What Can Be Said on the Anniversary of the Reformation?

Five hundred years ago yesterday, the Protestant Reformation is generally considered to begin, with the famous nailing of the 95 Theses on the cathedral of Wittenburg by Martin Luther.  Many people have or soon will be writing their takes on this significant anniversary (here's an example of a very bad take; here's an example of a good one from our old friend Morgan Guyton), so I figured I would try my hand at the take machine as well.

The Protestant Reformation, at least in its mature form, can be distilled down to two basic commitments--(1) that the Roman Catholic Church was corrupt in a structural or existential way, as opposed to an incidental way, and thus in need of structural reform; and (2) the solution to the structural or existential corruption, and a guidepost for the needed reforms, could be found in a purported return to a singular focus on the Biblical text.  In this way, it differed from the Catholic Counter-Reformation (itself just as much of a revolution as the Protestant Reformation), which asserted that the problems of the Roman Catholic Church were basically operational and incidental, and so could be fixed through procedural reforms without any need to challenge the core framework of the ultimate authority of the Roman Catholic Church as embodied in the Pope.  With 500 years now past since this thesis was articulated, it seems worthwhile to ask--who was right?  In the light of history, which side had the better of the argument?

The first thing that I think can be said with certainty is that prong two of the Protestant project, at least in the way that it came to be implemented, has proven to be a complete failure.  Not only is it a failure, but it is a multi-dimensional failure.  One dimension of this failure is historical--to the extent that there was any doubt in the 1500s that the early church believed in all the practices that were rejected by the Reformers as "unbiblical," those doubts have been erased by modern historical scholarship.  Modern scholarship also dealt a fatal blow to the uncomplicated, facial reading of the Biblical texts that forms the chassis of Protestantism.  As I have argued before, the Bible is too complicated and too nuanced to do the work and support the weight that the Protestant approach needs it to do.  Moreover, the need to make the world fit the theory of what the Bible is and does has distorted the Protestant project in the direction of an anti-realist, anti-science approach more generally.  It also, as an experiential matter, provided no way to adjudicate between interpretative disagreements, leading to endless splits.

So, sola Scriptura is a dead end.  But just because the solution was flawed doesn't mean that the initial diagnosis was also incorrect.  Is it the case that late medieval Roman Catholicism was broken structurally, as opposed to just suffering from a run of bad Popes and grifters like Johann Tetzel?  Or, perhaps more relevant, is the institutional church now (Roman Catholic or otherwise) structurally broken?

I think there is at least a couple of senses in which the answer is "yes."  One of the biggest problems is that the church as a whole has not shown any ability or willingness to grapple honestly with its own past, particularly where it has lashed itself to this broader amorphous thing called "Western civilization" and/or "Christendom" (to the extent those things are distinct).  The Protestant world is guilty of this, especially in its grotesque "Americanist" form, but the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are the biggest offenders in this regard.  Witness Pope Francis trotting out the shop-worn lament about those wicked people in the 60s rejecting Christian civilization.  No where in this screed, and never in these sorts of discussion, is there any acknowledgement that people in the 1960s, especially in Europe, had in their lifetimes watched Christendom throw itself in orgiastic violence and unspeakable horror.  If I were a European in 1968, I'd be pretty skeptical of Christendom, too--it falls under the old saying "if you do what you've always done, you will get what you've always gotten."  And no one is buying the self-serving two-step where the church pitches itself as an essential and integral component of the Western project, but them immediately disclaims any responsibility for the crimes of that same civilization and chalks everything up to "user error."  Everyone knows the history--there's no hiding from it, so you might as well face it and deal with it.

But grappling with those realities requires a willingness to truly and fully disclaim the sins of the past.  And disclaiming the sins of the past requires acknowledging that they are sins in the first place, which requires a church that can admit it was and is wrong.  Not "we had some bad actors," not "we had an evolving perspective on the issue," but actually, unambiguously wrong about certain things.  And, right now, that is the one thing that the church universal, especially in its High Church incarnations, has shown itself unwilling and unable to do.  Too often the church has convinced itself that more and more elaborate and elevated assertions of its own correctness and rightness are the key to credibility, but if that was ever true it is certainly no longer the case.  Just as with any public figure--or really anyone--the ability to admit wrongs is a sign of strength and excessive assertions of how right you are is a sign of weakness.

The other dimension to being lashed to Christendom that needs to be addressed is the Christian church's continued love-affair with Empire and all of the imperial trappings of Empire.  The biggest issue, especially in the United States, is the purely political dimension--witness the zealous efforts of certain evangelical leaders to become court priests of the Trump regime, as well as the Catholic masterminds behind the throne.  But it's not just about Trump, and it is not just about our current moment.  Even if you are unwilling to re-litigate the Constantinian settlement, there are parts of that settlement that have become an albatross around the neck of the church in the present day.  We live in a world where all of the trappings of Empire--the titles and the regalia and all of the rest--have been consigned to the dustbin of history, and for many good and sound reasons.  In many cases, they survive only in the context of the Christian Church.  At best, it looks like silly cosplaying; at worst, it looks like an institution dedicated to dragging us collectively back to a past that was a horror show for large swaths of the human population.

And it isn't just cosplay.  The Christian church often operates with a level of authoritarianism and unaccountable leadership that would be beyond the pale in the vast majority of other contexts.  You hear story after story of unilateral decisions and secret star chambers that wouldn't even fly in the military, let alone in the rest of society.  And, lest you think that this is only a Roman Catholic problem or only a conservative Christian problem, here are a bunch of stories from the liberal Episcopal Church.  This is not only unacceptable on its face, but also profoundly damaging to the credibility of the Christian church.  Why in the world would I sign up for an institution that disempowers me in a unique way?

All of this congeals into an obsession with authority employed to assert correctness.  Authority has come to be seen as a shield to ward off any challenges to the idea that the church is always right about everything.  It is this need to be correct, the need to shore up its own infallibility, that is the greatest structural problem that needs to be addressed.  A structural problem, it should be said, that is in no way unique to the Roman Catholic Church.  Orthodoxy has the same problem, conservative evangelical Christianity has the same problem.  Mainline Protestantism is starting to wean itself a bit off of this need for proving its own correctness, but there is a long way to go.

But, how can this be changed?  What can replace this focus on doctrinal certainty?  The only thing that makes any sense, the only thing that has any potential to do this work, is a renewed focus on the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church.  Not just in the form of councils or official bodies or in church leaders, but in the lives of every believer.  I have called this "soft Pentecostalism"--whatever you think of overt spiritual gifts, there are inward, unseen gifts at work in the lives of every person in the community that must be respected.  The measure of the legitimacy of the church is not found in its doctrinal correctness and consistency, but in the presence of the Spirit in the members and its willingness as an institution to listen to and empower the work of the Spirit.

This legitimacy coming from the Spirit creates space for the church release its death-grip on certainty and be open to God doing a new thing among us.  Once that happens, this frees the High Church traditions to focus on what I think is their true gift to the people of God, which is to preserve the vast and wonderful library of wisdom that is the Christian tradition, communicated through Liturgy.  That tradition can seen as a library to be mined as opposed to a legal regime to be obeyed.  It also allows, or maybe forces, all traditions but especially the High Church traditions to give up their stifling obsession with authority and org charts as the mark of genuine Christianity.

So we in our time, just like Luther in his time, are in need of a Reformation.  There are some structural problems that need to be fixed--getting rid of problematic individuals is not enough.  It will be scary and uncertain, no doubt.  But the good news is that the thing that we need to do the work is already right here, among us, gently nudging us along the road to the changes we need.  All we need to do is listen and be relaxed enough to be moved.  Come Holy Spirit.       

Comments

Anonymous said…
This post is embarrassing. I was unaware that you are the Holy Spirit and any thought older than 50 years was, ipso facto, unchristian.
Michael Boyle said…
I can assure you that I am not embarrassed by it.

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