The Reformation 500 Years Later by Benjamin Wiker

Author:Benjamin Wiker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621577065
Publisher: Regnery History
Published: 2017-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Nationalism Versus the Pope at the Time of the Reformation

As Michael Wilks observes, “In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this equation of ecclesia and terra, Church and land, spread to most parts of Europe,” and thus the splintering of the Catholic Church under nationalist pressure was already well under way before the Reformation. “The result,” declares Wilks, “was that the Reformation became a virtual inevitability as Europe came to accept this territorial doctrine of the Church as being essentially a collection of ‘lands’, of independent Israels. And this new—or rather, very old—conception of a church as a territory, as a defined geographical area, was bound to be inherently anti-papal.”13

It is certainly debatable whether nationalism made the Reformation inevitable (after all, the Catholic Church remained larger than the national Churches that broke away from it), but what is certainly beyond debate is that nationalism greatly exacerbated the religious conflicts of the time, and that it was a major factor in the consequent religious wars of the late 1500s and early 1600s. It also helps explain why these wars ended on the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, “whose realm, his religion.” Historians have tended to see this as a political result of intractable religious differences, but it may be more accurate to call it a religious result of intractable political differences.

We’ll take that question up about the religious wars in a later chapter. But one thing should be very clear from this chapter: nationalism contributed immensely to the division of Christianity in the 1500s, making it far more difficult to bring about reform and almost impossible to retain the unity of Christendom.

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