Lecture 15.docx

So, we\'re talking about Luther and the bondage of the will then, we\'re talking about the perspicuity of Scripture. As I say, I think, if you\'re thinking in contemporary terms, this is an important one. And I would also make it, I sort of implicitly made the distinction. I do think that, you k...

So, we\'re talking about Luther and the bondage of the will then, we\'re talking about the perspicuity of Scripture. As I say, I think, if you\'re thinking in contemporary terms, this is an important one. And I would also make it, I sort of implicitly made the distinction. I do think that, you know, pastorally it\'s good to have answers to these questions, but also to, you know, the questions you get asked in church may not require super sophisticated answers. So, always, you know, it\'s always good to answer the person in a way that meets the concern they have. Probably you\'re not going to be asked super sophisticated questions about linguistic theory relative to scriptural perspicuity. But you may have to have some kind of understanding of what some of the difficulties might be in order to respond to somebody who says, well, why do we understand this is my body this way and they understand it that way and yet we both claim the authority of Scripture on this. It\'s worth thinking about those things. They do pop up every now and then. Finally, just on perspicuity of Scripture, Luther also emphasizes, as far as he\'s concerned, key doctrines are clearly taught, clearly taught in Scripture. Again, we might say it\'s a little more complicated than Luther makes it out to be. To say that the incarnation is clearly taught, yes and no, I think, yes, that God is incarnate seems to be clearly taught, but the implications, the ramifications, the articulation of that requires a degree of sophistication and thinking. The bondage of the will can also be read. It\'s not simply a treatise on perspicuity, though. It\'s also a treatise about necessity. And Luther starts the treatise with a key theological claim. I\'ll read it and then I\'ll sort of syllogize it on the screen. Luther says this, do you suppose that God does not will what he foreknows or that he does not foreknow what he wills? If he wills what he foreknows, his will is eternal and changeless because his nature is so, from which it follows by resistless logic that all we do, however it may appear to us to be done mutably and contingently, is in reality done necessarily and immutably in respect of God\'s will. For the will of God is effective and cannot be impeded, since power belongs to God\'s nature, and his wisdom is such that he cannot be deceived. Luther\'s making a number of dogmatic assertions there. One, God is eternal and changeless. Two, that which God foreknows. He must first logically, this is not chronologically, foreordain everything. I think, which happens, happens of necessity or therefore happens of necessity relative to God\'s will. It\'s a pretty blunt and I think deterministic statement. The history of the church, there\'s a variety of emphases and approaches to the issue of the bondage of the will. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Got you. There are a variety of approaches to the bondage of the will. Augustine by and large focuses very much on the fall, that the will is bound because human beings are fallen and therefore the will is turned in on itself. Human beings are therefore not capable of choosing the good. We can choose, and in a sense we can choose freely, but we cannot choose the good. It\'s a development of the doctrine of the bondage of the will that\'s really rooted in the historical category of the fall and subsequent sinfulness of the human will. Luther represents a different strand. Luther really represents a more ontological strand of thinking, that it\'s the very nature of being a creature that means our will is in bondage. It\'s because we are not all powerful God, but are creatures created by God and therefore subject to his foreknowledge and therefore his foreordination that we do not have a free will. So Luther takes a pretty radical position. Both streams find precedent. Both are represented in the Middle Ages. A guy called Gregory of Rimini would be a sort of Augustine kind of guy. A man called Thomas Bradwardine would take more of the position of Martin Luther. So both positions were found quite to be acceptable articulations and explanations of predestination in the Middle Ages. Luther qualifies this by, you know, it\'s very clear that the necessity aspect of it is not experienced by us. We are not conscious of this necessitarianism. We feel that we act freely. I don\'t know how many of you have seen the great movie The Red Shoes? It\'s one of the great post-war British movies about the production of the ballet The Red Shoes. It\'s sort of a ballet within a movie. It\'s based on Hans Christian Andersen\'s fairy story The Red Shoes. Hans Christian Andersen\'s fairy story is in their original form, really pretty scary. They really do sort of mess with your head. And in The Red Shoes, the story is that this girl gets this pair of red shoes and she dances in these red shoes and then the shoes take on a life of their own. And she dances, they dances out of her parents\' house and over the hills and far away and they dance her to death. You know, typically Hans Christian Andersen\'s stories didn\'t begin and they all lived happily ever after. They all tend to die horribly at the end. For Luther, human life is not like The Red Shoes, we\'re not talking about The Red Shoes kind of necessity, that God does not work in an external compulsive way on us. We experience the world free. We freely make choices, we freely act. But in actual fact, behind the scenes, the ontology of that is these are not free acts at all. They are predetermined by God. Someone could press back on Luther and say, so life is a bit of an illusion then. And I think Luther would say, well, yeah, freedom is an illusion from that perspective. I have to say that while I appreciate the overall dogmatic thrust of what Luther\'s doing, I find certain aspects of the bondage of the will to be ones that I myself would probably want to question if we sort of got into a systematic mode here. Luther uses Judas as an example. If God foreknew that Judas would be a traitor, Judas becomes a traitor of necessity. And it was not in the power of Judas or of any creature to act differently or to change his will from that which God had foreseen. It is true that Judas acted willingly and not under compulsion, but his willing was the work of God brought into being by his omnipotence like everything else. For Luther, and I think this is a fair point, for Luther, if God\'s foreknowledge is fallible, then God is not really God. But if God\'s foreknowledge is infallible, then the implication of that is this deterministic framework that Luther is arguing for at this point. To argue for the freedom of the will, in other words, Luther would say, is to deny that God is God. That\'s the implication of it for Luther, to deny that God is not sovereign. It works to an extent because Luther does not address the big issue, and that\'s the issue of evil. It seems to me that when you get into this kind of thing, one of the first questions that\'s going to bubble up in your mind is, well, where does evil come from? Luther actually chooses never to answer that question. Luther\'s system works. Now, Judas is evil. Judas is made evil. God moves his will in a manner that God\'s determined. It doesn\'t change Judas\'s will from being evil, and Judas commits an evil act. That works. One might say this doesn\'t seem to be anything unfair there. But when you push it back to the origins of evil, it becomes a more complicated question. And Luther never ever addresses in his bondage of the will where evil comes from. It\'s simply always there, and God has to work in the light of that fact. Yeah? I think Calvin in his work against Pigius points pretty strongly in Luther\'s kind of direction as well. There is a certain logical coherence and consistency to it. The problem he faces is the origin of evil. Where does evil come from? To which I suspect, because it\'s not revealed to us, there is no answer. But the implication of this framework is that God himself must have willed evil at some point in order for it to exist. Now Luther doesn\'t draw that conclusion explicitly, and I think it\'s appropriate not to draw that conclusion explicitly. But it is that sort of loose end in this, that sort of niggle at the back of one\'s mind. Where does evil come from in this scheme? If you have a scheme that allows for more creaturely freedom, it still doesn\'t totally solve the problem, but it allows you to at least ameliorate the problem somewhat. I think other difficult questions come up at that point as well. The best book I read on Christianity and the problem of evil is Henri Bloché\'s Evil and the Cross of Christ, where what Bloché does there is reorient the question. And he essentially says the problem with Christian questions about evil is that we look to the origin for the solution and not to the resolution. And he says we have to look at evil from the perspective of the solution, the cross. That\'s how we solve the problem of evil, not by trying to find where it came from, because it\'s not revealed. This is the context. Say Luther is comfortable with individuals who are evil, continuing to be evil and moved on the evil path by God\'s sovereign will. He\'s simply not great. He simply chooses not to answer the question, the obvious question if you like, of where evil comes from. Talking about grace. Luther regards the whole idea of grace as a complete refutation of Erasmus\'s view of free will. The careful concern Luther says of God in promising grace to recall and raise up the sinner is itself a sufficiently great and trusty proof that free will of itself cannot but grow worse unless you believe that God is the kind of trifler who pours out words of promise in such abundance, not from any need of them for our salvation, but just because he likes to talk. In other words, they\'re saying why does the Bible contain so much talk about grace if grace is not truly grace? Grace for Luther is free unmerited favor. It captures, the essence of grace is captured in God\'s promises that are essentially unconditional. The priority of grace for Luther is demonstrated in passages like Matthew 23, 45, come you blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Romans 9 is another passage that Luther looks to. The priority of God. And remember, thinking back to the Heidelberg Disputation, God\'s love does not find but creates that which is lovely to it. And as a counterpoint to grace, Luther points to human beings impotence to save itself. Does this ontological framework that means human beings cannot in and of themselves without God willing them to do it move towards salvation? Secondly, human beings are depraved, which means that unless God specially moves them towards salvation, they will simply move continually in on themselves in a depraved way. And Luther here has some of his sharpest engagement with Erasmus. Erasmus argues that the existence of the law indicates humanity\'s ability, that the Lord would not command things if human beings were not to some extent capable of obeying or fulfilling those commands. For Luther, the law does not exist for that purpose. The law exists to demonstrate to us our moral impotence when it comes to standing right before God. It does not demonstrate our ability. In actual fact, it does the opposite. It demonstrates our inability. Luther says this, the passage of scripture which you cite are imperative, and they prove and establish nothing about the ability of man, but only lay down what is and is not to be done. They signify not what we can do or do do, but what we ought to do and what is required of us so that our impotence may be known to us and the knowledge of our sin may be given to us. And this leads Luther to throw Erasmus what for him is the ultimate theological insult. Our friend the diatribe, he says, makes no distinction at all between the voices of the law and the gospel. So blind and ignorant is it that it does not see what the law and gospel are. I am amazed and astounded that a man who has spent so much of his time in studying the sacred writings should be so utterly ignorant, Luther says. He\'s not one who holds back on his insults. For Luther, by allowing free will, Erasmus destroys the gospel because ultimately our salvation is made something that we do. It\'s not something that God does for us. It becomes a cooperative venture that involves a fundamental denial of the promise of the gospel. So we see that law gospel opposition that we\'ve noted before plays out here as well. What Luther is doing here is working out the conceptual underpinnings of his understanding of law and gospel. The bondage of the will is the crucial underpinning of salvation as Luther understands it. You take away the bondage of the will and everything has to be revised in the light of that including the notion of justification by grace through faith because grace is no longer grace and human salvation becomes on a personal level the result of a human act performed autonomously by ourselves. Of course this faces Luther with the question that you know Augustine, Paul faces it in Romans 9. Augustine faced it relative to baptism when Augustine was engaged in his controversy with the Pelagians in the early 5th century. One of the questions, you know one of the obvious pastoral question one might say for Augustine was why is it that some babies make it to get baptized? We\'re thinking in Augustine\'s framework here while other babies are killed, stillborn or killed you know through to unfortunate circumstances on the way to the baptismal font. Why is it that some if you like make it into the church as far as Augustine is concerned and why are some doomed by circumstances beyond their control never to be baptized never to be brought into the church. Luther faces the issue here Calvin will face it when he introduces his discussion of election. Why is the gospel Calvin asks not equally preached to all? Why is it that when the word is proclaimed some respond and others do not? All of those theologians stand in the you know what is really the Western Augustinian tradition make a distinction between God hidden and God revealed. We\'ve come across this distinction before in Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation there he uses the distinction differently there God\'s hiddenness is his revelation and his revelation is his hiddenness. Here in his work on the bondage of the will hiddenness refers to those parts of God that he does not reveal to us at all in any way. Erasmus focuses in on Ezekiel 18 23 do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked declares the sovereign Lord rather am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live. For Erasmus that passage clearly indicates that God does not desire that anyone should perish and therefore he needs to construct his theology in a way that if you like grants a good genuine opportunity to each and every one to repent. Luther however says that what\'s being referred to there is God\'s revealed will which has to be understood over against the background of God\'s hidden will. God Luther Luther says this God in his own nature majesty is to be left alone in this regard we have nothing to do with him nor does he wish us to deal with him we have to do with him as clothed and displayed in his word by which he presents himself to us. So it\'s a good it\'s a classic piece of Luther there Luther we are to we are only to find God where God has made himself available to be found. Words of scripture clothed in the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. Texts like it the one that Erasmus is focused on in Ezekiel 18 refer to God\'s revelation but for Luther there is if you like a God behind the revealed God whose will might be quite different. God in his own nature and majesty sorry wrong quotation God hidden in his majesty neither deplores nor takes away death but works life and death and all in all nor as he set bounds to himself by his word but has kept himself free over all things. There is a God behind God\'s revelation now I want to step aside at this point say this is where I start have problems with Luther. When Luther starts to contrast God\'s hiddenness with his revelation in such a way that God\'s revelation starts not to look like very reliable revelation at all in the way Luther\'s pressing it then I think we start to see dogmatic problems emerging. Luther gets close to saying God has revealed himself to be one way but actually he\'s really the complete opposite but don\'t worry about it just grab hold of God in his revelation but let\'s run with Luther for a bit and see how he he develops this. The diatribe Luther says is deceived by its own ignorance in that it makes no distinction between God preached and God hidden that is between the Word of God and God himself. God does many things which he does not in his word show us that he does. He does not will the death of a sinner that is in his word but he wills it by his inscrutable will. At present however we must keep in view his word and leave alone his inscrutable will for it is by his word and not by his inscrutable will that we must be guided. It\'s interesting Luther there is saying you know God may God\'s inscrutable will may stand in opposition to his revealed will but we are to cling to the way he has revealed himself to be. The response to this we are to worship. We owe nothing to God and he knows nothing to us as Luther says so this is the time and the place to adore the true majesty and its awful wondrous incomprehensible judgments and to say thy will be done as in heaven so in earth. We are nowhere more recklessly irreverent than when we trespass upon and argue about these inscrutable mysteries of judgments. Luther will even go on to say this he said now the highest degree of faith is to believe that God is merciful though he saves so few and damns so many to believe that he is just though of his own will he makes us perforce proper subjects for damnation and seems in Erasmus\'s words to delight in the torments of poor wretches and to be a fitter object for hate than for love. So for Luther makes this this fundamental distinction between God revealed and God hidden and I think that all of us have to make that distinction at some level. What I\'m uncomfortable with though is the way that having made that distinction then Luther proceeds really to tell us rather a lot about God hidden in a way that comes perilously close to undermining the reliability of God revealed. Now I\'m not sure what the answer to that is but it seems to me that Luther\'s very confident about what this hidden God who\'s never revealed himself is actually willing. The damnation of very very many. I\'m not sure that dogmatically one wants to really press that point too hard. One could see there that it\'s casting something of a shadow over his emphasis upon a God revealed in his word. So I\'m a big fan of Luther but the bondage of the will at that point I want to say yes I think that distinction is legitimate and important. We have to be able to understand why if we believe that God is sovereign why is it that some respond to the preaching the word and others don\'t? Doctrine of election. If we have a doctrine of election then we have to deal with passages like Ezekiel 18 in some way but I\'m not sure that Luther in setting up not simply a doctrine of God\'s revelation and God\'s hiddenness but then setting them so starkly in opposition to each other is a particularly helpful way of going about this and I can see that this could create pastoral problems because it will create questions of the reliability of God\'s revelation to us. So I\'m not a systematician it\'s not my job to put things together it\'s my job as a historian to make things more complicated than we thought they were and then to hand it over to the systematicians to put it all back together again. But that would be one of my criticisms of Luther. The radical opposition of hiddenness and revelation there seems to me to go beyond that which God\'s revelation would warrant us to do. If I could put it that way and Luther seems remarkably confident about the will of the hidden God which by his own definition has not been revealed to us and therefore he should not be confident about. Having said that we\'ve got to pull the lever and the vote I\'m going to be with Luther and not Erasmus. Got to go with Luther but I go with Luther with certain caveats and certain questions. Origin of evil, dialectical opposition of revelation hiddenness, these are questions that I think need further exploration and we have other sources we can go to Calvary go to Tarity we have a we have hundreds of years of theological reflection on these things we\'re not just dependent on Luther of course. So that was Luther on the bondage of the will then. Let us now move to Luther versus Zwingli. 1525, I think 1525 is a turning point for Luther. The Luther after 1525 will always be somewhat less sanguine about the way things are going. You know those early years when he returns from the Diet of Worms when he stamps his authority on the Reformation in 1522 he has every reason to believe that Jesus is coming soon because these are extraordinary times nobody has ever done this and got away with it. Nobody\'s ever achieved what he\'s achieved and survived. He has every reason we might say for believing his own propaganda at that point. Then it all starts to fall apart. The peasants war shatters once and for all the popular consensus that had carried him so strong and so far. The diatribe on free will means that no Erasmus and his guys they\'re not going to come on board. And the third strand of the whole thing of course is the rise of other models of Reformation elsewhere. And the principal one in the early years is that represented by Huldrych Zwingli and the Reformation in Zurich. Huldrych Zwingli born just a few weeks after Martin Luther, January 1st 1484. A few weeks apart but culturally there will be a vast gulf between these two men. Zwingli was educated in Basel and then in Bern and then back to Basel to matriculate at the university there where he studied under the leading humanist scholar Thomas Wittenbach. Zwingli in other words is a man of the modern age. Zwingli\'s educational path is that of the new men, the cutting-edge intellectuals. He\'s not a monk who\'s received you know the last swan song of a glorious medieval education. Zwingli from the word go is running with the new boys, the guys who are remaking Europe\'s educational system, the humanists. At age 22 he\'s called to be a priest at Glarus, slightly under slightly under age for it but it\'s a function of a shortage of priests. Ordained at Constance in 1506, so as I say slightly under the age and he\'s a priest at Glarus for 10 years during which time he engages in intensive study of the Greek language. 1516 to 1518 he ministers at Einsiedaun. A parish famous for its Marian shrine and Zwingli will always retain a high view of the Virgin Mary, always retains a high view of the Virgin Mary, argues for the perpetual virginity of the Virgin. I got myself into horrible knots at Westminster once in class when I say it\'s a passage and I think it\'s an Isaiah that he uses and the horse, a horseman rides through the gates and then the gates are closed and I said you know the horseman represents the baby Jesus and the gates represent and there were women in the class and I said and the gates represent and the gates represent then I went bright red and I said well I think you get the picture and we moved straight on but it\'s one of the few moments in class I\'ve ever experienced where I\'m speechless and I go red even thinking about it today but you get the picture. She\'s then called in 1518 to the great minster in Zurich and this is the context one of my favorite church history anecdotes. There was a story that Zwingli\'s appointment at the great minster was delayed because he had committed an act of fornication and had got a girl pregnant. Now this is the Reformation, scurrilous rumors spread by Protestants about Catholics and Catholics about Protestants, that staple that\'s part of the everyday propaganda. It had always been assumed, it had always been assumed that this was a bit of later Roman propaganda put around to undermine Zwingli\'s reputation. Up to the 19th century in the archives in Zurich and the great Zwingli scholar Johann Schultes is working in the archives with his assistant, a man who will go on to be a great historian of dogma, Alexander Schweitzer, not to be confused with Alfred Schweitzer of the quest for historical Jesus frame. Alexander Schweitzer is working in the archives and he comes across a document, a letter written in Zwingli\'s handwriting, written in Zwingli\'s handwriting confessing to this act of fornication and the story gets better at this point. Schultes doesn\'t know what to do so what he does, you know, he need to destroy the evidence, got to get rid of this because this would be a black mark, it\'s the reputation of my hero. So Schultes sticks the letter in the candle in the middle of the table to burn the evidence, get rid of it and then after about a quarter of the letter is burned he pulls it out of the candle, extinguishes the fire and turns to Schweitzer and says no Protestantism is the truth in all circumstances and he goes and files the letter with the university authorities. So we now know that this was true. I also, I use that as an anecdote to show that historians can come across evidence that cuts very deeply with their greatest loves and prejudices, whatever you call them, and take them into account and change their opinion as a result of it. History isn\'t simply a historian sitting down and writing the narrative that he wants in order to justify some position in the present as some radical postmodernists seem to think. Historians can actually change their opinions when faced with evidence to the contrary. That\'s I hope there\'s another anecdote about Ernst Raynaud, the very liberal later atheist guy in the 19th century. Raynaud was a Roman Catholic who lost his faith and he\'s walking one day in the park, I think in Paris or somewhere. Somebody recognizes him and runs up to him and says, Monsieur Raynaud, I hear that you\'ve become a Protestant. And Raynaud turns to this and he says, sir, I\'ve lost my faith, not my mind, and walks on. So that\'s a sort of counter one to the the the Scoltese statement. But anyway, this is cleared out of the way. By the way, Samuel Rutherford also, the great Presbyterian, was disciplined for getting his fiancee pregnant. I think, you know, one, it\'s good to know that our heroes were human in many ways. Two, I suspect it\'s just easier to get away with this stuff now than it was in the in the 16th, 17th centuries. Takes up the the pastorate in Zurich. In 1519, he hears of Luther\'s attack on papal authority at the Leipzig debate and he declares Luther to be a new Elijah. The relationship between Luther and Zwingli is a complicated one from a scholarly perspective because the scholarship has been very partisan. German scholarship has by and large tended to argue that Zwingli is, you know, very derivative of Luther for obvious patriotic reasons, I suppose. Swiss scholarship has tended to argue for the originality of Zwingli in the Reformation, again for patriotic reasons. It\'s hard sometimes to work it out. We certainly know that Zwingli was speaking favorably of Luther as early as 1519. Zwingli does not have the the existential crises that Luther has that shape his theology. Luther\'s emphasis upon justification is intimately tied to Luther\'s own personal struggles. Zwingli\'s theology is shaped by a very different thing and it\'s actually it\'s a big social event rather than a personal crisis. 1519 to 1520. Zurich is struck with the plague. And it wipes out 25% of the population of the city. You know, just let that figure sink in. 25% of the city dies in the plague. Every winter in America I\'ve noticed, you know, we\'re all going to die of the flu and they always give it a creepy name. You know, if you give the flu a name connected to an animal species, it sounds that much happier. You know, avian flu or swine flu, swine flu is the real one, wasn\'t it? Swine flu because it has that sort of Frankenstein feel of something crossing a species and being uncontrollable. But even in the even in the worst flu outbreaks of recent years, the amount of the population that it\'s of even got flu is really very small. And the number of people who\'ve died of it is infinitesimally small. Don\'t get me wrong, devastating tragedy for those families marked by fatalities from flu, but very, very small. Imagine if I were to say to you in your churches, 18 months from now, 25% of your congregation without respect to age or social standing will be gone. That\'d be devastating. That would profoundly affect how you think about your pastoral ministry. It would profoundly affect the rest of your life in terms of how you think about the pastorate. Again, you\'ve got to remember, pastors are real people living in real contexts. This has a profound effect upon Zwingli. And if Luther\'s doctrine is justification by grace, if we were to find anything approximating to that in importance in Zwingli, it\'s the doctrine of providence for Zwingli. For Zwingli, it\'s providence and this acute sense of God\'s sovereignty and of our dependence upon God, our fragility in the context of God. 1520 is also the year when, and I haven\'t mentioned that he even had this yet. In 1520, Zwingli renounces his papal pension. Yes, he was getting a pension from the papacy. One, this has been a source of embarrassment for Zwingli fans over the years because of course, you know, it does seem to indicate that he comes to the Reformation a bit after Martin Luther if he\'s still taking money from the papacy. Zwingli span it as, well, he\'d become a Protestant before that, but he thought it was kind of fun and a bit ironic to use papal money to subsidize his Protestant book buying habits. It\'s a little bit weak. Why did he have a papal pension? Well, it\'s interesting. Zwingli was a patriot, a Swiss patriot. One of the things about Switzerland in the late 15th, early 16th century is that it was the mercenary capital of Europe. I\'ve forgotten what we call them. We don\'t call them mercenaries anymore, do we? What is it? Security consultants or something? When we use them, they become security consultants. But in the old days, they were mercenaries. They were people who killed for money rather than money and patriotism or something like that. Switzerland was a, you know, the Swiss cantons, the Swiss territories, the Swiss states had made a lot of money by being mercenaries. And Zwingli was opposed to mercenary service and he wrote, one of his earliest works is a poem called The Ox, which is an allegorical poem about an ox who\'s hired by different groups of animals to do their kind of rough stuff for them. And finally, the ox dies physically broken and emotionally alone. He has no allies. And it\'s an allegory of Switzerland\'s mercenary industry. And the point that Zwingli is making is that, you know, we have militarily prostituted ourselves to everybody and you end up with no allies and ruined, you know. But Zwingli made one exception to this. The one foreign power that one could serve legitimately was the Vatican, the church. There is, of course, a kind of folk memory of this today at the Vatican. What is it? The Swiss Guard. The Vatican\'s guarded by the Swiss Guard. You go to the Vatican and those guys wearing, you know, uniforms that even make British beef eaters look kind of normally dressed. These rather bizarre uniforms are the Swiss Guard, the ceremonial guards at the Vatican. That is a throwback to the time when Switzerland was a significant provider of military power to Rome. And as a result of his support for the Swiss mercenary service to Rome, the Pope had granted Zwingli a papal pension. Man, if it was that easy, you know, I\'d write a pro-papal blog post if, you know, it was enough to get me a pension from the Vatican. But Zwingli renounces it in 1520. So I think we can say by 1520, Zwingli\'s moving in a Protestant direction. Things start to accelerate in 1522. And it\'s here the figure of man called Christoph Froshauer becomes significant. Christoph Froshauer is a Zurich printer. And printing is a radical profession in the 16th century. Again, we can draw analogies with today. I\'ve never met a radical IT internet geek who wasn\'t also a radical libertarian in their politics. It\'s interesting, isn\'t it? Is it the industry that makes them radical libertarian or is it the radical libertarianism that makes them attracted to the industry? But I think we can look around the world today and say that the culturally transforming radical people tend to be focused around the computer industry. That is the radical media innovation of our day. Sixteenth century is the same. The printers tended to be radical people. There are various reasons. One, printing is a risky profession. Used to be the case. My favorite magazine in Britain, I still get it sent to me in the US, is a thing called Private Eye, which is a combination of satire and investigative journalism. And it used to be difficult to get hold of in the UK. The newsagent chain, W.H. Smith\'s, wouldn\'t stock it because under British law, under English law, if you sold a magazine that contained a libelous statement, you yourself could be sued for libel. And Private Eye was an investigative journalism magazine, always being sued. I think it\'s the most sued magazine in British history. So I used to have to go to this slightly dubious tiny newsagents at the top of town and he sort of ordered me this magazine so I could get hold of it and read it. So I read him at 13, still read it today. It\'s fantastic. W.H. Smith\'s weren\'t willing to take the risk to stock it. Printing can be a radical thing. And in the 16th century, what are the books that are selling most? Radical books. Martin Luther single-handedly builds the Wittenberg printing industry. I think in the tiny town of Wittenberg, I think there were six printers in the Reformation. There was enough stuff being produced to give to six printers, I think. But there\'s a risk involved. If you\'re printing Martin Luther, then you\'re going to come to the attention of some fairly dangerous and powerful people pretty quickly. So the printing industry tended to be a radical industry as well. So say analogous really to the internet media industry today. The printers were, they were iconoclastic. They were also, of course, representative of the new economy. They were the new economy, a production-based economy. They were the beginnings of what would explode into the Industrial Revolution really in England in the 19th century. So printers tended to be radical people. And the Reformation in Zurich really begins in the workshop of Christoph Froshauer. Christoph Froshauer and his men break the Lenten fast in 1522. There were severe restrictions on when and what you could eat during Lent. And Christoph Froshauer and his men get together and they cook sausages and they eat them. And that\'s how the Zurich Reformation begins. It begins with a sausage. If the Wittenberg Reformation begins with a nail being hammered into a door, the Zurich Reformation begins with the eating of a sausage. And we kind of laugh because there\'s something farcical, isn\'t there, about the Reformation beginning with a sausage. But actually, it\'s profoundly appropriate in a whole lot of ways. One, it\'s an printer shop and there\'s nothing more emblematic than the new Europe that is emerging the Reformation than printing. And there\'s nothing more central to the Reformation than the printing press. Secondly, think about it, and this is a bit more subtle. Think about, and this is why the Zwinglian Reformation begins in a modern way, in a way that the Luther Reformation began in a medieval way. What\'s Luther doing? He\'s advertising a medieval university debate. That\'s how Luther\'s Reformation begins, with a quintessential medieval act of a medieval monk in a medieval academy. Think about the beginning of the Zurich Reformation, though. It starts the center of technology, that\'s a modern thing, but also it represents a shattering of the rhythm of time of the Middle Ages. Think about it. Think about the church\'s calendar. The medieval church calendar is a beautifully agrarian calendar. It\'s designed for a society where most people work the land. I grew up in a farming community. My wife and I, when we first married, we moved and lived in a farming community. Farming communities are interesting because there are periods of the year when the farmers do nothing but work. And there are other periods of the year when the farmers have nothing to do. And the medieval church calendar tended to reflect the rhythm of life. You can get away with the Lenten fast in an agrarian community because that\'s a period of the year when there\'s not a lot of heavy work to be done. Printing. Printing you can do, it\'s independent of the elements. Takes place indoors, it involves machinery. The rhythm of life in an industrial society is very different to the rhythm of life in a medieval society. When Froshauer breaks the Lenten fast, he\'s doing it because his men need to eat properly. They got heavy work to do. Those printing presses, those early printing presses, they took real strength and effort to operate. He cannot have his men going hungry when they need to be eating properly to use the machinery. Here we have, if you like, the economy and the industry of the new age shattering the rhythm of life of the Middle Ages. Zwingli\'s Reformation at its very inception is a reformation driven by the exigencies of the emerging new age in Europe. Luther\'s is a reformation of the Middle Ages. It\'s a university debate. It\'s taking place in a feudal society ruled by a prince. Zwingli\'s Reformation is beginning in a city and part of, if much of Luther\'s strength was drawn from the feudal aristocracy, Zwingli\'s strength is going to be drawn from what we might call not exactly the captains of industry, the heralds of the new economy that is emerging in Europe at this time. Now don\'t get me wrong, I\'m not reducing the Zurich Reformation to an economic occurrence, but what I\'m saying is the shape it takes is intimately connected to the kind of community in which it is happening. It\'s not incidental that Sabbatarianism takes off more than anywhere else in England in the 17th century because England in the 17th century has the most advanced economy in Europe. It has an economy that is less and less dependent upon the rhythm of the seasons and more and more dependent upon trade and commerce. And trade and commerce can be done five or six days a week and then you can have a day off. You live in a farming area. I mean I remember, I\'ve been laying awake more times than I care to remember when I was young and married and living on this farm. And there are certain times of year when there\'s a storm coming in and you can lie in bed at night and see the lights of the tractors dancing on the roof in the middle of the night because the farmer has got to get the crop in before the storm hits. He can\'t afford if you like to observe the Sabbath at that point. He\'s got to work through Sunday or he\'s going to starve or he\'s not going to, you know, he\'s going to go bankrupt. The agrarian rhythm of life is very different to the industrial, the urban rhythm of life. And Zwingli\'s Reformation and Luther\'s Reformation in some ways represent the difference there between those two. So Froshauer eats the sausage. Zwingli was always very careful to say that he did not eat the sausage but he was present there in order to indicate his approval of others eating the sausage. It also points towards another fact about the Lutheran Reformation that is, the Zwingli Reformation, that is this. From the word go, the Zwingli Reformation is going to be socially and politically more radical. It\'s about transforming the whole of society. And again that connects to the context. That\'s a possibility for Zwingli. Zwingli is operating in a city that is governed by a council and a city that is independent of the empire. Got its independence from the empire I think in 1499 under the terms of the Treaty of Basel. It\'s less dependent upon imperial politics. The Zürichs are not having to look over their shoulders all the time to worry about what the emperor\'s thinking. The scope for more radical reformation is there. Secondly Zwingli is an Erasmian. So he has that humanist vision for the transformation of society as a whole. What he\'s going to work out in Zürich is a much more radical project than that Luther proposes. And so from very early on in the Zwinglian Reformation in Zürich, Zürich is attracting more radical figures. As the word gets out that the Reformation is taking root in Zürich, more radical figures start to arrive in Zürich in order to press the Reformation in a more radical direction. And that I think is where I\'m going to break the narrative there. Open up for five, ten minutes of questions. Tomorrow we\'ll talk a little bit more about the Reformation in Zürich and then we\'re going to look at this great clash between Luther and Zwingli. A clash between two men that fundamentally shapes Protestantism in a way that persists to the present day. Okay, throw it open for questions, comments, anything. Yeah. You made comments about how Luther was a pastor as well as a professor. In his past ministry did he preach sequentially through books or was it more kind of topical? I think through both. And often he followed the church calendar as well. But you can find sequential sermons from Luther. But he was not expository preacher in quite the way we would expect. Most of the volumes that we have of, you know, on books of the Bible are lectures not sermons. Yeah. Luther\'s response to the peasants\' war as far as the strength of his response, do you think it was mostly to distance himself from that and the Reformation so that people are associating him with that? Yeah, I think the political motive is strong. I also think there\'s a great fear of chaos. There\'s a great fear of social chaos with people like Luther. And there\'s a sense in which you can imagine the struggle that a guy like Luther would have had knowing that he\'s helping to unleash forces that he doesn\'t want to see fly out of control. There\'s a sense in which these guys are causing the chaos. They know that there is a connection between what they\'re doing and the chaos they\'re seeing unraveling in front of them and not wanting that chaos to take on a life of its own. You can see this in a more subtle way in Calvin\'s Institutes. Calvin\'s Institutes, most of when we have our English translations, they\'re typically based on the Latin. Calvin is much ruder in the Latin than he is in the French. When he writes his French Institutes, he tends to tone down the rhetoric. And there\'s a sense in which there\'s an elitism at working there. There\'s a kind of, yes, us elite intellectuals who read Latin, we can share some nasty jokes. We can share jokes about our opponents. But really we don\'t want the riffraff thinking that they can say this about the elite, even the Catholic elite. And you find that there\'s a point in Calvin\'s commentary on the Psalms where he makes some comments about, I think the Psalmist goes too far at this point in the way he\'s talking to God. Well, one could jump on that and say, so does that mean that Calvin doesn\'t mean the Psalms are inspired? No. I think Calvin there, it\'s a rhetorical warning to his reader. It\'s okay for the Psalmist to say this, but you shouldn\'t say it. You need to keep yourself under control. These men are elitists. And their favored mode of government would be aristocracy because they do fear the masses. And the Peasants\' War is this explosion of, use a term a little bit anachronistically, an explosion of proletarian energy that they fear where it will go. Yeah. I\'m wondering about Luther\'s law and gospel from the New York and how that compares with a literal historical grammatical community. Maybe the difference between the two? I think Luther would not see his law and gospel interpretation as standing in opposition to a literal historical reading. I think he would see the law gospel approach as being how one responds to that. You know, for Luther, law and gospel is not a testamental distinction. It\'s not that the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is gospel. Law and gospel is how one responds to scripture. But if you respond to scripture as, this is something I must do and by doing it I make myself right with God, then you\'ve made, then that you are treating that passage of scripture as law. If you see it as pointing you to the promise in Christ, then you\'re reading it as gospel. So he would see, you know, if he was preaching on Abraham, he would certainly expand the historical elements of the Abrahamic story. But then he would want to draw out of that what that shows you about God\'s holiness and how you can never measure up to it, law, and then how it points you to the law of Jesus Christ and the promise in him, gospel. Yeah? As Luther\'s theology is developing in response to these different things, do we have like indications of who he\'s reading? Do we have historical indications of who he\'s looking at? Good question, you know, who\'s Luther reading as he\'s responding to various people. I think what the answer is he\'s reading widely and in a very Catholic way. He\'s reading, you know, Augustine is huge for Luther. And such that he quotes him a lot in the early part of the Eucharistic controversy. And then as it begins to dawn on him that Augustine might actually not be entirely with Luther and Zwingli is landing a few punches from Augustine, he just drops him. He doesn\'t sort of tell you that Augustine\'s with him. He just doesn\'t cite him quite as much. He\'s reading Augustine a lot. He\'s reading Bernard of Clairvaux. He\'s reading very widely. Bondage of the Will. He also uses the Apocrypha. I mean, the canon in Luther is an interesting question, not just because of James, but because Luther is quite flexible at times relative to what we now call the Apocrypha as to what he is. If it\'s good and helpful to him, he\'ll cite it without letting you, without the sort of usual qualifications that we would put in if we cited the Apocrypha. So yeah, he\'s just, he\'s reading very widely and citing liberally. Question here first. Oh sorry, yeah. First question from a distance, far away. Yes, I have a question about Augustine. Yesterday you spoke of Luther and inadequate ethic and early on in 1520. I\'m wondering how that compared to Karlstadt\'s ethic and just sort of doctrines on regeneration. Okay, I have to, at this point I have to answer my ignorance of that. I\'ve never looked at Karlstadt on ethics, so I don\'t know the answer. Don\'t know the answer to that. Sorry. Sorry that the first distance question was the question that floored me. That\'s alright. I would look at, I mean if you want to chase that up, Ron Sider\'s doctoral dissertation is published. It was published many, many years ago, but Ronald Sider wrote on Karlstadt and his political activism. So my guess is, and here you know it\'s speculation, but my guess is for Karlstadt was much more, would have been much more comfortable in articulating what Luther would have probably regarded as a law ethic, because clearly Karlstadt has a vision of what society is meant to look like based upon his reading of Scripture. But I\'ve never looked at him with that precise question in mind. Yeah. So Luther\'s distinction about God\'s hiddenness and God\'s revelation with kind of like the God behind God, is, can you explain that a little more and then is it in conflict because of the simplicity of God? Good question. Can I expand a little more on the God\'s revelation and God\'s hiddenness? I mean it\'s a fairly standard distinction throughout the Middle Ages that God is not completely revealed and therefore we do not fully comprehend God and God does not fully reveal himself because he\'s infinite and revelation is finite and therefore there is an expanse of God that is not revealed to us. My problem with Luther is the way that he seems to not just say that the hiddenness of God is a mystery, I\'m fully on board with that, but he seems to say the hiddenness of God stands in opposition to the revelation of God and that renders the revelation dangerously unrevelational to me. Is it a revelation of God or is it God pretending to be something that he really isn\'t? So that would be my dogmatic concern there. Does it endanger the simplicity of God? No, I don\'t think so. As long as we make sure that we are making, that when we make such distinctions, we are making formal distinctions or distinctions about God in relation to us rather than about parts of God in relation to God. We\'re not dividing God into parts, we\'re talking about his relation to his creation at that point. A little bit like when we talk about God\'s intellect and will, they are one and the same in God, but in order to talk meaningfully about God, we make a formal distinction between the two of them, knowing that that is very limited, knowing that ultimately it doesn\'t track back to a real distinction in God, but knowing that this is the only way in which we can actually talk about God. There\'s a wonderful passage in Augustine\'s On the Trinity when he sort of says something like, why is it if God, if we can\'t talk about God, do we talk about God? To which his answer is, because we must talk about God. And I think that sort of touches on this, that we need to remember these distinctions. Well, we need to be careful that when we use these distinctions, we are not, we know that we are not reading them back into God in a straightforward real way. You know, God\'s love and God\'s wrath are, you know, God is simple, but we\'re actually there talking about the one simple God in relation to his creation, not in relation to himself at that point.