Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World - Softcover

Ryrie, Alec

 
9780735222823: Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0735222827 ISBN 13: 9780735222823
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s theses, a landmark history of the revolutionary faith that shaped the modern world. 

"Ryrie writes that his aim 'is to persuade you that we cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.' To which I reply: Mission accomplished."
–Jon Meacham, author of American Lion and Thomas Jefferson

Five hundred years ago a stubborn German monk challenged the Pope with a radical vision of what Christianity could be. The revolution he set in motion toppled governments, upended social norms and transformed millions of people's understanding of their relationship with God. In this dazzling history, Alec Ryrie makes the case that we owe many of the rights and freedoms we have cause to take for granted--from free speech to limited government--to our Protestant roots.

Fired up by their faith, Protestants have embarked on courageous journeys into the unknown like many rebels and refugees who made their way to our shores. Protestants created America and defined its special brand of entrepreneurial diligence. Some turned to their bibles to justify bold acts of political opposition, others to spurn orthodoxies and insight on their God-given rights. Above all Protestants have fought for their beliefs, establishing a tradition of principled opposition and civil disobedience that is as alive today as it was 500 years ago. In this engrossing and magisterial work, Alec Ryrie makes the case that whether or not you are yourself a Protestant, you live in a world shaped by Protestants.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alec Ryrie was born in London and grew up in Washington DC. He graduated from Cambridge University with a double First in History and received a doctorate in Theology from Oxford University. He is now Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and a licensed minister in his local church. An expert on the Reformation in England and Scotland, he is the author of the prizewinning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain and The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England and is co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

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Chapter 1

Luther and the Fanatics

If God be for us, who can be against us?

    -Romans 8:31

Everyone knew how it was supposed to end. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, headed on earth by the bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter and vicar of Christ, had endured in Europe for over a thousand years. Nothing survives that long by accident. For Christians in the early sixteenth century who reflected on that astonishing fact, the explanation was obvious. This was no human institution. It was the visible Body of its founder, guided by the Holy Spirit. It would outlast this fading world and the carping of its critics, enduring forever to God's glory.

Nowadays, we prefer more mundane explanations. Catholic Christendom was flexible and creative, a walled garden with plenty of scope for novelty and variety, and room to adapt to changing political, social, and economic climates. But it also had boundaries, marked and unmarked. Those who wandered too far would be urged, and if necessary forced, to come back.

So if a professor at a small German university questioned an archbishop's fund-raising practices, there was a limited range of possible outcomes. The archbishop might ignore it or quietly concede the point. Or the professor might be induced to back down, by one means or another. If none of this happened, the matter would be contested on a bigger stage. Perhaps one party or the other in the debate would persuade his opponent to agree with him. Or, more likely, the process would be mired in procedure until the protagonists gave up or died. But if it reached an impasse, the troublesome professor would eventually be ordered to give way. In the unlikely event that he refused, the only recourse was the law, leading to the one outcome that nobody wanted: he could be executed as an impenitent heretic, in a fire that would purge Christendom of his errors and symbolize the hell to which he had willfully condemned himself.

This system had worked for centuries. But in 1517, when that professor, Martin Luther, challenged Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, his challenge instead kindled a series of increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that swept away many of the Catholic Church's ancient structures and its walls. We call this firestorm the Reformation and the new form, or forms, of Christianity that emerged from it Protestantism.

This was not what Luther had intended. When he voiced his local protest, he was not trying to start a fire. He was working out the implications of his own recent spiritual breakthrough and trying to start an argument about it. It turned out that those implications reached much further than either he or his opponents initially imagined. Once the smoke began to clear, they were forced to realize that they were in a new world.

The Call of Reform

With hindsight, we can see that Luther's fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the church.

Churches always need reform. They are staffed by human beings, some of whom will inevitably be fools, knaves, or merely incompetents. The church of the later Middle Ages was no more "corrupt" than usual, and in many ways much less so. Yet three problems converged to make it appear worse than it was: money, power, and high principle.

The Western church was very rich. It had to be; it was responsible for a continental network of parish priests, church buildings, and monastic houses, supported by an international bureaucracy of unparalleled sophistication, and these things do not come cheap. It had to preserve its political independence in a dangerous world, which meant choosing leaders of royal and noble stock. These were men-and some women, the great abbesses-whose dignity and effectiveness in their offices depended on maintaining the high courtly style to which they had been born.

Yet this was also an age that actively valued poverty, lauding it as a positive virtue like no Christian society before or since. The ideal late medieval cleric was a friar, who was forbidden even to touch money and who was supposed not even to own the rough clothes on his back. The contrast between that ideal and the church's corporate wealth was disturbing. Surely all that money must be corrupting? Once, as a rueful proverb had it, golden priests had served from wooden chalices; now wooden priests served from golden chalices. Every time the church extracted rents, tithes, or other payments from its flock, it fed a resentment that went beyond ordinary taxpayers' grumbles. And when there were real or perceived financial abuses, the gap between high ideals and sordid reality yawned dangerously wide. Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.

Then there was power. Back in the eleventh century, the popes had wriggled free from political control and established a vigilantly guarded independence. By the fifteenth century, they had quietly dropped some of their more startling claims. In theory, they were lords of Christendom, able to depose kings and demand universal obedience, but they knew not to push their luck. They had never really recovered from the ghastly schism of 1378-1417, when Europe was split between first two and then three rival popes. The schism was ended by a great reforming church council, which seemed to promise an era of renewal-a hope that slowly evaporated over the following decades, leaving a residue of bitterness. By 1500, virtually all Western Christians acknowledged the papacy, but they were not proud of it. Eye-popping tales were told about Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1501 supposedly held an orgy in the papal apartments for his son, to which he invited fifty chosen prostitutes and select senior clerics. True or not, it was widely believed.

Inadequate leadership and financial corruption make a dangerous mix. All the more so in the loose confederation of German, and other, north-central European territories known misleadingly as the Holy Roman Empire. The rivalry between popes and emperors was ancient, and as the papal court became dominated almost exclusively by Italians after the schism, it seemed increasingly foreign north of the Alps. National stereotypes came into play. Germans were, in their own minds, bluff, honest, easily duped, but firm in the defense of the right. Italians, by contrast, were scheming, malevolent, effeminate, avaricious, and cowardly. So when a German friar accused Italians of extortion and tyranny, German ears were ready to hear him.

There was also a matter of principle at stake. As well as some memorable popes, the Renaissance gave Western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, "to the sources," an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth. By 1500, this fashion for antiquity was sweeping into every field of knowledge. Renaissance linguists tried to recover the glories of Cicero. Renaissance generals tried, with dubious success, to remodel their armies as Roman legions. The problem with the ancient world was that it happened a long time ago, and reconstructing it involved guesswork. But late medieval Europeans never doubted that it had been a world of pristine perfection. They measured their own...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735222827
ISBN 13 
9780735222823
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
527
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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