Diarmaid MacCulloch



Yes

The 16th-century Reformation was needed to puncture an illusion of the Church in medieval Europe: that this was the only authentic form of Christianity, possessing unique truth and authority. This illusion led Western Christianity to hijack an ancient description of all Christianity for itself, so it called itself “the Catholic Church” (and it still does), though it was just a part of a wider Christian family. There were many other Christianities besides, in Asia, Africa and eastern Europe — this was really only the Western Latin Church, though you might then, and now, call it the Roman Catholic Church. The Western illusion grew from the fifth and sixth centuries and lasted in Europe for a thousand years, increasingly dominated by a single Bishop of Rome.

A millennium makes it seem almost like a norm in our history but it’s important to see that it was a freak in the history of the human race, and there has never been anything like it, anywhere else. This medieval Western Church produced beautiful art, architecture and music, and often expressed its faith in profound and moving ways, but its monopoly was bound to end; the Reformation was a reality check.

It was easy for the Western Church to make its mistake because it was in a corner of the Christian world, and it eliminated all local Christian competitors, dismissively defining them as Arian or heretical in some other way. Everyone had to be “Catholics”, with the grudging exception of Jews, who found life alongside tidy-minded Western Christians increasingly difficult.

Cut off from the Greek language in which the New Testament was written, the Church’s beliefs fatally diverged from foundation teachings in its writings about the most important subject: what happens to us when we die.

The big message in Paul’s letters in the Bible is that we can do nothing by ourselves to be saved; it’s all God’s merciful gift. The Western Church encouraged people to believe that they could influence God’s decision about their afterlives by doing things: praying their way out of a place called “Purgatory”, which simply does not appear in the Bible. Martin Luther, reading Paul, thought this teaching was a cheat, eventually convincing millions of other Europeans. When the Church told him to stop his questions, he was furious. The violence of the Reformation came from anger at feeling cheated.

Add another big reality check: this Western Church had forced all its clergy to be celibate, denying them marriage. No other Church has done this, and we’re only now beginning to appreciate, after the build-up of sexual scandal over centuries, what a bad idea universal clerical celibacy is.

Luther restored clerical marriage — and so much else: worship and music in a language understood by all (those glorious Lutheran hymns, Calvinist psalms, Anglican evensong). Protestantism led to all Christian people having a voice in making decisions about the future of their faith, thinking new thoughts without any inquisitions stepping in. Rome is only just catching up.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is professor of the history of the Church at the University of Oxford.

Eamon Duffy



No

The Reformation gave the world glorious gifts — noble translations of the Bible into the language of everyday life, the music of Johan Sebastian Bach, a new appreciation of the worth of family life and sexual love. But it was also a massively destructive force. The Protestant reformers persuaded themselves that the fabric of Christendom for a thousand years — its beliefs, institutions, worship, art and music — was the devil’s masterpiece, to be repudiated and where possible destroyed. Churches were plundered, great books, great art everywhere battered, burned or whitewashed over. The pilgrimage routes that had criss-crossed Europe, enabling men and women to enact symbolically the deep instinct that life was a journey towards God, were blocked and forbidden.

Christianity had always taught that the grace of God enabled and enobled human nature, that men and women might grow in holiness, become more like God, become saints. The reformers, believing this made people into rivals to God, promoted a darker anthropology. Human nature, they insisted, was depraved, even our virtues were manifestations of pride. Only faith mattered, there is no health in us.

For more than a millennium Christianity had treasured the monastic life of prayer, contemplation and manual work as a privileged route towards God, and a source of inspiration for the rest of the Church. Protestants dismissed all that as anti-Christian, and sent monks and nuns packing. The monasteries, including many of the world’s most sublime religious buildings, were demolished or turned into mansions for the hard-faced rich who did well out of the Reformation.

For women especially this was a catastrophe. The convent, one of the few social spaces in which women might control their own lives without male interference, disappeared. Now the only intelligible vocation for a Christian woman was as a wife or mother.

Devotion to the saints, and the custom of praying for the dead, were part of a perception that the past and the present intertwined, that the bond of charity held together the living and the dead. As the Reformers rejected Christian tradition as a source of truth, so they also banished the dead from human society. To kneel at a shrine, to pray for a dead parent, to light a candle in remembrance, became a sin.

The medieval church was often greedy and overbearing. But its structures provided a means of resolving disputes: one system of law, to which all could appeal, and in the papacy, or the bishops meeting in General Council, a court of final appeal to settle questions of truth and falsehood. The Reformation imagined that the Bible alone was the oracle of truth, and would explain itself. Instead, Protestantism shattered into hundreds of warring creeds, often controlled by local princes, and Europe descended into religious violence. Fear of heresy made both Catholics and Protestants fiercer, more closed-minded. The Christian imagination became harder, less inclusive, more aggressively male. The world was the poorer for it.

Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge.