Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

"Absolutely. And that’s probably an opportunity to start talking about another of the books on the list, which is Brad Gregory’s book—with the perhaps slightly questionable pun in the title, Salvation at Stake (1999). This is a very interesting and important book talking about the aspect of Reformation-era Christianity which is guaranteed to make modern people—and perhaps especially modern Christians—uncomfortable, which is the intolerance and the violence. We don’t know exact numbers, but certainly more than 5,000 people were judicially sentenced to death for their religious beliefs. That’s not to mention the many thousands of others who were slain in religious conflicts or wars with a strong religious underpinning. Gregory, of course, does not endorse any of this, but he says that we have to take it seriously. This book was published in 1999, but I believe that post-2001, there’s an imperative to take it more seriously still. That provocative and challenging and difficult word, ‘martyrdom,’ has been in the news a lot. “In earlier centuries, each religious tradition had rather celebrated its own martyrs and ignored the others” So the subject of Gregory’s book is the phenomenon of martyrdom, of Christians who were put to death for their beliefs. That has always been an important feature of the scholarship. What strikes me as important and original about this book is that it attempts to look comparatively across the whole range of martyrs. In earlier centuries, each religious tradition had rather celebrated its own martyrs and ignored the others. And people who died who didn’t have direct modern institutional successors tended to get rather neglected. Although an awful lot of our historical memory is of the mainstream Catholic and Protestant martyrs—the priests of England or Holland who were hanged or the Protestants who were burned in Mary’s reign—actually, the great majority of those who were put to death in this period were neither Catholics nor Protestants. They were that variety of really radical or spiritualist Christians who we lump together under the heading of ‘Anabaptist.’ Their ideas were equally offensive to the mainstream authorities in Protestant and Catholic territories. They’re arguing about things like the precise nature of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and the sort of flesh that Christ may have taken from his human mother or not. So, yes, things that clearly seem less important to us but come out of a profound reflection on Christian revelation. In the case of most of these radical Anabaptists, it comes from a reading of the Bible, which the Reformation had made more widely available in the—perhaps naïve—belief on the part of people like Luther that the meaning of the Bible was absolutely clear and straightforward and that no right-minded person could possibly divert from the authorised view of it. But, of course, once the Bible comes into the hands of ordinary people, really searching questions are asked about major Christian doctrines like the Trinity, which doesn’t appear in a very developed form in Scripture. One of the things that this phenomenon and Gregory’s account of it puts to rest is the very pervasive idea that doctrine was just a matter for the clergy and intellectuals and the universities. Ordinary people just weren’t interested, got on with their lives, and did what they were told if they thought about it at all. That may be true of some, but there is a lot of evidence from across Europe that really humble people, without formal education, took the business of their salvation, of what God expected from them, remarkably seriously, to the point at which they were willing to die for it. “One of the most important points about the Reformation is that although all sides are totalitarian and intolerant, no side was able to triumph completely and to totally eradicate its opposition. Not even the Spanish Inquisition was able to do that” The willingness to die, of course, is only one aspect of martyrdom. As modern people, we can understand it, to some extent, though we might not want to do it ourselves. The other aspect is the willingness to kill. That’s more challenging. It goes against every modern assumption about the uncertain or relative nature of truth and the mutual obligations and duties within a liberal, civil society. And, here, we do confront something about the Reformation, about why it is such an extraordinarily interesting and indeed violent period—because any notion of a relative or divisible truth is simply not there. There can only be one revelation, one true religion. For a couple of hundred years, you have this extraordinarily uncomfortable position where that is a universally shared assumption, but the reality on the ground is that unity and agreement about what that true religion was has completely broken down. Here we can move away from the idea that these are just very arcane or irrelevant doctrinal questions, because early modern people were convinced that the health and coherent functioning of a society were absolutely dependent on unity in faith. People who challenged that were also challenging the basic ability of society to work and stick together. The radicals known as Anabaptists were particularly offensive on that score, because their reading of Scripture led them to believe, for example, that it was impermissible to take oaths. Not taking oaths means that you can’t take up civic office or serve on a jury. They also refused to undertake military service. So really quite fundamental political and social issues are tied up with their reading of the demands of Scripture. One of the things I admire about Gregory’s book—and I think what it shares with Bossy and indeed with all the books on my list—is that it’s daring and provocative. Not necessarily in a polemical way—picking out particular earlier interpretations to attack, which is the game that historians usually play—but making us think, to use a cliché, outside the box. Gregory’s particular bête noire is what he sees as reductionist approaches to the history of religion and to an apparently strange phenomenon like the willingness to die or the willingness to kill. In the hands of some modern scholars, it seems to require that we translate this into terms that are more explicable to us. They may be talking about the doctrine of the Eucharist, but really there are other agendas at work—psychological, political, economic—for which this is merely a cover. That sort of approach has its roots in a classic, Marxist approach in which economic forces are everything and culture and ideology just a sort of icing on the cake. But it is also very prevalent in more recent, postmodern theories which are very concerned with hidden structures of power. Gregory is saying something deceptively simple, which I have great sympathy with: We have to take these people at their word, even though we don’t necessarily share or empathise with or admire these beliefs. We have to accept that they were very serious about them and willing both to die and to kill for them. In the end, part of the paradox of this intolerant world that he’s painting is that out of it grows a world which is much more recognisable to us. One of the most important points about the Reformation is that although all sides are totalitarian and intolerant, no side was able to triumph completely and to totally eradicate its opposition. Not even the Spanish Inquisition was able to do that. So out of the Religious Wars of the early modern period comes a kind of truce, a very reluctant recognition that actually toleration, if not tolerance—those are slightly different things—of opposing viewpoints had to be accepted within societies for the sake of social peace. And although it’s far too simple to say that this leads very quickly or straightforwardly to secularisation, it does, nonetheless, lead to a relocating of religion out of the public sphere—and away from the essential symbolism and identity of the state—into a more social and private sphere. For a long time, into very modern times really, rival religious groups reluctantly lived alongside each other, disliking each other to varying extents—but they stopped killing each other."