Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents

by James Simpson

The evidence is fundamentalist reading can stir passions and provoke violence that changes the world. Amid such present-day conflagrations, this illuminating book reminds us of the sources, and profound consequences, of Christian fundamentalism in the sixteenth century. James Simpson focuses on a critical moment in early modern England, specifically the cultural transformation that allowed common folk to read the Bible for the first time. Widely understood and accepted as the grounding moment of liberalism, this was actually, Simpson tells us, the source of fundamentalism, and of different kinds of persecutory violence. His argument overturns a widely held interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading--and a crucial tenet of the liberal tradition. After exploring the heroism and achievements of sixteenth-century English Lutherans, particularly William Tyndale, Burning to Read turns to the bad news of the Lutheran Bible. Simpson outlines the dark, dynamic, yet demeaning paradoxes of Lutheran its demands that readers hate the biblical text before they can love it; that they be constantly on the lookout for unreadable signs of their own salvation; that evangelical readers be prepared to repudiate friends and all tradition on the basis of their personal reading of Scripture. Such reading practice provoked violence not only against Lutheranism's stated enemies, as Simpson demonstrates; it also prompted psychological violence and permanent schism within its own adherents. The last wave of fundamentalist reading in the West provoked 150 years of violent upheaval; as we approach a second wave, this powerful book alerts us to our peril.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 23, 2007

About the author

William James Simpson (writing as James Simpson), Ph.D., is a lecturer and Chair of the English Department at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Girton College. His primary focus is on medieval literature, as well as Middle English and early modern literature and culture (1150-1600).

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful critique of the inconsistencies within 16th century Protestant theology, with a surprisingly sympathetic reading of Thomas More's views on Scripture. The author recognizes that More was not opposed to vernacular Bibles but to particular translations with a tendency to undermine Church teaching, especially on the Sacraments. The author is friendly to More's notion that Scripture must be read within a tradition, and hails this notion as a remedy for violent fundamentalism. His challenge to the notion that Protestantism is at the root of liberalism is very interesting, though I would have liked to see him address his claim in a more political and less literary way.

[Dan Knauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

[[ TLDR: Burning to Read is an academic but very readable collection of essays that were first given as lectures by a major figure in late medieval/early modern English literary studies. In Simpson's retelling, the Henrician Reformation is a story of the rise of fundamentalist discourse rooted in literalist textuality, a misanthropic and paranoid psychology of abjection, a hermeneutic of suspicion, and the basis for despotism and violence. Clearly this Reformation is not the unproblematic scene of modern liberalism's birth, which is Simpson's primary message. His reading of the momentous and tragically intertwined lives of Thomas More and William Tyndale is the strongest and most compelling one I've encountered. Despite its problematic conclusions it alone is worth the price of admission. Simpson finds himself sympathetic to the comparative liberality of More's Augustinian humanism which he sees as a faith- and trust-based pragmatism that was destroyed by the harsh polemical discourse and political exigencies introduced by Luther and propagated to English readers by Tyndale. Simpson doesn't quite let More off the hook for his complicity in the tragedy of his time, but he comes close. Simpson's sharp focus on the Henrician period is a strength, but it also raises larger questions about possible fundamentalist futures teased in the introduction that are never actually engaged. ]]

For anyone familiar with the primary sources Simpson focuses on (Luther, Tyndale, More and others in their milieu) Burning to Read is a solid, simple reminder that the Protestant Reformation was a violent psychological and cultural revolution that had a very dark, repressive, and violent side from its beginning. This is not exactly a "revisionist" claim anymore. Simpson references Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars and related studies that established the foundation for this view of the English Reformation as violently imposed "from above" on a population that didn't want it and resisted its own "reform." Burning to Read essentially provides a "prequel" to John Stachnieweski's magisterial study of late 16th and early 17th century Calvinism (The Persecutory Imagination), which has long flown under the radar as a key corrective to scholarship that regarded Protestantism of the Tudor era as a relatively benign precursor to the (now questionably) dominant liberal cultures of modern Anglo-American societies. Simpson is also engaged in something of a reprise to his colleague Stephen Greenblatt's seminal readings of Luther, Tyndale, More, and the Henrician court in Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

For those unfamiliar with the period, Burning to Read is an excellent primer *only* if read in combination with broader and more dispassionate studies. I would recommend Simpson's own volume in the Oxford English Literary History series, MacCulloch's The Reformation, and relevant selections from the Brady-Oberman-Tracy Handbook of European History, 1400-1600. Perhaps the best pairing would be Susan Brigden's incredibly rich London and the Reformation, since it provides a street-level view of the center of the English Reformation as a lived experience for the figures discussed in Burning to Read and their contemporaries.

In his semi-autobiographical introduction Simpson "begs indulgence" for classifying Henrician evangelicalism as "fundamentalism" well before the twentieth-century coinage of the term, but he really does not need to. The modern Protestant fundamentalist movement could not have occurred and is not intelligible without this prior history. The fact that this same history has traditionally been represented as the foundation of modern liberalism (over against any Catholic, Anabaptist, or other -- especially non-English -- group's contribution) is a significant problem that concerns Simpson and moved him to produce Burning to Read as a corrective. He does not however indicate what sources and genealogies do delineate the path to liberalism; he simply reveals a preference for humanist modes of textuality and discourse, but he presents them as a road not taken. The villain of Burning to Read is Tyndale scholar David Daniell who comes in for repeated and deserved drubbings that are evidently motivated less by his numerous faults and errors than by his glib and persistent narrative framing of Tyndale, the English Bible, and the Church of England as the source of nothing but sweetness and light. Nonetheless, it is odd that Simpson engages in such vituperation over Daniell while simultaneously describing and lamenting the same type of antagonistic discourse in Luther, More, and Tyndale.

Burning to Read is very much in line with the seminal work of Simpson's colleague Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning (1980), but Simpson is in some ways rethinking Greenblatt's view (especially of Tyndale and More) in light of a conflicted perspective on the far side of the 1990s "religious turn" in American academe and early modern studies in particular. Thanks in large part to Greenblatt's "New Historicism" and the steady work of traditional historians the religious beliefs and practices of people during the confessionalization of Europe came back into focus as central and important to any kind of literary, cultural, or historical analysis. It is probably significant as well that Simpson produced these essays from talks given around the world in the years following 2001 as Americans adopted a "clash of civilizations" interpretation of their relationship with Islamic fundamentalism and accepted serious restrictions on liberties at home with far more support than dissent from religious voices. As he gave these lectures, Simpson likely saw himself positioned within a period of fundamentalist reaction within the United States and globally. At one point he exhorts his academic audiences not to ignore religion but to engage in its contests of interpretation that continue to shape interpersonal, social, and international relations.

Obviously the fundamentalism Simpson is concerned with is not Islamic fundamentalism but Christian fundamentalism. This is a viewpoint that will likely rub many audiences the wrong way, particularly those who identify strongly with some form of Protestantism. Such readers should take Burning to Read seriously, however, since it is intensely focused on cogent readings of primary sources, and Simpson's concerns are not simply the paranoid fantasy of an academic liberal during the George W. Bush administration. Since Burning to Read was published, events in Greece and former Soviet territories have provided grim credence to the warnings of even the likes of conservative, "reactionary" historian John Lukacs about the prospects for a return of fascism and militant nationalism in Europe. Lukacs has also noted for many years the ease at which American populism is moved by demogogues and popularized images of the sacred. The fundamentalist habits of thought and modes of discourse Simpson examines will be recognizable as the common seed of despotism in corrupt societies no matter what ideological label they happen to embrace.

In taking religion seriously as a live and lived reality, Simpson "gets" what Greenblatt has always struggled with. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt confidently asserted (or took for granted) a version of the classic and now outmoded secularization thesis, which goes something like this: the era of the Reformation marks the beginning of the end of an age of faith when everyone was more or less a "fundamentalist" in the grip of an enormous, unquestioned religious fiction soon to be discarded in the Enlightenment. Simpson recognizes this was not the case and something more complicated happened. He seems to regard at least the Catholic humanism of More's circle as an admirable, healthy and preferable alternative to what followed, whether he personally regards their faith as one built upon patent fictions or not. It's interesting to note that Greenblatt most recently produced a sub-scholarly, semi-polemical book about atheism and materialism as an unjustly marginalized tradition (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern), while Simpson has produced in Burning to Read a semi-polemical but deep and intellectually honest book whose target is religion gone bad rather than religion per se. In a very un-Greenblattian move reminiscient of Charles Taylor (Modern Social Imaginaries, A Secular Age), Simpson actually takes seriously the warnings and worries of English Catholics and Henrician conservatives who saw a great alienation and disembedding of their culture looming.

Despite the subtitle of Burning to Read, Simpson writes mainly about the *proponents* of Lutheranism with Sir/Saint Thomas More as the Lutheran evangelicals' main *opponent.* (More himself and certainly Erasmus also could be -- and in some cases were -- seen as Catholic humanist evangelicals who "hatched" Luther and Tyndale.) Simpson contends and convincingly demonstrates that evangelical reading paradigms rooted in Luther's experience and theology do not have the effect or even attempt to produce anything like personal liberty for readers nor liberation from institutionally managed reading. Evangelical reading as promulgated by Luther and Tyndale instead prescribes forms of psychological self-harm as well as physical, social violence by fostering intense anxieties about whether one (or one's neighbor) is within or without an "invisible church" and a radically alien God's grace. When applied to others this concern becomes a convenient weapon that will tend to iteratively disrupt societies and even groups of believers from within by constantly sowing distrust and discord. Literalism in particular leads to despotism because interpretive authority is still needed to enforce what scripture literally says, and this authority has to be institutionally grounded even if that is what Luther and his evangelical adherents specifically wanted to deny the Catholic church of their day. "Right reading" must invariably be enforced by someone, and proceeding by a literalist hermeneutic will preclude a plurality of interpretations. Impersonalized communication in and about texts shorn of complexity and context in a scene of contested interpretations must be judged as either orthodox or heretical with no space for a tolerant pluralism. Adding fuel to the fire, hermeneutic complexity and diversity are not only a public threat to orthodoxy and its authorities; they are also the prescribed path (based in Luther's paradigmatic experience) for the individual's personal struggle for faith. As one seeks signs of one's salvation/election, the absence or presence of always ambiguous signs will never yield to certainty so the path of fundamentalist faith is beset with paranoia and chronic doubt. All of this is argued by reference to key primary texts and the activities of their authors -- e.g., vernacular Bible translation prologues by Luther, Tyndale, and the later succession of major English Bibles as well as the more and less polemical disputes over them.

Simpson seems to suggest that faith construed in the 16th century Lutheran paradigm -- finding the light of justification in the darkness of abjection -- leads to unstable minds and groups if not faithlessness. Of course it can have those outcomes, but one wonders why and how Simpson thinks Protestantism caught on so well and has successfully propagated itself for half a millenium, especially in its most evangelical and fundamentalist forms, if they are so pathological. Similarly, why has the faith and trust-based Augustinian hermeneutic of charity been such a failure? This is what Simpson sees in More as a form of humanist pragmatism, which he compares to and differentiates from "the impoverished, faithless understanding of all reading 'communities'" held by Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. (This is an argument Simpson has laid out elsewhere, but he references and summarizes it in Burning to Read.) Simpson indicates the generous conviviality of the humanist model did not stick with More because -- and perhaps Simpson is suggesting this is a permanent problem -- the irenic nature of humanist dialogue and its interpretive charity requires a partnership of trust that cannot be compelled. Once even a single party persistently abandons trust, the conversation is broken. This is how, in Simpson's reading, More ends up entangled in the nets of fundamentalist polemic which only escalates until its violent conclusion -- for Tyndale and others, eventually More too. Simpson's explanation of the descent of More's preference for non-violence and religious pluralism into a "weak defense" of the persecution of heretics does not absolve More of anything, but Simpson still suggests this tragic turn was inevitable -- that More would be complicit in Tyndale's state-mandated murder of necessity. Of course this is technically not true; More was as free to oppose Tyndale's execution as he was free later to refuse to support the Act of Supremacy though it cost him his life. This simply could not happen (or would be extremely unlikely) within the logic of loyalty More was formed by and beholden to. He could disobey the king out of loyalty to the pope and the church, but he could not disobey the king out of loyalty to Tyndale on the basis of some notion of universal human rights, or even by appealing to what Simpson suggests More felt was the superior position of the church in Augustine's time. (More knew excommunication was the worst that could be done to heretics in the early centuries of the church and wrote of his affinity for this view. In Utopia he seems to value religious pluralism and toleration as well.) To take these types of positions in a public, political way More would have had to become a Protestant standing against the world as a matter of conscience and fidelity to God's will apart from any mediating human authority. And there is the connection between Martin Luther (bigot, fundamentalist, hater of peasants, and anti-semite) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. How did that happen to come about? Simpson does not make this connection or ask that question, but he certainly sets them up for readers.

In some of his less developed claims Simpson looks at how history is flattened out as a consequence of Evangelicals stripping away traditions they construed as being full of error and asserting instead the unmediated, self-evident, literal truth of ancient biblical texts. That this also entailed an assault on the poetic (allegorical and figural) modes of literary interpretation (and creation) is something of a standard view, especially as applied to the later (Calvinist influenced) English Reformation. In the earlier period Simpson notices but does not elaborate on the intellectual and artistic possibilities that lay in Luther's powerfully dialectical law-gospel hermeneutic and his theology of the cross. The growing prevalence of radical apocalypticism, carnivalesque, grotesque, and scatological elements in Luther all provided rich material for evangelicals that were not disconnected from the larger humanist tradition. Simpson does dig into Cranach briefly, interpreting his "Law and Gospel" painting as illustrative of how Christian history has been replaced by psychic stress. (One might note at this point that it was Melanchthon who produced the earliest known usage of the term "psychology.")

Simpson seems to regard the Luther-inspired interior aesthetic as generally unhealthy, impoverished, and less accessible except to the anxiety-afflicted evangelical -- all points worth pondering -- but these are also some traits of the early protestant mentality that seem most modern, familiar, and recognizably human. Cranach's Christian, at once a sinner damned and justified, elucidates a certain truth in his naked alienation and anxiety that, however troubling, is not something that could be denied after Luther. It is unlikely that Luther himself created that anxiety but merely gave it a form that he and others apparently found more gratifying than the alternatives they saw prescribed by the church. Simpson has nothing to say about the evidently deep and widespread needs that might drive millions of people to embrace this representation of abject-yet-grateful humanity.

Much more, too, could also be said about how important an incisive, humanist critical historicism was in Protestant polemic as a way to delegitimize the Catholic church. Simpson makes a good case for how some of the historical thought in early Protestantism could lead to an anti-historical, "history is bunk" attitude, but obviously it also led to progressively more liberal forms of theology and historical-critical biblical scholarship that challenged core Protestant ideas like sola scriptura. This is what modern fundamentalism (and before it Catholic "anti-modernism") reacted to in the 20th century. Simpson never mentions in passing how Humanist and Protestant textualities flowed from the Reformation into modern fundamentalism, liberal Protestantism, ressourcement Catholicism (though he relies on de Lubac and others), or even the formation of literary studies as an academic discipline. It was the rise of modern philology out of Humanist and Protestant textualities in the Reformation (always tainted with nationalist agendas) that made classical, biblical, medieval, renaissance, and English literary studies possible. And in the attempt to define canons and repristinate texts, scholars eventually realized the impossibility (or perpetual provisionality) of the task. In academe, More won. No mainstream scholar today would say that any text can be read free from a surrounding manifold of prior tradition, including its deviants.

In another more frustrating than weak point, Simpson shows how martyrdom and physical suffering were embraced in rather masochistic ways as evangelicals believed dying for their faith was all but certain proof of their salvation. Unlike the other traits he considers, the idealization of martyrdom is not unique to Protestantism, but Simpson does not acknowledge connections with earlier Christian history on this point, contemporaneous Catholic experiences, or modern and non-western attitudes that are markedly similar. Willingness to die on principle and see it as an act of fidelity and protest that perhaps transcendentally validates -- and compels -- one's beliefs is not a Reformation phenomenon that can be treated in isolation or regarded as simply or even primarily negative. (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and other members of the German resistance in the second world war comes to mind.) Along with Protestant historicism, martyrdom also seems like more of a corridor to aspects of modernity that Simpson might regard as relatively healthy.

In a similar vein, Simpson has little of depth to say about the popular rebellions in Germany that were inspired by Luther's message or the English provincial revolts against evangelicalism imposed on the common people by the state. In both cases, but especially the pacifist traditions that grew from Luther's "Schwarmerei" and the rights articulated in the Twelve Articles of the Swabian League, it is easier to see connections with modern republican and liberal values. Simpson at one point notes how Tyndale differed sharply from Luther by having a social agenda (and sticking up for the poor commons), but Simpson does not mention Tyndale's connection to the "commonwealth men" and early social "gospellers" in England who shared many of the social, political and economic grievances of the German peasants. Most of their activity came later under Edward VI, but they connect with Tyndale and Thomas Becon, whom Simpson extensively quotes.

[Sasha Wolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting and disturbing account of the mentality of Reformation literalism. Unfortunately it is not an easy read; there is a lot of repetition, the style is uneven, and there is some postmodernist jargon. The Kindle edition unfortunately does not contain the images from the print version.

[Karl Steel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several months ago, visiting family, someone mentioned that he had just returned from a sermon on Ezekiel 16. We asked, "what did the pastor say?" "Do what God wants or else." If you don't know Ezekiel 16, have a read: it tropes Israel as a foundling that God raises, pimps out, marries, and then casts out for sleeping around. It might not strike you that "do what God wants or else" is the best or even an adequate reading of the strange sexuality of this chapter, but, armed with Simpson's Burning to Read, you can at least have a sense of the faithfulness of such an interpretation to early modern "Evangelical" (Simpson's locution in preference to the anachronistic "Protestant") hermeneutics and soteriology. Likewise you will understand why I recall that Romans 3:23 ("For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God") was the favorite verse of my fundamentalist upbringing.

Simpson's book, admittedly polemic, seeks to uproot claims that the liberal tradition begins with the 'liberation' of reading and interpretation in the early 16th century. His secondary purpose is to recuperate Thomas More and to reveal William Tyndale as champion of intolerance. David Daniell, Tyndale's modern day promoter and (to put it kindly) anglophile, gets kicked down the stairs repeatedly: this is a thrilling bonus. As Simpson argues, evangelical reading practices simultaneously idolized the 'mere' text, jettisoned non-textual contexts (such as traditions, reading communities, historical situation, and different speech situations), atomized the reader, made adherence to scripture impossible, and set up this very impossibility as the foundation of spiritual life (since one's own sense of failure was a sign, *perhaps,* that one belonged to the Elect). Despair, paranoia, and the secret impulses of fundamentalism sprang up in ground fertilized by Tyndale and Luther, points Simpson makes alternately by close reading of treatises and Psalm translations by Henrican courtiers (most of whom were on the verge of execution) and by citing casualty figures for the religious persecutions and religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Burning to Read never quite clarifies what this despair &c sprang up in place of. This is odd, since Simpson is a medievalist. As a result, the medieval church implicitly comes off much better than it should (and I'll let aside Simpson's explanation for More's persecution of Evangelicals: short version: he blames it on *Evangelical* reading practices!). Given that the book is semi-popular rather than strictly scholarly, I can't expect it to have the citational apparatus of, say, The King's Two Bodies. Nonetheless, I wonder at the absence of any reference to Pelagianism. I also wonder at the absence of any reference to Reginald Pecock's Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (1450). In defending the mainstream Church from the Lollards' refusal to hear any argument but those derived from scriptura sola, Pecock "asserts that whoever 'expresseli' bids any 'gouernance' to be carried out...'includingli' bids all those further (unspecified) things to be done which logically flow out of the said 'gouernaunce.' Therefore one cannot rightly insist 'that needis ech gouernaunce of Goddis ... lawe and seruise muste be groundid expresseli in Holi Scripture'" (qtd from Alcuin Blamires, "The Wife of Bath and Lollardy," Medium Aevum 58 (1989), at 228). Pecock's argument helps encompass ecclesiastical traditions, the sacraments, &c, all this seemingly non-scriptural 'dross' that the Evangelicals scorned, within scripture, while rescuing scripture from mere textuality, returning it to the vitalism of communities of faith as a lived experience. Surely this treatise, and the late 14th- and 15th-century English debates to which it belongs, belongs in Simpson's book? Without it, the debates of Tyndale, Luther, and More appear to be sui generis; with it, we would have been much better able to isolate the conditions that enabled Evangelical ascendence and all its nasty aftereffects.

As a side note, the discussion of Josiah (who provides a model for the bloody effects of the 'rediscovery' of scripture) could have been made even more useful had Simpson observed that the struggles described are, so far as I know, actually within "Judaism" between the centralizing Temple Cult and the dispersed Shrine Cultists, rather than--as it's portrayed in Scripture--between Hebrews and purportedly "foreign" deities.

I should in closing emphasize that the last two paragraphs are grousing, ungenerous given how much I enjoyed the book, its argument, and its limpid prose. I simply wish, then, that Simpson, or his publisher, had provided a page labeled "for more on these issues see" followed by a list of relevant books on the relevant late medieval controversies.

[Kev · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most imortant thing I learned is that it is very dangerous to misconstrue that what you read is what it says or means.

Pedagogy is crucial to understanding. Learning & competent wisdom depends upon a mentoring teacher to lead one to what one reads being what it says & means.

The bane of unintended consequences is that very opportunity of a new innovation can lead to the genesis of the exact opposite of the good one intended to do -- and it can happen so very much faster than one expects.

Important book to read.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very smooth, engaging prose makes this work quite enjoyable. It poses itself as a revisionist history of the reformation, but to a Catholic like myself (who has been hearing accounts of the reformation that go against the tide of protestant triumphalism) it doesn't seem to be doing anything particularly unusual. It is design for popular appeal, but it still manages to have some decent intellectual meat underneath the seasoning.

[Jonathan Lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

A radical reinterpretation of the roots of religious fundamentalism in the Christian tradition.