Posted on 12/06/2021 8:08:54 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Many years ago I had the privilege of delivering a lecture on the life and ministry of John Calvin in the unlikely context of the Interfaith Seminar of the Catholic Archdiocese of Trento in northern Italy.
A lone Reformed voice speaking to a room filled with priests and monks at the historic epicenter of the Catholic Reformation, I may not have been the exact modern equivalent of Leonidas at Thermopylae but I enjoyed being heavily outnumbered nonetheless.
At the end of my lecture, every single question I was asked related to the burning of Michael Servetus by the Genevan authorities in 1553. The fact that Servetus was burned in Geneva was almost an accident of history. A hunted, notorious heretic, he might have perished at the hands of numerous others, Protestant and Catholic. But again and again those in the audience demanded to know how I could lecture dispassionately on the man who killed Servetus.
Eventually, I pointed out that, when it comes to who burned whom in the 16th century, neither side in the Reformation emerged with much glory. It is always easier to blame the other side for the dark crimes of history while assuring ourselves that it would have been so much better if we had been in charge.
I was reminded of this when reading Casey Chalk’s recent article, “The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God,” at Public Discourse. Chalk argues that conservatives need to be very careful about unconditionally embracing comedians Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle. Though conservatives may appreciate the stands Breuer and Chappelle have taken against cancel culture and certain elements of woke orthodoxy, we must keep in mind that they are representatives of a libertarian notion of the autonomous self that is scarcely compatible with Christianity. Certainly I can affirm this central concern of Chalk's argument.
Yet I dissent from Chalk’s genealogy of modernity. He goes on to argue that this notion of the autonomous, emotivist self can be traced to Martin Luther. In part this is because Chalk depends upon Jacques Maritain's Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau for his reading of Luther. Luther is simply not the great apostle of subjectivism that Maritain claims he is. It may well be that subjectivism is where the Protestant Reformation led, but it was certainly neither Luther’s intention nor his own stated position. The debate with Zwingli over the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is the most obvious example of his concern for objective truth detached from the individual’s own beliefs, though one might also point to his notion of conscience as formed by the Word of God in the context of the Christian life, not as some principle of autonomous personal judgment.
Whether Luther’s positions on these issues proved stable in the long run is a matter for debate. The point is that he was wrestling with how to balance objective truth and personal commitment (an issue found throughout the New Testament). He was not arguing for human beings as isolated, atomized human beings.
This points to a deeper difficulty with Chalk's genealogy. In presenting Luther as the beginning of the problem, Chalk opts for the standard Catholic triumphalist opening: The Protestants are to blame. But Luther does not emerge from a vacuum. Philosophically, he is the heir of late medieval nominalism (a Catholic phenomenon). He achieves public prominence by asking for a debate about the sale of indulgences (a Catholic practice). Wondering about whether the sale of indulgences as exemplified by Tetzel represents the teaching of the Church seems wholly reasonable for a Catholic pastor concerned about the financial fleecing of his congregation. And the crisis of authority that Luther represents is not of his own making. The corruption of the papacy and the chaos of the 15th century shattered papal authority.
Astute theologians might respond by saying that we are not Donatists, that the corruption of the men who lead the Church and even the corruption of the papal bureaucracy do not negate the truth of the Gospel. That is true at a theoretical level. But in practice hypocrisy undermines credibility. It is not surprising that at the start of the 16th century there was a crisis of popular authority with regard to those who claimed to be Peter’s successors and Christ’s representatives on earth and yet who ostentatiously indulged the sins of the flesh.
If Luther was wrestling with the question of religious authority, it is in large part because the religious authority of his day had so signally failed in its task. Perhaps modernity is the fault of a failed papacy and not a Saxon friar?
We can complicate the narrative of authority yet further. The advent of the printing press and the rise of cities and trade served to reconfigure social structures across Europe. Power, once tied to land, started shifting more toward capital. The marketplace rose in prominence, challenging old hierarchies. Increasing levels of literacy served to remake and energize self-consciousness. Even if, purely for the sake of argument, one were to allow that the 13th century represented a rather harmonious period in which church and state, and faith and reason, lived together in perfect harmony, that world depended upon a social framework that required material conditions that technology and trade simply swept away. There is no medieval solution to the problems of modernity.
The above is not intended as a piece of Protestant triumphalism. Rather, it is a call for more self-awareness regarding the matter of the problems of our present age. Did Luther cause modernity? Was it the failure of the medieval papacy? Or was it the printing press and the rise of capitalism? Until such time as we eschew the simplistic blame game and start to think more historically, we are unlikely to move beyond partisan point-scoring. More significantly, we will prove incapable of moving beyond pipe dreams and nostalgia to real solutions to our difficulties.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
Importantly, Modernity lead to the defeat and containment of Islam.
Luther did not cause modernity, but Lutheran practice devolved into modernity through Kant primarily. To this day, down-and-dirty Lutherans think of themselves as the true inheritors of the Catholic church, devoid of all the Renaissance frufru (both cultural and theological). In America Lutheranism became an ethnic German/Scandinavian phenomenon, but that was not at all Luther’s intention.
People tend to forget that Servetus had already been arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death by order of the RC church. He escaped and fled to Geneva. He didn’t learn his lesson, continued in his behavior and was arrested by the civil (but still very religious) government of Geneva. At a trial where Calvin acted as prosecutor he was convicted and sentenced to death by the court. Calvin asked that he not be burned as a form of execution but the civil authorities ignored him.
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Boy, those Germans are sure trouble-makers . . . Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Wagner, Hegel, Bismarck. I am purposefully avoiding the big one from the 20th century in order to not invoke Godwin’s Law.
Charlemagne and the collection of warring pagan tribes into the Holy Roman Empire, Charles Martel, and the Battle of Lepanto all happened before the Modern Age and were all pivotal in holding off Islam.
Pesky facts…..
Thanks for posting that. Excellent essay.
My only critique is the author is his exclusion of the bigger picture gained by Scripture (a King, a Kingdom, a bride, a judgment, and eternal governance), which causes him to focus solely on human agency.
Here is an idea: Luther was used by the providence of God begin a cleansing of the Bride of Christ, while leaving the corruption of the Catholic Church intact for the last days. Everything else is just window dressing.
And here is the rub: We should all aspire to be Donatists by examining Scripture and contending for the faith by reclaiming New Testament Christianity. Modernity isn’t relevant in this pursuit because corruption will always be in the midst of the church: the only salient question is, “What do we intend to do about it?”
The battle of Lepanto was in 1571. It was won in large part, because Europe was developing modernity. The Protestant reformation was well underway. The cannon mounted on the Christian ships made a huge difference in the outcome. The wealth being generated by the New World exploration was a large factor.
I would say 1571 is well into the early modern period.
Very thought-provoking. Thank you
And catholic church is still run by old men who do not want to give up their power or position...hmmmm...sound like our congress.
We should all aspire to embrace a second-century heresy?
The Donatists began in the 4th century.
On the one hand, God has permitted it all. On the other, it’s all been His plan, as He’s ultimately sovereign over everything people do in both obedience and rebellion towards Him.
And from the human side, there’s been technological change along with fateful unforeseen events like the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the accidental discovery of the Americas by Europeans.
Then, too, there’s the Catholic sponsored “Renaissance.” Surprisingly for what would superficially be considered a Christian development, it’s beloved by unbelievers, who don’t seem threatened or offended by it at all. The liberal teachers I had in high school and college talked of it most reverently. As my liberal high school Social Studies teacher taught us, the Renaissance shifted the cultural focus from God to man, and from the group to the individual.
So the answer isn’t found in the actions of any one person, unless we’re identifying that one person as God. And if it hadn’t been Luther expressing problems with the Catholic Church, it would have been others, just as there were others.
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Here is an idea: Luther was used by the providence of God begin a cleansing of the Bride of Christ, while leaving the corruption of the Catholic Church intact for the last days. Everything else is just window dressing.
Providence indeed.
Leviticus 14 and the leprous house in the natural, has a spiritual house application.
The High Priest is coming back and will survey the house..
See if the leprous spots have come back after the repair work.
What heresy do you speak of?
If you look at the primary sources, they wanted to return to NT Christianity, opposed infant baptism, and opposed the chickenshit church leadership that departed during the persecutions, and wanted to come back in as if nothing happened.
So, yeah, Maureen Tilley was one of my professors.
I don’t think modernity led to the defeat and containment of Islam.
Islam had already been contained before by the Eastern Romans in the 9th century.
During the Catholic-Protestant disagreements, you had Hungarian calvinists fighting on the side of the Muslim Ottomans against catholic Hungarians and catholic Austrians. You had Queen Elizabeth I allying with the Barbery pirates against Catholic Spain.
And you had Catholic France allying with the Ottomans against Catholic Hapsburgs - but then the French are always perfidious.
the defeat and containment of Islam was due to
1. the work of al-Ghazali destroying the scientific questioning in the Islamic world
2. Hulagu Khan who destroyed Baghdad and the Caliphate, ending the triumphalism of Islam
3. the reconquista again giving a moral blow to Islam
4. the Marathas conquering the Gurkhani (i.e. the “Mughal”) empire.
did modernity really “contain” it?
The logical result of Donatism is to assert that the power of the sacraments comes from the righteousness of the human minister, rather than from Christ himself with the minister being merely a visible mediator or stand-in.
I don't think you really want that.
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