Approaches to History.

This essay raises an interesting perspective on the Reformation's relationship to history.

The traditional Protestant perspective is that Protestantism is a return to the sources ("ad fontes"); Protestantism scrubs off the barnacles that attached themselves to Christianity during the nebulously defined "Middle Ages." As such, Protestantism is the historic Christianity.

The problem with that approach is that anyone who studies Christian history discovers that the further they go back, the more Christian history looks Catholic/Orthodox. At the beginning of the Second Century, St. Ignatius is talking about the pre-eminence of bishops. St. Clement refers to apostolic succession in the 80s or 90s A.D. The best case scenario for Protestantism is that their "primitive Christianity" lasted for a four week period sometime in 33 AD. The worst case is that it is "turtles all the way down."

So, what do you do about that?

One approach, which I've noted in these pages, is to ignore history. For many people, history a foreign country indeed, and too many people think the Dark Ages ended shortly before they entered High School. The Protestant contribution is to imagine a kind of ahistorical "Bible Time" and then jump forward to today.

The essay argues that some historically-aware Protestants are taking a different approach:

In singing the praises of Protestantism, Leithart repeatedly does so not on the basis of its dedication to a return ad fontes, but because it represents a newer, better, more evolved form of the Church. He admiringly quotes 19th century Calvinist theologian Philip Schaff (one of the coiners of the phrase Reformed Catholic, though certainly not quite in Leithart’s camp) when he says that the “Reformation is the legitimate offspring, the greatest act of the Catholic Church.”

Thus, the partisans of Reformed Catholicity have lit upon a new way for the Protestant to deal with Christian history. The old way was to dismiss it all as so much apostasy. The most common way is simply to be ignorant of it. (“I don’t believe in history,” a fellow priest’s Baptist mother once told him. I don’t believe they’re related to the Fords, however.) And now we have a new way: Christian history is legitimate, but the Church has been improving over time, and Protestant denominationalism is in fact a higher and better version of the Church.

If you think about it, I believe that this really is the only way to hold on both to denominationalism (multiple, competing, contradictory doctrines and communions who are somehow all legitimately the Church) and keeping any semblance of historical integrity. After all, the arguments for apostasy are pretty watery. Once you accept the canon of the New Testament (and most Great Apostasy advocates do), you then have the sticky problem of dealing with all that liturgy and sacraments and bishops and such that seem to dominate the world that canonized the Bible. (One way to get around that problem is to take Joseph Smith’s approach: God gave me new revelation, and the old one was probably always corrupted, anyway. This is actually getting more common these days than we might like to think.)

I really have to hand it to these guys, because this is an ingenious way of dealing with all this data—you get to hang on to your own denominational (or non-denominational) loyalties, recognize those whose doctrines oppose yours as true Christians, and also subsume into your own legitimacy the Christianity of the past. You can even quote the Fathers and stir in a little of their liturgy into your otherwise bare walls echoing with sermons!

Never mind that historic Christianity still actually exists in “earlier forms of the church” whose membership represents the vast majority of living Christians. You can dismiss them as “childish.”

But that’s not the deep problem in this historiographical scheme. The deep problem is twofold. The first is the problem of knowledge: How am I supposed to know the truth? If the Church is always evolving (the real semper reformanda?), how can I be sure I’m actually on the Way? How am I to know that Reformed Catholicity is actually a better, legitimate offspring, “the greatest act of the Catholic Church,” and not just an egg it laid that turned out to be a dud? How do I know that that which has survived (for now) is really the fittest?

The essay is spot on about the attempt to dismiss the early church as "childish." A while ago, Parchment and Pen put up a blog post which made literally that argument, while providing the following illustration:

Likewise, the post-modern, evolutionary approach can be seen in Alister McGrath's "Christianity's Dangerous Idea," which argues that since "private interpretation" is Christianity's "dangerous idea," the advantage that Protestantism has is that it can be anything at all. To quote my review:

McGrath recognizes that "private interpretation" means that there is no teaching that cannot be made Protestant, so he decides to make a virtue of a necessity and decide that this diversity is a really good thing and the strength of Protestantism. As the book progressed, I started to wonder if the "dangerous idea was "the priesthood of all believers" and the fact that Protestantism disclaimed the existence of a "spiritual elite." p. 233. But, again, this is an idea that is honored in the breach by several of the main iterations of Protestantism, such as the Reformed wing, which taught that the 5th Commandment's injunction to love and honor one's father and mother applied to one's pastor. p. 293.

The "dangerous idea" seems to be the formless, protean essence of Protestantism. According to McGrath, historically, there was not a single Protestantism; Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anabaptism had separate origins and distinctive and contradictory beliefs. What held the Protestantisms together was the fact that they were not Catholic. (p. 132 ("Historically, Protestantism has always needed an "other," an external threat or enemy ,imagined or real, to hold itself together as a movement."

McGrath goes so far as to question whether essential Protestant distinctive such as Sola Fide and the inerrancy of the Bible may not be required doctrines in Protestantism. See p. 250 - 251. McGrath notes that the Protestant commitment to reassessing doctrines in the light of social development has led to "sea changes" in interpretation. For example, early Protestants held to a belief that the "great commission" of Matthew 28:19 to take the Gospel to the ends of the Earth had ended with the apostles. p. 176, 225. This understanding was reversed in the Nineteenth Century. Similarly, early Protetants held to "cessationism" which taught that the gifts of the Holy Spirit ended with the Apostles, but, again, in the 20th Century, with the rise of Pentecostalism, this doctrine too has been reversed.

So, it isn't clear that Protestantism has any particular core of doctrine. Even the adherence to the Trinity is questioned by "oneness Pentecostals." p. 434. Can we say even that the adherence to the Bible only is a core Protestant idea in light of the fact that, according to McGrath, the rise of science was a principally Protestant undertaking engaged in by people who wanted to interpret the "book of words" (the Bible) through the "book of works (nature) as Calvin proposed. p. 373 - 375. Ultimately, what is left of Protestantism, according to McGrath is a commitment to the idea that "all interpretations of the Bible must be regarded as provisional, not final." p. 377. This leaves Protestantism with nothing but a method and the core of Protestantism is the tautology that ends the book, "We have seen that Protestantism possesses a unique and innate capacity for innovation, renewal and reform based on its own internal resources. The future of Protestantism lies precisely in Protestantism being what Protestantism actually is."

Whatever that happens to be.

All in all, this approach seems to be more about making lemons into lemonade, than dealing with history.