Witnesses In The Dock. - 'Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe' - book review

Commonweal, March 8, 2002 by Marcia L. Colish

Salvation at Stake
Christian Martyrdom in
Early Modern Europe
Brad S. Gregory
Harvard University Press, $20, 528 pp.

Brad Gregory's important and highly original book is a social history of religion that eschews the reductionism that treats religious practices as "behaviors" having no transcendent meaning. That is welcome news, as is the forthright way in which Gregory critiques earlier scholarly approaches to his topic. As Gregory tells it, first came scholars for whom the Reformation was the history of doctrine, transcending everything except triumphalist confessionalism. Next came scholars for whom the Reformation was a political, economic, or social struggle, with religion manipulated as a strategy of rebellion, or alternatively, of social control. More recently came the view that the Reformation was a failure, since grassroots belief and practice, in whatever confession, lagged behind clerical desiderata.

Against the first group, Gregory observes that martyrs knew full well that they had bodies, and social locations, as well as souls. Against the second, he argues that beliefs counted deeply in the Reformation. The litmus test is the willingness of martyrs to die for their beliefs. Against the third, he shows that martyrs grasped the doctrines they died to defend, doctrines that were the common coin of their confessions' catechisms. Since martyrdom was an equal-opportunity fate, cutting across gender, social, and educational boundaries, martyrs belie the claim that doctrinal trickle-down failed to occur. Finally, for Gregory, martyrs are a "limit problem" undermining anachronistic readings of religion as a rationalization of other motives, as a self-contained symbolic system, or as a subjective construct. In Gregory's view, rather than try to "explain" martyrs in terms of present-minded criteria, we should understand them in their own terms. Gregory does just that, in the first comparative and multiconfessional study of Reformation martyrs.

Despite doctrinal differences, Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists internalized a basic New Testament theme: discipleship can be costly and may even be fatal. Those who pay the price embody the ultimate imitation of Christ and gain an imperishable heavenly reward. Still, martyrdom did not play out identically in each confession. Retaining devotion to the saints, Catholics used the lives and cults of early Christian martyrs as models for their Reformation flock, from early Englishmen executed for treason to later missionaries expunged by non-European pagans. Missionaries were more frequently canonized (for which Catholics had standard procedures) and incorporated into the church's prayer life and relic cult. The retention of visual art as a devotional aid facilitated this process. Highlighting missionary martyrs accented the globalization of Catholicism, a consolation prize offsetting European losses.

Rejecting the cult of saints, Protestants and Anabaptists had to invent other rationales for celebrating their martyrs. The early martyrs of both groups helped solidify confessional identities. Yet, martyrs were problematic; their deaths implied that deeds counted, and not faith alone. Protestants coped by emphasizing that martyrs died for their faith; repudiating false doctrine, they trusted wholly in God. Believing that the Apocalypse was imminent, and that Christians must suffer during the reign of Antichrist, they viewed their martyrs as victors, expediting the eschaton's arrival. In the later sixteenth century, national conditions affected Protestants' treatment of martyrs, and even their existence. French and Dutch Protestants claimed new martyrs in the religious and civil wars convulsing their countries. But, with the stabilization of Anglicanism under Elizabeth I and the legalization of biconfessionalism by the Peace of Augsburg (1555), English and German Protestants lacked contemporary martyrs; those they celebrated harked back to the glory days of the early Reformation.

For Anabaptists, persecution was a mark authenticating the true church throughout history. Their theology conditioned them to accept the high level of martyrdom this group endured; the victims were considered the leading edge of a community defined by its collective martyrological sensibility. Anabaptists encouraged themselves mainly with hortatory texts and liturgical hymns extolling martyrs and martyrdom. Unlike other Reformation Christians, they did not promote group cohesion by stigmatizing victims from other confessions as false martyrs.

Aside from enriching our understanding of how martyrdom functioned for Reformation Christians, and aside from his trenchant critique of methodologies that fail to give martyrs their due, Gregory offers something to readers seeking transhistorical insights. The very empathy, evenhandedness, and historical imagination that enable Gregory to recapture the age of religious intolerance can enable ecumenically minded Christians to listen to Christians of other persuasions, and to take their doctrines seriously while avoiding the temptation to trivialize or relativize them in aid of an easy but ultimately vacuous accommodation. By showing us where we have been, Gregory gives us intellectual tools for envisioning and shaping the kinds of destinations we may define for ourselves.