Bad Fruit — On the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation of the Catholic Church
Part I — The Vote
Every year in college during March Madness, the History majors would hold a tournament all for themselves. They would build a bracket and host head-to-head votes, choosing between two figures from the past one-thousand years of history. The point of the tournament was to vote for the person you consider most critical to the millennium as a whole. Whoever received the most votes would advance until a champion was crowned. Despite its niche voting block, the History Madness bracket always drew school-wide enthusiasm and debate.
The fiercest tournament (in my memory) crescendoed into a face-off between Martin Luther and Isaac Newton, the former being the chief catalyst behind the Protestant Reformation, the latter being the inventor of modern physics and the spiritual father of the Scientific Revolution. The school I attended was Evangelical with roots in fundamentalist Protestantism, so Luther’s popularity was no surprise, the students being themselves descendants of Luther’s Reformation, tracing their theological heritage to his great Protest against the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500’s. Evangelicals are only a species of Protestants, but make up the portion of Protestants arguably most engaged with the historical doctrines and practices of their faith.
The so-called “Mainline” Protestants, the large denominations whose numbers are rapidly dwindling, typically operate social-interaction services for seniors, child care for weary parents, and sacramental ceremonies for citizens doing their religious duties. They do all of this charity, but it comes separate from the individual piety and full-throated theology of historic Protestantism. It is decaffeinated Christianity: neither giving you vitality nor poisoning your blood. It cannot wound you, and thus it cannot heal you. Mainline Protestant faith is missing the toxic parts of Orthodoxy — spiritual warfare, sin, death, Satan — and so it is also missing the overflow of life described by Orthodox salvation. More interesting and inspiring gospels plunged it into a late-twentieth-century tailspin of declining influence and membership. The Mainline lost all temperature to its message, and being neither hot nor cold History has summarily spit it out of its mouth. The large Mainline denominations — Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, even Methodists — are functionally-irrelevant as denominations, offering nothing that is strictly denominated except a lack of attention to denominating anything at all. The quaddrennial tomes they publish, summarizing their beliefs and positions, turn Dan Brown into irresistible pleasure reading if only to avoid the mature, progressive, decaf-utopias of these denominations.
Evangelicals, however, operate thriving and powerful universities, influential publishing companies, massive non-profits. They produce big-budget films and build church campuses to rival private-sector peers dollar-for-dollar. Their power drove George W. Bush to the White House, but their plateau has suddenly turned into a steep descent. Americans are no longer Evangelicals. Millennials are abandoning official religious affiliation as fast as they are rejecting Bush-era patriotism. And with this exodus, the number of churches — and therefore official church membership — will plummet as the ex-churched leftovers sporadically attend mega-networks led by a few churches. The same consolidation effect that is driving wealth into fewer hands and people into smaller spaces (ie, the worldwide rural migration to cities) will impact the Protestant Church’s most engaged remnant by eliminating small churches almost altogether.
And so it is to Evangelicals — the pariahs of the world, lackeys of the GOP and Fox News, bigots standing in the way of equality — that the inheritance of the Reformation has been bequeathed. The righteous impulse to denounce corruption publicly, to break free from oppression where necessary, to take responsibility onto one’s self while releasing ultimate destiny back to God, that is the rightful legacy guarded by Evangelicals more than anyone else. And while the Left flank of Evangelicalism has recovered strength lately — think Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis — the children of the Reformation remain at a built-in disadvantage: their own children, the grandchildren of the Reformation, are full-grown and ready to leave their parents behind.
Part II — Post-Protestant, Post-Christian
When Martin Luther eventually beat Sir Isaac Newton in the March History Madness bracket, claiming the title of most important historical figure of the last one-thousand years, few were surprised. The Newton faction was all libertarians, half of them recent converts to Eastern Orthodoxy — a risky, socially-isolating move to make at a small Evangelical school (or so they imagined, out loud and frequently).
The Newton voters were the revolutionaries at what they considered a dogmatic and narrow university, the open minds that, like Sir Isaac, saw Science for the radical truth it contained: apophatic, mystical truth that broke open the world to itself and fit comfortably into their “non-Western” tastes. They understood the role Science would play in world history, how it would challenge the Western conscience and undermine the theologically-infected Western Church.
And perhaps their votes for Newton were correct.
If the same tournament showdown were to happen today, after a critical decade of societal changes and five-hundred years after Luther’s famous moment, the triumph of Newton’s Scientific Revolution might cast a deep shadow over the Reformation’s entire project. Hasn’t Science defeated Religion, and aren’t we haunted by a corpse-Church, a performance of a presence that can only touch us through fear?
Luther’s Reformation was about a sort of coming-of-age for the Roman Catholic world, a world on the precipice of the Imperial Age: Western Europe colonizing the planet and all of its inhabitants. At a time when education and printed books were becoming more common, when wealthy landowners needed leverage against the all-powerful Roman Church, and when the Church’s own corruption exposed it’s basic fraudulence, Luther and the other reformers forced the Church, as a mediator between humans and Truth, to give way to the individual interpreter of Scripture. And with the Eastern Orthodox and now Henry VIII of England disavowing Roman supremacy, the Reformers were sewing their theology in fertile soil. The Catholic Church’s children were full grown, ready to explore the great mysteries without the oversight of an untrustworthy, foreign, greedy Roman Papacy.
And these full-grown Christians, hot on the heels of Renaissance energy, reclaimed Science as its own world, its own network of realities, logics, languages, and truths. In the two centuries after Luther’s death, Europe would produce a barrage of skeptics, heretics, and outright atheists, ripping Reason free from Faith until entire worldviews could be crafted out of the rubble of the sad old Church. They call this era the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment to contrast it with the Dark Ages: when the Church kept knowledge hidden and people in poverty, hoarding power for itself. But in the Enlightenment, the citizens share both knowledge and resources, and everyone’s inalienable rights guarantee that power is at least partially distributed. Protestantism allowed these new spiritual “adults” to experiment with theology as much as with nature: if there was any controversy, new factions could simply splinter off and form a separate congregation, or join a denomination with a more “open mind.” There was no Pope to solve their problems, and so doctrine became a tradable commodity at the same time as everything else, birthed by the same impulse as Liberalism and Conservatism, Capitalism and Communism, Naturalism and Supernaturalism.
Today, those theories, born out of the womb of the Reformation, have moved beyond seniority and into senility. Like Newton graduating from Science to Alchemy, they have all discovered from God that there is no God, that they do not need God’s Scriptures, and that God’s Church has overstayed its welcome. They found religion to be a cure for itself, and Christianity became a myth about escaping myths, a wound in need of healing with pharmaceutical Reason. Christ and the Church were tutors on our spiritual path to Naturalism and a more secular spiritualism. Whatever Christianity continues to swim in these waters needs to avoid categorical nonsense like literal miracles, demons, or second comings. Instead, Christianity, in this post-Christian world, is more like an operation (or event), something that happens to an individual when artificial powers are stripped of their authority, and when genuine, transformational freedom is made available. Every Christian experiences the Event of Christ in such abstraction that redemption comes to mean annihilation, or at best a nirvana devoid of all ego.
This post-Christianity preaches Resurrection without Death. It says everything about radical freedom, freedom from desire and addiction and money and meaning and happiness. It says little, if anything, about taking up a cross for oneself, submitting to the King, or hating one’s parents. The post-Christian (atheist Christian, spiritualist) allows oppressive dreams of immortality to die with the God-Man, who in his death kills all of the little empires of the mind. Resurrection, then, is maturity into full subjective agency in a truly meaningless universe, a state of mind where we’re set free from delusions and destructive habits. At best, with Slavoj Zizek, it achieves a Christianized Communism, pulsating with distributist blood while denying the existence of the Heart. Post-Christian Christianity is nearly indistinguishable from atheistic Satanism a la Anton LeVay, worshiping as they both do the fully-free human agent, the moral superman. Flip back-and-forth between Anton LeVay and Peter Rollins and see for yourself. Or perhaps Rollins is even less tied to the Tree of Christianity than LeVay, since atheistic Satanism has the benefit of skipping the Resurrection, whereas Rollins has to celebrate a Resurrection into a world of infinite meaninglessness. “Atheistic Satanism” is just atheism, and as such has the seed of Christianity: to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, hating the light is better than ignoring the light. Post-Christian Christianity, on the other hand, is worse than simple atheism. It is a-satanism, disbelief in the flesh rather than worshiping it, leaving its believers totally exposed to the exteriority of the flesh.
Establishing an open universe, meaninglessly-undirected by God or Satan, grasped by the will of the individual, leaves such believers with two options:
A) Freeze, that is, do as the universe does by disappearing — nirvana-style — into it, leaving behind the worthless particulars of desire, or
B) Fly, retreat from the vacuum of the universe because it assimilates everything, and so remain among the isolated heroes of superhumanity, Exulted into the slim pantheon of the unfrozen.
Christianity, the orthodox kind with a radically-closed universe, offers the opposite two choices:
1) Fight, that is, draw up the courage to sacrifice yourself and believe in a Something-Greater-Than-Nothing, a Cause of superior worth, and thus overcome the enemy aspects of the universe that assimilate all things into Nothing, and
2) F***, relate and seduce the universe into friendship and communion, establishing both of yourselves as flames of the same fire, mutually gift-sharing and turbocharging the power of the Source — the Something, the Cause, the One — and transfiguring the fuel from less-than-Nothing — assimilated into the Nothing as its static potential-content — into more-than-Something, the wasteful excess of life.
Thus, when Protestantism matured in its first one-hundred years it bore the fruit of robustly-theological and pious denominations. But then its strength withered and so did its fruit, producing a Market free-for-all of America-Cult worship of the Will. Instead of losing our will into the One Will of God, God loses all Will and we inherit only the will to lose all will: to fly from the Nothing of the Real and so be consumed by it, or to succeed and freeze. Post-Protestantism is the worship of Dante’s Satan: one half frozen in ice, one half consuming the heroes of the Will: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. The orthodox Protestantism of the Reformation survives, but its whimpering vitality oscillates between conservative and progressive factions of Evangelicals, sprinkled with remnants from the liberal Mainline, fighting old culture wars with worn-out weapons.
Luther won the vote, but Newton and Science have won the thousand-year war.
But slowly and gracefully, like a swan or a Lexus commercial, out of the recycled last gasps of Protestant Christianity, a different spirit has taken its first breaths.
Part III — The New Tree
As celebrations of five-hundred years of Protestantism circle around theological and ecclesiastical social networks, a few thinkers have shared their ideas of what comes next for the children of the Reformation. Maybe you’ve heard calls for Protestants to shed that title, and embrace a new idea of their place in the larger Church family. “Reformational Catholics,” as one article put it, refuse to identify with a Protest that remains on the outside, but seeks, like the original Reformers, to act within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Christians who confess the historic creeds, keep the sacraments, and preserve the Hebrew Bible and New Testament as their most sacred tradition must be post-Protest without being post-Protestant, something marked by the Reformation but free from its laws of semper reformanda. Denominationalism ends in post-Protestant post-Christianity; Reformational Catholicism must end in something else.
Such efforts at reunification — in spirit if not in flesh — point to a commonality between genuine believers of both Catholic and Protestant flavors. These Protestants consider denominationalism to be an an artifact from a forgotten past, an obstacle that may serve some good where necessary, but quickly remedied whenever possible. Reformational Catholicism, the name given to the whole of the Christian faith following Luther’s righteous impulse, should be seen as a branch of the same tree as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, a single and distinct branch rather than thousands of splinters off of the Roman limb. All three branches stand united against the bad fruits of their Tree and the handing over of divinity to the creature rather than the Creator. The Church stands separate from Capitalism and Communism as a vision for the world, rejecting the bad fruit of the Enlightenment as counterfeit utopias, forgeries of the Kingdom of God. The Church turns antinomies of conservative and liberal into beatific visions, trinities, and hypostatic unions. All three branches do this work with the authority of the Holy Spirit, safeguarding the Sacraments of Christ and the purity of the Church as his faithful Bride.
But long before the limb of the Enlightenment gave us its fruit in our post-Protestant spiritual secularism, the bad fruit of the Reformation had already found soil fertile enough for an entirely new tree: a tree like the original, but not like it, echoing its doctrines but in a different key — the Latter Day Saints, Mormons.
I call the LDS Church “bad fruit of the Reformation” because it represents, as nearly all products of its founding era, the early-1800's, an end to Protestant orthodoxy and a beginning to post-Protestant heterodoxy. Departures from Reformational theology and practice were ascendant in every direction: G.W.F. Hegel, Thomas Jefferson, August Comte, Charles Finney. Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists and Christian Anarchists all broke with Traditions even Luther and Calvin thought important to keep, rejecting doctrines here, traditions there, transcending good and evil, hallucinating Matter, dialectizing Spirit.
Mormonism is one of these nineteenth-century parodies of Christianity. Mormonism, that beam of starlight in the dark night of secular melancholy, is nevertheless as thorough a departure from Christianity as Islam: it is a fundamentally-new religion, with a new scripture, a new Godhead, and a new cosmogony. And like Islam, itself an ancient version of post-Christianity, Mormonism is growing and thriving alongside the America Cult, though for the opposite reason and with the opposite class. Islam thrives because it resists the America Cult: Islam’s enemy is as clearly defined as any in history, the immanent imperial threat to half the world (or more). This is not to ignore the intrinsic culpability of Islam, as though its violence has no origin outside American hegemony. Like Christianity giving birth to the violence of imperial Euro-America, Islam gives birth to the violence of suicide bombers. Both religions operate with ethics that, when teleologically transcended, produce vigilantes who take up villainy in the name of God. Mormonism, sitting opposite Islam, gives the petite-bourgeois America Cult a glorious mythology: America’s founding documents are directly inspired by Jesus! As a massively-polytheistic religion (the doctrine of Exultation involves becoming a god in a sort-of-multiverse of gods), Mormonism acts as the perfect consumerist foil to Islam’s strict monotheism. And if Islam represents a vigilante Batman dark-hero, exploiting the terror of the Law, Superman comics then read like descriptions of Mormon mythology, complete with a savior from another planet wearing ceremonial underpants protecting the bruised-but-not-broken American way of “freedom.” Mormonism is tailor-made for the American Empire, a homegrown religious export, indirectly consumable through America’s favorite superhero franchise.
And so we are presented with one more tournament round, but this time we prophesy instead of reflect. This is a vote between Islam and Mormonism. Which will be the most critical to history-yet-to-come? Will the quintessentially-American religion continue to consume the remaining market share of religious energy and influence, or will Allah bring his enemies to ruin? Both religions encourage fertility and will continue to outpace their religious peers in new conversions, but who will claim victory in their apocalyptic showdown?
Part IV — History Madness Revisited
The remnant of Luther’s movement — those committed to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church but who cannot share Roman dogma — are right to overcome old denominational divides and find unity in a “Mere Christianity” and shared Communion. But the unity of the Church is only armor for the dark days ahead. It makes Christianity’s Gospel more clear and thus more appealing. But an offensive weapon is still needed, a sword of the Spirit,
And the Spirit is fire and love,
the Spirit is joy and self-control,
the Spirit is resurrection and humility.
The Spirit is the Word of God.
In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana has to pass three challenges in order to reach the Holy Grail. All three challenges are life-or-death. In the first challenge, The Breath of God, Indiana must be “penitent,” kneeling to dodge God’s wrathful breath in the form of horizontal and vertical blades. The Holy Spirit, the biblical Breath of God, is here figured as the angel of death, the Gospel that sings the good news of death first, then resurrection. (The second challenge, the Word of God, fits an obvious Trinitarian position, but more on this below.) In the third challenge, the Path of God, Indiana must make “a leap of faith,” stepping into a bottomless abyss only to discover that a bridge is hidden in the void. God the Father, the invisible mystery that is present in absence as solid ground in a plane of Nothingness, is the substance of this third challenge.
But it is the second challenge, the Word of God, that reveals the nature of Christianity’s offensive weapon. The Breath of God speaks the Word. The first challenge, humbling Indiana to death and giving birth to him again on the other side, leads to the second challenge: a tiled floor, each tile engraved with a single Latin letter.
The second challenge is dangerously straightforward: spell God’s name. Christ, the Son of God, the preexistent Logos (Word) of the Father, makes as his challenge not navigating a field of deadly blades or leaping an impossible gap, but a simple spelling test. “Who do you say that I am, Indiana Jones?” The hero missteps, forgetting his lesson in humility and forcing a foreign scheme onto the Word’s challenge. He attempts to spell the Name of God in his own tongue, forgetting that the Name does not belong to him, but to the Church that bears it. For Indiana, spelling the Name on his own terms reveals the nature of the challenge: stepping on the wrong tiles plunges the errant walker into a pit, a torturous nightmare where the fall, if it doesn’t kill you, will leave salvation hopelessly unreachable.
The Word of God is an offensive weapon because it speaks a Name, leaving all other names in a hopeless Hell. It cuts its way across the pit, dividing True from False, offending the world that demands all things be dragged down. But it offends first the one who would dare to face the challenge. It is not an offense because it is a challenge. All spiritualities necessarily pose some question. The original offensive capacity of the Word is its double edge, its multi-polar function, piercing not only the outside, the universal, the field of letters that can never spell the Name, but piercing the inside, the humble human particular who still believes he is a human who can spell for himself. Humility is divine, but not fully. The humble man must neither freeze in his humility and therefore never recover the Grail, nor stretch out only one edge of the Sword, cutting a path to Hell. He must be himself first pierced by the sword, overcome by a single Name, a Name that pulls the kneeling penitent animal to his feet and bids him walk as a human, even as He Himself, the Word, is a man.
A Church that does not bear this two-way offense can never hope to progress to the third challenge, the leap of faith, where God disappears, hope is impossible, and the demand of death is real. And this third challenge awaits us, staring at us from the immanent future, in the form of the Mormonism vs Islam apocalypse, another type of the final Armageddon. While the field of choices is obviously much larger than this simple duality, the image of the two competing post-Christian religions more than summarizes the nature of the religious challenge of the future. Future humans will be asked a question that is the same in its substance as every religious question, but different in its accidents: do you vote for
1) Mormonism, the quintessence of the impulse of consumption and expansion, the America Cult of individual freedom that opens the space for the saved to grow to the size of their own universe, big enough to keep everything outside of itself, the virtual data buzzing in the void of Nothingness, or
2) Islam, the impulse of democratic annihilation where freedom and the individual dissolve into the black flag of radical egalitarianism, the frozen dragon of Absolute Nothing.
Reformational Christians could offer joint statements, merge denominations, offer open Communions. It could rally and hold an ecumenical-style council like the ancient Church. But more than anything else, it needs to refuse the the binary of bad-fruit choices, the Fly or Freeze in the face of the apocalyptic abyss. Instead, it must re-affirm with all its strength the doctrine of the life of the world to come, the Fight that announces it and the marriage it consummates.
The only comfort, and the only hope, in that valley of the shadow of death is that the Word has already overcome the power behind the false idols, that there is a Name that can cross the final chasm, that a Something can cross the gap between my nothingness and his Totality. It is only in his Name that the Grail can be reached, only from the Carpenter’s cup that the Gospel’s ambrosia gives life.
For the Church of the Reformation to survive, it must be Christ’s Church, not Rome’s or Luther’s or yours or mine. It must not pretend to offer permanent procreative consumption like Mormonism or the Mammon of the America Cult; it must not offer annihilation into the frozen monad of Allah or post-Protestant nirvana. It must, with all its fire, offer the double-edged sword of the Spirit, the one Name that makes a bridge out of Faith, the resurrected body that overcomes the disfigurations of the world. The Church must offer the sanctifying blood that unites all things with its awesome vitality. For it is in Jesus the Christ that we live and move and have our being, that we can adopt the Something’s Name, shoe our feet with his Gospel of Peace, and become light enough to walk the chasm and grasp the grail. He is before all things, a Something begotten prior to any Totality, and in him all Totalities consist. He is the head of the body, the Church, and even with all of our fragmentation, he remains always the master healer.
Pray without ceasing.
Happy Anniversary.
Joshua Bean is a freelance and aspiring author, Master of Divinity (Cairn University 2011), and full-time parent.
©Joshua Craig Bean 2017 all rights reserved.
