The Protestant Reformation Book

There are more correlations between the histories of Christian and Marxist discourse than subscribers to either would want to admit. As an (I like to think) unconventional adherent of the latter, I must say that reading these selections of writings from the Protestant Reformation made me think of the turbulence in the Marxist world created by Maoism.

Mao was not the first commie revolutionary to break with the Soviet monolith. Tito did his thing in Yugoslavia and the Trotskyist movement made noise here and there. But Mao was the first to give rebellion from within the Communist sphere global-historical significance. Christianity was never as united as the Popes tried to present it as being, but Orthodoxy never presented itself as an insurrection against Catholicism, as much as an alternative that distance in the medieval world necessitated. The movement that Luther began was almost trying to found a new religion to destroy the old.

Reading the pieces by Luther collected in this volume, one has a sense of an individual who had lost control of the phenomenon he inspired. I had a terribly unfavorable impression of him. He seemed to want a radical break with the Church in so far as doing so granted him fame and significance. But as soon as that radicality showed the potential to win people freedoms, or put himself at risk, he disowned it.

It is unsurprising, then, that so many micro-reformations took place, rejecting both the Church and Luther, and proclaiming themselves the one truly liberational tendency. One doubts as much blood was spilled between communist tendencies even in the context of twentieth century murderous efficiency than was spilled not merely between Protestants and Catholics but between warring Protestant sects in the 16th century. One of this volume's most memorable passages is a letter sent by an Annapatist mother to her infant child before her execution by fellow Protestants for deciding to be rebaptized as an adult. Although she agonizes over the thought of not seeing her baby grow up, she assures her child that she is happy to die for worshipping in the one true way.

One wonders if Mao did not study the history of the Reformation, and its sectarian brutality. For it was such violence that he intentionally set forth within the revolutionary process that he initiated, hoping that the most radical tendency would win out, thereby making the very Catholic-esque Soviet Monotholism that had taken root in earlier Communist societies impossible in his own.