Feb. 13, 2026
Protestantism Under Luther: Authority, Chaos, and the Cost of “Bible Alone”
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In this episode of our German Reformation series, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Greg Quiggle begin exploring what happens after the attempt to reform the Catholic Church breaks down and the division becomes permanent: What does Protestantism look like under Luther once it’s no longer simply a reform movement?
The conversation opens with a key structural issue: the evolving relationship between church and state in early Protestant contexts. Greg explains that most Protestants still lived inside the world of Christendom—where church and state were distinct but not separate—operating like two authorities under one religious framework. That arrangement also clarifies a disturbing feature of the era: the execution of “heretics.” In the 16th century, the church might declare a person heretical, but it was the state that carried the sword—treating heresy as an act of political-religious destabilization and responding as “self-defense.”
From there, James and Greg move into the heart of the episode: the post-Reformation negotiation of identity. With the old Catholic structure breaking apart, Protestants faced a massive question:
What do we keep from 1,500 years of Christian practice—and what must go?
Greg frames the spectrum of Protestant responses:
- Luther’s approach: keep as much as possible, removing only what clearly violates Scripture
- Anabaptist/Radical approaches: jettison the entire Constantinian project, rejecting the church-state synthesis and attempting to rebuild from the New Testament alone
This clash didn’t remain theoretical. Greg explains how competing Protestant visions collided—sometimes violently—highlighting cases like Zurich where Anabaptists were condemned and executed under the authority of the city council after theological disputes (including disputes over baptism). The episode also touches on radical apocalyptic movements in Germany (including Münster and Thomas Müntzer), showing how social upheaval, plague trauma, and end-times expectations created fertile ground for charismatic extremism—and why Luther feared the Reformation could spiral beyond control.
James connects these dynamics to modern organizational realities: how policy tools (like catechesis) can become “passive instruments” when accountability structures fail, and why early Protestant instability wasn’t simply “denomination vs. denomination,” but often included fringe movements driven by chaos, charisma, and apocalyptic certainty.
The episode closes by returning to a critical constraint often overlooked today: mass illiteracy. “Bible alone” emerges in a world where most people cannot read, intensifying the importance—and vulnerability—of teaching authority, civic enforcement, and communal formation
Quotelos Travel offers small, expert-led “Tours for Ten” that provide an intimate and unforgettable way to explore church history and culture with guides who truly know the locations. Learn more at quotelostravelservice.com, and check out their upcoming trips to Germany, England, and Switzerland.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Thanking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, and I'm glad you're here. In this special series, we're stepping back into one of the most pivotal times in Christian history, the German Reformation. This was a time when the Gospel was being rediscovered, the Church was being challenged, and the course of Western civilization was being reshaped with ripples that still reach into our lives today. And to guide us through this journey, I'm joined by a true expert, someone who doesn't just know the Reformation from books, but from the cobblestone streets and cathedral halls where it actually happened, Doctor Greg Quiggle. Greg is a Reformation historian and the owner and operator of Kotelis Travel, a company that runs what they call tours for ten, intimate travel experiences designed for people who want something deeper than a typical tour. They offer a three to one guest to guide ratio, and these trips give you consistent access to guides who've been on location multiple times, who know not only the history, but also where to find the best able strudal and other German delicacies along the way. You can learn more about Greg and Kotellus at kotellistravelservice dot com. And if this series piques your interest, Greg actually has a German Reformation trip coming up this May, and last I heard, there are still a few seats available. In this series, Greg is going to help us explore the people, places, and theological stakes of the Reformation as well as helping us understand why it still matters for Christians today. So let's get started. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Greg Quiggle. We're continuing our discussion about the Reformation, the German Reformation specifically, and today what we're going to talk through, or begin talking through, is what does it look like for Protestantism under Luther. So the Reformation, the attempt to reform the Catholic Church has largely failed. There's going to now be a division between Luther's camp, let's call it just for the moment, and the Catholic side. And so that has implications for what Protestantism is actually going to look like. And now we enter this phase of negotiating what stays, what goes, what Protestantism really needs to look like and how that's going to function. So those are those are some of the complexities that we're going to dive into today. So Greg, welcome back to the program. Always great to have you here.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Great to be here, James.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: So let's just jump in. I mean, I think maybe the first thing that I was a little confused about on the last trip, and I think I got clarified was the relationship between church and state that we talked about in previous episodes. That is providing some stability and some support for Catholic churches, monasteries, those kind of things. How does that change when Luther is sort of cracked off from the Catholic Church, but it's still living in Wittenberg, has the same house where he stayed, you know, like a lot of things stay the same for Luther, but there had to be some economic and political changes, right, Yes, yes.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: And no, Okay, most crowds and are still going to work in the context of what we generally call Christendom, and that is this notion that church and state are distinct, but they're not separate. So the easiest way that I know to illustrate this is to read the Old Testament. Okay, what do you have How are the children of Israel led? The nation of Israel has a king and it.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Has a high priest.
00:03:33
Speaker 2: They have distinct functions, but they're functioning under a single religious system, same God. They have distinct roles, but they are certainly complementary. They're working together. So that model is pulled across. So you know, the old model was the pope and the emperor. Yeah, okay, so now now it's kind of okay. There is there is no pope. How is that going to work? And we don't have a singular emperor. So really the relationship is what's the relationship between in the case of Luther, the prince, the local prince elector, or the emperor in the case of somebody like Calvin, the city council, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the fundamental differences is going to be that for Protestants, the central document is going to be the Bible alone. So the Bible is going to be the defining document. And so, you know, it's not in Germany, but this kind of makes it work. In Zurich, in Switzerland, there's a statue of a guy named Zwingley who's a contemporary of Martin Luther says, giant statue right on the river, you know, bing bing bing here it is has a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other. And so the Bible grounds civil authority. So this is that Protestant notion of the Bible alone. The Bible is the grounds. Both the church and the state derive their authority from the text alone, and they function within the categories that the text mandates. Now, how that's going to work out? Who is responsible for what? So, for example, in Luther's sort of framework, the state functions with a higher degree of autonomy slash authority than in Calvin's Geneva and in Zwingley's contexts the state has more authority over the church than it does in Luther's. So, for example, when there's a debate about what kind of form of baptism they're going to use in Zurich, the city council decides that, well that Luther, you know, that's none No, I don't think so.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: So, but you still have the basic model here. And the basic model is one people, one religion, two authorities, a religious authority and a political civic authority. They are functioning in a synthesis under the authority of the Scripture, and they are forming the Kingdom of Christ on earth in that sense.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: Okay, that's helpful. I mean it's sort of what it makes me think of is federalism in our context, right, Like we have you have a different states that have relative autonomy, but then you also have the federal government who makes broader rules, and the negotiation of those two relationships are often difficult. So it's not exactly religion and state, but it's two entities attempting to collaborate and coordinate to get something done within a bigger body.
00:07:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: I guess that's what my head kind of goes to.
00:07:23
Speaker 2: Yes. So the thing where this gets crazy for the modern reader is the persecution, in fact, the execution of heretics.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: So, and this is you know, why is the church putting a heretic to death? The church is not putting the heretic to death, the state is.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: Okay, the church is proclaiming them a heretic.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: And then the state is putting them to death as an act of self defense.
00:08:00
Speaker 1: Would have been similar to what we would have seen with Martin Luther had he not gotten safe passage to the diet of arms and been sort of shuttled a way to Vordburg. You have somebody official proceeding over that diet, a representative from the pope, who decides not to debate Luther, and then this forced requirement to recant. Those are basically ultimatums recant or die correct.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: So the idea here is who bears the sword. The state bears the sword. So it is the obligation of the state to support the church. So in order to defend and support the Church, it is the state's obligation to put to death a heretic.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that sort of concretizes the relationship. I think, yes, It's got to get really hairy though, when we move into Protestantism and we basically have competing conceptions of what it means to be Protestant, or competing practices within Protestantism, competing beliefs within Protestantism, because you've largely lost this broad traditional heritage that comes through the Catholic Church, and unlike us today, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, you know, we have a sense I think, you know, even casual Christians would have a sense of faith alone Bible alone, you know, the different Reformation souls, which we'll address in a later episode. But we have the benefit of a tradition that stems at least from the different confessions of the Protestant era. Correct at that point with Luther, there is no such bo. What has to happen is all this has to be teased out from the Catholic tradition, and so it becomes an exercise in what do we keep what do we get rid of?
00:10:11
Speaker 2: Exactly? And yes, so this is why you get For example, Protestants are actually putting to death other Protestants, which sounds utterly bizarre, but this is exactly what is going to happen in Zurich, where the forerunners of people we know as Amish and Ana Baptists are actually being put to death by another Protestant, Zwingli, and the city council because of their view of Baptism.
00:10:43
Speaker 1: But yes, so and so, just to Clarifyzwingley's got the council's ear, or the council is on Zwingley's side there understanding Zwingley to be the quote established Protestant.
00:10:57
Speaker 2: Swingley goes to the city council and argues for a particular understanding of baptism. So to the Ana Baptists, the city council decides Zwingley is right there after the law, and so they violate the law. And though so against the waters of baptisms, you have sinned, So by the waters of baptism you shall be condemned. And they drowned them. So so you know, and and this is so you can see, and it's going to get money. So this is you know, what are we? Who? Who are we? What do we take?
00:11:47
Speaker 1: Yep?
00:11:47
Speaker 2: That's the question you're asking. And what you've got going here, and this is precisely why you don't have a single Protestantism. You're going to get fundamentally different conceptions of what do we do with fifteen hundred years of Christian practice?
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Right?
00:12:08
Speaker 2: Okay, so you know we've been doing this for fifteen hundred years. Uh oh, now what And you're going to get varieties of how much of this do we keep? How much of this do we jettison? What do we put in its place? And so you're going to get everything from Luther, who is going to say keep as much as you can yep, to Anabaptist i e. Mennonite, Amish types who are going to say, get rid of all of it. So do you do a reform And by reform Luther means you go through and you remove the things that are clearly in violation of scripture, but you keep everything else, or do you do what the Anabaptists say, And their argument is this whole thing went off the rails with Constantine in three thirteen when church and state got mixed. The entire enterprise is bad. To quote the late great Michael Jackson, bad bad, bad, really bad. You know, it's bad bad, woo oooh bad. He want to Grammy for that. The lyrical genius there is stunning, just absolutely stunning. And therefore we have to go back before three thirteen find anything that's pure. So we're gonna just throw it all out, open up our New Testament, and only do what it says so you can see. And the simple question that I used to tell students that moody is if you've ever been to a Lutheran church and a Mennonite church, which one.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: Looks more Catholic.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's not a hard question. Really why Because Luther says you only change what you have to, and the Anabaptists say, get rid of it all and then open your New Testament and only put in what it says to and so very different approaches were.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: How prominent was this within Germany? Greg So, I understand the distinctions in Switzerland oddly better than I understand the distinctions in Germany. Like Zwingli and the Anabaptists are sort of you know, theological legend right, like the what happened there is kind of crazy, this this schism over Baptism. I don't know as much about the tensions within Germany because Luther would have been such a almost like pillar of the reformation within Germany. Melankin follows. You know, you've got a fairly strong tradition within that, those German reformers who are probably going to stick relatively close to Luther. So were there still factions of any significance within Germany?
00:15:18
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, there were. These people were called the fanatics.
00:15:24
Speaker 1: And what.
00:15:27
Speaker 2: Complicates this is within this kind of Anabaptist movement you have a spectrum. So you have everything from people that we would recognize as sort of reasonable people who are trying to follow the Bible, to people that are apocalyptic lunatics who are trying to say the Bible is no longer relevant. We live in the age of the Spirit. God is revealing himself to me directly. And so, for example, in the German city of Munster, you have a group of these Antabaptists who go in there and they take the town over and they set up. You know, Jesus is returning. Immediately, they begin to practice polygamy. The guide's calling himself an Old Testament prophet. God is revealing all this stuff to him, and you know it's adult baptism, and on and on and on. And what happens is a combined army of Catholics and Protestants go in there slaughter everybody, and in fact they take the leaders of this thing. They put their bodies in cages and hang them from the cathedral. The cages are still there, James, if you you look it up online Google Google, you know Munster Cathedral, the cages. Now there's nothing in there anymore, but the cages are still hanging there. Anybody who tries this kind of nuttiness, we want you to know, this is what we're gonna do with you. You have another guy who's ironically his name is Thomas Muntzer. Again, this is in Germany, the Battle of Frankenhaus, and he tells peasants that this is the end of the world, the age of the Spirit. God is coming back soon, and that he is the Lord is returning, and that they should take over the you know that God is going to help them defeat the evil powers of church and state. And so all these peasants rise up and form an army and it's the one of the biggest slaughters in the history of the world. There's something like ten thousand and peasants killed in like a dozen of because Munster is telling them things like you're gonna catch their cannon balls in your sleeves and all this because God's told them all this stuff. This is part of the reason James, that Luther comes out of hiding hiding at the Vartberg and he begins to hear that these radical voices are increasingly taking over in Wittenberg and they're tearing down crucifixes and all this other kind of radical stuff. And Luther is saying, no, no, no, you've heard about the peasant wars. A lot of that stuff is this apocalyptic kind of and and in fairness, people like Mennonites and Amish et cetera. Want to distance themselves from this kind of nuttiness. The problem is they're all they're all claiming to be adult baptism, only they're all claiming that everything went off the rails with Constantine. It's the same sort of radicalism. We must radically break from the past. This is the age of the spirit. God is doing something new. This is exactly what Luther did not want to happen. This is exactly what the Catholic Church said was going to happen. This is what happens when you turn this loose and give it to the common folks. They go nutty. And so he has to try to domesticate this thing. He has to come out and try to, you know, stop this sort of craziness that that is going way beyond anything he had in vision. But once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop this thing.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: It's kind of crazy how right Plato was about this, wasn't it. I Mean, like, you know, you move from you know, sort of the centralized, wise ruler authoritarian model over to the democratized the people are in charge sort of model, and all you end up doing is swinging between the two pendulums. Because both sides. It's crazy. There's so much opportunity for it to devolve into something that just doesn't work that it's like you're in constant historical correction all the time. It feels like just an amazing observation he made.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Well, that is that is theoretically the genius of the American system. Because people walk around talking about the United States being a democracy, it's not. No, it's a democratic republic.
00:20:48
Speaker 1: Republic.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's committed to keeping us from becoming mob rule. That's what the Electoral College is about. Yeah, it's to keep it from being mob ruled, to protect the rights of the minority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, we don't want to do that. No.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: No, It's really interesting though, And I think as we look at this, you know, sort of sort of movement, a couple of things come to mind. I mean, number one, the number one is just lamentable that the Catholic Church didn't see that what they were doing were taking advantage of these people in the selling of indulgences and all of that weird stuff that was going on. It's just unfortunate that they didn't recognize, Hey, this isn't appropriate. These building projects in Rome are not worth people's souls, Like we really can't bind and loose people out of purgatory. I mean, I think a lot of what Luther addresses in the ninety five theses we know him for that sort of justification by faith alone, which is really crucial and important. But I think that his ninety five theses, what he's trying to get at it is, Look, you're claiming an authority that you don't actually have, and you need to pull it back in. And that's really through those ninety five thess. That's all I hear him saying over and over and over and over. How we're going to simplify those ninety five thess. That's sort of what I would say. You've overreached your authority and you need to bring it back in governed by the scriptures. Maybe that's his full message, not just the ninety five theeces.
00:22:25
Speaker 2: But I think that's fair. The problem is how do you do that right?
00:22:29
Speaker 1: And especially since yeah, especially since the church isn't admitting that they're doing something wrong, right, I mean, that's the crux of it.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: And in fairness, the Roman Church did try to clean their house after the fact. I mean, they did go back, they eliminated indulgent sellers, they addressed a lot of this corruption. But to at that point, you know, yeah, the train was out of the station. But yeah, I mean, how do you have authority without it being papal?
00:23:04
Speaker 1: That's right, that's.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: And and there had been a movement, and the movement was what was called conciliarism. We're going to put authority in the councils rather than the popes, and and early on people like Erasmus were hoping that's where Luther was going. But when Luther started banging scripture alone, that's when they started going, this is going well beyond where we wanted it to go. And at that point, uh and and you know, Luther, just as popes and councils have airred in the past.
00:23:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's an interesting So when I look at the Reformation and what Luther does, he makes sort of a classical mistake that we see in organizations. An awful lot organizations right policies, and they have these policy books and they say, Okay, this is what's going to govern our institution, this is what's going to govern our organization. But they can't actually enforce those things. This, to me is what Luther does with the Catechism. If you can't get people to follow the Catechism, to live within it, within those constraints, you really the Catechism is now a passive instrument. As good as it is, it's a passive instrument. It almost becomes I mean, I almost hate to make this parallelism, but it comes like the law. The law is good because God gave it, and it expresses, you know, an attempt to curtail sin and the point to goodness, truth and beauty. Now, however we want to frame that, but it's weak because it can't deal with human sin. And I think the Catechism falls short on that round. Whereas if you went to a different system where they're a clear line of authority that can execute some things you do have at least you might say a better shot at it. It's still not going to be perfect, You're still going to deal with some things. But I do think that the way Luther ended up with this is problematic. It creates a lot of problems. I shouldn't say it's problematic, it creates different problems that we're available in the Catholic Church. And then the second thing, I just want to say that I appreciate about what you explained. Even when I've looked at the peasant revolts, I sort of framed that in terms of there's one denomination going against another denomination when I when you described it at this time around, I'm thinking now more like David Koresh and you know, really fringe crazy movements that are are you know, just sort of gathering mobilizing people to do something, but there's no real structure or even feel logical weight or reasoned biblical interpretation around these things. It's just let's let's like wind people up and see what happens.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would, I would say, James, there, what you've got is a spectrum on this stuff. Okay, so you know some of them. What happens in the Kingdom of Munster is krisnipic fringe, what happens in with Thomas Munzer is lunatic fringe. And then you've got some Yeah, everybody believes that Jesus is coming back. Christians get nutty around big round numbers. Okay, it's fifteen hundred, fifteen thirty three. Oh, it's been fifteen. Jesus died thirty three. Oh, you know Jesus is coming back. Yeah, there is so much turmoil in the world. Muslims are at the gates of Vienna, on and on and on and on and on. This has to be the end of the world. So so God is going to do something radical. And so you know that that's in the water. There's apocalyptic thing is in the water. That's part of this. And the other part of this is you've been You've had massive social upheaval because of the Black Death. You know, we have no idea. I was reading numbers last night. I think it was somewhere between fifteen and seventy five million they estimate. Wow, Europeans died and the numbers are just stunning. Places like Siena. I believe it is a seventy percent seven zero percent. So the social disruption, all the structures of society that provide order.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Are just estimated.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: So you've got you've got multiple layers of chaos, and we know what that does in terms of charismatic leaders, apocalyptic sorts of messages, on and on and on. So all of this was it's an you could see it coming in that sense.
00:28:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really an interesting I mean I remember going through Luther's house and reading that even he thought they were living in the end times, you know. And so you can understand why because if we just look back in our recent past, we've had the COVID pandemic and all that kind of good stuff. And while there wasn't there may have been some religious fervor that I just sort of missed, right, But you know, I didn't get the sense that people really pointed to this as the apocalypse or something like that necessarily, but you did get a lot of charismatic leaders coming out and swaying things one way or another. And in a context where there's so much complexity and so much chaos that you really can't identify what is true or what is not because the information is constantly swinging out to you, you know, sort of moment by moment. The people who are going to take advantage of that and and be surer than they ought to be sure in a moment. And so it's just an interesting way to frame I think, and try to look back and go, this is the turmoil that these Germans were experiencing, that sort of societal discomfort, complete instability, and now they're also trying to navigate their religious convictions alongside that. And I think it's even crazier that most of these people probably again, correct me if I'm wrong, but Luther's just translated the Bible into English. It's not like these folks were you know, steeped in into German. I'm sorry, yeah, just really into German. But it's not like these folks were steeped in scripture and they were were illiterate, right, So, I mean it's one thing for for the Luther to say, you know, my conscious self captive by the Word of God. It's another thing for just you know, Joe Jerman on the street to say it, because he probably he hasn't read it, and if he has, he's just started.
00:30:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're if you're looking at a population where eighty percent of the mirror are illiterate, you know that that's the problem. We like to say things like the Roman Catholics kept the Bible from the people, Well, you don't have to keep it from him if they can't read, right, And I'm not saying that that's completely untrue, but I'm saying, yeah.
00:30:28
Speaker 1: It's a factor we have to take into account exactly exactly. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can distribute it all you want, but if it can't be read and understood. You know who is a Philip right in the Ethiopian yep, right, how well I know what it says. If no, there's no one here to teach me kind of thing, and he can read it, and he can read it. Yeah, he was literate and he's still needed to teach her. So I think this helps with the dynamics of what happens post Reformation, and we'll we'll kind of leave it there and we'll transition in and then next episode talking a little bit about the we could call it the tradition that emerges from Protestantism, the souls, and how these ultimately sort of start to frame the trajectory of the Protestant Church or the Protestant churches, however we want to phrase that, But that becomes the core really of our tradition. So that's we'll address the next time. So again, Greg, thanks for being here, and everybody else we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Thanking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, and I'm glad you're here. In this special series, we're stepping back into one of the most pivotal times in Christian history, the German Reformation. This was a time when the Gospel was being rediscovered, the Church was being challenged, and the course of Western civilization was being reshaped with ripples that still reach into our lives today. And to guide us through this journey, I'm joined by a true expert, someone who doesn't just know the Reformation from books, but from the cobblestone streets and cathedral halls where it actually happened, Doctor Greg Quiggle. Greg is a Reformation historian and the owner and operator of Kotelis Travel, a company that runs what they call tours for ten, intimate travel experiences designed for people who want something deeper than a typical tour. They offer a three to one guest to guide ratio, and these trips give you consistent access to guides who've been on location multiple times, who know not only the history, but also where to find the best able strudal and other German delicacies along the way. You can learn more about Greg and Kotellus at kotellistravelservice dot com. And if this series piques your interest, Greg actually has a German Reformation trip coming up this May, and last I heard, there are still a few seats available. In this series, Greg is going to help us explore the people, places, and theological stakes of the Reformation as well as helping us understand why it still matters for Christians today. So let's get started. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Greg Quiggle. We're continuing our discussion about the Reformation, the German Reformation specifically, and today what we're going to talk through, or begin talking through, is what does it look like for Protestantism under Luther. So the Reformation, the attempt to reform the Catholic Church has largely failed. There's going to now be a division between Luther's camp, let's call it just for the moment, and the Catholic side. And so that has implications for what Protestantism is actually going to look like. And now we enter this phase of negotiating what stays, what goes, what Protestantism really needs to look like and how that's going to function. So those are those are some of the complexities that we're going to dive into today. So Greg, welcome back to the program. Always great to have you here.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Great to be here, James.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: So let's just jump in. I mean, I think maybe the first thing that I was a little confused about on the last trip, and I think I got clarified was the relationship between church and state that we talked about in previous episodes. That is providing some stability and some support for Catholic churches, monasteries, those kind of things. How does that change when Luther is sort of cracked off from the Catholic Church, but it's still living in Wittenberg, has the same house where he stayed, you know, like a lot of things stay the same for Luther, but there had to be some economic and political changes, right, Yes, yes.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: And no, Okay, most crowds and are still going to work in the context of what we generally call Christendom, and that is this notion that church and state are distinct, but they're not separate. So the easiest way that I know to illustrate this is to read the Old Testament. Okay, what do you have How are the children of Israel led? The nation of Israel has a king and it.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Has a high priest.
00:03:33
Speaker 2: They have distinct functions, but they're functioning under a single religious system, same God. They have distinct roles, but they are certainly complementary. They're working together. So that model is pulled across. So you know, the old model was the pope and the emperor. Yeah, okay, so now now it's kind of okay. There is there is no pope. How is that going to work? And we don't have a singular emperor. So really the relationship is what's the relationship between in the case of Luther, the prince, the local prince elector, or the emperor in the case of somebody like Calvin, the city council, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the fundamental differences is going to be that for Protestants, the central document is going to be the Bible alone. So the Bible is going to be the defining document. And so, you know, it's not in Germany, but this kind of makes it work. In Zurich, in Switzerland, there's a statue of a guy named Zwingley who's a contemporary of Martin Luther says, giant statue right on the river, you know, bing bing bing here it is has a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other. And so the Bible grounds civil authority. So this is that Protestant notion of the Bible alone. The Bible is the grounds. Both the church and the state derive their authority from the text alone, and they function within the categories that the text mandates. Now, how that's going to work out? Who is responsible for what? So, for example, in Luther's sort of framework, the state functions with a higher degree of autonomy slash authority than in Calvin's Geneva and in Zwingley's contexts the state has more authority over the church than it does in Luther's. So, for example, when there's a debate about what kind of form of baptism they're going to use in Zurich, the city council decides that, well that Luther, you know, that's none No, I don't think so.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: So, but you still have the basic model here. And the basic model is one people, one religion, two authorities, a religious authority and a political civic authority. They are functioning in a synthesis under the authority of the Scripture, and they are forming the Kingdom of Christ on earth in that sense.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: Okay, that's helpful. I mean it's sort of what it makes me think of is federalism in our context, right, Like we have you have a different states that have relative autonomy, but then you also have the federal government who makes broader rules, and the negotiation of those two relationships are often difficult. So it's not exactly religion and state, but it's two entities attempting to collaborate and coordinate to get something done within a bigger body.
00:07:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: I guess that's what my head kind of goes to.
00:07:23
Speaker 2: Yes. So the thing where this gets crazy for the modern reader is the persecution, in fact, the execution of heretics.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: So, and this is you know, why is the church putting a heretic to death? The church is not putting the heretic to death, the state is.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: Okay, the church is proclaiming them a heretic.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: And then the state is putting them to death as an act of self defense.
00:08:00
Speaker 1: Would have been similar to what we would have seen with Martin Luther had he not gotten safe passage to the diet of arms and been sort of shuttled a way to Vordburg. You have somebody official proceeding over that diet, a representative from the pope, who decides not to debate Luther, and then this forced requirement to recant. Those are basically ultimatums recant or die correct.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: So the idea here is who bears the sword. The state bears the sword. So it is the obligation of the state to support the church. So in order to defend and support the Church, it is the state's obligation to put to death a heretic.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that sort of concretizes the relationship. I think, yes, It's got to get really hairy though, when we move into Protestantism and we basically have competing conceptions of what it means to be Protestant, or competing practices within Protestantism, competing beliefs within Protestantism, because you've largely lost this broad traditional heritage that comes through the Catholic Church, and unlike us today, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, you know, we have a sense I think, you know, even casual Christians would have a sense of faith alone Bible alone, you know, the different Reformation souls, which we'll address in a later episode. But we have the benefit of a tradition that stems at least from the different confessions of the Protestant era. Correct at that point with Luther, there is no such bo. What has to happen is all this has to be teased out from the Catholic tradition, and so it becomes an exercise in what do we keep what do we get rid of?
00:10:11
Speaker 2: Exactly? And yes, so this is why you get For example, Protestants are actually putting to death other Protestants, which sounds utterly bizarre, but this is exactly what is going to happen in Zurich, where the forerunners of people we know as Amish and Ana Baptists are actually being put to death by another Protestant, Zwingli, and the city council because of their view of Baptism.
00:10:43
Speaker 1: But yes, so and so, just to Clarifyzwingley's got the council's ear, or the council is on Zwingley's side there understanding Zwingley to be the quote established Protestant.
00:10:57
Speaker 2: Swingley goes to the city council and argues for a particular understanding of baptism. So to the Ana Baptists, the city council decides Zwingley is right there after the law, and so they violate the law. And though so against the waters of baptisms, you have sinned, So by the waters of baptism you shall be condemned. And they drowned them. So so you know, and and this is so you can see, and it's going to get money. So this is you know, what are we? Who? Who are we? What do we take?
00:11:47
Speaker 1: Yep?
00:11:47
Speaker 2: That's the question you're asking. And what you've got going here, and this is precisely why you don't have a single Protestantism. You're going to get fundamentally different conceptions of what do we do with fifteen hundred years of Christian practice?
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Right?
00:12:08
Speaker 2: Okay, so you know we've been doing this for fifteen hundred years. Uh oh, now what And you're going to get varieties of how much of this do we keep? How much of this do we jettison? What do we put in its place? And so you're going to get everything from Luther, who is going to say keep as much as you can yep, to Anabaptist i e. Mennonite, Amish types who are going to say, get rid of all of it. So do you do a reform And by reform Luther means you go through and you remove the things that are clearly in violation of scripture, but you keep everything else, or do you do what the Anabaptists say, And their argument is this whole thing went off the rails with Constantine in three thirteen when church and state got mixed. The entire enterprise is bad. To quote the late great Michael Jackson, bad bad, bad, really bad. You know, it's bad bad, woo oooh bad. He want to Grammy for that. The lyrical genius there is stunning, just absolutely stunning. And therefore we have to go back before three thirteen find anything that's pure. So we're gonna just throw it all out, open up our New Testament, and only do what it says so you can see. And the simple question that I used to tell students that moody is if you've ever been to a Lutheran church and a Mennonite church, which one.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: Looks more Catholic.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's not a hard question. Really why Because Luther says you only change what you have to, and the Anabaptists say, get rid of it all and then open your New Testament and only put in what it says to and so very different approaches were.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: How prominent was this within Germany? Greg So, I understand the distinctions in Switzerland oddly better than I understand the distinctions in Germany. Like Zwingli and the Anabaptists are sort of you know, theological legend right, like the what happened there is kind of crazy, this this schism over Baptism. I don't know as much about the tensions within Germany because Luther would have been such a almost like pillar of the reformation within Germany. Melankin follows. You know, you've got a fairly strong tradition within that, those German reformers who are probably going to stick relatively close to Luther. So were there still factions of any significance within Germany?
00:15:18
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, there were. These people were called the fanatics.
00:15:24
Speaker 1: And what.
00:15:27
Speaker 2: Complicates this is within this kind of Anabaptist movement you have a spectrum. So you have everything from people that we would recognize as sort of reasonable people who are trying to follow the Bible, to people that are apocalyptic lunatics who are trying to say the Bible is no longer relevant. We live in the age of the Spirit. God is revealing himself to me directly. And so, for example, in the German city of Munster, you have a group of these Antabaptists who go in there and they take the town over and they set up. You know, Jesus is returning. Immediately, they begin to practice polygamy. The guide's calling himself an Old Testament prophet. God is revealing all this stuff to him, and you know it's adult baptism, and on and on and on. And what happens is a combined army of Catholics and Protestants go in there slaughter everybody, and in fact they take the leaders of this thing. They put their bodies in cages and hang them from the cathedral. The cages are still there, James, if you you look it up online Google Google, you know Munster Cathedral, the cages. Now there's nothing in there anymore, but the cages are still hanging there. Anybody who tries this kind of nuttiness, we want you to know, this is what we're gonna do with you. You have another guy who's ironically his name is Thomas Muntzer. Again, this is in Germany, the Battle of Frankenhaus, and he tells peasants that this is the end of the world, the age of the Spirit. God is coming back soon, and that he is the Lord is returning, and that they should take over the you know that God is going to help them defeat the evil powers of church and state. And so all these peasants rise up and form an army and it's the one of the biggest slaughters in the history of the world. There's something like ten thousand and peasants killed in like a dozen of because Munster is telling them things like you're gonna catch their cannon balls in your sleeves and all this because God's told them all this stuff. This is part of the reason James, that Luther comes out of hiding hiding at the Vartberg and he begins to hear that these radical voices are increasingly taking over in Wittenberg and they're tearing down crucifixes and all this other kind of radical stuff. And Luther is saying, no, no, no, you've heard about the peasant wars. A lot of that stuff is this apocalyptic kind of and and in fairness, people like Mennonites and Amish et cetera. Want to distance themselves from this kind of nuttiness. The problem is they're all they're all claiming to be adult baptism, only they're all claiming that everything went off the rails with Constantine. It's the same sort of radicalism. We must radically break from the past. This is the age of the spirit. God is doing something new. This is exactly what Luther did not want to happen. This is exactly what the Catholic Church said was going to happen. This is what happens when you turn this loose and give it to the common folks. They go nutty. And so he has to try to domesticate this thing. He has to come out and try to, you know, stop this sort of craziness that that is going way beyond anything he had in vision. But once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop this thing.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: It's kind of crazy how right Plato was about this, wasn't it. I Mean, like, you know, you move from you know, sort of the centralized, wise ruler authoritarian model over to the democratized the people are in charge sort of model, and all you end up doing is swinging between the two pendulums. Because both sides. It's crazy. There's so much opportunity for it to devolve into something that just doesn't work that it's like you're in constant historical correction all the time. It feels like just an amazing observation he made.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Well, that is that is theoretically the genius of the American system. Because people walk around talking about the United States being a democracy, it's not. No, it's a democratic republic.
00:20:48
Speaker 1: Republic.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's committed to keeping us from becoming mob rule. That's what the Electoral College is about. Yeah, it's to keep it from being mob ruled, to protect the rights of the minority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, we don't want to do that. No.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: No, It's really interesting though, And I think as we look at this, you know, sort of sort of movement, a couple of things come to mind. I mean, number one, the number one is just lamentable that the Catholic Church didn't see that what they were doing were taking advantage of these people in the selling of indulgences and all of that weird stuff that was going on. It's just unfortunate that they didn't recognize, Hey, this isn't appropriate. These building projects in Rome are not worth people's souls, Like we really can't bind and loose people out of purgatory. I mean, I think a lot of what Luther addresses in the ninety five theses we know him for that sort of justification by faith alone, which is really crucial and important. But I think that his ninety five theses, what he's trying to get at it is, Look, you're claiming an authority that you don't actually have, and you need to pull it back in. And that's really through those ninety five thess. That's all I hear him saying over and over and over and over. How we're going to simplify those ninety five thess. That's sort of what I would say. You've overreached your authority and you need to bring it back in governed by the scriptures. Maybe that's his full message, not just the ninety five theeces.
00:22:25
Speaker 2: But I think that's fair. The problem is how do you do that right?
00:22:29
Speaker 1: And especially since yeah, especially since the church isn't admitting that they're doing something wrong, right, I mean, that's the crux of it.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: And in fairness, the Roman Church did try to clean their house after the fact. I mean, they did go back, they eliminated indulgent sellers, they addressed a lot of this corruption. But to at that point, you know, yeah, the train was out of the station. But yeah, I mean, how do you have authority without it being papal?
00:23:04
Speaker 1: That's right, that's.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: And and there had been a movement, and the movement was what was called conciliarism. We're going to put authority in the councils rather than the popes, and and early on people like Erasmus were hoping that's where Luther was going. But when Luther started banging scripture alone, that's when they started going, this is going well beyond where we wanted it to go. And at that point, uh and and you know, Luther, just as popes and councils have airred in the past.
00:23:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's an interesting So when I look at the Reformation and what Luther does, he makes sort of a classical mistake that we see in organizations. An awful lot organizations right policies, and they have these policy books and they say, Okay, this is what's going to govern our institution, this is what's going to govern our organization. But they can't actually enforce those things. This, to me is what Luther does with the Catechism. If you can't get people to follow the Catechism, to live within it, within those constraints, you really the Catechism is now a passive instrument. As good as it is, it's a passive instrument. It almost becomes I mean, I almost hate to make this parallelism, but it comes like the law. The law is good because God gave it, and it expresses, you know, an attempt to curtail sin and the point to goodness, truth and beauty. Now, however we want to frame that, but it's weak because it can't deal with human sin. And I think the Catechism falls short on that round. Whereas if you went to a different system where they're a clear line of authority that can execute some things you do have at least you might say a better shot at it. It's still not going to be perfect, You're still going to deal with some things. But I do think that the way Luther ended up with this is problematic. It creates a lot of problems. I shouldn't say it's problematic, it creates different problems that we're available in the Catholic Church. And then the second thing, I just want to say that I appreciate about what you explained. Even when I've looked at the peasant revolts, I sort of framed that in terms of there's one denomination going against another denomination when I when you described it at this time around, I'm thinking now more like David Koresh and you know, really fringe crazy movements that are are you know, just sort of gathering mobilizing people to do something, but there's no real structure or even feel logical weight or reasoned biblical interpretation around these things. It's just let's let's like wind people up and see what happens.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would, I would say, James, there, what you've got is a spectrum on this stuff. Okay, so you know some of them. What happens in the Kingdom of Munster is krisnipic fringe, what happens in with Thomas Munzer is lunatic fringe. And then you've got some Yeah, everybody believes that Jesus is coming back. Christians get nutty around big round numbers. Okay, it's fifteen hundred, fifteen thirty three. Oh, it's been fifteen. Jesus died thirty three. Oh, you know Jesus is coming back. Yeah, there is so much turmoil in the world. Muslims are at the gates of Vienna, on and on and on and on and on. This has to be the end of the world. So so God is going to do something radical. And so you know that that's in the water. There's apocalyptic thing is in the water. That's part of this. And the other part of this is you've been You've had massive social upheaval because of the Black Death. You know, we have no idea. I was reading numbers last night. I think it was somewhere between fifteen and seventy five million they estimate. Wow, Europeans died and the numbers are just stunning. Places like Siena. I believe it is a seventy percent seven zero percent. So the social disruption, all the structures of society that provide order.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Are just estimated.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: So you've got you've got multiple layers of chaos, and we know what that does in terms of charismatic leaders, apocalyptic sorts of messages, on and on and on. So all of this was it's an you could see it coming in that sense.
00:28:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really an interesting I mean I remember going through Luther's house and reading that even he thought they were living in the end times, you know. And so you can understand why because if we just look back in our recent past, we've had the COVID pandemic and all that kind of good stuff. And while there wasn't there may have been some religious fervor that I just sort of missed, right, But you know, I didn't get the sense that people really pointed to this as the apocalypse or something like that necessarily, but you did get a lot of charismatic leaders coming out and swaying things one way or another. And in a context where there's so much complexity and so much chaos that you really can't identify what is true or what is not because the information is constantly swinging out to you, you know, sort of moment by moment. The people who are going to take advantage of that and and be surer than they ought to be sure in a moment. And so it's just an interesting way to frame I think, and try to look back and go, this is the turmoil that these Germans were experiencing, that sort of societal discomfort, complete instability, and now they're also trying to navigate their religious convictions alongside that. And I think it's even crazier that most of these people probably again, correct me if I'm wrong, but Luther's just translated the Bible into English. It's not like these folks were you know, steeped in into German. I'm sorry, yeah, just really into German. But it's not like these folks were steeped in scripture and they were were illiterate, right, So, I mean it's one thing for for the Luther to say, you know, my conscious self captive by the Word of God. It's another thing for just you know, Joe Jerman on the street to say it, because he probably he hasn't read it, and if he has, he's just started.
00:30:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're if you're looking at a population where eighty percent of the mirror are illiterate, you know that that's the problem. We like to say things like the Roman Catholics kept the Bible from the people, Well, you don't have to keep it from him if they can't read, right, And I'm not saying that that's completely untrue, but I'm saying, yeah.
00:30:28
Speaker 1: It's a factor we have to take into account exactly exactly. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can distribute it all you want, but if it can't be read and understood. You know who is a Philip right in the Ethiopian yep, right, how well I know what it says. If no, there's no one here to teach me kind of thing, and he can read it, and he can read it. Yeah, he was literate and he's still needed to teach her. So I think this helps with the dynamics of what happens post Reformation, and we'll we'll kind of leave it there and we'll transition in and then next episode talking a little bit about the we could call it the tradition that emerges from Protestantism, the souls, and how these ultimately sort of start to frame the trajectory of the Protestant Church or the Protestant churches, however we want to phrase that, But that becomes the core really of our tradition. So that's we'll address the next time. So again, Greg, thanks for being here, and everybody else we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
