Who Is Actually Catholic? How Our Traditional Categories Keep Us from Understanding the Evangelical Reformations

Who is Actually Catholic? How Our Traditional Categories Keep Us from Understanding the Evangelical Reformations

Randall C. Zachman

The traditional description of the Reformation conceptually divides the parties of this event into Roman Catholics on the one hand, and Protestants on the other. Consequently, there are usually seen to be at least two Reformations in the sixteenth century: the Catholic Reformation, comprising those reform- ers who remained in communion with the Papacy in Rome, and the Protestant Reformation, made up of those who had been excommunicated from the Ro- man Church. Luther is customarily seen as starting the Protestant Reformation by departing from his identity as a Roman Catholic in order to become a Prot- estant. Once Luther becomes a Protestant, he undergoes further development until he becomes a Lutheran. The same holds true for Zwingli. First he is seen as breaking with the Catholic Church and thereby becoming Protestant, and then he further develops into a Reformed Protestant, over against the Lutheran Protestants in Wittenberg. Calvin is described as converting from the Catholic faith to Protestantism, and later develops into a major spokesperson for Re- formed Protestantism, and especially for Calvinism. Eventually, the Protestants develop confessions for their new anti-Catholic churches, such as the Augsburg Confession for the Lutheran Protestants, or the Second Helvetic Confession for the Reformed Protestants. The Catholics then respond to these new Protestant confessions at the Council of Trent, which condemns the new Protestant teaching and clarifies older catholic doctrine, so that it can be more successfully explained and defended over against the Prot- estants. This narrative assumes that the people it calls Protestants wanted to leave the Catholic Church in order to become good Protestants, and further assumes that they thought they could only become good Protestants by becoming Lutheran or Reformed Protestants. This narrative is further reinforced by describing the Catholic Reformation as being composed of those figures such as Faber Stapulensis or Desiderius Erasmus, who remained loyal to the Roman Church, over against the Protestant Reformation, made up of those who had been excommunicated by Rome, such as Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin. I would argue that this traditional narrative completely misrepresents what was at stake for those who were part of what I have termed the evangelical

Reformations, which would include Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin, among others. The question for them was not who is actually Prot- estant over against those who are self-evidently Catholic. The question rather involved asking, Who is actually Catholic? This latter question challenges from the outset the claim of Rome to represent the Catholic Church. Indeed, for all parties in the evangelical Reformations, the term “Roman Catholic” would be seen as an oxymoron. Rather, all of them claimed to be Catholic, thereby mak- ing the further claim that it was they, and not Rome, that truly represented the Catholic Church and Catholic doctrine. As Melanchthon says in his Loci Communes of 1543, “I am not creating new opinions. Nor do I believe that any greater crime can be committed in the church than to play games by inventing new ideas, departing from the prophetic and apostolic Scripture and the true consensus of the church of God. Further, I am following and embracing the teaching of the church at Wittenberg and those adhering to it. This teaching unquestionably is the consensus of the catholic church of Christ, that is, of all learned men in the church of Christ.”1 In other words, none of the participants in the evangelical Reformations wanted to be Protestant. Far from seeing themselves as leaving the Catholic Church to become good Protestants, and to start new Protestant churches, they saw Rome as having already left the ancient Catholic Church in order to start the new Roman Church of the papacy. Like Melanchthon, Zwingli did not see himself as leaving behind Catholic doctrine in order to become Protestant and then Reformed. Rather, he saw himself as clearly teaching catholic doctrine over against the novel innovations of Rome. “For we teach not a single jot which we have not learned from the sacred Scriptures. Nor do we make a single assertion for which we have not the authority of the first doctors of the Church—prophets, apostles, bish- ops, evangelists, and expositors—those ancient Fathers who drew more purely from the fountainhead.”2 Indeed, Zwingli distinguishes the catholic doctrine he teaches from the sectarian innovations of both the Anabaptists and the Ro- man Church. “And this is always the way with sectarians who separate themselves on their own authority. It is what the papacy itself did, claiming to be the true Church without either the approval or the consent of genuine churches.”3 His successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, made the same claim to be the true representative of orthodox and catholic teaching, without any recent

1 Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes (1543), trans. Jacob A. O. Preuss (St. Louis: Concordia, 1992), 15. 2 Ulrich Zwingli, An Exposition of the Faith, in Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 278. 3 Ulrich Zwingli, Of Baptism, in Zwingli and Bullinger, 158.