Recovering the First Reformation - Toward a Proto-Protestant Narrative of Church History (XXI)
This topic may seem off-base or represent a strange sidetrack
and it must be admitted not all will be interested in this discussion or even
be able to follow it. Nevertheless these are issues of practical importance,
all the more given the way in which such questions (presented within the
framework of a holistic system) permeate Evangelical discussions and dominate
airwaves, pulpits, and an endless stream of books and cultural commentaries.
Building from a false and contrived foundation, the governing
ideology of Christian Worldview is
not only off-base, it is simply in error and in many cases has done little more
than ratify the world system and the way that system has manifested itself in
the succession of imperial beast-powers. Championed as 'Christian' by the
leaders, intellectuals and adherents of the False Church, these cultural and
political entities are all the offspring and legacy of Daniel's fourth and most
terrible beast, the paragon for all of Western civilisation – the Roman Empire.
First, we had Christian Rome born of the Constantinian
synthesis and as a result of this new paradigm we witnessed throughout Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages the birth of various 'Christian' kingdoms giving
rise to the entity they refer to as 'Christendom'. The Magisterial Reformation
produced another line of these Rome-descended entities and it was their branch or
line of descent that unleashed the forces of so-called progress and modernity.
We live in this reality but should we simply accept it? Should we embrace it?
Rejecting the narrative does not mean we should turn Amish and as anyone knows
who has interacted with them, their lifestyle and claimed stance is more than a
little bit of a sham. In many respects they are only fooling themselves.
No, like it or not, we live in a techno-industrial age, the
progeny of the Enlightenment and the social revolutions it produced. This essay
is being written on a laptop computer. But to use technology is not necessarily
to embrace it, or at least it doesn't have to mean that. Likewise the same ethos
of the Magisterial Reformation also developed an aesthetic that affected not
only artistic sensibilities and concepts of beauty but it relied on an
understanding of symmetry, order, utility, and efficiency that would play out
not just in the arts but in economics, industry, technology and the culture at
large. This is a massive topic and there is necessarily a great deal of
subjectivity and interpretation required for one who would probe these waters.
That said, at best we can only hint at a framework for how Christians should
think about these issues but even that Biblically-informed rough outline or
crude shell leads us to categorically reject the dominant narratives within
Evangelicalism and its often egregious framing of a so-called Christian worldview
– that has sought and failed to interpret Western culture through the lens of
Scripture.
It is this author's contention that the Scriptures point us
in a very different direction and one that happens to harmonise with the
general ethos of the First Reformation. As they lived in a different time, the
parallels and analogies are limited but it's a place to start.
As Schaff and other historians have pointed out the First
Reformational movements were pre- or even anti-modernistic in their outlooks. For
this reason Schaff sees an existential gulf between their thinking and the
intellectual orientation of the 16th century Protestant Reformation.
To put it differently, the First Reformation was not part of the larger Renaissance
movement, a point that should not be merely relegated to the trivial. These
groups maintained their identities into the sixteenth century, a full century
or two into the Renaissance period (depending on how it is delineated). They
did not embrace the new mindset, or the new advances in science and culture. They
were not 'plugged in' to the mainstream nor did they desire to be. They were
medieval and yet not part of that culture's mainstream on intelligentsia
either. The groups that were in some capacity affected by the Renaissance,
perhaps the groups associated with the politics of the Great Schism-era would eventually
come to abandon such ideas and quests. The First Reformation was a movement
more rooted in Medievalism and the Late Antiquity of the Early Church.
This same point was stated in the previous essay:
In terms of Church and
culture, the First Reformation ethos is protestant but not part of the
Magisterial Reformation and its Confessional legacy. To embrace the Biblicist
epistemology being called for, the worldviews born of the Renaissance, the
precursors to modernity (and their contemporary progenies) must also be rejected.
Rejecting all progress narratives we necessarily reject Dominionism and the
various social constructs and hybrids that have emerged in the post-Renaissance
(and by implication) the post-Enlightenment period. Obviously we have to live
in this context and interact with these ideas but the epistemology that is
rooted in and results in Biblicism must necessarily reject them. We are
citizens of the heavenly Kingdom and we bring a message that defies all
man-made paradigms and hopes. Likewise we must categorically reject any claims
of a 'Christian' order, society, economics, statecraft or even the notion of
sacred arts. These are all foundationally flawed paradigms that fail to
properly appreciate the nature and profundity of the Fall and the curse that is
upon this Satan-ruled present evil age. Taking up the cross we embrace the near
(or seeming) nihilistic futility of Ecclesiastes, the epistemological impotency
revealed in 1 Corinthians, and the anti-historiographical lessons of Job.
The narratives surrounding the Protestant Reformation become
somewhat confused at this point and often have a tendency to sidetrack
Christian thinking when it comes to arts and culture. On the one hand there is
a certain distaste when it comes to the Renaissance, it is associated with
pagan revival, decadence, and by some it is connected (and with reason) to the
currents of thought that later produced the Enlightenment. Such connections can
be both artificial and real as the currents, indeed the movements themselves
are not easily packaged into tight boxes and isolated from their respective
contexts. We can speak separately of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of
Reason, and the Enlightenment and yet at the same time they are not so easily
distinguished as there is considerable overlap in foundations, ideas, and cultural
forces. Many Confessionalists champion the scientific and political
developments associated with the Enlightenment and view them as outgrowths of
the Reformation movement. Some attempt to introduce strict definitions and
timelines to disassociate the elements they don't like, but as discussed
elsewhere even attempts at defining and separating the Enlightenment from the
Age of Reason or the Counter-Enlightenment becomes quickly obscured and falls
into historiographical mire.
Most conservative Protestants wish to separate the
Renaissance from the Reformation which cannot honestly be attempted unless one
plays a game of bait-and-switch and introduces artificial divisions into the
historical period. These same Protestants champion a certain vein of art and
culture that arose in the 16th and 17th centuries and yet
it is arbitrary and misleading to tie these trends in with the Reformation and
divorce them from the larger cultural context – a Renaissance context which
defies the kind of divisions these self-serving historians wish to impose on
the record.
This Protestant (and yet really Renaissance) rooted
historical narrative regarding the culture and arts has generated a tendency to
sidetrack Christian thinking about these topics, and in some instances it has promoted
and fostered a specific view of aesthetics more rooted in the Catholic
synthesis of post-Constantinian Christendom, Scholasticism and Classical (but
very pagan) Antiquity.
At the same time Protestantism has exhibited a kind of
schizophrenia in its (up until just a generation ago) firm commitment to
modernity, progress and a rejection of Medievalism and anything that smacked of
it. The current decline of Western society and culture have led some in recent
years to re-embrace aspects of Medievalism and has rekindled an appreciation
for the holistic (but equally erroneous) expressions of Christendom – the
'Angels in the Architecture' approach of Dominionist thinkers like Doug Wilson
– a call to a new Protestant Christendom that revises and reforms the (as they
see it) praiseworthy and noble (but slightly flawed) attempts of Catholicism to
forge a Christian cultural unity during the Middle Ages. This was the same False
Church Catholicism that burned First Reformation Christians by the thousands.
Wilson (writing in the late 1990's) was building upon an
ethos already established by the likes of Francis Schaeffer who in the 1970's
began to steer Evangelicals back into the larger context of Catholic history
and medieval culture, even while retaining a framework of ideas rooted in
Classical Liberalism – social contract republicanism, a system of rights, economic
liberalisation and even the utilitarian ethics that are often used to undergird
them. Such contradictions are inherent in the schizophrenia that resulted from
the Protestant attempt to create a holistic philosophy rooted in the
Scriptures. It couldn't be done. It wasn't meant to be. Consequently the
Scriptures were downgraded and confused with philosophy and the new scientific
epistemology. And since then it's been one controversy after another and
ironically depending on the context, the result has produced both Left and
Right-wing expressions of Christian politics. But clearly at the present the
Right-leaning spectrum has come to dominate.
A First Reformation mindset, epistemology, historiography and
the values that flow from these things must categorically reject such thinking regarding
culture and the premises upon which they rest. The narrative and the
compromised thinking which undergirds them must also be rejected. This is one
of the creeping poisons, the latent cancers that was introduced with the still
sacralist-driven Magisterial Reformation. The Protestant movement would over
subsequent centuries be all but swallowed up by the modernity it helped to
create and unleash, but now the corrective, the cure, is just as bad as the
original disease. It's important that we step back and reassess the entire
narrative – and re-frame it.
While the First Reformation faded away, its testimony has
abiding validity and value and though we cannot undo the history or position
ourselves once more in the 12th or 15th century, we can
apply the lessons to interpreting the subsequent history and in assessing the
cultural controversies and struggles of the present – which will lead us to conclusions quite at
odds with the Schaeffers and Wilsons of the modern era.
The pursuit of these secondary questions is not essential to
the larger goals regarding the gospel or the Kingdom but as stated at the
outset, they are of some (even great) practical importance. These essays have
called for a paradigm shift and these questions of culture (like it or not)
play a role and in some cases and circles they play a significant one.
Our context may be quite different but many of the issues are
the same. In fact the discussions regarding culture, the arts, and aesthetics
are not easily divorced from the very pertinent and pressing questions
surrounding technology, its meaning vis-à-vis humanity and its moral nature.
The would-be cultural transformationalists are quick to point
out that art is not morally neutral and thus they have been quite critical of
many of its developments and twists and turns – especially in the modern era.
And yet most of their movement's history was quick to embrace technology as an
expression of efficiency and the ability to create systems, span gaps, and solve
problems. This was viewed not just as progress – but moral progress toward the
creation of an advanced society which would come (it was and is hoped) to
mirror Zion itself.
If the celebrated art of the Reformation was tied to the reality
of empirical experience, the secular or mundane and the limitations of space
and time, and if music was deemed ideal when it followed fixed patterns and
mathematical progressions then it's not much of a leap to see how aesthetics
and technology can be intertwined.*
A rejection of this entire mindset surrounding aesthetics,
progress, art, and technology is called for upon the Biblicist principles of
the First Reformation.
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*Further questions could be raised and explored regarding the
aesthetics of art and technology, or viewing technology as a kind of art that
creates reality, at which point it becomes a type of magic – the fusion
becoming all the more culturally powerful as seen with one of modern culture's
most celebrated sorcerers Steve Jobs. This Paracelsus-impulse is also seen in
the financial sector, the structuring of financial paradigms, and the
alchemical generation of wealth. It's interesting how many of the hedge-fund
types, entrepreneurs, and high-rolling investors are more captivated by the
chase and the thrill of not just victory but the 'beauty', even the sublimity
of a properly structured and executed transaction. Though distasteful to admit,
they are artists of a kind. And yet their art is certainly as degenerate as the
productions so vigorously condemned by conservatives in traditional artistic
mediums.