The soul of Protestantism, part 1

In preparing for Peace Corps service, I have tried to undertake the study of the intellectual and religious traditions of the cultures of Kazakhstan – I have already posted a brief ‘response paper’ to one of the essays of Nikolay Berdyaev. This course of study, however, ended up leading me to a deeper examination of my own culture.

Nikolay Berdyaev notes in his essays that in Western Christianity there has been a consistent tension between Teutonic and Latinate sensibilities. Berdyaev’s analysis in Uniting Christians East and West is emphasises primarily the differences between Latinate and Greco-Russian Christianity, however, painting a vivid portrait of the Church in Rome and its impulse for crafting and reinforcing a formal, external order. The mission and structure of the Western Roman Empire became the model for the Church; strict dominance hierarchies were established with the Pope taking on the authority of the Caesar. Thought was to be regimented, armed and equipped for battle through the Augustinian (and later Thomist) scholastic disciplines; the younger generation of legionnaires were to be trained, drilled and disciplined to the service of the Church Militant through study and through catechism. All energies were bent upon the unity and uniformity of thought within the framework of the external order of which the Bishopric of Rome was the keystone. Dissent was to be trodden underfoot or driven out on the lances and swords of the legions of Western Christendom’s faithful.

Berdyaev does not make as keen an effort of characterising the counterculture in the West (which later became a culture in its own right), the Teutonic strain of Christianity, but he does give us several clues. The impulse to external and formal order within Latinate Christianity is resisted in Teutonic Christianity in ‘processes of religious individuation’, what Berdyaev otherwise characterises as ‘a pathological protest against the constraint of the Latin universalism’. Pathological or not, there is more than just a kernel of truth to Berdyaev’s claims – one need look no further than to Berdyaev’s fellow existentialist and wholly Teutonic counterpart in (surprise, surprise) Søren Kierkegaard. Key to Kierkegaard’s thought is his assertion of the ultimate worth of the individual existence as an individual, overriding any kind of universal claim (even something as broad as ‘humanity’ or ‘reason’). Kierkegaard emerges as the Protestant’s Protestant, the worthy individual soul braving the scorn of the Danish evangelical state church against which he stood as prophet, facing his martyrdom with the unflinching resolve given him by his own faith in an intensely personal Christ.

But where does this protest come from? How are we to interpret or understand it? I cannot pretend my skill in this area compares with that of a practiced genealogist-of-morals like Nietzsche, but I can, perhaps, attempt to lay out some of the history. If I were to attempt to define the Protestant Reformation in 25 words or less, it would probably look something like this:

A 16th-Century reform movement within Christendom rejecting mediation and embracing the nearness of God, individual accountability for faith and the equality and kinship of believers.

Theologically, one can see in the basic tenets of both magisterial and radical Protestantism the basic elements, even in the earliest formulations of (what would later become) Protestant grievances with the Catholic Church. Luther, Zwingli, Chauvin and Sattler all objected to the sale of indulgences (which made a mockery of an individual’s accountability before God by turning it into a commodity to be bought), to the privileges and symbolism of the clergy placing them in positions of power over the laity and between the laity and Christ, to Papal authority in particular and to the mediation of specially-appointed priests in general (hence, the doctrine of das Priestertum aller Gläubigen).

But the definition above does not address the deeper reality that these convictions did not appear in a vacuum. The first Protestants, themselves a deeply scholarly movement, were influenced not only by other, earlier dissidents like John Wyclif or Jan Hus, but also by the ideologies of earlier peasant rebellions, by Renaissance humanists and by the late mediaeval tradition of mysticism in the Teutonic world. The individual pietism of Meister Eckhart earns Berdyaev’s particular notice, and he also mentions Johann Tauler and Heinrich Seuse… but I would go further and expand the list to include Julian of Norwich and Amalric of Bena.

We can see threads in Teutonic mysticism which would later become the warp and the woof of the fabric of the Protestant Reformation. In contrast to the impersonal God of Augustinian and Thomist scholasticism, the God of the Teutonic mystics is always intensely personal, even familial. Julian of Norwich has become famous in feminist theology for her view of God as a caring mother, as the Maker, the Keeper and the Lover of All Things. Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse and Ruysbroeck all emphatically proclaimed personal union with God – Ruysbroeck even went as far as espousing a form of Christian universalism. The very name which Amalric of Bena’s followers gave themselves speaks volumes – the ‘Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit’ – and their foremost doctrine was a panentheistic one, of the nearness of God to the individual believer!

So there seems to be something to the notion that there are certain tendencies endemic to the northern European, Teutonic cultures that they promote these kinds of individualistic, egalitarian and fraternal faith. We must descend deeper into the cave. Where did these tendencies come from? How did it come about that these mystics, these Germans, Swiss, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and Frenchmen understood Christianity in this way, when it had come to them in a Latinate artery whose guardians stood in constant, sometimes violent and censorious disapproval of their creative efforts to grasp what the religion meant?

To do this, we must follow the artery back through the mists of Late Antiquity, when Christianity was a completely new paradigm to these same Germans – Franks, Danes, Frisians, Saxons both continental and insular, Alamans, Swabians and Thuringians. These were barbarian tribes, ruled by their own barbarian laws, worshipping the Æsir and the Vanir, gods of war and nature. But what did they make of this Christ Jesus, this god who was also man? For that, we must examine how they treated their own kings. Before the Latinate, imperial concept of ‘divine right’ took root, the Teutonic concept of kingship was far more limited. The king had sacred duties, yes – in barbarian warrior societies the line between military and sacred duties was a fuzzy one indeed. But the king required the consent of his free followers to rule, being elected from among his kin. Christ, when described to the Germans, to be the kind of warrior-king that they would understand, had to be a brother – far nearer to them than the Roman Emperor was to his subjects, far nearer to them than the disembodied concept of God was to the Greek philosophers and scholastics! Upon Christ, the Germans read their values of freedom, of brotherhood, of honour, of strength of will. Read how this Old English poet comprehends our Saviour (narrating as the Cross) in Dream of the Rood!

Geseah ic þā frean mancynnes
efstan elne micle, þæt hē mē wolde on gestīgan.
Þær ic þā ne dorste ofer dryhtnes word
būgan oððe berstan, þā ic bifian geseah
eorðan scēatas. Ealle ic mihte
fēondas gefyllan, hwæðre ic fæste stōd.
Ongyrede hine þā geong hæleð, (þæt wæs god ælmihtig),
strang ond stīðmōd. Gestāh hē on gealgan hēanne,
mōdig on manigra gesyhðe, þā hē wolde mancyn lysan.

Then saw I mankind's Lord
come with great courage when he would mount on me.
Then dared I not against the Lord's word
bend or break, when I saw earth's
fields shake. All fiends
I could have felled, but I stood fast.
The young hero stripped himself--he, God Almighty--
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.

At the very heart of the Teutonic grasp on Christianity, we have this image of a very human, very personal God, who holds all humankind as family and tribe, who earned his warrior-kingship in the bravery with which he faced his suffering and death. At the heart of Protestant social theology is this heathen warrior ethic of personal honour and inward strength of will. It is with this image and with this moral genealogy we, the theological descendants of these barbarian tribes, must contend.

In subsequent essays, I hope to explore the relationship this barbarian warrior-king Christology has with the Radical Reformation (the theological tradition I consider home), and what it can mean for those espousing (as the Anabaptists do) a theology of community and of non-violence.