Did the Reformation Cause Secularization? Horton responds to Tom Holland

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1. 00:00

   TOM HOLLAND He stands at the head of the atheism that emerges in the West,

2. 00:08

   UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER partly because the atheism is all about you again. It's like, what do you think?

3. 00:12

   MICHAEL HORTON There's, I think, partial truths here, things that could be explored fruitfully, but totally misses what faith was for Luther.

4. 00:21

   TOM HOLLAND He's in a love affair. And when you're in a love affair, you don't care what other people think. You only care about the person you're in love with.

5. 00:27

   MICHAEL HORTON That's not— it doesn't— sorry, it doesn't even really explain why Luther himself said, who am I to think that I alone am right?

6. 00:38

   UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER He should call them, uh, CHINOs, Christians in Name Only.

7. 00:43

   TOM HOLLAND Very good, very good. I do like that. Yeah, excellent.

8. 00:55

   MICHAEL HORTON Hi, my name is Mike Horton, and I teach theology And one of the people I've been really interested in of late is Tom Holland. He's a great historian. We're going to be looking at his comments about the Reformation and Martin Luther, and you're wading into some pretty deep water there with a lot of different viewpoints, a lot of different historical takes on these figures and the Reformation in general. We're going to look at what Tom Holland has to say and— What do you think?

9. 01:30

   TOM HOLLAND On what it is that makes this Reformation moment so important. He says that Luther's theology was not a doctrine, it was a love affair. So it's not about drawing abstract theological principles. It's about articulating a feeling, a kind of an intensity.

10. 01:50

    MICHAEL HORTON Just a little bit of pushback there. First of all, I think he's absolutely right that it wasn't about a doctrine, it was about a love affair. Luther wasn't even looking for how a sinner can be justified. Initially, he was just looking for God. He wanted to believe in the real God who really exists, whether he's going to condemn him or he's going to save him, whether he's going to cast him out or embrace him. Luther was just looking for the true God. And it was a love affair. It was a passion. It was a drive. It wasn't just about dotting your i's or crossing your t's. And that's true for all of us.

11. 02:34

    TOM HOLLAND Of love. So all the time that Luther had kind of been dreading that he was unworthy of God's love, that he would be condemned by God's justice, that God hates him, this realization suddenly that God loves him and that God loves him in a way that transcends rubrics of, you've done this and therefore you have to pay this penalty and you'll be in purgatory this long. That's not what it's about at all. It's total, it's kind of intoxicating, it's beyond reason. And it comes to Luther, I think, partly through kind of psychological impulses, a kind of yearning for this love in the face of all the unhappiness that he's been feeling.

12. 03:15

    MICHAEL HORTON You've got to be careful about psychologizing Luther. And, you know, a lot of people had gone through similar experiences to Luther's. But really what made it— made a huge difference in Luther's life was Johann von Staupitz, his confessor and the head of the Augustinian monastery, telling him he was going to make him a Bible teacher. At the new university. And so he went to teach Bible, and starting with the Psalms and then moving to Romans, he discovered that the righteousness of God condemns, but the righteousness from God, which is a free gift, is free and absolutely gracious. It is the gift of Christ himself. And so you don't just take the Bible out. It's not just people, you know, making moves and interpreting passages based on their psychological experience. That's certainly a part of what Luther went through here, but a lot of people did, but they didn't become the leaders of the 16th century Reformation.

13. 04:31

    TOM HOLLAND In trying to kind of justify himself to God. But as I say, it also comes from reading Paul and particularly one line So there's a letter— so there's a line in, in the letter that Paul writes to the Christians in the church, the letter to the Romans: the righteous shall live through faith. And Luther understands this to mean the faith that specifically that God loves you and that it doesn't matter if you're lost to sin. Everyone is lost to sin. You know, there is no— humanity is so sinful that they can't through their own agency obtain the forgiveness of God. But it doesn't matter, because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace. And the state of grace is the feeling that you have that Christ is present in you.

14. 05:19

    MICHAEL HORTON Not really. Christ— it's not the feeling that you have in you that Christ is present. For Luther, faith is the confidence that God became flesh in Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, became a human being like us and fulfilled the law in our place, bore our sins, and rose again for our justification. And so it's not just that God loves us, it's that God loves us in Christ. And Christ is the only basis, not our feelings, not our experience, but the accomplishments of Jesus is the only basis for our acceptance before God.

15. 06:05

    TOM HOLLAND In your secretmost heart. And the certainty of that grace in turn gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience, that all your anxiety about whether you're going to be redeemed or not is gone. And so you can have a kind of deep, profound spiritual joy and sense of certitude that essentially cuts the Gordian knot of all the purgatory stuff, all the confession stuff, all the am I going to go to heaven or not?

16. 06:31

    MICHAEL HORTON Well said.

17. 06:33

    TOM HOLLAND And it's an incredibly— I mean, it's a really, really kind of profound moment because it provides both a theological, but more importantly, I think, an emotional justification for getting rid of all the purgatory and clergy and pilgrimage and all that kind of stuff. And it's not just that that stuff is wrong, it's positively sinful because it's blocking off a proper understanding to the Christian people of God's love. And so this is why Luther emphasizes the loneliness of the individual Christian before God. It is you alone with Scripture, with faith. You don't need anything else.

18. 07:13

    MICHAEL HORTON That's not quite true. Martin Luther said that a person reading his Bible in the corner without the help of teachers and the rest of the church would just mean everyone would go to hell in his own way.

19. 07:29

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER So 2 things, Tom. Number one, if this is the case, why isn't this just a massive get-out for, you know, you don't have to feel bad about your sins and stuff because God loves you. Everyone's sinful. Everyone, you know what, everybody is sinful. The world is sinful. And the thing is, all that matters is that God loves you. So crack on, you know, fill your boots.

20. 07:47

    TOM HOLLAND Well, this is, this is the great debate. And this is the great criticism of that kind of Protestant sense of election. I mean, you put your finger on it.

21. 07:58

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Secondly, what I would say—

22. 08:00

    MICHAEL HORTON Well, you know, he's right. I mean, ever since the Apostle Paul, there's been the criticism that if you believe that all of your merits before God are Christ's merits given to you freely as a gift, then you'll just go sin your daylights out. You know, God likes to forgive. I like to sin. Sounds like a perfect relationship. Paul said that that's what people were saying about his message. He said, I'm being slandered as saying eat, drink, and be merry because it doesn't matter really how you live because you're saved by grace. First thing to say is if you're not If you're not being charged with preaching license, you haven't preached the gospel yet. These people were. Those who have preached the gospel clearly down through the ages have actually been saddled with that charge. And it's a good indication that we're probably preaching the right gospel if we're criticized that, oh, that's— it can't be that easy. Oh. Well, then it'd be open for everybody. But the other thing to remember here is that even though it's open to everybody, it's a free gift, it's something that we receive. And all who receive him become the children of God. And so it's not just kind of a universal loving embrace. This is something that we all come to through faith in Christ. And we do that even because he's given us the gift to believe.

23. 09:41

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Thinking about the 2020s, a criticism that some people would have of the capital E enthusiasm of some activists, no matter what side they're on, is the tremendous sense of being puffed up with their own righteousness. The certainty that some of us more skeptical find so obnoxious. Is Luther not conscious that other people will find his moral certainty, his sense of being saved, oh, look at me, God loves me, isn't that brilliant? He doesn't think—

24. 10:14

    TOM HOLLAND He doesn't.

25. 10:15

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Other people will find that frightening.

26. 10:15

    TOM HOLLAND Because he's in a love affair.

27. 10:16

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Right.

28. 10:17

    MICHAEL HORTON No, that's not quite true. He doesn't because he believes in the scriptural teaching that whoever believes in Christ is justified. It's not because he's had this experience he can always go back to, oh, I had a profound experience. There are a lot of enthusiasts, capital E, a lot of people who base their whole confidence, their security in a decision they made or an experience that they had. That's not Luther. Luther is looking outside of himself to a promise that's been made. And so it's not— don't just say love affair and it's all emotional. It has emotional elements and aspects to it, of course, but he's looking outside of his own emotions, outside of his own heart, outside of his own experience, which often flies in the face of this free gift. And he embraces the promise. He looks outside of himself to the promise. That's a point I think that's missing from Tom Holland's analysis.

29. 11:22

    TOM HOLLAND He's in a love affair. And when you're in a love affair, you don't care what other people think. You only care about the person you're in love with.

30. 11:28

    MICHAEL HORTON That's not— it doesn't— sorry, it doesn't even really explain why Luther himself said, who am I to think that I alone am right? The devil comes to me and he says, who do you think you are? You think you're smarter than the Pope? And he realized, no, actually, it's not because I have this overweening self-confidence. This is because I know what I've read in the scriptures. Anyone can understand that. That's very clear. And that's the reason that Luther is remembered today as the reformer of the 16th century.

31. 12:11

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Yeah, because of course the Catholic—

32. 12:13

    TOM HOLLAND That is it.

33. 12:13

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Of course, the institutional criticism would be, it's all about you, isn't it? This is very narcissistic.

34. 12:19

    TOM HOLLAND Well, it is. But I think this is why it matters, because it does feed into all kinds of intellectual trends that will emerge over the course of the centuries that follow.

35. 12:28

    MICHAEL HORTON Now, again, another problem here is that it's all about you. It's not. It's for you. But precisely for salvation to be for you as a gift, given for you, it can't be about you because nothing you do contributes to it. So for Luther, actually, it's just the opposite. He was— his whole focus was get outside of yourself, stop navel-gazing, all these spiritual exercises trying to get you to focus on yourself. You got to look outside yourself. There's nothing in you that's going to save you. Nothing done by you that's going to save you. No experience you've had, no encounter you've had, no emotions that you've been able to express, no matter how many tears you've been able to cry. It's not that at all. It is looking outside of yourself to faith in Jesus Christ. That's the nature of saving faith according to Luther. It's the opposite of narcissism.

36. 13:32

    TOM HOLLAND Follow. So again, to quote Ryrie, the idea's initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times. It was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before, but that seemed to many people, once they had grasped it, to be self-evidently true. So it's not just Luther. I mean, it's other people as well. Once they have this, then they can share in the love. But of course, it kind of turns on its head the notion that everyone in Christendom is a Christian, because what Luther is saying basically is that you have to have this feeling that God loves you, that you've been born again, that you've entered the gates of paradise, or you're not really a Christian.

37. 14:05

    MICHAEL HORTON Now again, he's not saying you have to have a certain feeling, a certain ineffable experience. There are all sorts of different experiences people have, different emotional keys that people register when they are encountered by God. That's not the point. The point again for Luther and for all of the magisterial reformers unlike the capital E enthusiasts was, it's not about me and it's not about what happens inside of me. I'm not going to measure this by how big my experience was. This is about the unchanging truth of the gospel, the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

38. 14:54

    TOM HOLLAND So the implication in turn of that is that only a tiny elect really are going to be saved. And although Luther does believe that the knowledge of God is imprinted the soul of every human being. I mean, what he would call belief is, is the, the idea that you have an absolute conviction that, that your salvation has been granted to you. And this, of course, is a much, you know, it's a much rarer bloom. And so he basically— Luther ends up saying that maybe only 1 in 1,000 people rank as a Christian. You know what he would say?

39. 15:26

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER He should say that the other people are, Tom. I'm very pleased with this. It's very, uh, Liz Truss-like behavior. He should call them Chinos. Christians in name only.

40. 15:34

    TOM HOLLAND Very good. Very good. I do like that. Yeah, excellent. Of course, the implication in turn of that is that, say you live in a Protestant country, a country, you know, you're in a Protestant community, you can't just coast. I mean, you have to, you have to work out what you believe. The job of believing becomes something that is personal to you. You can't just leave it to the professional Christians. As you know, and—

41. 16:01

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Yeah, it's about your truth, right? It's about living your truth. Yes.

42. 16:05

    MICHAEL HORTON No, it's not about living your truth. But he's right in exactly the opposite fashion, that in order to come to truth and be able to communicate that truth to others, when you no longer have a situation of you just go to Mass, hear what the priest says, and you believe him, walk home and say, well, he knows, I don't even understand what he said. I know he understands. Instead, now you're kind of having to explore things on your own. The Bible's now being translated in your vernacular tongue. You can read it for yourself. Now there's more responsibility for people to know what they believe and why they believe it. And that did create, in some cases, an existential crisis where people kind of had to choose, what side am I on here? But nobody, nobody, Roman Catholic or Protestant, was saying, you got to live your truth. You got to choose your truth. I'm choosing my religion. That was not on the menu until quite recently.

43. 17:15

    TOM HOLLAND Living your truth. So the idea of— this is where the idea of living your truth comes from. And of course, the reason why this breeds in the long run, atheism and unbelief, as well as belief in God, is that you may just feel the strain is too great. You know, you, you try to believe and you don't. So again, I think this is why Luther stands at the, the kind of— he's, he stands at the head of the atheism that emerges in, in, in, in the West.

44. 17:45

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Partly because the atheism is all about you again. It's like, what do you think?

45. 17:49

    MICHAEL HORTON There is so much to the history of atheism that is left out in this conversation. There's, I think, partial truths here, things that could be explored fruitfully. But by first of all turning Luther's understanding of faith into a kind of mushy, subjective, individual, inward-looking sort of thing, totally misses what faith was for Luther. But then secondly, atheism had multiple influences. And so we have to account for the influences the Reformation had on it, mainly through unintended consequences, but also look at the influences that Roman Catholicism had on it. For example, with the rise of skepticism in 17th century France, the argument that Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation apologists gave was that we really can't know anything at all, even in science, and reason can't know anything. We can't really understand the Bible. We can't really know anything, so we surrender our minds to the Pope. That really was the argument of the skeptics in in France in the 17th and 18th, uh, early 18th centuries. So that— those are all— that's just an example of how complicated the rise of modern atheism is. But when you connect it to a misreading of Luther, that is not only reductionistic, it's unhelpful.

46. 19:32

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER It's not what— it's ignoring tradition and all that stuff.

47. 19:36

    TOM HOLLAND And so that's why it said, you know, humanists are patently the descendants of Luther. I mean, they— their truth is that they don't believe, but they don't believe in a very Lutheran way.

48. 19:46

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Right. Yeah.

49. 19:49

    MICHAEL HORTON That's just bizarre. There are so many points that Tom Holland makes here that are worth pursuing and that I think have some gold in them. But at the end of the day, the largest part of his claims rest on a misunderstanding of the Luther of history.