De Sales vs. Luther on Freedom
and Religious Devotion
By Dusty Gates
One of the major tenets of the Wittenberg Reforms implemented by Martin Luther in the early 1520s was his insistence on the equality of all men before God. A recognition of the “priesthood of all believers” was essential, according to Luther, to ensure proper respect for the rights of each individual person in regards to their religious experience. To him, there was no essential difference between the clergy and the laity, therefore the ordained and the non-ordained should each be free to do the things which had formerly been reserved to one vocational state or the other. InChristianity’s Dangerous Idea, Alister McGrath refers to this Lutheran agenda as the “democratization of faith,” and asserts that it was “one of the greatest themes of the Reformation” (p. 52). Specifically, this program supported things like the opportunity for clergy to marry and laypeople to interpret the Bible free from ecclesial authority. If we really believe that God created us with the same dignified human nature and potential for beatitude, it seems that Luther had a point when he insisted that our activities be interchangeable. The hierarchy and differentiation of roles in the Church seemed to him to be a separation of the holy from the unholy; the privileged from the underprivileged.
One generation later came another Catholic cleric who also saw a problem in the separate way clergy and non-clergy were viewed. St. Francis de Sales, whose birthday we celebrate on August 21, addressed the issue in a much different way than Luther had before him. Instead of focusing on equality of “rights,” Francis focused on equality of “calling.”
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