Chapter Four The Reformation
While the men of the Renaissance wrestled with the problem of what could give unity to life and specifically what universal could give meaning to life and to morals, another great movement, the Reformation, was emerging in the north of Europe. This was the reaction we mentioned at the end of our study of the Middle Ages—the reaction against the distortions which had gradually appeared in both a religious and a secular form. The High Renaissance in the south and the Reformation in the north must always be considered side by side. They dealt with the same basic problems, but they gave completely opposite answers and brought forth completely opposite results.
As we have seen, there had been forerunners of the Reformation. John Wycliffe (c. 1320–1384), whose life overlapped with Giotto, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, emphasized the Bible as the supreme authority, and he and his followers produced an English translation which had wide importance throughout Europe. John Huss of Bohemia (the heartland of modern Czechoslovakia) was a professor of the University of Prague (the Charles University). He lived between about 1369 and 1415. Thus his life overlapped with Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and van Eyck. In contrast to the humanistic elements which had come into the church—and which led to the authority of the church being accepted as equal to, or greater than, the authority of the Bible, and which emphasized human work as a basis for meriting the merit of Christ—Huss returned to the teachings of the Bible and of the early church and stressed that the Bible is the only source of final authority and that salvation comes only through Christ and His work. He further developed Wycliffe’s views on the priesthood of all believers. Promised safe conduct to speak at the Council of Constance, he was betrayed and burned at the stake there on July 6, 1415. Wycliffe’s and Huss’s views were the basic views of the Reformation which came later, and these views continued to exist in parts of the north of Europe even while the Renaissance was giving its humanist answers in the south. The Bohemian Brethren, the antecedents of the Moravian Church, were founded in 1457 by Huss’s followers, and, like Luther’s doctrines later, their ideas were spread not only by their teaching but by their emphasis on music and use of hymns. Huss himself wrote hymns which are still sung today. Another voice was the Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola, who drew large audiences in Florence between 1494 and 1498. He was not as clear as Wycliffe and Huss, but he did see some of the growing problems and spoke out against them until he was hanged and then his body burned in the square before the town hall in Florence.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. To put this into historical perspective, we should remember that Leonardo da Vinci lived from 1452 to 1519. Thus, Luther’s Theses were set forth just two years before Leonardo’s death. Calvin was born in 1509, ten years before Leonardo’s death, and the year Leonardo died Luther had his disputation in Leipzig with Dr. Eck. The Francis I, who in 1516 took Leonardo to France (where Leonardo died), is the same Francis I to whom Calvin (1509–1564) addressed his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.
One must understand that these two things were happening almost simultaneously: first, in the south, much of the High Renaissance was based on a humanistic ideal of man’s being the center of all things, of man’s being autonomous; second, in the north of Europe, the Reformation was giving an opposite answer. In other words, the Reformation was exploding with Luther just as the High Renaissance was coming to its close. As we have said, Luther nailed his Theses to the door in Wittenberg in 1517. Zwingli led Zürich to its break with Rome in 1523. Henry VIII of England broke with Rome in 1534. (This was at first political rather than religious, but it did lead later to a Protestant England.) Then, as we have mentioned, Calvin’s Institutes were written in 1536.
But while the Reformation and the Renaissance overlapped historically and while they dealt with the same basic questions, they gave completely different answers. You will remember that to Thomas Aquinas the will was fallen after man had revolted against God, but the mind was not. This eventually resulted in people believing they could think out the answers to all the great questions, beginning only from themselves. The Reformation, in contrast to Aquinas, had a more biblical concept of the Fall. For the people of the Reformation, people could not begin only from themselves and on the basis of human reason alone think out the answers to the great questions which confront mankind.
The men of the Reformation did learn from the new knowledge and attitudes brought forth by the Renaissance. A critical outlook, for example, toward what had previously been accepted without question was helpful. And while the Reformers rejected the skepticism of Lorenzo Valla (c. 1409–1457), they gladly learned from his study of language. But from the critical attitude toward the traditions which had been accepted without question, the Reformers turned not to man as beginning only from himself, but to the original Christianity of the Bible and the early church. Gradually they came to see that the church founded by Christ had since been marred by distortions. However, in contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they refused to accept the autonomy of human reason, which acts as though the human mind is infinite, with all knowledge within its realm. Rather, they took seriously the Bible’s own claim for itself—that it is the only final authority. And they took seriously that man needs the answers given by God in the Bible to have adequate answers, not only for how to be in an open relationship with God, but also for how to know the present meaning of life and how to have final answers in distinguishing between right and wrong. That is, man needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood.
The Reformers accepted the Bible as the Word of God in all that it teaches. Luther translated the Bible into German, and translations of the Bible began to be available for the people in the languages they could understand. To the Reformation thinkers, authority was not divided between the Bible and the church. The church was under the teaching of the Bible—not above it and not equal to it. It was sola Scriptura, the Scriptures only. This stood in contrast to the humanism that had infiltrated the church after the first centuries of Christianity. At its core, therefore, the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions that had entered the church.
It is worth reiterating the ways in which the infiltration by humanistic thought—growing over the years but fully developed by 1500—showed itself. First, the authority of the church was made equal to the authority of the Bible. Second, a strong element of human work was added to the work of Christ for salvation. Third, after Thomas Aquinas there had come an increasing synthesis between biblical teaching and pagan thought. This synthesis was not just a borrowing of words but actually of content. It is apparent in many places and could be illustrated in many ways. For example, Raphael in one of his rooms in the Vatican balanced The School of Athens (which represents Greek, non-Christian philosophic thought) with his pictorial representation of the church, putting them on opposite walls. This representation of the church is called the Disputà, for it deals with the nature of the mass. Raphael was par excellence the artist of the synthesis. But Michelangelo, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, also combined biblical teaching and non-Christian pagan thought; he made the pagan prophetesses equal to the Old Testament prophets (see ). Dante’s writings show the same mixture.
Plate 26 Michelangelo, details of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, The Vatican, Rome. Top, detail of Prophet Jeremiah, bottom, detail of Delphic Sibyl (a pagan prophetess of Delphi). “. . . combined biblical teaching and non-Christian pagan thought.” Photos courtesy of Organizzazione Milan.
When in Basel, Guillaume Farel (1489–1565), the Reformer in French-speaking Switzerland before Calvin, showed plainly that there was a second kind of humanism that he stood against, as well as that which had come into the church (see ). This kind of humanism was exemplified most clearly by Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536). Erasmus helped the Reformers by editing the New Testament in the original Greek (1516) and by urging in the preface that the New Testament be translated into all the vernacular languages. Some have called the view of Erasmus and those with him Christian humanism, but it was less than consistent Christianity. Erasmus and his followers wanted only a limited reform of the church, in contrast to the Reformers who wanted to go back to the church as it originally was, with the authority being the Bible only. Thus Farel thoroughly cut himself off from Erasmus to make plain that he stood on principle against either form of humanism. The various branches of the Reformation had differences among themselves, but together they constituted one system—a unity—in contrast to the humanism which had come into the church on one side and to the Erasmian humanism on the outside.
The Reformation was certainly not a golden age. It was far from perfect, and in many ways it did not act consistently with the Bible’s teaching, although the Reformers were trying to make the Bible their standard not only in religion but in all of life. No, it was not a golden age. For example, such overwhelming mistakes were made as Luther’s unbalanced position in regard to the peasant wars, and the Reformers showed little zeal for reaching people in other parts of the world with the Christian message. Yet though they indeed had many and serious weaknesses, in regard to religious and secular humanism, they did return to the Bible’s instruction and the example of the early church.
Because the Reformers did not mix humanism with their position, but took instead a serious view of the Bible, they had no problem of meaning for the individual things, the particulars; they had no nature-versus-grace problem. One could say that the Renaissance centered in autonomous man, while the Reformation centered in the infinite-personal God who had spoken in the Bible. In the answer the Reformation gave, the problem of meaning for individual things, including man, was so completely answered that the problem—as a problem—did not exist. The reason for this is that the Bible gives a unity to the universal and the particulars.
Plate 27 Statue of Guillaume Farel in Neuchatel, Switzerland. “. . . a serious view of the Bible.” Photos by Mustafa Arshad.
First, the Bible tells men and women true things about God. Therefore, they can know true things about God. One can know true things about God because God has revealed Himself. The word God was not contentless to Reformation man. God was not an unknown “philosophic other” because God had told man about Himself. As the Westminster Confession (1645–1647) says, when God revealed His attributes to people, the attributes are not only true to people but true to God. That is, when God tells people what He is like, what He says is not just relatively true but absolutely true. As finite beings, people do not have exhaustive truth about God, but they can have truth about God; and they can know, therefore, truth about that which is the ultimate universal. And the Bible speaks to men and women concerning meaning, morals, and values.
Second, the Bible tells us true things about people and about nature. It does not give men and women exhaustive truth about the world and the cosmos, but it does give truth about them. So one can know many true things about nature, especially why things exist and why they have the form they have. Yet, because the Bible does not give exhaustive truth about history and the cosmos, historians and scientists have a job to do, and their work is not meaningless. To be sure, there is a total break between God and His creation, that is, between God and created things; God is infinite—and created things are finite. But man can know both truth about God and truth about the things of creation, because in the Bible God has revealed Himself and has given man the key to understanding God’s world.
So, as the Reformation returned to biblical teaching, it gained two riches at once: It had no particulars-versus-universals (or meaning) problem, and yet at the same time science and art were set free to operate upon the basis of that which God had set forth in Scripture. The Christianity of the Reformation, therefore, stood in rich contrast to the basic weakness and final poverty of the humanism which existed in that day and the humanism which has existed since.
It is important that the Bible sets forth true knowledge about mankind. The biblical teaching gives meaning to all particulars, but this is especially so in regard to that particular which is the most important to man, namely, the individual himself or herself. It gives a reason for the individual being great. The ironic fact here is that humanism, which began with Man’s being central, eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible’s position that a person is created by God and created in the image of God, there is a basis for that person’s dignity. People, the Bible teaches, are made in the image of God—they are nonprogrammed. Each is thus Man with dignity.
That Man is made in the image of God gives many important answers intellectually, but it also has had vast practical results, both in the Reformation days and in our own age. For example, in the time of the Reformation it meant that all the vocations of life came to have dignity. The vocation of honest merchant or housewife had as much dignity as king. This was strengthened further by the emphasis on the biblical teaching of the priesthood of all believers—that is, that all Christians are priests. Thus, in a very real sense, all people are equal as persons. Moreover, the government of the church by lay elders created the potential for democratic emphasis.
The Bible, however, also says that man is fallen; he has revolted against God. At the historic space-time Fall, man refused to stand in the proper relationship with this infinite reference point which is the personal God. Therefore, people are now abnormal. The Reformation saw all people as equal in this way too—all are guilty before God. This is as true of the king and queen as the peasant. So in contrast to the humanism of the Renaissance, which never gave an answer to explain that which is observable in people, the Bible enabled people to solve the dilemma facing them as they look at themselves: they could understand both their greatness and their cruelty.
The Bible gives a different way to come to God from that teaching which had grown up in the church through the previous centuries. The Reformers went back to the teaching of the Bible and the early church and removed the humanistic elements which had been added. The individual person, they taught, could come to God directly by faith through the finished work of Christ. That is, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was of infinite value, and people cannot do and need not do anything to earn or add to Christ’s work. But this can be accepted as an unearned gift. It was sola gratia, grace only.
Previously, those who came into the churches were separated from what to them was the center of worship—the altar in the chancel—by a high grill of iron or wood. This was the rood screen, so called from the rood, or crucifix, which it often supported or which was hung above it. But with the Reformation, when the Bible was accepted in all its unique authority, these screens were often removed. In some churches the Bible was placed exactly where the screen had been, to show that the teaching of the Bible opened the way for all the people to come directly to God. One such church is in Ollon, Switzerland. You can still see where the rood screen had fit into the wall but was removed; the pulpit was then placed so that the Bible is where the rood screen had previously been.
Guillaume Farel, the early French-Swiss Reformer, preached in this church, and from there and nearby Aigle the Reformation began in French-speaking Switzerland. Later, after ministries in Geneva and Lausanne, Farel preached for many years in the cathedral in Neuchâtel. The statue outside that cathedral could well be taken as the mark of the Reformation and of Christianity. This statue has Farel holding the Bible aloft. Thus it is sola Scriptura, the Bible and the Bible only. This is what made all the difference to the Reformers, both in understanding the approach to God and in having the intellectual and practical answers needed in this present life.
Because of their tendency toward purifying religion from an overemphasis on visual symbols, the Reformers are often accused of being antagonistic to the arts. But the Reformation was not against art as art. To some of us the statues and paintings of the Madonna, saints, and so on may be art objects, and perhaps we wish that the people of the Reformation had taken these works and put them in a warehouse for a hundred years or so. Then they could have been brought out and put in a museum. But at that moment of history this would have been too much to ask! To the men and women of that time, these were images to worship. The men of the Reformation saw that the Bible stressed that there is only one mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus. Thus, in the pressure of that historic moment, they sometimes destroyed the images—not as works of art but as religious images which were contrary to the Bible’s emphasis on Jesus as the only mediator.
Plate 28 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1529, oil on panel, Museen Böttcherstraße, Bremen, Germany. “. . . the Reformation was not against art as art.”
We should note, however, that the Reformers usually distinguished between cult images and other works of art, the former alone falling under condemnation. But not even all of the cult images were destroyed. All over Europe in cathedrals and churches we can see thousands of statues which were not destroyed. The reason why some statues were destroyed is pointed out by Bernd Moeller (1931–) in Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1962; English translation, 1972). He shows that in certain cases the actual donors of the images smashed them because they represented religiously that which they now rejected as unbiblical. He writes, “Those who donated an image did not merely venerate that image; those who broke an image did not merely hate it. Both the donor and the breaker of images were concerned with eternal salvation.” Image-breaking parallels in the area of ecology the early Christians’ cutting down the sacred groves of trees which were related to the worship of pagan gods. These believers did not cut down the trees because they minimized trees or despised nature; they cut down these specific trees because of their anti-Christian religious significance. Equally, the people of the Reformation did not destroy art objects as art objects. Unlike modern man, the men of that day did not live in a splintered world. Art was an intimate part of life. What is represented had more than an aesthetic value divorced from considerations of truth and religious significance.
The proof that the Reformation was not against art as art is seen in the effects of the Reformation on culture. We should not forget that Lucas Cranach (1472–1553), the German painter and engraver, was a friend of Luther and painted Luther and his wife many times (see ). Cranach also painted Luther’s father. The vocal parts of the 1524 hymnbook were probably engraved by Cranach. Luther and Cranach were even the godfathers of each other’s children. There is no indication at all that Luther disapproved of Cranach’s painting in all the varied forms that it took.
Then too we can think of the music which the Reformation brought forth. There was the lively Geneva Psalter, the 1562 hymnbook made up of the Psalms. The tunes were so vivacious that some people in derision called them “Geneva Jigs.” The great Theodore Beza (1519–1605), who followed Calvin as leader of the Reformation in Geneva, translated the Psalms’ texts, and these were set to melodies selected or composed by Louis Bourgeois (1510–1570). Later this Psalter was used in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scotland, as well as in Switzerland. But it was in Luther’s Germany where the effects of the Reformation on music are best seen.
Luther himself was a fine musician. He was a singer with a good tenor voice as well as an instrumentalist with skill and verve. In 1524 his choirmaster, Johann Walther (1496–1570), put out a hymnbook (Wittenberg Gesangbuch) which was a tremendous innovation. Walther and his friend Conrad Rupff worked on these hymns in Luther’s home. Luther himself played out the tunes on his fife. The collection contained Luther’s own great hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” to which he wrote both words and music. As the rood screen was removed in the churches—because with an open Bible the people had direct access to God—so also in a direct approach to God the congregations were allowed to sing again for the first time in many centuries.
We are swept back in this, as in other things, to the practice as well as the teaching of the early church. We are carried back to Ambrose (339–397), bishop of Milan, and his antiphonal psalmody, as he, like Luther, wrote hymn texts and taught his congregations to sing them. Luther said in the preface to the Wittenberg Gesangbuch,
I wish that the young men might have something to rid them of their love ditties and wanton songs and might instead of these learn wholesome things and thus yield willingly to the good; also, because I am not of the opinion that all the arts shall be crushed to earth and perish through the Gospel, as some bigoted persons pretend, but would willingly see them all, and especially music, servants of Him who gave and created them.
Hymnwriters who later brought forth more complicated forms were Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612) and Michael Praetorius (1571–1621). Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) should also be noted. Schütz was influenced by the baroque music of Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1557–1612) from Venice, but in the Reformation this style took on its own character and direction. Buxtehude, the organist at Lübeck, had a profound influence on Bach. It is interesting to note that, two years before Bach came to hear Buxtehude at Lübeck, Handel (1685–1759) came there, not only intending to hear Buxtehude, but hoping to inherit Buxtehude’s post. In the contract was a clause saying that the new organist was to marry Buxtehude’s daughter. Handel did not take the position! The so-called Abendmusiken (late Sunday afternoon sacred concerts) were begun by Buxtehude, and both Handel and Bach went to hear them. The Reformation’s influence on culture was not just for a favored elite but for all the people. There were also less-remembered men of the period who did remarkable work. We could think of Bach’s predecessor as organist at Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722), who wrote biblical sonatas for the harpsichord in 1700.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was certainly the zenith of the composers coming out of the Reformation. His music was a direct result of the Reformation culture and the biblical Christianity of the time, which was so much a part of Bach himself. There would have been no Bach had there been no Luther. Bach wrote on his score initials representing such phrases as: “With the help of Jesus,” “To God alone be the glory,” and “In the name of Jesus.” It was appropriate that the last thing Bach the Christian wrote was “Before Thy Throne I Now Appear.” Bach consciously related both the form and the words of his music to biblical truth. Out of the biblical context came a rich combination of music and words and a diversity with unity. This rested on the fact that the Bible gives unity to the universal and the particulars, and therefore the particulars have meaning. Expressed musically, there can be endless variety and diversity without chaos. There is variety yet resolution.
Plate 29 Organ built during the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. “Bach was certainly the zenith of the composers coming out of the Reformation.” Photos by Mustafa Arshad.
We must, of course, remember Handel who also stood in the same tradition. One naturally thinks of Handel’s Messiah (1741), which was in the tradition of the restored Christianity in both its music and its message. Handel’s religious music included not only the Messiah but Saul (c. 1738), Israel in Egypt (c. 1738) and Samson (1743). The Messiah could only have come forth in a setting where the Bible stood at the center. Even the order of the selections follows with extreme accuracy the Bible’s teaching about the Christ as the Messiah. For example, Handel did not put the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the end, but in its proper place in the flow of the past and future history of Christ. Many modern performances often place it at the end as a musical climax, but Handel followed the Bible’s teaching exactly and placed it at that future historic moment when the Bible says Christ will come back to rule upon the earth—at that point where the Bible prophetically (in Revelation 19:16) puts the cry of “King of kings and Lord of lords!” Handel probably knew Charles Wesley (1707–1788) and wrote the music for a hymn to original words by Wesley, “Rejoice, the Lord Is King.”
In passing, we should note that English church music followed the same emphasis found in the early music of Reformation Germany. A demand arose for a simplified style which would permit the words to be understood. We could mention here Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) and Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). In England as in Germany the stress was on content. Music was not incidental to the Reformation’s return to biblical teaching; it was a natural outcome, a unity with what the Bible taught. What the Reformation produced musically gives us a clear affirmation that the Reformation was indeed interested in culture. As this was true in music, it was also true in visual art. We have already mentioned Cranach. We must also notice Dürer (1471–1528), Altdorfer (1480–1538), Hans Baldung-Grien (c. 1484–1545), and the Beham brothers: Hans (1500–1550) and Barthel (1502–1540).
Some of the work of Albrecht Dürer was done before the Reformation; yet he must be considered a Reformation artist. In 1521 he was in the Netherlands. (You will remember that Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.) There Dürer heard tidings that Luther had been taken captive. The rumor was false. Luther’s friends had hidden him to protect his life, but most people thought he was a prisoner. Dürer was keeping a diary, which he did not mean to have published. This diary is worth quoting at length (as translated by Udo Middelmann):
On Friday before Pentecost (17th of May) in the year 1521 the news reached Antwerpen, that Martin Luther had been so treacherously taken prisoner. For when the herald of the emperor Charles had been ordered to accompany him with the imperial guard, he trusted this. But when the herald had brought him near Eisenach to an inhospitable place, he told him that he had no further need of him and rode off. Pretty soon ten riders on horseback appeared; they treacherously led away this deceived, pious man, who was illumined by the Holy Spirit and professed the true Christian faith. And is he still alive? Or have they murdered him?—which I do not know—in that case he has suffered it for the sake of the Christian truth in that he chastized the unchristian papacy, which resists the liberation by Christ with its heavy burdens of human laws; and also for this reason has he suffered it, that we should even longer as until now be deprived and completely disrobed of all that is the fruit of our blood and sweat, and that this fruit should shamefully and blasphemously be consumed by idle folk while the thirsty, parched people die because of it.
And especially, the hardest factor for me is that God might possibly want to keep us under their false and blind teaching, which has only been composed and compiled by people whom they call fathers. Because of this, the delicious Word of God is wrongly exegeted or not at all taught in many places.
Oh God in heaven, have mercy on us. Oh Lord Jesus Christ, pray for your people, deliver us at the right time, preserve in us the right, true Christian faith, gather your widely scattered sheep by your voice, which is called the Word of God in Scripture. Help us that we might recognize this your voice and would not follow another tempting call, that would only be human imagination, so that we might never leave you, Lord Jesus Christ! . . . Oh God! You have never burdened a people so horribly with human laws as we are under the Roman chair, who desire daily to be free Christians, redeemed by your blood. Oh highest, heavenly Father! Pour into our hearts by your son Jesus Christ such light, that we might recognize which messenger we are constrained to obey, so that we might reject the burden of the others in good conscience and be able to serve you, eternal heavenly Father, with a glad and cheerful heart.
And should we have lost this man, who has written more clearly than any other that has lived in the last 140 years and to whom you have given such an evangelical spirit, we pray you, Oh heavenly Father, that you would give your Holy Spirit again to someone who would gather your holy Christian Church so that we might live together again in a Christian manner and that because of our good works all unbelievers, as there are Turks, heathen, and Kalicutes, would desire after us of themselves and would accept the Christian faith. . . . Oh Lord! Present us afterwards with the new, decorated Jerusalem that descends from heaven, of which it is written in the Apocalypse, the holy pure gospel, which has not been darkened by human doctrine.
Anyone, after all, who reads Martin Luther’s books, can see how his teaching is so clear and transparent when he sets forth the holy gospel. Therefore these are to be honored and ought not to be burned; unless one would throw his opponents, who combat the truth at all times, into the same fire together with their opinions, which want to make Gods out of men; and one should then proceed in this way that new printings of Luther’s books would again be available. Oh God, if Luther is dead, who will henceforth proclaim the holy gospel with such clarity? Oh God! What would he not have still been able to write for us in ten or twenty more years?
In a letter to George Spalatin in 1520, Dürer wrote:
In all subservience may I ask your grace to recommend to you the praiseworthy Dr. Luther, for the sake of the Christian truth, for which we care more than all riches or power of this world, for all this passes with time, only the truth remains eternally. And help me God, that I might get to Dr. Martinus Luther, so that I might diligently picture him and etch him in copper for a lasting memorial of this Christian man who has helped me out of great anxieties. And I ask you, your honor, that if Dr. Martinus produces something new in German, you would send it to me against my money.
There are a number of things to notice in these quotations. Dürer says Luther has written more clearly than anyone for 140 years. John Wycliffe had lived from 1320 to 1384, John Huss from 1369 to 1415. Dürer’s diary was written in 1521. When we subtract 140 years from this date, we arrive at 1381, which falls in the lifetime of both Wycliffe and Huss. Dürer may have had both men in mind, but probably he was thinking of Huss, for Huss’s influence had remained strong in southern Germany. One thing is clear: Dürer was in the line of these men before the Reformation who had set forth many of the Reformation’s basic ideas, especially the Bible as the only final authority. Notice how this fits in with what Dürer wrote about Martin Luther. A second prominent idea of Huss—that salvation did not come through the addition of man’s works but through Christ and His work only—is also found echoed in the diary.
Thus Dürer was indeed a man in the stream of the Reformation when he did his great woodcuts illustrating the Apocalypse (1498) and his copperplate engravings of The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and St. Jerome in His Cell (1514), even if he did them before Luther nailed his Theses to the door. Further, notice how he twice quotes from the Apocalypse (the last book in the Bible). This clearly ties in with his previous woodcuts and shows that even when he did them these thoughts were involved. His art is as much a cultural result of the Reformation as is Bach’s music. Dürer lived at the same time as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. When he was thirteen years old, he already took nature seriously. His beautiful watercolors of flowers, rabbits, and so on were a clear exhibition that God’s world has value, a real value (see ).
Plate 30 Top, Albrecht Dürer, The Little Owl, 1506, watercolor on paper, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria. Bottom, Dürer, Drawing of a Rhinoceros, 1515, British Museum, London, England “. . . a clear exhibition that God’s world has value.”
I am not at all saying that the art which the Reformation produced was in every case greater as art than the art of the south. The point is that to say that the Reformation depreciated art and culture or that it did not produce art and culture is either nonsense or dishonest.
It is not only Christians who can paint with beauty, nor for that matter only Christians who can love or who have creative stirrings. Even though the image is now contorted, people are made in the image of God. This is who people are, whether or not they know or acknowledge it. God is the great Creator, and part of the unique mannishness of man, as made in God’s image, is creativity. Thus, man as man paints, shows creativity in science and engineering, and so on. Such activity does not require a special impulse from God, and it does not mean that people are not alienated from God and do not need the work of Christ to return to God. It does mean that man as man, in contrast to non-man, is creative. A person’s worldview almost always shows through in his creative output, however, and thus the marks on the things he creates will be different. This is so in all fields—for example, in the art of the Renaissance compared to that of the Reformation, or in the direction man’s creative stirrings in science will assume, and whether and how the stirring will continue. In the case of the Reformation the art showed the good marks of its biblical base.
It was not only in Germany that the Reformation affirmed painting. The clearest example of the effects of the Reformation culture on painting is Rembrandt (1606–1669). Rembrandt had flaws in his life (as all people do), but he was a true Christian; he believed in the death of Christ for him personally. In 1633 he painted the Raising of the Cross for Prince Frederick Henry of Orange (see ). It now hangs in the museum Alte Pinakothek in Munich. A man in a blue painter’s beret raises Christ upon the cross. That man is Rembrandt himself—a self-portrait. He thus stated for all the world to see that his sins had sent Christ to the cross.
Plate 31 Rembrandt, The Raising of the Cross, 1633, oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. “. . . a self-portrait.”
Rembrandt shows in all his work that he was a man of the Reformation; he neither idealized nature nor demeaned it. Moreover, Rembrandt’s biblical base enabled him to excel in painting people with psychological depth (see ). Man was great, but man was also cruel and broken, for he had revolted against God. Rembrandt’s painting was thus lofty, yet down to earth. There was no need for him to slip into the world of illusion, as did much of the baroque painting which sprang out of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Nature to this Dutch Reformation artist was a thing to be enjoyed as a creation of God. We can think of Rembrandt’s painting Danae (1636) in the museum in Leningrad. This is a picture of Rembrandt’s nude wife waiting in bed for him. Rembrandt himself is not in the picture. And yet as she waits for him to come from the left side, though still hidden, he is the center of the picture. There is love and gentleness here. Rembrandt understood that Christ is the Lord of all of life. As a Christian, he lived in the midst of God’s world and did not need to make himself God. Rather, he could use God’s world and its form in his painting.
Plates 32–33 Etchings by Rembrandt. “. . . people with psychological depth.” Photos courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Many other Dutch artists stood firmly in the stream of Reformation culture. There were portrait painters, landscape painters, and still-life artists; for all of them, everyday reality was seen as God’s creation and thus as important (see ). This was the right direction, a proper view of nature. Up to a certain point the development of the Renaissance in the south could have gone in a good direction or a poor one. But humanism took over—all was made autonomous and meaning was lost. In the Reformation, the right direction was regained, and nature and the whole of life were things of dignity and beauty.
Plate 34 Top, Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Silver Brandy Bowl, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread, 1642, oil on panel. Middle, Claesz, Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread, 1642, oil on panel. Bottom, Francis Schaeffer filming at Boston Museum of Fine Arts. “. . . everyday reality was seen as God’s creation.” Photos courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 1860 Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy pointed out a crucial difference between the Renaissance and the Reformation. While no one now would follow Burckhardt exactly, his discussion of the contrast between the Renaissance and the Reformation is still the most remarkable one we have and seems to me to be still valid. He indicated that freedom was introduced both in the north by the Reformation and in the south by the Renaissance. But in the south it went to license; in the north it did not. The reason was that in Renaissance humanism man had no way to bring forth a meaning to the particulars of life and no place from which to get absolutes in morals. But in the north, the people of the Reformation, standing under the teaching of Scripture, had freedom and yet at the same time compelling absolute values.