Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
or the blame for everything that has happened since. Nor does it make Martin Luther a prophet of individualism or a hero of self-determination. He and the Protestants who succeeded him were not trying to modernize the world, but to save it. And yet in the process they profoundly changed how we think about ourselves, our society, and our relationship with God. This book tells the story of that transformation: a story, in outline, of how three of the key ingredients of the world we live in are rooted in Protestant Christianity.
The first is free inquiry. Protestants stumbled into this slowly and reluctantly, but Luther’s bedrock principles led inexorably in that direction. The insistence that all human authority in religious matters is provisional, and that the human conscience, constrained only by the Bible and the Holy Spirit, is ultimately sovereign, means that Protestants who try to police the boundaries of acceptable argument have in the end always failed. Protestants have always been divided among themselves both in their religious and in their political leadership, making it easy for new and dissenting ideas to find spaces both at home and across borders.
Protestantism is not a paradise of free speech, but an open-ended, ill-disciplined argument. How it has come to continuously generate new ideas, and revive old ones, is a recurring theme of this book. Protestants’ bare-knuckle style of public debate wore down print censorship, and Protestant universities and scholars led the way in the emergence of the new natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slowly and reluctantly, one notion which a few radical Protestants put about – that religious difference and free speech ought to be accepted as matters of principle, rather than merely tolerated as unavoidable necessities – became a new orthodoxy.
This is linked to Protestantism’s second, more dangerous contribution: its tendency towards what we are compelled to call democracy. Virtually all Protestants before the nineteenth century, and many since, regarded that word with horror, yet the undertow was there. Protestants regularly found themselves having to deal with governments that did not share their beliefs. They asserted not a right to choose their rulers but a solemn duty and responsibility to challenge them. In performing that duty, the Scottish radical John Knox wrote in 1558, “all man is equal”2 Few Protestants at the time agreed, and even Knox meant something very different from what we understand equality to mean today. Most early Protestants favoured monarchy, order and social stability. But their rulers had an intolerable tendency to act in defiance of God’s will, and so, again and again, they were forced reluctantly to take matters into their own hands. This is what we should expect from consciences fired with love for God and ready to take on all comers.
Left to itself, this could lead to revolution or to the creation of self-righteous theocracies, and as we shall see, both have repeatedly happened. But these impulses have been tempered by the third, much less remarked-upon but perhaps more significant ingredient of Protestantism’s modernizing cocktail: its apoliticism. Protestants might have sometimes confronted or overthrown their rulers, but their most constant political demand is simply to be left alone. Returning to Christianity’s roots in ancient Rome, they have tried to carve out a spiritual space where political authority does not apply and have insisted that that space, the kingdom of Christ, matters far more than the sordid and ephemeral quarrels of this world. The results are paradoxical. Protestants have often been obedient subjects to thoroughly noxious rulers, taking no interest in politics so long as their own separate sphere is respected. It has also meant that rulers who will not or cannot respect that sphere have faced unexpectedly stubborn opposition. In the process, Protestants have helped to give the modern world the strange, counterintuitive notion of limited government: the principle that the first duty even of the most righteous ruler is to respect his subjects’ freedom and allow them to live their lives as they see fit.
These ideals, which seem natural to our own age, are in the span of human history very unusual indeed. That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers’ powers over us should be limited – these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvellous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.
This brings us to one of the most persistent puzzles of Protestant modernity. Ever since the great German sociologist Max Weber advanced the notion of “the Protestant work ethic” in 1904, it has seemed intuitively obvious that there is some kind of connection between Protestantism and capitalism. But for all the brilliance of Weber’s arguments, the actual evidence he advanced to prove this intuition did not really hold up, and his successors have not done much better.3 It is true both that capitalism has often flourished in Protestant societies, and Protestantism has often flourished in societies that are newly embracing capitalism, from sixteenth-century Holland to eighteenth-century England through to twentieth-century South Korea. Equally plainly, capitalism and Protestantism can each prosper in the other’s absence. Two observations, perhaps, can be made. One is that the kind of socio-political structure that Protestantism engenders – based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government – tends to favour market economics.
The other is a matter of mood. As Weber pointed out, one of capitalism’s odd features is its “restless activity”.4 Protestants are not always driven to restless economic activity, although the need to fill the unforgiving minutes of their lives in a manner which is both blameless and worthwhile can certainly push them in that direction. But a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability, is absolutely a core characteristic of the Protestant life. Settled peace and consensus does not come easily to Protestants. They are more usually found straining after new truths, searching out new sins or striving to recover old virtues. They have always known that their religious life is flawed and inadequate, and no sooner create an institution than they suspect it of calcifying into formalism and hyprocrisy. They are forever starting new arguments and spawning new forms. This self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning has helped to fuel and support the growth of capitalism. More broadly, it has also been, and still is, one of the engines driving modern history.
This book tells the story of how the first five centuries of Protestant history brought us to where we are now and asks what might be coming next. It is not chiefly a history of Protestantism, of doctrines and churches and theological systems, although a certain amount of that can’t be avoided. It is a history of Protestants, who see themselves as God’s chosen people. There are towering thinkers like Martin Luther, the stubborn monk whose own overwhelming encounter with God began it all, and John Calvin, the brilliant and arrogant Frenchman who came tantalizingly close to forging a single, united Protestantism. There are outsiders like the self-taught Vermont preacher William Miller, whose apocalyptic hopes swept across 1840s America, and Choe Ja-Sil, the destitute Korean nurse who co-founded a tent church that became, by the time of her death in 1989, the world’s largest congregation. There are noblemen like Justinian von Welz and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, whose conversions drove them from their German estates to cross the world spreading their subversive religion. There are women like Rebecca Freundlich Protten, one of the first ordained Protestant women, who risked re-enslavement rather than compromise her faith, and Pandita Ramabai, the Indian widow whose campaign for women’s rights was underpinned by her Pentecostal revivalism. There are heroes with clay feet, like Martin Niemöller and Johan Heyns, who only slowly and painfully realized that their faith could not square with Nazism or apartheid; and reactionaries, like Walter Grundmann and Gustav Gerdener, whose faith seemed to find its fullest expression in those doctrines.
The book falls into three parts. Part 1 takes the story from the great crisis of the Reformation through to the eighteenth century, when it finally became clear that Protestantism would not only survive but spread around the world. The story begins in chapter 1 with Martin Luther’s attempt to work out the implications of his own personal spiritual crisis. What began as a decorous academic dispute quickly turned into a scandal, then a political crisis, and, within less than a decade, the largest mass rebellion Europe had ever seen. Chapter 2 asks how the fragmented, antagonistic reforming movements that emerged from this chaos tried to