1
History, Historiography, and Interpretations of the Reformations

We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life.

Peter of Blois (d. 1212)

History and Historiography

Peter of Blois penned this famous aphorism almost exactly three centuries before Luther's "Ninety-Five Theses" rocked Europe. A major study of the historiography of the Reformation (Dickens and Tonkin 1985: 323) concludes that it is "a window on the West, a major point of access to the developing Western mind through the last five centuries. . By any reckoning, the Reformation has proved a giant among the great international movements of modern times." On its shoulders we can look farther and deeper in both directions; that is, we can peer into both the medieval and contemporary worlds.

History provides a horizon for viewing not only the past but also the present and the future. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975: 269, 272) argued that a person without a horizon will overvalue what is immediately present, whereas the horizon enables us to sense the relative significance of what is near or far, great or small. "A horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand - not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion." In other words, "far away facts - in history as in navigation - are more effective than near ones in giving us true bearings" (Murray 1974: 285). Even novice sailors know it is foolish to navigate by sighting your prow rather than by sighting the stars or land.

Historical distance, by providing a focus beyond what we take for granted, can be a surprising component of contemporary comprehension. The analogy of living in a foreign city illustrates this. If you live in a foreign city for a year, you will not learn a great deal about that city. However, when you return home you will be surprised by your increasing comprehension of some of the most profound and individual characteristics of your homeland. You did not previously "see" these characteristics because you were too close to them; you knew them too well. Likewise, a visit to the past provides distance and a vantage point from which to comprehend the present (Nygren 1948; Braudel 1972). L. P. Hartley began his novel The Go-Between with the memorable sentence: "The past is another country; they do things differently there."

Memory also illustrates perspective. "Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity" (Hofstadter 1968: 3; Leff 1971: 115). Memory and historical identity are inseparable. Have you ever been asked to introduce someone and suddenly forgotten his or her name? At worst this common human experience is a temporary embarrassment. However, think what life would be like if you had no memory at all. We all have heard how terribly difficult life is for amnesiacs, and about the tragic effects of Alzheimer's disease upon its victims and their families. The loss of memory is not just the absence of "facts;" it is the loss of personal identity, family, friends, and, indeed, the whole complex of life's meaning. It is very difficult if not impossible to function in society if we do not know who we are and how we got this way. Our memory is the thread of our personal identity; our memory liberates us from what Melanchthon, Luther's colleague, called perpetual childhood. Without our past we have no present and no future.

What about our national and religious community identities? Are we amnesiacs, are we children, when it comes to identifying who we are in relation to our communities? What if we had to identify ourselves as an American or a Christian? Suppose someone asked why we are Protestant or Roman Catholic. Beyond referring to our parents or a move to a new neighborhood, could we explain why we belong to Grace Lutheran by the gas station instead of St Mary's by the grocery store?

I once asked a French friend to explain German-French relations. He began by referring to the ninth-century division of Charlemagne's empire! Most of us do not go that far back to answer contemporary questions, but his response illustrates that if memory is the thread of personal identity, history is the thread of community identity. These tenacious threads of community identity also have a dark side when they are not critically examined. This is painfully evident in the eruption of historical ethnic conflicts such as those in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union as well as in the Middle East. If we do not know our personal and community histories we are like children who are easily manipulated by those who would use the past for their own purposes.

Memory and history are crucial to our identity, but they are not easily conceptualized in relation to their origins and goals. Here I take comfort in the comment of the great African theologian, St Augustine (354-430), who when discussing time wrote: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not" (Confessions, Book XI). This most influential Western theologian was struggling to relate to his Hellenistic-Roman culture the Christian conviction that the identity of the community is rooted in history rather than in philosophy and ethics. This conviction had already been clearly stated in the historical shorthand of the Christian creeds, which confess faith in the historical person of Jesus who was born, suffered, and died. Christians put a unique spin on history when they also confess that this Jesus was raised from the dead and will return to bring history to completion. Thus, from an insider's perspective, the Christian community's identity is formed by both the historical past and the historical future. Without sensitivity to this theological claim, it would be difficult for us to fully realize the power in the Reformations of apocalyptic views of history or such works as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. This sense of the historical past, present, and future identity of the church, expressed in the third article of the creeds by the phrase "communion of saints," was so palpable to the medieval that the English Roman Catholic historian John Bossy (1985) makes it the theme of his study of the Reformation. As we shall see, the historical identity of the communion of saints became a central controversial issue in the Reformation era.

Sociologists of knowledge make a similar point about historical identity rooted in community. Historical identity is passed on to us through our conversations with the mothers and fathers who have gone before us. In this sense, church historians take seriously the fourth commandment of the Decalogue: "Honor your father and mother." We know, of course, from even limited family experience that when we no longer talk to our parents and children we begin to forget who we are. This is not to say that conversation between generations is always pleasant, but to say that it is important for learning how we got this way. Without such conversation we are condemned to "presentism," a fancy term to describe the solipsism of a continuous "me generation." Thus the postwar German phrase Welt ohne Vater is shorthand for the loss of roots and the authority crises suffered by the generation whose fathers fell in the war. Lord Acton stated this elegantly: "History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air we breathe. It requires all historic forces to produce their record and submit it to judgment, and it promotes the faculty of resistance to contemporary surroundings by familiarity with other ages and orbits of thought" (Pelikan 1971: 150).

Until recently the collectors and tellers of the family conversations of Christianity were nearly all insiders. Thus the subject matter and the discipline of its telling fell under the rubric of "church history." For a variety of reasons today, persons outside the Christian churches are also interested in presenting the history of Christianity. There is, to paraphrase an old maxim, the sense that the telling of the story of Christian contributions to contemporary identity is too important to be left to the Christians. The field of Reformation studies is a marked example of this recent development.

Awareness of the distinct perspectives of church historians and historians of Christianity will be useful in terms of reading both contemporary textbooks and the historical sources. We shall get to other perspectives later, but for now we may remind ourselves that interpretations of the past are not value free. Indeed, Heisenberg's "indeterminacy principle" applies as much to historical studies as it does to subatomic physics: what is observed is influenced by the observer. "It is paradoxical, in fact, that nature seems more unambiguously susceptible to human understanding and control than is history which man makes and in which he is personally and intimately involved" (Spitz 1962: vii). In the words of the late English historian, G. R. Elton (1967: 13): "In truth, historians, like other people, tend to judge their world from their own experiences and practice, and it is disturbing...