The West after the Protestant Reformation, 500 Years On- Catholic and Protestant: an Anglican Perspective

Rev Canon Professor Scott Cowdell is Canon Theologian of the Canberra-Goulburn Diocese and the author of seven books exploring Christian faith and contemporary culture, most recently Abiding Faith: Christianity Beyond Certainty, Anxiety, and Violence (Eugene, OR.: Cascade, 2009) and René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). He is also Research Professor in Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University. 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 WEST AFTER THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION, 500 YEARS ON – CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT: AN ANGLICAN PERSPECTIVE

SCOTT COWDELL

Someone from Northern Ireland once asked an Irish acquaintance of mine if he was Catholic or Protestant, only to be told “I’m a Buddhist”. Undaunted, the questioner replied, “Ah, so you’re a Protestant then.” Some of us will remember that old sectarian world here in Australia, with Irish, English, Italian and, later, central European versions of cultural tribalism, complicated by class differences between Protestants and Catholics, and between different types of Protestants.  Religion was typically a social marker before it was a meaningful theological or spiritual distinction.

Theological details really did matter in the Reformation era, however, at a time when religion was still necessary for binding a whole society together. There, on the cusp of modernity, Northern Europe was convulsed by a wave of social and religious change that surprised Martin Luther. His personal breakthrough as a spiritually troubled young friar and Bible teacher led him to seek a theological debate in little Wittenberg, but it ended up unleashing a revolution.

And it wasn’t just a matter of a few malcontents confronting the might of Rome. Widespread frustrations with the Church were involved: with the worldliness of many priests and monks, with excessive financial demands on the laity, with the lack of preaching, with the failure of conciliar reform from the previous century, and with the fresh memory of a divided papacy that had made a mockery of Catholic unity.

Indeed, when Luther was nailing up his 95 Theses in Wittenberg, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini was calling for a range of similar reforms at the heart of the Church in Rome itself. As the Anglican Church historian Owen Chadwick put it, “At the beginning of the sixteenth century everyone that mattered in the Western Church was crying out for reformation.”

In addition to various theological, spiritual and pastoral concerns, a range of wider factors were brought together in the Reformation:

• the rise of sovereign nation states
• a new mercantile economy with an aspirational commercial class
• the impact of printing, with a literate laity beginning to emerge
• the rediscovery of ancient texts by Renaissance humanists, which led to new studies of the Bible
• a trend towards democratic but less organic “social contract” views of society – rooted in late-medieval nominalist philosophy, which introduced a divine and human individualism that undermined a more holistic Catholic sense of belonging in God’s world.

So the Reformation was complex. Moreover, it didn’t entirely shape, let alone exhaust, the Protestant story. New Protestant groups have broken off from older ones in subsequent centuries. Today we’re well on the way to Pentecostalism becoming the majority form of Christianity worldwide, with scant connection to the classic teachings of the Reformers and to the great Protestant theologians of the Enlightenment through to the twentieth century.

At the heart of the Reformation ferment, then, was a European struggle to negotiate the transition to modernity. This involved a mixture of spiritual yearning, theological precision, and frustration with the quality of church life, along with a whole range of new social conditions and possibilities.

For his part, Luther recovered the Church’s ancient message of Christ, brim-full of grace and pardon, which cut through darker theological currents that he’d been caught up in thanks to late-medieval nominalism. Calvin, the French humanist in Geneva, set out to purify the Church and the city more comprehensively by strictly limiting things to what scripture allowed – though his motives were not as harsh as later followers of Calvinism such as the Puritans have proved to be. On the so-called radical left wing of the Reformation were the Anabaptists, who sought to restart the Church by baptising everyone again – and only adult believers. They insisted on a pure and faithful congregation, withdrawing from the corrupting potential of wider public engagement.

In response, the Catholic Church began an intensive period of its own internal transformation. This was the time of Saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, with their discalced Carmelite reform of religious life, and of St Ignatius Loyola, whose Jesuits were one of the first great institutional creations of the modern world, providing a missionary spearhead for a new colonial era. The mid-sixteenth century Council of Trent strengthened and reformed the pastoral practice and education of clergy, matching the Protestant Reformers on the centrality of Christ, and seeking both to galvanise and centralise the Church so it better served that vision.

One might speculate, then, that if cooler heads had prevailed, Protestant groups might not have sought separation from Rome. Instead, they could have discovered how much was achievable in common. Both reforming Catholics and Protestants were serious about holiness for instance. On one side was the priestly holiness of the consecrated life, of the sanctuary, of the holistic imagination that saw our world charged with the glory of God. On the other side was the holiness of God’s people gathered under the word of God, strengthened by preaching and fellowship. The Lutherans and Calvinists continued in their old parish churches with a new remit, wishing to see Christianity take hold in domestic and commercial life. On one side there was the holiness of J.S. Bach the Lutheran, serving the glory of God with his musical genius, and John Wesley the founder of Methodism, at whose grave you can find Catholic pilgrims at prayer honouring a saint of the Church. On the other side, there was the hidden holiness of many a monastery, likewise the public holiness of Saint Mary Mackillop and her kind, and of course the world-transforming holiness of great popes – like today’s Pope Francis, and like St John Paul II, on whose death Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen declared that the greatest heart in Europe had ceased to beat.

So much in common, then, and so much achieved together despite the divisions of 500 years. Think of the Ecumenical Movement and the Second Vatican Council, with more recent bridge building that’s overcome a number of old divides. For instance, Catholics and Lutherans are now officially agreed that our justification before God is by grace through faith, as Luther insisted, with what Paul Tillich called “the medieval bureaucracy of salvation” now firmly set aside. As a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, generously put it, “Catholicism always stands before the Church door at Wittenberg to read the truth by which she is created and by which also she is judged.”

Now, in the second half of my talk, let me speak as an Anglican and, like Michael Ramsey, as a High-Church Anglican, offering my own take on Protestant-Catholic divisions and prospects. As you may know, Anglicanism has been called a broad Church. It ranges from sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritanism, which remains uniquely alive and well in the mainstream of Sydney Anglicanism, to the full panoply of Catholic ceremonial in parishes typically found in the heart of great cities around the world, like Christ Church St Laurence. In the Anglican middle you’ll find a broad communitarian reasonableness, coloured as much by Enlightenment toleration as by Protestant doctrine. The English Reformation preserved the sacraments and the priests and bishops and all the rest from the old Church, but not the Latin or the Papacy. The emergent Church of England was regarded as the Old Church reformed, rather than a fresh creation. As an exchange between a disapproving Catholic and a convinced Anglican supposedly went at the time, the Catholic’s challenge “where was your Church before Henry VIII?” was met with the Anglican’s reply “where was your face before you washed it?”

In practical terms, the newly Reformed Church of England looked the same – there were most of the same bishops, clergy and people, worshipping in the same buildings – though the mass was now in English. And the priesthood was now supposed to be more pastoral: more about preaching, and more grounded in the ordinary Christian life of the wider community. So, for instance, there was now likely to be a wife in the Vicarage, and children of the priest playing in the graveyard after Sunday’s so-called Holy Communion.

So the Anglican version of Reformation can be regarded as a reform of Catholic apostolic truth by the application of what Paul Tillich called Protestant principle. Strictly, it was not an attempt to replace the Catholic Church, because Protestantism is better understood as a critical perspective rather than the charter for a new Church. A lot of Anglicans are not alert to this distinction, of course, happy to call themselves Protestants. Yet some of us, who increasingly seem to resemble the Thylacine, still rejoice in our Catholic identity, refuse to be called Protestant, and feel keenly the pain of our continuing separation from Rome.

The way I resolve this in my own mind is to view the Protestant principle as a perennial challenge to stay close to the heart of Catholic apostolic truth.

The apostolic truth lying at the centre of Catholic faith is centred on the richness of God, who wears the human face of Jesus Christ and is alive at the heart of all reality through the Holy Spirit. This isn’t an alien God, a divine stranger to our world, but a God deeply interwoven according to the Catholic imagination – in our heart, our reason, the events of world history, and accessible even outside the orbit of Christian faith. The word “catholic” means universal, and Catholic apostolic truth enshrines this generous, life-embracing impulse. The concrete markers of Catholic apostolic truth in the world are the Church, the word and the sacraments, the saints and martyrs, the bishops and clergy, all necessary mediators of a reality happy to be entrusted to human beings and to their institutions.

The Protestant principle, as I see it, is an insistence on first principles, on not letting the necessary mediating structures obscure the message, and not forgetting the reality of human deception that can capture and distort human reason. This reality of sin is of course acknowledged and dealt with in Catholicism, but the Protestant principle is a reminder that sin can adhere even to fallible religious authorities and de-rail sacramental mediation.

Anglicanism at its best can serve as a bridge between Catholic and Protestant. Its theology is rooted in scripture, Church tradition and reason in a way that I like to think can fulfill both traditions. Though Anglican theology is perhaps more contextual and less crystalline than Catholic theology can be. And we’re less prone both to liberal Protestantism’s willingness to abandon even central Christian beliefs, and to the biblical literalism of conservative Evangelicals and Pentecostals, which abandons the best instincts of classical Protestantism.

It was the Protestant tradition that led the way in Christian engagement with the Enlightenment, after all, with the Roman Catholic Church more than following suit in its modern theology and biblical studies. The Anglican vocation is in part to hold open this Godly space between Church and world, as well as between Catholic and Protestant. We can embody a pastoral Christianity that’s true to its foundations and its history while confidently embracing the present, seeking to honour the lived experience of Christians in these complicated times.

Of course, this attitude gets Anglicans into trouble with both Catholics and Protestants, along with those Anglicans who see things differently. Anglicanism has changed its mind on remarriage of divorced people, for instance, and on women’s ordination, by and large, following a Protestant lead, though at the cost of internal division and the cost of forestalling any return to full-communion with Rome. However, the Roman Church allows married men to be ordained in its Eastern-Rite communities, and a number too in the West—mostly ex-Anglican priests. The support for women’s ordination among Catholics is significant, too, if not officially sanctioned. So who knows what will happen? One wit declared that at Vatican III the bishops will bring their wives, and at Vatican IV the bishops will bring their husbands.

To conclude, the reformation of our Churches is not finished. As institutional Christianity continues its present decline in the West, which many Christians regard as a curse, we may yet see a regrowth of spiritual maturity and mutual love in a tighter-knit and more intentional Church. Hence what seems like a curse may conceal a blessing. Part of that blessing may be a renewed Church unity – with the Reformation’s lessons treasured as the property of all Christians, while its divisions are left behind.