This weekend, my church is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In the sermon, Martin Luther was the main focus; Jesus was mentioned once. (I have no idea whether that's typical of other pastors in my denomination. I actually suspect it's not typical, but that it might be accepted just this once ...) The risk that the early church warned about -- "I follow Peter, I follow Paul" -- is well in evidence today. Once we are not focused on Christ, where is our unity? I know that church divisions began long before the Reformation, but they've definitely accelerated since then.
Last week I focused on a specific way in which Christ undertook to bless us when he gave us each other, and sent out the apostles in pairs. There are blessings when we are united in his name: his presence, each others' love and fellowship, an ever-widening band of community that encircles the earth. All of those things are damaged or compromised now. Each and every day, we are affected in ways we hardly notice, at depths we hardly reckon with, that our nation is not unified, our neighborhood is not unified, our family is not unified, our international allies are not unified, our voice in the public square is not unified and we are easily played against each other. There is hardly a voice anywhere in the public square which people trust. We spend much of our energy against each other instead of towards our goal. How did we get here?
To read Luther's original 95 Theses, his main focuses were purgatory and indulgences. He wanted to abolish the fundraising abuses, curtail the embarrassingly-questionable theology that he was no longer willing to defend from his teaching post, and return to a Scriptural foundation for church teachings. Luther did not accomplish what he set out to do. "Speak the truth with love." Luther was an incendiary. We'll never know if Luther would have accomplished more if he had approached the problem in a more Christ-like way, or if his opponents had approached his criticisms in a more Christ-like way. For our own part, we have glorified an incendiary, made a role model of an incendiary. What is the fruit of that? Many more have followed in his footsteps. We live in an age in which incendiary people are seen as heroes. We are almost to the one-year anniversary of an election in which the political rhetoric was full of hatred and contempt, where it was a struggle for many people to figure out which was the lesser of two evils (or lesser of four, if you include the minor parties). We can expect that the same crew that organized riots last year after the election will probably be unconcerned (last year, I believe the right adjective was "satisfied") if their planned anniversary "demonstrations" again become violent riots; "rage" is encouraged.
That kind of satisfaction comes from a contempt towards peace, and an indifference towards whether we ever reconcile with the other side, that we have spent half a millenium rehearsing. That includes those who are just sure that "the other guys" are at fault and "the other guys" won't listen. Whether we recognize it or not -- whether those who hate us recognize it or not -- we have set the tone and the pace here by accepting divisions, promoting firebrands, encouraging indifference towards reconciling with each other. We justify our inaction by rehearsing the problems with the other side, while they do the same. It's an ironic thing we have in common, across the divides.
To heal divisions of this long-standing, at this depth, will take saints and miracles. In the early days, the theologians and saints of the church were
often the same people: they lived the life of Christ's people and
servants in this world. These days, the theologians are often arguers or
hair-splitters rather than those who love Christ and his people; they
are not at risk of becoming saints, and that means their theology will
never be truly great. There is a greatness in Scripture that they
believe is beneath them, when I wonder if it is over their heads.
For today, I think the best I can do is recognize that Jesus sent us out together, and to treat all of his people as my people, regardless of whether the various firebrands and their apologists ever call a cease-fire. We are in great need, I believe urgent need, to have the blessings of unity that Christ gave us. Wherever we are gathered together in his name, he is with us.
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6 comments:
I guess we're all talking about Mr. Luther this week. With 2 zeroes in the date, it's inevitable.
You've correctly shot at his limited diplomatic skills, but they're precisely why he broke free of bondage. He was incendiary, or he'd still be hunkered down in his cloister wishing God would kill him before he doomed himself. His mind was a dark, if brilliant, place and most of his powers of reason were trained on himself. Had he been more reasonable, he would not have needed so extreme a solution as grace. As it is, we have 5 centuries of horrid division because he lit his fire brightly enough to stir the whole world to opinion.
The decision of the reformers bears a lot of the blame as well. They decided sola scriptura, and set us to disdaining all sense when discussing matters of sola fide.
"To heal divisions of this long-standing, at this depth, will take saints and miracles."
Hi Kevin
If we're using explosive analogies, I can't help but wishing for ... the right shot. The 95 Theses had fairly good aim, but used too much powder; so did the return fire. When the smoke settled, it broke things that neither side had ever meant to break.
Oddly, looking at centuries-old writings, it looks to me like the original reformers meant different things by Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide than is generally understood today (context and all that). Sola Scriptura wasn't originally a cry of disdain for tradition, it was a cry for the foundation on which a legitimate tradition must stand (a safeguard against invented beliefs, or one century's speculation becoming the next century's dogma). Neither was Sola Fide originally some sort of radical disconnect between what we believe and how we live; it was insisting that we don't put the cart before the horse. Luther was fairly eloquent about the necessity of works; just never at the expense of grace.
I have a pet theory about debates: the longer and more heated an argument, the more polarized a debate gets and the more extreme/less sensible each side's positions become. Before long, the current positions become caricatures of the original positions, which people somehow feel obliged to defend.
So it sounds like you have some particular things in mind and I doubt my guessing skill on that. How does it look from where you stand?
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
Hi Martin
Thank you for reading, and for the encouragement.
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
I'm not sure the reformers get off so easy. Maybe so, but I see them argue to a dead stop over the Lord's Table, and think I'm seeing an explosive pattern.
My heart is heavily invested in the limits under which God has placed his work. He seems to have bound himself to work within the true and brutal flaws we find in Luther, Calvin, and the whole array of big names. I used not to think Luther was imbalanced, then to think God compensated for his weaknesses. Now, I'm coming to believe God stood aside and let the deep damage of Luther's humanity corrupt the new church in much bigger ways than I'd ever let myself believe.
The happy corollary of that new view is how the changes in the little people were the real source of the positive gains of the Reformation. The advances of the church are not about the big finds of the big names, but about the little things the little people do every day. The little people were making human gains in the horrible context of Catholic oppression, and they continued to make human gains under the human limitations of Mr. Luther. Love was growing, even in the absence of an understanding of grace, even in the presence of indulgences, even in the presence of great suffering.
I agree with your theory of debates. I come to doubt whether they can be a productive force at all. There's a place for hearing each other, but I'm not sure there's any place for picking a winner. In the best situation both sides are sincere, but debate draws out the narcissist in the best of us. And then all the little people who internalize how their side won (neither side ever feels it lost) turn around and project the displayed narcissism of their champions onto everyone around them. No good comes of it. I'm sure you're right about the solas, and I'd place the blame squarely on narcissism.
I'm still thinking this through, and I find myself overstating things at this point. I'm not clear at all about whether God's ways have changed as deeply as I feel they have. I'm just trying to deal more honestly with the way I see God not moving in his world, and I think the deep flaws of the men God used to push his church forward say something has changed in the way God works. Moses was a near flawless man and Luther seems not to have been. I can't reconcile that difference, but I see it and I have to keep trying to understand it. Right now I'm headed down a path to seeing God doing his amazing things with less and less amazing people. Of course, it might just be that Moses had a hagiographer, but I really doubt that. The more I read, the more convinced I am of the essential honesty of the biblical record.
Hi Kevin
Side note that I want to put first before I forget to say it: I'm thinking of taking your comment from a few posts ago & responding to it as this week's post. (I wrote up my first thoughts on it awhile back, & have let them marinate, so we'll see what comes out.)
Was Luther a good guy or a bad guy? I say this as someone who is a member of a Lutheran church, so please don't think I'm randomly bashing when I say: he was thoroughly both. He could and did say the same about himself, & encouraged people to look at Christ, not at him. As it is, I see God working with very flawed people, with major figures in the Bible who were adulterers or got passing-out-drunk or turned tail and ran rather than do what they were supposed to do. I think the great spiritual mirror of the church today may be Jonah.
And I think the great spiritual scene of our day may not be obvious to those of us who live it. Which is a great comfort to me, since I think the Flawless Hero thing is hard to attain, and might interfere with the theme of redemption. If modern films are anything to go by, we're ready for a good anti-hero to do the right thing anyway. Maybe we've seen some of those already.
Though with anti-heroes, the problem is that the copy-cats tend to copy the wrong thing. (Remember, it's the 5th of November ...)
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
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