Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
biblical combat.
And yet, before the Bible is a bludgeon that can be used to batter your opponents into submission, it is a source of inspiration. Before you can wield it like a fighter, you must read it like a lover. We can see this through one of the strangest features of Protestant Christianity. Although Protestants have from the beginning vigorously asserted that the Bible is authoritative, they have been strangely slow to argue that that is so. When the case has been made, it has often been done without much energy: citing biblical texts to justify the Bible’s authority, an obviously circular argument, or making shaky deductions to the effect that God must have inspired it. This is not because Protestants are avoiding an awkward subject or know they do not have a leg to stand on. It is because, in truth, their faith does not hang on these arguments. They do not need to convince themselves of the Bible’s authority, because they already know it.
Early Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian, John Calvin, confronted the question head-on. In an extraordinary passage, he simply refused to argue the case for the Bible’s authority at all. “We ought”, he said, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” In other words, we know that the Bible is the Word of God not by arguing about it but by reading it with “pure eyes and upright senses”, for then and only then “the majesty of God will immediately come to view”. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, and only the Holy Spirit can convince you that that is true. Therefore, Calvin concludes,
Scripture is indeed self-authenticating. . . . We feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, . . . a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.6
The Bible itself provides its own authority, and either you feel it (through the Spirit) or you don’t. This is Scripture for lovers, who can talk rapturously of the vision before them but cannot in the end compel anyone else to see it.
Across the span of Protestantism’s history, the experience Calvin describes is fundamental. The same argument, in essence, was made by seventeenth-century Puritans, eighteenth-century revivalists, nineteenth-century liberals, and twentieth-century Pentecostals. The Bible is woven into Western, and now global, civilization more deeply than any other book, and none of us can come to it cold. Yet in every generation, Protestants have felt that they are reading the Bible for the first time and have been enthralled by its stories, its poetry and its arguments. This is why they persistently refuse to let anyone else tell them how to read their Bibles. “I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God,” Martin Luther told Pope Leo X, “since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other matters, must not be bound.” The following century, John Bunyan gently refused to submit to anyone else’s interpretation. “I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.”7 Protestants have been finding refreshment and boldness in their own cisterns ever since.
When Protestant groups have distanced themselves from the Bible, like the Nazi-era “German Christians” for whom it was intolerably Jewish, they end up looking not very Protestant any more. But if to read the Bible as a lover is common to all Protestants, whether and how to use it as a weapon is not. Many Protestants have concluded, as Calvin did, that the entire text must be fully inspired. This seems the most openhearted way of honouring their encounter with God in the text and also makes the text much easier to use in combat. Others have for various reasons concluded that they cannot accept it as authoritative in that way, on some variant of a principle first articulated by Martin Luther himself. Luther argued that the Bible contains the Word of God rather than that it is that Word. He even called it “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies”.8 But even those who have picked up that idea and run with it most daringly still keep coming back to the manger to worship.
Protestants have no consensus on the question of how and in what sense the Bible is authoritative. Some would defend every comma. Others are more free and easy with the text. Both positions are attractive and both present formidable problems. But for all their arguments, both parties continue to drink from this cistern out of a shared conviction that here, supremely, is where they hear God’s voice – even if they are unable to agree on what he says.
A brief note about how and why I have written this book. I have written about a very wide range of religious movements. I find some of them admirable, some of them repellent, and some of them tinged with madness. In each case, I have tried to treat them with sympathy. This is not because I myself believe that witches should be put to death or that apartheid is God’s will. It is because earnest, God-fearing Protestants who were no more inherently wicked than you or I did believe these things, even at the same time as other Protestants passionately opposed them. Condemning ugly beliefs is easy, but it is also worth the effort to understand why people once believed them. If we are lucky, later ages might be as indulgent towards us. We all live in glass houses. Those who are without sin are welcome to cast the first stone.
So I have tried to explain what all kinds of Protestantism felt like from the inside, but like all of us I also have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England. This book was not, however, written to convert you to my views, and I should be amazed if it did. It was written to convince you of the richness, the power, and the creativity, as well as the dangers, of this vast religious tradition. If you are yourself a Protestant, I hope this book will show you your own tradition in a new perspective: to help you understand more about where it came from, how it ended up the way it is today, and where it might be going next. If you are not, I hope it will show you why so many people have been and still are. I hope you will also see how this tradition has not only made the modern world but also made itself at home in it.
If God be for us, who can be against us?
– ROMANS 8:31
Everyone knew how it was supposed to end. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, headed on earth by the bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter and vicar of Christ, had endured in Europe for over a thousand years. Nothing survives that long by accident. For Christians in the early sixteenth century who reflected on that astonishing fact, the explanation was obvious. This was no human institution. It was the visible Body of its founder, guided by the Holy Spirit. It would outlast this fading world and the carping of its critics, enduring for ever to God’s glory.
Nowadays, we prefer more mundane explanations. Catholic Christendom was flexible and creative, a walled garden with plenty of scope for novelty and variety, and room to adapt to changing political, social, and economic climates. But it also had boundaries, marked and unmarked. Those who wandered too far would be urged, and if necessary forced, to come back.
So if a professor at a small German university questioned an archbishop’s fund-raising practices, there was a limited range of possible outcomes. The archbishop might ignore it or quietly concede the point. Or the professor might be induced to back down, by one means or another. If none of this happened, the matter would be contested on a bigger stage. Perhaps one party or the other in the debate would persuade his opponent to agree with him. Or, more likely, the process would be mired in procedure until the protagonists gave up or died. But if it reached an impasse, the troublesome professor would eventually be ordered to give way. In the unlikely event that he refused, the only recourse was the law, leading to the one outcome that nobody wanted: he could be executed as an impenitent heretic, in a fire that would purge Christendom