MacCulloch, Diarmaid. 2003. The Reformation: A history. New York: Penguin.
I've been reading MacCulloch's history of the Reformation. It's a thick book, some 680 pages, and in a small typeface. So slow going but quite interesting.
I go to a Reformed church, and used to be a deacon in the PCA. I've studied a bit about the Reformation and thought that I knew a bit. But MacCulloch brings several strands together in a way that strikes me as relevant today.
Perhaps the Emergent (Protestant) Christians and their (Protestant) foes are correct and this "new way" is really revolutionizing the way that we think about faith.
Except that it's really just a reverse Reformation.
Not that it's a Counter-Reformation: that's a Roman Church's response to the original Reformers. (See the Encyclopædia Britannica article on the Counter-Reformation or the entry at the Catholic Encyclopedia.) It's not a reaction so much as the reverse of the original Reformation.
Take a look at MacCulloch's description of the Humanist's obsession with textual analysis:
How might one establish authenticity amid this intoxicating but unsorted flow of information [during the 14-15th c.]? One criterion must be to assess a text in every respect — its content, date, origins, motives, even its appearance. So much depended on texts being accurate. This meant developing ways of telling a good text from a corrupt text: looking at the way in which it was written and whether it sounded like tests reliably datable to the same historical period. Historical authenticity gained a new importance: It now became the chief criterion for authority. In earlier centuries, monks cheerfully forged documents on a huge scale for the greater glory of God, particularly charters proving their monastery's claim to lands and privileges. They lived in a world where there were too few documents, and so they needed to manufacture the authority to prove things they knew in their hearts to be true. That attitude would no longer do. A source for authority, or fons, now outweighed the unchallenged reputation of an auctoritas. Ad fontes, back to the sources, was the battle cry of the humanists, and Protestants would take it over from them. Hence the relevance of our earlier definition of a humanist as a textual editor: An individual, equipped with the right intellectual skills, could outface centuries of authority, even the greatest authority in medieval Europe, the Church.
[78]
The Evangelical Protestants exemplify this attitude of textual obsession, to the point where some will not preach on John 7:53-8:11 (Jesus and the woman caught in adultery because it "floats" in the ancient texts and has several variants. They also share what MacCulloch described as a "distaste" for emotive religion:
This new emphasis in devotion [based in reading texts and personal reflections] ... was likely to associate the more demonstrative, physical side of religion with rusticity and lack of education, and treat such religion with condescension or even distaste, seeing rituals and relics as less important than what texts can tell the believer seeking salvation. [72]
But the Emergent Protestants are still within the same mindset. They are simply reacting within the culture of the book, not moving outside of it. Their piety, and it is well practiced if unfocused, is personal and experiential. They long for community and family but fail because they attempt to replicate the role of the nuclear family, now lying in tatters, with their Christian "urban tribes". Like most utopian visions, they dissolve amidst acrimony and bitterness because the organization simply cannot replace the reality of the biological family.
The problem, of course, is reading. And writing. The human mind is not necessarily built to read and write. Doing so changes the way that the brain thinks which is why so many writing teachers talk about writing as a way of thinking and insist on stream-of-consciousness drafting as a way of getting your mind going.
The only way to be free to rediscover medieval Christianity would be to not have ever been able to read. Or write. Television would be OK as far as it was visual, Those running blurbs on the news would be out. Texting would be out, although it as a form of communication is also changing the way that people think.
And it's not just the Emergents stuck in the Reformation. Most Evangelicals in American and England are, too. How that plays out is fodder for the rest of this discussion.
