The most basic argument against Protestantism

Dave Armstrong at Patheos Catholic has pointed out that early Protestants "detested divisions" and were very concerned to maintain unity.

He's right. The most basic argument against Protestantism, which does not require any particular theological premises about authority, is

1. The Protestants expected and claimed that all Christians of good will ("endowed with the Spirit" as my dissertation subject Martin Bucer would put it) would be able to see that their interpretation of Scripture was correct, and that by unleashing Scripture a renewed and reunified Church would emerge. (It's important to bear in mind that early sixteenth-century Christians saw the Church as divided and fractious, and were looking for _greater_ unity, not less).

2. This didn't happen.

3. Therefore, by the standards of the early Reformers themselves, Protestantism is a failure.

Instead of admitting this, Protestants have spent 500 years arguing either that [visible] unity really doesn't matter or that it will happen if we only get one more bit of light out of Scripture or throw off one more unbiblical tradition.

Of course this is painting with a huge brush. Many Protestants do recognize this. But as a whole, Protestantism tends to take the Reformers as a model either substantively (by trying to follow their doctrines) or methodologically ("ecclesia semper reformanda"/"God hath yet more light to break forth out of His Holy Word") or both. And both of these approaches have proven disastrous.

James Payton, Part 2

Chapter 7 of Payton's Getting the Reformation Wrong focuses on the Anabaptists and other radical groups. His main point here seems to be to establish the diversity of 16th-century Anabaptism and to explain why both Catholics and mainstream Protestants found them so threatening. Payton's emphasis on diversity is in keeping with scholarship in the past 50 years, and is certainly something non-specialists need to hear, but he carries it too far. Menno Simons and what would become mainstream Anabaptism get only one sentence, at the end of the section on "Militant Anabaptism" (explaining, correctly, that Menno led Dutch and north German Anabaptists away from the revolutionary Anabaptism of Munster and toward something more like Swiss Anabaptism). The result is that this chapter reads too much like an apologia for the mainstream Protestant Reformers, and the Anabaptists don't get adequate treatment as a serious alternative.

Chapter 8, on the Catholic Reformation, is much better, presenting a sympathetic and richly textured account of  the various strands of Catholic reform that led up to the official reform agenda of the Council of Trent. There isn't much to say about this chapter except that it's a very good summary of scholarship on the subject.

With chapter 9: "Changing Direction," Payton moves out of the initial phase of the Reformation to address the question of whether Protestantism fundamentally changed character with the growth of "Protestant scholasticism" in the later sixteenth century. Here, Payton goes flatly against the most influential recent scholarship on the subject, which is that of Richard Muller, to affirm a decidedly old-fashioned understanding of Protestant scholasticism as a corruption of the original teaching of the Reformers. To his credit, Payton admits that he is doing this and refers readers to Muller for an alternative interpretation. I'm not convinced, however, and this chapter touches on perhaps the most fundamental point where I disagree with Payton throughout the book. His entire treatment of the Reformation is marked by a disdain for the scholastic tradition. For instance, in chapter 4 he uncritically accepts Erasmus' characterization of scholasticism as disputatious and arrogant, so that Luther's frequent bad temper and unfairness to opponents become typical scholastic behavior. In my opinion, this just isn't accurate. Humanists could be extremely nasty to opponents and could engage in vicious invective. Scholasticism could give rise to disputatiousness, but it could also foster a dispassionate love of the truth, which humanism in principle excluded. Here in chapter 9, Payton's animus against scholasticism becomes particularly evident. He argues--as many Protestants have argued ever since the rise of Pietism--that scholasticism fundamentally changes the nature of Protestant teaching. But I'm not convinced this is the case. Payton presents a passage from Johannes Wollebius analyzing the different causes of justification, its matter, form, etc. Payton comments, "It is a challenge to view this as an exposition of what Protestants believe about the doctrine of justification. In this treatment, justification seems little more than window dressing for technical distinctions from the Aristotelian canon about how to think appropriately." Similarly, he describes Johann Gerhard's Aristotelian analysis of the four causes of the Incarnation as an explanation of "how to ratiocinate" rather than "an exposition of Christian truth." But this dismissal strikes me as mere prejudice against Aristotelian language. Payton claims that any discussion using Aristotelian concepts simply becomes a discussion of those concepts--but this "overwhelming" of the subject being discussed by the Aristotelian machinery happens primarily in Payton's mind and the mind of other readers either untrained in or hostile to Aristotelianism. To someone for whom this was already a comfortable part of their mental furniture, the Aristotelian analysis would not necessarily "overwhelm" the subject at all. It is extremely odd to say that if I use a particular method of analysis, my discussion becomes merely a discussion of how to use the method. That would mean that we can never use any method of analysis at all, and Payton can't mean that. To be sure, no one is going to find the Protestant scholastics as appealing or pungent as the original Reformers. But that's not the same thing as saying that they fundamentally changed Protestant teaching.
Payton's reasons for taking this hard line against Protestant scholasticism will become clearer in chapter 11.

Meanwhile, chapter 10 addresses the complex question, "Was the Reformation a success?" To attempt to answer any such question in 23 pages is a hopeless task, but Payton delivers a careful, nuanced, but incisive analysis of the goals of several major Protestant figures (Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli and Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Calvin) as well as the Jesuits. He concludes that none of the Protestant figures accomplished what they themselves would have regarded as a success (though I think he's least convincing with regard to Calvin, who was probably the most successful of the Protestant figures he discusses), but that the Jesuits largely did. Thus, for Payton, it was ultimately the Catholic reformers who could claim the greatest success. I'm not sure that's true, since the Jesuits and other Catholic reformers would have defined true success as including the reunification of Western Christianity. However, it's clear that in this chapter Payton is trying to provide a reality check to the common triumphalist Protestant narrative, and I think this is wise and salutary.

Chapter 11 asks, "Is the Reformation a Norm?" Here Payton's overall agenda becomes clear. Payton argues against regarding the Reformation as a norm for Protestants, pointing out that the Reformers themselves saw the early Church, not their own time, as the "golden age" to which appeal should be made after Scripture. I think this needs to be qualified--as I said in my last post, Luther's views on the Fathers were much more qualified and frequently critical than Payton acknowledges. Ironically, to try to prove the superiority of the Fathers over the Reformers as a norm by appeal to the Reformers itself reinforces the treatment of the Reformers as a norm. To say that the Reformers (with, in my opinion, the exception of Luther and the possible exception of Calvin) didn't regard themselves as normative is to say that most of them were reasonably modest and sensible people, not to say that they shouldn't be regarded as a norm. Payton is arguing for a position with which I entirely agree--that all Christians should take the early Church as normative and that Protestants should radically relativize the Reformation by comparison. However, I think he's trying to argue for it in too "Protestant-friendly" a way. Furthermore, this agenda explains why he throws the scholastics under the bus. Scholasticism is the era in which the Reformers were first treated as a norm. Scholastic theology takes the insights of the first generation and systematizes them. Payton recognizes (as I do) that the Reformers had profound theological insights, and he wants to resist (as I do) the attempt to make those insights confessionally normative as a definition of orthodoxy. But I don't think there's any way to do that without challenging the Reformers themselves more than Payton wants to do.

Payton's goals become even clearer in the final chapter, "The Reformation as Triumph and Tragedy." Payton affirms that the Reformation was a "triumph" insofar as it "rediscovered and boldly proclaimed the apostolic message, the Christian gospel." But at the same time, it was a tragedy for that same Gospel, because of the endless divisions to which it gave rise. Again, Payton calls his readers to follow the example of the Reformers in looking to the early Church rather than to the Reformers themselves as a doctrinal norm. But if the Reformation really rediscovered and proclaimed the Gospel in a full and authentic way, surely it would not have had effects that were, as Payton himself says, "a tragedy for the Christian gospel"?

Payton's book is well worth reading. It is an accessible summary of recent scholarship on the Reformation. It does clear up some common misunderstandings, although that format is a bit misleading, since not all the chapters are primarily about misunderstandings (and in my opinion, there are some misunderstandings he doesn't clear up or even makes worse, such as the common caricature of Protestant scholasticism as a betrayal of the Reformation). But in its overall intention, it's a passionate plea for Christian unity and a renewed attention to the early Church--to honor and respect the insights of the Reformation without turning them into a divisive doctrinal norm. I agree entirely with Payton's overall agenda, even though I disagree with some aspects of his approach. Primarily, I think he should have been much harder on the first-generation Reformers themselves. By largely letting them off the hook and scapegoating the scholastics, he's still left too much ground for the Protestant triumphalism that he clearly wishes to dethrone.

Review of James Payton, Getting the Reformation Wrong, part 1

James Payton's 2010 book Getting the Reformation Wrong has a provocative title (one I would love to have used myself). Much of the book, in fact, is simply a summary of modern scholarship on the Reformation, but as the title indicates, one major reason Payton wrote the book is to address what he regards as common misunderstandings about the Reformation. Payton's list isn't quite the same as mine, and there are places where I disagree with his take on the Reformation and think he actually perpetuates some misunderstandings. But the book remains one of the best "first books" about the Reformation to recommend to people.

Getting the Reformation Wrong is divided into twelve chapters, each addressing a topic that Payton believes is often misunderstood. I'll walk through the twelve chapters and give my reaction to each, and end with some overall responses to Payton's broad perspective on the Reformation.

The first chapter, "The Medieval Call for Reform," makes the excellent point that "reform" wasn't something invented by the sixteenth-century theologians whom Protestants usually call the "Reformers." Payton masterfully summarizes the crises of the late Middle Ages and the various movements (scholasticism, mysticism, conciliarism, "preachers of repentance") that offered solutions to the challenges of the times. His portrayal of the era as one of almost unremitting crisis is probably too one-sided and feeds simplistic stereotypes of the "high Middle Ages" vs. the 14th and 15th centuries as a time of decline and chaos. There is plenty of evidence that many Christians in the fifteenth century were engaging in their faith and in civil society in positive and productive ways, fueled by desire for the common good. Payton's choice to emphasize the negative fuels the traditional Protestant narrative (the late Middle Ages were terrible and the Reformation was the answer to glaring problems) instead of challenging it.  But it does seem that something changed in Western European culture after 1300, and the Black Death and related crises seem to have had something to do with it. There was, on the whole, a more intense focus on human sinfulness. Whether the Church was more corrupt, or whether people were more frustrated and despairing about it, I'm not sure. There was certainly a great emphasis on the need for public order and the dangers of rebellion and chaos. My more specific problem with the first chapter is one that pops up throughout the book--Payton's heavy bias against scholasticism. More on that later.

The second chapter, "The Renaissance: Friend or Foe?" challenges the way many Christians set the Renaissance over against the Reformation (Francis Schaeffer, as Payton notes, made this view very popular) as an essentially secular, proto-Enlightenment movement. Payton summarizes modern scholarship on the Renaissance very well and points out the important continuities between the Renaissance and the Reformation. I would have preferred a bit sharper challenge to the other common dichotomy--between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. But this is a fine chapter that introduces non-specialists to a solid, scholarly accurate view of a subject often reduced to a cliche.

In chapter three, "Carried Along by Misunderstandings," Payton finally comes to Luther himself. This chapter is a summary of scholarship on the early Luther, but the overall thesis, as the title indicates, is that Luther was popular largely because he was "misunderstood." That is to say, many people with quite different agendas latched on to Luther's provocative ideas and took them in directions that Luther didn't necessarily intend, not always grasping the core theological convictions that made Luther tick. This "misunderstanding thesis" is particularly popular among Lutherans, and in my dissertation I argued against it in the case of Martin Bucer. Payton (who also wrote his dissertation on Bucer) actually cites Bucer along with Melanchthon as an example of someone who did understand Luther. However, I think Payton may mean that Bucer eventually came to understand Luther (a claim with which many Lutherans would disagree).  Specifically, Bucer heard Luther speak at Heidelberg in 1518 and wrote excitedly to a friend about Luther as a more outspoken version of Erasmus. Bucer's summary of Luther's Heidelberg theses (actually far more important for Luther's developing theology than the more famous 95 Theses) misses out some key concepts, such as the "theology of the Cross." But it's not at all clear that Luther actually presented those parts of the theses at Heidelberg, and even if he did, the things Bucer heard were things that were actually there. Again, Payton doesn't use Bucer as his example of "misunderstanding," but the reverse. But my experience with Bucer leads me to be suspicious of the "misunderstanding thesis" in general. Luther was saying an awful lot of things. It's easy to read him in retrospect in light of more developed Protestant theology and accuse the people who heard him saying other sorts of things (humanist criticisms of scholasticism, German criticisms of Rome, populist criticisms of exploitative overlords whether secular or religious) of "misunderstanding." They may have understood some aspects of Luther (aspects from which Luther later distanced himself) better than we do. In short, while Payton is making an important point in this chapter about the breadth of Luther's appeal and the difficulty many people had in understanding some of his key insights, his way of framing it gives too much credence, I think, to the standard Protestant narrative of the Reformation as being "all about" these particular theological ideas (such as sola fide).

The fourth chapter, "Conflict among the Reformers," discusses the growing division between Luther and the urban Reformers of southern Germany and Switzerland. It's an excellent summary of a very complex subject, though I do have a couple of caveats. He's right of course to point out that Luther's emphasis on justification by faith made him willing to go more slowly in liturgical and other practical reforms, because he was afraid that reform could itself become a kind of works righteousness if it didn't flow from justification by faith. But it's an exaggeration to say that little changed in Lutheran worship compared to medieval Catholicism. That's a very Protestant way to look at it. A medieval Catholic would have found Lutheran worship in 1550 quite startling. His discussion of the urban context of the Reformation is good, but he makes it sound as if before the Reformation religious people were pretty uniformly negative about cities. That's not my impression at all. There was plenty of complaint about the materialism and pride and general depravity of cities, to be sure. But there was also plenty of language about the city as an image of the heavenly city, as a Christian community that could mirror and shape virtue. This was especially the case in the work of humanists such as Erasmus, with his famous claim that the city was "nothing other than a huge monastery." Payton makes the urban Reformation seem like more of a break with the past than it was. I tend to be persuaded by Berndt Moeller's claim that, in many ways, the urban Reformation wasa highly "medieval" phenomenon.

Chap. 5, "What the Reformers meant by Sola Fide," is an excellent analysis of the basic Protestant message regarding salvation. He makes them sound like they agreed a bit more than they did (but of course he's trying to convey, in contrast to the last chapter, what they did have in common). When I wrote the dissertation I was pretty skeptical about claims (mostly by Lutherans) that Zwingli and Bucer (and even Melanchthon) had a fundamentally different view of justification from Luther. But over time I've come to think that actually Zwingli and the early Bucer were approaching the question from a very different angle, and that they didn't mean quite the same thing by sola fide as Luther. A much bigger problem with this chapter, however, is Payton's account of how Protestants came to think that faith unaccompanied by good works could save. He puts the blame solely on 19th-century revivalism. I find this highly misleading, given how much of that revivalism was driven by Wesleyan theology with its emphasis on holiness. 19th-century revivalists were, by and large, keenly aware of the importance of good works. Of course revivalism wasn't monolithic, and clearly there were antinomian elements to the revival movement. (Antinomianism is the view that observance of the moral law is entirely irrelevant to salvation, in contrast to the classical Protestant view that good works are the inevitable result of true faith.) But there were antimonian elements in Luther and other sixteenth-century figures as well. It's the shadow side of sola fide, only excluded by constant theological effort. (That does not in itself mean that sola fide is wrong. All doctrines have these "shadow sides," which is why there is so much heresy.) Of course such a simplistic parody of sola fide could flourish, given the right conditions, in the populist environment of revivalistic Protestantism, cut loose from confessional discipline. But so could the vigorously perfectionist theology of the Wesleyans (my own tradition). Payton is here following the standard Reformed tactic of throwing revivalism under the bus as a scapegoat for the problems in Protestantism.

Chap. 6 tackles the other classic doctrine of the Reformation, "sola scriptura." Payton drives home the theme that the Protestant Reformers deeply respected the Church Fathers and the historic tradition of the Church, and read Scripture within that context. This, of course, is true. My late advisor, David Steinmetz, built his career around this particular aspect of the Reformation and has probably done more than anyone else to remind the world of just how traditional, in many respects, the Reformers were. However, I've come to realize that many people misread Steinmetz here. Often Protestants will use his work to argue that really Luther and the other mainstream Reformers weren't radical at all. In fact, Steinmetz suggested at one point that Luther, not the Anabaptists, should be called a representative of the "Radical Reformation," if we're thinking of soteriology. He used a careful comparison of Reformation Biblical interpretation with patristic and medieval precedents in order to isolate, more clearly and precisely than had been done before, just where they were and were not breaking with previous tradition. Luther often spoke quite disparagingly of the Church Fathers, particularly during the "wild growth" years of the 1520s. All the Reformers drew on the Fathers selectively (as, to be fair, we all tend to do), arguing to be sure that on the whole they supported them over the "Papists," but not taking very seriously the possibility that the Fathers might, on some issues, be interpreting Scripture better than they themselves did. The standard Protestant claim, "we respect the Fathers, but the authority of Scripture is greater," actually meant for the most part "we agree with the Fathers when they agree with our interpretation of Scripture, but when they don't we simply dismiss them." One of the best "smoking guns" showing this is the letter of Melanchthon to Bucer in 1531 rebuking him for holding to Augustine's view of justification rather than Luther's, and admitting that the Wittenberg Reformers appealed to Augustine's authority publicly even though they knew he didn't really agree with them. To be sure, this shows that Brenz, at least, was paying serious attention to Augustine. In general, the Wittenberg Reformers were, in my opinion, the least respectful of the Fathers, and the mediating south German figures like Brenz and Bucer were the most. Bucer's 1536 Romans commentary is a mammoth effort to reconcile the Fathers, the Wittenberg Reformers, and the Swiss Reformers, and it paved the way in many respects for the work of Calvin, although Calvin was less interested in harmonization and harmony. In short, Payton once again presents a one-sided picture that obscures how radical the Protestants were on the question of the role of tradition in interpreting Scripture. Payton also does not acknowledge the quite clear "back-tracking" that took place after the "wild growth" years of the early 1520s, and the way in which the Protestants were obviously embarrassed and surprised by the potential of more radical Reformers to use the "appeal to Scripture" against them.

(To be continued)

Letter of Melanchthon to Brenz, May 1531

I translated this letter some years ago for Dave Armstrong, who had cited parts of it from Hartmann Grisar. This led to a debate between me and Dave on whether Dave and Grisar were overstating its implications for Protestant appeals to patristic authority and the question of how respectful the Protestant Reformers were of the Church Fathers. Dave posted the letter on his site, together with responses by him to some of my criticisms of his original use of the quote. For years now I've been sending people to that site in order to read the letter, but readers have to scroll through a lot of other material in order to get to it. Since I translated the letter as a whole and provided it to Dave, I've decided to post it on my own blog so I can send people straight to the letter itself (but do check out the discussion on Dave's site if you're interested in exploring these issues further). Here it is, with a few notes by me:

[Background and context: Melanchthon had written to Brenz on April 8, saying that he understood why Brenz, a newly married man, hadn’t written, but asking him to start corresponding again. He also sent some propositions about justification. Brenz must have commented on them in a letter not found in the collection of Melanchthon’s correspondence. In mid-May Melanchthon responded]:

I received your rather long letter, which I enjoyed very much. I beg you to write often and at length. Regarding faith, I have figured out what your problem is (1). You still hold on to that notion of Augustine’s, who gets to the point of denying that the righteousness of reason is reckoned for righteousness before God—and he thinks rightly. Next he imagines that we are counted righteous on account of that fulfillment of the Law which the Holy Spirit works in us. So you imagine that people are justified by faith, because we receive the Holy Spirit by faith, so that afterwards we can be righteous by the fulfillment of the law which the Holy Spirit works in us.

This notion places righteousness in our fulfillment, in our cleanness or perfection, even though this renewal must follow faith. But you should turn your eyes completely away from this renewal and from the law, and toward the promise and Christ, and you should think that we are righteous, that is, accepted before God, and find peace of conscience, on account of Christ, and not on account of that renewal. For this new quality itself does not suffice. Therefore we are righteous by faith alone, not because it is the root, as you write, but because it lays hold of Christ, on account of whom we are accepted, whatever this new life (2) may be like—indeed it follows necessarily, but it does not give the conscience peace.

Therefore love, which is the fulfillment of the law, does not justify, but faith alone, not because it is a certain perfection in us, but only because it lays hold of Christ. We are righteous, not on account of love, not on account of the fulfillment of the law, not on account of our new life, even though these things are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but on account of Christ; and we lay hold of this only through faith.

Augustine does not fully accord with (3) Paul’s pronouncement, even though he gets closer to it than the Scholastics. And I cite Augustine as fully agreeing with us (4) on account of the public conviction about him, even though he does not explain the righteousness of faith well enough. Believe me, dear Brenz, the controversy about the righteousness of faith is great and obscure. Nonetheless, you will understand it rightly if you totally take your eyes away from the law and Augustine’s notion about the fulfillment of the law, and fix your mind rather on the free promise, so that you think that we are righteous (that is, accepted) and find peace on account of the promise and on account of Christ. This pronouncement is true and makes Christ’s glory shine forth and wonderfully raises up [people’s] consciences. I have tried to explain it in the Apology, but it was not possible to speak in the same way there as I do now because of the calumnies of our opponents, even though I am saying the same thing essentially. (5) 
When would the conscience have peace and a sure hope if it had to think that we are only counted righteous when that new life has been made perfect within us? What is this other than to be justified on the basis of the law, not the free promise? In the disputation I said this: that to attribute justification to love is to attribute justification to our work. There I have in mind the work done by the Holy Spirit in us. For faith justifies, not because it is a new work of the Holy Spirit in us, but because it lays hold of Christ, on account of whom we are accepted, not on account of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us. 
If you will consider that the mind must be brought back from Augustine’s notion, you will easily understand the issue. Also, I hope to help you in some way by means of our apology, even if I speak cautiously of such things, which however cannot be understood except in the conflict of the conscience. The people indeed ought to hear the preaching of law and repentance; but meanwhile this true pronouncement of the Gospel must not be passed over. I ask you to write again, and let me know your judgment about this letter and the apology—whether this letter has satisfactorily answered your question. Farewell. 
Phil. Mel.

Luther’s P.S.

And I, dear Brenz, in order to get a better grip on this issue frequently imagine it this way: as if in my heart there is no quality that is called faith or charity, but instead of them I put Christ himself and say: this is my righteousness; He is the quality and my formal righteousness, as they call it. In this way I free myself from the perception (6) of the law and works, and even from the perception of this object, Christ (7), who is understood as a teacher or a giver; but I want Him to be my gift and teaching in Himself, so that I may have all things in Him. (8) So he says: I am the way, the truth and the life. He does not say: I give you the way, the truth and the life, as if He worked in me while being placed outside of me. He must be such things in me, remain in me, live in me, speak not through me but into me (9), 2 Cor. 5; so that we may be righteousness in Him, not in love or in gifts that follow. 
Footnotes

(1) Lit. “I hold/grasp what exercises you/should exercise you/might exercise you”.
(2) Lit. newness.
(3) Lit., does not satisfy.
(4) Melanchthon uses a Greek word which means “one who says the same”; “with us” is my addition since it’s understood in the original.
(5) Lit. in the thing/matter itself.
(6) Latin: ab intuitu.
(7) Or in another reading, this objective Christ.
(8) “Object” means “object of thought”—Luther’s point is that he doesn’t even think of Christ as a source of teaching or of gifts, such as the gift of charity.
(9) Luther uses the Greek here.

In memoriam magistri Latomi dilecti

I first met David Steinmetz in April 1995, more than twenty years ago. I was not quite 21; he was nearly 59. (It is sobering to realize that I am now, at 41, closer to the age he was then than to the age I was then.) Craig Farmer, who taught church history at my alma mater, Milligan College, had strongly encouraged me to attend grad school at Duke to study with Steinmetz. I had read several of his books at that point, and had been struck by the clarity and pungency of his writing. I knew there were a lot of good scholars out there, but I already realized that few of them could write like Steinmetz. It was obvious from his writing that he was not simply a great scholar but a well-rounded human being, and furthermore a deeply committed Christian. The sentence that probably had made most impression on me was from a wonderful little essay on theological education in his collection Memory and Mission: "Until you have been slain by the left hand of God's wrath and made alive by the right hand of God's mercy, you may be a dabbler, but you are not a theologian."

I came to graduate school with the typical sorts of misgivings that students from very conservative, particularly Pietist families often have. I had been homeschooled and had attended a local Christian college, even though my family found the professors at times to be a bit on the liberal side. We were not typical fundamentalists by any means--as Wesleyan Holiness folks, and furthermore as maverick Holiness people who had rejected some aspects of conventional "conservative Holiness" teaching--we were far more mystical and quirky than most conservative Christians. But we were very conservative Christians, to be sure, and furthermore because we were mystical and pietistic, we were deeply suspicious of an overly academic or systematic approach to Christian faith, even if it was conservative. My grandmother regularly spoke disparagingly of systematic theologians, and she approved of my going to grad school mostly because I would be studying church history, which she thought was a safer discipline than either theology or Biblical studies. Steinmetz' essay in Memory and Mission addressed these concerns almost as if he were speaking directly to me. (As I would learn, he came from a very evangelical UMC congregation in Ohio and was a Wheaton alumnus, so he had no doubt dealt with these things himself.) His essay assured me, before I ever met him, that learning to be a Christian scholar didn't have to mean letting go of an experiential relationship with God--that indeed scholarship should deepen such a relationship, and that the doubts and questions raised by scholarship might be part of the "temptations" that Luther said accompanied any serious attempt to follow God.

David and I did not hit it off immediately. He was gracious but reserved in manner--I was extremely nervous, and I'm sure I came across as cocky, because that's how I usually come across when I'm nervous. As I began my first year at Duke, I quickly found myself overwhelmed by living on my own for the first time. I had spent much of my life in the woods of East Tennessee, twelve miles from the nearest town of any size. Durham was a metropolis by my standards, and the libraries at Duke were paradises in which I could and did get lost for hours . I had no master's degree when I came to Duke, just a liberal arts BA. I had no background in theology or modern Biblical studies. I was interested in everything, and at the same time terrified that everything I encountered might change me in some sinister way. The liberty of living on my own and being able to spend my time as I wished (which mostly meant to read whatever I wanted) was intoxicating. I discovered sci-fi and spent hours and hours reading it instead of the work I was supposed to be doing. I also discovered the Internet (bear in mind, this was 1995) and developed a habit of arguing religion on the Internet that sucked up hours of my time, and continues to do so today. In short, I was the typical nerdy young person with far more curiosity than discipline, free for the first time from the limitations of an extremely strict upbringing but still carrying around the psychological effects of that upbringing. But I was going through all of this while a Ph.D. student at one of the finest universities in the world, rather than as an undergraduate or even seminary student.

I don't think David knew what to do with me. Most of his students had come to him out of seminary, and some (like Richard Muller) had by his account already figured out what they wanted to do with their careers and already possessed a great deal of learning in the field they wanted to study. (He gave me the impression, in fact, that Muller had come to Duke already knowing more about Reformed theology than David did--but then, David illustrated Chesterton's dictum about the difference between exaggerated praise and flattery. He could be ruthlessly honest about your faults while praising your virtues to other people in terms that utterly astounded you when you heard about them. Already in my first year he was telling people that my Latin was better than his own, when in fact it was merely very good for someone who had only had a couple of semesters of formal instruction in the language. No one I've known has ever used exaggeration more skilfully or proficiently than David, to make a valid point rather than to distort the truth.) Here I was, this loud, insecure, impossibly boyish 21-year-old (people meeting me for the first time usually thought I was about 15 at most), wandering around in polyester pants chattering endlessly about my thoughts and feelings, and really with no clue of what I wanted to do at Duke except the idea of studying the connection between the Reformation and the Middle Ages, mostly in order to sort out whether I could myself remain a Protestant or not. He tried to give me guidance, but he did so in an extremely courteous, restrained way that I found at times to be rather aloof and sardonic, but which I now realize was an expression of respect.

The most striking feature of how David treated all his students, in fact, was respect, and that included respect for their time and for their dignity as fellow scholars, from the first moment they met him until the time they got to shake his hand and call him "David" at their dissertation defense. The Ph.D. process has a lot in common with a medieval apprenticeship, and in many cases that includes some serious potential for abuse. I've often heard stories of grad students doing hours and hours of unremunerated work for their advisors, or doing the lion's share of work on a project and being rewarded with a bare mention in acknowledgments. David went to great lengths to avoid any kind of exploitation of his students. He made sure I was remunerated for work I did for him whenever possible, and if he asked me to do some small errand without remuneration he would apologize and say (truthfully) that he didn't ask such things often. At one point we were going to produce a primary-source reader together. He not only got funding to pay me for my time working on the project but also offered me full credit as a co-author, which would have given me name recognition in classrooms across the English-speaking world before I had even defended my Ph.D.: "But," he added rather hesitantly, as if he didn't like to mention it, "since I am the senior scholar my name will be listed first." (Unfortunately, David eventually decided to abandon the idea.)

Now, looking back, I realize that I was frustrated with him because I found the relative freedom of graduate school terrifying and wanted someone to give me a detailed program of action and coerce me to follow through on it. Other advisors I've heard of would have done something much more like that. (David's own advisor, Heiko Oberman, was one of them, by all accounts, and David's style seems to have been a deliberate corrective to Oberman's very controlling approach to his students.) At times, ungratefully, I thought that an advisor like that would have been better for me. But I am now extremely grateful for the fact that David was the first authority figure in my life to treat me like an adult. In fact, he treated me like an adult even when I didn't act like one.

He bore with me when I was 45 minutes late for a seminar (though he later claimed that that was one of my more punctual days--it wasn't only one's virtues that he tended to exaggerate), when I forgot that I was supposed to give a class presentation, when I remarked one evening during my dissertation phase (at a very nice dinner to which he was treating all his students at a Greek restaurant, which was a pretty regular sort of thing for him to do) in great excitement that I had actually managed to do some work that day. . . . He bore with me even when I took a sudden leave of absence and ran off to Romania for six months after my second year at Duke, because the pressure from my family and my own doubts and questions and uncertainties had just gotten too much. When I say "bore with me" I don't mean that he never expressed annoyance or spoke with less than perfect gentleness--in fact, sarcasm was his most common mode of expression, and he didn't spare his students. He could be quite ruthless with my papers (as any good professor is), pointing out when I was "skimming over the surface of the evidence" and "leaving hostages to fortune" by unsubstantiated remarks. He remarked frequently that I had "no unexpressed thoughts" and that I contradicted everything he said. (This was not a claim that could be refuted directly, of course, without confirming it.) At one point, quite late in my time at Duke, he wrote me a rather harsh letter in which he pointed out "in the nicest possible way" that "I can rip your guts out if I want to." (I had asked him once too often to recommend me for funding to continue working on a dissertation that showed no signs of progress whatsoever, and as he put it he was not going to lie for me and say I was making progress when I wasn't. Well, when he put it that way. . . . ) But this, like most of the things he said, was a well-crafted piece of rhetoric, designed in this case to shock me into moving forward with my dissertation. By this point I had been at Duke for something like six years with no end in sight, and I think he realized that his usual methods weren't working, so he tried shock therapy. In the end, David never gave up on me. And looking back, that's quite startling given some of the stunts I pulled (and the progress on my dissertation that I didn't make). He was not always reassuring, but he was always there--unflappable, ironic, and bemused.

Our relationship changed for the better as I finally moved toward completion of the dissertation. The moment when I came to his house to discuss the first dissertation chapter I had given him and he actually approved of it was one of the most exhilarating of my life. An entire chapter with not one place where I had "skimmed over the surface of the evidence" or "left hostages to fortune"! A year or so later, when I had completed all but the last chapter, if I recall correctly, he said in a rather stately manner, "It has been my custom to allow my students to call me David when they defend their dissertations. But I recognize that times are changing, and you can call me David now, if you want to." I replied that if it was all the same to him, I'd just as soon wait--it would give me an incentive to finish the darned thing. Which it did. And on the day of my defense, when he shook me by the hand and said, "Congratulations, Dr. Tait," I hesitated for about half a second, as if I were committing an impiety, before I dared to say, "Thank you, David."

I never lost my awe of him. I was always a bit too slow to contact him, and I regret that bitterly now. On the day after Thanksgiving, David's friend and colleague (and another of my former professors) Grant Wacker called me with the news that David had died the night before. The last time we talked had been an argument over Brad Gregory's book The Unintended Reformation, which David (like most Reformation scholars) hated, and which I like very much, though with some significant qualifications. (Contradicting everything, still.)

At the funeral in Chapel Hill, we had "A Mighty Fortress" (of course), "How Firm a Foundation," and an obscure but wonderful Luther hymn, "Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice," with lines like "Fast bound in Satan's chains I lay, Death brooded darkly o'er me". . . . not typical fare at a United Methodist funeral for a distinguished academic, but very typical of David. David had already told us how to think about his death years ago, as it turned out, in a sermon quoted by Timothy George in his recent CT obituary: 

Someday a funeral procession will go to a cemetery and after a brief ceremony, everyone will go home except me. At that moment, the vain and threadbare claim of the idols to be the final arbiters of human destiny will be shown up as the poor and empty thing it is. Only God can be God; only God has the power and the will to be God. Whatever claims to be God but is not God will abandon us one final time at the grave’s edge. On that day, the only question that will matter is whether underneath us are the everlasting arms of the living and true God.

This reminiscence has been far more about me than about David, which I suppose is appropriate. Many people have written about him in the past two weeks, and perhaps there isn't much left to say about him except to tell how he affected me personally. He haunts me and will always haunt me--a grey-haired, majestic figure in a wheelchair sitting in a corner of my mind smiling at my latest folly. I'm sitting here at the computer trying to sum up his wit and wisdom memorably, and I can't. I'll leave that to others. But in the end what stays with me most is the rock-solid, ironic, unsentimental piety reflected in the quote above. Or, in the words of Herbert Butterfield which David quoted in an email he sent me at the end of my first semester at Duke: "Hold on to Christ, and for the rest be uncomitted."

Wolf Hall and the myth of the Moral Pragmatist

The BBC/PBS miniseries Wolf Hall is six hours of some of the most absorbing television (or just storytelling generally) I've ever seen. I have not yet read the books by Hilary Mantel on which the show is based, but now I certainly intend to. The series does a splendid job of dramatizing the tense and devious politics of the Henrician court, and its central character, Thomas Cromwell, is splendidly acted (by Mark Rylance) and a riveting fictional portrait.

Emphasis on fictional. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall is almost certainly much more sensitive, compassionate, and moral than the historical character. The show goes out of its way to invite sympathy with Cromwell rather than with his hapless victims. In the two execution scenes, of Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, the camera focuses on Cromwell's reaction to the deaths rather than on the victims themselves. (This is particularly the case with More--at the moment of his beheading we get a flashback of Cromwell's early memory of More, when they were both adolescents, a flashback that demonstrates More's privileged social position compared to Cromwell and points up the irony of the present situation, but also draws off our sympathy to some degree from More to Cromwell.) Now this is entirely justifiable artistically on the grounds that Wolf Hall gives us Cromwell's subjective perspective on the events. But the effect of this artistic strategy is to force us to empathize with the ruthless choices Cromwell makes and to see them as difficult and anguish-ridden decisions by a basically benevolent person.

As many people have pointed out, this sympathetic portrait of Cromwell contrasts with the harsh picture of St. Thomas More, who is shown as a whiny, egotistical fanatic who has "cast himself as the hero of a drama for all of Europe" and forces everyone else to play his script (an obvious reference to the iconic play and movie A Man For All Seasons). Some of this is fair and well-deserved. More did do plenty of ruthless things himself. He was a fierce persecutor of Protestants, and when More (as he did historically) protests that he "does none harm" Cromwell retorts, effectively, that he has done plenty of harm to people like James Bainham, a Protestant whom More had tortured into recantation but who later returned to Protestantism and was burned at the stake. (Bainham's "relapse" and execution did not take place on More's watch as Lord Chancellor, and the show recognizes this, but again tries to shift our sympathy away from More with a fictional scene in which Cromwell begs More, now out of power, to go as a private individual to Bainham and try to persuade him to recant once again.) Cromwell even suggests (completely inaccurately as far as I know) that Tyndale's arrest and execution on the Continent was somehow the work of More's agents.

More has had his day in the dramatic sun with A Man for All Seasons (and if anyone reading this hasn't seen the Paul Schofield movie, or the lesser-known made for TV version with Charlton Heston, please go out and rent one of them as soon as possible!). It's quite fair to point out More's dark side. Nonetheless, Wolf Hall goes to outrageous lengths to negate More's well-documented virtues and in some cases to ascribe them to Cromwell. Cleverly, More's unusual (for his time) education of his daughters in Latin and Greek is foreshadowed by an earlier scene in which Cromwell does the same thing. So when we encounter the learned Margaret, her father's respect for her intellectual capacities doesn't seem as unusual as it really was. Similarly, Cromwell is shown opposing the king's desire to go to war with France (though for pragmatic rather than explicitly moral reasons). I'm not sure whether that happened or not, but I know that More distinguished himself from the beginning of his career by his opposition to foreign offensive warfare, and in fact nearly brought that career to a premature end as a very young man by opposing Henry VII on this point in Parliament (if his son-in-law Roper's admittedly hagiographic biography can be believed).

There's obvious anti-Catholicism in all of this. Mantel is an ex-Catholic with bad memories of her upbringing and education, and Wolf Hall, like Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth,  illustrates the truth of Chesterton's dictum that England has lost the Protestant faith but has kept up the Protestant feud. But there's more going on than simple anti-Catholicism. Truly zealous Protestants come off only a little better than More. At one point Cromwell reads a letter from Tyndale refusing to sanction the king's marriage and exclaims in disgust: "Tyndale and More deserve each other--these mules who think they are men." This remark nicely complements C. S. Lewis' statement in a letter to an Italian Catholic priest that (after having read all the works of both authors) he considered Tyndale and More to be two of the holiest men of their time.

Holiness, in short, gets short shrift in Wolf Hall. And this attitude is typical both of secular people in the contemporary Western world and of many folks who still adhere to some form of Christianity (as I believe Mantel herself does). It is taken for granted, in many circles, that religious fervor makes people more likely to do evil things, and that true morality is more likely to be found among people who are rather lukewarm in their commitment to transcendent ideals. But this does not, in fact, seem to be true in reality.  In reality, pragmatists have plenty of blood on their hands--I would argue far more than fanatics. Contrary to the stereotype, religion has not been the cause of most wars in history. Most wars, most massacres, most judicial murders have been done by people like Cromwell--cool-headed pragmatists who did what seemed the best and most reasonable thing at the time to advance their own interests and the peace of the realm. That is not to let the fanatics (whether conventionally "religious" or adherents of secular ideologies) off the hook. Their atrocities may be more spectacular. But those of the pragmatists are, I think, far more common.

Mantel tries valiantly to turn Cromwell into a hero, and she does succeed in making even More fans such as myself empathize with him. But in the end Wolf Hall (at least in the TV form as I saw it) says more about the particular prejudices of modern people than about the Tudor period itself. Which is par for the course in historical fiction, and so perhaps not really a criticism.