Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

Christian Century, August 2, 2000 by Ellen L. Babinsky

Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe.

By Brad S. Gregory. Harvard University Press, 528 pp., $49.95.

MARTYRDOM APPEARS so utterly alien to our time because postmodern theorists have reduced the truth claims of Western Christianity to private opinion, making any reference to ultimate truth unbelievable and certainly unverifiable. So asserts Brad S. Gregory in his impressive study of 16th-century martyrs and persecutors. Postmodern views, he declares, conclude that both the martyrs and their persecutors mistook for truth the necessarily tentative character of their cultural constructions. Gregory contends that such an approach will not help us understand the early modern Christians who were willing to kill and to die for religious belief. He wants to take martyrdom on its own terms because "the distinctiveness of religion demands methodological astuteness if we want to understand its practitioners, lest we misconstrue them from the outset.... Not to take such people on their own terms fails utterly to comprehend them, the character of their actions, and basis of their lives."

Confessional history puts up almost as many roadblocks to understanding as do the reductions of poststructuralist theory, Gregory argues. Therefore a "cross-confessional" study of martyrdom is warranted. Gregory hopes to encourage a "self-conscious neutrality" in the reader so that more than one perspective can be appropriated. He does not wish to relativize the competing faith claims, but "to let each resonate fully, creating a formal relativism of competing absolutisms." By this means he aims to make both martyrs and persecutors intelligible to the reader.

A startling outcome of Gregory's analysis of those willing to kill for religious belief is the assertion that the death of an "unrepentant, executed heretic marked a political defeat, not a victory." He is unwilling to dismiss the killing of heretics as "the ideological glove on the fist of political self-interest." Rulers, Gregory insists, understood themselves to be obligated to both God and their subjects to maintain true religion. Anabaptists, in contrast, viewed the notion of a "Christian government" as an oxymoron and understood their suffering at the hands of their persecutors as clear evidence that they were the true church which is persecuted and does not persecute.

Those willing to die for religious belief--Protestant, Anabaptist and Roman Catholic--shared the deep conviction that spiritual truth was worth dying for, because it was revealed by God in scripture. "Unlike prolonging one's life, fidelity to God was an absolute value. Otherwise scripture would not so often and so clearly have extolled it as the basis for a willingness to endure deprivation and even death,"

As Gregory explores for each group "the ways that faith and the willingness to die were woven into the martyrs' lives," he shows that "they died for God's truth, but they disputed what his truth was. Their disagreements proved central to the formation of the three principal mutually exclusive martyrological traditions." Gregory then analyzes the texts of these traditions in order to assess how fellow believers understood their martyrs, and how news and portrayals were circulated after executions had taken place.

Early collections of Protestant martyr texts from the 1520s proliferated across national boundaries, blurring geographical particularity. The earliest executions fit into a ready-made interpretive framework inherited from the medieval template of the imitation of Christ, so that these early evangelicals were instantly celebrated as martyrs among their sympathizers in the Low Countries, in German or Swiss towns, and in England and France. Reformation publicists saw in the martyr's concreteness of belief a new way of being Christian, so that a peculiar Protestant identity was being forged in print as well as on the scaffold.

Reports of martyrdoms steeled resistance to persecution and were the source of encouragement to persevere. "Anti-Nicodemism," taking its name from the story of Nicodemus, who visited Jesus at night, "specifically condemned those who, in order to avoid persecution, engaged in Catholic practices despite harboring Protestant sympathies." As they persevered in their faith Reformed Protestants were comforted by a "confidence of genuine election." For Anabaptists, anti-Nicodemist views were clear and straightforward: "to ponder becoming an Anabaptist was ipso facto to think about martyrdom." Roman Catholic martyrs in the time of Henry, and later Elizabeth, were exhorted to uphold the authority of the papacy even under the threat of death for treason. Dissembling for the sake of safety was a peril to salvation, one Catholic writer declared.

Belief in particular doctrines was central both to martyrs and to their persecutors, and for both Roman Catholics and Protestants doctrinal beliefs were crucial in separating "true" martyrs from "false." Following Augustine, their martyr documents declared that the cause makes the martyr, not the death. In contrast, Anabaptists never bothered with such distinctions because for them the tree martyrs were those who never persecuted --namely, the Anabaptists themselves.