The Church Which Restores - Spiritual Reformation in Action

In the category of "I hadn't thought of that before" has been a recent Reformation class I've been taking on the lives of the four "Major Reformers" of old Europe: Martin Luther (Germany), Huldrych Zwingli (Bern, Switzerland), and John Calvin (refugee from France fled to Geneva, Switzerland). Up next, John Knox, after which we will study some of the "Minor Reformers" in the Fall of 2018 next year. Significantly, under these major figures was born the Protestant Reformation of 500 years ago from the Catholic Church. Not ironically, during the intervening 500 years of "Reform," Protestantism has spawned multitudes of church divisions, schisms and sectarian splinter groups, marking it with its formative history of "dissent" within its own ranks for one reason or another. But in historical context, the Church of the reformer's day was more a state-church than a local body of believers; one whose spiritual practises were deeply intertwined with state politics making each corruptible for their own reasons as each bound community life and business into their coffers of economic gain and power. In reaction, the spiritual reforms occurring 500 years ago were as much about political agitation as they were about unworthy spiritual teachings and practises.

Conversely, 500 years later, it seems both Catholics and Protestants have more in common with one another than apart as each religious branch leads the way back into their communities (or parishes) of Christian service to the poor, hungry, homeless, and overlooked. But still, the political dagger of Damocles hangs thinly in the air above the church's head as an ever-ready earthly temptation made the more difficult in releasing when suckling at the tits of political office and its representatives. The harsh reality is that the church continually struggles with the strong temptation to recreate Christianity into irreligious forms of statism based upon particular beliefs and practises which has risen yet again under the auspices of a body of church doctrines collectively known as conservative evangelicalism diversely spread across both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Is it any wonder then we see the church splintering once again under major spiritual reforms of faith affiliations (or "non-faith affiliations," as example, consider the spiritual refugees of the "nones and dones" having left the church) as each faith, or non-faith group, protests their agitations across America and the World against self-serving nationalistic campaigns of propaganda, economic rape, and loss of personal liberties? Each emphasizing some overlooked, or under-appreciated, aspect of worship and service, but mostly in "protest" to the actions of the "politically-ensnared" evangelical church seeking to incorporate non-Christian state policies and actions across non-evangelical communities resisting and speaking out against them. Communities of protest-and-resistance wishing to safeguard a political constitution and federacy of democracy built upon life, liberty and freedom, rather than be robbed of their heritage in the bright daylight of state and corporate thievery!

In the much needed world of revival it usually comes down to the awful truth that oppression in any form - be it spiritual, political, or economic - is unwanted. Its tyranny demands its overthrow. Its self-enrichment demands its impoverishment. Once there were the Martin Luther's of the German/Catholic reformation; more recently, the Martin Luther Kings of Civil Rights; and now, there awaits the voices of today's church to arise and break off the chains which would bind its heart and people. Let us not be naive... each generation is accountable for its own spiritual reforms against the disfigurements of corruptible churches preaching another gospel not representative of the gospel of Christ. And unless this is done we more willingly seem to choose our own oppressions not realizing the harm it is creating more broadly across a constitutionally-freed, but politically-ensnared, federal democracy. In the end, we remember the Reformation for all the good it can potentially do but weigh it in its balances for all the harm it can produce when reforming for the wrong reasons back to its own ends.

R.E. Slater

November 2, 2017

*As a side note, I've included the article below not as a criticism to postmodernism's important rigors placed upon modernism; nor for a capitulation to more fundamental bible teachings; but to warn that for every good intention there may arise a poorer result than intended. If secularization is a bad thing than its converse arises in a new awareness of God in all things rather than in none, as is held here by myself and the author. But the result of secularization is certainly from the foundation stones of modernism which has stripped us of God  and left any yearning for the spiritual abandoned unless we rethink our academics, philosophies, and intentions, which, as you know, this website here intends to re-balance with its sense-and-sensibilities approach to both the secular and divine. - res

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Author: Brad S. Gregory
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012 574 pages
ISBN: 978-0-674-04563-7

The Unintended Reformation:

How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

 http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/book_20120820_1.htm

Reviewed by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

August 20, 2012

Time magazine’s ‘Is God Dead?’ issue of 8 April 1966 shocked me. It was not the message – any undergraduate could discuss Nietzsche’s madman’s proclamation that we had killed God – but the medium. Time articulated the views of the educated middle-class, read by the man on the Clapham omnibus and by the woman in the pew. That they would even consider the question, especially, if I may place the issue within Roman Catholicism, during Vatican II exhilaration, was indeed noteworthy.

During the subsequent forty years, Christendom morphed into post-Christian (Western) Europe. Politicians denied any connection between Christianity and the new millennium. Signs on London buses announced ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ as if theism were life’s sole irritant. The Oxford philosopher, Richard Dawkins, a major backer of the Atheist Bus Campaign, characterised theists as delusional and dismissed the God hypothesis in his bestseller, The God Delusion (2006). The late journalist Christopher Hitchens asserted, as expressed in the subtitle of the American edition of his attack, God is not Great (2007) that ‘religion poisons everything.’ Cambridge physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking dismissed God, or at least his God-of-the-gaps, as unnecessary in A Brief History of Time (1988). There have of course been counter-arguments, for example Roman Catholic theologian John F. Haught’s reply to the new atheists in God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, [Sam] Harris and Hitchens (2008), but overall God has taken a beating. Reason apparently has finally completed the promise first displayed during the Enlightenment and dispelled the fading shadows of medieval faith. Some indeed now wonder whether any questions will remain if the ‘God particle’ has in fact been discovered. In bookstores, serious religious and theological works are currently stored cheek-by-jowl with books on astrology, tarot cards, New Age and neo-paganism. In today’s multicultural cafeterias, one may mix and match religious beliefs and moral principles to conform to one’s palate. The culture of ‘whatever’ has reduced claims to objective truth to subjective comfort. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, commenting on recent financial scandals and the prominence of a Gordon Gecko, ‘greed is good’ mentality, notes: ‘We are reaching the endgame of a failed experiment: society’s attempt to live without a shared moral code. The 1960s applied this to private life. The 1980s applied it to the market’.[1] But how can we regain a common code of ethics, especially in a society that has defined diversity as its fundamental guiding principle? ‘How did we get here from there?’ if I may paraphrase a Stephen Sondheim song from Merrily We Roll Along. The book under review provides an answer.

Brad S. Gregory completed his doctorate in history at Princeton University in 1996. Currently he is the Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame. His doctoral thesis served as the basis for Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), a justly praised, comparative study of Protestant and Catholic martyrs with a distinct thesis. Repudiating contemporary, secular, ‘reductionist’ analyses of martyrdom, Gregory argued cogently for the re-introduction of religion:

‘The act of martyrdom makes no sense whatsoever unless we take religion seriously, on the terms of people who were willing to die for their convictions. When we do, the intelligibility of martyrdom hits us like a hammer’ (p. 350).

Subsequently Gregory was more concerned with secularisation and its effect on the study of religion than martyrs and martyrologies. Shorter lectures and articles[2] explore the mentality behind the deplored reductionist approach to religious phenomena; this monograph sets the origins of this mentality in the Reformation itself, the religious phenomenon par excellence later vitiated by social, economic, cultural and gender historians.

Gregory cites William Faulkner’s insight that the past is never really past but continues to be alive. The past in this case is the Reformation: the ‘ideological and institutional shifts that occurred five or more centuries ago remain substantively necessary to an explanation of why the Western world today is as it is’ (p. 7). Beginning with the phenomenological observation of the modern Western spectrum of contradictory truth claims, the author seeks their origin. Six subsequent chapters focus on specific subjects:

• exclusion of God from the natural world;
• loss of objective truth;
• privatisation of religion;
• subjectification of morality;
• the ascendancy of consumerism; and,
• the departmentalisation of knowledge.

Each chapter traces trajectories from the Reformation Ursprung to the contemporary world and in so doing conducts the reader on a crash course on a history of philosophy, of theology, of economic theory, etc., each rooted in the author’s firm grasp and appreciation of Reformation history.

The Six Solas

Gregory summarises the position of the above-cited ‘Neo-Atheists’ thus: ‘the findings of science either prescribe atheism as a matter of intellectual integrity or requite a schizophrenic separation of scientific findings from religious faith’ (p. 29). Faith then is about ‘ineffable feelings’ (p. 65). The multiplicity of religious options demonstrates religion’s subjective character. One generally practises (or lapses from) the religion in which one was born and raised, but does that commitment mean that one’s acceptance of the truth claims of that religion to life’s serious questions suggests the invalidity of rival truth claims? Certainly it should. The fundamental Protestant principle sola Scriptura demanded that Scripture alone be the criterion in the formulation of true answers to the ‘Life Questions.’ Ironically the principle, intended to galvanize Christians around their book, resulted in the proliferation of Protestant confessions as they disagreed over the interpretation of Scripture. Appeals to private revelation and reason failed to halt the centrifugal motion. The result:

‘in principle truth is whatever is true to you, values are whatever you value, priorities whatever you prioritize, and what you should live for is whatever you decide you should live for. In short: whatever’ (p. 77).

Religious hostilities have, for the most part, ceased in the Western world. The destruction and death during the different religious wars that followed the breakdown of Christendom ended with a general, at times reluctant, acceptance of toleration and religious liberty. But there was a price for the separation of Church and State, the transition from the defender of the faith to defender of the faiths: religion’s gradual separation from other aspects of society. Gregory comments on the unintended current state of the United States: ‘freedom of religion protected society from religion and so has secularized society and religion’ [italics Gregory’s]. Protected by appeals to individual conscience with legal guarantees of religious freedom, Americans can believe whatever they wish as long as they obey the law. The age of entitlement was born.

Similarly, moral values have devolved into subjective, personal preferences. As with religious beliefs, one may hold whatever moral values one feels good about as long as one observes the law. Inevitably Western civilisation embarked on a path that resulted in the de facto identification of morality and law. Roman Catholic insistence that morality be grounded in natural law and/or metaphysical anthropology results in frequent clashes with contemporary culture. Gregory blames the ongoing disputes between Catholics and mainline (magisterial) Protestants and the consequent religious wars for the eventual distinction between the public and private spheres. Laws defined public behaviour but left unregulated private behaviour. But here too, as with religion, we are left with a question regarding the definer of the public and the private. Who decides what is God’s and what is Caesar’s? If each prepared a reply, how they would differ!

With the secularisation of society and especially the subjectification of ‘Life Questions,’ knowledge as pursued at research universities became more specialised and barren – scientific in a negative sense. One is reminded here of Chief Rabbi Sacks’s comment: ‘Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean’.[3] More damning is Gregory’s contention (as witnessed by the authors mentioned in the second paragraph of this review) that there is a general derision of ‘any firmly held religious belief’ (p. 356) in academia. The secular mission of (principally American) universities demands that they ‘instill enough skepticism to divest students of any substantive truth claims – especially religious ones – that could disrupt the demands of the most important social virtue, namely open-ended toleration’ (p. 359). Protestant reformers opened Pandora’s Box in their attempt to strengthen and deepen Christian life and doctrine. Instead they launched the trajectory that produced the secular ‘Kingdom of Whatever’: the unintended reformation.

Many readers will note that some ‘World We Have Lost’ sentiments seem to lurk behind Gregory’s arguments, but the author argues against mere nostalgia. For him the post-modern world is failing due to its failure to provide sufficient answers to the Life Questions. Said questions remain essential and must be re-addressed. Contemporary society speaks of rights, but can contemporary science discover them in the material substance scrutinised by the finest microscopes? Rights take for granted a natural law, a philosophical anthropology, a creature created in the image and likeness of God: the academy must be unsecularised.

The Unintended Reformation demands much from the reader. Through circa 400 pages of text and 150 more of endnotes, the author leads us through a maze of critical positions. Unfortunately the publisher’s decision to publish endnotes instead of footnotes and to omit a bibliography hinders our progress as we seek the sources of information. The author writes with passion, but not always with clarity. Occasionally the prose runs away from him as sentences and paragraphs seem endless. But is Gregory’s argument convincing? A glance at the many reviews posted on amazon.com reveals the book’s impact. The majority are favourable; some suggest that the Ursprung is a moveable point and could just as easily be placed in the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment. Perhaps. Some commentators claim they have read the book two or three times. If you are worried about the current state of society and interested in understanding it, I recommend you read it at least once perhaps in the context of a course or discussion group, so the issues raised can be pondered and debated.

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The reviewer, Thomas M. McCoog SJ is the Archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus.

[1] The Times, 7 July 2012, p. 23

[2] e.g. ‘The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,’ History and Theory, 45(2006), pp. 132-49; ‘No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,’ History and Theory, 47 (2008), pp. 495-519; ‘Can We ‘See Things Their Way’? Should We Try?,’ in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, eds. Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 24-45

[3] http://www.chiefrabbi.org/2012/01/12/the-limits-of-secularism-published-in-standpoint-magazine/

Can a Contemporary Reformation Re-Awaken the Church?

Lately I've been listening to the life stories of the "Major Reformers" Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and John Knox. Though many, many other voices could be added to this list of reformers such as John Wycliffe, Theodore Beza, Martin Bucer, or Thomas More (see the Wikipedia link provided at end of this article), it is a testament to those hardy Reformers of yesteryear who sought to speak the will of God for the church of their time during what would later become known as a Reformational era of spiritual crisis.

An era before there was any Protestant church or denomination knowing only one Church Universal - commonly thought of as the "Church Catholic" - which spoke for God as His singularly appointed magistrates of spiritual administration since the days of the Apostles of the Early Church. By this time 1600 years of church history had come-and-gone revealing the church's priestly commissions to be spiritually wayward and corruptible requiring deep reform away from the practises of priestly indulgences and misguided Christian teachings. Teachings which withheld God's people from the hallowed halls of His love and grace, mercy and forgiveness, as readily seen in the spiritual practises of Christian worship becoming more form than function, more works-righteousness than true faith.

At the time, the seat of church government was under the papacy of Rome having tightly integrated itself into each regional government calling itself Christian as well as into each community parish overruled by a local bishop. This then lead to a regional system of church governance overruled by a series of church Archbishops who reported directly to the Vatican and its board of Cardinals otherwise considered the Church's protectors of the faith and fatherly regents of commission.

Into this churchly dispensation came the priests of the Catholic Church who were trained and taught in the holy halls of their commissions greatly learned and greatly read in the Bible of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Some of whom began to notice that what was being judged by God through his prophets in the OT, and later by Christ Himself and His Holy Apostles in the NT, were similarly being practiced in the Church itself during the years of their calling. To wit, one-by-one, these Spirit-burdened priests began to agitate in their ranks calling for a purifying fire of deep reform.

One such priest was Martin Luther having stepped forth on the Eve of All Saints Day (still observed by many churches in deference to the "Devil's Eve" of Halloween) by announcing his willingness to debate any priest, bishop, archbishop, or cardinal over a list of erroneous teachings of the church at any given date or time. Those teachings he considered to be most egregious were later known as Luther's "95 Theses" which he had nailed to the doors of the local parish church as would any regular communication be announced of similar manner in that day to be read by the community at large. Hence, Luther's proposal was more or less a public notice to all who felt deeply as he did about the many spiritual wrongs he was noticing within the Church's ministries.

As I have said, I have been attending a very short introductory class through Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) over a four week period to learn of the lives and stories of the Reformation's four Major Reformers who were central figures to the schism breaking across the Catholic Church. In the Fall of 2018 would be another class to discuss the Minor Reformers of the Reformation era, all of whom would have a contributive influence to the reformation of the Church of God.

Accordingly, these early Reformational breakaway church groups became known as "Protest-Groups, " or, "Protest-ants," willing to leave their parish to re-align their faith and beliefs into a new kind of churchly dynamic. One they felt was more biblical, more ordained of God, more worthy of Christ's calling and Passion. One of the first of these groups to be born from this growing schism were the "Lutherans" of Germany readily following the strong voice of young monk named Luther no longer content to do "business as usual" under the rule of the Papacy.

For myself, knowing very little of the reformers spawning this post-Renaissance movement, I quickly realized it led the Church into new ways of adaptive thinking as it responded to the impact of a new cultural renaissance occurring in the fields of the arts and sciences. A renaissance which had launched a hundred years earlier and was beginning to grow at a rapid rate of change across poly-lingual societies soon leading into a major historic era of European Enlightenment and early Modernity. 

And although the Reformation was strictly a religious undertaking within the Church itself it was also laying the important groundwork for revisualizing God and the Christian faith in new and significant ways which would be later necessary to its own religious life and culture. However, when it did not, we then see an era of Victorian despair occurring across religious societies unable to grasp the depth and meaning of human industry and discovery (cf. Victorian art, poetry, literature). And by failing to envision God in new ways also failed to lead society in its responsibilities of human and ecological care as older religious systems fought resistance to necessary spiritual reforms leading to a kind of spiritual destruction and death. It also led me to realize once again the importance of contemporary Christians today who similarly labor around the world impassioned by the Spirit of God to the tasks of post-modernal contemporary enlightenment-and-reformation which are occurring 500 years later after the European Reformations.

It is here, in the 21st Century, I and others are finding it importantly significant that the church again revise its orthodoxies to positively participate in a post-industrial, post-modern reawakening of global ecological awareness, technological revolution, and scientific discovery, so that the Christian faith might live again in important ways it cannot live under old line thinking, study, worship, and service. Indeed, if it does not then Christianity will consequentially be relegated to the sidelines of mysticism, mythology, and superstition, even as we see occurring now with the growing gulf between Christian fellowships, associations, and sects, as they double down into their closed systems of religious faith and folk religion.

Rather than allow this, the Lord has tasked his prophets and prophetesses, priests and priestesses, with illuminating how the church might participate with the contemporary world in a sociological relevance that might grant significant revelation to those seeking truth and enlightenment in the multiple pagan endeavors of naturalism, cultism, occultism, and atheism, to mention a few. If the church does not then we leave an important Christ-filled mission bereft to the world around us to redact and refill in spiritualizing invigorations, forms and functions, less than Christian, but most certainly spiritual, as attested to in the four areas just mentioned.

I find then that re-integrating the Christian faith within a postmodern framework must also confront the growing post-truth despair found in churches and societal turmoil as an important witness spanning the gulf between the Christian faith and a growing number of unChristian mysticisms; unChristian reflections searching for a kind of spiritual enlightenment; or, unChristian hopes which lead away from a redemptive meaningfulness to life, ministry, work, and social behavior.

This then is the basic task set upon the hearts and passions of today's global prophets and priests of the Church called to its renewing Reformation. It is the deep need for another Christian  Re-Awakening spawning an Orthodox Reformation both Protestant and Catholic, religious and liturgical, missionary and service-oriented, into all the areas of Christian endeavor, academic teaching, worship, and understanding. Through the years Relevancy22 has identified a few of these Christian movements and leaders as attested to in its roll call of  topics, blogger links, and study resources.

Even so, God is breathing His revelations across the world in lands far away and alien to Western civilizaiton, into the lands of Asia, India, Africa, and South America. It is a Wind testifying to the need of humanity to reorder its chaotic turmoil back to the very thrones of God that it might have a witness to a world leaving the church behind to its superstitions and mythologies unless it regains an adapting theology which is willing to grow up and mature to testify of the God we love and adore in a post-modern world.

Having begun in the 1990s, there is developing a new hope for the Church being attested to in a steady stream of contemporary witnesses to the Christian faith of Spirit-filled men and women having grown and being knit together as one community advocating a new reflection of the Christian faith that may allow its much needed post-Reformation to grow and take shape into ten thousand reflections of the Divine Light of the Son of God and His redemption brought into this old earth by the guiding hand of the God of Creation, Atonement, Revival, and Resurrected Life.

As such, it is not unlike the reformers of old God has used in the life of the Church - from its very first Church Fathers of the early Christian centuries to the Medieval and Reformational Reformers of the Medieval Ages, to the Great Awakenings of the American and British eras of the 1700's and onwards, to the Revivals of South America, Asia, Africa, and Middle East both in the past and lately, as the Spirit of God lays upon the hearts of men and women His heavy hand of guidance, groaning, and passion to awaken the hearts of us who cannot see, nor hear, nor even feel the Wind of God blowing across our hearts and souls, to come taste the Divine Bread and Wine of our Salvation.

Even so blows such a Divine Wind as it tears down and uproots all old and impervious Christian faith structures resisting the Lord and having become devolved and unlovely to the name of Christ. More heathen in its forms of worship, more pagan in its portrayals of Christ, and similarly destructive to the Word of the Lord when living within their closed structures of religious systems unable to renew themselves under God's guidance unless they first be torn down and uprooted to hear again the living Sepulcher's tolling God's life-giving Altars to stand forth, repent, and be born again into the hope, grace, mercy, and forgiveness of the Gospel of Christ.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

October 28, 2017

Links to the Reformation and Reformers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformers

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Martin Luther’s Greatest Contribution

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/martin-luthers-greatest-contribution

by Thomas Oord

October 25th, 2017

Christians around the world are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not just Protestants, even many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians are celebrating!

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on Castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Most Christians today who read the document Luther posted would find his theses bewildering. But this event and many others before and after brought great change to the world.

Luther’s Theology

As Christians celebrate the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation on October 29, many will correctly praise Luther for his courage.

Theologians like me who study the details of Luther’s theology often have mixed feelings about his ideas. Some of what Luther said is applicable today; other things are not. Some aspects of Luther’s theology should be left in dustbins of history.

Luther was an enigmatic figure with an odd personality. He was prone to hyperbole (all those “solas,” for example) and just plain weirdness. Few today would lift him up as a moral example. But Luther is rightly praised for his courage and conviction.

Reforming

Luther’s greatest legacy and the greatest legacy of the Protestant Reformation is less about the specific theology he proposed. It’s more about the general need for changes in theology.

The Reformation reminds us that Christianity is not a static religion. It moves, adjusts, and transforms. Times change, people change, and the gospel of Christianity changes too, at least to some extent.

Some things in Christianity seem constant. Jesus is always central, although how we understand him varies over time. Love is central too, although what love demands seems to change. We could add other seemingly timeless aspects of the Christian faith.

Debates about the essentials and nonessentials in Christian faith will continue. The consensus varies from generation to generation.

Jesus may be the same yesterday, today, and forever, but the Christian faith is always in process. The Spirit is always doing a new thing!

Time for a New Reformation

It’s time again for something new. Every 500 years or so, something major seems to occur in Christian history. We’re due.

It’s time to ask ourselves, What will Christianity look like tomorrow? Who will Jesus be interpreted to be? What does love require in the present age? How should we now live?

Answering these questions is our present task. But we’re not the first. Change agents, revolutionaries, and theological entrepreneurs like Martin Luther have come before.

So let’s celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by raising a glass to Martin Luther!

ps... When you’re celebrating Luther’s birthday on November 10, light a candle for me: I was born on that same date 482 years later! - T.O.

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

Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach

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

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

by Lyndal Roper

Random House, 540 pp., $40.00

Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation

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.

How the Reformational Church Brought Secularism to Society

The Past Is Never Dead

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/01/23/the-past-is-never-dead/

 

by Scot McKnight

Jan 23, 2013

Comment

 

William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is the argument of Brad Gregory in his monumental and erudite volume, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. This 600 page ramble of Western history traces interlocking themes that affect us today but which gained their fresh life in the Reformation. I’d say the book is a critique of modernity as much as the Reformation while it is also a strong apologetic for the Catholic Church.

 

A big idea is that there is a seamless story from the late Medieval church into the Reformation and that what was unleashed in the Reformation — a revolution in religion — has resulted in modernity and postmodernity. In other words, with undeniable sophistication, Gregory lays at the door of the Reformation the seeds of secularism that we inhabit today. The world’s enchantment took a step backward, then, because of the Reformation.

 

Gregory connects John Duns Scotus and William of Occam to a new metaphysic (univocity vs. analogy) that more or less made God’s being like our being and put God into the materialistic universe of proof vs. non-proof (and God loses since God is transcendent, etc) and the Reformation’s battle over [the Catholic doctrine of] transsubstantiation was but one example of how a metaphysic can unleash theological battles that ended up separating God from reason and science. (I’m not a specialist in this field but I’m not so sure the Protestant view of the “presence” of Christ might be more analogical than univocal, and the Catholic view more univocal.)

 

[Reason and] Science divorced God from the discussion and scientists could no longer be considered intelligent unless they presupposed a personal God. Gregory’s discussions involve probing into how relativizing doctrines and controlling the churches (State control of Reformation churches) and subjectivizing morality (manifest in Western’s sense of tolerance) and manufacturing the goods of life (Weber’s famous thesis at a new level) led eventually to a secularization of knowledge (by keeping God out by [the scientific] method).

 

Let’s grant Gregory the lion’s share of his argument: the Reformation’s cracking up of medieval Christianity’s hegemony [this was not proven or explicated and I do wonder how unified late medieval times were] led to fractures not only at the ecclesiastical and theological levels but also at the intellectual, political, aesthetic and scientific levels — and those fractures have led to modernity.

 

And let’s grant that Gregory is not being nostalgic and pleading a return to the medieval conditions — as if one could. But let’s not fail to observe that the two major thinkers — Duns Scotus and William of Occam — who got the ball rolling here, were Catholics [as it seemed most Christians were in the late medieval period - res]. In the end, it was also the anti-institutional [(sic, anti-Catholic Church - res)] move by the Reformers that set this ball rolling. Also, ironically, Gregory’s book leaves a fairly sharp periodization of the Reformation.

 

Over time the assault on authority and power in the Catholic Church led to democratization with all its implications, including thousands of sorts of Protestants (and post Protestants). And, yes, at some level then the Reformation contributed to the secularization of society – though some might point a long finger or two at strains of Catholicism as well.

 

Question: "Is the Post-Reformation world a better world (for the church) than the Pre-Reformation world?"

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

 

Univocity of being

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univocity

 

Univocity of being is the idea that words describing the properties of God mean the same thing as when they apply to people or things, even if God is vastly in kind.

 

In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. John Duns Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are "univocally" applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a man, or a flea.

 

Gilles Deleuze borrowed the doctrine of ontological univocity from Scotus.^{[citation needed]} He claimed that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we - and our individuality - which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."^[1]

Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza,^{[citation needed]} who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. He claims that it [(univocality)] is the organizing principle of the Dutchman's philosophy [(Spinoza)] - despite the absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".^[2]

for further discussion please refer to -

 

The Ontological Univocity of God's Being
from a Postmodern Perspective

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ontological-univocality-of-gods.html

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Amazon.com Book Review
go to amazon link here

 

About the Author

Brad S. Gregory is Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

 

 

Book Description

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries:

• a hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs,
 
• an absence of any substantive common good,
 
• the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism,

 

all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.

 

Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West.

 

Today, what we are left with are fragments:

• intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse;
 
• a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief;
 
• a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion;
 
• a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism;
 
• and, the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

 

The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

 

 

Editorial Reviews

A strikingly brave and wide-ranging work, in which a distinguished historian of early modern Europe interprets the contemporary world. The precision and clarity with which Gregory lays out his evidence and the accuracy with which he handles materials in many different languages and of many different kinds give this original book extraordinary credibility. It's rare for a book to attain this level of scholarship nowadays. An astonishing achievement.

 

--Anthony Grafton, author of Worlds Made by Words

 

A work of deep moral seriousness. Gregory's greatest contribution is his portrayal of the Reformation of Christianity as a central moment of disturbance and creativity in the modern Western world. In this endeavor, he has no equal among living authors. The Unintended Reformation is simply the most intelligent treatment of the subject by a contemporary author. It is also the most unconventional and most stirring engagement I know with the problem of how the West has dealt with its heritage of plural religions and concepts of values and happiness.

 

--Thomas A. Brady, Jr., author of German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1650

 

Gregory's insightful and compelling narrative invites us to recognize the surprising extent to which we are still what the Protestant Reformation and its heirs made us, a society of conflicting and contested truth claims. As he spells out the consequences--and the interest is in the detail--we become more sharply aware of sometimes unrecognized aspects of our present condition.

 

--Alasdair MacIntyre, author of God, Philosophy, Universities

 

A revisionist manifesto, sharp-edged and provocative, The Unintended Reformation analyzes the legacy of the Protestant Reformation with an eye firmly fixed on the present. Gregory challenges many revered assumptions and does so with verve and brilliance. Bound to stir debate for years to come, this magisterial history of the early modern era belongs on the shelf right next to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

 

--Carlos Eire, author of A Very Brief History of Eternity

 

The Protestant Reformation is considered by many to be one of the pivotal events in the history of the Western world. No one can doubt the central role that Luther, Calvin, and other reformers have played in the lives of Christians through the years... [Gregory] approaches the continuing impact of the Reformation in what he terms a "genealogical" approach--one that sees the Reformation as the root of a tree whose branches reach into every aspect of modern life.

 

Rejecting the "supersessionist" view, that contemporary Christendom constitutes a radically new understanding of God and of the world itself, Gregory insists that our views, even our presuppositions, must be reimagined and re-evaluated in ways that demonstrate how the Reformation continues to reach into our theologies, our laws, our lives... [A] rewarding look at the long reach of history, and how we are the poorer for ignoring it. (Publishers Weekly 20111114)

 

[An] extraordinary new book...But however brilliant is Gregory's historical presentation (and it is brilliant), what ultimately distinguishes The Unintended Reformation is the sheer forcefulness of the narrative, which he pursues by examining the shift in perspectives on six distinct but interrelated themes since the sixteenth century: God, truth, institution, ethics, consumption and knowledge. The effect of this approach is to give the book an uncommon clarity: by going over what is essentially the single narrative in six different ways, each slight turn of the story illuminates the whole, and each new element comes across as both surprising and yet strangely familiar.

 

The Unintended Reformation is unquestionably the most important contribution to the way we understand our present condition since Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. But it is also as a stinging rebuke to all those well-nigh fictitious accounts of the emergence of the enlightened West out of the intellectual darkness and decrepitude of the Middle Ages that now distort our collective self-perception. Let's hope Gregory's book wreaks havoc on some of these myths that we persist in telling ourselves.

 

--Scott Stephens (Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Religion and Ethics blog 20120210)

 

There could not be a more propitious moment for a book on greed and the historical roots of capitalism. Brad Gregory shows that historians have as much to contribute to contemporary debates about business and social ethics as most philosophers or economists...What is bold and unusual about The Unintended Reformation is that it comes from an explicitly Christian perspective and ends by arguing that only religion--properly understood as a doctrine of solidarity--can allow humanity to escape from the predicament of the modern, the material curse of poverty and the mental afflictions of prosperity. Gregory not only offers what is today a highly original combination of history and morality but also cogently explains why that combination is needed today.

 

--Harold James (Financial Times 20120211)

 

This book is truly breathtaking in its scope, erudition and sheer nerve. There is no faulting Gregory's grasp of Reformation history, but to his analysis of what has happened since there could be many objections raised. This is relatively unimportant, however. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was not completely right either, but it was brilliant nevertheless. Gregory's is a work not just of genuine scholarship but also of sincere moral purpose, which, even if it annoys, frustrates or fails to convince, has opened up an immensely important debate. There may yet be time to fix some of what went wrong in the Reformation.

 

--Lucy Wooding (Times Higher Education 20120309)

 

Restrained and erudite...Apart from furnishing an interesting and well written account of the Reformation, the book is perhaps most interesting when [Gregory] grapples with his opponents...[A] thought-provoking book.

 

--Nick Carn (Financial World 20120601)

 

A lucidly written and far-reaching analysis that shows how the contemporary Western world continues to be influenced by the complex transformations that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries.

 

--J. Werner (Choice 20120701)

 

 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars

 

A Landmark Book Explaining How We Got Our Present World

December 20, 2011, by Christian Smith

 

This is a tremendously important and illuminating work that deftly discloses the deep historical roots of the character of our modern, secular world. Brad Gregory offers us here a massive scholarly achievement of great significance and insight, which deserves a very wide reading.

 

Modern people love to think that they are radically different from those who lived in the pre-modern age. Gregory clearly shows instead how powerfully governed are modern thinking, practices, and tendencies by assumptions and categories formed in the late Middle Ages, as mediated by the Protestant Reformation. Particularly impressive is Gregory's case for the secularizing and pluralizing logic that the Protestant Reformation set into historical motion.

 

Thoughtful moderns and postmoderns who want to understand the massive historical forces that have produced their own social worlds, and therefore their very lives, must read this book. Professional historians, whose work has grown ever more specialized and narrow, need to read this sweeping narrative, which pulls us all back to the big picture and the big questions. Protestant (and other) Christians today who are puzzled or distressed by the secularization of so much of the world have to confront, absorb, and digest the implications of Gregory's powerful argument.

 

The historical, sociological, and philosophical thought that Brad Gregory has put into this broad-ranging work is extraordinary; his historical scholarship is meticulous; his writing is lucid; and the payoff of insight for readers who take his argument seriously is huge. Gregory is to be much congratulated and thanked for producing this landmark book. I myself have already read it once, and have already started to read it again.

 

5.0 out of 5 stars

An exceptional achievement

January 10, 2012, by Thomas W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

This book is a tour de force by a distinguished historian of the Reformation. The thesis is that many of the significant challenges we face today in terms of politics, culture, economics, and our ability deliberate together reasonably can be traced back to the unintended consequences of the Reformation. This fact is obscured by the assumption among many contemporary historians that we have moved beyond a pre-modern past in ways that mean we no longer need to understand the world of the Middle Ages and Reformation in order to understand ourselves. The book achieves that ambitious goal because the author has mastered an astonishing variety of different approaches to knowing -- history (of course), but also theology, moral and political philosophy, and metaphysics. The erudition and scope of the book is deeply impressive and inspiring. I hope that this work will become for a new generation of grad students what McIntyre's work was for me when I started grad school in the late eighties, or what Millbank's was to many grad students in the last decade -- a book that reorients students away from conventional grad school limitations on what they should learn and how they should learn it. I hope that it will become for everyone an occasion to reflect more deeply on the ways the past has influenced our current situation.

 

5.0 out of 5 stars

A real step forward

January 17, 2012, by Matthew C. Briel

 

My comments here build on earlier reviews, especially Christian Smith's and Thomas Smith's.

 

This book is a great achievement. Here I'd like to focus on what it brings to professional historians.

 

I am in graduate school and my experience of this book is close to what Thomas Smith said he hoped would happen to readers who are entering the academy. It's premature but this book may end up being as important as MacIntyre's After Virtue. However, it is a work of a historian rather than a philosopher and it has the particular strengths of a historian that a philosopher lacks: a great sensitivity to the details of ritual, everyday life, economic changes, political decisions, etc. Gregory's great contribution is his keen sense of how practices and thought impact each other (and some philosophical training seems evident here).

 

Though obviously a longish book, it seems a short book to me for how much it accomplishes. Many of the theorists of the past century and a half (Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other philosophers but especially the profoundly influential Weber and Foucault) are engaged well. My profession is dominated by these thinkers and their intellectual offspring. Gregory, engaged in a critique, briefly acknowledges the good that they have contributed (naive objectivity or positivism of some 19th century historians is no longer possible) but is more concerned to describe the negative effects of their thought and to argue against them- usually it is a question of the premises of their thought rather than mistakes in reasoning. Gregory has argued for a new space in the academy. I hope that he treats these questions in greater detail, or that some other author will develop Gregory's insights here.

 

It is bound to be sharply criticised by both the right and the left because Gregory challenges both in a penetrating analysis. (critical of secular dominance in certain arenas as well as smug Christian consumers.)

 

Like MacIntyre's After Virture (1981), Gregory has made a big step forward. The claims in this book are huge and it needs to be unpacked (could he please make this a trilogy?). I look forward to reading more from Gregory. Really, an intellectual thrill. Give it a full week of three or four hour evenings to soak it in. The longer footnotes (i.e. not just the bibliographical references) enhance the experience.

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