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Two Cheers for Martin Luther


I’m re-posting this from two years ago because it still seems important!
Five hundred years of separation is enough. If the quincentenary of the start of the Reformation is to be put to any use, it should be to bury the disastrous hostilities and recriminations that have riven the robe of Christ for all that time, and which are such a scandal to the non-Christian world.

I say ‘the robe of Christ’ because I truly believe that the Body of Christ cannot be torn apart—how could it be, being a temple built by God, not made with human hands? This is the ultimate tragedy of Christian disunity: it is all an illusion. In reality, in the Kingdom of Heaven, in the eyes of God, we Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Presbyterians, Methodists, Brethren, Quakers, Independents of all shades—all who profess the name of Christ—we are all one Body, whether we like our fellow-members or not, whether we believe them to be genuine or not, whether we label them as heretics or not.

Tearing Christ’s robe in this way, to my mind, is the great ecclesiastical sin. I’m sorry, but I refuse to accept that, when different groups of Christians have formulated different statements about a doctrine, just one of those statements is precisely right in the eyes of God, and every group that holds to a different statement is heretical, disqualified from salvation, and denied entry to God’s Kingdom. I don’t think churches, or individuals, are going to be held to account or damned for getting a factual statement about God or even a rule of Christian behaviour wrong. But I do think that Christians who separate themselves from other Christians, who criticize and judge them for their statements of faith and their teachings, who wage a war of words or weapons with them, who vilify and condemn them and kill them—they, I do think, will answer to God for their treatment of people who are brothers and sisters in Christ and fellow-members of his Body.
And that’s why I don’t give the full three cheers for Martin Luther, 1517. Of course, there had been schisms before his time. The split between the Western and Eastern churches was the first great disaster of this kind. There’s bound to have been wrong on both sides, but it’s instructive that the Western Church has flourished, whereas the Eastern churches have declined and are now vanishing from the original homeland of Christianity. But to Luther belongs the dubious distinction of bringing about a church-wide schism single-handedly by dint of his own dogged (or pig-headed?) adherence to what he thought was right. Not only that, but he bequeathed a strain of schismatic DNA to his whole Protestant progeny, causing it to go on reproducing schism within itself, generation after generation, century after century, right down to the present day. He effectively taught his spiritual descendants ‘read the Scriptures and if that makes you disagree with anything that your church teaches, walk away and start a new church—and call it the true church’. So that is my first reason for not cheering whole-heartedly for Martin Luther, 1517.

My second reason is that Luther misrepresented the teaching of St Paul; with destructive consequences. Luther’s exaltation of ‘justification by faith’ (set out in only two of the Pauline epistles) over everything else that St Paul taught represents Luther’s inner spiritual struggle projected on to a scriptural canvas. Luther, in despair of ever being good enough through carrying out ‘works’, discovered the wonderful truth of salvation through faith. He thought that Judaism, out of which St Paul emerged, was a religion of ‘works’. But in fact it wasn’t, and Paul never said it was. He opposed the adoption of Jewish ritual practices by Gentile Christians; he never relaxed the requirement for moral goodness—how could he? Luther pushed Christian teaching about the Atonement, which was already badly out of kilter in late medieval Catholicism, further into the realm of the courtroom. The New Testament doctrine is well summarized in St Paul’s statement that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself. Protestantism developed the idea of the vengeful Judge who can only pardon an offender by having the just requirement of his law satisfied by the death of his Son: effectively this means that Christ was reconciling God to the world. How could Paul have held such a belief, having grown up reciting the ubiquitous verses in the Psalms and Prophets about God’s mercy and readiness to forgive? How can anyone who has assimilated the Parable of the Prodigal Father doubt that the problem of atonement lies not in God’s unwillingness to forgive, but in humankind’s unwillingness to change? But in the light of my first point about toleration, anyone who wants to can of course cling on to the courtroom image of salvation if it really helps them. For me, the battle for virtue against vice calls for a saviour who deals with our human propensity to commit sin and enables us grow into his likeness.

My third reason for giving only two cheers for Martin Luther, 1517, is simply that Luther was not a saint. If someone is going to lead thousands of Christians along a new and blessed spiritual path, I expect that person to show signs of sanctity and Christlikeness. Please don’t remind me that no one is perfect. The fact is, there have been saints throughout Christian history who have been palpably holy, and many of them have had the power, through personal contact, to change people’s lives, physically and spiritually. Generally speaking such people have not usually persuaded secular rulers to favour their movements and to take up arms against those who opposed them. Many of them have cared deeply and sacrificially for the lowliest members of society. Nor have they been foul-mouthed and judgemental. Luther’s attitudes to the rebellious peasants, and to Jews, are too well-known to need repeating. It might have been a good idea if after receiving his revelation about justification by faith, Luther had spent several years developing his personal sanctity, taking the log out of his own eye before he set about removing the admittedly large amount of timber from the eyes of the church leadership.

My fourth reason. Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church gave a massive boost to secular ways of thinking. In some ways, of course, this was a good thing. People coming to think and act outside the box of religious conformity was a step forward for humanity. But it was probably a natural development, stemming from the changing social, economic, and political scene of the times. Luther’s role in it was disastrous for Christianity. Protestantism teamed up with so-called Renaissance Humanism to reject everything medieval. Effectively it began a process of debunking which has continued down to the present-day philosophy of postmodernism, which teaches that truth is merely a social construct. Once you begin a witch-hunt for ‘superstition’ you find it everywhere. First you clear out medieval Catholic practices which you think are out of line with Scripture. Then you clear out scriptural beliefs that you think are out of line with empirical fact. Finally you clear out empirical fact because it is out of line with what you would like to believe.

My fifth reason is roughly summed up by the word vituperation. The Protestant reformation launched centuries of ugly vilification between Protestant and Catholics. The Church should have been standing united against the immaterial adversaries—wickedness and unbelief— but instead the two parts entered into a mutually destructive internecine battle conducted by material adversaries. Christians vilified one another in barren, unedifying diatribes, of no interest now except to the historical lexicographer. The Protestant side devised a tedious litany of opprobrious stories about the Catholics, repeated over and over: perverted monks, duplicitous Jesuits, tyrannical priests, superstitious laity. Not that it was necessarily all untrue, but so prurient, so self-righteous, so deeply uncharitable. And I’m always intrigued at how one particular medieval idea became a foundational doctrine of Protestantism, maintained all the way down to Ian Paisley, though more delicate churchmen would prefer to draw a veil over it: the curious equation of the Pope with Antichrist. Christianity has no other doctrines that relate specifically to historical persons or places beyond those relating, naturally enough, to the life and work of Jesus Christ: yet here were the Reformers confidently steering themselves towards the possibility of calling good evil.

My sixth reason is to do with the Whig interpretation of history. On the latter theory, which generations of children were taught at school, Protestantism was on the side of ‘progress’ and Catholicism on the side of ‘reaction’. I don’t deny that Catholicism mainly tried to keep things as they were. But not a few aspects of Protestantism were far from promoting social progress and liberty. Women, for example, under Catholicism had a route for avoiding marriage and childbirth and, sometimes, for gaining education, by entering the monastic life. Everyone, of course, believed in the subjection of women, but under the Protestant dispensation subjection to a male became almost inescapable. Or again, in medieval times the Church fought hard (and often dirtily) to maintain its independence of the secular power. This had at least the potential for good. The Church could act as a critic and a conscience to the secular government. Of course it very often didn’t, and of course under the Counter-Reformation the Church got a grip on a number of Catholic governments. But at least there were two spheres, not a monoculture. Protestantism subjected the Church to the secular magistrate. Disloyalty to the one automatically equalled disloyalty to the other. It’s hard not to see the Church of England’s loss of moral appeal to the working class as connected with the cosy alliance between Church and State in England. Bad for the people and bad for the Church. Or again, in medieval England, the monasteries often acted as a kind of informal social service, relieving people in need and providing medical care. The dissolution of the religious houses removed this partial safety net. And I think it was Protestantism that fostered the idea that poverty was related to moral inadequacy, so that the more the poor were allowed to suffer the better it was for their moral welfare.

We don’t know if the world would have been a better or a worse place without Luther. Perhaps a schism in the Western Church would have happened anyway. But after five hundred years we might do more of a kindness to Luther by learning from the mistakes of the past than by celebrating what led to them.

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