Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1


cause of true faith. This greater and more accurate


knowledge of the early church fa- thers, so vigorously promoted by Erasmus, led many to question con- temporary Christianity. Was this the faith that had animated the beloved pioneers of the Gospel, giving birth to those great Creeds of the Church (the Nicene Creed, the Creed of Chalcedon) which were considered the bedrock of Christian theology? For many, a credibility gap began to open up between church life as they experienced it in the religious institutions of their day, and church life as they saw it in these newly available writings of the fathers. John Calvin, for example, would put it like this to the Roman Catholic Cardinal Sadoleto: ‘Our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, and all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the church, which was at first sullied and distorted by uneducated men of undistinguished character, and afterwards disgrace- fully mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman pope and his faction. I will not press you so closely as to call you back to that form of the church which the apostles instituted (though it presents us with a unique pattern of a true church, and deviation from that pattern, even slightly, involves us in error). But to indulge you so far, I beg you to place before your eyes that ancient form of the church, such as it is shown to have been during those times in the writings of Chry- sostom and Basil among the Greeks, and Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augus- tine among the Latins.’


In this Renaissance advocacy of the fathers as the best interpreters of the Gospel, one particular father loomed very large: Augustine of Hippo. Part- ly this was simply because Augustine towered over all the other fathers in the Western church for his theologi- cal genius, formative influence, and prolific authorship. But many found food for their souls in Augustine’s devotional and doctrinal writings. Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli became wholehearted disciples of Augustine, notably his understanding of the sovereignty of divine grace. A generation later, John Calvin said he would be happy to have his faith expressed entirely according to the teachings of Augustine. Here, then, is another and very specific way the Renaissance flowed into the Reforma- tion. By creating a new market for Augustine, it fed into the Augustinian ‘renewal movement’ that lay close to the Reformation’s heart. Nor must we discount Erasmus himself. His disgust at the flaws of late-medieval Catholicism, articulated often in devastating satire, helped to awaken in people’s minds a readiness for drastic remedies. His Praise of Folly is generally held up as the supreme example of Erasmus’ writing in this genre. To my mind, far funnier is his Julius Excluded from Heaven, in which the soul of Pope Julius II (1503-13) arrives at the gates of Heaven, only to find that St Peter doesn’t recognise him and refuses him entry – upon which Julius threatens to excommuni- cate Peter. It is side-splitting humour, and it is hard to see how the papacy could wholly recover from such irrev- erent mockery. Here is a brief extract


Seeds of the Reformation page 25


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