your expedition, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. Well, anyway, Columbus was sort of cooling his heels in Lisbon when he heard that Granada had fallen to Castile and to Ferdinand and Isabella, so he hightailed it off to their camp and presented himself and said, well, you know, will you finance my expedition to the west? And, of course, Isabella, who was just looking for projects, you know, having suddenly sort of come into her own, said, yes, I will. Ferdinand wouldn't.

Ferdinand was a man, you know, so he was a bit more cautious. I mean, this is quite true. He said, no way, you know, this man is not to be trusted.

We don't want this. But Isabella said, yes, yes, yes, yes, fine, go ahead, you know, take my jewels, take my this and that, and off you go. Well, anyway, much to everybody's surprise, Christopher Columbus found something, as you know.

It didn't turn out to be India. But it was an acceptable substitute for India, at least, you know, more or less. And within a few years, Spain, which had superior technology, it had guns, you know, was able to overthrow the Mexicans, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas in Peru and so on, and build for itself an American empire, as you know.

Now, the Spanish empire in America is a very important development because, for two reasons. One, because it was the last of the old-fashioned empires. An old-fashioned empire was an empire where people went out basically to knock off as many heads as they possibly could, to conquer as much territory as they could, and to dominate this territory for as long as they could.

I mean, it was for glory and honor and power. This was the purpose of the empire. The new style of empire was represented by the Portuguese first, later by the Dutch, and finally by the British.

A different kind of empire altogether. The new style of empire was mercantile. It was a commercial thing, you see.

And the Portuguese, when they finally did get to India, which they did not long afterwards, they did eventually get around the bottom of Africa, went basically for trade, you know. Conquering the country was a secondary issue, as far as they were concerned. It was fine if they could, and if they had to, they would.

But basically, they were trying to establish trading posts, centers where they could get spices and so on, and bring them back to Europe. I mean, that was the main element. The Spaniards in America were not so bothered about that, you see.

There were no spices in America. There were only things like potatoes, which they brought back, and tobacco, which they brought back, and syphilis, which they brought back. You know, it wasn't the healthiest of all.

It's amazing, you know, what they found. Yeah, I know. There you go.

And things like that, you see, which they introduced. Well, this was a rather different level, of course, you know, of thing. But more important than that, there was gold and especially silver for the asking in America.

There were silver mines and so on in what is now Bolivia, and places like that, and of course a lot of gold in Mexico. And although they didn't systematically mine it particularly, I mean, they did in Bolivia, but it wasn't quite like that. Nevertheless, the concept of El Dorado, you know, I mean, the golden country, this is the place where they're going, penetrated very deeply into the Spanish mind.

But even worse, it caused terrible inflation in Spain, that all of a sudden living in Spain became almost impossibly expensive because all this gold and silver was pouring in. You know, if you were lucky enough to have gone to America, you come back with all this money in your pocket, all this gold and silver in your pocket, but you haven't really done anything to earn it. You see, it wasn't earned money.

It was stolen money off Indians or out of Indian temples or something like this. And this, of course, dislocated the Spanish economy in the longer term and caused decline of Spain over, you know, a couple of hundred years. But initially, of course, Spain suddenly found that it was the richest, most powerful country in Europe because it had all kinds of money and access to money that nobody else had.

Now, at this point, of course, the European powers begin to take an interest in the country. I mean, nobody really bothered about Spain before, but now all of a sudden it became an interesting thing, you know, to get your teeth into if you possibly could. And Ferdinand and Isabella had no trouble whatever marrying off their two daughters.

They didn't have a son. Their elder daughter was married to the Habsburg prince who was the heir to most of what is now Austria and indeed to the title of emperor in central Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, which was there. So the elder daughter got married off to him and they produced a son whom we know as Charles V. Charles V, who became king of Spain and emperor of Germany in 1519 and remained as such until he abdicated.

He actually retired and went into a monastery in 1556. This is the man who confronted Luther because when Luther revolted and he had to go to make a count of himself at what is called the Diet of Worms, you know, Worms in Germany, and he had to stand up and give an account of his faith and when he said, here I stand, I can do no other. My conscience is captive to the word of God.

Charles V was the lucky recipient of that sermon, you can say. So it is important to remember who this man was and where he came from. The younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella made a rather different match.

Does anyone know who she married? No? All silence. She's quite well known. In fact, she's better known than her older sister.

No guesses? Who was she? Do you know? No, she wasn't Mary. She was Catherine, Catherine of Aragon, who eventually ended up marrying King Henry VIII, and we will certainly hear more of her in due course. But it's important to remember this, you see, that that's the kind of marriage links that are being made at this point and they are going to have long-term consequences, of course, in the development of the Reformation.

So the sudden rise to power of Spain, the circumstances of this rise, and the nature of Spanish Catholicism, this is terribly important, because Spain was not only the most powerful country in the world at the time, it was also the most intolerant of all the countries of Western Europe when it came to people who didn't agree with the official line. And of course this intolerance was going to spread and as Spanish power spread, wherever a Spanish army appeared, the Inquisition was not far behind. And it was this aspect, of course, which scared people in Germany and places like that to death, as you can imagine.

It wasn't so much having to fight the Spanish armies, it was what was in their wake if you surrendered. It wasn't kind of shake hands and all good friends again. It meant that the heresy trials and the burning at the stake and all these other things, which had more or less been forgotten in Northern Europe at this point, came back into full play.

Slightly later, but it's connected. Loyola is a generation later, a second generation. But yes, it certainly comes out of that mentality, definitely.

Martin Luther was born in 1483, probably on the 10th or 11th of November. Does anyone know how we know that? There's no record of it, but I'm just wondering whether anyone can tell how we know when he was born. Test your knowledge, you see.

Can you make some reference to it being Mary's birthday? No, no. There's a way you can tell. People at that time were normally named after the saint on whose day they were born or baptized.

And St. Martin's Day is the 11th of November. And Martin, I think, knew that, you see. I mean, his birthday was around there.

So he was either born that day or perhaps the day before in 1483. And he grew up in central Germany, here in Erfurt, around this area, in a family which was on the way up. Luther's father had somehow moved off the farm into town and he was gradually becoming a fairly wealthy businessman in the city of Erfurt.

And therefore he was able to afford a good education for his children. I mean, he was a sort of up-and-coming, the rising middle class, you see, of that particular time. And young Martin, as I say, received a good education and his father wanted him either to carry on in business or become a lawyer, you know, or enter the government service, something like that, something that would bring the family up even further, you know, in the next generation, to sort of carry on this development.

And young Martin, as far as we know, was more or less prepared to carry on in this way, except that when he was about 19 or 20, he was on horseback in a forest during a thunderstorm and the horse bolted at the lightning and Martin was thrown from the horse and was very, very lucky to have walked away without hardly a bruise, you know, at that time. And he was aware of just how lucky he was and he was so shaken by the fact that he was spared in this way that he vowed that he would give his life to God. And so he turned his back on worldly comfort and so on and, much to his father's annoyance, entered a monastery.

Now, the type of monastery which Martin Luther entered was an Augustinian monastery. He was the Order of St. Augustine. The Augustinians had not actually been founded by Augustine.

They had nothing to do with the historical Augustine. They were founded really in the high Middle Ages, in the 14th century, as an attempt to get back to the primitive lifestyle of the early church. And they regarded Augustine as their chief guide in this respect.

And they thought that studying the works of Augustine and so on, you see, and the life of Augustine, the career of Augustine, was the surest guide to living the authentic Christian life. Now, this meant that the young Martin Luther received a very good theological education with certain emphases which he might not have received otherwise. Augustine's theology is, of course, very strongly rooted in the doctrine of grace, that you are saved by grace through faith and not by works.

So that is one thing that Luther learned from Augustine. Of course, another thing, he learned the importance of conversion, because Augustine was converted. You know, he wasn't just sort of born and brought up in the system.

You know, he had a dramatic conversion experience. And Luther himself felt that he'd had a similar kind of experience, you see, when he'd been thrown from his horse. So there was a kind of psychological and emotional link in this way, you see, between the two men in that sense.

And, of course, Luther learned a lot of very good theology by reading the Master of Western Theology in the way that he did. So this was a very important training ground for him. After about ten years in the monastery, Luther was invited to become the first professor of New Testament studies at the new University of Wittenberg.

Now, Wittenberg... Let me spell this correctly. Be careful, because it is Wittenberg and not Wittenburg. People make this mistake constantly.

But a berg is a mountain, like an iceberg, and a burg is a fortress or a town, a city. You know, it's a different thing. So Wittenberg, which is here in central Germany, not far from where he came from originally, and Luther moved there and became professor of New Testament when the university opened, which was in 1512.

This was a very exciting time to be studying the New Testament because, of course, Luther now entered a world where the Greek text was being rediscovered. He became a devoted follower of Erasmus and was one of the purchasers of Erasmus's edition of 1516 as soon as it came out. Luther also studied the New Testament with an intensity which he had not previously devoted to it and which was relatively unusual in his time.

I mean, people didn't read the New Testament in the way that they do now. And, of course, there's nothing like having to teach a subject to make you actually learn it. You know, it's true.

And so Luther, you see, having to lecture to his class every day, had to think of something to say. And so this meant, you see, that, well, it's absolutely right. He had to dig deeply into the actual text of the New Testament itself in order to work it out for his students.

And, of course, it was in the process of doing this, as he was doing this, as he was sort of going through the text, that inevitably he came across the letters of Paul in the New Testament and that he began to lecture on them. Galatians, in particular, and then Romans, you see, which particularly attracted him. Now, all of that might not have meant too much in the longer term, but Luther, meanwhile, had been going through various spiritual traumas.

You must remember he was a monk, and therefore he lived under very strict spiritual discipline. And this spiritual discipline was designed, really, to cleanse his soul so that it would be able to meet with God in the right way. Luther could not cleanse his soul.

The harder he tried, the more he was aware that he was failing to do this. He didn't know what he could do to get rid of the sense of sin in his life. Now, there is no doubt that Luther was a pain in the neck to everybody else in the monastery.

I mean, if you don't believe me, just imagine what life would be like if there was somebody around here who was going on and on and on all the time about, A, how sinful they were, and B, how they couldn't get rid of it, and, you know, sort of making you the unfortunate victim of their problem. I mean, you would be very sorely tempted to do a number of things, but as you can't open the windows around here and push people out, you would have to do something else, you see. I mean, like, say, why don't you just sort of go and play basketball, or go swimming, or go shopping, or do something else.

I mean, just take your mind off this. You see, you're a nutcase, and you're driving the rest of us around the bend as well. And this is basically what he was told by his superiors.

I mean, I'm putting it in a rather crude way, but, I mean, they basically said, you know, look, Martin, we know you're sincere and all that, and you really mean this, but, you know, you're just driving us nuts. Stop it. But Luther, of course, had the bug, and he couldn't do that.

You know, I mean, he was determined to work this out. Another thing that affected him very deeply during this time was a pilgrimage which he took to Rome. Now, Italians never really bothered about Rome, or the Pope, or that, because the Pope was Italian, of course, most of the time anyway, and nobody really, you know, he was just part of the scenery, and nobody really noticed what was going on.

But Rome had been caught up, like the rest of Italy, in the Renaissance, in the tremendous cultural explosion which there had been at that time, and Rome had to keep up with the other cities of Italy, with Florence, and Venice, and so on, which, of course, meant, you know, lots of paintings, new buildings, and all this sort of thing, and that all cost money, and because Rome was not, the Pope was not a commercial person, I mean, Venice sort of lived off its commerce and so on, but Rome couldn't do that, so Rome got its money from selling indulgences and things like this, and, you know, there was a vast program for rebuilding St. Peter's Cathedral. The old St. Peter's was torn down, and the foundations were laid for St. Peter's as it is now, and people like Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, and so on, you see, were being paid to do their painting, and all this sort of thing, and, of course, it all cost a lot of money, but it also had very little to do with faith, or religion, or anything like that, you know, and the papacy became very much wrapped up in the worldly spirit of the Renaissance, and even some Italians began to notice. Machiavelli, the great Florentine political scientist, said that the closer you get to Rome, the less likely you are to believe the claims of the papacy, because the more you see just how corrupt an institution it was.

And that's Machiavelli, of course, who wasn't particularly interested in religion one way or another. But for Luther, going down from Germany, of course, to him, Rome was heaven on earth. Rome was the center, well, it was, I mean, it was the center of Christianity, the center of ancient culture, and so on, and Luther, in his rather simplistic, monastic kind of way, imagined, you know, that this would be several months of spiritual refreshment and joy, etc., when he landed in Rome.

You know, he thought this would be just the, he'd have the time of his life, spiritually speaking. Of course, when he got there, he found it was kind of like New Orleans on the Tiber, you know. I mean, a slightly different kind of thing from what he had expected.

Originally, Rome had more licensed brothels than it had churches, more prostitutes than priests, and so on, you see. And of course, Luther discovered this to his horror, that this is what was going on. And so, of course, he came back from Rome totally disillusioned with what he saw there.

And so, this was another thing which was feeding into his growing restlessness, you see. I mean, Luther, that didn't turn him totally away from the church, but he began to sort of wonder, it fed into the whole general impression, you know, that something was wrong. What finally tipped the scales, apparently, was his reading of Romans chapter 1, particularly verse 17, where he reads, The just shall live by faith.

And as he later recounted it, it was when he was reflecting on that, and the meaning of that, that the penny finally dropped, and he understood that we are saved by grace through faith and not by works. And it was at this moment that suddenly the scales dropped from his eyes, and he came to understand what it meant, really, to be a Christian, and he found peace with God. Now, that's the way he explained it later.

And anybody who's listened to somebody's testimony knows that stories grow in the telling, you know. The longer you've been a Christian, the better your testimony is, because you've had time to work on it. And so, we have to be a little bit careful about this, because it is the view from hindsight.

But nevertheless, there is no doubt that it was sometime around 1515 or 1516 that Luther came to understand what Christ had done for him on the cross, and that he came to realize that this was not just an idea, but it was something which could be a life-changing personal experience. Now, you might say, well, why didn't he jump out of bed and run around and start preaching this to everybody? Well, he didn't, because nobody, you know, what do you do? I mean, this happens to you, but it hasn't happened to anybody else you know, and you don't really know what to do, and it was all a bit confusing at the beginning. This is also true, you see.

So this is why Luther's sort of recounting of it from hindsight has to be taken a little bit with a grain of salt, because it wasn't as if he sort of went out and turned the world upside down the following day. It took a little while for things to really sink in as to what had actually happened to him, and what it meant. And indeed, it didn't sink in, or nothing really sort of came together, until a quite different external event took place, and that was that the cardinal archbishop of Mainz, which is a German city, had authorized a special sale of indulgences in the Wittenberg area, not actually in Wittenberg itself, because the prince of Saxony, who was the ruler of Wittenberg, would not allow the sale of indulgences on his territory, because he thought this was creaming off money for the pope, which he would rather keep for himself.

So the indulgences were not actually being sold in Wittenberg, but not very far away in other people's territory they were being sold, and people went from Wittenberg to buy them, you see. It wasn't terribly far away to go. So they did this kind of thing.

And this really got Luther, rubbed him up entirely the wrong way. And he sat down, and he wrote 95 reasons why the sale of indulgences was wrong. And these are, of course, his famous theses, which he pinned on the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg on the 31st of October in 1517.

This was a normal practice. Professors of the university would often put things on the church door, on the cathedral door, hoping that it would stir debate within the university, because Luther wanted to argue with his fellow professors whether this was right, whether the sale of indulgences could really be justified. And within the university context, this was perfectly understandable, because people had argued about this before.

This wasn't a new thing, and there were plenty of people around who agreed with Luther that indulgences were a bad idea. To be against the sale of indulgences was not by itself an unusual thing in academic circles. But what happened to Luther was that he just turned out to be the right person in the right place at the right time, because this particular campaign was crude in a way that earlier campaigns had not been.

The friar Tetzel, who was going around doing it, would stoop at nothing. He was worse than a used car salesman. He was the Tammy Faye Baker of his time.

I don't know what his mascara bill was, but he certainly went over the top. He was very crude and insensitive in the way that he tried to sell indulgences. And this just annoyed a whole lot of people, a lot of people who didn't like what they saw.

And so along came this man who was totally unknown, produced 95 reasons why it was a bad idea. And somebody must have walked past the church in Wittenberg one day, saw this on the notice board, and thought, oh, hey, that's a good idea. Took it up, took it to a printer, printed up thousands of copies.

This is the importance of the invention of printing, you see. And within a few weeks it was all over Germany, and indeed all over Europe. So what started off as a little local argument, by the end of 1517 had become a nationwide scandal, at least in Germany.

Now, the Prince of Saxony, as I say, who was the founder of the University of Wittenberg and Luther's ultimate protector, was actually delighted by this because he had been looking for a plausible reason not to allow the sale of indulgences in his territory. And here was one of his own university professors giving him all the ammunition he needed. So this was a good thing from his point of view.

And many of the other princes of Germany thought the same, you see. They weren't particularly religious, but they were concerned with not losing money, not having some sort of tax collection going on in their territory, because that's basically what it was. But they were looking for a good reason to stop it.

So Luther was very popular all of a sudden with a lot of people that previously had never heard of him, and that basically he probably would have preferred not to have anything to do with if he possibly could have done. You know, it just kind of came together in this way at the right time. Now the church authorities did not really know how to react to this for several reasons.

First of all, a lot of them agreed with him. I mean, they agreed, but they agreed rather like bureaucrats who say, well, yes, privately we agree with Luther, but he's rocking the boat. And if you've ever worked for the government, you know perfectly well that however good your case is, the one thing you must not do is rock the boat.

That is a sin, even if you've got God on your side in every other way. Upsetting the system is the thing you do not do. And so there were a lot of people who were in that position.

And this, of course, was a dangerous situation for the church because if the only thing you had against Luther was that Luther was causing trouble, this was not really an answer. And sooner or later, somebody would point out that this was not an answer and the whole edifice would fall down. And so gradually the church authorities realized that they had to produce some kind of response.

And various people put themselves forward to debate with Luther, not so much over the question of indulgences. They tried to sidetrack that one because they realized that was a weak case. You know, they had a weak case there.

But more fundamentally, over the question of authority in the church. Because, you see, the argument went was, well, all right, there may be many problems with the sale of indulgences, and we can see that you don't like the abuses, and we know that this guy, Tetzel, who's been going around, has done it in a very crude way, etc., etc. But the bottom line is, the Pope has approved of this, you see.

And of course, when Luther realized that, he said, well, you know, I won't say it in exact words, but you can imagine what he said to the Pope. And basically the Pope is anti-Christ. You see, if he says this, he's wrong.

Well, of course, the one thing you must not do if you are a good Catholic is say the Pope is wrong. At least not in that way, you know. And so the issue became not one of indulgences, but one of the authority of the Pope, the right of the Pope, to run the church.

And of course, once things had shifted to that ground, a whole new can of worms opened. Because now Luther was challenging not just an aberration, not just one particular person who might be doing something a little odd, but he was actually challenging the entire system. And if the system could not come up with a good answer, it was going to collapse.

And of course, that is what we see over the next few years. You see, that Luther's protest, which had begun in this way, actually turned into a revolution which created a new kind of church and a new kind of Christianity. Luther himself did not want that.

Luther would have been horrified if you had told him in 1517 that he would be the founder of a new church. Luther would have been very, very upset, as indeed he was later, at the thought that there was anybody who would call themselves Lutheran as opposed to Christian. What Luther wanted was for the whole church, including Rome, to come to repentance.

He was not against the papacy as such. It was only as he fought the abuses and realized that he was not talking the same language as his opponents and realized that there was no way that the system was going to bend, even to correct its own mistakes, that he was gradually pushed in that direction. And it's very important that you realize this.

Luther had no ambition to become a prominent anything, rabble-rouser or preacher or what have you. That was not his aim. He found himself pushed in that direction because of the way circumstances developed once his protest was made.

But that is a story for another time. Have a good day. We'll see you on Thursday.