"Radical Reformation: What Were the Issues?" by Kyle Stoltzfus | KFW 2025

I'm just struck again by the honor we have to be together here, by the privilege of being called together by our identity in Christ. Okay, I want that to be our common root here as our identity in Christ. And we continue in this talk kind of in just setting some groundwork. Other people get to do the more interesting or perhaps more compelling things of saying, "Okay, this is what this meant. This is what people did. This is how they responded." I find that in myself and Brother Chester's talk a little bit more, we're just saying what were some of the issues. Okay, what we're going to get what we're going to get here is to crystallize that broad picture that Brother Chester gave us, where you realize there's something going on here, but we're going to try to crystallize down and say, "Okay, so what were the issues?

What were the issues which brought about the Reformation, and specifically the Radical Reformation?" So I see it as my job to try to kind of narrow down and crystallize or boil down, like we do in Northwestern PA, we boil down our maple syrup, right? I'm going to try to boil that down, have four. Okay, I have to narrow down on four things, four issues that I think were very significant.

What I want to do is a little bit of a give you a picture, okay? Give you a picture of what this is all like, what this was like to live through, and how significant this thing we call the Reformation is.

And for that, I'm going to provide you a picture of something a little bit different, but also in history. It was on August 27, 1883, where there was a blast 13,000 times more powerful than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in Japan, World War II, 13,000 times more powerful than that and it tore the island of Krakatoa apart.

The blast was so powerful that it's estimated to have thrown six cubic miles of rock into the air. And forgive me, I had to do the math. That's the same volume as 23,869 Empire State buildings. Okay, same amount of material as that. It took that and it ejected it, that volume of rock, into the air, tearing the island apart and scattering it on nearby islands, 20, 30 miles away, pieces of Krakatoa raining down. The sound 100 miles away from Krakatoa is estimated to be 180 decibels.

Okay, and it was heard over 2,000 miles away. Unimaginable.

That's what happened immediately. But for months afterward, the dust from the explosion and all this rock being ejected into the air, it circled the globe and fire brigades were called out in New England months later. It's because the sunsets were so vivid, they were so red in their hue, that people were convinced that there was a massive blaze somewhere on the horizon and you'd better get the fire brigade on the way a while.

And sometimes a historical event, okay? This is what I'm meaning by this. Sometimes a historical event has this kind of effect. There was the world before the event, and then there's the world after the event. The whole landscape has been rearranged, and the reverberations, they continue. There's aftershocks.

At Krakatoa, in the months afterward, people came and they surveyed it and they realized that much that had been solid, much that had been known about this island, had slipped into the sea. It was gone. Two whole mountain peaks, eliminated. But smaller pieces had grown and had been pushed up. It's like the whole shape, you'd say, the topography, you know, the mapmakers, they talk about topography. The topography was different. And with it, all the old landmarks and markers, how you would know your way around on this island, they were gone too.

And it was yet to be seen what new world would emerge, what life would be birthed where the old had been swept away.

We encapsulate one such time in our history when we say the Reformation.

There was Europe before. There is Europe after. And the topography was different. And it's easy for us, this distant from all of that, to underestimate just how dramatic, how chaotic, how anxiety-inducing, okay, this time was.

But I take it as our purpose here, we have to look underneath Krakatoa a little bit. We have to ask the question, how? Okay, how did that happen? What contributed to the eruption? The eruption happened, and now we, looking back on it, we have to ask, well, why did that happen?

And then I'd like to at least, here's where the pastor side comes out, I have to ask, what can we appreciate about God's purposes in their times and in ours? Okay, so we've talked some about why change was needed.

Now, zero in four factors to try to crystallize why it was that the Radical Reformation took place. And I'd like for you to tap into your imaginations. I'll tell a little bit of a story for you or put you into a situation here, and let's see where we come out. Imagine with me, it's 1520, okay, and last week your grandmother died, and according to Roman Catholic beliefs about the afterlife, unless she's accumulated a surplus of merit, maybe like a bank account of virtue and good works, unless she's accumulated a surplus of merit, she's now spending an unknown amount of time in purgation, at one of those seven levels, perhaps, as Dante imagined it, to purge away the consequences of her forgiven sins, both less serious, they'd call venial sins, and the much more serious mortal sins.

Now, by your estimation, your grandmother, she was no saint. She had no surplus of merit, so you'd expect she's going to be in purgation for a pretty long time. And you can help that shorten that time up, you're told. You can help shorten that up by praying for her. And then you hear of another way that you can help shorten that time up a little bit. It's announced weeks before he arrives that Johann Tetzel is coming to town.

And when he comes, he preaches, and it's really compelling. It's really compelling to you because part of what he preaches is that money can be exchanged for the shortening of your grandmother's time in purgatory. Okay, and if you give enough, if you give enough, you can give her direct access to heaven.

I've got to ask, how are you going to respond to that? Okay, how are you going to respond to that?

It's questionable, isn't it? For us, looking on, you question that practice, and I'm glad you do. But there's even a further story beyond how questionable we might find that practice, paying for somebody's salvation, right? But there's an even further backstory that even Tetzel wouldn't tell you that we know from our perspective in history. We know that Tetzel, he was operating under the authority of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg. He was the Archbishop of Mainz.

Half the money that Tetzel raised was financing the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica. It's an enormous and beautiful structure in Rome, and it was being rebuilt. Money is being sent there to help refinance it. The other half, the other half of this money that Tetzel is raising, it's being used to pay off the debts that Cardinal Albert had incurred to purchase his position as an Archbishop.

Okay, that's the picture.

It's become kind of, it's become kind of popular these days, as a little aside here, okay? It's become a little popular these days to point out the problems coming from the Reformation. And granted, there have been a lot of problems that have come out of the Reformation, but in preparing for this, I'm just, I'm struck, okay? I'm struck by that level of corruption.

It'd become a common practice in this time for men of means to purchase a position in the church. This was the practice, here's the word, it's the practice of simony, the act of buying or selling spiritual things. And the name simony, it comes after, it's named after the practice of one Simon Magus. You remember him? He attempted to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles in Acts 8.

So these men, they're purchasing positions. And to be clear, I'm being a little facetious, but to be clear, simony was not practiced because they were jockeying to serve. You know, they purchased positions in the church because it gave them an advantage, power, prestige, money.

Let's try to capture the whole picture here.

The spiritual needs of people being leveraged by this non-biblical practice to fund the building of a glamorous building and the ladder-climbing ambition of Cardinal Albert.

What's the issue here?

You'd give different words to this, I guess. I'd point to one.

It's the issue of corruption.

Moral corruption. Institutional corruption. Spiritual corruption.

You look back and you realize, you know, dissatisfaction with this corruption was widespread. It's not like Luther just cooked it up when he came along with his 95 theses. It was widespread dissatisfaction with this level of corruption. And this corruption calls people to question the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church, or let's say briefly, and I will pick that up later. Corruption, first issue. Second issue is related to that. It's the alliance between the church and the state.

Since Constantine, I'll tell the story of how this came to be, this alliance. It's since Constantine in the 300s that the Roman Catholic Church came to idealize a close relationship between the Christian Church and the state. Some people call this the Constantinian synthesis, or Christendom is the result of that, right? The ideal was a unified Christian society, that'd be Christendom, where the state actively supports and promotes Christianity, and the church, the church promotes the spiritual development of the people. So there's a cooperative relationship. The state promotes Christianity, and the church comes along and looks after the spiritual well-being of the people and of the interests of the state.

And this had all kinds of consequences, this adoption of Christendom.

And as we go here, I'd like you to notice the progression. Okay, there's a story being told here. These are the consequences. It is true. It is true that right away after Constantine, and during the reign of Constantine, paganism was banished. The gladiatorial games started to peter out, okay? And new copies of the Bible were commissioned.

But what about in the long term? Okay, what about in the long term? It's Augustine of Hippo, a little bit later, not much. He originally rejected violence, but he later justified it in the hands of the state against those he considered heretics.

Okay, another consequence is that membership in the church became associated with citizenship in the state. Okay, if you're going to be living in this area, you belong to that church, and the two are just tied together. So it's like baptism began to function a lot like a birth certificate.

And then in the 1100s, we're moving on, when Bernard of Clairvaux, he counseled Pope Eugenius III on papal governance and authority. So he's a teacher and he's writing to the Pope, and he wrote this. He says, "We can therefore conclude that both swords, namely the spiritual and the material, the sword of the spirit, and then there's a sword of iron or steel, right, both belong to the church," he says, "and that although only the former is to be wielded by her own hand, the two are to be employed in her service."

Okay, the issue of violence. And here there's a counselor saying to the Pope, "You know, you really are justified in administering both." It's later in the 1200s. We've already been introduced to Pope Gregory, and he's a scoundrel. He's a violent man. And he started the War of the Keys against Emperor Frederick II because he claimed to control both swords, and Frederick II resented that.

And finally, at the start of the 1300s, the Pope was locked at that point in a power struggle with King Philip of France, Philip I Popes aren't known for their strategy always. Philip I, and in 1305, a Frenchman and personal friend of Philip, that's Clement, no doubt with some, you know, under-the-table influence and deal-making and probably some saber rattling too, he was elected Pope. And what do you know? Instead of going to Rome, we've talked about this, he remained in France and he moved the people court to Avignon, where it remained until 1376. We look back at that. That's the Babylonian captivity. We call it, why did that happen? Okay, it's because a Pope went to war with a French ruler and he lost.

Now the names here, I put out a lot of names, okay? The names are not quite so important. Did you notice the progression?

Did you notice the progression? There's this unifying ideal, the church, the state cooperating. I'd like for us to notice here that by this point in the 1300s, at the highest levels of the church, okay, of the Roman Catholic Church, primary attention was being focused on power struggles with the state. And this weakened the idea, this had the effect of weakening the idea that the Pope was a central spiritual authority.

He was in competition with state authorities. He was just another prince.

And he was also leaving a void of spiritual leadership.

Okay, those are two factors. You still here? There's corruption. There's the alliance of church and state. And these are problems that weren't being addressed.

Pressure starts to build. You add to this now a fresh wind of words, and with it the breath of the Spirit.

So now we turn to this third factor, and this is new access to Scripture.

Ancient texts that come with it.

The word here, the phrase is ad fontes, okay, it's a Latin phrase, just describes a movement back to the sources.

And this was the catchphrase of what would now be known as the Renaissance, a fresh breeze. It was in 15, or sorry, 1453, the Muslim Turks, they conquered Constantinople, and they began to spread, the Muslim Turks did, they began to spread out over Southeastern Europe. And as they're spreading out, these Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians, they're fleeing in front of the Muslim Turks, and they fled to Western Europe, some of them did. And as they're fleeing, they're moving, and they're taking ancient manuscripts with them from their monasteries and from their churches and their schools, they're taking them with them, and guess what? They can speak Greek, and they can read the Greek that's in these manuscripts.

And they go and they travel, and with them, they're reading and they're teaching Greek as they go. And across Europe, suddenly scholars, they're not just reading Latin, they're reading Homer, they're reading Aristotle, they're reading all kinds of various Greek and Roman historians, and suddenly, and suddenly there springs to the foreground this whole new attitude that comes with these men.

With all this corruption, with all of this dissatisfaction in the background, with all of these compromises that they're facing in the church of their days, they just begin to ask the question, why not leapfrog back, okay, to when times were different, when the terrain looked a little different?

What can we learn from these sources? Okay, when the topography was totally different, what do we have to learn from these?

And I think we know some of this history a little better.

This brings about the history of our English Bible, okay? It's very early in this period called the Renaissance, from August 1380 to the summer of 1381. That's a pretty speedy process here, but as John Wycliffe, he translated the Scriptures from the Latin Vulgate into English for the British people. And he wanted preachers to be able to preach the Bible in English for English-speaking people.

And then in 1440, the movable type press, the Gutenberg press, was invented, and Johann Gutenberg printed on his press the first Gutenberg Bible in Latin in 1455. Still in Latin, okay? We're still in Latin. But when you start to produce a Bible, okay, in mass quantities like that, some other things happened here. Printed Bibles, they were smaller than handwritten copies.

And think about it too, they're a whole lot more affordable. If you have to hire a group of scribes to produce a Bible, not many people can afford that. But if you have a mass-produced Bible that's being produced by people of less skill, perhaps, than a scribe, they become more affordable. So you have more Bibles available, still in Latin.

That's 1440. In the 1400s, it's in 1516 that Erasmus, he's a Catholic scholar, he produced Greek, a Greek New Testament drawing from Greek, okay? Not Latin manuscripts like the Vulgate.

And he followed in 1519 with his own Latin translation, which competed in, which competed with the Vulgate.

Okay, so that's fine. We now have a Greek New Testament. What's significant about that? Well, there's differences, okay? And through, as the Vulgate became accepted in the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes there were little scribal changes that came in there, which really made a difference. For example, in Matthew 3:2 and 4:17, the Vulgate said in Latin that we should do penance, okay? Do penance for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

And if you were to be in that time and you'd hear somebody say to do penance, you'd have a very specific idea of what that meant. You'd go to the priest, you would make a confession, the priest might prescribe for you some form of contrition, repentance, penance.

Do penance is what the Greek, or sorry, what the Latin Vulgate said. Erasmus, he's looking at the Greek and he says, "Hmm, I'm not sure if that's the best translation."

He corrected it. Repent, okay? Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That brings with it a different connotation, doesn't it? Instead of doing penance, it's repentance.

We move ahead. In 1522, it's William Tyndale, he began an English translation of the Bible using Erasmus's Latin translation, which comes from the Greek.

And finally, in 1525, Aldrich Zwingli, he produced from Greek and Aramaic transcripts of a German New Testament, okay? And in 1531, he completed the entire Bible. And first, you just have to notice the speed of this. That's six years for a complete Bible with a solo translator. These men, okay, nothing short of heroic. Just appreciate that. Six years for a full translation, first effort, Greek, Aramaic.

They weren't really good with their Hebrew, okay? And this was what's called then the Zurich Bible, also called the Froscher Bible, and it was completed four years before Luther's German version. And the Froscher Bible, it was loved, okay? It was loved, it was favored by the Swiss Anabaptists. So there's some, there's a connection there for us, perhaps. When the Swiss authorities banned it, they preferred Luther's Bible over the Froscher Bible.

So they banned the Froscher Bible. The Swiss Anabaptists, they tended to hide it. Or this is kind of interesting, they would remove the cover page of their Froscher Bible and fix the cover page of Luther's Bible to it, and then they would have an approved Luther's Bible. At least it looked that way on your bookshelf, right?

But here's what we have to see, okay? Here's the line that I'd like for us to follow here. It was well before Luther wrote his 95 theses. It was well before the Anabaptists had their rebaptisms. There was surging interest, surging interest, and broadened access to Scripture, to the Bible. And it's no exaggeration. It is not an exaggeration to say that without this surging interest, without this broadening access, the Reformation as it actually occurred, as we saw it, would be unimaginable. Does that seem right, Chester? Okay.

But of course, this is the only part of the picture. You have words. You have the Bible, you have Scripture, and now it's accessible to the common people. But it's like the resurrection narrative in John 20. It makes it pretty clear, I think, that the only thing sufficient to cause genuine faith in Jesus as the risen Lord is an encounter with Him, okay?

It's not limited to only those who saw the resurrected Jesus back in the times when He was here with us, because that encounter can be had through the Gospel, faithfully passed down through Scripture.

So with all this fresh access, I'm just pointing out, it's not quite enough just to say they had the words, okay? With this fresh access, they heard the Gospel.

Jesus is the risen Lord. And the Spirit moved. And they added their testimony. Yes, Jesus is the risen Lord, okay? They added their yes to that.

Three issues now. Corruption, okay? Church and state. Fresh access to Scripture. You might see this one coming. A growing crisis of authority.

Okay? You see how that fits? There's a growing crisis of authority. I already mentioned how alliances between the Roman Catholic Church and the state led to power struggles between the two. How corruption was making people distrust the Church, and the authority of the Church was being undermined.

You inject into that fresh access to the Bible, and a conflict of authority is now set up. And I can only go so far here, allow other brothers to take it further. Let's name a few of the issues that started to come up here.

Now, the way things were during this time, the way things were historically, the practice of buying and selling church offices was accepted. The practice of Simony.

You read your New Testament, and you realize that that practice is identified with the sin of Simon Magus.

That's one issue.

Another one. Well, the practice here of purchasing forgiveness for the sins of the dead was accepted.

Look at your New Testament, and you realize it seems more that the fate of the dead is in the hands of God, okay? And we accept by faith, accept by faith that those in Christ receive forgiveness of sins.

What does money have to do with that? It's offered as a gift.

It's claimed in this time that the Church could wield both swords, right? The sword of the Word, the sword of the Spirit, and also the steel sword, in case that one didn't work out.

Can you justify that in your New Testament or in the Old, for that matter, okay? Jesus here, He teaches us to take up our cross, follow Him. And I'll just, as a little aside, I'll just say there's a growing appreciation, okay? There's a growing appreciation in our times, which it's now considered, okay? It's considered we are in a post-Christian time. Christendom is dead, okay?

But in our times, there's a growing appreciation for the peace witness of Churches' traditions such as our own, okay? And there's a growing realization, I think, too, as some scholars have said it. You read your New Testament, you can't come away from that saying that somehow the sword, both swords, that is, belong in the hands of the Church. You can't do that. If you try to do that, you're just pointing out the massive faithlessness of the Church.

This is a hard thing. It's a hard thing to accept. But you just can't honestly read your New Testament and come away saying that's condoned.

Another thing that's challenged, you know, the Church claimed to mediate Christ's authority through this kind of tottering hierarchy with the Pope at the top. Supposedly, it was increasingly being challenged. Was he really at the top? He has this magisterium at his right hand who helps to dictate correct teaching for the Church. And there's cardinals and archbishops and bishops and priests and finally the others, the people. And you read, and it seems in my reading, that no such structure like that, no such hierarchy is apparent in the New Testament, okay?

And instead, the power of binding and loosening, the power of the keys that wars had been fought over, that's the power of moral authority, of saying what's right, what's wrong, what's in bounds, what's out of bounds. It seems like if you read Matthew, as Jesus describes that, this power of binding and loosening is much more brother to brother. It's very intimate. It's in brotherhood settings, not decided in courts in Rome, okay?

Those are some of the issues. You hear the questions. Who is in charge here?

Okay? Who's in charge? Who gets to say so?

Who calls the shots? Is it the Pope? Is it the magisterium? Scripture? Tradition? My brothers and sisters? My heart experience? All of the above. None of the above, okay?

It may be much more helpful to say it this way. It's that the Roman Catholic Church of this time, they had a massive problem of credibility.

And it had a massive, massive challenge to try to justify all of its tottering structures, all of its corruption. How are they going to justify that?

I think we might hear more about how this worked itself out in the Zurich Reformation with Brother Coulter. And again, looking forward to what Brother Schirk has to say. Establishment of the Church, how did they decide?

Another factor, I just have to mention this one in passing here about this growing crisis of authority. Another factor is just the incredible wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, the massive tracts of land that it owned, the political influence, the wealth that it had accumulated. And secular rulers, they had their eyes on that.

This is not a sacred reason. It's just greed.

So there were political factors. There were political factors as well.

It's like King Henry VIII in England. He used the Reformation as an opportunity to break away from the Roman Catholic Church and establish his own. He had other problems, okay?

There's other factors here too. For the sake of time, I'll just mention these briefly. We saw pictures of the Black Death in the mid-1300s. By the time the Black Death had ripped through Europe, somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population was dead.

That's significant. You don't want to miss that. The threat of invasion by the Ottoman Turks right there on the western doorstep of Europe, or rather eastern doorstep of Europe, right there's the Turks, and they're progressing. Constantinople is falling, you hear. What are we going to do about that?

There's growing national identities. Not just, am I a Roman Catholic Christian? I'm a German, we'd say. I'm a Frenchman. And as princes and rulers were kind of bringing together their own power, people began to identify themselves that way.

Growing national identity. There's increasing literacy. People are learning to read. There's economic factors too. Just mentioned those in passing, to be fair.

Now, how do we pull this all together? I'll return to this picture, Cracatola. It was at the beginning of the 1500s, and Europe was perched atop a simmering volcano of issues.

And a seemingly small event, perhaps some little known monk posting a letter of protest against the sale of indulgences. Maybe instead, it'd be the adult baptism of some men in Zurich in 1525. Something small like that. It would tap into that pressure, okay? It would unleash an explosion.

And the whole landscape would be rearranged. The reverberations, they continue.

Now, this will offer for us two responses.

The first is, the first here is just to encourage us to give this back over to God, okay? We peer back through 500 years of history. How can we know what caused the Reformation?

I'd point out a few things, sure. But it's like when the prophet Habakkuk, he lamented that he did not understand what God was doing in his time. Things were being ripped around for him. He didn't understand. And God replied pointedly to him. He said, "I am working a work in your days which you would not believe, even if somebody told it to you."

So for all of our efforts to explain, explain all we want, our work here is repentance, okay? Which means our transformation.

Our work is repentance.

Another thing, though, we do know some things. We know some things about what God is up to. It's like in Romans 8, where it reminds us that creation itself waits. And this language is just, it's just crackling with energy. Creation itself waits with eager longing, with earnest expectation. You see that picture?

Creation is quivering, and it's waiting for what? For the revealing of the sons of God, people bearing Christ's image.

And this, hear this. Perhaps, especially in turbulent times, perhaps especially in turbulent times like the Reformation, maybe like our own, this can anchor us. What caused the Reformation? What were the issues? Ultimately, God is determined. He will not relent.

He wishes for the revealing of many sons, many daughters bearing His glory.

I just have to read on there in Romans 8. Many sons, many daughters delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. I just trust that's true of us. In our times, I pray for it to be true of you as well.