Imaginative World of the Reformation, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2003 by Johnson, Dale Walden

The Imaginative World of the Reformation. By Peter Matheson. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001, xiii 153 pp., $15.00 paper.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the reader or reviewer of this book is finding an appropriate category or genre in which to place it. It is a social history of Reformation themes, viewed through the lens of a thesaurus. It is intellectual history using largely the thought of the forgotten, the inarticulate, and the obscure. It is cultural history with a sharp eye peeled for the powerful force of metaphors generated by the Reformation. It is a literary journey with numerous references to the German Reformation(s) and the Radical Reformers through time, space, and word.

Professor Peter Matheson believes that we need a new approach to teaching and understanding the Reformation. It is simplistic and pedestrian to explain the Reformation in moralistic terms as a reaction against the corruption of the late medieval Church. He wishes to move beyond the predictable doctrinal approach on the one hand and what he calls "social reductionism" on the other hand. Matheson proposes that we can understand the Reformation by examining the imaginative world it spawned. At its core the Reformation provided a catalyst for changing the imaginative world of the sixteenth century. Priests and pastors preached with new powerful metaphors. The pulpit became the forum for prompting new dreams, new visions, and new possibilities, giving hope to peasants as never before. Common people dreamed of taking their place among the privileged classes in the new City of God. It orchestrated new songs, ballads, choruses, and poetry. New art, architecture, woodcuts, and pamphlets were all expressions of the new mental furniture of the Reformation. Religious expressions of late medieval Europe had generated their own metaphors and encouraged the creation of their own imaginative tapestries. The iconoclastic activity of the Reformation, however, was an immense cultural wrecking ball and produced a vacuum of imagination filled by the Reformers and their followers. Matheson puts it succinctly: "When your metaphors change your world changes with them" (p. 7). In the metaphoric shower storm of the Reformation, every city became Jerusalem, every river the Jordan, and every nation the certain home of the new millennial kingdom. As the message spread listeners heard what they wanted to hear and painted their own canvases, drawing from the colorful pallet of biblical and poetic imagery. The Reformation was the fountain; it was the trumpet blast, the new wine, the dawn of the Utopia, the dance. It promised a deliverance from Egypt led by new prophets of God to the promised land. Each metaphor held a potent story. Each was exploited thousands of times to tell the story of the gospel to a new generation. Whether humanist by training or by default, each Reformer pointed ad fontes-to the sources: the Bible, the apostles, and the Christ. For the Reformers, "the way forward is back" (p. 34). The people then retranslated these messages, creating their own imaginative world.

Matheson describes with great eloquence his lament for the stripping of the altars by the Protestants. The late medieval world of indulgences, relics, and the veneration of Mary and the saints all came under attack, through the biting satire of Erasmus and bludgeoning of Protestant rhetoric. It appears Matheson admired the late medieval religious world not for its theology but for the rich imaginative tapestry it provided. He considers replacement of the aesthetic for the moralistic in the Reformation as something "uncouth, if not totalitarian" (p. 15). He hints that, aesthetically speaking, the Reformation had the net effect of giving the keys to the Louvre to the Philistines. He forgets or ignores, however, that the Reformation was not at its root a moralistic movement. The genius of the Reformation was its recovery of the NT and Pauline teaching of the doctrine of grace.

Readers and reviewers may, I fear, give the author a free "pass" because of the unique nature of his text-it is not wholly narrative nor strictly interpretive. Where Matheson's metaphors abound, imprecision doth much more abound. Readers may not know exactly what they are reading, nor how to assess it with anything approaching precision. The extended use of metaphors aid and abet the author to persuade (and or manipulate) both the text and the reader. I had the recurring sense that the screen writer for the movie Being There was the ghost writer of this script. A well-placed metaphor can provide the mistaken impression of brilliance.

Every revisionist argues that the previous interpreters got it wrong in their simplistic monocausal explanation. The pallet of the revisionist is always more colorful, the textures more variegated, the subtleties more complex. Matheson's genuine insights, however, serve in their own way as an iconoclastic force. He leaves readers without a place to stand. Matheson removes our solid footing and anchors us firmly in mid-air, unable to touch anything substantial. On those occasions when we regain our footing, we are forced to wrestle with a host of metaphoric angels hoping for Jacob's blessing before we release the angel. One blessing is to arrive at the end of our literary journey, generally unscathed, perhaps wiser, but largely bewildered about how we might describe our abduction. We thought we were on the interstate to Geneva, Wittenberg, Munster, and Canterbury. Matheson's roadmap is more like a scavenger hunt without the assurance that we will arrive back at base camp for the comfort of the campfire and marshmallows. On Matheson's tour bus, we bypassed the capitals, slowed down to admire the revisionist scenery, and moved toward the shining city on the hill called postmodernism. In the end everyone is left to give their own meaning to this highly imaginative journey.