Luther & Reason: Quick And Dirty Reflections
Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 7:57PM | by Otter From the comments section to my post on Sonlight Curriculum:
I have a related question which deals with the issues brought up in your blog from a historical perspective. From my understanding, Luther disagreed with the Catholic view that we can come to know God through faith and intelligent reasoning, and through his interpretation of scripture believed that we can come to know God through faith alone. If this it true, then did Luther also state that intelligent reasoning should not be used when reading and studying the bible? I'm losing the train of thought or logic that dismisses the uses of intelligent reasoning by protestants. Is this a self-inflicted limitation?
This is an enormously complicated question that pulls together lots of historical threads. And anything but a twelve volume book is going to do injustice somewhere.
So I urge you not to take me at my word but to read books by secular, Lutheran and Catholic historians on this.
Luther: Cloven Hoof Not Pictured, and Perhaps Not Available In Your Particular State of Grace. This will be very much a scattering of thoughts that occur to me as I read your question.
But very, very broadly, this is what I think.
To the best of my knowledge and reading, Luther nowhere repudiates reason. But I believe he created an approach towards religious experience and the Bible that could not do anything but result in a division between the two.
In fact I think Luther would have been scandalized by the suggestion that he was abandoning a belief in reason. He was neither a fool nor the devil he is sometimes imagined. Nor is he so farsighted as one might wish.
He would have said, I think, that he was restoring reason to the Church, and there's a case to be made there. When you read medieval Roman Catholic exegesis, sometimes it's pretty mild stuff that could come out of any mainline Protestant church, but at other times you really feel like you've fallen down the rabbit-hole. (If you're interested in this, do a little brief survey of hermeneutics of Augustine, Nicholas of Lyra, and Aquinas.) And it's against that sort of handling of scripture that Luther brandishes his rather stripped-down hermeneutics.
Luther believed that the text itself (and he could now mean a text stabilized by the earthshaking invention of the printing press) could constitute its own range of meanings, however. That is, he conceived of the scriptures as "self-limiting" in interpretation. (Cheap shot: the proliferation of denominations that can trace their parentage to this idea argues otherwise.)
It's customary among my fundamentalist friends to suggest that scripture functioned in the ancient world more or less as it does in modern conservative North American Protestantism, but nothing could be more misleading. Just to take one simple example of how Luther represents a change in intellectual habit, he emphasizes the "private reading" of scripture, something that previously had been the provenance of clerics and scholars. So true was this, and so different the world they lived in, that those who studied the scriptures did not read silently but aloud, or muttering it, because there was no modern punctuation in manuscripts of the time. That is, reading was explicitly interpretive: you had to find the right way to punctuate the text with your voice. Try that for a week: no reading silently. That's an invention of Luther's time.
(For fun and intellectual profit: get an electronic copy of the Sermon on the Mount, or 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, or Galatians 1 and 2, remove the punctuation, paragraph breaks, quotation marks, and even the space between words, and have a pagan friend who's never been in church read it aloud to you.)
The printing press and the Enlightenment had brought about several shifts in lexical thought that make Luther's ideas possible.
The idea that the text could be stable existed in a mutually enhancing relationship with the idea that reality was itself a stable thing that could be declared through the catalogue of facts.
This had enormous repercussions for Christianity. Whatever it had been, the Bible became, as it were, a statement of facts in much the same way that a scientific publication might be. The observed thing faithfully recorded in the Bible was, of course, God.
What this effectively meant was that he had shifted scripture's authority from its interpretation (which I think is a frightening but much more commonsensical place) to the text itself.
But he was no fool, and recognizing that one must interpret, he conceived of scripture as a thing that could only be interpreted rightly (that is, reasoned about rightly) with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit wrote it, the Holy Spirit interprets it. The "human mind," as it were, drops out of the equation except as a sanctified (or not) instrument.
The dimensions of that problem are huge.
What it means is that right reasoning about scripture is "faith specific." If you and I sit down to read Galatians and you have grace through faith and I do not, you will reason more correctly than I will. Since scripture deals with unseen things, only you, who have regenerate life, will be equipped to discern the meanings of those things. So sharp is that problem that Luther could denounce Catholic allegorizing of the scripture but substitute for it (in his commentaries on the Psalms) a breathtaking christologizing of the psalms. (And it's a majestic bit of reading for any Christian, when he can avoid damning Rome.) His interpretation was right because, well, because he was Luther, and Luther had grace.
But more importantly, that effectively puts paid to the idea that there is anything about scripture's "true content" that can be illuminated without grace and faith. The text itself is sufficient fact-book, the individual's faith is the guarantee against erroneous reading. Reason independent of grace is dead.
Which, if you're Catholic and want to posit a more diffuse grace that encompasses the community, nature, pagan wisdom, or whatever, might be something you could survive.
But if you're Luther (and even more so his successors) and you're tightening the definition of who has grace to those with a certain affective individual faith, you're creating worlds of worry, and drawing battle-lines between scripture and the world where truth is just true, and what isn't true just isn't, and it doesn't matter at all who you are.
His approach was democratic, and therefore wonderfully popular among certain temperaments. It was also somehow simultaneously elitist: you could believe not only that your neighbor was not really saved but therefore incapable of rightly reasoning about scripture. This is still with us of course: my favorite employment of it is in the sweeping denunciation of the faithless reasoning of "higher criticism" by people who use its findings ceaselessly in their translation and interpretation of scripture. But if anything, it's the logical result of Luther. The text is the perfect fact book, a repository of truths that cannot be told in any other way.
And the most basic, obvious, unavoidable question is, If it's so important, shouldn't we check that out?
At some point, the criticism becomes "higher" than the object simply because it is attempting to reason about the question, "What if we're wrong in our first assumptions?"
Is that a permissible question? If it is, and if the answer is, "Yes, you are wrong," then too the "graced" reading of Luther collapses.
We have to look elsewhere, to a place that can accommodate reason as well as scripture, that can see scripture as a part and not the totality of one's authority about the experience of God.
Reader Comments (2)
Gotta tell you how much I enjoy the captions you put under your blog pics. They crack me up every time.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question in such awesome detail!