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An Important Contribution to the Revisionist View of the Protestant Reformation - Rated
Modern secular liberal historiography tends to trace the history of the liberal tradition through the Enlightenment back to the Protestant Reformation, which is seen as a precursor of the Enlightenment. According to this narrative the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the Protestant victory which made the vernacular Bible available to all, established a reading culture which made the Enlightenment possible.
In Burning to Read, James Simpson dissents from this view and argues convincingly that far from being the ancestor of secular liberalism, the Reformation was in fact a fundamentalist movement that was a precursor of present day fundamentalism and that the origins of the secular liberal tradition are instead to be found in the late medieval scholastic tradition.
Simpson does this, not by considering the theological controversies of the 16th century, but by examining the manner in which 16th century evangelicals and in particular William Tyndale believed how the text of the Bible should be read and contrasting Tyndale's recommended approach to the biblical text with that of Sir Thomas More. The acrimonious debate between More and Tyndale is explored in detail and provides Simpson with a wealth of material with which to illustrate the opposing approaches to the reading of biblical texts.
Simpson shows that by arguing that scripture was the only source of divine authority, by insisting on a purely literal interpretation of scriptural texts and by asserting that the text speaks for itself and is self explanatory, the evangelicals had to explain the paradox of why everybody who read the Bible did not understand it in the same way. Surely, if the text is self explanatory its meaning should be clear to all. Tyndale's (and Luther's) answer to this problem was to argue that the true literal meaning of the text was written by God on the heart and that those on whose hearts the text was written and who consequently could understand the true literal meaning of scripture were `the Elect'. This `Elect' constituted the `True Church' which had always existed, but had become obscured because of the corruption of the Christian message by the Catholic church. Those who did not understand the true literal meaning were not members of the `True Church' and were consequently damned. This idea was closely linked to the Protestant concepts of predestination and justification by faith: long before a reader started to read the Bible God had already decided whether or not that person would be among `the Elect' and if a person was not one of `the Elect' there was nothing that could be done to change that fact and for that reason good works were to no avail.
More, by contrast, argued that the Bible did not stand on its own and that it was merely a part of the Christian tradition of which the Catholic church was the custodian. He argued that scripture was just a written record and pointed out that the gospels were not written until after the time of Jesus, who did not himself write any scriptural texts and that Paul's epistles were written only because Paul could not talk to his audiences in person. More believed that scripture could be understood only in the context of Christian tradition and described a process of reading which was very similar to modern theories which suggest that a reader constructs meaning both from the text and from extra textual knowledge. It would be impossible to make any sense of a written text without applying to it the extra textual knowledge which together with the text makes meaning possible. Like the evangelicals More wrote about the true meaning of the text being written on the heart, but for More the idea did not involve any suggestion of predestination or the concept of `the Elect' and the `True Church'. What he meant was that a reader of scripture brought up in the Catholic tradition would have internalized enough of the tradition to make the biblical text understandable.
Simpson also points out that in the medieval scholastic tradition scripture was understood in an allegorical as well as a literal sense and that there was a long tradition of interpreting as allegorical passages that in their literal sense were at variance with the Christian concept of charity. He cites Augustine who argued that scriptural texts should be considered "until the interpretation should be led to the realm of charity". This, Simpson argues, empowers the reader who is liberated from the literal level by being able to keep reading and re-reading the text until it yields up its `charitable ` meaning. In contrast the evangelical reader was condemned to trying to find if the true literal meaning was written on his or her heart, which amounted to reading the text for clues which would reveal whether the reader was saved or damned and this was far from liberating.
The evangelical approach to reading the Bible, with its emphasis on correct literal meaning being written on the heart, has inevitably led to numerous disputes and schisms within Protestantism which have produced a myriad of sects each claiming to be `the Elect'. Reading Simpson's book it is difficult to see how the Reformation could have led to modern secular liberalism. Instead, it marked the beginning of more than a century of violence and political instability. There was nothing liberating about the Reformation. With the monarch as the head of a nationalized church, heresy was simply re-branded as treason and a large number of those executed for treason in the later 16th and in the 17th centuries were killed because of their rejection of the new religious settlement. The tradition of intolerance continues and it is evangelical Christians who are at the forefront of the current attack on the Enlightenment inheritance of secular liberalism and scientific progress in the United States. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are the true inheritors of the tradition of Tyndale and Luther and if the Enlightenment has 16th century precursors, it is more likely to be the scholastic and humanist traditions of More and Erasmus than the literalism of Luther and Tyndale. Interestingly, the Church of England of which Tyndale can be seen as a kind of founding father appears to have distanced itself from its Protestant heritage and today promotes a strange mixture of half-baked Enlightenment attitudes and neo-Catholic rituals.
A final word: It is often lamented that Islam has not had a Reformation and that this is why fundamentalism has become so powerful in the Muslim world. This is a view that sees Islamic fundamentalism as essentially conservative in the sense in which late medieval Catholicism was conservative. Having read Burning to Read it now seems arguable to me that Islam is experiencing its Reformation right now. Muslim fundamentalists with their literal interpretations of their scriptural texts and their rejection of the recent past in favour of an imagined past appear to have much in common with the Protestant reformers. There is no comfort in this thought because fundamentalism is an intellectual dead end that inevitably leads to violence and not to enlightenment. What Islam needs is an Enlightenment, not a Reformation and if it ever does achieve an Enlightenment it will like the European Enlightenment be a reaction against and not a result of religious extremism.
