Proto-Protestantism: Appropriating the Waldenses (II)

30 October 2024

Appropriating the Waldenses (II)

Too often Protestants have fallen prey to 'successionist' thinking or rather tying the idea of succession to some kind of institutional or genealogical pedigree. The apostolic succession (if we want to call it that) is located not in a group, tribe, geographic location, or institutional/ecclesiastical continuity but in the doctrine of the apostles. Those who recognize and obey the Christ-granted oracular authority of the apostles or New Testament writers are the heirs of the apostles.

Rome cannot make this claim but instead represents an ancient and ever-growing repudiation of that teaching. The Waldensians could in many respects claim the mantle for many centuries but if we go back into the Dark Ages, the mantle (as it were) was not worn by any one group but could be claimed to varying degrees by congregations in the 'Catholic' Church as well as undoubtedly some surviving underground groups like the Novatians or the Donatists in North Africa. This is not to say these groups were 'the' Church but rather were keeping the Church alive and represented healthy correctives and protests to an increasingly wayward and corrupt Catholic Church. But this corruption was not uniform and as such there were stronger testimonies to truth in some places as opposed to others.

These neat packaged views of history are simply romanticism at their best and sometimes fiction and fantasy at their worst. Sadly many of the Protestant histories of the Waldenses (like those of Muston and Wylie) are a mixture of truth and error, but in promoting misinformation they lose their credibility and have damaged the ability to make arguments and explore these larger and very important questions. Because of their abuse of the history, these larger questions (which are doctrinal in nature) are all immediately dismissed as something akin to conspiracy theory.

As a champion of the Waldenses, I am more than a little put off by the way they were politicised in 19th century America, just as I am when Fundamentalists, Adventists, and even Calvinists (and Presbyterians!) try to claim them today. They did not fit into any of these categories and in every case their chosen appellation of 'Poor' is ignored and thus misunderstood. This was central to their identity and every time they strayed from it they would lose their way and succumb to the world. It's a lesson very relevant for today. Their poverty was not a Catholic Counsel of Perfection but essential to their identity and understanding of New Testament Christianity. Poverty is not just about money but about power and the Church's relation to the world - a set of categories utterly foreign and even repulsive to today's Western Church and in particular the Evangelical sects. For such groups to reference the Waldenses or claim them is absurd. They were not anything like today's Evangelicals.

As stated, this older Protestant narrative has been all but abandoned today apart from maybe some claims made by a few Fundamentalists and other groups like the Adventists and the Watchtower. The one place where the narrative still gains traction is in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland (such as Glasgow) where the tensions with Rome remain acute.

The article rightly reveals the way in which 19th century historians 'Americanised' the Waldenses, along with the now abandoned narratives regarding progress and liberalism. By their reckoning, the Waldenses were not so much proto-Protestants as much as they were proto-Americans. If anything these days the Catholic centuries are being held up as something of a model and the once cherished (if erroneous) notions of progress and liberalism are set aside.

Catholicism was so despised that for many centuries there was a real attempt to flesh out a successionist proto-Protestant narrative. The many attempts to do this play fast and loose with the history and as Schaff rightly demonstrates, these groups don't meet the critical criteria to be reckoned 'Protestant' - as the term was defined post-Luther and the Reformers. They were neither Protestant nor Catholic - a dilemma for Protestants who make Justification by Faith Alone the article by which the Church stands or falls. This is in addition to other doctrines but the most glaring contrast is in the realm of ethics.

While the main Hussite factions (Taborites and Utraquists) embraced violence, there were strong non-violent and non-resistant tendencies in the pre-Reformation movements. The Waldenses, some of the Lollards, and the later Bohemian Brethren (who were on the fringe of Hussitism) rejected the violence and power so eagerly embraced by the Magisterial Reformation. And once again with the Waldenses in particular, they embraced poverty - a more extreme rejection of the violence and power that were at the center of the Magisterial Reformation and what eventually became its New Christendom project.

This is why some historians have rightly separated the First Reformation from the later Magisterial Reformation. Once this is really understood many heirs of the Magisterial Reformation begin to drop interest in the various proto-Protestant groups and especially the Waldensians. And again, given the larger embrace of medieval culture over the past forty years, they're not even looking back. There's been a substantial shift in thinking that stands in fairly stark contrast with mainstream Protestant thought and historiography in the 19th century. Schaff was right but for all the wrong reasons. His concern was to promote and advance Christendom - he realized all too well that the Waldensians and the various medieval sects represented a repudiation of all that and their embrace would (from his jaundiced view) take the Church backwards. Unlike the Waldenses, he celebrated the castles, cathedrals, universities, art, and all the culture of Christendom. He did not (like the Waldenses) dismiss the bulk of it as mere expressions of apostasy - the antichrist system which persecuted them.

Today's ecumenically minded historians and those revisionists that would (as Protestants) celebrate the medieval period (in some capacity) tend to view the Waldenses as rabble-rousers, schismatics, and sometimes outright heretics. The theological liberal Euan Cameron's works go to the extreme of praising popes and inquisitors at the expense of Waldensian 'heretics'.

The older historiography and narrative becomes even more problematic when all the dissident groups are lumped together and treated as Biblical Christians - or Baptists, or whatever sect is trying to claim them. This is simply not the case and such sweeping and irresponsible claims have been largely dispensed with. The only place I still encounter tracts and literature that make these claims is in the foyers of a few Fundamentalist churches - right alongside The Sword of the Lord and stacks of Chick tracts.

The Manichaean-influenced Cathars were not even remotely akin to the Waldenses. There was a superficial similarity in conduct, commitment to poverty, and the rejection of Rome, but even this is nuanced as the Lyonists were not nearly as hostile to Rome as the Lombard groups. Regardless, the Cathars possessed a fundamentally different cosmology and theology and in no way can they be considered forerunners of Protestantism.

With other groups like the Paulicians - it's complicated and the history has been subject to many tortured and misguided debates.

The Waldenses are genuinely fascinating and inspiring - though much about them is misunderstood. They were not Reformed or Baptists or really in any way conformable to later Confessionalist conceptions of Protestantism. They were opposed to Rome and with the advent of the Magisterial Reformation it seems clear that many if not most did eventually join the larger movement. Those that didn't became Anabaptists - which also represents a doctrinal break from their older standing. The ethics lived on to some extent and the failings and compromise of contemporary Anabaptists are an explicit reminder of the same corruption that led to chapters of Waldensian failure and defection in earlier centuries.

Clearly the Magisterial Reformation generated a crisis in terms of doctrine, hermeneutics, and ethics. On a practical level it generated widespread religious war and persecution. Austria, Bohemia, and Northern Italy (to be distinguished from the Cottian grouping) were old heartlands for these people and they were effectively wiped out in the Counter-Reformation - as were the Magisterial Protestants who had also emerged in the Habsburg realms, often in the same places. The German groups that survived the 15th century relocated as necessary to Protestant enclaves and undoubtedly their children and grandchildren were swept up into the larger movements.

Well do I recall visiting places like Villach and Ljubljana - once Protestant strongholds that were re-Catholicised in the 17th century. One can drive through the Austrian countryside and find town after town that had a Waldensian presence, that today is marked by baroque onion domes - a reminder of the Counter-Reformation and the Jesuit success.

Waldensianism had always been viewed as a heresy and was subject to persecution but the Magisterial Reformation created a socio-political crisis that engendered trans-national warfare and a sweeping response. Medieval Heresy was largely episodic and never a serious threat to the overall system. It was an underground inhabiting back alleys and out of the way places. Even the Cathar episode which was presented as a large and existential threat to the Catholic system cannot in reality be separated from Capetian schemes to consolidate France at the expense of the House of Toulouse.

The Magisterial Reformation represented a much more serious threat and thus the Counter-Reformation campaign was comprehensive - even the old type of heretical underground could not be allowed to survive.