The Protestant Reformation: A Redistribution and Reduction of the Sacred

In the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, God reveals Himself both as a transcendent Creator – completely other to his creation – as well as fully immanent – present with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.^[1] God occupies two very different metaphysical spaces, the one being completely beyond human cognizance, and the other being familiar to mankind. The Incarnation of the Logos in God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, punctuates divine immanence. Through the ministries of Christ, his Apostles, and their successors, the celebration of the Eucharist – Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity – persists. To some, this kind of sacramentalized world seems to be steeped in the supernatural. For others, such a world is mere superstition, or magic. The latter attitude only began to prevail after Catholic Christendom had reigned for nearly 1500 years under the auspices of the “medieval sub specie aeternitatis worldview in which human existence and all of eternity had an eternal backdrop.”^[2] The Protestant reformation inaugurated the transition to modernity – a modernity disenchanted for some, secularized for others, and desacralized, having “decisively eroded beliefs about the immanence of the holy.”^[3] How was it, then, that the Protestant Reformation, a movement that sought to resurrect authentic Christianity, inadvertently incited a metaphysical revolution where the world became deprived of the sacred? The topic of disenchantment elicits spirited debates among scholars who argue for and against the desacralization caused by the Protestant Reformation, and to varying degrees. Max Weber’s thesis that the Protestant Reformation caused the “disenchantment of the world” (entzauberung der Welt) can be “heuristically rewarding,”^[4] though such a broad claim warrants a closer examination of the process of desacralization and secularization within Christendom. In some senses, The Protestant ethos is ostensibly “enchanted” by a providential perception of the world, as some scholars like Robert Scribner suggest. However, the Reformation era was also the embryonic stage of both secularization and desacralization in the West. The question is complicated by the disparity between pure Protestant theology and popular piety, as well as the gradation of desacralization among Protestant sects, such as Lutherans and Reformed Protestants. Nevertheless, the Protestant impulse to purge Christianity of its sacraments^[5] – particularly the Eucharist – begets a “natural world that precludes divine immanence in its desire to preserve divine transcendence.”^[6] In its attempt to abolish Catholic sacraments, the Protestant Reformation redistributed the sacred to the individual and reduced the sanctity of the material world. In many ways, Catholic Christianity was the touchstone of Medieval existence. Christianity in the Middle Ages was “simultaneously soteriological, functional, pastoral, and concerned with piety, as well as having irreducible social, political and economic dimensions.”^[7] Nothing captures the theocentric metaphysics of the Middle Ages better than Aquinas’s theology. For the Saint, God was “incomprehensibly, esse – not a being but the sheer act of to-be, in which all creatures participated insofar as they existed and through which all creation was mysteriously sustained.”^[8] For Max Weber, this framework was utterly “enchanted.” “We no longer have recourse to magic,” Weber laments, “in order to control the spirits or pray to them.”^[9] However, the desacralization of the Protestant Reformation “had much more to do with core metaphysical concepts than with “magic” (zauber).” Robert Scribner also tends to group supernatural phenomena into the “religio-magical” omnibus term. Both Weber and Scribner write of “disenchantment” from a functionalist, social scientific perspective. However, such an understanding of religion is reductive, as the Protestant Reformation provoked a shift that was far more consequential than mere belief in magic. Simply put, the Protestant Reformation was a metaphysical revolution that denoted a “fundamental shift in the way in which reality is conceived” as the world was “less charged with the otherworldly and supernatural.”^[10] Walsham perceptively acknowledges that Protestant reformers did not seek to fully extricate God from the world, but rather denied that “miracles could occur at the behest of human beings.”^[11] The efficacy of divine grace through human intermediaries and the ministry of the Church – e.g., the priest consecrating the Eucharistic Host – became null. Robert Scribner also acknowledges the impropriety of human intermediaries in divine efficacy for Protestant reformers, writing that “Protestant belief did not hold that the sacred did not intrude into the secular world, simply that it did not do so at human behest and could not automatically be commanded.^[12]” After conceding this, Scribner immediately transitions to a discussion about Protestant sacramentals as a popular response to the dearth of Catholic sacraments. To his credit, Scribner does devote a brief line to the “distinctive Protestant form of sacramentalism, albeit one far weaker than its Catholic counterpart.” ^[13]However, in his transition, Scribner seems to downplay the monumental significance of Catholic sacraments and risk conflating them ontologically with Protestant sacramentals. Walsham also suggests that “for fervent Protestants… hearing or reading the [Bible] itself could be a near sacramental and mystical experience.”^[14] Sacramentals, however, are not decaf sacraments. The distillation of Catholic sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, to Protestant sacramentals intimates a metaphysical departure and unfathomable desacralization that is understated by Scribner. The Eucharist, which the Catholic Church affirms is the “source and summit of Christian living,” ^[15]occupies a markedly superior ontological plane to, for instance, a verse of scripture from the King James Bible. For the Medieval Catholic, the celebration of the Eucharist was the moment when Heaven seemed to kiss Earth. This is what is meant by the sub specie aeternitatis worldview of Catholic Christendom. Despite the ontological diminution that was borne from “Protestantism’s radical assault upon the sanctity of the material world,” reformers still maintained “an emphatic insistence that God and the devil intervened unpredictably, providentially, and indeed miraculously, in human affairs.” Supernatural intervention for Protestants can best be understood in terms of a “redistribution of the sacred,” or what John Bossy dubs “migrations of the holy.” Walsham typifies this phenomenon as a “brand of introspective providentialism” wherein Protestant reformers “relocated the operations of the supernatural inside the soul.”^[16] In post-Reformation England, for example, the

sacralization of early modern rulers was in part a by-product of the Reformation repudiation of the miracle of transubstantiation at the heart of the mass: sacred presence passed from the host to the person of the king.

The sacred is redistributed away from consecrated priests through the ministry of the church to individuals, who “seem to have made idols of themselves.” The redistribution of the sacred also cropped up in particular areas wherein divine power seemed to be concentrated. As Walsham articulates, “the natural world was not simply an emblem of God’s majesty or a canvas on which he sketched His intentions; it was still perceived by some… to be a source of access to supernatural virtue and therapeutic potency itself.”

The Catholic Church is an institution replete with the supernatural. The same was true for the Medieval Church. The Church’s seven sacraments and affirmation that it is the “body” and “bride” of Christ are self-proclaimed testaments to its sacred bounty. Protestantism perceived the Church to be riddled in superstition and upended by the Devil, thereby deciding to “disarm itself of the ecclesiastical ‘magic’ of the medieval church.”^[17] However, some Protestants reverted to the Church as the repository of supernatural remedies in the priesthood and sacraments. Scribner’s functionalist analysis of sacraments can be helpful to understand their allure to Early-Modern Christians. “Sacraments,” Scribner suggests, were “also targeted on the whole person – body, soul, and spirit – so that they were seen as offering consolation, succor, and nourishment for the body as well as the soul.” ^[18]The “exigencies of the human condition” readily handled by the Medieval Church’s “inner-worldly as well as transcendental efficacy”^[19] could no longer be regulated through such a convenient outlet. Along with the redistribution of the sacred, the Reformation also encompassed a palpable reduction of the sacred among distressed Protestants who relapsed into the Catholic Church’s sacramental repository.

The economy of salvation that the Catholic Church promotes – where “universal” (katholikos) extends beyond spaciotemporal boundaries and includes the “communio sanctorum” whom Protestants considered to be dead – was sundered when the Reformation “drove a wedge between matter and spirit.”^[20] The “initial manifestation”^[21] of the fissure between matter and spirit was iconoclasm, which broadly encompassed “carnivalesque rituals of defilement and desecrated directed against priests, monks,” relics, religious images, and the Eucharist^[22]. Neither did Protestants endorse post-Apostolic miracles, as those were “strictly limited to biblical times.” Protestant reformers were committed to the “inviolability of natural laws” and condemned the naturally transgressive visions and deeds of Catholic mystics and miracle-workers as satanic. For the reformers, Christ’s Incarnation had sanctified the material world, but only for his tenure on Earth. Reformed Protestantism was particularly indignant about the reification of the supernatural in the natural realm. Reformed metaphysics were predicated on God’s absolute otherness and transcendence “above and beyond the natural and created order^[23].” The notion that God Almighty could really be present in the Eucharistic wafer was utterly repulsive to them. While Luther insisted upon the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Reformers like Calvin and Zwingli demonized materiality and set it in diametric opposition to spirituality and the divine. The veneration of anything material, from icons to Eucharistic adoration, was nothing short of blasphemy. One must question what Reformed Protestants thought of the Incarnation – where God became man in all his materiality. At worst, they might renew the ancient heresy of Docetism, and at best, they would restrict the chronology of the incarnate divinity to the first century AD. Understanding how the Reformation converged with other intellectual currents necessitates a closer investigation into what Edward Muir calls a “new theological metaphysics^[24].” A distinction must be drawn between Luther and Reformed Protestants like Zwingli, who incited a more radical departure from the sacralized conventions of the Medieval world. Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity retained a belief in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, but Zwingli “radically reconceptualized it as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice rather than a miraculous re-enactment of it.”^[25] In the Marburg Colloquy, Zwingli casts doubt on the omnipresence of Christ in the Eucharist. Christ’s divine ascension to Heaven would seem to preclude his presence on Earth in the Eucharist: the metaphysical could no longer permeate the physical in the Eucharist. Calvin occupied some middle ground between the two reformers with respect to the Eucharist. Regarding Medieval Christianity’s unio mystica, however, John Calvin would have “recoiled in horror at the thought that humans might claim any sort of divinization, for his God was “entirely other.””^[26] Christian mysticism, then, was also more likely to be a demonic intervention than a divine ecstasy for Calvin and other reformers.

Scribner suggests that “the world of Luther and the Reformation was a world of highly charged sacrality, and that “Calvin and the reformed religion intensified to an even higher degree the cosmic struggle between the divine and the diabolical.”" ^[27] However, especially among the Reformed milieu, “transcendental spiritual truth could not be accessed through the mediation of the mundane physical world.”^[28] It seems disingenuous for Scribner to posit that “the consequence [of the Reformation] was in no sense, a desacralization of the world.”^[29] Bearing in mind the desecration of the Eucharist, rejection of Christian mysticism, and the overall repudiation of the supernatural’s ability to be reified in the natural world, how can Scribner make such a statement? Perhaps the Reformation did provoke eschatological and apocalyptic motifs as Scribner suggests, but he asserts unequivocally that desacralization was not a feature among the first or second generations of Protestant reform. Luther did not desacralize the world alone, but his protest catalyzed an undeniable desacralization of materiality, especially among Reformed Protestants. Walsham captures the repercussions of Protestantism’s estrangement between the spiritual and terrestrial realms, writing that it “systematized strands in the Western philosophical tradition in a way that had profound intellectual implications” throughout modernity. ^[30]The Reformation did not fully disenchant the world, but its redistribution of the sacred to the individual provided the epistemological blueprint for Enlightenment thinkers to morph sola scriptura into sola ratio.

The Protestant reformers’ egress from traditionally-held Catholic positions might have “implied univocal metaphysical assumptions in ways that probably did contribute to an eventual conception of a disenchanted natural world.” Protestant metaphysics implies that, despite occupying two very different metaphysical spaces, the ideas of finite man about the infinite God refer to the same concept for human beings. Simply put, it presupposes that man and God are on a metaphysical par. However,

with the Christian conception of God as transcendent creator of the universe, it is precisely and only because of his radical difference from creation that God can be present to and through it. This is the metaphysics that continues to underlie and make possible a sacramental worldview.^[31]

In the book of Isaiah, God speaks of the metaphysical disparity between Himself and man, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55: 8-9). This excerpt warns against man’s lowly expectations for the transcendent God, who, in His metaphysical superiority, can become incarnate and transcend human expectations through His various miracles. Gregory reproaches “Zwingli’s spacial dichotomizing of Jesus’s divine and human natures” as a “logical corollary of metaphysical univocity” that “precludes divine immanence in its desire to preserve divine transcendence.” The shunning of God’s immanence, while not explicitly Deism, tills the soil for God to be cast aside, “no more than a remote first cause.”^[32]

Weber traces another consequence of the fissure between spirit and matter in the early 20th century. Science as a “vocation” – a literal “calling” – emerged as a suitable career when questions about man’s spirit eventually became untenable. Questions of science became confined to the natural world, and Weber goes so far as to say that “release from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental premise of life in communion with the divine.” He challenges the assumption that science is a worthwhile pursuit and its presupposed end “to preserve life as such and to reduce suffering as far as possible.^[33] Such a notion, Weber posits, “is problematic.”^[34] When one calls to mind the prevailing message of Christianity, which is to “deny [oneself] and take up the cross,” as well as its exemplary suffering men and martyrs – Christ, Job, Peter, Paul, and Polycarp, to name a few – Weber’s striking claim does not seem so outlandish (Matthew 16:24). Very rarely does science venture into interrogating the summum bonum of human existence.

Walsham notes that “in its early stages, Protestantism deliberately adopted a rhetoric of rationality and enlightenment.”^[35] Additionally, “doctrinal impasses in the Reformation era helped to foster a renaissance of ancient epistemological skepticism and to inspire modern philosophical foundationalism.”^[36] Both of these currents in Reformation thought galvanized an “epistemic revolution” that delegated authority to interpret scripture to the individual and evaluate it independent of the Church’s exegetical guardrails. This is a watershed moment that denoted the transition to individualism, which “has been identified as the key to “modernity.””^[37] With this comes the “open-ended profusion of competing truth claims about the Bible’s meaning and God’s will.” ^[38]These claims engendered an “unintended doctrinal pluralism [that] problematized the epistemological status of Christian truth claims.”

What followed was a flood of extrabiblical epistemic claims in the modern era, best embodied by Thomas Paine’s claim that “my own mind is my own church.”^[39] After a gloss of the history of Enlightenment philosophy from Descartes to Spinoza, Kant, and Leibniz, Brad Gregory retorts, “as even these few examples suffice to show, reason alone yielded wildly divergent and incompatible ideas about God and his relationship to the natural world.” ^[40]Weber noted a similar phenomenon nearly a century earlier, detailing “the different value systems of the world… caught up in an insoluble struggle with one another” when reason alone is deemed a sufficient epistemological route. Even worse, Hume’s hardline empiricism that considered human experience to be the foundation of knowledge led swiftly to “polytheism."^[41] Gregory uses a similar term – “hyperpluralism”^[42] – to describe the vying truth claims that epitomize the modern world. Weber concludes Science as a Vocation on a sinister note, suggesting that life can be “simple and straightforward if each person finds and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life.”^[43] Gregory reiterates the Faustian overtones of Weber’s conclusion, admonishing the “placing of sovereign human selves as Faustian deities at the center of their respective, Cartesianized universes.”^[44]

Understanding how modernity emerged requires a thorough examination of Medieval piety and its refraction through the Protestant Reformation. The early to post-modern world witnessed a Machiavellian redefinition of virtue, such as the Dutch Republic’s “deliberate redefinition of acquisitiveness as something good, something positive,” when centuries of Christian ascetic practice dictated otherwise. In this instance, capitalism and consumerism emerged as the predominant economic paradigm in the West. Broadly, the Enlightenment’s bifurcation of faith and reason facilitated the privatization of religion in modern societies.^[45] Take notice of the shift that transpired over a millennium: Christ, once the source and end of human life in the Middle Ages, has been supplanted and become little more than an “enlightened ethical sage” for many individuals today.

Bibliography

Eire, Carlos. “Incombustible Weber: How the Protestant Reformation Really Disenchanted the World.” Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity, edited by Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo. pp. 132-148. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Gregory, Brad S. “Disembedding Christianity: The Reformation Era and the Secularization of Western Society” in Reformation and Säkularisierung. pp. 29-55. Mohr Siebeck, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2250vdq.5.

Gregory, Brad S. “The World We Have Lost?” and “Excluding God” in The Unintended Reformation. pp. 1-73. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012.

John Paul II, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Ascension Edition. Ascension Press: West Chester, PA, 2022.

Scribner, Robert W. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the “Disenchantment of the World,”” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1993). The MIT Press. 475-494. https://www.jstor.org/stable/206099.

The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament, RSV2CE. ed. by Scott Hahn and Curtis J. Mitch. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2024.

Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans. by Rodney Livingstone and ed. by David Owen & Tracy B. Strong. pp. 1-31. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004.

Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 2 (2008). 479-528. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20175171.