Part 2: The Identity Crisis of the Christian Religion

This is a condensed English version of the Dutch essay Deel 2: De identiteitscrisis van de christelijke religie. It follows on from Part 1.

So the story goes…

31 October 1517: Luther and the 95 theses

“On the eve of All Saints’ 1517 a furious monk strides through Wittenberg towards the castle church. In one hand he holds a hammer, in the other a sheet of paper. At the church door he takes out a few nails, unrolls the paper and fixes it to the door with a few well-aimed blows. Bystanders look on in amazement. What is going on? A debate soon starts. The monk is Martin Luther, and on the paper are his 95 theses against indulgences. He will no longer put up with it. The way the indulgence preachers peddle their wares is outrageous: they squeeze the last pennies out of the poor by making them believe that by buying an indulgence they can get their own souls and those of their dead loved ones into heaven. Unheard of! You cannot stand by and watch. His ideas strike a chord; his protest spreads like wildfire through Europe. Despite fierce resistance from Rome, the Reformation (capital R!) cannot be stopped, and the true church is restored…”

Until well into the last century the story of Luther was told roughly like this – mainly by Protestants, of course, but since the mid-twentieth century increasingly by Roman Catholics too. In the commemorative year 2017 (500 years of the Thesenanschlag, prepared in Germany by a whole ‘Luther decade’ from 2007), this is still how Luther was put in the spotlight; churches, cultural centres and above all tourist offices worked overtime to sell him again. That scholarship has made quite a few marginal notes to the story over the last half-century was not really taken into account. Yet it matters to tell well the events that supposedly changed the course of history, if you want to put your finger on what happened and understand why it had such an impact on church and society. If some vérités vénérables must fall – even the origin myth of my own church, Reformation Day – so be it. An over-simple framing can hide what really happened and what was at stake. That, in my view, is the case with the standard story of ‘the Reformation’. It runs ‘too well’. There is a protagonist (Luther), an inciting incident (the Thesenanschlag), antagonists (in simple versions: the villains, pope and Inquisition), a conflict building up to a climax that is also the great crisis (the Diet of Worms; Luther before Emperor Charles: ‘Here I stand’), and, for Protestants, a catharsis: the beginning of the Reformation of the Church. All the elements of ‘story’ (McKee) are there: a successful film script, or – storytelling being big business – a ‘brand’ that markets very well. That has certainly succeeded. Whether the story does justice to what actually happened is another matter. The focus on the hero Luther and his lonely struggle for the true Church obscures that many contemporaries did not feel a ‘reform’ was under way, but that the very survival of the church was at stake. What Luther did was dangerous – for him, and for the church. The dominant religion, the only true one, instituted by God himself, fell into crisis: its identity suddenly unclear, its survival uncertain. It was never the same again. After Luther the one church burst into countless churches, each claiming to be the only true one, with all that followed. To see this, and its impact on our thinking about religion in general, we must look behind the myth.

There goes the story (the Thesenanschlag as myth)

On 8 November 1961 Erwin Iserloh, Catholic church historian and Reformation specialist at Trier, gave a lecture in Mainz entitled Luthers Thesenanschlag: Tatsache oder Legende?, showing in a tightly built argument that the latter option had much better papers than the former.¹ It struck like a bomb. The founding fact of ‘the Reformation’ denied – and by a Catholic scholar! Until then nobody had doubted it; there were engravings of it, every biography had it, it had been filmed several times. Iserloh pointed out that Luther himself never mentioned it, although he was quite open about his life and had a good feel for ‘strong stories’; there are no eyewitness reports, and nobody tells the story before it begins to circulate after Luther’s death. When the storm had died down (it took a long time, and is not quite over) the thesis proved fruitful. Even accepted only as a hypothesis, it opens new perspectives: with the Thesenanschlag and Luther’s personal action out of the centre of attention, much more light falls on what else happened around that 31 October 1517 – less spectacular, but far more profound.

That day Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, who was responsible for the jubilee indulgence. The letter had always been known but never emerged from the shadow of the Thesenanschlag. In it Luther urgently calls on his ecclesiastical superior to bring the indulgence preachers to order: the salvation of ordinary people is at stake, and if the archbishop does not act, Luther will no longer keep silent. With the letter he enclosed 95 theses for debate (disputationes), on the basis of which Professor Martin Luther wanted to discuss penance and indulgences – a pillar of the medieval church and financially indispensable – seriously with his fellow theologians. Sharply, but perfectly normally: in argument and counter-argument they would seek the ‘virtus’ (scope, force, legal ground) of indulgences, as the first Basel printing of the theses precisely adds. This important but geographically limited appeal became something else when his friends entrusted the theses to the printing press. Erasmus received a copy in Leuven in early March 1518 via his Basel connections and forwarded it without comment to his friend Thomas More in London. Translated into German – and Luther himself, when no answer came, took the ‘discussion to the street’ by summarising his main ideas in a handy German pamphlet – the question of the legitimacy of the church’s penitential practice became everybody’s business.

The new question: vera et falsa religio?

Who decides? And how?

This correction is more than marginal. It changes our view of what Luther did and wanted within the church, and frames the reactions – and non-reactions – differently. Luther wanted two things: that the church authorities would properly regulate the practice of the indulgence sellers, and that the theologians of the region would debate with him the grounds and limits of the church’s doctrine of indulgences, so that arbitrariness would be excluded. That doctrine had not yet been fixed definitively in church law, so there was room for discussion. Church (leaders) and university (experts) together would put their hands to the plough to improve the state of the church. The subject touches the essentials of the church, its self-image and identity, but at this point Luther still operates within the Church and assumes that the necessary ‘reformation’ will be borne church-wide. Founding a new church was unthinkable: there was one church, and that church was one.

This attempt to reform the one church from within soon got stuck. The debate never came; such discussion as arose bogged down in trench warfare. His own bishop did not condemn him but asked him to keep quiet and avoid the public arena. Archbishop Albrecht did not even answer – he thought Luther an ‘insolent monk’ – but on his theologians’ advice forwarded the theses to Rome to be screened for orthodoxy: one of the most consequential ‘forwards’ in history, for it opened the causa Lutheri and turned a local affair into a matter for the whole church. How Rome handled it did not help, to put it mildly. Silvester Mazzolini (usually called Prierias), Dominican and the pope’s court theologian, was charged with the file and had his answer ready quickly. Not ‘Luther has much wrong but has a point somewhere’ – the answer someone like Erasmus had hoped for, which might have started internal reform. No: Luther had got everything wrong. Despite its title, his Dialogus de potestate papae is no dialogue but a monologue: the superior jurist lecturing the naughty boy. Its content, by the way, was surprisingly ahead of its time: the pope is ‘infallible when he decides in his capacity as pope’ (a dogma only since 1870), and the doctrine he proclaims is ‘the infallible rule of faith, from which Holy Scripture draws its force and authority’. A heretic is anyone who ‘says that something cannot be which is de facto done by the real church’. Indulgences are therefore fine simply because they exist, and as they exist. And the Bible? Simple: it can never disagree with the pope, because the pope holds the key to its interpretation. Luther was infuriated by the pretension and wrote a biting refutation, denouncing the sophistry and noting in passing that both canon law and the Church Fathers (Augustine) hold that Scripture is the ultimate standard – as does common sense.

Meanwhile Prierias had brought everything to a head by demanding recognition of the quasi-absolute authority of the pope from anyone who wanted to belong to ‘the club’. Imperceptibly the subject shifted from how man can receive God’s grace (and what place indulgences have in that) to the authority of the pope – or, more precisely, though it took Luther a while to realise it: who actually decides what ‘church’ is? Could it be that what calls itself church is not church at all? Untrodden paths. The archbishop’s non-reaction and Rome’s haughty reaction were thus at least as crucial for the crisis of the Western church as Luther’s step of 31 October 1517. Together with the half-intended, half-unintended spread of the theses, they escalated a regional matter into an international affair of principle in which the fate of the church itself was at stake. And because faith and society, church and politics were bound by a thousand and one fibres, living together itself came under threat, especially when Luther went public and used the media (books, pamphlets, cartoons, the vernacular). No wonder many people worried: Luther was shaking the foundations, and the whole church threatened to collapse, and the world with it. The church was a load-bearing part of Western society – a major political actor, its practice permeating high and low culture, setting the calendar, shaping life. Was it responsible to put all that at risk? Luther himself later cited the 95 theses not for their content but only as ‘the beginning of the attack on the church of the Antichrist’. At first he had expected a ‘better-informed pope’ to take his side, but when Prierias staked everything on submission to papal authority, Luther changed tack and aimed at the complete deconstruction of the sacramental institution of salvation of which the pope was representative and guarantor. His instrument, especially after fierce debates with Professor Johannes Eck (culminating in the public disputation at Leipzig in 1519), would be the exegesis of the Bible.

The Scripture principle: Luther’s discovery

That proved a razor-sharp, double-edged sword. A book written in two foreign languages (Hebrew and Greek), full of wondrous and very diverse texts, now took centre stage in the discussion about the service of God – a book that, according to Luther, should be able to determine what is and is not church. Christians are so used to this way of arguing that they hardly realise how revolutionary Luther’s move was, for himself too. The Bible had always been regarded as holy, the source of doctrine and Christian life, but its interpretation had always been reserved to the institution, the teaching office, to protect that source of divine revelation from misinterpretation and abuse. Luther made the church that walked on two legs (Scripture and Tradition) trip over its own feet and told it to go on on one: sola scriptura. In the preface to the first volume of his Latin works (1545) he tells how he came to this idea – an autobiographical piece that takes the reader into his study in a tower of the monastery, hence ‘Turmerlebnis’, the tower experience.

The tower experience

We see a believing monk, also a professor of theology, afraid of God’s judgement because he knows he is anything but a saint, however hard he tries. Caught in this psychologically burdensome situation he looks for a way out. Philosophers, theologians, Church Fathers, rituals, sacraments: none of them help. He remains stuck in his Anfechtungen, as he always calls those negative feelings (tentationes tristitiae). In other words: the prevailing religion does not deliver. All the church’s official means of relieving his conscience fail. One thing remains: the Bible. It contains the ‘Gospel’, supposedly ‘good news’, and Paul writes (Romans 1:16–17) that the Gospel is ‘the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes’. Wonderful – he will cling to that. But then comes the hammer blow: ‘For in it the righteousness of God is revealed.’ That plunges him into deep crisis. If even the Gospel proclaims a strict and righteous God, there is no hope left. He writes:

“I hated that word ‘righteousness of God’, which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically, as the righteousness by which God is righteous and punishes sinners and the unrighteous. Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience… I did not love, indeed I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said: As if it were not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the Gospel and also by the Gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath! Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith… Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”

The power of words

The peculiar thing about this rebirth is that it is brought about by something as prosaic as a linguistic observation: a text Luther could not grasp suddenly speaks because he realises that an idiomatic construction – a genitive, iustitia Dei – can be read otherwise than he had always thought. ‘The righteousness of God’ need not refer to an attribute of God (the distributive justice by which he rewards good and punishes evil) but can refer to something God does to, in and through man. Then God’s righteousness is not something to fear but a gift to thank him for: he makes us righteous. Righteousness becomes for Luther almost synonymous with mercy. It is all already in Augustine, as Luther himself notes elsewhere; but being able to read a text does not mean the penny drops. For Luther it did, so strongly that he felt ‘the gates of paradise opened’. Whether his discovery is grammatically correct does not matter. What matters is that he hangs his church- and world-changing discovery (the justification of the sinner not by works but by God’s grace) on the interpretation of a text. That word saves, literally. Luther then universalises his own experience: what saved me will work for others. This experience, a combination of biblical word and lived faith, becomes for him the main mark of the Christian religion. He textualises the core of faith. It is not about belonging to the club, following the rites, saying your prayers on time or knowing doctrine, nor about greeting the priest (bishop, pope) as a man of God. It is about one thing only: experiencing that a word sets you free. ‘Word’ should really be written with and without a capital at the same time, for God’s Word and a text coincide; that is precisely the secret.

Let me note already how paradoxical it is, in the light of this founding discovery, that the ‘precise formulation of doctrine’ very soon became crucial again. In classical terms: by his own retelling, Luther is concerned not with fides quae (what you believe, its rational formulation) but with fides qua (the faith with which you believe, the existential experience). That faith saves. Luther’s theological statements are incomprehensible to anyone with no feeling for the performative power of language. This is Luther’s novum, and it set the trend: his ‘conversion experience’ became exemplary within Protestantism. To this day people search through intense Bible study for ‘what God wants to say to me’. They expect salvation from texts – they would not put it that way, they expect it from God, but it comes through those texts. Luther wrote text analysis and exegesis – and he did them scholarly – into the religious identity of the Christian. Everyone, men and women, must learn to read, for thus and thus only can God’s grace reach them. What this meant for the self-definition of Christianity and the organisation of its communities became clear only gradually, in a process of action and reaction, not immediately – not even to Luther.

Luther gained his saving insight by reading, and said at the same time that it is the right reading that saves. Formally, the essence of the church is thereby bound to the text of the Bible. That becomes the core and kernel of his theology, the foundation on which everything must be built. Pope, tradition, apostolic succession, canon law, Church Fathers no longer feature in Luther’s definition of church. Not that he threw them all overboard; he could value them, but only insofar as they agreed with what he heard in the Bible. If not, the church must adapt, not the Bible. Scripture stands above the church, not the church above Scripture. The Bible becomes the touchstone of everything, the norma normans, source and norm at once – and the Bible alone, needing no ‘helping church’ with its teaching office. Sola scriptura thus applies not only to the experience that God saves you, but becomes a theological principle tout court. It crystallised fully only in the public debate with Eck in Leipzig in 1519, and in the subsequent confrontation with the teaching office that condemned him as a heretic (1520) he put it forward ever more emphatically.

The confrontation: religious identities closing

A report of the Leipzig disputation had been sent to the theological faculties of Paris and Erfurt for judgement. They kept silent; Cologne and Leuven jumped into the gap and at the end of 1519 published a list of Luther’s statements labelled ‘error’, steering towards a heresy trial. On Eck’s prompting the pope condemned forty-one rather loosely assembled, heterogeneous propositions of Luther, without saying where exactly the error lay, let alone refuting them – a church can hardly react more weakly, spiritually speaking. On 15 June 1520 Leo X signed the bull threatening excommunication, Exsurge Domine. Even before receiving it officially, Luther answered with a devastating pamphlet, Adversus execrabilem Antichristi bullam (against the execrable bull of the Antichrist). The title says enough: every bridge was blown. In November he replied more calmly but no less fiercely in an Assertio (a solemn affirmation – also a legal term declaring someone a free man), refuting first some and in later editions all of the charges one by one.² He is now certain: the church is not the church, but a devilish puppet show to mislead the faithful. In that same Assertio he formulates a first version of the Scripture principle, which he will wield like Ockham’s razor in matters of faith and life: in the church ‘Scripture alone shall reign’ (solam scripturam regnare). And Scripture is well able to, for it is ‘most certain, most easy, most open, interpreting itself, proving, judging and illuminating all things’.³ The Bible interprets itself and will do its saving work without any outside help. That was Luther’s own experience, and he was rock-solidly convinced others would experience it too.

God’s word lies hidden in those letters and is guaranteed to come out if only you read well. Luther did not experience being left with the Bible alone as a loss but as a gain. It became the only remaining mark of the true church: where the Bible is opened and speaks, there is the church – better, there ‘church happens’. And with the Bible in hand you can defeat the devil and his henchmen. At the end of 1520, with the bull hanging over him like a sword of Damocles, he felt stronger than ever. When the sixty days expired and the bull would automatically turn into excommunication (a death sentence by proxy: the secular authority was to carry it out), he organised a symbolic act: on 10 December 1520 he gathered students and professors in Wittenberg for a solemn book-burning. Into the fire went not only the papal bull but the canons of church law and the theological and philosophical textbooks of the faculty. Aristotle is finished; Peter Lombard is passé. Sola scriptura taken very literally. Theology would henceforth no longer be philosophical-argumentative or canonical in colour; it would have to become the pearl of the faculty of arts, expecting absolute clarity in all matters of faith and life from the study and exegesis of this one writing, conveyed with the best possible literary means. Quintilian and Cicero become the new assistant teachers; the Wittenberg professor of Greek, Philip Melanchthon, stood ready to shape the new curriculum. More consistent and more daring is impossible. If this new foundation fails on any of these points, you can shut up shop – and Luther realised that too and wrote it down, as the rhetorical question concluding the passage from the Assertio: Scripture can rightly be lord and master of all books and doctrines; ‘otherwise, what is Scripture for? Let us reject it and be content with the books and ideas of men.’⁴

You cannot reform the ‘Christian project’ more radically, nor make the break with the existing church clearer: what calls itself ‘church’ is no church but a devilish parody of it, with the pope as Antichrist at the helm. A Christian need pay no attention to it. He is a free man, nobody’s subject; the only one above him is God – and precisely therefore he serves all people in joy. That is how it goes when you have experienced God’s grace. It is no coincidence that the little book these sentences echo appeared at the end of 1520 too: On the Freedom of a Christian. On the basis of the Bible he felt called and free, after the total bankruptcy of what had called itself church, to build the real church, with one source of authority: the Bible. All these elements come together beautifully in the last passage of his famous defence at the Diet of Worms in 1521, before the emperor and the assembled princes of the Holy Roman Empire:

“Since Your Majesty and Your Lordships ask for a simple answer, I will give it: unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by evident reason (ratione evidente) – for I trust neither pope nor councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves – I am bound by the Scriptures I have cited, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither safe nor right. [Here I stand, I can do no other.] God help me. Amen.”⁵

Sola scriptura

The Bible is the material source (everything is in it); human reason is the means of processing those ‘data’ into a consistent doctrine. Once you have done so in good conscience, the result is valid and binding. Then it is the truth: ‘thus God speaks to us’, and that word binds everyone who hears it. Luther’s appeal to ‘conscience’ has often been taken as a plea for ‘freedom of conscience’, but that is not what he means here. His conscience is captive to God’s Word (conscientia capta in verbis Dei): the existential, inescapable authority the biblical text acquires once it has been made to speak. Now you know the truth together with God (con-scientia), and you are bound to it – liberating (the tower) but also binding (Worms). The passage also presupposes that Luther firmly trusted that this objective truth exists and can be found through thorough Bible study, preferably as a team, in argument and counter-argument. His expectations of the new biblical scholarship were high; it would make God speak. Theology was and remained for him the highest science, with corresponding demands on its practitioners.

So much for Luther’s own account of how it began and what mattered. This is not ‘the’ story of ‘the’ Reformation – no such thing exists – but it is Luther’s story, his framing. The Bible, as had become definitively clear to him in 1520, is the only ground and standard for judging whatever happens in a human life, in church or world. Its texts not only save the soul from perdition (existentially) but also lay a foundation for society (socially, politically). And what emerges from the Bible is for Luther not subjective but objective truth. He constantly challenged opponents to debate, to bring biblical data and order them by reason so as to convince him; failing that, he could not but hold his own views to be true. That soon afterwards the Zwickau prophets, the Anabaptists and the German peasants, appealing to the same Bible and to Luther’s ‘freedom of a Christian’, reached very different conclusions could not shake his confidence. They had not read well enough, or had misunderstood; he was always ready to show them what was really there and how Scripture itself explains it. That it happened always to be Luther who could render the true sense of Scripture better than anyone else apparently did not strike him as problematic. He was simply always right. At the colloquy of Reformed leaders in Marburg (1529) he branded Zwingli, himself an excellent biblical scholar, a dimwit and a dangerous heretic, simply because Zwingli would not follow his account of the meaning of bread and wine in communion. At one point Zwingli is said to have cried out in despair: ‘But brother Martin, must everything always go exactly as you want?’ (Pettegree 2015, 250). Luther clearly found it hard to grant others the freedom he had claimed for himself. His world view and theology, formed under great external pressure, had soon solidified into absolute certainty: God had chosen him as the instrument to shape the church of Christ. Whoever joined him was his friend; whoever obstructed had better prepare for God’s judgement.

Scripture against the church

The consequences of this concentration on the Bible were enormous and became clear only in the course of the sixteenth century. I do not like to say ‘paradigm shift’ too quickly, but it fits here. Not only the church but society fell into a crisis it could not resolve. A series of religion-related conflicts broke out and soon escalated into open war: the German lands, the Low Countries, France, each got its share in the sixteenth century; in the seventeenth all of Central Europe was dragged into the Thirty Years’ War, pacified only in 1648, while England, after the bloody changes of course in the sixteenth century, slid into civil war from 1640 (Puritans versus Charles I). Never before in Europe had war been waged on such a scale, so bloodily and so fanatically, with the cause of the Christian religion playing – not alone, of course – a decisive role.

That is astonishing. How can text interpretation have such dramatic consequences? Clearly more is going on than a philological debate gone out of hand. The answer lies in the status ascribed to the text. For all participants the Bible was not just a book but ‘God’s Word’. Its stories, proverbs, poems, law codes and letters only look ordinary – an optical illusion; they are media through which God wants to teach us, about faith and morals, and for worship and contemplation too. On that everyone agreed. What was new with Luther is that he lifted this book out of the church tradition in which it had been handed down and interpreted, and set it against Tradition (with a capital: the second ‘source of faith’), while raising its status accordingly. Everything in the church is human work – theology, liturgy, organisation, church order – except that book. That is God’s work, and only that. Through that medium God himself speaks, live, to people living now. For Luther ‘God’s Word’ is no solemn phrase but the designation of a reality. What the Bible says is thus no longer of relative importance for the church (embedded in an interpretive tradition) but foundational for it. Luther raised the stakes of biblical exegesis considerably.

Even before Luther took the floor, the balance between Bible and Tradition had begun to shift. The humanists had started reading the biblical texts themselves, preferably in more original versions than the official Vulgate, with eyes trained on other classical texts. They edited them (Erasmus’s New Testament, 1516), translated them anew, wrote commentaries – and were impressed by them, as happens when you want to know what exactly a text says. They could not miss the great discrepancy between the life and work of Jesus, the simple rabbi of Nazareth, and the lifestyle and message of the official church. Erasmus and his French counterpart Lefèvre d’Étaples expected no less than Luther from the reactivation of the biblical writings: a renewal of church and society. The texts would do it (Bible), all scholarly means would be applied (reason), and everyone would have to admit: yes, that’s how it is; now it is clear what God wants; I agree with him (con-scientia). But where Luther, after a few violent clashes, soon questioned the whole church tradition and then denied the church its church-ness, Erasmus stayed within the frameworks of tradition and, despite opposition and blazing rows, kept hoping for gradual reform from within. Once the radicals have the wind in their sails – and beside Erasmus, Luther is radical – the moderates can forget it. Other attempts at reform from within often died a quiet death.

By putting the Bible at the centre, upgrading its authority to quasi-divine status and scrutinising the whole institution with that book in hand, Luther set the plates of the Christian religion shifting. Suddenly being a Christian meant reading, reading and reading again in the church’s source book. That would save you, not the priest with his sacrament. The promise: let the words of that book work on you and God himself will speak to your heart and touch you. The Bible is the material medium of God’s speaking; faith (fides qua) the instrumental medium through which the spark jumps. Believing becomes personal, existential. It sounds so normal that only by this historical exercise do we realise it was new. Pious monks and other religious professionals would have recognised it, but now it became the norm society-wide. The quip that Luther never left the monastery but simply placed the whole world under the monastic rule of faith finds its justification here. Demands once made only of the clergy became general: everyone must be occupied with faith, come into contact with the Bible, and know what he believes. The other side of this breakthrough, and the condition for its success, is that the Bible really does illuminate everything in the world and in life, judge it, and indicate unmistakably how to organise it. Luther and many with him were convinced in principle that objective truth would be found. Working it out concretely was a second step he did not always take willingly, especially in morals; his monastic upbringing had left him with an almost physical aversion to binding formulations (laws). He took the task on when challenged, simply because the vacuum left when he declared the Roman church dead had to be filled: anarchy threatened, hermeneutical and social. Whoever touches religion touches society. So, not systematically planned but consistently, he slowly built a whole new church with the pieces of the one he had blown up – deconstruction and reconstruction both on the basis of the book, or so he claimed. In reality much more was involved, for reading and interpreting are never ‘objective’ and never happen in a vacuum, least of all with a ‘holy book’ in which so much has been invested and on which so much depends. Anyone who thinks he can read it without presuppositions is fooling himself – exponentially so if a public organisation like the church must be built on its interpretation. Because religion takes place not in no-man’s-land but in the society of concrete people, biblical interpretation is entangled with political, social and cultural realities and will certainly be influenced by them.

The reform movement splinters

Besides the internal theological questions, a much more pragmatic one soon arose: how do you survive if you criticise the existing church? You need the secular authority, if only to keep you out of Rome’s grip. Without that umbrella the ‘heretics’ were easy prey. Had Frederick the Wise not held his hand over Luther, he would have had to go to Rome at the end of 1518 (he had been summoned), and it would have been his last journey. Luther and his circle also soon saw that things could get hugely out of hand if the authorities did not regulate them. The reforming impulse threatened at once to burst into a thousand and one Bible-related movements, each claiming the full truth on God’s behalf and seeing itself as the legitimate continuation of the ‘church of Christ’. From the beginning there was chaos, and anarchy threatened. This aspect of the Reformation period often stays out of view because of the later development of the Lutheran and Calvinist churches, and because official historiography pretends the splinter groups were the exception and the established churches the rule, whereas they are mirror images of each other – two sides of the same coin. The distortion is greater still because almost all the groups that did not ally themselves with a secular ruler died out over time (very often: were wiped out) and left few heirs to tell their story; when it is told, it is often from the victor’s perspective – ‘sects’, ‘enthusiasts’, ‘Anabaptist radicals’. From the start, then, there is a tension in the sola scriptura movement: in reality it is no sola scriptura movement at all, at least not once it becomes an institution. Around Luther, Zwingli, Bucer and Calvin – to name four pioneers – theoretical and practical reason were called upon at least as much as the Bible itself to get the message across structurally. You had an intellectual, social, political and cultural network, or you went looking for partners.

The role of the state

It is no coincidence that the Protestant communities that survived the sixteenth century were those allied with the secular ruler of the regions where they could, or were allowed to, develop. There they took over the church buildings, reformed or founded schools, expanded the universities with renewed curricula, and took over and developed the social and charitable institutions of the old church, usually together with the secular authority. The ‘Reformed church’ too was thus firmly anchored in society.

Where groups wanted to live church in a new way without binding themselves to the ruling powers, clashes soon followed, often violently suppressed; banishment, voluntary or forced, was the lesser evil. Christians who on biblical grounds could not subscribe to the Trinity (Unitarians, Socinians) fled first to Poland (sixteenth century), then, when banned there too, to Holland and Transylvania (seventeenth), finally taking root mainly in the English-speaking world (eighteenth). A group of English Calvinists who, like the Catholics, could not accept the Anglican state church in the early seventeenth century went via Holland to the New World as the Pilgrim Fathers. An Anabaptist group, the Amish, still lives in America in relative separation, as if time had stood still in the early eighteenth century when they left Switzerland after an internal Mennonite conflict. Those who did not or could not leave were often pushed to the margins by the establishment – which the ‘Reformed churches’ soon joined – fought with every means as dangerous sects (we know the mechanism by now), so that they sometimes radicalised further, which sealed their fate. We should not underestimate the despair that gripped many ordinary people far into the sixteenth century, simply because they were given not a millimetre of room even to continue their personal search for God, let alone meet as a group – and if they did, they lived under threat of a martyr’s death, glorified moreover as the finest sacrifice one could offer Christ. You would lose your bearings for less. In my view this explains how around 1534 an exodus could take place from the Low German lands to Münster, the city where, according to a visionary, the heavenly Jerusalem would descend. The prophet was ‘Elijah’, of course, though now called Melchior Hoffman, Jan Matthijs or Jan Beukelszoon of Leiden – had Jesus not said Elijah would come to prepare his final coming in glory? While the inhabitants fled the city, hopeful desperate people streamed into ‘Zion’ from far and wide, expecting to witness the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. It turned out otherwise: the army of Catholic and Lutheran princes, allied for the occasion, made short work of this outburst of apocalyptic Christianity after a siege; the iron cages in which the corpses of the three leaders were ‘shown to the people’ still hang from the church tower. Only movements that conformed to the dominant religion (guaranteed by the secular authority), or kept very quiet, could survive the sixteenth century in Europe. Part of the Anabaptists succeeded by transforming themselves, under Menno Simons, from assertive Protestants into the ‘quiet in the land’, world-avoiding and pacifist Mennonites. An esoteric, half-secret society also had a chance. And we should not underestimate how many ‘war-weary’ people – weary of real war and of the theologians’ war – found rest in mystical speculation and preferred that spiritual food to the meal the official churches set before them. Think of the followers of ‘prophets’ like David Joris and Hendrik Niclaes (c. 1501–1580), whose ‘Family of Love’ became a poetic-mystical current with a large following in sixteenth-century Low German lands, especially in mercantile circles: Abraham Ortelius is counted among them; Christophe Plantin printed Niclaes’s works. Even the stern Flemish Calvinist poet Pieter Datheen was so impressed in old age by the books of Joris and Niclaes that he came to regret his own militancy – which earned him disciplinary proceedings in the Calvinist church. In England the movement lasted far into the seventeenth century as The Family of Love.

The end of the church’s self-evidence

As Part 1 made clear, religion is always bound by a thousand fibres to human life – culture, society, politics. The Christian missionaries discovered how intertwined cult and culture were when they tried to separate the two: the end of the one meant the end of the other. What they were less aware of, because it did not seem problematic, was that the same held for Christianity, certainly in its late-medieval Catholic variant. That too was fused with society: a whole of acts and rituals embedded in daily life, experienced above all communally. Just joining in was the motto. It was not necessarily the deep conviction of the private person, but was organised, given meaning and legitimised by the church, which was of course competent to do so. Whether it really was, and how exactly, was a question you did not ask. There was much to criticise in that church, but in Europe it had no competition. The cult as it had grown coincided with the general culture: a cumulative cultural tradition, grown organically, its origin lost in the mists of history but traced in its founding myth directly to the founder, Jesus Christ. This societas christiana was very diverse and colourful, with great regional differences, but everywhere ‘the body social, the body politic and the body of Christ were so closely intertwined as to be inseparable’.⁶ This religion was ‘unconscious’ and ‘unreflected’, permeated everything and did not really need legitimising. Only a select elite of theologians dealt with definitions and modalities. Religious issues like the one that surfaced around Luther either remained internal quarrels among theologians or, once out of the university, exploded in the church’s face. Heresy was not only a threat to the church but dynamite under society. Everything was connected with everything; the heretic was the enemy within, and his early detection and neutralisation of eminent public importance. If the church tears, society bursts. That is still so, less conspicuously: public quarrels over religion still pick at the fabric of society. In Luther’s time it was exponentially so – nor could the resulting conflict be isolated so as to burn itself out under control, for there was no separate category ‘religion’ available to do so. What a modern observer easily overlooks is that by touching one thing (a ritual, an institution, a custom) everything else is set in motion, especially once the discussion reaches the street. Precisely what happened in Luther’s day.

Believing consciously

Another important aspect of pre-Luther Christianity is how ‘unconscious’ this state of affairs was. Because the cult was fully embedded in the culture – how life is ordered, how things go, how they should be – nobody thought about it. Why would they? A fish is not aware of the water it swims in until it lands outside the bowl. Until a few generations ago this was not essentially different in modern times. Growing up in a Flemish village, you were Roman Catholic. You did not think about it; you were it, imbibed with your mother’s milk. You went to Mass, walked in processions, put out your tongue for the host and shivered at stories of hell. In Holland you were probably Protestant and got the whole package that goes with that. Thinking was for the parish priest or the minister – or better still the theologians in Leuven or Leiden (or Utrecht or Groningen, for with Protestants you always have to split internally at once). Ordinary people learned their catechism not by heart but by rote; spiritual leaders deplored it, but that is how it was. The complaint about weak engagement with the church and its teaching is as old as the church. Believing in God was self-evident, and so was identifying that God with whatever church happened to be present in your life. You did not reflect on religion; you took part, more or less intensely – or, in a more Protestant idiom, it mattered more or less to you. The organisation of social, cultural and political life was bound up with it too, but again you did not rack your brains over how. You conformed or you clashed; you could not change it anyway. There was no alternative (except moving to the big city, where you could live anonymously and where a more or less pluralist society often already existed). Those much occupied with religion were preferably detected early by church leaders and incorporated into their own ranks; for besides being a mark of saints, being too occupied with religion was a trait of heretics. The picture is overdrawn, I know; it does no justice to the many efforts to involve the laity or to the authentic commitment of many. But it is important to realise that such a world, in which the church is embedded and therefore powerful because interwoven with the rest of culture, stands or falls with its self-evidence.

Contestation is as welcome there as toothache. Rulers, secular and spiritual, hate troublemakers and questioners, especially those who keep asking. Contesting, questioning, is precisely what Luther did, and he was good at it – sharp, never easily satisfied, accepting unpleasant consequences, loving consistent reasoning: die Konsequenz led not zum Teufel but to God. The longer Luther spoke, the less self-evident everything became. From the legitimacy of certain church customs (indulgences) it soon moved to the authority of church ministers (above all the ‘servant of servants’, the pope), and before anyone quite realised it the whole sacramental institution of salvation was called into question and the church shook on its foundations. No wonder many thought he had to be stopped: this would lead to anarchy, threatening not just the church but – because the church was bound up with society – the state and living together itself. Right and wrong mingled in the emergency procedures the establishment launched; missed opportunities abounded; but that it reacted is understandable. Society was at stake – and so it proved: the more his ideas spread, the greater the social unrest and political tension in Europe. I do not say it was Luther’s fault, but even if correlation is not causation, it should make you think. His writings sold like hot cakes – coarse attacks on the pope and his henchmen (in German), devotional works (German and Latin), theological tracts, church instructions and profound theological studies (Latin). In universities, monasteries, confraternities, churches, rectories, episcopal palaces, courtrooms, political councils and – last but not least – very ordinary households, discussion broke out. His views found resonance especially in north-western Europe, where the existing church lost its self-evidence, and therefore its authority, surprisingly quickly. The Western church fell into an identity crisis, and society went down with it. Discussing religion at its roots is playing with fire, because it touches the foundations of society, which are no longer taken ‘for granted’ – literally: as granted from on high. Luther’s theological method (referring back to the Bible) proved very effective as a critical principle.

The pope as Antichrist

By denying the existing church the right to call itself ‘church’, Luther brought matters to a head. If you call the pope the Antichrist and the Vatican Satan’s headquarters, you call on your followers at least to distance themselves spiritually from that church. After some hesitation he decided to offer these spiritual emigrants a real alternative, and his first sketch was again revolutionary. God did not work through a sacramental institution and a separate spiritual estate, but through ‘the word’ (literally, performatively), and that working was personal. So he had experienced it; so it was. The Bible is enough; a word is enough, no matter who speaks it, as long as it is biblically grounded. There goes the clergy. According to Luther, every person can become a ‘priest’ to another. Spiritual authority no longer lies in ordination but in a book available to everyone. When Luther calls the Bible the viva vox evangelii he means it literally: in a good reading of Scripture (which always presupposes exegetical study) the Gospel happens, the good news is proclaimed with divine authority, God speaks his word of grace live. The ‘Minister of the Word’ is the only office Luther retains; in his first sketch of a renewed church there is no priest or bishop to be seen. The community of faith itself is competent to appoint its minister and can judge him, because it has access to the Bible.⁷ This is Luther at his most principled. He was tampering with the sacrosanct basic structure of late-medieval society and its three estates (nobility, clergy, people); remove one pillar and the building becomes unstable. Luther did not care and published his ideas on the church in German, accessible to all Christians.

Only when communities began to form here and there, led by people calling themselves ‘prophets’ who proclaimed things Luther did not like at all but claimed to have found in the Bible, did Luther fall back on a more ordered model of church. And when, to crown it all, a social revolution followed in which oppressed peasants appealed to the Bible and to Luther against the landowners (the Peasants’ War, 1525), he called – with pain in his heart, for he had a strong sense of social justice – on the secular authorities, granting them the right, and indeed the duty, to crush the revolt. The consequences were horrific. He had already granted the ‘German nobility’ the right and duty to organise worship – another emergency measure, to root out wild ecclesiastical growth, with far-reaching consequences. If the church, i.e. the bishop, fails, the secular authority may and must take over the government and oversight of the church. The authorities gladly took on the task; they had been eyeing it all through the Middle Ages. Now they could finally domesticate that ‘restless thing’ religion: appoint church leaders, expropriate church goods and lands, and harness the church to their own cart – logically, since politicians do politics. By handing over the top position in church government so easily, Luther drew a heavy bill on the future, not appreciated by all; the later Calvinist reform remained more independent and critical of the state. The end result of the Lutheran alternative is paradoxical: the revolutionary church takes the form of a quasi-episcopal state church, as like as two drops of water to the church Luther had so fundamentally criticised and whose construction he had rejected in principle. Confusing – but it should not blind us to the fact that Luther’s vision was at the outset incredibly anti-institutional, not to say anarchistic, more radical than most movements classed in theological literature as the ‘radical Reformation’, which Luther counted among his worst enemies.

No wonder that, as these consequences became visible, a number of Luther’s colleagues and many church leaders and princes, after initial sympathy, became more reserved or turned away. His actions were too wild and led to more than a widely shared criticism of church practices and doctrines (which they were willing to go along with); they began to see them as an attack on the church itself. And that is what they were. Alister McGrath rightly calls Luther’s view that everyone can be another’s priest Christianity’s Dangerous Idea. If Luther soon settled for a safe option organisationally (outsourcing to the secular authority), he never watered down his Scripture principle. Through it he put a question mark beside everything taken for granted, and the church fell into a total identity crisis. Luther flatly denied that the church as steered by pope and bishops was ‘church’ at all: it was the devil’s work, and the devil is never original; he is God’s ape, a master at perverting what is good in se. The whole register of criticism used in Part 1 for category 4 (paganism, idolatry) was applied by the Protestant current, with as much fire and even more creativity, to the Roman church and its personnel. The Mass became a devilish puppet show to mislead the people; the pope became the Antichrist, a term Luther used systematically from 1520. Cartoons, broadsheets and illustrated lampoons completed the picture, and the common man joined in. Luther’s journey to Worms in 1521 was a triumphal procession: people lined the roads and cheered, parish priests invited him to preach, people tried to touch him as if he were a saint. When his speech was printed the day after his condemnation, one edition showed a dove hovering over his head and at least suggested a halo. Old habits die hard, among reformers too. The other side’s press raged against Luther in exactly the same way: a seven-headed monster, a lecherous monk, son of a mother impregnated by the devil at a witches’ sabbath – you can fill in the rest. Clearly there was no question of these two ‘churches’ coexisting. It was either-or. The religious identities that arose were hard, closed and mutually exclusive. The outcome is known: after much spilt ink and even more spilt blood came, more than a century later, a Europe-wide division of the estate in which the ruler’s religion determined which religion the people might openly profess. Luther had resigned himself to that a century earlier; not all his followers did, notably not those in Calvin’s camp, who developed an underground church which in time claimed the right of resistance against the secular ruler – on biblical grounds, of course. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not easily put back.

How do you actually know what God wants?

Luther asked the forbidden question: who in the church (and by extension in any religion) can really claim to speak on God’s behalf? A religious institution by definition presupposes that somewhere, sometime, God willed its origin and bound himself to it, preferably exclusively. In charismatic groups it is different – the repetition of God’s original speaking (verbal or emotional) guarantees you are on the right track – but there is often little institutionalisation there. Large religious institutions (and this holds beyond Christianity) must point to a ‘moment’ at which God conferred that authority. It lies by definition in the past and proves unreachable when you go looking for it. That is what founding myths are for, such as Jesus giving Peter the ‘power of the keys’ and apostolic succession. If that beginning is uncertain, an-archy threatens, literally: the first meaning of archē is not ‘rule’ but ‘beginning’, ‘the first’ (‘In the beginning’, en archēi). First come, first served: the first is the boss, the prince (princeps, primus capio, he who seizes first). While everyone assured (and assures⁸) that the institutional form of the Roman church is firmly anchored in God’s own will, Luther cried like the child in Andersen’s tale: ‘But the emperor (il papa) has no clothes on!’ He served up the traditional arguments one by one – not so much the pope’s ‘secular power’, based on the Donation of Constantine that Lorenzo Valla had exposed as a forgery (Luther used that argument when it suited), but his spiritual power and its legal ground: the legitimation of the church as Christ’s church. His razor was sola scriptura. Read the Gospels and interpret them with philological and exegetical means, and you soon see that the authority given to Peter in Matthew 16:18–19 (and two chapters later to all the disciples, 18:18) does not simply coincide with the claims the pope bases on it, let alone the assumption that it is transferable. Luther even suggests in passing that when Jesus speaks of ‘the rock’ (petra) on which he will build his church, he means not the person Peter but the confession Peter had just made. Luther could read.

If the Bible is the touchstone of everything, then literally everything can be called before the ‘court of the Bible’: if it stands, fine; if it fails, away with it. Luther claims the Bible can handle the role of executioner, that it will speak clearly and say unambiguously how things are and must be. And there the Achilles heel of Protestantism is revealed. That the Bible can do this is Protestantism’s founding myth, as doubtful as Catholicism’s. The Bible is no clear book; it is not even a book but 66 or 72 (or 74 – it depends on your church) different books, written over perhaps a thousand years. Luther remained convinced all his life that it is clear and contains indisputable knowledge of God’s will for us today; all the Protestant reformers confirm it in chorus; every Protestant confession and catechism repeats it – but in practice there is little to see of it. From the start there were serious disagreements over what God wants according to the Bible, soon leading to fierce quarrels. With the two-edged sword of God’s Word people cut into their own flesh. What Luther used against Rome – that everyone can be another’s priest – others used against him, demanding a fully egalitarian church. Luther took fright and pulled the emergency brake; that was not how he had understood the Bible. But they evidently had. Getting an unambiguous message out of the Bible that convinces every reader is not that simple; those seventy-odd heterogeneous writings were not meant for that. They are no church law codes and contain no explicit systematic theology. There are stories, prophecies critical and constructive, letters, reflections, counsel, analyses, half-sermons, each with its own historical context. God’s existence and activity are presupposed, of course, but that in itself says nothing. To say something from the Bible about a situation other than the one described, you must work by analogy, and then interpretation – ‘human work’ – creeps into what is supposed to sound like the pure word of God. Why should the ‘gifts of the Spirit’ of 1 Corinthians 12 (prophecy, healing) not still mark the church? Why should only the first congregation hold all goods in common (Acts 2)? What does it mean that, according to Galatians, the distinctions slave–free and male–female no longer matter ‘in Christ’? The systematically exploited peasants had a point, biblically too; the Zwickau prophets were at least not wrong to think that ‘prophets’ might arise according to the Bible. The many spiritualist currents could appeal to the Bible not only to stress the Holy Spirit but even to relativise the Bible: ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6). Everything can be questioned, and everything was. Whoever wants to found a religious institution that must be ‘one, holy and catholic’ on a book as diverse as the Bible alone overestimates what the biblical texts can bear. That book was neither written nor suited for it. So legions of faith communities arose at once (calling them churches is already misleading), all appealing to the Bible, but soon and permanently at each other’s throats over its application to baptism, the Lord’s Supper, ministry, the world, the authorities, private property, ranks and estates, the Holy Spirit, Christology… ‘Protestantism’ never existed. It is an umbrella term for a range of groups, communities, movements (church-like or not) and individuals whose main common feature, in the sixteenth century at least, was total rejection of the Roman church as an institution. They also had in common that they appealed to the Bible – but as soon as they had to fill that in, what bound them as a formal principle turned out to divide them as a material one. A broadly institutionalised ‘sola scriptura church’ never got off the ground.

This must have been an enormous disappointment for many well-meaning sixteenth-century people. The humanists, Erasmus first among them, had high expectations of the return to the source of faith, the Bible read and understood in the original languages, now – thanks to renewed knowledge of Hebrew and Greek – truly opened up for the first time in living memory. That there is no such thing as an unprejudiced reading, nor a definitive interpretation of any text that is more than a simple message, is self-evident to a modern linguist (well, more or less), but was unthinkable to a sixteenth-century reader – and regarding the Bible, blasphemy. The Bible was ‘God’s Word’: no human book but holy Scripture, inspired, revealed. Though not as massive as Islam’s claim regarding the Qur’an (dictated by God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel), in the experience of many Protestant-leaning Christians it came very close to verbal inspiration: in many a print the Holy Spirit whispers the text to the evangelists, who are regularly called ‘notaries’. With such a view of the holy book, expectations of the rising linguistic sciences were high. Philology would work miracles, blowing away the thick dust with which Catholic doctrine and tradition had covered (twisted, falsified, Protestant writings often say) the biblical message, so that the pure Word of God would shine again in its original clarity. Then the whole world – and at first Luther really believed this – would read with its own eyes how things stood and would surely repent: not only pope and bishops, but the Jews too would stream in and convert, now that the true meaning of the texts had come to light. That this did not happen partly explains the grimness with which he later fought both the Romana and the Jews. That with so much evidence they still would not see could only be put down to the devil: the Jews were blinded, the synagogue a school of Satan, the pope and his henchmen forging a devilish plot against Christ’s true church. The Antichrist was behind it, that was certain. The evident failure of theologians to derive a ‘clear, objective doctrine convincing everyone’ from the Bible also affected theology’s academic standing. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was still highly regarded, and many expected real answers to life’s questions from it. A century later church and society lay prostrate because the theologians kept quarrelling, and the scholarly avant-garde increasingly bypassed the theological faculty and developed its own dynamic – natural scientists (medicine, physics) and philologists (historical, ethnological) alike. Luther’s self-evident union of scholarship and theology fell apart. Reason emancipated itself; theology marked time and lost social relevance.

Confessionalisation

All the institutional, ‘church-like’ Protestant survivors became closely bound up with the secular authority in the course of the sixteenth century, just as the Catholic church had been before. They became the official state church or the privileged religion. All of them also built a strong internal structure; theologians worked overtime to draft more or less consistent sets of beliefs, often summarised in confessions (in the sense of openly professing what you believe). The first was the Augsburg Confession of 1530, with which the Lutheran princes tried to convince their overlord Charles V that they were ‘Christianly in order’, so that he might let them arrange worship in their own territories. Very important too is the Confessio Belgica (1561), with which the Tournai minister Guy de Brès tried to convince Philip II of something similar for the underground congregations in the Low Countries. Much organisational and legal ingenuity went into building the new church structures, and a cultural effort not to be underestimated into reshaping worship after the abolition of the ‘popish Mass’: the Bible was translated, the liturgy purified or rebuilt from scratch, prayers written, hymns composed, preaching schedules and model sermons compiled (postils), and – not to forget – music written so that churchgoers could take an active part. Here too, you will not be surprised, diversity reigned. Protestant church government ranged from episcopal to almost ‘flat’ (proto-democratic), with everything in between; liturgy from extreme sobriety (Zwingli read and commented on the biblical text, people prayed in silence, and that was it) to the full works, as mostly in Lutheran and Anglican churches. Appeal to the Bible marks all Protestant confessions, church orders and liturgies, and every Protestant theologian made it a point of honour to present the compromises with culture and arrangements with politics (or ‘resistance to princes’, depending on circumstances) as at least biblically justified. Confirmation bias is no stranger to theologians and church leaders.

Meanwhile a new problem surfaced. However united they were in rejecting the Roman option (easy: that was the devil, the Antichrist), cooperation among themselves would not get off the ground. The various Protestant ‘new-build projects’ could barely tolerate each other. For the settling churches too it was self-evident that only one church was possible, so they had to agree with the others, at least on essentials. But defining those (beginning with deciding what is essential) they could not resolve their differences, not even by joint Bible study – on the contrary. The new religious identities were constructed not only in opposition to Rome but against each other. And not only did the break with Rome repeat itself; so did the violence that went with it (rejecting the other as ‘heretic’). In 1523 two monks of the Augustinian house in Antwerp, Luther’s confrères, were burned in Brussels under the eye of the imperial inquisitor Frans van der Hulst; in 1525 the first ‘Anabaptists’ were drowned in the river at Zurich under the eye of Zwingli, who a few years earlier had persuaded the city council to reform public worship along the model he had derived from the Bible – in which there was no room for them (they did not call themselves Anabaptists, of course, since they held infant baptism to be no baptism; they called themselves simply ‘Christians’). The rest of the story is not very edifying. By the end of the sixteenth century many Lutheran theologians were more occupied with fighting ‘Calvinists’ than Rome. The rabies theologorum – the frenzied struggle among theologians over who is right – claimed many victims, though the established Protestant churches fairly soon confined themselves to the spiritual sword, the word. The blows still landed hard.

Constructing mutually exclusive religious identities

Bringing the ‘Scripture principle’ forward did not settle the religious question once and for all, as intended; it made it a huge one. Who can still claim with any authority to speak for God (and his church to be the true church of the Lord), if the Bible cannot be brought unambiguously and convincingly to one’s side? Everyone was convinced the Bible was on his side, of course, but an outsider would have trouble hearing, in the cacophony of competing visions of ‘Christianity’, a cantus firmus that irresistibly imposed itself. By staking everything on the Bible Luther played with fire. With the Reformation religious chaos in Europe only increased, with all its social consequences. When the body of Christ falls apart, so do the body social and the body politic. The church break translated automatically into a social and political one. New societies had to be forged and new borders drawn in Europe, and given the enormous energy and emotion invested in the debates, those borders could in the end only follow confessional lines. That the negotiators at the Peace of Westphalia sometimes had to shuttle between the parties’ representatives because they would not sit at the same table says enough.

The conflict produced not only new churches (the plural alone was intolerable to a sixteenth-century person) but changed the mother church too. It began putting its own house in order. From 1545 to 1563 the bishops met intermittently under the pope at Trent to put everything right: doctrine, church order and practice. If the pre-Luther Catholic church had been a colourful whole, oriented to communal experience and marked more by shared practice than by well-defined doctrine, the way Luther had questioned it now made a precise definition of doctrine unavoidable here too. After Trent the church was essentially a different kind of religious institution. For centuries it had grown organically with, and into, Western European culture; doctrinal decisions were taken only when necessary; shared life was what mattered; and in organisation and atmosphere it was almost as diverse as the cultures it was woven into. The Catholic churches of France, England and Bohemia resemble each other far more today than in the Middle Ages. In late fifteenth-century Bohemia a layman could receive communion under both kinds – a concession the pope had to make after the burning of Jan Hus if he did not want to lose all Bohemians. Clerical marriage was still being discussed, and transubstantiation, though defined, had not yet been promulgated as dogma; Cajetan could calmly write that the doctrine was not to be found in the Gospel. Reacting to Luther’s questions – that is, within his framing of the question – the council now opted radically for clarity, unity and uniformity, centralisation of authority and standardisation of rite. Precisely because the pope was so massively attacked by the Protestants, he became the symbol of the Catholic church and of its unity, which he certainly had not been before. Trent stipulated his absolute teaching authority for the first time – not yet his infallibility, but you can feel it coming: he alone can interpret the Bible definitively. Protestant criticism of the Bible text, especially of the many defects of Jerome’s Vulgate, led the council at the last moment (final session 1563) to decide on a revision of the Latin text. The new Sixto-Clementine Vulgate appeared in 1592 – from a translator’s point of view neither fish nor fowl, but by conciliar decree ‘the literal word of God’. Liturgy was standardised: the Roman Missal and Breviary were made obligatory everywhere. End of couleur locale; end of, say, the Gallican missal. Not that Trent’s decisions were introduced at once – the pope did not have that much authority. Venice went on printing and using its own missals far into the seventeenth century, to Rome’s great annoyance, and the struggle over the Roman Missal in France lasted into the nineteenth. Still, diversity in the Catholic church decreased significantly. It too presented itself as a ‘confessional church’ and took eager part in the debate about ‘doctrine’ that Luther had started. Of course, in people’s experience the Catholic church remained what it had been, a shared ritual life strongly anchored in local devotional traditions, and the council gave many impulses to deepen it – not all of them ‘reactionary’: the mystical currents and numerous new religious houses are offshoots of a reforming tendency going back to before Luther, and the Jesuits made their mark, especially in implementing the council. Flanders bears the stamp. No Counter-Reformation, no Rubens.

Clearly many points affirmed as essential to Catholic identity were reactions to the Protestant challenge – never conciliatory, always delimiting. Intercession of the saints, veneration of Mary, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the Mass, the efficacy of the sacraments, indulgences, the merit of good works, celibacy: everything the Protestants had attacked was now declared essential. Where there had been some latitude before Trent, after it these points were precisely defined and prescribed, and local clergy were urged to teach them to the people, beginning with parish priests, who were henceforth to be trained in diocesan seminaries. A decree on ‘the reform of the church’ cleaned up many things the Protestants had also denounced, but nowhere do we read that ‘the Protestants’ might perhaps have had a point. On the contrary, the Protestant position is often named explicitly, invariably introduced with ‘whoever says this… let him be anathema’ (anathema sit). The invective of the theological polemics since 1520 echoes into doctrinal definition. The Protestant Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 (the year the council decided to compile a ‘Roman catechism’) lashes out at Catholic teaching on the Lord’s Supper just as hard: ‘the popish Mass is at bottom nothing else than a denial of the one sacrifice and passion of Jesus Christ, and an accursed idolatry’ (Q&A 80). This catechism is still an official basic document of most Dutch Protestant churches, and in some circles still used as a textbook. Refuting each other’s positions, returning the ball, trading invective: that became a standard exercise every Christian of whatever denomination had to be able to perform – not only Bible-oriented Protestants, but rite-oriented Catholics too had to be able to put their faith into words, starting with the parish priest but, through catechism classes, down to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Excursus: Scherpenheuvel

The story of Scherpenheuvel (Montaigu) illustrates the change of identity Catholicism went through in the sixteenth century: from diffuse, communally experienced ‘superstition’ around a sacred oak (though that is already the later judge’s term) to a specifically interpreted Marian pilgrimage in a Baroque basilica. Since time immemorial a mysterious oak had stood on a lonely hill between Diest and Zichem. Its leaves had magical power, people knew; Christians too went to the tree for healing, especially against fever. In the early fifteenth century a statue of the Virgin appeared in the tree, and the clergy explained to the pilgrims that it was not the tree or its leaves that healed but the Virgin Mary. When in the seventeenth century Scherpenheuvel lay literally on the front line between Protestant and Catholic troops, going there became an act of strong Catholic faith, heroic, at times bordering on an application for martyrdom. The outrage was enormous when troops of the States removed and destroyed the statue. At the same time stories of miraculous cures multiplied, especially among wounded Spanish soldiers. The army finally drove out the Geuzen; the victory was dedicated to Mary, and the tree received a new little chapel, now a symbol of militant Catholicism with a strong patriotic element. Pilgrims flocked there, and every cure proved that Catholicism was the true faith – especially after the Archdukes visited the chapel in 1603. The higher clergy, however, grew uneasy with the explosion of healing stories, each more spectacular than the last; pilgrims seemed interested only in bodily welfare, and not every story seemed reliable. The Protestants mocked it anyway. Bishop Miraeus of Antwerp, sent to investigate, found the oak ‘becoming a danger to pilgrims’ because souvenir hunters were systematically hollowing it out. In 1604 the Archbishop of Mechelen ordered the sacred oak felled. Thus oak and Mary were separated. From its wood new statues of Mary were made, and pieces turned up for years afterwards, as far away as Spain, highly coveted. The Archdukes’ court architect Wenceslas Cobergher built a basilica on the hill entirely in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, in the form of a fortress and an enclosed garden at once. The symbolism could not be clearer. Strong Marian devotion colours the whole plan; liturgy according to the official rite takes centre stage, and Mary gets the chance to conquer the hearts of the faithful fully – something she managed brilliantly.⁹ In less than fifty years a rather diffuse popular devotion was turned by confessionalisation into an identity statement of the Roman Catholic church, highlighting its own identity in content (Marian doctrine) and doing so emphatically by profiling itself against the competitor – or rather, the enemy. The fortress form was not chosen for nothing.

A new definition of religion, after Luther

What remains at the end of this chapter is that Luther’s démarche had great consequences for how the Christian religion came to define itself. I do not say that most Christians’ experience changed fundamentally; I suspect it did not (whether that is good or bad news depends on your point of view). I could, after all, use a sketch of Flanders less than a century ago as an example of ‘self-evident religion embedded in culture’, and the Scherpenheuvel story shows how strongly spiritual and secular authorities steered. What certainly changed is how religion ‘appears’ in the public domain, how it is talked about. Like a postmodern thinker avant la lettre, Luther deconstructed the whole church edifice with the help of the Bible, so thoroughly that the institution had to reconstruct itself afterwards – and eagerly did, as a confessional identity. Put bluntly: before Luther you could still ‘just be a member of the club and join in’ without asking many questions; after Luther everyone had to be able to answer the question ‘what do you believe?’ And because individual appropriation of the content left much to be desired, that question largely coincided with ‘which church do you belong to?’ You could roughly reproduce the content yourself (if you had learned your catechism) or refer to a religious professional, who would answer ‘catechism-style’, listing the set of beliefs. Just as important: you also had to know what reprehensible things the others believe. That too was in the catechism, sometimes in smaller print. Rejecting the other was part of your religious identity – both ways, and within Protestantism repeated ad infinitum. That I use ‘faith’ here as a synonym for ‘religion’ is itself a symptom. Besides catechisms, countless textbooks appeared with every point set out and argued. In all confessions attention soon shifted from innovative linguistic Bible research and biblical theology (Luther’s beloved field, which he left reluctantly) to systematic theology. The Bible became a book of proof texts to underpin the confession’s doctrines and to beat dissenters over the head with. Universities specialised in polemical theology. The scholastic handbooks Luther had burned with the papal bull were back in the reading room within one generation, among Protestants too; before the century was out a new Lutheran scholasticism had arisen. Polemics dominated the religious market; differences were sought out and sharpened, and every party drew the line between orthodoxy and heresy ever more sharply. Popular handbooks spread these insights so widely in regions where confessions lived close together that a Catholic visitor in Germany once sighed that ‘some peasants knew the ten points of difference better than the Ten Commandments’ (Kaplan, 40).

The mutually exclusive religious identities grew ever more closed, and religion seemed to coincide ever more with a set of beliefs accepted or not. Through discussion the Christian religion was transformed into ‘a well-defined view of faith, with a practice based on it, to be individually assented to and known in outline’. Acceptance of the set of beliefs seemed to be the core of Christianity – accompanied, especially in its Protestant branch, by a strong emphasis on knowing it (much worked at, always complained about) and, increasingly, on experiencing it personally. In Catholic regions that aspect now mattered for identity too, but participation in the sacraments and devotion remained the priority; after Trent the veneration of Mary rose to unprecedented heights. Because religion and culture – body social, body politic and body of Christ – were still interwoven, mutually exclusive religious identities could not really live together. Where by a quirk of fate (usually a political fact) different variants were present in one town or region, pragmatic solutions were sought to keep tensions manageable, always with the pacifying and regulating role of the secular authority as essential; church leaders were the most recalcitrant when a compromise had to be found. Telling. Such compromises might allow ‘the others’ to attend church just across the border, or hold services at a set distance outside the walls, or tolerate meetings in clandestine churches more or less with eyes closed (in the Netherlands and, with more difficulty, Flanders). Sometimes – surprisingly – people even shared the same church building, the simultaneum: in Biberach an der Riss it has been an almost unbroken tradition since 1548 – not voluntarily, but by express order of Charles V, protecting the Catholic minority against the Protestant majority (Kaplan, 198), and kept in force because the Peace of Augsburg froze the status quo. People ‘bear’ each other if there really is no alternative. Intolerance is the norm, ‘toleration’ the exception. Every party found it hard to accept that people would live and die in that other ‘church’ (but it is no church!) by the doctrine taught there. Their souls would be lost; how could one ever resign oneself to that? And back and forth it rang: anathema sit… accursed idolatry, schismatics, heretics, Antichrist! The new-style churches could not really coexist, but since none managed to make the other(s) vanish from the earth, in the end a form of religious plurality had to be accepted – under compulsion, not wholeheartedly. In the pacification of 1648–1650 the concept of religion was defined, in line with the framing, as – and limited to – ‘a set of beliefs with its rituals’. Religious discussion was thereby placed outside politics; only so could the genie be put back in the bottle. Under the heading of freedom of conscience religion was referred to the private sphere, where an exercitium religionis privatum applied. In public life there was, in theory, one religion per territory: cuius regio, eius religio. Europe became a patchwork of confessionally distinct areas: living apart together; tolerating each other at the border – good fences make good neighbours. Where a significant group of another confession lived on someone’s territory, forms of ‘pragmatic toleration’ arose (toleration, not tolerance), but the state of war remained – minus the weapons. Far into the eighteenth century violence against those of other faiths continued, incidentally (the Calas affair) or by expelling whole groups (Huguenots from France, Lutherans from Salzburg and Austria, Waldensians from Savoy), sometimes with children forcibly left behind. That is what the Christian religion looked like as it entered the modern age, and so it remained until not so long ago. Advancing secularisation made the church shrink socially and the official doctrine’s impact on members declined accordingly. The confessional quarrel was still there on paper, but most ‘church members’ gradually began to find it ridiculous. Doctrine was evidently more important to theologians and church leaders than to many ordinary believers, whose religious identity was much broader, and more diffuse.

Not the church reformed, but religion in crisis

The Reformation movement led not to a reformation of the church but to a reformat of religion: henceforth it is about a set of beliefs, personally experienced, legitimised by reference to sources of knowledge outsiders cannot check.

The concept of religion that emerged from the church’s crisis still dominates our view of, and dealings with, the religious phenomena in our society – how religion is talked about. Essential to ‘religion’ is then a set of beliefs, more or less known by the ‘adherents’ and systematised by an institution (internal consistency), preferably with a legally clear form of organisation. Its physical and material ground of existence lies in its admission by the secular authority – which, in the period we discussed, usually meant that the authority made that variant compulsory for every citizen. After Westphalia (1648–1650) one was free in conscience to accept the set of beliefs or not, but to have civil rights one had to conform, at least outwardly, to the ruling religion: cuius regio, eius religio, already the outcome of the first war of religion at Augsburg in 1555, contested again in words and violence, and generalised after 1648. The great exception was France, where in certain defined areas another religion (the Protestant one) was permitted and people from there had civil rights throughout the country; with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the Sun King simply conformed to the European norm. The other exception was the Dutch Republic, where the Protestant religion was privileged but membership not compulsory. The astonishingly high proportion of citizens not belonging to the Reformed church in the seventeenth century gives food for thought. The Republic thereby also became a haven for those driven out elsewhere, and toleration of other religions (here too: toleration, not tolerance) took concrete form there more quickly, going hand in hand with reflection on whether something like ‘religious freedom’ might be possible after all – more on that in Part 3.

A second aspect that Luther attached to the concept of ‘religion’ is that the Bible received far more attention than before. Research into its text and interpretation (linguistic, exegetical, historical) became permanently bound up with at least the Christian religion; the Catholic church took full part, even while keeping Tradition beside the Bible as a source of faith. In public discussion of religion that book and the doctrine referring to it always play the leading role. Theologians and exegetes dominated the discussions so much that almost everyone came to think the most important side of faith was conviction, and that the ritual, experiential side had a right to exist only if it could be motivated ‘from that conviction’. Catholic authors too went along with this in the heat of polemics. In that debate ‘religion’ shifted towards the external, visible aspect, while ‘faith’ came to denote the inner, real core that it was supposedly all about – another sign of how deeply the Protestantisation of Christianity penetrated the Dutch-speaking world. Something similar holds for the United States; it reportedly made the brilliant Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton sigh ‘that in America even the Catholics are Protestant’.

Finally, the strong emphasis on the personal experience of God’s grace opened the door to a more subjective understanding and experience of religion. Luther’s emphasis on fides qua, the faith by which one appropriates salvation, was an important moment, though he stood in a movement of interiorisation that had had the wind in its sails since the late Middle Ages, and the general tendency to individualisation and the Romantic fascination with personal experience obviously reinforced it. This emphasis enabled the diplomats of 1648–1650 to detach religion partly from communal life and refer it to the ‘living room’ (privatim), where freedom of religion was now a fact. The line from intense personal experience (Luther) to individualisation and privatisation of religion is certainly not straight, but it can be drawn with some justification.

We are so familiar with these three aspects of (Christian) religion – set of beliefs, reference to a book, personal experience – that we risk thinking they apply to everything religious. Even when we know in theory that they do not, this view still determines our perception (or non-perception) of religious expressions. The reform movement around Luther may not have succeeded in a reformation of the one church into a better version of itself, but it did – by accident – succeed in a reformat of the phenomenon of religion.

Consequences

This new format has consequences, all bound up with the crucial role of the set of beliefs. The concept limits our perception of reality. Human behaviour that is not based on, or does not seem to flow from, particular beliefs we find hard to recognise as religion. We like a set of beliefs to be presented to explain a ritual; then at least we can ‘talk about it’. Someone lighting a candle in church must say: I do this because I believe that… and if he does not know, he will invent a rationalisation. Simply saying ‘because it feels right’ or ‘because my mother did it too’ we do not find enough; answers not filled in with more or less standard templates we do not take seriously. Catechesis is called for – or, with a foreign religion, an expert must explain to us why so many people in India bathe in the Ganges. I find this regrettable and even dangerous, because making behaviour explicit is always secondary, and the absence of (or inability for) explicitation must not determine the truthfulness and importance of that behaviour. Why should only articulate religions with elaborate metaphysics and moral doctrines deserve the word ‘religion’ and our attention? Regrettable, because truly different ways of experiencing reality can then hardly make their possible positive contribution to society; dangerous, because precisely the articulate religions have high pretensions. They often claim ‘to know’, and because their argument is circular (based on a ‘holy book’ and thus on a logic not communicable to outsiders), that knowledge does not communicate well. The Western Christian format of religion that became dominant through the Protestant Reformation contains much explosive material, which in the past often poured oil on the fire of existing conflicts. An example of each, to conclude.

A regrettable consequence: the Western Christian format of religion leads to tunnel vision

It blinds us to cultures where reality is experienced very differently than we usually do – the Far East, for instance (India, China), where most people perceive the world and themselves quite otherwise: put bluntly, not dualistically (human–divine, mortal–eternal, nature–supernature) but holistically (the divine in everything; life and death are one). When we encounter this we usually get stuck in a superficial fascination with the exotic, colourful rituals, buildings and images, and lose our way among the multitude of gods, goddesses and traditions. And when the sacred writings of what we call Hinduism turn out to be full of the most fantastic and mutually contradictory stories, and we look in vain for a bit of systematically worked-out metaphysics, we get a headache and stop thinking. That ‘Hinduism’ does not exist at all, but is a collective name given by Westerners at the end of the eighteenth century to all the very diverse indigenous cultural, ritual and philosophical traditions they found in India, already speaks volumes. Eastern experience of reality evidently does not fit easily into our format ‘religion’, and when we force it, the format distorts reality. Another Eastern example: Buddhism, which is no religion and has no doctrine (ask around), received attention in the West only once the Buddha’s teaching was published in English in the form of a catechism (Henry S. Olcott, 1881). Suddenly people recognised the formal features of what we call a religion (or a philosophy – that is then discussed, but it too depends on the limited format). The catechism form made Buddhism fit our mental frame, so we took it seriously. But such formatting can easily make the real otherness of other religious expressions disappear under the table. Tellingly, it is often Western ‘converts’ who make that translation, very often to answer the questions of ‘people here’. The author of this Buddhist catechism was a Protestant army officer, lawyer and journalist converted to Buddhism, and president of the Theosophical Society; he was even aware that he did real Buddhism an injustice by calling it a ‘religion’, and says so in a footnote in later editions.¹⁰ (In his catechism the Buddha has many traits of an empathetic liberal freethinker, but that aside.) And in Sri Lanka the catechism caused a real revival among the Buddhist population. Formatting in spiritual matters can evidently also form spiritual matters – perhaps even call them into being out of nothing. It can certainly strengthen certain tendencies while hiding others. Something to think about carefully when we (want to) regulate ‘religions’.

A dangerous consequence: the theological formatting of the ‘religious’ question

Because the set of beliefs is so central in this format, public conversation about religions very quickly takes on a quasi-theological colour and the form of a ‘debate’ – about views, ideas and convictions that are as self-evidently correct to the in-group as they are arbitrary and unconvincing to the out-group. Debate can be fine, but it is not the best form for an empathetic dialogue that binds people together. Hot heads, cold hearts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries groups of people came to face each other this way, and once estranged they could not be brought together again. People did not meet; belief systems collided – two internally consistent sets of beliefs with no common ground to settle the debate. Theologians are apologists. They organise the arguments within their own system optimally, which is very convincing for those who accept the premises; everyone else thinks ‘what is he talking about?’ or ‘how can you believe that?’ The difference between atheist and adherent is only relative, as Etienne Vermeersch rightly never fails to stress: the atheist rejects the rationality of all the stories, the believer of all the stories minus one (his own). A profound and subtle reflection on the Trinity can have a strong impact on a Christian, means nothing to an atheist, irritates a Jew no end and makes a Muslim think: shirk (idolatry). A rational debate (or rather, a debate with rational arguments) about sets of beliefs promotes the formation of mutually exclusive religious identities. So it was in the sixteenth century, and there is no reason to think the twenty-first will be different. The nuanced in every party will soon be overtaken by the hardliners, whose story is always tighter, certainly when a holy book is involved. A moderate view comes from looking at something from several sides at once (tiring). Making a sacred text speak by contextualising it twice (in its own time, then in ours) takes considerable intellectual effort, while a fundamentalist can simply say: ‘but it says so!’ We have become friendlier to each other, but essentially not much has changed since the sixteenth century. Mutually exclusive truth claims can hardly coexist peacefully, precisely because they are not non-committal but also concern the faith and life of the other. Every belief system contains unmistakable value judgements about those outside it. When these are made explicit (as in a real encounter they must be at some point), it will take its revenge that the set of beliefs was first proclaimed the essence of religion and the debate form chosen.

In my view it is therefore undesirable, in a pluralist context, to push the Western articulation of human religiosity forward as the mould for all religions. It gives systematically elaborated religions too much attention, condemns non-doctrinal religions and anarchic forms of spirituality to a marginal existence, and suggests that interreligious encounter must be about convictions. The religious impulse that has driven humans through time to all kinds of fine and less fine deeds is so much more than ‘accepting a set of beliefs with accompanying rules of life (morals and rituals)’.

I also suspect that for most people it is still not really about doctrine as such, but about what doctrine ‘yields’ for life. Even among confessional Christians it is experience rather than thought that consoles. The word ‘world view’ (levensbeschouwing), now in vogue as an umbrella term (distinguishing ‘with and without reference to god’), is far too theoretical. The human questions addressed in most religions are much more concrete, the answers much more primary and emotional. Does it strengthen my spirit? Does the rite or the saying comfort me? Do I feel ground under my feet? Do I experience connectedness with others? Do I get the sense that my life is about something? Do I find a place in the world? Does it give a sense of direction to a life that shoots off in every direction? Does it offer tools to deal with my own mortality, or a way not to lose entirely those who have died? Does it offer rituals to celebrate my wonder at life (at a birth, at finding a partner)? I list what many associate with religion, without any claim to objectivity or completeness. My point is that few people demand doctrinal correctness of the answer to such great and small questions of life. What they expect is that something is done with them that ‘works’, that convinces the heart rather than the head. Religion as part of human culture moves in the field of the stylisation of life in the light of life’s questions (no capitals needed). Of that segment of humanity that demands a strict theoretical justification and finds knowing it essential, a relatively large part is presumably in church leadership or a theologian (or philosopher, or ideologue). By constantly foregrounding doctrine we deprive ourselves of the view of much that plays in the background (the underground) and that I suspect matters far more to people than the precise doctrine of ministry, baptism, grace, fasting or feasts, or the explanation of why a ritual act supposedly works. Those are secondary matters, literally: they came later. I called pre-Luther religion a cumulative cultural tradition. In my view religion still is that: a historically grown cultural good. Whoever reduces religion to a doctrine to be accepted, without a word about how those views are rooted in the broad culture in which people live and move, is guilty of reduction. I described the church as a living organism, and I still find that a good description, open enough not to be a definition: people on their way through life, seeking their way. The institutional (organisation, and the account of why one does things this way and not that) is part of it, certainly, but no more. Religion so seen is a cultural activity par excellence. A human being is human precisely because he always transcends himself. In the religious contribution to that, many – not all – refer to a ‘more than ordinary’ actor, in the West usually called God. Full stop. Making that aspect explicit – God, what exactly is meant and how it works – belongs to it too, but may not draw all attention to itself. Theology is a second-order religious activity, a verbal articulation of human experience. It must not block the view of the experience itself; it is itself a product of religion as a cumulative cultural tradition.

Looking ahead

The body social, the body politic and the body religious are still so closely intertwined as to be inseparable. I quoted Barbara Diefendorf’s fine sentence before and repeat it because it is so true – and it still holds when the body religious is marked by hyperdiversity. That cannot but create tension in the body social, the fabric of society, and in the body politic, the institutions of civil government. High time, then, to look more closely at how religious plurality in our society is framed and managed. Is there a format that does justice to that plurality without mortgaging living together and politics? The Western Christian concept of religion does not meet these criteria, in my view; on the contrary, it readily pours oil on the fire, because it strengthens identities and treats conversation as debate.

To get further, we bring back the insights of Part 1. Religious expressions and local culture were like brother and sister; ethnography and the study of religion were born together, almost identical twins. In reflecting on that, we saw an idea begin to haunt people: the existence of a ‘general natural religion’ underlying all religious forms. Consciously and unconsciously it played a large role when people came to think that freedom of religion (several religions coexisting in one society) was possible and desirable. By combining that idea with the format ‘religion as a set of beliefs with rules of conduct’, the tensions between religious institutions were regulated by fixing religious freedom in legal frameworks. After the wars of religion and the unceasing religious quarrels in the West, that was an enormous improvement. On the other hand, it defined that freedom very one-sidedly. The format of ‘religion’ used is the Western one – the view-limiting idea that religion is about a set of beliefs. All other forms of religious creativity are ‘invisible’ within this frame and therefore unprotected; human religious creativity has degenerated into doctrinal dry-swimming and institutional systemic compulsion. To see that clearly we must go back in time again, to the end of the eighteenth century, when the idea of freedom of religion appeared in various declarations of the ‘unalienable rights of man’. If, as a legislator, you want to put [god] in brackets and at the same time not patronise people, you had better get it right. Continue with Part 3.

© Dick Wursten – fair use policy: all use permitted, provided the source is acknowledged.