Salvation at Stake
Gregory, Brad S.
WITH ESSES IN THE DOCK Salvation at Stake Christian Martyrdom in Early Modem Europe Brad S. Gregory Harvard University Press, $20, 528 pp. Marcia L. Colish Brad Gregory's important and highly...
...Believing that the Apocalypse was imminent, and that Christians must suffer during the reign of Antichrist, they viewed their martyrs as victors, expediting the eschaton's arrival...
...Gregory does just that, in the first comparative and multicon-fessional study of Reformation martyrs...
...Retaining devotion to the saints, Catholics used the lives and cults of early Christian martyrs as models for their Reformation flock, from early Englishmen executed for treason to later missionaries expunged by non-European pagans...
...In Gregory's view, rather than try to "explain" martyrs in terms of present-minded criteria, we should understand them in their own terms...
...Against the first group, Gregory observes that martyrs knew full well that they had bodies, and social locations, as well as souls...
...Despite doctrinal differences, Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists internalized a basic New Testament theme: dis-cipleship can be costly and may even be fatal...
...Protestants coped by emphasizing that martyrs died for their faith...
...Their theology conditioned them to accept the high level of martyrdom this group endured...
...Anabaptists encouraged themselves mainly with hortatory texts and liturgical hymns extolling martyrs and martyrdom...
...Highlighting missionary martyrs accented the globalization of Catholicism, a consolation prize offsetting European losses...
...More recently came the view that the Reformation was a failure, since grassroots belief and practice, in whatever confession, lagged behind clerical desiderata...
...Next came scholars for whom the Reformation was a political, economic, or social struggle, with religion manipulated as a strategy of rebellion, or alternatively, of social control...
...Still, martyrdom did not play out identically in each confession...
...Against the second, he argues that beliefs counted deeply in the Reformation...
...Aside from enriching our understanding of how martyrdom functioned for Reformation Christians, and aside from his trenchant critique of methodologies that fail to give martyrs their due, Gregory offers something to readers seeking transhistorical insights...
...Yet, martyrs were problematic...
...the victims were considered the leading edge of a community defined by its collective martyrological sensibility...
...Rejecting the cult of saints, Protestants and Anabaptists had to invent other rationales for celebrating their martyrs...
...repudiating false doctrine, they trusted wholly in God...
...French and Dutch Protestants claimed new martyrs in the religious and civil wars convulsing their countries...
...Since martyrdom was an equal-opportunity fate, cutting across gender, social, and educational boundaries, martyrs belie the claim that doctrinal trickle-down failed to occur...
...Missionaries were more frequently canonized (for which Catholics had standard procedures) and incorporated into the church's prayer life and relic cult...
...By showing us where we have been, Gregory gives us intellectual tools for envisioning and shaping the kinds of destinations we may define for ourselves...
...The early martyrs of both groups helped solidify confessional identities...
...But, with the stabilization of Anglicanism under Elizabeth I and the legalization of biconfessionalism by the Peace of Augsburg (1555), English and German Protestants lacked contemporary martyrs...
...Unlike other Reformation Christians, they did not promote group cohesion by stigmatizing victims from other confessions as false martyrs...
...Finally, for Gregory, martyrs are a "limit problem" undermining anachronistic readings of religion as a rationalization of other motives, as a self-contained symbolic system, or as a subjective construct...
...Marcia L. Colish Brad Gregory's important and highly original book is a social history of religion that eschews the reduction ism that treats religious practices as "behaviors" having no transcendent meaning...
...The litmus test is the willingness of martyrs to die for their beliefs...
...For Anabaptists, persecution was a mark authenticating the true church throughout history...
...The very empathy, evenhandedness, and historical imagination that enable Gregory to recapture the age of religious intolerance can enable ecumenically minded Christians to listen to Christians of other persuasions, and to take their doctrines seriously while avoiding the temptation to trivialize or relativize them in aid of an easy but ultimately vacuous accommodation...
...As Gregory tells it, first came scholars for whom the Reformation was the history of doctrine, transcending everything except triumphalist confes-sionalism...
...their deaths implied that deeds counted, and not faith alone...
...The retention of visual art as a devotional aid facilitated this process...
...those they celebrated harked back to the glory days of the early Reformation...
...Against the third, he shows that martyrs grasped the doctrines they died to defend, doctrines that were the common coin of their confessions' catechisms...
...In the later sixteenth century, national conditions affected Protestants' treatment of martyrs, and even their existence...
...That is welcome news, as is the forthright way in which Gregory critiques earlier scholarly approaches to his topic...
...Those who pay the price embody the ultimate imitation of Christ and gain an imperishable heavenly reward...
...Marcia L. Colish, a visiting fellow at Yale, is the Frederick B. Artz Professor of History emerita at Oberlin College.lin College...
Vol. 129 • March 2002 • No. 5
