Serious Christian folks have long wondered, what happened? If not to Christendom, at least what happened to something of a Christian consensus that underlay culture and society in general in American until the late 19th century (although that consensus had ended nearly a century earlier in Europe). To hear the modern secularist tell the story, it's good riddance. Good riddance to a society organized around oppressive myths and hello to an Enlightenment that baptized a world into reason and science. Of course, reason and science, progress and development, began long before the Enlightenment and this "Enlightened" world has given us revolutions (American, French, and Russian), a couple of World Wars, and multiple mass exterminations of human beings. But never mind; just a little more reason and a lot less religion will solve our problems, or so the contemporary Enlightened think. (Of course, the post-modern among us realize that the Enlightenment was and still in just another ideology, sometimes better and sometimes worse than what came before but nothing special. The Enlightenment most definitely did not get us out of our socially constructed skins into some supra-historical world of pure reason. But I digress.)
The typical American Evangelical blames the current sorry state of affairs on the theory of evolution or liberalism (theological and political), the media, or some amalgam thereof. Brad Gregory blames it on the Reformation. The rise of the all-powerful nation state, the separation of morality from reason, the division of the public sphere from religion, and the other declines that characterize the West over the past half-millennium are all, in Gregory's opinion, due to the rending of the Catholic church in the Reformation. Without the counterweight of a unified Church, the modern state could grow like Topsy. Without a accepted biblical interpretation, morality became subjective (notwithstanding the Reformers' hope in sola scriptura). And with the withdrawal of the academic side of the Christian faith into seminaries and departments of "religion," secularized science, politics, and culture swept the world of the intellect clean of substantive Christianity.
Dale Van Kleys' review of Gregory's Unintended Reformation (which you can read here) does a very fair job of acknowledging where Gregory has it right and where his Catholic perspective causes him to overlook the pre-reformation roots of modernity and the part the Catholic Church had to play in the failure that was the Reformation.
I observed where Gregory has it right in my 2003 piece, The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts (download it by going here). Excellent historians like Christopher Hill, Philip Gorski, and Philip Benedict have documented the impact of competing Christianities on the social and cultural world of Western Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. With the help of my co-author, Glen Hoshauer, I drew on their insights to show how Puritan social practices (rather than Puritan theology as such) helped mold the common law of contracts that we know and (some of us) love today. (One of my more accessible pieces, I think. At least the first two-thirds of it when I'm addressing history and theology. The concluding legal third? Not so much.)
The failure of the Reformation--which can be attributed in large part to the unwillingness of a large part of the Church to let itself be reformed--indeed helped open the space for modernity. All but the most Whiggish of Protestants admit this. And one hardly needs to be an obscurantist to note that modernity has been a mixed bag.
Of course, winning the historical blame game doesn't solve our contemporary problems. The West is not about to go back to before 1517. Nor even to before 1859. But, if the Christian faith is true (not to mention beautiful and good), it can speak even to our contemporary situation. Perhaps better than the centuries preceding the Reformation are the centuries preceding the Middle Ages as a model of faithful Christian living. One can hardly beat the tumult of the fall of the Roman Empire and the descent of Western Europe into the Dark Ages for challenges. And the Christian faith managed to pull through itself and its society. A willingness to live and think as Christians without bemoaning our current state of affairs would be a good place to start.
The typical American Evangelical blames the current sorry state of affairs on the theory of evolution or liberalism (theological and political), the media, or some amalgam thereof. Brad Gregory blames it on the Reformation. The rise of the all-powerful nation state, the separation of morality from reason, the division of the public sphere from religion, and the other declines that characterize the West over the past half-millennium are all, in Gregory's opinion, due to the rending of the Catholic church in the Reformation. Without the counterweight of a unified Church, the modern state could grow like Topsy. Without a accepted biblical interpretation, morality became subjective (notwithstanding the Reformers' hope in sola scriptura). And with the withdrawal of the academic side of the Christian faith into seminaries and departments of "religion," secularized science, politics, and culture swept the world of the intellect clean of substantive Christianity.
Dale Van Kleys' review of Gregory's Unintended Reformation (which you can read here) does a very fair job of acknowledging where Gregory has it right and where his Catholic perspective causes him to overlook the pre-reformation roots of modernity and the part the Catholic Church had to play in the failure that was the Reformation.
I observed where Gregory has it right in my 2003 piece, The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts (download it by going here). Excellent historians like Christopher Hill, Philip Gorski, and Philip Benedict have documented the impact of competing Christianities on the social and cultural world of Western Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. With the help of my co-author, Glen Hoshauer, I drew on their insights to show how Puritan social practices (rather than Puritan theology as such) helped mold the common law of contracts that we know and (some of us) love today. (One of my more accessible pieces, I think. At least the first two-thirds of it when I'm addressing history and theology. The concluding legal third? Not so much.)
The failure of the Reformation--which can be attributed in large part to the unwillingness of a large part of the Church to let itself be reformed--indeed helped open the space for modernity. All but the most Whiggish of Protestants admit this. And one hardly needs to be an obscurantist to note that modernity has been a mixed bag.
Of course, winning the historical blame game doesn't solve our contemporary problems. The West is not about to go back to before 1517. Nor even to before 1859. But, if the Christian faith is true (not to mention beautiful and good), it can speak even to our contemporary situation. Perhaps better than the centuries preceding the Reformation are the centuries preceding the Middle Ages as a model of faithful Christian living. One can hardly beat the tumult of the fall of the Roman Empire and the descent of Western Europe into the Dark Ages for challenges. And the Christian faith managed to pull through itself and its society. A willingness to live and think as Christians without bemoaning our current state of affairs would be a good place to start.
"The West is not about to go back to before 1517."
ReplyDeleteMaybe not right away, but Rick Santorum is working on it.
See http://tinyurl.com/7h2mund
"[Santorum]said that Satan has used “the great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality” to corrupt universities, politics and even most Christian churches, except one."
Can you guess which one?
Yep, you guessed it.
“You say, ‘The Catholic Church?’ No,” Santorum said, explaining that Satan aimed at the country’s Protestant roots. “... If you look at mainline Protestantism in this country, it is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity.”