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Protestantism Is Over and the Radicals Won B Y M I C H A E L S. H O R T O N
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Schwärmerei as Original Sin: Luther’s View of Doubt and Defiance of God’s Word as the Root of Sin B Y R O B E R T KO L B
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Anabaptism B Y W. R O B E R T G O D F R E Y
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The State of the Church before the Reformation B Y A L I S T E R M C G R AT H
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Against the Weber Thesis BY DIARMAID MACCULLOCH
Recommended Titles
Reformation Romance: Love and Marriage Luther and Katie’s Way
B Y S A R A H PAT T E R S O N W H I T E
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Classic Luther Biographies
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How-To History: Fact, Fiction, and the Art of the Past
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LETTER from the EDITOR
So, if both the Reformers and Catholicism lost, then who won? Inasmuch as it’s even possible (or proper) to speak of a winner in the midst of that turmoil, we must acknowledge that the Radicals are the victors. Drawn from disaffected Reformers and fringe mystics, the Radicals are united by their insistence on a strict biblicism that rejected both sola scriptura and the magisterial authority of the Roman Church. They developed aberrant doctrines about the person and work of the Holy Spirit, the place of baptism in the Christian life, and the relationship of the Christian to the state. They tore at the istory is written by the victors. That social fabric as well as the religious sensibilitruism is being put to the test this year ties of the time. as we celebrate the Reformation’s fiveIn this issue, we’re acknowledging the hard hundredth anniversary. Churches truth that the Radicals won. Why? Because across the world—however tenuous their contheir vision of the church and the core tenets nection to the Reformation—are joining in its of their theology are firmly ensconced in most victory parade, eager to share some of the glory modern versions of Christianity, especially of Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers. American Christianity. Even though we lost, we What exactly are we all celebrating? After have not given up the fight. We still protest—not all, we lost. All the darkest predictions of the just against Rome and the Radical Anabaptists, Reformers’ Catholic opponents came but also against an “enthusiasm” true: The Reformers didn’t reform that’s become the new normal in the Roman Catholic Church, nor did much of our own Christian world their efforts result in one or two viable today. We still believe that “THE alternatives to Roman Catholicism. the rich resources of the RADICALS Since 1517, the number of Christian Reformation must be brought ARE THE churches (loosely defined) has balto bear on the modern church if looned to more than 30,000 groups. we are to recover the joy, hope, VICTORS.” Among those churches, few continue and confidence of the gospel. to care about the issues that drove The Radicals may have emerged Luther’s hammer. Anyone who cares victorious, but their idea of the about the Reformation—who sees it as a necesChristian life is not sustainable. Our prayer sary correction to the medieval church, who is with this issue is that you will have a cleargrateful for the evangelistic fervor still being felt eyed vision of what really happened during the across the Global South—must also acknowledge Reformation and what must happen in the years the hard truth that those who follow in the footto come if we are to be faithful to the work of our steps of the Reformers are a small minority today. forefathers in the faith. It’s not that Catholicism has fared much better. Their current Vicar of Christ seems intent on upsetting the foundations of traditional teaching that were Rome’s best argument against the Reformers. ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor
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I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y S T U D I O M U T I
500 In honor of the Reformation’s anniversary, here are two past favorite MR essays—and a new one on Martin and Katie Luther.
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The State of the Church before the Reformation By Alister McGrath
hy was there a Reformation? What was the church like just before the Reformation took place? Why did the Reformation have to happen? By looking at these questions we can begin to gain some understanding of our own situation today. One of the reasons why the Reformation happened is that there was a rediscovery of the attractiveness of the gospel. A new generation arose, who by reading the New Testament firsthand began to discover for themselves that here was something exciting, something life changing, which was like new wine, which just couldn’t be contained in the old wine skins of the church of the late Middle Ages. So underlying everything I’m going to say was this sense of excitement and rediscovery of the gospel. And there was a realization that there was a need to bring this into the sixteenth century, that the medieval church was lacking something. But by studying Scripture, by rediscovering the
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doctrine of grace, something was made available that gave new life, new meaning, new purpose to the church back in those days. You and I can rediscover today that as well. In my hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a house owned by my grandparents. It is one of these great big old rambling houses built back in the 1890s. At the top of the house is this kind of attic, which is where my grandparents stored all the things they picked up in their youth and their early married life. Why did they do this? Their answer was, “You never know when these things come in useful.” That’s what the Reformation is like in many ways. It is about realizing that we can turn to our Christian past and rediscover the things that are there, that we’ve neglected, that we have forgotten—things that can be useful today. Studying history is not simply some kind of nostalgia, some kind of feeling that says, “Oh, they always did things better in the past.” No, it’s saying, “Look, we can reach into the past to enrich the present. We can reach
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“The Reformation brought with it a rediscovery of the truths of the Christian faith—a rebirth of Christian understanding and Christian knowledge— something that wasn’t there in the late Middle Ages.”
Christian in the world and be sure that your sins had been forgiven. But they weren’t sure that this was what the church taught. The point I’m trying to make is that this is a big question. It is a question we will surely be expected to answer. But these guys didn’t. They weren’t stupid. They weren’t uneducated. Like most people in their day and age, they just did not know. One of the themes of the Reformation is bringing to consciousness the great truths of the Christian faith. Karl Heim, one of the renowned historians of the Reformation, once wrote a line about his Calvinist friends. He said the Calvinist knows what he believes and why. Heim made the point that the Reformation brought with it a rediscovery of the truths of the Christian faith—a rebirth of Christian understanding and Christian knowledge—something that wasn’t there in the late Middle Ages. Instead, there was confusion and a lack of understanding. Again, I sense this is beginning to happen to us today for all kinds of reasons. One of them is
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into the past and discover things we need to hear today. It is a resource you and I can access as we try to face the tasks for today’s church.” One of the big themes, then, is rediscovering the gospel. But the other side, which I’ll address here, is that things had become pretty bad in the late Middle Ages. One thing you will notice is that these problems seem to be emerging again. Woody Allen once said, “History repeats itself. It has to; nobody listens the first time around.” I want to impress on you the need for us to rediscover some of the ideas from the Reformation, because we are beginning to experience the same problems to which the Reformation was a solution. Here is one of the first areas I want to look at. The late Middle Ages saw the church undergo a period of doctrinal confusion. People were not sure what they believed, nor were they sure why they believed it. This resulted in the church lacking any sense of certainty about what they believed or why they believed it. There arose a generation of Christians who didn’t understand what the gospel was all about. That was enormously important for a whole range of things. One of the great themes of the doctrine of justification is that it answers the question, “What must I do to be saved?” That is an important question for a lot of people, and it is a question that needs to be answered. Yet in the late Middle Ages, people weren’t certain how to answer that question at all. What must you do to be saved? Let me tell you a story to bring out the importance of this point. In 1510 in northern Italy, there was a group of about twenty Italian noblemen who met regularly to pray and to talk. An important issue for them was this question of knowing how you could be sure you were saved. It’s still an important issue for us. In the end, the group decided there was no way of answering this, so the group split into two parts. One group felt that the only way of being sure they were going to be saved was to go to the nearest monastery and spend the rest of their lives there. The others felt that somehow you had to be able to live your life as a
that people these days are often too experience oriented. What’s Christianity all about? Well, they’ll say, “It’s about my experience of God”— and it is. Experience of God is of enormous importance. Without an experience of God, we are simply talking about an external formal shell with no fire for life. Nevertheless, that is a part of the Christian faith. There’s intellectual depth there, and it has a converting power based on the strength of its ideas. If we don’t know and understand this, then we sell the gospel short talking about our subjective appreciation of the gospel but not the objective truth it brings to our lives. So that is one important area where there were problems in the late Middle Ages. I think the same thing is beginning to happen today. Let me move on and look at another major area that caused problems in the late Middle Ages: the clergy. The clergy in the late Middle Ages tended to be not well informed. They were often the target of abuse and ridicule because they knew so little. This reflected the fact that the social status of clergy wasn’t very high, but deeper down there was something much more worrisome: all the clergy needed to do was tend to the pastoral needs of their flock and not worry about anything else. There was no teaching ministry grounded in the word of God. There was no sense of mission or evangelism. Bear in mind, we’re talking about late fifteenth-century Europe, where the assumption was that everybody was a Christian, so there was no need to evangelize. The result was that people didn’t like the clergy, who had certain privileges. For example, they were exempt from taxation, and they were exempt from compulsory military service. Above all, they were not well informed, and they were not seen to play a decisive or important role in the life of the church. With the Reformation, this changed in a big way. It changed because enormous emphasis came to be placed upon the teaching role of the clergy. The clergy were there to enable their people to discover in its full depths the wonder and the glory of the gospel. They were there to open the word of God for
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their people, to help them discover what they had already discovered—namely, the depth and the attractiveness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So the clergy began to discover a role based on their understanding of the gospel and their passionate concern to communicate this—again, taking excitement in what God had done for them through the cross of Jesus Christ, wanting their people to share in this, to know that they were benefiting from it. So we see in the late Middle Ages a church whose clergy had ceased to have any teaching function. The Reformation restored the vital elements of teaching and evangelism to the ministers of the church, which was a much needed correction. I think it’s a correction we also need to rediscover today. In the late Middle Ages, Christianity tended to be formal and external. In other words, it was simply about people doing certain things, maybe believing certain things. But often there was no sense of personal commitment or personal appropriation of the gospel. In other words, if you were a Christian, then you would behave in certain ways, as in attending church. Christianity was defined in terms of what you did. There was little sense of the dynamic, something transforming, something that could take hold of your life and turn it inside out. We see this change in a number of ways as the Reformation began to dawn. It changed a bit through the doctrine of justification by faith, which invited its heroes to discover the wonderful truth that we can experience the touch of God’s forgiving grace even though we are sinners. This was an enormously important insight for the Reformers, for here was something that made the gospel relevant to the world of ordinary people. The Reformation made this connection between the gospel and the experiential world of ordinary people. We are not talking simply about people being told to do certain things. We are talking about the gospel being able to bring new life, new hope to ordinary people, connecting the gospel to people, helping them to discover what the gospel could mean in their lives. So there was a
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major change I call the rediscovery of the laity. As many of you know, one of the key ideas underlying this is the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that every Christian believer can act as a priest, that every Christian believer has a role to play in the church. You only have to look at the late Middle Ages to see how little the laity were valued. For example, if you look at Calvin’s city of Geneva, which before the Reformation had five thousand ordinary citizens and two hundred clergy, you can see how many clergy there were and how little the laity were allowed to do in the church. After the Reformation, there were still five thousand people there but only six or seven clergy whose task was primarily teaching. The laity was rediscovered and given a positive role to play in the life of the church. I think this rediscovery is a vital aspect of the Reformation heritage—a rediscovery that ordinary laypeople have been called by God, equipped by God, and given something to do by God. We to need to rediscover and value that today. Let me tell you more about the late medieval church. The late Middle Ages is now thought to have been a period of enormous interest in Christianity. People used to think it was an era of decline, but it’s now increasingly thought of as an era of growth that led to increased criticism of the church. Ordinary Christians came to have greater expectations of what the church ought to be doing. When expectations weren’t met, people began to criticize the church. One of the things that developed was a cynicism on
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rediscovery of the inward aspects of the gospel, taking delight in its objective truth but nonetheless insisting it also had a subjective impact on people’s lives. The relevance of the gospel, therefore, moved away from mere outward observance to a discovery of what the gospel can mean to our inward lives. Luther talked a lot about the importance of experience in the Christian life. In one of his writings, he says, “Only experience makes a theologian.” That means there is no point in writing about God unless you have experienced God, unless you know what he is like. In another one of his writings, he says, “It is not reading and understanding and speculating that makes a theologian, but living and dying and being damned.” He means that the gospel is about forgiveness. It is about this glorious knowledge that our sins have been forgiven through the gospel. But unless you have fully appreciated that you are a sinner, then the sweet news of forgiveness is not going to meet you in all its force. It’s only by experiencing the death of sin that you can understand how wonderful this message of forgiveness is. So we see that there was a rediscovery here of the importance of the individual believer. There was a new relevance given to the ordinary layperson. That brings me to the next point. The late Middle Ages saw the clergy living in a world different from ordinary lay Christians, who were seen to be at a lower level. The laity was simply despised. They had no place to play in the church. With the Reformation came a
the part of ordinary Christians about the church and the clergy. They had a sense they were being exploited by those who were meant to be their pastors, their shepherds, their leaders. Often, the exploitation in question was financial. Many of you know about the indulgence controversy that was of great importance to Luther’s Reformation at Wittenberg. Let me explain what this was and why it caused such a row. In the Middle Ages, the idea developed that although God does indeed forgive sinners, it was appropriate to express your gratitude for forgiveness in various ways. One of those ways was financial. Because God forgave your sins, you could express your gratitude to God by, for example, endowing a church or giving money to charity or something like that. But by the early sixteenth century, this idea had become debased. Now people were being told, “Give money and sin will be forgiven.” Often, this played on the love of people for their dead relatives. Your father or your mother has died, and you may be wondering if they made it to
“One of the great themes of the gospel is that of forgiveness. Again, we find Luther moving this into the forefront of the Reformation struggle.”
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heaven. Well, if you buy an indulgence, then they’ll make it. In fact, there was an advertising slogan for indulgences: “When the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” In other words, once you’ve paid this sum of money, your mother, your father, or other relative will be delivered from any torment they’re going through and will find their way safely through the pearly gates. Of course, it had enormous attraction for ordinary believers who were worried about what happened to their parents, their grandparents, people they loved. At one level, this was financial exploitation. Luther reacted against this very, very negatively. For him, this was perversion of the gospel. This made forgiveness a commodity, something you could buy. Luther was outraged and felt there was a need to rediscover the idea of forgiveness, justification by faith—that you could die knowing your sins had been forgiven. Not because of anything that you had done, but because of the grace of God and what he has done for you through Jesus Christ. So there was financial corruption that made many people wonder if the church and their pastors could be trusted. The same thing was happening in other aspects of the church. For example, in the late medieval church when someone you loved died, the priest had to say the right prayers for them. Someone had to conduct a requiem Mass to make sure they got safely to heaven—but that priest would have to be paid. Again, people began to think, “Here we are being exploited. We want to know that our loved ones are safely in the arms of God. The only way we can do this is by paying money to this priest to say certain prayers.” So there was this deep unease about the quality of ministers and the integrity of the church. The Reformation tried to restore the integrity and the public image of the church. One of the great themes of the gospel is that of forgiveness. Again, we find Luther moving this into the forefront of the Reformation struggle. You and I do not need a priest to tell us that we will die with our sins forgiven. We don’t need to pay a priest to say prayers for us. We know
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that when we die we will be safe in the arms of God. This deep reassurance of knowing that sins have been forgiven, through what Jesus Christ has done for us, is a central theme of the Reformation. We must rediscover this theme. Often, Christians are told that they are arrogant for thinking their sins are forgiven. But they aren’t arrogant; they’re just trusting—trusting in the word of God that makes those promises and realizing that they are addressed to us who joyfully accept what God wants us to have. I’ve talked a bit about the problem of confusion in the late medieval church. I have tried to make the point that one of the things the Reformation did was to bring home to believers the importance of knowing what they believed. That brings me to the next theme, which is that of Christian education. In the late Middle Ages, this was virtually nonexistent. The only people who were educated were the clergy. Yet, very often, they were poorly educated indeed, and they knew little about the gospel. As a result, they were simply unable to answer questions that ordinary people had. Because of this, a
climate of unease built up about the trustworthiness of the gospel—not because of any problems with the gospel, but because the inadequacy of the clergy made it difficult for the people to understand what the gospel was saying. The Reformation brought home the importance of Christian education. Not simply of having a literate and educated clergy but also a laity of ordinary Christians who understood their faith and what it meant to them. You can see this working at two different levels. At the first level, it meant being able to give a good account of what the Christian faith is. A whole range of works came into being at the time of the Reformation designed to give Christians a deeper understanding and appreciation of the intellectual resilience of the intellectual depths of the Christian faith. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion are an excellent example of this kind of work. They brought home to people that Christianity made sense, that it could be trusted, that by having a good understanding of the Christian faith you were well placed to deepen your own faith and also explain it to others. So, objectively, education was important. Education was also important subjectively. It brought home to people that they could feel good about the gospel by the reassurance of its attractiveness, stability, and the fact that it did make sense. Here is something we need to rediscover. We need to rediscover that by deepening our understanding of our faith, we do two things. First, we bring about a new depth of understanding of our own faith. It’s good news for us. As we begin to realize the full depths of our faith, we begin to open up and explore something we’ve always known was there but have never really explored in all its fullness. Second, one of the great ideas of the Reformation is to unpack the enormous riches of Scripture and to savor them as we realize just how much it means. But by appreciating for ourselves all that the gospel means, we can also be more effective evangelists as well. Having an enriched understanding and appreciation of the gospel will help us to give
a far more effective witness—to try to explain to others what it is about the gospel that is so attractive to us in the full knowledge that it could be attractive to them as well. This area of education was a great weakness in the late medieval church, which the Reformation was able to address and one that we too need to rediscover. Let me make another point about the problems in the late medieval church. Often, there was a huge gap between the ordinary Christian and Scripture. In part, the reason was technological. Before the invention of printing, Scripture had to be copied out by hand, which was expensive. Not every Christian believer could read, and Christian believers were often dependent on their priest for an understanding of Scripture. But with the Reformation came this glorious rediscovery that Scripture was like bread upon which you could feed, that it was living water, which you could drink and which would quench your thirst. It was a move toward rediscovering the importance of Scripture for the church. All kinds of developments took place to encourage this: for example, the development of exegetical sermons, biblical commentaries, and works of biblical theology such as Calvin’s Institutes. There was a rediscovery of Scripture and a realization that you did not need to rely upon your priest to understand Scripture but that you could go to Scripture directly. One of the great themes of the Reformation is that you can go to Scripture directly, read it, and be nourished by the word of God. This relieved
people of the false teachings the church was putting into circulation at the time. Reading Scripture is not merely about rediscovering the excitement of the gospel. It’s also about asking hard questions about what this religious teacher or that religious teacher is saying, asking, “Where did this come from? Is this really biblical?” As the Reformers began to open Scripture for their people, they began to rediscover that much of the teaching in the late medieval church could not be justified on the basis of Scripture at all. The doctrine that Scripture was not easy to understand had emerged in the late medieval church: God in his providence had provided the church to interpret Scripture to the people. But by putting the church between Scripture and the people, the church took control of Scripture. To this, the Reformers said, “Go back to Scripture. Read it for yourself and ask, ‘Where did these ideas come from?’” I think that is a central theme of the Reformation—that each and every believer has the right and the responsibility to ask: “Where do these ideas come from that we hear from our pulpits? Are they justified in the light of Scripture?” I think there is a need for us to rediscover that important Reformation theme. Because even in today’s church we have preachers who often say things that may be what their congregations want to hear, that may be what they want to say, but that aren’t well grounded in Scripture. There is a need for us to rediscover Scripture with a view to checking our preachers’ art, lest they
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“What does God want the church to do in the first place? By rediscovering that sense of purpose, we can bring the church back to life by allowing it to do what God wants it to do.”
The Reformation is one of those great moments in history when a church paused and asked itself these questions: What are we here for? What is the real reason the church is here? What is different about the church? What must the church do if it is to stay the church of God? In other words, there was a taking of stock, a posing of hard questions about the mission and purpose of the church. Every organization that has been around for a long time settles into inertia. It works on the assumption that, well, we did this today and yesterday, and it’ll go on like this forever. There’s no need to ask those hard questions. But the Reformers felt that the only way a church could be reformed or renewed was by asking: What does God want the church to do in the first place? By rediscovering that sense of purpose, we can bring the church back to life by allowing it to do what God wants it to do. As many of you well know, people such as Luther and Calvin asked that question. The answer they gave is that the church is the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Wherever
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lead us astray. To my mind, one of the greatest curses of the modern church is the personality cult that seems to descend upon some preachers. Going back to Scripture is about going back to the word of God and discovering what it is saying, rather than relying upon some preacher who may act as if he alone is the mean of communication between God and his people. So I’ve addressed some of the problems that were there in the late medieval church, though there were many more I could mention. I don’t want you to gain the impression that we are dealing with a whole series of problems and that the Reformation simply came along as a solution to those problems. It was a solution to those problems, but it was also something else as well. You must never think of the Reformation solely as a negative thing, as a response to weaknesses. It was also about our rediscovery of the gospel. Rediscovery of the gospel led to the correction of the weaknesses I’ve been talking about. But, in part, the Reformation was this glorious rediscovery of what God had already done for his people and would continue to do for them—if they were faithful to him and would rediscover his word and will through Scripture. I think this is a great theme for us, because you and I are seeking to rediscover the word and will of God for his people. The Reformation offers us a case study on how to do that. Many of us may look at the Reformation and say something like, “Look, this is very interesting and may be academically important, but you are talking about something that happened in sixteenth-century Europe. We want to know: Does it have any relevance for us today?” I think the answer is yes. First, because we are talking about the same God who needs to restore his church, wherever that church is. By looking at the way God restored, renewed, and reformed his church back then, we can gain some ideas about what he might want to do to his church here, today, in this place. It is about looking through history to discover what God has been doing in the past; then we can say, “Maybe he wants to do that kind of thing now.”
that takes place, there also is the true church. I think that’s an important insight: the need to take stock, the need to say, “Does God want us to move in a different direction?” We are to look back at our Christian history, back at Scripture, and ask, “Where does God want us to go from here?” Luther and Calvin said that the best way of rediscovering why we are here is to go back to the New Testament, read it, and become excited at what we find in its pages. If you read Luther, then you will discover that, for him, reading the New Testament is like getting an insight into the days when faith came to life, insights into days when the church seems to have died. Luther, and many others besides us, said we have a church that is slowly but surely dying because it does not know why it’s here. By going back to Scripture and rediscovering apostolic preaching, by rediscovering the dynamism of the early church, we can bring our church back to life by giving it the same mission, the same sense of encouragement we find in the early church. I think we still need to do that, to regain our sense of direction. The Reformers say this: There is no point in going forward, forward, forward. It helps to stop and look back, and ask, why are we here, what resources do we have? Then, we need to begin to go forward again in the full knowledge of why we’re here. As we seek to confront the future, this is a model we can rediscover. We’re not saying that the Reformation is basically something we have to repeat like parrots. We are saying that, as we seek to move the church into the future, it helps to look back at those great moments in Christian history when the Lord was active and ask, “Can we learn from that time? Is there anything the Lord wants to say to us through those people of long ago as we face their task in today’s age?” One of the reasons for studying church history is for the following. I’m sure many of you have been to a Bible study or discussion group. You talk about some big issue, perhaps some moral issue, theological issue, or biblical interpretation issue. You think about this, and then
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somebody says something that helps you. You go away from that Bible study or discussion group feeling a lot better, because something you didn’t understand is now sorted out. Studying church history—studying the Reformation—is like being at a Bible study with a great company of people who thought about those questions that are bothering you. Such as: Why is the church here? What should we do to be saved? How can we know that we are saved? It gives answers that you and I need to know because they still make sense today. You and I still ask those questions, and we want good answers. So one of the reasons we look at the Reformation is to rediscover the answers to questions that are still being asked, being able to rejoice in those answers. So there is a need to rediscover how helpful studying the past—studying the Reformation—can be. Another great reason for studying the Reformation is that you can be the person who brings these answers, which have been tried and tested in church history, to the people you minister to. Why was there a Reformation? First, there was a Reformation because there was a gospel that had to be rediscovered in all its fullness. When it was rediscovered, all kinds of reorientation had to take place. Second, there was a Reformation because the church had run into many problems and someone had to sort them out. You and I can rediscover that gospel today. The Reformation is about that process of rediscovering and bringing to life. That is still very much our agenda. But also on our agenda, I’m afraid, is the simple fact that we are looking at a church today that often has many of the same problems we find in the late Middle Ages. There is a need for us to think through what we can do about those problems. The Reformation gives us some bearings, some landmarks, some ideas about how to address today’s issues—using the resources, the methods, and above all, the inspiration that comes from the past. ALISTER MCGRATH is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.
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By Diarmaid MacCulloch
ax Weber, a nineteenth-century German sociologist of genius, put fo r war d a t h e o r y t h a t st i ll remains influential, particularly among those who are not historians. In a classic work first published in 1904, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,1 he suggested that there was a causal link between these two phenomena, more particularly between Calvinist Protestantism and modern capitalism—thus adroitly standing on its head the contention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that Protestant ideology was the superstructure of change in economy and society. Weber’s work shaped the English Christian socialist R. H. Tawney’s equally influential book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Tawney, who had more refined historical instincts than Weber, both widened and restricted the argument. He pointed out that an urge to accumulate capital and monopolize the means of production can be found in many cultures and civilizations, but he also contended that this instinct found a
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particular partner in “certain aspects of later Puritanism”: individual self-discipline, frugality, and self-denial.2 From vague memories of these two authorities combined comes that still frequently heard cliché, the “Protestant work ethic.” The Weber-Tawney thesis still has defenders, and much in the Reformed Protestant ethos might make it seem plausible. Plenty of Reformed Protestants exemplified the traditional image of disciplined, self-reliant people, with a powerful sense of their elect status, ready to defend their right to make decisions for themselves. Nevertheless, it is missing the larger picture simply to find the Weber-Tawney thesis proved in particular historical situations, like late nineteenth-century southern Germany and Switzerland, the setting for Weber’s own observations of contrasting Catholic and Protestant economic and social behavior. Tawney was, of course, right in seeing a wider canvas. He would have been further vindicated had he seen the explosion of emphatically non-Christian Indian, Pakistani, and East Asian entrepreneurial
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Against the Weber Thesis
energy in the late twentieth century. Above all are major questions of cause and effect. Protestant England and the Protestant Netherlands undoubtedly both became major economic powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—pioneers in economic production, and virtuosi in commerce and the creation of capital and finance systems—while formerly entrepreneurial Catholic Italy stagnated. Why? Any simple link between religion and capitalism founders on objections and counterexamples. Rather than taking its roots from religion, this new wealth and power represents a shift from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, which has political roots: particularly the disruption caused by the Italian wars from the 1490s and the long-term rise of the Ottoman Empire, which brought terrible social and economic blight to Mediterranean Christian coastal regions. Striking counter-examples would be the economic backwardness of Reformed Protestant Scotland or Transylvania. That suggests that prosperity in England and the Netherlands arose precisely because they were not well-regulated Calvinist societies, but from the mid-seventeenth century had reluctantly entrenched religious pluralism alongside a privileged church. Just as in the case of Judaism in medieval Europe, tolerated but disadvantaged minorities such as Protestant Dissenters in Stuart England found the best way to the social advancement available to them. Excluded from political power, ecclesiastical office, or the law, they turned to commerce and manufacture. French Huguenots and eighteenth-century English Methodists (who were emphatically not Calvinists) followed their example. One powerful objection to the notion of a structural or causal link between Reformed Protestantism and capitalism comes from the very dubious further linkage often made between Protestantism generally and individualism. Individualism, the denial or betrayal of community, is after all seen as one of the basic components of the capitalist ethos. It is very frequently suggested that medieval Catholicism was
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somehow more communitarian and collectiveminded than its successor, Protestantism, which was a dissolvent of community and promoted the sort of individualism embodied in that apocryphal cry of Luther, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Yet Calvinism is a Eucharist-centered and therefore community-minded faith. Its discipline at its most developed was designed to protect the Eucharist from devilish corruption, and the resulting societies formed one of the most powerful and integrated expressions of community ever seen in Europe. Certainly Protestants disrupted some forms of community, the structures created by medieval Catholicism, but they did so precisely because they considered them harmful to the community, just like witches or sacred images. They then rebuilt those communities and did so most successfully where Reformed Protestantism was at its most effective and thoroughgoing: Scotland, Hungary, and New England. Such places were not at the forefront of the birth either of modern individualism or of modern capitalism. In the United States, it is not Congregationalist Salem or Boston that are the best symbols of modern capitalist enterprise, despite their once-flourishing ocean-going trading fleets; it is the determined and foundational pluralism of New York or Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh. The “Spirit of Capitalism” debate shows how sensitive we should be in placing theology in its context before putting together cause and effect. Reformations and counterreformations always interacted with and were modified by other aspects of the peoples and the societies in which they operated. Equally, we should never forget that theology is an independent variable, capable in the Reformation of generating huge transformations in society, modes of behavior, even the very shape of the ritual year. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH is professor of the history of the church at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. 1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). 2 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926), 226–27.
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Reformation Romance: Love and Marriage Luther and Katie’s Way By Douglas Bond
“He’s merely a monk who wants a wife.” So the pope dismissed Martin Luther when first he heard of the Saxon monk’s decrying of the papacy. But then in 1521, during his compelled sequester in the Wartburg Castle, Luther began hearing of many former priests taking wives. “Good heavens!” he retorted. “They won’t give me a wife.” Even his colleagues Karlstadt and Melanchthon had married. But Luther was, at first, adamant; no one was going to give him a wife. Not that he was a sexless stone, but it made no sense for a man under the sentence of heresy, the stake looming, to marry—only to leave his bride a w idow. Perhap s t he mat r imonial news prompted Luther to set aside his German translation of the New Testament (and dozens of other writing projects) and write his great treatise on Christian marriage. “This will empty
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the cloisters,” a prophetic friend observed. Overnight Luther’s treatise circulated widely— even into nunneries. Luther received a letter, a passionate appeal for his counsel, from more than a dozen nuns who desperately wanted to flee a nunnery near Wittenberg. Though escaping from a monastic cloister in sixteenth-century Germany was a capital offense, Luther gave them a theological argument for why nonbiblical vows are not binding. These girls wanted out, but they needed help. As if in a romantic comedy, Luther and his merchant friend Leonard Kopp cooked up a scheme to smuggle the apostate nuns out of the nunnery—by some accounts, in pickled herring barrels. “A wagon load of vestal virgins has just come to town,” said one of Luther’s students at the news, “all more eager for marriage than for life. God grant them husbands lest worse befall.”
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The night before Easter in 1523, lest worse befall, Luther put on yet another hat: matchmaker. Luther became the roaring, German, beer-swilling, pugilist version of Jane Austen’s Emma. He felt duty bound. After all, he had started the barrel rolling by decrying false doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church, including the unbiblical teaching about clerical celibacy. He had to finish it. Setting to work with his illimitable zeal, Luther soon had suitable circumstances arranged for all but one of the runaway nuns, spunky twenty-six-year-old Katharina von Bora. After several failed attempts—choosy Katharina turned down more than one offer of marriage— she laughed off an aged candidate with the quip that she would rather marry Luther than Dr. Glatz. All in jest. A jest, however, that began its work on Luther. After a visit home wherein he shared his problem of finding a husband for an apostate nun,
“His father, with Teutonic bluntness, told Luther to marry the girl and give him offspring. Finally Luther was resolved. He would do it, ‘to please his father, to spite the pope and the Devil, and to seal his witness before martyrdom.’ ”
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his father, with Teutonic bluntness, told Luther to marry the girl and give him offspring. Finally Luther was resolved. He would do it, “to please his father, to spite the pope and the Devil, and to seal his witness before martyrdom.”
SACRAMENTAL CORRUPTION OF MARRIAGE Pause with me in our narrative of Luther and Katie’s life together. How had marriage become so corrupted by the medieval church? In one of his influential pamphlets, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther made a frontal assault on the “foul contagion” of the entire sacramental system of Rome. He decried making transubstantiation, indulgences, pilgrimage, baptism, marriage, monasticism, and penance into means of earning salvation. Rome had mangled and distorted even baptism and the Lord’s Supper until they bore no resemblance to the two sacraments Jesus had established. “What Rome has done with the sacraments,” declared Luther, “I compare to a lie, which like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled the greater it becomes.” Luther wanted to restore a biblical understanding of justification that comes not of works or sacraments, but by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Chief among the trumpery of Rome’s sacerdotal system was the garbling of marriage into a sacrament. According to canon law, monasticism and priestly celibacy were the higher order sacraments, but for the secular vocations marriage had been morphed into a sacrament—a means by which the lower order of society might have a better chance at achieving salvation. To Luther this was yet another instance of doctrinal bilge water spewing from Rome. Far from having a lower view of marriage, however, Luther wanted to restore marriage to its rightful place in God’s economy of grace. Just as there was no inherent grace in taking monastic vows of celibacy, so there was no salvific grace to be gained in marriage. Moreover, it
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“It was only when Luther moved from writing theoretically about marriage to entering into the covenant of marriage that he came to see it as a lovely school of character.”
Marriage is the God-appointed and legitimate union of man and woman in the hope of having children or at least for the purpose of avoiding fornication and sin, and living to the glory of God. The ultimate
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purpose of marriage is to obey God, to find aid and counsel against sin; to call upon God; to seek, love, and educate children for the glory of God. To live with one’s wife in the fear of God and to bear the cross; but if there are no children, nevertheless, to live with one’s wife in contentment; and to avoid all lewdness with others. Though at first adamant in his refusal to marry, it was only when Luther moved from writing theoretically about marriage to entering into the covenant of marriage that he came to see it as a lovely school of character—an ordinary means, given by a gracious God, whereby a husband and wife might grow in grace together and in the knowledge and love of Christ.
MATRIMONIAL TRAIN WRECK At last, romance-challenged Luther was resolved to marry Katharina von Bora, but (seemingly) without consulting her. What was she thinking of all this? Given up to the cloister when she was five, Katie had not been around men for the majority of her twenty-six years. Forty-twoyear-old Luther had been a celibate priest for two decades and had heard the confession of only two women. Marriage between two people so utterly inexperienced with the opposite sex was
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was doubly scandalous when men who had taken vows of chastity shamelessly violated those vows. Alexander VI, the pope of Luther’s youth, kept several mistresses and fathered numerous illegitimate children; on his pilgrimage to Rome in 1510, Luther witnessed priests consorting with prostitutes at specially sanctioned brothels reserved exclusively for clerics. Master of the invective insult, Luther declared of the pope: “You were born from the behind of the devil, are full of devils, lies, blasphemy, and idolatry; are the instigator of these things, God’s enemy, Antichrist, desolater of Christendom, and steward of Sodom.” Due to the stranglehold such abuses had on the common man, Luther felt justified in resorting to such vitriol. Later, however, upon more sober and gospel-centered reflection, Luther said, “I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.” Nevertheless, he was called in violent times to decry unsupportable abuses. Rome itself he declared “the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels.” If marriage was not a sacrament, then what was it?
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a matrimonial train wreck waiting to happen. If ever a couple needed extensive premarital counseling, it was Martin and Katie, but they didn’t even have one session with their pastor (Luther was their pastor). Neither did they go out on a date: no pizza, no movie, no concert together. Where was the romance? Frankly, there wasn’t one—not by our standards. Postmodernity, however, has relinquished the philosophical capital necessary to weigh in on anything to do with love, marriage, and sexual relations. Luther and Katie would have to do their falling in love in the years long after the last platter of bratwurst was eaten or beer stein emptied. “First love is drunken,” said Luther, “but when the intoxication wears off, then comes real marriage love.” If the Reformation was a revolution in theology—the recovery of the gospel was, after all, a recovery of true marriage love, Christ’s love for his bride, the Church—Luther’s marriage was about to be, for him, a revolution in everything. Including hygiene. “Before I was married,” recalled Luther, “the bed was not made for a whole year and became foul with sweat. But I worked so hard and was so weary I tumbled in without noticing it.” Imagine poor Katharina on their wedding night, with Luther’s greasy, hulking form outlined on the bedsheets. And their first home together? It was no chic apartment in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Katie was stepping into yet another cloister, the Augustinian monastery
in Wittenberg, given to Luther by his patron Elector Frederick. A massive, drafty, medieval structure, it was purpose-built for and entirely inhabited by males (in the opinion of refined Renaissance Europe, German barbarian males). What’s more, Luther’s colleague Karlstadt, fleeing a peasant uprising, came pounding on their door—on their wedding night! It was little wonder that Luther called marriage “the school of character.” It was to be a lifetime tutorial that worked both ways. While Katie had her work cut out for her living with colossal Luther, marriage would require still more radical adjustments for Luther. “There is a lot to get used to in the first year of marriage,” he wrote. “One wakes up in the morning and finds a pair of pigtails on the pillow which were not there before.”
CELEBRITY PREACHER After their marriage in June 1525, it would be more than “pigtails on the pillow” that would change for Luther. Theirs was no modern-day, grindingly protracted engagement; it was happening on the fly. “While I was thinking of other things,” wrote Luther, inviting a friend to the wedding, “God has suddenly brought me to marriage with Katharina”—after a two-week betrothal. To his cohort in the nuns’ escape, he wrote, “I am going to get married. God likes to
“If the Reformation was a revolution in theology . . . Luther’s marriage was about to be, for him, a revolution in everything. Including hygiene.” 20
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work miracles and to make a fool of the world. You must come to the wedding.” When wedding festivities had ended, steins and platters were empty and the guests had gone home, Luther, now a husband, was confronted with the real business of being married to a real woman. The school of character would immediately expose many of his relational weaknesses. Brilliant scholar that he was, he had to start at the bottom of the class in this school. For starters, he had become, almost overnight, the celebrity preacher and writer of his day. With his popularity came mounds of fan mail and legions of responsibilities. Luther wrote to a friend:
And he was now husband to Katie and soon to be father of her children. His new bride came to the marriage as an adoring admirer of the man who had been the instrument of her spiritual emancipation. She had even contributed a letter to the pile of fan mail. Imagine her chagrin as she realized that the theological giant from afar was an intensely earthy man up close and personal. Along with hygiene challenges, Luther was given to depression, insomnia, and had rumbling bowel disorders, and he worked best when in a full howling rage. “I find nothing that promotes work better than angry fervor. For when I wish to compose, write, pray and preach well, I must be angry. It refreshes my entire system, my mind is sharpened, and all unpleasant thoughts and depression fade away.” We have clinical names for this. Imagine living with a husband who had such anger issues.
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Meanwhile, Katie had the household to look after—without rotisserie chickens from Costco. Their cloister home would eventually be filled with six of their own children, an aunt and several nieces, four adopted children, and dozens of student boarders; and “my lord Katie,” as Luther affectionately called her, had to feed them all. With wonder in his tone, he extolled his wife: “She plants our fields, pastures and sells cows.” He described her slaughtering their pigs, chickens, and cows; making sausages and cheese; and even brewing her own special beer—custom crafted to be gentle on her husband’s kidney and bowel disorders. Their son Paul grew up to be a physician and praised his mother’s mastery of natural cures for every ailment, especially her skill with massage. When did the woman sleep? On top of all, Luther had given her a challenge to read through the whole Bible. “I have promised her fifty gulden if she finishes by Easter. She is hard at it and is at the end of the fifth book of Moses.”
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I could use two secretaries. I do almost nothing during the day but write letters. I am reader at meals, parochial preacher, director of studies, overseer of eleven monasteries, superintendent of the fish pond at Litzkau, referee of the squabble at Torgau, lecturer on Paul, writer of a commentary on the Psalms, and then, I am overwhelmed with letters. I rarely have full time for . . . my own temptations with the world, the flesh, and the Devil. You see how lazy I am.
“His new bride came to the marriage as an adoring admirer of the man who had been the instrument of her spiritual emancipation. She had even contributed a letter to the pile of fan mail.”
“As the household swelled to ten children, Luther, at a particularly chaotic moment, shouted above the din, ‘Christ tells us we must become as little children. Surely God does not expect us to become such idiots!’ ”
Not only was he hygiene challenged, he was also economically stunted; where penniless Luther would get the money was a mystery. But Katie was the master of home economics. (Her Bible, when she first took it up, must have fallen open on Proverbs 31; she obviously took the passage deeply to heart.)
MISTRESS OF THE PIG MARKET The demands on Luther, and thus on Katie, make our busiest days seem leisurely. But here’s where some accounts of heroes in church history become fantasy. Luther and Katie were not angels. These two intensely busy people were fallen and in need of daily grace. With the pressures of life came irritation and impatience. “All my life is patience,” roared Luther. “I have to have patience with the pope, the heretics, my family, and my dearest Kette.” He enjoyed calling her “Kette” (German for “chain”) at moments like these. One of the pressures on Katie was extending hospitality to the legion of student admirers that descended on their kitchen at meal times. At these unscripted table talks, bombastic Luther was in his element. Once when her husband was expatiating with gusto in response to a student’s question, Katie broke in, “Herr Doctor, why don’t you stop talking and eat?” Luther
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retorted, “I wish that women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening their mouths”— an admonition Luther himself would have done well to heed. Yet is there far more recorded of Luther’s affection and high esteem for his beloved wife. “My Katie is in all things so obliging and pleasing to me that I would not exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus.” He extolled her with the highest praise, calling the Epistle to the Galatians “my Katharina von Bora.” Troubled that his devotion to his wife had become too excessive, Luther admitted, “I give more credit to Katharina than to Christ, who has done so much more for me.” How much happier would many marriages be if more men were slave to such a vice, and how similar it sounds to Paul, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). From giddy first love, Luther and Katie were growing into true marriage love, seen in the adoring titles with which Luther referred to his wife. “To my beloved wife, Katharina, Mrs. Doctor Luther, mistress of the pig market, lady of Zulsdorf, and whatsoever other titles may befit thy Grace.” While Luther was rediscovering and proclaiming the doctrine of grace, he was also rediscovering the sanctity of all walks of life. Perhaps it was Katie’s wholehearted and cheerful application of herself to married life that
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helped Luther see that pig farmer or preacher, dung man or duchess, husband or wife were, in God’s economy, sacred vocations to be done by his grace and for his glory alone.
LET THEM LAUGH
I believe in Jesus Christ, who when I was lost and damned saved me from all sin and death and the power of the devil, not with gold and silver but with his own precious, holy blood and his sinless suffering and death, that I might belong to him and live in his kingdom and serve him forever in goodness, sinlessness, and happiness, just as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns forever. That is really so.
BAND OF LITTLE HEATHENS
WORDS ARE LIKE CHILDREN
In Luther’s day, students “tweeted” with goose quills their devotion to the great man, giving us beautiful vignettes into Luther’s home life. “Child, what have you done that I should love you so? You have disturbed the whole household with your bawling.” While watching his infant son Paul smacking and mulling at Katie’s breast, Luther said, “Child, your enemies are the pope, the bishops, Duke George, the emperor, and the devil, and there you are sucking unconcernedly.” Little Paul threw his head back and let out a howl. “Herein lies a lesson, dearest Katie,” said
His theology of family now practiced in daily tutorials in the school of character, Luther began to mine the illustrative family material surrounding him daily in his home. For example, determined to get his translation of the Bible exact (in “the German the mother chortles to her infant”), Luther spent much of the remainder of his life rewriting and revising. “Words are like children,” he said. “The more attention you lavish on them the more they demand.” Fulminating about the ignorance of a Roman Catholic critic, Luther blustered, “A
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Giant that Luther was, without Katie he would have had far less practical scope in his understanding and application of how the gospel affects every dimension of life, especially marriage and children. Proud men who marry to further their careers might wonder how much more Luther could have accomplished if he had not needed to stop what he was writing or teaching and tend to his pregnant wife when she suffered from morning sickness, or when she needed his assistance hanging out the diapers (much to the amusement of his neighbors and students). “Let them laugh,” mumbled Luther through the clothespins. “God and the angels smile in heaven.” Luther, a man of books and scholarship, discovered that writing a biblical treatise on marriage and raising children was not enough. Most things worth knowing and doing cannot be learned in theory, much less taught to others. Chief among these is managing married life, howling babies, and squabbling children.
Luther with a laugh. “We no more earn heaven by good works than little Paul earns his food and drink by crying and howling.” As the household swelled to ten children, Luther, at a particularly chaotic moment, shouted above the din, “Christ tells us we must become as little children. Surely God does not expect us to become such idiots!” Charged with the solemn duty of nurturing his children in the gospel of Jesus Christ, Luther still sometimes called them “a band of little heathens.” Several years before having children of his own, he wrote a children’s catechism. Next to the German Bible and his book Bondage of the Will, Luther considered it his crowning achievement. Imagine hearing his own children—Hans, Magdalena, or one of the others—responding to their father as he catechized them in family worship:
seven-year-old child, indeed, a silly fool, can figure it out on his fingers—although you, stupid ass, cannot understand anything.” On another occasion (perhaps after a time of dryness in his own marriage) he declared, What a lot of trouble there is in marriage! Adam has made a mess of our nature. Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their nine hundred years. Eve would say, “You ate the apple,” and Adam would retort, “You gave it to me.” One wonders what Katie might have contributed in a post-sermon discussion of this remark. Perhaps it was being surrounded by the sights, sounds, and sometimes earthy smells of a house filled with infants and children that made Luther able to write tender poetry about mothers and children: Once did the skies before thee bow; A virgin’s arms contain thee now, While angels, who in thee rejoice, Now listen for thine infant voice. Luther believed that in the Bible God speaks to his children and that those children needed German hymns to respond to their heavenly Father. As with everything, he felt strongly about this, declaring that anyone who did not appreciate music and poetry as great gifts of God
“was truly a clod and not worthy to be called a man.” As in the carol above, Luther displayed a tangible, experiential knowledge of the themes about which he wrote in his hymns. Only a father who had held his teen daughter as she breathed her last could have penned: Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still.
LET GOODS AND KINDRED GO Beneath all the bombast, Luther was a man of deep feeling. When he and Katie lost their daughter, Magdalenchen, he said, “I am blessed more than all the bishops of Rome. Why then cannot I give thanks to our Heavenly Father?” As they laid her body in the ground, he said, “You are so loved, Lenchen. You will rise, you will shine like the stars and the sun.” Perhaps turning to Katie and comforting her in his arms, he said, “How strange it is to know that she is at peace and all is well, and yet we here below—and so full of sorrow.” At last, it would be Katie who would have to “let kindred go” on February 18, 1546, when her beloved Herr Doctor died. He had been summoned by the magistrate of Eisleben, his birthplace, to arbitrate a local dispute. Though he had fallen ill on the journey from Wittenberg,
“[Luther declared] that anyone who did not appreciate music and poetry as great gifts of God ‘was truly a clod and not worthy to be called a man.’ ” 24
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LOVELY, FRIENDLY, CHARMING What would Luther and Katie say about modernday marriage if they were transported into our world today? “There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company, than a good marriage.” Marriage is the school of character; it is not the school of selfimprovement. Marriage is the school of grace, made into a charming relationship by Christ the bridegroom who alone justifies his bride, and who loves and keeps loving her, regardless of her failings and unfaithfulness. To honest readers who know their marriage is far less than it ought
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“Marriage is the school of grace, made into a charming relationship by Christ the bridegroom who alone justifies his bride, and who loves and keeps loving her, regardless of her failings and unfaithfulness.”
to be, what would Luther say to you? It would not be earth-shattering; there would be no thunderbolt. He would give us ordinary means of grace and tell us what made his marriage lovely. “I must listen to the gospel. It tells me not what I must do, but what Jesus Christ the Son of God has done for me.” The ancient foe schemes to work woe in our marriages and families, but his doom is sure. By keeping our eyes on Jesus, we are enabled to work out marriage disappointments and troubles, sometimes with fear and trembling, but also with confidence, because it is God himself who is at work in our marriages to accomplish his good pleasure. Christ is our mighty fortress, and his kingdom is forever. DOUGLAS BOND is the author of many books, including
Luther in Love (Inkblots Press, January 2017). He also speaks at churches and conferences, and he leads church history tours (www.bondvoyage.webs.com).
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he managed to preach four times. Luther responded to the illness that would take his life with characteristic wit: “If I make it home to Wittenberg, I will lay myself in my coffin to let maggots feast on the stout Doctor.” Katie had begged him not to go, not in midwinter with snow still on the ground. “Should I die on this journey, God will care for you,” he had told his wife. “It is his promise. Hold to God’s Word.” When she explained that she was thinking not only of herself and their children but the many people who needed him, Luther replied, “I have long said, when this book is in the hands of all, then Luther must retire, and the Bible advance; this poor man must disappear, and God in Christ appear!” At news of her husband’s death, Katie was devastated. “God knows that when I think of having lost him, in all my suffering, I can neither talk nor can I find the words to write.” Life was hard in the sixteenth century, and after her husband’s death, Katie’s life was no exception. War and plague ravaged Wittenberg, and three times she and her youngest children were forced to flee, their cloister home plundered, their livestock stolen. In 1552, while fleeing for her life, Katie’s cart overturned, and she was mortally injured. Well nurtured by her husband, on her deathbed in Torgau she said, “I cling to Christ like a burr to cloth.”
HELP EACH GENERATION REDISCOVER AND APPLY THE GOSPEL NUMEROUS SURVEYS, polls, and sociological studies have conclusively shown that evangelical Christians—that is, those who profess to take Scripture, Christ, and the gospel seriously—are increasingly unaware of or unclear about some of the most basic issues of Christian faith and practice. While many pastors and elders are faithfully devoted to their ministry, it must be concluded with a grave sense of duty as well as soberness and humility that this is the exception rather than the rule. In a time when the “nones” (or those claiming no religious adherence) are growing according to pollsters, and when our own churches are stagnant or shrinking, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. This is Christ-centered Christianity at its best, and we want to partner with you to help inform the next generation of Reformers. Will you join us?
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Now that we have tried Radical Protestantism for several centuries, the best way of celebrating the Reformation would be to give it a chance again to be heard.”
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PROTESTANTISM IS OVER AND THE RADICALS WON
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“I want to test the waters with an outlandish suggestion: Our modern world can be understood at least in part as the triumph of the Radicals.”
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uch of the hoopla surrounding the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation has been blather. On October 31, 2016, at a joint service in Lund, Sweden, Pope Francis and the president of the World Lutheran Federation exchanged warm feelings. Rev. Martin Junge, general secretary of the mainline Lutheran body, said in a press release for the joint service, “I’m carried by the profound conviction identify Martin Luther as the one who started that by working towards recon- the Reformation. (“Oddly, Jews, atheists, and Mormons were more familiar with Luther.”) In ciliation between Lutherans and fact, “Fewer than 3 in 10 white evangelicals corCatholics, we are working towards rectly identified Protestantism as the faith that believes in the doctrine of sola fide, or justificajustice, peace and reconciliation tion 1 by faith alone.” in a world torn apart by conflict Many today who claim the Reformation as their heritage are more likely heirs of the Radical and violence.” Acknowledging Anabaptists. In fact, I want to test the waters Luther’s positive contributions, with an outlandish suggestion: Our modern the pope spoke of how important world can be understood at least in part as the of the Radicals. At first, this seems a Christian unity is to bring heal- triumph nonstarter; after all, the Anabaptists were the ing and reconciliation to a world most persecuted group of the era—persecuted divided by violence. “But,” he not only by the pope, but also by Lutheran and Reformed magistrates. Furthermore, today’s added, according to one report, Anabaptists are pacifists who generally eschew “we have no intention of correct- mingling with outsiders, rather than revolutioning what took place but to tell that ary firebrands such as Thomas Müntzer, who led insurrections in the attempt to establish endhistory differently.” time communist utopias (with themselves as Perhaps the most evident example of missing the point is the statement last year in Berlin by Christina Aus der Au, Swiss pastor and president of an ecumenical church convention: “Reformation means courageously seeking what is new and turning away from old, familiar customs.” Right, that’s what the Reformation was all about: average laypeople and archbishops gave their bodies to be burned and the Western church was divided, because people became tired of the same old thing and were looking for nontraditional beliefs and ways of living—just like us! The Wall Street Journal reports a Pew study in which 53 percent of US Protestants couldn’t
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messianic rulers). I’m not talking about Amish communities in rural Pennsylvania. In fact, I don’t have in mind specific offshoots, like Arminian Baptists, as such. I’m thinking more of the Radical Anabaptists, especially the early ones, who were more an eruption of late medieval revolutionary mysticism than an offshoot of the Reformation. I have in mind a utopian, revolutionary, quasiGnostic religion of the “inner light” that came eventually to influence all branches of Christendom. It’s the sort of piety that the Reformers referred to as “enthusiasm.” But it has seeped like a fog into all of our traditions. It is impor tant to note that the early Anabaptists had a precarious relationship
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“ IRONICALLY, THE ANABAPTISTS WERE MORE RADICALLY PAPIST THAN RADICAL PROTESTANTS. THIS STRANGE CLAIM WAS MADE BY CALVIN IN HIS FAMOUS 1539 LETTER TO CARDINAL SADOLETO.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG
to what is usually called the magisterial Reformation. Its main leaders were erstwhile students of Luther and Zwingli, but their theological course was set by the Radical forms of late medieval mysticism, especially Meister Eckhart and the German Theology. This pantheistic-leaning system bore a closer resemblance to ancient Gnosticism than to mainstream Christian teaching, whether Roman Catholic or Reformation. They were also influenced by the twelfth-century mystical prophet Joachim of Fiore, whose interpretation of the book of Revelation divided history into three ages: the Age of the Father, associated with the law and the order of the married, would eventually give way to the Age of the Son, identified with the gospel and the order of the clergy. But the day is coming—perhaps soon, Joachim argued—when the Age of the Spirit will dawn within history, rendering the new covenant as obsolete as the old. In the Age of the Spirit—that is, the order of the monks—everyone will know God immediately, intuitively, and directly. No need for preachers or even for Scripture, creeds, and doctrines that divide religions or for sacraments. In fact, the external, visible church itself will be no more, as the whole human race will become one family of God. Joachim’s speculations impregnated the medieval era with expectations of utopia after a time of revolutionary suffering. The early Anabaptists said explicitly that they were fulfilling the visions of Joachim. The early Anabaptists also showed no interest in the doctrine of justification, sola fide. Becoming essentially one with God was a big jump from the imputation of an alien righteousness. In fact, according to Anabaptist historians, they were if anything further removed from Rome on these questions, since the whole point of salvation was to attain union with God through extreme discipline. They were hardly fans of sola scriptura, since they were even more convinced than the pope that contemporary prophets were inspired agents of fresh revelation. So, ironically, the Anabaptists were more radically papist than Radical Protestants. This strange claim was made by Calvin in his famous 1539 letter to Cardinal Sadoleto: “We
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are opposed by two sects: the pope and the Anabaptists.” At first glance, he acknowledges, the comparison makes little sense, as these parties were at opposite extremes. Nevertheless, they are actually united in an important way: “For both bury the word of God in order to make room for their falsehoods,” claiming the authority of modern vehicles of revelation over the express teaching of the prophets and apostles 2 of canonical Scripture. Reformers rather than revolutionaries, Luther and Calvin believed that the church had been blown off course significantly but that it could still be called back. They certainly believed in miracles and revelation, but not that there were still prophets and apostles bringing inspired revelation today. They certainly believed in the importance of the law, but they were convinced that the pope and the Anabaptists alike had basically turned the gospel into a new law. And the Reformers insisted that Christ was Lord over both the kingdoms of this world and the church. But like the pope, the early Anabaptists wanted to collapse the former into the latter with one kingdom of God, like the Old Testament theocracy. The Reformers had a name for this: “enthusiasm.” Meaning literally “God-within-ism,” this penchant for confusing ourselves with God was a perennial temptation, they lamented. In his Smalcald Articles (SA III. 4–15), Martin Luther argued that Adam was the first enthusiast. His point was that the craving to identify the word of God with our own inner voice, rather than heed external Scripture and preaching, is part and parcel of original sin. We’re all enthusiasts. Müntzer and other Radicals claimed (and still claim today) that the Spirit speaks directly to them, above and even sometimes against what he has revealed in Scripture. The secret, private, and inborn “word” was contrasted with the “outer word that 3 merely beats the air.” The Reformers pressed: Is this not what the pope does? While enthusiasm works from the inside out (inner experiences, reason, and free will expressed outwardly), God works from the outside in (the word and the sacraments). “Therefore we ought and must
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constantly maintain this point,” Luther thundered, “that God does not wish to deal with us otherwise than through the spoken Word and the Sacraments. It is the devil himself whatsoever is extolled as Spirit without the Word and the Sacraments” (SA III. 8.10–11). For the Anabaptists, the Platonic dualism between matter and spirit was mapped onto the New Testament contrast between the flesh 4 and the Spirit. Everything external, ordered, ordinary, structured, and official was “manmade,” as opposed to the internal, spontaneous, extraordinary, informal, and individual testimony of the Spirit within. So when Immanuel Kant said that the revelation we can really trust is that which is inside us—reason and “the moral law within”—he was not following Luther but the “spirit” of enthusiasm. When he extolled “true religion”—namely, duty to the universal law we know deep down— over against “ecclesiastical faiths” with their particular creeds, miraculous claims, doctrines, and rituals, he was basically following the script of the Gnostics and the Radical medieval sects that led to the early Anabaptists. The enthusiast in all of us does not want to hear an external word, confirmed by external sacraments, submitting to the external discipline of a visible church. We want to be autonomous, extending our domain from the little throne of our own free will, works, reason, and subjective experience. Apart from God’s conquering grace, we will never allow ourselves to be told who we are by God in his law and gospel. The same contrast between inner and outer 5 dominates liberal Protestantism. It is Jesus in my heart—not the external, salvific Jesus of history who is known through Scripture and preaching, baptism, and the Eucharist. Even where important differences exist on particular beliefs, more conservative Protestants exhibit the same categories of thinking and living. The same antithesis drawn by centuries of liberalism appears in the manifesto that launched Pentecostalism: “We are . . . seeking to replace the dead forms and creeds 6 . . . with living, practical Christianity.” But the same contrasts have long been evident in non-Pentecostal evangelicalism. For
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“THE IRONY IS NOT TO BE MISSED: MODERN SECULARIZATION IS THE PRODUCT LESS OF ATHEISM THAN OF A FANATICAL ‘ENTHUSIASM’ THAT IS PERPETUALLY BEING STRIPPED OF ITS EXPLICITLY RELIGIOUS REFERENCE.”
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example, Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz encouraged a retrieval of the movement’s Pietist roots over against the Reformation and postReformation emphases: “In recent years, we have begun to shift the focus of our attention away from doctrine with its focus on propositional truth in favor of a renewed interest in what constitutes the uniquely evangelical vision 7 of spirituality.” Other familiar contrasts appear in his Revisioning Evangelical Theology: “creedbased” versus “piety” (57), “religious ritual” versus “doing what Jesus would do” (48), with priority given to “our daily walk” over “Sunday morning worship attendance” (49), and individual and inward commitment over corporate identity (49–53). “A person does not come to church to receive salvation,” but to receive marching orders for daily life (49). He adds, “We practice baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but understand the significance of these rites in a guarded manner.” They are “perpetuated not so much for their value as conduits . . . of grace from God to the communicant as because they remind the participant and the community of the grace of God received inwardly” and are part of “an obedient response” (48). Given the history of enthusiasm, sociologist Wade Clark Roof ’s findings are hardly surprising: “The distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘institution’ is of major importance” to spiritual 8 seekers today. “Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, 9 established form of religion.” He adds, “Direct experience is always more trustworthy, if for no other reason than because of its ‘inwardness’ and ‘withinness’—two qualities that have come to be much appreciated in a highly expressive, 10 narcissistic culture.” The irony is not to be missed: modern secularization is the product less of atheism than of a fanatical “enthusiasm” that is perpetually being stripped of its explicitly religious reference. It is the type of vapid mysticism people have in mind when they say they are “spiritual, not religious.” Just as Joachim prophesied, the Age of the Spirit, identified with the kingdom of God, has now rendered the visible church and its ministry obsolete. The father of the Social Gospel, Walter
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Rauschenbusch, asserted, “Jesus always spoke of the Kingdom of God. Only two of his reported sayings contain the word ‘Church,’ and both passages are of questionable authenticity. It is safe to say that he never thought of founding the kind of institution which afterward claimed to be 11 acting for him.” With the subordination of the kingdom to the church, Rauschenbusch argued, came the eclipse of ethics by an ingrown focus on doctrine, worship, preaching, and sacraments—hence, the corruptions of the medieval church and the failure of Protestantism also to 12 reform the structures of society. Catholic theologian Matthew Levering refers to the example of religion scholar Diana Eck, who eschews the image of “the body of Christ” as hierarchical in favor of “household.” “The underlying foundation of the world household 13 will finally have to be pluralism,” she claims. Further, “this kingdom of divine blessing ‘is much wider than the church. It is the Kingdom of God, not the Christian Church.’” Levering properly judges, Eck’s vision of a world-unity based on the recognition of our common humanity neglects the human need for forgiveness, for mercy, which requires the historical action of the living God to overcome our brokenness and the harm that we have done to others. We need the God of mercy, in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, to heal our alienated condition and establish for us a relationship of love and justice by a trans14 formative gift of love. Further, for Eck, death is the end; thus our 15 only hope lies in this life. Everything sacred, including the Spirit and the kingdom, has been reduced to the immanent frame—in other words, it has been secularized. But this spirit of enthusiasm is evident in Roman Catholic circles as well, as Levering also recognizes. The kingdom of God (which is universal and inward) is set over against the church (which is particular and created by the external word). In Do We Need the Church? Fr. Richard P. McBrien writes, “The church is no longer to be
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“ EVEN A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN SUCH AS PAUL TILLICH RECOGNIZED THAT THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS TO SOME EXTENT THE TRIUMPH OF RADICAL ENTHUSIASM.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG
conceived as the center of God’s plan of salvation. Not all men are called to membership in the Church, nor is such membership a sign of present salvation or a guarantee of future salvation. Salvation comes through participation in the Kingdom of God rather than through affilia16 tion with the Christian Church.” He adds, “All men are called to the kingdom, because all men are called to live the gospel. But the living of the gospel is not necessarily allied to membership in 17 the visible, structured Christian community.” Thomas Sheehan’s The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (Random House, 1986) is yet another example of the opposition between the kingdom and the church in Roman Catholic circles today. It is impossible (especially in such a short space) to offer any detailed account. But my contention is that many of the principal features of our modern, secularized world are driven in part by this shift away from a God who speaks authoritatively, judging and saving us, outside of us in history, to the “god within”—meaning that our own inner voice is our sovereign ruler. Even a liberal theologian such as Paul Tillich recognized that the Enlightenment was to some extent the triumph of Radical enthusiasm: “The inner reason of the Enlightenment is really the 18 inner light of the Quakers.” We also see the quasi-Gnostic impulse in the modern obsession with religious, cultural, and political revolutions. Eric Voegelin’s work has helped me to understand how the Gnostic’s hatred of the world can take two forms: either the Gnostic insists on destroying it and remaking it all over again in the form of pure spirit, or he recoils from the world altogether and seeks security in a small group of purists who isolate themselves from the godless. We can see both approaches in countless movements that are always deeply religious or spiritual in their basic motive—even when the proletariat replaces God. Raze this world to its foundations and build a new civilization from scratch. History is moving toward an endpoint, either of apocalyptic disaster or utopia, and we are going to be agents of this providential destiny. As Karl Löwith explains, the modern doctrine
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“Raze this world to build a new civiliza History is moving t either of apocalypti and we are going t providential desti explains, the modern is Christian eschat
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its foundations and tion from scratch. oward an endpoint, c disaster or utopia, o be agents of this ny. As Karl Löwith doctrine of progress ology secularized.”
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of progress is Christian eschatology secularized. The climax of history is to be found not at the end of history but in the middle—not by Christ’s return but by our collective striving. We also see the two approaches of the Gnostic in various forms of evangelical engagement with politics. For the first half of the twentieth century, fundamentalists tended to separate themselves from the godless world but then became politically engaged in the 1980s. Their basic attitude toward the world, however, remained constant: a relatively hostile view of culture, science, the arts, and especially of “elites” who increasingly were themselves Gnostics of the Left—the same Manichean divide between light and darkness, the saints and the reprobate, agents of revolutionary freedom versus coconspirators with the forces of evil. But if the idea of autonomy—the self as sovereign—is at the heart of modern secularism, then its genealogy can be easily traced back to the Renaissance magus and the Radical Protestants who were shaped by that concept of the inner self as a spark of the divine. If my thesis is anywhere close to being right, then the story of our modern age is not so much Lessing’s idea of “the education of the human race” and the gradual triumph of reason over presumed revelation, science over superstition, and secular peace over religious violence, as it is a secularized version of Radical Christian mysticism. In fact, Lessing himself said that Joachim of Fiore’s visions of an Age of the Spirit were not wrong, only premature, awaiting the arrival of the Enlightenment. Let’s bring this out of the clouds and down to where most of us live every day as Christians. A cursory inventory of the most popular Christian books and preachers tells the tale. Focusing more on inner empowerment for the autonomous self than on God himself and his work of creation, providence, redemption, justification, sanctification, glorification, and the resurrection of the body, much of the spiritual diet is “chicken soup for the soul.” Many believers consider spending time alone with God in prayer, listening for “what he is saying to me today,” as more important than going to church to gather
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“ IF THE IDEA OF AUTONOMY . . . IS AT THE HEART OF MODERN SECULARISM, THEN ITS GENEALOGY CAN BE EASILY TRACED BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE MAGUS AND THE RADICAL PROTESTANTS WHO WERE SHAPED BY THAT CONCEPT OF THE INNER SELF AS A SPARK OF THE DIVINE.” VOL.26 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2017
with other sinners and hear God’s word proclaimed and receive his sacraments. We are on our home ground doing it ourselves rather than submitting to something external to our inner voice. Why try to follow difficult arguments, narratives, doctrines, and commands together with other people when we can basically look within to find the answers? As the growth of Christianity shifts to the Global South, some forms are more faithful than their more liberal northern counterparts. Anglicans in Africa often scratch their heads, wondering what possible spiritual connection they have with the Episcopal Church in the United States. And yet American “enthusiasm” continues to spread like wildfire in extreme forms of revivalism, Pentecostalism, and the “prosperity gospel.” Conservative Protestants have become quite adept at detecting liberalism miles away. But we’re not very good at recognizing more fundamentalist varieties of Gnostic enthusiasm, even when we are swimming in it. So what exactly are we celebrating in this year of the Reformation’s five hundredth anniversary? Are we rejoicing in the reformation of the church’s doctrine and worship, away from human-centered religion to a faith centered on the Triune God and the gospel of his saving grace in Christ alone, received through faith alone, communicated through the word and the sacraments alone? Or are we celebrating the Radical enthusiasm that our culture mistakes as the Reformation: the autonomous self, individualism, free will, and inner experience and reason? While many people are debating this year whether the Reformation is over, my thought is this: Did it really ever get off the ground? Yes, at first, there was a marvelous recovery of the gospel and a sense that we are utterly dependent on God and his grace in Jesus Christ. In many parts of the world, the effects of that recovery are still being powerfully felt. But in modern culture generally, the magisterial Reformation lost ground to the enthusiasts of the Left and the Right. Now that we have tried Radical Protestantism for several centuries, the best
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way of celebrating the Reformation would be to give it a chance again to be heard. MICHAEL S. HORTON is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.
1 Matthew Hennessey, “A Catholic World Fades Over a Lifetime,” The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/acatholic-world-fades-over-a-lifetime-1493939277?mod=e2fb. 2 John Calvin, “Reply by John Calvin to Cardinal Sadoleto’s Letter,” in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet, 7 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 1:36. 3 See, for example, Thomas Müntzer, “The Prague Protest” (2–7) and “Sermon to the Princes” (20), in The Radical Reformation: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and trans. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cf. Thomas N. Finger, “Sources for Contemporary Spirituality: Anabaptist and Pietist Contributions,” Brethren Life and Thought 51, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2006): 37. 4 Thomas N. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 563. 5 F. C. Bauer, for example, argued that the apostle Paul used “‘the term, “spirit” . . . to denote the Christian consciousness.’ This consciousness is an ‘essentially spiritual principle, which forbids him [a Christian] to regard anything merely outward sensuous material as in any way a condition of his salvation. . . . Thus the spirit is the element in which God and man are related to each other as spirit to spirit.” and where they are one with each other in the unity of the spirit.’” Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine (London: Williams and Norgate, 1875), quoted in John R. Levison, Filled with the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 4. Levison adds the sentiment of Herman Gunkel: “The relationship between divine and human activity is that of mutually exclusive opposition” (5). 6 Donald Gee, Azusa Street Mission, “Tests for ‘Fuller Revelations,’ The Pentecostal Evangel” (14 Feb 1925), cited by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen in Toward a Pneumatological Theology: Pentecostal and Ecumenical Perspectives on Ecclesiology, Soteriology, and Theology of Mission, ed. Amos Yong (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 98. 7 Stanley Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21st Century (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 56; also Kärkkäinen, 9-37. In all of these cases, a “pneumatic hermeneutics” is put forward as a way of attaining rapprochement with Rome. 8 Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 23. 9 Roof, 30. 10 Roof, 67. 11 Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 132. 12 Rauschenbusch, 133–34. 13 Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 228, quoted by Matthew Levering in Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 303. 14 Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 303. 15 Levering, 303. 16 Richard P. McBrien, Do We Need the Church? (London: Collins, 1969), 228. 17 McBrien,161. 18 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Touchstone, 1972), 286.
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ROBERT KOLB
“They fill the world with their chattering and scribbling— as if the Spirit could not come through the Scriptures or the spoken word of the apostles, but the Spirit must come through their own writings and words.” —MARTIN LUTHER
SCHWÄRMEREI AS ORIGINAL SIN LUTHER’S VIEW OF DOUBT AND DEFIANCE OF GOD’S WORD AS THE RO OT OF SIN
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n 1537, at the behest of Elector Johann Friedrich the Elder, Martin Luther composed (with the help of colleagues and friends) a statement of faith that he said “should be publicly submitted and presented as the confession of our faith—should the pope and his adherents ever become so bold as to convene a truly free council,” in response to Pope Paul III’s call for a council issued in 1537.1 This document, written in German and later dubbed “The Smalcald Articles,” was essentially a collection One responded to the necessity of preaching of talking points for the the law in calling to repentance those Christians had fallen into sin, contrary to the antievangelical princes of the who nomian tendencies of one of Luther’s best Smalcald League as they pre- students, Johann Agricola. Another defended the Wittenberg understanding of the location of pared to testify their faith at the salvific power of the word in its oral, written, a council that finally assem- and sacramental forms. Luther was here thinking of Thomas Müntzer, another student whose bled in December 1545.2 spiritualist theology had offended his former 3
teacher, at least as much as his leadership in the Peasant Rebellion of 1525. Luther compared the papacy’s claim to access to truth in the heart of the pope “above or contrary to the Scriptures or the spoken Word” to Müntzer’s alternative to relying on the external word. He compared this contempt for external forms of God’s word to the original sin in Eden: This is all the old devil and old snake, who also turned Adam and Eve into enthusiasts and led them from the external Word of God to Spiritism and their own arrogance although he accomplished this by means of other, external words. In the same way our enthusiasts also condemn the external Word, and yet they themselves do not keep silent. Instead, they fill the world with their chattering and scribbling—as if the Spirit could not come through the Scriptures or the spoken word of the apostles, but the Spirit must come through their own writ4 ings and words.
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In this case, Luther used Enthusiasten, a word borrowed from the Greek for ecstatic religious experiences. Some years earlier, he had translated this term into German with his own construction from the verb meaning “to swarm” or, freely translated, “to rave”: Schwärmer. The reformer coined the term to describe those whose ideas “swarmed” or flew about like bees. It became a polemical label for all his opponents, but throughout his career he continued to use it especially for those who confused the proper ordering of external and internal. As a consequence of this error, they did not share his understanding of how God works through the oral and written word and through both sacraments as 5 means of grace.
“ ACCORDING TO LUTHER, WHAT ENDED THE RELATIONSHIP OF PEACE AND TRUST BETWEEN CREATOR AND HUMAN CREATURES WAS PRECISELY THE FAILURE TO ACKNOWLEDGE GOD’S LORDSHIP BY DOUBTING HIS WORD.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG
Luther’s equation of original sin and Schwärmerei stems from his understanding that God is truly present and active in the words of Holy Scripture and in the delivery of its message, especially the promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation given in the oral, written, and sac6 ramental forms of his word. Thus God chose the writings of selected prophets and apostles to function as the ultimate authority for conveying the message that presents the reality of who he is and who his human creatures are designed to be. Because God’s word is by its very nature active—performative, (even more) creative, and re-creative—any other source of human perception of reality can only mislead if it deviates from what God has written through his 7 chosen human coauthors. According to Luther, what ended the relationship of peace and trust between Creator and human creatures was precisely the failure to acknowledge God’s lordship by doubting his word. That doubt constituted the original sin, just as trust constituted the original righteousness that governed the human side of the divine-human relationship. Three years before he wrote this definition of original sin in his addition to the Smalcald Articles, he lectured on Genesis 3 and described what had happened when the Deceiver confronted Adam and Eve. Rather than focus on
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“pride, lack of concern or just simple eating of the fruit,” Luther described the original sin—“the greatest and severest of all temptations”—in this way: The serpent directs its attack at God’s good will and makes it its business to prove from the prohibition of the tree that God’s will toward the human creature is not good. Therefore, it launches its attack against the very image of God and the most excellent powers in the uncorrupted nature. The highest form of worship itself, which God had ordained, it tries to destroy. It is, therefore, vain for us to discuss this or that sin. Eve is simply urged on to all sins since she is being urged on against the Word and the 8 good will of God. Luther explains: Satan here poses the question to Adam and Eve in this way to deprive them of the Word and to make them believe his lie after they have lost the Word and their trust in God. Is it a wonder that when this happens, the human being later on becomes proud, that he has contempt for God and other people, that he becomes an adulterer or a murderer? Indeed, this temptation is the sum of all temptations. It brings with it the toppling and violation of the entire Decalogue. Unbelief is the source of all sins. When Satan brought about this unbelief by driving out or corrupting the Word, the rest 9 was easy for him. Luther describes original sin in the traditional manner: “Sin comes from that one human being, Adam, through whose disobedience all people became sinners and subject to death and the devil.” He calls this “inherited sin” or “the chief sin.” His list of sins follows the Ten Commandments, but eight of the eighteen specific examples stem from the first commandment: “Unbelief, false belief, idolatry, being without the fear of God, presumption, despair, blindness, and, in short, not knowing or honoring
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God,”10 which are synonyms for the doubt and disregard of what God had to say to Adam and Eve, which the professor highlights in his Genesis commentary and comments on Psalm 51. Luther believed that this doubt and disregard for the person of the Creator and what he has to say to his human creatures permeates the lives of the descendants of Adam and Eve, which was confirmed by his own honest evaluation of his life. His often-cited complaints about human reason, labeling it a “whore” and similar more 11 developed criticisms, do not reflect the whole of Luther’s appraisal of rational thinking. He also considered it a good gift of God, necessary for the exercise of the callings he gives human beings in this world. His rejection of reason did not exclude its use as a servant in the study of Scripture, but he refused to permit human reasoning to define who God is and what it means to be human. He joined the definition of the Creator to the definition of the human creature, acknowledging that God is indeed a person who, while exceeding the ability of his creatures to grasp everything about him (i.e., “God Hidden” or Deus absconditus), is also “God Revealed” in Scripture and in Jesus 12 Christ (Deus revelatus). Any attempt to probe into God’s person beyond his revelation will end only in human reason inventing an image of God. Luther found no usable depiction of God apart from that which is revealed in his relationship to his human creatures; likewise, his definition of what it means to be human is revealed in their relationship to God: to have no other gods before him and “to fear, love, and 13 trust in him above all things.” Thus any attempt to define God, apart from how he has revealed himself in Scripture to be, only blurs (if not obliterates) the human being’s true understanding of God. Any attempt to interpret what it means to be human apart from viewing humanity as listening to the voice of the Creator, as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, will result in a distortion of what God fashioned in Eden. Aristotle’s definition of “human” as animal rationale constituted for Luther a fatal misconception at its very heart; for without the presence of the God who
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“LUTHER FOUND NO USABLE DEPICTION OF GOD APART FROM THAT WHICH IS REVEALED IN HIS RELATIONSHIP TO HIS HUMAN CREATURES; LIKEWISE, HIS DEFINITION OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN IS REVEALED IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD: TO HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM AND ‘TO FEAR, LOVE, AND TRUST IN HIM ABOVE ALL THINGS.’ ”
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personally moves and shakes all things, the human creature is flawed and failing. 14 The absence of a personal Creator in Aristotle’s anthropology made the movement generated by the Unmoved Mover subject to eternal laws. The laws that govern human life must be mastered by humanity in order to control their actions and, by extension, their own destiny. Luther’s training as an Ockhamist taught him that God had created law and order in his world according to his will. In Luther’s estimation, too much of the scholastic theology he had learned attempted to wrap biblical definitions of reality in an Aristotelian straitjacket. Aristotle’s was not the only false theory of reality that Luther encountered: Müntzer and other Schwärmerei had operated with equally misleading frameworks. He recognized that in Eden the devil had exposed himself as the great deceiver, whose very nature it is to lie. His misrepresentation of who God is and what it means to be human lies at the heart of his murderous deception, as Jesus observed in John 8:44. His means of assaulting human trust in God and his word are manifold; believers are constantly confronted with assaults on the word in various forms, some taking the form of direct contradictions and others in subtle perversions of what God says in Scripture, so that the pious may remain pious in their own minds and in the sight of others while closing their ears to God. Luther’s challenge from the Schwärmerei has its roots in a kind of medieval reform movement that occasionally surfaced during the five hundred years before the Reformation. These movements usually viewed the Bible as a moralistic path to salvation (rather than one dependent on sacred religious communion through the sacraments) and opposed the use of ecclesiastical law and tradition alongside Scripture. They were anti-clerical (since sacraments and hierarchy were closely intertwined) and premillennial, expecting the imminent introduction of the kingdom of Christ. It was this spirit that moved the so-called Zwickau Prophets, who came to Wittenberg while Luther was at the Wartburg Castle in
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1521–22, and who claimed to have received special revelations directly from the Holy Spirit, obviating the need to listen to the witness of Scripture. When Luther’s colleague at the Wittenberg theological faculty, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, began sharing at least some of their views and moved toward a swift and radical introduction of reform, 15 Luther reacted with horror. Personally, he felt betrayed by a good friend. “Doctor Andreas Karlstadt has abandoned us and in addition has become our worst enemy,” he stated at the begin16 ning of Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525). Karlstadt’s rejection of the true presence of Christ’s body and blood, his destruction of artistic works in the churches, and his reliance on the performance of many aspects of Mosaic ceremonial law violated Luther’s understanding of what God had revealed in Scripture. Luther also criticized his failure to submit to the written word of God and his reliance on inner revelation. Luther emphasized the necessity of recognizing the relationship of the outward action of God and his internal working that creates trust in the promises of Christ: When God sends for this holy gospel, he deals with us in a twofold manner, first outwardly, then inwardly. Outwardly, he deals with us through the oral word of the gospel and through material signs, that is baptism and the sacrament of the altar. Inwardly, he deals with us through the Holy Spirit, faith, and other gifts. But whatever their measure or order, the outward factors should and must precede. The inward experience follows and is brought about by the outward. God has determined to give the inward to no one except through the outward. Luther points out that in Luke 16:29, Christ simply directed the living to Moses and the prophets. In Titus 3:5, Paul says that the baptismal promise involved in the washing of regeneration is God’s means of pouring out the Holy Spirit richly. In Romans 1:16, Paul states that the proclamation of the gospel is “God’s 17 power for saving everyone who has faith.”
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By suggesting some direct access to God, the followers of Karlstadt were following a path Luther knew well from his use of mystical writings from the monastic piety that had contributed much to his own develop18 ment. Using the language of the tradition of Johannes Tauler, much of whose work he highly appreciated, Luther identified people in Karlstadt’s camp as longing for an experience of “self-abstraction”:
“ LUTHER ARGUES THAT ‘WHERE HOLY SCRIPTURE IS THE GROUND OF FAITH, WE ARE NOT TO DEVIATE FROM THE WORDS AS THEY STAND OR FROM THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY STAND, UNLESS AN EXPRESS ARTICLE OF FAITH COMPELS A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION OR ORDER.’ ” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG
But should you ask how one gains access to this lofty spirit, they do not refer you to the outward gospel but to some imaginary realm, saying, “remain in ‘resignation.’” A heavenly voice will come, and God himself will speak to you. Further inquiry into what this state of resignation does cannot yield an answer. Luther appeals to his readers: Do you not see here the devil, the enemy of God’s order? With all his mouthing of the words, “Spirit, Spirit, Spirit,” he tears down the bridge, the path, the way, the ladder, and all the means by which the Spirit may come to you. Instead of the outward order of God in the material sign of baptism and the oral proclamation of the Word of God, he wants to teach you, not how the Spirit comes to you, but how you come to the Spirit. They would have you journey on the clouds and ride to the wind. They do not tell you how or when, from where or what, but you are to share their experience. The result of their creation of their own internal spirit is that they must devise a legalistic 19 external order using biblical words. Against this Luther argues that “where Holy Scripture is the ground of faith, we are not to deviate from the words as they stand or from the order in which they stand, unless an express article of faith compels a different interpretation or 20 order.” Presumed in this statement is that articles of faith are constructed out of scriptural texts and that they represent the clear consensus
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of the biblical writers that aids in the interpretation of individual passages in the Bible. This meant for Luther that “faith should and must rest on certainty, not on punctuation marks and capitals. Faith must have clear, distinct passages and altogether plain words out of Scripture as 21 its foundations.” Even before he began to confront the Schwärmerei in central Germany, Luther recognized that Christians live on an eschatological battlefield, where Satan uses all kinds of “cunning and trickery” to ensnare and entrap. “Even if you are well armed at one place, he pounces on you at another place. . . . He never ceases but goes around and gives you no rest anywhere.” In his 1523 sermon on 1 Peter 5:8–9, Luther admonishes: The true sword is your strong and firm faith. If you take hold of God’s Word in your heart and cling to it with faith, the devil cannot win but must flee. If you can say, “This is what my God has said, and I take my stand on it,” you will see that the devil will soon go away. Then defiance, evil lust, anger, greed, melancholy, and doubt all vanish. But the devil is crafty and unwilling to let this happen to you. He tries to wrest the sword from your hand. If he makes you lazy, so that the body becomes unfit and is inclined to unruliness, he soon tears the sword out of your hand, as he did to Eve. She had God’s Word. If she had clung to 22 it, she would not have fallen. The devil comes as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), making sense and seeming wise, blinding believers as a glistening, snow-white presenter of 23 the truth. The antidote to such poison is found in returning to the text of Scripture. At the beginning of his sermon on the parable of the wedding banquet (Luke 14:16–24), Luther uses popular imagery to remind hearers that “whoever wants to battle against Satan dare not waver and sway to and fro but must be convinced of his cause and be armed with clear, certain written documents, for if the devil gets him on his fork through his unsettled notions, he will then toss him here and 24 there as the wind does the dry leaf.”
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“ LUTHER RECOGNIZED THAT CHRISTIANS LIVE ON AN ESCHATOLOGICAL BATTLEFIELD, WHERE SATAN USES ALL KINDS OF ‘CUNNING AND TRICKERY’ TO ENSNARE AND ENTRAP.” VOL.26 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2017
In preaching on Ephesians 6 in 1531, Luther told his Wittenberg congregation that the devil can be put to flight above all when the Word is publicly presented from the pulpit, but also every Christian individually or with others is to be hearing, reading, singing, speaking, and meditating on the Word. For it has the power, when clearly and purely proclaimed and used, diligently learned, and earnestly meditated on. Then Satan or any devil can remain. For the Word reveals his deception and roguery which deceive people, with the intention of building false trust or false faith, sadness, or despair. For the Word reveals the Lord Christ, whom he crucified, but he collided with Christ and got burned, for Christ trampled on his head. Therefore, he is afraid and flees from his presence. That did him tremendous harm, takes many souls back from him, and weakens and destroys his kingdom. This Word of (or derived from) 25 Scripture is “God’s might and power.” 1 Die Bekenntnisschrfiten der Evangelische-Lutherischen Kirche, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 770/771, 24–30 (hereafter cited as BSELK); The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 297 (hereafter cited as BC). 2 That the document was not prepared for presentation as such, as is often said, is clear from its being cast in German. It was intended to present talking points for the evangelical princes of the Smalcald League when instructing their theologians who would be delegated to attend the council. 3 BSELK 764/765, 13–33; BC 318–19. On Agricola, see Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with Johann Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids / Carlisle: Baker / Paternoster, 1997); and also Joachim Rogge, Johann Agricolas Lutherverständnis (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1960); Steffan Kjellgaard-Pedersen, Gesetz, Evangelium und Busse: Theologiegeschichtliche Studien zum Verhältnis zwischen dem jungen Johann Agricola (Eisleben) und Martin Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1983); Ernst Koch, “Johann Agricola neben Luther: Schülerschaft und theologische Eigenart,” in Lutheriana, ed. Gerhard Hammer and Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984), 131–50. 4 BSELK 770, 24–30; BC 322. 5 “Luther and the Schwärmer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology, ed. Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and Lubomir Batka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 512. 6 Robert Kolb, Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God: The Wittenberg School and Its Scripture-Centered Proclamation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 75–97.
Luther never ventured to explain the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptized. Instead, he counseled fighting the root sin that is the origin of all other sins—doubt and defiance of God’s word—with the sword of the Spirit: the very word of God and all its derivative manifestations in oral, written, and sacramental forms. This doubt and defiance of God’s word had already come in papal claims to the right of ultimate interpretation, and it came now in the spiritualists’ claim of an inner word independent of God’s chosen vehicle of revelation in Scripture. For Luther, any rejection of the sole authority of the biblical text was the foundational error from which all other sins arose. Against this root of sin, Luther believed that God’s word endures forever. ROBERT KOLB is professor of systematic theology emeritus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, and author of Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God: The Wittenberg School and Its Scripture-Centered Proclamation (Baker Academic, 2016). and idem, “Martin Luther,” in T & T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin, ed. Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 217–33. 9 WA 42:110, 38–111, 35; LW 1:147. 10 BSELK 746, 17–24; BC 310. 11 Brian Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962); Theodor Dieter, “Luther as Late Medieval Theologian, His Positive and Negative Use of Nominalism and Realism,” in The Oxford Handbook, 31–48. 12 Steven Paulson, “Luther’s Doctrine of God,” in The Oxford Handbook, 187–200. 13 BSELK 862/863, 6–10; BC 351. 14 Notger Slenczka, “Luther’s Anthropology,” in The Oxford Handbook, 212–17. 15 Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 16 WA 18:62, 6–7; LW 40:79. 17 WA 18:136, 9–23; LW 40:146. 18 Volker Leppin, “Luther’s Roots in Monastic-Mystical Piety,” in The Oxford Handbook, 49–61. 19 WA 18:137, 5–19; LW 40:147. 20 WA 18:147, 12–26; LW 40:157. 21 WA 18:150, 7–9; LW 40:160. 22 WA 12: 395, 7–396, 20; LW 30:141–42.
7 Kolb, 54–74.
23 WA 34, 2:381, 33–382, 24.
8 D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–1993), 42:110, 5–15 (hereafter cited as WA); Luther’s Works (St. Louis / Philadelphia: Concordia / Fortress, 1958–86), 1:146 (hereafter cited as LW); cf. Robert Kolb, “The Lutheran Doctrine of Original Sin,” in Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin, ed. Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 109–27;
25 WA 34, 2:405, 4–32. See Robert Kolb, “The Armor of God and the Might of His Strength. Luther’s Sermon on Ephesians 6 (1531/1533),” Concordia Journal (2017): 59–73.
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24 WA 12:598, 9–13; Sermons of Martin Luther (the Church Postil), ed. and trans. John Nicholas Lenker (1905; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 4:33.
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by
W. ROBERT GODFREY
“For Roman Catholics they represented the destructive, destabilizing logical outcome of the Reformation. Lutherans and Calvinists sought to make clear that they were utterly different from those Anabaptists.”
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artwork by
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SEAN FREEMAN & EVE STEBEN
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S
ome of you may have been to parts of the United States (such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania) where you have seen a bearded man in plain clothes driving a horse-drawn carriage down paved roads—perhaps with a number of cars behind him moving slowly. He may be moving toward a farm where plows are still pulled by horses and where he lives in a beautiful farmhouse with no electricity. Such an Amish or Mennonite man pursues a simple and separated life, committed to pacifism and humility. This way of life may well seem to us noble and inspirational in many ways. This pious man seems the polar opposite of a man such as John of Leiden, who in 1535 set himself up as the king of the New Jerusalem in the German city of Münster. Guided by prophetic teachings, he and his violent apocalyptics took over the city, set up a community exclusively restricted to true believers who practiced common ownership of property along with polygamy, and executed any opponents. But after a few months, the city was retaken, and John of Leiden and his supporters were defeated. Despite the immense differences between our Mennonite and John of Leiden, historically they have been grouped together under the common sixteenth-century label of “Anabaptism” (historians today usually use the label “Radical Reformation”). The dominant—and far and away the largest—religious movements of the sixteenth century were clearly Lutheranism, Calvinism, and renewed Roman Catholicism. While most of the “Anabaptist” groups were quite small, they made a significant impact on perceptions of religious reality at the time. For Roman Catholics they represented the destructive, destabilizing logical outcome of the Reformation. Lutherans and Calvinists sought to make clear that they were utterly different from those Anabaptists. It was the opponents, of course, who came up with the label “Anabaptist,” which means “rebaptism.” Although these disparate groups did reject
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infant baptism and taught that Christians needed to be baptized only after they became believers, they rejected this label, insisting that they were not rebaptizing anyone; rather, they were baptizing people properly for the first time. Even though it described only one element of their teaching, their opponents had chosen this label deliberately, because the Code of Justinian (the great legal code from the ancient world) had declared that re-baptizing anyone was a capital crime. That code was still in effect in parts of Europe, and the appellation “Anabaptist” made clear that such a person was a dangerous criminal indeed. As a result, numerous Anabaptists were executed for their religion. Ever since then, students of the sixteenth century have puzzled over this label and the movements it covers. Today, historians have largely rejected “Anabaptism” and replaced it with the label “Radical Reformation,” which was suggested by the Harvard historian George Huntston Williams. Williams argued that his label did not have negative connotations and positively united the various groups in terms of the more radical way in which they rejected medieval Roman Catholicism. While this label has been criticized as perhaps too political and perhaps demeaning to Luther and Calvin as not being truly radical, no better alternative has met with broad approval. This discussion of labels reminds us that labels and groupings are important to the ways in which we understand reality. It is true that all the groups gathered together under the label “Anabaptism” or the “Radical Reformation” in one way or another rejected the ancient, catholic consensus about the church and culture and/or about Christ and God, but it is equally true that these groups differ so much from each other that uniting them under one label perhaps distorts as much as it clarifies. What is clear is that the Reformation’s fracturing of the medieval church’s control over all religion in Europe allowed various religious movements to emerge and survive. Standard histories of the Reformation— such as the new study by Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450– 1650 (Yale University Press, 2016)—analyze
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a variety of individuals and groups under the heading “Radical Reformation.” Some leaders were well-educated and careful students of the Bible, while others were poorly educated, charismatic figures. Some stressed communal elements of Christian life, while others were rather individualistic and mystical. We will look briefly at the history and characteristics of the three groups that had the most historical impact.
THE APOCALYPTIC REVOLUTIONARIES One strain of the Radical Reformation has been called “apocalyptic.” For this group, the end of the world seemed at hand, and often the book of the Revelation became the inspiration of their vision. They believed that the end of the age was to be ushered in violently by figures inspired by the Holy Spirit. One early apocalyptic figure was Thomas Müntzer, who claimed to be a spokesman for the Holy Spirit and who was active in the Peasants’ Revolt in the mid-1520s. Müntzer claimed to be so full of the Holy Spirit that he could protect his followers by catching bullets in his sleeves. As spokesman for the Holy Spirit, he also was dismissive of dependence on the Bible, saying “Bible, bubble, babel.” Luther said of him, “He thinks he has swallowed the Holy Ghost feathers and all.” Later, Melchior Hoffman became a central figure as Bible teacher and spokesman for the Holy Spirit in a similar kind of apocalyptic movement, prophesying that Strasburg would become the New Jerusalem. Some of his followers, however, took over the city of Münster in 1534 and began to establish a theocracy there as the New Jerusalem. Only rebaptized believers could remain in the city. Jan Matthijs from the Netherlands led the movement until he was killed in April 1535 and was replaced by John of Leiden. Private property was outlawed, and polygamy was introduced. John declared himself king and messiah and told the population of Münster, In like manner was David, a humble shepherd, anointed by the prophet, at God’s
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command, as King of Israel. God often acts this way; and whoever resists the will of God calls down God’s wrath upon himself. Now I am given power over all nations of the earth, and the right to use the sword to the confusion of the wicked and in defense of the righteous. So let none in this town stain himself with crime or resist the will of God, or else he shall without delay be put to death with the sword. When some did not accept this declaration immediately, he continued: Shame on you, that you murmur against the ordinance of the Heavenly Father! Though you were all to join together to oppose me, I shall still reign, despite you, not only over this town but over the whole world, for the Father will have it so; and my kingdom which begins now shall endure and know 1 no downfall. This theocratic kingdom united Roman Catholic and Protestant forces in response, and the city fell in June 1535. John of Leiden was captured, tortured for months, and then horribly executed, the flesh torn from his body with red-hot tongs. His dead body was publicly displayed in a cage hanging from a church tower in the center of the city and left there until it had rotted away. The cage still hangs from the tower in Münster. The actions of these violent, theocratic movements determined the attitudes of almost all other Europeans in the sixteenth century toward the “Anabaptists.” For example, the Belgic Confession, article 36, states: “We detest the Anabaptists and other seditious people, and in general all those who reject the higher powers and magistrates and would subvert justice, introduce community of goods, and confound that decency and good order which God has established among men.” The visceral antipathy to the Anabaptists saw no distinction between violent and nonviolent groups. It was not just the violence, however, that so concerned sixteenth-century critics. The
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Anabaptist rejection of Christian involvement in the common life of society threatened the whole stability of Christian civilization. Much later, Abraham Kuyper captured this concern when he wrote: “When he [Jesus] comes to this earth, the King does not overturn human society as such. He does not do what the Anabaptists throughout history have tried to do, namely, to introduce a new state of affairs 2 for social life.”
ANTI-TRINITARIANS Within the Radical Reformation, the antiTrinitarians were another movement. They have often been called “evangelical rationalists,” which seems to be a particularly inappropriate label, considering that they were not evangelical in terms of embracing the gospel as recovered by Luther. They were not rationalists but rather claimed to accept the Bible as their authority. They did teach, however, that the doctrines of Trinity and classic Christology were irrational, and so in some ways they may be considered proto-rationalists. These anti-Trinitarians argued that the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus were Roman Catholic traditions that should be subjected to the same biblical judgment as the doctrine of justification. Here we see not so much an Anabaptist rejection of Christ and culture, as a rejection of the ancient, catholic consensus on God and Christ. The major Reformers, of course, argued that by any biblical standard the ancient doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ were clearly taught in the Scriptures. Michael Servetus (1511–53) became one of the earliest explicitly anti-Trinitarians. Educated as a physician in Spain, he became known in the 1530s as one who rejected the eternal divinity of Jesus. This heresy was most serious. Servetus was condemned to death by Roman Catholic authorities, but he managed to avoid arrest. John Calvin tried several times in the 1530s and 1540s to convince Servetus of his errors, but Servetus persisted in his teaching. Early in 1553, Servetus published yet another defense
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of his anti-Trinitarian views, Restitution of the Christian Religion. This title was a clear attack on Calvin and his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin had warned Servetus to stay away from Geneva, but Servetus went there in August 1553 intentionally to cause trouble for Calvin. He was arrested, tried, and publicly executed there in October. More widely influential were Lelio Socinus (1525–62) and his nephew Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), who became significant promoters of the anti-Trinitarian position. Lelio, an Italian jurist, apparently was influenced by the death of Servetus. In 1579, he moved to Poland, where he became the leader of an already wellestablished anti-Trinitarian group, which had formed initially in the Calvinistic churches in Poland but by 1565 had separated and was for a time known as the Minor Reformed Church of Poland. (The use of the word Reformed by these Polish unitarians did not help the genuinely Reformed cause at all.) Faustus Socinus, who was a talented theologian, managed to unite his Polish followers in confession that Jesus was simply human, that the Christian life was following the Sermon on the Mount, and that the death of Jesus was not a substitutionary atonement but a moral example of love. In the city of Rakow, he established a center that published a catechism in 1605 summarizing their teachings. The resurgence of Roman Catholicism in Poland through the influence of the Jesuits there led to the expulsion of the Socinians from Poland in 1660.
THE QUIETLY WITHDRAWN Yet another strain of Radical Reformation was led by students of the Bible who adopted a form of Christianity fundamentally moral in character, where baptism became more a matter of obedience than a source of grace. They wanted to separate from any cooperation with the state— Christianity was not to compromise with the world, but to provide a righteous community that withdrew from the world to live a simple, pacifist life.
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Michael Sattler is an early example of such Anabaptism. He was a Roman Catholic monastic who became an Anabaptist and then had to flee from place to place. In 1527, he presided over an Anabaptist conference and prepared the Schleitheim Confession of Faith that summarized their convictions. It stands as a basic statement of Anabaptist faith, calling for baptism only for the believers who pursue righteous living (which included separation from worldliness, particularly military service and oath taking). Anabaptist congregations also needed to practice the discipline of excommunication. Later, in the same year in which he had written the confession, he was arrested and brutally tortured and executed. Menno Simons (1496–1561) ultimately became the most famous of all the Radicals. He was from Friesland in the north of the Netherlands, had become a priest, and then embraced the Reformation after reading Luther. As the calamity at Münster unfolded, he became more radical in a different way, converting to a vision of Christianity of sincere believers who rejected the medieval view of sacraments as a means of grace and withdrew from traditional cooperation with the state. In 1539, he wrote a summary of his convictions titled Book of Fundamentals or Foundation of Christian Doctrine. His followers refused to serve in the military, take oaths, or occupy civil office. They organized disciplined congregations of Christians who lived holy, humble lives. In 1535, Menno converted to Anabaptism just before the rise of John of Leiden, whom he utterly repudiated. While John was alive, Menno wrote “The Blasphemy of John of Leiden,” in which he made clear his differences: “So all false teachers forget the covenant of God whereby they are bound to Him, as, O God, many do at present who have forgotten all that upon which they were baptized, namely, the cross, and 3 would recommend and make use of the sword.” Further, he wrote: “Greater antichrist there cannot arise than he who poses as the David of promise. This David is Christ as the Scriptures 4 testify abundantly.” Still, Menno believed that the time was short before the end:
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Alas, it is about time to awake! Remember that the angel of Revelation has sworn by the eternal and living God who made heaven and earth that after this time, there shall be time no more. From the Scriptures we cannot conclude but that this is the last festival of the year, the last proclamation of the holy Gospel, the last invitation to the marriage of the Lamb, which is to be celebrated, published, and sanctified before the 5 great and terrible day of the Lord. He believed that true conversion was to a righteous, separated life. “In the first place we teach that which Jesus the teacher from heaven, the mouth and word of the Most High God taught (John 3:2), that now is the time of grace, a time to awake from the sleep of our ugly sins, and to be of an upright, converted, renewed, contrite, 6 and penitent heart.” He wrote of his opponents on baptism and the church:
“ MANY OF THEM WERE SINCERE, COURAGEOUS, AND SELFSACRIFICING, BUT THE REFORMERS UNDERSTOOD THE BIBLE MORE CORRECTLY AND MORE PROFOUNDLY.” 58
Truly, I do not know how a worse heresy could be invented, notwithstanding that these miserable men cruelly cry against us, saying, Heretics! Heretics! Drown them, slay them, and burn them! And this for no other reason than that we teach the new life, baptism on the confession of faith, and the Supper in both elements in an unblamable church, according to the holy Gospel 7 of Christ Jesus. More specifically, he taught that one had to be baptized as a believer to be saved: Besides we have also shown how very weak, useless, and groundless all the arguments of the world are, by which they defend infant baptism, so that the before-mentioned despisers of God may know and understand that they are not baptized according to the evangelical commandment of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ. It follows that they are not in obedience to the divine Word, and if they are not in the obedience which has the promise (I speak of those who have come to years of discretion), then they
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cannot inherit or obtain the promise, as long as they do not believe the Word of God and obediently fulfill it in all respects. Let everyone consider carefully and save his 8 own soul; for our God is a consuming fire. Menno spent most of the rest of his life teaching and writing in the Netherlands and northwestern Germany. His later years were troubled by differences in his movement over the extent of discipline required in a righteous church, and he died sick and exhausted in 1561. His movement—the Mennonites—continued, the largest and most influential of the Radical groups. Today, some look back to the Radical Reformation (particularly to the Quietly Withdrawn) as forerunners of the modern church. The end of religious coercion has been widely accepted in the West, and the separation of church and state as well as the voluntary character of church membership are nearly universal convictions in America. But it is not at all clear that these developments in the modern world are the result of Anabaptist teachings. Some historians see the influence of Anabaptism in the rise of the modern Baptist movement. Others (with whom I agree) argue that while there is agreement in rejecting infant baptism, there is little agreement on any other point. The modern Baptist movement really emerged from seventeenth-century English Calvinist circles, sharing with paedo-Baptist Calvinists common views of church and soteriology as well as of Christ and culture. Rather than anticipating modern Christianity, the Radical Reformation is better seen as a new expression of medieval dissent and call for reform. We use the label “the Reformation” to describe the great religious event of the sixteenth century led by Luther. Yet throughout the medieval period, various movements pursued what they called “reforms in the life of the church.” Some remained within the church, such as new monastic movements seeking to purify the moral character of the ascetic life; others moved outside the church and were much more radical in their rejection of
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received Christianity. Two groups in particular bear interesting similarities to the sixteenthcentury Anabaptists. In the thirteenth century, the Cathari (also known as the Albigensians) were apocalyptic and violently rejected the established church of their day. By contrast, in the late twelfth century, the Waldensians tried to cooperate with the church but ultimately were forced to withdraw and separate in order to pursue a simple approach to their faith. In this Luther year, we need to ask ourselves how we should evaluate these Radical movements in relation to the Reformation. The Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, believed that the church needed to be reformed by the word of God, not restored or reborn after years of nonexistence. They were not revolutionaries but proponents of continuity with the past while pursuing improvement. The Reformation was primarily a theological movement, seeking to reform the teaching of the church. That reform certainly affected the lives of Christians in profound ways, but it was the saving work of Jesus as taught in the Bible that was the central concern. By contrast, the Anabaptists, like the medieval church, focused primarily on the moral character of Christianity. Many of them were sincere, courageous, and self-sacrificing, but the Reformers understood the Bible more correctly and more profoundly. The church today needs to be inspired by and follow not the Anabaptists but the Reformers. W. ROBERT GODFREY is president emeritus and professor
of church history at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.
1 Cited in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 296. 2 Abraham Kuyper, Pro Rege: Living under Christ’s Kingship, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016), 400. 3 Menno Simons, The Complete Writings (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 1984), 33f. 4 Simons, 37. 5 Simons, “Foundation of Christian Doctrine,” 109. 6 Simons, 108. 7 Simons, “Christian Baptism,” 232. 8 Simons, 235.
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HERE’S TO 25 MORE YEARS Get your copy of Reformation Then and Now as a thank you for your gift of 50 dollars or more! As a part of our 25th Anniversary celebration, we partnered with Hendrickson Publishers to release a new book filled with Modern Reformation articles celebrating 500 years of the Reformation. White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation are possible because of your support. So, thank you! We’re looking forward to many years to come.
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Book Reviews 62
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COMPILED BY
REVIEWED BY
REVIEWED BY
MR Editors
R. Scott Clark
Adam S. Francisco
Recommended Titles
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Classic Luther Biographies
New Luther Biographies
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REFORMATION 500 LEGACY n 2008, Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom published the controversial book Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism (Baker Academic). The year before, in 2007, the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, converted to Roman Catholicism, and the evangelical world continued to debate “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” initiatives of the mid-1990s. Ever since, Noll and Nystrom’s book has spawned a small catalogue of responses and extended discussions under the same title, including an issue of Modern Reformation magazine (Vol. 22, Issue 1, 2013) and twenty-plus episodes of the White Horse Inn. This anniversary year, there are a variety of fascinating publications taking stock after five hundred years of the Reformation legacy, continuing the conversation for a modern reformation of the church. Here are a few recommended titles:
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REFORMED
ACADEMIC
THEOLOGY
Why the Reformation Still Matters
The Legacy of Luther
Protestantism after 500 Years
By R.C. Sproul and Stephen J. Nichols Reformation Trust, 2016
Edited by Thomas Albert Howard and Mark A. Noll Oxford University Press, 2016
Reformation Theology: A Systematic Summary
By Michael Reeves and Tim Chester Crossway, 2016 According to Michael Horton, “This is a warm, pastoral, and rigorous defense of the central claims of the Reformation” from the perspective of the Anabaptist/ Baptist tradition that “recognizes important differences with the magisterial Reformers.”
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A collection of essays from trustworthy evangelical and Reformed pastors and leaders, exploring Luther’s life, theology, and legacy.
Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom By Carl Trueman Crossway, 2015 An overview of Luther’s historical context, theological system, and approach to the Christian life.
Leading historians assess the Reformation and the state of scholarship from a variety of perspectives. The essays are challenging, and some are quite controversial, including contributions from Roman Catholic historians (and critics) of the Reformation.
Edited by Matthew Barrett Crossway, 2017 A summary of key doctrines of the Reformation with contributions from leading evangelical and Reformed scholars.
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CLASSIC LUTHER BIOGRAPHIES By Roland H. Bainton Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950
Luther: Man between God and the Devil By Heiko Oberman Yale University Press, 1989 ne of the first books I remember reading as a young Christian was Roland H. Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950). It has been the entry point to Luther’s biography and theology for many English-language readers and a fine one it is. Bainton (1894–1984) was a Congregational minister and faculty member of the Yale Divinity School for forty-two years. At his retirement in 1962, he was the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History. According to the New York Times obituary by Walter H. Waggoner, Here I Stand sold a staggering 1.2 million copies. The influence of this volume on Englishspeaking readers is as deserved as it is hard to calculate. Bainton was a brilliant scholar who wrote in fluid and eminently readable English.
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The volume has no footnotes, but the evidence of scholarship is everywhere in the text. Though one might be tempted to avoid it because of its 1950 publication date, this would be a mistake. He got things right that more recent scholarship has not. For example, he avoided the mistake of the Luther Renaissance, which wanted to date Luther’s Protestant turn much earlier than the facts will allow (which then created a significant mischaracterization of what constitutes essential Protestant theology). If Bainton may be dated in other ways—e.g., the title of the volume rests on words that Luther most likely never actually said—even so, his Luther is still a fellow worth meeting. The just successor to Bainton’s Luther is Heiko Oberman (1930–2001), whose death, like Bainton’s, also received notice in the New York Times, which was an indicator of his cultural status. In his time, Oberman was the preeminent scholar of Late Medieval Scholasticism and Reformation theology. Born in Utrecht and educated there, as well as in Indonesia and Oxford, Oberman began his academic career at Harvard Divinity School. He also taught at Tübingen and finished his career at the University of Arizona. His work (and method)
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Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
BOOK REVIEWS
has been foundational for scholars of both the Reformation and post-Reformation periods for decades. Oberman’s Luther: Man between God and the Devil is brilliant from beginning to end. His Luther is the baseline to which other writers add. My only significant dissent is from his account of Luther’s view of Scripture. He could not resist the temptation to recast Luther as one who anticipated Karl Barth (lest Luther seem too conservative or a fundamentalist). Still, few volumes draw one into Luther’s world
as thoroughly and successfully as Oberman’s, who perhaps better than any prior account, put Luther in his late medieval context. No one can read Oberman’s Luther and think of him as a “modern” man. No other writer has done better at dealing with the complexities in Luther’s relationship to and rhetoric about the Jews. In this Luther Year, the reader will do well to meet Oberman’s Luther. R. SCOTT CLARK is professor of church history and historical
theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.
NEW LUTHER BIOGRAPHIES Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
By Scott H. Hendrix Yale University Press, 2017 368 pages (paperback), $22.00
By Lyndal Roper Random House, 2017 576 pages (hardback), $40.00
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October 31, 1517: Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World By Martin Marty Paraclete Press, 2016 128 pages (hardback), $19.99
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“The Reformation . . . changed the world, and given the quincentenary of its opening salvo, a number of books on the subject have been and will continue to be written.”
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There are, nevertheless, some superb books on Martin Luther and the early Protestant Reformation. Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand (1950) and James Kittelson’s Luther the Reformer (1986) are veritable classics. Both are reliable and lucidly written, and they make great first reads on the life and ideas of the Reformer. Alongside these, there is the work of Heiko Oberman. His Luther: Man between God and the Devil (1992) is distinct. Less concerned about the controversies and events of the Reformation—presuming his readers would be familiar with these—Oberman focused primarily on the Reformer’s theological and apocalyptic worldview as it took shape during the course of his life. [Editorial note: For more information on these books by Bainton and Oberman, see the Classic Luther Biographies section of this book review.] More could and perhaps should be mentioned—for example, the massive three- volume, fifteen-hundred-page work by Martin Brecht. The point here is that there is a well-worn path of Luther scholarship. Most of what can be known about his life and theology already is. Few historical figures have received as much attention as he has. So it is hard to imagine the work of Bainton, Kittelson, and Oberman being outdone. But then there is the new, outstanding work of two leading early modern historians—Scott Hendrix and Lyndal Roper. Hendrix’s book, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer, is the culmination of decades of research and writing. Although short for a scholarly work, it is still dense in the details of
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hen Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, he had hoped only to start a local academic debate over the practice of selling indulgences. He got more than he bargained for, though. When papal authorities received and read the theses, they sensed he wasn’t just questioning an approved practice of the church but was ultimately presenting a challenge to the authority of the church. So they began to investigate his most basic theological convictions in an ecclesiastical trial of sorts that would conclude at the Diet of Worms. It was here that Luther made his last stand, refusing to recant and announcing his intention to stand firm in his theological convictions. The result was what Luther described as the beginning of a “reformation according to Holy Scripture.” This story continues to fascinate historians and theologians, clergy and laity, and for good reason. The Reformation, as Martin Marty’s October 31, 1517 suggests, changed the world, and given the quincentenary of its opening salvo, a number of books on the subject have been and will continue to be written. The curious thing about Marty’s new work is that it has very little to do with its subtitle, Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World. It is more the reflections of a Lutheran ecumenist, using the Ninety-Five Theses as a pretext, with a call for Christian unity despite the doctrinal divisions that surfaced (and remain) in the wake of 1517.
BOOK REVIEWS
Luther’s life and thought. Some details, such as the uncertainty of the year of his birth (Luther and Melanchthon even argued about his age on one occasion), are of little consequence, but it is the stuff any history aficionado would find interesting. Others, such as his descriptions of Luther’s piety in Erfurt’s Augustinian monastery and the later polemics of works with delightful titles, such as Against the Roman Papacy Instituted by the Devil, are essential to the Reformer’s story. Hendrix’s prose is clear and complete, and in the end he accomplishes what he set out to do: to describe Luther as accurately and objectively as possible (he was “a human being with both merits and faults”) in light of the complicated context of sixteenth-century Germany. Roper, on the other hand, is quite different. She takes the controversial approach of psychohistory. Focusing on “Luther’s inner development,” Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet “charts the emotional transformations wrought by the religious changes Luther set in motion.” This approach to biography was first applied to the Reformer in Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958). Rather than explain Luther theologically, Hendrix summarizes that Erikson “proposed that resentment of both parents and ambivalence towards the father predisposed his adult son to rebel against the pope in place of the father he could not safely defy” (16). As one might imagine, psychohistory has not escaped significant criticism. There is a long history of it found in literature reviews of Luther biographies going back to Roland Bainton’s essay “Psychiatry and History: An Examination of Erickson’s ‘Young Man Luther’” (Religion in Life 40 [1971]: 463). (Hendrix’s brief critique can be found at the beginning of chapter 2 of his book.) Roper is certainly well aware of these, and she is cautious to avoid the shortcomings of Erikson’s approach. “Luther’s relationship to his father was fundamental to his personality,” she maintains. However, this is “only part of what
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KATIE AND MARTIN LUTHER In one of the great adventure stories of the Reformation, Katharina von Bora escaped her Cistercian convent in 1523 and fled to Wittenberg. She and Martin Luther were married on June 13, 1525, and had a blessed and rich life together. Katie continues to be a fascinating woman of the Reformation in her own right.
Katie Luther, First Lady of the Reformation: The Unconventional Life of Katharina von Bora By Ruth A. Tucker Zondervan, 2017 A biography from former professor of church history.
Katharina and Martin Luther: The Radical Marriage of a Runaway Nun and a Renegade Monk By Michelle DeRusha Baker Books, 2017 The story of Luther and Katie narrated by a broadly evangelical author.
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“Luther was very much a premodern thinker. His world was filled with demonic forces and apocalyptic manifestations, but he wasn’t quite medieval.”
complement each other nicely. Hendrix’s volume tends to follow the traditional approach by focusing especially on the landmarks of Luther’s story, but it brings the reader up to date on all the research since Bainton and Kittelson published their lives of Luther. Roper’s is state of the art, too, but it focuses much more on Luther’s worldview and psychology. She is a wordsmith, more eloquent than Oberman, and carefully avoids falling into the reductionist and historiographical errors of Erikson. Both are sophisticated yet accessible, comprehensive yet manageable. So which one should you read? It depends what you are looking for. The student of theology and church history will probably find Hendrix more beneficial. The student of the humanities—who is especially interested in the way we are shaped by the people and culture of our world and how we in turn shape the world we live in—will find Roper’s work both captivating and inspiring. The student of history and biography, however, should read both. They are exemplary biographies about a remarkable and significant man. ADAM S. FRANCISCO is professor of history and chair of the History and Political Thought Department at Concordia University Irvine in California.
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shaped him” (xxvi). He must also be understood in light of the social and cultural forces of the sixteenth century. Roper is quite compelling in her description of Luther’s attitudes, emotions, and worldview. “I want to understand Luther himself,” she explains in the introduction, “to know how a sixteenthcentury individual perceived the world around him, and why he viewed it in this way” (xxvii). She does just this in a masterful way—not by merely describing but also by carefully explaining the nuances of the ideas he expressed in a world different from our own. Luther was very much a premodern thinker. His world was filled with demonic forces and apocalyptic manifestations, but he wasn’t quite medieval. The movement he set in motion can be credited, in part, “with starting the process of secularization in the West” (xviii). Even so, he was conservative, he respected tradition, and he had a high view of authority (rightly conceived), but he could also be described as an independent thinker (bound only to the word of God) and a “maverick.” He was certainly “no killjoy” and could, in contradistinction to most of medieval Christian thought, be “remarkably positive about the body and physical experience” (410). Thes e almo st p ar a doxic al a sp e c ts o f Luther’s personality are wonderfully illustrated throughout the book. They are also complemented by eloquent descriptions of the details of his life’s work against the social and cultural backdrop of the Reformation. Like Hendrix, but in quite a different way, Roper’s work is an elegant and fascinating biography of Luther that strikes just the right balance between describing his prejudices and inflexibility alongside his most attractive features, his “extraordinary openness, his honest willingness to put everything on the line, and his capacity to accept God’s grace as a gift he did not merit” (410). Both biographies are sure to become classic resources for those want to learn about or brush up on their knowledge of the man who paved the way for the Protestant Reformation. They
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GEEK SQUAD
How-To History: Fact, Fiction, and the Art of the Past By Sarah Patterson White
n AD 336, a report was circulated that the Egyptian bishop Arsenius had been killed and Athanasius was to blame. The schismatic Meletian party could even produce the corpse’s severed hand as proof. The evidence was persuasive enough that Emperor Constantine was prevailed upon to press a murder charge against the theologian. Fortunately, it turned out that the bishop in question was alive and well (hand and all) and in hiding. Call it fake news, fourth-century style. Since the Fall, humans have struggled to discern between truth and falsehood. Besides reminding us that scandal and sensationalism have always been with us, the study of history
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provides a helpful analogue to the challenges of everyday knowing. History is a necessarily selective retelling of the past. This interpreted character is broadly acknowledged today in both scholarly and popular circles; in fact, some question whether reliable historical knowledge is attainable. Are we not just confronted with competing stories about the past, with the most powerful storyteller “winning”? This is the assumption of much popular “history”—one has only to think of The Da Vinci Code’s portrayal of power-hungry Nicene bishops fabricating the divinity of Christ. It is good to recognize that everyone tells stories about the past. Human beings, situated as we are within history, are inescapably biased. The
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“Historical method begins with a basic question: Why is a certain thing happening in a certain way in a given context?”
celebration but encountered resistance in light of lingering medieval custom. The narrative of overwhelming discontinuity weakens. The centrality of the sacrament to Christian practice had not changed; rather, the change in doctrine led to an effort to instill a distinctively Reformed understanding of the sacrament. However, sources are limited. Kirk records survive predominantly for urban parishes and so do not document reforming activity in rural areas. Published sermons are revised from what had been preached publicly, or even from auditors’ notes; therefore, accurately assessing lay reception of reform is perennially difficult—lay writings are relatively rare, as ministers were usually more literate than communicants. Conclusions must therefore be somewhat cautious. You might revise the original hypothesis to say that, in an effort to inculcate a Reformed sacramental piety, pastoral concern focused on the formation of an informed, prepared laity with the frequency of reception largely unchanged (see the work of Margo Todd and Leigh Eric Schmidt on this subject). Sound historical method builds a measure of modesty into our conclusions. We know what we
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question is whether we acknowledge our limited perspectives. Even though we cannot escape our particularities, we can still consider evidence in an objective manner. That is, we can appeal to accessible evidence—as opposed to undocumentable appeals to progress or providence. Even when dealing with empirical facts, we are not dealing with epistemic certainties. We use evidence to argue for what is most probable. That is why good historians don’t simply make assertions; they seek to demonstrate a case through the application of historical method. Historical method begins with a basic question: Why is a certain thing happening in a certain way in a given context? One proposes a hypothesis, which should be tested in light of positive evidence. This investigation should also unearth the immediate and historical contexts of our subject. One should also be mindful of evidence that challenges the hypothesis and then be ready to modify the argument, if warranted. Reviewing evidence, refining one’s argument, and constructing a narrative is not a linear process— the more types of evidence that are considered, the more context becomes illuminated and the greater the chance of finding nuance. For example, if you look at the sacramental reforms of the Scottish Reformation and ask why Scottish Presbyterians celebrated Communion only once a year, you might form the hypothesis that there was an effort to downplay the sacraments in favor of Reformed, word-centered worship. You find points of continuity with the medieval church (such as annual reception of Communion at Easter, preceded by a preparatory, penitential season) and, after looking at Kirk session records, see that the emphasis on extensive catechism and church discipline points to an overriding pastoral desire for knowledgeable participation by the laity. This same emphasis can be detected in the surviving body of sermons by such preachers as Robert Bruce, Samuel Rutherford, and many others. Kirk records also suggest that in some places, sessions pushed for more frequent
do not know. It also creates space for evidencedriven interaction with others about where and why our conclusions diverge. Historical method can also support healthy pastoral practice. It can help us to have more modest expectations when we appeal to history in support of current practices. Taking the example above, one finds that a superficial look at sacramental practices (“How frequently did this or that church celebrate Communion?”) reveals less about realities on the ground. Broadening the evidence and asking deeper questions about context can inform practice more richly than isolated examples. Knowing is fraught in our day. Modernity boasts a definite certainty, while postmodernity revels in the multiplicity of narratives and the inaccessibility of objective truth. The reality of truth should not trouble us, but we should beware of forgetting the unavoidably mediated aspect of creaturely knowledge. We cannot know our world like God does, but this doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about it at all. Like historians, everyday knowers can be thoughtful about the contexts and commitments evident in the sources they encounter. They can notice what questions are being asked, what kinds of evidence are selected, and what narratives are
“We cannot know our world like God does, but this doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about it at all.”
created. They can cultivate a readiness to consider sources that challenge those narratives. Just as a historian’s interpretation of the past is always provisional, so we must maintain a certain modesty about the conclusions we draw. Our assertions cannot be neatly disentangled from our commitments. And just as historians will never exhaust every avenue of research, we will never, either individually or corporately, know all there is to know. Think of the upheaval occasioned by the 2016 election. Some experienced cognitive dissonance in its wake, and perceptions differ of Trump’s presidency so far—peppered by discussion of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Much of the controversy centers on our ability to identify genuine information. Critical evaluation of sources can help. We can also work toward fruitful interaction with others around those sources. One of our biggest obstacles is distinguishing between falsehood and opinion. We are primed to make emotional judgments and to be attuned to those “facts” that support the judgments to which we are disposed. The challenge is to engage charitably with one another’s evidence. Only on that basis can we begin to reason together about where and why our opinions collide. While this is a tall order, it is first a question of attitude. Epistemic modesty teaches us that we lack an exhaustive picture. Our Facebook newsfeed and media intake reveal only so much about the larger world. It’s good to expand our horizons, but even when we do, we won’t figure everything out. We don’t have to. Ultimately, whether as historians or as everyday knowers, we must remember who we are. Confidence in our conclusions is possible and is a worthy pursuit, as long as we are mindful of our human limitations. Because we know the Truth personally, we are free to have our narratives corrected and we can trust that he alone sees (and governs) all of history, from the beginning to the end. SARAH PATTERSON WHITE holds an MA in Historical Theol-
ogy from Saint Louis University. She lives in Missouri.
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IT’S NOT ad ALWAYS TEXTBOOK As you already know, understanding the truths of Scripture can be a major turning point in life. Give a gift that is food for the soul—not fluff. Give your favorite student the gift of MR at a special rate.
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B AC K PAG E
Different Version, Same Story By Michael S. Horton
uring a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I noticed the small number of travelers in the airport. When I asked about this, I received quite different accounts about why: from moving major airline hubs to other airports to post-9/11 woes. Doing a little research, I discovered that all of these versions were crucial parts of the whole story—none was incorrect or contradictory; they just illustrated different aspects of what had happened. A thorough report would take all of the versions together, check the facts, and integrate the different reasons into a composite picture. This is precisely what we have to do when we read the four Gospels and the various reports from the apostles in their letters. There are no contradictions in the eyewitness testimony as reported. Apparent discrepancies reflect the different perspectives owing to the standpoint of time and place. A collection of eyewitness reports that lacked apparent discrepancies would suggest collusion and fabrication. The same is true of different interpretations of the Bible, expressed in the tens of thousands of denominations today. I've often heard people say, “How can Christianity be true if there are so many religions—and so many different interpretations of Christianity itself?" True, this is a scandal. But there are other scandals. What about people who have had different diagnoses from doctors? We don’t give up on good journalistic accounts of the various factors or in the myriad diagnoses of even the most recognized illnesses.
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We still read the newspaper and go to doctors. So why, when it comes to religion, do we think that everyone is unreliable and we have to go it alone? It’s a lot easier to abandon critical thinking, homework, and testing the analyses and either throw ourselves in the arms of a “specialist” or reject expertise altogether. The Reformation was an amazing movement because they did neither. The Reformers were experts in the Bible in its original languages. They weren’t always right, but they had a level of expertise average Christians lacked. They also encouraged average Christians to investigate Scripture for themselves. Neither expertise nor democratic “pooling of ignorance” was the the goal, but a way of taking the authoritative interpretation of “many counselors” over idiosyncratic, individualistic interpretation. It’s much harder to be a Reformation Christian. It’s a lot easier to surrender either to an absolute monarchy (the pope) or to the narcissistic principle of individualism. It’s a lot harder to work really hard with the whole church, in all times and places. That’s accountability, social engagement, and compromise: three things Americans don’t like very much. I hope that as we celebrate the Reformation, we can recover not only its insight into the gospel but also its recovery of biblical practices in order to come to a common understanding of “what we believe and why we believe it.” MICHAEL S. HORTON is editor-in-chief of Modern Reforma-
tion magazine.
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You may have received a survey from Modern Reformation in the mail. It’s a questionnaire meant for us to hear your constructive criticism that will help shape the future of Modern Reformation. These insights will be used to grow our readership, and more importantly, unfurl the rich tapestry of the Protestant tradition for the next generation.
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