Peter J. Thuesen Predestination, The American Ca

Podstrony

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.” They condemned the Mass as “hocus pocus,” dismissing it as superstition at best and sorcery at worst.What such views ignored was the profound comfort that many Catholics derived from the sacramental system.Historian Miri Rubin has written eloquently of this in her book on the Eucharist in late medieval culture.Sacramental mediation, she notes, was “this-worldly in emphasizing that channels of regeneration and salvation were available and attainable, renewable and never exhaustible.” The Eucharist in particular was a promise “fulfi lled here and now, offering powerful and tangible rewards tothe living in the present, as well as to their relatives, the dead.”48PROTESTANTISM AND PREDESTINARIAN PIETYElements of medieval sacramentalism persisted in some forms of Protestantism, despite Protestants’ nearly universal hostility toward such doctrines as transubstantiation and purgatory.Luther’s own faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is well known.To those who would explain the bread and wine’s signifi cance in purely symbolic terms, he thundered:“Before I would have mere wine with the fanatics, I would rather receive sheer blood with the pope.” 49 Even Reformed Protestants such as the Scottish Presbyterians, heirs of the furiously anti-Catholic John Knox, developed a tradition of annual communion occasions—four-day festivals centering on the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.50 Yet in their rebellion against Roman authority and the sacramental abuses of the medieval church, the early Protestants rediscovered the spiritual power of predestination to strip away all intermediaries between the individual and God.Aesthetically, predestination was no less mystical than medieval sacramentalism.The goal of both was an awestruck apprehension of God’s grace, but whereas sacramentalism achieved it through ritual, predestination achieved it through contemplation.To surrender oneself to the inscrutable divine will—to accept the doctrine of humans’ utter powerlessness to redeem themselves—was to prostrate oneself before God’s absolute glory and majesty.Those who embraced this piety regarded it as religion pure and undefi led, monotheism in its most authentic and compelling form.“All things happen by necessity,” declared Luther in refuting the humanism of Erasmus.51 To deny divine control over all things is to deny God himself.The human will, Luther said, borrowing an earlier The Predestinarian Labyrinth27medieval image, is like a beast of burden that either God or Satan rides.The will is powerless to choose which rider will mount it, “but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it.” 52Here was Christianity in its undiluted biblical essence, or so predestinarians have often claimed.In reality, the “strong wine” of predestination (as Luther called it), like the medieval eucharistic ritual, was mediated by church tradition.53 The fi rst great mediator was the late Augustine, whose reading of Romans 9 infl uenced Luther to conclude that the election of Jacob over Esau was not based on any foreknowledge of Jacob’s merits but simply on God’s inscrutable choice to save him from the mass of sinful humanity.54Luther’s strong predestinarianism must also be seen as a reaction to the late medieval via moderna, or “modern way,” of William Ockham (c.1285–1347) and his follower Gabriel Biel (c.1420–1495).This school of theology taught, contrary to the earlier view of Thomas Aquinas, that humans retain enough natural ability to initiate their own salvation by “doing their best,”which God rewards with an infusion of grace.Confounded by the uncertainty of what counts as one’s “best,” Luther conjured up Augustine the exe-gete to do battle against the “new Pelagians.”55 Augustinianism was already in the air thanks to the fourteenth-century theologians Gregory of Rimini and Thomas Bradwardine, archbishop of Canterbury, who, like Gottschalk fi ve centuries before, spoke unfl inchingly of both election and reprobation and insisted that God saves people without any regard for their future goodconduct.56 Thus, when Luther made his storied discovery that humans are justifi ed by grace through faith, he was in one sense simply rediscovering Augustine’s basic claim that God bestows righteousness on sinners as a pure gift.Where Luther differed from the Neoplatonic Augustine was in his comparatively hostile attitude toward philosophical speculation and humanreason.57 Consequently, Luther always cautioned against speculation about predestination, which he warned was the devil’s way of making the passion of Christ and the sacraments of no effect.The sacraments, he insisted, wereinstituted “to drive such speculations out of your mind.”58Luther’s confi dence in sacramental effi cacy, motivated by his antirational trust that Christ meant what he said when he proclaimed “This is my body,”helped to make Lutherans a special case among Protestants on the question of predestination, as we will see in chapter 5.Luther’s view contrasted sharply with that of his Swiss contemporary Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) of Zurich, who insisted that by the “is” in “This is my body,” Christ meant“signifi es.” After the two men failed to reconcile their differences on the Eucharist at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Luther wrote to his wife in disgust that God must have blinded the Zwinglians.59 Luther and Zwinglialso differed on the authority of the Bible, on which Zwingli had resolved to 28Predestinationpreach in its entirety, verse by verse—even the epistle of James, which Luther had rejected because of its emphasis on works.Finally, whereas Luther made justifi cation the linchpin of his theology, Zwingli stressed God’s absolute sovereignty in a way that almost seemed to revive the Stoicism of Seneca, whom the Zurich reformer admired.An affi nity for Stoic determinism was perhaps not surprising for a man who narrowly escaped death from the plague when it ravaged Zurich in 1519–1520.Believing himself to be God’s chosen instrument, Zwingli carried the same sense of destiny to his death in battle against an army of Switzerland’s Catholic cantons.60Zwingli foreshadowed the fi ghting spirit of Reformed Protestant-ism when it became an international movement, but it was the second-generation reformer John Calvin (1509–1564) of Geneva who gave the Reformed tradition its most infl uential early statements on predestination.Calvin’s name is virtually synonymous with the doctrine, a popular association that Calvin specialists never tire of lamenting.Their complaint is not without merit.Calvin was in one sense no more of a predestinarian than Luther, whom he admired for restoring the purity of the gospel.Calvin was also closer to Luther than to Zwingli on the Eucharist—for Calvin, Christ’s presence was spiritual but still “real”—and he waged an unsuccessful campaign for more frequent celebrations of the Lord’s Supper in Geneva [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

bezglutenowo.pev.pl