The Man Who Stayed Catholic: Erasmus — Stephen Russell — Ep. 142

Well, this is Ed about this perspectives of Steve Russell and myself, Kyle Stoltzfuss. We're here at Faith Builders Educational Programs, and today we're going to talk for just a little while about Erasmus. And I remember when I was a student of yours, just the mixed character of Erasmus and kind of enjoying who he was as a scholar, but at the same time recognizing he's hard to pin down as a person. But let's just back up a little bit.

Some of the significance of Erasmus, it's hard, in some ways it's hard to overstate how significant Erasmus is during the time of the Reformation. People say things about Erasmus like, you know, Erasmus, he laid the egg that Luther hatched. What do people mean when they say things like that? Well, Erasmus is key to the Reformation, and that's one of the things that means that without Erasmus would Luther have done what he did. Now, why is he so important?

He was a great scholar, Renaissance scholar. Most Renaissance scholars, at least in the South, were interested in the old ancient Greek and Latin writings and often pagans. He, on the other hand, was interested in the foundational records of the church. In fact, the Renaissance was about Ad Fontes, going back to the sources. So the Southern Renaissance people would go back to the sources of philosophy and things like that. He, on the other hand, was interested in the sources of Christianity. And so he looked to the Church Fathers, but first of all he looked to the New Testament. And he got together all the manuscripts he could of the Greek New Testament, and he is the one who published, first published the Greek New Testament with a Latin translation so that someone who didn't know Greek could teach himself Greek because almost everybody, or at least the educated people, knew Latin.

So he did a critical text of the Greek New Testament, he did a Latin translation of it, and he did a paraphrase of Matthew and the book of Acts. So he gave the tools to the people like Luther and like the Anabaptists who were going to actually proceed with the Reformation. So he laid the egg, Luther hatched it, and then look what comes out of it, Anabaptists and other things, you know. Yeah. Okay. So especially that he's critically engaging the New Testament, he's going back to some of the Fathers. What about some of the other stuff he wrote? I mean, you're giving a pretty pristine picture of Erasmus.

Are you thinking about, well, he saw that Christianity was in trouble and that it needed to change. So he wrote, for instance, in Praise of Folly, to try to get people to recognize that the church as it was, was at least corrupted and needed some kind of change. So he was actually in favor of change.

So that would be one thing that he wrote, and it poked at Christian leaders that weren't used to being poked at. And I think you might be thinking about Julius... Julius Exclusus. Yes, Julius Exclusus. Well, anyway, Erasmus made fun of his contemporary pope, Julius II, who was, some people have said he spent more time on a warhorse in armor than he did at the altar. Well, he was a pope, he was supposed to be at the altar, but he also worked to consolidate politically and militarily the papal states, the states that in central Italy that the popes ruled. And that seems to have been his key thrust. And before the cameras started rolling, I was telling you how he conquered the city of Bologna, which was outside of the papal states, and he had a statue, a bronze statue of himself made and set up in the plaza there.

And when he died, the people of Bologna revolted and they melted down the statue and they recast it as a cannon just in case the next pope had similar designs on Bologna as Julius had had. There's one more interesting story. I think this is in Praise of Folly, but I might be wrong on that. But this is while Julius was still alive. He wrote that Julius died and he comes up to the gates of heaven on a warhorse with a lance and his armor on, and he's tapping on the gate of, one gate of heaven demanding entrance. And Peter looks down from the top and he says, "Who are you?" And he says, "I'm Pope Julius II, can't you see?"

And Peter says, "Well, you don't look like a pope." Now, keep in mind, this is medieval Europe. They look to the pope as the leader of Christianity. And so this was a pretty stinging thing to say. Peter looks down, the first pope looks down and says, "You don't look like a pope." Well, that was Erasmus' point. This man has gone far. And Christianity in general in Europe had gone far away from where it should be. And he wanted it to go back to be followers of, he made a big deal about being followers of Christ.

So he's providing resources for especially some folks like Luther, he's providing resources for the Reformation to happen. He's offering some criticism here too. He's offering a little weak. He's jabbing it right in sometimes. Oh, by the way, he did that anonymously. Oh, okay. Julius was still alive.

Yeah, very shrewd. But he did remain a Roman Catholic. Yes, he did. Okay. So why did he remain in the Roman Catholic Church when so many reformers and the Anabaptists were pushed out or left? Well, I'll tell you why. And later on you're going to ask me, I think probably about why he was important for us as Anabaptists, right? Yeah. Okay. So at this point I'll just say he didn't leave because he was platonic.

His way of thinking was platonic. And all of us have, whether we realize it or not, a philosophical way of thinking. And Platonism says that the real is in the mind of God. And what we see here on the earth are somewhat faulty replicas of whatever's in God's mind. And so he felt that the New Testament told us what's in God's mind. This is the way the church ought to function. It will never get there.

Okay? He's platonic. It will never get there. But he did want to see the church move in the right direction. So he is trying to stimulate movement in the right direction, but he never leaves because, well, all of the reformers would have agreed with him and the Catholics, in fact, that splitting is wrong, that splitting the church is wrong. So he felt that the reformers were doing that and so he wasn't willing to do that. But he usually lived in a reformed city. So he's showing that he doesn't like where the Catholics are. He died before the Catholics started to reform themselves. So he didn't like where they were, but he didn't like the fact that the Protestants had split the church.

And also with us, he thought we were trying to make what can't come real, real. We were, anyway, so I'll wait till you ask about that. But that was what, so he despised us. You are going, you are doing something that's impossible. You're trying to do something that's impossible. Although they were following what he said.

This is what makes him such an interesting character, isn't it? I mean, he's very complicated. So in one sense he's very open to criticize the Roman Catholic Church. He's providing resources to the reformers, but he's not totally casting his lot with them. And you're saying that's because of his Platonism, but also because of his commitment not to be a schismatic, not to split the church. Both of those things were very important to him. And I just have to comment there, I think, it does place him on a real tug of war. And you see some of the reformers, numerous of them, kind of appealing to Erasmus as he's one of us. Yes. He's one of us.

And Erasmus himself is really not very enchanted with a lot of what's going on anywhere, is he? Both sides were trying to pull him, at least initially, their way. And yeah, he resisted that. And finally, this is really important. A lot of us don't realize that he wrote a book, The Freedom of the Will. He was hearing the Protestants saying something that he didn't like. And he wrote a book, Freedom of the Will. And what he said was, "Yes, we're fallen. Yes, we need grace, but we're not so fallen that we can't respond with the grace God gives us to the gospel message." This is called synergism, that God works with us, that we aren't so corrupted that we can't hear the gospel, or at least we can hear the gospel with grace that comes with the hearing of the gospel, and we can either say yes or no, a real yes or no from me.

All of the Protestants said, they were monergists. They said that we are so corrupt that we can't respond. And only, so only when God has chosen specific people and given them grace, will they respond and they can't reject the grace. They have to respond. So for the Protestants, it was all of God. They felt the Catholics had made it too much of the human part too big.

The interesting thing is the, so first Erasmus wrote The Freedom of the Will, and Luther wrote back The Bondage of the Will, and he says, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Erasmus. You have hit the nail on the head. This is the difference between those who don't leave the Catholic Church and those who do.

That we believe we can't respond to God positively. He is the one who does everything." Now, the funny thing is the Anabaptists were with Erasmus on this one. And so they were also synergistic. That means they're sort of in the same boat in this area as the Catholics. And they said, "When you hear the gospel, you can respond." Now, they weren't saying you didn't need God's grace, but you can respond. You can either say a yes, a real yes, or a real no.

And so that was one way that he was very definitely not Protestant. He felt that God works with humans, wooing them to himself, but letting them make that decision, giving them all the grace they need, doing everything in Jesus that was necessary, but you in the end make your decision. And Luther and Zwingli and Calvin disagreed with that.

Okay. Well, let's keep going with this. Maybe you could just notice for us some points of connection here of Erasmus with, say, the Anabaptists, that's what we're talking about. You could talk a little bit about his views of violence or some other ways that he agreed with the Anabaptists that kind of set him apart from other reformers. Where were their points of connection, maybe points of departure? Well, one of the things that fascinates me about Erasmus is that I think he is our, I'll say Conrad Grebel is our father and I think he's our grandfather. So I think we were hearing from him what the scriptures say. We're not his followers. But he was saying, he criticized, as you suggested, the Christians of his day for fighting each other.

And so he was definitely a pacifist. I don't think he would have said it's wrong to resist the Turks when they attack the Ottoman Turks who were. Right at the gate. Yeah, they were right at the gates of Vienna.

He would have, I think he would have still believed in the just war theory, but he really meant the just war theory, which means you don't fight other Christians. And you don't start a war. It's got to be defensive. I think he would have been in that place, but clearly critical of Julius II and other European Christians for their willingness to fight. So that was big for him. And he pointed it back to the scriptures. He was pointing them to the scriptures. I mentioned earlier that he paraphrased Matthew and Acts, and he seems to have done it very purposefully to make very clear, you know, they're now reading the original and he wants to make clear to them this really is different than what you've been hearing preached for a thousand years.

And so he does a paraphrase. And the focus was that at the end of Matthew, Jesus said, "Go out into the whole world and preach the gospel and baptize when people turn to Christ and then teach all things." And then he did Acts to show how the church did this.

And it's so clear, he doesn't say, "I believe only in adult baptism." But his paraphrase is so clear that he was actually, I don't think he was condemned by the University of Paris, but they said, "You are, at the very least," I don't remember that they condemned him, but at the very least they said, "You are on the verge of heresy by what you're saying here. You're essentially questioning infant baptism," which he was.

And so the, and I want to say this, all of the reformers were reading his New Testament Greek, the Latin translation if they needed it, and the paraphrase. So they were quite aware of what he was saying. And they were quite aware he's saying, "We need to change a lot," and including perhaps how we do, how we bring people into the church.

He also, just one more thing before I go any further with that, one more thing that he questioned, he said, "I really think if you read the scriptures that it points to a memorial as the communion service being a memorial." But he says, "But the church has uniformly said that we somehow receive Christ there, so I can't, so I don't want to argue with that." This shows both, you know, his kind of foot in both camps, but at least he expressed this. This is where the Anabaptists more or less go. So there are so many things where they either went in the direction he was pointing, but he was pointing that way because of the scriptures, or they went further.

So it's not that they were his followers, but they benefited from his production of the New Testament with all these helps. And then they also read, all of them read to some degree, or at least the more educated ones, some of the church fathers that he also published. So they saw in the New Testament and in his paraphrase, they saw clear objections to where the church was. And then they saw that too in what the church fathers wrote. He was the stimulus, I would say, that led people like Luther and Zwingli and Calvin to leave. But all of them mentioned, all of them mentioned this thing about infant baptism, and they're all afraid to do it because for over, for about 1,200 years, church and state have been together.

And if you now give people the option of being in the church or not, letting them decide as they're adults, what's that going to do to the union of the church and state? They were terrified of that. And the Anabaptists said, "No, we think he's hit the nail on the head and we're going to go ahead." Their argument wasn't he hit the nail on the head, but he provided the resources and they went with the direction he pointed. That's why I'm fascinated with him.

Well, he is a complex character, like you say, and so he's kind of got one foot in both sides. But he also is the one who gave the Anabaptists what they needed to say, "Yes, we're going to do this."

And he savagely scolded them because he felt they were doing something that was impossible. Which is my next question. I mean, there's four areas, the issue of baptism, like paid baptism or adult baptism. There's synergism where he's just, unlike the reformers, he's saying, you know, I don't really see some kind of antinomy here between human and divine wealth. Yeah, you're going to have to put that up if you want it to be there. So he's not seeing it. There's communion, there's non-violence.

What does he have to say to the Anabaptists? And maybe this is where his Platonism comes in again. That is it. He felt that, well, they were worse probably than the reformers because. The Anabaptists were worse. Yes, the Anabaptists were worse than the reformers because the reformers tended to keep the state church structure, the connection between state and church. And so there's not as much fragmentation. But these people, there was no, they did really have a connection among themselves, but it wasn't obvious. And I think they looked like they were, and some of them did go different directions, but it looked like they're just leaving behind community. They're leaving behind, they really are shattering the church and the union throughout all of Europe.

You know, in Europe, you could have gone to church in southern Spain all the way up into Finland, and it would have all been the same. It would have all been in Latin. It would have been the same kind of service.

There was a unity there that he didn't want to see shattered. And these people were shattering that, and more than the reformers. So I think he disliked them much more intensely than the reformers. So he recognizes the ideal that he sees in the New Testament and the early church. Yeah. And yet in his mind, the unity of the church is something that's more of more sacred value than that ideal. Yes. And that ideal might be in the mind of God, right? But actually pursue it and fragment the church, that's. That's really problematic. I see. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, well, let's fast forward a little bit further here. We've been in the Reformation with Erasmus. Now there's been 30 years of bloodletting in post-Reformation Europe, or kind of as a coming after that. There's the disintegration of any alliance between church and state. We keep on spooling forward. We're now in our times and Erasmus is here with us.

What do you think he would have to say to the Christians in our times? Well, that's really a hard question. You know, if he just would be plopped down here and didn't have much time to think and experience this world. Let's at least give him a little bit of time to get current. Okay. Well, I think he would have been horrified if he hadn't had the time. Because we shattered, we live in a world which is everybody's at everybody's else's throat, you know, at least in our country, you know. Anyway, but yeah, let's give him some time. I think he would have said, "Okay, this is where we're at. It's like the early days of the church."

So I think he would have felt that what the Anabaptists were doing might now work. I think he would have. That's a suspicion. I could be wrong. But, well, one thing though that I do think that he would have liked to see is a little bit more respect on our part of the whole long tradition of the church for its 2,000 years.

And I'm with him on that if that's what he thinks. Maybe I'm imposing my thoughts on him. But I do think that if we have a lack, it's not recognizing that the history of the church from Constantine till the Reformation is part of us too. It shaped us. And I think we should recognize that. And it actually has some good things for us. I think he would have, he was so concerned with the historical aspect of the church. I think he would have been concerned about that. But I also think he would say, "All right, give it a try."

Because we're in, you had mentioned one time in one of our talks that the situation of the church now in a relatively hostile environment is a lot like it was in the early days of the church, right? Yeah. And I think he would see that. Yeah. So he'd be in some ways kind of begrudging, but he might be a little bit more supportive of, say, forms of community that look more like Anabaptism. That's what you're saying. That's what I think. But you'd also have some criticisms. He would. Of course. This is Erasmus. Yeah. And I think he would see us as maybe pushing holiness too much. Okay. There's that Platonism again. Yeah.

Okay. Anything else you want to say about Erasmus? Well, I really do think that he was powerful in shaping us. And I think I say that just to say that the years between Constantine and the Reformation are times that we should not ignore. We should recognize they are times that helped to shape the Anabaptists and they continue to shape us. And looking at one man like this, Erasmus, who did not become a Protestant and didn't become an Anabaptist, and yet greatly shaped both, I think it should help us realize we need to try to understand history, understand people where they were, and see how that can help us understand our own roots and understand where we are today.

So I find him really valuable that way. And this is a big thing for me is that we own all 2,000 years of church history, recognizing the good and the bad. And also in our own shorter history, I've already had some Anabaptists say, "Oh, the Münsterites weren't really Anabaptists." Well, I think that is doing a disservice to yourself.

Own your history. And that was part of it. Let's learn from that. They made some big mistakes. Let's not do the same thing. Let's wake up. And part of what they did was they got involved politically. And a lot of us are being tempted the same way. Politically in the sense of they got involved in, they actually established an Anabaptist state church. Münster, you said. Yes, Münster did. So let's learn from that. And some of our own people today, I think, are feeling that temptation to get involved in government, which is not the place to put your energy.

Okay. Well, thank you for the introduction here to this character of Erasmus. And also, I think for the reminder about the value of exploring the place that he had in his times. But it also gives us something that's stabilizing and it helps us to orient into the times which are distinctly ours too. Yes. Thanks for that. You're welcome.