Up to this point, we’ve taken a big look at everything that led to the Catholic Church as we saw it in the 1500s, just before it split during the Protestant Reformation. As we’ve seen, it’s clear that the church’s roots in Christianity had been almost lost as sinful men did what they always do when they’re given too much power. Now that we know how the church came to power, and the major beliefs that had grown up around that, lets look at all the gunpowder that God used to ignite a global change in Christ’s people.
(If you’d like to get caught up on this series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
Rapid-fire reasons the church had to split
The world is a big place, which means that there was a lot going on that led to the Reformation. Even things like politics and the economy created a worldview that allowed people to accept something as unthinkable as finding salvation outside the Catholic Church, even though people had spent centuries feeling certain that there could be no other way. Instead of looking at everything, let’s look at those specific areas where leaders and citizens could see that the Catholic Church was failing as Christ’s representative on Earth.
A history of discontent
Although Martin Luther is the big name of the Protestant Reformation, he’s far from being the first to question the church’s teachings. For centuries, people had been pushing against the corruption and false teaching they saw in the church. Some had tried to make the Bible available in a language that anyone could read, while others questioned the very authority of the Pope himself. Some tried making minor changes to problems they saw, while others called for drastic changes.
One of the biggest examples of this is what we call the Greek Orthodox Church. In the years leading up to 1054, there were massive debates about various teachings in the Catholic Church. Essentially, two kinds of churches had developed under the Catholic Church – one in the east, and one in the west. It’s not surprising that with the distance between the two groups, different beliefs were formed based on how people were understanding and teaching the Bible, and indeed even beliefs on which church leader was the true representative of Christ on Earth.
After a lot of petty squabling, which included things like “Close all the churches in the West!” “No, you close all the churches in the East!” and both religious leaders ex-communicating one another, the biggest division in history finally occurred. The world watched as a massive group of people abandoned the Catholic Church to pursue, in their minds, the true teachings of Christ.
This event, known as “The Great Schism,” did more than create a split. The church that once seemed to own the world showed its weakness, and people saw that the Church had a lot of threats, but perhaps not all the power. The centuries that followed created a world where people felt more open to questioning what the Catholic Church taught, but the Church wouldn’t let it happen easily.
Increasingly abusive
When an animal feels cornered and threatened, it’s far more likely to be hostile and aggressive to protect itself. People in power are no different, and by the 1500s the Catholic church was feeling very threatened. More and more people had been speaking against the Church, especially in the countries where the Church’s influence was weaker.
Although the Church had originally used their understandingn of ex-communication (essentially removing someone from the Church, and therefore removing their salvation) to protect the Church from false teachers, now they used it to maintain control.
It’s important to remember that people truly believed salvation could only be found in the church. If you questioned the church, it was rarely because someone wanted to leave Catholicism, but wanted to bring attention to something that seemed to go against the Bible. Even Martin Luther didn’t intend to radically change the world, but instead wanted to bring things back to what God taught in the Bible.
So as questions continued to come, the church grew more aggressive in excommunicating those who asked. It gave people a very difficult choice – if the Church was right, then asking questions risked their eternal salvation. Yet if the church was wrong, then much of what they taught may have been wrong as well.
In addition to excommunication, there was a lot of aggressive attacks on heresy. The famous Spanish Inquisition is an example of a terrible attempt at stamping out all heresy in Spain. Acts like these showed that the Catholic Church had resorted to a dictator-style of rule, telling people to fall in line without question or else.
Not only that, but burning heretics at the stake was far more horrific than what we often assume. The church at the time believed that when Christ returned, He would raise our physical bodies wherever they were at that time. Whether in tombs or lost at sea, it was important for our bodies to be somewhere “whole” to receive a resurrection.
Thus, how the Church handled heretics shows how abusive they had become. Through excommunication, they would remove their salvation. But just in case Christ still somehow forgave them, the Church would burn their bodies so that they couldn’t be resurrected anyway.
In a way, the church leadership reminds us of an abusive relationship. It was willing to do whatever it took to maintain control over its people, and the more it felt its power fading, the more drastic measures it took to try and hold on to what it could.
The love of money
It’s no surprise that money was a motivator. Christ had become very profitable, and the more that Catholic Church was able to manipulate those who trusted it, the more ways the found to squeeze even more money out of people.
It’s almost humorous that the Catholic Church looks so much like Acts 8:18-24. In this part of church history, a man named Simon tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles, and was harshly shut down for it. Yet this is so similar to what we see through how easily the Church was influenced by money.
Religious positions were essentially up for sale. The very people who would be interpreting and teaching the Bible gained their position by being rich enough, rather than being wise and trustworthy. When in power, they were more likely to appoint their friends and financial supporters, thus adding even more corruption and weakness.
And of course, there was the disastrous sale of “indulgences,” where people could pay money to have sins forgiven, whether for themselves or their family members who were currently suffering in Purgatory. This was a major turning point for Martin Luther because it showed that the Pope was only interested in granting Heaven to those who were willing to pay for it.
Control the Bible, control the people
Of course, one of the greatest ways the Catholic Church could run unchecked is because they held tight control of the Bible. We see this in any sort of controlling environment – if you limit someone’s access to truth, they must rely on you for it.
People had spent centuries growing up in a world where you just trusted what the church leadership said – after all, the Bible was kept in Latin specifically because you had to be trained to read it. While this was originally done with the noble intention of preventing uneducated people from forming false teachings, it easily shifted to preventing people from seeing if the Church’s teachings were true.
The dangers of a monopoly
Whether it’s business, religion, or board games, “monopoly” is never a good word. When a group doesn’t have any competition, those in charge can get away with almost anything. After all, what can people do if they’re unhappy about it? With competition and competing ideas, there’s a requirement to examine everything you do.
Ultimately, this is how the Catholic Church remained unchecked for so long. Even though there was some different opinions, and even entire countries breaking away, those in the heart of areas controlled by Catholicism had no other options. And again, their aggressive control methods helped cement the idea that there was no salvation outside of what was taught by the pope.
This was also complicated by the technology of the time. If someone in Scotland discovered something in the Bible, how could thousands of people in Italy learn about it? If someone believed in the teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church, how could they participate without expensively uprooting their lives and moving to a place that allowed that kind of worship?
One of the greatest problems in the Catholic Church was simple laziness. They were comfortable with their control, and thus a lot of dangerous beliefs and practices went on without question. Small compromises and changes didn’t receive harsh feedback, and thus the leadership could start pushing things farther and farther. The idea of selling the forgiveness of sin would have been unthinkable in the early centuries of the church, yet we can look back and see how something unthinkable only required time.
The greatest reason the church needed to split
If we’re honest, all Christians get things wrong. There’s likely no single belief system out there which fully understands everything, and thus we need to be careful not to point to Catholicism’s (many) failures and say the whole system needed to go down. Ultimately, we must ask one question when determining whether it was time for Christianity to change: What did they say about Christ and salvation?
In all of church history, whether from the 1500s or 2000s, we can see that a church lives and dies based on its understanding of salvation. Churches that practice legalism will eventually burn out because people are impossibly trying to earn their righteousness and salvation on their own merit, yet deep down know that for every “good” thing they do there are 15 more wicked ones. At the same time, those who teach that salvation is as simple as praying a prayer without repentance will die out because it doesn’t lead to true conversion and thus there’s no fruit.
The same is true of the Catholic Church. At the time, salvation had gone from “Christ alone” to “Christ plus works,” and in many cases it was just “works, with a little Christ for extra help.” For all the compromises and corruption that had taken place, sacrificing the truth of the gospel in the pursuit of power was their greatest offense. At that point, it was clear how far the Church had fallen from its origins with the apostles, and why it no longer represented Christ.
In the next article, we’ll discuss the “5 Solas of the Reformation,” which is just a fancy way of saying “5 things about God, truth, and salvation that Christians were fighting to correct.” These 5 things represent the core of how the Catholic Church had given up on the gospel, and remains the 5 things we still fight for in Christianity today.
Why did God let it get to this point?
Let’s end with a big question. Over 4 articles, we’ve seen a pretty grim picture of how far Christianity fell from the original teachings of Christ and the apostles. We saw beliefs and practices start with good intentions in one century, only to slowly become corrupted later. We’ve clearly seen that hundreds of thousands of people were taught a false understanding of salvation by the only people who could read the Bible. Thousands of faithful Christians died trying to bring the Church back to the gospel.
Yet if God is sovereign, why didn’t he stop it? Why did He wait over a thousand years to finally correct this disastrous course?
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28)
I’ll admit, I don’t know why God does what He does. And with the Catholic Church, there’s no doubt that thousands of things happened behind the scenes that we’ll never understand. However, we can be confident that God’s ultimate goal is His glory, and one of the greatest ways He receives that glory is through His people. So how do we see God receive glory in spite of everything that happened?
Let’s look at what we see in Christianity today:
- Christians everywhere have the ability to read and study the Bible themselves
- Many Christians want to understand God at a deeper level by understanding how He reveals Himself in the Bible
- When we give the gospel to someone, it’s a basic understanding that we also try to give them a Bible in their own language
- Pastors know that when they teach, their members will hold them responsible for their words because they can compare what God says to what the pastor says
- We are very sensitive to any teaching that implies we need to earn our salvation
- We’re often critical of churches that put a big emphasis on wealth
- A great number of denominations, although sometimes harmful, mean that churches need to have a firm understanding of why they hold certain beliefs so they can defend themselves against those who believe differently
- We want to defend our beliefs from the Bible itself, not from saying “this is what we’ve always believed”
- The church is understood as a global collection of Christ’s people, not a physical center of power
Much of what shapes Christianity today is a strong rejection of the false teachings that we came from. We spent centuries holding false beliefs because we let tradition, not the Bible tell us what was true. We saw what happened when sinful people, no matter how righteous or well-intentioned, were allowed too much power.
Although it’s difficult to accept, it’s possible that God allowed the Catholic Church to depart from the gospel specifically because He had a greater plan in mind. Although God was still saving people in spite of the Church’s teaching, we can look back and see why our personal love of Christ, the Bible, and the gospel itself stems from those who spent the last 500 years digger deeper into the Bible than anyone had since the days of the early church.
And this isn’t the only time we see God strengthening His people through decades, even centuries, of struggle. Consider all the times in the Bible where someone could say “Why God? Where were you?” only for God to eventually use it for something far greater:
- Joseph was sold into slavery, yet God saved countless lives by putting a faithful servant in a position of power
- Daniel was nearly killed, yet God used it to affect an entire country’s worship of false gods
- Pharoah tried to kill all the Israelite babies, yet God used that to put Moses in a position to radically change history
- God let Israel sit in Babylonian capitivity with the specific purpose of bringing them out of idolatry and back to Him
- God revealed His plans to Habakkuk, explaining why Israel would be defeated by pagans
- God appeared to be silent for 400 years before Christ, allowing the Pharisees to radically change how people understood the Law of Moses
- God let Paul imprison and kill many Christians before He was converted
On and on we see that God isn’t just making the best of a bad situation, but purposely using things we see as bad for His ultimate glory.
We must remember that the Catholic Church didn’t spring into existence. It truly is our history – it’s a lesson of what happens when we let small compromises to the gospel and doctrine go unchecked. We have the benefit of looking back and seeing how the church got to where it was, yet at the time no one could have imagined how bad things were, nor how bad they could get.
We can learn much from this history, but above all it should encourage us to never become lazy in our faith. Each of our lives is filled with examples of what happens when we make small compromises, and it’s no surprise that the entire church can likewise fall away from God by doing the same thing.
Ultimately, the Protestant Reformation wasn’t a matter of “good vs. evil” but a wake-up call to Christians everywhere. The physical church may have split, but Christianity itself is more united and powerful than ever because of our firm belief in the gospel. Just as God uses discipline to bring us back from our wanderings, it appears that He likewise had a plan of restoration in mind for the beautiful bride of Christ. We may go by different names and disagree on minor beliefs, but make no mistake that those who are truly in Christ are united by His blood, and that is a far greater bond than any physical church could ever offer.
