Why the Reformation Happened: Germany Before Luther (Greg Quiggle)

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. Greg, Welcome to the podcast man.

00:01:20
Speaker 2: Thank you, it's great to be here.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, so today we're going to be kind of talking a little bit pre Reformation context and what context is it that the Reformation emerges from. What's the world like at this point in Germany? So maybe we'll start there, what's going on in society in Germany. Paint us a picture of the utopian moment of Germany at this time that the horrible reformers eventually destroy and break apart. Now and that's not really I kind of know what's coming. So yeah, paint the picture.

00:02:00
Speaker 2: Let me back it up five hundred years just to give a bit of context here. So most people in the West tend to think about Christianity as either Protestant or Roman Catholic, but if we go back in the early Church, you're aware there's one church, and frankly, there's one church throughout the world until ten fifty four, and in ten fifty four the church divides into two, the Western or Latin or Catholic Church and the Eastern or Greek or Orthodox Church. So Russia and these other places have been in the news more recently, and you see religion over there that's Orthodox Christianity, that is not Roman Catholicism. That's an entirely different deal for another time and another lesson. But what you need to understand is what we're talking about is happening in the Western Church. So this is a split, a second split in the Western or Catholic Church that takes place in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. And so one of the first things I need people to understand is we tend to hear the word Reformation SUN, but it's actually reformationuns. There are many of them. So we're focusing in this set of podcasts on what happened in Germany. So that's going to be luther and Lutheranism, and that's going to eventually spread into modern day Scandinavia, so Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway. Those are still predominantly Lutheran places, but there was also separate movements in Switzerland. For example, in the city of Zurich. Among German speaking Swiss, there's a guy named Zwingli who has a movement going. Most people have heard of John Calvin. That's French speaking people. He's in the French part of Switzerland. You've heard of the Reformed churches. The Reformed Churches trace the roots to both Swingley and Calvin. Then you have a separate Reformation in England. You mentioned at the beginning about you know, I do a trip to England and that's the story of Henry the Eighth and his six wives and divorces, and that produces what we did. They called the Church of England, the Anglican or Episcopal Church. That's totally separate from what we're going to talk about in this podcast. Then you get a group called the Radicals, and these produce Mennonites, Amish, some Brethren. Most of them start in Switzerland or around the German border. And again we're not touching on those people today in this set of broadcasts. So we're really talking about something that's happening in what was called the Holy Roman Empire, which is modern day Germany. And why does this happen? Why is the Western Church suddenly reforming. Well, there's a couple reasons. Number one is it's been around now for fifteen hundred years and it's become bureaucratic and bloated, and you know how these things go. Church laws become a mess. There's a high degree of corruption. Most of us know the stories about bad popes or you know, illegitimate children, or buying and selling church offices called simony. There's this going on. We'll learn more about that and other future podcasts. A lot of ministers aren't even in it's called absenteeism. In fact, at one point it was guest and only one one in fourteen parishes had their priests and residence in Germany, so they weren't even there. They were collecting a salary and weren't there. So there's all kinds of stuff going on. But underneath it, and we'll spend a whole podcast on this, but underneath this, there's this real question of theology. Because those who are going to become what we call Protestants are going to say all of this other stuff, all this bad stuff I've talked about, is the product of bad doctrine? The church lost its way theologically, And those who are going to remain or become what we call Roman Catholic are going to say, no, the doctrine is pretty much fine. We just got corrupt. So it's not fair to say that Protestantism started because of corruption in the church, because the Roman Church is going to address the corruption too. Everybody agrees the church had become corrupt. The question is is the corruption the problem itself or a symptom of a deeper theological problem. And like I said, in a future podcast, we'll talk about the basic theological problems. But in addition to that, I want to frame out what the world was like. So first off, we talk about cities. Well, what we call the city and what they call the city were quite different. So, for example, the population in Geneva, I mentioned Geneva, it's about twenty five thousand people. That's a city. London is sixty thousand. I mean that Florence is fifty thousand. Naples is forty thousand something a lot, so we're talking about numbers one hundred thousand for Naples. Paris is a big dog. It's about two hundred thousand. You know, these are the size of just big suburbs now, and so most of Europe was rural and peasant, and they lived hand to mouth, so death was extraordinarily present in day to day life. So I've just got some statistics here to help you understand this. In Central Europe, life expectancy was between thirty and forty years. That's average. Charge. So let's talk about infinite child mortality rates. Somewhere around thirty percent of newborns died before their first year, first birthday, About forty five percent died before they reached adulthood. So look at it this way. One out of every two children never made it to adulthood roughly. Yeah, and you know, just try to imagine if those of us that have had children half of them never made it to adulthood. The emotional toll would just be stunning. Now, let's add on to that things like the Black Death. So you've heard of the plague, the Black Death. Now, most of this predates Reformation, but it goes through during the reference nation two. So the worst years for this between let's say thirteen fifty and fourteen twenty in Germany, roughly forty four zero percent of the population died. Provence in France fifty percent five zero Tuscany in Italy seventy seven zero percent died when Zwingli was in Zurich at one point the plague went through. Twenty five percent died when he was pastor imagine pasting. You know we talk about COVID. Imagine twenty five percent going through. It's stunning. And so on top of this, you've got famine et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:10:56
Speaker 1: So right, you're not living the easy life if you survive. This is a difficult, hard life, marked by death constantly.

00:11:05
Speaker 2: And so what I've tried to get people to understand is the cumulative effect on the medieval mind is something we just cannot grasp. But what it does do is it intensifies their concern about death. They are obsessed with death. In fact, the cathedral in barn has a stained glass window. If you can imagine this, and it has in the window, I believe it's fifty fifty different portrayals of how you can die. Can you imagine going to church, He'll and here's this big window in your church. You could die this way, you could die this way. You could die this way, you could die this way. So two things. Number One, they are more committed to the life to come than this life. What's going to happen when I die? What's going to happen when I die? What's going to happen when I die? Number two, God is perpetually angry. There is overwhelming evidence that God is constantly angry. And the evidence is clear. Half my kids are dead, and the disease is coming through town. And when it comes through town, who causes disease? They know the stories from the Old Testament. Why do people die? They die because they're singing against God. So God must be angry. And this is all so in light of that, I've described the tradition of the church, who is supposed to be able to provide comfort and answers in this kind of trauma. The church who is failing the church? And so this is why you get so much emphasis in extreme religious behaviors, pilgrimages, people beating themselves, starving themselves, anything they can do to manipulate God, because remember the priests, isn't there Yeah, and so h.

00:13:51
Speaker 1: He is there is any prescribing some of these things anyway, I mean.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: But what these things are on the books. But the people that are driving these things are the peasants because they're desperate. Right, So if I don't if I go see the Relic, I get time off purgatory. If I go in a pilgrimage, I get time off purgatory. I don't need a priest to do that. So if I haven't gotten the masks, I can at least go on a I can go to the Relic. I can buy an indulgence. We'll talk more about that later. You can see why this is all. Purgatory is going to become really important because I've got to figure out I've got to do something to a keep God from killing me because he's mad, and B I've got to do something to make sure I spend eternity in heaven instead of hell. You walk into church and you got the last Judgment carved over the door and lie these places. So you know this is not like we go to church and there's somebody smiling with a big smile at face. Button you know, Jesus loves you, and so do we know this? This is God is angry at you. He's damning you to hell. And if you don't straighten up and fly, you know, so you have to take your brain and you have to do a one eighty with it, because the way we see life and the way they see life, it's just radically different. And as in aside, one of the despicable byproducts of this is anti Semitism. So lots of times when the play comes through, if God isn't responsible for it, then guess who is? The Jews? So you get slaughter of Jews? Are they poisoned the well? And then Jews will be in Germany and Central Europe there's horrible. Well you know what's wrong with these people? Why didn't they read the Bible? Well, that's a good question. Why didn't they read the Bible? Literacy rate in Germany in fifteen hundred only twenty percent of the population could read, could not read.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: When even at that point would there have been a Bible they could read.

00:16:24
Speaker 2: That's the second point. The printing press has been around by that point, so there would have been some around, and there were a few early German translations. Were they very good? No? Were they very prominent? No? So that's the other thing. Well, why didn't these people just read the Bible? Well, the Catholic Church was keeping them from it. Well, you don't have to worry about keeping it from them if they can't read it. Yeah, so there is some sense of yes, they didn't want lay people grabbing the Bible and deciding for themselves what it meant. And we'll talk more about that than later broadcasts or podcast but but the fact of the matter is the vast majority, eighty percent of the population couldn't read.

00:17:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it didn't matter whether they had or.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: Not, didn't matter whether they had it or not. Yeah.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: And the reality is, until you up the literatary rates, there's you're kind of stuck. You're you're left with your own imagination in this context and working on whatever limited understanding you may have had. You can't really check yourself based you know, like we would go back to God's word and look and say, oh, I'm probably off about that, you know, what have you? They don't even have that recourse, right.

00:17:43
Speaker 2: They have stained glass windows, so they know the stories, They know the stories of the Bible, and you know those stories of the saints. Yeah, some extent, the lasses are the masses in Latin. They can't understand that the sermons are horrible, So these are sheep without a shepherd, and they're desperate.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: Do the this. Yeah, it's probably a too blunt a question, so I'll let you nuance it. But you know, looking forward to what we're going to talk about with Luther, obviously I see him identifying a theological problem within the church. But for most of the peasants, they're they're dissatisfaction with this. Probably isn't theological. It's probably more pragmatic. In other words, none of this is working, and the Church just seems to take more from me and give me less back.

00:18:45
Speaker 2: Exactly.

00:18:46
Speaker 1: Is that okay?

00:18:47
Speaker 2: Exactly? And you know, one of the other things is clergy were not subject to civil law, so they can get away with murder. Literally. I mean, it's like it's a mess. Yeah. Roman Catholics and Protestants are going to say it's a mess, because frankly, there is such a thing as a Roman Catholic reformation. A Catholic reformation, they do clean house, they do get rid of the corruption. They understand. Nobody is arguing that the church was in good shape in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth century was a mess. The question is how much of this was bad theology.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: And that's where you have guys who are trained. Luther was a trained person. He understood the doctrinal elements. He could read the you know, and study these various things. He understood canon law and all that kind of good stuff. And so what he's identifying is these theological or doctrinal kernels within the Catholic Church that are creating the context for corruption. And if these aren't changed, he has very little hope that the Church can actually reform.

00:19:57
Speaker 2: Right, And his question is the question of every peasant in Germany, how can I stand before a holy God? And he comes to a conclusion that number one, he can stand before a holy God on the basis of faith alone, and number two, he can have a degree of certainty about what happens to him before he dies. And both of those are going to be revolutionary ideas. And those are things, I mean, imagine living your life knowing that you can die at any moment, which is true of all of us. We just don't think about it, right, And this overwhelming sense that God is perpetually angry at me, and no way to have any degree of certainty about where I stand with God, just I don't really know, you know, I do what the priest kind of says. And I hope this kind of works. And I'm you know, I bought an indulgence and I'm going to the relic and maybe I'll go on a pilgrimage. My crops are okay, And and this guy comes along and says, no, all you have to do is believe that Jesus died for your sins on the cross. When you believe that Jesus died, you're forgiven and you can know that you're okay with God. Just keep looking to Jesus, Just keep focused on Jesus. Just keep believing that Jesus on the Cross is there for you. Keep going to him, keep repenting of your sins, keep throwing yourself at his mercy. Is long as you are believing in Him, you're okay. And you can know, well, this is just absolutely utterly stunning. Yeah, and it's gonna and it's gonna. You know, the craft side to this is it's gonna undercut a lot of money making opportunities here, do you So?

00:22:23
Speaker 1: One of the things I've always kind of wondered about as you moved from the Catholic side to the Protestant side, you tend to lose purgatory. Yes, that that happened with Luther.

00:22:36
Speaker 2: Among others.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean, but I mean he I guess my question is, and did Luth? Was that Luther's innovation but Luthor didn't carry that with him at all, Like that was just dawn. Purgatory is a doctrine? Was kind of like, nope, we're done well.

00:22:57
Speaker 2: Luther's theology evolves, all, I don't want to tell you you.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: Know what was necessarily, but he's.

00:23:08
Speaker 2: He is working through these things, but it is logically no longer necessary if you believe in justification by faith alone. That is what Luther is saying is when you put your faith in what Jesus did on the cross, there is this magnificent exchange, and the exchange is your sin goes to Jesus and Jesus' righteousness becomes yours. Theologians call this imputed righteousness. I like Luther's term much better. He calls it alien righteousness. That is, it's in you but not yours, so that you are right before God, not because of who you are, but because of who Jesus is, and by faith you are united with Jesus, so that when God, the Father looks at you, he sees Jesus righteousness, and he says acceptable. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and you are in Christ Jesus by faith alone.

00:24:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just interesting to think through all the things that hinged on purgatory, right, And we'll talk about a lot of them throughout the rest of the series, but just to kind of intro it, it's like, the indulgences hang on purgatory.

00:24:48
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:24:49
Speaker 1: Many of the ascetic practices like these beatings and that kind of stuff, they hinge on purgatory, like I want to get time off for good behavior.

00:24:59
Speaker 2: Right.

00:24:59
Speaker 1: So it's just fascinating to think about the revolution and thought that people would have had to go through to move from this context that you've described really well, like this, it's just death and just sort of horrible living conditions. You're looking to the church for answers. The church has no real answers. You're doing these pilgrimages, you're spending more money, you're buying, you know, you're doing all this other stuff. And then Luther comes along and says, yeah, really, you don't have to do any of that stuff anymore. Here's what it looks like. I mean that, you know, as a release valve to all that pressure was probably revolutionary. But also working that through the entire aspect of theology had to have been a job. Oh yeah, yeah, it just from a practical perspective. You know, why would we do any of the sacraments anymore if purgatory isn't real, Like you have to come up with a whole different sort of system for that. And I'm sure he had resources are drawn, I know, the huss Yeah sort of predated Luther's I mean, it wasn't like this the only time that's ever come up. And then obviously you have materials prior to some of this near term context that you go back and draw on.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: But uh, he's going to go back to August and he's gonna hut. You don't get much justification by faith from hust but you do get things like communion in both kinds, that is, both the cup and the bread, to the play people, variety of sorts of things. But yeah, the stunning thing that Luther is, the question that Luther is answering is you can know now what happens to me when I die? Well, you have hope. No, no, you have certainty. What's a certainty from the shed blood of Christ. Christ died for my sins, according to the Scripture, and I believe that He died for me. And so the sacraments no longer are the means by which God turns me into a righteous person. The sacraments testify to the truth of the Bible, help me understand the Bible and become objects of faith in that sense. So when I receive the communion, I receive the promise of Jesus in the form of bread and wine. So Jesus says to me in bread what he says to me in the book, this is my body broken for you. And then the question is the same question when I read the book, do I believe that?

00:28:00
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:28:01
Speaker 2: If I believe it, then it saves me. If I don't, it damns me.

00:28:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:28:08
Speaker 2: Well I believe if you make the Bible personal freaking is the Bible general?

00:28:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean belief. I've sort of come around to this. There's a body of scholarship that talks about belief in terms of loyalty. Now, I don't think that what that means is that every time you read faith you should read loyalty or faith, you should read allegiance. But I do think that that's a nuance within the language. It's not just cognitive assent. Yes, right, it's not just an I believe that statement. There's a wonderful illustration. John Verbaiki does some interesting work on what he calls participatory knowing, and he talks about a shaman who watches wolves, and he says, in watching the wolves, the shaman is not developing beliefs about the wolves. The shaman is enacting what the wolf is doing. He's getting a bodily sense of how the wolf moves, what its habits are right, and this helps him move and think like the wolf, so that when he's hunting the wolf, he has a better shot at getting the wolf. And you know that's paraphrastic, but the general idea on this is when I think about faith, I'm thinking about it in those terms. When we're participating in some of these sacraments, we're not just going through motions or trying to assent to something in a cognitive strictly cognitive sense. We're actually participating. We're enacting it, and in enacting it we learn to imitate Christ and demonstrate that we are faithful to him, we believe he is Lord, and we submit to him as Lord. All of that sort of put into that same kind of context. Yeah, So I don't know, just that clarification seems sometimes I think we get when I think of the Reformation justification by faith, it can get a little bit when we talk about it. Sometimes you get a little bit of anemic, right, And I don't think at all that that's where Luther is pushing or you are, just to clarify for the audience, it's not a you know, it's not like as simple as I believe that chair will hold me, you know that we often get that sort of conversation. It's like, No, it's more like, you know, I'm gonna I'm going to hang from a rope over the Grand Canyon and I trust that it's going to hold me.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Well, you're you know. I mean, I drive this from Calvin, but I think it catches Luther. Calvin talks about something called told depravity, and people think, oh, that means you're as bad as you can possibly be. No, total is a statement of quality, not quantity. That is affects the entirety of your being. There is no part of you unaffected by sin might have varying degrees. So for example, my eyes are awful, are awful because of original sin. Frankly, your eyes might be less brave than mine, but nonetheless there's still not nobody's eyes are absolutely utterly pristine. So all we're talking about is degree, not quality. I think Calvin applies the same principle to faith. I think he says faith is total, that is, it involves the totality of your being. So God doesn't save you on the basis of the quantity of faith you have. He saves you on the basis of the quality of your faith. That is, it's the entirety of your being, not just your mind, not just your will, not just your emotions. The entirety of your being is inclined. So that and here's how Luther, I think Bridge is it you talked about us participating. Yeah, for Luther, Christ is participating in the bread too. It's a double participation. He is somehow mystically in the bread. Then you are somehow mystically participating with sharing, in a sharing, so that there is union with Christ. And it's this union because you see if when Paul says there is therefore nomenal commendation of those who are in Christ Jesus. The end doesn't imply just your intellect. It implies the entirety of your being. And that's why I think faith is total, not just partial. Now I don't know exactly what all that means, but I do think the Bible, and you know this, it's the old word heart. That's a holistic term.

00:33:09
Speaker 1: Right, It's not just it's not referring simply to our emotions. When we read in Deuteronomy six' five love the loygric oud with all your, heart with all your, soul with all your. Strength, normally the WAY i would parse Those hebrew words out is heart is you, know sort of your, will your, desire all your volitional, capability your, soul which is actually The hebrew word and fish often occasionally used for. Corpse it refers to your whole, being not just some sort of inanimate soul that we can't. See and then strength in The hebrew, context it's actually ode is The hebrew. Word it's the very and very, Good so you know it's Your the WAY i like to think of, it it's all your, oomph all your, muchness and it probably refers to everything you can, muster not just how much you can, bench but all of your resources piled in right into. This that's all your. Strength and so that CAPTURES i, think you, know again from An Old testament, perspective that SOMETIMES i think this is a little easier to see than when we get into The New, testament that there is this, holistic whole self giving oneself over to The, lord and that this is what faithfulness looks. LIKE i like that idea of. QUALITY i hadn't heard that about total gravity And, calvin that's really. Helpful AND i think as long as we keep that in mind as we go, forward that this isn't about a particular, assent but that justification by faith can almost be read as justification by faith and justification by faithfulness. Simultaneously we just don't have the word for.

00:34:51
Speaker 2: It, YEAH i, MEAN i try to be helpful occasionally just for the share thrill of it. All AND i think the guy that that picks this up maybe even better Is Jonathan edwards in HIS treati someun religious. Affections what does he mean by? Affections that's, right that's the whole point of this. Thing so, YEAH i MEAN i that's my read Of. Calvin calvin doesn't say that, exactly but THAT'S i think that's What calvin is, Saying so.

00:35:23
Speaker 1: It TRACKS i think for what from WHAT i understand the scripture and the doctrine of again justification by. FAITH i think we're we're in an interesting, Setting, greg where you, know all this new scholarship is coming out with regard to, that and you have an old guard who's, saying, no we haven't gotten the you, know the doctrine of justification wrong for the last fifty, years and the new guys are kind of, saying, well we're not necessarily saying you get it. Wrong we're just saying that this is an aspect that's been Under that's the WAY i read. It at least some of them are probably saying they're. Wrong BUT i do think that we're sort of in this moment where if we're not, careful our doctrine will become too, reified too, stiff and we'll lose the ability to Allow god's word to reform some of our. Ideas in the same way that we See luther battling against The Catholic church to do the. Same you, know, well.

00:36:19
Speaker 2: This is precisely why you, know and we'll talk about this in future. Podcasts when you do the ninety five, Thesis luther, says The christian's repentance for The christian is a way of. Life, yeah not an.

00:36:36
Speaker 1: Event, yeah it has to be an ongoing, thing.

00:36:40
Speaker 2: Right, well this is.

00:36:41
Speaker 1: Helpful this gives us a good context for The, reformation gives us a decent enough picture of the bleakness of this moment and how The church's corruption combined with just the difficulties of daily, life the tragedy of daily, life creates a fair amount of un. Rest and for learned folks Like, luthor who really understood what he was doing from a theological, perspective begin to pick this apart and, say we are contributing to the. Problem these things need to change from a theological perspective because at route they simply are not. Correct, yes, well this is. Good this is a great introduction to the. Series, folks just come. Back we're gonna do several episodes on, this and we'll do them in, sequence and so you can kind of get a broad sense of The. Reformation, again i'd encourage you to check out the tours tours for ten That greg offers there's a link in the show notes to where you can find out more about. That and, yeah we'll catch you on the next episode Of Thinking. Christian take, care. Everybody. THANKS 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.

00:37:59
Speaker 2: More