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Reformations Then and Now

Reformations Then and Now

Last updated on: October 19, 2015 at 1:02 am by Philip Jenkins

Reformations Then and Now 2015-10-15T15:23:35-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I described the religious revolution that overcame the Jewish world in the seventh century BC, and which I compared explicitly to a reformation of the sort we know very well from Early Modern Europe.

The resemblances between the two eras, as portrayed by a scholar like Baruch Halpern, are often striking. Halpern, indeed, repeatedly and explicitly draws Reformation-era analogies. Noting Martin Luther’s fondness for the prophet Jeremiah, he suggests that this affinity was quite natural. “[Jeremiah] stands to the cultic establishment of pre-Josianic Jerusalem much as Luther stood to the Catholic Church of his day” (48). Similarly, Halpern suggests that “Josiah’s iconoclasm was Cromwellian in scope, directed against any plastic art that could remotely be construed as cultic” (411).

In both eras, we see a new sense of individualism and individual moral responsibility; a stress on the personal and individual nature of sin, rather than the collective; and a much more radical monotheism. A new religious sensibility is indicated by the emphasis on the text as the guide to belief and practice, and a veneration of that text. Scripture becomes the criterion by which to assess popular ritual life and devotion – usually, in the harshest possible manner. If it is perhaps too early to speak of sola scriptura in the ancient context, then the concept was at least recognizable.

Once reformers recognized the core problem, they had to disrupt and eradicate the cults and now-proscribed practices, leading to widespread iconoclasm:

[h]e put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven. . . . and the altars that were on the top of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, did the king beat down, and break them down from thence, and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron.

Such activities focused especially on practices involving venerated ancestors, leading to the disruption of tombs and shrines. Whatever the theoretical goals of the reform movement, the practical outcome is a serious reduction in the role of women as makers and consumers of religious rituals, and as ritual specialists.

All analogies limp, but some less than others. The preceding paragraphs could be describing Judea in 620 BC or Switzerland and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century AD. In both cases too, the specific issues surrounding the “reformation” movement had enduring consequences. If the religion was in fact to be based thereafter on scripture, that placed a whole new premium on the craft of writing and producing books, and a veneration for the written word as holy artifact.

The more a religion becomes a religion of the Book, of the Word, the more books become the heart of religious behavior, almost to the exclusion of other once-popular forms of religious expression. Also, the more possible it is for religious people to live their faith internally and individually, dwelling on the word, rather than performing acts, such as sacrifices. That shift from the sacrificial cult to the world of prayer and meditation would be one of the leading trends in Second Temple Judaism.

With all this in mind, we might look closer at the world of the European Reformation in terms of its long-term causation. Halpern, you recall, traced the Jewish experience to a general intellectual and cultural destabilization arising from prolonged contacts with new ideas and scientific insights from neighboring empires. Pursuing that analogy into later Europe, we should not look just at the immediate circumstances of the decade or so preceding Luther’s protest, but the previous two centuries or more. We see for instance the flood of ancient philosophy mediated through the Arab world, in addition to the works of Arabic philosophers themselves. These provided the foundation for the new intellectual world reflected most obviously in the universities, and in the rise of philosophical systems like Nominalism. Without that Nominalist context, Luther’s thought makes little sense.

Beyond that intellectual change, moreover, we see the spread of literacy and the idea of the text, and new concerns about sinfulness and individual responsibility. At least for some educated elites, the notion of true religion is also reshaped, with growing contempt for popular or vernacular religion.

In Luther’s age, as in Jeremiah’s, some of the most furious debates concern the homage paid to a sacred feminine figure, who was seen as usurping the worship due rightfully to God alone. In Jeremiah 44.16-18, we hear the voices of women who had always venerated the Queen of Heaven. The European Reformation found its stubbornest opponents among traditional-minded adherents of the Virgin Mary.

At least for its adherents, the new movement is a great mental liberation, a casting off of internal shackles. Earlier generations of Protestants celebrated the cultural religious revolution that supposedly launched the modern world around 1500, as Renaissance laid the groundwork for Reformation. Rudyard Kipling summed this view up perfectly in his poem, “The Dawn Wind:”

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking

Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,

Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,

And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!

From that perspective, who could possibly fail to want a Reformation?

Another analogy I would stress is in the rewriting of history. After the seventh century BC, Jewish reformers rewrote the history of their religion to suggest that the popular religious practices at the shrines and sacred groves were somehow foreign and syncretistic, and had never been part of the authentic ways of true Israel (as of course they had been). In the Reformation context, early Protestants had to stress the purity of the primitive pre-Nicene church while studiously underplaying the very “Catholic” aspects that emerged quite clearly from the second century onwards, especially in such matters as the role of the clergy, and the veneration of Mary and the saints. When such practices were acknowledged, they were commonly attributed to borrowings from paganism.

I don’t wish to draw out such analogies in excruciating detail, but the point is clear. In both movements, we do see a rather similar shift in fundamental sensibility, which is far more significant than any particular detail.

What other reformations might we consider in the same category?

One intriguing Christian example is the Iconoclastic movement within the Eastern Roman Empire in the eighth century. Seeking to reject Islamic charges that Christians indulged in idolatry, the Roman Empire and its church condemned human-made images, and this iconoclastic movement prevailed from the 720s through the 780s. Countless paintings and figurative works were destroyed throughout the empire, in what has variously been termed the Ikon-Struggle (eikonomachia) and, more intriguingly, the Byzantine Reformation.

Here again, the movement was inspired by a transformation of sensibility, a new proclamation of the means by which holiness could be explored and expressed. Above all, it meant the rejection of external, material or sensual, and a total emphasis on the internal and spiritual:

we found that the unlawful art of painting living creatures blasphemes the fundamental doctrine of our salvation-namely, the Incarnation of Christ, and contradicted the six holy synods . . . If anyone shall endeavor to represent the forms of the saints in lifeless pictures with material colors which are of no value (for this notion is vain and introduced by the devil), and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, etc. . . . let him be anathema.

Human beings alone were to serve as the divine image, the true ikon.

Next time I’ll explore how far the reformation model can be used in other religions and cultural settings.

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