History of Christianity

by Robert Alvis

I recently had the good fortune to spend a day in Aachen, Germany, and to tour the city’s magnificent cathedral and the neighboring Cathedral Treasury Museum. These two sites offer an abundance of riches that are especially meaningful for historians of European Christianity. In addition, they offer valuable insights into the important relationship between history and Christianity within European societies. In addition to offering doctrines, rituals, and ethical guidelines to its practitioners, the Christian tradition has provided means for articulating the past in meaningful ways.

The core of the cathedral was built during the reign of Charlemagne, and alongside the neighboring palace it formed the heart of the Frankish Kingdom’s new fixed capital. Its construction was part of a larger project of cultural and intellectual renewal that has come to be known as the Carolingian Renaissance. This renewal, in turn, was linked to a long string of military successes, through which Charlemagne gained mastery over much of the European continent. Pope Leo III famously crowned Charlemagne’s achievement by placing an imperial diadem on his head in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day in the year 800.

Historians long have debated whether Charlemagne was a willing participant in his imperial coronation, or whether he was duped into receiving the honor in a way that suggested his dependency upon the pope. Charlemagne’s courtier, Einhard, argues the latter position in his Vita Karoli Magni, claiming that Charlemagne never would have entered St. Peter’s Basilica had he known in advance of the pope’s intentions. And yet the notion that a man as shrewd as Charlemagne would have walked obliviously into a carefully executed imperial coronation strains the imagination.

The church he commissioned at Aachen lends further credence to the view that he welcomed the imperial title. Its striking design—a soaring domed octagon ringed by a sixteen-sided ambulatory, richly clad throughout in mosaic, marble, and polychrome stone—was unlike any other existing church north of the Alps, but it was hardly unprecedented. It was clearly patterned after the San Vitale Basilica in Ravenna.

Commissioned by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, San Vitale is an early example of Byzantine church architecture, a style closely associated with the imperial court in Constantinople in the two centuries leading up to Charlemagne’s reign. In choosing to build a church after the Byzantine style in his new capital, Charlemagne was acting the part of a Roman emperor and rooting his sprawling domains in a venerable political and ecclesiastical tradition.

While Charlemagne sought to anchor his young dynasty to a pre-existing model of great renown, time would gradually hallow his legacy with a potent legitimacy of its own. Many subsequent rulers sought to bask in the afterglow of his glory, and once again Christian symbols and practices were employed to forge the connection, with the Aachen Cathedral providing a stage for the drama.

When Frederick Barbarossa was appointed Holy Roman emperor in 1152, he was determined to restore to the office much of the power and prestige that had been lost in preceding decades. And so he appealed to the memory of Charlemagne, the heroic wellspring of the imperial line. In 1165 he prevailed upon Antipope Paschal III to canonize Charlemagne (a decision annulled at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, though Charlemagne remained beatified), an honor that was celebrated with great fanfare at Aachen.

Emperor Frederick II pursued a similar strategy. In 1215 he commissioned an ornate golden sarcophagus to house Charlemagne’s remains, which he had placed in the center of the cathedral’s octagonal nave. The side panels of the sarcophagus depict a succession of emperors running from Charlemagne to Frederick II, rendering plainly the lofty legacy Frederick claimed for himself.

In 1349 Emperor Charles IV likewise sought to activate the memory of Charlemagne, ordering the skull and thighbone removed from the golden sarcophagus in order to be displayed in two elaborate reliquaries. In 1481 King Louis XI of France arranged for the bones of Charlemagne’s right arm to be placed in the now famous Arm Reliquary.

Charlemagne’s bones no longer inspire the kind of veneration that first led them to be encased in exquisite reliquaries. This explains why they are now on view in the Cathedral Treasury Museum rather than the sacred precincts of the cathedral itself.

This is not to say, however, that the relics of Charlemagne are devoid of religious significance altogether. I suspect that many of the contemporary pilgrims who make their way to Aachen each day are drawn there by more than just an appreciation for medieval artistry. They recognize in the cathedral and its treasures dimensions of a religious heritage that still matters, even if they adhere to its ritual obligations sporadically at best.

Grace Davie has coined the memorable phrase “vicarious religion” to describe the disconnect that currently exists between religious practice and religious belief and/or affiliation in Europe. While rates of weekly church attendance are dismally low throughout much of the region, in many countries healthy majorities of the population still identify with a Christian tradition. According to Davie, active members within the churches uphold values, perform rituals, and sustain collective memory on behalf of the wider population. Historical sites like Aachen play an important role in this new religious landscape, providing a richly textured past that lends meaning and depth to the European experience.

From the moment of its conception, the Aachen Cathedral was designed to shape the present by appealing to the past. It has since accumulated a dense history of its own, and this history continues to influence how those who encounter this space situate themselves in the march of time.

by Christopher Ocker

I thought I would take the liberty of this medium to share thoughts not drawn from my research in late medieval and early modern Christianity but provoked by the American intellectual historian David Hollinger.  They are, in the end, somewhat personal.

In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians last March, Hollinger calls attention to the role of Ecumenical Protestantism in recent American culture.  True, Hollinger concedes, the Ecumenism that dominated the Protestant Establishment at mid-century, with its advocacy of cultural diversity, racial justice, and modernized belief, contributed mightily to the decline of the Protestant mainline.

The Ecumenists were lulled by their own success.  Membership rose and peaked in the old Protestant churches in the early 1960′s, and the Ecumenists exploited an extraordinarily privileged access to government and media.  They also underestimated the impact of the laity’s growing dissatisfaction with them, as the clergy turned increasingly leftward.  Meanwhile, their intellectual progeny took themselves and the enterprise of social reform out of churches and into secular organizations.  In the 1980′s and 1990′s, evangelicals handily took the Ecumenists’ place as the public face of Protestantism in the United States.

According to Hollinger, the Ecumenists got what they wished for, and then some.  For one, Ecumenical Protestantism became “a commodius halfway house to what for lack of a better term we can call post-Protestant secularism.”  Yet, too, the Ecumenists’ discourse of cultural diversity and tolerance and their criticism of religious orthodoxy now govern public attitudes in “the most ostensibly religious society in the industrialized North Atlantic West,” even among self-identifying evangelicals, perhaps indicating, he suggests, a kind of secularization by stealth.  Sure, the success of mid-century programs has contributed to trans-generational attrition in the ecumenical churches, their numbers famously declining since the 1970′s.  But these same endeavors have also left a deep imprint on American cultural life.

I teach medieval and early modern Christianity as cultural history in one of those Protestant Establishment seminaries.  This one was begun under the leadership of a clergyman 140 years ago in a prominent church on San Francisco’s Union  Square, and it is one of a dozen or so of the oldest surviving educational institutions in the American west.  In his day, the founder was a visible and controversial public voice in the city.

A slave-owning southern clergyman before he came to the Presbyterian Church on the square, he thought the separation of church and state precluded government interference in the secular institution of slavery in the South and precluded public school prayer in the West.  He is referred to cautiously and with caveats around here.  His mid-century biographer was my predecessor by some generations removed, a historian of Protestant missions in California and the Pacific Northwest and a frequent contributor to the Pacific Historical Review.  The biographer emphasized the bit about school prayer.  We have all but forgotten the founder’s place in public life.  The loss of his memory is emblematic of the decline of the Protestant Establishment of which Hollinger and others speak.

Around here, we tend to presuppose the academic parochialism of places like ours before the mid-twentieth century, while we are blind to the threat of parochialism now.  We get it exactly backwards.  In the 1920′s and 1930′s, when our faculty mostly avoided the stormy, definitive doctrinal and missionary policy debates racking the Protestant Establishment in those years, future Presbyterian ministers at this seminary could choose courses in Akkadian to complement standard offerings in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek of the bible. Now we send those students to the University of California.

Across the Bay at our nearest rival, the Congregationalist Pacific School of Religion, a professor who had trained in another seminary, the Moravian one in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, directed a significant archeological dig at Tell en-Nasbeh, northwest of Jerusalem.   Such were the Protestant seminaries scattered across North America in the early twentieth century.

The rise of the Ecumenists in the 1950′s, in spite of their insistent self-distancing from the doctrinal orthodoxies of the past, seemed to reap a harvest planted by their ancestors.  Their rise brought an ambitious president to the San Francisco Theological Seminary.  As a young college professor in the Midwest, Ted Gill led study tours of college students to meet activist missionaries in Latin America.  Once he arrived in the Bay Area, he expanded the faculty.  He appointed, among several other mavericks, the seminary’s first medievalist, an intellectual historian imported from Europe named Martin Anton Schmidt.  He appointed the historian of Puritanism Leonard Trinterud, the historian of Protestant theology John Dillenberger, and Noel Freedman,  a scholar of Hebrew bible,  who went on to become one of the most prominent bible scholars of his generation.

Gill’s impatient correspondence with disillusioned donors makes for an interesting read.  The donors were goaded by news of his endorsement of the civil rights movement, and by a newly appointed theologian’s court testimony against local obscenity laws, and by things said by bible professors visiting churches to preach – denying the Exodus, the resurrection of the dead, and other less axiomatic biblical miracles.

Gill also invested time, personnel, and property into the creation of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, a quintessentially ecumenical project if ever there was one.  Dillenberger was transferred to the GTU.  Neither the medieval intellectual historian nor the prominent bible scholar stayed long, moving on, respectively, to the universities of Basel and Michigan.  The ambitious young president himself left to become professor and then provost of John Jay College in New York.  US withdrawal from Vietnam took away the draft deferments that incentivized applications for admission.  Soon after, the decline in enrollment, mercifully gradual here, began.

The mid-century expansion ultimately proved unsustainable, although I hasten to add that at both the GTU and SFTS we like to think that we’ve continued to thrive, and our pride in our graduates is fulsome.  That I should teach a decidedly medieval Reformation on this Protestant faculty in a well-integrated ecumenical consortium is a privilege I owe to the expanded intellectual, social, and cultural space created by Ecumenical Protestants.

Those who teach history in a theology faculty associated with the old Protestant churches know their own versions of this story.  It’s hard not to yearn for the halcyon days at mid-century when the Ecumenists could all rest confidently in a public, liberal-Protestant prestige, and yet it’s hard not to marvel at the Ecumenists, if for no other reason than because fewer and fewer of us, or our students, were born and raised in their ancestral faith with its peculiar assumptions and prejudices.

I won’t go into the details of those assumptions and prejudices.  I prefer to consider the reminders of an earlier prestige.  Here, our stately buildings, a popular local wedding venue, are rare, if late, examples of Richardsonian Romanesque on the west coast and a gorgeous testimony to the Protestant Establishment’s past, which included a handful of the region’s generous captains of industry.  Today, passersby admire the buildings wondering if we are monks (none are) and nuns (one is), train priests, or reject evolution (none do).

Meanwhile, theological education among Ecumenical Protestants seems to have regressed into vigorous nail-biting.  This is hidden by an awkward optimism, that when we become the kind of dynamic, adaptable organizations that evangelical schools and churches are presumed to be (and to be fair, some really are), the numbers of our students will rise, followed by a bounty of job openings for our enterprising graduates.

Here, in the Ecumenical Protestant seminary, it occurs to the teacher of history that the study of ancient, medieval, or early modern religion has little to contribute to the perfection of Godly Play or the role of Power Point and social media in “a new model for ministry” patterned after the evangelical seminary’s, or the seminary satellite’s, model down the road.  Spirituality, on-line education, and youth ministry, some say, are the most important things a seminary can teach today, and by teach they seem to mean train.  To embrace that ambition would make a travesty of what theological education born in the Protestant Establishment had aspired to be.  At the same time, like our Establishment forebears, we tend to ignore the center of serious theological inquiry that our best evangelical rival, Fuller Seminary, has become.

Needless to say, the august Society sponsoring this blog is, in its own way, both a product of the old Protestant Establishment and, in its current, vibrant form, a by-product of the transitions discussed by David Hollinger and others.  Both facts, the society’s origins and its current form, are reflected in the journal’s indicative title/subtitle, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture – “Christianity” and “Culture” coaxing the reader away from the delimiting “church.”  A member of the ASCH teaching in a seminary is not inclined to surrender all real education in the history of religion and culture to the divinity schools and departments of universities, as though real scholarship should not belong in a seminary, a presupposition occasionally voiced, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, by friends outside of seminaries and, more alarmingly, by others within.  No, I’m not willing to admit the failure of Ecumenical Protestantism.

Hollinger points out that the presumption of failure typical among Ecumenical Protestants, and I would add, the confusion, depression, and muddled aspirations that accompany it, make sense from only one perspective.  He says,

To recognize the historic function of ecumenical Protestantism as a halfway house, if not actually a slippery slope to secularism, is in no way invidious unless one approaches history as a Christian survivalist.  Religious affiliations, like other solidarities, are contingent entities, generated, sustained, transformed, diminished, and destroyed by the changing circumstances of history.  Those circumstances still render ecumenical Protestantism a vibrant and vital home for many persons.  A genuinely historicist approach to the history of religion will not teleologically imply that those committed to that faith today are headed for history’s dustbin.  On the contrary, historicism demands that we address every human phenomenon in its local and global contexts, and be as respectful as we can of the honest decisions people make in those settings and refrain from thinking we know the future.

It’s worth pondering this observation in all its dimensions.  There is, for example, the business about secularism.  What’s wrong with it, in the pluralistic form once advocated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the young Martin Marty, Henry van Deusen, and their admirers of yore?  I, in my interfaith family, with my Catholic dean and my Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican, Jewish, Muslim, Swedenborgian, Buddhist, evangelical, Unitarian, Ecumenical Protestant, unidentified, religiously indifferent, and atheist colleagues and students across the Bay, find this saeculum a good and productive place to call home.  A particular religious or cultural identity does not have to dominate a society to be morally relevant or spiritually alive, quite the contrary, a point the old guard Ecumenists argued on principle but might have found difficult to feel in their Anglo-Protestant, Euro-American bones.

Ecumenism was not only a Protestant affair, and the pluralism encouraged by the Ecumenists was not unique to them but widely shared among the political left.  This fact was reflected in Fundamentalist accusations of selling-out the church, familiar to those of us who passed near or through evangelicalism in the 1970′s.  The rejection of a Christianity leaning affectionately on its diverse cultural pasts and presents in a world of religions, beliefs, and unbelief survives in an evangelical rhetoric against “cultural Christianity.”  But, tellingly, cultural Christianity is now also recognized by evangelicals to be a threat within evangelicalism and not just outside it.

That pluralism has subsumed Protestant-Catholic, Jewish-Christian, or Christian-Muslim differences under the umbrella of cultural diversity is hardly a bad thing.  Nor is it a damaging thing.  A historian should never regret contributing to a comparative, deeply human and humane dialectic of identification and differentiation, the I-am-you-not-you dialectic created by interaction across boundaries.

A great danger in seminaries is that a recidivism around a particular religious identity, encouraged by what Hollinger calls Christian survivalism, could destroy any interest in a genuinely historicist approach to history.  Anxiety to survive threatens to collapse the teaching of church history or the history of Christianity, whichever side of the journal’s title you prefer, into a self-affirming exercise, an exercise in a particular version of Christian identity or theological or spiritual tradition, a history taught by people with little training in, or sympathy for, a genuine historicism, a history that studies the past only to appropriate bits, pieces, and distortions for the present.

I don’t mean to begrudge anyone the history of his or her particular brand of the world’s “traditioned communities,” a phrase coined by Lewis Seymour Mudge, a theologian and a fondly remembered colleague, a dedicated Ecumenist, and a scion of the Protestant Establishment whose father, as stated clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly, was mentioned regularly in the pages of Henry Robinson Luce’s Time Magazine.  The plural of Mudge’s phrase is essential.  The pluralistic, historicizing alternative to self-affirmation is, in fact, wonderful.  There is no better reason to study the history of Christianity anywhere, in a seminary or out, than to be seduced, charmed, provoked, shamed, offended, and engaged by the magnificent imaginaries that color the history of religion, a culturally promiscuous science.

Christopher Ocker is Professor of Church History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, Coordinator of the seminary’s Muilenburg-Koenig History of Religion Seminar, a Member of the Core Doctoral Faculty of the Graduate Theological Union, affiliated with the Joint Program in Jewish Studies of the GTU and the University of California at Berkeley, and affiliated with Berkeley’s History Department.

by Patricia Appelbaum

Pious forgeries are still with us. I’ve been studying modern treatments of St. Francis of Assisi for a while, and I learned a long time ago (thanks to the good work of my predecessors) that the well-known “prayer of St. Francis” – the one that begins “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” – is a twentieth-century creation. Recently, though, I’ve realized that there are many more spurious quotations out there, so I am beginning to collect them. I have not yet tracked down many sources; that remains to be done. What I’m thinking about right now is their meaning.

One current favorite is “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” The many variant versions suggest that this aphorism has already entered into folklore. (Of course, the Internet has an unprecedented ability to multiply and spread this kind of material.) This saying is quite consistent with what we know of Francis – preaching was an important part of his mission, and all sources and commentators would agree that he enacted his message as much as he verbalized it. It’s even consistent with the humor and wit, the sense of reversal, that surfaces in most accounts of his life. But there’s no record that he actually said it.

Another one is a blessing attributed to Francis’s counterpart Clare: “Live without fear. Your Creator has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you like a mother. Go in peace to follow the good road, and may God’s blessing remain with you always.” This one, appealing though it is, is a little more far-fetched than the first. The few documents that we have from Clare’s hand are nothing like this. They evince a sense of humility and sacrifice, and her God-language is all masculine in the traditional way. The idea that we are created holy would be alien to her (and to a good deal of Jewish and Christian tradition).

These “quotes” have turned up in published sources, sermons, and other places that ought to be reasonably reliable. A quick Internet search will reveal lots more, including many variations on the theme of preaching through actions.

This phenomenon suggests several things to me. To begin with, many practitioners of religion aren’t really worried about accuracy. If a text offers some kind of spiritual truth, or illuminates some kind of spiritual question, that’s good enough. This is probably as true of liberals as of literalists. It suggests that Enlightenment and modernist concerns have lost much of their impact, if indeed they ever penetrated very far into everyday practice.

It also suggests that the authority of the past is still very powerful. So is the authority of holy figures. We know, of course, that many texts, from biblical periods onward, derived authority from attribution: to a prophet, an apostle, a philosopher, a saint. But we would expect modern people, the heirs of scientific history, to look for authority in accuracy – in reliable documents and sources, in careful interpretation, in accountability. And we would expect postmoderns to work with the text as it stands, regardless of source or authority. Most contemporary Americans would laugh at the idea that anyone would need to attribute a text to an authority figure from the past in order for it to be taken seriously.

And yet these little texts do not circulate as anonymous aphorisms or blessings – they are presented as quotations. The holy figure from the past provides authority. Without attribution, a proverb or blessing or poem is just another text, to be considered, evaluated, and perhaps forgotten. Attached to St. Francis, it makes a stronger claim to be taken seriously and to be remembered.

But perhaps we should read this phenomenon the other way around. Perhaps it is devotion to the saint that generates the saying. Perhaps devotees of Francis are looking, consciously or unconsciously, for fresh ways to get his message across, to make it meaningful in the present. If a formulation sounds as if he could have said it, someone will make a short leap from “could have” to “actually did” or to “would have if he were living today.” Or if it is circulated in connection with his name, or his picture, or his followers, someone will make the leap to direct attribution.

This is roughly what happened in the case of the “peace prayer.” (I’ve even seen a website that names Francis as author of the “Little Flowers,” a collection compiled some hundred years after his death in which he is described in the third person.) And again, most devotees don’t care very much. It’s often said of the “peace prayer” that it conveys the spirit of St. Francis, even if he didn’t actually write it.

But this line of reasoning doesn’t work well for the blessing attributed to Clare. True, it may have been associated with her name or image at some point. But it seems very distant from her voice and her actions. It doesn’t seem to convey her spirit at all. Instead, again, the attribution invokes her power and authority. A formulation that meets some contemporary need is attached to an important figure from the past. Why it should be Clare in this case I don’t know: the blessing clearly has female references, but there is nothing particularly Claretian about it. Still, its users do not allow it to be anonymous.

What I am saying is largely speculative, I know, though it is informed by what we know of folkloric processes and historical practices. But my real purpose is to think about religious believers’ uses of history. And their relationship to St. Francis seems a good place to begin.

In one sense, history signifies reality. One reason Francis appeals to modern and contemporary people is that he is historical and therefore “real.” His life is reasonably well-documented, we can connect him with dates and a family and a place (although this last generates some other interesting questions). He acted a lot like Jesus, but no one claimed that he was more than human; he was bound by time and space and physical reality, as all historical actors are.

Many believers are looking for a usable past, and Francis is appealing because he is at least theoretically a role model. Many of his actions were concrete and simple, and people can at least conceive of imitating them. (Many of his actions were also rather mad, but that raises other complicated questions.) The spurious quotes may be a way of creating a collective memory – a shared interpretation of Francis that is comprehensible and useful in the present. These little texts, anonymously produced, collectively circulated, make oblique suggestions about meaning – sometimes invented meaning.

And holy figures from the past still carry a surprising amount of authority. Pious forgeries are still being attributed to Francis and Clare, less because of their historicity than because of their moral weight. Despite Americans’ reputation for being ahistorical, many religious Americans are still looking to the past for support. We may be more medieval than we think.

by Barbara Newman

According to Vatican insider Andrea Tornielli, Pope Benedict XVI plans to canonize Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) and declare her a doctor of the church in October 2012.  To date, thirty-three theologians have been granted this honor, only three of them women (St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux).

Many will be surprised to learn that their favorite visionary is not a saint already, for she is often styled as such.  In fact, she has officially been “St. Hildegard” since 1940, her feast observed on September 17—but only in Germany and within the Benedictine order.  To the puzzlement of non-Catholics, sainthood within the Roman Church is not an all-or-nothing affair.  Regional observance and the liturgies of religious orders allow some middle ground between unofficial popular cults and veneration by the universal Church.  Canonization itself did not become a papal prerogative until the mid-twelfth century, only a generation before Hildegard’s death.  The great Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), one of her correspondents, was among the first saints to be formally canonized by Rome.  Hildegard herself corresponded with several popes.  Eugenius III gave her his blessing, but she harshly reproached his successor for failing “to rein in the pomposity of arrogance” among his subordinates and tolerating “depraved people who are blinded by foolishness and who delight in harmful things.”  In a 2010 address on Hildegard, Benedict XVI stated that she served the church at a time when it was “wounded by the sins of priests and laity”—which she never hesitated to denounce.

That in itself would not have precluded her canonization in the Middle Ages.  A process was first launched in 1233, but like most medieval processes, it fell short of its goal.  A chief difficulty seems to have been the labyrinthine complexity of the process itself.  Although numerous miracles were collected by the inquisitors charged with that task, the precise names, dates, and places could not be verified.  More than half a century after Hildegard’s passing at the age of 81, most of her beneficiaries had also died.

As André Vauchez has shown in his great work on canonization, no special reason need be offered to explain why this or that medieval cause failed—though both women and Benedictines (as opposed to friars) stood at a disadvantage in the late Middle Ages.  Rather, the rare cause that succeeded would owe its success to some extraordinary impetus.  Often the deciding factor lay, and still lies, in a pope’s regional sympathies.  For instance, Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) won a large popular following that quickly evolved into a cult, but she was not canonized until 1461, when the Sienese pope Pius II sat in Peter’s chair.  Agnes of Prague, a princess who founded the first Franciscan nunnery in Bohemia, died in 1282 but achieved sainthood seven hundred years later, in 1989—when the Polish pope John Paul II was eager to encourage the faithful in countries newly freed from the Soviet yoke.  Hildegard’s wait has been even longer.  But it will be a German, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who finally raises one of his nation’s heroines to the honors of the altar.

Controversial in her lifetime, Hildegard was more so after her death, though the theological books for which she is now revered were soon forgotten.  Too long and difficult to be frequently copied, they lay far outside both the scholastic and the mystical mainstream.  The Hildegard best remembered by later generations was neither the theologian nor the composer, but the apocalyptic prophet.  Not content merely to denounce clerical sins, the “sibyl of the Rhine” prophesied the advent of a treacherous new people with an aura of holiness, the birth of Antichrist, and the disendowment of the Church by secular princes—all in a suitably obscure and portentous style.

Depending on the interpreter, she was therefore said to have predicted the rise of the mendicant orders, the Jesuits, the English Reformation, and the French Revolution.  But once partisan polemics ceded to the skeptical temper of the Enlightenment, Hildegard’s star sank rapidly.  Like most medieval women writers, she was either confidently deprived of her authorship or relegated to the ranks of hysterical females.  Some wondered what male author had used her as a convenient mask.  One Catholic scholar allowed that Hildegard had written the works ascribed to her, but only as a passive vessel of the Holy Spirit, not understanding a word of them.

The soon-to-be-saint’s rehabilitation began in the mid-twentieth century.  One of the chief grounds for canonizing long-dead figures is “immemorial cult,” which Hildegard can certainly claim.  Of the two monasteries she founded, one perished in the Thirty Years’ War but the second, at Eibingen on the Rhine, survived until its secularization in 1803.   Rebuilt from 1900-1908, it is today a thriving nunnery and pilgrimage site.  The nuns of St. Hildegard’s Abbey may well have exerted some quiet pressure behind the scenes in Rome.  For precisely that reason, the founders of religious communities hold an advantage in the politics of sainthood.  But Hildegard’s nuns did more than exercise a long institutional memory.  Two of them braved academic scorn and returned to the manuscripts, proving in a carefully documented study of 1956 that the visionary abbess had indeed authored the books bearing her name.  Though their findings have been corrected in details, the achievement of Marianna Schrader and Adelgundis Führkötter, OSB, remains the essential foundation of all Hildegard scholarship and thus of the saint’s modern cult.

Other church historians followed in their wake—first German, then anglophone.  By the 1980s this obscure medieval visionary had become a spiritual superstar, firing the imagination of a church transformed by the re-emergence of feminism.  Hildegard was suddenly everywhere:  musicians recorded her liturgical chant, medievalists edited and translated her works, book covers reproduced the manuscript paintings ascribed to her, retreat leaders presented her as a feminist role model, New Age healers touted her holistic remedies, deep ecologists recognized her as a precursor, and even cookbooks appeared in her name.

The Dominican Matthew Fox made Hildegard the poster child for his “creation-centered spirituality,” popularizing her in a series of books that bridged the chasm between scholarship and fandom.  In 1998, the nine hundredth anniversary of her birth, she was celebrated in liturgies, conferences, lectures, and concerts around the globe—and the nuns of Eibingen constructed a new guest house for pilgrims.  The latest episode in Hildegard’s media celebrity came in 2009 with the German film Vision, directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa as the mystical nun.

Many devotees expected that in 1998, if ever, the papacy would bow to Hildegard’s burgeoning cult and make it official.  In retrospect, however, it is hard to say whether this belated fame helped or harmed her official cause.  Matthew Fox was silenced by Cardinal Ratzinger for doctrinal errors and evicted from the Dominican order in 1993; a year later he left the Catholic Church.  Nor did Hildegard’s popularity in women’s spirituality circles, both within and beyond the Catholic fold, necessarily commend her to a conservative papacy.  The pope who had declared a moratorium on the mere discussion of women priests may have been less than eager to canonize a twelfth-century woman who made four extensive preaching tours.  When Benedict XVI succeeded John Paul II in 2005, Catholic progressives feared that the papacy would continue on its conservative course, if not veer even further to the right.  Moreover, Benedict reversed the policy of his predecessor, who had canonized more saints than all previous popes combined, by making the streamlined process more rigorous again.

In many ways, therefore, the announcement concerning Hildegard comes as a surprise.  But it appears that the Roman tortoise has caught up with the dashing seer of Bingen at last.  Secure in the possession of eternity, Rome never hurries.  It would be a papal courtesy and a great honor for the Eibingen nuns if Hildegard’s sainthood were to be proclaimed urbi et orbi from the abbey she founded.  She would almost certainly be the first saint to have her own music performed on such an occasion, and who better than her nuns to sing it?  Your humble blogger would hope to be there.

The Institute on World War II and the Human Experience and the Department of Religion

 Florida State University

“World War II and Religion”

November 30-December 1, 2012

Call for Papers

The Institute on World War II and the Human Experience and the Department of Religion of Florida State University seek paper proposals for a two-day conference in Tallahassee, Florida focusing on Religion and World War II.

Conference organizers G. Kurt Piehler and John Corrigan seek papers that touch on the institutional, theological, and human impact of religion in World War II.   We are interested in the global dimension of this conflict and encourage scholars whose work focuses on Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and the Soviet Union, as well as Europe and North America.  We are interested in addressing the ways that combatants and civilians drew upon religious ideals and institutions to sustain them in an age of total war, and especially how soldiers, sailors, and aviators behaved religiously in the course of their service.  Additionally we solicit papers that consider the roles religious organizations and values played in fostering ethical conduct during the war, providing humanitarian relief, and protecting non-combatants and conscientious objectors, as well as analyses of various kinds of religious justifications for violence, including genocide.

Among the questions we seek to address:  did religious leaders and institutions foster a climate that encouraged rather than retarded the drift to total war?   Are there really no atheists in foxholes? What was the legacy of the war for religious institutions and ideals, especially in the defeated Axis Powers? How did religious institutions discredited by their support of the Axis Powers seek to regain their legitimacy?  What kinds of compromises did persons negotiate with their religious beliefs in wartime? In what way was pre-existent religious rhetoric deployed to characterize enemies as evil? How did the war diminish and exacerbate the perception of religious differences?

We encourage contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.   The conference organizers hope to provide travel funding to graduate students and junior scholars to encourage their participation.  Plans call for the publication of an anthology drawn from the conference proceedings edited by John Corrigan and G. Kurt Piehler.

Those seeking to participate in the conference should submit a 750 word abstract along with a short 3-5 page c.v. via Microsoft word attachment or PDF File to G. Kurt Piehler at kpiehler@fsu.edu by March 15, 2012.  For further information about the conference, please contact John Corrigan at jcorrigan@fsu.edu or G. Kurt Piehler at kpiehler@fsu.edu.

G. Kurt Piehler, Director
Institute on World War II and the Human Experience

Department of History
Florida State University
401 Bellamy Hall
113 Collegiate Loop
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2200

Telephone:  (850) 644-9541

E: Mail:  kpiehler@fsu.edu

Website:  ww2.fsu.edu

by Timothy S. Lee

Reading Peggy Bendroth’s discussion of the Christian Right’s involvement in U.S. politics has prompted me to think about evangelicals’ involvement in contemporary South Korean politics. Evangelicals have always been involved in the politics of South Korea—i.e., the Republic of Korea—ever since the state was founded in August 1948.

Three of the nine South Korean presidents have been evangelicals—Syngman Rhee (1948–1960), Kim Young Sam (1993-1998), and Lee Myung Bak (2008-2012), the current president. And in the past couple of decades Protestants, mostly evangelicals, have usually constituted about forty percent of the members of the National Assembly, the highest legislative body in the country—this in a country where Christians constitute 29.1 percent of the population, 10.9 percent of whom are Catholics and 18.2 of whom are Protestants, again mostly evangelical.[1]

Given such a record, it is no surprise that politically-minded evangelicals are abuzz with activity this year, for looming large in their mind is the 2012 election year, in which the country will choose a new president and vote on most of the seats in the National Assembly. Among these evangelicals, a minority has caused a stir by forming political parties that are specifically identified as Christian.

The stir arose because most Korean evangelicals think it is bad taste to have the word “Christian” in the name of a political party: they prefer Christians to engage in politics by working in established parties. A minority of evangelicals, however, have seen otherwise. They avow that South Korean politics and society have become so corrupt and leftist that nothing less than an explicitly Christian political party will make any difference—and they believe there are a great many people in the pews who share their views.

Their contention was put to test in the 2004 National Assembly election, for which the first explicitly Christian (i.e., evangelical) party was formed. The Korean Christian Party (han’guk kidoktang) was formed with the blessing of prominent church leaders such as Cho Yonggi and Kim Chun-gon. But despite high hopes, the party flopped, winning only 1.1 percent of the vote: not enough to elect even a single candidate to the National Assembly.

The Korean Christian Party failed to overcome the evangelicals’ aversion to explicitly mixing religion and politics. This precedent, however, has not deterred the diehard advocates. Thus far this year, two Christian (evangelical) political parties are gearing up for next year’s election: another party named Korean Christian Party (han’guk kidoktang), different from the one that suffered defeat in 2004, and a party that was born of the joining two separate parties—The Party for Practicing Christian Love (Kidok sarang silch’ŏn’dang) and The Christian Democratic Freedom Party (Kidok minju jayudang)—the joining having taken place December 6, the party has not yet settled on a name.

These advocates have been making rounds in churches, espousing their cause, not shying away from engaging in debate with critics such as Son Bong-ho and Yi Mahn-yol, both highly respected evangelicals who have fiercely argued for the mainstream view, that evangelicals should first try to get their own houses in order before trying to fix society, that explicitly Christian political parties will only besmirch the good name of the faith, which is already under attack for insalubrious goings-on in many of the churches, and that forming such parties will invite religious discord, as it will likely galvanize, for example, Buddhists to form their own explicitly political party. The year 2012 will be an interesting year for those observing how evangelicals and politics intermesh—on both side of the big pond.

[1]The figures are from the 2005 national census conducted by the South Korean government. The census indicated that 22.8 percent of South Koreans identified themselves as Buddhists.

by Craig Atwood

Church history has traditionally been divided into four epochs: the Patristic Age, the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, and the modern era. When I did my doctoral studies at I had to complete comprehensive exams in each of these eras of the church, and there was little question that these divisions accurately reflect the turning points of Christian history. Aside from the fact that this schema ignores the histories of the Greek, Coptic Orthodox, East Syrian, Jacobite, and other Asian and African churches, it even distorts the history of Western Christian. In recent years historians have begun referring to Protestant reformations instead of a single Reformation that began on or around the 31^st of October in 1517, which is a step forward in better understanding of a complex era. Historians discuss the Swiss Reformation or the English Reformation or the Radical Reformation, but all of these reformations are confined to the 16^th century. These groups are called Protestants, but it has proven difficult to identify what is common to these groups. The “Protestant” reformers disagreed, sometimes violently, over doctrine, ecclesiastical structure, sacraments, and biblical interpretation.

Was there anything that the myriad expressions of the “Reformation” held in common? There is one practice that clearly identified a church as separated from the Roman Catholic Church prior to 1965: lay persons could drink from the chalice in the ritual of the Lord’s Supper.

I think it would be much easier and clearly for historians to use the lay chalice as the marker of the spread of reformation in the early modern period than abstract doctrines like “justification by faith” or “sola scriptura.” Despite the importance of the lay chalice in the history of reformation in Western Christianity, historians pay little attention to the revolution that occurred on October 28, 1414 when a priest named Jakoubek of Stribro intentionally violated canon law by offering the chalice to lay persons in Prague.

John Hus makes an appearance in most church history textbooks, either as a “heretic” or forerunner of Luther, but church history texts and course syllabi rarely acknowledge that Czech Reformation continued after the death of Hus. Two churches in Bohemia had already rejected canon law, separated from the papacy, questioned the authority of church councils, and established their own ecclesiastical structures before Luther posted his famous theses. The Czech reformers were the first theologians to make the lay chalice central to church reform, and it was in Bohemia that the Catholic Church tried to abolish the lay practice through military force.

Jakoubek, a master at the University of Prague, decided that the Fourth Lateran Council was guilty of heresy when it reserved the chalice to the priests. This was not a minor issue. The same council that condemned Hus to death also repudiated communion in both kinds (or utraquism). When King Vaclav of Bohemia tried to enforce the prohibition of the lay chalice in 1419 a priest named Jan Zelivsky led a popular rebellion that began with the defenestration of town councilors in Prague. The five crusades launched against the rebellious Hussites were the first of the fratricidal wars of religion that ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and should be included in discussions of religion and violence. On the battlefields in Bohemian it was the cross of the crusaders against the chalice of the Hussites.

The Czech Reformation produced three distinct churches in the 15^th century. The Utraquist Church tried unsuccessfully for two centuries to reach an accord with the papacy that would allow for the lay chalice. The Church of Tabor lasted only from 1424 to 1451, but it developed some of the doctrines and practices that were adopted by later Protestants, most notably the use of the vernacular in the liturgy and the restoration of confirmation as a key ritual. In 1457 the first pacifist church was founded in the village of Kunwald in Bohemia. A decade later this Unity of the Brethren ordained their own bishop and priests. In the 1520s Martin Luther met with members of the Utraquist Church and the Unity of the Brethren. He examined several texts of the Czech Reformation and agreed that it is necessary for lay persons to have access to the chalice. Luther also published the Brethren’s catechism before writing his own more eloquent expression of basic Christianity. The rest, as they say, is history, or rather the history we are most familiar with.

For more information see: Craig D. Atwood, Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).