Writings on the Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen Lane (London, 2016) Hbk. 464 pages. £25.00
This year is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, or at least one of its most defining moments when Martin Luther nailed his message of defiance to the Church door at Wittenberg. 'Here I stand, I can do no other': words, as Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us, he probably didn't say but were attributed to him years later.
But so what? Why should we even bother to think about it any more? MacCulloch, perhaps the most distinguished of contemporary ecclesiastical historians, whose specialty is the Reformation, likens the Reformation to a 'particularly disastrous car crash'; a cataclysm that left people dazed and disoriented trying to make sense of their lives which has reverberated down to the present day.
This latest collection of 'Writings on the Reformation' comprises twenty-two essays, that have already appeared in various publications, with the overall intention of synthesising for a wider public the vast amount of specialist research which the Reformation still generates. Covering numerous aspects of the Reformation in both England and across Europe it also embraces the Catholic Counter-Reformation with a chapter on the Council of Trent. In a way these chapters are like snapshots of the flying debris generated by that giant car crash as it ricocheted across generations.
But what caused the crash? Is there any fundamental issue which enables us to get some purchase or perspective on this epochal upheaval? Here we may well ponder for a moment the apposite picture on the cover of the book. A querulous finger points (yes, it's Martin Luther's, in a portrait by Lucas Cranach) to a text, even a particular word, of an opened Bible as if to inquire, what does this word mean? For MacCulloch, the Reformation was primarily about 'how to read a book'.
Why this should have been so was largely a result of Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus, who had popularised an awareness of the Greek texts that underlay the Latin (Vulgate) Bible of the West. As MacCulloch opines, 'it was a huge shock for scholars when they first experienced the text again in Greek at the end of the fifteenth century.' This, he points out, was in contrast to the Orthodox Church where Greek had always been familiar: 'That single fact may explain why Orthodoxy has never had a Reformation.'
The significance of linguistics was the subtle differences that often existed between the Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts, which in turn raised a more fundamental issue: the nature of authority. 'Do we arrive at truths as a matter of individual judgement, or through deference to authoritative church leaders or to an infallible sacred text?'
It was this question that became central to the Enlightenment, which 'for Christianity was a revolution in how to read that same book.' The effect of this revolution, argues MacCulloch, has over two centuries transformed Western Christianity in such a way that the polarisation is not now between Catholic and Protestant but how a scripture claiming divine revelation relates to those other sources of revelation in personal experience and understanding. It is exactly this issue which still splits churches today, for example in relation to sexual ethics when considering lesbian, gay and trans-gender rights.
The divisiveness of the Reformation was so traumatic for Europe largely because the preceding Roman Catholic orthodoxy and its accompanying culture had been so monolithic. MacCulloch sees this medieval dominance by a single form of monotheism for so long as something unique in human history, with the nearest exception being the Wahhabism of Islamic culture. And it is this that makes the issues of the Reformation so relevant today. What we are now experiencing in the twenty-first century is a global re-run of that epochal cultural car crash that happened in Europe five hundred years ago as Islam faces the challenges of modernity. Islam needs reformation to become modern, which is why the Reformation still has important lessons to teach.
Dominic Kirkham is a community activist in Manchester. His book From Monk to Modernity was published by SOF in 2015.