Disentangling the myths of the Reformation

Disentangling the myths of the Reformation 

The Tablet

25 October 2017 | by Alexandra Walsham Five hundred years ago an obscure Augustinian monk in the small university town of Wittenberg carried out an act of protest that is widely recognised as a watershed in western European history. Though scholars now debate what exactly took place on 31 October 1517, the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses against indulgences and the papacy’s power to pardon sin to the door of the castle church has acquired a pivotal place in the historical imagination. It has become a shorthand for the beginning of the movement that we call the Reformation.

The mythology of enlightenment and progress that still clusters around that moment half a millennium ago is a flattering projection of the values our society claims to hold dear: freedom of conscience, reason, and principled resistance to corruption and tyranny. It has helped to create a vision of the Middle Ages as a period blighted by superstition, intolerance and fear. Whether we are atheists or people of faith, professional historians or members of the general public, this is a story that has helped to shape our culture and outlook.
The big birthday that the Reformation is celebrating this year may even help to entrench this further. Many of the commemorative events that are being organised across the globe are being conducted in a spirit
of ecumenical understanding. Much of the literature that is flooding from the presses is subjecting enduring and confessionally coloured legends about the Reformation to critical scrutiny. Some have made the very invention of this tradition the subject of sophisticated investigation.
Yet there is a distinct danger that the anniversary is serving to perpetuate a Luther-centred version of Reformation history, along with its attendant myths. It is arguably eclipsing the significance of initiatives and impulses that did not have their taproot in Wittenberg in the autumn of 1517. In short, it is encouraging us to remember some dimensions of the Reformation at the expense of others.
In England, this anniversary of the Lutherjahr, like its predecessors in 1617, 1717, 1817 and 1917, has been comparatively subdued. There has been a late surge of activity in the lead-up to 31 October, but it cannot be denied that the event which allegedly took place on that date lacks the resonance in Britain that it has elsewhere. Luther may be a household name, but he does not occupy centre stage in accounts of the idiosyncratic version of Reformation that changed religious life in England for ever after Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.
This is partly because Lutheranism was only one phase in the somewhat haphazard and protracted process by which England became a Protestant nation. But the illicit Lutheran books and biblical translations that were smuggled across the Channel did help to sow the seeds for a grass-roots movement.
Despite Henry VIII’s own learned Latin attack on the teachings of the Wittenberg friar, published by the king in 1521, Luther’s agendas did leave their mark on the legislation laying out a programme for liturgical and ecclesiastical reform, and on the government propaganda that justified Henry’s claim to royal supremacy over the Church and the largest land-grab in this country’s history, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. They also helped to bolster his sense of himself as a godly monarch following in the footsteps of the Old Testament kings of old.
With the accession of his evangelically inclined son Edward VI, however, the theological centre of gravity of the English Reformation shifted in a decidedly Swiss direction. The infant Church of England increasingly took its bearings from reformers other than Luther – from Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, and from exiles such as Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli who found asylum in Cambridge and Oxford during this period.
In the cities in which English Protestants themselves sought refuge during the reign of Mary I, including Frankfurt and Geneva, they in turn were exposed to a new set of influences emanating from John Calvin, which left their imprint on the religious settlement of 1559. The “strange death of Lutheran England” of which some historians speak was the product of swirling political, dynastic and ecclesiastical contingencies that collectively reset the compass of Protestantism in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.
By the 1560s, the process by which England had cast off the papacy had already become the subject of myth-making. Tracing the origins of Protestantism back to the pristine purity of the primitive Church and heralding the heretics who had resisted its descent into “error” as heroes, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments presented the Reformation as a providential act to liberate the people from spiritual thraldom. Propelled by divine force, this was a swift and popular revolution whose success was never in doubt, for all the fires of persecution it faced.
International in scope, Foxe’s history allocated Luther’s protest a prominent place in the drama, though it distanced itself from his views on the real presence in the Eucharist. The Actes and Monuments was simultaneously an empowering patriotic narrative whose defining moment was the accession of Elizabeth I, whom it celebrated as a latter-day Constantine, even as it sought to admonish her into perfecting what Puritans regarded as a half-baked Reformation.
In time Elizabeth’s refusal to abolish the institution of episcopacy and instead to uphold a via media between Geneva and Rome became the subject of legend in its own right. With the rise of Laudianism in the 1630s, the English Reformation was recast as a movement that had only reluctantly resorted to schism and that steered a safe course between the equally pernicious extremes of popery and radical Calvinism. In this climate its Lutheran roots and legacies might be expected to have undergone a revival, but the longer-term effect of these trends was to distance English Protestantism from the sister churches on the Continent with which it had previously felt a deep sense of affinity.
Reinforced following the Restoration, the status of England’s Reformation as sui generis was never uncontested, but the myth of its unique moderation gathered strength within Anglicanism over the course of the next century and a half, reaching its peak in Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. This reinvention of the Reformation entailed forgetting the influence exerted by foreign reformers in favour of dwelling on its indigenous character.
The more radical varieties of Reformation that the Puritans and sects had striven to consummate during the English Civil War and Interregnum were likewise ones from which Martin Luther was largely excluded. In so far as he featured in this millennial vision it was as a stooge. Refashioned for the politics of the 1640s and 1650s, his Reformation simply served to underline the more far-reaching religious achievements of this revolutionary era. It was presented as merely an interim stage on a journey towards spiritual and institutional reform that would culminate with the rule of Christ on Earth.
There is a further element in the forgetting of Luther: the Catholic counter-narrative of Reformation history that began to emerge as early as the mid-sixteenth century. This, too, served to occlude his part in the process by which England had abandoned her allegiance to Rome, seeing Lutheran ideas as alien imports that had seduced the English people from the faith of their forefathers. Suffusing the pages of recusant history that grew out of the polemics of Nicholas Sander, Thomas Stapleton and others, this sentiment remains an undercurrent in the revisionist histories that still dominate our understanding of the Reformation.
These have also arguably had the effect of making us forget thinkers who were swept away by Luther’s ideas in favour of conservative voices who wistfully recalled a world that was lost and who, actively or passively, pushed back against Protestantism’s steady advance. To remember a time before and without Luther was – and remains – a mode of resisting the whole project of the Reformation.
The Reformation that we now remember in England is thus one in which Luther has been consigned to the margins. Devoid of much theological substance, he remains a site of memory in our society and culture. If we view the past through the prism of the present, we also view the present through the prism of the past. We see it with the aid of individuals and events to which our societies have assigned historical significance.
Luther is one such cultural matrix and icon who has proved to be a flexible and adaptable tool. He may never have nailed 95 theses to a church door on 31 October 1517 – but remembering him, and the Reformation he is credited with initiating, reminds us of how we repeatedly remake history in our own image. We must not, therefore, fall into the trap of forgetting it.
Alexandra Walsham is one of the speakers at the symposium being held on 31 October in St Margaret’s Church, Westmnster Abbey, marking the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation.