Michael Root, Ph.D. Complete Interview
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A central question for the Reformation
is what the Christian life is about, what
it's seeking. In a sense, it's about
seeking a kind of purity in Christ. Jesus
said, "blessed are the pure in heart," but
what constitutes being pure in heart?
Catholics and Protestants would agree
that being pure in heart is not
something that's just about me; it's
something about participation in the
reality of Jesus. Jesus is the one who
exemplifies, who does, the saving act and
we participate in that. But how do we
understand the ways in which the
Christian does that participation? And
that's at a crucial point now of
Catholic and Protestant differences,
particularly the differences between
traditional Catholic theology and Martin
Luther. For Catholicism, yes, it's a
dependence on Christ, it's a
participation in Christ; but there is a
sense in which we develop always in
dependence on God's grace. We develop a
kind of purity which is a reality in our
lives. And we can think about that, we can
seek it in this life - that purity is
almost never achieved, but we hope
eschatologically in the kingdom, come
the last day, maybe on the other side of
purgatory, we will then be fully in
Christ. We will be purified; God will be
able to say to us, come good and faithful
servant to the kingdom prepared for you
and the saints. Luther was greatly
worried that if you say we're to develop
a kind of purity or holiness that's
actually participation in Christ but
real in us, then we'll start looking: "well,
how am i doing, or how is grace doing
inside me?" And then there's two dangers:
one danger's despair -
it doesn't appear that grace is working
in me; maybe I'm not one of the elect, I'm
lost. Or, I'll say, you know, grace is doing
a pretty good job in me; I think I'm one
of God's elect, I'm pretty good! That's
pride. You get either pride or despair.
For Luther, the Christian life is about
utter dependence on the reality of
Christ and His saving work, and that's
what you look at; don't look inward. If
you look inward, all you will do is find
your failures. Is it ever the case that
we will fulfill the law that we should
love the Lord our God with all our heart,
all our mind and all our strength?
Luther emphasized that we're always both
a saint and a sinner, in a certain sense.
It's always the case that I try to
follow what God wishes me to do, but I
have to fight an internal opposition, the
old Adam or the old Eve within me. And as
long as I'm fighting the old Adam and
the old Eve, then I'm not fulfilling the
law that I should love the Lord my God
with all my heart, all my mind, and all my
strength. I'll be doing good works; it's a
good thing to resist the old Adam and
Eve in me and seek to follow Christ. But
because I have to resist this resistance
within me, then I am not loving God
perfectly, and that's what the law
demands. So if we're Luther, there's this
tension, and he thinks the only way to
live in that tension is not to look
inward; it's to look outward to the
purity of Christ. So a significant
difference, I think, down beyond the
theology, at the level of piety, is that
there's a kind of emphasis on
Catholicism of the pursuit of holiness.
The pursuit of holiness is
central to the Christian life.
Luther worries about that. He worries
that it's too much about, however much
you may say about "holiness is a
participation in Christ, it's always in
dependence on Christ at every single
moment," however much you say about that,
it's still going to be the case that
when the eye turns back to the self, the
game is just lost. Faith is about utter
dependence on the objective reality of
Christ given to me in word, in baptism,
in sacrament, that's outside of me and
on which I depend.
A phrase that's deeply associated with Martin Luther is justification by faith. Now, justification is the question of, "How am I just?" The Latin word, justificatio, is "being made just." And the question is, come the last day when I stand before the judgment of God, what will be the basis of my being judged innocent. The full phrase for Luther is that we are justified by grace through faith for the sake of Jesus Christ, and I always say, to get Luther straight, you must have all three. Not by our own achievements are we going to be made righteous on the last day. I should note also Catholics and Protestants completely agree on that: grace is what saves us. But Luther insists the only way to receive grace is purely by trust, no a kind of internal achievement, because for Luther the Gospel is first and foremost a promise, and how do I show that I really received a promise? I depend upon it. If you say you promise to pick me up at five o'clock this afternoon in front of this church, and then I say yes, sure, sure, I believe your promise; but I also call for a taxi at five after five, just in case you're gonna miss me, then I haven't trusted you. Faith is complete dependence on the trustworthiness of the promise, and that promise is centered in Christ. So for Luther, the righteousness by which we are saved is a righteousness which is Christ's, and is ours also because we are married to Christ. Luther picks up marital imagery. Faith is the wedding band that unites me with Christ, in a happy exchange - his phrase - and in this exchange, I take on Christ's righteousness, and he takes on my sin. Now, the Catholic worry about this kind of talk in Luther is that it could seem as if God's judgment is a kind of legal fiction. I remain utterly sinful, but the righteousness of Christ covers me like a handkerchief over a dirty hand. The Catholic concern is that when God says, "you are innocent on the last day, come into the kingdom," God is a just judge; God does it lie. It can't just be a legal fiction. Grace must work in me in such a way that I will in fact be what God says I am - by His work, but it will be true that I will be righteous. Now, one way of getting at some of the difference, is a different question of what is righteousness. Here we come to a standard kind of theological distinction between justification - and that's the question, how am I pronounced innocent or righteous before the judgment of God? - and sanctification - how do I become holy, how do I become a true follower of Christ? Now, sometimes, I mean, people say, well - Protestants especially - Luther emphasizes justification, Catholics emphasize sanctification. That's way too simple, I think. Luther does have his own understanding of sanctification, but it isn't that first you have faith, and then you have good works or something. It's that sanctification for Luther, I think, is having faith shape who you are more and more, so that we will be perfectly...we will be perfected on the last day. But for Luther, perfected means, I will be completely dependent upon the righteousness of Christ. My faith will now shape who I am. Now here is a place where Catholics and Protestants in some ways at crucial moments turn to different Biblical texts. For Luther, central to his development was Romans 1:17: "The just shall live by faith." Faith is a way of life: it's what you do throughout your life. When Catholics think about the Christian life, they think about the triad in 1st Corinthians 13 of faith, hope, and love. And note, Paul says, "these three abide, and the greatest of them is love." Love is what binds us to the neighbour, and what binds us to God, so it's a complicated question: how do you understand the relationship between Luther's emphasis upon faith, and the Catholic emphasis upon love? Luther worried that if you say too much about love, that makes it sound like something I do, whereas faith is this complete trust in the other. Whereas the Catholic will insist, well, Paul's clear: love is the greatest of the three, and has thought it through that way, and love is what connects us with God. So that's part of the issue here, is that for Catholics, sanctification is the growth in us, the perfection, of all three: always oriented toward Christ, but having also a kind of internal reality, that I can talk about my own love-hope-faith. For Luther, sanctification is having faith shape us more and more. But that faith, because it's utter trust and something outside of me, it's hard to talk about. It's like humility. I mean, if I go into a job interview and I'm asked, "well, what are some of your strengths?" And I say, "Well, I'm really humble, I mean, I'm the humblest guy I know!" I mean, that's not going to work. Humility is shown, it's not claimed. There's the line about the monks' convention with the big banner that we're tops in humility! Faith is like that for Luther. So one of the places where the trains cross each other, we have ships passing in the night, is that Catholics do want to talk about how the self pursues holiness, whereas Luther - well, the self doesn't talk about itself, because faith is utterly other-developed. Faith can be other-oriented. Faith can be strong or weak; but what I should be concerned about is Jesus, not about my faith. My faith doesn't save me, Jesus saves me, although Jesus saves me through my faith.
One of the issues that always comes up in thinking about Luther and the 95 Theses is the question of purgatory, which is for Protestants and increasingly for many Catholics a somewhat odd notion. Purgatory isn't explicitly mentioned in scripture - where does it come from? What sort of idea is it? I'm a firm believer in purgatory. I hope there's a purgatory, because purgatory deals with certain basic issues. It seems I would say likely - people would argue - but it seems to me likely that Christians, we know from very early on by around 200, are praying for the dead. They're asking God to be merciful to the dead on the last day, to aid them. And I think it's a good guess that this was always going on, Christians praying for the dead. We also have a kind of issue: they're the saints, the great figures, they're sort of ready for primetime. They die and they're ready for Heaven. But what about Uncle Fred? He wasn't a bad guy, went to church, he missed church sometimes; you know, he had a little too much to drink now and then, but he was a good soul guy. But you know, Uncle Fred needs a little work. Is there hope for the middling Christian? You already can find this middling Christian problem with Saint Augustine, writing in the early 5th century: what to do about the sort of standard guy? Purgatory is a kind of sense that even though we die imperfect, even though we die not quite ready to enter the pure presence of God, God will take care of it! God will take care of it, in helping us through that last stage of penance, coming to terms with ourselves, moving us along to that point where we are genuinely ready for primetime, so to speak. For certainly many of the saints, purgatory is the completion of penance in this life. In this life, we must confront our sins, we must deal with them, we must seek to reconcile with those around us, deal with the effects of sin in us - that's what we have to do. That often isn't completed in this life. I still am dealing with my own recalcitrant emotions and desires. That's what's completed in purgatory. Now, what is the case, we know better now than we certainly did in Luther's time, is that penance has had a complicated history. Already in the New Testament, we find talk of, in the book of James, for example, you should go to the elders and confess your sins. And we know that certain kinds of particularly major sins - murder, adultery in the early church - the early church, 2nd 3rd century - this would require a public confession and major public penance. In the process of the Middle Ages, you develop the notion that even for small sins, one should confess to a priest, and there would be, as an example, a part of the coming to terms with your sin, "satisfactions" you would do afterwards: the proverbial, "say 10 Hail Marys and then Our Father" - is a way of seeking in a small way to start to deal with the consequences of that sin. Purgatory was then understood as both a healing process, a process by which God deals with the effects of sin in us, and a kind of finishing out dealing with the consequences, even in terms of punishments, in a certain sense, of sins. In connection with purgatory, inevitably in discussing Martin Luther, you have to address indulgences. Indulgences - again, we now know a good deal more about their history - the way they sort of develop willy nilly without any particular intention initially in the church (3rd, 4th century) when penances were far more rigorous, going on a long time. It could be the case that somebody who is known for his or her holiness, particularly in an era of persecutions, somebody that risked their life for the faith, they would come and talk to you, they would regularly pray for you, and your penance would be shortened. This was a kind of indulgence: that there were various penitential works to be done. But perhaps there'd be some special good work you would do that would substitute for that penance. And connected with that work was the prayer of all of the church: all of the church would be praying for those engaged and the good work connected with this indulgence - not only us, the saints in Heaven, the Blessed Virgin, Christ Himself. And the Bible says, the prayers of a good man availeth much; what must the prayers of all the saints Christ included avail if they join you in doing this penitential good work? So over time, you had this notion, in my various penitential tasks, I could perhaps substitute doing X for Y if there was a indulgence attached. Only in the late Middle Ages, in fact only officially at the end of the 15th century (1470s) is it made clear you could also attach these indulgences...you could say, I've done the good work attached to this indulgence, and I want this indulgence to be applied to Uncle Fred who's not the greatest guy, but a good guy - will apply this to him in purgatory. It'll help him deal with the penitential work of purgatory. In addition, about the same time, I'm afraid, the question arose: could a possible good work be a financial donation to some worthy project like repairing a roof, or building St. Peter's in Rome? And the answer was yes. For about the 30 years before the Reformation - this was really a late development - you started getting what amounted to fundraising campaigns, raising money for worthy causes: for example, building St. Peter's in Rome. When these indulgences would then be basically tied to giving a financial contribution, it was precisely the indulgence campaign to raise money for the building of St. Peter's that Luther protested against in his 95 Theses. If Luther had only protested about indulgences, that they undercut true penance, which was a major theme in the 95 Theses, he wouldn't have been saying anything a variety of critics of indulgences hadn't said throughout the medieval period. But he raised another question: what was the authority of the Pope to grant these indulgences, particularly once you started applying them to purgatory. This was a question which was debated in the Middle Ages, and it might be the case here that Luther didn't quite fully grasp just what had been decided in the 1470s, just a little before his own life. Official Catholic teaching is not that the Pope can apply indulgences to purgatory by his administrative authority. That was rejected, although it hadn't been held by Luther's own order: their understanding had been the Pope's sort of authority as Pope could do this administratively, could shorten people's time in purgatory. The official teaching is that it's a matter of prayer, it's not something we do on our own; we don't have that authority - but we can pray with confidence. And remember, attached to an indulgence are the saints, the Blessed Virgin, Christ, offering their merits to God in prayer, and God will respond.
In Matthew 16, Jesus says to Peter that he grants him the keys of the Kingdom: what he binds on Earth will be bound in Heaven, what he frees on earth will be freed in Heaven. Now, there is scholarly debate about what that means: Was it the power to forgive sins? Was it also the power to decide difficult moral questions about what was right and wrong? There's some argument about what it meant in a rabbinic context. It came to be the notion that particularly the power of binding or forgiving sins in the confessional is bound up with that gift. Now - this is always a complicated question - is that in Matthew 18, two chapters later, Jesus gives the same gift to all the Apostles. Within months of the posting of the 95 Theses, the public debate which went rather viral, shifted from a direct discussion of indulgences, to a discussion of Papal authority. And once one got on the subject of Papal Authority, the discussion started, so to speak, getting out of hand. It had become a much tougher, sharper kind of debate.
The context for these debates about penance, purgatory, etc. was confession: the practice of auricular or private confession, of going to the priest and confessing one's sins. In many ways it was then like it is now, with the exception in fact of the confessional, the box. The box so to speak was actually developed just at the very end of Luther's life. Charles Borromeo of Milan is credited with at least popularizing the modern confessional. One went to the priest; one goes to the priest - "bless me Father, for I have sinned" - and one recounts one's sins. One confesses one's sins. That's what we're called upon to do. The priest then pronounces absolution - "ego te absolvo" (the old Latin phrase) - and he forgives you your sin: your sins are then forgiven, period. However, think about the reality of sin. This is not my sin (I'm not confessing here on camera), but let's say somebody commits adultery and they go to their wife, they tell them (it's a man) - he goes to his wife and he says, you know, I committed adultery; please forgive me. And after a lot of struggle, a lot of discussion, the wife says, yes I'm ready to forgive you. But now does that mean everything's hunky-dory in the marriage? Does that mean there's no work left to do? There has to be a kind of work done to overcome the damage done by that sin. Or think of the contemporary sin: you know, online pornography - regular watching such things has an effect on you, and even if you repent, truly repent, there has to be work on what that has done to you over time. The concept in Catholic theology - again, perhaps this isn't the most attractive way of putting it - is that in the confessional, the eternal punishment for sin - your alienation from God - is overcome. But, there are temporal punishments, there are the effects of sin, there are the consequences of that sin that now need to be addressed. And that finds a focus today in the proverbial "10 Hail Marys" and in "Our Father." In the past, I should note, these penances - the past, really meaning fourth, fifth, sixth century - these penances were quite more extreme. They would be public humiliation for a year or two. They would be being excluded from the Eucharist for five years. They would be no meat, a vegetarian diet, for a year. They were a good deal more strict. But the concept of temporal punishments, satisfactions, is bound up with this notion that there are temporal punishments, consequences, that still need to be addressed. In a sense, that's what purgatory is about: purgatory is about completing that process of overcoming the effects of sin on us.
Certainly you'll find various statements about confessing one's sins in Scripture. When one has to go to a proof text, it tends to be, for example, in James talking about confessing to the elders. But there's a lot of talk in the New Testament about sort of the healthiness, the goodness of confessing one's sins one to another. We now know the word purgatory - purgatoriam in Latin - can only be found in the early 8th century for the first time. You'll find early on some practices; in particular, I would say praying for the dead. You find in Tertullian, the father of the early third century, writing in 200, 210 or so: he's already talking about offering the mass for the dead. Now, the question is, this practice seems fairly early, fairly deeply embedded. We had this very confusing passage in 1st Corinthians 15, where Paul mentions - he doesn't endorse, he doesn't condemn - baptizing the dead. There's some concern of doing something for the dead. What this becomes - again, practice in the ancient church - is particularly praying for the dead, and offering the mass for the dead. But what did that imply? I think as a Catholic theologian, I have to grant: of course, the word purgatory isn't in Scripture; but rather, I would say those practices which imply something like purgatory - prayer for the dead in particular - are there. And, I would say the obvious reality: we die still with sin in us in some ways, and we'll be perfect in the kingdom - that there'll be a purging, a transformation of us between death and final perfection, that seems obvious. The questions are the details here, so to speak. Now, you do get here not so much a difference between Catholicism and Luther, as a difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. I would note, Luther's criticism of purgatory had more to do with the way he thought it was bound up with works righteousness. That was his "you do things to help people to salvation" rather than depend on Christ. That's Luther's central critique. However, the Reformation develops and you get a greater stress, a greater difference drawing, about the way you appeal to scripture. It is the case that Catholic theology is willing to say - the Catholic Church is willing to say - that over time the church develops out of that original deposit of faith. There are no new revelations after the Apostles. But there is the power of the church, the capacity of the church, to discern the inner meaning of the faith - particularly, say, something like purgatory, even though I think we have to be honest, the word isn't there. It can't be derive. There, there is a difference about a kind of trust in the way the Holy Spirit guides the church so that it can draw out implications from the original deposit of the faith.
It's well-known the Reformation began with the indulgence campaign, ostensibly to help build St. Peter's, that Luther objected to. And this raises a question about the whole role of money in the Reformation. As I mentioned, these indulgence campaigns - these fundraising campaigns, in a sense - had really only been going on for thirty years. There had been critics, and the St. Peter's indulgence was the last one of these big money-raising indulgences campaigns. It was actually worse than Luther knew. There was with papal knowledge various amounts of money, about half, being siphoned off for other purposes. Now, it wasn't the case simply that the Roman Church money involved XYZ; it was true in the Protestant side, the Lutheran side too. Famously in England, Henry the 8th made a good deal of money by expropriating church lands. This occurred in other places. And certainly part of what's going on in the Reformation is the attempt of princes to control the churches in their territory. If a church and its territory became Protestant, it fell under the control of the local ruling body - city council, in a city of the prince in another area. Politics and money inevitably play a role in the Reformation. Behind this there are large questions. It takes money to build a church like this, so majestic: this is the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception; going to St. Peter's in Rome; going to St. Paul's Anglican, Protestant Cathedral in London - these are wonderful spaces. But are they what simpler followers of the crucified carpenter should be doing? That's a real question. These are inspirational kinds of places. Luther himself went on supporting great art. Lutherans built very large churches. But one has to note, one of the ways of the Reformation, one of the complexities of the Reformation, is the way from the very beginning, issues of pure theology - what I've talked about, the nature of justification and grace, church practices, confession - it was always bound up with politics: the role of the princes, princes want control solidifying states, they were unhappy with the role of a super-national institution like the papacy telling them what to do, there was too much German money going to Rome. Secular financial economic considerations were always bound up with the Reformation. And part of the tragedy of the Reformation is the way in which the divisive but perhaps controllable differences in theology were bound up also with divisive political, social and economic tensions which reinforced one another, and helped to produce the permanent (so far, sadly) permanent divisions of Western Christianity.
Often when we think about the issues raised by the Reformation and the division of Christianity, we think only about Catholicism and Protestantism. But it's important to remember, if you take worldwide Christianity, there are Catholics, there are Protestants, and there are the Orthodox - the great churches of the East headed as first among equals by the ecumenical patriarch the Archbishop of Constantinople in Istanbul; the Russian Orthodox Church clearly being the largest. Relations between the Orthodox and the West certainly haven't been close, but they haven't had exactly the same kind of history as in the West. The reality of the Western relations certainly was both sharper - we spoke the same language, Catholics and Protestants initially - and in addition, there was the wars: the wars of religion beginning 1546 in Germany, the last one really being the end of the 30 Years War in 1648 - were vicious wars, civilian kind of theological road rage, one historian calls it. These were bitter wars. And the reality is, over an extended period of time, when two groups kill a significant number of each other, it's very hard to sit down and have a theological discussion calmly. The Orthodox here might be an example: a different kind, a different spirit, different aesthetic. You go into their churches, they look quite different; a rather different theology. It's often useful when you have it sort of binary - two opposites battling each other - to bring in a quite different third that doesn't quite fit in between them, but it's a different way of looking at things - can be helpful. Over time, both Catholics and Protestants in some ways tried to appeal to the Orthodox as an ally against the other - that never really quite worked for either side. So one ecumenical hope would be the ways in which Catholicism and Protestantism and their theological discussions might be able to bring in Orthodoxy as a complicating and hopefully helpful resource in the discussions. Luther and his writings came at the same time as there were new technological possibilities for distributing them, the movable-type printing press. And Luther and the printing press industry, as it was developing, fed off each other. Luther was a master at writing short pithy pieces, and this is what the printers love to do: cheap, short pamphlets - they could sell them really cheaply, distribute large numbers. And Luther wrote very quickly, he churned these things out, so that by 1520, say, three years after the 95 Theses, when the argument had moved on from indulgences, enormous numbers of these were in circulation. One thing that happened was that opinions form very rapidly. By 1520, Luther is excommunicated, and by that time on the other side, Luther had decided that the Pope was the Antichrist. By late 1520, the two sides have dug in in ways that it's very hard to then reach reconciliation. To make a very long story short, by the 1530s you start getting institutionalization - that is, the Lutheran territories start creating their own church structures; 1546, you get the wars of religion beginning, you have the development, the structure now of what no one in 1517 could imagine: the long-term, virtually permanent existence of separate churches. Now, part of the effect of this, I think deeply against Luther's intentions, was to create a new situation: one not immediately where you had different territories, but it led to a situation ultimately that we have now. You can choose what church to go to! In some ways, you have to choose: it's not just given for you anymore. There's a shift where, as Luther emphasized, the external realities you should trust in - you are, despite Luther's intention, an effect of the Reformation is you're thrown back on your own devices. I moved to Washington, what do I do? I'd gone to a Lutheran Church before, but I don't like this pastor; maybe I go to the Presbyterian Church! I'll go to a Baptist Church! I was raised Catholic, but I really like the Orthodox. Despite themselves, however churches may want to stress the givenness of their reality and authority, the effect of the divisions of the Reformation are that we're in a new situation where inevitably private decision, private judgment, the individual, play a new kind of role. Now, the sort of genius of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I would note, are more that here's the church structure: you live in that structure, it's not really your decision. However, in the modern situation - an unintended consequence in history is often the story of unintended consequences - is that in Luther's protests (leading up to now), permanent Church division has had the effect of throwing the individual on to their own devices. It's hard to exaggerate how important this has been for European history. Do you have the whole rise of this kind of skepticism and philosophy and wider culture? Because the structures of certainty, the givens, were undermined by the division of opinion, and then that division of opinion being expressed in war, in violence, in rage against the other. This is a sad consequence of the Reformation - is this movement, I would say, this movement inevitably (I would argue, despite Luther's intentions) toward a kind of individualization of religion. How would Luther fit into the modern world? I think it's almost a world of Tweets, the Internet: it is attractive to make some parallels. Luther fed off (and it fed off him) the most modern technology of his time: as I mentioned, the printing press. He produced things fast; he made strong accusations: the Pope is the Antichrist! He didn't pull punches; so you have texts like, "against the goat Emser" (Emser is another theologian). How would he fit into the modern kind of situation? I think he'd be complicated. I think Luther would be utterly baffled by the modern world, that you have multiple churches, that you have people who seem to be perfectly happy with no religious faith at all. There are parallels: he's a man of deep convictions; he is a man of a certain coarseness. Luther is famous for his scatological language; it's referenced as what we say are bathroom kinds of discussions. There is a kind of, if one wants to celebrate it, earthiness - if you want to criticize it, coarseness and crudity to Luther. Unfortunately, that might fit into the modern world, particularly the recent world fairly well. Luther's a man with many warts, some people say a force of nature beyond any kind of judgment. He is a man of rage sometimes; there are texts of Luther's that, would that he had never written them, on some of his anti- Papal texts, some of his anti-Jewish texts - this is a bad side of Luther. There is also sometimes a kind of simplicity, a kind of utter trust, a kind of a warmth that you don't get in the colder scholastic philosophical theologian. Luther wrote spiritual masterpieces ("On the Freedom of a Christian"). He was a great interpreter of scripture. He worked like like a dog; he could produce enormous amounts of stuff in short periods of time. He's a complicated mix, and he is deeply a man of his time. That's why it's so hard to ask, how would Luther, how would he fit into the modern world. He was a late medieval man; he believed fervently and literally in the Devil. The Devil is a real force that must be struggled with, and some interpreters think this is quite central to Luther, this quite literal belief in the Devil. He was a man who lived in that late medieval world that was difficult, I think, for us to imagine.
Famously, the 95 Theses begin with the first thesis, Thesis 1: "When Jesus said 'repent,' he meant our whole lives to be lives of repentance" - that is, penance, repenance, is a characteristic of your entire life, not a matter simply of going to confession every second Saturday afternoon or something like that. What does this mean? Does it mean Luther was an advocate of gloominess, of always beating yourself or whipping yourself with a chain or a whip or thorns? It helps to remember: the late medieval period - say, 1350 on - was a hard time. The Black Death arrives in Central Europe in 1349. Remember, this is 25, 30% of the population dying. This was a horrible event. You also have what's called the beginning of the Little Ice Age: you have a climate change, something we know about today; except instead of things getting warmer, they got colder. Northern Europe, you had significant crop failures - it was a difficult time. It was also a time of economic change. Luther's father is something of a modern story: begins as a mine worker, becomes a co-owner in the mine - it's a time of change. Luther fits into a kind of late medieval piety, one that stressed humility, one in which one way of justifying yourself, of having you as a sinner be justified by God, is to condemn yourself. If you condemn yourself adequately, well then you're on God's side condemning sin. And paradoxically, by focusing on your own sinfulness you would be in line with God and thus be in a sense innocent. Remember the parable of the publican and the sinner: publican says, thank God you didn't make me a sinner, the sinner says have mercy on me, I know I'm a sinner, and Jesus says to the publican, the one who says I'm a sinner goes home justified. That's a part of Luther, and if that's what all he was about - if it was just about beating up on yourself, and if you beat up on yourself hard enough, God's on your side - if that was it, it would be gloomy. What's striking is that Luther never loses that late-medieval sense of a world on the brink; of a world in which the devil is constantly threatening; in which there are deep, deep threats around you. He never loses that. But there's the decisive shift. And the shift is, yes, I need to repent, but my penance is now bound up with dependence on Christ. There's not just the negative - I'm awful, I fail - but then that statement, I fail but Jesus doesn't: Jesus succeeds and if I trust in Christ - and I can trust that God will lead me to trust in Christ - if I trust in Christ, then I can have a kind of joyous life, knowing I'm a sinner - yes, that's the case - but Luther thought, as long as you trust in Jesus, you can have a kind of basic confidence: a confidence that, come the last day and now you are in the love of God. And that's the kind of joyousness. But note that joyousness requires the dark background. It's only that if it was up to me, I'm screwed: it's over. Because I am a deep sinner. I'm a bag of maggots. I'm a worm. If you don't have that background - and we don't in most of modern culture - we don't have that penitential kind of sense. Without that penitential sense, the attractiveness of Luther's understanding of the Gospel - which was attractive to many people at the time - without that sense, you don't see the joyousness. It's precisely the sharp contrasts in Luther's picture, as in a lot of late medieval art, between the rather grotesque, the gloomy, and against that background, the sunlight of the Gospel.
One of the blessings of the modern period has been the work on overcoming these Reformation divides between Catholic and Protestant. This has been a large part of my life. My sort of academic specialty has been working on overcoming Reformation divides. I've been on the International and the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, I was privileged to be a part of the work on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, where narrowly on the question of justification, Lutherans and Catholics now say they need not condemn each other. There's still some real differences, but on the topic itself, there need not be condemnations. Now in my own case, things got a little complicated. A challenge of ecumenical dialogue: if it's not just negotiation, I mean ecumenical dialogue should be a joint pursuit of the deeper truth that we hope can unify us despite (or help us overcome) divisions. There's always a risk in that, that you'll find, gee, the other side seems right! There's a real difference here, and I think maybe I'm on the wrong side. Now, that happened to me: I sort of despite myself became convinced on some basic issues about grace, about the way in which grace elevates human freedom, where grace engages the self, the way grace transforms the self. I became convinced in the end that the Catholic position was correct. So I did the only thing I could honestly do: I became a Catholic. I now teach here at Catholic University. That's the kind of risk that goes on in any kind of genuine intellectual pursuit. It's always possible that one simply becomes convinced. We don't control our convictions - Luther would certainly agree with that! The ecumenical dialogues between Catholics and Lutherans - that's what I know the best - have been very successful in some topics, particularly the nature of salvation, justification which Luther thought was absolutely central, and some other topics such as the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and some other issues. Where the dialogues are working now, but I have to say, to my mind with very little real success, are on issues of the church, and on actual Christian practice. Issues about what is authority in the church, how do we make decisions, who makes those decisions, what's the nature of the priesthood. I mean, finally it's not about reconciling Luther with the Pope at the time, Leo the 10th; the issue is about reconciling the contemporary Lutheran Church with a contemporary Catholic Church, and that means bringing together people and structures. In some certain ways that's harder to do than simply dealing with questions about theology. It's hard work. I also have to add honestly that whereas Lutherans and Catholics - or more broadly, Catholics and mainline Protestants - have come together in many ways on some doctrinal issues, time doesn't stand still on some other issues: particularly some social ethical issues, issues of divorce, issues of abortion, same-sex marriage issues - there's an increasing divide between Catholics and many at least mainstream Protestants. So at the present moment, dialogue goes on. I don't think...I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful. Hope is a theological virtue - hope's the gift of God - one always goes on working, but you never know how it's going to turn out. But at this point we are dealing with quite difficult issues, I think. How does one judge the Reformation, particularly as a Catholic? I think the Catholic has to regret the division among Christians that occurred at the Reformation - there's no way around that. There is blame on both sides: both sides rushed to judgment in certain ways. There were certainly failures in the Catholic Church. I think it's it's easy and correct to be critical of the indulgence campaign that set things off to begin with. Even if I judge in the end, I think the Catholic Church was right in some deep sense. There's more than enough blame to go around. What was the effect of the Reformation on the Catholic Church? Well, positive and negative. Certainly negatively, a problem for both Lutheran and Catholic was that each side defined themself over against the other. "If the Catholics do it, we won't." "If Protestants do it, we won't!" So that led in some ways probably to the Catholic Church not distributing the Bible in the vernacular - that's what Protestants do, we don't do that! - and that was a negative effect. I do think in the long term there have been positive effects of the Reformation, particularly in the last 100, 125 years where some aspects of the Reformation - the Catholic Church no longer says, well, if the Protestants do it, it must be wrong - there are good reasons perhaps for, most often, the mass being in the vernacular. I tend to like the mass in Latin sometimes, but I can easily see, one needs to go ahead and move the mass into the vernacular. The widespread distribution of Bibles, something that should have been done earlier in Catholic history. So in that sense there had been particularly in the last 150 years, as we've gotten over this, "that the other side does it, we won't just to make it clear that we're not them" - there has been a kind of mutual enrichment that John Paul II talked about, a gift exchange, between Protestants and Catholics. And the hope would be that we don't pick each up each other's bad habits, but that there are gifts that each of us have been given by God in our histories that we can exchange with the others, and that's part of what ecumenism is about: even if we're in a situation where we may be deadlocked on formal relations for a while, that doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other, we can't share our gifts with one another, that there can't be as much fellowship as there can be in this situation. And that's certainly, I think, one of my hopes for the future, is that as much as possible this gift exchange can go on.
Luther was a man of strong convictions. He believed in God, he believed in the Devil, he believed in sin, he believed in eternal judgment, he believed in Heaven, believed in Hell. And he thought it made a great difference whether you believed in these things. If you had true faith in Jesus, you would enjoy eternal life, eternal bliss. And if you didn't, you would be cast out into the darkness where the real devils, the real demons, will torment you for eternity. He was a man who believed these things, and would have a hard time understanding how people wouldn't care; how this wouldn't be a burning issue. And that's why I think in many ways Luther - if you were to drop him down into America in 2017 - would be baffled. He would be baffled at people, not who aren't fervent atheists - I mean that I think Luther might understand (again, that's strong convictions). It'd be people that shrug their shoulders: you know, "I don't need religion. I'm spiritual, but not religious. I've made my own religion." I think the notion of making your own religion, Luther would find something between laughable and something to cry over. Your own religion won't stand up before the assaults of the Devil. They're not built on the only foundation that's adequate: Jesus. I think Luther, if you would set him down today - of course, this is a guess - I think he'd be appalled at even what's happened in some ways to his own theology. It's not...for Luther, his message is not therapeutic. It's not about helping you get through the day. It's not about being the best you possible. If you try and really emphasize being the best you possible, you're going be the worst you, Luther would think, because you're looking at yourself. I think Luther would look at a lot of what passes as a kind of mild Christianity, positive thinking, spiritual but not religious - I think Luther would look at that and condemn them with the kind of vehemence that he used for the papacy, for the works of the Devil. I think he would be baffled, horrified, by the kind of not caring. One of the things that the Catholic Church historically has criticized the effect of the Reformation, is what's called indifferentism: that one is indifferent, one doesn't care; that faced with all these choices, it doesn't really matter - you can take Jif, you can take Skippy, but maybe you just want to eat peanut butter! - that religion is a matter of taste. It's not a matter of the deep realities of life: that life is serious, life has goals, ends, and if you don't meet those goals, that means your life has in some ways run aground; it's wrecked. For Luther, life is a serious business, and that's one reason why, I mentioned earlier, I think it's important: this sort of dark background - for Luther, it's not cheap grace. This grace is going to lift you out of a situation of deep threat. And yes, it's pure gift - but that gift calls for acceptance, it calls for faith, it calls for trust in the face of temptation. I think, for Luther, he might find the modern world frivolous. Frivolous in its lack of seriousness, amusing itself to death. I think he would think there's been a decline at the basic background conditions that he and his Catholic opponents shared in the 16th century. They believed a lot was at stake in every human life, and they were struggling over it, and I think they would find today the battle has been given up too often. One is settling for a pablum, for mere therapy that doesn't address the disease.
A phrase that's deeply associated with Martin Luther is justification by faith. Now, justification is the question of, "How am I just?" The Latin word, justificatio, is "being made just." And the question is, come the last day when I stand before the judgment of God, what will be the basis of my being judged innocent. The full phrase for Luther is that we are justified by grace through faith for the sake of Jesus Christ, and I always say, to get Luther straight, you must have all three. Not by our own achievements are we going to be made righteous on the last day. I should note also Catholics and Protestants completely agree on that: grace is what saves us. But Luther insists the only way to receive grace is purely by trust, no a kind of internal achievement, because for Luther the Gospel is first and foremost a promise, and how do I show that I really received a promise? I depend upon it. If you say you promise to pick me up at five o'clock this afternoon in front of this church, and then I say yes, sure, sure, I believe your promise; but I also call for a taxi at five after five, just in case you're gonna miss me, then I haven't trusted you. Faith is complete dependence on the trustworthiness of the promise, and that promise is centered in Christ. So for Luther, the righteousness by which we are saved is a righteousness which is Christ's, and is ours also because we are married to Christ. Luther picks up marital imagery. Faith is the wedding band that unites me with Christ, in a happy exchange - his phrase - and in this exchange, I take on Christ's righteousness, and he takes on my sin. Now, the Catholic worry about this kind of talk in Luther is that it could seem as if God's judgment is a kind of legal fiction. I remain utterly sinful, but the righteousness of Christ covers me like a handkerchief over a dirty hand. The Catholic concern is that when God says, "you are innocent on the last day, come into the kingdom," God is a just judge; God does it lie. It can't just be a legal fiction. Grace must work in me in such a way that I will in fact be what God says I am - by His work, but it will be true that I will be righteous. Now, one way of getting at some of the difference, is a different question of what is righteousness. Here we come to a standard kind of theological distinction between justification - and that's the question, how am I pronounced innocent or righteous before the judgment of God? - and sanctification - how do I become holy, how do I become a true follower of Christ? Now, sometimes, I mean, people say, well - Protestants especially - Luther emphasizes justification, Catholics emphasize sanctification. That's way too simple, I think. Luther does have his own understanding of sanctification, but it isn't that first you have faith, and then you have good works or something. It's that sanctification for Luther, I think, is having faith shape who you are more and more, so that we will be perfectly...we will be perfected on the last day. But for Luther, perfected means, I will be completely dependent upon the righteousness of Christ. My faith will now shape who I am. Now here is a place where Catholics and Protestants in some ways at crucial moments turn to different Biblical texts. For Luther, central to his development was Romans 1:17: "The just shall live by faith." Faith is a way of life: it's what you do throughout your life. When Catholics think about the Christian life, they think about the triad in 1st Corinthians 13 of faith, hope, and love. And note, Paul says, "these three abide, and the greatest of them is love." Love is what binds us to the neighbour, and what binds us to God, so it's a complicated question: how do you understand the relationship between Luther's emphasis upon faith, and the Catholic emphasis upon love? Luther worried that if you say too much about love, that makes it sound like something I do, whereas faith is this complete trust in the other. Whereas the Catholic will insist, well, Paul's clear: love is the greatest of the three, and has thought it through that way, and love is what connects us with God. So that's part of the issue here, is that for Catholics, sanctification is the growth in us, the perfection, of all three: always oriented toward Christ, but having also a kind of internal reality, that I can talk about my own love-hope-faith. For Luther, sanctification is having faith shape us more and more. But that faith, because it's utter trust and something outside of me, it's hard to talk about. It's like humility. I mean, if I go into a job interview and I'm asked, "well, what are some of your strengths?" And I say, "Well, I'm really humble, I mean, I'm the humblest guy I know!" I mean, that's not going to work. Humility is shown, it's not claimed. There's the line about the monks' convention with the big banner that we're tops in humility! Faith is like that for Luther. So one of the places where the trains cross each other, we have ships passing in the night, is that Catholics do want to talk about how the self pursues holiness, whereas Luther - well, the self doesn't talk about itself, because faith is utterly other-developed. Faith can be other-oriented. Faith can be strong or weak; but what I should be concerned about is Jesus, not about my faith. My faith doesn't save me, Jesus saves me, although Jesus saves me through my faith.
One of the issues that always comes up in thinking about Luther and the 95 Theses is the question of purgatory, which is for Protestants and increasingly for many Catholics a somewhat odd notion. Purgatory isn't explicitly mentioned in scripture - where does it come from? What sort of idea is it? I'm a firm believer in purgatory. I hope there's a purgatory, because purgatory deals with certain basic issues. It seems I would say likely - people would argue - but it seems to me likely that Christians, we know from very early on by around 200, are praying for the dead. They're asking God to be merciful to the dead on the last day, to aid them. And I think it's a good guess that this was always going on, Christians praying for the dead. We also have a kind of issue: they're the saints, the great figures, they're sort of ready for primetime. They die and they're ready for Heaven. But what about Uncle Fred? He wasn't a bad guy, went to church, he missed church sometimes; you know, he had a little too much to drink now and then, but he was a good soul guy. But you know, Uncle Fred needs a little work. Is there hope for the middling Christian? You already can find this middling Christian problem with Saint Augustine, writing in the early 5th century: what to do about the sort of standard guy? Purgatory is a kind of sense that even though we die imperfect, even though we die not quite ready to enter the pure presence of God, God will take care of it! God will take care of it, in helping us through that last stage of penance, coming to terms with ourselves, moving us along to that point where we are genuinely ready for primetime, so to speak. For certainly many of the saints, purgatory is the completion of penance in this life. In this life, we must confront our sins, we must deal with them, we must seek to reconcile with those around us, deal with the effects of sin in us - that's what we have to do. That often isn't completed in this life. I still am dealing with my own recalcitrant emotions and desires. That's what's completed in purgatory. Now, what is the case, we know better now than we certainly did in Luther's time, is that penance has had a complicated history. Already in the New Testament, we find talk of, in the book of James, for example, you should go to the elders and confess your sins. And we know that certain kinds of particularly major sins - murder, adultery in the early church - the early church, 2nd 3rd century - this would require a public confession and major public penance. In the process of the Middle Ages, you develop the notion that even for small sins, one should confess to a priest, and there would be, as an example, a part of the coming to terms with your sin, "satisfactions" you would do afterwards: the proverbial, "say 10 Hail Marys and then Our Father" - is a way of seeking in a small way to start to deal with the consequences of that sin. Purgatory was then understood as both a healing process, a process by which God deals with the effects of sin in us, and a kind of finishing out dealing with the consequences, even in terms of punishments, in a certain sense, of sins. In connection with purgatory, inevitably in discussing Martin Luther, you have to address indulgences. Indulgences - again, we now know a good deal more about their history - the way they sort of develop willy nilly without any particular intention initially in the church (3rd, 4th century) when penances were far more rigorous, going on a long time. It could be the case that somebody who is known for his or her holiness, particularly in an era of persecutions, somebody that risked their life for the faith, they would come and talk to you, they would regularly pray for you, and your penance would be shortened. This was a kind of indulgence: that there were various penitential works to be done. But perhaps there'd be some special good work you would do that would substitute for that penance. And connected with that work was the prayer of all of the church: all of the church would be praying for those engaged and the good work connected with this indulgence - not only us, the saints in Heaven, the Blessed Virgin, Christ Himself. And the Bible says, the prayers of a good man availeth much; what must the prayers of all the saints Christ included avail if they join you in doing this penitential good work? So over time, you had this notion, in my various penitential tasks, I could perhaps substitute doing X for Y if there was a indulgence attached. Only in the late Middle Ages, in fact only officially at the end of the 15th century (1470s) is it made clear you could also attach these indulgences...you could say, I've done the good work attached to this indulgence, and I want this indulgence to be applied to Uncle Fred who's not the greatest guy, but a good guy - will apply this to him in purgatory. It'll help him deal with the penitential work of purgatory. In addition, about the same time, I'm afraid, the question arose: could a possible good work be a financial donation to some worthy project like repairing a roof, or building St. Peter's in Rome? And the answer was yes. For about the 30 years before the Reformation - this was really a late development - you started getting what amounted to fundraising campaigns, raising money for worthy causes: for example, building St. Peter's in Rome. When these indulgences would then be basically tied to giving a financial contribution, it was precisely the indulgence campaign to raise money for the building of St. Peter's that Luther protested against in his 95 Theses. If Luther had only protested about indulgences, that they undercut true penance, which was a major theme in the 95 Theses, he wouldn't have been saying anything a variety of critics of indulgences hadn't said throughout the medieval period. But he raised another question: what was the authority of the Pope to grant these indulgences, particularly once you started applying them to purgatory. This was a question which was debated in the Middle Ages, and it might be the case here that Luther didn't quite fully grasp just what had been decided in the 1470s, just a little before his own life. Official Catholic teaching is not that the Pope can apply indulgences to purgatory by his administrative authority. That was rejected, although it hadn't been held by Luther's own order: their understanding had been the Pope's sort of authority as Pope could do this administratively, could shorten people's time in purgatory. The official teaching is that it's a matter of prayer, it's not something we do on our own; we don't have that authority - but we can pray with confidence. And remember, attached to an indulgence are the saints, the Blessed Virgin, Christ, offering their merits to God in prayer, and God will respond.
In Matthew 16, Jesus says to Peter that he grants him the keys of the Kingdom: what he binds on Earth will be bound in Heaven, what he frees on earth will be freed in Heaven. Now, there is scholarly debate about what that means: Was it the power to forgive sins? Was it also the power to decide difficult moral questions about what was right and wrong? There's some argument about what it meant in a rabbinic context. It came to be the notion that particularly the power of binding or forgiving sins in the confessional is bound up with that gift. Now - this is always a complicated question - is that in Matthew 18, two chapters later, Jesus gives the same gift to all the Apostles. Within months of the posting of the 95 Theses, the public debate which went rather viral, shifted from a direct discussion of indulgences, to a discussion of Papal authority. And once one got on the subject of Papal Authority, the discussion started, so to speak, getting out of hand. It had become a much tougher, sharper kind of debate.
The context for these debates about penance, purgatory, etc. was confession: the practice of auricular or private confession, of going to the priest and confessing one's sins. In many ways it was then like it is now, with the exception in fact of the confessional, the box. The box so to speak was actually developed just at the very end of Luther's life. Charles Borromeo of Milan is credited with at least popularizing the modern confessional. One went to the priest; one goes to the priest - "bless me Father, for I have sinned" - and one recounts one's sins. One confesses one's sins. That's what we're called upon to do. The priest then pronounces absolution - "ego te absolvo" (the old Latin phrase) - and he forgives you your sin: your sins are then forgiven, period. However, think about the reality of sin. This is not my sin (I'm not confessing here on camera), but let's say somebody commits adultery and they go to their wife, they tell them (it's a man) - he goes to his wife and he says, you know, I committed adultery; please forgive me. And after a lot of struggle, a lot of discussion, the wife says, yes I'm ready to forgive you. But now does that mean everything's hunky-dory in the marriage? Does that mean there's no work left to do? There has to be a kind of work done to overcome the damage done by that sin. Or think of the contemporary sin: you know, online pornography - regular watching such things has an effect on you, and even if you repent, truly repent, there has to be work on what that has done to you over time. The concept in Catholic theology - again, perhaps this isn't the most attractive way of putting it - is that in the confessional, the eternal punishment for sin - your alienation from God - is overcome. But, there are temporal punishments, there are the effects of sin, there are the consequences of that sin that now need to be addressed. And that finds a focus today in the proverbial "10 Hail Marys" and in "Our Father." In the past, I should note, these penances - the past, really meaning fourth, fifth, sixth century - these penances were quite more extreme. They would be public humiliation for a year or two. They would be being excluded from the Eucharist for five years. They would be no meat, a vegetarian diet, for a year. They were a good deal more strict. But the concept of temporal punishments, satisfactions, is bound up with this notion that there are temporal punishments, consequences, that still need to be addressed. In a sense, that's what purgatory is about: purgatory is about completing that process of overcoming the effects of sin on us.
Certainly you'll find various statements about confessing one's sins in Scripture. When one has to go to a proof text, it tends to be, for example, in James talking about confessing to the elders. But there's a lot of talk in the New Testament about sort of the healthiness, the goodness of confessing one's sins one to another. We now know the word purgatory - purgatoriam in Latin - can only be found in the early 8th century for the first time. You'll find early on some practices; in particular, I would say praying for the dead. You find in Tertullian, the father of the early third century, writing in 200, 210 or so: he's already talking about offering the mass for the dead. Now, the question is, this practice seems fairly early, fairly deeply embedded. We had this very confusing passage in 1st Corinthians 15, where Paul mentions - he doesn't endorse, he doesn't condemn - baptizing the dead. There's some concern of doing something for the dead. What this becomes - again, practice in the ancient church - is particularly praying for the dead, and offering the mass for the dead. But what did that imply? I think as a Catholic theologian, I have to grant: of course, the word purgatory isn't in Scripture; but rather, I would say those practices which imply something like purgatory - prayer for the dead in particular - are there. And, I would say the obvious reality: we die still with sin in us in some ways, and we'll be perfect in the kingdom - that there'll be a purging, a transformation of us between death and final perfection, that seems obvious. The questions are the details here, so to speak. Now, you do get here not so much a difference between Catholicism and Luther, as a difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. I would note, Luther's criticism of purgatory had more to do with the way he thought it was bound up with works righteousness. That was his "you do things to help people to salvation" rather than depend on Christ. That's Luther's central critique. However, the Reformation develops and you get a greater stress, a greater difference drawing, about the way you appeal to scripture. It is the case that Catholic theology is willing to say - the Catholic Church is willing to say - that over time the church develops out of that original deposit of faith. There are no new revelations after the Apostles. But there is the power of the church, the capacity of the church, to discern the inner meaning of the faith - particularly, say, something like purgatory, even though I think we have to be honest, the word isn't there. It can't be derive. There, there is a difference about a kind of trust in the way the Holy Spirit guides the church so that it can draw out implications from the original deposit of the faith.
It's well-known the Reformation began with the indulgence campaign, ostensibly to help build St. Peter's, that Luther objected to. And this raises a question about the whole role of money in the Reformation. As I mentioned, these indulgence campaigns - these fundraising campaigns, in a sense - had really only been going on for thirty years. There had been critics, and the St. Peter's indulgence was the last one of these big money-raising indulgences campaigns. It was actually worse than Luther knew. There was with papal knowledge various amounts of money, about half, being siphoned off for other purposes. Now, it wasn't the case simply that the Roman Church money involved XYZ; it was true in the Protestant side, the Lutheran side too. Famously in England, Henry the 8th made a good deal of money by expropriating church lands. This occurred in other places. And certainly part of what's going on in the Reformation is the attempt of princes to control the churches in their territory. If a church and its territory became Protestant, it fell under the control of the local ruling body - city council, in a city of the prince in another area. Politics and money inevitably play a role in the Reformation. Behind this there are large questions. It takes money to build a church like this, so majestic: this is the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception; going to St. Peter's in Rome; going to St. Paul's Anglican, Protestant Cathedral in London - these are wonderful spaces. But are they what simpler followers of the crucified carpenter should be doing? That's a real question. These are inspirational kinds of places. Luther himself went on supporting great art. Lutherans built very large churches. But one has to note, one of the ways of the Reformation, one of the complexities of the Reformation, is the way from the very beginning, issues of pure theology - what I've talked about, the nature of justification and grace, church practices, confession - it was always bound up with politics: the role of the princes, princes want control solidifying states, they were unhappy with the role of a super-national institution like the papacy telling them what to do, there was too much German money going to Rome. Secular financial economic considerations were always bound up with the Reformation. And part of the tragedy of the Reformation is the way in which the divisive but perhaps controllable differences in theology were bound up also with divisive political, social and economic tensions which reinforced one another, and helped to produce the permanent (so far, sadly) permanent divisions of Western Christianity.
Often when we think about the issues raised by the Reformation and the division of Christianity, we think only about Catholicism and Protestantism. But it's important to remember, if you take worldwide Christianity, there are Catholics, there are Protestants, and there are the Orthodox - the great churches of the East headed as first among equals by the ecumenical patriarch the Archbishop of Constantinople in Istanbul; the Russian Orthodox Church clearly being the largest. Relations between the Orthodox and the West certainly haven't been close, but they haven't had exactly the same kind of history as in the West. The reality of the Western relations certainly was both sharper - we spoke the same language, Catholics and Protestants initially - and in addition, there was the wars: the wars of religion beginning 1546 in Germany, the last one really being the end of the 30 Years War in 1648 - were vicious wars, civilian kind of theological road rage, one historian calls it. These were bitter wars. And the reality is, over an extended period of time, when two groups kill a significant number of each other, it's very hard to sit down and have a theological discussion calmly. The Orthodox here might be an example: a different kind, a different spirit, different aesthetic. You go into their churches, they look quite different; a rather different theology. It's often useful when you have it sort of binary - two opposites battling each other - to bring in a quite different third that doesn't quite fit in between them, but it's a different way of looking at things - can be helpful. Over time, both Catholics and Protestants in some ways tried to appeal to the Orthodox as an ally against the other - that never really quite worked for either side. So one ecumenical hope would be the ways in which Catholicism and Protestantism and their theological discussions might be able to bring in Orthodoxy as a complicating and hopefully helpful resource in the discussions. Luther and his writings came at the same time as there were new technological possibilities for distributing them, the movable-type printing press. And Luther and the printing press industry, as it was developing, fed off each other. Luther was a master at writing short pithy pieces, and this is what the printers love to do: cheap, short pamphlets - they could sell them really cheaply, distribute large numbers. And Luther wrote very quickly, he churned these things out, so that by 1520, say, three years after the 95 Theses, when the argument had moved on from indulgences, enormous numbers of these were in circulation. One thing that happened was that opinions form very rapidly. By 1520, Luther is excommunicated, and by that time on the other side, Luther had decided that the Pope was the Antichrist. By late 1520, the two sides have dug in in ways that it's very hard to then reach reconciliation. To make a very long story short, by the 1530s you start getting institutionalization - that is, the Lutheran territories start creating their own church structures; 1546, you get the wars of religion beginning, you have the development, the structure now of what no one in 1517 could imagine: the long-term, virtually permanent existence of separate churches. Now, part of the effect of this, I think deeply against Luther's intentions, was to create a new situation: one not immediately where you had different territories, but it led to a situation ultimately that we have now. You can choose what church to go to! In some ways, you have to choose: it's not just given for you anymore. There's a shift where, as Luther emphasized, the external realities you should trust in - you are, despite Luther's intention, an effect of the Reformation is you're thrown back on your own devices. I moved to Washington, what do I do? I'd gone to a Lutheran Church before, but I don't like this pastor; maybe I go to the Presbyterian Church! I'll go to a Baptist Church! I was raised Catholic, but I really like the Orthodox. Despite themselves, however churches may want to stress the givenness of their reality and authority, the effect of the divisions of the Reformation are that we're in a new situation where inevitably private decision, private judgment, the individual, play a new kind of role. Now, the sort of genius of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I would note, are more that here's the church structure: you live in that structure, it's not really your decision. However, in the modern situation - an unintended consequence in history is often the story of unintended consequences - is that in Luther's protests (leading up to now), permanent Church division has had the effect of throwing the individual on to their own devices. It's hard to exaggerate how important this has been for European history. Do you have the whole rise of this kind of skepticism and philosophy and wider culture? Because the structures of certainty, the givens, were undermined by the division of opinion, and then that division of opinion being expressed in war, in violence, in rage against the other. This is a sad consequence of the Reformation - is this movement, I would say, this movement inevitably (I would argue, despite Luther's intentions) toward a kind of individualization of religion. How would Luther fit into the modern world? I think it's almost a world of Tweets, the Internet: it is attractive to make some parallels. Luther fed off (and it fed off him) the most modern technology of his time: as I mentioned, the printing press. He produced things fast; he made strong accusations: the Pope is the Antichrist! He didn't pull punches; so you have texts like, "against the goat Emser" (Emser is another theologian). How would he fit into the modern kind of situation? I think he'd be complicated. I think Luther would be utterly baffled by the modern world, that you have multiple churches, that you have people who seem to be perfectly happy with no religious faith at all. There are parallels: he's a man of deep convictions; he is a man of a certain coarseness. Luther is famous for his scatological language; it's referenced as what we say are bathroom kinds of discussions. There is a kind of, if one wants to celebrate it, earthiness - if you want to criticize it, coarseness and crudity to Luther. Unfortunately, that might fit into the modern world, particularly the recent world fairly well. Luther's a man with many warts, some people say a force of nature beyond any kind of judgment. He is a man of rage sometimes; there are texts of Luther's that, would that he had never written them, on some of his anti- Papal texts, some of his anti-Jewish texts - this is a bad side of Luther. There is also sometimes a kind of simplicity, a kind of utter trust, a kind of a warmth that you don't get in the colder scholastic philosophical theologian. Luther wrote spiritual masterpieces ("On the Freedom of a Christian"). He was a great interpreter of scripture. He worked like like a dog; he could produce enormous amounts of stuff in short periods of time. He's a complicated mix, and he is deeply a man of his time. That's why it's so hard to ask, how would Luther, how would he fit into the modern world. He was a late medieval man; he believed fervently and literally in the Devil. The Devil is a real force that must be struggled with, and some interpreters think this is quite central to Luther, this quite literal belief in the Devil. He was a man who lived in that late medieval world that was difficult, I think, for us to imagine.
Famously, the 95 Theses begin with the first thesis, Thesis 1: "When Jesus said 'repent,' he meant our whole lives to be lives of repentance" - that is, penance, repenance, is a characteristic of your entire life, not a matter simply of going to confession every second Saturday afternoon or something like that. What does this mean? Does it mean Luther was an advocate of gloominess, of always beating yourself or whipping yourself with a chain or a whip or thorns? It helps to remember: the late medieval period - say, 1350 on - was a hard time. The Black Death arrives in Central Europe in 1349. Remember, this is 25, 30% of the population dying. This was a horrible event. You also have what's called the beginning of the Little Ice Age: you have a climate change, something we know about today; except instead of things getting warmer, they got colder. Northern Europe, you had significant crop failures - it was a difficult time. It was also a time of economic change. Luther's father is something of a modern story: begins as a mine worker, becomes a co-owner in the mine - it's a time of change. Luther fits into a kind of late medieval piety, one that stressed humility, one in which one way of justifying yourself, of having you as a sinner be justified by God, is to condemn yourself. If you condemn yourself adequately, well then you're on God's side condemning sin. And paradoxically, by focusing on your own sinfulness you would be in line with God and thus be in a sense innocent. Remember the parable of the publican and the sinner: publican says, thank God you didn't make me a sinner, the sinner says have mercy on me, I know I'm a sinner, and Jesus says to the publican, the one who says I'm a sinner goes home justified. That's a part of Luther, and if that's what all he was about - if it was just about beating up on yourself, and if you beat up on yourself hard enough, God's on your side - if that was it, it would be gloomy. What's striking is that Luther never loses that late-medieval sense of a world on the brink; of a world in which the devil is constantly threatening; in which there are deep, deep threats around you. He never loses that. But there's the decisive shift. And the shift is, yes, I need to repent, but my penance is now bound up with dependence on Christ. There's not just the negative - I'm awful, I fail - but then that statement, I fail but Jesus doesn't: Jesus succeeds and if I trust in Christ - and I can trust that God will lead me to trust in Christ - if I trust in Christ, then I can have a kind of joyous life, knowing I'm a sinner - yes, that's the case - but Luther thought, as long as you trust in Jesus, you can have a kind of basic confidence: a confidence that, come the last day and now you are in the love of God. And that's the kind of joyousness. But note that joyousness requires the dark background. It's only that if it was up to me, I'm screwed: it's over. Because I am a deep sinner. I'm a bag of maggots. I'm a worm. If you don't have that background - and we don't in most of modern culture - we don't have that penitential kind of sense. Without that penitential sense, the attractiveness of Luther's understanding of the Gospel - which was attractive to many people at the time - without that sense, you don't see the joyousness. It's precisely the sharp contrasts in Luther's picture, as in a lot of late medieval art, between the rather grotesque, the gloomy, and against that background, the sunlight of the Gospel.
One of the blessings of the modern period has been the work on overcoming these Reformation divides between Catholic and Protestant. This has been a large part of my life. My sort of academic specialty has been working on overcoming Reformation divides. I've been on the International and the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, I was privileged to be a part of the work on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, where narrowly on the question of justification, Lutherans and Catholics now say they need not condemn each other. There's still some real differences, but on the topic itself, there need not be condemnations. Now in my own case, things got a little complicated. A challenge of ecumenical dialogue: if it's not just negotiation, I mean ecumenical dialogue should be a joint pursuit of the deeper truth that we hope can unify us despite (or help us overcome) divisions. There's always a risk in that, that you'll find, gee, the other side seems right! There's a real difference here, and I think maybe I'm on the wrong side. Now, that happened to me: I sort of despite myself became convinced on some basic issues about grace, about the way in which grace elevates human freedom, where grace engages the self, the way grace transforms the self. I became convinced in the end that the Catholic position was correct. So I did the only thing I could honestly do: I became a Catholic. I now teach here at Catholic University. That's the kind of risk that goes on in any kind of genuine intellectual pursuit. It's always possible that one simply becomes convinced. We don't control our convictions - Luther would certainly agree with that! The ecumenical dialogues between Catholics and Lutherans - that's what I know the best - have been very successful in some topics, particularly the nature of salvation, justification which Luther thought was absolutely central, and some other topics such as the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and some other issues. Where the dialogues are working now, but I have to say, to my mind with very little real success, are on issues of the church, and on actual Christian practice. Issues about what is authority in the church, how do we make decisions, who makes those decisions, what's the nature of the priesthood. I mean, finally it's not about reconciling Luther with the Pope at the time, Leo the 10th; the issue is about reconciling the contemporary Lutheran Church with a contemporary Catholic Church, and that means bringing together people and structures. In some certain ways that's harder to do than simply dealing with questions about theology. It's hard work. I also have to add honestly that whereas Lutherans and Catholics - or more broadly, Catholics and mainline Protestants - have come together in many ways on some doctrinal issues, time doesn't stand still on some other issues: particularly some social ethical issues, issues of divorce, issues of abortion, same-sex marriage issues - there's an increasing divide between Catholics and many at least mainstream Protestants. So at the present moment, dialogue goes on. I don't think...I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful. Hope is a theological virtue - hope's the gift of God - one always goes on working, but you never know how it's going to turn out. But at this point we are dealing with quite difficult issues, I think. How does one judge the Reformation, particularly as a Catholic? I think the Catholic has to regret the division among Christians that occurred at the Reformation - there's no way around that. There is blame on both sides: both sides rushed to judgment in certain ways. There were certainly failures in the Catholic Church. I think it's it's easy and correct to be critical of the indulgence campaign that set things off to begin with. Even if I judge in the end, I think the Catholic Church was right in some deep sense. There's more than enough blame to go around. What was the effect of the Reformation on the Catholic Church? Well, positive and negative. Certainly negatively, a problem for both Lutheran and Catholic was that each side defined themself over against the other. "If the Catholics do it, we won't." "If Protestants do it, we won't!" So that led in some ways probably to the Catholic Church not distributing the Bible in the vernacular - that's what Protestants do, we don't do that! - and that was a negative effect. I do think in the long term there have been positive effects of the Reformation, particularly in the last 100, 125 years where some aspects of the Reformation - the Catholic Church no longer says, well, if the Protestants do it, it must be wrong - there are good reasons perhaps for, most often, the mass being in the vernacular. I tend to like the mass in Latin sometimes, but I can easily see, one needs to go ahead and move the mass into the vernacular. The widespread distribution of Bibles, something that should have been done earlier in Catholic history. So in that sense there had been particularly in the last 150 years, as we've gotten over this, "that the other side does it, we won't just to make it clear that we're not them" - there has been a kind of mutual enrichment that John Paul II talked about, a gift exchange, between Protestants and Catholics. And the hope would be that we don't pick each up each other's bad habits, but that there are gifts that each of us have been given by God in our histories that we can exchange with the others, and that's part of what ecumenism is about: even if we're in a situation where we may be deadlocked on formal relations for a while, that doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other, we can't share our gifts with one another, that there can't be as much fellowship as there can be in this situation. And that's certainly, I think, one of my hopes for the future, is that as much as possible this gift exchange can go on.
Luther was a man of strong convictions. He believed in God, he believed in the Devil, he believed in sin, he believed in eternal judgment, he believed in Heaven, believed in Hell. And he thought it made a great difference whether you believed in these things. If you had true faith in Jesus, you would enjoy eternal life, eternal bliss. And if you didn't, you would be cast out into the darkness where the real devils, the real demons, will torment you for eternity. He was a man who believed these things, and would have a hard time understanding how people wouldn't care; how this wouldn't be a burning issue. And that's why I think in many ways Luther - if you were to drop him down into America in 2017 - would be baffled. He would be baffled at people, not who aren't fervent atheists - I mean that I think Luther might understand (again, that's strong convictions). It'd be people that shrug their shoulders: you know, "I don't need religion. I'm spiritual, but not religious. I've made my own religion." I think the notion of making your own religion, Luther would find something between laughable and something to cry over. Your own religion won't stand up before the assaults of the Devil. They're not built on the only foundation that's adequate: Jesus. I think Luther, if you would set him down today - of course, this is a guess - I think he'd be appalled at even what's happened in some ways to his own theology. It's not...for Luther, his message is not therapeutic. It's not about helping you get through the day. It's not about being the best you possible. If you try and really emphasize being the best you possible, you're going be the worst you, Luther would think, because you're looking at yourself. I think Luther would look at a lot of what passes as a kind of mild Christianity, positive thinking, spiritual but not religious - I think Luther would look at that and condemn them with the kind of vehemence that he used for the papacy, for the works of the Devil. I think he would be baffled, horrified, by the kind of not caring. One of the things that the Catholic Church historically has criticized the effect of the Reformation, is what's called indifferentism: that one is indifferent, one doesn't care; that faced with all these choices, it doesn't really matter - you can take Jif, you can take Skippy, but maybe you just want to eat peanut butter! - that religion is a matter of taste. It's not a matter of the deep realities of life: that life is serious, life has goals, ends, and if you don't meet those goals, that means your life has in some ways run aground; it's wrecked. For Luther, life is a serious business, and that's one reason why, I mentioned earlier, I think it's important: this sort of dark background - for Luther, it's not cheap grace. This grace is going to lift you out of a situation of deep threat. And yes, it's pure gift - but that gift calls for acceptance, it calls for faith, it calls for trust in the face of temptation. I think, for Luther, he might find the modern world frivolous. Frivolous in its lack of seriousness, amusing itself to death. I think he would think there's been a decline at the basic background conditions that he and his Catholic opponents shared in the 16th century. They believed a lot was at stake in every human life, and they were struggling over it, and I think they would find today the battle has been given up too often. One is settling for a pablum, for mere therapy that doesn't address the disease.
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