In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses. So began two stories that have shaped the West since the 16th century. But what happens if we link the two?
The first story cast the relationship between Europe and the Western hemisphere in terms of conquest: Columbus crossed the Atlantic and "discovered" islands. He was followed by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, who conquered first Central and then South America for Spain. The second is the foundation story for modern western Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. A small handful of men who were God's instruments on earth broke with Catholicism, which was traditional and medieval, to found modern, liberal churches. Each Church caught in that battle for souls claimed the authority of God's will; each found its origins in the person of Christ; and each claimed those origins were exclusive of any other understanding of Christianity.
Those two stories obscured much that was and is important. Columbus "crossing" the Atlantic obscured that he knew neither the sheer breadth of the body of water -- his sailors were close to mutiny when they sighted land -- nor the islands and the two continents we now call North and South America: he was literally out of his reckoning. "Crossing" the Atlantic presumes that both coasts were known and the distance between them known. They were not. The 95 Theses belonged to an established tradition of university debate -- a pedantic act of a local university professor shrank in comparison with the dangers posed by the Ottoman Empire to the east or the possibilities posed by new lands to the west. It was not the theses themselves that moved thousands, but the authority that Luther, along with hundreds of others seized as certain: the Bible or, as they called it, the Word of God. They turned to a printed object, where they located absolute authority, to ground their own understanding of their salvation.
Only in bringing the two stories together can we see why that printed thing, the product of a new technology, very much like the internet today, became so important. It had been around, after all, for a long time. Why then? Why there? But the printed Bible, as the Word of God, offered Europeans something certain in the face of truly overwhelming "discoveries." We are used to discoveries -- they happen every nanosecond. In this, we are heirs to Columbus: it has become normal to "discover." But in 1492, Europeans thought they knew the size of the world, and they thought that their classical sources were not simply right, but authoritative -- the foundation for all knowledge. Columbus's voyage shattered that confidence.
If, as we now understand, the story of conquest obscured terrifying uncertainties, the overthrow of what was familiar and trusted, the story of Reformation cast different understandings of a sacred text in terms of divine revelation: only one of those understandings, according to the story, could be "true." That one text was not simply an authority unto itself. It could have only one true reading. All other readings were "false," "misunderstandings" of God's will, God's intent, God's meaning. That story of Luther's 95 theses obscures that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of different readings -- indeed, by the end of the century, there were different Bibles, different Ten Commandments and different understandings of the ancient words of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. It silences the richness of the text; it denies the authenticity of other readings.
To tell a different story of the Reformation -- of human difference, of divisive readings of a sacred text, of divergent experiences of faith -- is not simply good scholarship: the practice of detachment and the willingness to lay aside prejudice to look afresh at the evidence. It is to recognize polemics for what they were: the construction of absolute oppositions, where there were differences of understanding on one point, but shared understandings on others, which echoes today. It is to recover another perspective of the period: that the Muslim empire to the East threatened what Emperor and Pope took to be Christian Europe. Pope and Emperor did not, at first, see essential divisions between Christians: they saw an external threat to a universal Church.
To set 16th-century Christians' insistence upon the authority of the printed Bible in a longer narrative is to erode the force of revelation as a model for human history, to undercut that sense that some individuals are chosen as God's instrument. It is to recognize many more actors in history, whose voices were different, not "false." Most important, we can at long last hear one question that so gripped Europeans and Americans in the 16th century: "What is it to be human?" The question links debates on converting the Western hemisphere with bitter divisions over the nature of Christ's humanity and over the meaning of words central to both their faith and the practice of that faith, words Christ spoke the night before he died: "this is my body." Was Christ's body human in the same way as all human bodies are? As Taino or Aztec bodies? And then, we can hear voices left out of those trajectories of triumph, such as the essayist, Michel de Montaigne, who asked: "What binds us together? What separates us? Is anything at once essential and shared? A deeply human history that speaks to us."
George Lakoff: The Use of 9/11 to Consolidate Conservative Power: Intimidation via Framing
On the Luther Trail 2011: Reformation and Freedom
Commentary: Germany trip connected Adventist leaders, laity, pastors in ...
Brilliant Bio of Italian Painting's Bad Boy
The book was callsed "On Jews and their Lies." Luther was angry that Jews hadn't converted to Christianity (before the "End Times," which he believed were fast approaching) so he called on his followers to burn synogogues, attack Jewish institutions, etc., etc. Ironically, centuries later, Nazis did just than on the "Night of the Broken Glass" in 1938. They arrested 30,000 Jews, sent them off to concentration camps, and killed a couple of hundred.
Columbus most certainly was a navigator and explorer. He spent a lot of his life on ships beginning in his childhood. He'd led several long and difficult voyages before 1492. An adventurer? Sure. But that went along with sailing.
"and he wanted to make money for his sponsors in Genoa"
He wanted to make money for himself and his family. And from 1492 on the only one sponsoring him was Isabella of Castile. Isabella died in 1504, and that's also when Columbus' voyages stopped.
"Luther was a freedom fighter"
A mistake which many people have made, beginning in Luther's lifetime. Peasants in lands whose rules became Lutheran had been oppressed by the Catholic Church, and they assumed that Luther wanted them to be free from oppression. Oops! Wrong.
The question of the size of the Earth was controversial, and it remained so until the actual voyages around the world.
I call BS. If you meant most -- no quotation marks necessary -- then you should have said most. And even then I'm not sure you'd be right. You and all these other people are repeating a meme and refusing to step back and examine it.
First, Europeans knew the circumference of the earth. Columbas didn't: he grossly underestimated it, and this is why he was so strongly opposed. If there had been no Americas, his ships would never have made it to Asia, and everyone besides him knew that.
Second, people in the 16th century (or just about any time) didn't think there was one "true" reading of the bible or theology. Well maybe metaphysically, but few were so arrogant as to think their own view was correct. People tend to grossly overestimate the amount of theological uniformity in the 16th century. Very few were marching in lockstep behind the pope. What made the protestants unique wasn't that they disagreed with the Roman church on theology (many did, especially in 16th century Germany). What made them unique was that they constituted a large group that was able to unite (not theologically) behind a single man (Luther) and become the single largest movement pushing for long overdue reform in the Roman church. They were social revolutionaries, not because they opposed anything about the Roman church but because they defied the Holy Roman Emperor. The pushback these governments instiuted over the next 150 years was what made this schism permanent.
Catholicism then as now was not a monolithic group. There were many people whose views differed from the pope, especially in Germany. This had been the case for well over a century by Luther's day, so his theological disagreements weren't unique. He looks much more unique looking back in time at him than he looked in his own day. In his own day he was more akin to a Martin Luther King: the leader of a major movement. Today we see him as one of the defining persons in human history. His legacy was formed by events long after his death: in particular the counter-offensives against protestants that transformed them from a group of social dissenters into a different sect of Christian.
In his day, "protestants" could only identify themselves as a single group because they "protested" the treatment of Luther by the Holy Roman Emperor. Luther was the personality that drove a much larger desire to reform the Roman church and remove the corruptions that had entered it. Had catholic kings not violently repressed protestants, they may well have merged back within the catholic realm.
is pretty well understood to have done his share of instituting slavery in the New World.
I see there was no mention of Martin Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies", written in the
1540's, a tract that was so virulently anti-Semitic that it was revered by the Nazis. So much
so that all it's suggestions were put into practice. The original document was even displayed
at the Nuremberg rallies. To my mind such racism negates any claim to being a "spiritual"
leader.
But then again few religions have qualms against genocide, slavery, racism, or fear
mongering.
"A small handful of men who were God's instruments on earth broke with Catholicism, which was traditional and medieval, to found modern, liberal churches."
Luther for one was a reformator. He wanted to REFORM the catholic church, not found a "modern liberal church".
When looked at in the context of late-medieval Europe, neither Columbus nor Luther look very extraordinary. Both of them seem to be doing things that had been done for hundreds of years. There was nothing that exceptional about the sixteenth century - nothing even that "modern" about it.