Friday, June 16, 2017

The Bad (UnChristian) Idea that was "The Crusades" both Then and Now


Islamophobes want to recreate the Crusades.
But they don’t understand them at all.

[It wasn't] a clash of civilizations, or a war of Christianity against Islam.

by Matthew Gabriele
June 6, 2017

*Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the department of religion and culture at Virginia Tech and has published widely on religion and violence in the Middle Ages.

**Author's Perspective was published in the Washington Post, June 6, 2017

The Crusades as we imagine them are different from the actual
conflicts medievals experienced. (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Recent terrorist attacks in London have sparked a new wave of “clash of civilizations” rhetoric — that brand of political language that characterizes events like those in London as the West vs. the East, Christianity vs. Islam. To defeat the terrorists, this logic holds, we must “obliterate these savages from the face of the earth.” In the wake of the attacks in London, some openly wished for an end to Islam altogether, posting under the #NoMoreRamadans hashtag.

Frequently these kinds of statements refer back — longingly — to the Crusades. Shortly after news of the attack in London spread, a writer at the white nationalist website Breitbart tweeted that “the crusades need to come back.” He quickly deleted the tweet, but a TownHall columnist shared that he, too, thought that “Christians were the unequivocal good guys in the Crusades” and that he “supported” the Crusades. Then, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) wrote on Facebook that “all of Christendom … is at war with Islamic horror” and that the only solution is to “kill them all.” This wasn’t the first time. Last year, during his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama mentioned the fact that all religious groups have perpetrated violent acts throughout history, citing the Crusades as evidence. That remark sparked a vigorous response from the right, focusing primarily around a defense of the medieval Crusades. Before that, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a group of schoolchildren that “the left” only criticizes the Crusades because “they hate Christendom.” Santorum, too, held that the Crusades were purely a defensive war against Islamic aggression. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

Exploiting a simplified, misleading story of the Crusades (namely, that they were primarily a Western, Christian, defensive response to Middle Eastern incursion on Christian lands) isn’t a strictly contemporary phenomenon. In fact, it came into fashion during the age of colonialism and was reborn again in the early 20th century. In both of those cases — and in our own current climate — the imaginary parallel between the Crusades and our own conflicts does much more to advance our own political causes than to accurately represent the Crusades.

As scholars of the Crusades have shown for several generations now, there was no necessary evolutionary movement toward the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century was long forgotten by that time, and Latin Europe felt very little (if any) pressure from the highly divided Seljuk Turks, who were quite busy fighting one another as well as the Fatimids in Egypt. Even during their march toward Jerusalem, the crusaders themselves showed absolute willingness to ally with some Muslim leaders against other Muslims (or even fellow Christians). Things only got more complicated once the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established in the 12th century, when the Emperor Frederick II was criticized by contemporaries for his supposed friendliness with Muslims, even after he recovered Jerusalem for the Christians in 1229. In other words, the story is not nearly so simple as Christians vs. Muslims locked in a black-and-white battle for contested lands.

The popular conception of the Crusades comes not from their historical reality, but from two related places: First, from 19th and early 20th century scholars of the Crusades, such as French historian Joseph-Francois Michaud or the German Heinrich von Sybel or the American George Lincoln Burr, who saw their research linked to contemporary nationalistic colonial projects in Africa and the Middle East; and second, from the resurrection of those ideas by 21st century conservatives, such as cold warrior Robert Spencer, Santorum and many surrounding the presidency of George W. Bush.

Indeed, the term “crusade” as it’s used these days is anachronistic, more an artifact of our own politics than those of the medievals. The word “crusade” in Latin (crucesignatus — “one marked by the cross”) didn’t make its first appearance until about 1200, more than 100 years after the phenomenon supposedly began. In English, the gap is even longer, since the words “crusade” and “crusader” don’t really appear until around 1700. Even then, the word’s introduction was meant to resolve a contemporary — not historical — problem: To simultaneously describe wars fought during the Middle Ages and to characterize any struggle against “evil” or “error.” In other words, to link past and present in the era of discovery and colonial expansion. Modern historians have since put the term to political use over and over again: For example, Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem from the Ottomans in 1917 was linked to Richard the Lionheart’s failure in 1189, while René Grousset concluded his history of the crusades by writing: “The Templars only held until 1303 the islet of Ruad, south of Tortosa, from where one day — in 1914 — the ‘Franks’ would again set foot in Syria.”

Although scholarship on the Crusades may have moved on, these colonialist ideas persist. Together with colleagues Susanna Throop and David Perry, we’ve begun to trace the resurgence of these ideas with the rise (and normalization) of the alt-right. There’s a long history of white nationalists and white supremacists using the Middle Ages (badly) to justify their ideas, and the Crusades are no exception. Most recently, the so-called crying templar meme gained popularity in summer 2016 as a xenophobic response to Syrian refugees entering Europe, while at the same time some protesters showed up in full medieval Templar costume to anti-immigrant rallies, and “Deus Vult” (the supposed war cry of the First Crusaders) became a rallying cry for white nationalists in both Europe and the United States.

But all blame can’t be laid at the feet of the alt-right. At least since Bush used “crusade” to describe the American response to al-Qaeda, many conservatives have been comfortable with positioning the U.S. as the new Latin medieval Europe imposing order on an unruly Middle East as a “defensive” response to aggression. We saw this in Donald H. Rumsfeld’s PowerPoints on Iraq, Erik Prince’s Blackwater, and in the response to Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. Even if mistaken nostalgia for the Middle Ages is most prominent among the fringes of the right, it’s a feature of the mainstream right as well, and the response to the London attacks suggests it isn’t going anywhere soon.

Debating the meaning of the Crusades is debating what it means to be modern: If the conservatives are correct, the world has always been quasi-apocalyptic and won’t ever change; if the historians are correct, different epochs have markedly different characters, and we’re not doomed to repeat our historical mistakes forever. “Crusade” has always said, will always say, more about how we see the world than about the Middle Ages. It’s a modern word imposed on a medieval world, an attempt at a rainbow connection. And a rainbow, after all, dissipates into air when you change your perspective.


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For further reference:




Readings on the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther


Martin Luther before the Courts








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Martin Luther’s Burning Questions
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/08/martin-luthers-burning-questions/

by Ingrid D. Rowland
June 8, 2017

Reading Suggestions

Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation
an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 30, 2016–January 15, 2017
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Anne-Simone Rous, Katrin Herbst, Ralf Kluttig-Altmann, and others
Dresden: Sandstein, two volumes, 998 pp., $69.96

Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation
an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 7, 2016–January 22, 2017

Law and Grace: Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach, and the Promise of Salvation
an exhibition at the Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta, October 11, 2016–January 16, 2017

an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 20, 2016–March 26, 2017
Catalog of the exhibition by Jeffrey Chipps Smith and others
Prestel, 239 pp., $49.95

by Lyndal Roper
Random House, 540 pp., $40.00

by Andrew Pettegree
Penguin, 383 pp., $29.95; $18.00 (paper)

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Klassik Stiftung Weimar
'Martin Luther as Junker Jörg,' the name under which
Luther  went into hiding in 1521 | woodcut by
Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1521–1522

On All Hallow’s Eve of 1517, Martin Luther, Augustinian friar and professor of theology, posted a broadsheet on the faculty bulletin board of tiny, provincial Wittenberg University in the German state of Saxony (which happened to be the door of the church attached to the local lord’s castle). The poster was no Halloween prank; it proclaimed, according to academic custom, his willingness to debate a series of propositions in public. Although he also sent copies of the same broadsheet to important statesmen, churchmen, and academics outside Wittenberg, no one seems to have taken up his challenge to a formal discussion. His propositions were too explosive for that; in blunt, forceful language, they questioned the basic beliefs of the church to which, as a Hermit of Saint Augustine, he had vowed his obedience.

Luther would say that his life’s turning point came two years later, when he had a sudden revelation about the nature of Christian salvation. For his contemporaries, however, the posting of his ninety-five theses in 1517 set off the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation, and the Reformation in turn marked a fundamental stage in the forging of a collective German identity. To mark the event’s five hundredth anniversary, the Federal Republic of Germany has sponsored a series of Luther celebrations at home and abroad, which began in the fall of 2016 and continue throughout 2017. They include an ambitious series of Luther-themed exhibitions in the United States: major shows in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, with smaller versions of the Minneapolis extravaganza in New York and Atlanta, all providing a fresh, insightful view into Luther’s life and times and the vast, unpredictable forces his rebellion unleashed.

The exhibition catalogs—two impressive five-hundred-page volumes shared by Minneapolis, New York, and Atlanta, and a separate work for Los Angeles—cover a vast range of topics: Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Martin Luther’s latrine, Lutherans in North America, Luther in Communist East Germany, the unintended consequences of the Reformation. The intensity of their focus is relieved by clever, colorful charts and a bountiful complement of illustrations. It is impossible, given our own recent past, to ponder the Reformation without also pondering its darker legacy of religious warfare, anti-Semitism, and lingering mistrust between Catholics and Protestants, German East and German West; and these are issues the catalogs face head-on.

Yet what drove the friar and his contemporaries to their drastic actions were ideas of transcendent beauty, including the profound inner music behind the cadences of Luther’s oratory and the stirring hymns that set his spiritual armies on the march. To understand this complicated, superbly talented man, and to make the most of the Luther exhibitions, it helps to have a good biography on hand, and Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet provides expert and spirited guidance. So, in a more specialized way, does Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther, a fascinating study of Luther’s pioneering relationship with the printing press that is especially helpful for understanding these exhibitions dedicated in large measure to books and other mass-produced printed works.

The Protestant Reformation took hold where it did and when it did for a variety of reasons, beginning with the blazing personality of Martin Luther himself. Strictly speaking, he was not a monk, though he is often described as one: he was a preaching friar who belonged to the largest Catholic religious order of his day, the Hermits of Saint Augustine. Rather than spending their time, as monks did, in secluded prayer in a monastery, the Augustinians lived in cities and moved from place to place. They trained to communicate the Christian message in what for the time was a revolutionary new style: borrowing techniques from the orators of classical antiquity and from contemporary preachers who gave sermons in colloquial languages rather than Latin, they appealed openly to the emotions of their hearers.

Friar Martin focused his ire (and most of the ninety-five theses) on one particular practice of the institutional church: the sale of indulgences. These papal dispensations, confirmed by paper certificates, grew out of a traditional medieval conviction that prayer, repentance, good works, and pilgrimage could atone in some measure for sin. It was even possible to do penance for someone else, as Luther did during his stay in Rome, kneeling on the steps of the Holy Stairs at Saint John Lateran to earn an indulgence for his grandfather. Giving alms or endowing a church could also earn remission from sins, reducing the amount of time a person would need to spend after death in the uncomfortable realm of Purgatory, where, in late medieval Christian belief, human souls were gradually cleansed of their iniquities until they were pure enough to enter the Earthly Paradise, there to await final admission to Heaven on Judgment Day. By the late fifteenth century, however, remission from sins could simply be purchased from a papal agent, for oneself or for another person, whether alive or deceased.

The sale of indulgences became an industry only in Luther’s own lifetime and in his own lands, put into place by the “warrior Pope” Julius II and the Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger. After 1506, pope and banker directed the revenue from German indulgences toward the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in Rome. “Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation,” a monumental exhibition that took inspired advantage of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s spacious galleries, and “Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation,” a scaled-down version of the Minneapolis show tailored to the intimate spaces of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, displayed specially-made “indulgence chests,” iron-bound coffers with handy coin slots, the equivalent of immense, armor-plated piggy banks.

These heavy wooden boxes with their multiple locks demonstrate the extent to which the German states were exporting huge quantities of metal to Rome and receiving printed slips of paper in return, exchanging material wealth for the equivalent of checks that drew on the currency of heaven rather than earth. Jakob Fugger took a 3 percent cut—in coins, not release from Purgatory—on every shipment south. Is it any wonder that the man who finally pulled the plug on this improbable trade knew a thing or two himself about the value of metal?

In later life, in one of his famous dinner-table conversations, Martin Luther claimed to come from modest origins, and indeed his father, Hans Luder, ended his life in financial trouble. But in 1483, when Martin came into the world, the Luders were a prosperous family of copper smelters living in the foothills of the ore-rich Harz Mountains. Archaeological remains excavated from the family compound in Mansfeld, where Martin spent his childhood, tell a tale of affluence.

The exhibitions in Minneapolis and New York included fine glassware among the beer steins, as well as gold sequins and other ornaments from the Luder girls’ dresses, buried, perhaps, when plague struck the city in 1505 and killed two of the Luder boys. Dorothea Luder, Martin’s sister, had to sacrifice a monogrammed gold buckle along with her belt for fear of contagion. The family’s rubbish pit also yielded copper slag and an abundance of pig and goose bones, further signs of the household’s prosperity. Hand-rolled clay marbles may have been Martin’s own, along with bowling pins made of knucklebones with a metal weight sunk into one end.

To a remarkable extent, as these exhibitions reveal, Luther’s world, and Luther’s Reformation, revolved around metal. The silver, copper, lead, and iron mined from the Harz Mountains and smelted in small-scale factories like Hans Luder’s copper works took up only a corner of an international market in which Jakob Fugger was one of the most aggressive participants. Fugger may have been shipping coins by the cofferful to the pope in Rome, but metal was also flowing into his own treasury from his silver and copper mines in Tyrol and Bohemia.

Almost every aspect of these impressive exhibitions intersected with metal somewhere. Friar Martin, for instance, probably stuck his theses to the Castle Church door using glue or wax rather than expending precious metal to nail them. German expertise with metallurgy was so renowned in Renaissance Europe that Italian jewelers sought technical advice from their German colleagues.

At the same time, German artists absorbed lessons in style from Italians, so that Hans Reinhardt and Wenzel Jamnitzer became as internationally renowned for their gold- and silversmithing in the early sixteenth century as Albrecht Dürer was for his copperplate engraving, all three of them joining incomparable German craftsmanship to Italian-inspired flair. The metal typefaces that broadcast the arguments of Reformers and Roman traditionalists back and forth across Europe originated among German metalworkers, and so did the glittering weapons and guns that would soon be carrying out the butchery of new and vicious religious wars. The first treatise on metallurgy was written by an Italian, Vannoccio Biringuccio, but he gained his experience with lead and silver at the Fugger mines in Tyrol.

And metals, of course, meant money. Between 1508 and 1524, Fugger’s firm not only managed the business of indulgences for the German states, but also struck the coins produced by the papal mint in Rome, as Luther may well have learned (or known already) when he visited that city in the winter of 1510–1511. He certainly focused on money in his forty-fifth thesis:

Christians are to be taught that he who sees a needy man and passes him by, yet gives his money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God’s wrath.

And his forty-eighth:

Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting indulgences, needs and thus desires their devout prayer more than their money.

And his fiftieth:

Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather that the basilica of Saint Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.

On an epic scale in Minneapolis, an expansive scale in Los Angeles, and an intimate scale in New York (I was unable to see the exhibition in Atlanta), the aesthetic refinement and technical mastery of German metalwork stood out in all its dazzling virtuosity. Hans Reinhardt’s intricately layered, delicately textured medal depicting the Holy Trinity is probably the most complex example ever created of this popular Renaissance art form. Albrecht Dürer’s triumphant series of engravings from the first decade of the sixteenth century—The Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I, and Saint Jerome in His Study—use black lines on white paper to suggest every possible nuance of light and shadow, along with the dense fur of Saint Jerome’s contented lion, the loose, mangy skin on the ribs of Death’s skinny horse, sunbeams streaming through the glass panes of Saint Jerome’s window, and the ambiguous sunrise in the distance beyond a dark-complexioned Melancholy (Greek for “black bile”). Los Angeles displayed an opulent casket by the Jamnitzer workshop, an enormous piece of jewelry in itself: enameled, engraved, studded with saucy sphinxes and tiny lions, gleaming in silver, gold, and royal blue, with pull-out drawers.

German artists excelled in other media as well. Los Angeles displayed two wooden sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider of Würzburg: a tender Virgin Mary and a Saint Matthew whose sensitive hands make one wonder what the sculptor’s own must have looked like. (The story that Riemenschneider’s hands were broken by Lutheran iconoclasts is a nineteenth-century myth, one of many vicious rumors spun by both sides of the Reformation.) Priestly vestments of wool and damask (a mixture of wool and silk) hung in elegant folds in New York and especially Minneapolis, embroidered in wool, silk, and metallic wire of silver and gold. Minneapolis and Los Angeles displayed whole suits of armor, the wasp-waisted corrugated panoply of Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt-Köthen standing out among breastplates forged to accommodate multiple chins and beer bellies.

What drove Friar Martin to post his theses, however, was a spiritual insight, a realization so overwhelming that it prompted him to alter his name from Martin Luder to Martinus Eleutherius—“Martin the Free.”*

*Because “Luder,” the family name, could mean “loose woman,” the ninety-five theses already spell Friar Martin’s name as “Lutther.” When, after a few months, Martinus Eleutherius reverted to a more normal name, it was to our familiar “Luther.”

The Christian hope for eternal life, he had come to believe, was a divine gift that no human being, no matter how virtuous, could ever deserve—there was no penance for sin that could truly merit divine indulgence. Salvation, therefore, was not a reward, but an outright gift from God, bestowed out of the sheer abundance of his love for his creation.

For years Friar Martin had chafed at the idea of a judgmental God who lay in wait to punish sinners. But now a phrase that had always irked him, “the righteousness of God,” struck, as he would later say, “like a thunderbolt”:

It is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel…with which the merciful God justifies us by faith…. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me.

His thirty-seventh thesis asserted:

Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

He posted his theses, as the broadsheet declared, “Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it.”

Luther’s message swiftly found followers, especially in the German states: on the spiritual level with his doctrine of justification by faith, and on the practical level with his attack on the alliance between religion and capitalism that had turned remission of sins into a commercial enterprise. He survived the religious and political firestorm he ignited not only because of his courage and eloquence, phenomenal though they were, but also because the local sovereign, Elector Frederick III of Saxony, decided to side with his renegade friar rather than his bishop. Nicknamed “the Wise,” Frederick was as shrewd as he was pious. Over the years he had amassed a staggering number of saints’ relics, some 18,970 by 1520, which he displayed once a year in Wittenberg Castle, each one lovingly installed in an opulent, beautifully wrought metal reliquary (several of which were on view in Minneapolis).

Pilgrims flocked to see the collection and left their offerings of coins and valuables, ensuring that metal continued to flow into Wittenberg rather than Rome, and keeping Frederick free, unlike his bishop (and his nominal liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor), of colossal debts to Fugger. Frederick the Wise never entirely sided with Luther’s revolution (he remained Catholic), but neither did he oppose it. And at one crucial juncture in 1521, he saved Luther’s life by hiding him away in Wartburg Castle disguised as a bourgeois layman named “Junker Jörg.”

Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
Lucas Cranach the Younger: Double Portrait of Martin Luther
and Philip Melanchthon, sixteenth century

Luther’s bishop, Albert of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, was one of his first and most powerful detractors. Albert received one of the first copies of the ninety-five theses and reported on them to Pope Leo X. The archbishop had good reason to worry: he was responsible for the sale of indulgences in his metal-rich diocese, and he was hopelessly in debt to Jakob Fugger, who had financed his campaign for office. The pope, duly informed, summoned Friar Martin to Rome to answer for his actions, but it was soon clear that the renegade had no intention of playing into the pontiff’s hands.

Eventually an interview was arranged in Augsburg in 1518, in conjunction with the meeting of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the very German statesmen who faced the spreading religious rebellion among their citizens. From the papal point of view, Cardinal Tommaso de Vio da Gaeta (usually known as Cajetan, “the Gaetan”) must have seemed like the ideal man for the job: the former head of the Dominican order and one of the most influential prelates of his era, he was also a trained inquisitor under instructions to make Luther recant or to arrest him and drag him back to Rome.

The meeting between the friar and the cardinal took place in Fugger’s Augsburg house. Cajetan was a master of Scholastic reasoning, the elaborate medieval system of theology, thought, and rhetoric that had developed with the first universities—the very system that new universities like Wittenberg and orders like Luther’s Augustinians were dedicated to overthrowing for new kinds of inquiry and expression. Luther hated Scholasticism and its pedantry at least as passionately as he hated the mixing of religion and business, and few people have ever hated with Luther’s white-hot intensity. Gaunt, ailing, and urgently aware that he might be risking a death sentence, he stood his ground against the cardinal, who lectured him about a few of the theses and let him leave Fugger’s house untouched. The cardinal realized that it was too late for an arrest to solve the problem. Luther already represented a movement. He was not an isolated heretic who could be whisked away in secret.

If he had written little before, now Luther went into overdrive, proclaiming his theology in torrents of prose and poetry in both Latin and German, and spreading his ideas as widely as the printing press could reach. He forged two indispensable partnerships, one with his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, the professor of Greek at Wittenberg, and one with Elector Frederick’s court painter, Lucas Cranach. Melanchthon gave the burgeoning movement its intellectual rigor, and Cranach, together with Luther, turned tiny, remote Wittenberg into a center for publishing; his own workshop became the crucible of Lutheran art.

Cranach already managed a sizable enterprise from his house in the center of Wittenberg, producing portraits, altarpieces, allegories, and history paintings for private patrons as well as for Elector Frederick and his family. His state portraits show that Luther was supported throughout his life by a series of imposingly large men: Frederick the Wise, his brother and successor John, and John’s son John Frederick, whose wife, the slender, cat-eyed Sibylle of Cleves, captivated Cranach. One portrait displayed at the Morgan Library shows the veins beneath her porcelain skin; in another painting, of a hunting expedition that never happened, Sibylle, in her pearl-studded dress, shoots off a massive arquebus with the aplomb of a Renaissance Annie Oakley.

As the Reformation took hold, Cranach continued to work for Catholic patrons as well as Lutherans, but his efforts for Luther were inspired and revolutionary. Quickly the painter and the friar devised a standard format for their publications: quarto books (the size of a large modern paperback) with titles in crisp Gothic letters above a large woodcut image from the Cranach studio, tailored to the new Lutheran vision of heaven and earth. (One popular theme was the contrast between life under the old law and life under the rule of grace, where the old law is both Jewish and Catholic.) Even before Luther’s impassioned words could sink in for readers of his tracts, the black-on-white clarity of their visual presentation already cut as sharply as a sword.

At the same time, Cranach worked on the image of Luther himself. His first portraits of the Reformer show a thin, clean-shaven friar with hollow cheeks, an Augustinian tonsure, a sunburst behind his head, and a look of blazing concentration. As the years go on, he grows in bulk and authority, culminating in the deathbed portrait of a man finally at peace.

Satires, cartoons, and broadsheets followed closely on the stream of tracts and Luther’s translation of the Bible for the first time into German (illustrated by Cranach), with the Protestants almost always striking a clever blow one step ahead of their adversaries. There was nothing refined about Martin Luther’s sense of humor; if he called the world a sewer (cloaca) in Latin, in German he called it (and many of its phenomena) a pile of shit. Freed from his Augustinian vows (which had never included poverty), he continued to live in the same convent in a bachelor’s chaos until 1525, when he married the runaway nun Katharina von Bora.

Luther soon discovered the range of his wife’s talents: she cleaned up the sprawling house, brewed excellent beer, set up a pig farm and a hospital, entertained a host of students at dinner, bore him six children, and cared for four orphan children besides. Archaeological excavations of the Luther household reveal glassware from Venice, broken beer steins, and an abundance of pig bones. For his part, Cranach developed an image of Martin and Katharina as the ideal Christian couple through a new series of portraits, small enough for faithful Lutherans to keep at home, complemented by huge, less expensive, paper images of Luther and Melanchthon that could be posted on walls, presenting both the portly Reformer and the weedy professor as Titans.

Roper’s biography and the exhibition catalogs squarely confront the legacy of Luther’s searing hatred, of Jews especially, but also of papists, Calvinists, and anyone else who failed to see the truth as he did. But what these impressive exhibitions show most of all is an inspired man with an earnest mission in a complex world of money and alchemy, sublime art and music, and burning questions about how faith should fit into a society that had burst its immemorial boundaries.


Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Catherine Keller - Parenting & the Uncontrolling God


Catherine Keller on the Uncontrolling God
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/catherine-keller-uncontrolling-god

Guest Post by Catherine Keller
November 15th, 2016

A friend describes a process she learned as a mother: “I never did try to control my kids, there were too many of them to do that. I had three children in two years, and it became very clear early on (such as day one), that control was not possible. Instead of getting in their way and trying to run their play, I had to arrive at some other mode of being with them as they are.”

So she invited friends over for them to play with, and chaos mounted. But this is what she observed: “If I were willing and able to let the four or five very young children jostle, master round, explore for about 45 minutes-with the ground rules of not hurting each other or the home-if I just let them go through whatever procedures they needed to go through, they would come up with something that they loved to do together. They would arrive at some game, project, make-believe… That would keep them positively, joyfully engaged for up to three hours. All of them.”

This is a humble parable of creation from chaos. It illustrates uncontrolling love.

Parents and all who relate in love have to “let be.” So do good teachers, pastors, and leaders. As Elohim italicized “Let be” the light? John McQuarrie defines “letting be” as something much more positive than just leaving alone: “as enabling to be, empowering to be, or bringing into being.” Thus our experience of “letting be” may serve as an analogy of “the ultimate letting-be.”

Love does not control. It opens up the space of becoming. The space is not without protective boundaries, not without rules.

The healthy parent is not merely permissive, but constantly teaching ideals of fairness, cooperation, and creative development. This space comprises neither rampant disorder nor imposed order. It opens at the edge of chaos, without plunging into the abyss. It supports the free play of relations — and satisfies desires of both parent and children. This uncontrolling care empowers the children to construct their own “complex self-organizing system.” At least temporarily!

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If I may push our parable a bit further, the desired into play is not about a private “me and my God” relation but I love open and out into a fuller sociality. “Two or more gathered in my name.” In the communality of genesis things are risky, noisy, messy. But fresh order continues to emerge from the chaos. And while its equilibria do not last forever — “love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8).

Does God just choose not to interfere with our freedom? The so-called free-will defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence tries that middle road: God permits, but does not cause evil, and so leaves us our freedom. This is close to the chilly deism Calvin railed against.

But usually those who hold this reasonable view also hold out for occasional special or miraculous interventions on God’s part. But then: Why didn’t God manipulate the vote just a bit so that Hitler would lose the election? Or, for that matter, heal my friend’s little sister’s leukemia? Or excise that bad gene in the first place? Or all bad genes?

The free-will defense only works if held consistently. But that is hard to do. To say God “permits” evil for the sake of our freedom implies that God could step in at any time, and as far as history demonstrates, just chooses not to.

The alternative to omnipotence lies in the risky interactivity of relationship. It does not toss the creatures into a deistic void, chilled but autonomous. It continues to call them forth, to inviteThe power of God, if it is response-able power, empowers the others – to respond. In their freedom.

In what sense then is the divine powerful? It can perhaps even be called all-powerful, if that language for the biblical God seems indispensable to some, in this sense: God has “all the power” that a good God, a God who fosters and delights in the goodness of the creation, could have or want to have.

But the point is that this is not the unilateral power to command things to happen out of nothing and then to control them under threat of nothingness. It is another kind of power all together, a qualitatively different power — a power that seems weak when dominance is the ideal.

The metaphor of “power perfected in weakness” tried to make comprehensible the difficult alternative to coercive force: the contagious influence that flows from a radically vulnerable strength. Two thousand years later, we have made limited collective progress in its realization. Perhaps experiments in social democracy, in which persuasion is favored over coercion, and care valued as a supreme public strength, hint at the alternative. Perhaps experiments in gender equality and nonviolent parenting are also advancing, here and there, our metaphoric reservoir.

The One who calls forth good even from the ashes of evil, a good that requires—indeed commands—but cannot coerce our cooperation. A power that makes possible our response.

---

From On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process pp. 88-90 copyright © 2007 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission. For a more complete treatment of the subject consider purchase of the book, which may be found at the following link: http://fortresspress.com/product/mystery-discerning-divinity-process

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at The Theological School of Drew University. She’s the author or editor of more than a dozen books, her latest being Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.


Saturday, June 3, 2017

Thomas Jay Oord - God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly




Thomas Jay Oord - God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly
May 9, 2019


IanRamseyCentre
Wed 1 May 2019, 5:00pm – 6:15pm

God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly
Thomas Jay Oord

Blackfriars Main Aula, Oxford
Nearly everyone wonders why a good and powerful God doesn't prevent evil. But the usual answers are unsatisfactory. In his best-selling book, God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils, Thomas Jay Oord offers an answer to solve the problem of evil. This solution has five aspects, including a rethinking of God's relation to humans, other creatures, and all creation. Drawing from science, personal experiences, scripture, theology, and more, Oord lays out the heart of his solution in this lecture.

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. Oord is a best-selling and award-winning author, having written or edited more than twenty-five books. A twelve-time Faculty Award winning professor, Oord teaches at institutions around the globe. A gifted speaker, Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and the implications of freedom and relationships for transformation.





Friday, June 2, 2017

Matthew Burdette - Reflections on Theological Training


article link

The presumption that theological education is for some practical end is perhaps
also related to widespread biblical illiteracy and poor catechesis. It is difficult to
prioritize teaching the Christian faith when the implicit assumption is that its
content is inconsequential. - mb

Matthew Burdette
May 15, 2017

This academic year, in preparation for ordained ministry, I have been studying at General Theological Seminary. As I anticipate ordination, I have been reflecting on my experience of formal theological education over the last thirteen years, and thinking what it will come to mean in ministry.

The purpose of theological education is not obvious. While some academic institutions and most churchly ones continue to offer ostensibly theological education, many of the Church’s members and clergy nevertheless do not acknowledge that theology has much of a purpose. A few days ago, a priest whom I had just met congratulated me for studying at GTS, which, she alleged, thankfully prepares “worker priests” rather than “scholar priests.”

In the 20th century especially, theologians were perhaps tacitly acknowledging that theology was soon to be haunted by the specter of obsolescence when so many of them dedicated so much attention to theology’s starting point and method, often spelled out in lengthy prolegomena. The only real consensus that emerged was that nothing is pre- or non- theological (including the opinion that theology is a pointless academic exercise). No matter where you start, or where you claim theology is going, or what theology is for, you are already making a theological choice — and you could reasonably have chosen otherwise. But particularly, Christian theology is not [in] such an infinite range of choices, and to choose otherwise than what the Christian faith warrants is to transgress the boundaries of what the Church is about — to commit heresy (hairesis, “choice”).

What interests me is the contested purpose of theology and theological education, in juxtaposition with the concept of heresy. The explicit language of heresy and orthodoxy need not be deployed in debates about theological education for the concepts to be fully operative. For a few decades, theological education has increasingly moved towards the “practical” and the ethical, and away from the doctrinal and the abstract. What is implicitly said is that what matters is that ministers can offer pastoral care and lead communities in improving society. In this landscape, “theological theology” — to use John Webster’s helpful and polemical slogan — is, by its very nature, outside the bounds of this orthodoxy.

A useful illustration of this dynamic is the centrality given to pastoral care, the current conception of which is a 20th-century innovation. Prior to this time, pastoral ministry was generally conceived of in moral and sacramental terms, rather than in therapeutic (and therefore medical) terms, which is currently dominant. It has become a widespread requirement for ministers of different faiths to undergo the training of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, usually in the context of hospital chaplaincy. One of the stretching and beneficial characteristics of CPE is that ministers work with ministers of other faiths, as well as offer pastoral care to people of other faiths. Beneficial as interfaith learning is, a question does loom over the whole process: If I can offer the same pastoral care to a patient as the imam, and if I think that pastoral care is at the center of ministry, then what is the significance of those doctrinal matters that separate me from the imam?

The question is a serious one, and my own suspicion is that there is a correlation between the pervasive focus on this model of pastoral care and the implicit Unitarianism espoused by many clergy in mainline Protestantism. The same question emerges from the focus on social justice. When a parish’s or cleric’s social vision is indistinguishable from a party platform, and when the Church’s message is said to find its telos in that social vision, one must wonder why anyone should bother with the religious baggage. Again and more pointedly: When pastoral care or social action are assumed to be the goal of theological education, then the particular matters of doctrine that are the content of the Christian faith become irrelevant and distracting; focusing on them deters from what theology or ministry is allegedly about.

I do not intend to say that pastoral care or ecclesial social action do not matter. Of course they do. The question is how they matter. When such things become the very goals of ministry, such that theology is in the service of these goals, what we face is, by the actual norms set out in the Church’s tradition, operant — if not espoused — heresy. In other words, if every Church practice conveys a certain implicit or operant theology, then surely certain modes of practice imply a heretical theology. Theology as a means to some other practical end necessarily puts the Creator in the service of creatures, and treats creation as a self-existing and self-justifying project, rather than, with Christian orthodoxy, conveying the creation’s obligation to utter dependence on God. Nor is this a theologically conservative observation. For a somewhat random example, Paul Tillich’s work represents exemplary liberal theology, committedly interested in matters of justice; yet even for the politically-radical Tillich, politics was not of ultimate concern, because the polis is not that which concerns us ultimately. (Tillich might be accused of other heresies, of course.)

The presumption that theological education is for some practical end is perhaps also related to widespread biblical illiteracy and poor catechesis. It is difficult to prioritize teaching the Christian faith when the implicit assumption is that its content is inconsequential.

As I anticipate life in ministry, I consider these things in the awareness that my theological education, which was largely philosophical and doctrinal, sets me up in some ways as a “heretic” of the ecclesial culture in which I will work. In my limited experience serving in parishes, I have found that the Church’s members desperately crave to learn the faith, even when it is abstract and not obviously applicable to their lives. The Christian faith claims to introduce them to the true God, their Creator and their End. The knowledge of him is its own end, which cannot be wielded for some other purpose.

Theological educators and those who administrate theological education ought to deal seriously and explicitly with this dissonance between “theological theology” and the culture of ministry, with its implicit theological assumptions. Either the theology - or the culture - ought to be identified with orthodoxy, the other as heresy.

- mb

Recommended Book Reads




What does an open, process-driven theology mean? Especially in the expression of a God who is timeless when He may be more earth-bound than we lend credence too? And if so, where then can this "earthy" God be found if not everywhere abounding? Was He intimately involved with the creation of mankind? And if so, how is it then when the science of evolution persuades us otherwise? Or is God the God of evolution who put its processes into place and "pronounced it good"?

Must a moribund Christianity always be moribund or can we look at God and the bible through the lens of the 21st Century to discover what we thought we knew may not be fully true, or not true at all? And if so, whose fault does it lie with? God or His many interpreters "looking through a glass darkly" dispelling fictions with facts, half-truths with cultural biases, or with a studied ignorance that does not enlighten?

If the theology of God has died in this past century than the fault lies with the guardians of its faith refusing to allow it to react and counter-react to postmodern discussion. The apostles of apology who give a defense of their faith do to that faith a great disservice when refusing to listen to the contemporary theologies providing more relevant fundamental orthodoxies unperceived by the Ancients, the Greeks, Medievals, and Modern day saints.

Theology must challenge as much as console, stand up to the vagaries of human sentiment and politics, and redirect our attention to the very God who is our life, breath, redeemer, and guide. And so we must read challenging theologies because they must challenge in order to break down old line thinking that is no longer orthodox or helpful.

To be missional is to be relevant. And to be relevant is to be willing to be challenged in past cherished beliefs and faiths. Jesus' theology did just this and if we are to be prophets of God than we must learn how to speak the old truths with the new, the new turths with the old, in ways that are beneficial, liberating, and gracious.

R.E. Slater
June 2, 2017

* * * * * * * * * * *


The End of the Timeless God

Amazon Link
The claim that God is timeless has been the majority view throughout church history. However, it is not obvious that divine timelessness is compatible with fundamental Christian doctrines such as creation and incarnation. Theologians have long been aware of the conflict between divine timelessness and Christian doctrine, and various solutions to these conflicts have been developed. In contemporary thought, it is widely agreed that new theories on the nature of time can further help solve these conflicts. Do these solutions actually solve the conflict? Can the Christian God be timeless? The End of the Timeless God sets forth a thorough investigation into the Christian understanding of God and the God-world relationship. It argues that the Christian God cannot be timeless









Stars Beneath Us

Amazon Link
In ways both confident and gentle, Stars Beneath Us brilliantly shows God's presence in the ever-evolving cosmos. Relying on his upbringing as a Baptist, his doctoral work in experimental nuclear physics and gamma-ray astronomy, and his ordination to the gospel ministry in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Paul Wallace weaves a book unlike any other in faith and science literature. Instead of engaging the debates of natural theology or proofs for the existence of God, this is a call to courage for those who fear a true encounter with the cosmos will distance them from God.

With a winsome mix of compelling personal narrative and insightful biblical analysis, the author calls into perspective the scale of the cosmos and our place within it. Relying on a theology of openness to the world, Stars Beneath Us will inspire readers to engage with the natural world in new ways and find God, as it turns out, everywhere.











The End of Adam and Eve

Amazon Link
Today’s science is changing the way we see ourselves. We know now that Neandertals were not primitive brutes but that they interbred with our ancestors. We also know that interbreeding between ancient human populations played a key role in shaping humanity today.

The End of Adam and Eve grows out of the conviction that good theology takes the latest science seriously. The most recent findings, like interbreeding with Neandertals and the re-dating of the first tools and cave art, are brought together here in a strongly Christian theological vision of humanity created through evolution for unity and completion in Jesus Christ.

This book summarizes the science but also builds upon it to offer an updated Christian theological interpretation of human beings as created in the image of God and made into one new humanity in Christ. A brief excerpt from the final chapter…

"As a flowing stream is separated by an island and then rejoins, human communities separated, changed, and then came back together genetically. To ask which group is human is to ask which branch is the stream." Diverging, we became many things. We became Denisovans, Neandertals, and many other unknown ancestral groups. By being them, we became us. Converging, we are still on our way to becoming one thing, one unified global human community. For Christians, our hope for one unified global human community has a concrete form. It has a name. It is Jesus Christ. Faced by all the racism and xenophobia that still work their violence and evil in our world, Christians defiantly and faithfully proclaim that Christ makes us all one."

Science and Christianity

Amazon Link
Science and Christianity is an accessible, engaging introduction to topics at the intersection of science and Christian theology:
  • A philosophically orientated treatment that introduces the relationship of science to Christianity and explores to what extent the findings of science affect traditional Christian theology.
  • Addresses important theological topics in light of contemporary science, including divine action, the problem of natural evil, and eschatology.
  • Historically oriented chapters and chapters covering methodological principles for both science and theology provide the reader with a strong foundational understanding of the issues
  • Includes feature boxes highlighting quotations, biographies of major scientists and theologians, key terms, and other helpful information
  • Issues are presented as fairly and objectively as possible, with strengths and weaknesses of particular interpretations fully. discussed