Sectarian Rome

It was a well-nigh universal trope of Reformation rhetoric that the Reformers were the catholics who had to defend orthodoxy and catholicity against the sectarianism of the Roman church.

Luther disputed the Catholic claim that obedience to Rome was the definition of catholicity, and disputed it on the basis of the universal testimony of the church (Unitive Protestantism, 65). Calvin defended the Reformers against the charge that they were schismatics: “Verily the wolves complain against the lambs” (quoted, 73). The 1559 French Confession distinguished the true church from “all other sects who call themselves the church” (quoted, 80), a thinly veiled allusion to Rome.

McNeill writes, “The Reformation was a revolt, not against the principle of unity and catholicity, but against the privileged and oppressive monarchy of Rome – an uprising not merely of national, but of catholic feeling, against what had become a localized and overcentralized imperialism in Christianity, which made true catholicity impossible” (86).

That this was more than a rhetorical maneuver is evident, albeit in an extreme form, in an exchange between Luther and Eck at the Leipzig Disputation (1519). McNeill summarizes:

For Luther, “Christianity was vastly wider than Romanism. Against Eck he cited the Greek Church as proof that the ‘rock’ passage in Matthew is not applicable to the Pope, whose connection with ‘My Church’ is with a section of it only. This argument Eck tried to dismiss with contempt: the Greeks, in separating from Rome, he said, became exiles from the faith of Christ. Luther insistently returned to the point, expressing the hope that Eck, ‘with Eccian modesty,’ will spare so many thousands of saints, since the Greek Church, though separated from Rome, has endured and will endure. Eck in turn, while he avoids condemning the Greek fathers, has little hope for the salvation of any in the modern East except a few who hold the Roman obedience (qui Romanam obedientiam tenent). . . . Eck’s expressions were calculated to confirm the differentiation that had arisen in Luther’s mind between ‘catholic church’ and ‘Roman obedience’” (66).