All-hallown eve: Welcome to the 505th anniversary of the original pinned tweet

 

The Lutheran Reformation saved the Papacy

The greatest danger of all--secularization--the danger which came from within, from the Popes themselves and their 'nipoti', was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. ... This alone had made the expedition against Rome (1527) possible and successful, [and] so did it compel the Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. ... In the face of the defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism ... It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. ... Without the Reformation ... the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 79.

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries, but too readily accepts their recent Catholic opponents' definition of "revolutionary"

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries in "Was the Protestant Reformation a Radical Revolution?", but he could have done better by framing them as restorationists who returned the Christian religion to its rightful origins as revealed in Holy Scripture. That is most certainly how they saw themselves.

 

And this was not coincidentally how American Protestant revolutionaries also saw themselves:

 

Magisterial Protestants rejected the proliferation of radical sects and dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic and were, by liberal standards, quite severe with their opponents (e.g., Anabaptists or Quakers). According to Sidney Ahlstrom, three-quarters of eighteenth-century Americans were magisterial Protestants.

To revolt derives from revolve, to roll back or around. In Biblical terms this is the meaning of repentance, a turning away from present evil and going back to the original, right way.

This old meaning of "revolution" still dominated at the time of Alexander Hamilton and the American founders, and is inextricably bound up with the development of English Protestantism, which of course derived from Luther and Calvin.

What Is Conservatism? :

First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention, General George Washington. ...

Anyone comparing the Constitution that emerged with the earlier Articles of Confederation immediately recognizes that what took place at this convention was a reprise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Despite being adapted to the American context, the document that the convention produced proposed a restoration of the fundamental forms of the English constitution . . .. Even the American Bill of Rights of 1789 is modeled upon the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, largely elaborating the same rights that had been described by Coke and Selden and their followers, and breathing not a word anywhere about universal reason or universal rights.

Nadia Bolz-Weber's god is her SELF, and she still doesn't understand Paul of Tarsus

Probably never really read Paul, or Luther for that matter.

The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual Reformation:

The hypocrisy of purity culture, she argues, has recently been exposed through the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, as survivors of sexual violence within the Church speak out about abuse. “Purity culture equals rape culture,” she told me, by placing the onus on women. “It says to young women that your bodies aren’t your own and you can’t be a sexual being until you are the property of your future husband.” 

. . . and ye are not your own. -- I Corinthians 6:9

Catholic Marc Thiessen understands for the first time how the Reformation happened

Commentary: Suddenly I understand how Reformation happened:

For the first time, I understand how the Reformation happened. ... If Vigano is right, it means the corruption in the Catholic Church has reached not just the highest levels of Roman Curia but the papacy itself. Vigano last week effectively nailed his 95 theses to the door of St. Peter’s. ... He got no response. ... Vigano is courageously sacrificing his own episcopal career to expose the truth. Now is the time for others with inside knowledge to step forward and do the same. ...  Five hundred years ago, faithful Catholics waited too long to root out corruption in the Vatican – with disastrous consequences. We can’t make the same mistake again.

As with most Christians, Luther's basic failure was to misunderstand the apocalyptic setting of repentance

What does it all mean, Bertie?

As here:

"When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence." This was the first of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, pinned to the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517—and the beginning of the movement that would ultimately fracture the church and alter the trajectory of the West.

The crux of the matter is in the phrase "entire life". Luther's excellence is that he grasped the difference between what was self-evidently not authentic about Christian civilization and what it should have looked like, but himself fell short of the implications. Well, who hasn't? Haven't all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?

Jesus did not imagine generation upon generation of millions of repentant believers across the globe spending their long lives daily drowning the Old Adam in the waters of baptism in fervent hope of eternal life as they pursued their vocations to the glory of God. Instead he imagined a few chosen ones from his own generation of Jews repudiating their lives, their relationships, obligations and values, all of which held them back from the righteousness of God, in firm expectation of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God and the final judgment. The history of Christianity is nothing more than a long list of compromises with this radicalism, more or less trying to corral this elephant in the chancel, disguise it or shoot it.

Schweitzer at least let it return to the jungle.  

A Jesuit imagines that he would have been exempt from Jesus' call to discipleship because he has a child to support

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in "Are Christians really supposed to be communists? A response to David Bentley Hart" in America: The Jesuit Review, here:

Jesus, we are told, did not just speak in parables, he spoke in hyperbole. Quite right: Nobody thinks that Jesus actually wants you to pluck your eye out if it drives you to lust. (Wouldn’t you be just as able to lust after a beautiful person with just one eye?) What is wrong is to stop once we have said this.

Professor Hart is wrong and the church is right. There are vocations, and some Christians are called to total poverty; others are called to live in the world, and therefore to engage in market transactions, to earn wages and to accumulate savings to provide economic security for their families. No church father, catechism, encyclical or council has ever preached the opposite. What is wrong is to stop once we have said this, as his critics would have us.

Here’s the rub: The fact that I can know that God does not want me to give up all worldly goods because I support a child is precisely why I cannot rest easy. The fact that my vocation is perfectly acceptable to God is why Jesus’ thunderous words still apply to me. Jesus’ dramatic, hyperbolic words are a reminder that even while maintaining my vocation as a petit bourgeois, I can always be more radical in how I love and how I give to my fellow man. “Fearful it is to fall in the hands of the living God,” Kierkegaard reminds us in the same passage I quoted above. And how reassuring it would be for petit bourgeois Christians like myself to tell ourselves that the way Jesus preaches is for the others, for those who go into the desert.

To put it simply: poverty sine glosa is not the only way for the Christian. But that reminder should always be followed up by the always urgent reminder that we could still do with a lot less glosa and a lot more poverty.

As usual, this confused mess arises precisely because it is divorced from the all important context of the history of early Christian apocalyptic. Divorce Jesus' message from that and all that remains is one form of compromise with the world or another. Anything can then be made of it, and has. The error arises when the existence of early Christian poverty and communism is not seen simply as evidence of this original apocalyptic context, but instead as a prescription. The same error takes Paul's compromises as an entrepreneur for a blessing of capitalism. "Is" does not mean "ought".

It will not do, as Gobry does, to say "virtually all church fathers missed" the early Christian call to poverty and communism. The great value of Hart's essay is to show the fathers' knowledge of it, and to link it to the evidence for it in Scripture. Gobry simply ignores all this.

The imminent end of the world as imagined by Jesus and even Paul has little to offer in the way of life instruction for an interminable future, whether spiritually conceived, for example as the hermetism of the Desert Fathers or the monasticism still thriving on the eve of the Reformation, or materially, as the base conceptions of mercantilism, capitalism, fascism, socialism or communism now and again embraced by Christian thinkers.  Everything Jesus taught is repentance from this life in the face of the impending judgment. There was nothing hyperbolic about this, nor about the requirements necessary for navigating to the new reality of the arriving kingdom of God. The disciples understood this clearly, as did every hearer of Jesus' message, which is why it was at once so compelling to a few and so revolting to the many:

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. ... And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. -- Mark 10:21f., 29f. 

Evidently Mr. Gobry can't imagine any of The Twelve were deadbeat dads.

Paul himself, the first theologian to compromise the teaching of Jesus and get away with it, didn't even recommend his own capitalist industriousness in the service of the gospel, not to mention class struggle nor freedom from slavery nor any other social value, because he himself retained the apocalyptic outlook where everything is impermanent. Paul's was a halfway house of vocationalism where everyone was to remain in the state in which they were called because of the impending end of the world, whether slave, free, married, unmarried, etc.:

Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. Was any one at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was any one at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. Every one should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. So, brethren, in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God. Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away. -- 1 Cor.7:17ff. 

This so-called hyperbolism of apocalyptic was anything but. It only waned because history ensued and destroyed its very credibility, including Paul's halfway house of the already/not yet. Faced with its basis in the false predictions of the end, the Christians had to adapt their story to reality or die. What had become no longer conceivable they replaced with something less susceptible of contradiction, something at once more durable because it was by definition social but ironically also actually hyperbolic, something which made sense of the failures and transformed them into victory, the doctrine and practice of the Real Presence:

"Take, eat; this is my body. ... Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." 

This actual hyperbole became the center of the holy catholic faith, and remains so to this day for over a billion of the world's Christians. Perhaps that's why Christians such as Gobry read hyperbolism into everything which competes with it, especially when it comes from Catholicism's enemies the Orthodox and the Protestants: "Hart, a tireless basher of Protestant theology (not one of his least virtues), has produced a crypto-Protestant theology out of his exegesis".

They know their own error only too well. 

 

David Jamieson, a Scottish leftist from Glasgow, provides a needed corrective to the idea that Luther was a radical revolutionary

For Jacobin Magazine here, from which this excerpt:

When Luther finally emerged from Wartburg, he became a force for restraint within the increasingly diverse Reformation movement. He called for a stop to many of the more aggressive changes and introduced a more gradual pace of change. ...

Characterizing Protestantism as the seed of the Enlightenment or of the classical liberal tradition ignores its often dogmatic forms and its relative disinterest in intellectual life outside theology. Indeed, in the Reformation period itself, many Catholic humanist intellectuals, such as Desiderius Erasmus, rejected the movement for its sheer inflexibility. 

David Jamieson is on Twitter, here.

An Ohio campus pastor considers the Lutheran Reformation a conservative restoration of catholic Christianity

Peter Burfeind, here:

Luther’s goal was not a radical departure from tradition, but a conservative restoration of catholic Christianity.

INC Christianity: Paulinism's Achilles' heel is disintegrating Protestantism into a Corinthian chaos of self-appointed profiteering prophets and apostles

And its locus is libertarian America, which worships at the altar of the unencumbered individual, fruitful ground for those who claim they are imitating the self-appointed apostle who was "not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but [directly] through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead" (Galatians 1:1).

From the story here:

These apostles are able to access a lot more money, because they are operating with a pay-for-service model, rather than relying on people’s donations and their goodwill. Congregations bend over backwards to keep people happy and keep the butts in the seats; people don’t have to pay unless they feel like it. But this is a completely different financial model, and it tends to generate much more money. ...

It’s all sort of self-appointed. Leaders in the [movement] would say that people are recognized as apostles because of the influence that they have—not only over your own congregation but over other leaders. But there’s definitely a good deal of self-appointing going on. Peter Wagner, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, referred to himself as a “super apostle,” because he was influential with a bunch of other apostles. ...

[T]he INC movement is explicitly post-millennial. In their minds, God’s kingdom can come to earth before Christ returns—and, by the way, it will be in America. There is this interesting combination of America first, Americans as God’s chosen people, and a romantic vision of God working it out through the people he chooses. /end

You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different kind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed. But I don't consider myself inferior in any way to these "super apostles" who teach such things. ... But I will continue doing what I have always done [paying my own way, not charging for the gospel]. This will undercut those who are looking for an opportunity to boast that their work is just like ours. These people are false apostles. They are deceitful workers who disguise themselves as apostles of Christ.

-- 2 Corinthians 11:4f., 12f.

The Arminian Roger Olson, hostile to Augustine, does not believe God is "infinite" and is therefore outside the catholic faith

Here, already from a young age, which ought to tell you something (enthusiasm dies hard):

I long ago rejected the notion that God is “infinite.” I rejected it when I first heard it articulated which was probably in some seminary class. I immediately thought that the concept itself was beyond comprehension (except perhaps in mathematics) and that attributing it to God led away from thinking of God as personal, present, involved, loving and able to be affected by us. With Brightman (who I only learned about later) I thought of that attribute of God in traditional theology as an inappropriate expansion of the concept of God brought into Christian thought through philosophy, not the Bible.

Compare the Athanasian Creed:

And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite [et unus immensus]. 

Hilary of Poitiers, On the Councils (composed in 359), thought it was a mark of safety to employ expansion in theology in order to avoid error (unlike Olson), and that the profusion of definitions appropriately mimics the boundlessness of God:

The infinite and boundless [infinitus et immensus] God cannot be made comprehensible by a few words of human speech. Brevity often misleads both learner and teacher, and a concentrated discourse either causes a subject not to be understood, or spoils the meaning of an argument where a thing is hinted at, and is not proved by full demonstration. The bishops fully understood this, and therefore have used for the purpose of teaching many definitions and a profusion of words that the ordinary understanding might find no difficulty, but that their hearers might be saturated with the truth thus differently expressed, and that in treating of divine things these adequate and manifold definitions might leave no room for danger or obscurity.

The reductionism of the Reformation is a contrary tendency.

The first schismatics are the Roman Catholics themselves, and then the Greek Orthodox, and they are divided to this day

Spare me the critique of "schismatic" Protestantism beginning with Luther in 1517.

You Catholics and Orthodox were at it over 400 years before us, and still are.

Meanwhile Protestants laid the groundwork for the most free, enlightened and prosperous populations which have ever existed in human history while you sit there arguing about who runs this rathole and that rathole as both are being overrun by Muslims.

In 1053, the first step was taken in the process which led to formal schism: the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople, in response to the Greek churches in southern Italy having been forced either to close or to conform to Latin practices. According to the historian J. B. Bury, Cerularius' purpose in closing the Latin churches was "to cut short any attempt at conciliation". ... Several attempts at reconciliation did not bear fruit. In 1965, Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras I nullified the anathemas of 1054, although this nullification of measures taken against a few individuals was essentially a goodwill gesture and did not constitute any sort of reunion. Contacts between the two sides continue: every year a delegation from each joins in the other's celebration of its patronal feast, Saints Peter and Paul (29 June) for Rome and Saint Andrew (30 November) for Constantinople, and there have been a number of visits by the head of each to the other. The efforts of the Ecumenical Patriarchs towards reconciliation with the Catholic Church have often been the target of sharp criticism from some fellow Orthodox.

Peter Leithart wrings his hands over the divisions caused by the Reformation, uttering complete rubbish

Here in First Things:

The catastrophic effects of these divisions rippled out into European culture, society, and politics. They’re rippling still. Worse, the fragmentation of the Church undermined the evangelical aims of the Reformers. By its sibling feuds, the Reformation quenched the very Spirit it had unleashed.

Protestants were not solely responsible for the division of the Church. Catholic intransigence and treachery silenced prophetic voices and delayed and prevented the deep self-examination the Church needed. Yet Protestants were responsible, especially for the divisions within the Reformation’s own ranks.

Quenched the Spirit, eh? Which spirit? Peter Leithart, like most Christians of the contemporary period, doesn't grasp the essentially divisive nature of the coming of the Spirit, as if the prophets were put to death for preaching the unity of the faith in the bond of peace. The prophets critiqued the household of God, calling it to repentance and revealing its sins, often at the cost of their lives.

It is a fetish of our utopian age to exclude this point of view in favor of a preoccupation with unity. But it's still disturbing that churchmen seem caught up in it, even at this late hour in the ridiculous history of ecumenism. They'll do anything it seems not to face the fact that in the Bible the idea is a development of its later literature, emphasized in the Fourth Gospel (especially John 10 and 17) and the Pauline Ephesian letter (chapter 4), neither of which can be reconciled with the Synoptic tradition nor the early genuine letters of Paul without doing a little violence to reason. Even the Passion narratives have been reworked from this point of view of the later "church", which is the first concrete expression of Christianity's decadence. Robust preoccupation with "the Other" from the original period of the Spirit gave way to the crabbed self-reflection and identity "politics" of Christian, Jew, church, synagogue, Greek, barbarian, male, female, slave, free, and Roman citizen.  

Jesus the eschatological prophet, on the other hand, never imagined a "church", let alone this long, drawn out history betwixt heaven and hell. He did not imagine "identities". Those who do the will of God are my mother, sisters and brothers, he said. Many are called. Few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life. Few are they who find it. Repent while you still can. The reign of God is nigh. Come follow me.

What a polarizing fellow.

"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).

 

Protestants shouldn't apologize for it.

Stupidest story of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation: "Das Ende" on Playmobil Luther Bible is anti-Semitic

My KJV page at the end of the Old Testament: The End of the Prophets

Only a fool or a malcontent would fail to recognize the heretofore customary and universal editorial use of "the end". In this case, it's a malcontent, but it's fools who take his lies seriously.

Here:

Why was the word “END” written so prominently, Brumlik asked. “Theologically, there can be no other reason than that the ‘Old Testament’ and its validity should be seen as ended and superseded,” he wrote in the Berlin newspaper tageszeitung [sic]. 

My KJV page at the end of the New Testament: The End

I have a daydream: Pope Francis travels to Lutheran Sweden to apologize on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation

The reality from the joint declaration:

"While we are profoundly thankful for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation, we also confess and lament before Christ that Lutherans and Catholics have wounded the visible unity of the church. Theological differences were accompanied by prejudice and conflicts, and religion was instrumentalised for political ends.”

The two leaders prayed for wounds to be healed, saying: “We emphatically reject all hatred and violence, past and present, especially that expressed in the name of religion.” ...

Recent moves towards closer coexistence have been resisted by hardliners on both sides, and few people have suggested that the Christian church could reunite even though Francis has made ecumenicalism a hallmark of his papacy.

30-year old Lutherans sit around for three hours drinking beer wondering why death has no urgency

Maybe they should learn to talk to someone who's 50ish and nearer to it, or over 500 and quite dead. Kids these days.

From the story here:

'Booze, scripture and YouTube helped anoint the latest Bible and Brew hosted by Nicholas and Kristin Tangen, both 30 and members of Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church in Northeast. ... The group of 10 debated: Does mortality pack the same punch these days as during New Testament times? “There’s a sense of non-urgency around death now,” Kristin Tangen said about an hour into the group’s three-hour chat. That same attitude might apply to being proactive about goals or recognizing the threat of global warming, she said. We all nestle comfortably into modernity’s promises, she added. Her husband added, “ ‘Live today like it’s your last’ sounds so trite,” but does it have credence? He wondered: Should we dismiss such simple adages?'

For some beer offerings celebrating the 500th anniversay of the Reformation, with some choice Luther quotations, see here.

The development of liberal social equality in the West would have been unthinkable without Pauline Christianity and Protestantism

Knox thought rule by Queens was unnatural

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

-- Galatians 3:28

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.

-- Colossians 3:11

[7]Neither would I that you should esteem the reformation and care of religion less to appertain to you, because you are not kings, rulers, judges, nobles, nor in authority. Beloved brethren, you are God's creatures, created and formed to his own image and similitude, for whose redemption was shed the most precious blood of the only beloved Son of God, to whom he has commanded his gospel and glad tidings to be preached, and for whom he has prepared the heavenly inheritance, so that you will not obstinately refuse, and disdainfully contemn the means which he has appointed to obtain the same: to wit, his blessed evangel, which now he offers unto you, to the end that you may be saved. For the gospel and glad tidings of the kingdom truly preached, is the power of God to the salvation of every believer (Rom. 1:16), which to credit and receive, you, the commonalty, are no less indebted than are your rulers and princes. [8]For albeit God has put and ordained distinction and difference betwixt the king and subjects, betwixt the rulers and the common people, in the regiment and administration of civil policies; yet in the hope of the life to come he has made all equal. For as in Christ Jesus the Jew has no greater prerogative than has the Gentile, the man than has the woman, the learned than the unlearned, the lord than the servant, but all are one in him (Ga. 3:26-29), so there is but one way and means to attain to the participation of his benefits and spiritual graces, which is a lively faith working by charity.

-- John Knox, Letter to Scotland, 1558

The Protestant idea of the spiritual equality of all "in the hope of the life to come" took on a life of its own in the West as secularization took hold during the Enlightenment.

Wingnut Princeton professor blames 'tens of millions' of deaths on Protestants during 30 Years' War, compares them to ISIS

The best estimates put total losses on all sides from all causes in all venues at 8 million. 

Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, knows a thing or two about sloppy, exaggerated, scholarship, and politically correct slurs, quoted here:

'If there are any lessons about ISIS that can be drawn from what happened during the Protestant Reformation, Bernard Haykel said, those lessons are "terrifying."

'"If we're embarking or are actually already in something like the Reformation in the Muslim world, then, you know, hold on because we're in for a really wild ride with lots of violence," he added. ...

'"Christianity was a violent religion at times, extremely violent, in fact, much more violent than what we're seeing with the Islamists today. If you think of the 30 Years War, something like 30 percent of Germany's population was killed, tens of millions of people," he said.

'Haykel also noted that ISIS is similar to the Protestant Reformation in its emphasis on individualism.

'"The individual is at the core of this [ISIS] movement, the autonomy of the individual, the decision of the individual to make decisions despite, and even against one's own family, which flies in the face of Arab and Muslim tradition," he said. ...

'"Calvin was a really nasty guy. Okay? I mean, read up about him — and there's a huge, a big statue of him in Geneva today — but people forget actually what the city he led was like under him."'

Haykel is the son of a Lebanese Christian and a Polish Jew.

Anti-protestant silliness on the Pericope Adulterae from Joel J. Miller

Joel Miller here on John 7:53ff., the favorite New Testament cudgel of liberals everywhere:

"[W]hat should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived before this reconstruction [which excludes the pericope from John], including great exegetes like Augustine or Chrysostom, or pastors who led the church before even the canon (let alone this imagined reconstruction) was settled?"

Well, what should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived with a Gospel of John without the passage, including the readers of:

Papyri 66 (c. 200) and 75 (early 3rd century); Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th century), also apparently Alexandrinus and Ephraemi (5th), Codices Washingtonianus and Borgianus also from the 5th century, Regius from the 8th, Athous Lavrensis (c. 800), Petropolitanus Purpureus, Macedoniensis, Sangallensis and Koridethi from the 9th century and Monacensis from the 10th; Uncials 0141 and 0211; Minuscules 3, 12, 15, 21, 22, 32, 33, 36, 39, 44, 49, 63, 72, 87, 96, 97, 106, 108, 124, 131, 134, 139, 151, 157, 169, 209, 213, 228, 297, 388, 391, 401, 416, 445, 488, 496, 499, 501, 523, 537, 542, 554, 565, 578, 584, 703, 719, 723, 730, 731, 736, 741, 742, 768, 770, 772, 773, 776, 777, 780, 799, 800, 817, 827, 828, 843, 896, 989, 1077, 1080, 1100, 1178, 1230, 1241, 1242, 1253, 1333, 2193 and 2768; the majority of lectionaries; some Old Latin, the majority of the Syriac, the Sahidic dialect of the Coptic, the Gothic, some Armenian, Georgian mss. of Adysh (9th century); Diatessaron (2nd century); apparently Clement of Alexandria (died 215), other Church Fathers namely Tertullian (died 220), Origen (died 254), Cyprian (died 258), Nonnus (died 431), Cyril of Alexandria (died 444) and Cosmas (died 550) ?

What were those Christians, chopped liver?

"Rather than a collection of texts written in and for the church and recognized as valid by that church, biblical books and even minute passages now become arbitrated by scholars."

Well, no. The above collection of texts without the pericope is arbitrated as valid by scribes, who presumably were themselves Christians. But apparently their voices don't count as the voice of the church to Joel Miller.

"If the church doesn’t validate the text, who does? In this instance, scholarly consensus is consulted to 'uncanonize' a portion of generally received scripture."

Sorry, no. The absence of the pericope suggests churchmen "uncanonized" it long before contemporary scholars did. Martin Luther did nothing different. Joel Miller just doesn't want to face it.

"Sola Scriptura becomes queer indeed when ideas from outside Scripture are determining what goes into it."

Well, if some extra-Biblical principle was at work excluding the pericope from the manuscript evidence, it pre-dated the Reformation by a thousand years and was operating in scriptoria funded by churches all over the place. What's with the anti-protestantism, Miller?

"[I]nerrancy becomes equally queer when ... Christians have been hearing a bunk passage read from the lectionary and expounded from the pulpit for centuries."

Just because there are obvious suspect passages like John 7:53ff. and the famous 1 John 5:7f. and Mark 16:9ff. based on the manuscript evidence doesn't "bunkify" the rest of John, 1 John or Mark anymore than the selectivity exercised by lectors in churches for 1,900 years has.

No one suggests Matthew 10:23 isn't original to Matthew just because it's avoided by the church like the plague.

Peter Leithart Hates America And The Protestantism Which Gave Birth To It

 

Where else? In "grace and cooperation with grace" First Things, here:

The Reformation isn’t over. But Protestantism is, or should be.

Protestantism is a negative theology ... 

Mainline churches are nearly bereft of “Protestants.” ...

Though it agrees with the original Protestant protest, Reformational catholicism is defined as much by the things it shares with Roman Catholicism as by its differences. Its existence is not bound up with finding flaws in Roman Catholicism. ...

Protestantism has had a good run. It remade Europe and made America. It inspired global missions, soup kitchens, church plants, and colleges in the four corners of the earth. But the world and the Church have changed, and Protestantism isn’t what the Church, including Protestants themselves, needs today. It’s time to turn the protest against Protestantism and to envision a new way of being heirs of the Reformation, a new way that happens to conform to the original Catholic vision of the Reformers.

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Flattery will get you nowhere, Peter.

"By definition, Roman Catholic is an oxymoron."