WB: Vanishing Johan Tetzel
Greetings from Hancock County, Tennessee! I’m on a home repairs camp called Appalachia Service Project (ASP) with my High School students this week, so my blog will be brief.
Growing up Protestant, I have really only learned the side of history where Martin Luther is the hero facing impossible odds agains the villainous Medieval Catholic Church. Strange things like indulgences, relics, and praying to Mary or the saints must be superstitious or even idolatrous distractions from real Christian faith.
So I thought it would be fun to spend some time this summer learning the Catholic perspectives on the Reformation, and retell it Wesley Bros-style through a Stranger Things parody. For Protestants, the Reformation is about simplifying the church of man-made rules and ideas for a return to biblical basics. Catholics don’t deny that reform was necessary, but view the Council of Trent (1545-1563) as the proper Reformation.
The Upside Down was breaking in.
This week, our main characters are Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) and his contemporary, St. Bonaventure (1217-1274), along with their forefather, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and an otherwise irrelevant German Friar, Johan Tetzel.
Augustine shaped Christian theology and church structure for the Early Middle Ages, and 800 years later, Aquinas shaped the Christian landscape from the Renaissance onward. Augustine had established a systematic Catholic philosophy rooted in Neo-Platonism, Aquinas re-centered Catholic teaching around the philosophy of Aristotle.
These theologies and philosophies would be taught and debated among the intellectuals and monastics who dedicated their whole lives to divine thinking.
But it’s always been hard to scale nuance to the masses.
So you get something as carefully thought out as transubstantiation of the communion elements getting mistaken by the masses as magical bread transformed by the words “hocus pocus.” And when it comes to the forgiveness of sins, you get masses confused into thinking that they could save a loved one from Purgatory if they gave enough to the pope’s capital campaign.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation is often referred to as penance or confession. In John 20:22-23, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them, if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” Christ bestowed his own power to forgive sins upon the church, “and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
As a sacrament in Catholicism, this becomes a sacred mystery that can only be administered by an ordained priest through Apostolic Succession. Put simply, Christ did not give that power of forgiveness equally to the entire body of believers, but only through the chain of those who have received authority by (Catholic) ordination, connecting the ordained directly back to those initial disciples.
Through Augustine’s Plato-inspired philosophy, you got levels of the gravity of sin (mortal and venial). Through Aquinas’s Aristotle-inspired philosophy, you got a virtue-building action step to go along with confession, something you do to prove your sorrow over sin. Both men had profoundly deep and scripture-based logic for ascribing a process to how the masses could be truly reconciled to God and each other through the sacrament.
Then a little Augustinian monk named Martin Luther just ruined it all with his protests…
That’s all I’ve got time to write this week, back to the work site! Tune back next week!
New Charlie Baber
The Rev. Charlie Baber, author of Wesley Bros cartoon.
When not drawing the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves as youth minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.