David Bagchi

The Council of Trent

The general councils of the medieval Catholic Church were instruments for crisis management. This was particularly true in the early fifteenth century, when the church was divided by two, and then three, rival claimants to the papal throne. Unlike chapter meetings and episcopal visitations, councils were not a routine part of the church’s self-governance. When the Council of Trent finally convened in 1545, it was only the nineteenth general council in the long history of the Catholic Church. The crises that provoked councils might be internal to the Catholic Church, such as the rise of the Joachite heresy, or stimulated by external pressures such as the Turkish invasion of Europe. They might touch on matters of the church’s doctrine or of its practice. Early councils articulated the dogmas of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. Later councils decided on the place of icons in Christian worship, defined the doctrine of transubstantiation, and ended the scandal of a divided church. Popes were often reluctant to take the risks inherent in the convocation of a general council. They were painfully aware that the Council of Constance had deposed three competing popes and installed a fourth. By the time of Luther, however, it was generally conceded, even by theologians who were jealous defenders of papal power, that under certain circumstances the convocation of a general council might be the church’s only recourse to resolve a crisis that had proved impossible to resolve in any other way.

Old Questions, New Answers?

Abstract Luther’s omission of the word “catholic” from his German translations of the creedal article on the Church have led many to suppose that he had little time for the concept of catholicity. A survey of vernacular devotional literature on the eve of the Reformation shows however that he was merely respecting traditional translation practice, and a study of his polemical writings in 1518–1519 demonstrates that a strong concept of catholicity underpinned his critique of the Roman Church.

Martin Luther: ‘Confessional’ Theologian

The contemporary fame of Martin Luther (1483-1546) rested at least as much on his popular devotional writings as on his public defiance of Pope and Emperor. By re-considering his early struggles and later work in the light of this reputation, he emerges more clearly as a ‘confessional’ theologian, that is, a theologian of the confessional and of spiritual direction. It is argued that this approach provides a healthy corrective to some one-sided views of Luther, and offers a useful complementary approach in its own right for biography and historical theology.

Book Review: A Fresh Approach to Luther’s Theology Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008. £17.99. pp. 398. ISBN: 978-0-8028-2799-9)

The fifth volume of Hans Dieter Betz’s collected works focuses on two seemingly contrary terms: theology and religious history. His Paulinische Theologie und Religionsgeschichte comprises twelve individual studies separated into two main sections: the first seven studies deal with Pauline theology as manifested in specific passages (1 Cor 3:18-23, 11:17-34, Rom 9:1-5, and Colossians) and throughout his work (for instance, in respect of Pauline Anthropology), while the next five are dedicated to two non-Christian authors with studies eight and nine about Dio of Prusa’s (i.e., Dio Chrysostom’s) Oratio XII (Olympikos) and ten, eleven, and twelve about Plutarch of Chaironeia’s Life of Numa Pomphilius. The nicely produced book comes with a preface by the author introducing the topics of his twelve studies and indices of Greek, Latin, Biblical, and apocryphal literature. The five German and seven English studies perfectly serve the purpose of intertwining specific topics of Pauline theology with others of Hellenistic philosophy and theology. Consequently, Betz shows how Paul and Pagan philosophers treated theological issues and, at the same time, successfully demonstrates that theological problem-solving is not a purely Christian feature. Thus, everybody interested in early Christian theology and religious history will certainly profit from the wide and precise knowledge Betz presents in volume five of his collected studies; but readers will probably be pleasantly surprised by the fresh and vivid style most of the studies – lectures at international meetings and conferences – are written in.

The German Rabelais? Foul words and the Word in Luther

Abstract Luther is infamous for his use of scatological language, but Luther scholars (with the notable exception of Heiko Oberman) have not attempted to relate his use of scatology to his theology. This contrasts strongly with Rabelais scholarship, in which the theological significance of the Frenchmans scatology is widely acknowledged. Suggested is a number of ways in which the ‘problem’ of Luthers scatological coarseness could be explained on non-theological grounds (by attributing it to the exaggerations of Roman Catholic polemic, or to the angry ravings of Luthers painfully afflicted and disillusioned dotage, or to an anally-fixated psychology, or to the coarseness of the age in which he lived), but the conclusion is that none is completely successful. After a brief comparison with relevant work on Rabelais that provides a theoretical context, a review of the state of the question in Luther scholarship shows that the nature and function of Luthers scatological language in polemical contexts has been convincingly elucidated by Mark Edwards and Heiko Oberman. However, the author suggests that an investigation of Luthers unexpected use of such language in pastoral contexts (in letters of spiritual counsel and in several Table Talk fragments) demonstrates more directly how his scatology relates to the key themes in his theology. Here Luther recommends scatological outbursts as an efficacious remedy against diabolically inspired attacks of melancholy (depression). These outbursts are shown to be based on his doctrine of creation, his doctrine of incarnation, and his doctrine of justification by faith alone. A concluding comparison reveals that, while the scatology of Rabelais the humanist emphasized the importance of perceiving a harmonious balance between ones higher and lower natures, Luthers emphasized the tension inherent in this life of being simul iustus et peccator.

The theology of the English reformers

While it was not until the advent of the works of William Perkins in the late sixteenth century that England produced a theologian of truly international stature, the earlier phases of the English Reformation witness to the work of a number of talented individuals who were able to draw upon that of their continental counterparts and take advantage of the developments in university education in order to articulate distinctively Protestant theologies within the English context. Thus, while the theological contribution of the English reformers was in no way as significant as their innovations in, say, liturgical practice, it nevertheless stood in positive relation to continental movements and defined the kinds of debate that were to shape English church life until the end of the seventeenth century. ORIGINS The wider field of the intellectual history of the Reformation has, over recent decades, preoccupied itself with tracing dogmatic and exegetical trajectories back into the theological world of the Middle Ages. Study of the English Reformation over the same period has, however, been to a large extent the preserve of social and political historians with little interest in theology. Their work has tended not to take English Reformation theology seriously in terms of its place within the ongoing Western tradition of thought. In addition, the slight and occasional nature of many of the theological productions of the English Reformation, combined with little hard evidence (for instance, in the form of citations) regarding relations to late medieval thought, has made such study almost impossible to raise above the level of educated guesswork.

Luther and the Problem of Martyrdom

Kingsley Amis once had great fun imagining how the modern world might have turned out if Luther had successfully been bribed with the offer of a cardinalate. A much more likely miseen-scene is that suggested by Kierkegaard, who preferred to think how much better the world, or at least Danish Protestantism, would have been had Luther become a martyr. What makes the martyr’s crown a more plausible item of ecclesiastical headgear for Luther than a cardinal’s hat is that the idea of martyrdom was so important to him. Its importance was by no means restricted to the four years or so during which he daily expected to have to witness to the Gospel with his own blood: from his earliest lectures on the Psalms to his last lectures on Genesis, martyrdom and its implications for the Christian life were a central theme. In between Luther became not the first martyr of the Reformation, as he (no less than Kierkegaard) would have preferred, but its first martyrologist. In spite of this, Luther’s attitude to martyrdom has never, to my knowledge, been the subject of a full-scale study. In this paper I want to highlight some of the issues which would have to be explored further in any such study, and also to indicate the sense in which martyrdom became a problem for Luther.

‘Eyn Mercklich Underscheyd’: Catholic Reactions to Luther’s Doctrine of the Priesthood of all Believers, 1520–25

After the great Reformation principles of ‘faith alone’ and ‘Scripture alone’, probably the most revolutionary doctrine commonly associated with Martin Luther is that of the priesthood of all believers. It is well known that, as it appears in his address ‘to the Christian nobility of the German nation’ of 1520, he intended this doctrine to bring down the walls of the new Jericho by striking at the heart of the distinction between clergy and laity on which the medieval Church was based. What is less well known is the reaction to this doctrine of Luther’s contemporaries, and in particular his critics. I propose to look at how they regarded the reformer’s conception of the universal priesthood, and what they thought its implications were, in the hope of shedding more light on its contemporary significance.