As someone who specializes in church history, there are two events that I focus my attention on. The rise of Protestantism and the rise of Islam. The Greek-Latin(Sometimes called East-West Schism though I refuse to call it that) separation is interesting but I think the reasons why it happened are pretty clear. What caused Islam? What caused Protestantism? In this post I will be discussing Protestantism, specifically Martin Luther.
Luther doesn’t come out of nowhere. He wasn’t just reading the Bible one day and concluded that the Bible said go left and the church said go right. In the early 16th century, the medieval world had recently ended though traces of it obviously remained. In the medieval world, scholasticism was the ultimate learning tool of the day. It’s a highly sophisticated method of learning. Most Protestant polemicists will talk about it with scorn but Protestants who know church history respect it greatly.
Since it’s a method, it is by no means confined to Christianity. Jews and Muslims both used scholasticism. It’s not a theology or philosophy so anyone can use it. Historian Carl Trueman pointed out that an atheist can be a scholastic.
Among the people who used scholasticism, many philosophies existed. Some were better than others. The worst of these was called Nominalism. The most famous person in this movement was William of Ockham. He was the ring leader of this horrible philosophy.
American author Rod Dreher writes:
The theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model-that is, Christian metaphysical realism-was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham(1285-1347). The ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to be called nominalism.
– The Benedict Option, p. 26-27
In The Benedict Option, Dreher has a good discussion about nominalism which I recommend. The nominalist most known to Luther would have been a man named Gabriel Biel. Not only did Biel die in 1495 which is less than a decade before Luther became a monk, but Biel had lived in the same region of Germany where Luther lived.
The two most important theological works in the medieval period were the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Sentences by Peter Lombard. While Luther read neither, he did read a commentary on the Sentences and it was by none other than Gabriel Biel.
People date the reformation to October 31, 1517 because that’s when Luther posted his 95 theses about indulgences on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Contrary to popular belief, this document wasn’t that controversial. Indulgences were nothing new in Luther’s day but they were an extremely undeveloped doctrine. No ecumenical council had dealt with the issue and for the most part neither had any of the theological giants in prior centuries. There were a couple papal bulls in the medieval era but apart from that there wasn’t much, hence the reason for Luther’s document.
Luther was saying far more controversial things in the month prior. In September 1517 he wrote the Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. In this document he condemns the teachings of Duns Scotus four times and that of nominalist William of Ockham twice. However, he condemns Gabriel Biel 13 times. The document can be found here:
Martin Luther’s 1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology
For Luther, his only exposure to scholasticism was through highly flawed nominalism. In the sermon on the mount, our Lord Jesus Christ says:
So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.
– Matthew 7:17
The nominalism was the diseased tree and drawing from this source, Luther didn’t have much to work with. Now, not every nominalist did what Luther did but I don’t see any positive fruit from this movement. Perhaps if Luther had been studying better scholasticism, things would have ended differently.
Feel free to disagree and share your thoughts below.
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