The Reformation: Blessing or Curse?

Exactly 492 years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg – or so Philipp Melanchthon tells us three decades later. This event is commonly seen as the spark that ignited the Reformation.

I’ve often asked myself whether the Reformation was mostly a curse or a blessing. Reformation was necessary at that time, yes, but the way it came about and all the horrors that followed …

I think it’s good to remember all of this and not celebrate Reformation Day as if it had been the only light after centuries of darkness. Such a picture, which is not unheard of in some Protestant circles, is certainly a very sad distortion of the past and does not bode well for the future.

Painting the Book of Genesis

Several years ago, I started painting pictures of various Bible books. One day, when I’m an old man with a long white beard, I might publish all 66 pictures with written explanations. But I’m still a long way off from completing the entire Bible, so I’ll post a picture every now and then on this blog – without written explanations for now.

Here’s the Book of Genesis:

A Brief History of Interpreting the Bible, Or: The Failure of the Historical Critical Method

Several Christians I know are still overly optimistic about the historical critical method of studying the Bible, without being willing to take the method to its logical conclusion. For those people, Prof. Dale Martin gives something to think about. Here’s a slightly edited transcript taken from one of his lectures:

Before the Reformation, basically the Bible was supposed to mean what the Catholic Church said it meant, what the Pope and bishops said it meant. The authority structure of the church was taken to be the way that you controlled wild interpretations.

People in the ancient world knew that you can interpret a text any way you want to. So what keeps heretics from interpreting this text in false ways? The institution of the church. So Ignatius said that you can’t just interpret scripture any you want to; you must be in agreement with your bishop. The rule of the bishop and the rule of the church was the way to keep control over the interpretation of the text.

Of course in the pre-Reformation time, you did have the rise of humanism and the Renaissance, which started questioning that a bit, and they started going back and looking at the original Hebrew, the original Greek, insisting that you should read these texts in their original languages and not just in Latin. That was before the Reformation. You already had this move toward history and reading the text in historical context in the humanist movement and the Renaissance.

With the Reformation, though, of course you really get it in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Melanchthon, different writers saying, “Well, we’re going to throw out this Catholic authority on the text. We’re going to get back to the text itself.” The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture. You know this as sola scriptura, scripture only; scripture only will be the guide for authority for Protestants.

Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They’re very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, “The predominant guide of scripture isn’t going to be just scripture; it’s going to be one particular meaning of scripture.” And that’s sensus literalis. The literal sense of scripture is what will be now the guide for the Reformation, not the Pope, not the bishops. Even the bishop must submit to the literal sense of scripture.

Now it’s rather debatable what they meant by “the literal sense” because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” They knew that the  text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text.

So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.

Beginning somewhat in the eighteenth century but mainly in the nineteenth century, and mainly in German speaking lands, scholars started pushing the historical reading of the text. They said, “We’ve got to get down to what the author meant. What did the historical Paul mean? How did we discover that?” That’s when you have the rise of the dominance of the historical critical method. It was elaborated and invented in the nineteenth century, and in some places it was precisely invented in order to try to make the text of the New Testament and the Bible a firm foundation for doctrine and ethics within Protestantism and within the wide of varieties of different kinds of Protestantism.

Then the last part of this — just in the last, say, thirty years — is that people like me come along and say, “You know, it hasn’t worked. This attempt to use historical criticism, to settle disputes about the meaning of the text, doesn’t work.” Because even the historical critical method can render wildly varying interpretations of these texts.

So you’ve got some people reading Romans 1 as a condemnation of modern homosexuality and thinking they’re doing a good historical reading of this text. You’ve got other people who read the same text, using the same methods of historical criticism, and say, “Are you crazy? He’s not talking about homosexuality, that’s not his concern. It’s talking about idolatry or something else.”

Even scholars using the same method of historical criticism, trained in the same schools, getting degrees from the same places, come up with different interpretations of these texts. And that’s why you have right now a lot of questioning of this method as not supplying the firm foundations that Protestants originally thought it might.

What We Eat, Why We Eat and the Key Role of Food in Modern Life

In the time of the health-care debate, the giant elephant in the room is clearly our actual health and the often self-inflicted lack thereof. Health care is important, but much more essential is food, our lifestyles, and how they affect society as a whole.

Yale offers a really good course on this topic, and it’s for free on the web. Here’s the first session: What We Eat, Why We Eat and the Key Role of Food in Modern Life.

Want to make the world a better place? Start with the plate right in front of you.

Life is a Hill

The other day, my six-year-old daughter Sophie summed up life like this:

“Tore [her newborn cousin] is like at the very bottom of the hill, we [i.e. Sophie and her siblings] are on the side of the hill, you [i.e. my wife and I] are at the very top of the hill, but soon you’ll start going DOWN!”

(The picture, by the way, is of me as a six-year old climbing the Harz Mountains in Germany.)

When Truth Becomes One’s Heresy

“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”

- John Milton, Areopagitica

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 5 of 5)

I ended my last post by saying that C. S. Lewis could quite easily picture a universe in which vicariousness has been redeemed and is only used in a good way. In his view, we do not have to throw out Nature with the bathwater. The Christian message neither merely confirms nor flatly contradicts our experience in nature, but offers a new twist to a recognized principle.

That point is an important one, because it distinguishes Christianity from the vicariousness of other religions that are either nature religions or anti-nature religions. The nature religions simply drive men to fulfill their natural desires: “You actually got drunk in the temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in the temple of Aphrodite. […] The nature religions simply give a new sanction to what I already always thought about the universe in my moments of rude health and cheerful brutality.”[1]

And the anti-natural religions are simply a flat denial of nature: “I starve my flesh. I care not whether I live or die.”[2] This merely repeats “what I have always thought about it in my moods of lassitude, or delicacy, or compassion.”[3]

But Christianity is different. It never says that death does not matter, that we ought to deny nature altogether. Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane. Death—that is, Christ’s vicarious suffering—is “an appalling horror; a stinking indignity.”[4] And yet, it is not only that. It is also infinitely good. “Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death: it tells me something quite new about it.”

Again it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people. On the other hand, it does not allow me to say, ‘Oh, Lord, won’t there be a day when everyone will be as good as everyone else?’ In the same way, about vicariousness. It will not, in any way, allow me to be an exploiter, to act as a parasite on other people; yet it will not allow me any dream of living on my own. It will teach me to accept with glad humility the enormous sacrifice that others make for me, as well as to make sacrifices for others.”[5]

That is why C. S. Lewis considered Christianity to be the missing chapter in the story of world history, “the chapter on which the whole plot turns.”[6]

Read more about it in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought about the Greatest Book.

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[1] Lewis, “The Grand Miracle”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 4)

The two most important points in which C. S. Lewis saw the Christian story to fit reality were (1) its pattern of death and rebirth, and (2) its vicariousness. After I explained the first one in my last post, let me now tackle the second one:

(2) The vicariousness. The idea of vicariousness, particularly of vicarious suffering, stands at the very center of Christianity. It is the idea that one person profits from someone else’s sacrifice; that Christ’s death and resurrection have a profound effect on all humanity; that humanity has been “redeemed” through the death of God.

Does this idea make sense? Does vicariousness fit into the picture? Before C. S. Lewis became a Christian, he could not quite understand why the death of Christ should have the said effect on mankind. But then, on September 19, 1931, he had a conversation with his Christian friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

In a letter he composed about a month later, Lewis wrote about that night, “Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself […] I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacher) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.’ […] Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

From a Pagan perspective, therefore, the Christian chapter of history fits very well. It carries the same theme of vicarious suffering (and the dying God, as discussed above) that we find in other places of humanity. This means that vicariousness is not something foreign to human understanding. Almost all cultures seem to understand that vicarious sacrifice and suffering can have a real effect on the beneficiary.

The only difference between the animal sacrifices in the Pagan-Judaic world and the sacrifice of Christ is that the latter is the perfect sacrifice—the only sacrifice of a completely innocent and completely voluntary victim. Not only did He go to the cross on His own accord; He was even born of His own accord. He chose to live His life among us, though He did not have to, and chose to be killed by us, though He could have ruled over us.

People might still find objections to the validity of Christianity on other grounds. But one thing, Lewis maintained, they cannot do. They cannot accuse it of having a nonsensical idea at its center. Such an argument sets itself against the testimony of humanity.

Lewis also pointed out that vicariousness is a strong characteristic of Nature. We find in Nature a law by which no creature can exist by itself. Everyone and everything is indebted to everyone and everything else. This is the case both in a positive and a negative sense. On the one hand, there are parasites under people’s skin that only live by destroying their bearers. On the other hand, the principle does not always take this negative form. Almost everything good in nature also comes from it. The newborn lives on the mother as much as the parasite; but what revolts us in one case is in the other case “the source of almost every natural goodness in the world.” The goodness or badness of the principle of vicariousness depends on what you do with it.

C. S. Lewis said he could quite easily picture a universe in which vicariousness has been redeemed and is only used in a good way. We do not have to throw out Nature with the bathwater. The Christian message neither merely confirms nor flatly contradicts our experience in nature, but offers a new twist to a recognized principle.

Read more about it in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought about the Greatest Book.

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 3)

Like I said in the last post, the two most important points in which C. S. Lewis saw the Christian story to fit reality were (1) its pattern of death and rebirth, and (2) its vicariousness. Let me explain the first one for now:

(1) The pattern of death and rebirth.

As I explain in my book The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible [1], Paganism can be said to have foreshadowed the death and resurrection of Christ. The reason is that the theme of death and rebirth is so engrained into nature that it became a main feature in the so-called nature religions. They are full of gods that die and rise again because nature itself bears this pattern. The seed falls into the soil and dies, and out of its death rises new life. The annual cycle of nature is one of life and death. Plants blossom and plants die, only to come to life again in next year’s cycle.

In this sense the death and resurrection of Christ fit as naturally into the picture as the nature religions do. And that raises a suspicion: “Is it not fitting a great deal too well? In other words, does not the Christian story show this pattern of descent and re-ascent because that is part of all the nature religions in the world?”[2] If we accept Christianity because it fits so well, wouldn’t we then have to accept all the nature religions too? Is it not obvious that Nature itself explains the existence of these religions, including Christianity?

This would be plausible, if first-century Judaism showed any signs of being influenced by nature religions. But C. S. Lewis maintained that it did not. He relates how he found the Pagan idea of the dying God very poetic, mysterious, and quickening, and that, when he turned to the Gospels, he was sorely disappointed at finding hardly anything about it at all.

Writes he, “The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connection occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament (John 12:24; I Corinthians 15:36), and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extraordinary. You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn: you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand, and saying, ‘This is My Body’ (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; I Corinthians 11:24), and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realise what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connection between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor and still more those about Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it another way, why is it that the only case of the ‘dying God’ which might conceivably have been historical occurred among people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seem to know nothing about it? Why is it among them the thing suddenly appears to happen?”[3]

The absence of this idea is almost incomprehensible, except if we asked, “How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent because here at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here?”[4]

As Lewis observes in Surprised by Joy, “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”[5]

Thus Christianity fits nature, even though it does not seem to be inferred from nature; it seems rather that Christ Himself is the reality, and the nature religions the shadow which He casts. Christianity is, in fact, as Lewis said above, not a religion at all. It is rather the summing up, the pivotal point, of them all. Like the culprit in the detective story, Christ makes sense of them in a way that made C. S. Lewis exclaim, “That is what they have been pointing to all the time!”

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[1] See Chapter X, “The Alleged Evidence of Messianic Prophecies.”

[2] Lewis, “The Grand Miracle.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XV.

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 2)

Of course, before we can decide whether the death and resurrection of Christ might be this missing chapter of world history—this culprit in the detective story—we first have to have a clear picture in our minds as to its content. C. S. Lewis dedicated much of writings to explaining it, and it can be briefly stated thus.

The eternal God becomes Man. This He does by choosing out of all nations one nation, and out of all people in that nation one woman, into whom He enters and begins to develop as a small lump of cells. After nine months He is born as a common baby, grows into boyhood, and finally into manhood. As a man He is rejected and crucified, and through His innocent suffering He works the redemption of humanity.

He crawls down, so to speak, from above like a gold miner descends into some deep and dark shaft, and, through His sweat and toil, retrieves the gold from the worthless dirt and rock. He retrieves humanity from its own sinfulness. Then He rises from the dead, and henceforth humanity is no longer what it used to be. It no longer lies down in the deep, dark shafts; it is being carried up, up into Godhood. The miner returns to the surface, His face still dirty, and in His hands He holds the pure gold. He holds redeemed mankind.

This is the story: God crawling down into the darkness of humanity in order to take it up into the dazzling light of Godhood. And the means by which He does it is His own death and resurrection; His vicarious suffering.

Now does this story make sense? Does it fit into world history? Are there other signs that point to this story being the missing chapter, the culprit in the detective story?

C. S. Lewis answered this question with a resounding Yes. Probably the two most important points in which he saw the Christian story to fit were (1) its pattern of death and rebirth, and (2) its vicariousness. Let me explain in the next post what he meant by these terms.