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josie_L
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Contarini wouldn’t you say that for the most part the reformation in the countries where it took place was more about power struggling and less about doctrinal issues (those that backed the reformers were more interested in money, power, glory . . .etc.)?
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caoimhin
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Yes, please. Let’s leave the judging of each other’s souls to God.
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placido
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What part of that verse does “Rome” not teach? I hope you are aware of folks who believe that after accepting Jesus as their personal Savior, they need to do some works by way of a public demonstration (baptism). Do you consider that to be a works-based salavation too?Ephesians 2:8 ESV
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
placido
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Contarini
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No. Why would I say that?
But that’s quite different. Political leaders are, generally, interested in political priorities. Even there it isn’t just about money, power, and glory. If you read Thomas Brady’s work on the Strasbourg political leader Jacob Sturm, for instance, you see someone who actually cared about theology and certainly cared about Christian unity and the welfare of the Christian city of Strasbourg. Peace, order, brotherhood–these were high priorities for many political leaders of the sixteenth century. Sure, many of them may have mouthed these ideals cynically. But not all–and it’s hard to read the heart, so I’d be cautious about a purely cynical interpretation even of someone like Henry VIII, tempting as it is. Sturm is someone I can hold up as clearly motivated by genuine Christian conviction, and I’d say the same about Emperor Charles V. Not always a nice person–not by any means a candidate for sainthood–but someone who took his responsibilities as a Christian ruler very seriously.
Where I agree with you, of course, is that even sincerely Christian political leaders viewed things more pragmatically than the theologians did. Brady talks a lot about Sturm’s disagreements with the Strasbourg Protestant theologian Martin Bucer (I wrote my dissertation on Bucer, so this is the aspect of Brady’s work I know best). When the Protestants were defeated by Charles V, Bucer blamed Protestant sin and urged the people of Strasbourg to repent, call on God for help, and defy the emperor (in imitation of Hezekiah’s actions when attacked by Assyria). Sturm took a different approach. He wasn’t willing to destroy his beloved city in the name of Bucer’s uncompromising religious agenda. So he helped negotiate a treaty with the emperor which involved among other things giving some of the churches inside Strasbourg back to the Catholics (something Bucer and other Protestant Reformers regarded as a surrender to Antichrist). Bucer had to leave Strasbourg as a result of this treaty.
I give this example because I am trying to flesh out for you how the interaction between political and theological priorities actually worked in the sixteenth century. Admittedly, Sturm was an unusually intelligent, pious, and honorable politician for that or any era (at least that’s how he comes across in Brady’s work). But he wasn’t unique.
Another false assumption in your question, I think, is that “those who backed the Reformers” (i.e., the political leaders) were the ones whose actions really counted. But often the political leaders found their hands tied because preachers and religious writers had stirred up public opinion to the point that defying it would have led to violence and chaos (apart from the fact that the political leaders were often sincerely influenced by religious ideas themselves).
The idea that the Reformation was all about power and money and not about religion is a kind of pop Marxism. It’s a weird approach for Catholics to take–and of course you take it selectively, applying it only to those religious movements of which you disapprove. But to be consistent, you’d have to apply it to the actions of Catholic rulers in the sixteenth century as well–and beyond that, to the actions of medieval Catholic rulers (including those who embraced Christianity in the first place) and perhaps most obviously to Constantine and the other emperors who made Christianity the religion of the late Roman Empire. And as you know, people often do this, dismissing all of Trinitarian Christianity (or more narrowly and inconsistently, just Catholicism, or whatever other parts of the Christian tradition a given polemicists wants to debunk) as nothing but a facade for Constantine’s political ambitions.
This approach is unwarranted across the board. It’s a bad way to look at history, period. Why can’t we instead take *all *kinds of motivations seriously?
Edwin
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Contarini
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I apologize for my tone. How can I not feel ashamed of myself when you respond that way?
I didn’t mean to imply that you had to have read Ganoczy to have an opinion about Calvin. I mentioned him simply as one example of a respected Catholic scholar who takes Calvin’s religious motivations seriously.
I agree that the Reformation was in large part a surrender to the emerging state. But that doesn’t mean that theology didn’t matter, or even that the leaders of the civil governments were solely out for power. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a strand of political theology that saw Christian rulers as the divinely ordained leaders of the Christian people, in the model of the kings of ancient Israel. I see no reason to dismiss this as insincere any more than I dismiss the papal claims as insincere (although of course individual kings/magistrates and individual popes may have been primarily interested in power). However, I do think that this kind of political theology was seriously mistaken and has led to disaster. And I agree with you entirely that Protestants are often ignorant of this aspect of the Reformation and bizarrely think that the Reformation was actually about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, when in fact many of the Reformers essentially subordinated the church to the state (they “separated” the powers of each, but this meant that the church’s “external” functions such as owning property or exercising discipline were taken over by the state). Those who did not, like Calvin and the English Puritans, were accused of being “new papists.”
Edwin
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caoimhin
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I understand what you’re saying, Edwin. Still, a ruler couldn’t remain a good Catholic and loot the monasteries and seize Church lands. They would have to become Protestant first. While Marxism is in error for reducing everything to materialism, even Our Lord treated the of idolizing of money as a real phenomenon.
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Lapey
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Original context may not be everything; however, it is most critical to understanding what the original meaning the author had in mind. Exegesis, unless I am truly mistaken is a method of extracting the meaning from the text within its proper context, not reading a movements ideas into it such as DD2007 has done. Anti-Christ never was referred to apocalyptic writings, especially Revelation, that’s another subject for lack of time I won’t get into. That idea has been placed into scripture, not a product of exegeses.
The idea of the anti-Christ taking over the Papacy in the middle ages is more reason to not allow the misinformation to go without calling attention to it. It was used as an excuse to go along with the reformers.
I don’t care what your background is, you speak disparagingly about the Pope and I will call you out, as all faithful Catholics would.
Exegeses have nothing to do with the historical context after the authors have completed their work, only the historical fact while being written. Anti-Christ was used within the Johanine letters to combat heresy within the Johanine community, that’s it. If you use it in any other fashion it is not exegesis.
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Trilor
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'Scuse me for butting in at this late date, but I think it is time to go back to the original greek passage and see if MAY or Will is the better rendering? If this has already been done in one of the 22 pages of comments that have transpired since this comment, please accept my apologies.
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josie_L
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Contarini I’m not trying to imply that there weren’t those who were sincere about their new found faith but almost every country which became Protestant did so under the directives of a King and/or the nobility which enforced for the most part a religion on a people that were still very much Catholic.
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Contarini
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Very true. Although they could remain Catholic and use their support of the Church to strongarm the Papacy into signing very favorable Concordats which gave them all kinds of control (including financial) over the Church in their territories. In some ways that may have been the more prudent approach in terms of power and financial gain. Confiscating Church lands was tempting to monarchs who were always short of money, but in the end it may have been like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Catholic monarchs were always in a position (not to put too fine a point on it) to blackmail the Church by trading protection for favors.
Of course this is cynical. My point is simply that there were both sincere and cynical reasons for monarchs to either oppose or support the church. What any given monarch or other government did was motivated by all sorts of factors, and a serious historical analysis takes account of *all *of them instead of using some of them to declare others irrelevant. As my advisor used to put it, “human behavior is always overdetermined.”
Edwin
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Contarini
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I think you are over-generalizing from the English experience. Even there, I’m not convinced that the “revisionist” account is entirely true. I don’t think that Duffy et al do justice to the strong anticlerical and reformist sentiments of significant sectors of the lower middle classes. Duffy focuses largely on rural areas and simply dismisses the very probable links between Lollardy and the acceptance of Protestantism by certain social classes in England. However, the broader point is that in other parts of Europe–in many of the German cities for instance, or in Switzerland–you can clearly see popular sentiment in favor of the Reformation.
Furthermore, France is a country that never did become Protestant but where Protestantism was a very powerful movement for decades. What do you do with that? Sure, it was largely led by the lesser nobility. Insofar as there was a “People’s Reformation” on a broad scale anywhere in Europe, it was in Germany and it mostly went down in blood in 1525. It’s often hard to figure out what the common people actually thought. No doubt they thought many different things, and people with axes to grind pick on certain parts of the very fragmentary evidence to make their point.
I think it’s fair to say that generally (not exclusively) the Reformation was an urban phenomenon. So sure, impoverished peasants typically either didn’t care or were opposed to it. (Obviously the Revolution of 1525 is a huge exception, but many of these “peasants” were quite wealthy and some in fact miners rather than farmers, so the generalization probably still holds). The fact is that if you were at the bottom of the social scale, those above you didn’t really care what you thought (though they might care, or at least claim to care, for your welfare) until you got together in a large mob and started murdering people right and left. Sixteenth-century Europe was a hierarchical society and most social movements were led by relatively privileged people. In fact that’s true of most societies in history–maybe all of them, and maybe even ours. Social change is almost always imposed by a small group of elite folks. That’s one of the reasons I’m generally against it
Edwin
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Gabriel_of_12
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I think clarification is needed here; Protestant belief’s independent from their catholic belief becomes heresy such as the man made Sola’s theology which makes their communities independent from (the body of Jesus Christ) one another.Let’s play nice, now.
Depends. Certain aspects of Protestantism are considered heresy, but there are aspects where we share common beliefs. As well, it’s difficult with all the Protestant sects out there to paint every belief of every one with the same broad brush.
The individual person who unknowingly practices these heretical views are in themselves not heretical technically, they are baptised Christians journeying towards the Catholic Church which is the pillar foundation of Truth.
The CCC and Vatican Council II makes mention of this difficult interpretation of non catholic/protestant heretical teachings and the seperated baptised brethern who are born into such heretical views (teachings) of no fault of their own.
Just wanted to make caution that the heresy is in the teaching not necessarily the baptised individual who unknowingly practices them.
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Contarini
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And nineteenth-century liberal Protestants defined exegesis as the historical reconstruction of the original human author’s intentions. But that is not the traditional Christian view–it’s too limited.
Then we should not be Christians, for sure. We should all be Jews or give up on this whole Biblical thing altogether. Because there’s no way you can justify Christian interpretation of the Old Testament based solely on the original historical context. And yet the New Testament writers very clearly appeal to the Old Testament as an essential pillar of their faith. Maintain the 19th-century liberal-Protestant definition of exegesis, and you call the Apostles shoddy exegetes. And why should we trust them about anything else, in that case?
Sure it’s a product of exegesis. It’s a product of traditional Christian exegesis, which is unashamedly intertextual. The idea that you isolate individual books and look at them in their specific historical contexts is certainly helpful and legitimate, but it’s not the only way to go, or the most traditional way to go. Christians have from the beginning seen Scripture as a unity within the context of Sacred Tradition.
I wouldn’t say “excuse.”
It would be more effective to refute DD2007 rather than simply “calling him out.”
This is a modern and highly narrow definition of exegesis. Why should any traditional Christian accept it, in defiance of the New Testament writers, the Church Fathers, the medieval theologians–for that matter even the Protestant Reformers, who were not as “modern” in this respect as many people think? (Of course you don’t care about them, but my point is that insofar as they interpreted the Bible through theological lenses and as a divinely inspired whole they were acting as traditional, even Catholic Christians, and to criticize them for not being modern liberal Protestants is both unfair and un-Catholic.)
Edwin
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Lapey
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You can call it modern and narrow minded but a word means what it means. You seem to be confusing “exegesis” with “theology”, just an observation.
I am going through Homiletics training and to exegete is to extract from the text the meaning of the text in its context, nothing more.
For example, in the Gospel there is a passage where Jesus tells His disciples to go to town and see the man with the water jug and he will take you to a room where He and the Apostles can eat the Passover meal. Exegesis would tell you that a man carrying a water jug is not normal, it was a signal that he was safe to talk to, thats it.
Big difference between the prophetic books within the Old Testament and the Johanine letters, don’t you think? The latter was written with a certain purpose and there is no other prophetic writing to illustrate otherwise. Isaiah, even though written with a very different meaning than currently believed, is a totally different subject in a sense that there are many other writings pointing out the Messianic message of Isaiah.
This comparison on your part I believe to be comparing apples and oranges, am I wrong here?
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Convert66
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Edwin,
This is a little off-topic, but it seems the thread has gone that way, so I wanted to ask your thoughts about a couple of things you mentioned to Josie.
That is, what role, by your lights, did the Reformation have in emboldening the revolutionaries/atheists to attempt (nearly successfully) to overthrow the Church in France, and religion in general?
All my best . . .
This is a little off-topic, but it seems the thread has gone that way, so I wanted to ask your thoughts about a couple of things you mentioned to Josie.
Do you think that the French experience during this period brewed underneath the surface until the idea of reformation was abstractualized and, via the philosophes “inspired” the revolutionaries against the Church and the Ancien Regime ( reacting against the theological thread running through medieval thought you referred to before; i.e., “divine right of kings”)?
That is, what role, by your lights, did the Reformation have in emboldening the revolutionaries/atheists to attempt (nearly successfully) to overthrow the Church in France, and religion in general?
This reminds me of the old revolutionaries conundrum. The new regimes usually end up being worse than the ones they replaced. The tyrants are beheaded, replaced with liberators that then become the new, and improved tyrants. “Satan can not cast out Satan”, as it were.Sixteenth-century Europe was a hierarchical society and most social movements were led by relatively privileged people. In fact that’s true of most societies in history–maybe all of them, and maybe even ours. Social change is almost always imposed by a small group of elite folks. That’s one of the reasons I’m generally against it
All my best . . .
C
caoimhin
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This is why I agree with those who predict that the future of Evangelicalism is either (1) a slide into postmodernism (which has already happened for the most part) and then liberal unbelief, (2) a regression back into fundamentalism, and/or (3) a move to those liturgical churches that trace themselves back to the beginning.
This realization was one of the factors that led me to the Catholic Church. Once it is conceded that modern hermeneutical method is not only extra-biblical but in many cases *un-*biblical, sola scriptura collapses in self-contradiction. The alternative is that the Holy Spirit illumines the text the same way today as at the Council of Jerusalem: corporately in the Church and not through this or that faction (Gal. 5:20) or Lone Ranger Christians.
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adstrinity
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Thank you to those two who corrected me. It was late at night and I didn’t want to get into it. I knew my reply wouldn’t be read for the intended recipient, so, I decided not to rant off, but, simply state that what was being said was not what the Bible claimed.
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Contarini
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Well no. It means various things at various points in history.
The sharp distinction between exegesis and theology is a modern one. The Church Fathers knew nothing of it. To them theology sprang out of Scripture and Scripture could only be rightly interpreted through the lens of the Christian theological tradition. There were some tensions caused by encounters with Jewish exegesis (this is one reason why Jerome’s work is relatively closer to what modern scholars recognize as “exegesis” than that of some of the other Fathers), and particularly in the Middle Ages this dialogue with Jews began to put some space between exegesis and theology. I don’t know too much about how it was done in the Catholic Church between the Reformation and Vatican II–my impression however is that exegesis was seen as ancillary to theology and was very strictly controlled by it (rather than being the heart of theology as in the early Church). Vatican II called for a Biblical renewal and for preaching to be based more closely on Scripture. And that’s where you come in:
In the U.S. at least (I shouldn’t assume that you’re in the U.S., but I know more about Catholicism in America than in the rest of the world), it seems to me that the Biblical renewal called for by Vatican II turned into a “Babylonian Captivity” of Catholic preaching and exegesis to the canons of historical criticism. I’m no enemy of historical criticism. But it has severe limitations as a basis for Christian preaching. In their desire to be more Biblical, American Catholic seminaries seem to have trained priests to separate exegesis from theology and to restrict their preaching to an explication of the basic meaning of the text (usually the Gospel text–of course you can’t link the OT and NT texts because that’s not part of the “context”) with some banal moral applications. At least, that’s what most of the Catholic preaching I’ve heard has been like (when it wasn’t just made up of the banal remarks with almost no reference to Scripture at all). You have cut yourselves off from the riches of both Scripture and Tradition (which are inextricably intertwined with each other, as Dei Verbum tells you). And you wonder why so many Catholics leave for Protestant churches? It’s because evangelical Protestants *do theology *when they preach from Scripture. (Well, when they haven’t been too corrupted by modern scholarly exegesis themselves.) They relate each passage of Scripture to the entirety of the Bible and to the entirety of Christian faith and practice. They treat Scripture not as a historical relic but as the living Word of God. Often they do this badly, unintelligently, in ignorance of the richness of Christian tradition. They mangle Scripture, they put it in wrong contexts, they twist it to serve parochial and sometimes deeply heretical traditions. But nonetheless, the most ignorant, bigoted, doctrinally more than dubious fundamentalist preacher treats Scripture as something living, all of which is relevant for all of life. And that’s one of the reasons ex-Catholics say things like “the Catholic Church doesn’t preach the Bible.” Your own seminaries are teaching you to treat the Bible in a way totally alien to your own Tradition and in its essentials far inferior even to the horribly inadequate way fundamentalists and populist evangelicals treat it.
Please don’t think that I’m holding up my own denomination as the standard here. I have been fortunate in hearing some very good preaching in Episcopal churches. But I’ve also heard abysmally bad preaching–as bad as anything in Catholic churches and far more likely to be downright heretical. But I do think that some of the more orthodox mainline seminaries (such as Duke) are teaching their students to treat the Bible in a healthier way than you find in most places. And I’m sure that’s true in the Catholic Church as well. I’m confident that my friend Tim Gray, who now teaches at the seminary in Denver, doesn’t teach people to treat Scripture in isolation from theology.
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Contarini
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That’s what the late medieval tradition would call the literal-historical sense. It’s important. But not the only thing.
I’m not quite sure what the “very different meaning” is. And of course much traditional messianic interpretation of Isaiah depends on ignoring the original context, or at least moving beyond it. If you limit yourself to the original context, you have no way of applying Isaiah 7:14 to Jesus. The original context is clearly talking about Ahaz and the threatened attack by Syria and Israel. (This is, by the way, the passage that caused the most controversies over “Judaizing” exegesis in the Middle Ages, at least if Beryl Smalley is to be believed.)
Of course each book has a different purpose. And we need to respect that and begin our exegesis with it. But Christian exegesis flows into theology and can’t be sharply separated from it. If you *only *talk about what the passage meant in its original context, you aren’t really doing *Christian *exegesis at all.
I have a cookbook describing the essentials of Chinese cooking. According to this book, the way I tend to do my “Asian” style food is all wrong. I cook the different vegetables all together in the same pan. According to the book, the Chinese method is to cook each vegetable separate so that you get its distinct flavor, and *then *mix them together. The way I cook is the way that modern exegesis rightly accuses some folks of proceeding. We shouldn’t just throw bits of Isaiah and bits of 1 John and bits of Acts together and stir them up with a lot of sauce. We should cook them on their own for a bit so that we can taste their distinctiveness. But in the final preparation, they all need to come together.
Perhaps we differ largely in semantics. You would say that this final stage of “cooking” is theology rather than exegesis. But of course the original discussion was a theological one. You ruled out DD2007’s interpretation on the grounds that it wasn’t good exegesis. You won’t let 1 John talk to 2 Thessalonians and Revelation and Daniel and say “Hey guys, does my antichrist have anything to do with your man of sin, or your beast with seven heads and ten horns?” I don’t care whether you call this exegesis or theology as long as you recognize that this is an essential part of determining the *Christian *meaning of Scripture.
I am not of course defending the way Protestants use these passages (whether the historicist interpretation of traditional Protestantism or the dispensational approach more common in the past century). But the problem isn’t that they are letting these passages talk to each other. It’s that they are not doing this in the context of the broad tradition of the Church. They are using Scripture to justify division by demonizing their fellow Christians. I don’t disagree with you in attacking DD2007’s exegesis, but I disagree with *how *you are doing it. In a way, his method is more Catholic than yours.
In Christ,
Edwin
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