§ 49. THE REFORMATION AND THE PAPACY. 268
If we would seek for Scripture authority against the sins
and errors of popery, we must take our stand on our Lord’s opposition to the traditions of the elders, which virtually set aside the word of God; on Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, where he defends Christian freedom against legalistic bondage, and teaches the great doctrines of sin and grace, forgotten by Rome, and revived by the Reformation ; and on St. Peter’s protest against hierarchical presumption and pride. _ There was in the early Church a general expectation that an Antichrist in the emphatic sense, an incarnation of the antichristian principle, a pseudo-Christ of hell, a “ worlddeceiver ” (as he is called in the newly discovered “ Teaching of the Apostles”1), should appear, and lead astray many Christians immediately before the second coming of Christ. The Reformers saw this Antichrist in the Pope, and looked for his speedy destruction; but an experience of more than three hundred and fifty years proves that in this expectation they were mistaken, and that the fmal Antichrist is still in the future.
2. As regards church history, it was as yet an unexplored field at the time of the Reformation; but the Reformation itself roused the spirit of inquiry and independent, impartial research. The documentary sources of the middle ages have only recently been made accessible on a large scale by such collections as the Monumenta Germania. “The keys of Peter,” says Dr. Pertz, the Protestant editor of the Monumenta, “are still the keys of the middle ages.” The greatest Protestant historians, ecclesiastical and secular, — I need only
1 Ch. 16:4; κοσμοπλάνος, a very significant term, which unites the several marks of the Antichrist of John (2 John 7: ὁ πλάνος καὶ ἀντίχριστος), of the Apocalypse (12:9: ὁ πλανῶν τὴν οἰκουμένην), and of Paul, since the Didaché connects the appearance of the world-deceiver with the increase of lawlessness (ἀνομία, as in 2 Thess. 2:7). Comp. my monograph on the Didaché, pp. 77 and 214 sq.
256 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
mention Neander and Ranke, —agree in a more liberal view of the papacy.}
After the downfall of the old Roman Empire, the papacy was, with all its abuses and vices, a necessary and wholesome training-school of the barbarian nations of Western and Northern Europe, and educated them from a state of savage heathenism to that degree of Christian civilization which they reached at the time of the Reformation. It was a check upon the despotism of rude force; it maintained the outward unity of the Church; it brought the nations into— communication ; it protected the sanctity of marriage against the lust of princes; it moderated slavery; it softened the manners; it inspired great enterprises; it promoted the extension of Christianity ; it encouraged the cause of learning and the cultivation of the arts of peace. __ |
And even now the mission of the papacy is not yet finished. It seems to be as needful for certain nations, and a lower stage of civilization, as ever. It still stands, not a forsaken ruin, but an imposing pyramid completed to the very top. The Roman Church rose like a wounded giant from the struggle with the Reformation, abolished in the Council of Trent some of the worst abuses, reconquered a considerable portion of her lost territory in Europe, added to her dominion one-half of the American Continent, and completed her doctrinal and governmental system in the decrees of the
1 Comp. especially Ranke’s classical work, Die rémischen Papste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, 8th edition, Leipzig, 1885, 3 vols. The first edition appeared 1834-36. Ranke has found a worthy successor in an English scholar, Dr. M. Creighton (professor of Church history in Cambridge), the author of an equally impartial History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, beginning with the Great Schism, 1378. London and Boston, 1882 sqq. (so far 4 vols.). But the same period of the papacy is now being written with ample learning and ability from the modern Roman point of view, by Dr. Ludwig Pastor (professor of Church history at Innsbruck) in his Geschichte der Pdpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, of which the first volume appeared at Freiburg-i.-B. 1886, and extends from 1305 to the election of Pius II. The author promises six volumes. He had the advantage of using the papal archives by the effectual favor of Pope Leo XIII.