Systematic Theology – The State

The Conciliar Movement

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 27

Dictation Name: 27 The Conciliar Movement

Year: 1970’s

Well, we’ll continue now with our second subject for the evening, The Conciliar Movement.

Very early in what we call the Middle Ages, justice began to perish in Europe because a local lord, or the local petty kingdom, controlled the courts absolutely and it controlled the church. A lord or a king would make his older son his heir, and his other sons the abbots, or the bishops in the locality, and he would control both church and state absolutely and would give no real justice. And so, when people went to the church for a word of freedom and a word of witness against the evils around them, they couldn’t hear it. Why would the bishop, a brother to the local lord speak out against the Lord when he was indulging in robbery and theft, and abusing all the people, and so it was, step by step, the papacy tried to strengthen itself against this. It introduced sacerdotal celibacy, not for ascetic reasons, but to prevent the local abbots, the local bishops, and so on from intermarrying with the lords and being interrelated, and thereby having a stranglehold on the area, and the Vatican made itself the supreme court of justice. The result was a great liberating force in Europe, which lasted for almost three, three and a half centuries. It gave Europe a measure of freedom, in that anyone could walk to Rome and say, “I appeal to Rome,” against the king, or against the lord, or against the local bishop and his injustice, and the pope could warn them and excommunicate them, and thereby, bring them into line.

But, internal problems developed in the church and the Great Schism followed. There were two popes, and there was anarchy in the church, and then, towards the last, three popes. Not only was there a disunity at the top, but corruption had set in, so that the supreme court of justice was now an unjust court.

As a result, there was a cry throughout the length and breadth of the church and Europe for a council, an ecumenical council to reform the church and to unify the church, these two goals. The Council of Constance was called a met 1414-1418 to reform and to unite the church. It unified it but it did not reform it. It brought about the abdication of John XXIII, Benedict XIII, and Gregory XII, and the election of Martin V, so they had one pope, but it did little to reform the church. The reforms were very trifling. The condemned immodest dress for the clergy, a few little trifles like that. They did not address themselves to the real issues.

The call for a council had been largely motivated by an argument that later was used by Protestants. We need to get back to the early church and its standards. In fact, this was the cry of Catholic reform throughout the centuries. The Catholics stopped using it when the Protestants did at the Reformation, but that was overlooked at the Council of Constance. In fact, the Council went further. It burned John Hus and Jerome of Prague at the stake. So much for their spirit of reform. The failure of the Council of Constance began with the leader, the Emperor Sigismund. He was an able man, and some regarded him in his day and since as a heroic figure, but his was a very flawed character. He gave a safe conduct to John Hus to come and present his arguments before the Council, and then turned on him, violated the safe conduct, and John Hus was burned at the stake. The Council met in Constance for four years, hundreds of men, and the emperor was to foot the bill for that, but he was a deadbeat. He walked away leaving a pledge that as soon as he returned home, he would pay the bill. He never did, and anyone who runs up a hotel and food bill for four years, and all kinds of expenses, stable expenses for the horses, for the grooms, for their retinues, and so on, for a few thousand men, it must have totaled altogether, for four years, and walks away and leaves the city fathers to try to figure out how their city is going to meet that bill, can’t be all good.

Sigismund had very definitely a flawed character. Moreover, the Council of Constance was not governed by ideas of reform, but by rationalism and statism, by the kind of thinking that Marsilius of Padua had begun.

Now, it’s ironic that Wycliffe and Hus were both somewhat favorable to Marsilius only because they were anti-papal. For that reason, they were ready to seek allies where they should not have. The Council of Constance hypocritically condemned them for following Marsilius. Marsilius, in his day, had never been condemned. In order to say, “We’re not Marsilians in our thinking. We don’t like these boys because they have bad ideas.” So they put a distance between themselves and two ostensible Marsilians, while they went their own merry way, and applied them more rigorously than anyone else. So, the Council of Constance accomplished Marsilian purposes while denouncing them in John Hus and Jerome of Prague.

The Council was more given to nationalism than it was to Christianity. As a matter of fact, all the voting was by nations. Each of the nations met in a separate council chamber and voted as a unit, so that their priority was not the faith, not the church, but their nation states. Moreover, at the Council Basil in 1431, a few years later, the Council continued its anti-church attitude and affirmed the right of councils to depose popes and to control the church, and these were not churchmen. The Council of Constance and the subsequent councils were dominated, not by the clergy, but by academicians, professors, and by civil rulers, and their perspective was essentially hostile to the church.

In 1438, King Charles VII of France called a Council of Bourges, and the pragmatic sanctions were issued which declared that the authority of a general council is above the pope, and that no papal bull could take effect in France until the king so ordered it. What they were saying, and this is the meaning of it, that in any country, the state is over the church and controls the church, and the church can take no step without the permission of the state. This is what the pragmatic sanctions meant. This was the beginning also of the Gallican church. The Gallican church was the Catholic church of France which was technically associated with the Vatican, but actually controlled by the rulers of France. The Gallican church, with a few interludes, prevailed for three centuries or more, but at the Council of Bourges, a few adherents of the Vatican advanced some arguments that shook up the monarchists. They said if a council can depose popes, and control the church, cannot a council, within a nation, depose kings and control the nation? This very greatly distressed the monarchs of Europe. They wanted no such power to exist. In fact, they wanted to deny the power of any human agency to touch kings.

We see this a few centuries later when, more than a century later, when Queen Elizabeth was faced with the fact that Mary Queen of Scots was openly planning her overthrow. The logic of the situation require that Mary Queen of Scots be executed, but the idea of anyone, even another king, ordering the execution of a queen or a king, was anathema to Elizabeth, and she tried to find someone in her court who would execute, or assassinate, Mary, so it would not be a legal act. She resented the idea that it had to be a legal fact.

The main accomplishment of the Council of Constance was the superiority of the state over the church. The world of Henry VIII was born at the Council of Constance. When the Reformation came, some of the countries of Europe had gained exactly what France had gained with the pragmatic sanctions. They had concordats from the Vatican giving them freedom to control the church within their realms. It was only those countries where this freedom to control the church by the state did not exist that the Reformation took place, because only there were the rulers interested in breaking the power of the Vatican.

In other words, Marsilius’s thinking had triumphed on both sides. Most Catholics were Marsilian. Most Protestants were Marsilian, except for Calvin, and this made Calvinism very much a kind of an outlaw group, very much feared and hated, because it stood for the freedom of the church, and the crown rights of Christ as King over the state. This was the motto, in fact, of the Puritans in England during the Commonwealth Era, the crown rights of Christ the King, and when it came to a showdown, they beheaded the King of England, because they believed in the crown rights of Christ, not in the crown rights of Charles I.

The Conciliar movement thus, was a failure, because the Conciliar movement stood for the supremacy of the state. It represented a Marsilian impulse. It is significant that in our day, very little attention has been paid by the Christian church to Marsilius’s thinking. In fact, it would be probably true that if they studied Marsilius, they’d find his thinking very pleasing. Why shouldn’t they? They are in substantial agreement with what he had to say, but Marsilius of Padua was a champion of totalitarianism, of the separation of morality from religion, of antinomianism, and state law over God’s law, and of confining the church to a purely spiritual, pietistic concern, and making it irrelevant.

It is important for us, therefore, to recognize where these influences came from and how evil they were.

End of tape