Secularization—The Unintended Consequence of the Reformation

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Secularization—The Unintended Consequence of the Reformation:

An Interview with Brad S. Gregory

Jonathan Petersen

Content manager for Bible Gateway

What are the complicated and unintended legacies of Martin Luther and the epochal 500-year-old movement known as the Reformation that continue to shape the world today? How did Luther’s earnest questioning lead to the rise of competing churches, political conflicts, social upheavals, and moral relativism?

Bible Gateway interviewed Brad S. Gregory about his book, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World (HarperOne, 2017).

[See the Bible Gateway Blog post, The Authority Of Scripture: An Interview with Matthew Barrett]

[See the Reformation Studies section in the Bible Gateway Store]

Describe the person of Martin Luther and what his intentions were when he published his 95 Theses in October 1517.

Brad S. Gregory: In the fall of 1517 Luther was to all appearances a strongly committed, deeply devout, pastorally engaged, and clearly successful Augustinian friar, university professor, preacher, and administrator in Wittenberg, a small and forgettable central German town. He had been a Catholic priest and a member of his religious order for more than ten years. Interiorly, however, his relentless self-examination made him despair of God’s love and forgiveness.

The principal intentions behind the 95 Theses were pastoral: Luther was concerned that ordinary laypeople were being misled into thinking that Christian life was easier than it was because the indulgences they were buying near Wittenberg were being misrepresented and insufficiently explained. Out of concern that laypeople’s religious lives were being damaged, Luther wrote a letter to the most powerful churchman in Germany, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, on October 31, 1517, which included the 95 Theses.

[See the Bible Gateway Blog post, The Reformation Study Bible: An Interview with Dr. R.C. Sproul]

Why do you portray Luther as a reluctant rebel?

Brad S. Gregory: Luther didn’t set out in late 1517 to reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, to rail against the pope, to reject so many Christian teachings and practices in which he had himself participated for decades, still less to divide Latin Christendom or start his own church. He came to reject the authority of the Roman Church under the pope’s leadership by 1521 because his evolving views about grace, faith, and Christian experience, based on his interpretation of the Bible, were condemned by other theologians, university faculties of theology, and Pope Leo X as outside the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy. This came about through an unanticipated, dramatic series of interactions in print and in person between himself and his opponents. But it’s not what Luther was aiming for.

That Luther came to denounce as the Antichrist the office he had regarded as the Vicar of Christ must have been in many ways painful and shocking, even as it was coupled with his own growing conviction about having understood the correct meaning of God’s Word.

Why were Luther’s 95 Theses considered so dangerous?

Brad S. Gregory: The most dangerous aspect of the 95 Theses—which were written in technical, scholastic Latin and not at all a clarion call to the laity—was their implicit challenge to papal authority. This was embedded in several of Luther’s theses. He was presuming to say what the pope could and couldn’t do in matters of Christian doctrine and practice; in effect implying that he was the arbiter of Christian truth. A number of his fellow theologians saw this and reacted critically to it, which started a back-and-forth process that also helped Luther develop his own theology between late 1517 and his major treatises of 1520. For the public spread of his ideas, Luther’s pamphlets and sermons, published in German starting in March 1518, were far more influential than the 95 Theses.

Describe the violence fomented by religious differences in the Reformation era.

Brad S. Gregory: The religious conflicts of the Reformation era, the period from around 1520 to 1650, were never simply and only about religion, because religion during this era as in the Middle Ages that preceded it, informed and was meant to inform every domain of life. Violence involving religion and touching other areas of life took many forms: from the Protestant destruction of Catholic religious art and objects in iconoclasm, to Catholic executions of Protestants who refused to renounce their views, to widespread popular uprisings such as the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25, to major destructive conflicts such as the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War. Not all violence in the era was Catholic versus Protestant, either: the English Civil Wars of the 1640s pitted different sorts of Protestants against each other.

All told, the major religio-political conflicts of the era had a huge impact on the subsequent, gradual, and unintended secularization of the Western world.

How did the Reformation’s emphasis on sola scriptura contribute to competing and contentious claims about the Bible?

Brad S. Gregory: Luther’s bedrock principle that the Bible alone is a self-sufficient basis for Christian faith and life proved the be both the powerful inspiration for and the fatal problem of the Protestant Reformation. The divisive disagreements about what Christian truth is, based on different interpretations of Scripture, did not emerge gradually, after Luther’s movement was up and running; they accompany the Reformation from the very start, certainly no later than early 1522, when Luther returns to Wittenberg from the Wartburg Castle and denounces Karlstadt.

This is only one example among many: already in the 1520s, in a host of different ways, those who agreed with Luther that Scripture alone should be the criterion for determining Christian doctrine disagreed among themselves about how Scripture should be understood—on the sacraments, faith and works, ministry, ecclesiology, political life, and more. Their communities divided accordingly, without any shared means of determining how disagreements should be resolved; a feature obvious throughout the history of Protestantism down to the present. And because religion in the 16th century was interconnected with everything else, these disagreements affected everything else: they were socially, politically, and culturally divisive.

[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Rebel in the Ranks: How Martin Luther’s Reformation Changed Much More Than the Church]

How did the Reformation unintentionally secularize Europe?

Brad S. Gregory: The processes of secularization that followed in the wake of the Reformation continue to work themselves out in complicated ways, not only in Europe but also in North America. To make a very long and complex story short, the success of the Reformation combined with the persistence and renewal of Roman Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries made Christianity into an enduring, disruptive problem in new ways, layered on top of problems that already affected late medieval Christianity.

Because religion was connected with everything else, everything else was also affected. The eventual solution was to disconnect religion from everything else, which went together with redefining “religion” as something that could and should be separated from politics, economics, and public life, even as everyone was allowed to believe whatever they wanted to in their religious lives.

Redefining religion so as to separate it from the rest of life, making it a matter of individual preference, and politically protecting it as a matter of belief and worship all contributed to secularization understood as the diminished presence of religion in shared, public life.

What effect did the Reformation have on the political thinking of America’s founding fathers?

Brad S. Gregory: The American founding fathers, like many interpreters since, tended to draw a connection between the Reformation as the dawn of modern liberation and individual religious freedom, even though Martin Luther, John Calvin, and all the other major Protestant reformers of the 16th century opposed such notions and would’ve been appalled by the political protection of individual religious preference that’s enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. In American history, freedom of religion has provided a framework for people who believe different things about matters of faith to coexist in relative tranquility; the same framework has allowed for the political protection of unbelief, and so has unintentionally contributed to secularization.

Why does the Reformation, something that happened 500 years ago, still matter today?

Brad S. Gregory: We’re still living with the mostly unintended effects of the Reformation—above all the consequences of its concrete conflicts and doctrinal disagreements—in the early 21st century. The modern Western world is in many ways a sustained attempt to deal with the unintended and unwanted problems related to the disruptive fracturing of Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries; from modern philosophy and the Enlightenment as efforts to ground morality and politics in reason without reference to religion, to modern capitalism and consumerism as efforts to get everyone on board with the same acquisitive program regardless of their religious views. We can’t understand ourselves or our world in 2017—or its increasingly obvious and grave problems, and just how deeply rooted they are—unless we understand how much they owe to attempts to deal with the problems derived from what started 500 years ago, in 1517.

How do you want your book to influence its readers?

Brad S. Gregory: I’d like readers of my book to gain a greater appreciation for the ways that the present is the product of the past: not just the recent past, since the economic collapse of 2008, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the end of World War II in 1945, but also of the much more distant past, and how so much that they take for granted—about the character of modern political life, the never-ending pursuit of more and better stuff, the high value placed on self-determination and autonomy, and countless things more—cannot be understood apart from historical processes that were set in motion by the religious disagreements and conflicts of the Reformation era. Most Americans are shockingly ignorant when it comes to history, which means they’re shockingly ignorant about the character of present that is the product of that history. With Rebel in the Ranks I’d like to contribute in some small way to changing that.

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Bio: Brad S. Gregory is Professor of History and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2003, and where he is also the Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. From 1996-2003 he taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He specializes in the history of Christianity in Europe during the Reformation era and on the long-term influence of the Reformation era on the modern world. He has given invited lectures at many of the most prestigious universities in North America, as well as in England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Before teaching at Stanford, he earned his PhD in history at Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows; he also has two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards. Professor Gregory was the recipient of two teaching awards at Stanford and has received three more at Notre Dame. In 2005, he was named the inaugural winner of the first annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 award from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States. He’s the author of Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World (HarperOne, 2017) and The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), which received two book awards.

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5. Rebel in the Ranks: How Martin Luther’s Reformation Changed Much More Than the Church