This is absolutely true, Roman. I’ve never denied that.
But the struggle between good and evil that takes place within ourselves shouldn’t allow us overlook the fact that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one”. (1 John 5:19)
I agree, I can relate.
Here I have to disagree. Jesus talks with the utmost clarity about the devil and demons as personal beings. Like, He couldn’t have been clearer even if He tried.
The devil is definitely tempting us, but we have all the means to do good and choose what’s good, so we are responsible when we don’t.
Well, I mentioned what was happening in 96 AD and the assessment of non Catholic historians to show that the Church was already conscious of her prerogative and authority just 32 years after Peter’s death.
I have read the article you’re quoting, and while it contains some perfectly valid observations about the abuses that existed in the late medieval Church, several of its historical claims are seriously misleading.
I have no intention of denying the corruption that existed in the Church at the time of the Reformation. Substantial reform was certainly needed, and I have acknowledged that repeatedly, but acknowledging corruption is one thing. Claiming that Catholicism taught that salvation could be purchased, that Luther introduced the principle of religious freedom, or that Protestantism liberated scientific inquiry from ecclesiastical interference is quite another.
Let’s look at the historical evidence.
1. The Reformation didn’t introduce the Bible in vernacular languages.
Luther’s translation was an extraordinary literary and cultural achievement, and its influence was enormous, nobody needs to deny that, but the idea that Christians had to wait for Luther before the Bible became available in their own languages is simply false.
The first printed German Bible appeared in 1466, more than fifty years before Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. It was printed by Johann Mentelin in Strasbourg.
Bridwell Library, which preserves an original copy, documents seventeen German editions of the Bible published before Luther’s translation.
These are surviving historical artifacts, not speculative reconstructions.
Euan Cameron discusses these pre-Reformation editions in “The Luther Bible,” published in The New Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 217–238). He fully acknowledges Luther’s enormous contribution while establishing that German Bible translations and printings had a substantial history before the Reformation.
2. The claim that Luther discovered that divine forgiveness could not be purchased confuses Catholic doctrine with abuses committed in its name.
This is perhaps the most misleading part of the article.
The Catholic Church never taught teach that God’s forgiveness could be purchased with money.
Catholic theology distinguished between the forgiveness of the guilt of sin and the remission of the temporal punishment associated with sins already forgiven.
Indulgences concerned the latter, not the purchase of divine grace, and this distinction was certainly not invented after the Reformation, It was already present in medieval Catholic theology.
In the Supplementum to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, question 27, article 1, we find this explicit statement: “none can be freed from punishment who is not yet freed from guilt.”
The text also establishes that contrition and confession (which is null and void, actually sacrilegious, without a firm purpose of amendment) are required for obtaining indulgences on one’s own behalf.
That is medieval Catholic theology, centuries before Luther.
And the Church had already recognized and attempted to regulate abuses involving indulgences.
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, more than three centuries before Luther, explicitly condemned excessive and indiscriminate indulgences and imposed restrictions on their concession.
So the distinction between legitimate doctrine and abuses was hardly a Protestant discovery.
Now, were there serious abuses in 1517?
Absolutely.
Pope Leo X authorized an indulgence campaign connected with financing the construction of St Peter’s Basilica. The financial arrangements involving Archbishop Albert of Mainz were deeply problematic, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The Church’s authorities bear genuine historical responsibility for those decisions.
But the distinction remains fundamental: a pope or bishop can make a disastrous administrative decision without that decision becoming an article of Catholic faith.
Catholicism doesn’t claim and has never claimed that bishops are incapable of corruption or that every administrative decision made by a pope is infallible.
Indeed, the historical evidence concerning those financial arrangements is readily available.
3. Even Luther’s own Ninety-Five Theses don’t support the interpretation offered in the article.
The author portrays the theses as though they had already established a radically individualistic understanding of Christianity, dispensing with ecclesiastical authority and mediation.
But have you actually looked at what Luther wrote in 1517?
In Thesis 38, he acknowledges a legitimate papal role in declaring divine remission.
In Thesis 69, he instructs bishops and priests to receive the commissioners of apostolic indulgences reverently.
And in Thesis 71, he writes: “Let anyone who denies the truth about apostolic indulgences be excommunicated and cursed.”
That is Luther himself.
He hadn’t yet rejected Purgatory (he will reject it much later, claiming that the book of the Maccabees shouldn’t have been canonical, despite the fact that the Church recognized its canonical nature more than a millenium before Luther’s existence, all of this while perfectly knowing that the Jews didn’t recognize the canonicity of the book, so the argument that the Church recognized its canonicity because she mistakenly thought that the Jews recognized it as well is null and void; I say this because I’ve read this notion here and there), nor had he rejected every legitimate use of indulgences.
In other words, portraying the Ninety-Five Theses as an outright rejection of indulgences, ecclesiastical authority and religious mediation is anachronistic.
The original text is available in the University of Oxford’s scholarly edition.
There is also an illuminating letter that Luther sent to Archbishop Albert of Mainz on 31 October 1517.
In it, Luther denounces the false assurance of salvation that people were deriving from indulgence purchases and asks the archbishop to correct the preaching.
That is important evidence of the immediate pastoral concerns behind the controversy.
4. But there is another distinction that I think is absolutely fundamental: the need to reform abuses is not the same thing as establishing that the Church’s doctrinal authority was fundamentally defective.
This is where the historical development of Luther’s position becomes especially significant and problematic.
In 1517, Luther was protesting, among other things, deeply troubling abuses surrounding indulgences. His subsequent theological development, however, took him inmensely further.
He came to reject not merely particular ecclesiastical practices but central Catholic teachings concerning the papacy, the sacraments and the authority of the Church.
By 1519, during the Leipzig Disputation with Johann Eck, Luther was defending the proposition that an ecumenical council could err.
By 1520, his view of the papacy had become radically more hostile.
David M. Whitford documents this transformation in “The Papal Antichrist: Martin Luther and the Underappreciated Influence of Lorenzo Valla,” published in Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1 (2008), pp. 26–52.
Whitford examines how Luther came to identify the papacy with the Antichrist, marking a decisive transformation in his understanding of Roman ecclesiastical authority.
And by 1521, at the Diet of Worms, Luther openly rejected the proposition that popes and councils possessed an authority capable of definitively settling doctrinal disputes independently of Scripture, despite the fact that the authority of ecumenical councils was a cornerstone of the first millenium of Christianity.
In his recorded response, he justified his refusal to submit to their judgment on the grounds that they had frequently erred.
This is not a retrospective Catholic interpretation. It is documented in the historical record of the Diet itself.
Luther did not reject the doctrinal conclusions of every ecumenical council. He continued to accept the first four councils, particularly their Christological teachings. What he rejected was the principle that an ecumenical council, by virtue of its ecclesiastical authority, was protected from doctrinal error.
And I think the implications of that rejection are profound.
Once you deny that ecumenical councils can issue definitive, infallible judgments on matters of faith, you fundamentally undermine their ability to serve as the final arbiters of doctrinal disputes. After all, if a council’s ruling can always be challenged on the grounds that it has misinterpreted Scripture, what prevents those who disagree with it from simply rejecting its conclusions and continuing to uphold the very doctrines it condemned?
In other words, the entire principle of ecclesiastical authority is turned on its head.
What we already find in embryonic form in the Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts 15, where the apostles and elders settled a dispute through an authoritative decision attributed to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and subsequently transmitted to the churches for observance (Acts 16:4), developed over the following centuries into one of Christianity’s most powerful instruments of doctrinal unity: the ecumenical council.
Yet under Luther’s understanding of ecclesiastical authority, the judgments of such councils, rather than being definitively binding upon the Church, remained subject to challenge whenever Christians privately considered them incompatible with their interpretation of Scripture.
Thus, an institution whose very purpose was to resolve doctrinal disputes through authoritative judgments assisted by the Holy Spirit became one whose judgments could themselves be disputed, depriving it of the capacity to serve as a final, universally binding arbiter of doctrinal controversies. And something that was recognized as a fact during the first millenium (namely that the charism of truth of the apostles was transmitted to their successors) was disputed and denied.
Of course, councils can still be respected, and individual Protestant denominations can still regard their decisions as authoritative, but if that authority is ultimately conditional upon agreement with a particular interpretation of Scripture, then the council can no longer provide a universally binding resolution to disputes between Christians who sincerely disagree about what Scripture teaches.
And that is the problem: the institution that was supposed to settle doctrinal disputes becomes yet another source of dispute, because its authority to settle them is itself perpetually open to challenge.
What was once intended to provide a definitive resolution to theological disagreements can now be rejected whenever the disputing parties disagree with the resolution itself.
This distinction is explicitly documented in the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, in its scholarly article “Conciliarity of the Church.”
And this raises a question that the original article completely overlooks.
How does the existence of serious corruption within the Church establish that the Church lacked the authority to define doctrine or preserve apostolic teaching?
It doesn’t. Plain and simple.
Those are two entirely different propositions, and establishing the first absolutely doesn’t logically establish the second. Not by a long shot.
Indeed, it is perfectly possible to acknowledge that ecclesiastical authorities committed grave abuses while maintaining that the Church’s doctrinal authority remained intact.
The existence of corrupt bishops does not, by itself, demonstrate the falsity of apostolic succession.
The existence of abusive indulgence practices (that were never justified by Catholic actual teaching) doesn’t, by itself, establish that ecumenical councils are incapable of teaching infallibly.
And the moral failures of popes don’t, by themselves, demonstrate that the Church’s doctrines concerning the papacy are false. Peter himself was rebuked by Paul, and yet he was and remained Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built His Church
Reforming ecclesiastical corruption and repudiating the Church’s claim to divinely protected doctrinal authority are fundamentally different undertakings, and the transformation of Luther’s own position illustrates just how profound that distinction is.
In 1517, Luther still recognized the legitimacy of apostolic indulgences and explicitly called for the excommunication of those who denied their truth. Yet within a few years, he had come to reject the very papal authority on which the Catholic understanding of indulgences rested.
The irony is striking: some of the positions Luther eventually embraced stood in direct opposition to principles he had explicitly defended at the very beginning of the controversy.
What began as a dispute over abuses and the proper limits of indulgences ultimately developed into a rejection of fundamental Catholic claims concerning ecclesiastical authority, doctrinal infallibility and even the very nature of the Sacraments (with Zwingly establishing even more radical alterations).
But the existence of those abuses couldn’t establish that far more radical theological conclusion.
5. The assertion that Protestantism introduced an unhindered exchange of ideas is simply incompatible with the historical record.
The Reformation didn’t suddenly replace religious coercion with liberty of conscience.
Consider Zurich.
On 5 January 1527, Felix Manz, an Anabaptist who disagreed with the established Reformed authorities over baptism, was executed by drowning.
This happened in a city where the Protestant Reformation had already prevailed.
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, published under the auspices of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, documents his persecution and execution.
In 1553, Michael Servetus was executed for heresy, with John Calvin’s involvement.
The case is thoroughly documented in historical scholarship, including “Calvin’s Critics,” in John Calvin in Context(Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 336–344).
The Cambridge History of Christianity, in its chapter “Toleration and Movements of Christian Reunion, 1660–1789,” explains that religious uniformity remained a fundamental expectation of early modern political society, in Catholic and Protestant territories alike.
I’m certainly not suggesting that Catholic authorities were innocent of religious persecution, but the claim that Protestantism inaugurated an era of unhindered religious and intellectual freedom is historically indefensible.
Protestant authorities also punished dissenters and restricted beliefs they considered dangerous.
The emergence of religious toleration in Europe was a much longer and more complicated process.
As for this
I have already addressed this point at large in my first reply to you. This is what I wrote
Also
Just to clarify: I’m not talking about a “merely human plot”.
Efesians 6:12; “For we are not struggling against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, the powers, and the cosmic rulers of this present darkness, and against the spirits of evil in the heavens.”
You’re right that I didn’t address the Enlightenment explicitly, so let me do that now.
I see no reason to describe the Enlightenment as merely a human conspiracy, but I also think your alternative ( that it was essentially a reaction against the injustices of the Catholic Church ) is far too simplistic.
Enlightenment thinkers reacted against genuine injustices, that’s true: religious persecution, censorship, political absolutism and abuses of authority were real problems, and I have no intention of denying them, but those problems were hardly exclusive to Catholic societies. Protestant Europe had its own established churches, restrictions on religious dissent and forms of institutional coercion.
And the Enlightenment was’t a single, coordinated movement pursuing one objective either, it encompassed different intellectual traditions, religious commitments and political ambitions, often in disagreement with one another.
More importantly, the idea that the Enlightenment was fundamentally a Protestant-inspired reaction against Catholic oppression is impossible to reconcile with serious historical scholarship.
Consider John Robertson, an important historian at Oxford.
In The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Robertson undertakes a detailed comparative study of the emergence of Enlightenment thought in two markedly different societies: Protestant Scotland and Catholic Naples.
He demonstrates that important Enlightenment developments took place in both environments, despite their different religious and political circumstances.
That alone should make us cautious about reducing the Enlightenment to a Protestant triumph over Catholic intellectual authority.
And there is another dimension that your interpretation overlooks.
In The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford University Press, 2016), historian Ulrich L. Lehner documents the participation of Catholic intellectuals and reformers in the Enlightenment.
His research challenges the common assumption that Catholicism and Enlightenment thought were necessarily incompatible in all possible ways.
Catholic thinkers participated in Enlightenment debates, engaged with new scientific and philosophical developments, and pursued reforms from within their own religious tradition.
So the historical picture is not one in which Protestantism liberated European thought, the Enlightenment completed that liberation, and Catholicism remained uniformly opposed to both, that is a retrospective narrative, not an adequate explanation of the historical evidence.
And there is a more fundamental logical problem with your argument.
Even if we agreed that the Enlightenment arose primarily as a reaction against ecclesiastical abuses, what exactly would that establish about the truth or falsity of Catholic doctrine?
Like I said, the legitimacy of a grievance does not automatically establish the validity of every proposed remedy, especially if the remedy does more harm than good (like the murderous wars that followed and the ever growing divisions among Christians, with several schisms within Protestantism documented in just the last 4/5 years, let alone in the last 500 years).
That is also the distinction I have been making about the Reformation: i can acknowledge that Luther had legitimate reasons to protest serious abuses without accepting that those abuses demonstrated the falsity of Catholic teaching on apostolic succession, ecclesiastical authority or the infallibility of ecumenical councils.
And I can acknowledge that Enlightenment thinkers challenged genuine injustices without accepting that the Enlightenment somehow demonstrated the intellectual bankruptcy of Catholicism and without accepting the relativism and many times the outright reversal of good and evil its later “disciples” (of the Enlightenment) established,
So my answer is straightforward: the Enlightenment was not simply a plot, and it was certainly, in part, a reaction against real injustices, but it was also a complex intellectual movement that developed across Catholic and Protestant societies, drew on traditions that long predated the Reformation, and included Catholic thinkers among its participants. It also was, at large, a symptom of the ever growing principe of lawlessness that is growing and growing until the Katéchon will be finally removed at the end of days.
Recognizing all of that is perfectly compatible with condemning the abuses that existed within the Church, what it doesn’t justify is turning those abuses into proof that Protestantism was right about Catholic doctrine.