The Protestant Reformation: 500 Years On

Peter Elliott is an Auxiliary Bishop in the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, with responsibility  for the Southern Region of the Archdiocese.  He is Director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne Session, and Episcopal Vicar for Religious Education. He holds Masters degrees in History and Theology from the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford and a Doctorate in sacred Theology from the Lateran University, Rome. 31 October 2017 marked the 500^th anniversary of the day Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation by launching his 95 Theses. Centuries of sectarian deaths and divisions followed. Today, Protestants and Catholics are mending bridges. Looking back there are flaws to be discovered on each side – the dogmatic clinging to scripture of the Protestants and the Catholic rigidity around tradition, especially on the subject of unmarried priests. Reflecting on lessons learned and mistakes made – as well as reflecting on the positive contribution of Christianity in its various forms – Bishop Peter Elliott of Melbourne, Reverend Canon Professor Scott Cowdell of Canberra and Jesuit scholar Frank Brennan addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 26 October 2017.

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION: 500 YEARS ON

PETER J. ELLIOTT

As a small boy growing up in a country vicarage just after the Second World War, I soon became aware that there were other Christians as well as the sedate Anglicans who worshipped each Sunday in my father’s church, St Paul’s, Inverleigh. Across the road a larger bluestone edifice housed the mysterious Presbyterians and our friends the McDonalds were of this persuasion. I discovered that Anglican and Presbyterian men met in something called a “lodge”, and I later learnt that this was the power engine of the Western District establishment in Victoria.

When it came to Methodists, my precocious liturgical eyes noted that they disdained placing a cross on the gable of their churches, preferring a fleur-de-lys, which to a five-year-old looked like a cabbage. Did these Methodists, who also disdained wine, beer and dancing, feast riotously on cabbages and lemonade instead? Later I came to know a Methodist minister, one of those Christians you can truly describe as “holy”.

However, there was something else, lurking behind a large cypress hedge at the Western extremity of the village, something foreign, like the gypsies who took naughty little boys away in battered American cars. The hedge concealed the humble wooden church of the Roman Catholics. But impressions of their insignificance evaporated when we went shopping in Geelong and I dragged my mother into the gothic glories of the St Mary of the Angels church. There, in front of entrancing candle racks, began a life’s journey, to Catholicism and priesthood.

The Reformation is still imprinted on the landscape of our cities, suburbs and towns. In some places it is less obvious, where Protestant churches have been converted into blocks of flats or recycled by Eastern Orthodox communities. In Melbourne, those Anglican or Protestant parishes that flourish seem to be predominantly Evangelical or Pentecostal, often manned by Asiatic Christians, who are also a boon to Catholic parishes.

In talking each week with eleven-year old Confirmation candidates, I find that they have a minimal awareness of other kinds of Christian, except in affluent areas where some Catholic children are enrolled in private Anglican or Protestant schools. They know nothing of the appalling name-calling that went on in the early ‘fifties when I was a state-school boy in North Fitzroy. Ecumenism is now well-established.

In 1960, St John XXIII opened the ecumenical door to Archbishop Fisher of Canterbury who came to the Vatican for a historic low-key visit. Vatican II followed with the Decree on Ecumenism. Enthusiasts announced that both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were over.

Not really. Sectarianism lingers; subterranean streams of anti-Catholicism fuel our Irish propensity for paranoia. You can still find the bigotry of the ranter (what a wonderful seventeenth century word! ranter) who blasts away with fundamentalist verve on his fringe website. But something worse is rapidly replacing the old bigotry, evident when an atheist celebrity on Channel 7 Sunrise rails against those “God botherers” who impede her utopian dream of doctor-assisted suicide, that is, State-sanctioned killing, not that she would know that.

In our era, it is not the Reformation that divides Christians, rather the new fault lines that run across all denominations: a liberal and conservative divide, progressives against traditionalists, modernism versus orthodoxy, many ways of describing it. But the realignment has generated a new kind of ecumenism, where conservative Catholics rub shoulders with Evangelicals and Pentecostals, assuring one another that it is “OK to Vote No” or waving placards in front of the Victorian Parliament, soon perhaps to be known as “euthanasia central”. 

At the same time, liberal Christians maintain what remains of an ecumenism they once dominated. In Malcom Muggeridge’s view, they can agree with one another so easily because they do not believe in much at all. Yet they are also part of the Reformation heritage, beginning with Erasmus and motivated by the scholarly schools of scriptural criticism emerging in Enlightenment and nineteenth century Germany. Fear of resurgent fundamentalism binds them together, yet their numbers diminish and they do not attract the young.

While public issues bring together Christian social conservatives in common cause, at a broader official level for years there has been dialogue with those who once seemed so different, for example through ongoing talks with Anglicans (ARCIC), and an agreement with the Lutherans on justification.

That was another fragment in my childhood encounter with the Reformation, getting to know our Lutheran cousins on my mother’s side, wheat farmers in the Wimmera. This provoked a historical and theological interest in Luther, beginning in my Melbourne Grammar matriculation year, 1961. But I was always aware that in our family we were high-church Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, and we did not think of ourselves as Protestants.

However, a greater vertical fault line runs through Western societies: God believers versus unbelievers, theists versus atheists. In this continuing debate and culture war, the Reformation no longer matters much. But secularisation and its aggressive child secularism may be traced in an indirect way to the Reformation which, thanks to Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII, took the medieval Church-state relationship and turned it on its head.  One Italian scholar, Danilo Castellano, also claims that Luther, via Hegel, was the father of revolutions on the Right and on the Left. 

However, according to Christopher Dawson, capitalism is the child of the Reformation, via Calvinism. That needs to be balanced by the involvement of Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists in the Labor movement and trade unions. In Australia, this shaped a political ecumenism because Catholics were equally involved. I recall the active presence of some Protestants in Bob Santamaria’s Movement and the DLP.  Then, the common Marxist foe brought us together; today a shrieking mutation known as “cultural Marxism” brings together conservative Christians and members of the other religions.

The Reformation is also supposed to be the source of the “Protestant work ethic”, but this was not necessarily a Puritan or Lutheran principle. You find a similar work ethic among Catholic and Orthodox peasants and workers, albeit softened in Southern Europe by the humane repose of the siesta and riotous celebrations of the fiesta.

Tracing the effects of the Reformation in our liberal pluralist society raises a question: to what extent was the Enlightenment influenced by the Reformation? There seem to have been both Protestant and Catholic sources of the Enlightenment, alongside those sceptical streams which surfaced brutally in the radical phase of the French Revolution and later morphed into the totalitarians of Left and Right.  On the other hand, the American Revolution drew heavily on the radical side of the Reformation (Congregationalists, Unitarians, Quakers etc.), for example at Harvard. This was expressed in terms of religious tolerance, pluralism and particularly freedom from any state-established church. The latter principle was distorted into the “separation of church and state” by a juridical misinterpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

Here we see what developed from and beyond Luther, the role of conscience, political and religious conscience. At its best, the Enlightenment also maintained the Natural Law traditions in ethics, morality and the law. The Natural Law is favoured by Christians but now it is negated by secularist legal positivism which each passing year drags us towards the totalitarian swamp.

It seems as if we all owe something to the Reformation. Nor should we forget the creative Catholic response, the Counter-Reformation, better described as the Catholic Reform, rehabilitated by revisionist historians such as Eamon Duffy. However, last week, at the Luther Conference held in the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral, we did not celebrate the Reformation. The Lutherans insisted that we were commemorating not celebrating. This was not only out of ecumenical sensitivity to Catholic feelings, rather it expressed a shared opinion in an ecumenical age that all-in-all the Reformation was not a “good thing”.

The Reformation divided us. It fragmented Western Christianity. It weakened us through religious wars, futile persecutions, pointless disputations and scandals, and five hundred years later, with the neo-atheists at the gates, here we are still trying to work it out.