Lecture three, the philosophy of Christ, a Rasmus, and the Humanists. You're going to talk about a number of people today, but the most important of all is the great Dutch scholar, a Rasmus. And I'd like to begin with a prayer from a Rasmus. I'm going to have some criticism of a Rasmus in this lecture. That is, I read the prayers of a Rasmus. I am inspired and blessed by the faith of this man. And so as we begin our study of the Humanist today, let's join together in prayer. And I will pray these words from a Rasmus. Let's pray. O Lord Jesus Christ, you are the way, the truth, and the life. We pray you allow us never to stray from you who are the way, nor distrust you who are the truth, nor rest in any one other thing than you who are the life. Teach us by your Holy Spirit, what to believe, what to do, and how to take our rest. Amen. Before Luther nailed his 95 PCs on the church door in 5th and 3rd, 1517, other reformers had long been working to accomplish the task that almost everybody wanted to see accomplished. And that is something done about the deplorable status of the church. These earlier reformers, we often call humanists. We have to understand that that word isn't used the way it's used today. We use it today to talk about atheistic, humanist, or secular, humanist. But in the 16th century, it meant that these people were committed to the study of the humanities. Actually, the humanist movement began not in the 16th century, but back in the 14th century of what we call the Renaissance. As scholars, particularly in northern Italy, began to develop interest in and began to study the humanities, language, history, and literature. And so when I refer to these people today as humanists, don't think of them as anti-religious. They are very much committed to the church and really to the reform of the church. There were two great concerns that motivated the humanists. One was to reform the church. We know now that almost everybody was saying the church needs to be reformed. One of the pictures that appears over and over in the art, the cartoons of the period, is the church as a ship. And the ship is in trouble because there is a storm. The ship is being tossed to and fro by the waves of the times. And people realize that unless something was done, the ship could sink. The church could go down. And so the humanists were just as concerned as Luther and the others were to see something done about the deplorable condition of Christianity. Not only did they work to reform the church, but the humanists were also very concerned to recover the Bible. Now, the Bible was around, of course, but it was in Latin. It was the Vulget. Not many people had copies and not many people could read it or understand it. And so these humanists were concerned to get the Bible more accurately translated and into the minds of people as a means of reforming the church. The greatest of the humanists was Erasmus. And these two themes will be illustrated in his life. But before I talk about Erasmus, I would like to talk about three of his contemporaries, great humanist whose names are not as familiar to us, but people that we ought to know about. One German, one French, one English, and then we will come to the great Dutch humanist. Erasmus sometimes called the prince of the humanist. One thing that the 16th century humanists did for the church was to preserve the Hebrew Old Testament. And the hero of that work, courageous work of preserving the Hebrew Old Testament for the church was the German scholar Johannes Roichlenn. Roichlenn was the most accomplished Hebrew scholar among the humanists and probably the most able Christian Hebrew scholar for a thousand years since Jerome. Because not many people learn Hebrew. They read the Old Testament in the Latin August and it was Roichlenn who said it's important to preserve the Hebrew text and to study Hebrew so that we can read the Old Testament in the Hebrew language. That was not an easy accomplishment for Roichlenn. In fact, he was opposed by a Jewish Christian convert named Feppercorn and by the German Dominicans who said the Hebrew Bible is the book of the Jews and ought to be destroyed. We have the Latin translation. We don't need the Hebrew. And there was a mighty battle in Germany that went on for some time with people taking both sides of that issue. Two great books came out of that battle. One was called Letters of Distinguished Men. Letters from scholars who supported Roichlenn and said, yes, we need to study Hebrew. We need the Hebrew Old Testament as part of our Christian heritage. And a second book was called Letters of Obscure Men. Some of Roichlenn's students and disciples wrote this rather biting satire pretending to be opponents of Roichlenn and these letters make them seem woefully ignorant and backward. And both letters of Obscure Men and letters of Distinguished Men help to turn the tide in favor of Roichlenn and the Hebrew Bible. So as you study Hebrew here at the seminary, give thanks for Roichlenn. I think you will give thanks for Roichlenn because it was his work that made Hebrew the important part of theological study that it is today. Humanism also pioneered the translation of Scripture into the vernacular languages. Roman Catholic Church did not absolutely forbid the translation of the Bible into the languages of Europe that discouraged it, preferred to keep the Bible in the hands of the scholars. After all, if it's translated into English and French and German, it's no telling who might read it and it's no telling what they might think as they read this book. So the Catholic Church discouraged and limited such translations, but it was the humanist like the great French scholar, Jacques Lefebvre, who encouraged and actually pioneered the translation of the Bible in this case into French. Lefebvre was a French scholar who wrote commentaries, commentary on the Psalms, and then a few years later his commentary on the Paulina Pistols came out that was in 1512. It's rather remarkable that in this commentary justification by faith alone is presented as the teaching of Paul. Some years before Luther came to the same conclusion. Actually among French Protestants, the Reformation is often dated 1512, not 1570 because they go back to the teaching of Lefebvre in his commentary on the Paulina Pistols. Lefebvre also translated the Bible into French. He actually translated the vulga, so it was from the Latin to the French. He did this in 1530 that his translation was a good and useful French version of the Bible for people to read who could not read Latin. Of course, he faced a good bit of opposition in doing this. Some of the Catholic authorities opposed him bitterly. Lefebvre said if it was fitting for the Romans to have the Bible translated into Latin in the first place, so they could read it. Why can't the people of France have the Bible translated into French so they could read it? Lefebvre said, well, if people in France start reading the Bible, it's no telling what heresies they will come up with. And Lefebvre's answer to that was, it's not the simple people who read the Bible who are producing the heresies, it's the scholars who read the Latin who are coming up with the heresies. Lefebvre made his stand as an old man. He met the young John Calvin. He met William Farrell and he inspired these younger French scholars to greater determination in their work of reform. And also, humanism promoted, as you probably would guess, the study of Greek, the study of Hebrew, translation of the Bible into vernacular languages and the study of Greek. And one of the people who was instrumental in promoting the study of Greek was John Collette, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Collette had been preaching in St. Paul's mighty sermons on the Reformation of the Church. He said the church had so conformed to the world that the face of the church is more, it's dirty, it's disfigured, and her influence is destroyed, far more than by the persecutions in the early church, and even more than by the heresies that came in later. Some people in London were hearing great sermons from John Collette, and then Collette went out to Oxford and gave a series of lectures on the Book of Romans using Greek as his faces. In fact, he was so taken with Greek, he said without Greek, we're nothing. Not too many people knew Greek, and they were challenged by Collette to start learning it. The lectures of Collette at Oxford were based on a historical, grammatical exegesis, and so as even today we read those lectures, we feel that here's a man who is finally getting at what Paul really meant. We see something of the power and the excitement of that, it's hard for us to imagine how a preacher giving lectures on the Book of Romans at University of Oxford could generate such excitement that people had not heard this before. I've given a little story in the syllabus that you can read about one man who was just overwhelmed by the fact that here was somebody who really knew what Paul was talking about. We see them sitting together and talking about Paul and talking about Romans, and Collette saying, brother, I love you if you love Paul. The other man saying, oh, how much you've helped me understand Paul, and they are the two of them together in that room, in the church, St. Paul's taking out a bit of the Book of Romans and studying it together. Well, it was Collette who inspired Erasmus to study Greek. Now, Erasmus had actually studied a bit of Greek, but he had not learned all that much. Once he met Collette in England, Erasmus traveled around a good bit. He began much more earnestly to begin his study of Greek. Erasmus was now 33 years old, so he did not start seriously studying Greek until he was well into his 30s. And yet he became the most important Greek scholar of his time, and one of the most important Greek scholars of all time. Erasmus is indeed the prince of the humanist, interesting man, sometimes hard to understand, often misunderstood, but a man who loved to study, loved to write, and who made some significant contributions to the reform through his study and through his writing. The life of Erasmus can be divided into two parts, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Erasmus of Christodum. He was the illegitimate son of a priest, of course any son of a priest was illegitimate, and he studied at the schools of the brothers of a common life, and then he became an Augustinian monk, and he was ordained priest in the year 1492. Something else was happening that year that probably no from early days in school was the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but Erasmus did not make a very good monk. He enjoyed his comfort too much, and he was finally enabled by permission of the Pope to abandon the monastery, and spent the rest of his life as a scholar and writer who appeared in various places in Europe teaching and lecturing. His greatest work was the critical edition of the Greek New Testament, which he produced in the year 1516. This is the first or one of the first, there may have been an earlier critical Greek New Testament produced in Spain, but this is one of the first critical editions of the Greek. You know of course what I mean by that, Erasmus compared different manuscripts, and came up with a composite edition based on what he felt was the most accurate reading in any case, and with a critical Greek version of the New Testament. Scholars now have a more authentic Bible New Testament to study in Greek and to use in translating the Bible New Testament into other languages. And so as in the quote from Warfield in the syllabus, we owe a great deal both to Rochland and to Erasmus, our Hebrew Old Testaments and our Greek New Testaments are gifts that they gave to the church. Erasmus was also famous for his satire. His writings are witty, biting, sarcastic, he's writing about reform of the church, but rather than producing learned tombs on problems related to the church, Erasmus sharpened a very sharp pin and put fun at the church. Soon people were reading these books all over the place and laughing at what Erasmus had to say, and that was a very effective way in which Erasmus began to point to the need for reform. One of his books is called The Praise of Folly, and with a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach in the praise of Folly, he praises Folly, how good it is that we do all these foolish things, he says, like Mucks, for instance. They know that the real heart of religion is in how many knots they tie in their sandals, in the shape of their haircuts, and the color of their garments, on and on he goes, telling how wonderfully the Mucks have defined the real truth of Christianity. And he talks about the theologians, and he says they argue and quibble over everything imaginable, and when they have finished with that they argue and quibble over nothing, and they're so fierce, and they're so dogmatic, and they are so sure of themselves that it would be wonderful if we could have a whole army of theologians and send them over to fight the Turks. The Turks would certainly flee from this great group of people, and even the Pope doesn't escape from the fighting satire of Erasmus. One of the books of Erasmus was called Julius Excluses. Julius was one of the Pope's, one of the Renaissance 6. Julius II, the Renaissance Pope, the warrior Pope, the Pope who began the construction of the new St. Peter's in Rome, and in this book, Erasmus imagines Julius going to heaven. And as he appears at the gate, St. Peter meets him, and Peter says, I see somebody coming. Who is he? Well, he's a man who wants to be regarded as next to Christ, he's a man who wants to be regarded as equal with Christ, but what I see is a man submerged in the filthiest of all things by far. Money, power, armies, wars, and the whole book is Peter's reason for refusing to allow the Pope to go into heaven since somewhere else. That was not a favorite book in Rome, but a lot of people thought it was real funny. And the point that Erasmus was making was made strongly throughout the length and breadth of Europe. In his familiar colloquies, he does the same sort of thing. These are stories about how things are in the church, and by making fun of these things Erasmus points to some of the problems in the familiar colloquies, he talks about the folly of trusting in the saints, and he does this by telling the story of a shipwreck. It was a ship, in a storm, and the waves were rising almost up to the moon, and then falling, crashing down almost to hell itself. And this little ship was about to be destroyed. And many of the passengers were praying to the saints and to the Virgin Mary for help. That Frenchman called an allowed voice to the statue in Paris of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers saying, oh, St. Christopher, if you only deliver me from this, I'll give you a candle as big as the statue of yourself in the cathedral in Paris. Somebody else in the ship said, don't promise too much. That's quite a lot that you are offering to give to St. Christopher, and the Frenchman said, don't make a lot of noise, be quiet. I don't mean it. If I get out of the storm, I won't give in anything. But the storyteller was asked whether he would not pray to the saints. No, he said because if I started praying to the saints, the first one to hear would probably be Saint Peter. And while he was going to check with God, I might go to the bottom. I'm going to go straight to God himself in my prayers. When the ship broke up, one man took hold of a wooden, worm-eaten image of the Virgin which soaked up the water and took him to the bottom. A woman with a little child was strapped to a stout plank. She got to show her. So did the storyteller, of course, who preferred a bag of cork to a golden candlestick. Well, you get something of the flavor of arasmas. Another writing of arasmas, a different writing, is his incuridian of the Christian soldier. The word incuridian had two meanings. It either mean the handbook or the sword of the Christian soldier. And this is arasmas' attempt to set forth the gospel. What it means to be a Christian, to fight the good fight of faith. Let me just read a bit of this as an arasian sermon. I don't know that arasmas ever preach this, but if you can imagine arasmas preaching, it would sound something like this. Do not tell me that charity consists in being frequently in church in prostrating oneself before signs of the same sin burning tapers and repeating such and such a number of prayers. God has no need for all of this. Paul defines love as to edify one's neighbor, to lead all to become members of the same body, to consider all one in Christ to rejoice and a brother's good fortune in the Lord just as you would concerning your own. To heal his hurt as you would try to heal your own hurt, compassionately, to review the airing, to teach the ignorant, to lift up the fallen, to console the downhearted, to help the toiler, to support the needy in the highest degree to bring all your wealth, all your zeal, all your care, to bear on this that you may benefit as many as you possibly can in Christ. Beautiful language and noble aspirations, a beautiful description of the Christian life. The problem is, it's not much grace in all of this. There's not much grace in the writings of arasmas. The weakness of most of the humanist, certainly of arasmas, is their grasp of grace, their understanding of the theology, of salvation. The aras, the uns, not only were not good at theology, they just didn't like it. And because of that, there was a break in the ranks of the reformers. Those early years of the 16th century reformers were united, but eventually there would be a division between the humanist and what we could call the Lutherans. Not the only division that we're going to study about as we look at the 16th century, but one of the first on the Protestant side of things, although it's hard to describe the humanist as Protestants, most of them remain loyal to the Catholic Church as arasmas did. But the break comes with two great books. Arasmas wrote in 1524 a book called Own Free Will. In the more Martin Luther read in that book, the more disturbed he became, the more he disliked it, until finally he wrote his answer, which is called on the bondage of the will. So in comparing arasmas on Free Will and Luther on the bondage of the will, we have a prime illustration of the parting of the ways between the humanist and Luther and the other reformers. Certainly, Luther appreciated the charm and the style of arasmas. Luther said, I can't match that, I can't write the way arasmas wrote, but Luther had his own way of communicating. He could tell some very good stories, and he could hit pretty hard when he needed to. Luther said, the voice of arasmas sounded to him like the song of a nightingale, so beautiful, almost out of this world. But Luther said he was in search of substance and not form. And he felt bound to confess that his experience in reading arasmas was much like that of the wolf, in the fable who was charmed by the singing of a nightingale. And that wolf could not rest until he had caught it and greedily devoured it. Only to remark, disgustedly afterwards, this wolf spoke Latin, so he said, box at Preterra Nihil, a voice with nothing else. So Luther says, beautiful sounds, but nothing there, no substance, no nourishment. And Luther goes on to oppose the attitude of arasmas who said, let's just don't argue about theology. Can't we just agree that the church needs to clean up its act and get on with it? As soon as we start nitpicking and splitting hairs, we're going to get into all sorts of trouble. And things will be back to where they were when we started. Arasmas disliked assertions. Luther countered by saying that if you don't have any pleasure in assertions, it's the same thing as saying you're not a Christian, because the Christian is made up of assertions, teachings that are not things that we can do away with. But one thing, Luther appreciated about arasmas, and that is, arasmas had focused on the big thing. It wasn't talking about indulgences and purgatory and the pope and all of that. The big thing is, how is a person saying, how does God's grace work? And so Luther says, I thank you, because you've gone right to the heart of the matter, and that allows me to go right to the heart of the matter. And so when Luther wrote his book on the bondage of the will, he saw that as his statement of salvation. It was a book that Luther put his heart and soul into, and Luther loved that book, and an excusable way he was proud of it. Lutherans feel a little bit ambiguous about that book, but Luther never did. You see arasmas in his book had presented with great skill and great beauty, and with great persuasion, the Roman Catholic semi-Poladian doctrine, the center, has power to do good things. Not all by ourselves, of course, God helps us with his grace, but we can contribute to our salvation, we can do good things, and those good things have merit. In the sight of God, in our salvation depends upon our doing those good things. Arasmas said, I like the sentiments of those who attribute a little to the freedom of the will most, however, to grace. He was not a polygion, but he wanted to have something there for the freedom of the will. He sometimes used the illustration of an apple placed before a little child on a high table, and the child can't reach the apple, the child is trying to reach the apple, the child can't reach the apple. But then grace comes along in the form of the father who picks the child up and raises the child higher, and then the child of his own free will. And energy can retire and get the apple, so it's grace and human effort that brings us salvation. Well, so much of Arasmas is good advice, but it's hardly good news. And that's what Luther understood. It was a man preaching once in a rescue mission. A lot of people, bombs there, off the street, people who had been overcome by drink and drugs and everything else. This man was preaching, and as he preached, he began to quote Kipling's famous poem, if, to these men, if you can keep your head. When all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you'll be a man, my son. And if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, you'll be a man, my son. Finally, one of these derelicts had had all he could take, and he shouted out interrupting the poem, but what if I can't? You see that's Luther's bondage of the will. But what if I can't? Even if grace picks me up, I can't reach the apple because I don't want to. Well, we'll have to get into that teaching further, other points in this class, and of course in other classes in the seminary. But Luther's position on the bondage of the will is set forth with great force in his book. How do we view Erasmus? Well, he really ended up with no friends on either side. The Catholics didn't like him because of his criticism of the church. In fact, here is a picture of Erasmus. One of the libraries in Switzerland, and the inquisition has visited that library and defaced Erasmus by indicating Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic discussed his teaching. Most Protestants didn't like him either because he did not go far enough and he broke with Luther. John Alasco, who was a reformer of Poland, who served also in the Netherlands and England, Calvinist, wrote these words about Erasmus. And I think this is the way we really should feel about the prince of the humanist. John Alasco said, we must rejoice in the gifts of Erasmus, which were of a truth great and significant enough to acknowledge God in them. But if we believe we have advanced farther, let us consider that this too was only granted to us of God. So we can thank God for Erasmus. He went along the path a certain distance and he did some good things. Certainly his new testament is something for which we are thankful. And his writings alerted people to the problems in the church. If Luther and Calvin and John Knox and the others went further, we can still thank God for Erasmus because he helped them. Go further. Grass withers, flower fades, the word of our God shall stand forever. Now I'll show you a timeline from last semester from Brian Howard. It's called the History of the Early Church has a very beautiful cover and a quotation from one of the lectures from the early church portion of this class. Brian has given me this so I can use it as a calendar for 1998 with important dates in church history and thought for the month and a little calendar over here. It's a very handy and beautiful timeline and I brought it today in order to remind you that the first exam is Friday, February 27. So we haven't figured that out yet. Get that into your notes and that will cover items one through 26 on the 100 most important things. So you should be underway with that. Answer those questions. You probably want to do it somewhat in sequence with the lectures that you can get ahead of that if you would like. So all kinds of ways to do timelines. You of course get your timelines back. I don't keep them all, but sometimes people give timelines to be so don't think you're going to have to give it up unless you want to. Or unless you make two. OK, questions on the humanism and arasmas and all of this. Do you like arasmas? Well, he studied first at the sorribon in Paris and he had to study the scholastics and that was pretty dry and deadly sort of theology. He discovered he didn't like that. He really liked the humanist better. He liked the beautiful style and the writing of the early humanist. So he had a taste of theology. It wasn't very good theology. It was medieval scholastic theology, which could be incredibly minute. In fact, arasmas makes a lot of fun of this when he says, you know, what the theologians really try to decide is could God had become incarnate, not as a man, but as a cucumber or something like that, you know, debates what all over this topic. Well, it's no wonder he had a bad taste of theology, but what Luther, of course, is saying accurately is you can't just say because there's bad theology. There can't be any theology. Luther said the Holy Spirit is not a skeptic. Arasmas said, I would be a skeptic. I would just throw it all over except the church tells me I can't. So the church was sort of keeping him within bounds. But like many modern people, he just felt theology was not only not useful but positively harmful. Yes. Oh, yes. He deals a lot with personal sin. Pride, lust, covetousness. Well, you just try harder. You just do. You just certainly arasmas say God's grace is involved. You pray. You ask for God's help. But basically it comes down to you've got to do something about it. Now Luther will say you've got to do something about it too, but you've got to do something about it because God now is enabled you to do something about it. Whereas Arasmas says God helps those who help themselves. Luther says God helps people who then must do what God has enabled them to do. Somebody else, yes. Yes, it's rather comparable. Wickliffe translated also from Latin from the Volgaet. So he's he's a bit earlier. So he doesn't come into this lecture but he had done for English what Jacque Febre did for French a little later. Of course with tendle, you get an English translation directly from the Hebrew and the Greek as you do with Luther into German. So we're just about with Wickliffe and Jacque Febre at the end of the translation from the Latin. It's the work of these people today like Rajlan and Arasmas and others that showed the importance of going back to the original languages. Roman Catholic Church doesn't accept that because in some ways the Volgaet is more important to them than the original languages. Since the Volgaet they felt was based on more authentic manuscripts than were present in the 16th century. So the Latin preserved an earlier form of the Greek in the Hebrew. I really can't be maintained anymore but it was back in the 16th century. Yes. Who was that? He did not do a translation as far as I know. He was a Hebrew teacher and Luther's translation not only his September testament which is the New Testament translation but his Old Testament translation. It's a great deal from Rajlan. Rajlan's grand nephew was Philip Malanthin. So there's a kind of connection there between Rajlan who remained a Roman Catholic as did Jacque Febre, as did John College, as did Arasmas. But Philip Malanthin of course was Luther's great colleague associate in Bittenberg. Okay, time's up. Thank you.