Reformation Church/State Teaching with Dr. Ben Esswein

Welcome once again, everyone, to another episode of Conversations That Matter. I'm your host John Harris, as always, here to talk to you a little bit about something

I'm excited about today, which is Reformation theology, specifically public theology during the time of the

Reformation, the relationship of church -state, the relationship the Reformers had to culture.

These are topics that have a lot of questions attached to them today, and there's a lot of controversies today, as many of you know, surrounding these topics.

And so to help me, to give me some expertise on this, I've invited my former professor at Liberty University, Dr.

Benjamin S. Wein, who is an expert at Reformation history, to help me. Thank you for joining me, Dr. S. Wein.

Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me. I haven't listened to any of your podcasts, but I know you have a dedicated group of followers, and so I'm happy to kind of reach out, and that's kind of why

I like doing this, is connecting with groups I don't normally connect with. Keep the dialogue going, right?

As a professor, though, I wonder whether you have time to listen to any podcasts because of your schedule.

It's probably just too much. Usually, when somebody sends me one to listen, I'll try to, but yeah, it's limited.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you keep a very tight schedule, and even now, the reason we're doing it in the summer—well, effectively, it's summer—is because you're off, and you don't have as many responsibilities.

A lot of these questions that—I know I sent you some questions before we did the podcast, just so you know what the topics would be, but I don't think they're going away.

These are questions reformed evangelical Christians especially, but even broader evangelicalism, people are asking these.

I don't know whether it's the situation we're in now because things have secularized so much that we're losing our freedoms, we're losing religious liberty, and we're wondering what can we do to protect ourselves.

I don't know what's exactly bringing this about, probably a combination of things, but you've studied so much of the

Reformation. I think maybe a good starting place would be how the

Reformers conceived of a nation because a lot of the debate seems to center around what is a nation, just like what is a woman, what is a pastor, what is a nation, is

America a nation, is Virginia—what would the Reformers say to that? What do you think their conception was?

Yeah, these are fascinating questions, and I'm glad you're asking them.

I think that the first thing to note is that the

Reformation took place in what we call the early modern period, so it's period 1517 when the 95

Theses are nailed to the Wittenberg door cathedral, and perhaps also mailed—he may have also mailed them—but the point being that that's usually the beginning point of that, and then from there what goes on is you have a series of movements, not just Luther, but multiple different groups and people attempting to enact reforms throughout

Europe at the time, and it's really the beginning of what we call the early modern period.

So this is the formative period, it's the period that began or formed modern society.

This is the society we live in today, and that's—so as a result there are things about the

Reformation that we recognize, things that we understand, and then there's a lot of things we don't get or understand or recognize because it's from the

Middle Ages. There's still a large hold over from the Middle Ages that is pushing into that era, and so Luther really acts as one of these transitionary figures, and the

Reformation acts as a transitionary movement where a lot of these ideas are not formed yet.

A lot of these ideas are still forming, so one of those would be this idea of nationhood or a nation.

The term nation was used as far back, obviously, biblical times, and it has been translated—the

Hebrew scriptures, certain words have been translated as nation, which refers to the

Jewish people or different groups like that. But at the same time, the context and the ways that they're using it are very different from what we think of as nationhood or nationalism, which is sort of a product of the

Enlightenment and also of the Revolutionary Era, so the

American Revolution and the French Revolution, specifically in the late 1700s. That's where, really, we get the modern concept of nationhood or the nationalism from.

Before that, people talk about things like—there are more, I guess we could term patriotism—ideas of being loyal to your fatherland or to your homeland, your birth land, the place where you came from, but that is ill -defined.

It's not well -defined or understood what that means, and it's usually much more local. It's usually much more regional.

So the Reformers are in that mindset when they're discussing and looking at these different attempts to reform society, to bring

Christian teaching to bear upon not only a change in the church structure that's going on, but also on society.

They're doing it from a local, regionalized perspective. They're not thinking of it from some sort of grand, large overview, and so that's important to note.

So for them, the ideas of a nation probably hold very loose connotations.

It's not specific to a given people or even a large section, ethnicity even.

It would be something connected to sort of probably certain linguistic, and I would say perhaps connected to a political boundary, and it would be something that would be connected to discussions of who's in control of which prince is looking at control of that.

So it's certainly something that lacks some of the social or even ethnic ties that we have today, and they're looking at it from the basis of a region, a territory, and the prince who's over that state.

So it's kind of the beginnings of the idea of a state of a nation, and they're starting to form it, but it is not fully functioned.

So their thoughts on this are, hey, we're establishing a spiritual reform, and how that plays out then upon the physical will depend on each given region.

They really are much more regionalized. So what I'm hearing you saying is that this is more organic to them.

In a pre -modern world, this is something that is more assumed, and you know it when you see it because you live it, and it's not something that you can abstractly define with 10 points or the idea of the nation state and now the modern state where you have a certain people must be under this one government.

They had, I don't know, it wasn't federalism, I guess, but a feudalism where things were very localized, and so it's just a different world.

So it's asking this question, even a form of presentism, to say, well, what would they have thought a nation is?

Well, they didn't think of it the same way we did. Yeah, that's a good point. Looking at Luther specifically, and even

Calvin, some of the others, they're in the Holy Roman Empire, right? So even the Swiss Confederation, which is made up of city -states, essentially cantons, as they're known, and each canton votes for their own magistrates and people, but they exist within this larger, what's known as the

Holy Roman Empire, this larger entity that existed. But it is actually sort of a precursor even to federalism in that sense, where you have this union between these different groups that are united by the emperor himself and his imperial administration, and then by a sense of Christian connectedness through the church.

But those things are very, again, in terms of how they interact at the local level, it's very nebulous.

There's no clear design as to how that is supposed to go. So yeah, absolutely, it's not at all fully worked out.

I would say that there's a lack of ideology behind it, right? So the nation -state is clearly ideologically driven.

Right, yeah. No, that's a good one. Good point there, because one of my hangups with the term Christian nationalism, even if in the best construction of that, is that it does seem like that term comes from modernity.

That term is a modern innovation. Nation -states are somewhat of a new thing.

I think one way to get at this question is also to ask, what did they think, and I know

Luther's, I think, written about this, of Jewish people and gypsies and maybe even Muslims who would live in their midst.

Would they be part of, would they consider them part of the laws that would govern the land that they were in, or were they outsiders, or how were they treated?

Yeah, so, and that's a good, they would never use the term nation -state, like you said, as a result. And so these would be other peoples, other groups that existed, and in terms of whether or not they're part of that identity of that region, they would probably use the term

Commonwealth. Commonwealth was a term that was used a lot, and that essentially was synonymous to an idea of a res publica, or a common public good, or bringing together of what the needs of the community of that region are.

And so, you know, very Roman in that sense, but it's also connected to this idea that in terms of your identity, and in particular talking about Jews and other groups like that, that's, a lot of that is based not so much upon ethnicity as it is upon religious affiliation.

And so if you look at Luther's writings, there's two Luthers, right? We always talk about there's a young Luther who's very bold and brash, and he's not afraid to speak his mind, but at the same time, he's fairly open to ideas of reform from all over the place.

There's even a time early on in Luther's writings where he's actually working out his ideas on baptism, even though he hasn't quite figured out where he stands on that.

So there's all these what -ifs of had he moved more in one direction or another, how would that have changed the

Lutheran church, the Reformation as a whole, things like that. But yeah, in those early days, and part of this was probably as he was learning and connected to the universities there, he's coming into contact with all sorts of different groups, including

Jews, including different people, some of whom would have probably connected to him as scholars. There were some

Jewish converts to Christianity that he came into contact with, people like that. So he would have seen this in a religious sense, first and foremost, not in the ethnic sense of today.

And early on, he would have seen Jews fairly favorably, right? In the early 1520s, he writes that famous pamphlet that Jesus Christ was born a

Jew, and he states in it not only one of the first Europeans to acknowledge that Jesus was

Jewish, which it took them a thousand years to acknowledge that, but not only does he do that, but he essentially advocates not using any violence against Jews, but instead trying to convert them through action and through love and grace and mercy.

And so that's his early early views on that. As he gets older, he turns into the grumpy

Luther, right? That's the other Luther where he gets older. He's a little more cantankerous. He's seen a little bit more.

Some of his Reformation ideas have been very upset or overturned.

His ideas have been taken in all sorts of different directions that he never wanted them to be taken. Stuff like that kind of gives him a mindset that's a little bit less interested in that forward thinking and so as a result, he becomes a little more hostile towards those groups specifically.

And of course, the famous pamphlet later in his life is one of his last pamphlets actually is on the

Jews and their lies, where he really goes after them specifically, again, relating to a couple things that he targets in it.

One, he targets what he sees as blasphemy. He thinks that if they're essentially, if they're preaching in their synagogues that Jesus is not the

Son of God, that that should not be allowed in a Christian realm and that a

Christian prince has a duty then to remove that from his realm. That's what he says there.

And then secondly, that it could have consequences judgment -wise upon a society if that's allowed, so it needs to be gotten rid of.

So he's more worried about what they're teaching religiously and then he says that if they don't stop teaching that, that then they should be expelled.

But he never advocates bodily harm to Jews. I think that that's a key differentiation there.

He never says to kill or murder or get them to be removed physically, but he does advocate that if they're teaching blasphemy that they should be removed and their synagogues destroyed.

So he advocates the destruction of property, things like that. So people get on him about that.

Certainly, many of his friends at the time did not want him to publish, told him not to publish that pamphlet, and he did it anyway.

It's his least purchased pamphlet of all his pamphlets on the

Jews and their lies did not sell well. Most of the other pamphlets were best sellers.

He sold millions of copies, all sorts of things that were record -breaking at the time, and not so with that one.

So yeah, groups like that, and I think he says a few things about gypsies, not so much, but certainly

I would say Luther was an equal opportunity basher. He would bash anybody that disagreed with him, and so the things that he said about Jews weren't right, but he said some pretty nasty things about papists, about Muslims, about different groups as well,

Anabaptists, etc. So yeah, Luther always spoke his mind, and sometimes that got him into trouble.

Well, one of the things in On the Jews and Their Lies when I was reading it for Holocaust class, actually, because I was writing a paper to basically point out some of the things you just pointed out that, look, this wasn't an ethnic thing in a genetic sense.

This was a religious issue, but he does complain, I remember at one point, about how the

Jews would trade with the Ottomans, and he suspected subversion of Germany and the

West, I guess, beyond that, because the Ottomans were clear enemies. How did the

Crusades, and well, there's this situation with having, to the

East, this Muslim empire affect the

Reformers, and what did, like, I guess the deeper question would be, does that give us any insight in what they thought of a

Christian people, or a Christian government, or what the responsibilities were to protect from this empire?

Yeah, that's a great question, and I think it's key to why some of this is changing in Luther's mind. We forget that, you know, these people were affected by the events of their times, just like we're affected today, 9 -11, different things have affected our mentality, our views on the world, that's exactly what happens to Luther and the others.

Luther was certainly affected by the invasion of the

Ottoman Turks into Central Europe. They had a major victory over the

Kingdom of Hungary, and between 1525 and 1526, they conquered the

Kingdom of Hungary. The Battle of Mohacs was a major victory for them, it essentially obliterated the kingdom, killed, the

King of Hungary was killed, and the Ottomans took over, and then they advanced on Austria, which was part of the

Holy Roman Empire at the time, and the Habsburgs, who were the princes over that, and so they actually were besieging

Vienna in 1529, so you can see that, therefore, in Luther's writings, that after those events, he is very worried about the

Turks, much more so than he had been beforehand. Luther had always preached, and continued to preach, that the

Crusades did not work, and we should not push for Crusades. Crusades were bad, in his opinion, because obviously they went against the so -called

Christian virtues that they were supposed to uphold. The main Christian virtue that was at the core of the

Crusades was the idea of loving one's brother, to fight for one's brother, to protect the pilgrims and the

Christians who were going to the Holy Land. That was the original purpose of the Crusades, and so to that extent, it was actually a very noble goal, but it had been polluted and corrupted by attempts to gain gold, and then, of course, the

Pope had said that anyone who was killed on Crusade was granted an indulgence, and of course, Luther was completely against indulgences because they're not scriptural, so it had been corrupted and led to all sorts of catastrophes and destruction that never would have happened if the original intent of the

Crusade had been upheld. So Luther completely did away with that and said, no, we don't want

Crusades, but at the same time, he certainly believed in a territorial defense of Europe, that the

Ottomans should be stopped, that the Europeans should do, particularly the

German lands, the German princes should band together and fight the

Turks. So he was okay with that for the defense of the realm, but he certainly disagreed with the idea of a

Crusade. One of the questions that comes up is concerning the Mosaic law and whether or not the principles or specifically laws from the time of Moses and the giving of the

Torah apply to us today, and if so, how do they apply? How did the Reformers—I know we've been talking a lot about Luther, but I'm sure this is going to get into Calvin and Zwingli and others—how did they look at that question?

Did they tell the Christian prince in their area, look, you got to apply these laws? Because obviously, they have to disciple the people who are now the new converts to Protestantism.

Yeah, yeah, well, so a little bit of backstory to that to get a perspective on that, how the

Reformation branches out from Luther specifically, because he's only, you know, like you said, the first of many different Reformers, and I think to that extent, to answer that question, we have to kind of look at that change, how it's spread out from him.

His ideas, obviously, once they're put in print and they're spread, there's no copyright laws back then, so they spread like wildfire.

People are copying them left and right, and they're just disseminating all over the place.

So as a result, anyone who agrees with Luther, obviously, can kind of take his ideas and march with them as far as they want, or add to them, or expand on them in some way, and that's what happens.

So Luther's ideas, particularly, it's not so much the 95 Theses, that those gain him a lot of traction and notoriety, but it's his later pamphlets, usually what's looked upon as the

Three Treatises, which would be the Babylonian captivity of the papacy, the address to the

German nobility, and then on the freedom of a Christian. Those three pamphlets essentially outline

Luther's theology, and again, Luther always insisted that he was looking for a spiritual reform, and that was something that he would adamantly hang on to when, for instance, more radical

Anabaptist groups arose, and he would look upon them as contrary to what he was teaching, because he would say they're taking them and they're applying them in a literal, physical sense, where I'm looking at this from a spiritual and a heart -based change in reform, and so that's where the first big division occurs, and this occurs actually while he's away after the

Diet of Worms in 1521. He has to leave, he has to go into hiding, because technically his life could be taken at any moment.

Anyone, once the emperor and the pope have issued their decrees excommunicating him and issuing that he could be executed, then anyone can do that.

Anyone can go up and just kill Luther. So he has to go into hiding, and he goes to the Wartburg Castle, and in doing that, he loses track of his own reformation for a bit.

He's up there, he does some amazing things, he translates the Bible into German from Greek and Hebrew, and he does it very quickly over about three months.

He translates the New Testament, so he's very fast in his translation, and it's a very good translation, it's a very solid translation, and it proves that Luther is definitely up there among the best

Greek scholars in Europe at that time. He certainly understood his Greek very well, but all that is to say that he's distracted, the reformation goes off in a different direction.

At Wittenberg, specifically, it falls under the control of several of his, what are known as his lieutenants,

Luther's lieutenants, these other guys who were essentially learning under Luther and were connected to him, but took orders from him, but then they disseminated this information elsewhere.

Karlstadt was one of those. Karlstadt goes on to go very,

I think, easily to the point of understanding that many of the spiritual reforms and changes that Luther's talking about is going to have flow over into very physical things.

For instance, to give you just two examples, one would be tithing. Tithing in the

Middle Ages was an actual tax that was collected by the nobles on behalf of the church, and so the nobles would collect the tithe from the peasants and from everyone else.

They would give it to the church, probably skim a little bit off the top for themselves in the process, and then the church would take it and usually would go to Rome, and then

Rome would then sort of send a few pennies back to the local congregation, so the tithe was rarely ever used locally.

It always went to Rome, and so that was a major issue. So you have to reform that, but that means you have to change the whole social structure, the ways in which politics works, and then you have to change, the other one would be idols or icons specifically, which again many

Protestants looked upon as idols in the church. Well, what do you do with them? How do you get rid of them?

Do you destroy them, smash them? That's what the iconoclasts would say. Karlstad certainly preached that.

Luther didn't want that. He wanted to get rid of the icons out of the church. He didn't want them in the church at all, but he didn't want to destroy them because he thought that they were beautiful works of art, so he wanted to just remove them and put them somewhere else.

So you had those two views differing there. That's what gives rise to all these different reformers.

They have different ways of connecting with that on a local level, so that's what has to be decided. What extent are we going to enact reforms?

How many of Luther's ideas can we embrace? And then physically, what does that mean for our society?

Because now we have to restructure our churches, restructure our governmental order. There's no separation of church and state or anything like that, so what one side does, the other essentially backs up in some way.

But now that you have a reformer, you have on the one hand you have a prince, on the other hand you have a reformer, and they're supposed to work together, but where's that line?

Where does one's power begin, and where does the other one end? So those are what each reformer is looking to do, and that's where it verges away from Luther.

Well, you know the classic example given is Servetus, and that Calvin's killing

Servetus, that's the reason that we should never enforce,

I don't want to say mosaic, but we shouldn't enforce laws that are only fit for the church in the civil realm, because it'll lead to this kind of tyranny, and tyranny over Anabaptists, and that this is no different than the way that the

Catholics treated the Protestants. And I'd be curious what you have to say about that, because that's a debate currently over whether or not we here in the

United States in some regions should, well I just saw recently, and I think it was

Minnesota if I'm not mistaken, I think it was St. Paul, they passed a law to allow the

Muslim call to prayer at all hours of the night in certain communities and so forth, and so people are debating like is this, should we do that?

Are we Christians here, and as Christians do we go with the church bells, or do we allow these other groups to come in?

And there is going to be a conflict, like you can't have them both necessarily. One is going to win out over the other, and so drawing those lines,

I don't know if you have any personal opinions you want to put into this, but what would the Reformers say, you think, if they lived today in this situation?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, so those ideas, again, it's a fine line.

I think when you're talking about the church bells specifically, there's a lot of ordinances and stuff that have been put out to silence those, which is interesting in a lot of communities, whereas beforehand they used to ring out every

Sunday or on holidays, things like that. Yeah, that's not something you see if you go to Europe today.

If you go to Europe, for instance, because technically there's no separation of church and state in Europe, so for instance, in Lutheran communities they still follow

Lutheran holidays, and in Catholic communities, Catholic countries, they still follow

Catholic holidays, so they'll ring the bells in most cities then on those holidays, and so it is a distinctly

Christian phenomenon that would grate against a call to prayer, although on the one hand, a call to prayer in an

Islamic sense, usually in the Islamic countries, is magnified by the use of some sort of speaker or a microphone or something that pushes it out.

That's where I think it would be problematic if they started to do that in communities in the United States, as opposed to just if they were just shouting it out,

I don't know how far they'd be able to actually be heard anyway, so if they're within their little

Muslim community, that may not be as big of an issue, but I think in terms of what the Reformers would say on that, yeah, there's no separation of church and state at that time.

Separation of church and state came about in the writings of the Founding Fathers, specifically in the

United States. Jefferson, among others, are very central to that, primarily as a way of trying to prevent there from being a state church.

They were afraid of one specific denomination, one specific group, whether it be the

Catholic Church or the Anglican Church or some church essentially enforcing its form of worship on the rest, and so for groups who are like the

Puritans or the Moravians or others, that was something that would have jarred with their ability to proselytize, to spread their beliefs and to worship according to their conscience, so that would be,

I think, the issue for me is that if you're taking it back to Reformers, the Reformers were very much about freedom of conscience and being able to worship and stand on principle based upon what you believe and according to what your conscience says, so I think that that's where the debate would have to be.

Well, that's one of the questions I know I'd sent to you, and maybe I could ask two of them in one. How did they apply?

Because they thought the Ten Commandments were applicable, and they thought civil magistrates, at least some of the

Ten Commandments, if not all, but at least some of them needed to be applied. How did they balance that with freedom of conscience?

Did they feel like they had to balance it, or was there a conflict? Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that could bring us back to Calvin in Geneva there with,

I mean, he had a lot of, we forget this, but him and the city council of Geneva did not get along very well, and so he actually had, there was a lot of debate between the city council members and him, even over the burning of heretics like Servetus, like you were saying, who was essentially hated in pretty much every city he went to, whether it be

Catholic or Protestant. He ends up in Geneva primarily because he believes Geneva is his best chance at surviving.

Every other city had to put out a ultimatum that if he was found there, they would execute him as a heretic, because he'd rejected the

Trinity, he rejected very basic Christian doctrines. So in Geneva, he thought he might have a chance, which is, it tells you a lot about how forgiving

Calvin was, because Calvin had confronted him several times, and each time had told him, you need to change or you need to leave, one of those two.

And so the fact that it took four chances before Servetus was finally arrested, and then the city council was the one that actually condemned him to be burned,

Calvin at first attempted to get him to be exiled, and then when that didn't work, he attempted to have him just beheaded, because he didn't want him to be burned specifically.

He thought that that was too sort of part of the medieval world. So that's what we're talking about, in this point of transition at that time.

So to that extent, even Calvin held on to an idea that you can hold a position if your conscience dictates to you that this is the position you can hold on to, but the extent to which that needs to be enforced was left up to the magistrates, was left up to the civil society.

So you can preach the ten commandments, you can preach those laws, but it's really up to the civil magistrates to decide how they're going to enforce them.

Is the rule that essentially, practically speaking, that you can hold to whatever belief you want, you are free to think, but as soon as you start to undermine the established religion of that particular region, that's when you run into problems.

Because that's what Servetus did, right? It wasn't just that he held these beliefs, it's that he was gaining followers to himself and undermining the local establishment.

Correct, correct. He would do such things as standing up in the middle of a sermon and argue with the preacher about, do you use one way or the other on Christ?

One of those guys. He would be great on Twitter today, you know. Yeah, we don't allow that in our churches today, so why would they have allowed it back then?

So yeah, if you were disruptive like that, and people started to follow you, then it became an issue.

You could approach somebody like Calvin later and talk to them theologically without there being an issue and have differences of opinions, but it was when you created a public scene or spectacle that it became seen as imperative to respond to that.

So it was seen as disruptive and jarring to society to allow that. At the same time, again, like Calvin said,

I don't obviously think the burning of heretics does more than simply, they're essentially trying to make examples of them.

What that does to actually reform the individual is nothing. So it's not, I mean, it's essentially killing someone to try to prevent others from doing the same.

Is that effective? I don't think so. Historically, it doesn't seem to be effective. So yeah, it's morally not necessarily something that was done even in the early church when they had heretics, so it's definitely an medieval phenomenon.

Right. Well, and they didn't have the ability in the early church, I suppose, until there was state power that they—

Yeah, but even then, right, Augustine, others who fought— Yeah, true. —the Aegeans or the Arius, Arius was never burned as a heretic.

That's an interesting point. All right, so no, these are good questions to ponder for people who are considering these things and respect the reformers.

Now, the Anabaptists, I want to talk about them a little bit. They had a different view, and I know that that's a big group and I want to paint with a broad brush, but is it not the case that they wanted to be so separate that they thought even political involvement for a

Christian was maybe not an option or not holy? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it's one of the most important questions today because I prefer the term radical than Anabaptist.

Anabaptist is a name that their enemies called them, right? It means to re -baptize, and it was the fact that essentially they believed in believers' baptism and so believed that infant baptism was invalid, but they were called re -baptizers.

Does not apply to everyone who's a radical or everyone who is considered an Anabaptist. There were some Anabaptist groups that practiced infant baptism.

There were some that diverged on all sorts of different theological topics, so I think radical is probably a better term for them.

There are some Anabaptist groups, what they call Anabaptist groups in Switzerland, for instance, or even

Scotland, such as the Swiss Brethren or the Scottish Brethren or some groups like that, that are very much in line with kind of modern

Congregationalist, Protestant -thinking Baptists, specifically

Baptist denomination groups like that. Essentially, they form the basis of what becomes those groups, the

Congregationalists and the Baptists. But on the other hand, you have a huge variety of other groups, such as the

Mennonites and the Amish, which came out of the Quakers, all sorts of different groups that, in terms of their theology, very different from each other and wouldn't have wanted to be associated with each other either.

So that's why I think radicals is a better term as opposed to Anabaptists. At the same time, with all those groups, the point of contention, there's two major ones.

One was the Peasants' War in 1525, and then the other one, which is even bigger, was the

Munster Rebellion, starting in 1530, going into 1532, up to 1534 there.

That's really the point of no return for the radicals or Anabaptists, where they're looked upon as a threat, because essentially they take over a town, they try to establish this town,

Munster, specifically according to Anabaptist principles, or specifically principles that are related to John of Leiden, Matthias, and a few others who were seen as the theological leaders of that movement.

But they try to produce this city on a hill, if you will, there. And it goes horribly wrong, and they tear down property laws, make everybody share everything in common, they practice polygamy, all sorts of odd things start to occur, and of course the

Protestants and the Catholics kind of move in and put an end to that together.

They actually unite to stop that. So I think that the key issue with these

Anabaptist groups, some of which theologically I actually agree with, particularly on believers' baptism, they tended to not connect with the magistrates, not see the need for Christians to dialogue with the rulers of a given area, and of course that's what the

Reformers and Protestantism was all about. Calvin, Luther, as the other

Reformers, Cranmer, you name them, they all had in common what's known as being a magisterial

Reformers, being that they were part of this attempt to reform society, but do it under the banner, under the guise of the local authorities, and pretty much creating a dialogue and convincing the local authorities on the need for these religious reforms to occur.

So what the Radicals are doing is they're dropping all that and saying, no, we're going to do it, and we're going to do it our way, and to heck with the civil government, which

I think kind of flies in the face of particularly Romans, where it talks about being respectful of governance.

I think you still need to do that as a Christian. So I think the Reformers had that in mind, and they believed that they could convince the local authorities of the need to establish a civil law according to the

Mosaic standard, and for the most part they were able to do that successfully. It did require a give and take, it did require a balanced approach of compromise, and that's where I think a lot of times the

Radicals would be upset. They feel that they're compromising in areas that they weren't willing to compromise.

So I think that that's what's behind that, but I think we have a duty as Christians to try to be good citizens, and I don't know the extent to which, especially with the example of Ponce de

Rebellion and others, that the Radicals were good citizens. Even today, and I know this sounds maybe judgmental, but some of the

Radical sects, even in the United States, they don't maybe harm others, but they're not willing to defend our country.

They're pacifists, things like that. If everyone was of that conviction, we wouldn't have an army, right?

That would be a problem. So it's good that they're smaller groups in a way. You know, we live in a liberal democracy today, or a,

I mean, I say it's a federal republic, but I'm broadly speaking in Europe here, and even now in other parts of the world who are copying this pattern, they want to establish these liberal democracies.

And it presents, I suppose, a whole new host of problems, and for Reformed Christians who live in these areas, they have to navigate these issues.

In our context, in the United States, I just mentioned the issue with Muslims. Obviously, there's the

LGBT stuff going on, and different regions are different. I'm sure in Lynchburg, they're not quite as receptive, perhaps.

Now, maybe that's changing, but to a gay pride parade as they would be up here, where you would have local politicians go out and endorse the event, and speak at the event, and that kind of thing.

And pastors, by the way, too, unfortunately. Presbyterians, Baptists, all the denominations will come out to support the gay pride parade.

It's kind of crazy. So all that to say, the question that seems to be arising today more and more is, to what extent do we allow this kind of thing to continue?

What would the Reformers have done? If Luther saw a gay pride parade coming down the street, would he have said, oh, that's just freedom of speech, or that's just freedom of assembly, or freedom of conscience, or inalienable rights?

Or would he have said, no, I mean, look, we got to stop this. This is degrading. Children are seeing this, whatever.

And I know this is a dangerous question in some ways, because these weren't circumstances that they were faced with.

And to find similar circumstances, you have to, I guess, the Munster Rebellion, or come up with cross -cultural experiences that they would have had.

But I'm just curious, since you've studied so much of this, what you think, if they were around today, what would they have thought?

Would they have been like our founding fathers? Would they have been more, I guess they've been more medieval, but would they have thought that, look, we need to really allow any person who profanes the name of the

Lord to be given sanction? And blasphemy is fine. And hopefully I'm being clear in my question.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of that obviously goes beyond what they intended, certainly.

And so Luther would not have been—he wasn't okay with blasphemy. That's the main problem he had with the

Jewish people, specifically. But he wouldn't have been okay with atheism.

I don't know of any reformers who would have. So in that sense, yeah, that is something that they would have held against certain extremes.

They would have seen the freedom of conscience to be kept within the bounds of what they saw as natural or sort of a normal sense of what that should be.

And so again, if someone used that as a means to promote a lifestyle or something that was beyond what they were looking to achieve, they would have had a problem with that and certainly showed that.

But, you know, Luther is the one who establishes the idea of marriage for clergy again, which had been dropped in the

West in the 11th century. That's when the Catholic Church had said it was wrong for clerics to marry.

Before that, we have plenty of records of priests who marry. And we talked earlier about the

Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church has never banned their clergy from marrying priests specifically.

So he brings that back in the West. He establishes that relationship between a man and a woman in a very positive way.

Luther is considered to be the founder of what we call the nuclear family in that sense.

Him and Catherine Von Bora really set that example, that tone. And so to that extent, he's extremely foundational to the modern lifestyle of the family unit specifically.

Before that, there are all sorts of definitions of what a family should be in the medieval sense specifically.

For instance, in Italy in the Middle Ages, a family unit would have not simply a father and a mother and children, but it would have grandparents, usually aunts and uncles.

Everybody lived under one roof, right? There was no clear delineation. It's interesting.

Yeah, Luther's the one. And of course, the other reformers follow that. Calvin, Cranmer, others all do the same thing.

And the idea is to, by example, show what a good

Christian household should look like. So they certainly would promote marriage specifically between a man and a woman and with children specifically for the purpose of having children.

That's how they would define it actually, is that the purpose of marriage is for having children specifically.

That's how they would see it. That's fascinating because I never thought of that. That's literally a new thought for me.

I mean, living in upstate New York, I'm close enough to New York City that we have a fairly strong Italian presence here and of course other immigrants.

And I have noticed that sometimes in these more traditional Italian families, they are a little more like what you just described and Hispanic families even more so.

When I go, because I like to go hiking and stuff and I'll go to this waterfall, it's not far.

And there's certain groups of people, Hispanic, Latino people, and then

Indian people specifically that when they come, they're bringing grandma, they're bringing the whole land, everyone's there.

And they're not doing the physically exerting things that are going to prevent certain members from participating.

Whereas you notice when you get to the higher trails, where it's harder to hike and so forth, you see more white people.

And it's a dynamic I've never really thought about a whole lot, but maybe it does trace in some ways back to what you're saying that this family unit that was inclusive of grandparents and uncles and aunts and so forth is at play in more of those

Latin countries. That's interesting. I never thought of it. Yeah, it is. And again, it's a cultural difference.

I would say in that regard, those are not things that are wrong, per se, if you have a larger perspective on family,

I'm talking about theologically. But yeah, for what

Luther and the Reformers, and that's the question I was trying to answer, what they're trying to establish, it was that core nucleus of a family, the nuclear family, as we call it, of the mother, the father, and the children specifically, that that was key to ingraining virtue and in training up children properly in the way that they should go, as the

Bible says. So that's at the core that how that is adapted in society today in sort of the multicultural settings that we have.

There's many different ways to do that, but I don't think that takes away from the fact that there was a statement there that Luther was making on that when he did that.

Yeah. Well, we've been going about an hour, so I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but this has been fascinating.

I could rabbit trail on a lot of these things because it's interesting to me, but I appreciate you weighing in.

I should have asked this at the beginning, but I don't know if you have a website or anywhere you want to send people. Do you do blogging or anything like that?

I don't do blogging. I might, or at least maybe you've interested me in the podcasts here, so it'd be interesting to do a

Reformation podcast, but I haven't done anything like that.

I think there's a lot of good resources out there on the

Reformers that you can read, and the point here being that not every

Reformer got everything right. Not every Reformer figured it out, so to speak, but we can use the ability of hindsight here to determine,

I think, a lot of the things that they did right and keep those. I don't think we should completely toss out everything that they said, and then the ideas that are useful reincorporate into the society in a way that is helpful and useful to producing meaningful reform and change, bettering people's lives specifically, and I think certainly in terms of spreading the gospel, they would have seen that as key to doing that.

So if you go on Post -Reformation Digital Library, there's a bunch of writings of different Reformers on there, and so there's a lot of different digital collections that you can really get into.

You know, Project Gutenberg has a lot of their writings as well, so any of those that you can find on there and just read through them and see different Reformers, what they taught, obviously goes much deeper than just Luther.

I mentioned his lieutenants. There's a bunch of them. Calvin sent out hundreds of ministers to France, Italy, to the

New World, to Brazil. He sent missionaries everywhere, and so they have a whole plethora of different writings and essays and things to consider as well.

So just being involved in meeting all those different perspectives and the fact that they were dealing with a world that was changing, like ours is, and they were trying to find ways of enacting meaningful change, reform, and spreading the gospel because they believed it would change people's lives.

So yeah, look at those things. I think that if we embrace that attitude, it could really be transforming.

Yeah, well thank you so much, and I'll plug to end the podcast, the Liberty University History Program.

You can go online, liberty .edu, and I think your contact information is there too, Dr. S.

Swine, if people want to email you or have a question. But yeah, if you go to Liberty University and the grad—well, you teach undergrad too, so undergrad or grad history, you'll probably get

Dr. S. Swine. I know I had you for two classes, I think, historiography and—I can't remember the other one now.

It was so bad. There's another one, yeah, I forget. I think it was an online class or something like that. They all run together.

That's the problem, right? They all run together when I look back. But anyway, hey, God bless. Thank you so much, and look forward to having you on again at some point.