Martyrdom post-Christendom

Photo: where we had coffee in Nantes and it cost us 19 Euros.

One of the glaring questions for a discussion of martyrdom is something of the lines of 'what are we to do with those who died in sectarian violence between Christians?' That is: what of those who were executed for being Catholic/Protestant/Anabaptist? In what sense are they martyrs?

There are two obvious ways to analyse this question. First, you could take the traditional view and say that only the martyrs to my particular cause were truly martyrs because only they were dying for the truth. And, in addition, you might seek to take the high moral ground (as Foxe does) and show that Catholics burnt far more heretics than Protestants ever did. As Augustine said, not the suffering but the cause makes the martyr. He wouldn't have the Donatists as martyrs, and was quite happy to set the soldiers on them.

Or, second, you could take the view that in some sense martyrs of every hue were (at least potentially) true martyrs. Now to do this, you have to theorise that both Cranmer and Thomas More were in some sense witnessing to Christ - perhaps imperfectly, but equally validly. This isn't an easy route to follow, because you have clashing beliefs in force.

What won't do is to see the martyrs as merely witnessing against crown/church practices of execution. That is not what the martyrs saw themselves as doing! Take Cranmer for example - I don't think he would have denied Mary the right to execute heretics by burning, even if he would have disputed her criteria for selecting victims. He was quite happy to burn those he thought were heretics after all! Even the more radical reformers (say, the Dutch Mennonites) did not see themselves as dying for some principle like non-violence. They thought they were testifying to Christ.

I guess a third, and more secular, strategy would be to say that the whole martyrdom idea is dangerous when applied to this period because all it does is bolster sectarianism and its potential for violent conflict.

Hmm..

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.