Did Martin Luther intend to break with the 16th century Church? And if so, was that necessarily a bad thing? What we can learn from history… and the game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”!
Intro:
You are listening to Shameless Popery, with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi. Welcome to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to talk to you about the radical nature of the Reformation, and the reason I want to talk about this is because there’s a popular idea these days, particularly among Protestants, even among some Catholics, that Luther didn’t really mean to start his own religion. He didn’t mean to start his own church. He was just trying to reform real abuses in the church, and was excommunicated for it. That’s not really true, and one of the ways we know that’s not really true is from Martin Luther’s own writings. But I want to focus particularly on one aspect, one kind of argument, and it is basically an appeal to authority, and the idea is really simple. In the early church, in really the 1500 years prior to Luther’s reform, people would regularly appeal to the consensus of the church to prove a teaching.
Now, I don’t mean here just like an official dogmatic definition from a church counselor, from a Pope or anything like that. I mean, simply, everybody knows this, because this is what we’ve always agreed on, this kind of argumentation, and I think it’s going to sound foreign to many of you watching this, but here’s an example. This is St. Augustine, and on the Predestination of the Saints, he mentions that the Book of Wisdom is inspired scripture. His defense of it is that, well, for so long, a course of years, that book has deserved to be read in the Church of Christ, from the station of the readers of the Church of Christ. That is, it’s read in church, in the liturgy, and it’s heard by all Christians from bishops downwards, even to the lowest lay believers, penitent and catechumens who venerate it with divine authority. That’s the argument that, look, we know the Book of Wisdom is inspired scripture, because everybody knows that, because the church has always treated it that way, and that’s good enough.
Now, that argument, again, this is not the church dramatically defined it in this year. It’s not the Pope said. It’s just, we’ve always known this. This is an appeal to the consensus of the church. Now, there’s a lot more that could be said about this, but this idea of the consensus of the church or the consensus of the early Christians that this is what Christians have always done, this has been the unanimous belief of Christians throughout the ages, or at least this has been the overwhelming belief of Christians throughout the ages. Because Augustine knows not every Christian regards the Book of Wisdom as canonical. St. Jerome is a great example of someone who lived in Augustine’s own day, who didn’t think the Book of Wisdom was as inspired, as canonical as other books. So, the argument from consensus is not really an argument from literal unanimity, but it is an argument that, hey, when everybody in Christianity or overwhelmingly, what we’ve gotten through the ages has been X is true.
That’s every reason to believe that X is true, and it’d be foolish to take the opposite opinion. Luther doesn’t buy that argument. Maybe you don’t either, but Luther doesn’t buy that argument, and he is totally comfortable saying that everybody besides him is wrong, and I’m not exaggerating about that. I mention this in my book. The Early Church Was the Catholic Church. There’s one doctrine in particular that I’d like to point this out at, because Luther, he really spells it out. In the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he says, There’s today no more generally accepted and firmly believed opinion in the church than this, that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice,” and he says, “This is an abuse.” He says, “This is as common a belief as you’re going to get in Christianity, and it’s still a false belief,” and that’s a really striking kind of claim.
Now, you’ll notice there he’s talking about the 16th century, but he realizes this isn’t just true of the 16th century, because he also explains, well why is this? He says, “Well, it’s believed by the common people. It’s in the words of the canon,” that is to say, in the mass itself we refer to these gifts, these offerings, this holy sacrifice, this offering. Then we explicitly, the priest explicitly prays that the sacrifice may be accepted even as the sacrifice of Abel, and is referred to as, Christ is referred to as the sacrifice of the altar, in addition to the common belief of the people, in addition to the words of the mass, he also says, ‘Well, there’s also the sayings of the Holy Fathers,” the great number of examples and the constant usage and custom of all the world. I don’t know. When I read that, I was really struck by the fact that Luther is saying, everybody disagrees with me, today and throughout history, and they’re all wrong.
Now, he goes on to nuances a little bit, and so in fairness to him, I want to give a little bit of that nuance. He says, “Well, what are we going to say about the words of the mass? What are we going to say about the sayings of the church fathers?” Well, he said, “On the one hand, if we can’t find any way of kind of excusing them, basically,” he said, “The safer course is to reject them all, rather than admit that the masses of work are a sacrifice, unless we deny the word of Christ, and overthrow faith together with the mass.” In other words, he is so convinced of his own reading of scripture that we cannot consider the Mass of Sacrifice, cannot consider the mass of work, that therefore he’s willing to throw out 100% of Christians. He’s willing to throw out everybody in his own day.
He’s willing to throw out everybody who came before him, but nevertheless he’s going to try to say, “Well, okay. Well, so we don’t have to throw out the mass. We don’t have to throw out the church fathers. Maybe we can say they were gathering these collections, and maybe when we hear the word sacrifice in offering that this meant not the sacrament, not the Eucharist, but it just meant these monetary collections.” I’ve never seen anyone seriously defend that position. Even Luther doesn’t seem to really buy his own argument there. He’s looking for a way of avoiding the intellectual conclusion he’s come to, which is everybody but me is wrong. Now that is a really striking position, and it’s that particular thing I want to talk about, the everybody but me is wrong kind of vision of Christianity, because I think it’s incredibly dangerous. I think it’s something that all of us, Catholic, Protestant, whatever, should be on guard against in ourselves.
I think it’s a really clear reason to reject the Reformation, and I’m by no means the first person to notice this. So, there’s a book called Are You Alone Wise?: A Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, by Susan Schreiner, in which she points out that this question, are you alone wise, haunted Luther throughout his life as a reformer. And that even in 1521 Henry VII is asking, “Well, how could Luther alone be right while the whole tradition is wrong?” She says, “Almost every opponent repeated this accusing question.” Time and again, Luther defended himself against this accusation in both his early and late writings. So, I don’t know. It’s really kind of striking and one of the places that we see Luther kind of grapple with this is in his commentary on Genesis.
I think this is just so fascinating to me, so kind of shocking, because Luther has clearly got this on his mind, and he clearly presents himself as the new Noah, which is, I would say, certainly as a Catholic, like shockingly arrogant to say, “Everyone but me is horribly evil, and I’ve been sent to deliver the world from corruption just like Noah was.” So, in his commentary he says, “Well, amid the corruption of all these,” meaning the people around Noah, “stands Noah, a truly marvelous man. He swerves neither to the left nor to the right. He retains the true worship of God. He retains the pure doctrine, and lives in the fear of God.” Now, I want to pause on that for a second, because already we actually see a difference there. Noah is a traditionalist, in other words. Noah is preserving what’s been handed on. He’s not an innovator. He’s not a reformer. He’s not someone who says, “Here’s some new idea. Here’s some new interpretation of the divine Commandments that nobody before me’s ever done.”
He’s holding onto what’s been handed down in the midst of a corrupt generation. So, it’s, that’s the first red flag that Luther’s not really the new Noah, but we’ll continue. He says, there’s no doubt that a depraved generation hated him inordinately, tantalized him in various ways, and thus insulted him. “Art thou thou alone wise? Does thou alone please God? Are the rest of us all in error?” Now, I want to just pause here, and say none of that’s in scripture. Luther’s clearly just projecting his own baggage, the questions he’s been dealing with onto Noah, onto kind of the situation Noah finds himself in Genesis. But I’ll continue. “Shall we all be damned, thou alone does not err? Thou alone shall not be condemned? Now that’s even more striking, because Luther is recognizing his position logically isn’t just that everybody else is wrong on some insignificant doctrine that he happens to get right, but that on an issue of actual salvific importance, everyone but him is in damnable error.
Everyone but him, in the 16th century, but everyone but in the 15th centuries prior to that as well. This is really an incredibly shocking, incredibly megalomaniacal kind of vision of Christianity. Everyone but me is going to hell, because I alone understand the truth. So, yeah, rightly, people are calling this out as being just insane, and Luther, again doing himself as Noah says, “Thus, the just and holy man must have concluded in his mind that all others were in error, and about to be condemned,” while he and his offspring alone were to be saved. “Although his conviction was right in the matter, his lot was a hard one. The holy man was in various ways troubled by such a reflections.” In other words, Luther has not completely lost the plot. He knows, yeah, these seem to be kind of crazy conclusions I’m coming to. It’s pretty hard to defend the idea that everyone besides me is actually in error.
In case you think I’m just applying this, Luther’s viewing himself as the Noah, he makes it pretty clear. He goes, “The wretched Papists pressed us today with this one argument. Do you believe that all the fathers have been an error”? Now I want to focus here on the question. It’s not, do you believe that all the 16th century people are in error? It’s not. Do you believe that you know the Borgia Popes or the Renaissance papacy or [inaudible 00:10:21] selling indulgences are in error? No. The question is, do you believe the church fathers are in error? Do you believe the early Christians are in error? Do you believe the people who died to bring Christianity to us today, that they were all believers in damnable heresy? He admits it seems so hard to believe, especially of the worthier ones such as Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard, and that whole throng of the best men who’ve governed churches with the word, and have been adorned with the august name of the church, the laborers of such we both laud and admire.
So, yeah, he can’t just say these were all horribly wicked men, because it’s just not, anyone who reads the church fathers knows that isn’t true. Anyone who sees the way they defend Christianity at the cost of their own lives knows that they’re not just these wretched, horrible godless men. Yet, nevertheless, he’s going to say, “But surely no less a difficulty confronted Noah himself,” who alone is called just and upright. He points out that Noah’s peers would’ve raved against him, because Noah followed quoting him here, “another doctrine and another worship.” Now, what I want to really press here is that this doesn’t apply to Luther, because he’s just acknowledged that the church fathers have obvious saints. You might quibble here and there with the conclusion they come to, but to deny the holiness of one or all of the people considered saints by the church in these early days is really fighting an uphill battle, because they’re just so obviously holy.
Now, that’s a very striking contrast to how the Book of Genesis presents the people alive in Noah’s day. It says that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. So much that God is presented as regretting, having created humans and saying, “I will blot out man, whom I’ve created from the face of the ground.” Then it says, “but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” So, in other words, everyone but Noah seems to just be fanatically corrupt. Luther cannot claim that about the early Christians, whom he’s rejecting. He can’t claim they’re just fanatically corrupt, because you don’t have Christianity without these early martyrs, without these early witnesses of the faith. Anyone who’s read their writings realizes they’re not fanatically corrupt, that this was a real sacrifice to follow Jesus Christ, and that they really pursued this sacrifice at great kind of pain to themselves.
So, it’s nothing like the great deluge. It’s nothing like the great flood. So, if they are not the corrupt and wicked generation that we see in Genesis, then it also follows that Luther can’t claim to be the new Noah. In other words, if Noah’s whole thing was following a different worship than the wicked people around him, and Luther’s trying to apply that to why he rejects the early church fathers, the early Christians, why he thinks all of them are wrong and only he’s right. What he’s saying there is that he follows a different worship than early Christianity. He’s drawing himself, by his own words, outside of Christianity. Now that is just something to contemplate if you’re a Protestant, that Luther realized to be a Christian for 1500 years meant amongst other things, to consider that the mass was the sacrifice, the representation of Jesus Christ to the Father.
You can try to quibble and say, “Well maybe they didn’t understand the words in the way that they seem to mean,” and you’ll see that they mean exactly what they mean, that the meaning is very clear. So, Luther’s left in this position where he has to both pay lip service to how great and worthy ministers of the word they are, and compare them to those who die in the flood, because of their unspeakable wickedness. He’s trying to thread a needle that I think is impossible to thread, because you can’t really, logically hold both of those positions. Okay. So, all of that is me just saying, “Hey look, Luther knowingly broke with Christianity, not just a few corruptions here and there, but Christianity as it had been practiced on earth for a millennium and a half, that he just said, ‘Everybody but me is wrong, and they’re committing damnable heresy, and I alone have the truth,’ and that his opponents rightly called him on this.
Now that leads to a question, because you might say, “Well, maybe Luther was right. How do we know he wasn’t?” I want to give a couple answers to that question. The first answer I want to give is from scripture. The second is from pop culture. You’ll see where I’m going with this in a second. But the one from scripture is this, in John 16, Jesus promises the last supper. “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he’ll declare to you the things that are to come.” Now, this is one of just many promises Jesus makes. He promises not to leave us orphans.
He promise to send, as you saw here, the Spirit of Truth. He also calls them the counselor. There are these repeated kind of promises. The gates of hell won’t overcome the church, from Matthew 16. The list goes on. It doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with the scriptural data to say everybody was in error. Because if the Spirit of Truth is guiding anybody into truth at all, you’re not going to have everyone in error. Yet, Luther’s view … now, I gave his view on the [inaudible 00:15:54] mass, that really is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of examples in which Luther breaks away from what everyone before him had done. When you look at what the Reformers taught about justification, forensic justification, even Protestant historians like Alistair McGrath will say, “This is a theological nova. This is a novelty. This is something that hadn’t been believed by Christianity until the 16th century.”
So, all that’s to say Luther is breaking in a really radical way, not on one issue, but on a lot of issues that were unanimously, universally believed as far as we can tell, and that if the spirit of truth is doing anything, he’s surely protecting either the collective, I would argue, or at least somebody. There would at least be a faithful remnant. Yet, Luther’s argument is that there’s neither, that until him, everybody is just wrong. So, that’s the argument from scripture. More could be said, but I want to actually go in a much weirder direction. I’ve gotten kind of obsessed with the looking at some of the data behind the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? This game show’s been on for decades now, which is crazy, because I remember when it came out, and I am realizing my own mortality. When it originally came out it had three lifelines.
This has kind of changed now in the age of the internet. But it’s important that you know just a general idea of how the game works. You’ll see where I’m going at this in a minute. So, here’s Regis Philbin, the original host explaining back in 1999 on the second episode how these three lifelines work.
Intro:
Money. We want you to win as much as possible, Norman. We’re even throwing in three lifeline, not that you’ll need them, but they are 50/50, and the computer will take away two of the wrong answers, leaving one wrong answer and one correct answer. Ask the Audience. The audience will vote on their keypads. They’ll let you know how they feel about it. Or you can phone a friend, anybody in the country and we’ll put you through.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That last line is really important, that with a phone a friend, you can phone anybody in the country, and talk to them for 30 seconds. Now, I want you to just think, without me giving away the information, maybe you can tell where this is going. If you’ve got real money, up to $1 million on the line, and you’ve got those three options to find the truth, and you face a question you don’t know the answer to, what do you use? Now, 50/50, it’s straightforward. It gets rid of two of the four answers. But looking specifically at the other two, which of those do you think is more effective? Calling a person of your choice, anyone you know, anywhere in the United States or polling a random group of people who happen to be in the audience?
It seems like it ought to be asking an expert, asking a friend, because we say phone a friend, but we really mean like phone the smartest person in the particular area, because you’ve already seen the question. So, if it’s a sports question, you’d probably have a friend who you know is just like the sports guy, who knows all the sports data or if it’s English literature or something. In other words, it’s not just one person of your choosing. You can go as deep as you want into your social network and find someone you think, this person would be, who I would bet real money would know the answer to this question or turn it over to a bunch of random strangers, who don’t even pretend to be experts. As you [inaudible 00:19:09] can tell me from the fact that I’m raising this, the answer is kind of counterintuitive. And this was brought out by James Surowiecki in the Wisdom of Crowds. He says, “Everything we think we know about intelligence suggests that the smart individual will offer the most help,” and he said the experts did okay.
They offered the right answer under pressure, almost 65% of the time. But they paled in comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio, picked the right answer 91% of the time. So, two-thirds of the time phoning a friend is going to get you the right answer. If you ask random strangers, it’s more than nine times out of 10. Now, there were some problems, and Surowiecki even notices this in his book. This is old data. This is from 2004. That’s when his book comes out, and actually the data itself is even I think older than that. It just comes from the internal kind of records-keeping from the game show people themselves. So, it’s not scientifically rigorous. It’s not been parsed out, based on what was the difficulty of the question, et cetera, et cetera.
Fortunately, there’s a weird amount of, or maybe not a weird amount, there’s a lot of stuff written about Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, about the way solving problems works, because you get to see in these unedited, in front of a large group of people, here are these three ways you can solve a problem. You can have a computer randomly cut the number of options in half. You can ask these crowd of strangers or you can ask any one person of your choosing. What they find is really consistent. So, the game is not just, it started in the US, but it spread a across the country, and so, or excuse me, across the world. Two sociologists from the University of Bern in Switzerland, Axel Franzen and Sonja Pointner did a similar study in 2010, looking at the German version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? They were looking at all the data from 1999 to 2007, and their findings agreed, but were actually a little more extreme even than what James Surowiecki talks about back in 2004.
So, they say, yeah, the Audience Lifeline is the best one at every level of difficulty, followed by the 50/50 Lifeline and then the Phone a Friend. In other words, asking the audience, asking the consensus of the people in the room is better than randomly cutting down your choices, and that is even better than reaching out to the one person you think is going to know the answer. Now that is a really striking finding to me, because it means if you have one person saying everybody besides me is wrong, the chances are good statistically, no matter kind of what the topic is, they’re probably wrong. Now, we can caveat that, but I want to give you a little more of the data. So, they look specifically, they break the questions down by difficulty, because the questions go, there’s 15 questions to get you $1 million, and they go from easy to heart.
So, overall the error rate was 6.2%. So, the audience was right about 94% of the time. But if you phoned a friend, the error rate wasn’t 6%. It was 46%. It was several times worse to call your buddy. It was basically a 50/50 chance. When you look at the hardest questions, there’s a 38%, 38.7% error rate for asking the audience. So, even on things that you wouldn’t expect ordinary people to know, even on things that ordinary people don’t know, these are really hard questions. Even there, trusting the consensus that the audience is coming to, is you’re probably in luck. On the other hand, trusting the person you hand-picked, you’re probably out of luck, because the error rate for phoning a friend, 69.4%. That is scarcely better than randomly choosing one of the four. So, all that’s to say, a lot of people have handpicked Luther as their kind of phone of friend, theological answer guy.
Yet, everything we know about that suggests that’s not a good way to do things. Now, I want to caveat that a little more, because it doesn’t mean that every time, like if you’ve got a super complicated mathematical equation, and you know a brilliant mathematician, you’d probably go with them instead of polling a group of random people. But even Luther doesn’t think that’s the way scripture is. Luther argues that everybody can understand scripture. Now, that doesn’t mean everybody can understand it super easily. It doesn’t mean we don’t need theologian. It doesn’t mean we don’t need guidance, but he argues for what he calls perspicuity or the clarity of scripture, that anyone led by the Holy Spirit can understand scripture. Again, not necessarily super easily, but it can be done, and so I think in fairness, we should put it at the level of the medium questions. These are the questions, five to 10 of the 15 questions on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
One to five are the easy ones. He doesn’t think it’s that easy, but five to 10 is the kind of medium difficulty. If you look at the error rate there, it is shocking. It is jaw- dropping. It is a 1% error rate for asking the audience or a 28.6% error rate for asking a so-called expert, for asking a friend who you think is going to know the answer. Which means, applying it here, that when Luther questions the scriptural interpretations, when he questions what people believe Christianity teaches, the odds that he’s wrong are about 28 times higher than the odds that the consensus of the early Christians is wrong, even ignoring the role of the Holy Spirit. That’s just looking at the way reasoning works. That’s really just looking at the way that everything we know about consensus, decision-making and these things kind of work, that when you are saying everyone besides me is wrong, even in an area in which the Holy Spirit isn’t working to provide some sort of certainty, you’re probably wrong.
Now, we can make further distinctions, because a lot of people are probably thinking, what about all these great mathematical discoveries? What about Copernicus? What about Galileo? What about these people? Yeah, fair enough. In the data that we’re looking at, there are going to be times in which the expert might know, and the audience doesn’t. The audience is not perfect. It fails 1% of the time on the medium difficulty questions, and some of those you might know a person who they’re positive what the right answer is, and if you’d just reached out to them, you would’ve gotten the right answer. So, we can acknowledge that. The other thing is that science doesn’t really work the way theology does, because there’s what you might call an epistemic completeness to theology, meaning we have the fullness of revelation given to us in Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1:1-2, that God reveals himself in various ways and the Old Covenant, and then in the New Covenant now reveals himself by the son.
So, in the epistle of Jude, Verse three, it talks about contending for the faith delivered once for all to the apostles. Science isn’t like that. We don’t have science delivered once for all. We’re constantly discovering new things. We’re finding galaxies we didn’t even know existed before. But theology isn’t like that. Theology is not, if you’re suddenly discovering books of the Bible that weren’t there before, that’s a bad sign, that you are instead called to contend for the faith delivered once for all. Which means that whatever scientific analogs you might be thinking of probably don’t apply. So, again, I would say three things. Number one, Luther radically breaks from Christianity as it was practiced for 1500 years. He knows he does. He all but acknowledges that he does. I mean, he does acknowledge that he does in Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and he does so with kind of an audacity.
He does so in the face of even Henry VIII and people, realizing that doesn’t make sense. How could you possibly be the only one whose right on this? He does so on issues of significant importance, because when we’re talking about the Sacrifice of the Mass again, just to use the one example here, this is something that either we’re receiving Jesus Christ or we are mocking and diminishing Calvary by sacrificing him. That’s a huge issue, and he’s going to say everyone but him got it wrong. That’s the first major issue. The second one is, there are good scriptural reasons to believe he couldn’t be right about this. That if we take Jesus’ promises to not leave us orphans, to not let the gates of hell overcome the church, to send the Spirit of Truth, to have the Spirit of Truth lead us into all truth.
If we take those to mean anything, they mean at a bare minimum that for three-quarters of the church’s history, we were not just abandoned in heresy in error. But then third, that even if you find that unconvincing, even if you are unconcerned with or interpret differently, the scriptural passages, everything we know about the way human reasoning and intelligence and decision-making works suggests that it’s exceedingly unlikely that Luther would be right, and that everyone else would be wrong on even one issue, much less the numerous issues on which he views himself as the sole Noah in a world of corruption, and pits himself even against church fathers like Augustine, like Bernard, like Ambrose, that he acknowledges are great and holy men who are august, who are worthy of the August name of the church, who are these great ministers of the word, that the greatest theologians in history, he’s going to just wave them all away.
All of those reasons I would suggest should give pause to you if you are someone who’s indebted to Luther, if you’re someone who follows in that kind of Protestant tradition. Now, I realize people don’t think Luther is infallible. I realize Protestants don’t believe that. But nevertheless, Protestants today accept Luther’s position, rejecting the Sacrifice of the Mass. They accept Luther’s radical positions on many of these issues, even as they realize that he was himself in extreme error on a lot of issues. His treatment of the Jews is, his view, even of the mass, most Protestants would be appalled by. He has an anathema clause for anyone who denies purgatory. Luther is not just accepted by Protestants today. His fallibility, and his errors, and all of these big red flags are visible to Protestants. Yet, nevertheless, so many Protestants are accepting these issues, these major doctrines on which Luther freely acknowledges that he thinks everyone before him is wrong.
So, my question would be, could he alone be wise? Is it really possible that the way Christianity goes through history, is that Jesus’s teaching is somehow so clear that anyone can get it, and yet so convoluted and so complicated that nobody does get it for 1500 years? I don’t even see a coherent story by which that could be the right answer. With that, I’ll leave you. I’d love to hear your comments. I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks. God bless.
Intro:
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