Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ Pentecostals. These groups have radically different beliefs, but they share a family resemblance. They are as quarrelsome and fervent as any other Protestant, and that first spark, the life-changing encounter between the individual believer and the grace of God, is visible in all of them.

      One definition does need a little more attention: the one on which Erasmus focused. As a much-quoted seventeenth-century Englishman put it, “The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants!”⁵ It is a truism that the Bible, the ancient library of Jewish and early Christian texts that Christians regard as Scripture, is close to Protestantism’s heart. It is also clear that one of the things Protestants love to fight over is what the Bible is and means. To understand those battles, we need to ask just what Protestants’ relationship with the Bible is – as a matter of historical practice, not of theological principle.

      Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity”, a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth. This view makes Protestantism’s history of division easy enough to understand; these are simply arguments about the interpretation of a complex text. But the claim that Protestantism is mere Bible Christianity does not stand up. For one thing, there is that love affair. What Protestants share is an experience of God’s grace rather than a doctrine of authority. Martin Luther had his life upended by God’s grace before he decided that he could not be bound by any authority outside Scripture. Indeed, many Protestants have not treated the Bible as their sole authority. Some have found authority elsewhere, through (as they believed) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others have questioned whether and in what sense the whole text as we have it is authoritative at all.

      Even those who do use the whole Bible as their sole authority do so in two different ways. They are Erasmus’s lovers and fighters. The Bible has from the beginning been Protestants’ weapon for defending their beliefs and dismissing their opponents’, citing chapter and verse to prove the point. This works best if you believe in the word-for-word authority of the entire text, and the earliest Protestants were as adept as any modern evangelicals at that kind of close-quarters biblical combat.

      And yet, before the Bible is a bludgeon that can be used to batter your opponents into submission, it is a source of inspiration. Before you can wield it like a fighter, you must read it like a lover. We can see this through one of the strangest features of Protestant Christianity. Although Protestants have from the beginning vigorously asserted that the Bible is authoritative, they have been strangely slow to argue that that is so. When the case has been made, it has often been done without much energy: citing biblical texts to justify the Bible’s authority, an obviously circular argument, or making shaky deductions to the effect that God must have inspired it. This is not because Protestants are avoiding an awkward subject or know they do not have a leg to stand on. It is because, in truth, their faith does not hang on these arguments. They do not need to convince themselves of the Bible’s authority, because they already know it.

      Early Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian, John Calvin, confronted the question head-on. In an extraordinary passage, he simply refused to argue the case for the Bible’s authority at all. “We ought”, he said, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” In other words, we know that the Bible is the Word of God not by arguing about it but by reading it with “pure eyes and upright senses”, for then and only then “the majesty of God will immediately come to view”. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, and only the Holy Spirit can convince you that that is true. Therefore, Calvin concludes,

      Scripture is indeed self-authenticating. . . . We feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, . . . a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.⁶

      The Bible itself provides its own authority, and either you feel it (through the Spirit) or you don’t. This is Scripture for lovers, who can talk rapturously of the vision before them but cannot in the end compel anyone else to see it.

      Across the span of Protestantism’s history, the experience Calvin describes is fundamental. The same argument, in essence, was made by seventeenth-century Puritans, eighteenth-century revivalists, nineteenth-century liberals, and twentieth-century Pentecostals. The Bible is woven into Western, and now global, civilization more deeply than any other book, and none of us can come to it cold. Yet in every generation, Protestants have felt that they are reading the Bible for the first time and have been enthralled by its stories, its poetry and its arguments. This is why they persistently refuse to let anyone else tell them how to read their Bibles. “I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God,” Martin Luther told Pope Leo X, “since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other matters, must not be bound.” The following century, John Bunyan gently refused to submit to anyone else’s interpretation. “I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.”⁷ Protestants have been finding refreshment and boldness in their own cisterns ever since.

      When Protestant groups have distanced themselves from the Bible, like the Nazi-era “German Christians” for whom it was intolerably Jewish, they end up looking not very Protestant any more. But if to read the Bible as a lover is common to all Protestants, whether and how to use it as a weapon is not. Many Protestants have concluded, as Calvin did, that the entire text must be fully inspired. This seems the most openhearted way of honouring their encounter with God in the text and also makes the text much easier to use in combat. Others have for various reasons concluded that they cannot accept it as authoritative in that way, on some variant of a principle first articulated by Martin Luther himself. Luther argued that the Bible contains the Word of God rather than that it is that Word. He even called it “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies”.⁸ But even those who have picked up that idea and run with it most daringly still keep coming back to the manger to worship.

      Protestants have no consensus on the question of how and in what sense the Bible is authoritative. Some would defend every comma. Others are more free and easy with the text. Both positions are attractive and both present formidable problems. But for all their arguments, both parties continue to drink from this cistern out of a shared conviction that here, supremely, is where they hear God’s voice – even if they are unable to agree on what he says.

      A brief note about how and why I have written this book. I have written about a very wide range of religious movements. I find some of them admirable, some of them repellent, and some of them tinged with madness. In each case, I have tried to treat them with sympathy. This is not because I myself believe that witches should be put to death or that apartheid is God’s will. It is because earnest, God-fearing Protestants who were no more inherently wicked than you or I did believe these things, even at the same time as other Protestants passionately opposed them. Condemning ugly beliefs is easy, but it is also worth the effort to understand why people once believed them. If we are lucky, later ages might be as indulgent towards us. We all live in glass houses. Those who are without sin are welcome to cast the first stone.

      So I have tried to explain what all kinds of Protestantism felt like from the inside, but like all of us I also have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England. This book was not, however, written to convert you to my views, and I should be amazed if it did. It was written to convince you of the richness, the power, and the creativity, as well as the dangers, of this vast religious tradition. If you are yourself a Protestant, I hope this book will show you your own tradition in a new perspective: to help you understand more about where it came from, how it ended up the way it is today, and where it might be going next. If you are not, I hope it will show you why so many people have been and still are. I hope you will also see how this tradition has not only made the modern world but also made itself at СКАЧАТЬ