Luther and His Progeny: 500
Years of Protestantism and Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society,
edited by John C. Rao
This will be interesting….
With this post, I begin my
exploration of this book edited by Rao. The title is
self-explanatory. My intent is not to get into the theology, but to
examine the impact on society and what this meant (and means) for the growth of
the state.
Of course, I recognize that I
cannot publicly conduct this examination without theological blowback; do not
be offended if I do not reply to any such comments.
I will also suggest: as I view a commonly accepted culture as perhaps the
most important weapon against a growing state, whatever my view of the theology
it cannot be escaped that the Reformation blew apart the previously commonly
accepted culture. What we know today as “the state” did not exist
throughout much of the European Middle Ages – it could not exist, given the
view of “the law” during this more-or-less 1000 year
period.
With this, let’s begin with
the introduction: Half a Millennium of Total Depravity (1517 – 2017): A
Critique of Luther’s Impact in the Year of His “Catholic” Apotheosis.
Our
civilization is so sick that even the best efforts to prop up its tottering
remains manifest the same illness that is step by step bringing the entire
structure crumbling down. The disease in question is a willful, prideful,
irrational, and ignorant obsession with “freedom.”
I can hear the howls in the
audience – at least from those for whom libertarianism is the highest ideal,
that freedom and liberty (as the terms are understood today) will unleash the
best in humanity. All I can suggest is stick with me; we might all learn
something.
Rao describes the events that
Luther unleashed not as a “Reformation,” but a “Revolution”; I had never
thought about these events in this way, but in retrospect it seems a more
accurate label. It isn’t that Luther gave birth to ideas of his own; there
were numerous sources indicating that man’s individual reason and conscious
were both a reliable and sufficient pathway to God.
Nevertheless,
the Christian man of the Late Middle Ages was too aware of the reality of sin
to leap directly into an adulation of his individual willfulness.
Luther, and Calvin after him,
offered a theology that embraced man’s “total depravity”; it was hopeless for
man to attempt to transform himself and his communities into a manner that
would be pleasing to God. It was hopeless for man to improve himself – we
know what this means on an individual basis, when a man sees no hope: suicide.
But this lack of hope, this
suicidal condition, came to be known as man’s “freedom”:
The
remedy he offered was freedom from a Law that man, in his depraved,
post-lapsarian state, could not possibly aspire to keeping.
Thus was born a negative definition of liberty – a freedom from
the Law; within a couple of generations, the Enlightenment offered a new form
of redemption: exultation in man’s sins and imperfections. Whatever one
believes regarding theology, it cannot be denied that western man revels in
almost every type of depravity and that modern liberalism promotes this as
virtuous. All to the benefit of a growing state.
“Total
depravity” became a self-fulfilling doctrine and the individual who could never
hope to be reconciled with God made himself a god instead.
With man’s “freedom” being
the ultimate (and only) good.
Rao’s opening chapter is
entitled A Necessary Reform, Depraved From Birth. Again, I return
to my idea of a common culture; I also think about comments offered by Jordan
Peterson – and I paraphrase: don’t destroy the wheat with the chaff. As
applied in this context, keep what is good of the culture, reform what is not –
do not tear down all.
Rao does not ignore the
chaff; he sees in the Europe of 1517 defects that could be – and were –
exploited; not least in this was that the Catholic sovereigns – including the
Pope – were constantly at war with each other – even to the extent of allying
against each other and with the Muslim Turks!
Attempts at reform were made;
vested interests would intervene and the proposed reforms were watered
down. Within this environment, Luther unleashed the destruction of the
unity of western Christianity and a “civilization integrally connected with the
Catholic religion”; in its place came “the triumph of arbitrary willfulness.”
Rao examines the opportunity
that Luther brought to princes and various local authorities to break free from
the dual and competing governance of the Church; many took advantage of this
opportunity to become the sole sovereign, unanswerable to any higher or
alternate authority. This
came to become the state that we know today.
Conclusion
I am immediately struck with
considering the view presented by Jacques Barzun in his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence:
1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Barzun begins
with Martin Luther. He describes 1500 as the “dawn”; he views World War I
as the suicide of the west – decadence.
Rao and his fellow authors
would say that Luther brought on no “dawn”; instead, the decadence and suicide
came in 1517.
I must say, well before I
heard of Rao or began reading this book, I suggested a similar
view: the west’s liberalism, with its roots in the Renaissance, gave
birth to the decadence that even Barzun finds today. I purposely avoided
making a statement about the Reformation, as I did not (and still do not) feel
qualified to dive into theology. Rao and his co-authors will now carry
this load for me.
There is no possibility of freedom absent man accepting to live under a
common culture, a culture that sustains and enhances life – this is not a
sufficient condition for freedom to flourish, but it is a necessary condition.
In other words, defining
freedom as man’s individual willfulness – even respecting solely the negative
rights of libertarianism – offers us the opposite of freedom; in the place of
common culture providing governance, we get the state.
