Diarmaid MacCulloch: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you’re one of the best-known historians of the Reformation, and there’s a very standard account. The printing press comes. Well, Bibles can be published and printed more easily, more cheaply. That leads to the Reformation. Are there any aspects of that story that you’re skeptical about? No, I wouldn’t say I’m skeptical about that. It’s certainly true that the circulation of texts, particularly biblical texts, is really very important in late medieval Europe. It’s not that the Catholic Church, in general, forbade such texts. It just didn’t see where they might lead. But I think there’s something very significant about the Reformation which is underplayed. Those who know about it and talk about it — look at Martin Luther, for instance — they use a piece of theological jargon about the Protestant Reformation. They talk of justification by faith alone. Who knows what that means? Well, what it means is that salvation is really in the hands of God, not in the hands of the clergy. Now, that’s the important thing, that one of the things which Martin Luther did very quickly as he began unfurling his own instincts about the need for change in the church was to make sure that the clergy once more would marry. They would become like laymen in that they had an equal right to have marriage and families, and that made them the same as the rest of the world. Martin Luther’s concept of the old church, the church he was rejecting, was one which had played a huge confidence trick on the laity of Europe by saying that clergy are special, and the way we’re going to make them special is by making them celibate. So, making all clergy married, which is effectively what happened in the Protestant Reformation, absolutely transforms the rules on marriage and sexuality generally because from then on, actually, the clerical family is the model of the Christian life. Previously, the model of the Christian life had been that of the monk, the celibate clergy, the celibate priest, and now that is absolutely reversed. Protestants destroyed most of the monasteries. Yet a few in Lutheran countries, but very few. Otherwise, this absolutely central part of medieval Western Christianity, the monastery, was absolutely eliminated. What is in its place? The parish, the minister in his parish with his wife, with his children, one of whom is me. I’m particularly passionate about this thought, that Protestantism put the minister on the pedestal as the way that all Christians should live, not just clergy. All Christians could take the model of marriage and family from the clergy. As you well know, if we look at Henrician England, some key figures like Cromwell, Cranmer, Wolsey — they don’t come from very exalted backgrounds, right? They started off as quite common. There’s something meritocratic about the society. How does that happen? Or where does that come from? How do they climb?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.