In reading around the subject of the Reformation, I came across a summary of the issues that I would like to share with my readers. It has a simplicity about it which helps to make it useful to our thinking about the Reformation, as well to our interest concerning power and its abuse.
The classic principles of the Protestant Reformation (Anglicans like me have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with them) are threefold. First there is the principle of ‘justification by faith alone’. This is in particular read out of the Epistle to the Romans. In the second place there is the teaching that Christ on the on the cross died a substitutionary death in an act of atonement for the sins of mankind. Thirdly there is the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These principles of theology were read out of Scripture and proclaimed by all of the Reformers with different emphases throughout the 16th century and later. Even though my reducing so much theological writing into a small compass will probably meet with scepticism, I ask that the reader bears with me sufficiently as I observe that each of these principles has to do with power, particularly reclaiming power from the religious monolith that was the mediaeval Catholic church.
It is a commonplace to note that the Reformation was a movement of protest. This word ‘protest’ has a double meaning in modern usage. It contains the idea of objecting to and targeting an idea or principle, but also simply making an opinion known. The early Protestants were in fact doing both these things. They were attacking the power of Catholic authority and at the same time they were articulating (protesting) a new way of being Christian. This new vision of how to be a Christian stood on its own but it had, at the same time, the effect of attacking the monopoly of the powerful institutions of the Catholic church. How were the three planks of Reformation teaching undermining the power of the mediaeval church?
The first principle that I mentioned as a key to understanding the Reformation ‘protest’, was the rediscovery that faith, as understood by Paul, was a matter for the individual and his relationship with God. This possibility of a relationship of faith with God, without the mediation of sacraments and the entire paraphernalia of clerical structures, was deeply subversive to the old order. A second principle to challenge what had gone before was the new understanding of how Christ’s death had been an atoning sacrifice. This sacrifice did not need repetition and Protestants, by making their claim that Christ’s death was a once-for-all event, were effectively undermining the Catholic claims for its theology of the Mass. Why was it necessary to re-enact the death of Christ over and over again in the Mass, when the original event was decisive? If the Lord’s Supper was to be remembered, it was a mere remembrance of an event in the past. It did not involve some magical process as suggested by the teaching on transubstantiation. The third point was the inner relationship with the Holy Spirit as taught by Scripture. This did not need anything beyond the believer and his life of personal inner growth to make it happen.
In this way Luther and the other Reformers of the 16th century challenged the institutional power of the Roman church with their ‘plain’ reading of Scripture. Whether they were in fact handling Scripture correctly through these attacks is arguable, but I have to leave that point to one side for the moment. What is important to realise is that, at an important level, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation after it were struggles for power. Theological ideas read out of Scripture had massive implications not just for the Christian faith but also for the world of politics, society and the whole course of history. John Calvin took political authority in Geneva in the name of the principles set out in his Christian Institutes. In every society in Western Europe since that day, power, political and sometimes military power, has often been exercised in the name of Christian truth. Arguably when Christian truth believes that it has the right to dictate to others, believers or not, how to live and behave, it then has the potential to become an abusive system. This is true whether it takes place at a national level or at the level of an individual congregation, or even at a family level. We can always imagine the authority figure being able to say: ‘God has given me the power to tell you how to live your life’.
The argument of this blog piece is simply to point out the way that power and thus power-games have infiltrated into Christian institutions at every level, sometimes to their enormous detriment. Obviously institutions have to have rules and order, but these rules and the order they promote, have often become instruments of control. Protestant and Catholic institutions have both failed in this area in many places. We need to remind ourselves, once more, that the Christian way, as proposed by Jesus, was a way that completely turned upside down the rules of power. Jesus stated quite clearly that while the kings and governors made people feel the weight of their authority, ‘it shall not be so among you’. The crucifixion, which is very much in our minds and imaginations at this time, was a powerful living out of a protest against conventional power and the way it is used. The way of God was to be the path of powerlessness and humility. Somehow we keep losing the plot over this call to learn the meaning of humility and love. Christian institutions should not be places where people are bullied sometimes and humiliated. I find it hard to understand why there is not within the churches a massive amount of knowledge and experience with which to put into practice the way of powerlessness as taught and practised by Jesus. We have had 2000 years to get it right. There are of course some places which seem to understand gentleness, true altruism and the way of service, but they are not as common as one would like them to be. Above all the Church should be far better at spotting very quickly when things are going wrong in terms of the failure to use power appropriately. Sadly the Church is better at leaving things to fester. Sometimes dysfunctional structures continue for decades before they are challenged, having left pain and abuse in their wake.