Last Sunday at small group we watched the movie "Luther" in honor of Reformation Sunday and afterwards had quite a lively discussion about it. I found myself in the interesting position of a Catholic explaining Luther to a bunch of Evangelicals who had very little knowledge of that crucial period of church history.
The Reformation is one of my favorite periods of history because so much was going on at that time. Columbus had just come back with news of a whole new world (though he never did realize the extent of what he had "discovered"). Europe was awakening to the Renaissance and rediscovering lost knowledge. Suleiman the Magnificent's Ottoman Turks were trying to conquer Europe and came all the way to Vienna before they were turned back. But the most important thing of all was the invention of the printing press. Without it there could have been no Luther, no Reformation, and no independent "Bible" churches like mine. I pointed out that the movie made a brief mention of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which never underwent a Reformation. And the Eastern Orthodox is a major branch of Christianity even if it is largely ignored in the West.
This is what I find so amusing about American Evangelicals. Historically speaking they are just a twig at the very tip of a massive oak tree yet they act and speak as if they were the tree itself and nothing exists below or under them. I am not surprised that my friends don't know their church history; they barely know the Bible and have no idea of how it came about or why Christianity developed as it did.
The religious issues of the Reformation arose in part because people were ignorant. They had very little access to literature of any kind. It is no accident that the three biggest leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII (and his advisors) were all educated people. Luther and Calvin were priests and Henry VIII was not only a ruler but a theologian. In fact the Pope declared him to be a Defender of the Faith because he defended Catholicism against Luther's "innovations." Little did anyone know at the time that Henry would take the Reformation in yet another direction!
These were people with access to books and information. Today we take this sort of thing so much for granted that it is hard to understand what it is like to live without those things. Perhaps a good parallel would be movies. When I was young (here I go again) the only way you could see a movie was if it came to your town. If it did not you were out of luck. If it came and for some reason you were unable to go you were out of luck.
One of my favorite books when I was in elementary school was Marguerite Henry's "Misty of Chincoteague" about a wild pony living on an island on the east coast (one of the islands that was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy; I haven't heard about how the wild ponies are faring but since they say Sandy was worse than the storm of 1962--which Henry also wrote about in another "Misty" book--I am afraid things are not so good for them). Anyway, in the next book of the series, "Sea Star of Chincoteague" Henry described the movie crew that came to the island to make a movie about Misty. Oh, how I wanted to see that movie! But it was too late! If that movie had ever come to my hometown it had long gone.
Flash forward 50 years. If someone had told me back in the 1960's that I would, with a few keystrokes, call up this very movie on something called a computer and order it on "DVD" from "Amazon.com" I would not have believed them. And yet, here it sits on my bookshelf, "Misty." The movie I thought I'd never get to see.
This all came about because a change in technology made movies relatively cheap and available. No longer do I have to hope that a movie I want to see comes to a theater near me. I can watch what I want almost anytime in the privacy of my home. Gutenberg's printing press did the same thing for printed materials. It made almost universal literacy not only possible but desirable.
However, it seems to me that we are now moving into a "post-literate" society where images are taking precedence over the written word. And this is not good news for any religion that relies on a sacred text, because many of the concepts contained in those texts do not translate well to images. I have heard (though not seen) that there are Manga Bibles, cartoon Bibles. I don't think there is any equivalent for the Qu'ran, not yet. But if people don't choose to read for themselves and only get their information from what ministers, priests, rabbis, or imans tell them, then it is very easy for corruptions to sneak in. By not knowing why the conditions that led to the Reformation developed in the first place it is hard to recognize them should they start occurring again.
The Reformation is one of my favorite periods of history because so much was going on at that time. Columbus had just come back with news of a whole new world (though he never did realize the extent of what he had "discovered"). Europe was awakening to the Renaissance and rediscovering lost knowledge. Suleiman the Magnificent's Ottoman Turks were trying to conquer Europe and came all the way to Vienna before they were turned back. But the most important thing of all was the invention of the printing press. Without it there could have been no Luther, no Reformation, and no independent "Bible" churches like mine. I pointed out that the movie made a brief mention of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which never underwent a Reformation. And the Eastern Orthodox is a major branch of Christianity even if it is largely ignored in the West.
This is what I find so amusing about American Evangelicals. Historically speaking they are just a twig at the very tip of a massive oak tree yet they act and speak as if they were the tree itself and nothing exists below or under them. I am not surprised that my friends don't know their church history; they barely know the Bible and have no idea of how it came about or why Christianity developed as it did.
The religious issues of the Reformation arose in part because people were ignorant. They had very little access to literature of any kind. It is no accident that the three biggest leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII (and his advisors) were all educated people. Luther and Calvin were priests and Henry VIII was not only a ruler but a theologian. In fact the Pope declared him to be a Defender of the Faith because he defended Catholicism against Luther's "innovations." Little did anyone know at the time that Henry would take the Reformation in yet another direction!
These were people with access to books and information. Today we take this sort of thing so much for granted that it is hard to understand what it is like to live without those things. Perhaps a good parallel would be movies. When I was young (here I go again) the only way you could see a movie was if it came to your town. If it did not you were out of luck. If it came and for some reason you were unable to go you were out of luck.
One of my favorite books when I was in elementary school was Marguerite Henry's "Misty of Chincoteague" about a wild pony living on an island on the east coast (one of the islands that was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy; I haven't heard about how the wild ponies are faring but since they say Sandy was worse than the storm of 1962--which Henry also wrote about in another "Misty" book--I am afraid things are not so good for them). Anyway, in the next book of the series, "Sea Star of Chincoteague" Henry described the movie crew that came to the island to make a movie about Misty. Oh, how I wanted to see that movie! But it was too late! If that movie had ever come to my hometown it had long gone.
Flash forward 50 years. If someone had told me back in the 1960's that I would, with a few keystrokes, call up this very movie on something called a computer and order it on "DVD" from "Amazon.com" I would not have believed them. And yet, here it sits on my bookshelf, "Misty." The movie I thought I'd never get to see.
This all came about because a change in technology made movies relatively cheap and available. No longer do I have to hope that a movie I want to see comes to a theater near me. I can watch what I want almost anytime in the privacy of my home. Gutenberg's printing press did the same thing for printed materials. It made almost universal literacy not only possible but desirable.
However, it seems to me that we are now moving into a "post-literate" society where images are taking precedence over the written word. And this is not good news for any religion that relies on a sacred text, because many of the concepts contained in those texts do not translate well to images. I have heard (though not seen) that there are Manga Bibles, cartoon Bibles. I don't think there is any equivalent for the Qu'ran, not yet. But if people don't choose to read for themselves and only get their information from what ministers, priests, rabbis, or imans tell them, then it is very easy for corruptions to sneak in. By not knowing why the conditions that led to the Reformation developed in the first place it is hard to recognize them should they start occurring again.
