The Reformation as Tragedy

Today's Reading

Read John 17:20-23, the prayer of Jesus on the night he was betrayed, for the unity of his church: "I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me."

Then 1 Corinthians 1:10-13 ("Is Christ divided?"), Ephesians 4:1-6 ("there is one body and one Spirit"), and Jeremiah 6:14 — the prophet's word against false comforters who say "peace, peace, when there is no peace."

Reflection

It is possible to celebrate the Reformation without ever mourning it. Many evangelicals do. We tell the story as a clean liberation: a corrupt church, a courageous monk, a recovered gospel, a new dawn. Many Roman Catholics tell the same story in reverse: a settled church, a divisive monk, a fractured West, a long disaster. Both versions are tidy. Both are wrong about something the Reformers themselves understood.

John Calvin did not write the Institutes of the Christian Religion in triumph. He wrote it in pain. He grew up Catholic, was trained in Catholic schools, watched friends in France killed for their evangelical convictions, fled into exile, and spent the rest of his life trying to give the Reformed churches a stable doctrine and a stable worship. Read the Institutes on the church — Book 4, especially the early chapters — and what you find is not a man who relishes division. You find a man who insists, repeatedly and uncomfortably, that he longs for the unity of the catholic church and grieves what has been torn. "Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution," he writes, "there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists." That is a high doctrine of the local church. It is also, when you read it carefully, a lament for the parts of Christendom from which Calvin found himself separated.

In 1539, Cardinal Sadoleto wrote an open letter to the people of Geneva pleading with them to return to Rome. The Genevans, with no other Reformer of stature available, asked Calvin — then exiled in Strasbourg — to reply. The "Reply to Sadoleto" is a small masterpiece. Calvin does not argue that the Reformers have started something new. He argues, with great care, that they have recovered something ancient. Our agreement with the ancient church is far closer than yours. He sees himself not as a schismatic but as a patient reaching for the medicine of the apostles and the early fathers, against a Roman church that, in his view, had departed from them. Whether or not you accept the diagnosis — Catholic and Protestant historians have disagreed about it for five centuries — you cannot accuse Calvin of ever taking division lightly. He framed his entire ministry as an attempt to be more catholic, not less. The Reformation was not, in his self-understanding, the founding of a new tradition. It was the painful surgery of a body that had grown sick.

It is important to take that self-understanding seriously, because the alternative is to read the Reformation either as triumph or as catastrophe. Both readings are inadequate to what actually happened.

The Reformation gave back to the church the gospel of justification by grace through faith — a recovery that, even Catholic theologians today acknowledge, addressed something real. It restored the Bible to the people in their own languages. It put preaching back at the center of worship. It produced an extraordinary outpouring of pastoral writing, theological clarity, hymnody, and missionary witness whose fruits the global church still enjoys.

It also tore a body that Christ had prayed would be one.

The Wars of Religion in France and the Holy Roman Empire killed an estimated several million people, soldiers and civilians, over the course of more than a century. Catholic and Protestant villages massacred each other. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 saw Protestants in Paris slaughtered by the thousands; the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) reduced parts of Germany to depopulated ruin. Christian unity, prayed for by the Lord on the night of his betrayal, was not just doctrinally fractured but physically drenched in the blood of those Christ had bled to save. No honest Reformation history can pretend this was incidental. It was, at minimum, the price.

NT Wright, writing as a New Testament scholar and a churchman who has spent his life on these questions, has argued that one of the gravest failures of the church through the centuries has been our willingness to divide over what is genuinely important and our equal willingness to divide over what is not. The Reformation was, in many respects, the first kind of division — a fight about whether sinners are justified by grace alone — but it almost immediately produced the second kind, as Lutherans split from Reformed, Reformed from Anglican, Anglican from Anabaptist, and on and on, often over questions that the New Testament does not treat with anything like the urgency of Galatians. Wright's point, against both Catholic and Protestant triumphalism, is that the Reformation set in motion a divisive logic that its founders did not intend and could not control.

What does this mean for us, Christians five centuries downstream?

It means we should hold the Reformation as both gift and grief. Gift — because the gospel of grace is precious, and many of us would not have heard it had Luther not stood at Worms and Calvin not preached at St. Pierre. Grief — because the price was the visible unity of the body of Christ in the West, and that unity was not Luther's or Calvin's to dispose of cheaply. The most spiritually mature Reformed Christians I have known have felt both at once, and have refused to let one feeling silence the other.

It means, when we approach our own moment of potential division, we should refuse the temptation to treat splitting as either heroic or scandalous in the abstract. Some divisions are necessary. None are small. The faithful word at the door of any departure is the same word that should have been at the door of Wittenberg and Geneva: we do this with grief, not glee, because the body of Christ bleeds even when the cut is right.

And it means we should pray, with new intensity, the prayer Jesus prayed for us — that we may all be one — knowing that the unity he asked for is not a goal we have already secured by talking about it. It is a wound we are still walking inside, hoping for a healing only the master can give. Jeremiah's warning hangs over every glib peace: "They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace." But so does the Lord's own promise that the gates of hell will not prevail, and that one day the church will be presented to him in splendor, "without spot or wrinkle or any such thing."

Until that day, we live as Calvin did. Confessing the gospel where it has been obscured. Loving the brothers and sisters across the divides we did not choose. Refusing to harden the lines further than they already are. Carrying the grief of fractures we cannot, in this age, undo.

Going Deeper

If you have ever assumed that the Reformation was an unambiguous victory, sit for a moment with the fact that the man most associated with it spent his life writing about how the church should be one. Calvin's vision was not a shattered Christendom. It was a reformed and reunited one. He died, by all accounts, longing for a healing that did not come.

Whatever else this teaches us, it teaches us this: divisions made for the gospel must always be made with grief, never with relish, and the faithful party in any split is the one that loved the body it left.