Quit Blaming Luther for the Ills of Today

 

…a straight, unqualified line of transition between the nominalism of the via moderna and the Reformation must be challenged…

The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, by Matthew Barrett

I have been somewhat guilty of accepting this line myself, while at the same time seeing some of the fallacies that such a simple connection presents.  Barrett, in this introduction, will summarize that which he will describe in further detail in later chapters.

What is the simple connection?  Luther to Reformation to nominalism to secularism to modernism to post-modernism.  In other words, it was the schism of the Reformation that set the West on its destructive course, the fruits of which we have seen in the twentieth century wars and “isms” and the insanity of which we see today.

What is the standard narrative?  Combine the priesthood of all believers with sola scriptura and you create individual Christians each with his own reality.  It was not only a revolutionary idea; it inspired revolution.  Further, even the label “Protestant” reveals a fixation on a protest, a discontinuity that is destructive for Christianity – its past, present and future. 

Let’s see how Barrett unpacks and deconstructs this.  He first points to the reality that the move toward nominalism began well before the Reformation and well within the Roman Church – beginning with Duns Scotus and culminating with the via moderna of William of Ockham in the fourteenth century and Gabriel Biel in the fifteenth century.

The via moderna was a reaction against the via Antigua (old way), especially as it was embodied in Thomas Aquinas.

Out with universals, in with nominalism.  The realist metaphysic that explained how reality participates in the likeness of God and that could trace itself from the Cappadocians to Augustine, and from Boethius to Aquinas, was out – and it was sent packing by the scholastics within the Roman Church.

Ockham considered universals illogical.  …his nominalism redirected attention away from universals to individual objects.

Therefore, at least some blame for the advent of modernity rests here.  But this does not yet absolve the Reformers from the possibility that they were carrying this virus.  Did they run with this notion?  To answer “yes” is too simplistic; the path is both complicated and variegated.  Barrett offers a few reasons why this is so:

First, the secularization narrative’s categories are not nuanced enough.

Yes, the Reformers reacted against Rome, and did so via a strong polemic.  Accused of dualism: church vs. state, God’s agency vs. human agency, sacred vs. secular, etc.  But, citing Horton, such a charge assumes too much:

The “charge assumes that distinctions are separations, which is certainly not characteristic of the Lutheran or Reformed treatment of these topics.”

In later chapters, Barrett will argue that the German Reformation started because Martin Luther revolted against Ockham and Biel’s voluntaristic, nominalist justification theology.  And Luther would come to believe more and more, with each passing year, that his protest put him in continuity with the church catholic – the historic church and the historic traditions.

Second, the secularization narrative fails to consider the Reformation’s relationship to classical theism and its orthodoxy…

The first generation of Reformers didn’t abandon the realist metaphysic of the via antqua – they didn’t even address such matters.  Yes, Luther would make sweeping condemnations of scholastic metaphysics, but in each case his comments were addressing a specific something or someone.

As to the second generation of Reformers, they did not jettison a classical theology, nor did they leave behind Thomas.  Yes, they criticized the angelic doctor regarding infused righteousness and transubstantiation, but there were numerous other ways in which they were influenced by and even indebted to Aquinas.

One such area was metaphysics and its consequences for theology, as they aligned themselves with Thomas’s realist paradigm of participation…

The historian Richard Muller would make a sweeping examination of several Reformed Scholastics: Zanchi, Daneau, Beza, Keckerman, Crakanthorpe, Timpler, Maccovius, and others.  He finds nothing of Scotus in these thinkers, instead finding positive interest in Thomist thought.

Both Luther and Calvin were, in fact, hostile to the nominalists that they confronted – in Luther’s case, to Ockham and Biel; in Calvin’s case, to those found at the Sorbonne.

Conclusion

…advocates of the secularization narrative must explain why Luther is a carrier of nominalist voluntarism when his spirituality is reliant on the realist metaphysic of Christian Platonism in a way not all that different from Augustine.

I must say, I didn’t expect Barrett’s book to dive into this specific topic – one so near to my heart.  Yet he does so, almost immediately.  And it appears it will be the focus of his first few chapters.

Epilogue

Barrett closes this section with the issue of union with Christ – what the East would call theosis, and Rome would call divinization. 

…Julie Canlis writes, Calvin “makes both the goal and means of the Christian life to be participatory communion.”

Calvin would engage with sources including Irenaeus, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria, and offer that grace fulfills nature such that believers may “participate in God.”

Far from abandoning the concept of participation, a number of Calvin scholars now recognize that union with Christ is an essential motif for a Reformation vision of the entire Christian faith.

Which, as I have noted before on other topics and even on this specific topic, is just one more man-made distinction for a reason to invent cause to divide the Church.  Call it theosis, call it divinization, call it becoming more Christ-like, call it union with Christ.  If there are any differences in such terms, the nuance is so exceedingly subtle as to be meaningless to the overwhelming majority of believers.