Unintended consequences

After visiting such cradles of the Reformation as Wittenberg and Geneva, it was rather unsettling for our Summer School participants to read Alistair McGrath's suggestion that Protestantism may have unintentionally encouraged the rise of atheism in Europe, and ushered in the era of secularisation.  

Wasn't Protestantism a renewal of long-lost biblical truths?!

Yes, admits, McGrath, to link Protestantism and atheism might well seem 'bizarre'.

Yet, in his book, The Twilight of Atheism: the rise and fall of disbelief in the modern world (Random House, 2004), McGrath, himself a former atheist turned Protestant, draws from a number of scholarly studies of the origins and development of Protestantism pointing to the divorce of the sacred and secular.

Reformers like Zwingli and Calvin helped 'desacralise' or 'disenchant' nature, such studies claim, by declaring that the natural world was not a spiritual, mysterious sacred realm inappropriate for prying human eyes. Rather, they taught, it was God's Book of Works which could be explored via the natural sciences.

Interestingly, the word 'secular' was given to us by the medieval Church. It described a call from God to serve outside of a monastery or religious rule. All of life was, nevertheless, to be lived in obedience to God, whether 'secular' or 'regular'.

Interlocked

Under medieval Catholicism, sacred and secular were often indistinguishable. The church calendar and the natural seasons were interwoven. There was a pervasive sense of the presence of the sacred in the world. Haymaking and harvesting went together with religious processions and rituals. The spiritual and the material, religion and everyday life, were interlocked and inseparable. The devout expected to encounter the spiritual in daily routines.

The Protestant Reformers understandably criticised a Catholicism that often degenerated into a folk religion of nature. They stressed God's revelation through His Word, and delivered through sermons. Church architecture reflected this emphasis with the pulpit replacing the altar as the focal point.

While the Catholic faith taught that God could be encountered in nature and through the sacraments, Protestant congregations learned that God's will and ways could be known through Bible-based sermons. Believers needed to learn the great foundational doctrines, and know their moral duties. But they should not expect spiritual realities to be known or experienced through the material world.

'Christ was in heaven; Christian worship was about recalling what Christ had done in the past and looking forward to his future return,' writes McGrath. 'But in the present-in the here and now-Christ was known only as an absence.'

The rise of Protestantism promoted an 'absent God' knowable only indirectly, through the mind, not the imagination, argues McGrath. God thus became an absence in the world. While the Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, might see the world being 'charged with the grandeur of God', Protestants saw God more as chief architect or mechanic. The divine was excluded from nature. Creation became 'disenchanted', as Max Weber described it.

It's a relatively small step conceptually, suggests McGrath, from an absentee God to a God who does not exist. He quotes Francis Fukuyama, that 'the generally accepted agent for this secularisation in the West was Protestantism'.

Dry and dusty

The Reformation also led to widespread 'secularisation' through the disestablishment of monasteries and marriage of monks and nuns, following Luther's own example. Many social functions previously conducted by the Church became state tasks.

By the end of the seventeenth century, after many religious wars, Protestant theology had become rigid and scholastic, dry and dusty. Puritanism, Pietism and Methodism however were important correcting influences in the Protestant stream, he notes. And today it is Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on direct, immediate experience of God, that has by far become the largest strand of Protestantism.

Western observers have not yet fully realised how much an experientially grounded and socially activist Pentecostalism is undermining the traditional appeal of atheism, writes McGrath. This is especially true in our western cities where many African, Asian and Latin American Christian migrants are settling today.  

'Its sense of the immediacy of God's presence through the Holy Spirit is of immense importance in repairing the felt loss of the presence of the divine in everyday life in the West.'

Till next week,

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