Chapter Five The Reformation—Continued
We have seen that the Reformation was neither against culture nor against art as art. Let us also note the political freedom, which the return to biblical Christianity gradually brought forth. The accent here is on the word gradually, for all the results did not come at once. Let us emphasize again that the Reformation was no golden age; and our eyes should not turn back to it as if it were to be our perfect model. People have never carried out the biblical teaching perfectly. Nonetheless, wherever the biblical teaching has gone, even though it has always been marred by men, it not only has told of an open approach to God through the work of Christ, but also has brought peripheral results in society, including political institutions. Secondary results are produced by the preaching of the gospel in both the arts and political affairs.
The Reformation did not bring social or political perfection, but it did gradually bring forth a vast and unique improvement. What the Reformation’s return to biblical teaching gave society was the opportunity for tremendous freedom, but without chaos. That is, an individual had freedom because there was a consensus based upon the absolutes given in the Bible, and therefore real values within which to have freedom, without these freedoms leading to chaos. The world had not known anything like this before. In northern Europe, this view was seen in the form of society that resulted. The conveniently small Greek city-states for a short period of time attempted to have social and political participation for carefully defined segments of the population. And Roman law secured certain freedoms for Roman citizens—as we learn, for example, from the Apostle Paul’s experiences. Yet these never approached what the Reformation produced.
The basis for freedom without chaos is exhibited by Paul Robert’s (1851–1923) mural which he entitled Justice Lifts the Nations (1905). To make his point so that it could not be missed, he painted the title on the mural itself (see ). It is on the stairway in the old Supreme Court Building in Lausanne where the judges had to pass each time before going up to try a case. Robert wanted to remind them that the place which the Reformation gave to the Bible provided a basis not only for morals but for law. Robert pictured many types of legal cases in the foreground and the judges in their black robes standing behind the judges’ bench. The problem is neatly posed: How shall the judges judge? On what basis shall they proceed so that their judgment will not be arbitrary? Above them Robert painted Justice standing unblindfolded, with her sword pointed not vertically upward but downward toward a book, and on the book is written “The Law of God.” This painting expressed the sociological base, the legal base, in northern Europe after the Reformation. Paul Robert understood what the Reformation was all about in the area of law. It is the Bible which gives a base to law.
Plate 35 Paul Robert, Justice Lifts the Nations, 1905, Old Supreme Court building, Lausanne, Switzerland. “. . . freedom without chaos.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
Robert was expressing at a later date what some men in the flow of the Reformation had already understood and had expressed verbally. Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847) was professor of theology at the Academy of Lausanne (now the university). He was the thinker in the canton of Vaud who stood in the stream of the Reformers who had preceded him in Switzerland. He was the foremost representative of French Protestantism in the French-speaking world of his day. He said, “Christianity is the immortal seed of freedom of the world.” Switzerland’s unique freedoms rest on this base. Vinet did not just talk and write about these things, but was the outspoken leader for both freedom of religious worship and freedom of the conscience in relationship to the state. A statue of Vinet with the above quote on it is situated only a few hundred feet from the old Supreme Court Building in which Robert painted his mural.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, England showed clearly the results of the Reformation, as did Holland and in varying degrees the other Reformation countries. Too often we think of law, however, only in the context of civil and criminal conduct, forgetting that law is related to the entire structure of a society, including its government. Here the return to the Bible in the Reformation had an important and beneficial influence. The exact impact in any one place or country varied according to circumstance and opportunity. But, in general, the constitutionalist ideas of a Martin Bucer (1491–1551), who was a leader of the Reformation in Strasbourg and important throughout all the Reformation countries, or a John Calvin produced results because—unlike the moribund contract ideas of the late Middle Ages—they did not lose contact with daily life.
Bucer was one of the most levelheaded and charitable Reformers and had the strongest personal influence on Calvin’s deep-rooted conciliatory views in church affairs at Geneva and in church-state relations. The constitutionalist model, implicit in Presbyterian church government, was not just an example but an education in the principle of political limitation. And where, as in England, Presbyterianism as such did not triumph, its political ideas were communicated through the many complex groups which made up the Puritan element in English public life and played a creative role in trimming the power of the English kings. As a result, the ordinary citizen discovered a freedom from arbitrary governmental power in an age when in other countries the advance toward absolutist political options was restricting liberty of expression.
Thus the biblical insistence on the responsibility of people—even of monarchs—to God’s law turned the political tide in those countries where the Reformation emphasis on the Bible as the only final authority took root. Elsewhere, it was natural politically for the centralizing monarchs to welcome the aid of the monarchical Roman Church in controlling political (as well as religious) heterodoxy. In England the threat of absolutism was thwarted. Here was a country where increasingly men lived without fear of arbitrary revenge.
Many good things in England came from Scotland. The clearest example of the Reformation principle of a people’s political control of its sovereign is a book written by a Scot, Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661). The book is Lex Rex: Law Is King. When it was published in 1644, Rutherford was one of the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly in London. Later he became rector of St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. What Paul Robert painted for the justices at the Supreme Court Building, Samuel Rutherford had already laid down in writing in this book. Here was a concept of freedom without chaos because there was a form. Or, to put it another way, here was a government of law rather than of the arbitrary decisions of men—because the Bible as the final authority was there as the base. This went beyond the Conciliar Movement and the early medieval parliaments, for these had no base beyond inconsistent church pronouncements and the changing winds of political events.
Samuel Rutherford’s work and the tradition it embodied had a great influence on the United States Constitution, even though modern Anglo-Saxons have largely forgotten him. This influence was mediated through two sources. The first was John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a Presbyterian who followed Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex directly and brought its principles to bear on the writing of the Constitution and the laying down of forms and freedoms. Witherspoon, educated at Edinburgh University, became president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1768. He was a member of the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1779 and from 1780 to 1782. The only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, he played an important role on a number of the committees of the Congress.
Plate 36 Independence Hall, Philadelphia. “. . . the laying down of forms and freedoms.” National Park Service photo.
The second mediator of Rutherford’s influence was John Locke (1632–1704), who, though secularizing the Presbyterian tradition, nevertheless drew heavily from it. He stressed inalienable rights, government by consent, separation of powers, and the right of revolution. But the biblical base for these is discovered in Rutherford’s work. Without this biblical background, the whole system would be without a foundation. This is seen by the fact that Locke’s own work has an inherent contradiction. His empiricism, as revealed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), really leaves no place for “natural rights.” Empiricism would rest everything on experience. But “natural rights” must either be innate to the nature of man and not based on experience (thereby conflicting with the concept of empiricism) or they must have an adequate base other than man’s experience. Locke’s difficulty was that he did not have Samuel Rutherford’s Christian base. He stated the results which come from biblical Christianity without having the base which produced them. That is, he secularized Christian teaching.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) picked up the secularized form, often tying it into classical examples. Not all the individual men who laid down the foundation for the United States Constitution were Christians; some, in fact, were deists. But we should realize that the word Christian can legitimately be used two ways. The primary meaning is: an individual who has come to God through the work of Christ. The second meaning must be kept distinct but also has validity. It is possible for an individual to live within the circle of that which a Christian consensus brings forth, even though he himself is not a Christian in the first sense. This may be true in many areas—for example, in the arts or political thought. Some of the men who laid the foundation of the United States Constitution were not Christians in the first sense, and yet they built upon the basis of the Reformation either directly through the Lex Rex tradition or indirectly through Locke. To whatever degree a society allows the teaching of the Bible to bring forth its natural conclusions, it is able to have form and freedom in society and government.
So the Reformation’s preaching of the gospel brought forth two things which were secondary to the central message of the gospel but nonetheless were important: an interest in culture and a true basis for form and freedom in society and government. The latter carries with it an important corollary, namely, that 51 percent of the vote never becomes the final source of right and wrong in government because the absolutes of the Bible are available to judge a society. The “little man,” the private citizen, can at any time stand up and, on the basis of biblical teaching, say that the majority is wrong. So, to the extent to which the biblical teaching is practiced, one can control the despotism of the majority vote or the despotism of one person or group.
The Reformation in northern Europe also contributed to checks and balances in government. This idea was, of course, not new in the sixteenth century. Some form of checks and balances was implicit in some medieval political thought, as we saw earlier, and a particular form of it is central to so-called Polybian republicanism, which supposedly exemplified the best elements in Greek and Roman practice. Polybian republicanism is named for Polybius (c. 198–c. 117 BC), a Greek who wrote a history of the growth of the Roman Republic in terms which were designed to cause his fellow Greeks to accept Roman rule. Polybian republicanism—which Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) embraced—was, however, economically and politically elitist. Since Machiavelli had witnessed the destruction of Florentine republicanism, he was interested in the Polybian theory of political cycles, which involved a cyclical view of history. Machiavelli therefore wrote The Prince, advocating firm autocratic rule, because in his view only the dictatorial regime of the “ideal” prince could push along the cycle of political history; only the exercise of ruthlessness could improve the cycles. Machiavelli already showed in his day that ultimately the humanist Renaissance had no more of a universal in political morals than it had in personal morals. Machiavelli’s The Prince—destined to become a handbook of political practice used by heads of state as remote in time as Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)—stands in sharp contrast to the checks-and-balances tradition encouraged by the Reformation.
The Reformers were not romantic about man. With their strong emphasis on the Fall, they understood that since every person is indeed a sinner there is a need for checks and balances, especially on people in power. For this reason, Calvin himself in Geneva did not have the authority often attributed to him. As we have seen, Calvin had been greatly influenced by the thinking of Bucer in regard to these things. In contrast to a formalized or institutional authority, Calvin’s influence was moral and informal. This was so not only in political matters (in which historians recognize that Calvin had little or no direct say), but also in church affairs. For example, he preferred to have the Lord’s Supper given weekly, but he allowed the will of the majority of the pastors in Geneva to prevail. Thus the Lord’s Supper was celebrated only once every three months.
Each Reformation country showed the practice of checks and balances in different forms. Switzerland (whose national political life was shaped by the Reformation tradition even though not all its cantons followed the Reformation) is especially interesting in this regard. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Swiss have separated geographically the legislative and executive parts of government from the judiciary, placing the former in Bern, the latter in Lausanne. In Great Britain came the checks and balances of a king, two Houses of Parliament, and the courts. Today the monarch has less authority than when the division of power was made, but the concept of checks and balances continues. The United States has a slightly different arrangement, but with the same basic principle. The White House covers the executive administration; Congress, in two balanced parts, is the legislature; the Supreme Court embodies the judiciary. In the Reformation countries, there was a solution to the “form” or “chaos” problem in society.
We must repeat that when Christians who came out of the Reformation tradition had more influence than they do now on the consensus in the northern European culture (which would include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on), this did not mean that they achieved perfection. Even when the Reformation had more influence on generally accepted thinking than is the case today, as the centuries passed, weaknesses definitely existed and certain specific weaknesses gradually developed. At certain points the people in the stream of the Reformation were inconsistent with the biblical teaching they claimed to follow. There were many areas where the Bible was not followed as it should have been, but two are outstanding: first, a twisted view of race, and second, a noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth.
In the area of race there were two types of abuse. The first was slavery based on race; the second, racial prejudice as such. Both practices were wrong, and often both were present when Christians had a stronger influence on the consensus than they now have. And yet the church, as the church, did not speak out sufficiently against them.
The conditions on the slave ships—in which thousands died crossing the seas, the treatment slaves often received, and, in a special way, slavery based on skin color cannot be just passed over. For complex reasons still debated by historians, Englishmen, continental Europeans, and Americans indulged in the fiction that the black man was not a person and could therefore be treated as a thing. This fiction covered their hypocrisy. Actually they harked back to Aristotle’s definition of a slave as a living tool and were far removed from the biblical teaching. And in this situation the church as the church was all too often silent.
Today’s Christians, by identification with their forebears, must acknowledge these inconsistencies in regard to a twisted view of race. We can use no lesser word than sin to describe those instances where the practice was (or is) so far from what the Bible directs. The most effective acknowledgment is for Christians to strive in the present to follow the Bible at these points. Of course, slavery was not only practiced in these Christian countries. In fact, in some Moslem countries, black slavery continues to the present day. But that does not lessen the wrongness of a twisted view of race in the countries where churches out of the Reformation tradition could have done more about it.
The lack of a compassionate use of accumulated wealth, especially following the Industrial Revolution, must also be faced squarely. We must not, of course, forget all the good things industrialization brought forth. The age belonged to the inventors and the engineers who harnessed first the power of water and then the power of steam (see ). And out of that time came a steady stream of better things (one small example would be better pottery for the use of working people), and the base was laid for a greater flow of goods for people in general. If industrialization had been accompanied by a strong emphasis on the compassionate use of accumulated wealth and on the dignity of each individual, the Industrial Revolution would have indeed been a revolution for good. But all too often in England and other countries the church was silent about the Old and the New Testament’s emphasis on a compassionate use of wealth. Individual efforts of charity did not excuse this silence. Following industrialization, the noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth was particularly glaring.
Plate 37 Water power and steam power. “The age belonged to the inventors.” Photos courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.
It was not that the majority of the people were worse off than under the previous agrarian situation, but rather that the wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution was not used with compassion. This resulted in the growth of the slums in London and other cities and industrial towns, the exploitation of children and women (who suffered especially), and the general discrepancy between the vast wealth of the few and the misery of the many (whose average working day was between twelve and sixteen hours). Seldom did the church, as the church, lift its voice against such “utilitarianism” (the teaching that utility is the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions).
It is significant that the evils of slavery and the noncompassionate use of wealth merged at this point, as slave owners used the arguments of utilitarianism to plead their cause. It must be said in fairness to Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the father of utilitarianism, that he himself proposed that the government should intervene to protect working children and improve housing and working conditions. But when utilitarianism is made the standard—if there is no absolute standard to judge it by or if the standard existing in the Bible is not courageously applied—then the concept of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” is easily manipulated.
It is often forgotten that Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose warnings about population growth in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) are much quoted today, also advocated a hands-off policy in regard to social reforms. To him, poverty is inevitable, and social reforms only increase the problems. Some of his followers today take the same position, saying, for example, that medical care for all people is an evil rather than a good. The same note came from David Ricardo (1772–1823), who in 1817 wrote the first real economics textbook, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. A tragic example of the acceptance of these views was the attitude toward the Irish potato famine held by Charles Edward Trevelyan (1807–1886), who was in charge of government relief in Ireland. He withheld government assistance from the Irish on the grounds that they should help themselves and that to do otherwise would encourage them to be lazy. It was not that he lacked compassion or a social conscience (his later career shows otherwise), but that at a crucial point a sub-Christian prejudice stifled the teaching of Christ and the Bible, and sealed Ireland’s doom.
These views were not the product of the Christian consensus, but the churches of that time must be criticized for not shouting loudly enough against these abuses. The churches could have changed things in that day if they had spoken with clarity and courage. The central reason the church should have spoken clearly and courageously on these issues is that the Bible commands it. Had the church been faithful to the Bible’s teaching about the compassionate use of wealth, it would not later have lost so many of the workers. And if it had spoken clearly against the use of wealth as a weapon in a kind of “survival of the fittest,” in all probability this concept as it came into secularized science would not have been so automatically accepted. Of course, the church’s silence was not only a problem in England. It was equally a problem in the United States. And in the area of slavery, the United States must bear special criticism, since slavery based on race continued there until such a late date.
To keep the matter in balance: in the first place it must be said that many non-Christian influences were also at work in the culture. Likewise, many influential people who automatically called themselves Christians were not Christian at all; it was merely socially acceptable to bear the name and go through the outward forms. In the second place, many Christians did take a vital and vocal lead in the fight against these abuses. Many Christians struggled to bring into being the social realities that should accompany a Christian consensus. Pastors and others spoke out as prophets, often at great personal cost to themselves. The Bible makes plain that there should be effects in society from the preaching of the gospel, and voices were raised to emphasize this fact and lives were given to illustrate it.
John Howard (1726–1790), John Wesley’s friend, labored indefatigably for the reform of the prisons. A Quaker, Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845), had a profound and practical compassion for the prisoners at Newgate. The better-known Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885) carried on an endless battle to prevent the exploitation of women and children in the mines and factories; he well understood the meaning of a compassionate use of wealth. John Wesley (1703–1791) was himself a strong critic of slavery, and he spoke his mind bluntly, including very frank statements against the slavery he observed in the United States. John Newton (1725–1807), after he became a Christian, not only was no longer a slave trader but turned against the trade. Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), who spoke out so clearly against the slave trade, was the son of a clergyman in the Church of England and was an admirer and historian of the Quakers.
William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was able to utilize Clarkson’s pioneer work. Wilberforce fought for many years in Parliament against the slave trade, battling for the basic recognition of the black man’s humanity under God. Wilberforce the Christian—and because he was Christian—was the outstanding voice in England against the slave trade. Finally slave trade was prohibited in England in 1807, and as Wilberforce was dying, slavery itself was abolished there. Slavery was forbidden throughout the British colonies in a bill passed in 1833, to be effective in 1834. The British taxpayers paid twenty million pounds sterling as compensation to the owners of the slaves. One could wish that the United States had had some outstanding Christian as consistent as Wilberforce, someone in a position of influence who could have produced the same result in the United States at the same date, or better, much before! Or better still, to have kept slavery out of the United States entirely.
The black church in the United States cannot, of course, be included in our criticism about the silence of the churches. It was giving much to the United States in many ways, including its cultural heritage—of which the wonder of its music was a part—but it had no way to speak effectively about slavery. This was especially so in those states where black slavery was practiced. Anyone with a tendency to minimize the brutality of the slavery which existed in the United States should read Charles Dickens’s (1812–1870) American Notes (1842). He begins this portion of the book by saying, “The upholders of slavery in America—of the atrocities of which system I shall not write one word for which I have not ample proof and warrant. . . .” He then goes on to quote pages of newspaper ads which speak profoundly for themselves. Here are four examples out of the dozens which Dickens quotes: “Ran away, a negro boy about 12 years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar with ‘De Lampert’ engraved on it.” “Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myra. Has several marks of lashing, and has irons on her feet.” “One hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompoy, 40 years old. He is branded on the left jaw.” “Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burned her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.”
In the United States some groups did speak out. The Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States decreed as a denomination as early as 1800 that no slave holder should be retained in their communion, and after that date no slave holder was admitted.
We should also mention the impact of the George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley revivals and the early Methodists and others who emerged from the revivals, from whom came so much emphasis on political, educational, and economic reform. In fact, the Cambridge historian J. H. Plumb (1911–2001) indicated that it is not too much to say that, without the influence which the Whitefield-Wesley revivals had at the grass roots, it is doubtful whether England would have avoided its own version of the French Revolution.