Celebrating the Reformation: a reply to Sarah Condon

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm by Edwin Woodruff Tait

Celebrating the Reformation: a reply to Sarah Condon 2020-05-15T12:35:23-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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The Episcopal priest Sarah Condon has just written a defiant blog post expressing her frustration with (male) Protestant clergy who mourn the Reformation. She gives three basic reasons (or sets of reasons) for celebrating the Reformation:

1. Women can be ordained and clergy can be married (openly and legally–she points out correctly that a large number of medieval priests lived in illicit but tacitly accepted relationships with women, and that the women involved were called “whores” and had a low social status).

2. The Reformation allowed people to hear the Gospel of God’s grace clearly and the Bible was translated into vernacular languages.

3. Sometimes God calls us to “burn it all down,” pouring out his judgment on the established order. (Obviously this is dependent on the previous two points.)

To the first point: Rev. Condon says with certainty that we know that women would not be ordained if the Reformation had not occurred. Pope John Paul II would, of course, agree with her. But then, Rev. Condon doesn’t agree with the Pope’s reasons for thinking this (i.e., that the ordination of women is theologically impossible). From a purely historical point of view, I think the matter is much less certain than she claims. One of the big mistakes Protestants (and secular post-Protestants) make about Catholicism is to assume that Counter-Reformation Catholicism is what Catholicism would have been like if not for the Reformation (at least in all the aspects they consider bad–they are happy to take credit for what they consider real reform). Kingsley Amis’ novel The Alteration is a really good example of this. We simply don’t know what would have happened if Protestants had rejected schism as a means of reform. Maybe they would all have been stamped out without much trace, but I suspect not. And with regard to clerical marriage, where Condon makes the same claim, I’m fairly sure not. The possibility of allowing married clergy was seriously batted about in the Reformation era among Catholics, particularly as a means of healing the growing schism. One of the reasons it didn’t happen was that schism happened anyway, and the Catholic Church adopted a very hostile attitude to signature Protestant demands even when there wasn’t a clear doctrinal reason to do so. I am reasonably confident that there would be married clergy in the Catholic Church today if Protestants had pulled back from the doctrinal and liturgical demands that were genuinely incompatible with the Tradition and had doubled down on practical reforms. More on that later. First, a few more points about women and the Reformation.

Rev. Condon seems to follow a line of scholarship, which was once very common, holding that the Reformation was a liberating movement for women. She points to the role Katy Luther played in sometimes arguing theology with Luther and his friends and students. (From the quotes I remember in the Table Talk, I think she’s exaggerating a bit–my memory is that Katharina played the role of the sympathetic and common-sense “uneducated woman” whose views were recorded with a bit of a patronizing smile–but I could be wrong, and Rev. Condon is right that at least they were recorded and she had her say.) But there’s another approach, which has on the whole been more dominant in recent decades, I think (at least it seemed so when I was in grad school and I don’t think it’s waned since), which emphasizes the ways in which the Reformation doubled down on patriarchy. Lyndal Roper’s book The Holy Household on the Reformation in Augsburg is one of the key works arguing this position, though her arguments have not been accepted without controversy. Amy Leonard has documented the stories of German nuns in the Reformation era who resisted the efforts of (male) Protestant clergy to “liberate” them from their vocations. (Of course there were other nuns, such as Katharina von Bora, who did find Protestantism liberating. But their stories may not be as typical as Protestant propaganda has claimed.) Sometimes these efforts were quite coercive and even, at least by threat, violent.

The Protestant Reformers by and large argued that women’s only vocation was within the household. Martin Bucer objected to Catholic veneration of Mary in part because it made her a powerful figure in her own right over against her husband, whereas Bucer insisted that after the miraculous events of Jesus’ birth Mary lived the life of a perfect and obedient housewife and should only be celebrated in that context. Luther said in his treatise on The Estate of Marriage (1522) that women were created to bear children and that it didn’t matter if this wore them down and shortened their lives. (To be fair, as this Protestant website points out, he also said that childbearing was healthy for women and that it was better to have a short life in good health than a long life in bad health.) In medieval Catholicism, on the other hand, women often exercised powerful social roles with considerable independence from men. They weren’t priests, true, but they were abbesses, anchorites, hospital workers. . . . There is a lot of evidence of women resisting the Reformation because their spirituality was focused on the very shrines and rituals that the Protestants destroyed. And yes, there are other examples of iconoclastic women who mocked Catholic piety by saying that they could piss as holy water as the priest could make, and so on. It’s complicated–far more complicated than Rev. Condon’s desire for celebration allows.

I am married to an Episcopal priest myself, so I understand how important vocation is. I understand that Rev. Condon probably experiences her vocation in a way that this particular essay does not do justice to. But as it stands, her way of speaking about it sounds like a confirmation of what many conservative Catholics and conservative Anglicans say, that women want ordination as an expression of personal power. It sounds as if she is saying “the unity of the Church doesn’t matter–what matters is that I get what I want.” Again, I’m sure that there’s more to her sense of vocation than this, but in this particular piece of writing it doesn’t come through, at least to me.

Her snarky and witty style no doubt contributes to this. But to be honest, this is one of my problems with the whole piece. I appreciate Rev. Condon’s lively writing, but her rhetorical approach (indicated by the title, for starters) is of a piece with a general trend in our culture that I think is deeply toxic. The willingness to flout other people’s sensibilities, to glory in being offensive, to jeer at what others hold sacred–I think we are drowning in these things already. I don’t think more of this is needed, however justified Rev. Condon may find her particular cause. I know that many conservative Catholics and Anglicans treat ordained women this way. I can only say, inadequate as Rev. Condon will find it, that I protest passionately against it when I run into it. I think her anger and snark are understandable. I don’t think they are particularly convincing to anyone not already in her corner. But perhaps she doesn’t intend them to be.

As an Anglican priest, Rev. Condon presumably confesses regularly her faith in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I don’t see how she can reconcile that profession with the cavalier way in which she mocks those (she claims they are all male, but I doubt that) who care about unity. Yes, of course, unity must be unity in truth and justice. But a love of unity itself is not something to be ashmed of.

Rev. Condon’s second point is that the Reformation restored a proper understanding of grace. (She also claims that the Reformation is responsible for the Bible being in the vernacular, which ignores the multiple translations in multiple European languages that existed before the Reformation.) This isn’t the place to deal with this claim, which is of course the basic Protestant claim and is a solid reason to celebrate the Reformation if true. Indeed, since I think the Reformation did give us some fresh insights on grace, it’s a reason why I do celebrate aspects of the Reformation (but not the schism). But Reformation theology, taken “straight,” does not liberate grace so much as segregate it. “Law” is allowed to reign in the affairs of this world, but banished from the Gospel. I don’t think that’s Biblical. The Sermon on the Mount is at the heart of the Gospel, as the Gospels themselves define it. Here’s a basic challenge for Rev. Condon and other defenders of the Reformation: does racial justice belong to law or Gospel? Or, in other words, is a church that proclaims and practices racial segregation preaching the true Gospel?

Her final point is that sometimes God wants us to burn everything down. I think she’s wrong there. Yes, there is divine judgment. Biblically, the harshest proclamations of judgment are against God’s own people. The problem with “burning it all down” is that you are repudiating your former people and starting a new people, who presumably don’t deserve God’s judgment. But the new people always do too. After 500 years, is it really still credible to claim that the endless sequence of burning it all down that has marked Protestant history is God’s will? But perhaps Rev. Condon doesn’t mean that. She is, after all, an Anglican, a tradition distinguished from most other Protestant traditions precisely by its level of continuity with the past. So what does she actually mean by “burning it all down”? Wouldn’t that, logically, lead her to abandon Anglicanism itself? (Not that I want her to do that–but she’s not going to listen to me anyway!)

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