As Catholicism spread around the world, gaining both political and religious power, the inevitable happened. By being given the ability to have power, leaders gained a desire to not just maintain that power, but see it continue to grow. Biblical understandings went unchecked, grumblings were met with persecution, and the Bible itself became a tool of authority, rather than an authority itself. Although there were many specific things that led to the church’s eventual split, there are 3 main teachings that pushed things too far.
(If you’d like to read the previous articles in this series, check out Part 1 and Part 2)
#1 The Church owned the Bible
In any area of life, one of the greatest ways to control a group of people is to control their understanding of truth. Whether it’s within an abusive relationship or an entire country, people are easiest to control when they have no choice but to trust someone else for their understanding of truth. And so the teachers and leadership of the Catholic Church found itself as the only ones with access to a Bible, and thus the only way the general populace could know what it said.
However, this didn’t start out as villainous and many would assume. In fact, removing the Bible from the hands of the people was actually done out of reverence for the truths of Christ. Put simply, the basic motivation stemmed from a concern of what happens when untrained individuals are allowed to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Let’s not forget that the church had spent a considerable amount of time combatting heresy, and if we look around today we can even see that their fears weren’t necessarily without some truth.
And so the Catholic Church kept everything about the Bible in Latin, a language that would require training to understand. In doing this, they could guarantee that only those trained to interpret the Bible’s teachings correctly would be able to read it. It was a respectable idea that would have ended far better if our sin nature couldn’t ruin it.
Of course, it’s no surprise that an earnest desire to protect the Bible’s teachings eventually became a way of using the Bible to say whatever the church wanted. As Catholic leadership became more entwined with politics, the temptation to exercise further control became too much. Soon, the Church stopped teaching what the Bible said, and instead the Bible started saying exactly what the church needed it to say.
Unsurprisingly, the Bible started giving the Church absolute authority over the lives of its followers. Christ started blessing all manner of wars and political maneuvering. All spiritual power rested in the hands of those few people who were trusted to handle the Bible well, rather than use it to serve themselves. This led to an incredible amount of manipulation and abuse, but perhaps none were as dominating as the Church’s teaching on their role in a person’s salvation.
#2 The Church owned salvation
They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us. (1 John 2:19)
Apostasy is a danger in any part of Christian history. The fact that there are many false converts who appear Christian for a time and fall away is something we’ll deal with until we meet Christ in glory. Yet in a world that only knew the Catholic Church, this idea took on an entirely different meaning.
Unlike today, the world had no concept of the difference between the physical church (filled with saved and unsaved individuals) and the “invisible church” (filled with Christ’s people around the world, regardless of any other beliefs). Instead, you were either in the Catholic Church, or you weren’t. This led to one of the primary teachings of the Catholic Church – that salvation is only found within the church.
To understand how this makes sense, it’s important to understand how the world understood salvation. To them, Christ’s death didn’t pay for individual sins, but instead granted an unlimited supply of “merits.” This is a fairly involved idea, but for now let’s get a simple understanding. Think of a merit as the opposite of a sin – for every sin we commit, it can either be paid for by a good work now, or through suffering (whether in this life or in Purgatory). While we have some good works on our own, we don’t have nearly enough to cover our multitude of sins. Thus, the Catholic Church has the authority to dispense these merits so that people can make sure the rest of their sins are covered.
When Christ (plus Mary and the saints) died, He had a near-limitless supply of His own merits that He gifted to the Church. Because of his position and authority, the Pope was given the power to give out these merits to those within the Church. There was all manner of ways to acquire these, from communion to marriage to buying “indulgences” (more on that soon). But in the end, the critical thing to understand is that the Church itself held, or withheld, these merits.
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. (Matthew 16:19)
Adding to that, the church also had the authority to outright remove someone’s salvation. After all, if salvation can only be found within the church, then what happens when someone doesn’t just choose to remove themselves but is ordered to be removed because they aren’t obeying the Church authorities? This is the basis of “ex-communication,” and it was one of the greatest ways that the Church could control the world.
“There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved.” (The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215 AD)
For those who truly understand the depravity of their sin and their desperate need for a savior, the risk of losing salvation could never be worth something as unimportant as questioning the teachings of the Church or disobeying the commands of its leaders. Thus, ex-communication because the Church’s primary tool to keep people under its authority.
What’s amazing is that people truly believed this, yet still chose to speak against the Church. Not only were they willing to risk prison, torture, and execution, but they had to be so convinced of the gospel that they were willing to risk being wrong and losing their salvation altogether.
As time progressed, the Catholic Church became almost obsessed with ex-communicating the world. Kings and countries were removed from fellowship with the Church. An entire belief system, known today as the Greek Orthodox Church, had their salvation removed. People everywhere had to decide whether the Church was something they truly believed, or if it was just a part of their culture that didn’t have the authority they claimed.
#3 The sale of indulgences
This teaching is certainly small when compared to the previous ones, but it was definitely the one that truly sparked the Protestant Reformation. Indulgences, if nothing else, showed just how far the church had fallen from its understanding of grace, and how much that had been replaced by greed and manipulation.
Many are familiar with the Church letting people, essentially, buy their way to Heaven. However, indulgences go deeper than that. And like everything else in our history, understanding where they came from can better help us understand how they become corrupted.
If our sins are paid for by merits, whether from our good works or those of others, then it only makes sense to create ways for people to earn these merits. This is the core of things like confession and Mass, where extra merits are given to cover those sins that don’t cause us to outright lose our salvation. This means of receiving extra merits is called an indulgence.
However, it doesn’t make good business sense to give something away for free when you can find a way to profit from it. So as the Church slowly pivoted away from understanding and teaching the grace of God through Jesus Christ, things like indulgences likewise turned from a flawed understanding of the Bible and became another means of controlling those who simply wanted Christ.
In the 1500s, the Catholic Church found itself low on the funds required to build one of today’s most impressive church buildings, St. Peter’s Basilica (pictured below). With all the options available to them, they realized that they had a perfect way for the devout followers of Christ to help them pay for it. They could sell indulgences.
Although the practice of selling indulgences had already been used to pay for wars and other projects, these indulgences were unique. In order to make them more appealing, the Pope offered to sell indulgences not only to cover the sins of the person who purchases it, but that person can also apply the indulgence for a family member who is currently dead and suffering in Purgatory, a place for those who didn’t commit a “mortal sin” (an act that removes salvation), but didn’t die with enough merits to get them straight to Heaven.
It was even possible for these indulgences to cover sins that other merits couldn’t. A man named Johann Tetzel, who was an expert salesman of indulgences, famously said “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.”
So loving parents could find a way to care for their children who had died. People could get their parents out of Purgatory sooner. A loving spouse could spend their money to remove the suffering from someone they’d spent their lives with.
Who wouldn’t buy an indulgence for such ultimate forgiveness of sins? And that’s exactly what the Church leadership was counting on. Although the practice had some disagreements in earlier centuries, by this time it was simply another way for these trusted leaders to use their power and authority to deceive and abuse the very people who trusted them.
Growing doubt and fading power
By the 1500s, the Catholic Church didn’t enjoy nearly as much power as it once had. For several centuries, people had been speaking out against the abuses of those in authority. Although still a dominant power, the Church saw increasingly more countries and individual Christians question their teachings, sometimes outright walking away and embracing their own understandings. As their power started slipping, their turned to more oppressive and violent methods to regain it. All of this worked together to finally reach a breaking point that would send the world into a totally new direction, splitting the Church that Christ had supposedly established and undoing centuries of religious teaching.
It was finally time for the Protestant Reformation.
