54 - Erasmus, Papal Corruption, German Reformation

All right, we pick up where we left off in our church history study last week, actually.

We were talking about Desiderius Erasmus, the only person

I've ever known in church history by the name of Desiderius, but we had looked a little bit at his production of his

Greek New Testament, because that's really where most of us have been most greatly impacted by him, would be in the production of what eventually becomes known as the

Textus Receptus or the TR. There is a movement, even amongst Reformed Baptists today, to go back to that.

If you'd like to see a discussion of something similar to that, I did a debate book last year with Doug Wilson, who is an ecclesiastical text advocate, which is similar to being a

TR advocate, so we mentioned all that last week. But I didn't give you much in the way of personal information about Erasmus himself, because he was a very interesting individual.

He was the illegitimate son of a priest. Now, unfortunately, that was not overly unusual in that day, but it did require of you to obtain a special indulgence or variance or something for you yourself to become involved in ministry.

Erasmus was an ordained Roman Catholic priest, and he died in communion with the

Church of Rome. And so when we talk about Erasmus, we talk about his satirical criticism of the relics trade.

Remember last week we mentioned he may not have been the origin of the statement, but certainly repeated and said very many similar things to you could build an entire ship out of all the genuine pieces of the cross that were floating around Europe at that time.

And he was critical of the lax clergy and the general gullibility of the people, even though, as I mentioned last week again, he was part of a very, even as the

Dutch humanist, the prince of the humanists, he still, when writing at one point, working on his work during the summer, they didn't have air conditioning back then, was being bothered by a number of mosquitoes and he made comment that these were demons that were seeking to distract him from his work.

And that wasn't, you know, you may think of that. Every once in a while we'll get these blood -sucking leeches in our house and, man,

I just can't find them. You know one of the real bummers about getting old is you can't see them anymore.

You know, they're too small to see a distance and once they get close, is that one of my floaters or is that a mosquito?

I don't know. So you're spending half your time swatting at your own stuff floating around in your own eye.

It's a bummer. And, you know, they just love me. I guess my blood tastes good or something like that.

And so it'd be easy to say these demons are bothering me, but he actually meant it. And so, you know, we look at him and we have to put him in the time that he lived, but he was a

Roman Catholic priest. And we hear him criticizing excesses in Roman Catholicism and there were many in the

Reformation that expected him to come over and to leave Roman Catholicism.

He did not. And even though he debated, you know, Luther on the bondage of the will and clearly had sympathies toward much of what the

Reformers were saying. And there are a number of his books that are very

Christ -centered, very focused upon the supremacy of Christ and things like that.

Yet he also writes a book in defense of transubstantiation. And so it is ironic to me, you know,

I've had to deal with the King James Only movement a lot over the years and it's always been ironic to me that many of these individuals will just sing the praises of Erasmus while at the same time the modern

Greek text that is utilized by pretty much everyone today in scholarship, there is an international inter -religious group that is involved in doing the work on that, which included

Cardinal Muriel Martini, a Roman Catholic. And they'll go, see, there it is, if you use that Greek text, you're a

Jesuit. And you can go online right now and find numerous videos identifying me as a

Jesuit as well. So, but the problem is their own text came from a Roman Catholic priest that wrote a book in defense of transubstantiation and they don't, they don't see the contradiction between doing, you know, holding those two different positions.

And so when we, when we look at Erasmus, we are really faced with a lot of questions as to exactly how to evaluate him as an individual.

There are times when you, when you go, yay Erasmus, and other times you go, wow, there's that coming humanism, and then there are other times you go, you know, there's

Roman Catholicism and it's a real mixture. And you run into a lot of that at the time of the

Reformation. It's just, there's no way to get around that. So, Erasmus is a fascinating character to look at in church history, and it's just one of those many situations where you can be reading along and you go, oh, this is good, this is good, this is good.

Whoop, that isn't. Oh, this is good, this is good. Whoop, that isn't. And, you know, the tendency is always to try to do long -distance, chronologically impossible mind reading and soul reading.

You know, you just honestly deal with the man as he was and leave the rest to God.

So, but what's extremely important, this is in the section of stuff that was necessary for the

Reformation, and as we will see, that first edition of the, and let's see if anybody was awake last week or is awake this week, what was

Erasmus' text first called? Sean, you've got competition.

Okay. Das ist aber richtig, mein Herr. The Novum Instrumentum, the new instrument, which is, you know, just another

Latin way of referring to the Berith, the covenant, and it was a diglot, and as I mentioned before, initially,

Erasmus was considerably more focused on the Latin that he was providing, because it wasn't the

Vulgate, and more concerned about what he was going to, how he was going to get attacked for that. That shifted over time to the

Greek, as that became the centerpiece of the

Reformers' argumentation, not the Latin. I mean, to be honest with you, his

Latin translation went nowhere, because it came right at the beginning of the

Reformation, a little bit before the Reformation. And so, once the Reformation starts, then the focus shifts, and the

Reformed are focused upon the Greek text, and the resultant reaction on Rome's part is to double down on the

Latin Vulgate as the official translation of the

Church. Now, that's not Rome's position anymore, but it was then.

For quite some time, that was Rome's position, and in fact, you'll end up with Pope Sixtus the

Latin numeral after his name, V, VI, I can't remember which one it was. Somewhere before V, VI, Pope Sixtus comes out with the infallible

Vulgate, which had to immediately be withdrawn, because it was filled with so many errors.

So, they learned their lesson, and in fact, what is interesting, and you'll see this if I just got a cool thought, and what's scary is it's a really cool thought, but I'm not sure that I'll still have it at the end of class.

That's frightening. I want to do that, but at the end of class, I'm going to go, no, what was it I was thinking about doing? And it's just this way it goes.

But if you will read, and I would just highly recommend to everybody, if you're looking to put a real valuable historical and theological resource in your library, the three volumes called

The Institutes of Elenctic Theology by Francis Turretin.

Turretin is a couple, two generations from Calvin, approximately, reformed, scholastic, it's in the form of questions and answers, a lot of writing back then was, and it's really the height of reformed orthodoxy.

But Rome has launched the counter -reformation by that point in time, and it's been going for a number of decades, well, longer than that.

And so, he's responding to a lot of the things that the Jesuits have developed. Jesuits today are known for being ultra -liberals, but back then, they were the ultra -conservative, founded by a man by the name of Ignatius Loyola, and not to be confused with Ignatius of Antioch, they're only 1 ,400, 1 ,500 years apart, but who was known to say that if the pope were to declare anything to be black, which to our eyes appears white, we should proclaim it to be black.

The pope is the final authority. And what's interesting is, Rome's approach for quite some time, it's still this way today, but from a different perspective,

Rome's approach for quite some time was to attack the Reformation by saying that without us, you can have no real knowledge of the

Bible. Not the interpretation of the Bible, but the text of the Bible. And so, they would focus upon differences in manuscripts and things like that.

And it's funny, it was the Jesuits who were really behind that, but you take it to its final conclusion, and it destroys their own position.

I mean, literally, if you've ever seen some of those cartoons on the internet of someone vigorously sawing away on the branch that they're sitting on, that's what the

Jesuits were doing. And so, you'll find a bunch of stuff in Turretin. And there is a point where the

Reformed Orthodox sort of do something like in the early church.

Remember, if you remember in the early church, when the Orthodox were being challenged by the

Gnostics and stuff, some in the early church started grabbing hold of the concept of apostolic tradition, succession, and authority to try to say, well, our churches go back to the apostles, yours don't.

Which of course, the Gnostics were more than happy to come up with ways of saying that theirs did.

But something similar happens amongst the Reformed, to where they start defaulting back to a traditional text as a means of defending against these things.

Now, we don't have to do that today, because we've got a whole lot more information about the antiquity of the text, we have many more manuscripts than they had back then, many older manuscripts, and even

Rome has gone, well, we tried, and has moved on from there and isn't making that kind of an argument any longer.

But it is fascinating to observe that into what comes of Erasmus' text.

Now, the last element of the background information, this is the last subheading before the

Reformation, at least in my notes, not that we couldn't do a ton of other things.

And that is corruption in the church. Now, we've seen the

Avignon papacy, we've seen the Babylonian captivity of the church, but there was, it wasn't to quite the same level as the pornocracy, if you recall that in the 9th and 10th centuries.

But there was a tremendous amount of corruption in the church. You know, this becomes clear, for example, in Luther's own personal experience.

He, in 1510, he goes to Rome on business for the Augustinian order, and at one point he sees the pope riding through the streets of Rome in a full suit of armor, sword and lance in hand with his entourage, not of penitent monks, but of armed soldiers.

And the corruption that he sees in Rome obviously is one of the many factors that leads him to recognize the need for reformation.

And so this was the case for many people. The 15th century saw a tremendous decline in the papacy, even lower than that point reached in the

Avignon period. The papal office was bought and sold to the highest bidder, and everybody knew it.

If you were a cardinal, you were in the running, but you had to have tremendous financial resources.

And of course, as a cardinal, you would be over numerous bishops. We're going to see later one of the big, big, big stories we'll get to just in a very short period of time.

Albrecht wants to become the Archbishop of Mainz. Well, he's already got too many bishoprics, according to church law, and so he has to buy a very, very expensive variance from Rome, and it was 300 ,000 ducats.

And when we were in Germany last year, I wondered, what is that in modern money?

And it was about $1 .6 million he had to borrow to buy his position.

That's just an archbishop. That's not a cardinal. So the cardinals would be in Trump's league.

They'd be bopping around with the real rich folks. And so everybody knew that whoever became pope had had to leverage himself tremendously in the process of obtaining that position.

And actually, it was 30 ,000 ducats, not 300 ,000, but it still ends up being over a million bucks.

An entire series of corrupt popes damaged the prestige of the papal office. Innocent VIII.

I just love that name, Innocent. It's just why anybody would ever take that name is truly beyond me.

1484 to 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean, had a number of illegitimate children prior to his being made pope.

He used his influence to have them married into rich families after taking the chair of Saint Peter.

Innocent was basically controlled by Giuliano della Rovera, who became

Julius II. Innocent was followed by Alexander VI, better known as Rodrigo Borgia.

Yes, you've heard of the Borgia popes. Well, Alexander VI loaded with benefices.

Now, Calvin had a benefice. You could be given positions in the church that would pay a certain amount of money.

Basically, they basically turned into scholarships. You could go to university and stuff, but you technically were like a priest or even a bishop, and then that would pay

X amount of money. And so you would take part of that and pay some priest to do what you're supposed to be doing in that place while you're off doing something else.

And technically, you're only supposed to have one of those, but that was just a technicality.

The more of them you could get, the more money you could make. And so Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, loaded with benefices from his youth.

He was the second richest cardinal at his ascension to the papacy. And so,

I mean, these people were the mega rich of that day. I mean, they had houses and land and fared sumptuously and so on and so forth.

He lived an openly licentious lifestyle by numerous women. Some of his more famous offspring include

Juan, Cesar, and yes, Lucrezia. Lucrezia Borgia.

That's where this comes from. Borgia simply bought the papacy by bribing many of the cardinals to vote for him.

Upon becoming pope, he made his 17 -year -old son, Cesar, bishop of several seas.

Lucrezia was married a number of times to rich and powerful men. And in the absence of Borgia, she virtually ran the papal office.

So when he was off on vacation, Lucrezia ran stuff.

That's how it was done. Borgia continued his sexual affairs even while pope.

And he died in 1503. Vast majority of historians believe that he was poisoned, which was how you moved up in the ranks back then in the papacy.

Alexander's arch rival became Julius II, again by bribery and promises.

And he began the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in 1506.

Now, have any of you been to St. Peter's in Rome?

Got a couple of people willing to put their hands up and say, yes, I've actually been there.

I have too. And I got into a lot of trouble by basically commenting on social media back then, which was not what social media is today, but still writing a blog post about just the gaudiness of it all.

I mean, it just you eventually just get overwhelmed by marble and statues.

And there's all these crypts of the various popes in there. They're just so outrageously ornate that after a while it just looks almost fake because there's so much of it.

And so anyway, so now think of the timing here.

The Reformation begins 1517. This is 1506. This is only 11 years. Luther is already studying and in school and so on and so forth at this point in time.

And so we're talking immediately prior to this.

And in fact, it's going to be Julius II who is the one that Luther is going to see riding in full armor in Rome in 1510.

And it is the need for money to build

St. Peter's that leads eventually, this is part of the background, to a certain man by the name of Johann Tetzel coming into Saxony to sell indulgences.

And so you can see where the connection, where we're going here. Julius is the one who proclaimed a special indulgence to help pay for the expensive building project by means of war.

He was a warrior. Interdict, remember, that's where the pope says to the clergy in a certain area, you can no longer marry him or bury him or baptize him or anything else.

And excommunication, Julius subdued Bologna and Venice, which were obviously great rivals to Roman power in the boot of Italy.

Creating the Holy League, he removed French power at Ravenna in 1512. So he's a real politician.

These activities earned him the name of Pontifice Terrible, the terrible or ferocious pontiff.

Julius was succeeded by Leo X. And Leo X reigns from 1513 to 1521, which means

Leo X is the pope of the Reformation. The Reformation begins under Leo X.

And I suppose I should tell the story now before we actually get into the

Reformation material. But I made mention of something last week. And as I mentioned it,

I may have said we'll talk more about that later. I just remember clearly thinking someone may go, that doesn't make any sense.

So I want to clear something up from last week and also tie it in here with Leo X. Remember, we were talking about Erasmus and how he was rushing to put together his

Greek New Testament because his printer, John Froben, knew that Cardinal Jimenez, and there are some people that say that Jimenez is sort of the modern way of, it's

X -I -M -E -N -E -S. Some say that's pronounced differently in older Spanish.

But anyway, that they knew that he had already printed his multi -volume polyglot, which included

Latin and Greek and Hebrew and things like that. And so you might go, well, if it's already printed and you're just now trying to get to print, how are you going to beat them?

Because why can't they just put it out? Well, the polyglot did not come out for a number of years. And the reason was pretty simple.

It was called bureaucracy. You had to have papal approval. To publish anything in the religious realm.

So you might go, OK, well, he's still ahead of Erasmus in that process.

So how could he beat him? Well, Froben and Erasmus chose to take a risk.

Jimenez went, you know, he's a cardinal. So he went the safe, proper route as far as getting papal approval and stuff like that.

And the amount of time that takes. Probably the amount of money that takes as well. And Erasmus and Froben came up with the idea that they would go ahead and go to print and publication and distribution without papal approval.

But they padded their chances by dedicating that volume to Pope Leo X.

So it's fascinating that if you look at the first edition of what becomes the

Textus Receptus, the first edition is dedicated to Pope Leo X.

And that was sort of their way of hoping that that would be enough to keep them from jail or fines or the stake for publishing this.

And of course, with the wild popularity, Erasmus didn't have to really worry much about money after that.

And with the wild popularity of his text and the next four editions after it, there were five total editions between 1516 and 1535, then it worked out.

And of course, Jimenez's set would never have been a competition. Luther's is a single,

I'm sorry, Erasmus's is a single volume you can carry with you. Jimenez, you could carry with you if you had your donkey or horse or something like that,

I suppose. But it was multiple volumes and very heavy and cumbersome and so on.

More for a scholar for a shelf than it was for someone to carry around.

So Erasmus's work was significantly more portable and useful to the reformers as a result.

And it was that first edition that Luther has. So the very text from which

Luther is going to begin to come to understand justification by faith up at the front was dedicated to Pope Leo X.

So that's how that works. OK, so with that, obviously, when we start talking about the

Reformation, we are doing so, you know, as Reformed Baptists frequently are, about six months late when you think about it.

But it's viewed very, very differently by different people.

Obviously, last year, Catholic Answers had a conference over in San Diego around the same time as Reformation Day about how many

Roman Catholics will refer to it as the deformation, not the Reformation.

It's viewed as a rending, a ripping, a splitting of the faith.

Even if they admit there was need for change, it had to be within the church, not by separating from the church.

Obviously, Protestants in history, maybe not so much the main lines today, but in history view it as a revival, a recovery, a moving of the

Holy Spirit, the unshackling of the gospel, a return to a pure, more primitive form of Christian proclamation, a sweeping out of all the dust and the accretions of tradition over time.

Of course, the Marxists, as they view everything, viewed it as a class struggle.

The Reformation representing the lower classes fighting against the oppressive upper classes.

You may note that that theme can be changed from group to group quite easily and is in our land even now, though sadly, many of the millennial generation don't know who

Marx was or what Marxism is. That's what happens with many public education.

And then the secular view is that this is just simply a part of the

Renaissance movement, a necessary part that was inevitable and could have taken all sorts of different forms.

It didn't have to take the particularly religious form that it did. And they will note, as we will note, that in many key points in the

Reformation, and this may be uncomfortable to you.

It was uncomfortable to folks on our tour last year in Germany when I kept bringing it up, that many major milestones in Reformation history really came from a mixture of theological and political influences.

You simply can't separate out the Reformation from what was going on around it.

And if you try to do it, if you present the

Reformation as a wholly religious movement, you're going to end up with cartoon figures.

Luther becomes a cartoon. Everybody becomes a cartoon. It's not longer. You have to just start really ignoring a lot of the stuff that really happened at that time.

And so with that, believe it or not, we move into the

Reformation in Germany. There are arguments. Zwingli would make the claim that he had come to these conclusions before reading

Luther. But most people feel that really just on a chronological level and impact level politically and everything else, you really have to start with Luther.

Zwingli is predominantly concurrent, but sort of a little bit behind where Luther is as far as, and of course, there are differences in the

Lutheran and the Swiss Reformations. The background is that there was no national ruler in Germany.

There was no single individual who was, you know, there wasn't a king of Germany.

Germany was made up of smaller subunits such as Saxony.

And so they would have an elector, and their electors would meet in diets,

D -I -E -T -S, diets. This would be the equivalent of our

Congress or the Houses of Parliament. It's a legislative body that would meet every certain number of years, or as the emperor of the

Holy Roman Empire would determine. And so this is a mixed form of government with lots of power struggles between the electors and the emperor.

And of course, the emperor would be elected by the electors, and so would himself almost always be a former elector himself.

There were mixtures of kings in there, but since this was considered what's called the

Holy Roman Empire, you know, the empire would need to have an emperor as the head of that empire, and sometimes that would be a king, it all depended.

It was very complicated, and it's not like there was, we're used to, we have a constitution, and that constitution is supposed to determine how everything works.

Well, there was no constitution. Things could change depending on who had the biggest army, or whose city was getting hit by the plague worse than somebody else's city, basically.

So things were a little bit variable there. The Elector of Saxony in the beginning of the 16th century was a man by the name of Frederick the

Wise, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. He founded the

University of Wittenberg in 1502, barely over a decade before Luther first came there.

So, you know, you look at Wittenberg even today, it's not that big of a place.

And, you know, when you go by the castle church there now, you have a cobblestone road, which is a pain to run on.

It's a pain to walk on, actually, either way. If you ever go there, bring very comfortable shoes.

But even then, it's sort of out toward the boonies.

There would have just been a dirt road, and there would have been cows wandering around, and the river ran much closer to the, it's been diverted since the days of Luther.

And it ran very close to the village, as most villages needed, you need water, obviously.

And so, Wittenberg was not your huge metropolis at that time, and so to begin a university there, that university would have to struggle both to attract professors that would be well known to then attract students.

And so, to be honest with you, the primary reason that Frederick did this was personal.

He's an elector. He's a particularly powerful elector, seems to have been a wise man and a very judicious individual.

He didn't live an overly sumptuous lifestyle. He seemed to be a just ruler, unlike many in that day.

But there was probably a little pride and ego in the founding of the University of Wittenberg.

And so, when Luther does come there to teach, it's still a fairly young school.

And keep in mind, when people ask, why did Frederick defend

Luther when it was really not in his best political interest to do so?

Frederick will die as a Lutheran, but that's only toward the very end of his life.

He was very circumspect about these things, because he was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was run by a

Roman Catholic emperor. So it would be politically inexpedient to be a

Lutheran early on. But why would he, for example, later on have

Luther kidnapped and taken off to the Wartburg Castle and all the rest of that stuff we'll look at later?

Part of it, at least early on, when Luther, before Luther had really developed his theology to the fullest extent, part of it was just, hey, this is my professor at my school.

And I think, for example, Duke George, who was one of Luther's lifelong enemies after the disputation in Leipzig.

Duke George is just one of my competitors, and he's just going after Luther as a means of going after me.

And so there was some of that, I think, in the background to keep in mind, that it wasn't necessarily so much a dedication to Luther's theology, which had not yet even fully developed, but, hey, this is my university, and he's my star guy, so I'm going to defend my star guy.

And I think that was a part of that situation at that time.

Now, I'm trying to figure out, just thinking here, how we're going to do something.

Obviously, at some point over the next few weeks, I'm going to have to figure out how to set up the projector again.

And I mean, I suppose I could skip this, and we could get done faster if I just simply assigned as external work for the class and just hope and trust that you would do so.

We've shown it on New Year's Eve. I think it's probably the easiest way to do this.

There are two or three videos that I would play in class.

But computer technology is so ubiquitous now, you could watch these on your phone for the vast majority of you.

But the two videos, I'll just give you one right now, they're all free on YouTube.

So it's not like you even have to go rent something. Or when

I first showed these videos, when I first taught this class in the 1990s,

I was playing them on VHS cassette tapes. And most everybody in here remembers

VHS, but some of the very, very young folks might be going, I sort of remember hearing about that.

But anyway, the video that I would highly recommend, and it's only about an hour long, so it's not some two and a half hour massive thing.

The video that I know is available on YouTube for free is the

BBC production titled Martin Luther Heretic. Martin Luther Heretic.

And there was a Martin Luther film done in 2004, which is about two hours, and is really good up until a certain point, and then it goes wacky as far as the timeline goes, because they,

I guess, had to hurry up and finish it. Which, if you wish to watch that, that's fine as well.

But Martin Luther Heretic touches on pretty much everything we're going to be touching on in only an hour.

It's very well acted, very well done. The man who plays

Luther, pretty well known guy, used to, what was it, Mercedes or Lexus, I forget which of the two he was a spokesperson for a number of years ago.

But if you can find the time to view

Martin Luther Heretic, that would greatly enhance the next couple of weeks of discussion, shall we say.

You'll have sort of a visual background to some of the things that we're going to be talking about.

So when we talk about the relics in the castle church in Wittenberg, you'll remember that one scene where once we get to Luther in front of Charles at the

Diet of Worms, you have that in your mind. It'll probably help things to stick a little bit more.

And so, yes, sir. I'd like to ask you a quick question before you ask this. Yeah, it's going to have to be quick.

Go ahead. During that period, let's say from 11, 1200s and on, through all the church history, prior, during, and after the

Reformation, what happened to the Eastern church? What's going on there?

I mean, I don't hear nothing. Yeah. Were they true to the truth? Were they corrupted?

What's going on with this? Well, that is a very good question, especially because the

West's relationship to the Eastern churches comes up during the Reformation. And unfortunately,

I can't cover that today. But remind me about that.

It is an important thing to discuss, especially what happened in the middle of the 15th century at the

Council of Constance and the Eastern representatives and stuff that some of the relationships there.

Yeah, that is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I think Greece had a pause because around 1400 to 1800, occupied by the

Ottoman Turks. Right. Yeah, you're fighting a war. So, yeah. Yeah, that's quite true.

Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, we're late, but we'll definitely need to address that.

Okay, let's close the word of prayer. Father, we do thank you for this day. We thank you for the opportunity we have to, once again, with freedom, consider our past and our heritage.