LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary

48 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XII
Gregory VII died a failure in exile in Salerno in 1085, boasting that, “I
have loved righteousness and hated iniquity.” For a brief season his vision of
absolute papal power was realized in the early 13 th century by Innocent III
(1198-1216), but the hubris of many pontiffs was brought low when
Boniface VIII took on Philip V of France and precipitated the papacy’s 70year
“Babylonian captivity” in Avignon. Innocent’s ostensible triumph was
bought at a heavy price, for the existing legislation used by Henry VIII to
prise the Church of England out of Europe had been enacted by English
kings of the high Middle Ages in their attempts to rein back papal power.
Only against the background of what he lambasted as the “imperial papacy”
of the Cluniac reform can Luther’s denunciation of the papal office be
rightly understood. For the first of the “three walls” of the Romanists to be
demolished in the Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of
1520 is the papal claim of superiority over and immunity from the civil
authorities.
It is one of the choicest and bitterest ironies of history that Luther’s
assault on the totalitarian claims of the mediaeval papacy permitted the
pendulum to swing to the very opposite extreme. Despairing of meaningful
reform at the hands of the established bishops, the Reformer begged the
ruling princes to step into the vacuum. As is well known, in both Germany
and the united kingdom of Denmark and Norway the territorial sovereigns
soon progressed from the temporary status of “emergency bishops”
(Notbischöfe) to become the “supreme bishops” (summi episcopi) of the
churches in their realms. The Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555 allowed
for ruling princes to choose between two confessions, the Roman and the
Lutheran, granting these sovereigns the right to determine the religion of
their subjects according to the principle summarized in the phrase cuius
regio eius religio. Shortly after the promulgation of the Book of Concord the
Elector Palatine defected to the Reformed Faith, taking his subjects with him
to Geneva. In 1613 Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg likewise
repudiated the Lutheran confession. The Pennsylvania historian Bodo
Nischan provides a wealth of valuable detail as he approvingly describes the
endeavours of John Sigismund to uproot Lutheran faith and practice from his
realm. Readers of Prince, People, and Confession cannot take seriously Karl
Barth’s much publicized and widely accepted charge that cringing servility
to the secular authorities pertains to the essence of Lutheranism. For in the
years immediately following John Sigismund’s apostasy, leading clergy
bravely denounced their ruler’s attack on the Church, some of them being
forced into exile in neighbouring Saxony. A generation before princely
absolutism was set in place by the woefully misnamed “Great Elector”, the
estates of Brandenburg and Prussia resisted John Sigismund’s church
policies. And the common people demonstrated by the force of their
opposition that they were by now well catechized in the Lutheran Faith to