Brad S. Gregory

The true and Zealouse Seruice of God': Robert Parsons, Edmund Bunny, and The first booke of the Christian exercise

It appeareth (I saye) what an exacte lyfe the trew lyfe of a Christian is: which is a continuall resistance of all sinne, bothe in thought, word and deede, and a performance or exercise of all good woorkes, that possiblie he can deuise to doe. God requireth at our handes, that we should make his lawes and preceptes our studie and cogitations: that we should think of them continuallie, & meditate vpon them bothe day and night, at home and abrode, early & late, when we go to bedde, and when we rise in the morning: this is his commaudement, & there is no dispensation therin.

Tyndale and More, In Life and In Death

Abstract The continuing fascination with the clash between William Tyndale and Thomas More derives partly from the way in which it reveals fundamental doctrinal disputes within Christianity in the Reformation era, and from the fact that both men were executed for their convictions. Setting the two men within a context wider than England in the 1520S and 1530S helps us better to grasp the nature of their dispute. At the root of their controversy in life was the question of whether the Bible requires an authoritative interpreter. Tyndale asserted that the literal sense of Scripture was a clear, self-sufficient authority that needs no interpreter, but in the context of competing and incompatible interpretations in the early Reformation in fact he placed himself in this role. More, by contrast, argued that Scripture was sometimes straightforward but often obscure, and so required the authoritative interpretation of the Roman Church. The issue for More was not whether Scripture needs an interpreter, but where interpretative authority lies. Despite their disagreements about biblical interpretation, however, in anticipating death for their respective beliefs both men turned to Scripture for consolatory preparation, sometimes adducing exactly the same biblical verses.

The one or the many? Narrating and evaluating Western secularization

ABSTRACT Secularization in the Western world is not a contrived combination of disconnected phenomena. It is a complex, long-term, multi-faceted process in which the central place of Christianity has greatly diminished in all areas of life since the sixteenth century, and which derives from the enduring doctrinal disagreements and recurrent religio-political conflicts of the Reformation era. Because late medieval Christianity was embedded in and intended to influence all areas of human life, including buying and selling, the exercise of power, and higher education, all areas of human life were powerfully affected by the Reformation’s rejection of Roman Catholicism. By problematizing religion, the disagreements and conflicts inspired new ideas and institutional means to address them, and thus inadvertently contributed to secularization. The two principal accounts of long-term Western secularization – Enlightenment-liberationist and Catholic-disembedding – diverge not in their descriptions of what happened, but rather in their overall assessments of the process as respectively positive or not.

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (review)

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism--all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformations protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science--as the source of all truth--necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (review)

2nd Pass Pages fraternité. Le conflit du “suffrage universel” chez les capucins du XVII siècle.” Sparking this controversy was mounting tension between concern about preserving “humility”and the clericalization of the order,a tension that was particularly intense in the seventeenth century.Daniel-Odon Hurel investigates Maurist spirituality in “La contribution des Mauristes aux missions de l’intérieur au XVII siècle.”This rich analysis of Maurist missionary strategies and recruitment shows that the missionary efforts of 1660 and 1686 in France responded to two very different concerns: internal corruption and heresy.Marcel Bernos’s “La pastorale sacramentelle des insensés” shows that seventeenth-century confessors were sensitive to psychological maladies, and worked closely with doctors to understand and treat their flock. Claude Soetens’ interesting examination of the rites controversy in China,“La condemnation romaine des rites chinois au 18 siècle,” situates the condemnation of Christian rites at the intersection of Chinese politics and inter-order conflict. Also intriguing is “Protestantisme et FrancMaçonnerie: Une histoire sans histories?” by Jean-Louis Cornez. Cornez questions the traditional association of masonry with Protestantism by marking out its shared sensibilities with Catholicism.