Reformers or Revolutionaries? Why the Church Needed the Reformation

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Gavin Ortlund

   The Roman Catholic hierarchy waged five distinct crusades against the Hussites alone, let alone other proto-Protestant groups. It was a savage time. It was absolutely brutal. And we don't say that in a spirit of just to score a point. We can acknowledge the great sins among Protestants as well. We're not just trying to be inflammatory, but we just want our viewers to understand the historical context and what it was like to live in these times.

2. 00:25

   Jordan Cooper

   He was prepared. He was trained. He wasn't just a random person that just said, I have got a burning in my bosom, and so the Spirit is just telling me to go do this or that. He was going through the proper external kind of channels, and this happened kind of accidentally. And I think anytime you have real reform that is meaningful and lasting, it is not something that's manufactured, right? It's something that arises out of circumstance, and I think that's what you have with Luther.

3. 00:52

   Michael Horton

   Calvin writes, “you know, Sadoleto, that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours. And we are only trying to renew that ancient form of the church that has been distorted by illiterate men and was afterwards mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman pontiff and his faction.” Hi everyone. I'm pleased to begin a six-part series with Dr. Gavin Ortlund and Dr. Jordan Cooper called “Defending the Reformation: Protestant Apologetics for Today.” Now, in this series, the three of us seek to answer some of the most prominent criticisms against the Reformation and Protestant doctrines. We'll be publishing this series on our respective channels, so be sure to subscribe to all our channels linked in the description below. Thanks for watching.

4. 01:42

   Michael Horton

   Joining us in this important conversation are two colleagues. Dr. Jordan Cooper is ordained in the American Association of Lutheran Churches, executive director of Just and Sinner, and fellow of systematic theology at the Weidner Institute. He also chairs the Lutheran dogmatics position at the American Lutheran Seminary and is working on a contemporary Protestant scholastic theology.

5. 02:15

   Jordan Cooper

   Yeah, thanks for having me on.

6. 02:16

   Michael Horton

   And Dr. Gavin Ortlund, who's been on with us before. He is visiting professor of historical theology at Phoenix Seminary, president of Truth Unites, which is his main podcast. He's also written biblical commentaries as well as one book that's especially germane to this discussion, What It Means to Be Protestant.

7. 02:36

   Gavin Ortlund

   Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me back.

8. 02:42

   Michael Horton

   Well, the opening question a lot of people have before we get even really to the heart of the doctrine, are we better off now because the Reformation happened. It seems like there's a lot of—even in Protestant circles, you hear people almost nostalgic for the pre-Reformation unity that they suppose there was. And maybe the Reformation was an unfortunate break in that. Were the Reformers revolutionaries?

9. 03:18

   Gavin Ortlund

   I'll be fascinated to hear Dr. Cooper's thoughts on this as well. I will say, just to lead us off here, I, I think it's harder to think of us as worse off today if we go back and really look at all the realities of the 14th century European world, the 15th century European world, and take off the rose-colored glasses and really see the good and the bad. There were some aspects of medieval life in Europe and elsewhere where we can recognize loss and we can look back nostalgically, but there are also some brutal aspects. And with respect to unity, you brought up, you know, the unified church before the Reformation, the unified church. And I think this is an idea we hear a lot, but two things we can observe right out of the gate that immediately become visible as we just start to turn that over in our mind is that, number one, it wasn't unified. You had a series of different schisms prior to the Reformation. And not only that, number two, those schisms were regarded as absolutely severe by those involved. So whenever we do these videos, we're going to get fact-checked and people are going to push back and so forth. And you guys, you can correct me if you think I'm off base here, but based upon everything I've seen, based upon how I'm looking at it, I really think the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics in the medieval era looked across the way at each other and saw the other side as outside of the one true church and off of Noah's Ark and cut off from salvation in the main. I almost could take the words “in the main” out of that sentence because it really is a brutal division. And so Protestantism comes along, it doesn't divide a church that's united. It inherits a divided church. And yes, it introduces further institutional separations, which we believe are justified, and we'll talk about why. But it also interprets those differently. It doesn't say that the church is one institution with one visible hierarchy, everybody outside is off Noah's Ark. It introduces a different way of thinking about these institutional splits.

10. Gavin Ortlund

    Just on this issue, the issue of unity. Absolutely. One of the gifts of Protestantism is this ability to think more expansively about the nature of unity and not having such a hard line on institutional unity, which is only one piece of the pie for unity. So that's just a few quick thoughts. I want to know what Dr. Cooper will say about this as well.

11. 05:41

    Jordan Cooper

    Yeah. Thanks. I mean, I would echo a lot of the same kinds of things that you said here. We just have a tendency, and everybody does this in every single age in the history of the world, we have a tendency to look at the problems in our world today and then look back at a time that didn't have the particular issues that we face, and then we idealize that period in time, and this can happen among all sorts of different kinds of people. You know, this can happen among Protestants as well as we look back at, say, you know, maybe some Calvinists look back at the Puritans and see this as kind of maybe the purest time in the church. Like, we all have this tendency to do that when we look back into the past. I think something that is worth mentioning is that when you look at the prominence of things like, you know, popular apologetics from those who are exploring Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, something that I think remains maybe unrecognized or not discussed enough is the fact that the ability that people have to study theology in the way that they do to even make those decisions is largely due to the Protestant Reformation. If you're really looking back and going back to say the, you know, 13th century or whatever particular time it might be, you're looking at a time where there is not a lot of literacy. I think we idealize the learning of, you know, say the Scholastics, you look back at Thomas Aquinas. The reality is the majority of people don't have access to those kinds of works. They're not thinking deeply philosophically, and they don't have those things accessibly in the way that we do today. So I just think that's worth mentioning here. But then there was a question that was asked then at the end of this, right, related to this, which was, is the Reformation a revolution? And that is in some ways the core question to ask with a lot of these conversations because that's the way that the Reformation is often portrayed, and the language that I use to talk about this idea of revolution versus Reformation comes from an American Lutheran theologian named Charles Porterfield Krauth who speaks about the conservative Reformation, and he says that there are errors on two different sides of things, right? On the one hand, you can just idealize the past so that you don't have any reform, right? You don't have any change, and in response to that we—we need to conserve the past. We need to conserve the truth of the past, the good of the past, what God has done and what He's revealed, and how people have thought through the ideas in God's Word and traditions. All of those kinds of things we conserve those, but at the same time we want to say that we should conserve the good of the past. We don't want to move to a dead traditionalism on one hand, but on the other hand we don't want to move toward this radical revolution that just says well everything is just change. We need to just change everything. We need to start over, and every generation kind of needs to go back and take a fresh look at the Bible. You see this kind of thing—

12. 08:29

    Michael Horton

    What the Anabaptists were doing.

13. 08:31

    Jordan Cooper

    Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the Anabaptists were doing this. So there were people—and that's why we call them the radical reformers, right? So, there were people that were proposing this kind of radical tossing away of the past. We then see that kind of echoed in the political realm when you get someone like, uh, Thomas Paine, for example, who starts to say that a constitution basically needs to be kind of reworked with every generation. We just got to start over all the time, right? So you do see these kind of revolutionary moves. I don't even think they're really connected that much to the Protestant Reformation, but maybe we'll touch on that. But they're at least around at the time of the Reformation that do kind of have some, I think, serious effects in the way that culture ends up and the church ends up in many ways. But that's certainly not— and we're talking about the magisterial reformers— that's not their attitude, right? So we have both the need to reform — the need to go back to God's Word and fix practices that are aberrant and learn new ways to speak the truth in the world that is constantly changing — but we also need to conserve what we have been handed in our heritage in the past as well, and I think the Reformers really tried to balance those two things, so I'd make a pretty strong distinction between the Magisterial Reformation, which is that more conservative Reformation, versus that more maybe revolutionary attitude you might find among some of the Anabaptists.

14. 09:50

    Michael Horton

    Hans Hillerbrand said that there would have been a division in the church if Luther had died in his cradle. Essentially, there were so many seething divisions in the church. For example, one of the most notable ones, I think you both mentioned it, was the Western Schism. So not only was there a division between the Eastern Church and the Western Church, but in the Western Church itself for an entire century—from 1305 to 1377—there were at one point 4 popes excommunicating each other. And here is how—I mean, people want to fact-check Pope Benedict XVI because he put it this way. “For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another. And in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The church no longer offered certainty of salvation. She had become questionable in her whole objective form. The true church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution.” This is the description by Pope Benedict of the church prior to the Reformation, and it fits well with what people like Erasmus said. Hey, people have been calling for reform so loudly, and I don't think there's ever been a time when the church has been more corrupt from head to toe, from the pope all the way down. Of course, he wasn't thinking about doctrinal issues, especially justification through faith alone on the basis of Christ alone. He was thinking more in terms of the — the morals of the church, the moral and ritualistic corruption of the church. But man, there were—I mean, you had divisions between papalists, people who thought the pope should have the last say, and conciliarists who thought that councils should be above popes. And this was, you know, you had councils contradicting each other. These were major wars really within the church between people who disagreed vehemently on the institution itself. So what made Luther different?

15. 12:33

    Michael Horton

    Maybe, Gavin, you could talk about some of the reformers before Luther, but Luther was different from the reformers who went before him—recognized that. Can you give us, first of all, a little bit of background on some of the pre-Reformation reformers?

16. 12:49

    Gavin Ortlund

    Yeah, and if someone wants to point out that, okay, yeah, there were problems in the medieval West, and especially in those centuries preceding the Reformation, but they were ultimately resolved or at least resolvable, I think what we're speaking to here is just the on-the-ground reality. And this is a totally valid point of protest against those who say to be a Protestant you have to live with all of these ambiguities and uncertainties and so forth. And I think we can just observe this is not too far removed from what any system ultimately will have to work through in different points. But I think what you've asked about here, the proto-Reformers, there's so many different proto-Protestant groups. I think if we're asking the big question here of kind of was the Reformation ultimately a movement toward good rather than bad with respect to Christ's church, I think one of the ways we again can get back into historical context and appreciate this is just how brutal it was. For those who were dissenting or protesting prior to the 16th century, prior to Luther. One of my great personal heroes is Jan Hus, sometimes pronounced John Huss, Bohemian reformer, great preacher. He was burned at the stake at an ecumenical council. And if you go, I've spent so much time just tracing, I just find him fascinating, you know, just what it was, what were his concerns? What was his personality? What happened? What was it like for him? The little detail that always gets me is he didn't know what day his execution would transpire. So in 1415, he's just waiting day by day, and the courage that he had, but his concerns were extremely reasonable. He was protesting real abuse, simony, the purchasing of church offices, papal overreach. He wanted the Bible to be translated into the vernacular. That was a huge issue. To Jordan's point about our ability to even study these things today, you know, Tom Holland has this point about Christianity that the modern world is more Christianized than we realize, and a lot of the latent values reflect Christianity. In some respects, I think there's something to the same degree with Protestantism. The very ability to come together and have an open clash of ideas is in various ways, I think, the result of Protestant influence. And if anyone disputes that, look what it was like for the Hussites. The Roman Catholic hierarchy waged five distinct crusades against the Hussites alone, let alone other proto-Protestant groups. It was a savage time. It was absolutely brutal. And we don't say that in a spirit of just to score a point. We can acknowledge great sins among Protestants as well. We're not just trying to be inflammatory, but we just want our viewers to understand the historical context and what it was like to live in these times. If you're a Christian in the 1500s, or in the 1400s, or in the 1300s, you probably would be somewhat starved of the Word of God in your vernacular language, starved of frequent participation in the Eucharist. There would be financial abuse with indulgences, and they would never—

17. 15:42

    Michael Horton

    Well, you never actually received the—the Eucharist, because you only could take the bread.

18. 15:48

    Gavin Ortlund

    Right. You only get one kind, and that sometimes very infrequently. There's a lot of superstition. There's a lot of darkness. Again, it's easy to romanticize the past. You get back and you look, take off the rose-colored glasses, and you're able to see why did so many people experience the Protestant Reformation as a breakthrough? Of the experience of the felt love of God and the grace of God in the gospel. In no small measure is it the amount of persecution against protest that is taking place. And it's not just the Hussites. It is so many other groups as well. The Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe, is another group I've done some study on. And boy, there's worlds to uncover. You know, I just want to motivate people to study these times a little more. So there's so much to say about that. And we can go, you know, we can chase this further if you guys want to, but I just want people to be aware. Not only did the Protestants in the 16th century inherit an already divided church, they inherited a long tradition of protest that sometimes was pretty savagely treated.

19. 16:51

    Michael Horton

    I want to ask you, Jordan, in just a second, what Luther thought was different about his reform, and your point that the Anabaptists were not really— didn't come out of the Reformation is so important for people to realize. It's a late medieval spirituality grounded in German mysticism. And maybe you can unpack that a little after I give this quote on Calvin's side of things, showing again this conservative Reformation you're talking about. In his preface to the Institutes of the Christian Religion, his dedication to the French king, he says, “we have laid down with simplicity a brief confession of the faith we hold, which we trust you will find in accordance with that of the Catholic Church.” And as Richard Muller says, “the Reformation provoked controversy over justification, the sacraments, and the church, but the doctrines of God, the Trinity, creation, providence, predestination, and the last things were taken over by the magisterial Reformation virtually without alteration.” And one more quote from Calvin. This is Calvin on behalf of Geneva to Cardinal Sadoleto, who was trying to get Geneva to come back to Rome. Calvin writes, “you know, Sadoleto, that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, and we are only trying to renew that ancient form of the church that has been distorted by illiterate men, and was afterwards mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman pontiff and his faction. Although there still remains remnants of a true church, every aspect of the church's ministry, its doctrine, the sacraments, ceremonies, and discipline have been profaned by Rome. Will you obtrude upon me for the church a body which furiously persecutes everything sanctioned by our religion? Both as delivered by the oracles of God and embodied in the writings of the Holy Fathers and approved by ancient councils?” This shows really the heart of the polemic is not, you know, the church died after the apostles and, you know, now there's a new Pentecost. It's really we're just—we're trying to—we're trying to get the church back. We're conservatives. We're trying to get the ancient form of the church back.

20. 19:37

    Michael Horton

    Jordan, can you help us here understand Luther's place in this, why he's so unique as a reformer?

21. 19:45

    Jordan Cooper

    Before I address that directly, I do just want to make a comment about some of the things we've been talking about here in terms of the pre-Reformation era, the kind of culture out of which the Reformation came. There's a perception that I think a lot of people who aren't very well versed in history and are starting to study these things for the first time — a perception that people have that a lot of revolutionary attitudes or all these changes in the West that they see as really the secularization come out of something that Martin Luther did. This was just this total shift in Western medieval history. And I just think it's important to make note of the fact that has already really been kind of discussed here a bit, but that is that these changes that created the modern world were already underway at the time that the Reformation started. The papal schism that we've already talked about has played a role in this. The, you know, size of armies are increasing significantly, which is then consolidating power more so in what become nation-states. There's kind of proto-capitalism starting. A lot of these things are already there at the time of the Reformation. In some ways, I think maybe the most significant is the rise of humanism. And humanism forced the church to reckon with inconsistencies in its history. It just had to. When you find out that—when you start using more critical methods to evaluate authorship of certain texts, right? So you start looking at something like the Donation of Constantine, which had been so often used as really a primary support for the supremacy of the papacy, and we know it's a fraudulent text. Now to be fair, there were some people that questioned it in the medieval period, but it was generally regarded as authentic, but that's just one example of many—these inconsistencies were just being revealed, so something's got to happen, right? And so the Reformers are really responding to a situation that's already underway. In light of that then, what is Luther doing? Well, like many of his time, in being trained amidst the time of the rise of humanism, and amidst a time where there are a number of new universities, there is a kind of new or revived intellectual life that's leading toward more public debate. Luther was engaged in all of these ordinary things that were happening at his time when he posted those 95 Theses. Now, Luther had no intention of starting a new church or anything like that when he posted those 95 Theses. He did what was a very ordinary thing to do, which was if there was some kind of topic of theological debate, a professor would propose a series of theses, and then you'd have some public debate about it. And so this instance of the abuse of indulgences that was happening at this time led to the writing of the 95 Theses. Luther never meant to make any kind of controversial stance. The fact was that nothing that Luther taught at this time went against any official church teaching.

22. Jordan Cooper

    There was no ecumenical council that decreed any of these kinds of things about indulgences, and this is true about so many of the things that Luther was addressing. So he was just entering into the theological conversations that were happening at this time. Now, what ended up coming from that, of course, was a more significant change than just the challenging of indulgences, because out of this—out of what was really an attempt just to debate a theological point—there were a number of other things that were revealed about, yeah, inconsistencies between the way that the church had practiced certain things in its history and the way that these things had been developed in medieval Rome. And so it's really actually the early Lutherans that are usually credited with creating the field of patrology, right? This really intense study of patristics. And something that really was only actually possible because of the Reformation was that scholars were able to actually look at the Church Fathers and look at them honestly without having to prove a point that they agreed with later Roman dogma. And so it led to just an honest look at texts and an honest scholarship in a way that really wasn't possible before that. So that's really all Luther himself was doing at this time. He was kind of an accidental reformer, really. I mean, none of this was purposeful. And this is another point that I'll make here—and this is one that I make a lot, largely because of the way that a lot of our conversations and culture happen today—that people just, because it's easy to have a platform, people just kind of often give themselves a platform, sometimes irresponsibly. And Luther was called by his ecclesiastical superior, Staupitz, Johann von Staupitz, to get a doctorate in Wittenberg. And he had no intentions of really doing that, but because he was asked to, he did. Now when Luther became a doctor, the doctorate was awarded, he saw this as an external call, right? He said, I've been given a call. What was essentially his pastor really asked him to study for a doctorate, and that was awarded, and he was given a call publicly. He was told to go teach theology under the prince as well at this time. And so—yeah. It was in all of that that Luther said, okay, well, I now have been commissioned, and I've taken a vow to teach the Word of God, and so I'm going to do that. So I think that's really important too, to say Luther had training, and he spoke about this all the time. This is why later Lutherans, when they referred to throughout like the scholastic period, 17th century Protestant scholasticism, they all just call him Dr. Luther. The reason for that is because they say he had a call. He was given a doctorate. He was asked to do this. He was prepared. He was trained. He wasn't just a random person that just said, I have got a burning in my bosom, and so the Spirit is just telling me to go do this or that. I mean, he was going through the proper external kind of channels, and this happened kind of accidentally. And I think anytime you have real reform that is meaningful and lasting, it is not something that's manufactured, right? It's something that arises out of circumstance, and I think that's what you have with Luther.

23. 25:57

    Michael Horton

    And he even says, right, that I didn't come to all this all at once. You know, he didn't even—there's nothing about justification in the 95 Theses. He didn't really come to understand the imputed righteousness of Christ until much later, through Melanchthon especially. I love the honesty. Like, you know, I didn't come to this all at once. I came to it through— what does he say? Through torture and prayer, or— Sometimes Protestants have that nostalgic view of Luther that he, you know, ta-da, on a postage stamp or something. And, you know, he's a man of his time.

24. 26:35

    Jordan Cooper

    And it is important to bring up, as you say, that he came to these conclusions largely through Melanchthon too. And this wasn't just Luther as an isolated individual. Now, Luther was a unique man in history, right? He was one of these very charismatic individuals that a lot of people followed. And I think he was the right man for the right time. But it is important that there was a whole circle of people—pastors and professors in Wittenberg—that were dialoguing and discussing and praying through these issues all together. And so this isn't just an issue of one charismatic personality just making a bunch of decisions, but these ideas were formed in prayer and conversation.

25. 27:16

    Michael Horton

    What do you guys think—in the long view of things—would have been the possibility of the Roman Catholic Church becoming more reformed, little r, more evangelical, slowly but surely? The picture is the Reformers left the church. If they had just stayed in the church and tried to reform it from within, we hear this. What's your response?

26. 27:48

    Gavin Ortlund

    I could speak to that briefly. I mean, I think there can be a naivety in this idea of, oh, just stay, work from within, work incrementally. We might already have seen a little bit of this in just looking at how the Hussites and the Waldensians—we didn't mention them yet—but then the Lollards and others were treated. But one thing I think I could say that gets right to the issue here, I think, is we'll often hear this appeal that, well, okay, fine, suppose Luther had some valid concerns, he's working things out and so forth. Ultimately, he still shouldn't have broken off from the one true church that Christ founded. And the way I think we would want to push back against this, amidst some other things we could say, is the entities being protested, we believe, are not of divine institution. So the papacy, we cannot submit to this institution because we don't believe it is what it purports to be. For that, I think we have very strong biblical and historical evidence. The New Testament's pretty important for telling us what the church should look like, how unity should be aspired to, and what are the offices of the church. And in the New Testament, we do not see any idea of a Petrine office, let alone a Petrine office that is capable of infallibility and is the location of unity and is supreme and head of the church and so on and so forth. And so if someone says, well, you're assuming sola scriptura by just looking at the New Testament, all we need to do is just expand outwards and look at the rest of the historical evidence as well. The First Epistle of Clement and the Didache, and then going into the 2nd century evidence. And we can just quote the Catholic scholars who are honest with this historical data. This really doesn't seem like it actually is an apostolic institution. It does seem like it is an incremental growth within the church that comes about over time. And it's just slowly, slowly growing along the way. And it's different in the second century versus the sixth versus the 13th versus the 21st. But it ultimately does not relate back to the apostles in the way it purports to. And for that reason, I think we can just say it is legitimate to refuse to submit to that which seeks to yoke our consciences when it does not have divine authority behind it—when it claims to have divine authority, but it doesn't. I do think that puts us in the territory of Mark 7 and these traditions of the Pharisees, where they claim to have an oral tradition and Jesus said, no, you're nullifying the Word of God. So it's a simple point, but I mean, hopefully that could be clarifying for our viewers to just think this through.

27. 30:28

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

28. 30:28

    Gavin Ortlund

    You know, we're not departing from the one true church. We are protesting accrued incremental structures over time within that church. And that's a completely different thing.

29. 30:42

    Jordan Cooper

    Yeah, I would add to that that Luther didn't really have an option. Melanchthon didn't really have an option. They were kicked out. And you find these statements repeatedly in Luther and Melanchthon that if the Pope would allow their churches to preach the gospel, they would remain. But they didn't. So—like, what else were they supposed to do? But I think that Gavin makes a really good point in talking about the exclusive claims of the papacy. And Melanchthon, for example, in his treatise on the power and primacy of the Pope, he makes a really important distinction in church structure between divine right and human right. And so he says, well, it's one thing just to say that by human organization, we have organized in such a way that—yes, the Bishop of Rome is the head of the church in some sense. It's a very different thing to say that this is a divine office that God has placed into a position in such a way that it is necessary for your salvation that you submit to this office. And it's very evident that those who are arguing against the Reformers certainly believed that in the most literal sense. I mean, they believed in the most literal sense that if you do not submit to the Pope, you are eternally damned.

30. 32:00

    Michael Horton

    I wonder if, as we're bringing this to a close, what you think of this—if this is too out of line to say. It seems to me that the church before the Council of Trent and after the Council of Trent is a different institution. Before the Council of Trent, you had all kinds of issues that were not settled, that were not binding—no real debate over justification or sola scriptura. We'll talk about that in the next episode. Instead, you had people like Thomas Aquinas affirming sola scriptura in exactly those words. Now these views are condemned by the Council of Trent. So what you have after the Council of Trent is a very strict set of dogmas that are either not decided in the Middle Ages or contradict what was said and decided in the Middle Ages, so that neither the Protestant Reformers nor the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church is exactly in continuity with the previous centuries. Is that fair?

31. 33:27

    Gavin Ortlund

    Certainly so. I’d love Dr. Cooper's thoughts here as well. Yeah, it is a real turning point because there's a difference between, you know, in the medieval era—I think Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Lutheran-turned-Orthodox Church historian of dogma, talks about justification prior to the Council of Trent. And he's making the point that there was more variation throughout church history, and that there wasn't as much requirement of one view. And on that particular doctrine, that would be a great example of what you're saying, Dr. Horton—that there is a difference between a situation in which you may hold to a view, even if it is at times opposed, and a situation in which it is anathematized. And so the Council of Trent's a real turning point. Justification is a good example of that. And I think there's some others too. What would you add on to that, Dr. Cooper?

32. 34:13

    Jordan Cooper

    Yeah. You know, the comment has often been made that Trent is the time where the Roman Church really became the Roman Church, at least as we know it today. And the Council of Trent was so comprehensive in its declarations, in its prescriptions, that it really surpasses any council prior to this in the Western Church. I mean, it really reforms the church in such a significant way that it's really not exactly precisely the same kind of entity that it really is prior to that.

33. 34:46

    Michael Horton

    Although it wasn't even broadly representative of the church, right? There were a lot fewer bishops who showed up than they hoped.

34. 34:57

    Jordan Cooper

    Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely the case. And even on the question of justification, there actually was a lot of variance even debated at Trent at this time. One other example, obviously, of justification—of an issue that was debated—there's no definitive declaration of the canon, and there are ongoing debates about the canon. And I point this out that Cardinal Cajetan, who was one of Luther's strongest opponents, very significant theologian of his time, he questioned the canonicity of what are known as the apocryphal texts, the Deutero-Canon, as well as a couple books in the New Testament. And so— and that's a pretty major point to have some disagreement on. But that's just, I think, illustrative of the broader point that there was so much room for disagreement and debate on a number of significant issues prior to Trent. This is why the Augsburg Confession consistently says—this is the first and primary confession of the Lutheran Church, 1530—the Augsburg Confession consistently says throughout its articles that we teach nothing against the Catholic tradition, because these things hadn't been definitively declared.

35. 36:02

    Michael Horton

    Well, we're just getting started. In the next episode, we're going to talk about authority and scripture, and dig into some of the more doctrinal issues. Here we've explored especially the historical question of why the Reformation happened, what was different about what's called the Magisterial Reformation, which means the Reformation that was led by cities and princes rather than the Anabaptists, the radical Reformation. And we're going to look at what the Reformation said about the nature of authority in the church. Did they just disregard it? Just me and my Bible in a corner deciding what's true? And be able to do that again with my friends (Michael Horton)Jordan Cooper) and (Michael Horton)Gavin Ortlund). Thanks. Be sure to subscribe to Gavin's channel. Uh, at Truth Unites, where this next episode will be.