Aids for Bible Readers by Charles Johnston

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 20, 1908

Aids for Bible Readers

By Charles Johnston

Historical quotations and extracts from various writers which may assist the thoughtful student of the Scriptures.

The Catholic Reformation and the Authority of the Vatican

(Concluded)

In defiance of the words of the Scripture and the practise of the apostolic age and the early Fathers, the claims of the bishops of Rome to political power and mental domination steadily increased. It is written: “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt; for the tree is known by his fruit.” Let us consider the fruit of the tree.

As early as the Theodosian Code, we find the alliance with the civil power used as an instrument of persecution, and Gregory invoked the civil power against the Donatists, in perfect anticipation of the “Holy Inquisition.” Hildebrand, who assumed the triple tiara as Gregory VII, went further; he asserted that all political authority was derived from the pope. He made good his claim against the emperor, and demanded that William the Conqueror should do allegiance for the throne of England. Here Hildebrand was met with flat refusal. Yet the pope’s claim to political suzerainty was made good. Innocent III succeeded where Gregory VII had failed. He brought the king of England to his knees, and forced him to become a vassal of Rome. To take other instances: in 1465 Pope Paul II deposed the king of Bohemia, and brought on a sanguinary war. Half a century later Pope Julius II deposed the king of Navarre. But the most signal instance of this political usurpation came in 1215, when Innocent III formally cursed the Great Charter of England, “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: Damnamus sub intimatione Anatematis prohibentes, ne dictus Rex eam observare praesumet, aut Barones cum complicibus suis ipsam exigant observari; tam Chartam quam obligationes. . . .” Thus did the Vatican set its face like a flint against the charter of modern liberty.

Infinitely worse was another event of the same year. Summoning the bishops to Rome, Innocent III read to them the decrees which, after they had listened to them in silence, were recorded as the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council. Among these were two of ominous note: one approving the massacre of the Waldenses, and the other establishing the “Holy Inquisition.” It is not my intention to enlarge upon that massacre, or to discuss the question whether Torquemada burned three thousand or thirty thousand “heretics.” Let the dead past bury its dead.

But what must be insisted on is this: that the poison of despotism, once taken into the veins of an ecclesiastical organization, will always work deadly harm. There are evil powers in the heart which despotism kindles, and they bear horrible fruit of torture and massacre.

Yet, during this very period, there was an abundance of the purest spirituality within the church. To it belong the great names of Saint Francis, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Thomas a Kempis, for whom one can have nothing but reverent admiration. These peerless souls, and multitudes of others less renowned, were the salt of the earth, the leaven of the church, in a very real sense. For no one with reverent faith in the God of love can believe that the church of Christ was upheld by the butchery of the Albigenses, the fires of the Inquisition. Was it not rather the spiritual power of the true followers of the Master, who “heard his commandments and kept them,” which upheld the church as on a rock? May we not believe in an unbroken succession of such saints, rich in love and purity, forming the soul of the church within the temporal body, and breathing forth a spiritual power which kept the church sweet through centuries of despotism and cruelty?

We have seen that Origen, Irenæus, Tertullian, and Jerome opposed the Roman bishop’s claim to supremacy, and that Origen expressly declares that the church was not founded on Peter alone. In like manner, we find the Council of Nicæa expressly recognizing other sees—Antioch and Alexandria, for instance—as “apostolic sees,” a title appropriated by Rome. This question was the cause of the division between the Eastern and Western churches. It was the claim of Gregory VII and of Innocent III to exercise supreme authority over these independent apostolic sees of the East which tore Christendom in twain.

In like manner, the claim of the see of Rome to exercise intellectual despotism over Christendom was the real source of the later division which sprang from the fiery protest of Martin Luther. There was crying need for purification. But had there been more moderate counsels on both sides, had the claims of the Vatican been abated, while the Reformers checked their violence, we might have had a strong and vital evolution of the church without division, the vigorous spiritual forces of Northern Europe developing within its boundaries, in an atmosphere of light and liberty. We might have had the great movements of modern science, saved from materialism, growing up in an atmosphere of reverence and spiritual life. Had she not insisted on banishing intellectual liberty, the church might have been saved from the ignominy of that famous decree: “We say, pronounce, declare, that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in process, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself, in the judgment of this holy office, vehemently suspected of heresy; namely, of having believed and held the doctrine, which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the sun is the center of the system and does not move from east to west, and that the earth is not the center of the system. . . .”

We may say, therefore, that the tree is judged by its fruits. The Vatican’s successive claims of supremacy, of civil suzerainty and intellectual despotism, twice rent Christendom in twain, forcing the separation of the independent apostolic sees of the East, and driving into revolt the nations of Northern Europe, in the movement of the Reformation. And these same claims, and most of all that of intellectual despotism, lightened the pyres of the Inquisition, spread massacre through the Piedmont Valleys, gave hundreds up to torture and death, and wrought a myriad agonies through the Middle Ages.

What most imports us to recognize to-day is that Pius X is making exactly the same claims as the most extreme of his predecessors. He has openly declared that the separation of church and state is a “pernicious error,” and he evidently holds that the church is higher than the state. But even more certain and much more significant is his steady adherence to the principle of intellectual despotism, as illustrated by the syllabus, the encyclicals, the papal pronouncements. He firmly believes that he holds the right to say what Christians shall and shall not believe, whether as to the Scriptures, the early history of the church, or the facts and theories of science; and he is prepared to use every means in his power to compel obedience, “even to the shedding of blood.” . . .

If we are right, and we call on history to vindicate us, the evil which for centuries overshadowed Europe like a nightmare has a clearly defined source: the principle of “domination.” Jesus himself set up no authority, but taught the perfect law of love and obedience to the divine will. For Jesus, orthodoxy was not a belief, but a life: “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” There is no question here of any one declaring what another shall or shall not believe; there is a question of denying one’s self, of hating one’s life that one may keep it unto life eternal. There is no authority, but that of more perfect obedience to the law of love, the law of sacrifice. And those should exercise authority who most perfectly exemplify the spirit of the Master, and, by perfect obedience, are united in spirit to the Master. Even then their authority must ever be that of a holy example; they must never “lord it over the inheritance,” and, if they win anything of the spirit of the Master, they can never so lord it, for does not the Master say, “I am meek and lowly in heart”? — Charles Johnston, in The North American Review for December, 1907.