The Protestant Reformation and World Christianity

Global Perspectives

Dale T. Irvin

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467447874
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The sixteenth-century Reformation in all its forms and expressions sought nothing less than the transformation of the Christian faith. Five hundred years later, in today's context of world Christianity, the transformation continues. In this volume, editor Dale Irvin draws together a variety of international Christian perspectives that open up new understandings of the Reformation. In six chapters, contributors offer general discussions and case studies of the effects of the Protestant Reformation on global communities from the sixteenth century to the present. Together, these essays encourage a reading and interpretation of the Reformation that will aid in the further transformation of Christianity today. CONTENTS: Introduction
1. Jews and Muslims in Europe: Exorcising Prejudice against the Other Charles Amjad-Ali
2. Spaniards in the Americas: Las Casas among the Reformers Joel Morales Cruz
3. Women from Then to Now: A Commitment to Mutuality and Literacy Rebecca A. Giselbrecht
4. The Global South: The Synod of Dort on Baptizing the "Ethnics" David D. Daniels
5. The Protestant Reformations in Asia: A Blessing or a Curse? Peter C. Phan
6. The Modern Era: Contemporary Challenges in Light of the Reformation Vladimir Latinovic

1Jews and Muslims in Europe

Exorcising Prejudice against the Other

CHARLES AMJAD-ALI

As part of the 500th anniversary celebrations of Calvin’s birth in 2009, a special work of art was unveiled in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Dordrecht, the site of the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, has a special significance for Reformed theology and the Reformation itself. Here Calvinism and its classical “five points” (viz., TULIP)¹ were established as the state religion of the Netherlands over against Arminianism. The artwork was commissioned by the city from a Moroccan artist, Aziz Bekkaoui, and was titled Het Mekka van Calvijn (Calvin’s Mecca); it was a reflective glass cube apparently replicating the Ka’aba.² It displayed a link between Calvin and Islam conspicuously absent in academic works on Calvin, Reformed theology, and the Reformation in general. This monument generated deep emotions, controversy, and soul-searching in Holland (and Europe), and it produced intensely vitriolic attacks on Islam and Muslims. Calvinist identity became of critical importance in the highly secular political and sociocultural milieu of Holland. The then Prime Minister³ even confessed openly in a political speech that he was a Calvinist—this in a context where openly confessing to being a Christian is a contested public stance. One of the main questions that surfaced during this controversy was what exactly do Calvin and the Reformation have to do with Islam?

The Resurgence of Islam as Epistemological Challenge

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Islam has emerged as the new binary enemy of the West. The best-known articulation of this was Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?”⁴ Unfortunately, this phrase has since acquired ubiquity with little reflection on its historical accuracy, full meaning, and implications.⁵ In Europe especially, Islam as the new enemy of the West is highlighted regularly across newspapers and magazines, and at conferences in universities and ecclesial centers. This debate is grounded in the epistemological conviction that religion is at best a residual superstition that will be eradicated with the full flowering of science and reason, and is also the source of all conflict and violence within and between societies. It is ironical therefore that the Christian identity of the West is instantly championed whenever dealing with the “Muslim question.”⁶

As the new enemy, Islam has forced itself into political and economic arenas, as well as the sociocultural consciousness and discourse of the West. It poses a threat to Western scientific rationality and raises a question in the West about whether it should take its Christian identity seriously. Islam poses a security problem and challenges the rights-based sociopolitical achievements in the West. These standards are increasingly threatened by the reversion to a “survivalist ethics”: i.e., rights are placed in abeyance in the face of these threats. Islam also challenges the very survival of the modern Western nation-state—a product of the Reformation finalized in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).

The Het Mekka van Calvijn debate not only symbolically brought all these issues to the fore; it demanded a critical look at the Reformation in relation to Islam. Epistemologically, this issue has been consciously, almost universally, ignored. This, in spite of the perception of Islam’s widespread threat, deep impact, and major significance at the time of the Reformation. It is truly ironic given that some of the contemporary antipathy and sophistry against Islam is uncritically borrowed directly from the Reformation’s vitriol.

Crisis of Meaning and the Emergence of the New Episteme

The Reformation had world-changing consequences in Europe. It thoroughly challenged the apparently singular architectonic political system of the “Holy Roman Empire” and the determining orthodoxy of Christianity as controlled through the papacy and the Catholic Church. Their diminution led to the emergence of plurivocal religious and moral authorities. The bishops acquired local ruling ecclesial authority, while the princes acquired the power of local political “emperors,” precipitating the emergence of princely-denominational nation-states through the Treaty of Westphalia. This was achieved through the reconfirmation of the critical clause cuius regio, eius religio (whose region/realm, his religion) of the Peace of Augsburg (1555),⁷ while at the same time epistemologically claiming the separation of “Church and State.”⁸ The latter was then thrust as a requirement for acceptability and epistemological validity in the contemporary political and religious world order.

The Reformation not only had religious, theological, and spiritual dimensions but it also impacted philosophical and political discourse. Politically it led to nationalistic tendencies, and philosophically and religiously to a high individualization. These produced in their wake liberal political theory with the locus politicus tied to a vying individuality and in religion to the imperative of individual personal faith and conversion. It was a period of major rethinking, not just of existing doctrines, theology, and the understanding of Christian faith, but of the theological epistemology as well as the sociopolitical nature of the church. These positions had evolved over eleven hundred years, from the early fourth century and the Edict of Milan in 313, the subsequent “conversion of Constantine,” and finally, Christianity becoming the official imperial religion under Theodosius in 380. This sequence of events had provided the epistemological foundation for theology, ethics, social virtue, etc.

This much we learned in our theological and doctrinal formation, and in our church history. What we tend to overlook, however, is the critical role of Islam during medieval times and particularly during the Reformation.

The Emergence of Islam and Its Challenge to Christendom

Born in the early seventh century, Islam expanded rapidly and took over almost all of the biblical lands, absorbing three of the five founding patriarchates (the Pentarchy) of Christianity.⁹ It controlled most of the Mediterranean and the “Eastern” Roman Empire, as well as large portions of the “Western” Roman Empire. It occupied North Africa and ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula for eight hundred years; made forays into France and Italy; and attacked the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), finally capturing Constantinople itself in 1453.

The threat and awe of Islam was further exacerbated during the crusades, which became a self-justifying cause célèbre for Christianity and played a very significant role in most aspects of European medieval life. From their very inception, the crusades were put on a religious and spiritual footing by Urban II in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, who linked them to Christian independence struggles on the Muslim Iberian Peninsula. In brief, the Crusades were a series of Christian “holy wars,” initially between 1096 and 1270,¹⁰ against the Muslims in larger Syria and Palestine and subsequently elsewhere in the region. Steven Runciman, one of the major historians of the crusades, correctly describes them as “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.”¹¹ Others have argued that “[i]n a broad sense the Crusades were an expression of militant Christianity and European expansion.”¹² It is obvious that besides religion, there were political and economic interests at play. What is seldom mentioned is that besides killing a vast number of noncombatant Muslims, the crusades also killed a huge number of Jews in Europe along the way as well as in the Near East. These genocidal massacres were justified on the grounds that such killings were not sinful because the ones killed were not Christians but infidels (not of the faith).¹³ All this had a deep impact on the developments leading up to the Reformation.

After the euphoric success of the First Crusade, the subsequent failures to sustain it shook Christianity, given the ubiquitous religious notion that success and victory show that “God is on our side/God is with us” (Nobiscum deus/Gott mit uns, etc.). Conversely, the Muslims were buoyed by the same idea, given their successes in these centuries. By the time of the Reformation, the Turks were at the gates of Vienna threatening the core of what is now known as Western Europe. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had therefore called a diet at the imperial city of Augsburg in 1530, to ensure a unity of Catholic and Lutheran princes for a new crusade against this threat. The Augsburg Confession—a critical doctrine for Lutherans and the Reformation—was presented there in the context of crusades and the war against the Muslims. It was also the precursor to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, and led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

Overall, these were seen as apocalyptic times by the Reformation founders. They anticipated cataclysmic persecution of the saints under Islam, which they perceived as a judgment of God—thus their highly negative anti-Islamic polemics. Their anti-papist rhetoric was because they considered Catholicism, and at times also the Jews, as the cause behind God’s punishment through the rod of Islam.¹⁴

The Multireligious and Multicultural Context

Contrary to traditional wisdom, Europe at the time of Luther was neither monoreligious, nor monocultural; rather a sequence of historical developments over the previous centuries reflected a highly pluralistic context. These developments were still part of the collective memory, and in fact were the theological and epistemic grist for the Reformation. Spain had been under Muslim rule from 711¹⁵ until the completion of the Reconquista of 1492, with the fall of Granada, the last Islamic state on the Iberian Peninsula.¹⁶ After 1492, the most Catholic monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, forcefully converted the Muslims and Jews of Spain.¹⁷ The Jewish expulsion started after their genocide of 1391,¹⁸ and is seen as the turning point for the Spanish (Sephardic) Jewish existence in Europe.¹⁹ This led to the Inquisition in 1478 to check the orthodoxy of the converts and finally to the expulsion of even the converted Jews that followed. The final expulsion of the Muslim converts from Spain began in 1609 and was completed in 1614.²⁰

Despite this history of Islam in southern Europe, today northern and western Europe claim direct, unmediated continuity with southern and eastern Mediterranean ancient civilizations and the “mother” Greco-Roman civilizations. This sleight of hand conceptually and emotionally locates the Mediterranean²¹ exclusively in Europe, even though geographically it is located between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Through this historical manipulation they claim sole possession of this heritage, and thus to be the real successor of the Roman Empire.

What is critical to understand is that this perception of unbridged Mediterranean continuity and Europe’s monoreligious status evolved largely out of a Constantinian Christendom model. The location of the capital of this Constantinian Christendom and empire bordered Asia, if it was not directly in Asia itself, i.e., on the Bosphorus. It had no real contribution from, nor was it ever a direct product of, the so-called European “barbarian” tribes²² (except negatively in the threat they posed to Rome and the Roman Empire). In fact, it was their continued aggressions that led to the move from Rome to Byzantium (the New Rome on the Bosphorus) as the new capital of the empire in the fourth century. It is also important to recall that at the beginning of this period there is only one Roman Empire, no such mythical aberrations as Western and Eastern Roman Empires²³ as is oft romantically but falsely stated. It is also critical to note that it is here that Christianity becomes the religion of imperial Rome. Constantinople, therefore, is the original location of what came to be called “Christendom,” rather than its accepted location in Western Europe.

To Islam, which emerged after this shift, Constantinople was the Rum. It was they who became the true inheritors of this Roman Empire and of most of the Mediterranean, beginning with the initial period of Islamic expansion and conquest, crescendoing finally with the capture of Constantinople in 1453. With this, Muslims inherited the intellectual traditions of the Greco-Roman world, which later were transmitted to the West through Muslim scholars even for as central and pivotal a Christian theologian/philosopher as St. Thomas Aquinas. Sidney Griffiths rightly points out that

Al-Farabi (870–950), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (980–1037), and Ibn Rushd/Averroes (1126–1198), are the Muslim philosophers with the most immediate name recognition . . . but they are far from being the only ones making major contributions. And, of course, their accomplishments sparked yet another translation movement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this time in the Islamo-Christian west, in places like Bologna, Toledo, and Barcelona, where eager minds translated philosophical texts from Arabic into Latin, and provided the impetus for the flowering of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Jews and Muslims in Europe: Exorcising Prejudice against the Other
• 2. Spaniards in the Americas: Las Casas among the Reformers
• 3. Women from Then to Now: A Commitment to Mutuality and Literacy
• 4. The Global South: The Synod of Dort on Baptizing “Ethnics”
• 5. The Protestant Reformations in Asia: A Blessing or a Curse?
• 6. Contemporary Challenges: The Reformation and the World Today
• Contributors
• Index