The Bible, the Reformation & Printing

[Gregory Matthews]

On the surface one might wonder who this article  is related to theology.   I will suggest that it deals with the place that the Bible has in  theology.

See:

https://spectrummagazine.org/article/2017/11/24/reformation-journey-part-7-found-translation

A common conception of the Reformation is of the Catholic Church hiding all the truth from the people by keeping the Bible in Latin so no one could read it. Along come the great reformers, who together with the printing press, organize the translation of the Bible and its distribution to the grateful masses, who huddle around the Bible, drinking in its words.

This isn’t exactly true, but it’s not completely false either. It’s absolutely true that the Reformation and the printing press go hand-in-hand, but their relationship is complicated, and it’s not always clear whose hand is leading whose. It’s true that people were grateful to have the Bible and to be able to read it for themselves, but that number of people was rather small, and vernacular Bibles were available in the main European languages by 1492.

Equally, the leaders of the Reformation wanted restrictions placed on who could read it: Luther’s attempts at schooling people were aimed towards creating an elite to direct religious and secular society, not to creating people who could read the Bible for themselves.

Calvin said that God “wants the bread to be cut for us, the pieces to be put in our mouths, and the chewing to be done for us.” Clearly, that means somebody “higher” has to do that for you, in Calvin’s case, the preacher. He wanted people to know what God said, but not necessarily directly from the Bible, which is what reformation finally came to mean.