Friday, August 9, 2019

Karen Armstrong on the Reformers and their Disagreements


As far as I can ascertain, I am the Latter-day Saint apologist who has written the most against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. See, for e.g., my lengthy essay:


In a recent book by Karen Armstrong, in the chapter “Sola Scriptura,” she wrote the following, which shows how, in spite of the so-called perspicuity of scripture and other tenets the Reformers and their followers accepted, they were more than willing to condemn each other with an anathema for disagreeing on issues such as the nature of the Eucharist as well as physically persecute Anabaptists for daring to reject infant baptism, and so forth:

The Reformation, it has been said, signalled a resurgence of the left hemisphere of the brain, which, as we have seen, had begun in Europe during the thirteenth century. The Eucharistic quarrels represented a flight from the metaphorical to a literalistic mode of thought. The reformers were grappling with the implausible doctrine of transubstantiation, an unhappy attempt by medieval theologians to make sense of the Eucharist in Aristotelian terms, which was never accepted by Greek Christian. IT claimed that when the priest spoke the words of consecration, the ‘substance’ (the underlying reality) of the bread and wine literally because the body and blood of Christ, while leaving their ‘accidents’ (their outward appearance) intact.

Transubstantiation represented an ‘unskilful’ flight from metaphor, the natural model of expression of the brain’s right hemisphere which sees the interconnectedness of things. Metaphor links the whole of one thing with the whole of another so that we see both differently. When we can a man a wolf, the wolf becomes more human and a man more animal, and when we say that a human being is divine, we gain a new understanding of both humanity and divinity. The metaphoric insight occurs before the information is processed in the left hemisphere. Traditional Catholic ritual was deliberately metaphorical, implicit and indecipherable, enabling participants tacitly to glimpse the unity of reality. The Reformation, however, heralded the triumph of the written Word and a preference for clarity and definition. Christ’s words would not mean that the bread could only be a loaf—a mode of thought that resulted in an emphasis on the word rather than the image, on the literal rather than the metaphorical, and an insistence on the explicit meaning of scripture. Instead of ‘cracking open’ the words of scripture to glimpse something Beyond, like Ambrose of Milan, the reformers abandoned the traditional four ‘senses’, focusing instead on the literal, historical reading. Allegory was permitted only if it did not jeopardise the plain meaning of the text—a decision that would subject the Western Christians mind to a tension that would soon become intolerable.

The new literalism was also evident in the reformers’ vehement disagreement about infant baptism, which the Anabaptists, the more radical reformers, claimed was ‘unscriptural’. True, there was no explicit mention of this practice in the New Testament, but it had been accepted, for different reasons, by both Eastern and Western Christians who had felt free to improvise and innovate. But the reformers debated this issue with an anger and self-righteousness that embedded them in the ego that the art of scripture obliged them to transcend. Konrad Grebel denounced the baptism of children as ‘a senseless, blasphemous abomination, against all scripture’, while Felix Mantz declared that it was ‘against God, an insult to Christ, and a trampling underfoot of his own true eternal word’. For Hans Hut it was an immoral ‘defrauding of simple people, a cunning trick on all Christendom, and an arch-rogue’s cover for all the godless’, while Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine monk condemned it as ‘the pope’s greatest and first abomination’.

The reformers seem to have forgotten Valla’s warning about the fallibility of proof texts: the warring parties all cited scriptural maxims to incriminate their opponents, who, of course, hurled back other texts to endorse their own position . . . .The Reformers all revered Augustine, but seem to have forgotten his insistence that scripture taught nothing but charity. ‘Beware of Zwingli and avoid his books as the hellish poison of Satan,’ Luther warned his colleagues, ‘for the man is completely perverted and has completely lost Christ’.

Luther claimed that the Bible had only one meaning. ‘In the whole of scripture, there is nothing else but Christ, either in plain words or involved words’. But he soon became aware that some books of the Bible were more Christological than others. His solution was to create a ‘canon within the canon’, privileging books that supported his own theology. Here he clashed with the Wittenberg theologian Andreas Karlstadt, who objected strongly to Luther’s marginalisation of the Epistle of James which challenged his doctrine of justification by faith alone. ‘Take the case, my brothers, of someone who has never done a single good act but claims that he has faith. Will that faith save him’ James had asked. Could faith save a man who did nothing to help those who lacked the necessities of life? ‘If good works do not go with it’, James had concluded, faith is ‘quite dead’. (Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts [London: The Bodley Head, 2019], 304-5)