Audio only:
Joe highlights a few ironic things that some Protestants do when they celebrate Reformation Day.
Transcript:
Joe:
What’s actually happening in the Reformation is no less dark. It’s still celebrating sin only. Now it’s the sin of schism. It’s less spooky maybe, but it’s not less sinful. Thesis number 25 says that the power which the Pope has in general over purgatory corresponds to the power which any bishop or curate has in a particular way in his own diocese. And per, I don’t know of a lot of Protestants who would agree with that. If you’re imagining this is going to look or read anything like a Protestant theology textbook or anything like what you’d get in a Protestant church, you are wildly mistaken. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And tomorrow some Christians are going to celebrate a holiday that other Christians are afraid is not acceptable to celebrate. And the reason has to do with this question of whether it has evil origins or not.
I mean, of course, Reformation Day. So for those of you who may not be familiar with it, obviously for most normal people tomorrow is Halloween. But there are some people, some Christians even who say we shouldn’t be celebrating Halloween. And so either in addition to Halloween or instead of Halloween, they’ll also celebrate something they call Reformation Day honoring the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. And as a non Protestant, I find this kind of funny and I find this sort of ironic, sometimes ironic in a lighthearted fun way and sometimes ironic in a sad way, and I want to cover both of those extremes with you. So these are five things that I find ironic about Reformation Day. Your mileage may vary. These may not all be five things you do. These are just five things I’ve seen that I thought noteworthy. The first one is Calvinist graven images.
Now this is what actually got this list started all the way back in 2011. Excuse me, Danny Burke and Timothy Paul Jones were promoting these John Calvin Jack of lantern templates that you could carve your pumpkin to look like. John Calvin and Burke thought it was like one of the funniest things it’d ever seen, and I was really struck by the fact that it is literally a grave, an image. I mean, it’s very hard to have a form of image making these days that uses actual engraving for an ordinary person. If you think about all the art you’ve ever made, things like crayons, marker pencils, et cetera, you’re not really engraving. But with carving the Jack and lantern you are, and this matches some other Calvinist grave images. I’ve seen things like the Reformation Wall in Geneva, Switzerland. Now why would that be a big deal? Well, in a sense it’s not.
But in another sense, Exodus 20, part of the 10 Commandments says You shall not make for yourself. And then the Hebrew word there, which normally means idol, literally means a graven image. So you might say, Joe, that’s absurd, that’s unfair. Obviously Exodus 20 doesn’t mean you literally are not allowed to engrave images after all. Just a little bit after that in Exodus, God orders the Ark of the Covenant to be made with engraved cherubim on it. That’s a great point. That’s totally fair. You know who wouldn’t have bought that point though, John Calvin, because John Calvin thought that was a lame. He said, it is mere infatuation to attempt to defend images of God and the saints by the example of the cherub. So he doesn’t think you can point to that passage and justify making images of either God or saints. So if you think John Calvin is holy and you want to honor him on Reformation Day, John Calvin would not be cool with that. I just thought that was kind of funny and ironic. The second thing I thought was ironic, and this is a darker one by a lot, is that Reformation Day celebrates a document that damns Protestants. Now I want to be very clear about this. So here’s Ali best ducky accurately explaining where Reformation Day comes from,
CLIP:
Whether you or your family participate in any of these Halloween festivities. One thing that I would encourage all Christians to do is to honor this day as Reformation Day. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of a church of Wittenberg in 1517, and that is what mark’s reformation day.
Joe:
So that’s the idea. On October 31st, 1517 allegedly Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Now, scholars more recently have thrown a lot of doubt on this because we don’t actually have any evidence of that happening. The first time we hear about the nailing the theses to the door of Wittenberg is nearly 30 years later, and Luther never mentions doing anything like this. It seems more likely according to many historians that he would’ve just mailed these 95 theses to the Bishop rather than posting them up. Scholars don’t know. There just is no evidence from say the first 20 some odd years of Protestantism that this event actually happened. Not a big deal, but it is kind of an interesting thing. How much of what we know about the reformation is later inventions. I actually have a video about that as well, but more to the point, the 95 theses are a weird document for Protestants to celebrate because it’s true.
It challenges some aspects of the church’s practice with indulgences. But if you’re imagining this is going to look or read anything like a Protestant theology textbook or anything like what you’d get in a Protestant church, you are wildly mistaken. And so I think most of the people celebrating the 95, these have never really read it or considered what it has to say. For instance, thesis number 25 says that the power which the Pope has in general over purgatory corresponds to the power which any bishop or curate has in a particular way in his own diocese and perish. I don’t know of a lot of Protestants who would agree with that, that the Pope has that kind of authority over purgatory or how about thesis 56, the true treasures of the church out of which the Pope distributes indulgences are not sufficiently discussed or known among the people of Christ.
That is Luthers not denying purgatory. He’s not denying indulgences. He doesn’t like the way indulgences are being preached by people like Johan Tsel, but he doesn’t deny that these things are true and actually thinks that the merits of the church, the true treasures of the church actually need to be preached more so people can understand them better. He does have one anathema clause in there, but it’s not against the Catholic church, it’s not against Catholic bishops or anything like that. He says in thesis number 71, let him who speaks against the truth concerning papal indulgences be anathema and a cursed. So I regularly hear from Protestants who will say, oh, at the Council of Trent Rome ize the gospel, but guys, the founder of your religious movement ized you as well. That seems like a bigger problem in a lot of ways. Now, I realize Protestants don’t feel beholden to believe everything Martin Luther believes certainly not in 1517, but if you’re going to celebrate the anniversary of the 95 thesis, there is something kind of weird and ironic about celebrating the document that explicitly condemns you as an eth curse.
I don’t know. I just find that kind of ironic. The third irony, and this one, I don’t know if this is darker, it’s at least similarly dark, is that this is a matter of celebrating evil to avoid celebrating evil because look, I understand why a lot of Christians are uneasy Catholic, Protestant, you name it about celebrating Halloween because sometimes it’s too dark. It can seem demonic. People do it badly. I relate to all of that I completely understand. And so something like Reformation Day instead of that might be appealing. The problem is what’s actually happening in the reformation is no less dark, by which I mean it’s still celebrating sin only now it’s the sin of schism. It’s less spooky maybe, but it’s not less sinful. Martin Luther, there’s a collection of his sayings called Table Talk and you’ll find people who debate the accuracy of everything in there, but it’s a generally accepted source for quoting things Luther said and table talk number 4 56 Luther says, the chief cause that I fell out with the Pope was this.
The Pope boasted that he was the head of the church and condemned all that would not be under his power and authority for he said, although Christ be the head of the church, hit notwithstanding, there must be a corporal head of the church of upon Earth. So that’s his argument. It wasn’t really primarily about preparatory or indulgences or anything like this. It was the Pope claiming too much authority for himself. But even this Luther said, he says with this, I could have been content had he but taught the gospel pure and clear, not introduced human inventions and lies in. Instead, I find this very interesting Luther’s position is papacy might be okay as long as the Pope teaches things that I agree with. Now, he’s not going to put it like that, but if you think about it, what does it mean to teach the gospel pure and clear?
If not, you teach the same understanding of the gospel that I have because obviously different Christians articulating different theologies and different views of the gospel all think that they’re the ones teaching the gospel pure and clear. So it really does amount to Luther saying he was willing to follow the Pope as long as the Pope agreed with him, which sure who wouldn’t I guess. But then he makes a surprising admission. He says, we through God’s grace are not heretics. He schisms causing indeed separation and division wherein we are not to blame but are adversaries who gave occasion thereto because they remain not by God’s word alone, which we have here and follow. Now, I want you to think about this because I think this is a really crucial argument. Luther is admitting to being a schmo, and I think Protestants need to grapple with was Luther guilty of the sin of schism or not?
Now, you can always say if someone initiates a divorce or a schism or whatever, sure, they maybe filed the paperwork, they did it, but they were kind of pushed into it. And so I’ve seen Protestants say, oh, Luther didn’t leave the church. The church left Luther, which is a wild statement to make about a mere human being. But that’s the question we should ask because even if you’re someone who falls in that campus and says, oh, the Catholic church isn’t a true church after the Council of Trent because it denies ide, okay, is the church a true church in 1517 when Luther’s protesting the sale of indulgences and submitting his case to be heard by the Pope and everything? Is it then or was there not a true visible church on earth or what? I think you need to grapple with that very seriously because schism, if it means anything, involves a breaking of visible communion.
So if your idea of church is so ephemeral, so up in the clouds somewhere that you can’t really be amatic because no one has access to the church, that doesn’t seem like a good definition of what the church is. So if there is a visible church on earth during Luther’s, say boyhood, if it’s not the Catholic church and it’s not the Eastern Orthodox Church and it’s not the Oriental Orthodox Church, what is it? And if it is the Catholic church, then Luther’s right that he’s a sch asthmatic and so are the other early Protestants. Now why does that matter though? Because schmos don’t inherit the kingdom of God. Obviously you can repent of the sin, but it is a damnable sin. St. Paul says so explicitly in Galatians five, he lists things like enmity and strife and dissension and party spirit and says, I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
So if this action, even if you think he’s right on a lot of the principles, even if you think he’s right on all the merits, if the act of dividing from the church of separating, of being a self-proclaimed schematic is sinful and wrong, that’s a weird thing to be celebrating on Reformation Day, isn’t it? Okay, that’s the third irony. The fourth one is that I think evangelicals should hate Reformation day. Now, this one, I couldn’t find a good way to title it because I have a very specific kind of Protestant in mind, and it’s certainly not all Protestants. There is a type of Protestant who believes something like this.
CLIP:
Samhain is obviously the original Halloween. Samhain is the Pagan death festival. Samhain is the time of year where people believe that spirits of the dead would walk among us and they would worship these spirits. Samhain is still very much celebrated even today, and that’s where a lot of people get confused because a lot of people say, well, isn’t Halloween a Christian holiday? The reason why Halloween is known to be a Christian holiday is because it was appropriated by the Roman Catholics in order to be that. And the reason why they made Smahain this death festival into a Christian holiday is because they wanted to convert the Celtic people into Catholicism. And the way that they did that was by allowing them to keep the same core elements of the death festival Samhain, but instead of worshiping dead spirits and dead family members, now the Roman Catholics wanted them to worship the Christian martyrs.
Joe:
Now, the first thing I want to say is that’s not really true. This whole thing about samhain being a festival of death that was in All Saints Day and Halloween were invented to combat it. None of that’s true. I covered that last year in an episode called Should Christians Boycott Halloween. And in that, I look at the work of Robert Davis escaping through flames. Halloween is a Christian festival and he makes several important points, but I want to highlight just a couple of them. If you want the longer form of this, go check that video out. But he points out, for instance, Samhain isn’t this broad Pan-Celtic festival all over England, France, Ireland, et cetera. It’s just Irish. And second, what we do have in the way of evidence from this is just of it being a celebration of the harvest and there’s no indication of actions exhibiting a religious or supernatural significance.
In other words, from everything we can tell, Samhain is literally just a harvest fest that you’ve got an agrarian society, got a bunch of farmers, and at the end of it, they want to have a party because they’re done with the hardest work of their year. That’s a very normal thing. This is going out to drinks with your coworkers on a Friday. It’s that. But the agrarian form to read this as some like ancient, mystical, magical pagan wright is to impute to it a bunch of stuff. We have no actual historical evidence of it ever being imbued with originally, and it simply isn’t there in the records. And so there’s this narrative that this was this huge holiday celebrating the demonic, and we wanted them to worship saints instead of worshiping their gods. None of this is true. None of this is true. The actual history is the Christians had been celebrating All Saints Day for a long time, and the movement of it to November 1st didn’t come from Ireland or anywhere near there.
That started in Germany, and it was obviously not in response to an Irish holiday of Samhain. And if there was a desire to respond to an Irish holiday called Samhain, why would you make that a global festival for the church? None of it makes sense. So the whole thing is built on a very kind of paper thin idea of history. There’s little to no evidence. I mean, the evidence is basically, yeah, there was a holiday called Samhain and people would celebrate after they did the harvest. And then people are like, well, maybe they did demonic stuff. Maybe they did pagan stuff. We don’t know that, but we can invent it. We can imagine it, but that’s just what it’s, it’s just people’s invention, their hyperactive imaginations. You might as well say, well, you know what, I bet before they ate meals that they probably said thank you to some pagan deity.
So therefore, grace before meals was clearly a Christian attempt to co-opt Pagan practices. And I think the normal response would just be That is weird and wrong, obviously not true. So what’s ironic about this? Well, everything that we’re falsely accused of doing with Halloween actually is done by the opponents of Halloween. Here’s what I mean by that. The weirdest form is when you have Protestants who have harvest fests because they don’t want to do Halloween, they’re afraid Halloween’s too much like samhain, and then they do Harvest Fest, which is actually what SAmhain was like. samhain by all the historical evidence appears to have been a harvest fest and you decided you didn’t want it look like sa, so you made a Harvest Fest, okay, that one didn’t quite work out. You thought it would, there had a little irony there. But moreover, the idea of particularly when you do this on October 31st with Reformation Day or Harvest Fest or Trunk or Treat or whatever you want to call it, this desire to say, we don’t like how spooky and pagan and demonic and a cult Halloween is, so we’re going to create a Christian alternative.
Again, I have no problem with somebody saying they want to do that, but you can’t do that and complain that Catholic missionaries might’ve done the same thing when they got to places and said, Hey, instead of doing that weird creepy holiday, how about we do a good holiday instead? That way you can still celebrate and still have fun, but you’re no longer doing it to a demon. That’s actually not a bad thing to do. That isn’t the thing that happened with Halloween, but there’s nothing in principle wrong with that. The example I like to use is May 1st is Mayday the communist holiday. And the church pretty intentionally responds to this by creating St. Joseph the worker day to say, yes, work is dignified, but treat that in a Christian way and not in a Marxist way. That’s a response. But it would be absurd to say, oh, this is just Marxism.
No, it’s the response to Marxism. It’s an alternative. Well, similarly, if Christians create a holiday to rival a Pagan one, they’re not just papered over paganism. And if you think they are, then you’ve got to think Harvest Fest is just Halloween. It certainly looks like Halloween. Alright, so that’s the fourth irony that the evangelicals who don’t like Halloween because they think it’s like SA should really hate all of the Halloween replacements that often look way more like sa The fifth and final irony that Reformation Day celebrates failed reform. And I don’t know why, but it took me a while to realize when people were saying that it’s not the Protestant Reformation, it’s the Protestant revolt, that they’re actually right and that this matters because it sounded like they were just being pedantic, like, okay, fine, whatever is American Revolution, enough of a revolution for you.
But no, this actually matters. This makes sense. Imagine if we called the American Revolution like the English Reformation when we’re not reforming England, we’re leaving England. So it’d be a mistake to call it that. Also, there is another thing called the English Reformation, so it’d be a confusing mistake to call it that, but the Protestant Reformation, well here, Claire Adams has a book called The Human Experience, and it’s just a basic college textbook, but one of the things that covers is the difference between reform and revolution. And she explains these are both actions people undertake to change an existing institution, system or practice with the goal of improving it. Reform involves making internal changes or modifications and without completely removing the existing system, if someone says they want to reform the company, you don’t assume they’re going to break away from the company. They’re going to just try to fix things so the company runs better.
On the other hand, as she explains, when changes are not being implemented or have not gone far enough, reform may become the catalyst for revolution. The goal of revolution is usually an extreme or complete change to the status quo, including the replacement of the existing authority. So if somebody said they wanted to reform the government, you would not assume that they mean they wanted to secede from the union. Presumably you would think they wanted to fix the existing powers that be in the state of affairs and status quo. And so if you think about it in that light, church reform should be about reforming the church not breaking away from the church. And so there are plenty of church reformers in the history of the church. Think about people like St. Francis. St. Francis has a vision by God where he is told, rebuild my church.
He originally takes that to mean literally the church there in Assisi and he rebuilds it. But it turns out he’s being called to create this whole wave of renewal within the church in the 12th century, and he does. That’s a reform. You go from bad Catholics to good Catholics, but what Luther is trying to do is you go from bad Catholics or good Catholics to good Lutherans, that’s no longer a reform. That’s a revolution. And so I here I think it matters. The issue in other context is people weren’t living out their Catholic faith, they weren’t doing what the church told them they should be doing, and that includes plenty of churchmen, that includes even Popes. They weren’t living according to the gospel, they weren’t living according to Catholic teaching. And so the solution there was do things that are more in keeping with Catholic teaching.
But for Luther, the problem is instead and for all the reformers after him who have different ideas of this, is that what the things the church is calling you to do, they’re not even the right things to do in the first place. And so the church teaching needs to change not just the holiness or the practice of members. That’s an important difference in how we conceptualize things. This is one of the points Matthew Barrett makes in his book, the Reformation as Retrieval, is that the Catholic idea of reform is about things like spiritual renewal, whereas the Protestant idea of reform was things like changing teaching. I think that’s a really good insight on Barrett’s part, particularly as someone who’s not himself a Catholic, but only one of those is truly reform. If you take the existing teachings of the church and say, we reject these teachings, we’re going to form a different denomination.
That’s not really a reform. Now, you could always say, well, the church could have changed all of her teachings, all the people saying that they’re not going to get what they’re asking for there. So I would say this, there have been plenty of church reforms. There were even church reforms in response to the Reformation. Think about the Council of Trent. It forbids, for instance, the sale of indulgences. A lot of things that the reformers were justifiably grieved by are addressed. So this strikes me as I think an area where maybe there’s some agreement and some disagreement because a lot of Protestants celebrate reformation date, not because they love schism or anything like that, but because they saw that there were real problems in the church and they’re really happy that people stood up to the church and faced those problems. And the reality is there were real problems in the church, but breaking away from the church wasn’t the right answer.
Just like you might have real problems in your marriage, but divorce isn’t the right answer. That’s a basic kind of principle. This is why we’re against schism even when it’s inconvenience. I know I say this all the time, but I have to say it today in John 17, when Jesus prays for his future disciples that we will all be one, he prays that knowing all of the excuses, we’re going to have to not be one. He prays that knowing all of the church conflicts and crises and everything else that might justify you wanting to leave, wanting to break away, and still he prays that we’ll all be one. So I want to end now with a Protestant homily actually for Reformation Day by the Methodist theologian, Stanley Harva of us. And this was back in 1995, and this is just part of a much longer, it’s really worth reading the whole thing, but it’s on why he doesn’t like Reformation Day, and I thought this was brilliantly and beautifully written.
He says, it must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday. I do not understand why it’s part of the Church Year. Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the church Catholic. On the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure or at least horror as part of our church year. We do, after all go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly it’s the reformation is to be narrated rightly. It is to be narrated as part of those dark days. Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success, but when we make reformation a success, it only ends up killing us. After all, the very name Protestantism is meant to denote a reform movement of protest within the church Catholic.
When Protestantism becomes an end in itself, which it certainly has through the mainstream denominations in America, it becomes anathema. If we no longer have broken hearts of the church’s division, then we cannot help but Unfaithfully celebrate Reformation Sunday. So look, I want to echo that. I understand that there were plenty of abuses and outrageous and things done badly on both sides of the reformation, and I think that should be a cause of great mourning, not for celebration. That if you take seriously that Catholics and Protestants are both Christians, then surely the division of Catholics and Protestants and then of Protestants and Protestants and Protestants and Protestants and Protestants should be a sign of great tragedy. It should not be something we celebrate in the same way that we don’t celebrate when a married couple gets divorced. So I hope that these words are received in the spirit of both a little bit of good faith, joking, but also in a heartfelt plea to say, I don’t think Reformation Sunday or Reformation Day is a thing that should be honored amongst Christians for much the same reason the Stanley Harvest says that. I think this is something that we should be striving to move past, not to dwell on or to bask in. So with that, I hope you have a blessed Halloween, blessed All Saints Day and blessed All Souls Day. If you want to know more about why we as Christians certainly can celebrate Halloween and all that stuff about how not really a pagan origins, you should be able to check that out right here for Shameless popery, I’m Joe heschMeyer. God bless you.