500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations (Sept 15th 2017)

Friday September 15^th

500 years: the Reformation and its Resonations Symposium

 

9.00 – 9.30 Registration and coffee

 

9.30 – 9.40 Welcome

 

9.40 – 10.40 Keynote Speaker:  Rev Dr Peter Clarkson Matheson. Emeritus Professor Knox Theological College, Dunedin and Fellow of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand. RECORDED

 

“The elusive Martin Luther”

 Luther’s historical importance as a motor for change is not uncontested, but generally agreed.  His authority on the issues which perplex us today: ethical, cultural, or theological is quite another matter.   Despite all the tub-thumping   Luther 500 has hardly caught fire, even in Germany.  If  he  was in tune  with his  own  Zeitgeist  the  opposite  would seem to be  the  case  in 2017. Actually to read him, to enter his world of discourse, is a shock to the system, even when we try to take our post-Enlightenment presuppositions into account. His apocalyptic take on reality and his categorical self-assurance are no small part of the problem.

 

10.40 – 11.00 Coffee break

 

11.00 – 12.00 John Coffey, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Leicester.

 

“Protestant Millennialism and British Antislavery, 1770-1840”

The abolitionist movement has been studied as an episode in the history of capitalism, empire, and domestic political culture, but it is also a puzzling episode in the history of English-speaking Protestantism. Why did many British (and American) Protestants come to believe that the eradication of slavery was possible and even imperative? This belief flew in the face of received wisdom, and was at odds with the traditional Augustinian view that slavery (like war) was a necessary evil in a fallen world. This lecture will address the problem by exploring the impact of the rise of Protestant millennialism over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will argue that millennialism injected a new sense of possibility into Protestant culture. In particular, millennialist expectation inspired the rise of an evangelical missionary movement in the late eighteenth century. Missionary millennialism would powerfully inform the outlook of many abolitionists, including William Wilberforce and other leading activists. It is no coincidence that the great era of missionary expansion and postmillennial eschatology was also the age in which many Protestants came to believe that they could change the world, that slavery could be eradicated across the globe.

 

 

12.00- 1.00 Lunch

 

1.00– 1.30 Raheem Oluwafunminiyi, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, Nigeria. RECORDED

 

“Luther versus Us: Encountering the Reformation through the Eyes of an African Class”

A decade ago as a fresher in one of the local universities, I including ninety-five students across three departments (History, English and French) in the Arts Faculty offered the course, European History, 1300-1789. Each outline was examined once every week in a two and half hour class, sometimes less, but one particular topic – The Reformation and Rise of Protestantism – appeared atypical. Aside the fact that it lasted for three weeks, close to 4 hours was spent haggling critically over wide-ranging issues under this rather ‘provocative’ topic. For three weeks, fierce debates on why the principal actor, Martin Luther would openly challenge the Church took centre stage. A good number questioned Luther’s arguments against the Church while others criticised the latter for its non-receptiveness to change. The class took an introspective assessment of Luther’s 95 Theses, a piece many accused him of ‘stealing’ from earlier reformists like Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, John Huss, Desiderius Erasmus among others. This group, albeit, argued that Luther presented absolutely nothing new, they were of the conviction, nevertheless, that the Church needed reforms and it was only a matter of time that someone would eventually emerge to call for a shift. Not a few believed Luther was wrong yet a handful openly went up in arms against his decision to perpetually back the Catholic Church and Catholicism he had inadvertently fragmented into two distinct ideologies. This study reflects on this three-week class where ninety-five African students critically engaged Luther and the Reformation through robust, and at other times, critical debates. It identifies and examines some of the contentious issues that characterised the Reformation era through the eyes of this class and the divisive propensities such religious encounters tend to assume in strictly African academic (student) settings. Oral interviews shall also be conducted among select students of that class to gauge their opinions on how they perceive the Reformation 500 years after. While it may have thawed in coming centuries across Europe, this study contends that the Reformation would be re-awakened in distant West Africa in the second decade of the 20^th century where African independent churches established by Africans also split from mainline historic churches, enacting reforms doctrinally native to African peoples.

 

1.30 –2.00 Marta Quatrale, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie (PhD Candidate):

 

‘Nos esse tubam illam nouissimam. (Gnesio) lutheran Identity and the Revelation of the Antichrist in the so-called “Herrgotts Kanzlei”’

Within the context of a confessional use of Historiography, the Lutheran apocalyptic Self-identification has been originally and programmatically oriented against the Roman Church. As asserted in the Formula of Concord itself, the importance of the Reformation as historical event should be found in the historical revelation of the hidden pattern of the Revelation as a whole. This happens through the event of the revelation of the identity of the -- already existent, but hidden -- Antichrist. Despite the recognition of several “Antichrists” – this topic became for many reason by far the most famous and spread point of Martin Luther’s doctrine – the proper Antichrist remained for Luther himself the Papacy. Shortly after Luther’s death, as a consequence of the defeat of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546/47, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered at the 1548 Diet of Augsburg the so-called Augsburg Interim (Declaration of His Roman Imperial Majesty on the Observance of Religion Within the Holy Empire Until the Decision of the General Council). In this context, such “generally protestant” historical awareness – the fact that everything concerning the Pope, and later, everything concerning each possible kind of political theology, lies on fictive, so invalid premises – found a perfect storm for the development of a new, more radical Self-legitimation within the Reformation itself: the so-called Hergotts Kanzlei in Magdeburg, forerunner of the Gnesiolutheran (namely: “truly Lutheran”) production. The reason is to trace back to one of its implied assumption: if intended in its apocalyptic potential, the legitimation of Lutheranism as historical event of revelation is made possible due to its historical defeat, recognised as sign of the divine presence, historically revealing itself as mortifying bond. My aim here is to shortly sketch this process, and to trace back its implications to clarify the apocalyptic connotation of the construction of the concept of “(Gnesio)lutheran Identity”, as controversial element first and foremost in the negative sense of the refusal of any possible theological-political claim.

2.00 – 2.30 Break

 

2.30 – 3.15 Michael Questier, recently a Leverhulme research professor of history. He is currently honorary professor in the centre of Catholic studies in the Durham theology department.

 

“The Protestant Reformation in England and the Making of Catholic Saints.”

If there is one thing on which many scholars of the English Reformation are agreed, it is that the Catholic account of that historical event is, if not exactly a fantasy, then so heavily coloured by polemical and hagiographical bias as to be almost incompatible with “mainstream” versions of politics and religion in the sixteenth century and after. Nor would one deny that (though Catholics are not alone in this) there has been a fair amount of myth-making in the way in which Catholic narratives of their past have been compiled. On the other hand, that process has itself remained largely concealed. The contention of this paper is that we should look again at the nineteenth- and twentieth-century English response to the Roman curia’s legal procedures for investigating the causes of those in the Reformation period who were, in their own time, acclaimed for their heroic sanctity; and this included those who suffered for their opposition to, as they saw it, heresy and heretical tyranny. The complex investigations conducted by Rome’s officials and agents, in the period up to 1987, into cases of alleged martyrdom for religion, it is argued here, have in fact contributed substantially to the accumulation of the historiographical traditions which are now central to our narratives of the Reformation.

 

3.15 – 3.45 Ariel Hessayon, Senior Lecturer & Deputy Head of Department of History Goldsmiths, University of London:

 

“The English Revolution as Radical Reformation”

In retrospect the events that began in the new university town of Wittenberg in 1517 initiated more than one Reformation.  Following G.H. Williams's seminal work it is conventional to think of both a Magisterial and a Radical Reformation spreading through Europe during the sixteenth century.  In this paper I want to make the case that England experienced not only a Magisterial Reformation through its break with the papacy and adoption of Calvinism by the state church, but also a Radical Reformation during the English Revolution of 1641-1660.

The Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a cohesive movement.  Indeed it might best be conceived as a jumble of ideas spread by a heterogeneous assortment of charismatic and committed believers.  And yet a number of the key doctrines and demands that emerged during this period subsequently reappeared in a different English context.  I think this is significant.  Accordingly, I want to explore these notable commonalities: identification of the Pope with antichrist within an intoxicating apocalyptic milieu; hostility to university trained clergy and calls for the abolition of tithes; desire to return to an uncorrupted primitive Christianity practised and preached by the Apostles (occasionally extending to community of goods); opposition to infant baptism; and, if somewhat rarely, denial of the Trinity.

 

3.45 – 4.15 Break

 

4.15 – 5.15 Andrew Weeks, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Illinois State University. RECORDED

 

“The Faustian Reformation”.

We have grown accustomed to an expanded concept of the Reformation that began 500 years ago.  We are familiar with the long and multiple, the radical and magisterial reformations.  In my presentation, I intend to draw on a strand of Reformation historiography that goes back to the late nineteenth century and flourished again at the end of the twentieth.  Its findings stress the anticlerical and antiauthoritarian motives within the popular reformation.  By focusing on this well documented aspect of the German Reformation, we can capture important facets of its distinctness, as well as its impact in Germany and abroad.  The antiauthoritarianism of the German Reformation informed popular literature, medicine, nature theory, and mystical dissent.  In this light, we can re-interpret an anonymous literary work that became emblematic of the age, the “Faustbook” of 1587; and we can better understand the German reforming tradition of Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, and Jacob Boehme and their wider European influence.

 

5.30 Close