First for anyone feeling too happy or nostalgic about the Reformation an excerpt from the very clever and poignant review by Mark Lilla of Brad Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society:
GREGORY CHOOSES not to weave one grand narrative that tells this sorry tale. Instead he teases out six historical strands that get separate treatment: theology, philosophy, politics, morality, economics, and education. This strategy entails much redundancy, since the moral he draws in each chapter is the same. But it also reveals that he has two unconnected stories to tell about how everything went to hell.
The first story is about the historical Reformation, which is his academic specialty. Gregory does not provide even a brief history of the Catholic Middle Ages that preceded the Reformation, only a single, static, rose-tinted image of The World We Have Lost. (He also avoids the term “Catholic,” preferring instead “medieval Christianity,” which sounds more inclusive.) If not an entirely happy world, it was at least a relatively harmonious one, despite what everyone thinks. Yes, there were theological disagreements and conflicts over authority, pitting popes against monastic orders against church councils against emperors against princes. Yes, the church split into east and west, and for a time there were rival popes. And yes, mistakes were made. Heretics were roughly handled, pointless Crusades launched, Jews and Muslims expelled or worse. Still, through it all, the Catholic complexio oppositorum was held together by a unified institutionalized view of the human good. “Over the course of more than a millennium the church had gradually and unsystematically institutionalized throughout Latin Europe a comprehensive sacramental worldview based on truth claims about God’s actions in history, centered on the incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.” And this translated into a “shared, social life of faith, hope, love, humility, patience, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, compassion, service, and generosity [that] simply was Christianity.” Hieronymus Bosch must have been high.
Then it happened. The Church itself was largely to blame for creating the conditions that the early Reformers complained of, and for not policing itself. The charges leveled by Luther and Calvin had merit, and theirs was originally a conservative rebellion aimed at returning the Church to its right mind. But then things got out of hand, as the intoxicating spirit of rebellion spread to the spiritual Jacobins of the radical Reformation. They are our real founding fathers, who bequeathed to us not a coherent set of moral and theological doctrines, but the corrosive pluralism that characterizes our age. The radicals denied the need for sacraments or relics, which ordinary believers believed in, handing them Bibles they were unequipped to understand. Sola scriptura, plus the idea that anyone could be filled with the Holy Spirit, inspired every radical reformer to become his own Saint Paul—and then demand that his neighbors put down their nets and follow him. Disagreements erupted, leading to war, which led to the creation of confessional states, which led to more wars. Modern liberalism was born to cope with these conflicts, which it did. But the price was high: it required the institutionalization of toleration as the highest moral virtue. The nineteenth-century Catholic Church rejected this whole package and withdrew within its walls, where intellectual life declined and dogma ossified. It thus left the rest of us to sink ever deeper into the confusing, unsatisfying, hyper-pluralistic, consumer-driven, dogmatically relativistic world of today.
. . . So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with the task of examining these orthodoxies in their own terms and judging for ourselves their presuppositions, aspirations, and effects—which is what theology and philosophy have traditionally done. But this is precisely what today’s religious romantics, like Gregory, shy away from, preferring instead to construct mytho-histories that insinuate rather than argue, and appeal to readers’ prejudices rather than their rational faculties. They become what Friedrich von Schlegel once said all historians are at heart: prophets in reverse.
Why does anyone think it worthwhile to consult such prophets? For the same reason people have always done so. We want the comfort, however cold, of thinking that we understand the present, while at the same time escaping full responsibility for the future. There is a book to be done on Western mytho-histories in relation to the times in which they were written, and the social-psychological work they accomplished in different epochs. Such a book would eventually trace how, beginning in the early nineteenth century, archaic theological narratives about the past were modernized and substituted for argument in intellectual proxy wars over the present. In the chapter on our time, it would note how techno-libertarian progressives and liberal hawks rediscovered Goodbye to All That bedtime stories that induced dreams of a radiant global democracy, while conservatives read ghost stories, then sang themselves to sleep with ancient songs about The World We Have Lost.
One wonders why Brad Gregory felt compelled to add to our stock of historical fables. He is obviously dissatisfied with the way we live now and despairs that things will only get worse. I share his dissatisfaction and, in my worst moments, his despair. But it enlightens me not at all to think that “medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing,” as if each of these were self-conscious “projects” the annual reports of which are available for consultation. Life does not work that way; history does not work that way. Nor does it help me to imagine that the peak of Western civilization was reached in the decades just before the Reformation, or to imagine that we might rejoin The Road Not Taken by taking the next exit off the autobahn, which is the vague hope this book wants to plant in readers’ minds.
Then a little Halloween humor from Russell Moore (thanks to John Fea):
An evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for Halloween.
A conservative evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for the church’s “Fall Festival.”
A confessional evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up as Zwingli and Bucer for “Reformation Day.”
A revivalist evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up as demons and angels for the church’s Judgment House community evangelism outreach.
An Emerging Church evangelical is a fundamentalist who has no kids, but who dresses up for Halloween anyway.
A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist whose kids hand out gospel tracts to all those mentioned above.
I’d make one change.
A confessional evangelical is one who dresses like Zwingli and Bucer but once he sees a baptismal font takes off his clothes to expose a Charles Spurgeon costume (minus the cigar).
Old Life 
Gregory has got to belong to CTC.
I’ll have to ask the secretary who was sitting at the front desk dressed as Pochahontas this morning what camp she falls into.
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DGH —
That was quite a good review. I agree with Gregory’s theory that the Reformers didn’t mean to create the degree of change they did… but not his conclusion. They early Reformers didn’t understand how fragile the system was.
I lost a tree to Sandy. Abut 5 years ago a large branch broke off about halfway up the tree, and where it broke off the tree started to rot. The tree snapping in 1/2 this weekend was indicative of the sustained winds. But it was also a measure of the fact the tree had become very unstable and hurricane or no it was going to collapse.
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My wife and I decided tonight that our children will dress like Luther, going door to door not to receive candy, but to hammer 95 theses to the entry-way of every house in the neighborhood. Does that make us confessional fundamentalists?
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Good post. I listen to books on my commute, using my kindle’s “text to speech” feature, and this was the latest one that was my companion. Odd practice, perhaps, I know.
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I liked the evangelical humor- especially the one about Spurgeon minus the cigar. Another myth or fable of history. One would never find Spurgeon without his cigars.
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I once dressed up as Oecolampadius by wearing a lampshade for a PCA Reformation Day stump the pastor with your favorite Bible or church history character costume party. After a longer than usual deliberation time, they actually got it. I was impressed.
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Terry, that’s how I am attired when I leave all parties.
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Certainly Russell Moore and Al Mohler are on board with equating the kingdom of God with their own version of the social gospel (which they share with certain Roman Catholic moralists). I like this gem from Lilla:
After Virtue is catnip for grumpy souls. By blurring the lines between intellectual history and philosophical argument, MacIntyre developed a compelling just-so story about how our awful world came to be. Once upon a time the Aristotelian tradition of moral reflection, which ran continuously from antiquity through the Catholic Middle Ages, gave Europeans a coherent narrative for understanding and practicing virtue in their individual and collective lives. That tradition was destroyed by the “Enlightenment project.” (Note to students: distrust any book that uses this empty phrase.)
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Why does Leithart follow Milbank toward Augustine’s religiously justified violence. Lilla’s review of Gregory’s book explains:
“For Gregory these vast and various problems have a single source: the “hyper-pluralism” of modern societies. In an Agnew-esque moment he even complains of “pullulating pluralism.” “All Westerners,” Gregory declares at one point, “live in the Kingdom of Whatever.”
Except when they don’t. For by now this hyper-pluralism has been so deeply rooted in our institutions, especially universities, that those who question it are excommunicated from intellectual life. On the one hand, “within the limits of the law, literally anything goes as far as truth claims and religious practices are concerned”; on the other, “the religious truth claims made by billions of people are excluded from consideration on their own terms in nearly all research universities,” where “those who reject any substantive religious answers to the Life Questions … are statistically overrepresented.”
What bothers Gregory is not that there is no social consensus, but that the one we have supports moral pluralism. “There is no shared, substantive common good, nor are there any realistic prospects for devising one (at least in the immediately foreseeable future).” Nor can we expect help from Catholic universities, which in their rush to appear accepting of modernity have “unwittingly invited in an intellectual Trojan horse bearing a load of subversive assumptions.”
This picture of our present will be familiar to anyone who reads the American theocons, left-leaning Radical Orthodoxy figures such as John Milbank, and occasionally Charles Taylor. Whether you find it plausible will probably depend on the kind of day you’re having: it expresses a mood, not an analysis. But unless you do accept it, very little in Gregory’s book will make sense to you, since it is essentially a five-hundred-page connect-the-dots puzzle that begins with the way we supposedly live now and works back to the Big Bang of the Protestant Reformation. Its method is an inverted Whiggism—a Whiggism for depressives.
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Darryl,
I find that hard to believe, that is, that you leave most parties with a lamp shade on your head. Or, are you just trying provoke a Neo-Cal? I will have to look up who Oecolampadedius is. Was he the guy who sat on top of the pole for a very long time?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Oecolampadius
He was an interesting guy- I don’t get the lampshade reference though.
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John Y., if neo-Cals are pietists, then I wrote that with them in mind. Though for one New Year’s Party, my wife and I showed up wearing lamp shades. Just to set the tone.
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I do appreciate your sense of humor Darryl and that you occasionally respond to my quirky comments.
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McMark,
I am trying to decipher your two last posts and the significance of them. No one wants to seem to tackle the issue that the Reformers might have made some serious blunders in how they justified the use of violence and capital punishment in regards to those who disagreed with their social thinking. I find this to be a rather complex issue or else the Reformers had some serious blind spots in how they thought about social issues. And I am not sure if either the Neo-Cals or 2Kers have a good answer to this issue of the use of justified violence. Everyone seems to skirt around the issue but no one seems to want to tackle it head on. The theonomists and some Neo-Cals (I am not sure whether I should equate the two) want to implement more capital punishment whereas the 2kers seem reluctant to go there but do justify the killing of social offenders and going to war when necessary. Is there a good answer to this quandry?
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mark mcculley: Certainly Russell Moore and Al Mohler are on board with equating the kingdom of God with their own version of the social gospel (which they share with certain Roman Catholic moralists).
RS: It was bad enough the Dr. Hart brought in Russell More, but you brought him up along with Al Mohler. I would think that one would not have to read about those two at this location. Imputed righteousness is a much better subject.
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Culture transformation projects grounded in RC natural theology or from the other side, theonomic or softer kuyperian soil, reminds me of wild life management programs at the national parks including reflective declarations of success: “see how the wolf has recovered, and the buffalo have been reintroduced and are flourishing! But wait, now we’re observing decreasing prey herds! The land can’t sustain the increasing predatory presence and, and, and what about the endangered blind salamander and then we’ve got global climate change and changing migratory patterns we may have to rethink our rethinking all over again.” “Remember when the Indian lived with the land and their were no flags or fences?! That’s where we need to get too again”(cue CSNY back to the Garden).
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I am still trying to get this common grace issue and why many react so negatively to it. I know there was a big controversy about it in Kalamazoo, Michigan a long while back which seems to surface from time to time. I even remember arguing about it at Scott Clarks site 3 or 4 years ago. I am reading an article about the controversy now but it is a long and laborious read. I think there is some connection to how one understands the doctine of justification and union with Christ to social issues but cannot link it yet in a coherent fashion. I am trying to connect the dots but finding that it is a difficult connection. I might be wasting my time too.
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“I don’t get the lampshade reference though.” Perhaps it is the lamp in the middle of his name. I just happened to read that one over again.
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Oecolampadius was not his original name. He made it up from the Greek for “house” as in economics and “lamp”.
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Neo-Cals as pietists? You’ve got to be kidding. So-called Neo-Cals today might argue that second hand smoke is as dangerous as CO2 or that alcoholic beverages and marijuana are from the devil. But Dutch Calvinists are quite in league with Old School Presbterians in their enjoyment of God’s good gifts.
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Terry, think intellectual pietism. For fundies you have to show you devotion on your sleeve or bumper sticker. For Neo-Cals, you have to show it on your self-consciousness.
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True piety embraces what God actually says we should do–Romans 12:1-2. Nothing more, nothing less. I still don’t see how neo-Calvinism violates true Christian liberty. Being self-conscious is just thinking about what you do. You’re as good as anyone when it comes to that.
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Terry, think the PRC and Christian schools. How is that liberty and not soft intellectual pietism gone hard?
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Terry, here’s the way I see it. The scriptures are abstracted into presupps, the presupps are applied, and the result is called the Christian view. But the abstraction and then application of presupps leave one two steps removed from scripture. And maybe the presupp filtered out relevant biblical data and replaced it with a more philosophical concept before the fallible work of application. Then the result is embraced by the group which looks askance at anyone who doesn’t share the result.
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I’m feeling afflicted by seriosity today. Where’s Yeazel when I need him to tell a good story?
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You should know better than to encourage me MM- you may be opening a Pandora’s box. You should get that new Dylan biography by David Dalton that I have been reading. I keep thinking of you and your musical tastes while reading it. I think you would enjoy it. Dylan was a postmodern, stream of consciousness, existentialist amphetemine addict who was into the French poets in his years up to 1969. And he was not a nice guy either. But he did make some remarkable albums during those early years (I got a new appreciation for his Blonde on Blonde album so I am going to have to listen to it closely again after reading the chapter on the album). He had a motorcycle accident in 1969 and then disappeared from the music scene for 8 years except for some “bootleg” music he made with “The Band.” I’m curious to read the chapters after his accident to see how (or if) he changed but have not gotten there yet.
I hope that cures your seriousity- although sometimes seriousity can be a good thing. Dylan was good at not taking himself so seriously (and boomeraghing-sp? the media who wanted to make a big deal out of him) although I think he was afflicted with the same narcissism that grabbed hold of many during the baby boom generation. He had a very agile mind- no doubt about that. I find it to be interesting reading. Although the author has the annoying habit of continuing to refer to Dylan as a “hipster.” That is a four letter word among Christian Reformed types who critique culture. It is not cool to be hip and cool amongst the Reformed intelligentsia. I do understand that hip and cool can be disguised as defiance of any kind of authority, worldliness and lack of maturity but I have often wondered if that constant critique it is just a cover for some other underlying malady in the author himself. Like Rushdoony’s dislike of the Beatles and constant reference to them in a negative fashion. I am going off on a tangent.
I also have been going to the Saturday night concerts at the Old Town School of Folk music in Chicago and they all have been both informative and musically exceptional. It is a nice venue in an auditorium that holds about 400 people. Lots of older people in the crowd- my guess is that there are a lot of Jewish liberals who frequent the types of concerts they have there.
I kind of referenced in some Christ and culture in the comment- right?
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THAT’S what I’m talkin’bout, Yeazel!
The book does look interesting – it’s on my list.Of course, the blues connection looks interesting. Does it do much with his evangelical albums?
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MM,
I have not gotten that far in the book yet. I am up to about 1969. His evangelical albums came out in the 80’s I believe. From what I can tell about the author I do not think he has a vast knowledge of evangelicalism or the various factions within Christendom so I am not sure how he will handle those years. He is taking a chronological approach in the book and not skipping around from years to years.
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Some more Dylan remarks and a correction from my reading another chapter last night. Dylan’s motorcycle accident was in 1966. This is significant because Dylan was out of the music scene in the late 60’s when the psychedelic musicians appeared, ie., Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, etc. Dylan and his friends did make a couple documentaries after his accident about what life was like on the road during their 1966 tour which featured the albums “Highway 61 revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde.” Dylan had left his folk roots and mythmaking about his life and backround and went electric which caused must controversy back then for those who cared about such things.
The two documentaries made after his accident were a kind of closure to this phase in his life. They were an indictment against the bizarre culture that got worse after Dylan left the music scene for eight years between 1966 and 1974. The two hour long documentaries were called DON’T LOOK BACK and EAT THE DOCUMENT. One scene on EAT THE DOCUMENT had this dialog: Interviewer: Why are you here?; Dylan: I take orders from someone on the telephone, but I never see him. He calls up and tells me where to go.
Dalton had this to say about the two films: “In contrast to the black and white cinema verite of DON’T LOOK BACK, the look of EAT THE DOCUMENT is positively trippy. Some of this has to do with the uncoated 7242 reversible color film stock used, one of the first films that Eastman Kodak brought out. But it’s advantage Pennebaker took of it-intuitively playing on its distortions and technical shortcomings- that makes the footage so electric…..this was Dylan’s farewell to the 60’s….he was implying that he was at the end of a cycle, that he was going back to his acoustic roots- the ancient folk music that he will reawaken in his next musical mutations: John Wesley Harding and the The Basement Tapes….Dylan saw documentaries as he’d come to see folk music, a form that exuded authenticity, but was almost as much a work of fiction as your average Hollywoood movie….Dylan is a mythmaker, a collector of folk truths, legends, and revelations, for whom the garden-variety realism aspired to in most documentaries is toxic. So EAT THE DOCUMENT might be seen as Dylan’s poetic journal of the 1966 tour- how it felt to him, its arbitrariness mirroring the way memory is reconstituted from fragments.”
“What did Dylan want from his documentary? What kind of film would come out of a head like this? Jonathan Cott suggested in Rolling Stone that Dylan wanted to make an “anti-documentary that uses the ‘star’ image in order to demystify and decompose it. In other words Bob deconstructing Bob, dismantling the monumental Dylan effigy he’d so brilliantly created.
Dalton continues: “Was he trying to cast the characters from his songs in a movie? Give them legs and set them loose on the world? In a sense Dylan’s songs are short surreal film sequences, his lyrics a form of cinematography complete with tracking shots, extreme close-ups, and reverse angles.”
“Maybe one day Dylan will paint his cinematic masterpiece. In the meantime we have his spectral movies in our heads; they run everytime we hear “Visions of Johanna”; “Desolation Row,” or “Positively 4th Street.”
I thought that was quite a good summary of what Dylan was all about during those turbulent years. He needed an eight year break to recover and reflect from the madness and insanity. I am now anxious to see what transpired next.
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