By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them.
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By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them. |
Bible Truth Communion: By Their Fruits You |
FRUITS OF THE REFORMATION Matthew 7.15-17: Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognise them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. These words of Jesus are intended to help us to tell good teachers from bad. We are to judge them by the quality of the fruits that they produce, whether good or bad. On another page, Reformation Leaders, we have examined the lives of some of the key Protestant Reformers. Here we will take a look at the effects of the Reformation in general? Was the fruit good? GOOD FRUITS As Good Fruits, most
people will agree that the Reformation, directly or
indirectly achieved the following:
But at what cost have these claimed gains been made? BITTER FRUITS The Reformation led directly to many consequences that can be considered bad both for the world and for Christianity in general. Many of these negative consequences have had enormous effects, which persist to the present day. 1. It broke the Unity of the Western Church. Before the Reformation, the Church from Ireland to the borders of Russia, from the Arctic to the edges of the Sahara, was one Internationalist body. Bishops, clergy, monks and legates, could and did move across borders, taking positions in new countries, spreading new ideas in learning, art and architecture, helping to unify European culture. The Church supplied a counterbalance to the authority of individual states and rulers, providing avenues of appeal beyond state power. It also enabled Christian nations to unite against external threats. The Reformation fatally destroyed this unity. Protestant Churches tended to be National bodies, under the control of the State. By and large they ceased to function as bodies that had the independent authority to modify state policies. Civil courts became the only courts, secular power the only legal power. Secular rulers appointed Church personnel and appropriated Church property. The Church became subject to the state. Life became secularized, even as it became more nationalist and parochial. WARS Worst of all, the Reformation brought in its wake nearly two centuries of war, bloodshed and hatred. From the bloodshed of the Peasants Revolt, Zwingli's attempts to conquer neighbouring Catholic regions, and the Anabaptist struggles in Germany, there was something about Protestantism and the violence with which it was preached that inevitably brought war in its wake. By demonizing the Catholic Church and seeking to destroy its priesthood, sacraments and institutions, Protestants forced Catholics who did not wish to abandon their faith into a life-or-death confrontation. Early judicial and injudicial killings of dissenters on both sides turned rapidly to wholesale civil, and then national warfare. In England, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was only the first in a series of religious risings and conflicts that culminated in the Civil War of the 1640s and which dragged on intermittently until the defeat of the last Catholic claimant to the throne in 1745. The Netherlands endured fifty years of devastating warfare before being divided in two. In France the Wars of Religion lasted over a century. Hundreds of thousands died. In Ireland the results are still with us. From Scandinavia to Switzerland war and destruction set brothers at each others throats. Worse still was the fate of Germany, birthplace of the Reformation. Luther had stoked up the forces of German nationalism to increase the popularity of his teachings. However Germany, until then the political and economic powerhouse of Europe, soon found itself divided into two warring camps. Smaller conflicts finally culminated in the devastating Thirty Years War of the early 1600s. Initially a civil conflict, the later intervention of Denmark, Sweden, Spain and France turned Germany into a European battleground, stricken by disease and famine. Millions died. By the end of the conflict Germany had lost a third of its population, its economy lay in ruins, and it was to take centuries to recover. The fruits of the Reformation were bitter indeed. 2. It led to Unbelief and Secularism. The Reformation, like all revolutions, began on a tide of optimism. Everything that had gone wrong with Religion or Society for the previous thousand years had been the fault of the Catholic Church. If very few in the general population lived like Saints, surely this was because of the legalistic and sacramentally-based teachings of the Roman Church. Was there crime and corruption? Once taught the true doctrines of Faith Alone, all people would truly live like saints, and crime and corruption would be no more. Was there poverty, heavy taxation? All that need be done, as many Protestant preachers proclaimed, was to take over the lands and riches of the Church, and no-one need ever pay taxes again! REALITY BITES Once the euphoria immediately following the Reformation was over, however, reality began to set in. The German Peasants Revolt, inspired by Luther's teachings on Christian freedom was brutally crushed by the Protestant princes, with Luther's support. This, looting of churches for private gain, and the moral excesses of the Anabaptists, made it clear that no brave new world was going to come out of the Reformation. In the nations where the Reformation took hold, the lands and wealth of the Church ended up, not in the hands of the poor, but in those of the King and nobility. In fact all too often taxes soon rose, the social services, education and hospitals that had been provided by the church were heavily damaged, where they did not vanish altogether. The poor soon found themselves poorer still, and without the counterbalance to unbridled state power supplied by the Church. In addition the terrible wars of religion brought on by the Reformation badly damaged the faith of many. Never again was belief so general and universal. GROWTH OF DISBELIEF Where once there had been One Truth taught by One Church, now there were dozens of opposing doctrines, with the prelates of each viewpoint condemning one anothers doctrines as satanic and condemning each other to the flames of hell. Nothing could have been better designed to kill the faith of ordinary believers. The Protestant doctrine of Faith Alone for Salvation, and the consequent denial of the need for a believer to do good works in order to be saved, also led to many losing the need for holiness. Many of the Reformers themselves realised that things had not turned out as they had hoped: Luther. Under the papacy it snowed alms, foundations, legacies. Under the Evangel, on the contrary, no one will give a farthing." Martin Bucer: The majority of people despise and neglect the whole of the Church service, the Word and the sacraments, the comfort of absolution and of prayer, in short the whole fellowship of the Church . . . Only too true, is the reproach levelled against us that while we condemn lustily the prayers, fasts . . . hitherto in vogue, and neither pray nor fast ourselves, we are losing all piety . . . and leading . . . sensual, easy lives." "The greater part of the people seem only to have embraced the gospel in order . . . that they may live according to their own pleasure, enjoying their lusts and lawless appetites without control." Erasmus: "Nothing was ever seen more licentious, and, withal, more seditious; nothing, in a word, less evangelical than these pretended evangelists. . . All is carried to extremes in this new Reformation. They root up what ought to be pruned; they set fire to the house in order to cleanse it. Morals are neglected; luxury, debauchery, adulteries, increase more than ever; there is no order, no discipline among them . . . I find more piety in one good Catholic bishop than in all these new evangelists." The disillusion with Christianity caused by the divisions over doctrine, and also by the consequent wars and hatreds, led to an exponential growth in disbelief and atheism. The rejection of Christianity by the mass of today's society is a direct result of the disunity and strife created by the Reformation. As Jesus Himself said: "I have given them the glory that you gave me that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." (John 17: 22-23) 3. Destruction of Culture When the reformation hit Northern Europe in the 1520s and 1530s, something strange happened. Something that one doesn't normally expect to tie-in with a "revival" in the Church. Virtually all Church building stopped dead. The centuries before the Reformation had seen a continuous wave of Church building, town and village churches being constantly renewed, great cathedrals and monasteries rising above green fields and city townscapes. Suddenly this all ceased, and even went into reverse. Virtually no more new churches were bult in the protestant lands. Most Monasteries and not a few Cathedrals (St Andrews, Scotland, for one example) were completely destroyed. But much worse was soon to come. CULTURAL HOLOCAUST With the notable exception of the Lutherans, most protestant Churches began their reign with an orgy of artistic destruction almost unparallelled in world history. Taking the Old Testament condemnation of Idolatrous images as their cue, Reformers such as Calvin, Knox, Zwingli and Cranmer urged their followers into the systematic destruction of all Religious Art. In some nations this was done by government order, in others, mobs whipped up by zealous preachers, progressed from church to church tearing interiors apart, breaking, burning and hacking the contents to pieces. Shrines, statues, paintings, crucifixes, stained-glass windows, illustrated missals, even copes and vestments were destroyed by the tens of thousands. The cultural loss was incredible. Not one single piece of English medieval wooden statuary remains. Virtually the same applies to the world of Painting, where only a few battered works survived the systematic destruction. Perhaps there was a British Raphael, a British Giotto or Leonardo. We shall never know. All their works have been comprhensively destroyed. In England even personal missals and books of hours had to be handed in for burning on pain of imprisonment. The blood of every art historian would run cold at the thought of what would have happened to Western culture if Knox, Calvin, Cranmer or their allies had ever gained control of Italy. DESTRUCTION OF THE LIBRARIES In England, the monasteries held by far the greatest collection of books in the country, all the great libraries were destroyed. The
holocaust began between 1535 and 1540 with the libraries
of 800 monastic houses that were dissolved... Worcester,
for example, had 600 volumes at the time of the
dissolution. Of these only six survived to make their way
into the royal libraries. The Austin Friars at York had a
library of 646 volumes, of which only three have ever
been traced... A great number of them which purchased those supersticious mansions, rescued of those library books, some to use in their jakes, some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers.... John Bale 1549 The second time we came to New College, after we had declared your injunctions, we found all the Great Quadrant Court full of the leaves of Duns Scotus, the wind blowing them into every corner. And there we found one Mr Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the same book leaves, as he said, to make him scarecrows, or blawnshers to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to have a better cry with his hounds. Dr London and Dr Layton to Thomas Cromwell. c1540 The world-famous Book of Kells only survived destruction due to the bravery of Richard Plunkett, the last abbot, who smugged it out of St Mary's Abbey in 1539. The Protestant Rector of Malmesbury used the manuscripts he possessed to stop the bung-hole of his barrel of special ale; but the Rector was so far from being pursuaded to the contrary that he was accustomed to assert repeatedly that for stopping a bung-hole there was nothing in the world like an ancient parchment manuscript. Anthony Powell on John Aubrey. The Book of Discipline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. Calvin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther considered them 'fool's work' and at times dangerous." We are lucky that in England a slightly more moderate protestantism at least allowed Shakespeare and Marlowe to continue. 4. Bigotry In England and Lutheran Europe the Reformation transformed the Church from an Internationalist body into a State institution, run on National lines and under the authority of State Legislature. The idea of the "National" Church was constantly reinforced by linking it with the sense of national patriotism. Other forms of religious belief became "foreign" and "unpatriotic". The Catholic Church was often renamed the Roman Catholic Church, in order to emphasise that it was foreign and "other". And since it was taught that True Doctrine and therefore True Salvation lay only in the National Church, the people of other nations must therefore be opposed to True Faith, and therefore to God himself. This licensed treating them in a harsher and harsher fashion. We can see this particularly in the way Irish Catholics were treated during the English Civil War of the 1640s. Other soldiers captured by the Parliamentarians were imprisoned, ransomed or disarmed. But captured Irish Catholic troops were generally shot to the last man. "CHOSEN BY GOD" Calvinism proved even worse than other forms of Protestantism in this respect. This was because of the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination. This stated that God had, at the beginning of time, chosen certain people, (the saved, or elect) for eternal joy in Heaven, and the rest of humanity, (the reprobate) for eternal torment in Hell. Once God had placed you in one group, nothing that you could do could change this decision. Since most Calvinists wished to believe that they, their friends, relatives and fellow-countrymen had been chosen by God for Paradise. It became obvious that those chosen for eternal perdition in hell had to be those who didn't believe in the truths of Calvinism - Latitudinarians, Catholics, Foreigners... Since, under their theology, these people were irrevocably damned to hell anyway, it didn't matter how you treated them. Once Calvinists came to power over large groups on non-Calvinists, these darker elements of their theology came to the fore. Scottish Calvinist Prebyterians formed the major part of the protestant "settlement" of Ireland. They became a dominant Ascendancy, hated by the local Irish Catholics. Catholics quickly became 2nd class citizens, forbidden to vote, forbidden the higher professions, forbidden their own religion, barred from entry to university, their lands seized, and subject to harsh restrictions. When Famine came in the 1840s, virtually nothing was done to relieve the suffering, and fully half the population of Ireland died or was forced to emigrate. MANIFEST DESTINY In America, the majority of the colonists in the first centuries came from Calvinist "Scotch-Irish" stock. Often from the same groups who had imposed a virtual "Apartheid" upon Catholics in Ireland. A large portion of the rest were Calvinist Puritans and Baptists from England. Holding to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, these had far less interest than the Catholic French and Spanish in converting the Native American "Indians". Instead, the settlers developed a theology of "Manifest Destiny", that God had destined them to replace the "doomed" Indians of America. The native peoples would "die out" and the "chosen" protestant settlers would inherit their lands. This quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There was virtually no admixture with the Indians. Helped by disease, native tribes were driven from their lands into tiny "reserves". Tribes like the Pequod and the Huron were subject to organised massacre. The tribes of the southern USA were forced en-masse on a 2,000 mile winter death-march, The trail of Tears, into Oklahoma. Even in California, the Spanish policy of mission and conversion of the Indians was replaced after the US take-over in 1847, by a policy of "replacement". As late as 1900 bounties were still being paid for the scalps of local Indians. Today most of the Californian Indian tribes are extinct. RACIAL TENSION In the USA, the Penal Laws that had been used against the Irish Catholics, were transferred virtually unchanged to the Southern Slave States, where they became the "Jim Crow" laws, used to oppress and segregate the black slaves and ex-slaves. Again, Calvinist theology of the "elect" and "non-elect" helped sustain a rigid and bitter colour-line of division of a harshness rarely seen elsewhere. This was reinforced by the churches themselves barring black people from services, in "white-only" Baptist, Presbyterian and other churches. The only other place in the world where racial bigotry reached these levels was South Africa, where once again Calvinism played a leading role. The Calvinistic Dutch Reformed Church also established segregated congregations, for blacks and whites, and a consequently segregated and embittered society. Again the aim of the "chosen" was to replace the black inhabitants, and establish an elite society. So again we see that some of the world's most deeply-embittered and divided societies have developed where the poisoned theology of Calvinism has gained control. Many of the fruits of the Reformation were indeed bitter.
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