Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, John Tetzel, Pope Leo X, Charles V, are just a few of the  names that we would associate with the sixteenth century Reformation.  We would also recognize these names because they represent the fragmentation and polarization that characterized Christianity after the Reformation.  In fact, most Christian traditions now identify themselves in terms of how they are not like others.  Catholics are Catholics because they are not Protestants and vice versa.  We go even further when we write our various histories to indicate how triumphal we are about the fact that we are the “true church” as opposed to those other people.  You would almost get the impression that there were only two kinds of people during the tumultuous period of the Reformation, Catholics who hated Protestants and Protestants who despised Catholics.  We are almost persuaded that there were no other voices, voices for moderation, reconciliation, unity and restoration, but there were.

Gasparo Contarini, John Eck and Johannes Gropper were Catholics; Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer and Johannes Pistorius were Protestants.  From June of 1540 until May of 1541, these men at various times and places met to talk, write, discuss, debate and negotiate in an attempt to hold the church together.  These were the first Protestants and Catholics Together, to borrow a name from a more recent series of meetings.

From April to May of 1541 these men met in the German city of Regensburg to see if they could arrive at a consensus that would prevent the further splintering of the faith.  They made a valiant attempt to navigate their way through 23 articles of faith in order to find common ground for the two parties to begin new negotiations.  By early May they came to a tentative agreement on the original state of mankind, free will, the cause of sin, the nature of original sin and, amazingly, justification by faith.  Cardinal Contarini wrote the final draft on justification by faith.  However, their best efforts at reconciliation could not overcome the issue of authority located in the papacy and church councils and they were finally stumped on article 14 concerning the Eucharist.

So what’s the point?  The point is that they gathered in Regensburg to make an effort that failed because it mattered.  There was no way for these men to know if their efforts would be successful or not.  Each of them risked a great deal to even be there.  Cardinal Contarini was later accused of heresy and died in 1542, but the saddest legacy of Regensburg is that the voices there have been forgotten in the larger history of the Reformation.  It seems that we are too content to write and believe histories that tell us that the church has always been fragmented and polarized and that there were no voices that sought moderation, reconciliation, or restoration.  Worst of all, perhaps we have come to think that this fragmented and polarized church is for the best and that any efforts to talk and interact are just a waste of time and energy.  I am not suggesting that we resurrect the ecumenical movement as the “silver bullet”, but I am suggesting that people on all sides of the faith have names, faces and voices.  Efforts to heal wounds are never a waste of time, even if they fail.

So last night I am teaching on the Radical Reformation, that would be the Anabaptist and all their descendants:  Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Moravian Brethren, some Baptists etc, and  I was reminded of what a viral combination it is when you unite principles like liberty of conscience with an authoritative document like the Bible.   Liberty of conscience at the time of the Reformation was a revolutionary concept that was understood primarily as a social or political theory, but the power structures of Europe had never allowed it the opportunity afforded by time and space to grow and expand as a social or political experiment.  The Bible had always been a revolutionary document, but full access to its ideas had been denied to the average person until the sixteenth century and the work of Martin Luther and other reformers.  The magisterial reformers were all about providing vernacular access to the Bible as a theological text, but they were not keen on promoting liberty of conscience as a foundational principle for biblical interpretation, enter the Anabaptists. 

Anabaptist were the true sola scriptura decendants of the Reformation, if by sola scriptura we mean “the Bible alone as the church’s source of authority”.  These bad boys (and girls) combined the Bible alone idea with liberty of conscience as their main interpretive method and, as they say, “it hit the fan” in a big way.  Liberty’s rhetoric and practice is a powerful drug that once tasted becomes addictive, and when you combine that addiction with the Bible as one’s primary source of authority, you have a recipe for revolution.  Revolution can be defined as creating the circumstances in which the  authority of tradition, station, and education are challenged by freedom, equality, and representation.  Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were focused on reform; the Anabaptists insisted on revolution.

The  religious and political powers of Europe were able to control this viral combination for a time because Europe was a restrictive environment in which ideas and movements could be geographically quarantined, but with the opening of the new world, all bets were off.  Let’s just say that America represented a nonrestrictive environment that offered both the time and space for the Anabaptists’ scions and others to experiment with this viral combination of liberty of conscience and the  Bible.  America became the laboratory where liberty’s rhetoric and practice and the Bible’s authority could be uncritically mixed and fused together to create a powerful, revolutionary sentiment that would permeate more than theology.  It would become the populist language for social and political revolution as well.  If you are interested in reading more about the role of liberty of conscience and the Bible in creating the powerful impulse of American popular sovereignty, read Nathan Hatch’s The  Democratization of American Christianity.

So, I’m in the process of finishing a course on Medieval/Reformation Christianity and I begin the Reformation section by asking the question, would there have been a Reformation without Martin Luther?  It is not meant to be a rhetorical question and I realize that such a question demands all sorts of speculative mental gymnastics, but I ask it for a reason.  My point is that history is full of all kinds of stuff:  pivotal events, inspiring movements, endless institutions, competing ideas, technological advances, diverse cultural traditions, social innovations and political systems, but all of this stuff composes the historical frame.  People are the picture and because people are at the center of the historical picture, history is biography.  History is a story about people.

So what?  Well, for many Christians, the Reformation was the decisive moment in the history of the faith and, though we might not admit it, we often act as though the Reformation trumped the incarnation and resurrection.  The names of Martin Luther, John Calvin and their disciples are  revered, but even more important are the complete theological systems these men are reported to have produced, theological systems intended to instruct, inform, and guide the faithful into the parousia(that’s theological language for the second coming of Jesus).  We are currently in the twenty-first century and these theological systems are still being used by various traditions to guide the faith into the parousia.  So, do I have a axe to grind, a bone to pick, a burr under my saddle, are my panties in a wad about theological systems per se? No…but I would like to make a suggestion.

Luther, Calvin and  many of their disciples were sixteenth-century or seventeeth-century people.  Allowing them to remain in their century is a good idea.  The theology they created emerged from their lives.  It was not like the Koran.  It was not given to them by God from heaven in some kind of inspired, prophetic moment.  Their theology was not the Bible, it was their understanding of the Bible developed over time. 

So my suggestion is simply this,  if you are interested in a person’s theology, especially if that person offers a theological system that you intend to use for instructing, informing, and guiding the faithful into the parousia, please find a good biography of that person’s life and read it carefully.  You are not looking for their theology in a biography, you are  learning their story.  You are trying to know the person that created the theology.  Allow them to be a person before you decide to let them be “your” theologian.  Allowing theologians to be people with a history and a theology will offer us an appropriate corrective for how we understand and use their theology.  For Martin Luther I would suggest Heiko Oberman’s  Luther:  Man Between God and the Devil, and for John Calvin I would recommend William J. Bouwsma’s  John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait.

By the way, this biography stuff  works well for philosophers, economists, politicians, scientists, CEOs, and other people as well.  The only problem is that you often have to wait for them to die before you can get a good biography.

By virtue of the fact that most of us live in communities surrounded by people we interact with on a number of levels each day, each of us exert a certain measure of influence over our circumstances and relationships.  In this most general sense I believe that we all bear responsibility for the good or evil influence we have in this world, but that is not what I am talking about in this blog.  I am talking about what happens when influence becomes a decision we make, when influence becomes intentional and strategic.  I am talking about what influence looks like when it is married to commitment.

I recently read Steven Pressfield’s book, the WAR of ART.  Over half of the book is devoted to one subject, resistance.  Pressfield employs the word resistance in order to anthropomorphize (yes that is a real word) that insidious something that meets us every day in the places where we can decide to have real, intentional, influence, but don’t.  It meets us for only one reason, to prevent us from making that decision at any cost.  It will beat us down, paralyze us with fear or doubt, negotiate with us, cajole us, threaten us, accuse us or distract us.  And if none of that works, it will enlist people to help.

One quote from Pressfield’s book stood out for me.  It was taken from W.H. Murray’s The Scottish Himalayan Expedition:  “Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:  that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.”

I am currently teaching on the sixteenth century Reformation and last night I was speaking about Martin Luther.  Regardless of whether you personally/religiously appreciate Luther or despise him, the one thing you cannot do is deny his influence on his world and ours.  No one can know the influence their life is going to have.  No one can predict whether or not their decisions are going to change the world.  No one knows whether or not their plans will succeed or if future generations will bless or curse them.  Luther could not have known any of these things when he made the decisions he made in the face of continual resistance, but we do know based on the historical record that he continued to make decisions in the same direction day after day:  the 95 Theses, meeting Cardinal Cajetan, the Leipzig Debate, his 3 treatises of 1520, the Diet of Worms etc. etc. etc. 

That is in esssence what I mean when I say, influence is a decision.  I am tempted day after day to not have real influence in the places where I live and work, to not decide, to not commit, to not offer the best of who I am to the people around me because of all the reasons that resistence provides.  But what if it’s true?  What if at the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too?

It seems to me, as a follower of Jesus Christ, that Christians have struggled mightily with being clear and consistent about what they mean when they use the word ”Church” and our history has not always helped us in this regard.  For example, Christian history in medieval Europe during the fourteenth century is filled with less than sterling examples of this dilemma.  Though of course many things occurred in the fourteenth century and it would be a bit of a stretch to characterize  the entire century by a few events, I am going to anyway.

Two periods bracket Christian history in the fourteenth century:  The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (BCC) and the Great Schism.  Let’s just say that the former precipitated the latter and that the majority of the fourteenth century was dedicated to resolving the issues/events that spilled over from these two periods.  The BCC was a period between 1309-1377 when the papacy moved its residence from Rome, Italy to Avignon, France.  For the French pope Clement V this was not captivity, it was self preservation, but later popes looked back on it as a period when the church was held captive by the French Monarchy.  The Great Schism was the direct result of the BCC when the European Christendom was eventually split between three popes, all excommunicating each other and dividing the church.  I believe that this less than exemplary period offers us an opportunity to address what is meant when Christians talk about “Church”.

There is a sense in which it is appropriate to speak of the church as an institution if by that we mean that it is an historical entity, that it has leaders, and that over the centuries it has developed its own peculiar organizational structures and practices.  But I do not believe that the church is primarily an institution and when it has tried to be one it has lost sight of its mission and purpose.  You see by the fourteenth century it was becoming readily apparent that the church as an institution could not back up its universal claims of temporal and political power in medieval Europe.  The BCC and the Great Schism were the practical consequences put into effect when the church failed as a temporal/political power, when it failed as a medieval institution.

So what is the church if it is not primarily an institution?  If you read the New Testament long enough you realize that there is no verse, no idea, no indication that is possible for the followers of Jesus Christ to go to church.  Practically speaking they have only two viable choices.  They can either be church or not be church; they cannot go to church.  Christians have through the centuries developed the bad habit of turning language about people in to language about places.   Biblically speaking, church is a community.  It is a people whose lives are  intimately connected with the person of Jesus Christ and the story of his death and resurrection.  The Church is a powerful, transformational community of broken, vulnerable people with leaders, organizational structures and practices developed over the centuries, but it is not an institution.  It is not building churches that Christians have struggled with through the centuries, it is being Church.

As I was plodding my way through a lesson on Medieval Scholasticism recently I was reminded of the need to keep the big picture in mind when dealing with any period of history.  When examining the past there are many times when we may find a person’s answer to an issue or problem to be, well, dumb.  At least it may appear dumb or misguided or unintelligible to us, but I was reminded that even though we might not like their answers or solutions, in the bigger picture, it may be more important to us that they understood the right questions to ask.

For example, scholastic thinkers in the thirteenth century all had their panties in a wad about what to do about the growing corpus of Aristotle’s works that were being translated into Latin and finding their way into the medieval university’s curriculum.  Why you ask should Aristotle pose such a problem for these Christian intellectuals?  Well, let’s just say that Aristotelian naturalism’s understanding and explanation of the world and the way that one truly knows the world did not exactly square with the Bible’s teachings and with Church doctrine.  So, some of these thinkers began to address the apparent inconsistencies and incongruencies that existed between Aristotle and the Bible.  Of course we have no comparable issues in our day, but this was a real problem for them.

One of these thinkers was Thomas Aquinas, the “dumb ox”, a name given to him by some mean spirited classmates.  A good biography to read is G.K Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, but I digress.  The point is that Aquinas was not afraid that his faith in God or the Bible would be threatened or undermined by addressing this issue, and he was unwilling to dismiss Aristotle’s teachings out of hand just because Aristotle offered a different way of knowing the world and did not seem to be all that interested in God.  Instead, he attempted something truly amazing.  He attempted to reconcile the Bible and Aristotle because he truly believed that faith and reason were compatible, that people were meant to be full knowers and not just thinkers, that we were created to know the world and to know the world’s Creator, that we were incarnate spirits and not just a brain inside of a body driven by a will.

More importantly, he knew the right question to ask.  Do we know God the same way we know the world?  If the answer is no, is the knowledge of God or the world immediately invalidated?  Aquinas’ Summa Theologia was his attempt to answer that fundamental question in his generation.  I might add that later thinkers gave up on his attempt with significant consequences, but I for one am glad that he tried.  I am glad that he refused to accept that humans are just a brain inside a body driven by a will.  I am glad that he knew the right question to ask.  It is still one of the right questions to ask.  If you are interested in more of this discussion listen to the podcast on Scholasticism found in the Medieval/Reformation Christianity course.

Studying history offers us a number of opportunities.   Whether or not we choose to take advantage of those opportunities is another matter.  History offers us more than learning interesting, or not so interesting, facts.  It also offers us the chance to better understand other cultures, what they believed and how they practiced their beliefs.  For many of us, studying history can be an exercise that reveals large gaps between what we think we know about another culture’s beliefs and practices and what in fact another culture actually believes and practices.  History offers us the opportunity to clarify some things that may be fuzzy for us. 

The study of religious history is a good example.  There is nothing more invigorating or challenging than finding out that what we thought we knew about another culture’s faith, all the sound bites, anecdotes, and Cliff Clavenisms “it’s a little known fact that…”, were in fact not accurate at all. 

For example, I recently taught a session on the history of Islam and the Crusades.  In the process I tried to point out that many Christians make an inaccurate comparison when they equate Mohammad with Jesus Christ: what Mohammad is for Muslims, Jesus is for Christians.  Actually, it would be more accurate to equate the Koran with Jesus Christ.  For Muslims the Koran is the perfect, complete and divine revelation of Allah, not Mohammad.  Mohammad is the blessed prophet of Allah.  Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the perfect divine/human revelation of God.  It is not Jesus’ prophetic office that Christians emphasize, it is his divinity as the Son of God.  The Bible for Christians is the divinely inspired, authoritative revelation of God, but there is a difference between saying that the Bible is divinely inspired and saying that it is divine.   The Bible for Christians is not like the Koran and Mohammad is not like Jesus Christ. 

That’s what I mean by history offering us an opportunity to clarify things.  Oh, and the part about these discoveries being invigorating and challenging, it might be better to say that they are more often irritating, frustrating and aggravating because clarifying things is the first step toward changing our minds.  “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” but first it might make you mad.

For those who are  interested in a book that gets at this business of clarification I would suggest Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t.

Ascetic- “a person who renounces the comforts of society and  leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious  devotion.”  There are not too many people in our society in danger of being classified as an ascetic.  Being an ascetic is just not cool.  Some of us may occasionally think about it for a bit but the best remedy is to lie down until the feeling passes, and then go to In and Out Burger for a #2 and shake.  And no, starving yourself in order to fit in a pair of jeans does not count.

But in the medieval world of Christianity people thought about religious devotion in terms of self-denial.  They thought about it a lot  because they were continually concerned about their spiritual condition.  Life in medieval Europe was uncertain at best and making plans for your eternal security was an ever present worry for the average person.  Joining a monastic community was one way a person could obtain hope that at death they were more likely to  go up rather than down.  In effect, becoming a member of a monastic community also meant becoming an ascetic.  In fact, becoming an ascetic for Jesus was at the heart of Medieval Monasticism’s mission.  All monks focused on achieving what was called the vita apostolica or the life of an apostle.  They were trying to emulate the life and faith of those early followers of Jesus.  There were three main characteristics that defined an apostolic life:  obedience, poverty, and preaching.  Over time, the monks found obedience and poverty to be the toughest of the three and, of those two, poverty was really tough.  Why you ask?  Well that is the dilemma and the irony of it all.  It was tough because the very act of fulfilling the apostolic life resulted in many things, poverty was not one of them, but  no self-respecting ascetic could be successful without maintaining the state of poverty.

You see, living a truly apostolic life meant doing everything, and I mean everything, to the glory of God.  You did everything with excellence for the Lord:  prayer, worship, scholarship, confession, and work.  Everyone worked and work was spiritual.  Monastic communities were self-contained, self-sufficient entities.  Everyone had a job that helped contribute to the life of the community.    In many monastic communities monks worked to build and maintain the monastery, prepare the fields, plant the crops and vineyards, harvest the crops and vineyards,  make cheese and wine, bake bread, etc. etc.  So what happens when a bunch of ascetics practice self-discipline and self-denial together while doing everything with excellence to the glory of God?   Are you able to maintain your poverty, not likely.  Instead you are steadily improving your condition.  You are in fact achieving material prosperity even as you continue to promote ascetic self-denial/poverty as one of the hallmarks of following Christ.  Most attempts to reform monasticism were begun by those who sought to regain the lost ascetic practices that maintained a firm commitment to poverty. 

So what’s the point?  Is an ascetic life-style essential in order to truly follow Jesus?  Can one demonstrate the characteristics of an apostolic life in the absence of literal poverty?  Are asceticism and poverty prerequisites for doing everything for the glory of God?  Did monasticism end up confusing its methods with its mission?

So what was the answer to the ascetic’s dilemma?  Would it have required them to stop interpreting poverty as a personal spiritual state to achieve and started treating it as a human issue to address by doing everything for the glory of God out of their wealth and prosperity? 

So what is our dilemma?

I am currently teaching a course entitled Medieval and Reformation Christianity, but before you hit the snooze button to catch just ten more minutes of sleep, hear me out.  I start the course by reminding  myself and the students that a good question to ask about any period of history is, what was it possible for the people of a particular time to believe?  Not what I wish they had believed, or what they should have believed, or if I had lived then I would have believed such and such; the only legitimate question is, what was it possible for them to believe?  I then make a valiant attempt to recreate the medieval world before filling it with people like popes, monks, nuns, priests, bishops, scholastics, reformers, kings, emperors, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers along with other assorted historical figures.

What I try to impress on the students is that what you are looking for in recreating any period of history are the sentiments and the symbols that formed the foundation upon which people built the institutions that represented their culture.  Rather than starting with famous people, events, ideas and institutions; start with sentiments and symbols.  By sentiments I mean the core values people held, the values they used to interpret and shape the world around them.  What were they driven by?  What were they passionate about?  By symbols I mean just that, what were the prevailing symbols that appeared over and over in their art, architecture and literature?  Why is this exercise valuable?  It’s valuable because the political, educational, religious, social, artistic, legal and literary institutions that uniquely define every culture in history emerge out of and are shaped by the sentiments/values of the people who created them, and the symbols that represented those sentiments can be found everywhere if you look for them. 

For example, the medieval world was shaped by people who believed in continuity, the ultimate unity and oneness of all reality.  They believed that spiritual things and temporal things were meant to be connected somehow; therefore, they believed that politics and religion could not be and should not be separated.  In various ways they understood that heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent, were different realities, but they would not and could not accept the idea that they were mutually exclusive or unrelated realities.  At the center of the medieval world was a strong, prevailing belief in the existence of God and the belief that all of life was somehow connected with this God and for the glory of this God.  So, the great medieval project was to actually create a world in which the sentiments and symbols regarding heaven were functionally realized in all of its earthly institutions and vice versa.  The crowing political achievement of this medieval project was the creation of the Holy Roman Empire where Popes and Emperors represented the uniting of heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent.

Bottom line, this  great medieval project failed in many respects.  So what’s my point?  If my premise regarding sentiments and symbols has any weight, when our world is carefully examined 75 or 100 years from now, what will these future researchers deduce were the prevailing sentiments that motivated and drove us?  What were our core values as a culture?  What were we passionate about?  When they look at all of our institutions, what sentiments and symbols will be evident?  If our institutions reveal our values, what do we value?  What are the most powerful symbols in our culture?

Just something to think about.

Well, I sat and sat trying to think of a really thoughtful blog topic to end 2009 and start 2010.  I pondered my way through any number of mind numbing possibilities from quotes and commentary from the Desert Fathers/Mothers to the ever ready “lives of the Reformers” to “what’s wrong with the church anyway” to personal reflections on my life and how I want to do better in the future.  Thankfully both of us were saved from these less than worthwhile entries by a Facebook post from a friend/colleague.  He suggested I read an article and I spent the next ten minutes laughing. 

Call it desparate for an idea or call it finding a better way to end 2009 and start 2010.  Either way, it came and not a minute too soon.  The point is, I am grateaful that my sober, serious attempts at starting a new year were highjacked just in time in favor of a choice I find much more compelling and healthy.  Considering the great  unknown that faces all of us, the history yet unwritten that we will experience, the people, places, events and circumstances we will encounter, I am inviting you to begin 2010 with a sense of humor.  I have decided to laugh my way into the next decade.

So, in the spirit that gave Scrooge a new lease on life and made him a much nicer person to be around, I end 2009 by turning my blog over to Dave Barry.  May the New Year begin with a gut splitting laugh and a sense that no matter what 2010 holds for us, we will live it and, after all, living it is so much better than the alternative.

http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/dave-barry/v-fullstory/story/1397654.html

Happy New Year!