Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch Read Free Book Online Page A

Reformed themselves. There has never been any imposed uniformity among the Reformed family. Reformed Protestantism from the beginning differed from Luther's Reformation - much to his fury - in several key respects, principally its attitude to images, to law and to the Eucharist. The seeds of division were actually sown even before there was much contact between Wittenberg and Zurich, since, from 1521 onwards, Luther's independently minded colleague in Wittenberg University Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt had already started to push the logic of what Luther had said, in regard to these same questions. As Luther immediately failed to find common ground with Karlstadt, and eventually got him expelled from Wittenberg, it was not surprising that he failed to reach agreement with the reformers of the faraway Swiss city when he found that they were making similar statements.
    It was Zwingli's friend Leo Jud, pastor of St Peter's across the river from the Grossmunster, who in a sermon of 1523 pointed out quite rightly that the Bible ordered the destruction of images in no less prominent a setting than the Ten Commandments. Jud (as that nickname 'Jew' indicated) was a distinguished Hebrew scholar: he noticed the significant oddity, forgotten by most of the Western Church, that there were two contrasting ways of numbering the Commandments, and that the system to which Augustine of Hippo had long ago given his authority conveniently downplayed the command against images. So Jud was reopening the question of images which had nearly brought the Byzantine Empire to ruin in the eighth and ninth centuries (see pp. 442-53), and which had been only briefly and partially reopened by John Wyclif and the avengers of Jan Hus a century before - Wyclif had noted that same numbering anomaly in the Ten Commandments. Now Zurichers started pulling down images from churches and from the roadside. This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never enthused Swiss society. The city council took action: in October 1523 it arranged a further disputation, leading to the first official statement of doctrine produced anywhere in the Reformation. First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Mass itself was banned in the city. Until that latter moment, astonishingly, Zurich still remained in communion with its traditional ally the Pope, who had let politics blind him to the seriousness of what was happening there, and who never made any official condemnation of the man who was steering events in the city.
    On the matter both of images and of the Eucharist, Luther was less inhibited than the Pope, and strongly and publicly disagreed with Zurich. Thanks to Karlstadt he had already faced image-smashing in Wittenberg in 1522, when he was alarmed enough by the disorder to hurry back from the Wartburg to preach against it, standing in the pulpit pointedly dressed in a brand-new monk's habit of his Augustinian Order. 20 After that bruising episode, Luther decided that the problem of sacred art was no problem at all. Once the most obviously absurd images had been removed in orderly fashion, destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: it suggested that images had some power, and in fact they had none. What could be wrong with beautiful pictures of God's mother or of Christ hanging on the Cross? Luther used a battery of biblical arguments to offset the Ten Commandments; as early as 1520, when preparing teaching material on the Commandments, he showed his characteristic ability to play fast and loose with scripture by omitting all reference to the Commandment prohibiting images. He was certainly not going to adopt the 'Zurich' renumbering: the result, bizarrely, is that the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other