Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. konfessionellen Europa: 1 politisch-militärisch, 2 allgemeine Zustimmung; Gehorsam - Wahrheitsanspruch; Dilemm: caritas - Zwang im Rahmen eines konfessionellen Staates

Kurzinhalt: ... the failure of confessional Europe was twofold: they failed politically and militarily, just as they failed to create moral communities free of religious dissent... Thus was the stage set for Enlightenment emancipation and the postulation ...

Textausschnitt: 371a In terms of what its respective protagonists hoped to achieve, the failure of confessional Europe was twofold: they failed politically and militarily, just as they failed to create moral communities free of religious dissent. In the first instance, none of the leaders in the religio-political conflicts during the Reformation era achieved their principal military or political goals in any enduring ways. Unlike the medieval heresies that secular and ecclesiastical authorities had largely managed to suppress and control, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism, including the Church of England, demonstrated their institutionalized staying power. Sustained political support from secular authorities made them in this respect parallel to Catholic regimes and distinguished them from marginalized and persecuted radical Protestants who collectively manifested a much wider range of claims about true Christianity. At the same time, despite the apocalyptic expectations of many Protestant reformers about the demise of the papal Antichrist, Catholicism not only persisted but its leaders regrouped, reenergized, and spread the faith around the world from Brazil and New France to the Philippines. By the mid-seventeenth century the religio-political conflicts of the Reformation era, capped by the Thirty Years War and the English civil wars, had proved ruinously destructive, extremely expensive, and frequently subversive of rulers’ own desires to serve God as they shored up their political authority. In various forms confessional regimes endured in most European states throughout the eighteenth century, but partly because of the failure of bellicose confessionalism, some monarchical authorities began experimenting more robustly with modifications and accommodations in the direction of religious toleration. Some of them began to look with particular interest on a new nation, the Dutch Republic, whose political leaders and mercantile elite supported a Reformed Protestant public church but eschewed confessionalization in the interests of promoting commercial profits and pursuing lives increasingly devoted to the acquisition of things that money could buy. This was an alternative to assumptions about the relationship among Christianity, morality, the exercise of power, and economic prosperity that ignored the biblical condemnation of avarice but looked as though it might be able to overcome the vexing problem of confessional antagonisms. (Fs)

371b In the second instance, early modern confessional regimes failed within their respective polities to rid their moral communities of religious dissent. This was true in Puritan New England no less than in Europe. Confessionalizing efforts to secure subjects’ obedience echoed in geographically more circumscribed but politically more demanding, more narrowly prescribed ways the ambitions of medieval Christian authorities at least to ensure conformity through the threat of punishment wherever persuasion or personal enthusiasm failed to produce desired behavior and piety. This was not a problem for everyone: the willingly devout seem largely to have welcomed the confessionalizing efforts of the early modern period, whether manifest in the efflorescence of Catholic Marian and eucharistic piety, the spread of individual Bible reading among Lutherans and Reformed Protestants, or the astonishing demand for devotional literature among all confessions. Indeed, eager practitioners were likely to think that authorities were not doing enough to foster the formation of godly fellow Christians. The willingly devout helped to make confessionalization a partial success, marking the Reformation era as one of fervent religiosity among Catholics and Protestants alike. Committed believers who agreed with authorities’ truth claims in confessional regimes did not resent their demands of obedience per se, because whatever else it entails Christianity is, like Judaism, most fundamentally and ineradicably a matter of obedience to God, the faith’s sine qua non. (Fs)

372a The real questions, then, were whether subjects thought that secular and ecclesiastical authorities had the truth claims right, and whether they thought those in charge acted in ways that Christian rulers and pastors should act. If so, then obedience was not a problem, but merely an obvious, almost trivial condition for the pursuit of substantive Christian life in community. Those subjects that disagreed, however, were bound to resent the same requirements that others willingly embraced as a minimal prerequisite for shared Christian life. And now there were many different non-Roman versions of God’s truth from which to choose, including whatever one might come up with oneself. More than a few Protestants pleased to have thrown off the Roman yoke were frustrated to find themselves under much more restrictive forms of “new popery.” Confessional authorities sought to compel obedience among the unwilling by exercising coercive power, which tended to cause discontent in proportion to their efforts precisely among those whose conformity was sought. Objectors resented as invasively obnoxious or presumptuously tyrannical the heavy-handed measures of confessional regimes from Catholic Spain to Presbyterian Scotland, most dramatically manifest in judicial executions for heterodoxy. Some advocates of toleration argued that even if authorities were seeking to create and protect a Christian community, such actions were unchristian attacks on human beings who were ostensibly supposed to be part of that community and whom God had created in his image. This createdness in God’s image was why and how human beings had individual rights, as canon lawyers had begun to argue in the twelfth century. Now the inherited discourse of individual rights was being appropriated in novel ways, against Catholic as well as magisterial Protestant confessional regimes. (Fs)

373a Experience demonstrated that grudging conformity was simply incompatible with joy, was not the truth that made one free, and did not conduce to one’s flourishing. In order for Christianity to thrive as shared life in Christ rather than to be experienced as an ideology of coercive oppression, faith had to be adopted freely and practiced willingly. But this was antithetical to the ambitions of confessional authorities, secular and ecclesiastical alike, and it was unlikely to be spontaneously pursued by individuals left to their own devices, because Jesus’s commands grated sharply against ordinary human inclinations. Hence the importance of communities of faith through which the virtues could be inculcated and in which joy would be apparent, communities to which Christians would want to belong. But how could those communities be fashioned without at least some exercise of force, when necessary, given the recalcitrant desires of selfish individuals to seek their own advantage and have their own way? It was the same medieval conundrum of caritas and coercion, but now in the context of a divided Christendom among much more resolute confessionalizing regimes. Those for whom Christianity seemed little more than obeying hated rules and committing catechetical propositions to memory understandably hoped for something better, a way of life that would dispense with resented impositions. Thus was the stage set for Enlightenment emancipation and the postulation of Western modernity’s autonomous individual selves. But how much of the rest of Christianity, and in what forms, would be retained? By the mid-seventeenth century, amid deadlocked doctrinal controversies and revivified Pyrrhonian skepticism, new options were being pursued that sought to transcend disputed religious truth claims by endeavoring to base answers to the Life Questions entirely on reason. (Fs)