Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. Reformation: Problem d. Wahrheitsfrage der Christentums; Versagen d. Prinzipien: sola scrptura, prophetische Inspiration; Ursache für: Relativismus, Hyperpluralismus; Konfessionalisierung; weltliche Herrscher: Kontrolle d. Öffentlichkeit

Kurzinhalt: In contrast to medieval Christendom, this was not in the first instance a moral failure ...problem of how to know what true Christianity was. “Scripture alone” was not a solution to this new problem, but its cause.

Textausschnitt: 368a Many of those who rejected the authority of the Roman church in the sixteenth century were moved by the same problems, but they proposed a different diagnosis, one that various suppressed individuals and groups had in their respective ways proffered in preceding centuries. They thought that doctrinal error lay behind medieval Christendom’s moral shortcomings. They believed that human life was so troubled not merely because of the manifest failure of so many sinful Christians to live up to the church’s teachings, as so many medieval reformers had said. It was also that many of the church’s teachings were themselves false, as those condemned for heresy in the Middle Ages had also claimed. Certain key doctrines were grave misunderstandings of the way God worked and misrepresentations of how he revealed himself in history. Only God’s true teachings could ground a genuine renewal of human life, and they were to be found in the Bible alone liberated from the self-interested trappings and traditions of the Roman church. In order for Christianity to be the right sort of shared human life actually willed by God, it had to be based on the correct interpretation of God’s word in scripture. (Fs) (notabene)

368b The Reformation succeeded in providing an alternative way of grounding Christian answers to the Life Questions and thus of providing the basis for the living of Christian lives ideologically and socially separated from the Roman Catholic Church. The history of Protestantism over the past five hundred years provides a great many examples. But the Reformation’s putative solution to Christendom’s problems turned out to be a simultaneous failure relative to its protagonists’ intentions. In contrast to medieval Christendom, this was not in the first instance a moral failure (leaving aside the historical evidence for ways in which many Reformation-era Protestants also failed to live up to their respective ideals and teachings). Rather, the Reformation’s failure derived directly from the patent infeasibility of successfully applying the reformers’ own foundational principle. For even when highly educated, well-intentioned Christians interpreted the Bible, beginning in the early 1520s they did not and manifestly could not agree about its meaning or implications. Nor would anti-Roman Christians change or compromise their exegetical claims about the meaning of God’s word on points they regarded as essential. Furthermore, what was essential rather than inessential and the criteria for distinguishing between them were themselves just additional things about which they could and did disagree. The unintended problem created by the Reformation was therefore not simply a perpetuation of the inherited and still-present challenge of how to make human life more genuinely Christian, but also the new and compounding problem of how to know what true Christianity was. “Scripture alone” was not a solution to this new problem, but its cause. It implied questions about the nature of knowledge and raised explicitly the specter of radical doctrinal skepticism and relativism already in the 1520s. Supplementary interpretative criteria such as illumination by the Holy Spirit or the exercise of discursive reason in the determination of true doctrine increased rather than resolved the disagreements they were intended to overcome, as did bolder claims of direct prophetic inspiration or new revelation from God. This was the case throughout the Reformation era and has remained so ever since. (Fs) (notabene)

369b Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church.)1 Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong. This settled nothing. Having rejected the authority of the Roman church, Protestants shared no institutions or authorities in common to which they could turn to resolve disputes among themselves. This was evident already in the 1520s and has remained the case ever since. Instead, their disagreements were themselves institutionalized most influentially in the only two Protestant traditions that, because their leaders secured lasting political protection from secular authorities, turned out to be the great exceptions among anti-Roman Christians in the Reformation era: Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism (including the Church of England). Especially after the Peasants’ War of 1524-1526 and the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster a decade later, the large majority of anti-Roman answers to the Life Questions were suppressed, and socially or politically challenging expressions of Protestantism were curtailed until they emerged again in England in the early 1640s. This control was an imperative in the eyes of those committed to maintaining a traditional sociopolitical order, because some Christians wanted radically to remake socioeconomic and political realities according to their very different understandings of the Gospel. The largely successful suppression of radical Protestantism in the century between the Kingdom of Münster in 1534-1535 and the English Revolution also helped to minimize the implications of the Reformation’s practical failure, because the predominance of Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism made it seem as though Christians who had rejected Rome exhibited more doctrinal coherence than in fact they did. Nearly all radical and magisterial Protestants agreed, though, with the traditional condemnation of the avarice that was so obviously present in the Roman church, so corruptive of the rest of human life, and so contrary to biblical condemnations of greed. (Fs) (notabene)

370a The late medieval Christianity that Protestant reformers sought to fix was not something called “religion,” separate from the rest of life. It was an institutionalized worldview on which eternal life depended, with ramifications for all of human life lived in certain ways rather than others. Regardless of the particular forms taken by their respective ambitions, magisterial Protestant reformers shared this assumption plus many other biblically based beliefs with their late medieval predecessors and Catholic contemporaries. Accordingly, Lutheran, Reformed Protestant, and Catholic leaders (especially after the Council of Trent) embarked on the arduous work of confessionalization in their respective territories. Secular authorities oversaw the churches they controlled and together with ecclesiastical leaders sought to create a better-informed, better-behaved, more-disciplined and self-disciplined laity compared to the laypeople of pre-Reformation Christendom. Better-educated, more-conscientious clergy led worship, supervised lay piety, catechized, preached, explained, exhorted, encouraged, threatened, and consoled, reinforcing repeatedly the newly central virtue of obedience in every domain of human life. The threat of heterodoxy necessitated vigilance because dissenters subverted the very conditions of the moral communities that authorities sought to forge. Secular rulers also oversaw their respective institutions of higher education, politically privileging theology and seeking to ensure that the transmission of knowledge in the training of bureaucratic officials was shielded from threats to orthodoxy. Outside of confessionalized universities, the same rulers were patronizing the pursuit of new knowledge, especially the observation-based knowledge about material things in the natural world that could be used to serve human desires. In a divided and confessionalizing Christendom, sovereign secular authorities exercised all public political power, ceding to the control of their respective churches only what seemed to serve their own desires and perceived interests. Encouraged oftentimes by clerical advisers convinced that they saw clearly the particular paths of God’s providence, conscientious rulers sometimes took advantage of the new opportunities for the military defense and proactive promotion of Christian truth as they respectively understood it. They made war on each other, off and on, from the late 1520s through the 1640s, with confessional hostilities persisting much longer. (Fs)