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Theology for the Curious
Debating theology that makes sense of life and faith. A team of regular people discuss issues of theology, faith and life. Uncovering bible thinking from cutting edge, to conservative, to all things in-between. A lively debate show that gets you thinking, challenging the relevance of God, scripture and faith to today's contemporary outlook.
Theology for the Curious
Ep.123 - The Road to Reformation: Why the Reformation? w/Nick Page
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In his book A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation, writer Nick Page claims that the effects of the sixteenth century European reformation, created and defined denominational identities, changed our perspectives of God, living and the afterlife, reshaped the map of Europe, and hugely affected our present ideas of sovereignty, individuality, and democratic rights.
In this introductory episode to a brand-new series on the reformation, the Curious team speak with Nick Page about his book, God, history, and the key players and movers within the reformation. In an attempt to set the scene for the following episodes, Nick paints the landscape in broad brush strokes, attempting to define just what sixteenth century Europe looked like, and the significant players and their inevitable impact.
This stands to be a very different series for the Curious Team as they tackle the reformation, looking at it from an historical as well as theological perspective. Be sure to tune in to what will be a rip-roaring ride of facts, figures, key personalities and major movements
Further Reading
In an attempt to maintain balance, we have listed below brief overviews of the reformation from both Protestant and catholic perspectives…
Introducing the Reformation - TheGospelCoalition.org
The Reformation - Catholic.com
What we’re reading?
As a feature to our notes, we are adding the book or books that we’ve been browsing and reading as part of this series. So here goes. We’ve been getting stuck into the following;
Nick Page — A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation
Diarmaid MacCulloch — Reformation (Europe’s House Divided)
Richard Rex — The Making of Martin Luther
Andrew Pettegree — Brand Luther
Michael Reeves — The Unquenchable Flame
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Introduction to Nick Page
Speaker 1On this episode we have a very special guest.
Speaker 2Nick Page. The thing about non-Christians is they've been completely peaceful all history? Obviously, they've never. The church is not good when it gains power.
Speaker 1Particularly in magisterial reformers, there was an element of madness, craziness, violence, you name it.
Speaker 2This, I think, is what drove Luther off the rails? It was the fear of all that he'd fought for being lost.
Speaker 3Because they didn't agree with him. He just threw most of them under the bus.
Speaker 2I hate to say there's something quite Trumpian about him isn't there?
Speaker 1Theology for the Curious is ready to rock. Hello and welcome to Theology for the Curious, and you will be listening to me this evening, Pete Golding. I'm your host and I am joined by Brian.
Speaker 4Turner, Nigel.
Speaker 1Byrne, sarah McKinney and we are Theology for the Curious. And on this episode, well, we have a very, very special guest the writer and broadcaster and unlicensed historian. I heard it say nick, nick, page hello, now you have written a book. Well, you've written a lot of books actually, nick. I think last time I looked on something up on you he said over 80 books. Is that right?
Speaker 2yeah, it's right, but a lot of those for children, you know, and stuff like that and and I've been I'm quite old now so I've been writing a long time so probably about 35, 40 books for adults, I think, something around there.
Speaker 1That's incredible really. But of course, amongst the ones you've written, what caught our attention is we have been sort of thinking through on Theology of the Curious for a little while to do something around the Reformation and and understanding of that. And of course I actually had your book on my bookshelf for quite a while the Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation. I thought I'm going to give that a read and I think in reading that I also felt it would be really good just to get you on to reflect a little on and I know you said before when we were off air that it's been a while since you wrote it.
Speaker 1But you know just trying to capture a flavor as an introduction really, because I think in the podcast we do, we have a lot of folk who wouldn't say they are religious. Some are Christian, some aren't, Some would have a very loose understanding of Reformation, Some would have a bit more. So we just wanted to sort of talk about that and that aspect of it. Really, when were you actually born? Just a little bit about yourself, Nick. You're English, obviously. You're living in England.
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm offensively English, my wife would say. You know, I'm a sort of cricket-loving country Englishman. I was born in Watford, hertfordshire, and I now live in Wantage or near a town called Wantage in Oxfordshire, birthplace of Alfred the Great, and just below the Ridgeway, the ancient Ridgeway. So I live in a former pub. So I'm kind of living the dream really in many respects. Excellent, that was the idea anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 1So I mean the book, the Nearly Infallible History. I think one of my first things was what made you write it? Where did that inspiration or that sense of I know what I'll do I'm going to write a book on this where did that come from that?
Speaker 2inspiration or that sense of I know what I'll do. I'm going to write a book on this. Where did that come from? Well, it was a follow-up to a book that I'd done on board, a sort of Christian history, a nearly infallible history of Christianity, and what inspired this particular sort of follow-up was the anniversary the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses, his 90 the anniversary, the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses, his 90 theses, that he apparently or maybe not tacked to the door of the church at Wittenberg, and that's seen as the sort of spark, the spark that lit the flame of the Reformation. And so it was really written to tie in with that, to take a similar approach and to try and unravel that really, I think, for the ordinary reader really history?
Luther and the Reformation's Origins
Speaker 1Do you think that without Luther this would have happened? Or do you think he really was that influential that possibly would not have gone the way it did, or with the force it did, if it wasn't for him?
Speaker 2Well, I mean, what ifs are really hard, you know, I suspect that something like this would have happened anyway. Luther's particularity made it happen in the way that it happened really, and a lot of. It's never one thing in history, you know, but we like to see like cause and effect, we like to see straight lines. Actually it's never one thing. And what happened in that time the reformation was a lot of currents came together to form a kind of river, really, a lot of sources to this particular stream. So one is Luther and his character, and he was an obstreperous, quite potty-mouthed, you know, passionate, you know, angry monk. He wasn't going to be put down, he hated being looked down upon. So his character drove it forward.
Speaker 2He was a brilliant writer, a brilliant polemicist, he understood the new media of the time, which was the printing press. He understood, he understood propaganda, actually understood how to get his point across, he understood the common man, and so that's one huge strand of it. The other strand is that politically, things were shifting, and there's a whole political dimension to it, there's a whole social dimension to it. In the book I start off actually looking at the Durer, the painter Durer, and this painting of himself, the first sort of self-portrait that looked at the artist as an individual, and so there's a whole rise of individualism that drives it. So I think it's hard to say would it have happened without him? I don't know, it probably wouldn't have happened in the same way, but I think a lot of things were coming together that made this kind of thing almost inevitable.
Speaker 1So the other thing that was I found quite curious is when you get to the part where you start talking about the Genevan aspect of the Reformation, a little bit of the Scottish aspect. I had to smile because when you wrote about John Calvin, I think you described him as a very difficult person to like and the kind of guy you wouldn't want to go out for a meal with. And I think when you came to John Knox you said he was an old curmudgeon without a single bone of joy in his body. And I'm just wondering what kind of? Because I've, obviously, and you read different writers who would write differently about them, particular characters. What gave you that feel that actually, I think these guys were either over stern or in some way they just lost that sense of joy, or whatever it was.
Speaker 2Well, I mean, it's reading their works as much as anything else and, excuse me, reading about them as well. You know, I think one of the things I describe myself as an unlicensed historian because I'm not an academic historian, I'm not part of the academy. In that sense, that's not my training. One of the things that gives you is that I don't have to obey some of the rules so I can say what I think.
Speaker 2Historical objectivity, I think, is very important. We can't expect people to behave in exactly the same way that we did, but I think as a Christian I sort of expect people to take Jesus seriously, in any age, you know. And so I think people who look at Jesus and completely miss out the bit about loving your enemies. I wonder which bit they've read about loving your enemies. I wonder which bit they've read.
Speaker 2So I think that with Calvin, I find him a very difficult man to admire or like, I think, because his theology is so to me un-Christlike, if I'm honest, you know bits of it. I ought to say bits of it. You know we focus on the predestination, which I think takes up about 60-odd pages of his Institutes, which is a book that is 14 times the length of the Bible by the time he'd finished with it. So it is only that bit. But I find that kind of bit hard to reconcile with my own faith and therefore you know I'm going to be more outspoken again. So I'm probably not very professional, but I don't care. I don't think historian is a profession. You don't get to wear a white coat or anything like that, you just get to read a lot and say what you think.
Speaker 1But I think, like you said, it was an era, because I think one of the things I found reading your book and Dermot McCulloch's book on the Reformation is that that era wasn't a very how's the word? It wasn't a tolerant and it wasn't a loving environment. It very much seemed to be a dog-eat-dog. If you don't agree with us, we don't just have a shout and write a pamphlet, we burn you to the stake, kind of thing. You know it be. That seemed to be the. There was one or two characters who seemed to come up as tolerant and encouraged it, whilst all the rest were if you don't agree with me, you're a heretic kind of thing yeah, and I think that people like that are my real heroes.
Speaker 2Um, people like um. There's a man called castelio who, who wrote a book on heretics and and basically denied that anyone should be executed for their ideas, and, um, that was very much swimming against the the tide, um castelio. He wasn't actually killed, but later on his bones, I think, were dug up and he was burned symbolically as a heretic, I think. Look, it was a violent time and it was always, and so people are going to react violently. It was a time without modern, what we would call legal apparatus and so, but it was also a time where people were passionate about what they believed and they knew they, in some respects, they would have to fight for it, they would have to be prepared to die for it.
Speaker 2Um, and this is actually still true. You know, we can look back and say well, you know, haven't we moved on a lot? But all around the world, there are still people who are, who are killed for their beliefs. Um, part of my other work is with an organization called open doors, which supports persecuted christians around the world. So all around the world, there's people who still have to make this choice, who still have to face up to the chance that their faith might cost them everything. Their beliefs might cost them everything.
Speaker 1Do you think, nick, if they were more tolerant Now, in the 21st century, we would say sort of tolerance is king. But if they were more tolerant, do you think that they wouldn't have driven the Reformation quite like they did? I mean, was some of that angst and passion and anger the very thing that drove it, that necessarily needed to drive it at those initial stages, or was it kind of unnecessary anyway?
Calvin, Knox and Reformer Temperaments
Speaker 2I think that in the time I'm not sure that you could have done it in any other way. You know, when you look at the people who were in charge the emperors and the popes and people like that, these are not tolerant people. You know, these are not going to that. These are people who are interested in power and so I don't think actually it would have happened. It could have happened in any other way. I don't think they had that kind of mindset, they had that worldview. I mean, it's hard for us because, you know, I can't even think really in the same mindset as a Victorian, let alone someone way back then. Our ideas are so different now.
Speaker 1Because one of the things you mention is that you said in your book that there were moments in the Reformation that almost border on the absurd. I don't know how do you think that affects how we see it? Do people look back on some of the craziness of it and either kind of misunderstand it or paint it in the wrong pictures?
Speaker 2Well, I don't know if they know the craziness of it actually some of it, I don't know if they're aware of it. There are some really fun absurd moments, you know. The one I particularly like is William Tyndale, who was one of my heroes, who was an Englishman who translated the New Testament and eventually some other bits of the Bible as well. He published his New Testament in 1526. And a bishop, bishop Tunstall, was given the job of suppressing it, basically because they didn't want an English New Testament. Because if people start reading the Bible, they get all kinds of ideas. It's very bad for them, you know. They start thinking of getting above themselves, and so they didn't want that.
Speaker 2So they put Bishop Tunstall in charge of suppressing it. So he came up with a brilliant plan. What he would do is buy up all the copies and burn them. Yes, so he got a man, he got an agent to buy up all the copies 2,000 copies and burn them, with the result that Tyndale made an enormous profit on the first edition and could reprint it with a corrected second edition. It's an illuminatingly stupid way of trying to suppress ideas. That's an entrepreneur for you yeah.
Speaker 2As if you could. Suddenly Someone really didn't understand the print, he didn't really understand how ideas were spread, and so you have those. And then you have the more bizarre craziness, things like Munster, where the sort of militant Anabaptists took over and it went utterly mad. And of course you see that kind of cult-like behaviour echoed throughout history, right down to the things like the Branch Davidians in America. So there is a lot of craziness about because people are prone to that really in whatever era.
Speaker 1Well, it was kind of almost the undoing of Zwingli as well in that sense, wasn't it the whole kind of militant approach to the Reformation which I think you kind of highlight quite a lot in the book as well?
Speaker 2actually about that, yeah, yeah. Well, people are a real mixture, aren't they? I mean, you know, people aren't one thing or another. It's not a zero-sum game, you're not. You're not either sort of right or or wrong. You're generally a mixture of both. Swingley is a great example. You know, had some right ideas but could behave like well, did behave like an utter monster to people he disagreed with and died on the battlefield for it, for sure and I think that's the difficulty.
Speaker 1Well, sometimes you get, like a non-christian would say, the problem. You christians look at you, you look at your history. You just fight and kill each other and and I think that, although that's true, of course, um in in a lot of historical moments, the thing that kind of affects me is and this is what I was saying to you before about well, you've got to context some of that that it was a violent time, just as much if you drop into the old testament and wonder why israel are annihilating other nations. It was a time of great violence where things were sorted with the sword and and there was a lot of that in the reformation it wasn't totally that was a lot of ideas, of fighting ideas, but there was that physical element to it that you probably wouldn't get today if certain things were found to be highly disagreeable amongst church groups or denominations.
Violence and Intolerance in Reformation
Speaker 2Probably not in that context. I mean, you know, the thing about non-Christians is they've been completely peaceful all history. Obviously they've never. That Starley guy, he was a real lovely chap, he never did anyone any wrong. It's about power, really it's about power, and part of the violence in the Reformation was the fear of losing what you'd gained, losing what you'd achieved in terms of religious freedom or in terms of new faith ideas, um. This, I think, is what drove luther off the rails. Really it was. It was the fear of all that he'd fought for being um sort of lost. Yes, um, and so, yeah, you know violence is is, I don't know it's it's. Christians do a lot of violent, have done a lot of violent things, but so have everybody else.
Speaker 1Really it's what humans tend to do, to be honest one of the things you do mention in the book actually go again going back to you mentioned it before actually about luther and his prolific writing. Um, I think it was andrew pedigree who wrote a book called branding luther and took that whole understanding of how Luther capitalized on the printing press and the reach of that. I mean, how influential would you say that was to the spread and the strength of the Reformation.
Speaker 2Oh, I think it was crucial. Yeah, it was like I said at the beginning about these streams that come together. You know the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century. Well, really, the development beyond that. Because Gutenberg, although he invented the printing press, he didn't really see its potential. He just did sort of old-fashioned things. It was the publishers of places like Venice and Geneva that really saw the potential of it.
Speaker 2It meant that your ideas could spread rapidly and widely and Luther understood it and he wrote for consumption. He would have been a fantastic person on social media, absolutely incendiary, because he understood it. He understood how to write in such a way that people read it. And you know there were the accounts of the sheer quantities of Luther's tracts, because a lot of the Reformation was fuelled by sort of 16 or 24-page pamphlets. Really, you know these sermons and tracts that people churn out. His tracts could be, you know, printed, and he didn't mind in a way, if they were pirated. You know they were pirated, they were just copied by somebody else and then printed on because it meant the idea spread. People would form queues and mobs to receive the latest outbursts from Luther. It was fantastic.
Speaker 2He understood what it was to entertain actually Luther. He also understood popular cultural imagination. He understood the need for visuals. He was a big fan of pictures, unlike Z cultural imagination. He understood the need for visuals. He was a big fan of pictures, unlike Zwingli. He liked paintings and pictures and sculpture. He loved music and he used that a lot in his services. So he really, I think he grasped modern media in a way that others were always playing catch up. They really were. He particularly language, that's the thing I mean. Luther's Bible, luther's New Testament, wasn't in high German, it was in ordinary German. In order to hear, in order to translate it, he went out into the marketplace and listened to how people spoke and that's how he wrote.
Speaker 1See, that's interesting that, nick, because I did. I read that in your book and I thought to myself that's a brilliant bit of insight because you don't read that there's a lot of people who've written about that Wartburg Castle moment and very few, if any I don't think it was the first time I read that where you said he would disguise himself and listen to Common Germ, which helped him in his translation and choice of words which I common germ, which helped him in his translation and choice of words, which I think was a remarkable insight really, about luther as a person, you know, yeah, yeah, is that just like?
Speaker 4sorry nick, is that just like, uh, when they use koine greek for the new testament rather than classical?
Speaker 1greek but it reminded me of the message, you know, the message bible civil idea trying to use the language people speak in um, but I didn't what I'm saying. I didn't actually know that about Luther. You get the idea that he was just locked up in a castle writing his New Testament, but actually he was busy trying to cultivate the kind of language that a common German person would understand, you know, which I thought was quite amazing. Let's go to the question about that literacy.
Speaker 4So it produced loads of stuff, and who would have read it? Was the literacy rate quite high? In Germany it was 4%.
Speaker 3According to Nick's book, that's your point.
Speaker 2I can't remember writing that.
Speaker 4It was only the actual, the high end, if you like, of people who were actually literate that were actually getting these ideas. The ordinary person would just get it via sermons. It was the word of male type.
Speaker 1Yeah, how pure was that then, nick? I mean, if you were thinking of, like peasants, artisans, women, people who you would say could possibly be literate, they may not have been getting Luther's words, they may be coming through the filter of I don't know, their local priest or someone who could actually speak it, or some other person.
Speaker 2Maybe, and there's always that interpretative sort of voice. I think you don't need a lot of literate people in a village, you need one or two to read it out, and people learnt to read in order to read this stuff. One of the lovely stories, I think there's a fisherman called Rawlins White and he lived in Cardiff, just about where the Millennium Stadium is now, and he sent his son to school so that his son could come home and read him the Bible. And so literacy rates actually grew across these centuries in order for people to read books, because books became. The other thing Luther understood was pricing. He priced his books as cheap as he could and that made them affordable. And so you need people who are going to read stuff to other people.
Luther's Media Strategy and Impact
Speaker 2I think literacy rates are. I'm surprised if that's the figure I gave. I don't know. I think literacy rates are. I'm surprised if that's the figure I gave. I don't know but literacy rates rose generally in the from the 15th to the sort of 17th century. They rose much higher. Yeah, partly because people wanted to read the Bible for themselves.
Speaker 1But I think, as you said, Nick, it's probably some of that was Luther was never after making a living out of writing. He was never after making a name for himself.
Speaker 2I thought he said what was driving him was just get the ideas out there. Yeah, there wasn't that structure. In fact, People didn't really make a living out of writing in the way that some of us try to and fail to today. But you know, I mean juror was one of the guys who actually sort of first sort of had his own brand and sent his own and did his own sort of printing of his pictures so he could sort of do it. But yeah, exactly, it's about the dissemination of ideas really.
Speaker 1One of the things you said which I thought was interesting. You said that in the later part of Luther's life he carried a sense of disappointment and anger, frustration and even disillusion. I think you said why do you think that was?
Speaker 2Well, he's a very complex character. He suffered from mental health issues for most of his life. He had depression, frankly, he had big physical problems, so a lot of his writing is focused around his own bowels, to be honest, because it was one of his problems that he had um, so that that plays into it. But I think he saw the ways that people had taken his ideas and done things that he didn't want done with them. He, luther, believed that everybody should believe in his ideas. Everybody should, um, you know, be free to believe what they liked, as long as they were luther's ideas. Basically that's what he believed, and he he saw that people took his ideas and ran much further than he would.
Speaker 2In some ways he was quite conservative and so in his outbursts against, for example, the peasants revolt or the farmers war, as it's sometimes known now in germany, where he really threw them under the bus, it was partly because he saw, for example, the Peasants' Revolt or the Farmers' War, as it's sometimes known now in Germany, where he really threw them under the bus, it was partly because he saw he feared that he would lose everything. He feared that everything would be lost. And then later there's the very unfortunate stuff he wrote against the Jews which I think leaves us a very distasteful legacy. Again, I think he was the kind of person who didn't like being slighted. He, he and the book. I quote a line from tom waits, the blessed saint tom waits, where he said he smoked his friends down to the filter.
Speaker 3You know, he basically exhausted everybody, really he did fall out, nick, I'm sorry for cutting across there. He did fall out with quite a lot of reformers, even people he started initially that he did like, including erasmus zingley, he had he had utter contempt for um for zingley, um for erasmus.
Speaker 3He started off liking and basically said he hated a guy and to the core. So all of that from a time where he just wanted to reform the church into a guy that basically disagreed and disliked everyone that he had and basically started off and, as you say, because they didn't agree with him, he just threw most of them under the bus. Yeah, he.
Speaker 2I hate to say there's something quite Trumpian about him, isn't there? He never forgot a slight. He never forgot a slight and he, I think he had an enormous chip on his shoulder. The one thing I think that drove him right from the beginning was that people completely underestimated him. They looked down on him. The beginning was that people completely underestimated him, they looked down on him. They they thought he was just a little sort of ordinary friar from germany, an uneducated man, and he hated being looked down on. So I think he he looked on disagreement as sort of personal offense, really, um and and yeah, he, he fell out with with a of people, really a lot of people. But he was ill. I think that was part. We should take this into account. He was ill for most of his life. He was not a well man.
Speaker 1But somewhere in that mix. This is the crazy thing, isn't it? Because each of the, particularly in magisterial reformers none of them would be people you'd say they had it all together knew what they were doing. There was, there was an element of madness, craziness, violence, you name it and every one of them has been left with a stain on their history. You know whether luther's got a stain of what he said about the jews and everything, the peasants war and and calvin with servetus and others? They've always got a stain. Others would look back on and and and maybe all that madness was part of their genius as well, which is a bit crazy.
Speaker 2Look who of us doesn't you know. It's just a question of extremes really. It's a question of you know. The scale they were operating at means perhaps that some of the failures were bigger really. Yes, but I don't think you should not call out the failures Absolutely. I feel that you should really, if only as instruction to other people really, and yourself partly.
Personal Complexities of the Reformers
Speaker 1We hope you're enjoying this week's edition of Theology for the Curious. Remember, if you want to know more, you can catch us on Instagram at Theology for the Curious, or if you have a question, some thoughts or just want to query something that you've heard us discussing on the show, why not email us at theologyforthecurious at gmailcom? We hope you'll enjoy the rest of the show at gmailcom. We hope you'll enjoy the rest of the show. One of the things that was in my mind as I was reading your book was was there anything, nick, in your research? If you can think back, that surprised you. Was there anything that you thought I didn't expect to find that about him or about the Reformation?
Speaker 2find that about him or about the Reformation. I think a lot of the early stuff quite surprised me. You know the stuff before Luther. I mean there was a you know the idea of justification by faith was around before Luther. It was a cardinal who came up with it, I think it was Contarini, I can't remember his name actually, but he didn't really publish. So I think you find surprises in in the youth. You're told one thing and there's the other. I mean there's lots of surprises in luther himself. You know he's mythologized, he's purified a bit, well, quite a lot by the victorians and by later generations. He was very earthy. Um, I loved the. The anabaptists, the peaceful anabaptists, are for me the real heroes. Uh, these are people who are non-violent on the whole and who, or very reluctantly, were drawn in, at the very least I knew was about to get a good hit yeah, well, you know, the later baptists are just weirdos actually.
Speaker 4But you know, you can't have good groups over in were a bit all over the place over in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3But you know, yeah and I did enjoy reading about those.
Speaker 2Yeah, so there's histories like that. It's always surprising.
Speaker 3Nick, on the scores you give to all of the reformers on the propensity to violence. The Anabaptists is given zero. Zingley is given 98. Erasmus is given eightaptists is given zero. Zingley is given 98.
Speaker 2Erasmus is given 8.
Speaker 3Munster is given 99. Luther started off with 10. And the list goes on. But one thing I'd just like to ask you. I've read all of the Reformers and each of the chapters you have. I think you've only had four pages when it comes to Calvin and really nothing about his theology. So that I think you've only had four pages when it comes to Calvin and really nothing about his theology.
Speaker 2So that I think I do more than that.
Speaker 3I think probably six pages, I think. I think, it's quite a lot about Calvin yeah, but on the rest of the reformers you go really deep, even into Malenkin, zingley, even Erasmus. But I went directly to that, to that particular chapter on calvin, and just to see where you would throw in some of his theology within the book itself. And, um, yeah, as you mentioned earlier predestination, so it wasn't something that was on the top of your agenda, I'm sure I, I do deal with him.
Speaker 2He comes back later on, so I do do in several places. Yes, yeah, so I so he. It's not just there and I do deal with the institutes and with predestination at okay right at reasonable length there was at least reasonable as I could face really. So yeah he, he comes, he comes back um. He's a major figure. So yeah he, you, I do talk quite a lot about him really.
Speaker 1I think it was a contrast for me because I'd read a book recently on Calvin which detailed, as most of them do, his life but particularly his time in Geneva. This, I think, reflecting on your words. This writer was a bit more positive about calvin and his discipline and what he tried to build there. But I think one of the things and this is always the case there's a balanced understanding. He spoke in glowing terms of what calvin achieved in geneva, because no other reformer got quite near that in what they tried to establish, be it wittenberg or zurich, um. But one of the things that I think your book brought out was that that also lent into being quite an oppressive regime as well, because it was so controlled the environment at Geneva.
Speaker 1There was times when that control went from healthy discipline to very kind of well.
Speaker 1It crossed a line really to it could become almost persecuting others.
Speaker 1And I hadn't seen it like that before.
Speaker 1Because having read this person's quite in-depth breakdown of his Geneva years, I thought, yeah, I never assumed that that with all that sort of discipline, control, bible teaching and and whatever, because they set up like a town council almost and they had a voice into everything, not just religion, but they basically the way people lived and with that it was like don't you dare cross that line and and yeah, so I thought you brought that out quite well and I know like there was places where I personally felt you were probably over negative about Calvin but at the same time I could understand where you're coming from and I thought that's a good balance for me. You know, in what I'd read, because it made me appreciate that, yeah, there would have been not just Servetus, there would have been other elements to Calvin that would have been overly harsh Because, again, he himself had had a difficult time losing his wife, children, whatever, and there was that element to Calvin's life, similar to Luther, that you carried a little bit of mental pressure on at some point, you know.
Contemporary Lessons from Reformation
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean the question is, yes, he did, or the leaders in Geneva did, establish a sort of what some people saw as the perfect Reformation state, perfect Reformation city. I rather naughtily call it Calvin-a-grad. But you know, the question is my am temperamentally, I think, sort of biased against Calvin, which is not great for a historian. But I do think the other thing about Calvin is he did it in a very kind of background way. He managed to always to get, I think, plausible deniability. You know he managed to always to be well. It's not really me, I'm not really in charge, actually it's all these other people. But you, knowiability, you know he managed always to be well. It's not really me, I'm not really in charge, actually it's all these other people. But you know, come on, we know who was really doing that. And a lot of people in Geneva, of course, didn't like him. There were swings against him, weren't there? There were all kinds of things going on at times.
Speaker 1Really, yeah, like you said, those indigenous to Zurich itself Geneva, sorry, those who were kind of born there saw it as this infiltration of Calvin and a pile of others who were, I suppose, escaping the pressures of Reformation, but saw it as oh, we'll just camp out here and take this place over.
Speaker 2And it produced some great things. It produced, for example, the Geneva Bible, the first real study Bible, the first Bible intended for people to read for themselves and think about things and you know, really, a Bible that was actually almost literally revolutionary in its time did you have um?
Speaker 1when you wrote the book, nick, did you have a thing in your head that said I hope when people read this they will think x of the reformation I didn't really, because I didn't know where I was going with it.
Speaker 2You know I write these kinds of books to find out myself, and so I didn't know what I was going to conclude about it. I think it is important for people to read it and I think there is lots we can learn about it, not least the thing that actually, in the end, you've got to talk to people. You know you cannot achieve change by just issuing words and hitting people with a sword. You actually have to talk to people and it takes time and it's hard work to talk to your enemies and to kind of try and struggle to reach agreements. Some of the I think the heroes are people like Melanthon or people like Boussa, who tried to bring sides together, tried to actually get people talking to one another. But I didn't have an overall view. I wanted to produce something that would entertain people, make people laugh, but also would be a kind of respectable stab at history.
Speaker 1Do you think the longer it went on I mean obviously stretching into the Puritans and stuff do you think the longer the Reformation went on the less violent it was? Do you think the violence was concentrated mainly in those initial kind of Luther stomping out against the Catholic Church one thing or another, or do you think actually it kind of maintained it for 100, 150 years before its status of subside?
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't think the violence necessarily declined in none, but it probably got more stretched out. So you have the 30-year war, which is a sort of long, grinding, wearying war throughout Europe, and then obviously I see the sort of culmination in some respects of the reformation in england in the execution of charles the first, because that is the ultimate kind of putting you, in a sense your faith, above um systems, um, and then you know there's a sort of echoes, the reformation, almost even in the civil war. But I think, so I think it just gets more stretched out. You lose the flashpoints that you heard earlier and obviously the establishment of nation states and following the agreement at Augsburg, you kind of things settle a little bit, but I still think it's pretty violent because, as I say, people love power.
Speaker 1When you think about the Reformation. Obviously, every time churches refer to it or Christians refer to it, they do in heroic terms of this is what faith's all about standing up against the system, making it happen. What would be your overriding takeaway, I mean, would it be just it's incredible what Christians can do when they really believe what they believe or do you think actually there's one or two key messages from the Reformations we dare not forget?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think some good things and some bad things. I mean, the Reformation was about individual conscience. Luther never said here I stand, I think it was invented by a later newspaper writer, but he did stand on his conscience and so from that we actually have freedom of conscience, we have the rights of individuals we have so much. You could argue that modern political democracy is based in principles from the reformation. Um, certainly, we have the nation states invented out of that. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, it's up to you. But uh, but I think I think there are some really important things.
Speaker 2The importance of freedom of belief is crucial to us as human beings. It's the most fundamental belief I think. Freedom of belief is is is so important, and not being killed because of your ideas is seems to be quite crucial for us to remember. I think the flip side of that is look, it's so easy to get obsessed with your ideology, to believe so much in your ideology or theology that you actually can do very un-Christlike things, and as a Christian, I want to remember that. I hope I'm not likely ever to sort of torture anyone or execute anyone in those ways, but believe me, I can be nasty about people. I can be mean, I can be spiteful, I can be very un-Christlike about people who don't believe the same things that I do sometimes, and so I have to kind of remember that.
Speaker 2You know it's very easy to sort of behave like a little tyrant in your life. So I think to try and focus on the good things, to try and focus on the sense, sense of freedom, the sense of relief, the sense you don't have to try, uh, to be loved by god. You are loved by god, you are loved into being by god, I believe. So you don't have to work your way towards, you can't earn that grace is a marvelous thing, but the flip side of that is you know, well, don't go crazy do you think, um, if luther was still around today, that he would wear a make germany great again?
Speaker 2well, you see, see, germany didn't exist at the time he might have he probably wore a make luther great again, again, I don't know, maybe but just to correlate church and state to separation of church and state yeah well, they didn't separate it because in that sense, there wasn't states to separate from.
Speaker 3Yeah, they were principalities.
Speaker 4A concept of nation state is later, it comes later.
Speaker 2I don't think they had a distinction between the political and the sacred and the secular, because everything was sacred, all of life was full, was suffused with meaning. Luther saw sort of spirits and demons everywhere. He saw all of life as suffused with the religious, so there wasn't that separation for them anyway.
Speaker 3No, but do you think we should take that from the past the separation of church and state, given what we've heard through the whole church history from the popes and what they've done? The violence right up. Even the reformers did some of the stakes that they were being punished from from a Catholic church perspective.
Closing Thoughts and Reflections
Speaker 2Well, I think that the church is not good when it gains power. That's the thing. If it gains political and financial power, it tends to turn everybody's head. Really, I don't think you can ever fully separate um church and state, because how, how can I, how can I go to church on sunday and pray about one thing and then go maybe into a government job and leave all those principles behind? It's not severance. I don't get to do that. I don't get to sort of cut my mind off. So there can never be a full separation. But you must have some distance and you must have checks and balances in place, absolutely Exactly, checks and balances in in in place absolutely exactly.
Speaker 1Well, nick, we've really appreciated you joining us, pal and um, I must admit I did enjoy the book. I enjoyed the way you wrote it and it just gives a brilliant overview with a lot of details, like I said, about luther in the castle, just little bits like that that I thought, oh, that's, that's something I've not read anywhere else, and so I really enjoyed all them elements. And, like I said to you, we always recommend the books for our series and that will certainly be one on the top of the list there for people to get a hold of, you know, and have a read of I'll never buy an ikea kitchen again well, thank you very much.
Speaker 2Uh, yeah, I hope people enjoy it and, um, if not, well you know, give it to somebody you don't like take revenge.
Speaker 1Brilliant, nick. Well, thank you folks. You've been listening to pete golding theology for the curious and we have thoroughly enjoyed that time with nick page. And until next week, join, join us again, grace and peace, don't forget, folks. If you've enjoyed this episode of Theology for the Curious and you like the kind of thing we do here, why not rate us or leave us a review, or follow us by pressing the plus button?