At the end of this month, just before Halloween, there’s a recognition in some Protestant churches of Reformation Sunday. This morning I'm going to be looking at some of the good and healthy and important things which came out of the Reformation. I'm going to take the period of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries as covering the Reformation movement, although of course the seeds were sown earlier, probably in the very first years of Christianity, and the effects are still being felt today. What I want to suggest to you is that we're deeply indebted to the great Reformers -- to Luther and Calvin and Erasmus and others whose names may not be so familiar. Yes, indebted even to Calvin, whose name is mainly associated, for us, with the doctrines of total depravity and predestination and everlasting punishment, doctrines which we've totally rejected. I want to try to show you a side of Calvin, and Luther and the others which helped make it possible for our free religious tradition to take root and grow. There are three themes (are you surprised?) which I particularly want to explore as our legacy from the Reformation: access to information, the importance of attitude, and the priesthood of all believers.

One of the central themes of the Reformation was the right of ordinary people to read for themselves the Scriptures and other documents on which their religion was based; that right, which we take so much for granted today, is absolutely central to our Unitarian principle which encourages "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning." The name I want to draw to your attention in connection with this part of my talk is William Tyndale, and I'm indebted for my material, as is often the case, to an article some years ago in the Globe and Mail, and particularly to Robertson Cochrane whose writings on language used to be one of my favourite aspects of that paper.

Tyndale was born around 1494 (no one's exactly sure, but at least 500 years ago). He attended both Oxford and Cambridge, apparently attracted to Cambridge because the great humanist Erasmus had taught there a few years earlier. He entered the priesthood, but then became a private tutor for the children of a wealthy aristocrat ..... I guess you could say he did a kind of teaching ministry! He preached outdoors to whoever would listen and he quarrelled with the local clergy, whom he considered to be ignorant spouters of Latin they didn’t understand. He was sure that religion was declining in influence, but that it could be revived only if people were able to read the scriptures in their own language.

Tyndale was an argumentative, opinionated personality, and he quickly wore out his welcome in the English countryside, but his reputation as a bit of a heretic followed him when he decided to try living in London. In 1524, after antagonizing the bishop of London, he fled to Germany, where a soul brother named Martin Luther was stirring things up. It was only a couple of years later, in the spring of 1526, that about 3,000 copies of a mysterious, newly printed book began arriving in England, smuggled from Europe in wine kegs and bales of wool. It contained such admonitions as "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." It told how "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." It included the stern rebuke, "O ye of little faith." And it warned would-be critics to "judge not, lest ye be judged."

English Christians had heard this kind of thing before, but usually in Latin, which most of them didn’t understand, and usually intoned from a pulpit. Few people had ever actually read the Bible, and almost no-one had seen it in their own familiar language. For more than 1,000 years, the Bible was known only in the Latin version which had been translated by St.Jerome in the 4th century. Over the centuries, parts of this had been translated into Old English, and all of it had been converted to the current form of English in 1382 by John Wycliffe. But that was before the printing press, and copies were not widely available. In any case, they were stilted, literal translations from the Latin, not the easy, earthy tongues of the farmers, fishermen and carpenters who populated the Bible stories and who ordinary people could relate to. The New Testament in common English took the country by storm, although it was going to become even more of a tempest. It was the work of William Tyndale.

Tyndale's New Testament, the first to be translated straight from Greek and the first to be printed, was popular with the people but heavily frowned on by the establishment. Tyndale believed that the scriptures carried more authority than the pope, so as you can guess he was by now regarded as a heretic, and his work was considered blasphemous. The Bishop of London decreed that all copies of his Bible translation be turned in and destroyed or the owners would be excommunicated, and regular book-burnings were held.

Publishing was in its very early days, and there was no way for the Church to foresee how the public would react to their heavy-handedness. The book may have been banned, but it became wildly popular. The Bishop sent underlings to continental Europe to buy-up copies in bulk, and at premium prices. This meant more money coming in for Tyndale and his associates, who kept one step ahead of the authorities by moving from one city to another.

Meanwhile, Tyndale learned Hebrew in a hurry, and in 1530, contraband copies of the first five books of the Old Testament arrived in England, rendered straight from the Hebrew with no Latin filter. And for the first time, English people read in their own language the words, "And God said: let there be light, and there was light."

But Tyndale paid a high price, the ultimate price, for his work; he was finally betrayed, arrested and convicted of heresy. On Oct.6, 1536, he was strangled at the stake and his body burnt. As he faced death, he cried: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." His prayer was answered. Henry VIII, after his own run-in with the Pope over certain marital matters that you may remember, declared himself head of the Church of England. Shortly after Tyndale's execution, Henry had the bright idea of providing his subjects with a Bible in their own language; that Bible was largely the work of William Tyndale.

In case you think that Tyndale's battle for freedom of the press has been won, let me remind you of the skirmishes every now and then, still, over what can be imported into Canada and what can be on school curricula. The reason no-one worries about the Bible getting into the wrong hands nowadays is probably because so few people attach much importance to its religious ideas. But it was incendiary stuff, literally, in Tyndale's day. Next time you read something that makes you question ideas which you'd taken for granted, a book or an article which throws new light on your faith or your doubts, remember Tyndale. He's as responsible as anyone for the freedom of the press that we do, to a large extent, enjoy today. He was one of the great Reformers.

The second theme, or aspect of the Reformation legacy, which I want us to consider is the emphasis on attitude. Nowadays, to say someone "has an attitude" suggests bad temper or being unco-operative, but maybe we can try to understand what it meant to the people of the 16th century when Martin Luther proclaimed that salvation -- that is, health and wholeness of the spirit -- was a matter of faith, not works, that is, a matter of one's attitude.

In the words of Karen Armstrong's book A History of God, before he formulated his ideas about justification by faith,: "Luther had almost despaired of the possibility of pleasing a God he had come to hate." But then, in a conversion experience like Paul's on the road to Damascus, Luther came to see that, as Armstrong says,

God provides everything necessary for "justification," the restoration of a relationship between the sinner and God. God is active and humans only passive. Our "good works" and observance of the Law are not the cause of our justification but only the result. We are able to observe the precepts of religion simply because God has saved us.

You might notice some similarities here with the thinking of the great Universalist, Hosea Ballou, three centuries later. Ballou, you may remember, talked about universal salvation, as freedom from sin -- not just freedom from punishment for sin, but freedom from the sin itself. For both Luther and Ballou, salvation is neither a matter of doing the right things or adopting the right intellectual ideas about God, but a matter of a trusting attitude, a confidence that our salvation has been accomplished, that things will be all right in the end. "Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty," Luther preached in one of his sermons, "but a free surrender and a joyful bet on [God's] unfelt, untried and unknown goodness." ..... Faith did not mean assent to the propositions of a creed and it was not "belief" in orthodox opinion. Instead, faith was a leap in the dark toward a reality that had to be taken on trust.

Luther has probably been more influential on the Universalist strand of our tradition, which proclaims the intrinsic goodness of the world and encourages us to trust in the eventual putting right of all that is wrong, than on the Unitarian strand with its emphasis on intellect and reason. Luther didn't believe in the usefulness of rational thought at all; in fact he referred to it as "that whore, reason". And in case you think I'm holding Luther up as a thoroughgoing hero for religious liberals, let me acknowledge that, in Armstrong's words, he "was a rabid anti-Semite, a misogynist, was convulsed with a loathing and horror of sexuality and believed that all rebellious peasants should be killed." Hardly a model for us! But two things about Luther constitute a legacy for which I am grateful: his advocacy of a trusting attitude towards the force which rules the world, and the immense courage of his convictions. Whenever I hear anyone say that UUs can believe whatever they like, I think of Luther and his ringing statement, "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise." Religion, for Luther, wasn't a matter of picking and choosing among ideas, but a readiness to be grasped by convictions and to go with them wherever they lead.

Karen Armstrong suggests that Luther was ultimately a less important reformer than John Calvin, who has such a bad name among us liberals. Considering Calvin's ideas about the total depravity of human nature and the illusory character of "free will", it's amazing (but true) that in Armstrong's words,

By the end of the sixteenth century, "Calvinism" ..... was able to transform society and give people the inspiration to believe that they could achieve whatever they wanted. Calvinistic ideas inspired the Puritan revolution in England under Oliver Cromwell in 1645 and the colonization of New England in the 1620s. ..... Calvin's version of Christianity was especially attractive to the bourgeoisie ..... [who] wanted to shake off the shackles of a repressive hierarchy.

As in the case of Luther, I don't want to present Calvin as a hero. After all, he was responsible for the death of our Unitarian founding father, Michael Servetus; he was also responsible for terrible anxiety about the possibility of being predestined to eternal damnation in Hell, and for a great deal of rigid intolerance. But I see a positive legacy of Calvin, too. As Armstrong says, "Puritanism gave people pride in their work, which had hitherto been experienced as a slavery but which was now seen as a `calling'." I think that by extension it allowed the process of "reframing", of seeing facts in a new way, through a new frame of understanding. I once heard someone say about a friend that every time he told his life story it got a little bit better. I was suspicious of this at the time: surely the facts were the same all along and if his story changed that meant there was distortion. Then I began to see that the facts are only the little truths; the Truth with a capital T is the interpretation that we put on the facts, the way we frame them. Luther and Calvin and other great reformers taught us that what matters most about our lives is not the dates and facts but the story that we make of them, our attitude to them.

The third Reformation theme or legacy I want to look at is dear to all Protestants, but especially important to Unitarian Universalists with our emphasis on democracy and equality; it's the "priesthood of all believers". The idea became important early in the Reformation, with John Wycliffe; you may remember that I mentioned him earlier, as having translated the Bible even before Tyndale did, but not as successfully. Wycliffe suggested that such things as the elevation of the clergy over lay people, and imposing requirements such as celibacy, were distortions; ministers were supposed to be servants, not privileged people. Particularly he thought that clergy should be appointed to their positions by the people they were going to serve rather than by the hierarchy of the Church; he said that "Then there would be free election by the parishioners and the choice of the curate would be limited by merit alone". Well, we've certainly taken that idea to heart, while many denominations which think of themselves as closer to the Reformation still cling to the old hierarchical ways. The Reformers have left us a legacy which keeps Ministers in their proper place, and I say that with not the slightest trace of regret.

It was Luther who actually gave us the phrase "priesthood of all believers". He said,

Through baptism we are all ordained to the priesthood ... When a bishop ordains [a priest,] it is simply that one person is selected to exercise for the rest the power in which all share ..... But although we are all priests, we are not to assume the office without the commission of the congregation, and if anyone is deposed, he is in the same status as he was before because a priest ..... is nothing but an office holder.

Luther himself may not have recognized how revolutionary his ideas about ministry were. By introducing the idea that there was no hierarchy of Christians, Luther was sowing the seeds of belief in the radical equality of all human beings, a belief which he actually rejected with a kind of horrified astonishment five years later, in his writing titled "Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants". Doesn't sound terribly democratic, does it? It just goes to show that we can never tell where our good ideas will lead; we just have to trust the process!

I now want to mention a reformer who's probably unfamiliar to you but who happens to be a favourite of mine from way back; he was a Quaker and I feel a deep affinity with the Quakers. His name is Robert Barclay. Writing in 1676, early in the history of the Quakers but relatively late in the Reformation period, Barclay explains what’s meant by the Quaker concept of the "Inner Light". He's absolutely clear that this Inner Light makes everyone equal; he says, "this light enlighteneth the hearts of all ... nor is it less universal than the seed of sin ..." And Barclay really did mean universal; not only are priests unnecessary for Christians, but conscious Christianity is also unnecessary. Barclay says that the knowledge of Jesus, "we willingly confess to be very profitable and comfortable, but not absolutely needful ... if they [allow] his ... light to take place." So the priesthood of all believers includes, for these radical Protestants, non-Christian believers who respond to their own inner light. It also included women more explicitly than in other strands of the Reformation; Barclay says,

... seeing male and female are one in Christ Jesus, and that he gives his Spirit no less to one than to the other, when God moveth by his Spirit in a woman, we judge it in no ways unlawful for her to preach in the assemblies of God's people.

I don't know whether anything comparable was written by the earliest Unitarians or Universalists, but I think the Quakers certainly have grounds to be proud of this early stand in favour of women's rights, and I'm grateful to them for helping pave the way to equality in our own time.

Some historians think that one of the reasons for the expulsion of the Puritans from England and their emigration to America was their rejection of ecclesiastical authority, their belief in the priesthood of all believers, in fact. King James I recognized the implications of doing away with the priestly hierarchy. "No Bishop, No King", he said, and "I will harry them out of the land". One contemporary of the 17th century Puritans described them this way:

They hold that the pastors, teachers, and ruling elders of particular congregations, are, or ought to be the highest spiritual officers in the church, over whom (by any divine ordinance) there is no superior Pastor but only Jesus Christ.

If this sounds like congregational autonomy to you, the kind that we have, I think you've got it right. The Puritans brought their democratic ideas to America and put them into practice in their Congregational Churches, where our North American UU roots are. Without a sense of a sacramental or mystic priesthood, the men and women of the congregation took over the authority. You can probably see that there's a relationship between these concepts of equality and revolutionary ideas in the political arena. The concept of universal priesthood became potential dynamite in the hands of the masses; it's not only in today's world that we see the close connection between religious and political ideas. Liberal thinking about the equality of everyone in the church brought about a new social ethic of participation in the work of the world by all people of faith, and a new sense of shared responsibility for social well-being.