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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Folly (1509), which told his readers that almost every aspect of the world they lived in was ridiculous. The piety and shrewdness were seen in his pathbreaking 1516 Latin translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Its preface recommended that the Bible be made available in all languages so that it could be read even by those on the very extremes of Christian civilization: the wild Scots, the Irish, even – he strained himself – women. Characteristically, he wrote that dangerous preface in Latin. He knew what he could get away with. He also knew that the content of his New Testament mattered less than the fact of its existence. He was offering the chance to use the Bible to judge the Church.¹

      The Church’s old guard was duly provoked. Erasmus himself always stayed on the right side of trouble, but others were less careful and more vulnerable. The great cause célèbre of early sixteenth-century Germany was Johannes Reuchlin, a pioneer of Christian Hebrew scholarship. Unfortunately, the only people who could teach Christians Hebrew were Jews, and late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews. Reuchlin, however, both was openly friendly with certain Jews and acknowledged his debt to Jewish biblical scholarship. Inevitably, he was denounced for crypto-Judaism, which the Church regarded as heresy. His denouncer, with grim irony, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. German Renaissance scholars rallied to his defence, viciously mocking his opponents as self-serving obscurantists. For them, this was a war between fearless, cutting-edge German scholarship and corrupt, ignorant Italian power politics. The court case dragged on until 1516, and even then it was merely suspended; Reuchlin was never formally cleared. In the court of public opinion, however, the new scholarship was triumphantly vindicated, and the brethren sharpened their pens in readiness for the next skirmish. Enter Martin Luther.

An Accidental Revolutionary

      Martin Luther was the Reformation’s indispensable firestarter. Would there have been a Reformation if young Martin had followed his father’s wishes and become a lawyer? Who knows, but the Reformation as it actually happened is unimaginable without him.

      Luther does not fit the stereotype of a great Christian revolutionary. He never held high office, and he remained professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg to the end of his life, squeezing his revolution in between his regular lectures. He was not a man of heroic virtues. He was grouchy, obstinate, and an unabashed sensualist, from his boisterous, flirtatious, and deeply affectionate marriage to his well-documented fondness for Saxon beer. In later life, he was frankly fat, and for most of his life he struggled with constipation. Fittingly enough, his religion was a matter less of the mind than of the heart and the gut. Spiritually as well as physically, he was larger than life. Even his flaws were outsized. His piercing insights, his raw honesty and the shattering spiritual experiences that drove his life still leap off the page five centuries later. They do so because they resonate with the modern age, an age that he made.

      Luther was born in 1483 or 1484, the eldest son of a family that was newly prosperous from copper mining. He became a monk in 1505, against his father’s wishes, and remembered those early years in the monastery as a torment. He felt imprisoned in his own sin, whose grip on him grew stronger the more he struggled against it. Seemingly trivial sins tortured him. His exasperated confessor told him to go and commit some real sins, but his superior, more constructively, packed him off to the new university at Wittenberg for further study in 1507. He drank in his studies. Over the following dozen years, as he rose rapidly in both the monastic and the academic hierarchies, he gradually came to understand the Christian Gospel in a way that seemed to him completely new, authentically ancient, and utterly life changing.

      Luther was not a systematic theologian, trading in logical definitions or philosophical consistency. The systematizers who followed in his wake picked out two key principles in his thought: sola fide and sola scriptura, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”. But this risks missing the point. Luther’s theology was not a doctrine; it was a love affair. Consuming love for God has been part of Christian experience since the beginning, but Luther’s passion had a reckless extravagance that set it apart, and which has echoed down Protestantism’s history. He pursued his love for God with blithe disregard for the bounds set by Church and tradition. It was an intense, desolating, intoxicating passion, sparked by his life-upending glimpse of God’s incomprehensible, terrible, beautiful love for him. Like any lover, he found it incredible that his beloved should love him, unworthy as he was. And yet he discovered over the long years of prayer and study that God loved him wildly, irresponsibly, and beyond all reason. God, in Christ, had laid down his life for him. This was not, as the medievals’ subtle theology had taught, a transaction, or a process by which believers had to do whatever was in their power to pursue holiness. It was a sheer gift. All that mattered was accepting it.²

      This went beyond anything Erasmus had imagined. Erasmus wanted to free Christians from superstition, not to interfere with Christianity’s basic theological framework. Indeed, he thought that too much attention to theology was a futile distraction from the pursuit of holiness. He called Luther doctor hyperbolicus, the “doctor of overstatement”.³ But for Luther, it was impossible to overstate God’s grace. He too wanted a radically simplified Christian life, but he wanted it because the flood of God’s grace had swept everything else away. All the structures that the medieval Church had provided for the Christian life, from pious works through sacraments to the Church itself, mediating between sinners and their Saviour – all of this was now so much clutter. Or worse, a blasphemous attempt to buy and sell what God gives us for free.

      This talk of grace and free forgiveness was dangerous. If grace is free and all we need do is believe, surely that would lead to moral anarchy? The fact that free forgiveness can look like a licence to sin has plagued Protestantism for centuries. But for Luther, even to ask this question was block-headed. What kind of lover needs rules about how to love? What kind of lover has to be bribed or threatened into loving? God loves us unreservedly. If we recognize that love, we will love him unreservedly in return.

      Luther’s breakthrough had a dazzling, corrosive simplicity to it. The power of those twin principles, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”, lay in the word “alone”. There is nothing and no one else other than God incarnate in Jesus Christ worth attending to. Being a Christian means throwing yourself abjectly, unreservedly, on Christ’s mercy. Living a Christian life means living Christ’s life – that is, abandoning all security and worldly ambitions to follow him “through penalties, deaths and hell”. It is only then that we may find peace. That ravishing paradox is at the heart of Protestantism. It is a further paradox that such a profoundly personal insight should have such an impact on the outside world.

      The idea’s initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times: it was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before but that seemed to many people, once they had grasped it, to be self-evidently true. Luther’s themes were all familiar ones, either ancient or newly fashionable. St Augustine had emphasized God’s grace, the late medievals had stressed God’s absolute sovereignty, and Erasmus had called for simplicity. What Luther did was to combine those themes as never before.

      However, his idea was also powerful because it was obscure. Luther suddenly became a public figure in late 1517 not because he was preaching free salvation but because his new theology made his archbishop’s financial practices seem especially offensive. He denounced them and called for a debate on the principles behind them. It was only natural that Germans, primed to expect battles between a corrupt hierarchy and brave, pious scholars, should jump to conclusions. Luther was the new Reuchlin. Even Erasmus rallied to his side. The burgeoning scandal had run on for well over a year before it became plain that Luther was calling not only for moral reform and good scholarship but for a complete reimagining of what it meant to be a Christian.

      Reuchlin had chiefly been a symbolic figure. The satires that destroyed his opponents’ reputations were other people’s work. But in 1518, Luther discovered that he could write: accessibly, pungently, СКАЧАТЬ