Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States

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Petr

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Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States

An honest and straightforward reading of the bible makes one a nationalist–indeed an “ethno-nationalist.” Here we see that there would have been no Reformation as we understand it…
ironink.org

Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States​

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An honest and straightforward reading of the bible makes one a nationalist – indeed an “ethno-nationalist.” Here we see that there would have been no Reformation as we understand it today if ethno-Nationalism had not been in the mix. Do not believe the lies of the modern Reformed clergy today (like Dr. Alan Strange) who want to suggest that there is something inherently evil and/or dangerous about Christian Nationalism. At least this is the conclusion of Dianne Applebaum’s “Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States.”​
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“The emergence of Protestant nations in sixteenth-century Europe was driven by the sudden rediscovery of biblical nationalism, a political model that did not separate the religious from the political. Biblical nationalism was new because pre-Reformation Europeans encountered the Hebrew Bible through paraphrases and abridgments. Full-text Bibles revealed a programmatic nationalism backed by unmatched authority as the word of God to readers primed by Reformation theology to seek models in the Bible for the reform of their own societies. Sixteenth-century biblical nationalism was the unintended side effect of a Reformation intended to save souls.”​
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“Christians inspired by the Reformation to read or hear the Bible found a ‘developed model’ (Hastings, 1997, p. 18) of nationhood, beginning with an expansive description of a world arranged into ‘kindreds, tongues, lands, and nations’ [Tyndale [1530] Genesis 10:20 (Daniell, 1992)]. This association of nations with kin, language, and territory is part of a biblical discourse that reflects many of the desiderata identified by later scholars as characteristic of nations. The biblical world is imagined as composed of rightfully sovereign and equal nations. God Put the borders of the nations (Tyndale, Deuteronomy 32:8), and generally played an active role in human history, allotting territories to specific peoples.”​
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“But [John] Foxe would have had in mind the establishment of Protestant states in the Swiss cantons and Germanies, Sweden (1531), Denmark (1536), and Scotland (1560). Protestantism in each of these states was driven by specific factors along a unique path. What they shared was a new conviction that the model of the Godly life, for whole societies as for individuals, must be sought and would be found in the unmediated text of the Bible. Some lands experienced the Reformation primarily as a top-down royal programme, some as popular revolutions, others as a reform movement harnessed by magnates. What the several sixteenth-century ‘New Israels’ had in common was the power of the biblical narrative of nationhood to generate mass political participation because the Bible not only provided both a lexicon and a discourse of nationhood, it provided those ideas with unmatched authority as the word of God.”​
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Diana Muir Applebaum​

“Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States”​
 
Petr

Petr

Administrator
More on this topic here:

www.medievalists.net

Biblical nationalism and the sixteenth-century states - Medievalists.net

Biblical nationalism was new because pre-Reformation Europeans encountered the Hebrew Bible through paraphrases and abridgments. Full-text Bibles revealed a programmatic nationalism backed by unmatched authority as the word of God to readers primed by Reformation theology to seek models in the...
www.medievalists.net

Scholars who have considered the origins of nationalism generally concur that it is a product of modernity that cannot have arisen before a nationalist discourse was elaborated and made available to a mass public, or before such key enabling conditions as the modern state, secularization, industrialization, and print capitalism. In recent decades, however, a series of studies of particular peoples and territories have described the existence of biblical nationalism during the Reformation in the Netherlands, England, Scandinavia, and Hungary, and during the proto-Reformation in Hussite Bohemia.​
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It argues that the key to understanding the emergence of biblical nationalism in the sixteenth-century Europe was the rediscovery of the Bible by a Latin Christian culture in which, prior to 1517, almost no one read the Bible. Before Luther, Roman Catholics rarely read complete Bibles; they preferred Bible substitutes: paraphrases, epitomes, and commentaries edited to emphasize Christological interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. The discourse of biblical nationhood visible in the suddenly popular full-text Bibles therefore came as new revelation to a Western European public who had not encountered it before.​
 

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Phoron
“German money for the German people”

“So Martin…Wie können wir also verhindern, dass unser Geld nach Rom fließt?“
 
Petr

Petr

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The Romish polemicists, who after all were proponents of an international (if not outright globalist) church, often threw this fact into the teeth of their Protestant opponents, claiming that their religion had its origin in such “carnal” factors as ethnic identity or loyalty – which position, of course, goes nicely along with modern anti-racist posturing.

G.K. Chesterton, for example, mocked the Protestants of Northern Ireland for being embarrassing race-idolater bigots, much like the imperial Germans, who had just been defeated in the First World War at the time of this writing:

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The men of Belfast offer that city as something supreme, unique and unrivalled; and they are very nearly right. There is nothing exactly like it in the industrialism of this country; but for all that, the fight against its religion of arrogance has been fought out elsewhere and on a larger field. There is another centre and citadel from which this theory, of strength in a self-hypnotised superiority, has despised Christendom. There has been a rival city to Belfast; and its name was Berlin.​
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Historians of all religions and no religion may yet come to regard it as an historical fact, I fancy, that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century (at least in the form it actually took) was a barbaric breakdown, like that Prussianism which was the ultimate product of that Protestantism.​


And actually the old-school RC ultramontane polemicists criticized even the Eastern Orthodox for similar kind of “nationalist heresy,” for having many separate national churches or patriarchates, which contradicted their own globalist, centralized, vision of universal papal rule:

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Until the wars of independence began the Patriarch got to be as near a Pope as any one ever has. And the Phanariote Greeks kept all the perquisites of the Church for themselves; the poor village priests might be Serbs or Bulgars or Roumans, they were married, and so in any case they could never rise to any higher place, but all the metropolitans were Greeks, sent out from Constantinople.​
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So it has become a regular principle that wherever there is a free State, there shall there be a free and independent national Church. It is again the old Byzantine idea of making the Church follow the vagaries of civil politics, that we saw to be the root of the claims of the See of Constantinople, and indeed the original root of the great schism. Only the idea is turned against the very see that had grown and flourished on it. And that see finds the national and political idea much less sympathetic now that she stands to lose by it.​
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The principle of the independent Church in the independent State finds no favour in the Phanar. The Patriarchs worked so hard and grovelled so low in the old days for the sake of getting a big Patriarchate, naturally they do not like losing it piece by piece, as they have done throughout the 19th century. The process is nearly always the same. As soon as the first National Assembly, or House of Deputies, or whatever it may be, of the new State meets, it passes a law that the national Orthodox Church of the land acknowledges no Head but Christ; it then forms a Holy Synod on the Russian model, giving all possible authority over the Church to the civil government ("no Head but Christ" always means this), and lastly sends a note to the Patriarch to inform him that he has ceased to reign in the land in question. Of course the Patriarch is furious, generally begins by excommunicating the new schismatics in a mass, but eventually has to accept things (Russia makes him do so as a rule), and, swallowing his pride, he receives the Holy Synod as his "Sister in Christ." Only in the quite specially bitter case of the Bulgarian Church has he hitherto refused, and the Bulgars are still excommunicate. But here, too, he will have to give in at last.​
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Naturally the Phanar hates the national idea; in 1872 it held a synod to declare that Philetism1 (the love of one's race in ecclesiastical matters) is the latest and most poisonous heresy. But it is a most astonishing case of poetic justice. It was on the strength of this very national idea that centuries ago the Patriarch waxed strong and rebelled against his over-lord, the Pope. Now he sees his own children, having learned it from him, also wax strong on it and rebel against him. And so he finds Philetism to be a deadly heresy. Poor Patriarch! in his glory he was only a very feeble imitation of the Pope, and now he is fixed between two theories, and either way he loses. Shall he denounce Philetism, stand out for the old rights of the hierarchy and of the chief sees, preach unity and ancient councils? Alas! his see is not even an Apostolic one; he would have to go down below Alexandria and Antioch. Every one knows which is the first see in Christendom, and every one knows that unity means returning to the obedience of that see. Or shall he, taking up a cry that seems to come more naturally from Constantinople, talk of equality and national Churches, national rights and no aggression, no Head, in short, but Christ? But, then, what shall he say to the Bulgars? Of course what he wants is just enough national idea to disobey the Pope and not enough for the Bulgars to disobey him. And so the irony of development has landed him in that most hopeless of positions, a via media between two consistent and mutually exclusive systems.​
 
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