A Post-Christendom Faith

The Long Battle for the Human Soul

Philip A. Rolnick

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781481308922
• eBook ISBN: 9781481308946
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Confronted by multiple religious possibilities, the rise of atheistic naturalism, and moral relativism, one can easily become perplexed about what matters most--or be tempted to conclude that nothing could matter most. As the first volume of A Post-Christendom Faith, a set of three interrelated theological works, The Long Battle for the Human Soul examines major historical developments that have led to our contemporary confusion--so that we might chart a way forward.

Philip Rolnick begins with a theological assessment of the Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution, three movements that attempted, and to some degree accomplished, basic reformulations of humanity. After the shock of the Reformation, with its faith-based criticism, the Enlightenment's reason-based criticism more or less set faith aside. The radical nature of Enlightenment criticism in turn led to the radical anthropological reformulations of the French Revolution--and then devolved into the Terror. Separated from Christian faith, and oftentimes fiercely opposing it, early forms of secular humanism poured their energies into reshaping social and political structures, while the crescendo of critique profoundly altered the spiritual landscape of the West. With foundational certainties shattered, new movements arose that pulled in different directions, some of them dangerous and deadly. Rolnick maps this fracturing through Feuerbach's atheism, the excesses of Romantic literature, the rise of nihilism, the "moral inversion" of Marxism, Comte's positivism, and Nietzsche's all-out war against Christianity.

In this story of broken foundations, Rolnick is careful to show that the church and the gospel have never ceased to offer a very different foundation--trustworthy and eternally enduring. This first volume ends on a hopeful note, turning from the problematic humanism of recent centuries to a humanism grounded in incarnational faith. Its christological reflection looks beyond brokenness and toward the one who has never ceased restoring human wholeness.

1

Critical Turns

Reformation, Enlightenment, and Revolution

Why is it so hard to believe in God in (many milieux of) the modern West, while in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to?

Charles Taylor

Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.

Immanuel Kant

To laicize the Gospel, to keep the human aspirations of Christianity but do away with Christ—is not all this the whole essence of the Revolution? . . . It was Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] who completed that amazing performance.

Jacques Maritain

But if it was a time of freedom and hope, it was also a time of illusion.

Christopher Dawson on the French Revolution1

There are numerous ways to understand the prodigious changes over the last five hundred years in the West, but from a theological, religious point of view, the Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution stand out as turning points. Each of these historical events has in common a radical critique of authority, whether of the churcha or of political, social, or economic affairs. From the early 1500s to the end of the eighteenth century, there was a crescendo of critique: the Reformation’s faith-based criticism in turn led to the Enlightenment’s reason-based criticism, which in turn led to the radical reformulations and dramatic events of the French Revolution.

While Catholics and Protestant Reformers still agreed that human identity is determined in relation to God, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution moved toward exclusively humanistic self-understandings, toward understanding humanity and its undertakings apart from God. In a broad, social sense, attempting to understand the world and humanity apart from God was unprecedented. This secularized humanism directed its attention to the immanent, tangible experience of nature and human society. It tended to leave aside or overtly reject the transcendent. Instead of understanding humanity as made in the image of God, a self-understanding that combines transcendence and immanence, secular humanism focused solely on the immanent, pouring its energy into reshaping social and political structures.

Over a little less than a three-hundred-year period, the West successively underwent the earthshaking developments of the Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution. The Reformation was begun as an effort to restore Christian faith; the Enlightenment and the Revolution were, generally speaking, attempts to break away from Christian faith. At the onset of the Reformation, for many centuries the church had been the most perduring, most central, and most important institution of the Western world. Once its structural unity was broken, other kinds of breakage, once unthinkable, would follow—the progressive dismantlings of the Enlightenment and the Revolution.

Reformation

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire (often dated as AD 476), with the progressive weakness of Rome’s secular authorities, the bishops of Rome took on much of the ruling authority of the capital city. By the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590–604), responsibility for social, economic, and political questions had fallen upon church leadership; and by the mid-eighth century, the bishops of Rome actually became rulers of entire Italian territories, the Papal States. Amid the catastrophic upheavals of barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, and then again of Viking, Magyar, and Muslim invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the church provided stability and a path forward. Repeatedly, as Thomas E. Woods observes, in times of widespread destruction, “The Church, as the educator of Europe, was the one light that survived.”2

Nevertheless, over the following centuries, as its medieval bureaucracy extended, the church often faltered in its attempt to live up to Jesus’ vision. In historian Brad S. Gregory’s assessment, “The church as a whole and in practice never closely resembled the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus, despite the way in which late medieval theologians self-flatteringly tended to identify the two. In fact, by the fourteenth century, the more the church lengthened its bureaucratic reach and influence, the less did it look like the kingdom.”3 For the church, the danger was that involvements of secondary import, valuable as they may have been, could divert the body of Christ from its greater and primary purpose.

As early as the twelfth century, with Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), and continuing all the way up to Martin Luther (1483–1546), devout voices rose up to protest the discrepancy between the church’s sacred calling and its actual state. Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) called for the church to yield its secular power. John Wyclif and John Hus contrasted the very imperfect reality of the visible church to the true, invisible church of Christ.4 In 1512, just before the strife with Luther, Giles of Viterbo, leader of the Augustinian order, opened the Fifth Lateran Council by declaring that the problem was not what was being taught, but rather that so many were not living up to Christ’s teachings.5 From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, earnest Reformers attempted to awaken leaders and laity to their calling; and especially during the fifteenth century, there was a period of growing lay devotion.

By contrast, the popes immediately preceding Luther’s times simply failed to recognize the sacred responsibility of their office. They instead indulged in “venality, luxury, and blatant violations of Christian morality at the papal court.”6 Unfortunately, this papal failure was in various ways shared by many cardinals, bishops, and priests. Burdened with these flaws of leadership, the church was vulnerable to the extremely serious challenge that Luther would bring.

Luther was a gifted Augustinian monk trained by the church in biblical languages. In 1517 he posted ninety-five theses about the nature of faith and church practice, a kind of challenge that was in those days not uncommon. But as his theses were disputed, something quite uncommon came to pass: his criticism of church teaching and practice became a revolt against church authority. Luther did not originally intend to break the unity of the Western church and start a church of his own; but when the controversy reached a breaking point, he refused to recant and refused to be silenced. With the support and protection of various German princes, the Protestant Reformation was launched.

Our present task is not to adjudicate Lutheran or Catholic theology or their differing understandings of church practices. Our more modest (and irenic) task is merely to recognize the cataclysmic effects of this unexpected and, at least at first, involuntary shattering of the church’s unity.

Unintended Consequences

In the West, once a second Christian church had been established, even within Luther’s lifetime other Protestant movements arose that opposed both Catholicism and Luther. All the non-Catholic Reformers agreed on the basic principle of sola scriptura, but intractable problems arose in how to interpret scripture. Attempts to solve disputes by appealing to the guidance of the Holy Spirit made disagreements more heated, since neither party was likely to own that it was not inspired by the Holy Spirit. All Protestant groups agreed in refusing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, but they could not agree about eucharist, baptism, and social/political engagement. Having discarded the authority of Rome, there was no way to adjudicate disagreements. Hostilities among Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Mennonite, and other smaller sects became intense, as did opposition between Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, one of the most vigorous and powerful of the early Reformers. When Zwingli wrote, “I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced it,” Luther replied, “Beware of Zwingli and avoid his books as the hellish poison of Satan . . . , for the man is completely perverted . . . and has completely lost Christ.”7 The times were polemical and dangerous; it was easy to be exiled or to lose one’s life for one’s beliefs. Nuance, tolerance, and striving to hear the other’s point of view were not the order of the day.

One of the most regrettable outcomes was an insoluble hyperpluralism that has never gone away.8 Disagreements arose about whether doctrinal truth claims even mattered, as some would-be prophets and “spiritualists” thoroughly relativized the place of doctrine.9 Disparity of religious belief in turn bred fierce social, political, and economic disagreements. The roots of our current relativism were established, as the highly contentious, pluralist environment led to the question that still remains: Who’s to say who’s right?

Luther’s rebellion against church authority all too quickly led to a different kind of conflict, the Peasant Rebellion of 1524–1525. While Luther recognized that the peasants had some just complaints, he had no love for radicals or revolutionaries. He commendably attempted to broker a peaceful resolution to the conflict between tens of thousands of German peasants, the landed aristocracy, and wealthy merchants. When his efforts to achieve peace failed, Luther felt that order had to be restored. He then advised the rulers to take strong measures to suppress the rebellion, and they did.10 The ensuing battles went badly for the peasants, with over 100,000 killed. In Protestant lands, a new policy of church/state relations was established that implemented Luther’s views of the relation between the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms.11

In addition to the Peasant Rebellion, a series of other wars broke out among Protestant and Catholic rulers, as well as between Protestants. In the late 1520s and early 1530s in Switzerland, Catholic and Protestant forces clashed. In 1547 the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V, defeated the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League but then later suffered reverses, which led to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, an arrangement that pleased neither side but did manage an uneasy peace. Between 1562 and 1598 French Huguenots and Catholics fought eight civil wars, with religious riots often erupting in between and sporadic hostilities lasting until 1629. In 1566, the Dutch rebelled against the Spanish Catholic Philip II’s efforts against heresy, with these hostilities lasting until 1648. In the 1640s in England, Puritan resistance to the Anglican Charles I, in addition to other issues of governance, led to two civil wars. Between 1618 and 1648 much of Europe was afflicted by the Thirty Years War, a complicated affair that involved Catholic versus Protestant as well as various opportunistic reaches for land and power. At the end, besides other European devastation, almost one-third of the German people had perished. The intensity of religious and political disagreement led to warfare, the extensive scope of which was unprecedented in European history.12

The formal treaty that ended the Thirty Years War established territorial linkages of church and political authority, both in Catholic lands like Bavaria and in what would be recognized as Protestant lands like Prussia. The formula first used at the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, cuius regio, eius religio (whose region, his religion), now provided a more permanent territorial solution, the establishment of confessional states.

In these confessional regimes, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, or Anglican, political rulers sanctioned and enforced church doctrine in their respective territories. This concentrated amalgam of church and state provided publicly held expectations of religious belief and morality as well as political obedience. However, the destabilizing problem was that each confessional state had its share of religious dissenters; and under the fusion of church and state, dissenters were often, in one way or another, persecuted.13 Perhaps a political realm can continue indefinitely with coerced uniformity, but to Jesus’ followers, being the partner of coercion will sooner or later prove offensive. The establishment of confessional states may have been the best stopgap solution to chaos and warfare, but the internal contradiction of confessional states would become the target of severe critique. The freedom of the citizens of Christ’s kingdom cannot sit comfortably with the coercion of the state. The goal of preserving Christianity as a shared way of life is better relinquished than pursued by force.

The dissonant multiplicity of Christian truth claims led some to question if any of the claims were true. Given the disparity among Christian groups, the exercise of private judgment could claim new validity not previously on offer. With multiple and proliferating church beliefs, it was almost inevitable that individuals would also proliferate their own subjective beliefs, including the belief that God did not exist, or that if there is a God, we cannot know anything true about this Deity.

Criticizing the church from within the church, the Reformation was the first epochal event of criticism. After this critical turn, religious divisions were permanently established, a new map was required, and the hope of quickly reuniting the church was gone. Luther’s dispute with church authority began as a substantive disagreement about the nature of faith, an intramural religious argument. But by its end, the dispute splintered the church’s unity, and questions about faith, political rule, and their interrelationship spread. The ugliness of protracted warfare led to the fitful arrangement of territorial confessional states, whose internal inconsistencies would soon enough lead to additional religious and societal breakages, as increasingly harsh criticism of the authority of the church—and of w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Critical Turns
• 2. Descent into Darkness
• 3. Endeavors in Darkness I
• 4. Endeavors in Darkness II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture