Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World

It will already be obvious that I am using the word “Protestant” broadly. There are narrow definitions, restricting it, for example, to Lutheran and Calvinist Christians and their immediate descendants. One of the things Protestants like to fight over is who does and does not count as a proper Protestant. As a historian, I prefer a genealogical definition: Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk. So in this book “Protestant” includes those who are often shut out of the party, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals. These groups have radically different beliefs, but they share a family resemblance. They are as quarrelsome and fervent as any other Protestant, and that first spark, the life-changing encounter between the individual believer and the grace of God, is visible in all of them.

One definition does need a little more attention: the one on which Erasmus focused. As a much-quoted seventeenth-century Englishman put it, “The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants!”5 It is a truism that the Bible, the ancient library of Jewish and early Christian texts that Christians regard as Scripture, is close to Protestantism’s heart. It is also clear that one of the things Protestants love to fight over is what the Bible is and means. To understand those battles, we need to ask just what Protestants’ relationship with the Bible is – as a matter of historical practice, not of theological principle.

Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity”, a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth. This view makes Protestantism’s history of division easy enough to understand; these are simply arguments about the interpretation of a complex text. But the claim that Protestantism is mere Bible Christianity does not stand up. For one thing, there is that love affair. What Protestants share is an experience of God’s grace rather than a doctrine of authority. Martin Luther had his life upended by God’s grace before he decided that he could not be bound by any authority outside Scripture. Indeed, many Protestants have not treated the Bible as their sole authority. Some have found authority elsewhere, through (as they believed) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others have questioned whether and in what sense the whole text as we have it is authoritative at all.

Even those who do use the whole Bible as their sole authority do so in two different ways. They are Erasmus’s lovers and fighters. The Bible has from the beginning been Protestants’ weapon for defending their beliefs and dismissing their opponents’, citing chapter and verse to prove the point. This works best if you believe in the word-for-word authority of the entire text, and the earliest Protestants were as adept as any modern evangelicals at that kind of close-quarters biblical combat.

And yet, before the Bible is a bludgeon that can be used to batter your opponents into submission, it is a source of inspiration. Before you can wield it like a fighter, you must read it like a lover. We can see this through one of the strangest features of Protestant Christianity. Although Protestants have from the beginning vigorously asserted that the Bible is authoritative, they have been strangely slow to argue that that is so. When the case has been made, it has often been done without much energy: citing biblical texts to justify the Bible’s authority, an obviously circular argument, or making shaky deductions to the effect that God must have inspired it. This is not because Protestants are avoiding an awkward subject or know they do not have a leg to stand on. It is because, in truth, their faith does not hang on these arguments. They do not need to convince themselves of the Bible’s authority, because they already know it.

Early Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian, John Calvin, confronted the question head-on. In an extraordinary passage, he simply refused to argue the case for the Bible’s authority at all. “We ought”, he said, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” In other words, we know that the Bible is the Word of God not by arguing about it but by reading it with “pure eyes and upright senses”, for then and only then “the majesty of God will immediately come to view”. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, and only the Holy Spirit can convince you that that is true. Therefore, Calvin concludes,

Scripture is indeed self-authenticating. . . . We feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, . . . a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.6

The Bible itself provides its own authority, and either you feel it (through the Spirit) or you don’t. This is Scripture for lovers, who can talk rapturously of the vision before them but cannot in the end compel anyone else to see it.

Across the span of Protestantism’s history, the experience Calvin describes is fundamental. The same argument, in essence, was made by seventeenth-century Puritans, eighteenth-century revivalists, nineteenth-century liberals, and twentieth-century Pentecostals. The Bible is woven into Western, and now global, civilization more deeply than any other book, and none of us can come to it cold. Yet in every generation, Protestants have felt that they are reading the Bible for the first time and have been enthralled by its stories, its poetry and its arguments. This is why they persistently refuse to let anyone else tell them how to read their Bibles. “I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God,” Martin Luther told Pope Leo X, “since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other matters, must not be bound.” The following century, John Bunyan gently refused to submit to anyone else’s interpretation. “I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.”7 Protestants have been finding refreshment and boldness in their own cisterns ever since.

When Protestant groups have distanced themselves from the Bible, like the Nazi-era “German Christians” for whom it was intolerably Jewish, they end up looking not very Protestant any more. But if to read the Bible as a lover is common to all Protestants, whether and how to use it as a weapon is not. Many Protestants have concluded, as Calvin did, that the entire text must be fully inspired. This seems the most openhearted way of honouring their encounter with God in the text and also makes the text much easier to use in combat. Others have for various reasons concluded that they cannot accept it as authoritative in that way, on some variant of a principle first articulated by Martin Luther himself. Luther argued that the Bible contains the Word of God rather than that it is that Word. He even called it “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies”.8 But even those who have picked up that idea and run with it most daringly still keep coming back to the manger to worship.

Protestants have no consensus on the question of how and in what sense the Bible is authoritative. Some would defend every comma. Others are more free and easy with the text. Both positions are attractive and both present formidable problems. But for all their arguments, both parties continue to drink from this cistern out of a shared conviction that here, supremely, is where they hear God’s voice – even if they are unable to agree on what he says.

A brief note about how and why I have written this book. I have written about a very wide range of religious movements. I find some of them admirable, some of them repellent, and some of them tinged with madness. In each case, I have tried to treat them with sympathy. This is not because I myself believe that witches should be put to death or that apartheid is God’s will. It is because earnest, God-fearing Protestants who were no more inherently wicked than you or I did believe these things, even at the same time as other Protestants passionately opposed them. Condemning ugly beliefs is easy, but it is also worth the effort to understand why people once believed them. If we are lucky, later ages might be as indulgent towards us. We all live in glass houses. Those who are without sin are welcome to cast the first stone.

So I have tried to explain what all kinds of Protestantism felt like from the inside, but like all of us I also have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England. This book was not, however, written to convert you to my views, and I should be amazed if it did. It was written to convince you of the richness, the power, and the creativity, as well as the dangers, of this vast religious tradition. If you are yourself a Protestant, I hope this book will show you your own tradition in a new perspective: to help you understand more about where it came from, how it ended up the way it is today, and where it might be going next. If you are not, I hope it will show you why so many people have been and still are. I hope you will also see how this tradition has not only made the modern world but also made itself at home in it.

PART I

The Reformation Age

CHAPTER 1

Luther and the Fanatics

If God be for us, who can be against us?

– ROMANS 8:31

Everyone knew how it was supposed to end. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, headed on earth by the bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter and vicar of Christ, had endured in Europe for over a thousand years. Nothing survives that long by accident. For Christians in the early sixteenth century who reflected on that astonishing fact, the explanation was obvious. This was no human institution. It was the visible Body of its founder, guided by the Holy Spirit. It would outlast this fading world and the carping of its critics, enduring for ever to God’s glory.

Nowadays, we prefer more mundane explanations. Catholic Christendom was flexible and creative, a walled garden with plenty of scope for novelty and variety, and room to adapt to changing political, social, and economic climates. But it also had boundaries, marked and unmarked. Those who wandered too far would be urged, and if necessary forced, to come back.

So if a professor at a small German university questioned an archbishop’s fund-raising practices, there was a limited range of possible outcomes. The archbishop might ignore it or quietly concede the point. Or the professor might be induced to back down, by one means or another. If none of this happened, the matter would be contested on a bigger stage. Perhaps one party or the other in the debate would persuade his opponent to agree with him. Or, more likely, the process would be mired in procedure until the protagonists gave up or died. But if it reached an impasse, the troublesome professor would eventually be ordered to give way. In the unlikely event that he refused, the only recourse was the law, leading to the one outcome that nobody wanted: he could be executed as an impenitent heretic, in a fire that would purge Christendom of his errors and symbolize the hell to which he had wilfully condemned himself.

This system had worked for centuries. But in 1517, when that professor, Martin Luther, challenged Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, his challenge instead kindled a series of increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that swept away many of the Catholic Church’s ancient structures and its walls. We call this firestorm the Reformation and the new form, or forms, of Christianity that emerged from it, Protestantism.

This was not what Luther had intended. When he voiced his local protest, he was not trying to start a fire. He was working out the implications of his own recent spiritual breakthrough and trying to start an argument about it. It turned out that those implications reached much further than either he or his opponents initially imagined. Once the smoke began to clear, they were forced to realize that they were in a new world.

The Call of Reform

With hindsight, we can see that Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the Church.

Churches always need reform. They are staffed by human beings, some of whom will inevitably be fools, knaves, or merely incompetents. The Church of the later Middle Ages was no more “corrupt” than usual, and in many ways much less so. Yet three problems converged to make it appear worse than it was: money, power, and high principle.

The Western Church was very rich. It had to be; it was responsible for a continental network of parish priests, church buildings, and monastic houses, supported by an international bureaucracy of unparalleled sophistication, and these things do not come cheap. It had to preserve its political independence in a dangerous world, which meant choosing leaders of royal and noble stock. These were men – and some women, the great abbesses – whose dignity and effectiveness in their offices depended on maintaining the high courtly style to which they had been born.

Yet this was also an age that actively valued poverty, lauding it as a positive virtue like no Christian society before or since. The ideal late medieval cleric was a friar, who was forbidden even to touch money and who was supposed not even to own the rough clothes on his back. The contrast between that ideal and the Church’s corporate wealth was disturbing. Surely all that money must be corrupting? Once, as a rueful proverb had it, golden priests had served from wooden chalices; now wooden priests served from golden chalices. Every time the Church extracted rents, tithes, or other payments from its flock, it fed a resentment that went beyond ordinary taxpayers’ grumbles. And when there were real or perceived financial abuses, the gap between high ideals and sordid reality yawned dangerously wide. Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the Church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.

Then there was power. Back in the eleventh century, the popes had wriggled free from political control and established a vigilantly guarded independence. By the fifteenth century, they had quietly dropped some of their more startling claims. In theory, they were lords of Christendom, able to depose kings and demand universal obedience, but they knew not to push their luck. They had never really recovered from the ghastly schism of 1378–1417, when Europe was split between first two and then three rival popes. The schism was ended by a great reforming Church council, which seemed to promise an era of renewal – a hope that slowly evaporated over the following decades, leaving a residue of bitterness. By 1500, virtually all Western Christians acknowledged the papacy, but they were not proud of it. Eye-popping tales were told about Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1501 supposedly held an orgy in the papal apartments for his son, to which he invited fifty chosen prostitutes and select senior clerics. True or not, it was widely believed.

Inadequate leadership and financial corruption make a dangerous mix. All the more so in “Germany”, the vast, north-central European territories that fell loosely under the so-called Holy Roman Emperor. The rivalry between popes and emperors was ancient, and as the papal court became dominated almost exclusively by Italians after the schism, it seemed increasingly foreign north of the Alps. National stereotypes came into play. Germans were, in their own minds, bluff, honest, easily duped, but firm in the defence of the right. Italians, by contrast, were scheming, malevolent, effeminate, avaricious, and cowardly. So when a German friar accused Italians of extortion and tyranny, German ears were ready to hear him.

There was also a matter of principle at stake. As well as some memorable popes, the Renaissance gave Western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, “to the sources”, an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth. By 1500, this fashion for antiquity was sweeping into every field of knowledge. Renaissance linguists tried to recover the glories of Cicero. Renaissance generals tried, with dubious success, to remodel their armies as Roman legions. The problem with the ancient world was that it happened a long time ago, and reconstructing it involved guesswork. But late medieval Europeans never doubted that it had been a world of pristine perfection. They measured their own age against that imagined ideal. Inevitably, it fell short. And so the most devastating critiques of the late medieval Church came not from the discontented or marginalized but from within: from powerful establishment figures who believed in an ideal Church and who would not hide their disappointment with the reality. They wanted to renew the Church, not destroy it.

Leading these critics was the age’s intellectual colossus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a brilliant, sharp-tongued, penny-pinching, peripatetic monk who combined a deliberately simple piety, an acid wit and a finely judged sense of when and with whom to pick a fight. The wit was displayed in his satire The Praise of Folly (1509), which told his readers that almost every aspect of the world they lived in was ridiculous. The piety and shrewdness were seen in his pathbreaking 1516 Latin translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Its preface recommended that the Bible be made available in all languages so that it could be read even by those on the very extremes of Christian civilization: the wild Scots, the Irish, even – he strained himself – women. Characteristically, he wrote that dangerous preface in Latin. He knew what he could get away with. He also knew that the content of his New Testament mattered less than the fact of its existence. He was offering the chance to use the Bible to judge the Church.1

The Church’s old guard was duly provoked. Erasmus himself always stayed on the right side of trouble, but others were less careful and more vulnerable. The great cause célèbre of early sixteenth-century Germany was Johannes Reuchlin, a pioneer of Christian Hebrew scholarship. Unfortunately, the only people who could teach Christians Hebrew were Jews, and late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews. Reuchlin, however, both was openly friendly with certain Jews and acknowledged his debt to Jewish biblical scholarship. Inevitably, he was denounced for crypto-Judaism, which the Church regarded as heresy. His denouncer, with grim irony, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. German Renaissance scholars rallied to his defence, viciously mocking his opponents as self-serving obscurantists. For them, this was a war between fearless, cutting-edge German scholarship and corrupt, ignorant Italian power politics. The court case dragged on until 1516, and even then it was merely suspended; Reuchlin was never formally cleared. In the court of public opinion, however, the new scholarship was triumphantly vindicated, and the brethren sharpened their pens in readiness for the next skirmish. Enter Martin Luther.

An Accidental Revolutionary

Martin Luther was the Reformation’s indispensable firestarter. Would there have been a Reformation if young Martin had followed his father’s wishes and become a lawyer? Who knows, but the Reformation as it actually happened is unimaginable without him.

Luther does not fit the stereotype of a great Christian revolutionary. He never held high office, and he remained professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg to the end of his life, squeezing his revolution in between his regular lectures. He was not a man of heroic virtues. He was grouchy, obstinate, and an unabashed sensualist, from his boisterous, flirtatious, and deeply affectionate marriage to his well-documented fondness for Saxon beer. In later life, he was frankly fat, and for most of his life he struggled with constipation. Fittingly enough, his religion was a matter less of the mind than of the heart and the gut. Spiritually as well as physically, he was larger than life. Even his flaws were outsized. His piercing insights, his raw honesty and the shattering spiritual experiences that drove his life still leap off the page five centuries later. They do so because they resonate with the modern age, an age that he made.

Luther was born in 1483 or 1484, the eldest son of a family that was newly prosperous from copper mining. He became a monk in 1505, against his father’s wishes, and remembered those early years in the monastery as a torment. He felt imprisoned in his own sin, whose grip on him grew stronger the more he struggled against it. Seemingly trivial sins tortured him. His exasperated confessor told him to go and commit some real sins, but his superior, more constructively, packed him off to the new university at Wittenberg for further study in 1507. He drank in his studies. Over the following dozen years, as he rose rapidly in both the monastic and the academic hierarchies, he gradually came to understand the Christian Gospel in a way that seemed to him completely new, authentically ancient, and utterly life changing.

Luther was not a systematic theologian, trading in logical definitions or philosophical consistency. The systematizers who followed in his wake picked out two key principles in his thought: sola fide and sola scriptura, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”. But this risks missing the point. Luther’s theology was not a doctrine; it was a love affair. Consuming love for God has been part of Christian experience since the beginning, but Luther’s passion had a reckless extravagance that set it apart, and which has echoed down Protestantism’s history. He pursued his love for God with blithe disregard for the bounds set by Church and tradition. It was an intense, desolating, intoxicating passion, sparked by his life-upending glimpse of God’s incomprehensible, terrible, beautiful love for him. Like any lover, he found it incredible that his beloved should love him, unworthy as he was. And yet he discovered over the long years of prayer and study that God loved him wildly, irresponsibly, and beyond all reason. God, in Christ, had laid down his life for him. This was not, as the medievals’ subtle theology had taught, a transaction, or a process by which believers had to do whatever was in their power to pursue holiness. It was a sheer gift. All that mattered was accepting it.2

This went beyond anything Erasmus had imagined. Erasmus wanted to free Christians from superstition, not to interfere with Christianity’s basic theological framework. Indeed, he thought that too much attention to theology was a futile distraction from the pursuit of holiness. He called Luther doctor hyperbolicus, the “doctor of overstatement”.3 But for Luther, it was impossible to overstate God’s grace. He too wanted a radically simplified Christian life, but he wanted it because the flood of God’s grace had swept everything else away. All the structures that the medieval Church had provided for the Christian life, from pious works through sacraments to the Church itself, mediating between sinners and their Saviour – all of this was now so much clutter. Or worse, a blasphemous attempt to buy and sell what God gives us for free.

This talk of grace and free forgiveness was dangerous. If grace is free and all we need do is believe, surely that would lead to moral anarchy? The fact that free forgiveness can look like a licence to sin has plagued Protestantism for centuries. But for Luther, even to ask this question was block-headed. What kind of lover needs rules about how to love? What kind of lover has to be bribed or threatened into loving? God loves us unreservedly. If we recognize that love, we will love him unreservedly in return.

Luther’s breakthrough had a dazzling, corrosive simplicity to it. The power of those twin principles, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”, lay in the word “alone”. There is nothing and no one else other than God incarnate in Jesus Christ worth attending to. Being a Christian means throwing yourself abjectly, unreservedly, on Christ’s mercy. Living a Christian life means living Christ’s life – that is, abandoning all security and worldly ambitions to follow him “through penalties, deaths and hell”. It is only then that we may find peace. That ravishing paradox is at the heart of Protestantism. It is a further paradox that such a profoundly personal insight should have such an impact on the outside world.