Luther as a model of intolerance in social debate

Martin Luther, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1529

The debate over important issues in many communities these days are wracked by vicious personal attacks arising from a bitter intolerance of the opposition, and evident in an unwillingness to even listen to the views of others, let alone engage with the arguments offered.

This is has happened before during times when world views were at odds. One discussion of what it means for those trying to understand the world but have "hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on their left" leads to the comparison of the argumentative styles of the violently out-spoken Luther and quietly rebellious Erasmus. The writers' examination gives rise to a question that is at the heart of any study of the spirit of public debate: Would church history as well as world history have been different if there had been more tolerance shown?

Luther's temperament and ingrained behaviour made it impossible for there to be calm reasoning over the contentious practices and beliefs that Luther attacked.  Erasmus was Luther's precursor in attacking the evils in church life of the time - the late 1400s and early 1500s.  After a considerable time ignoring the insistence that he weigh in against Luther, Erasmus produced a work, A Discourse on Free Will,  that provided a critique of Luther's central belief about predestination, where Luther denied the human capacity to exercise free will.

Already Luther had such an intolerant view of Europe's foremost scholar that "mention of the name Erasmus sent Luther into a paroxysm of loathing" (Richard Marius, Martin Luther, Belknap Press 1999), and Luther's treatise written in reply "is insulting, vehement, monstrously unfair, and utterly uncompromising - which is to say it shows Luther reacting in accordance with the character that temperament and experience had stamped upon him by 1525" (Marius, p456).

Of all his Catholic foes, only Erasmus sought to approach Luther gently. Luther responded with a blast that echoes with the cannonades and associated horrors of the coming religious wars (p456).

To make explicit how Luther's violence in his texts and in his speech debased the public debate on the church and the person's relationship with God, I want to quote at length from Marius:

Erasmus, c.1530, maybe by Hans Holbein Snr

To Erasmus's plea for peace, Luther replied that tumult is a sign of the gospel. It is a familiar theme of his but in this context a striking observation, given the smoke still rising from battlefields where peasants were being slaughtered in Germany. In Luther's flexible all-purpose theology, the tumult and fury of the times were part of the wrath of God, and in writing against the peasants he could deplore their rebellion [against land owners and princes] as satanic and at the same time see the gospel as an agent that provoked at once satanic opposition and God's visible anger against Satan. Here, too, was Luther's growing conviction that God had raised him up as a prophet. He was God's tool, and he mocked Erasmus for his desire for peace and an easy life. Luther believed he himself had been the tortured instrument whereby God had revealed the gospel after a long night, and to him his suffering and hardship became the seal of his divine calling as evangelist. Adolf von Harnack said he would concede to Catholic critics of Luther a self-estimation that might appear to be "an insane" pride (p458).

Luther's ongoing attacks on Erasmus the man and Erasmus's understanding of Christian life led to Erasmus's complaint of having been the victim, at the hand of Luther, of "so many wounds worse than fatal". However, the Catholic Erasmus was not the only target. Among many others who ventured further into the morass that the Luther's reform had become, Luther considered radical reformers Andreas Karlstadt and Ulrich Zwingli "blasphemers pure and simple" - "Luther's rhetoric against them was fierce and extreme"; when "Zwingli tried to answer him with mild language, Luther responded with unmitigated rage and railing"(p474).

Similarly, on on the wider scale, Luther's temperament destroyed the spiritual richness of the life of ordinary people of Europe. His reforms gutted the church of its rituals and beliefs that had warmed the hearts and minds of the people over centuries. The "contempt" which Luther had toward the "common people" drew a response where the Wittenbergers who accepted his gospel ignored his teachings and displayed moral standards that dismayed him.  His further view that the masses must "bow to control solely by princes" ensured his "doctrines never attracted a majority of the German people" (p424); The fact was that "people and pastors were alienated from each other" and:

When the Enlightenment came, with its impersonal religiosity devoted to order and obedience, it found the way prepared by Lutheran churches. The ruling class coldly professed their faith; the lower classes did not bother (p473).

It is true that this posting presents an onslaught against Martin Luther, but only as the model "enlightened" reformer. My theme has been that Luther shows that one individual, principally by means of their ugly temperament and their lack of a generous spirit of public debate, though with the support others, is able to destroy, to fragment, to debase what had been established by God's will and human insight and effort over centuries, notwithstanding whatever courage or eloquence they may have.

I repeat the question asked at the top: Would church history as well as world history have been different if there had been more tolerance shown in the religious debate? My answer is that with calmness and tolerance, the widespread rebellion within the Catholic culture of the time could have produced fruit by way of reforms to ecclesiastical abuses decades earlier than those that started to appear late in the century. Also, social reforms in society would likely have occurred earlier.

Science is rightly strewn with doubt

                                     Tina Zellmer for The Chronicle Review 'Big Brains, Small Minds'

Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where his work focuses on dark matter and general relativity, has a new book, The Big Picture, that has been greeted with praise of this kind:

“Weaving the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry, Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we’ve figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don’t yet understand.  Yet in the end, it’s the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

Just as Tyson makes a key point about science when he points to the fact that there are some (not all) things "we’ve figured out in the universe",  Carroll is eloquent in his honesty about what is not yet understood. He points to this state of affairs in a subsequent interview with Phil Torres published on Salon.com: "Of course I’m not an expert in all of the fields I talk about in the book – nobody is [my emphasis]. But the different disciplines need to keep up a continual conversation, if we’re to fit the big picture together."

That "conversation', conducted in humility by all parties, must include philosophy, anthropology and theology because these delve into the nature of the human race just as much as areas of study regarded as hard science. The conversation is needed within the broad church of science, which is the search for knowledge,  because of the diversity of views about all kinds of reality. For example, Carroll calls himself a "poetic naturalist", just one of the divisions within the scientific community, who seem to find it hard to agree with each other:

On the one end of the spectrum you have the most hard-core variety, who claim that only the most deep-down fundamental description of nature can be said to describe something “real.” They might say that consciousness, or morality, or free will, are all just illusions. On the other end of the spectrum you have naturalists who believe in only the natural world, but are willing to ascribe objective reality to various extra properties it might have – moral judgments, for example, or inner states of conscious experience.

Following on from that portion of the interview, Carroll in fact makes the case which those who believe in God have been making to promote dialogue with atheists. Carroll declares:

There is only one world, but we have many ways of talking about that world. And if a particular way of talking gives us a useful handle on what the world is and how it behaves, it’s completely appropriate to consider the concepts it evokes as “real.” Air is really made of atoms, but its temperature and pressure are real, even though the individual atoms don’t have temperatures or pressures. Human consciousness and free will are real, even though they’re not present in the individual particles or cells of which we are made.

When it comes to meaning and morality, there are multiple allowed ways of talking, and the correctness of one or the other can’t be settled by doing experiments. That’s where naturalism becomes its most poetic – when we use our creative powers to attach judgment and significance to what goes on all around us.

Those last statements could have come from a Christian in the face of a dogmatic scientist who is arguing that only what can be measured can be regarded as real. The statements also draw a very pertinent question from Torres, an American biologist and scholar and the founder of a non-profit organisation, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. The question relates to the projection that in 2050, despite the expected continued loss of adherence to organised religion in the materialistic West, Pew researchers expect 87% of the world's population to have a value system based on some form of religious belief. Torres leads up to his question this way:

I’ve often thought of science as a special kind of story-telling in “assertion mode.” And the story it tells — involving quivering atoms, swirling galaxies, and evolving organisms — is without a doubt the “greatest story ever told.” But what’s missing from the story is a transcendent source of meaning for our lives. Without such a source — usually said to be God — how can our lives have true meaning? If the ultimate fate of the universe is a state of infinite entropy [the decline in or lack of order or predictability - Brendan] then what makes life valuable and worth living?

Carroll's response highlights one of the intellectual weaknesses of New Atheists, and even the threat they pose to the common good. Carroll states:

The trick here is “true” meaning. My life has meaning without any supernatural guidance, no matter what anyone else might say about it. The meanings that we finite human beings attribute to our lives are the only kinds of true meanings, because those are the only kinds of meanings there are.

That response could only have come from someone thoroughly imbued with an utterly individualistic cultural mindset. "My life", Carroll declares, is the source of "true" meaning, "no matter what anyone else might say about it".  This blog has just previously featured one insightful description into how the culture we live in can be deterministic as to our beliefs and behaviour if we let it. The way such a value system can be a threat is that it denies the hard-won human rights victories of humanity, such as with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world", which closely echoes the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which sources the origin of human dignity: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

Where does Carroll source his value system? In his own self. He has been fortunate that American society retains enough of its Christian credentials for him to feel secure in his atomistic world, but if the Christian (and mainstream religious) world view is lost, he would be far less sanguine about his situation. Of course, here I am creating somewhat of a straw-man, because Carroll may be bighearted, strong in defence of the poor and weak, and decidedly not self-centred.

But the fact remains, notwithstanding so much scandalous history to the negative, religious groups are more likely than those without a spiritual dimension in their lives to see the dignity of the person, the worth of nature in itself, and the obligation to uphold the rights of others, even to the point of death, all because they understand how God has makes clear this dignity in his own relationship with humankind.

However, Carroll's main point of the need for conversation about reality must be an ongoing one. His point of view is reinforced by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Big Brains, Small Minds", in which the authors decry the way those in the hard sciences have come to snub the contribution of the humanities, which the authors refer to as the "soft sciences". They find it disturbing in this way:

As the sciences rightly grow, a free society must ensure that criticism of the sciences grows apace. Effective criticism depends on distance, in this case on an unshakeable difference, between the humanities and the STEM fields. That is not to say that STEM researchers can’t or shouldn’t be experts in the humanities, but rather that the work that the humanities do should not be judged by the metrics of hard science. As Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, suggests at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, "precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions." Similarly, we should not expect the humanities to be driven or dominated by the objectives of science. Plato teaches us that part of the liberal arts’ enduring mission is precisely to critique these objectives.

It ought to be obvious that the study of law, justice, and the arts is one of the best preparations for governing. This goes for governing our polis and equally for governing our technologies and ourselves. If you’re interested in learning about justice, you don’t go to the chemistry laboratory. You go to philosophy class and travel to Plato’s Republic.

But if you go to the Republic in search of concrete answers about justice (as do many of our students who are encouraged to search for the "right" answers in their labs), you will be disappointed. Plato is not famous for answering questions but for staking his life on the chance to ask them. He seems more interested in inviting his readers to ask their own questions and to finish the dialogue themselves, as if to say that it’s more important to learn to think than to memorize others’ dogmatic principles. The question about justice that motivates the Republic is posed in a lengthy series of dialogues, and it does not give rise to a fixed doctrine. Plato seems to be suggesting that part of being just is taking the time to think seriously about justice. 

Carroll would, I'm sure, agree with the authors' fears that the West is "on the verge of becoming the best trained, and least educated, society"  in 2000 years, given the historically recent demarcation by some of the totality of human experience of reality into spheres that are "clean" and "unclean", or "higher caste" or "lower caste" - even to the degree of there being "untouchables" - and based upon about the same degree of logic or reasonableness.

When it comes down to it, as to the important things of life, mainstream Christians don't care if there are multiple universes, for example. As we have seen, most people in the world care more about understanding their spiritual experience, especially to be in a closer relationship with the God who loves them.  Therefore, to interpolate a wider significance as to their conclusion, the authors of "Big Brains, Small Minds" see the only chance of rescuing the situation is if scientists of all shades, as with all seekers of knowledge, join together and "take it as their mission to pursue wisdom [so as to] guide political and technological ambition, and to stake their lives on the chance to help [us all] ask meaningful questions, rather than give half-baked answers, about the meaning of life".

God's guiding hand awaits our cooperation

We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.

― From The Alchemist by Paul Coelho, a Brazilian, writing in Portuguese; first published 1988.

Earlier in that novel:

The boy knew what [ a fellow traveller] was about to describe: the mysterious chain that links one thing to another, the same chain that had caused him to become a shepherd, that had caused his recurring dream [of the Pyramids as a key to finding treasure], that had brought him to a city in Spain near Africa, to find a king, and to be robbed in order to meet a crystal merchant and...

The Alchemist employs the concept of "maktub" meaning "It is written" - but Coelho is careful not to downplay our own agency in fulfilling our life's destiny. Coelho says this about fate and each one's personal story in life:

There’s an important difference between blind fate and the path of the personal legend. When we speak of fate, man’s free will is absent: we are merely puppets in the hands of a cold and distant puppeteer. In the case of personal legend, there’s the dimension of mission. This means that the person has to actively wish to tread down the path that will enable her to flourish. It is a difficult path, there are many obstacles, but it’s the person’s choice. There is always the possibility for us to turn our backs to our personal legend.

God has a plan, a goal, a purpose for each person, and pursuing that goal is our life's work, as Coelho describes  here:

“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.” ― Brida

Rick Warren offers a useful insight into our personal story and God's will for our destiny:

God’s will is not automatic. He allows us to make choices. Many of the things that happen to you are not God’s perfect will. We all have to choose between God’s will and our will. We often choose our will.

If I got drunk, fell in a pool, and drowned, that wouldn’t be God’s will for my life. It would be my own stupid decision. God has a destiny for your life, but he won’t force it on you.

But you can have God’s will for your life. Even when you mess up, God can turn disaster into destiny. It’s never too late to have his perfect will in your life. Just pray, “God, I want your purpose for my life,” and you won’t miss it — no matter where you’ve been. He’ll get you in line with his purpose. He wants you to fulfill your destiny more than you do!

A postscript: In a 2008 interview , Coelho spoke about being a Catholic and his delight in the mystery of the Mass, where Christ, as both human and God, becomes present in a physical way. He went on to make this point:

God’s a verb. God is action. God is - is a verb, yes. You cannot define. When Moses asks who are you and He says, “I Am.” He does not say I am this or that or that. He just says, “I Am.” So, I think this is the best definition, you know? He is.

The dominating influence of the culture we live in

More and more people are becoming concerned at the human wreckage left as moral behaviour changes. One marker of the damage to individuals, and to the whole of society, is the way suicide rates have surged in the developed countries (see here and here) where the Christian insight into the value of each person has been lost most thoroughly under the onslaught of a mindset that puts the individual above all else, that puts things above the common good, and pleasure before social responsibility.

 That Western society has changed rapidly and without a deliberate decision by society to depart from the traditional Judeo-Christian pattern of life to one that opposes it shows how destructive the tyranny of profit alone, to take one example, can be when it becomes the guiding principle.

The way the societies and their individual members can be the victim of the reshaping of  a culture for business goals or because of neglect of the intangible riches society already possessed can be illustrated by means of this excerpt from Peter Block’s management book The Answer To How Is Yes. Block discusses how the pattern of life that is the culture we live in can unconsciously determine much of our beliefs and practices. And therein lies a vicious trap:

These patterns – personal, institutional, and societal – partially gain their power through their subtlety. As powerful as the culture is, we hardly notice its effects on us. It is the sea we swim in. The culture works on us and through us and even expresses us. In a literal sense, though, the culture does not really determine our actions or even explain why we do what we do. We are responsible for this. The culture is more like a presence in the shadows, ready to step in when we are not paying attention.

One useful way to think about it is as the default culture. In computer software, a whole host of default settings comes with every new program you buy. If you choose, you can change these settings to suit your preferences but if you don’t, the defaults create the rules.

Each time we turn our attention away from our own intentions, we operate, in a sense, by default. In the absence of our clear intention, our willingness to consciously change the settings of the world we are creating, the default culture is decisive. This is hard to see clearly because the culture is able to absorb the rhetoric of our individuality and freedom. It (we) allows space for our own desires, it just does not encourage acting on them. While no one argues against values and desires, we fear they might lead to anarchy and chaos. The result is that although every institution lists its human values on its mission statement, these are often operationally set aside, only to be resurrected during retreats or when public declarations are required.