A remarkable social movement arose to provide this guidance.  It is the great social movement of the last millennium.  We call it Protestantism.  It is the royal road to the middle class.

When Protestantism burst into the world in the early sixteenth century through the midwifery of Martin Luther, it was already strong enough to withstand the counterstrokes that immediately arose to destroy it, for its heart had already pulsed for centuries before its dramatic birth.  In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin explained why the origins of great events in the universe lie shrouded in mystery.  It is because beginnings are too small to be noticed, or even to leave a record.  We cannot observe in the fossil record how the first living cell came into existence, and we cannot see how humans first began evolving from the apes.  Nor is the greatness of the Standard Oil Company revealed in the first job obtained in 1855 by sixteen-year-old bookkeeper John D. Rockefeller as a clerk in the firm of Hewitt and Tuttle, commission merchants of Cleveland, Ohio.  When great phenomena impinge upon public consciousness, they are already fully formed, as Protestantism was when it exploded into northern Europe with Martin Luther and John Calvin in the early sixteenth century or as Standard Oil was when it exploded into public consciousness in the 1870s as the octopus that controlled most of the oil refined from the western Pennsylvania oilfields.

The first attempts to found the Protestant movement failed.

Born a century before Luther around 1328, John Wyclif was a farmer’s son from Yorkshire, in England.  He went to Oxford, got an education, and taught theology and philosophy.  He developed a doctrine that the right to rule could only inhere to a virtuous ruler, including the rulers of the church.  He supervised the first translation of the Bible into English.  Wyclif’s ideas helped fire the Peasant Revolt led by Wat Tyler that leaped out of the countryside around London in 1381, although the revolt was mainly inspired by resentment at the Statute of Laborers enacted by Parliament in 1352.  After the decimation of the Black Death in 1348-49 wages had increased, and the political elite had decided to do something about it.  But the rage of the workers was not enough to prevail against England’s warrior aristocracy.  Tyler was killed, and the revolt was suppressed.  Calm had returned to the English countryside.

But all was not calm.  Over the next century, others took up the torch of Wyclif, including Jan Huss in Bohemia and Colet in England.  A century later Erasmus in Holland extended the challenge to authority with the notion that

obedience to the law is worthless unless it is based on obedience of the heart… This was to appeal from the authority of the church to the individual… [so] laymen, learned and unlearned, [could] reject the authority of the priesthood. (Stevenson 1952 p11)

Of course, it would be difficult for laymen to challenge the priesthood unless they possessed the means to do so.  In 1455, Johannes of Gutenberg invented that tool.  With the printing press and movable type, he printed and published the first “title.” And that title was the Bible.  With that single stroke he slashed the cost of the written word that previously had kept book learning far beyond the means of ordinary people.  Now the layman could study the Bible and challenge the authority of the church hierarchy, could challenge the sacramental religion of the Holy Catholic Church with a religion of the book in which every family, with their family Bible, could participate.  The Reformation started with the printed Bible.

The contrast between pre and post-Gutenberg society can scarcely be over-emphasized.  Before Gutenberg, God was in his heaven, the King was on his throne, the peasants were toiling in the fields and all was right with the world.  The church fathers spread Christianity by converting kings and princes to the faith (Fletcher 1999 2,3), and the bishops and abbots of the church were scions of the warrior aristocracy.  After Gutenberg, there came into the world a new force: the middle class of the cities and their peculiar democratic belief system, Protestantism.  Now, instead of a magisterium, a church run by the top, for the top, from the top, with doctrine revealed ex cathedra, a new concept was born.  People came together and built their own modest churches, ran them themselves, and hired and fired their preachers.

The man who symbolized this revolution was Erasmus.  Born in 1466, the illegitimate son of a priest and a washerwoman, he was a victim of the old system of priestly celibacy and struggled to obtain an education.  Excited by the first printed editions of the Bible and the Greek classics, he supported a life of scholarship by becoming the first best-selling author.  In some years, over ten percent of the books sold in London and Paris were written by Erasmus.  In the 1530s, over a million copies of his works, including his Greek New Testament, were circulating in Europe.

Erasmus represented a new force in society, He was “a product of the new urban civilization and spoke for its middle-class members.”  He “regarded the sober, hard-working, middle-ranking townsman as the Christian elite.”  It was the beginning of the Protestant idea “that there could be no intermediaries between the Christian soul and the scriptures,” (Johnson 1979 p273)

In 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and Professor of Scripture, took the challenge a step further.  He railed against the abuses of Rome and questioned the right of the pope to be the sole interpreter of the Bible.  He drew up an indictment of the pope and nailed it to the church door of Wittenberg castle as “Ninety-five Theses Against Indulgences,” and translated the New Testament into German.  He set off a frenzied reaction in the breasts of the townspeople of Germany, who wanted their own preachers and their own churches, and to be free of the corruption of Rome. 

But why did Luther succeed where Wyclif failed?  Why do we still enjoy a whole spectrum of churches bearing the name of Luther but none with the name or inspiration of Wyclif?  There are probably two reasons, one economic and one political.  One we have already mentioned, the invention of printing with movable type in Gutenberg in 1455.  When the Wyclif Bible appeared, it could only be published through expensive hand copying.  After Gutenberg, the Bible could be printed and published at a fraction of the cost of scribe copying, and ordinary city burghers could begin to afford their own family Bible.  The other reason is that Wyclif’s movement was associated with the peasant revolt of Wat Tyler, and thus was identified with rebellion against the king and his barons.  Luther carefully maintained his relations with the temporal powers, even to the extent of encouraging the suppression of peasant revolt.  He never mounted a challenge against the landed power.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill