R. Po-Chia Hsia – A Companion to the Reformation World

Автор: R. Po-Chia Hsia
Название книги: A Companion to the Reformation World
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 592
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This volume brings together 29 new essays by leading international scholars, to provide an inclusive overview of recent work in Reformation history.

Presents Catholic Renewal as a continuum of the Protestant Reformation.
Examines Reformation in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Takes a broad, inclusive approach – covering both traditional topics and cutting-edge areas of debate.

In commenting on the Book of Daniel in 1530, Luther reflected on the eschatological
mood of the Reformation movement: “Everything has come to pass and is
fulfilled: the Roman Empire is at the end, the Turk has arrived at the door, the splendor
of popery has faded away, and the world is crackling in all places, as if it is going
to break apart and crumble.” The world that Luther lived in had indeed come to an
end. Once, Latin Christendom, united in faith and allegiance to the Roman pontiff,
had resisted many forces that threatened to break it apart: the struggles between
popes and kings, the critique of medieval reformers and prophets, and the mixture
of social, national, and anticlerical movements branded as heretical – Lollardy and
the Hussite Revolution of the late Middle Ages. Now, challenged by new theologies,
the Latin Church jostled for orthodoxy amidst a growing array of churches and sects,
each claiming for itself the apostolic mantle of pristine evangelical Christianity.
Suspended as it were between heaven and earth, the world of the Reformation
existed simultaneously in different temporal and spatial dimensions. Drawing their
inspiration from the world of the Gospels, the reformers and their supporters called
themselves evangelicals and clamored for a pure Christianity, purged of its human
and papal encrustations. Critics of the Roman Church harked back to a golden ecclesiastical
age, much as the humanists advocated returning to the Greco-Roman sources
of moral philosophy and rhetorical elegance, for many of the latter were found among
the defenders of the causa Lutheri. This imagined world of primitive Christianity was
invoked in order to discredit the present world of corruption: there, the true shepherds
of Christ, here wolves in clerical garment; then, apostolic poverty in imitation
of Christ, now, the pomp of prelates mocking the passio Christi; a past world of the
true Kingdom of God struck a poignant comparison with this present world in the
clutches of the devil. Yet, “the world is crackling in all places,” as Luther reminded
us, for the corrupt world would yield to a new time, to the Second Coming of Christ,
to a new world subsumed under heaven.
Convinced though he was of the imminence of the end-time, Luther refused to
prophesy its precise advent. For the true church of the new world was like an unborn
child,
a representation and simile of the Church, as the baby in the womb is surrounded and
wrapped with a thin skin, which in Greek is called a chorion. . . . The chorion does not
break until the fruit is ripe and timely and is brought forth into the light of the world.
And thus also is the Church wrapped up and enclosed by the Word and seeks no other
teaching of God’s will, except what is revealed and shown in the very same Word, with
which it is at peace, and remains steadfast through the faith until such a time, that it
will see in that other life God’s light and countenance and hear God Himself preaching
on the mysterious and now hidden things, which we have here in faith, but only there
in beholding.
Not all waited patiently for the birth of the new world. In their midwifely zeal, radical
reformers ruptured the chorion, only to bring forth premature matter and aborted
children, as Luther would castigate the Anabaptists “and other enthusiasts and hordes
of rebellious spirits.”
Indeed, for the radicals of the Reformation, Luther had stopped dead in the tracks
of reform. In the words of Thomas Müntzer, reformer turned prophet of the rebellious
peasants and townsmen of Thuringia, Luther was “the spiritless, soft-living flesh
at Wittenberg, who has most lamentably befouled pitiable Christianity in a perverted
way by his theft of holy Scripture.”1 Once a follower of Luther, Müntzer became disenchanted
with the Wittenberg reformer for his refusal to call on the princes to root
out godless popery with the sword. Urging the princes to wield the surgeon’s knife
to rip through the womb of the corrupt body ecclesiastic in order to deliver the
newborn evangelical church, Müntzer and the other radical reformers failed to understand
Luther’s reluctance to hasten a divine delivery. What separated the Reformation
of the established Protestant churches and the radical movements was a
fundamental disagreement over the timing of the new world of redemption. Eager
as they might have been for the Second Coming, the Lutheran Church refused to
give in to the eschatological temptation: the imminent end of the world signified not
a reordering of society and congregation, as the radicals would have it, whether by
violence or peace, but an infinite patience to await the will of God.
If expectations for the future – the end of time itself – created a chasm between
the Protestant and radical reformations, it was memory of a past world that cemented
the permanent schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the new evangelical
churches. History itself was up for grabs. After the battle lines were drawn, the
doctrinal fronts stabilized, both the Protestant and Catholic churches turned to create
a new understanding of the past world of apostolic Christianity and the present world
of confessional conflicts. The blood of martyrs ensured the wounds would not heal,
that the world torn asunder would not come together again in desecration of their
memory. For the Protestants, the blood of their martyrs flowed in a continuous
stream from the persecutions of the pagan tyrants to the repression of papal tyrants.
Hence, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe or the Actes Martyrs of Jean Crespin
represented the English and French Protestant martyrs of the sixteenth century completing
a redemptive history that stretched back to the world of apostolic Christianity.
This was one area in which the Protestants and the Anabaptists held the moral
high ground for some time, as initially Catholics played the role of killers rather than
martyrs. England, however, proved an exception: the executions of Thomas More
and John Fisher gave the Catholic world, especially English Catholics, their martyrdoms
and just cause. The bonfires of the Marian reign yielded to the quarterings
triumph of Protestant martyrdom during the Marian years.
Crucial to the Catholic world’s recovery of redemptive history was not so much
its present martyrs, but the discovery of a past world of Christian heroism and sacrifice
centered in Rome. The wonder of corporeal perfection after the opening of St.
Cecilia’s tomb, the discovery of the full extent of the catacombs, and the cognizance
of the bloody baptism of the apostolic church restored the full confidence of the
Roman Catholic Church. Publications in the early seventeenth century described the
sacred subterranean world of Rome, the horror of instruments of torture and martyrdom,
and the stories of early Roman virgins and their families, whose exempla
served both to inspire the elites of a resurgent Catholicism and to affirm the legitimacy
of the Roman Church, built literally upon the soil soaked through by the blood
of martyrs.2 Parallel to this Tridentine discourse of martyrology, the Catholic renewal
fashioned a new ecclesiastical history: Cesare Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici was published
in 12 volumes between 1564 and 1588, to refute the claims of Lutheran ecclesiastical
history, exemplified by Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Centuriae Magdeburgenses,
that represented the papacy as an aberration of the apostolic tradition. Contesting
the Protestant assertion of martyrdom, the Tridentine Church affirmed its own continuous
martyrological history, with new chapters written by Catholic missionaries
who testified with their lives to the traditional faith in lands far from the doctrinal
struggles of Latin Christianity.
As early as 1535, during the turmoil of the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster, the
Carthusian monk Dionysius of Cologne linked the confessional struggles at home
with the European voyages overseas:3
When Greece was involved in various heresies, finally became schismatic, and hence was
cast away by God, it fell into the hands of the Muslims. . . . Did, therefore, the faith or
the church perish? To be sure, it has perished with those in the Orient, but meanwhile
in the Occident it has increased and remained. Even if here in the Occident – on account
of our sins – faith, obedience, and finally the holy sacrifice have been taken away from
many cities and territories, they nevertheless remain healthy and unimpaired with others.
. . . For God is able to arouse other sons of Abraham even in the most distant nations.
. . . But why do we say God can do this, since we know that the same is just now happening
in America, Cuba, New Spain, and in other regions, populations, and languages
of Great Asia through the Spaniards. And what is happening in Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia,
India, and on the surrounding southern isles through the Portuguese?
This was a remarkable statement. Tucked away in a Latin manuscript in the
Carthusian monastery of Cologne, these lines by Dionysius foreshadowed already
the close connections between the confessional struggles in central Europe – where
the Protestant schism originated – and the restorative evangelizations in the wider
non-European Catholic world. Even as the Holy Roman Empire was torn between
the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic churches and rocked by popular revolts, it survived
the carnage of the Thirty Years’ War and the witch-craze to furnish reinforcements
for the Catholic overseas missions.