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The Catholic/Protestant Split
The Roman Catholic Church at the time of Martin Luther had two merits.
Firstly, it attributed Christianity to existence, the life and actions
of a person. Christianity was conceived of in an existential way, and
was essentially tied to the everyday life of a person. Its second merit
was the importance laid on solitude, as the monk was daily involved in
techniques that relied on inwardness and peacefulness to commune with
God. These two merits are very significant in attaining and maintaining
an authentic religion of Christianity.
There were also, however,
two significant errors that provoked Martin Luther and the protestant
movement in rejecting the Catholic Church of that time. First of all,
although it related Christianity to existence, it attributed the wrong
kinds of action to piety. Holiness was defined by actions such as
fasting, entering the monastery, performing traditions and rites, and
not the existential directives of Jesus. It was in this way that
Christianity had in a sense reverted back to the religion of the
Pharisees.
The second error was the Roman Catholics concept of
“meritousness”, meaning if you perform good works you can gain favour
from God. Meritousness gradually expanded as good works not only
affected the individuals relationship to God but others who were
associated with him, as it was a common practice in those times for
Catholics to give money to the Church in order to help their dead
family members or relatives who would supposedly benefit from this
monetary donation. This error climaxed when the Church virtually
operated as a business, peasants would come and pay them and perform
other frivolous activities, and in return the Church would bless them
and give away salvation to the highest bidder.
It was at this
point that Martin Luther appeared, and he concluded that the age was in
dreaded spiritlessness. Luther argued that salvation that was earned by
works resulted in either despair or presumptousness. If a person could
not live up to the high and strict standards that the church had set
for him, the individual would consider himself unrighteous and his
heart would be filled with despair and depression. On the other hand,
if a person thought he upheld these strict standards he would become
proud and judgmental (just like the Pharisees). Accordingly, Luther
proposed that man be saved by “faith alone”, which taken alone is a
very dangerous concept.
Because of the severity of the
situation he saw around him, Luther saw it fit to completely ignore the
words of St. James (who said that faith without works is dead). In
Luther’s own life good works was abundant, but he had failed to
articulate this aspect of his own Christianity in his writings. In this
sense it was an overreaction to what he perceived as a dire situation,
and it led his followers to misinterpret and exaggerate this statement
throughout the following generations. Given enough time, Luther’s words
of “faith alone” became a doctrine, and strict Protestantism is the
present day result. People who said Salvation is entirely works wanted
merit for their actions, and people who said it was entirely faith
wanted to be freed from works. As I argued in my last Faith vs. Works
post, neither is correct, and both distort Christianity into something
it is not.
(I give credit where credit is due, and a good deal
of the ideas in this post was based from a passage in Kierkegaard’s
work “Judge for Yourself!”… Also, I mean no offence to Catholics or
Lutherans. People are not defined by their religion; since it is the
people that define the religion, and I understand what is true of
Catholicism in those days is not necessarily true of today.)
-- By Timothy Neal |
