Agora spring 2018

Agora

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

SPRING 2018

LUTHER COLLEGE, DECORAH, IOWA

The Reformation Of Everything, Part II

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

Martin Klammer, editor

SPRING 2018 VOLUME 30 NUMBER 2

Judy K. Boese, production editor

Agora, an interdisciplinary journal grounded in the humanities, is a project of the Luther College Paideia Program. Paideia consists of many activities and opportunities, including a three-course interdisciplinary core curriculum; performances and events, including an annual lecture series; library acquisitions; student writing services; networked computer classrooms; and a faculty development program that includes sabbatical grants and summer workshops. All these activities receive support from the Paideia Endowment, originally established through National Endowment for the Humanities grants matched by friends of Luther College. To see the current issue and archival issues on-line, go to <http://www. luther.edu/paideia/agora>.

The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. The journal was established in 1988 by then Paideia Director Wilfred F. Bunge, Professor of Religion and Classics. Mark Z. Muggli, Professor of English, was the editor from 1998-2004 and Peter A. Scholl, Professor of English, from 2004-2014.

Agora is distributed to five hundred on-campus faculty and administrators and to another five hundred off-campus friends of the college. Anyone wishing to be included on the mailing list should contact the editor. phone: (563) 387-2112 e-mail: klammerm@luther.edu

Contents 2017-18 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Be the Change Humanizing the Syrian Refugee Crisis Ashalul Aden and Pedro dos Santos.................................................................................. 3 Turn and Face the Strange: Creative Activity as a Catalyst for Change David Kamm and Lise Kildegaard............................................................................... 12

Reformation of Everything, 1517-2017 The Reformation in Scandinavia Marvin G. Slind.......................................................................................................... 15 Reforming Islam or Reforming the West: Who Needs to Change?

Robert F. Shedinger....................................................................................................... 21 Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril Lise E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm.............................................................. 25 Martin Luther and the Jews Robert J. Christman...................................................................................................... 27 Religious Conflict and Coexistence: The Changing Religious Landscape in the Long Sixteenth Century Victoria Christman....................................................................................................... 33 Fugue as Reformation: J.S. Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” Gregory Peterson and Kathryn Reed.............................................................................. 37 Reformation Cantata Brooke Joyce.................................................................................................................. 40

Cover: photo by Anna Dewitt (’19)

Introduction

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Agora Editor

S

ome readers may take offense at the Playmobile Martin Luther on the cover. The little plastic Martin is in fact a gift from the German Lutheran pastor couple here in Nottingham where Kathy and I direct the college’s 2017-18 program. Our pastor friends Diemut and Olaf tell us that the Martin Luther Playmobile was a huge seller over the Reformation period in Germany last year.

And why not? The little Martin is cute, but he is also a reminder of something quite serious. One customer wrote in an Amazon review: “It is a good way to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The little figure of the German reformer comes complete with plume pen and Bible translation and is making a talking point as he sits on my shelf.”

Playmobile Luther is just one artifact in a range of Martin Luther paraphernalia that can be found on-line: Diet of Worms coffee mugs, Luther beer steins (of course), Grace-Faith-Word-Alone tote bags, Saint and Sinner men’s pajamas, Here I Stand water bottles, “Lutheran by grace through faith” bumper stickers, Katharina Von Bora “The Original Lutheran Chick” fridge magnets, and Martin Luther notecards, buttons, mousepads, tee-shirts, hoodies and—believe it or not—boxer shorts.

So, the Great Reformer has been thoroughly commodified and packaged for public consumption. But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised; he is, after all, one of the most written about figures in Western history. But beyond the Playmobile Martin, how well do most people, even Lutherans, understand who Luther was, what he did and wrote, and what his impact was on history?

In this issue we offer three essays that provide a richer, deeper understanding of Luther and Lutheranism by 2

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historians Marv Slind, Robert Christman, and Victoria Christman as we complete our two-part series of presentations from last October 31 on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. What these writers demonstrate is just how complex is the history of Lutheranism in the years following the Reformation.

Professor Slind writes that the Reformation in Scandinavia was deeply entwined with developments in the political and economic order: “the course of religious developments in Scandinavia was affected when one king’s reign ended and another’s began, or when individual rulers applied their own changing views to their kingdoms.”

His essay is too detailed and nuanced to do it justice here, but suffice it to say that readers will find interesting differences in the effect of the Reformation on various Scandinavian nations as well as commonalities that Professor Slind summarizes in his conclusion, such as the transformation of the clergy into a class dependent on the crown, the spread of vernacular languages, the narrowing of options for women, and yet a “slow transformation of actual religious practices.”

Victoria Christman examines the complexities of religious toleration in the century and more following Luther’s 95 theses in 1517. She argues that the standard histories of this period have it backwards: religious toleration did not emerge only after decades of intolerance and the brutal Thirty Years War with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; rather, the Reformation provided an impetus for communities in the Low Countries (present day Belgium and the Netherlands) to practice “pragmatic toleration,” while the Peace of Westphalia, specifically designed to legislate tolerance, actually “cemented

confessional identities” and encouraged religious strife.

Robert Christman addresses perhaps the most troubling historical complexity for Lutherans: Martin Luther’s attitude toward the Jews. His essay begins with Luther’s “most incendiary invective against the Jews,” then follows with a careful examination of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe and Luther’s time before addressing the striking differences between Luther’s early and later writings on the Jews. Christman argues that neither a “simplistic condemnation” of Luther as a raging anti-Semite nor “the naïve vindication” that Luther was merely a product of his times is adequate to explain the Reformer’s views on Jews and Judaism.

And he concludes with a call to us as an institution which welcomes people of all faiths to “begin the process of healing” by acknowledging “Luther’s role in the long process of anti-Semitism.”

What these historians provide is a way for all of us, no matter what background or faith, to grow in our understanding of others by looking at the past—and the present—as honestly and thoroughly as we can. The essays by Pedro dos Santos, Ashalul Aden, and Robert Shedinger make clear that to overcome fear and distrust of others, we need to listen to the stories and understand the faith convictions of those whom we may see as different. As Pedro and Ashalul remind us, much is at stake: “To reduce or belittle the humanity of others, no matter how different they are from you, is to endanger humanity as a whole.”

Humanizing the Syrian Refugee Crisis

by ASHALUL ADEN, Luther College ’20 and PEDRO dos SANTOS, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program

T

he overarching question for Paideia 111 is “What makes us human?” Another way to think about this question is to ask a different, but related question: “What dehumanizes us?” This is a question that relates directly to a crisis that has plagued a country for almost a decade.

The conflict in Syria has been ongoing since March of 2011. The war has caused over 11 million people to be displaced from their homes, resulting in one of the biggest contemporary humanitarian crises (Rodgers et al.). The crisis has countries around the world wondering if it is their responsibility to provide shelter and protection for Syrian refugees. These Syrian citizens, who have fled a tyrannical government, ISIS, or both, are now being denied basic human rights like food, water, and shelter. Some are forced to live in inhumane conditions in overcrowded refugee camps. Some attempt dangerous treks across seas to reach Europe. Some seek refuge in countries like Canada or the United States, countries that have a history of protecting those fleeing international conflict.

As the Syrian conflict continues and millions of citizens flee their country in search for a glimpse of hope, we often have conversations about the ability of these refugees to integrate into our culture and norms, but are these fair questions? By placing these questions of integration above questions of survival, we are making decisions about which lives we believe deserve our protection.

In this presentation we seek to show how debates about the crisis in Syria have the potential of undermining and belittling the experience of those fleeing conflict. And to reduce or belittle the humanity of others, no matter how different they are from you, is to endanger humanity as a whole.

Refugees by the Numbers

account for 2.5 percent of the world’s economic output, and yet they host over half of the world’s refugees (Al Jazeera News; Gharib; UNHCR, “Poorer Countries Host Most of the Forcibly Displaced, Report Shows”). Since the rise in the number of Syrians fleeing towards Europe, Germany continued to increase the numbers of refugees in their soil, and yet in 2017 the official number of refugees in Germany (260,000), a country with 82 million people and a GDP of 3.5 trillion dollars, was still below the number of refugees currently present in Chad, a country with 14.5 million citizens and a GDP of 9.6 billion (World Bank Group). As countries with limited resources become overburdened with the continuous arrival of refugees on their own soil, the capacity to provide adequate support to these refugees diminishes considerably, leading to the inhumane conditions observed in many of the largest refugee camps in these recipient countries.

Refugees are a very specific and special type of individual, just one of the many definitions for those directly affected by conflict in the world. Today, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) over 65 million people are considered forcibly displaced people, meaning they had to leave their residence as a consequence of war or other conflict. Of those 65 million, 25 million are defined as internally displaced persons (UNHCR, “UNHCR Viewpoint”). Because they have not crossed an international border, they are not protected by the international regulations concerning refugees, making them even more vulnerable to the perils of war and conflict (Avery). Another 22.5 million are considered refugees, simply defined by the UNHCR as persons fleeing armed conflict and persecution (UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance”). Almost 25% of all refugees in the world today are Admitted Refugees and Admissions Syrian, as citizens from that Ceiling: United States 2008—20181 country continue to flee the now Total Admissions seven year long conflict (Al Jazeera Fiscal Year (October to Admitted Ceiling News).

September) One misconception about 2008 60,191 80,000 refugees, and specifically the 2009 74,654 80,000 current humanitarian crisis in 2010 73,311 80,000 Syria, is that European countries, the United States, and Canada 2011 56,424 80,000 bear the burden of accommodating 2012 58,238 76,000 refugees. Only a little over 30% of 2013 69,926 70,000 refugees ever make their way to those countries, with the majority 2014 69,987 70,000 of them being placed in refugee 2015 69,933 70,000 camps across Africa, the Middle 2016 84,994 85,000 East, and Asia (UNHCR, “Figures 2017 53,716 NA at a Glance”). Of the ten countries with the largest numbers of 2018 8,635 45,000 refugees inside their borders, none (proj. 20,724)* of them is in either Europe or Source: Refugee Processing Center the Americas. These ten countries Spring 2018/Agora

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Of the ten countries with the largest numbers of refugees inside their borders, none of them is in either Europe or the Americas.

The resources utilized to resettle refugees on American soil and the number of refugees accepted every year makes the country a leader in the resettlement of refugees in the world (Zong and Batalova; Refugee Processing Center). For the past decade (2008-2017), the United States has accepted an average of 67,000 refugees per year, with the government setting an average cap of 76,000 refugees per year.

Current policy changes have altered the refugee resettlement parameters. In 2017 no official cap was determined and the country admitted 53,000 refugees.

In 2018 the refugee admission cap has been reduced to 45,000, but at the pace of currently admitted refugees the country will receive during the 2017-2018 fiscal year less than 23,000 refugees, a number almost as low as the ones seen in the post 9/11 years of 2002 and 2003 (Refugee Processing Center).

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It is important to remember that United States refugee and resettlement policy will reflect both global events and American foreign policy priorities.

Whether one agrees that the decision to bring people from conflictridden regions should be based on foreign policy priorities, or, in international relations terms, the country’s selfinterest, is a topic that goes beyond the scope of our talk. But it is essential to keep this in mind as we discuss the ways in which refugees are dehumanized.

Syria’s War in Context In thinking about the Syrian refugees, one must not ignore the roots of crisis and the reason why so many people are forced to leave their homes in search for security. The current Syrian conflict, now entering it’s eighth year, is a consequence of global forces affecting domestic politics and has been prolonged by the same forces.

The conflict originated during the Arab Spring, a movement that started in Tunisia and spread across the Middle East in 2010 and 2011, most notably leading to the collapse of the Libyan and Egyptian governments (Anderson; Bellin, “A Modest Transformation”; Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East”). As the push for democracy spread across the Middle East, most scholars and pundits did not see Syria’s dictator Bashar Al-Asad as a candidate for being removed from office. Seen as a benevolent dictator responsible for some modernization in the Syrian system, Asad enjoyed a considerably stable tenure and faced a small and decentralized opposition (Droz-Vincent 33). But the combination of outside forces, via the Arab Spring movement, and inside opposition that grew in the peripheries and moved into the main cities led to the spark that would lead to the civil war we see today. Meanwhile, as ISIL grows in Iraq, partly as a

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The United States’ place in the protections and resettlement of refugees has evolved over the years.

An important moment in solidifying American refugee policy and in confirming the country’s stance as a haven for the persecuted and dispossessed was the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. The act, passed unanimously by the Senate and with almost 90 percent of support in the House, “sought to harmonize US law with the 1951 United Nations (UN) Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” (Kerwin 205). Since then, the United States government has facilitated the arrival of about three million refugees in the country, with numbers fluctuating along with global events and American foreign policy priorities (Krogstad and Radford).

consequence of the 2003 United States’ invasion (Milne; Brands and Feaver), it starts to gain support and consequent control of regions close to the IraqSyria border, adding one more layer of complexity to the conflict.

Today, there are many belligerents in the region, and the long conflict lacks a clear “good guy–bad guy” dichotomy.

The 6.5 million internally displaced people and 5.5 million refugees may be fleeing any of these violent threats.

Supporting the government we see Assad’s forces, numbering over 1 million military officials; Iranian and Russian forces, responsible for many of the air raids targeting civilians; and Hezbollah, a jihadist group focusing especially on the Lebanese border. Opposing the regime we see the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella group of fighting organizations that includes many defectors of the Syrian military and is supported by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United States; The Islamic Front, a loose organization of Salfists who reject Western concepts such as democracy and support a strict imposition of their interpretation of Sharia Law; and Kurdish forces, fighting to defend the nine percent Kurdish Syrian population and fiercely opposed by the Turkish ( Jenkins).

The large amount of belligerents and intensity of conflict leave many Syrians with limited options: stay and join the fight, stay and eventually become the target of one of the groups fighting for control, or leave.

As the conflict continues, neighboring countries close their borders, as they are not able to provide the support needed

to the Syrians fleeing conflict (Vio).

With no legal way out, illegal boats to Turkey and Europe and dangerous treks across the desert are the only options left for most of the Syrians escaping certain death, whether it be immediate or slow. The more Syrians seek refuge outside their borders, the harder it is for countries to accept their entrance. The more Syrians flee their home trying to protect their loved ones, the easier it is for citizens of other countries to see these human beings as something other than human.

We would like you to imagine the following scenario. You are ten years old.

You live in Aleppo, Syria. It is a warm, beautiful summer day. You just finished hanging out with your friends. You are happy and love the life you are living.

It is now nighttime. As you attempt to sleep, you hear a loud explosion.

You hear your parents screaming that it was an airstrike. Your parents rush to comfort you as the sound of bombs rings throughout the night. You have trouble sleeping so you stay awake with fear in your heart and scary thoughts running through your mind. The next morning you overhear your parents talking about leaving the country. You are scared and just want everything to go back to “normal.” You do not want to leave. You want to stay home. If you leave, you ask yourself—where will we go? Who will help our family? Where can we be safe? When can we go home?

The situation we describe is similar to the real story of many Syrian refugees. The war has caused over 11 million Syrians, people of different backgrounds, to be displaced from their homes. The crisis has led to leaders and citizens from countries around the world discussing whether it is their responsibility to provide shelter and protection for Syrian refugees. When debates regarding the movement of peoples at the scale as we see in Syria arise, they arise in the context of misunderstandings and fears in potential host countries, as their citizens try to grapple with the magnitude of people fleeing one country and seeking refuge. It is in this context that the dehumanization of Syrian refugees happens on a daily basis, both from

those who believe their own country should not host refugees and from those who support the arrival of refugees in their country.

Dehumanizing Refugees: The Anti-Refugee and Pro-Refugee Movements The anti-refugee movement is built on the nativist sentiment that a country belongs to a certain group of people (Malkin; Fekete; Kanki). This perspective, while not new, has gained considerable coverage in the news these past years as the Syrian crisis continued to unfold. The movement consistently asks if it is their country’s responsibility to give shelter, food, or jobs to foreign nationals fleeing conflicts, natural disasters, and other hardships. They often advocate for closing of borders to protect themselves and make those unwanted persons leave (Rheindorf and Wodak; Gilbert; Virchow).

There are many ways in which refugees are dehumanized by this movement.

Our talk focuses on three: refugees as economic burdens, refugees as cultural burdens, and equating refugees to terrorists.

The anti-refugee movement claims that refugees cost too much money.

Proponents see refugees as an economic burden on taxpayers. They fear that refugees will place an additional burden on their country. The concerns tend to lead to two arguments: either refugees will consume government resources through resettlement, or they will find work and take jobs away from deserving citizens.

One example in the United States is a news segment from a well-known conservative news organization that focuses on the narrative that refugees are a burden for the American state, outlining the percentage of refugees receiving cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance (“Shocking Report Reveals Feds Spend $20K Per Refugee”). On the surface, the segment shows how refugees are depleting our resources and relying heavily on government assistance.

However, the report fails to mention that, according to the same government

document used to develop the news segment, the employment rate of refugees of working age is almost the same as the employment rate of the U.S. population (Rush). By focusing on the number that makes it seem like refugees are an undue burden on society, this report ignores contextual factors that show this specific group seeks employment and government support at similar rates to those of the local population, and thus tries to illustrate how refugees are different than Americans and therefore not worthy of our help. This narrative seeks to dehumanize refugees to those watching the news segment, othering them in a way to make them look like nothing more than a burden, ignoring their humanity and the reason why they are seeking refuge (Leudar et al.).

“What makes us human?”

Another way to think about this question is to ask a different, but related question: “What dehumanizes us?”

Another way the anti-refugee movement seeks to dehumanize those seeking refuge is by arguing that those seeking refuge, especially in the case of Syrian refugees and other Muslim– majority nations, do not have the ability to integrate into a new country’s culture and norms. This narrative permeates beyond the fringes of the movement, and is a rhetoric used by politicians all over the United States and Europe.

Emphasizing an “us versus them mentality” and focusing on cultural and religious differences that are often misunderstood, those using this narrative seek to make refugees look less than normal, less than American (or any other nationality), less human.

Iowa Representative Steve King said of refugees in Europe and the U.S., “We have the right to protect our borders, our culture and civilization,” alluding to the fact that Europeans are “replacing themselves with people who do not share their values” (Swoyer). French Mayor Robert Menard alluded to Spring 2018/Agora

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something similar, stating that “only people who behaved correctly are welcome” (Blunt). Some politicians and pundits speak in codes, dog whistling to the real fear. Others like Nadine Morano of the French Party Les Republicains and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are less subtle and spell out the real fear: Muslim culture taking over Judeo–Christian cultures (Burdsey; Traub).

By focusing on their religion and culture, and making the blanket statement that these groups cannot and are not willing to “assimilate,” these politicians are holding their cultural values as a higher priority than human life. By emphasizing the differences, and exploiting myths and lies about religious and cultural values of many of those fleeing conflict and natural disasters, those using this argument dehumanize refugees by positioning them as complete outsiders, unworthy of their help.

The more Syrians flee their home trying to protect their loved ones, the easier it is for citizens of other countries to see these human beings as something other than human.

An extreme version of the cultural burden argument is the association between refugees and terrorism. The anti-refugee movement argues that terrorists are blending in or coming with refugees. Some believe that terrorists will abuse the system and infiltrate countries to push their agenda and attack the homeland. Safety and security are legitimate concerns, but it is hard to imagine a more difficult way of trying to get to new countries than by posing as a refugee. Statistics show there is no connection between refugees and terrorists (Nowrasteh and 2016).

The vetting process is difficult, and it can take up to two years to complete the application process (Park). Additionally, in the case of the approximate 800,000 refugees admitted to the United States 6

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since 9/11, only three of them have carried out an act of domestic terrorism (Lee; Friedman).

Anti-refugee sentiment is not a new trend in the United States. Over the years, the Pew Research Center has conducted surveys on whether refugees should be admitted or not. These surveys show that “American opposition to admitting large numbers of foreigners fleeing war and oppression has been pretty consistent, regardless of official government policy” (DeSilver). On the issue of Syria, a 2015 Bloomberg Politics poll showed that 53% of respondents believed the United States should not accept any refugees from Syria, while 11% believed the U.S. government should only resettle Syrians of the Christian faith, and only 28% of respondents saw Obama’s proposed policy of resettling 10,000 Syrians as a good policy (“Bloomberg Politics Poll”).

Here we see religion and culture as key factors in understanding public opinion, and the fear of the unknown likely providing the backdrop as to how most respondents see this as an “us versus them” issue, probably not fully capturing the humanity in those seeking refuge from a multi–year conflict.

The pro-refugee movement is based on the belief that every person is an immigrant and every refugee’s life is important. This movement believes countries should open their borders to foreign nationals seeking refuge from conflicts and natural disasters and make refugee resettlement a priority.

This movement has good intentions, but in some ways it can also create a dehumanizing narrative towards refugees.

In opposition to the demonization of refugees, a seemingly more positive rhetoric emerges. Sectors of the mainstream media (CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and BBC) often portray refugees as innocent, helpless creatures.

Innocence implies purity and extreme vulnerability (Ticktin). This means as people in a privileged position, we should help them. However, this also means that Syrian refugees must be saved and cared for by people in positions of power. This puts a hierarchical structure on refugees as those who are saved and cared for. The

individuals doing the saving and caring pat themselves on the back, whereas those receiving the help should be forever grateful (Nayeri). Refugees are fleeing violence and war. They have seen some of the worst aspects of humanity. However, the pro-refugee movement in the media tends to downplay their trauma, and create a clean, helpless image of a refugee. The sanitization of the refugee image, combined with the prominent role shown to those who helped, often times infantilizes and consequently dehumanizes those who have made their way from a conflict zone like Syria to a “safe haven” like the United States.

The pro-refugee movement creates the “super human” refugee idealization. This is the notion that refugees come to a country with nothing, but because they are in a country with more resources such as the United States or European countries they are capable of graduating top of their high school class, getting admitted to Harvard, becoming a Rhodes Scholar, creating the biggest electronic product of all time, and discovering the cure to cancer (Levitt; Waters; “Luol Deng - From Refugee to Miami Heat NBA Superstar”; Jary).

These are great goals and aspirations to have, but it is a difficult expectation.

Many people often do not expect average citizens to be “superhuman.” So why do people expect foreign nationals who have suffered heavy losses to be superhuman?

By using this trope, well–intentioned supporters inadvertently put undue pressure on refugees and the refugee community, expecting superhuman feats, but ironically dehumanizing those who are trying to survive in a new country.

Lastly, in support of admitting more refugees, the pro-refugee movement uses the argument that letting in refugees has a healthy return on investment (Casteel; “Refugees Are a Great Investment”; Sola). This is a direct counter–argument to the refugees as economic burden narrative. While this is an important argument, one must be careful of the unintended consequences of focusing on it as a key to why we should welcome refugees. By focusing on their economic value, we are inadvertently downplaying or ignoring their humanity.

Altogether, good intentions can dehumanize refugees. The ways we talk about refugees and to refugees are important because it impacts the way people perceive refugees, shaping opinions and behavior.

Humanizing Refugees: The Power of Storytelling Oxford Anthropology Professor Dawn Chatty criticizes the lack of agency given to the experience of those being forced to relocate. She argues “the voices of forced migrants, exiles, and refugees are rarely heard . . . except to reinforce their passivity, vulnerability, and ‘neediness’ as humanitarian aid recipients in an undefined space between nation–states” (Chatty 3). This is true even in our presentation, as we have yet to focus on the experience of those fleeing conflict and natural disasters. One way to address this lack of voice and in a way give refugees an avenue to process their feelings and humanize their experience is through storytelling and the sharing of these stories. Cheryl Hamilton, director of the International Institute of New England’s Lowell office said, “Storytelling is where you share a human experience with somebody else and you start to reflect yourself in them and just are transformed into someone else’s life immediately” (Dooling).

It is because of this connection, this transformation that we want to share with you three stories.

This past winter break, we were able to talk and listen to the stories of refugees in Rochester, Minnesota. Minnesota takes in many refugees every year.

In 2016, refugees from 25 different countries arrived in Minnesota. Nearly 40 percent of Minnesota’s refugees are from Somalia, a consequence of displacement following the Somali Civil War and consequential instability in the region (Fortili). In Rochester, there are many refugee families. In our interviews, one story was especially powerful.2

Amina’s story In 1991, Amina was just six–years–old.

She was in the marketplace with her mother in Mogadishu, Somalia. As they were grocery shopping, a bomb went

off. They both ducked to the floor and crawled to safety. As they were crawling, Amina knew there was something very wrong with her left arm. When they both made it out of the building, Amina saw that her arm had been blown off. Her mother immediately grabbed her and ran to the local hospital. The doctors tried everything to keep Amina’s arm on her body, but the damage had been done. The doctors told Amina and her mother that they were going to amputate Amina’s arm. Amina was in tears as she woke up after surgery with no arm. She loved playing outside with her brothers, and helping her father hunt. Now, with only one arm, she had to limit herself. Shortly after this incident, Amina and her family moved to a refugee camp in Kenya.

There they applied to live in the United States. In November 1992, Amina and her family moved to Rochester, Minnesota. After their arrival, Amina was able to obtain a prosthetic arm. She was grateful for the Mayo Clinic and her doctors, but Amina was still stunned and upset because of the bombing and what it cost her. She did not talk to her parents or brothers about the bombing or her arm. Her parents and brothers never brought those topics up to her.

It was a forbidden thing to do in her household. Nobody in the house knew that Amina actually hated her prosthetic arm and she saw it as a burden.

In 2003, Amina was a senior in high school. She saw a poster for an upcoming storytelling event. Her English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, urged Amina to participate. Mrs. Johnson loved Amina’s writings, and wanted her to showcase her talents to the school.

On the night before the event, Amina wrote about the bombing and the emotional and physical cost it had on her. On the day of the event, Amina spoke to her classmates about being a refugee and how the bombing in the marketplace impacted her life forever.

Her classmates were shocked to learn that Amina was a refugee and had no arm because of a bombing. After telling her story, Amina said that she felt free and happy for the first time in her life since before the bombing. She credits her newfound freedom to the power of storytelling. After the event, Amina

took off her prosthetic arm and has not put it on since.

Amina said having to wear her prosthetic everyday brought her back to the bombing. In a sense, her arm was a daily reminder of the horrific event that took place back in 1991. She credits her English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, for giving her courage to speak at the storytelling event. Before sharing her story, Amina felt like her arm and the bombing was a burden for her. She never wanted to talk to her parents or brothers about the event because she knew they were battling their own demons and did not want to add to it. She said she will always love and appreciate her parents for the sacrifices they made. When her family first came to the United States, they all shared a wish that one day they would be able to return to their homeland. This is a dream her family still holds dear to their heart.

One way to address this lack of voice and give refugees an avenue to process their feelings and humanize their experience is through storytelling.

From this story, we can see the power of storytelling on an individual who experienced a traumatic event. Before the storytelling event, Amina kept to herself and never shared her story.

She did not want to burden her family with her own battles and she did not want strangers to feel sorry for her for something they had no control over.

Amina wished her classmates knew why she always had a longing face and always tried her best to hide her arm. After telling her story, Amina felt empowered and free. She no longer wears her prosthetic arm and that is the best decision for her. Additionally, whenever she talks about the bombing, she does not feel sad or helpless any more. She feels like a survivor—a proud survivor who is free and does not let her past define her any more. She is a warrior. Storytelling is powerful. It gives Spring 2018/Agora

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Amina’s story empowered Asha Aden to share the story of her family here tonight. Due to the horror some refugees witnessed, they often remain silent about their journey to safety.

There are some refugees who do not want to open up old wounds because the history/backstory was traumatic for them. For Asha’s parents, it took a couple years for her mother to open up about a brother’s death. On the other hand, her father still has trouble speaking about his experience.

Asha’s Story “When reflecting on their journey to the United States, July 24, 1993 is a day my parents will never forget. That is the day they arrived in the United States of America. As refugees, my parents lost their homeland—their country of Somalia—and life as they had known it. When they came to America, they did not speak English nor did they have money. My parents had absolutely nothing. They both witnessed horrific and traumatizing events.

“It was a summer day in 1992. My father had just finished his work in the watermelon field. He was in the living room with his older brother when he heard gunshots ringing through his house. My father and his brother began running towards the living room window to escape. As they are both running, the perpetrators shot his brother. As he lay there bleeding, my father rushed to his side. His brother told him he loved him and to run for his life. He did just that, never turning back around. In this attack, my father lost his beloved older brother. As nighttime came, he knew he could not remain in Somalia any more. Soon after that, my mother and father travelled to a refugee camp in Kenya in hope that they both would be living safely in the United States. They still want to go back home to Somalia. However, since their arrival in 1993, they have not had a chance to go back.

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“Before fleeing to Kenya, in the fall of 1992, my mother was outside her house with her half–brother. They had been working all day and nighttime was coming soon. As they were conversing, a man came towards them and ruthlessly shot and killed her half–brother.

The man proceeded to run away. My mother, struck with horror, had no idea what just happened. She knew there was an ongoing Civil War in Somalia, but she never imagined that her brother would succumb to that war.

The next day, her family held a funeral for him and then she had to move on.

Looking back, my mother feels that she never had the proper time to mourn her brother’s loss or completely understand the shooting that took his life. After this attack on her family, my mother, along with my father, packed what little belongings they had and went to Kenya.

“Each of my parents witnessed a brutal attack on a loved one. The attacks were unprecedented and showed that the climate of the Civil War was ruthless.

The government and the rebels were going to do whatever they wanted—no matter the cost—to win. My parents had hopes and dreams for their children to be born and raised in Somalia. They wanted their children to understand their homeland and appreciate the culture they came from. However, seeing that Somalia was not safe and its future unknown, my parents knew they had to leave the only place they lived, the only place they ever called home. They had to leave behind every person they knew and everything they had. They had to leave in order to live. Refugees leave their homeland, language, family, and a multitude of other things in order to survive. Most refugees have a dream or wish to return to their homeland one day. They hope their homes will return to normalcy after the war.

“My parents had a hard time maintaining jobs here in the U.S. During the day my father worked as

LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU

people a chance to share their most intimate and private aspects of their lives. This allows people to feel more empathy towards people they know or even don’t know.

an interpreter, and during the night he worked as a janitor. He took naps as opposed to having a full night’s rest.

This unhealthy schedule caused him to have back pain and permanent red eyes.

My mother went back to school during the day to receive her nursing degree, and at night she worked at a contract airline. Because they both worked all day and night, I would rarely see them.

It wasn’t until 2008 that I had both my parents under the same roof at the same time.

“Growing up with two refugee parents in a refugee community was a lasting experience for me. My neighbors and I all had a hard time speaking English, and never understood American holidays such as Halloween and Valentine’s Day, increasing the constant feeling of being outsiders. The first time I went to preschool, I did not speak English. It was a confusing, scary day for me. After that experience, there was a translator who would help me every day. By the end of the year, I was able to speak English fluently, but with a distinct accent. Because of my accent, people would ridicule me. I spent an entire summer trying to make my accent go away. I was successful changing my accent, but I did it out of fear. Looking back, I loved my accent and should not have changed something so intimate and personal because of criticism from others.

“Fast–forward 24 years: Both of my parents are fluent in English and are successful business owners. This is how most of the stories of refugees sound like. However, not every refugee story

will be this successful. Since many cannot shake the trauma of the conflict that forced them to move, compounding that with the adversities and limitations stemming from resettlement support, many struggle to “make it” in their new country. For every success story like my parents’ story, there are likely dozens of stories of refugees who could not make it in their new country.

“The Somali Civil War has had a lasting impact on my family. My father owns a home healthcare company, but in his free time he helps refugees who have recently been resettled in Minnesota.

It does not matter to him if they are in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Burnsville, or wherever, he will help them. My mother often volunteers at the refugee resettlement center as an interpreter and often helps refugees get their driver’s license. My parents will never forget how the Lutheran church in Texas helped them when they arrived.

They want to extend to others the same hospitality and love that was shown to them, showing new refugees that they are human beings who are cared for because of their humanity and not because of their neediness, their earning potential, or their possible bright future in America.

“My parents’ journey from refugee to business owners can be described as the American dream. They came to the United States with nothing, and now they are successful. However, the American dream does not happen to every refugee. Some still have a burden and have not been able to overcome that burden. It is hard to be successful without understanding the complexities of what it means to make it in America.”

A Syrian Mother’s Story The last family interviewed was a Syrian family. They have not been able to find the success Asha’s parents have found.

The family consists of a mother, son, and daughter. They lived in Aleppo, Syria before moving to Rochester in 2015. In her own words, the mother tells her story.

“I lived my entire life in Syria. I loved life there before war ruined everything.

I used to work at a Syrian hospital as an obstetrician. That was always my dream job growing up. I always wanted to help pregnant women and women in general.

However, as the years went by, I could see the war getting worse. I did not see an end in sight. I thought my family and I could stay at home until the war ended.

“Life is hard, but I am going to keep moving forward. I am going to try my best to improve my kids’ lives. That is all that matters. My children.”

“My mind changed after an airstrike changed and ruined my life forever. I was at work, and I heard an explosion.

I went outside and I saw that it was an airstrike. Since the explosion was so loud, I was worried for my family’s safety. I ran home and I saw that I had no home. I ran into the rubble crying and screaming my children and husband’s name. I saw my son emerge from the rubble and I was so thankful.

I embraced him and asked him where his dad and sister were. He just stood there with a blank look on his face. I set him aside and ran inside my home.

At this point, I was screaming their names and frantically looking through the rubble. With the help of emergency responders, they found my daughter.

But she did not look the same. Her two legs had been completely blown off.

My heart sank. My beautiful, energetic daughter was no longer able to walk. I had to keep myself together and look for my husband. A couple minutes after they found my daughter, they found my husband’s body. He was disfigured and dead. This airstrike destroyed my family. My husband was dead. The father of my kids, the love of my life was gone. He lived such a short life and had many aspirations. My daughter was disabled. She will never be able to walk again without prosthetic legs. My son was traumatized. He saw his father’s dead body and his sister physically challenged. I wondered how he was able to escape with no injuries. I found

out later that he was at his friend’s house, but ran home when he heard the airstrike.

“After this incident, I knew I had to leave. I took whatever was left of my house, my kids, and I left. We went to Turkey in 2013 and stayed there until our application (to live in the U.S.) was approved. We left Turkey and boarded a plane to the United States. From there, we were able to obtain Section 8 housing in Rochester. I am thankful for the refugee resettlement center because they have helped me and my children tremendously. They helped us with healthcare, housing, and my children’s education.

“Even though we are safe now, I still feel depressed. I applied to work at a hospital and my application was denied.

I applied to work at McDonald’s and they accepted me. I went from being a doctor in Syria to a fast food worker in the U.S. I also feel helpless when it comes to my son. He has never been the same after the attack. He never talks about the attack and refuses to talk about his father. I know he misses him. It hurts my heart. I can’t bring my husband back to life, but I do not know how we can heal. I want my son to be the happy–go–lucky kid again.

Unfortunately, I do not think that is possible. He spends his days doing homework or reading. He doesn’t really have friends nor does he care to have any. He loves and misses his friends back home.

“I want to go back home too, but it’s not safe. I cannot afford to lose more.

My daughter is doing better. She has prosthetic legs now, but she spends the majority of her day in a wheelchair. I miss seeing her run around and not in pain. I have to take her to physical therapy a couple of times a week now.

I am grateful to be living in the United States, but I feel like my life has been robbed. I never really had the time to heal after my husband’s death and there is a hole in my heart that will always be there. My mental health has deteriorated. I don’t know if my son will ever be happy again. I don’t know if my daughter will ever be able to live her life without any assistance. It’s hard. Life is hard, but I am going to keep moving Spring 2018/Agora

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forward. I am going to try my best to improve my kids’ lives. That is all that matters. My children.”

This powerful mother’s story highlights some misconceptions. The pro-refugee movement often talks about how refugees are the future doctors, dentists, and CEO’s. But here is a former doctor working at McDonald’s. Even when a refugee with training and qualifications comes to the U.S., they are denied being an “economic value,” denying them their vocation, passions, and consequently, their humanity. Additionally, this Syrian mother’s story highlights an issue among refugees that is rarely talked about: mental health. Many refugees are traumatized from the attacks that have killed their loved ones or because of how quick they had to leave everything they’ve ever known. Refugees are often so focused on surviving, they forget to heal.

The journey of being a refugee is never over. From their journey to their new country to adaptation, there are obstacles they face along the way and afterwards. The two–year paperwork, learning a new language, dealing with trauma, starting a new job, adapting to a new society—these are just some of the difficulties refugees face on their journey to starting a new life.

Conflict, Humanity, and Storytelling In this talk tonight we wanted to emphasize the humanity of refugees.

Reports and debates in the media often focus on numbers, and after a while even seeing traumatic events on a video or picture becomes numbing. We wanted to provide a brief introduction to the current refugee crisis, paying special attention to the Syrian crisis.

We hope we provided some context to understanding why so many human beings are fleeing their homes, why they see this as the only option.

By highlighting the story of three refugee families we hope we showed the importance of storytelling in humanizing refugees, both as part of the healing process for those escaping the unimaginable, and as a way to emphasize the fact that regardless of where these people are moving from 10

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they are doing so not by choice but necessity. Where they come from should not matter, their professions should not matter, their economic impact should not be the main topic of discussion.

We should treat these people as human beings, without thinking of them as hopeless and innocent souls, without expecting them to do superhuman feats, without justifying their existence in dollars and cents.

Notes 1. Source: Refugee Processing Center.

2. We changed the names in this story to protect the privacy of those involved.

Works Cited Al Jazeera News. Ten Countries Host Half of World’s Refugees: Report. 4 Oct. 2016, http://www. aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/ ten-countries-host-world-refugeesreport-161004042014076.html.

Anderson, Lisa. “Demystifying the Arab Spring: Parsing the Differences Between Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.”

Foreign Affairs, vol. 90, no. 3, 2011, pp.

2–7.

Avery, AH. “Internally Displaced People: A Global Survey.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 81, no. 3, 2003, p. 227.

Bellin, Eva. “A Modest Transformation: Political Change in the Arab World after the ‘Arab Spring.’” The Arab Spring, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, pp. 33–48.

---. “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring.”

Comparative Politics, vol. 44, no. 2, Jan. 2012, pp. 127–49.

“Bloomberg Politics Poll: Most Americans Oppose Syrian Refugee Resettlement.”

Bloomberg.Com, 18 Nov. 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2015-11-18/bloomberg-pollmost-americans-oppose-syrian-refugeeresettlement.

Blunt, Christopher. “French Mayor Tells Syrian Refugees ‘You’re Not Welcome In This Town.’” UNILAD, 16 Sept.

2015, https://www.unilad.co.uk/ featured/french-mayor-tells-syrianrefugees-youre-not-welcome-in-thistown/.

Brands, Hal, and Peter Feaver. “Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable?” Survival, vol. 59, no.

3, May 2017, pp. 7–54.

Burdsey, Daniel. Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge. Springer, 2016.

Casteel, Kathryn. “Refugees May Be Good For The Economy.” FiveThirtyEight, 14 June 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/ features/refugees-may-be-good-for-theeconomy/.

Chatty, Dawn. “Refugee Voices: Exploring the Border Zones between States and State Bureaucracies.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, vol. 32, no. 1, May 2016.

DeSilver, Drew. “U.S. Public Seldom Has Welcomed Refugees into Country.”

Pew Research Center, 19 Nov. 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/11/19/u-s-public-seldomhas-welcomed-refugees-into-country/.

Dooling, Shannon. “Refugee Resettlement Agency Seeks To Connect Cultures Through Live Storytelling.” WBUR, 2 May 2017, http://www.wbur.org/ news/2017/05/02/refugee-storytellingseries-suitcase-stories.

Droz-Vincent, Philippe. “‘State of Barbary’ (Take Two): From the Arab Spring to the Return of Violence in Syria.” The Middle East Journal, vol. 68, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 33–58.

Fekete, Liz. “The Emergence of XenoRacism.” Race & Class, vol. 43, no. 2, Oct. 2001, pp. 23–40.

Fortili, Amy. “With Minnesota Set to Receive 2,500 Refugees in 2017, Here’s a Look at Process.” Twin CitiesPioneer Press, 3 Dec. 2016, https:// www.twincities.com/2016/12/02/ with-minnesota-set-to-receive-2500refugees-in-2017-heres-a-look-atprocess/.

Friedman, Uri. “Where America’s Terrorists Actually Come From.” The Atlantic, Jan. 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2017/01/trumpimmigration-ban-terrorism/514361/.

Gharib, Malaka. “Chart: Where The World’s Refugees Are.” NPR.org, 17 Mar. 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/ goatsandsoda/2017/03/27/518217052/ chart-where-the-worlds-refugees-are.

Gilbert, Geoff. “President Trump’s Executive Order: Denying Protection on Holocaust Memorial Day.” International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 29, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 323–26.

Jary, Simon. “Syria’s Least-Known but Most Famous Migrant Is the Father of Apple’s Steve Jobs.” Macworld UK, 2 Feb. 2017, https://www.macworld.

co.uk/feature/apple/who-is-steve-jobssyrian-immigrant-father-abdul-fattahjandali-3624958/.

Jenkins, Brian Michael. When Jihadis Come Marching Home: The Terrorist Threat Posed by Westerners Returning from Syria and Iraq. RAND Corporation, 2014.

Kanki, Azeeka. “The Disturbing Movement against Syrian Refugees in Canada.”

The Toronto Star, 10 Mar. 2016, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/ commentary/2016/03/10/thedisturbing-movement-against-syrianrefugees-in-canada.html.

Kerwin, Donald. “The US Refugee Protection System on the 35th Anniversary of the Refugee Act of 1980.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 3, 2015, p. 205.

Krogstad, Jens Manuel, and Jynnah Radford.

“Key Facts about Refugees to the U.S.” Pew Research Center, 30 Jan. 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2017/01/30/key-facts-aboutrefugees-to-the-u-s/.

Lee, Michelle Ye Hee. “The Viral Claim That ‘Not One’ Refugee Resettled since 9/11 Has Been ‘Arrested on Domestic Terrorism Charges.’”

Washington Post, 19 Nov. 2015. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/ fact-checker/wp/2015/11/19/the-viralclaim-that-not-one-refugee-resettledsince-911-has-been-arrested-ondomestic-terrorism-charges/.

Leudar, Ivan, et al. “Hostility Themes in Media, Community and Refugee Narratives.” Discourse & Society, vol. 19, no. 2, Mar. 2008, pp. 187–221.

Levitt, Heidi. “From Refugee to Starring in an Oliver Stone Film.” USA Today, 24 Dec. 2017, https://www.usatoday. com/story/opinion/2017/12/23/hieple-refugee-oliver-stone-heidi-levittcolumn/978095001/.

“Luol Deng - From Refugee to Miami Heat NBA Superstar.” BBC Sport, 1 Jan. 2016. http://www.bbc.com/sport/ basketball/35066273.

Malkin, Michele. “Not All Refugees Are Welcome.” National Review, 1 Feb. 2017, https://www.nationalreview. com/2017/02/trump-refugeeimmigration-order-broken-systemprotesters/.

Milne, Seumas. “Now the Truth Emerges: How the US Fuelled the Rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq.” The Guardian, 3 June 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isissyria-iraq.

Nayeri, Dina. “The Ungrateful Refugee: ‘We Have No Debt to Repay.’” The Guardian, 4 Apr. 2017. http://www.theguardian. com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeriungrateful-refugee.

Nowrasteh, Alex. “Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis.” Cato Institute, 13 Sept. 2016.

Park, Haeyoun. “Refugees Entering the U.S. Already Face a Rigorous Vetting Process.” The New York Times, 29 Jan. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2017/01/29/us/refugeevetting-process.html.

Refugee Processing Center. “Admissions & Arrivals.” Refugee Processing Center, http://www.wrapsnet.org/admissionsand-arrivals/. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018.

fieldsights/902-what-s-wrong-withinnocence.

Traub, James. “Viktor Orban Wades into Hungary’s Dark Waters.” Foreign Policy, 26 Oct. 2015, https://foreignpolicy. com/2015/10/26/viktor-orban-wadesinto-dark-waters-eu-hungary-refugeecrisis-europe-jobbik/.

UNHCR. “Figures at a Glance.” UNHCR, 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/figures-ata-glance.html.

---. “Poorer Countries Host Most of the Forcibly Displaced, Report Shows.”

UNHCR, http://www.unhcr.org/news/ latest/2017/2/58b001ab4/poorercountries-host-forcibly-displacedreport-shows.html.

“Refugees Are a Great Investment.”

Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy. com/2017/02/03/refugees-are-a-greatinvestment/.

---. “UNHCR Viewpoint: ‘Refugee’ or ‘Migrant’ – Which Is Right?” UNHCR, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/news/ latest/2016/7/55df0e556/unhcrviewpoint-refugee-migrant-right.html.

Rodgers, Lucy, et al. “Syria: The Story of the Conflict.” BBC News, 11 Mar. 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/worldmiddle-east-26116868.

Virchow, Fabian. “PEGIDA: Understanding the Emergence and Essence of Nativist Protest in Dresden.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no. 6, Nov. 2016, pp. 541–55.

Rheindorf, Markus, and Ruth Wodak.

“Borders, Fences, and Limits— Protecting Austria From Refugees: Metadiscursive Negotiation of Meaning in the Current Refugee Crisis.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, vol. 16, no. 1–2, Apr. 2018, pp. 15–38.

Rush, Nayla. Fact-Checking a Fact Sheet On Refugee Resettlement. Center for Immigration Studies, Nov. 2015, https://cis.org/sites/default/files/rushrefugees-mpi.pdf.

“Shocking Report Reveals Feds Spend $20K Per Refugee.” Fox News Insider, 11 June 2016, http://insider.foxnews. com/2016/06/11/feds-spend-20krefugee-or-asylum-seeker-report-says.

Sola, Katie. “Here’s Why Welcoming Refugees Is A Sound Economic Investment As Well As A Moral Imperative.” Forbes, 8 Jan. 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ katiesola/2016/01/08/germany-costrefugees/.

Vio, Eleonora. “No Way out: How Syrians Are Struggling to Find an Exit.” IRIN, 10 Mar. 2016, https://www.irinnews. org/special-report/2016/03/10/no-wayout-how-syrians-are-struggling-findexit.

Waters, Cara. “From Refugee to Runway: How Migrants Are Transforming Australian Small Business.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Jan. 2018, https:// www.smh.com.au/business/smallbusiness/from-refugee-to-runway-howmigrants-are-transforming-australiansmall-business-20180118-h0k7im.html.

World Bank Group. “World Bank Open Data.” World Bank Open Data, 2017, https://data.worldbank.org/.

Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. “Refugees and Asylees in the United States.”

Migrationpolicy.org, 5 June 2017, https:// www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ refugees-and-asylees-united-states.

Swoyer, Alex. “Steve King: ‘We Shouldn’t Be a Suicidal Nation’ Taking in Tens of Thousands of Refugees.” Breitbart, 20 Nov. 2015, http://www.breitbart.com/ big-government/2015/11/20/steveking-shouldnt-suicidal-nation-takingtens-thousands-refugees/.

Ticktin, Miriam. “What’s Wrong with Innocence.” Cultural Anthropology, 28 June 2016, https://culanth.org/

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Turn and Face the Strange: Creative Activity as a Catalyst for Change

by DAVID KAMM, Assistant Professor of Art, Art Gallery Coordinator and LISE KILDEGAARD, Professor of English

Editor’s note: Since David and Lise’s presentation was a conversation based on his artwork on gun violence in our schools, what they offer here in lieu of a lecture are four of David’s mixed–media art pieces along with his brief introduction on how—and why—these came to be.

T

he December 14, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was so heart-breaking that it demanded a response. Since I am an artist, the most authentic response I could offer was to make art, but not art that wallowed in despair or capitalized on the sorrow and grief of others.

Sometime after the shooting I saw an editorial cartoon that included images of spent cartridge casings (i.e. “bullets”) and crayons.

The symbolism was stark and prompted me to consider the potent juxtaposition of those two types of objects. Before long, I was inserting crayons into empty cartridge casings, one for each of the children killed at Sandy Hook. Arranging the crayons as a spectrum of colors created a childlike rainbow effect that was muted by the implied violence of the cartridge casings. That piece, titled “End of the Rainbow,” became the first in a continuing series of works addressing the topic of gun violence in schools.

Several of the subsequent works contain .223 caliber casings, the cartridge of choice for many mass shootings, but other caliber casings have also been used, as in “.40 Caliber Safety Crayons” and “Unwinnable Game.” Along with whole crayons, “Unwinnable Game” includes crayon fragments nested into casings, along with other objects and materials that contribute conceptual, symbolic or aesthetic value to the piece. “Luck-of-the-Draw” and “.40 Caliber Safety Crayons” both incorporate existing product packaging with modified graphics to “normalize” the horror of school shootings, events that have become nearly routine.

While the subject of this art is somber, I hope to arrive at some sense of beauty through the creation of works that don’t literally depict or illustrate gun violence and school shootings, but rather offer visual metaphors that may prompt consideration of the issues. Bringing disparate objects and materials together into some sort of coherent, even pleasing harmony, gives me hope that it may be possible to peacefully coexist and start to heal the wounds of a badly shattered country.

David Kamm

End of the Rainbow

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.40 Caliber Safety Crayons

Unwinnable Game Spring 2018/Agora

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Luck-of-the-Draw

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The Reformation in Scandinavia

by MARVIN G. SLIND, Professor Emeritus of History

T

he Reformation in Scandinavia generally developed “from the top down,” imposed by the kings of Denmark and Sweden. As was the case in many areas of Northern Germany, it was not primarily a grass-roots movement. Consequently, the course of religious developments in Scandinavia was affected when one king’s reign ended and another’s began, or when individual rulers applied their own changing views to their kingdoms. But while the kings may have imposed change, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century or later that the older, former Catholic leaders were replaced throughout the church hierarchy by officials who fully embraced the new order. Only then were the changes brought by the Reformation truly implemented in Scandinavia.

Because of the rulers’ involvement, the development of the Reformation in Scandinavia was affected by more than religious concerns. Political and economic issues were also important in shaping its course. For example, events in Scandinavia were intertwined with the final break-up of the Kalmar Union, a weak union created in 1397

by Queen Margaret I of Denmark (r.

1397-1412). Throughout the fifteenth century, and into the next, the king of Denmark nominally ruled the Union. But in 1523, Christian II’s (r.

1513-1523) policies finally brought a reaction in Sweden that destroyed what was left of it. Developments there became tied to the emergence of an independent Sweden, led by Gustav Vasa.

No region of Scandinavia was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the King of Denmark also held the title of Duke of Schleswig and Holstein; Holstein was a duchy within the Holy Roman Empire. Because of the dynastic

connections, developments in Denmark thus became intertwined with what was happening in the Empire.

The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (r. 1519 – 1558), was a devout Catholic, and as Emperor, he was also bound to uphold Catholicism. Only in a Catholic world did the Holy Roman Empire have meaning. Beyond his devout religious feelings, it was necessary to suppress the Reformation in order to maintain his own power and authority. However, many states within the Empire saw Charles’s efforts to repress Luther as a threat to their own authority. As the Reformation progressed, many imperial free cities, and most dynastic states of Northern Germany, insisted on adding the right to determine their own religion to their other rights and liberties.

When a state turned Lutheran, it usually “secularized” (or more bluntly, confiscated) church properties. That considerably enriched some of the Lutheran princes, and gave them a strong material interest in the success of the Lutheran movement.1

Breakup of the Kalmar Union and Emergence of an Independent Sweden During Queen Margaret’s reign, the Kalmar Union ran relatively smoothly from its establishment in 1397 until her death in 1412. Under her successors, however, the cohesion of the union gradually dissolved. In particular, Swedish nobles increasingly objected to the Union’s rule from Denmark. A rebellion in 1434 led to the formation of the Riksdag (Sweden’s Parliament) in 1435. It proposed separation of the governments of Sweden and Denmark.

Even with the creation of a new popular administration of Sweden with an elected Regent, or riksföreståndare

(sometimes translated as “Guardian” or “Protector”), there was growing dissatisfaction with Danish authority in Sweden.

This came to a head during the reign of Christian II (r. 1513 – 1523).

He was able to reassert authority in Sweden, but in so doing, he made his position untenable by his ruthlessness.

After another uprising in Sweden, he had his opponents tried for heresy and executed, despite an amnesty granted when Stockholm surrendered to his forces. In the “Bloodbath of Stockholm” of 1523, Christian II’s supporters executed 82 people (some reports say 90), including two bishops, and many noblemen, in the city marketplace. One chronicle of the time noted, “The heads of bishops, nobles, and worthy burghers were rolling together in the dust.”

Resistance in Sweden, though scattered and severely weakened by this event, found a leader in Gustav Vasa. Peasants rallied to him when there were rumors of further punitive campaigns from Denmark. Christian II’s Archbishop Gustav Trolle, who had tried Christian II’s opponents for heresy, had subsequently been left in control of Sweden. He was driven out in 1523, and Gustav was proclaimed King of Sweden by the Assembly of the Realm. He ruled until his death in 1560.

Christian II also encountered opposition from Danish nobility, who supported his uncle Frederick.

Bowing to this pressure, Christian II withdrew to the Netherlands in 1523.

Frederick I (r. 1523 – 1533) was now king of Denmark (as well as Norway and Iceland), and Gustav Vasa was king of Sweden (which included Finland). The Kalmar Union was dead.

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During Christian II’s reign, Luther’s teachings entered Scandinavia through three main channels. German preachers moving north brought Protestant ideas with them. Native supporters who studied in Wittenberg and other centers of the Reformation also helped to disseminate Luther’s theology. Finally, Hansa merchants spread Protestant ideas in areas where their trade was long established.2 In Scandinavia, the monarchs were deeply involved in the development of the Reformation. For example, Christian II asked the Elector of Saxony to send him a preacher. In 1521, Martin Reinhardt came to Denmark and spread Lutheranism, quickly making converts among the German-speaking members of the upper classes.3 Christian II’s support of Reformation ideas was primarily part of his interest in Humanism, though he temporarily converted to Lutheranism himself. He continued to vacillate in his support of the Reformation, and had difficulty deciding between Protestantism and Catholicism. To complicate matters, Christian II’s brother-in-law was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, which placed additional pressure on him to remain faithful to the Roman Catholic Church.

Christian’s successor, his uncle Frederick I (r. 1523-1533), essentially attempted to tolerate both Catholicism and Lutheranism. He officially condemned the Reformation ideas, but he tolerated their spread. He also forbade payments to Rome, as well as papal confirmation of episcopal appointments.

In 1525, a monk from the monastery of Antvorskov, Hans Tausen (1494-1561), began preaching Lutheran doctrines in Viborg. Soon the Lutheran movement began to spread throughout the country.

Prior to Frederick I’s coronation, Catholic bishops had included a number of clauses in his coronation charter to protect both their interests and the broader interests of the Catholic Church in Denmark. Despite those supposed guarantees and 16

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protections of Catholicism, Lutheranism nonetheless made considerable gains during Frederick’s 10-year reign. As solemn protector (værner) of the Catholic Church in Denmark, Frederick I asserted his right to select bishops for Roman Catholic dioceses. And though he had pledged in his coronation charter to fight against Lutheranism, he issued an edict to citizens of Viborg in 1526, obliging them to protect Hans Tausen. To further protect Tausen, Frederick I appointed him as his personal chaplain, which gave Tausen immunity from any actions the city might seek to take against him.

Christian II continued as a threat to Frederick I’s rule for some time. From exile, he issued propaganda writings, agitating for himself and the King Christian III (1503-1559) of Denmark by Lutheran doctrines. However, Jacob Binck (1550). he eventually reconverted to northern Jutland and elsewhere, rallied Catholicism, and reconciled around the cause of exiled Christian II. with his brother-in-law, the Emperor.

(He would remain a threat to the In January of 1534, the city government monarchy until Frederick imprisoned of Malmø refused to comply with an him in 1532; he remained a prisoner order from the Bishop of Lund to expel until his death in 1551. Even though Lutheran preachers. (Malmø had long he was in prison, he continued to have been a center of Evangelical activities.) supporters who attempted to advance The German Count Christopher of his interests.)

Oldenburg had been hired by leaders in Malmø and Lubeck to conquer After Frederick’s death in 1533, the Denmark in order to restore King Council of State (Rigsråd) could not Christian II, and he now attacked agree who should be king. The Roman Holstein. His participation in what was Catholic majority preferred Frederick’s essentially a civil war gave it the name 12-year old son, Hans the Elder of “Count’s War” (sometimes called the Schleswig-Holstein-Haderslev. The “Count’s Feud”). Count Christopher Lutheran minority on the Council soon took control of Zealand and supported Hans’s older half-brother, Danish territory east of the Great Belt.

Christian. As duke of Schleswig and Holstein, Christian had introduced The lower nobility forced the bishops to Lutheranism there during the 1520s. nominate Christian, Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, to the Danish kingship.

Election of the new king was He accepted, and ruled as King delayed for a year due to a number of Christian III (r. 1534 – 1559). Christian disagreements, and during that time, the III had been at the Diet of Worms, Council of State governed Denmark. where he heard Luther speak. He had Bishops were allowed to decide what worked to introduce the Protestant could be preached in their respective Reformation in his court in Schleswig, dioceses. But noble control through the and he made the Lutheran Church the Council created growing discontent.

State Church of Schleswig-Holstein As a result, the citizens of Malmø and in 1528. As king, his alliance with the Copenhagen, along with peasants from

SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Spread of Lutheran Ideas in Scandinavia

nobles formed the basis of power in Denmark that would last until the midnineteenth century.

Initially, Christian III’s rule was hampered by the fact that Roman Catholics still controlled the Council of State. In 1536, he ordered the arrest of three of the bishops on the Council.

And even though he was imprisoned, Christian II remained a threat lurking in the background, because of his support from Charles V and other allies.

In 1536, Christian III established Lutheranism as the Danish National Church. He paid off expenses incurred in the Count’s War by confiscating Church lands, swept away Catholic bishops, and introduced a fully Lutheran Church Ordinance, which the Church proclaimed in 1537.

The new Ordinance replaced bishops with “superintendents.” They had no link with apostolic succession, and without episcopal estates (which had been seized by the crown) they could not aspire to status comparable to lay nobility, which Danish bishops had previously enjoyed.

Within this new church, there was a pool of capable Danish Lutherans who had all studied at the University of Wittenberg. They drafted a Danish Lutheran church order, which was completed in September 1537, after being revised and amended by Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558). Bugenhagen was a prominent Wittenberg reformer whom Johann Friedrich I, Elector of Saxony (1503-1544), had sent to Denmark.

In addition to creating the administrative structure of the Danish church, the Order established a distinctive Lutheran agenda by eliminating veneration of saints, fast days, celibacy, and other Catholic practices, and decreed that church services would be performed in Danish.

Monks and nuns were allowed to stay in their monasteries and convents, and priests were allowed to keep their churches until they died. Only when the last monk or nun had died was a monastery or convent added to the state’s property. Thus the Reformation in

Denmark became a relatively bloodless affair.

In addition to changes within the Church, the Reformation brought other intellectual changes as well. The University of Copenhagen, which had been closed since the Count’s War, was reopened in 1537; Bugenhagen modelled it after the University of Wittenberg. In 1550, the “Christian III Bible” was printed. This “Reformation Bible,” as it was also known, was a Danish translation of Luther’s Bible by Christiern Pederson (c. 1480 – 1544), on behalf of Christian III. The Danes imposed Lutheranism on Norway and Iceland, but the Reformation did not go as smoothly in either place. Resistance in Iceland was stronger than anywhere else in Scandinavia. A new church order was not implemented there until 1552, after the execution of Bishop Jon Arason in 1550, and the local population contested it until the next century.4 As in Denmark and Sweden, the Reformation in Iceland was a significant moment in the country’s culturallinguistic history. In 1584, Icelanders published a translation of the Bible. An Icelandic hymnal appeared in 1589, and a worship manual followed in 1594.

In Norway, however, the implementation of Reformation changes was hampered partly by use of the Danish language in the church.

Structurally, Christian III’s actions in Denmark in 1536 set the process in motion, and the Danish Church imposed the new Church ordinance on Norway. Although there had been little criticism of the Catholic Church in Norway, and few reformers had found support outside of Bergen, Danish policies nonetheless prevailed over local interests. Some Norwegian resistance developed, headed by Archbishop Olav Engelbriktsson, but it was quickly crushed. The old Church aristocracy was effectively eliminated, church lands and properties were confiscated, and religious orders’ houses closed.

(This was in contrast to developments in Denmark, where the orders were allowed to maintain their properties until the last monks or nuns had died.)

Episcopal fortresses were destroyed, or taken over by secular authorities, and new bishops (now “superintendents”) were appointed for Oslo, Stavanger, and Nidaros/Trondheim. All of them were Catholic in background, but they were obligated to support the reforms.

By the 1560s, a new, thoroughly Lutheran, generation had replaced them, and the Reformation could be pursued more effectively. But it was impossible to bring about a genuine change of faith overnight. Beyond Bergen, where Hansa merchants had brought Reformation ideas from Germany, there were few Lutheran preachers in the country before the 1530s. After 1537, an essentially Catholic clergy remained in the parishes, and it took several generations for a reformed clergy to replace them.

Lutheran practices only gradually displaced Catholic versions in Norway.

Reformers gradually “purified” church interiors: they stripped churches of saints’ images and other artifacts of the Catholic faith, and installed pews and pulpits.

Unlike in Sweden or Denmark, the Reformation did not aid in the development of a literary language in Norway. The new church was Danish, which was the language of the literature and the services. The Bible in Danish translation was introduced in Norway in the 1550s. Norwegian translations of the Bible did not appear until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Until then, there were not significant differences between written Danish and Norwegian. Furthermore, until Danish control of Norway ended in 1814, there was little impetus within the Danish state church to provide a Norwegian translation. During the nineteenth century, however, differences were growing between the languages.

And the same nationalistic impulses that contributed to the development of Nynorsk (Landsmål) also increased interest in a Norwegian translation of the Bible.5 (Nynorsk is one of the two written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål.)

The Norwegian Bible Society (NBS) was established in 1816. Together with the British and Foreign Bible Society, Spring 2018/Agora

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it initially published revisions of earlier Danish translations. The first Bible the NBS published, The Norwegian Bible of the Norwegian Bible Society, appeared in 1854. Despite its name, however, it was still a Danish Bible.

Because it modernized some wordings and orthography, it was very popular in Denmark, where it was widely used until a new Danish translation appeared in 1871. It was also based on earlier Danish translations, not the original sources. A translation of the New Testament from Greek to Nynorsk appeared in 1889, and a translation from the Old Testament from Hebrew followed two years later.

The NBS published a revised edition of the 1889 translation in 1899. In 1904, it published the first translation of the complete Bible, directly from the Hebrew and Greek texts, into Bokmål.

Reformation in Sweden Developments in Sweden were complicated by the fact that royal leadership did not provide a consistent doctrinal course. In addition, there was not much popular support for many years.6 Gustav Vasa was not very interested in the theological side of the Reformation.

Nonetheless, Lutheranism made significant progress during his long reign. Political and economic factors led him to support Lutheran preachers and bring about the break with Rome. That was followed by royal confiscation of Church properties, and the creation of the Swedish State Church.

At Västerås in 1527, the Riksdag sanctioned steps that initiated this process. Some Church properties were confiscated, noble land donations made to the Church since 1454 were recovered, and bishops were deprived of their private armies and most of their governmental functions.

The progress of the Reformation in Sweden was aided by close relations between the crown and the first generation of evangelical reformers. In particular, Olaus Petri (“Master Olof,” 1493-1552) and his brother Laurentius Petri (1499-1573), were major figures in the development of the Swedish 18

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State Church. Gustav appointed Olaus to be preacher at the Great Church in Stockholm in 1524, and Olaus also served as Gustav’s chancellor for three years.

Olaus Petri was most active as a preacher, especially in Stockholm. But he also provided much of the essential literature of the new faith in Sweden.

For example, he played a central role in the publication of a Swedish translation of the New Testament in 1526. (The full Gustav Vasa Bible was published in 1541.) His Protestant manual appeared in 1529, followed by a hymnbook in 1530, and a Swedish mass in 1531.

Laurentius Petri became archbishop in 1531, and held that office for 41 years.

In that capacity, he issued a new Church Ordinance in 1571.

Gustav Vasa established what amounted to a minister of ecclesiastic affairs, a position first held by a German, Wittenberg-educated Georg Norman (c. 1490-1553). Norman emphasized obedience to the secular sovereign, and supported royal confiscation of “unnecessary” valuables from churches.

However, he instituted structural changes very slowly, so Lutheranism was established in Sweden more gradually and broke less completely with medieval tradition than in Denmark.

For example, Gustav had new bishops consecrated by a bishop who had received papal approval, thus preserving apostolic succession in his realm.

Even though the Lutheran reforms were implemented during his reign, Gustav also arranged for two Calvinist tutors for his sons, Erik and Karl. Following Gustav’s death in 1560, his son Erik XIV came to throne. Together with immigrants from East Friesland, Erik’s Calvinist tutors attempted to promote Calvinism. Those efforts were shortlived, however. In 1565, Archbishop Laurentius Petri attacked the Calvinist position, thus forcing Erik to reverse his father’s policy of inviting persecuted Calvinists to settle in Sweden, and also to forbid Calvinist propaganda in his kingdom.

But Erik quickly undid many of his father’s accomplishments. He was described as “unstable and unrealistic,”

and his policies alienated most of the leading men of the realm. These problems were compounded by questions regarding his sanity, which ultimately made him incapable of governing.

In September 1568, Erik was deposed; he was succeeded by his half-brother, Johan. His deposition, as well as Johan’s succession, were recognized by the Riksdag in January 1569. (Erik spent the remaining eight years of his life in prison. Some suggest that he may have been gradually poisoned by his brother.)

Johan III’s reign (1568-1592) was marked by religious confusion. His wife, the Polish princess, Katarina Jagellonica, was a devout Catholic.

Until her death in 1583, the court was a center for Counter Reformation activity. She was permitted to have her own priests at court, and for several years in the late 1570s, Norwegianborn Jesuit, Laurentius Nicolai, and Papal Ambassador, Antonio Possevino, actively tried to convert the king and restore Sweden to the Roman Catholic fold. Nicolai was even permitted to open a college of theology in Stockholm.

Johan III, however, sought a middle way. This was reflected in the so-called “Red Book” (1576), a new liturgical manual which contained both Lutheran and Catholic elements. Unfortunately, this satisfied neither side. In 1579, antiCatholic demonstrations in Stockholm compelled Johan to expel Possevino and Nicolai.

The Queen’s death in 1583 quieted some of the turmoil. However, their son and heir to the throne, Sigismund (b. 1566), had been baptized Catholic.

This seriously complicated the situation, especially when Sigismund succeeded to the throne following Johan’s death in 1592. He was already king of Poland, and thus had outside forces at his command which might be used in support of Catholicism in Sweden. His accession to the Swedish throne was thus a major threat to Lutheranism there. To forestall any actions that might strengthen Catholic interests, a gathering of about 300 Lutheran

Church leaders met at the Uppsala Assembly in 1593. They made a clear affirmation of Sweden’s Lutheran position.

Åbo, Martin Skytte (d. 1550), pursued a middle course in actual transformation of the Church; many Catholic practices continued under his leadership.

Sigismund had to spend most of his time in Poland. In his absence, government fell to his uncle, Duke Karl, and the Council of State. (In many sources, Swedish kings named Karl are referred to as Charles.) In 1597, Karl led a rebellion, which ended with Sigismund’s deposition in 1599. That effectively ended the religious question in Sweden in favor of Lutheranism.

During the rebellion, Sigismund was captured in the Battle of Stångebro in 1598. The following year he was deposed by the Estates in the Riksdag.

In 1604, the Riksdag declared that Sigismund had abdicated the Swedish throne, and it recognized Karl as sovereign.

In 1554, Gustav Vasa split the church administration in Finland by creating the new bishopric of Viborg/Viipuri.

The two new bishops (Agricola, who had succeeded Skytte in Turku/Åbo, and Juusten in Viborg/Viipuri) pursued a more aggressive course.

Karl IX may have harbored Calvinist preferences; however, some accusations of Calvinism may have been part of efforts to limit his power. In particular, some members of the clergy feared that he might assume too much power in ecclesiastical affairs, and claims of Calvinist sympathies might serve to weaken his position. Regardless of the extent to which he truly espoused Calvinist ideas, while Karl continued to debate Church organizational and theological matters, Sweden was irreversibly Lutheran.

Finland The Reformation in Finland parallels that in Sweden (of which it was a province). German-educated preachers began to spread Lutheran ideas in the 1520s. These included Peder (Pietari) Särkilahti (d. 1529), Mikael Agricola (c. 1508 – 1557), and Paaveli Juusten (c.

1516-1576).

Because Finland was part of the Swedish kingdom, the terms of the Swedish Edict of Västerås (1527) applied there as well. That led to the confiscation of Church properties, reclamation of noble donations, and the transfer of tithes and other payments to Swedish coffers. It also created a state-controlled clergy in Finland. The first Reformation bishop of Turku/

But events in Sweden after Gustav Vasa’s death meant that Finnish religious practices remained a changing mixture of old and new. It was only after 1593 that a purer form of Lutheranism took hold in Finland.

More than anywhere else in Scandinavia, the Reformation played a role in the development of the vernacular language in Finland. Prior to the Reformation, some Finnish was used in church services, and a few religious texts had been translated into Finnish. But the Reformation rapidly accelerated this trend. It was vitally important to the development of Finnish as a written language. Mikael Agricola’s Finnish language primer (1542), and his translation of the New Testament (published in 1548) were central to these developments.

General Impact of the Reformation in Scandinavia Overall, throughout Scandinavia, the Reformation resulted in a significant increase in the wealth of the state and the authority of the crown.

There was also an accompanying land ownership revolution. Simultaneously, it transformed the clergy into a crowndependent social class, with continuing importance in local affairs. Culturally, it was marked by the spread of vernacular languages and the development of modern literature. Finally, there was a slow transformation of actual religious practices.

Negatively, the Reformation resulted in the loss of a cultural richness previously fostered by the Church. There was also a decline of educational institutions and welfare networks, and a change from an independent Church to one easily manipulated and corrupted for

State purposes. The Reformation also narrowed options for women by closing convents.

Because the Reformation led to the creation of State Churches in Scandinavia, it built close ties between Church and State in each realm. Criticism of the Church was equated with criticism of the State.

Following the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, that was viewed as an existential threat to the monarchical state. The religious teachings of people such as Hans Nielsen Hauge in Norway, and the Swedish Mission Covenant Church in Sweden (later to become the Evangelical Covenant Church) were often critical of the State Church.

Consequently, this put them at odds with the State.

The Scandinavian Lutheran churches supported their respective governments.

This included preaching against emigration, which the monarchies viewed as a threat to their wealth and power. In the nineteenth century, the numbers of Scandinavians emigrating to the United States continued to grow. After 1865, with the end of the American Civil War, and the passage of the Homestead Act as well as the construction of transcontinental railroads, America was an increasingly attractive destination for would-be emigrants.

While some emigrants represented minority religious groups in Scandinavia, the vast majority who emigrated were members of their respective State churches. The Norwegian Church tried unsuccessfully to discourage emigration. By the late 1840s, it was clear that the growing wave of emigrants could not be stopped. Thus some Church leaders began to advocate sending pastors to minister to the needs of the growing number of Norwegians in the US. It quickly became apparent that they could not keep up with the demand for Norwegian-trained pastors, so they began the process of establishing seminaries in the United States. (The history of Luther College is tied to those developments.)

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(often as a result of religious disputes within the church), Norwegians by and large remained Lutheran. When disagreements arose, as they often did, Norwegians generally started new synods to represent their views, rather than abandoning the Lutheran Church in general. As a result, over time, there were at least fourteen different Norwegian Lutheran synods. As the Scandinavian immigrants died and their descendants were assimilated, the various churches with Scandinavian roots gradually merged. Relatively few elements of their national origins remain in the twenty-first century.

Although the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia remain state churches, they no longer wield the power they had until the late nineteenth century. As society has become more secularized in all of the Nordic countries, the churches’ influence has waned. The vast majority of Scandinavians remain nominally members of their respective state churches. But few attend church.

Confirmation has become more of a social rite of passage than a ceremony with deep religious significance for the participants. As the Scandinavian monarchies ceased to wield real power, the power of the state churches declined as well.

Sources Bibelselskapet. “Norwegian (and Danish) Bible Translations.” https://www.bibel. no/Bibelselskapet/English/BibleTranslations/Norwegian-and-Danishtranslations. Accessed October 4, 2017.

Derry, T.K. A History of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.

Dunkley, E.H. The Reformation in Denmark.

London: S.P.C.K., 1948.

Grell, Ole Peter, ed. The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Nordstrom, Byron. Scandinavia Since 1500.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Rian, Dagfinn, ed. Bibel og Bibeloversettelse.

Trondheim: Tapir, 1995.

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Notes 1. For a general survey of the political history of the Nordic kingdoms in the Reformation era, see Byron Nordstrom, Scandinavia Since 1500 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and T.K. Derry, A History of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).

2. For an overview of the Reformation in the Nordic kingdoms, see Ole Peter Grell, ed., The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and E.H. Dunkley, The Reformation in Denmark (London: S.P.C.K., 1948), as well as Nordstrom and Derry.

3. Danish and Norwegian developments are surveyed in Martin Schwarz Lausten, “The Early Reformation in Denmark and Norway 1520-1559,” in Grell.

4. Icelandic developments are described briefly in Derry and Nordstrom.

5. The history of Norwegian translations of the Bible is outlined in Dagfinn Rian, “Norske bibeloversettelser – sett på bakgrunn af dansk-norsk bibeloversettelsetradisjon,” in Dagfinn Rian, ed., Bibel og Bibeloversettelse. (Trondheim: Tapir, 1995). Rian also includes a brief summary of the history of the Danish translations, such as the “Christian III Bible,” which were used until Norwegian versions became available. See also, Bibelselskapet “Norwegian (and Danish) Bible Translations” https://www.bibel.no/ Bibelselskapet/English/Bible-Translations/ Norwegian-and-Danish-translations.

(Accessed October 4, 2017.)

6. For details regarding the history of the Reformation in Sweden and Finland, see E.I. Kouri, “The early Reformation in Sweden and Finland c. 1520-1560,” and Ingun Montgomery, “The institutionalisation of Lutheranism in Sweden and Finland,” in Grell. Nordstrom and Derry also include brief summaries of those developments.

Reforming Islam or Reforming the West: Who Needs to Change?

by ROBERT F. SHEDINGER, Professor of Religion

A

t least since the events of September 11, 2001 and perhaps even before, it has been common in Western political discourse to call for Islam to undergo a reformation along the lines experienced

by Christianity beginning in the sixteenth century. Why does Islam need to be reformed? Criticisms of Islam normally revolve around three main issues: Islam is said to be too political in its ambitions; Muslims are said to not really value democracy but instead opt for authoritarian forms of government when given the chance; and finally that Muslims do not value individual rights and liberties. If Islam were to undergo a Protestant-style reformation, the argument goes, these three issues would be solved, radical Islamic terrorism would be defeated, and Islam would become compatible with the modern world.

I will argue, by contrast, that the three issues on which Islam is said to need a reformation are, when correctly understood, the three defining features of what makes Islam Islam. A Westernstyle reformation, short of bringing Islam into the modern world, would actually undermine fundamental concepts of Islamic thought and silence a powerful voice of critique of some of the worst excesses of modern Western society. Perhaps it is the West that needs a reformation, not Islam. I will consider each of these three issues in more detail in what follows. But first we need to be familiar with some basic Islamic terminology.

The essence of Islam is often captured by what are known as the Five Pillars of the faith. The Five Pillars consist of confessing the Shahadah (the confession of faith), praying five times a day, giving zakat (often misunderstood as charity), fasting during Ramadan, and performing the hajj pilgrimage to

Mecca. I will focus here on the two pillars of Shahadah and zakat, along with the Islamic concept of shura (consultation).

Shahadah, or the Muslim confession of faith, goes as follows: There is no God but The God; and Muhammad is the Messenger of The God. The first half of the Shahadah, “There is no God but The God,” is an expression of the central Islamic concept of tawhid (unity). Islam arose in a polytheistic environment where there was a belief in the existence of a supreme creator God (Al-Lah, an Arabic phrase meaning “The God”) who formed the universe, but then sat back and retired from involvement in human affairs. Thus, polytheistic Arabs worshiped a bevy of lesser deities in the form of idols.

Muhammad, however, proclaimed the unique existence of Al-Lah as the only real God and the only one worthy of worship and submission. So, while on the surface tawhid appears to be simply an affirmation of monotheism—the idea of the utter oneness of God that Islam is famous for—tawhid has two additional dimensions. Not only is it an expression of the oneness of God, but also of the oneness of humanity living in submission to this one God (expressed in the concept of ummah, the worldwide Islamic community). Finally, tawhid also speaks to the oneness and integrity of lived experience such that the world cannot be carved up into separate sacred and secular spheres.

All of life is one, such that spiritual teachings are understood to also be political and economic teachings, while political and economic teachings are understood to also be spiritual teachings. The dualistic sacred/ secular dichotomy so much a part of the modern Western mindset is

fundamentally at odds with the whole conceptual foundation of Islam, which emphasizes the unity and wholeness of lived experience rather than its fragmented or dichotomous nature.

Therefore, when Western commentators complain that Muslims are too political, that they fail to recognize the separation between religion and politics or that they inappropriately use (or abuse) their religion for political ends, these Western commentators fail to comprehend the fundamental difference between the conceptual foundations of Islam and the conceptual foundations of modern Western society. For Islam to undergo a reformation that forced a sacred/secular dichotomy on Islamic thinking would undermine the very concept of tawhid, the central organizing principle of all Islamic thought. And possibly this is intentional.

The dualistic sacred/secular dichotomy of the Western mindset is fundamentally at odds with the conceptual foundation of Islam which emphasizes unity and wholeness.

Farid Esack is a contemporary Muslim scholar at the University of Johannesburg who grew up in South Africa during the days of apartheid. He recalls that during the darkest days of the struggle against apartheid, members of the government would approach the Muslim community and exhort them not to engage in anti-apartheid politics on the grounds that the Muslim community was being given complete freedom of religion. They could pray, Spring 2018/Agora

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worship, fast, give the call to prayer, and build mosques and Islamic schools.

What more could they want? For Esack, this separation of the spiritual affairs of life from the material is inconsistent with Islamic teachings. He writes: If our worship is not linked to our lives and to people’s suffering, then it becomes a safe part of religion, a part that all decision makers in unjust socioeconomic structures would want to encourage. The separation between this-worldly and otherworldly matters has never really struck a responsive chord in the world of Islam.1 Trying to get the Muslim community to practice an apolitical religiosity, in Esack’s view, was part of a strategy to domesticate the community and bring them to tacitly accept the injustice of the apartheid system. In Esack’s view, the existence of an apolitical religiosity is a myth: The question is not whether religion can be used for political purposes … The question is which religion—that of the feudal lord or that of the villager—and for whose objectives?2 When we criticize Islam as being too political, are we buying into a Western discourse of the separation of religion and politics that serves the interests of those who benefit from systems of social and economic injustice by keeping us locked in an apolitical spiritual piety that ignores the connections between a God of justice and the world of material existence? Many Muslims definitely think so. Practicing Islam as a purely spiritual activity is simply not enough. Flowing from the concept of tawhid, a divinely motivated struggle for justice is deeply embedded in Muslim identity, and the struggle for justice will always require political activity. Islam is political for the very reason that religion itself is always political.

Another Islamic thinker almost universally vilified by the West makes a similar point. The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, complained that during the 22

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Western-supported authoritarian rule of the Shah in the 1960s, Western scholars infiltrated the educational institutions of Iran trying to convince Islamic religious scholars that Islam was a religion, meaning a set of primarily spiritual beliefs and practices largely divorced from the material aspects of life.

Khomeini viewed this as an attempt to intentionally domesticate the population and bring them to tacitly accept the authoritarian rule of the Shah and the injustices it produced in Iranian society.

In response, Khomeini wrote: Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to truth and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism. But the servants of imperialism have presented Islam in a totally different light.

They have created in men’s minds a false notion of Islam.

The defective version of Islam, which they have presented in the religious teaching institutions, is intended to deprive Islam of its vital, revolutionary aspect and to prevent Muslims from arousing themselves in order to gain their freedom, fulfill the ordinances of Islam, and create a government that will assure their happiness and allow them to live lives worthy of human beings.3 To be sure, the Islamic state created by Khomeini’s revolution has created its own form of authoritarian government, now being resisted by many of the Iranian people. But this government might not even exist if not for the actions of the United States meddling in Iranian affairs in the 1950s. More on this below.

On the charge that Islam does not value democracy, I turn to the Islamic concept of shura and the work of Ahmad Moussalli, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. The Arabic word shura means consultation, and refers to an event from early Islamic history. The second successor (caliph) to Muhammad was a man named Umar ibn al-Khattab. Umar was fatally wounded by a disgruntled

slave, but before he died, he is said to have chosen six representatives from various factions within the growing Muslim community and instructed them to choose a leader from among themselves following Umar’s impending death. This is known as the shura council, and represents for Muslims an early form of democracy. Rather than leadership decisions being made by hereditary succession or dictatorial rule, leadership in the early Muslim community was determined by the community itself through the process of consultation. Because of this, many Muslim thinkers view democracy as entirely compatible with Islamic teachings, though an Islamic democracy will not be exactly like the secular democracy common in the West.

Muslims firmly believe in the absolute sovereignty of God to rule over all aspects of human affairs. Humans do not have the right to make their own laws without reference to the divine will. But in practice, it is humans who have to interpret the Qur’an and prophetic tradition and determine what exactly the divine will is. This cannot be left up to a single individual or small group of leaders, but requires consultation with the entire community. Ahmad Moussalli, who holds a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, nevertheless rejects notions of Western secular democracy that put the popular will of the people over the will of God. He agrees with Farid Esack on the importance of resisting the sacred/secular dichotomy of the West: Again, the most important measure of divine oneness (tawhid) manifests not in an individual’s private conscience but in his or her commitment and actions toward the Islamization of state and society. For deep theological commitment to Islam must involve the economic, social, and political concerns of society.4 But in order to bring about the transformation of political, economic, and social structures of society toward greater reflection of the divine will, the

effective exercise of shura, in his view, will be absolutely necessary: Although Divine governance has become for moderate Islamism an absolute political doctrine, so has the doctrine of shura. In fact, the good realization of the former becomes dependent on the good exercise of the latter.

Moderate Islamism developed shura to absorb democracy within Islamic political and even epistemological thought.5 One can always question the practical nature of this attempt to access the divine will through a democratic process, but one cannot accuse Muslims of not valuing democracy as an idea. It is firmly rooted in Islamic thought.

You might not know this from looking around the world and noticing all those Muslim majority countries led by kings and autocrats. But few Muslims view these governments as reflective of the ideals of Islam. They are rather the creation of centuries of Western colonialism in Muslim lands, where the democratic process has been consistently undermined in service to Western political interests. Recall that in the 1950s when the Iranian people had elected a Muslim leader to replace the Shah of Iran, the latter a secular dictatorial ruler supported by Western powers, the U.S. government, through the actions of the CIA, fomented a coup to drive the democratically elected leader from power and restore the Western-friendly dictator hated by the people. This U.S. intervention in and undermining of a nascent democracy set the stage for the previously mentioned Iranian Revolution and the development of an autocratic Muslim regime considered today to be a highly disruptive force in global politics.

The lack of functioning democracy in Muslim majority countries today is not a reflex of Muslim disdain for democracy.

Besides, two of the largest Muslim countries by population—Indonesia and Bangladesh—are functioning democracies (and Bangladesh has even elected a woman as head of state!).

This leads us to the pillar of zakat and the question of whether Muslims value

individual rights and liberties. While zakat is usually translated as almsgiving in most Western books about Islam, this translation is entirely inaccurate.

It gives the impression that zakat is a form of voluntary charity. Rather, zakat is understood to be an institutionalized form of wealth redistribution designed to prevent the concentration of wealth in too few hands. In theory, zakat would be an annual tax of 2.5% on a person’s net worth (not income) to be collected by an Islamic state and redistributed to those who currently lack the means to meet their basic material needs. Zakat is the lynchpin of an Islamic economic system that prioritizes the welfare of society over that of the individual when those two things come into conflict.

It is not that Muslims do not value individual freedom, but for them, the welfare of society at large is more important, and so individual liberties must be reined in when to do so promotes the greater good of society.

In the West, individual rights often trump the larger good of society. Muslims generally view this the other way around.

Should a person be free to accumulate as much wealth as possible as long as it is done legally? In the West we say yes. People have the right to advance their economic self-interest, and the government does not have the right to put constraints on this. But this laissez faire attitude may lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

At this point, Muslims are more likely to say that the interests of the many take priority over the unfettered liberty of the few, and wealth must be systematically redistributed for the good of all. This last point deserves comment.

Zakat comes from an Arabic word meaning to purify. Requiring the rich to pay zakat is a way to help purify their hearts away from greed, it is a reminder that all resources ultimately belong to God, not to us. We are mere stewards.

Zakat not only helps to meet the material needs of the poor, but it also helps to develop the spiritual resources of the rich!

M. Umar Chapra, an Islamic economist who earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota, refers to an Islamic economic system as a welfare state and declares: It is the duty of the Islamic state to ensure a respectable standard of living for every individual who is unable to take care of his own needs and hence requires assistance.6 This does not mean, however, that individual liberties are not valued, for he continues: …since social welfare has a place of absolute importance in Islam, individual freedom—though of considerable significance—does not enjoy a place independent of its social consequences. It is sacred only as long as it does not conflict with the larger social interest or the overall spiritual and material goals of Muslim society.7 Islam is not socialism. The goal is not the complete leveling of economic classes. Individual initiative is important, and it is taken for granted that some people will be better off economically than others. But unfettered wealth accumulation, when it leads to the creation of a permanent underclass, must be reined in for the good of society. Economic justice is a higher value than individual liberty.

These ideas find expression also in the work of another influential contemporary Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan. In a pointed critique of Western capitalism, Ramadan writes: Islamic teachings are intrinsically opposed to the basic premises and logic of the neoliberal capitalist system.8 In Ramadan’s view, neoliberal capitalism accepts the existence of the poor as simply the price of doing business. In a system built on competition there will always be winners and losers. Charitable Spring 2018/Agora

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organizations exist for the purpose of softening the blow for the losers since the system itself cannot be changed for their benefit. But these ideas do not square with Ramadan’s understanding of fundamental Islamic teachings: Islam does not conceive of poverty as a normal feature of the social arena and does not envisage that the remedy for this distortion should be the free generosity of some toward others in the hope that the wealth of the rich and the destitution of the poor may somehow miraculously find a point of balance. The obligation of zakat puts this question into the realm of law and morality and cannot be left to anyone’s discretion. 9 In Islam, individual rights and liberties are valued, but only to the extent that their exercise does not have a detrimental effect on the whole of society.

Perhaps it is the West that needs a reformation, not Islam.

This is an important critique of Western hyper-individualism given the prevalence of gun violence in America.

The constitutionally-protected right to own and even stockpile all manner of firearms cannot be challenged, even when the exercise of that right helps to create a society with disproportionate levels of gun violence, mass shootings, and even the slaughter of children. In the West, individual rights often trump the larger good of society. Muslims generally view this the other way around.

So the three-fold critique of Islam— that it is too political, it does not value democracy, and it does not value individual rights and liberties—is not entirely inaccurate. Muslims do believe that living a life of submission to God must entail the transformation of political and economic structures as an inherent part of enacting that 24

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submission. Muslims do believe that democracy is entirely compatible with Islamic teachings, but not Western secular democracy as we know it. And Muslims do prioritize the good of society over the rights of the individual leading to structures that put limits on the exercise of individual liberty when it conflicts with the greater good. But all of these ideas flow directly from basic aspects of Islamic teachings: tawhid, shura, and zakat. A reformation in Islam that would bring Islam into complete compliance with Western norms and values would violate these basic teachings. Such an Islam would cease to be Islam as it has been historically understood and practiced. The larger question, of course, is why we desire to see Islam reformed in this way.

pearls of wisdom hidden away in the Islamic tradition that just might help us to develop solutions to the many very pressing problems we face.

Islamophobic discourse in the West trades on the idea that the West represents the pinnacle of human civilization by contrasting it with a view of Islam understood as primitive and backward. The argument goes that the West in general and Christianity in particular put aside its primitive ways five hundred years ago beginning with the Protestant Reformation. Islam and the Muslim world unfortunately are still stuck in their primitive ways because such a reformation has not yet occurred.

But the idea that the West represents the pinnacle of human civilization (with America as its most shining example) is belied by the continuing existence of growing levels of wealth inequality (which will be made worse by recent changes in tax policy), deeply embedded forms of racial and gender injustice, socially normalized levels of violence, and accelerating levels of environmental degradation. Rather than squarely face these issues and grapple with the threat they pose to our cultural hubris, it is easier to ignore them and then try to silence the voices of criticism.

6. M. Umar Chapra, “The Islamic Welfare State” in John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 242.

The call for an Islamic reformation should be understood as an attempt to silence the voice of a powerful critique of the worst excesses of our Reformation-inspired values. We don’t necessarily have to agree with Muslim solutions, but we should at least listen to and seriously engage with what Muslims have to say. We may find

Notes 1. Farid Esack, One Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 92.

2. Esack, 93.

3. Quoted from Hamid Algar, trans., Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981), 28.

4. Ahmad S. Moussalli, “Islamic Democracy and Pluralism” in Omid Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 301.

5. Moussalli, 301.

7. Chapra, 246.

8. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 177.

9. Ramadan, 178.

Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril

by LISA E. DAHILL, Associate Professor of Religion, California Lutheran University and JAMES B. MARTIN-SCHRAMM, Professor of Religion

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from the preface to the book by the same title, published 2016 by Wipf & Stock.

I

n 1517, Martin Luther famously put hammer to nail, posting his outrage at the economic corruption of the church of his time. His 95 Theses brought together scriptural, pastoral, ethical, and theological arguments against the practice of the sale of indulgences: the linchpin of what quickly grew into a much larger critique of theological malfeasance and its damage to the faithful and to the faith. Arguing that “[e]very true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church … [granted] by God, even without letters of pardon” (Thesis 37), Luther pointed to the open doors of grace in Jesus Christ, the Gospel of endless and redemptive divine mercy for all who trust in this love. In the years since, Christians in Europe and eventually around the world have found liberation, solace, dismay, aggravation, and inspiration in the Reformation Luther sparked; popular history through the centuries has granted his challenge to the medieval ecclesial structuring of European society iconic status— for better or worse—in giving rise to modernity.

In 2017 Christians around the world, and Lutherans in particular, marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

Worship services, conferences, festivals, and pronouncements of all kinds heralded this anniversary with much fanfare and critical attention to the continuing significance of Luther’s insights and legacy. In the midst of many appeals for reformation today, an overarching chorus is becoming audible in which human cries join with croaks and squawks and storms: the slowly suffocated or violently silenced voices of people, cultures, species, and ecosystems

at risk. That is, a growing number of theologians, scholars, and activists around the world believe that Reformation celebrations in 2017 and beyond need to focus now on the urgent need for an Eco-Reformation.

Indeed a great deal has changed since 1517. For one thing, this time the Pope isn’t the enemy. In preparation for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, Pope Francis published a watershed encyclical, titled Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, calling all people on Earth of every faith and culture to love, care for, and protect our planet. Perhaps here is a voice today like that of the 1517 Luther: I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.… All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents.1 Along with many other religious, scientific, and political leaders, Pope Francis points out that the rise of industrial, fossil-fuel-driven capitalism and the explosive growth in human population are endangering the fundamental planetary life-support

systems in which life as we know it has evolved. In fact, the overwhelming impact of our species is leading many scientists to conclude that we have entered a new era of planetary history—the Anthropocene. Recent reports by the world’s leading scientists make it clear that the twenty-first century will be increasingly marked by unprecedented climate change. The collective impact of human production, consumption, and reproduction is undermining the ecological systems that support human life on Earth.

If human beings don’t reform our relationship with God’s creation, enormous suffering will befall many— especially the weakest and most vulnerable among all species.

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A gospel call for ecological justice thus belongs at the heart of the 500th anniversary observance of the Reformation and as a—if not the—central dimension of Christian conversion, faith, and practice (in collaboration with others among the world’s diversity of religious and spiritual traditions) into the foreseeable future. Luther protested the sale of indulgences, God’s grace marketed to the desperate as a fund-raising tool; and Christians in many contexts have condemned the commodification of human life in countless forms of slavery, impoverishment, trafficking, and oppression, the deadly injustice of global economic systems. Now Christians along with many others are recognizing the even more catastrophic implications of the past millennium’s shift from regarding the natural world as a living and beloved face of divine creation to treating it as a commodity to be exploited for profit. The Lutheran World Federation brought together all three of these interwoven—indeed, inseparable—layers of economic idolatry in its theme for the global 2017 Reformation anniversary, a banner under which surely all those of good faith might unite today: “Salvation: Not for sale. Human beings: Not for sale.

Creation: Not for sale.”

We look forward to taking part in expanding circles of Eco-Reformation, with new generations of reformers who insist that to be Christian today means nothing less than the repentance of privilege, immersion in the holy waters of Earth, and courageous costly witness against the economics of alienation.

With people of all backgrounds, with creatures of all kinds, we give thanks for the relationships, beauty, and joy that make life on this planet so rich, all grace. Here we stand: we can do no other.

Note 1. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), para. 14.

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Martin Luther and the Jews

by ROBERT J. CHRISTMAN, Associate Professor of History

I

would like to begin with a quotation from Martin Luther’s text of 1543, On the Jews and their Lies.

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?

Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing, and blasphemy…. I shall give you my sincere advice: First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians….

Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies.

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.

Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.

Fifth, I advise that safeconduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or

the like.

Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping.

Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3 [:19]).

In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule: if my counsel does not please you, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews ... Do not grant them protection, safeconduct, or communion with us … so it is not necessary to burden ourselves also with these alien, shameful vices of the Jews.…

And you, my dear gentlemen and friends who are pastors and preachers, I wish to remind very faithfully of your official duty, so that you too may warn your parishioners concerning their eternal harm, as you know how to do, namely, that they be on their guard against the Jews and avoid them so far as possible.1 This quotation represents some of Martin Luther’s most incendiary invective against the Jews, and I begin with it to make very clear how deeply offensive some of his opinions are. In light of their scandalous nature, it may come as a surprise to you that when I, the product of a rather conservative Lutheran pastor’s household, left Green Bay, Wisconsin as an eighteen– year–old to attend Boston University, I had no idea that Martin Luther had

ever written such violent anti–Jewish diatribes. I was further unaware that Boston University had a large Jewish population, among them my freshmen– year roommate. In the course of my first year at college as I met many new people, when the topic of my father’s career arose, the response was invariably something like: “You’re a Lutheran?

Martin Luther was a raging antiSemite.” I was shocked. How come I had never heard this before? Since those days, however, I have many times heard various Lutheran apologists offer the following defense: “Martin Luther was merely a product of his times. That’s how people understood the Jews in the Middle Ages and he was only reflecting his culture.” So which is true, raging anti-Semite or product of his times? Or are neither true? These are the questions I would like to explore in the next half hour before ending with a few remarks on what Luther’s writings on the Jews mean for the college that bears his name.

The Position of the Jews in Medieval Society In order to understand whether Luther was merely a product of his times it is first necessary to comprehend the place of the Jews in medieval society. To do so, one has to go back to St. Augustine (354–430 AD) whose views on the matter cast a long shadow. He was certainly not the only one to hold them, but he was among the most prominent.

For the sake of this presentation, his understanding of the Jews can be boiled down to three main points.

First, argued Augustine, the Old Testament was a book of shadows, the New Testament a book of light. Put differently, the only way to understand the Old Testament was through the New Testament, and because the Jews rejected it, they were blind to the Spring 2018/Agora

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meaning of their own writings. Their rabbis acted as librarians who carry books, but did not understand them.

Thus, divorced from Christianity, Judaism was not a legitimate religion.

Second, Augustine insisted that it was the Jews who killed Christ, not the Romans. Despite the fact that the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, had executed Jesus, the real blame lay with the Jews. Reflecting the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ suffering and death, this is an important concept, because more often than not, medieval persecutions of the Jews revolved around their role as “Christ Killers.”

And third, and perhaps most influentially, argued Augustine, the fact that the Jews had no homeland, no government, and no temple offered proof that God had turned his back on them. Their constant exile demonstrated God’s wrath against this people that had rejected his Son. Thus, argued Augustine, they should be tolerated as a kind of picture lesson, a warning to Christians of what it looked like to be under God’s curse, but never allowed a stable position in society. Although the logic is circular—because they do not have a place of their own, they have been rejected by God; and because they have been rejected by God, they do not have their own place—it profoundly shaped the contours of the Jews’ position in medieval society.

If these three aspects of Augustine’s thought underlay how Christian Europe understood the Jews, it is also necessary to get a sense for how it understood itself. Succinctly put, Europe was the Corpus Christianum, the body of all Christians. That term, often translated as “Christendom,” was a religious, political, and geographic concept that meant that everyone in Europe was part of a unit defined by its religion, itself the basis of the political order, the social order, and a common culture. The only exception allowed in this society was the Jews—and they could remain, but only to play their role as Augustine’s picture lesson. As a result, in times of great stress, patriotism, or religious emotion—during the Crusades, the Black Death, or annually in Holy Week, for example—violence against the Jews 28

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often occurred. Although they resided within the Corpus Christianum, they were never of it.

The legal status of the Jews in medieval Europe reflects this liminal position.

By 1205, the church had codified an understanding of the Jews based upon the notion of “perpetual servitude.”

They were allowed to remain, but always in a position of legal inferiority.

This ambivalence manifested itself in the rulings of various church councils regarding the Jews. In 1179, the third Lateran Council ruled that Jews could not be deprived of land, money, or goods without proper legal procedures; they were not to be assaulted with sticks and stones during the celebration of Christian religious festivals; and the invasion or violation of Jewish cemeteries was sharply prohibited. But the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 took a different position, promulgating rules to single out Jews and pressure them to convert. Secular rulers were commanded to require that Jews dress distinctively and wear a badge sown to their clothing. They were not allowed to show themselves during Holy Week (for their own safety), and the amount of interest they were allowed to charge was limited to twenty percent.

Often Jews were connected closely to the monarchs. In the middle ages, most people were serfs, beholden to local lords by oaths of fealty. But for the Jews, wherever they resided in the realm, they were considered serfs of the kings. The English legal scholar and jurist, Henry de Bracton (c.1210–c.1268), described this relationship as follows: “The Jew can have nothing of his own, for whatever he acquires he acquires not for himself, but for the king; for the Jews live not for themselves, but for others and so they acquire not for themselves, but for others.”2 This statement epitomizes a view of servitude to the crown. But what began as the privilege of royal protection often became a means of extortion and a cause for oppression.

Allow me to give you the example of the Jews of France. In 1179, Philip Augustus became king of France.

Three months after his coronation, he arrested all the Jews in his lands

and held their goods for ransom until they made a substantial payment.

Three years later, he expelled them from lands directly controlled by the crown. Although allowed to sell their movable goods, their houses as well as their fields, vineyards, barns, and winepresses were reserved for the king, and their synagogues handed over to the bishops to be converted into churches.

The King’s biographer claims that this move was made because the Jews were engaged in usury (the charging of interest) and in response to accusations that they had murdered Christians.

In 1189, Philip Augustus allowed the Jews to return to royal lands, but for a substantial payment. In 1291 and 1306 they were again expelled by King Philip IV, each time allowed to return for a large payment. Finally in 1394, Charles VI banished them for good. The point is, “royal protection” was often a myth.

Kings used expulsions as a means to garner the support of the populace and to extort payments from the Jews.3 And the events in France are indicative of a broader European phenomenon, as between 1290–1496 Jews were expelled from many European lands or suffered severe violence against them.

During the period of the Black Death (1348-1351), for example, particularly bloody pogroms occurred when they were blamed for causing the epidemic by poisoning the wells. Many fled into southern Europe or east to the more welcoming atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire. By 1492, 42% of Europe’s Jews lived in Spain, and 75% of all European Jews lived in the combination of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In that year, just as it defeated the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian peninsula, Spain gave its Jewish population an ultimatum: convert or leave. Two years later, many of the Italian city States expelled their Jews, events that would have taken place within Luther’s lifetime (1483–1546).

Clearly Jews were targeted for economic reasons. Because they were allowed to lend for interest, an act considered by Christians to be the sin of usury, and because nobles and monarchs needed ready access to capital, they protected the Jews. But commoners became indebted to them, sometimes hopelessly

so. As a result, outbreaks of violence against the Jews often occurred upon the death of a monarch. Whenever they lost their protector, people took advantage of the situation. In sum, bigotry against the Jews was the result of economic, as well as social, political, and religious motives.

Elite Anti-Jewish Sentiment Closer to Luther’s Time If we focus more closely on anti-Jewish sentiment in Luther’s time, there are a few noteworthy developments. Before Spain decided to expel its Jews in 1492, it attempted to convert them by force, an initiative that necessitated an increased focus on who was Jewish and who was not. The result was an understanding of Jewishness that became increasingly ethnic and even racial. Up to that point, Jewishness had been understood primarily as an issue of religion. But in the mid-fifteenth century, Toledo, Spain, created a legal framework that defined Jewishness according to ethnicity. Despite the fact that one third of its members were conversos, converted Jews, in 1449 the city council passed the Statute of Purity of Blood, a law that stated that because converts were likely to revert, they should not be allowed to hold public office. As a result, anyone with one or more grandparents who had converted from Judaism to Christianity was barred from public office. Jewishness was now connected to bloodlines and family trees. Although there is no reason to believe that Luther would have known about these events, such initiatives suggest a change in the early modern understandings of Jewishness.

But Luther would have been aware of what historians refer to as the Reuchlin Affair, a case that gripped the attention of the intellectual world of his day.

Johannes Reuchlin was the uncle of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s friend and collaborator at the University of Wittenberg. In the 1480s, Reuchlin (1455–1522), a German humanist and a pioneer in Hebrew studies, argued that Hebrew had tremendous importance for Christianity and Christian theology.

From a Jewish physician he received thorough instruction in Hebrew

language and literature, and in 1506 published his own Hebrew grammar.

But his championing of this language eventually got him into trouble with the Inquisition, which painted him a Judaiser. He was condemned by Rome and forced to retract his support.

The point is that during this period, Germany was comprised of forces that saw tremendous value in the study of the Hebrew language (and perhaps also in the Jewish culture and learning) and competing forces that viewed any movement in this direction as dangerous and even blasphemous.

One more example serves to illustrate the elite attitudes toward the Jews during Luther’s lifetime, that of the famous humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Usually considered deeply irenic and demonstrably tolerant, Erasmus had a rather harsh view of the Jews, one that bordered on an ethnic understanding. It was his positions that “once a Jew, always a Jew.” In other words, even the water of baptism did nothing to dent Jewishness: Jews retained their Jewishness. Like the blood laws in Spain, this view suggests not a religious, but an ethnic or racial understanding of Jewishness.

Popular Anti-Jewishness in Luther’s Time If we move away from the views of the cultural elites to more popular understandings of Jews, we witness a variety of myths and legends that reveal a deep-seated fear of “the other.”

There was the widespread belief that Jews stole the communion host in order to desecrate it. Supposedly, out of hatred for Christ, Jews would pilfer communion wafers (understood to be the body of Christ), then stab or cut them in pieces. Often the wafers were said to bleed as a result.

Through judicial torture, some Jews were forced to admit to as much. It was also widely alleged that Jews engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children called “Blood Libel.”

Because they were generally

not allowed to own land or be part of artisan guilds, Jews’ career options were limited. But one avenue open to them was that of physician, and often popes and other potentates employed Jews as their personal doctors. As a result, the idea gained currency that Jews believed in the healing power of the blood of Christian children. They were rumored to steal children, cut a cross into their chests, and drain their blood, claims already in circulation in England by the early 13th century. Closer to Germany, there was the infamous case of Simon of Trent. On Easter Sunday 1475, the body of a two–year–old Christian boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family’s house in Trent, Italy.

Town magistrates arrested eighteen Jewish men and five Jewish women on the charge of ritual murder. In a series of interrogations that involved liberal use of judicial torture the magistrates obtained the confessions. Eight men were executed, and another committed suicide in jail.4 In the wake of the invention of the printing press (c. 1450), the case obtained international notoriety.

Pamphlets describing it, complete with woodcuts like the one below, circulated throughout Germany. And rumors of blood libel rumors remained widespread, with the last reported case occurring in Germany in 1919.

Image known as Martyrdom of Simon at Trent, after a woodcut in ‘Liber Chronicarum Mundi,’ published in Nuremburg in 1493, lithograph. Courtesy of Stapleton Collection.

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

limited contact with a handful of converts. As one historian has indicated, Luther’s negative attitudes toward the Jews were “based less on personal experience than upon exegetically based observations, [and] theological judgements.”5

This fact indicates that Luther’s primary concern with the Jews was theological, not ethnic, Contemporary woodcut with the Judensau motif. social, or economic. He And we would be remiss if we did not followed the anti–Jewish opinions of mention the Judensau ( Jewish pig), the New Testament, so that for him, a common motif in the middle ages a preoccupation with the Jews was a that depicted the most offensive and fundamental fact of Christian existence. demeaning image conceivable: Jewish Put another way, if asked about his children suckling from a female pig, motive for anti–Judaism, he would have while a rabbi lifts the creature’s tail to seen himself as merely proclaiming the kiss its anus. biblical truth of the Christian faith. But Common throughout the German this theological understanding was not lands both as carved reliefs and in print, that of Erasmus, nor of the Spanish one such relief dated to about 1300— Blood Laws. For Luther, a baptized Jew thought to have marked the entrance to was a Christian. what was probably the Jewish quarter of Having said that, as an Augustinian the city—was included in Wittenberg’s friar Luther essentially took Augustine’s city church, St. Mary’s. On his way position on the Jews. Their existence to and from the city church, Luther took place under the wrath of God and himself would have passed by it daily. had symbolic significance for Christians.

The point of the motif was not only In fact, they were the opposite of to blaspheme Judaism in the most Christians. Christ, and faith in him, offensive terms possible, but also to were the key to salvation and therefore humiliate Jews and remind them of reconciliation with God. Jewish refusal their debased position in society. to acknowledge Christ was, therefore, irrefutable proof that they were the Luther’s General Attitude toward inverse of Christians. As historian the Jews Thomas Kaufmann has put it, “To the extent that commitment to Christ and Such was the complex set of beliefs and the divine Word, faith, and love were attitudes toward the Jews that Luther understood to be marks of Christianity, was born into. But as we shall see, his the Jews represented for Luther the views of the Jews were more nuanced opposite of what it meant to be a than mere reflections of the opinions of Christian or what it ought to mean.”6 his times. Before addressing his writings To expand upon this idea in slightly on the Jews, I would like to begin with different terms, Luther understood the some general observations regarding Bible as the combination of Law and his attitude toward them. Noteworthy Gospel. The role of the Law (of the 10 is the fact that at no point in his life Commandments) was not to establish was he ever in conversation with Jews. the standard of behavior required No evidence exists that he ever took to deserve God’s love and grace; the the initiative to contact learned Jews, as purpose of the Law was to condemn many of his contemporaries did, often each human being, demonstrate fallen with the objective of improving their human nature, and make explicit that no own abilities to read the Old Testament one could become completely acceptable in Hebrew. Over his lifetime, the closest to God. Condemned by the Law, argued he came to interacting with Jews was 30

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Luther, sinful humanity was driven to despair only to be rescued by the Gospel message, which promised that despite their failings, God sent his son to suffer and die in place of each human being. Christ was the antidote to an inability to fulfill the Law. This gift of unmerited grace from the Father, purely out of love for humanity, was meant to overwhelm each human heart and elicit an outpouring of thankfulness for God’s grace and for Christ’s sacrifice. The result: human beings would naturally strive to do God’s will and to keep God’s law.

With this understanding of Law and Gospel, Luther was deeply offended by any individual or group that insisted on keeping God’s Law as the means to salvation. For Luther this was nothing more than an egotistical, arrogant, misled attempt by human beings to save themselves, an outright affront to God, a refusal of his gift of grace, and a denial of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice for humanity. And for him, Jews were the classic example of this phenomenon, trusting in adherence to the law as their means of saving themselves. But Luther also saw such tendencies elsewhere. The papacy, with its conviction in the merit of good works, suffered from the same error, as did the entire Muslim religion.

Thus pope, Jew, and Turk became a sort of unholy triumvirate in Luther’s mind, the inverse of true Christians. Luther’s anti-Jewish sentiments were largely theological.

Luther’s Writings on the Jews We now turn our attention to the Reformer’s writings on the Jews. In his entire career as a Christian theologian and therefore throughout his exegetical writings, there are innumerable references to the Jews, primarily the ancient Jews. But at two points in his career, he focused intensely on Jewish contemporaries. The first was early on in 1523 in a treatise entitled That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew.7 At the time, Luther was still in the euphoric phase of the Reformation, six years removed from the ninety–five theses, deeply convinced by the potential for the effective power of the Word of God and that his rediscovery of the

Gospel message had the capacity to persuade the Jews to become Christians.

Of course they were not inclined to do so under the Roman Church, argued Luther, for the papacy had misunderstood Christianity. But if the Jews could be convinced that Christ had died for them, there was no reason to cling to the Law. This treatise was as much a condemnation of the Church as an appeal to the Jews.

Luther went further, however. He ridiculed as foolish papal propaganda the notion that the Jews killed Christian children for their blood, desecrated the host, and took part in ritual murders.

He called for a revocation of the prohibition of Jewish membership in guilds and for a repeal of ghettoization.

“By making social and economic daily contacts possible between Christians and Jews,” states Thomas Kaufmann, “Luther was convinced that the Gospel would be brought nearer to them.” 8 What is more, continued Luther, it was no wonder that the Jews did not convert to Christianity: “So long as we treat them like dogs, how can we expect to work any good among them? Again when we forbid them to labor and do business and have any human fellowship with us, thereby forcing them into usury, how is that supposed to do them any good.”9 Now that the Gospel message had reappeared, argued Luther, “If we really want to help them we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love.”10 News got out among the Jews regarding Luther’s views, with one of them summarizing the Reformer’s treatise as follows: “He [Luther] and his followers said that one should not place a heavy yoke upon the Jews, but should treat them honorably and with love and bring them nearer [in this way to the Church]. He provided proof for this and wrote a book [entitled] ‘ Jesus is from the Family of Israel.’”11 Despite these suggestions, Luther never developed a program to missionize the Jews.

It was not until almost twenty years later that Luther again took up the issue of the Jews in contemporary Germany in a sustained manner.

Between 1538 and 1543 he produced four polemical writings against

the Jews, the primary basis for his reputation as violently anti–Jewish.

What, precisely, inspired him to take up the question again is a matter of speculation, but three events seem to have precipitated these writings.

The first was the rumor that a group called the Sabbatarians, a Christian sect interested in adhering literally to the Bible, had decided to have themselves circumcised, an important and defining ritual among the Jews. From this rumor, Luther appears to have created a sort of bogey man, fearing that the Jews were working to proselytize Christians. A second precipitating factor may have been the shifting policies toward the Jews in Electoral Saxony, Luther’s home territory, as well as in other Protestant territories. The expulsion of Jews from the nearby Kingdom of Bohemia in 1540–41 had resulted in an increased Jewish presence in Saxony. And a third factor may have been the publication of a book by Sebastian Münster, Messiah of the Christians and the Jews, a treatise that contained a literary representation of an obdurate, hostile, blasphemous Jew. A Christian Hebraist, Münster confirmed in this work what Luther “knew” from both the Bible and from the witness of church history, that the doctrine and life of the Jews was marked by a hatred of Christ.12 Of his four writings from this period, Luther’s most anti–Jewish was On the Jews and Their Lies of 1543, from which the opening quotation was taken. In it, Luther did not explicitly recommend physical violence against the Jews, although he came very close as the quotation indicates. He did, however, call for their expulsion from Christian lands, a complete reversal of his 1523 recommendation for closer ties and living conditions between Jews and Christians. Another discontinuity with his earlier position was that his focus was no longer on the Catholic Church’s failings as the reason for Jewish antipathy Christianity. And Luther even appears willing to entertain the popular views that the Jews were engaged in the desecration of the host and the ritual murder of Christian children.

But there are also some continuities between the early Luther and the late

Luther with regard to his views on the Jews. At no time did he ever believe that Judaism was a legitimate expression of biblical interpretation. Put in contemporary terms, he never exhibited toleration of Judaism, but always saw it as a misunderstanding and distortion of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. And with Augustine, he was convinced that Jewish history and the Jews’ hated position in society were a result of God’s divine judgement.

But the biggest discontinuity between his early and late writings was his encouragement that direct action be taken against the Jews. As one historian has concluded: “Luther became a Jew–baiter at the end of his life, using his writings, his pulpit and his prestige and authority to demand persecution of the Jews. In doing so, he deliberately violated our Lord’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves … During the 1520s he repeatedly denounced incitement against the Jews from the pulpit, especially during Passion Week, and yet in the 1540s he was doing what he himself earlier condemned and ridiculed.”13

Coming to Terms with this Aspect of Luther’s Thought Luther’s late views on the Jews were controversial in their own day, even among his followers and, as my personal experience can attest, for centuries a point of embarrassment, something to be forgotten by Lutherans. It was only when the Nazis republished these works, at the same time chastising Lutheran theologians for silencing this authentic German voice from the past, that the Lutheran Church began to take notice of them. Following World War II, some historians began to argue that a line could be traced directly from Luther to Hitler and the Holocaust.

And although Luther’s anti–Judaism was primarily theological while Hitler’s was ethnic, and although Luther’s Jewish writings had been generally suppressed, the thesis from “from Luther to Hitler” appears to have some staying power, at least in the popular mind. What is more, Amazon sells a half dozen different editions of On the Jews and Their Lies, available on Kindle Spring 2018/Agora

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for $7.99. And while we may think of this treatise purely as an historical artifact, a friend of mine who teaches early modern European history in Cairo, Egypt recently told me that his students were excited to read it—not because they want to know more about Luther, but because they found in it support for their own prejudices. For all these reasons, not to mention because of our ethical duty to the truth, we as a college must confront Luther’s views of the Jews.

So while I hope that this presentation has made clear that neither the simplistic condemnation, “Luther was a raging anti-Semite,” nor the naïve vindication, “Luther was merely a product of his times” is adequate, the first thing we must do is to acknowledge Luther’s writings on the Jews. For one reason, if we wish to be an institution welcoming to students, faculty, and staff of all religious backgrounds and none, we need to own up to the fact that our namesake wrote such things and, at least in the later phases of his life, held such attitudes. For although the Lutheran Church has never considered Luther’s writings the standard of doctrine and practice for the church bearing his name, as an institution of higher learning named in his honor, we cannot sweep them under the rug.

Second, I believe that we must also seek to understand Luther’s views on the Jews to ask ourselves, why, however mistakenly, did he hold and articulate them? What was his larger purpose?

What dangers, however, misplaced, did the Jews represent in his mind? And while we might utterly condemn his instrumentalization of the Jews, we should not ignore the larger theological point he was making, that good works do not save, nor does adherence to the law. Grace alone saves.

But I think we can do even better than that, taking the lead from the church body with which we are associated, the ELCA. In 1994, the ELCA officially addressed this issue in a statement entitled “Declaration of ELCA to Jewish Community.”

In the spirit of … truth-telling, we who bear [Martin Luther’s] 32

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name and heritage must with pain acknowledge also Luther’s anti–Judaic diatribes and the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews.

As did many of Luther’s own companions in the sixteenth century, we reject this violent invective, and yet more do we express our deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effects on subsequent generations. In concert with the Lutheran World Federation, we particularly deplore the appropriation of Luther’s words by modern anti–Semites for the teaching of hatred toward Judaism or toward the Jewish people in our day. Grieving the complicity of our own tradition within this history, moreover, we express our urgent desire to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with love and respect for the Jewish people.

We recognize in anti–Semitism a contradiction and an affront to the Gospel, a violation of our hope and calling, and we pledge this church to oppose the deadly working of such bigotry, both within our own circles and in the society around us.14 There can be no better way to begin the process of healing than by acknowledging Martin Luther’s role in the long history of anti–Semitism. And there can be no better way to honor Martin Luther than by rejecting this aspect of his thought, acknowledging it as an affront to that which he held most sacred, namely the Gospel of Christ.

Notes 1. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 47: 268-274.

2. Henri de Bracton, “On the Laws and Customs of England,” as quoted in Frederick Pollock and Frederic Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1909), 1: 468.

3. See William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: from Philip

Augustus to the last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

4. R. Po-Chia, Trent 1475: Stories of A Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 26.

5. Thomas Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 69-104, here at 74.

6. Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” 72.

7. Martin Luther, “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew,” Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 45: 195-230.

8. Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” 82.

9. Martin Luther, “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew,” 229.

10. Martin Luther, “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew,” 229.

11. As quoted in Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” 78-79.

94.

12. Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,”

13. Stephen Burnett, from a private email to the author.

14.“Declaration of the ELCA to the Jewish Community.” http://download.elca. org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/ Declaration_Of_The_ELCA_To_The_Jewish_Community.pdf

Religious Conflict and Coexistence: The Changing Religious Landscape in the Long Sixteenth Century

by VICTORIA CHRISTMAN, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Engagement

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uch of my work as an historian of the early modern period has focused on the development of religious toleration in “the long sixteenth century,” the period roughly stretching from the start of the Reformation (1517) to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). One of the observations I have made in that work is that the development of religious tolerance did not take the smooth upward trajectory that we (historians as well as laypeople) so often assume. The Reformations of the sixteenth century rent the religious fabric of Europe, forcing a new religious pluralism on a society that prized uniformity of belief.

The responses to this upheaval were varied. Historians have long assumed that a religiously intolerant Europe slowly devolved into religious conflict and war, until tolerant coexistence was finally achieved in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). I will argue that in actual fact, the opposite was the case: the Reformation provided an impetus to increased toleration in the early period, while the Peace of Westphalia actually incited religious hostilities by its attempted institutionalization of religious tolerance.

The Pre-Reformation World In order to understand the changes that took place over the long sixteenth century, it is beneficial to briefly look backward, in order to understand the shape of the world into which the Reformation emerged in 1517. In many ways, the history of the church up to 1517 was the history of an institution centralizing its power base and policing its borders. Perhaps the clearest example of this process is to be found in a feature of the Christian church with which all Christians then and now are most familiar: the creeds.

Modern churches in the Christian west speak with one, universal voice in reciting the Nicene, Apostles, or Athanasian creeds. But these beautifully constructed expressions of common belief were not written as pieces of poetry to embellish the liturgical splendor of Christian worship. On the contrary, each of these statements was written in opposition to an early heresy in the church—that is, their purpose was to point out clearly what beliefs were acceptable, in order that transgressors might more easily be identified. This was possible and even necessary because the predominant feature of the early and medieval church was its claim to universality.

Thus, in the period directly preceding the Reformation, commonality of belief was the defining feature of the church.

The “one,” “true,” church was also known as the Corpus Christianum or “body (singular) of Christendom.” Those who deviated from the beliefs or practices of the church were known as “heretics,” a word that derives from Greek, and describes one who consciously makes an incorrect choice. The punishment of heresy was considered a vital Christian duty, as variety of belief was not prized as “diversity,” but feared as a disease or contagion. The natural response to such a threat was the development of mechanisms to eliminate it from the body of Christendom, and it was the impulse for this constant purification of the Corpus Christianum and protection of the Christian common weal that led to the creation of the Inquisition in the 1200s, and its many iterations in the centuries that followed. As a system, the Inquisition was brutal and prone to abuse, but generally quite effective in stamping out heresy. Its success was dependent upon the majority church remaining in the majority, and the rest of Christendom sharing its zeal for

unity. But the religious revolution that was the Protestant Reformation was to destroy completely the universality of that shared vision.

Post-Reformation Fragmentation In the post-Reformation period, the religious map of Europe turned into a checkerboard of divisions within territories, municipalities, and individual families. Methods for dealing with religious difference became a major and immediate concern. But in this newly fragmented landscape, there was no longer a single, authoritative voice of agreement to legislate a single boundary to be policed. Indeed, there was not even agreement on who had the jurisdiction to establish such a boundary, or to do the policing. How could this early Reformation situation actually have provided an impetus to increased toleration?

The example for this apparent paradox lies in the small territory of the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands). Unlike the centralized realms of England or France, in which a monarch legislated religious policy for the entire country, the sixteenth-century Low Countries was a conglomeration of independently-administered provinces, each with its own governing structure, and with a history of fiercely guarded autonomy. In 1515, just two years prior to Luther’s emergence on the international stage, Charles V ascended to the throne of Spain and became ruler of the Low Countries as part of his patrimonial inheritance. Four years later, he would become Holy Roman Emperor, and the most powerful man in Christendom. His many titles would not, however, enable him to rule the feisty Low Countries with any amount of ease. Despite his efforts to maintain religious uniformity there via a centralized inquisition modeled Spring 2018/Agora

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on that of Spain, local resistance was unwavering, and he faced opposition at every turn. It is in this resistance that we see the first glimmers of a pragmatic form of religious toleration at work.

Early Reformation Tolerance: Antwerp One example to illustrate this “pragmatic toleration” is to be found in the city of Antwerp. Cosmopolitan even by modern standards, in the early sixteenth century Antwerp was an important center of international trade.

Merchants from all over the globe established “nation houses” in the city and shuttled goods from as far as the West Indies, through Antwerp and on to lucrative markets throughout Europe and beyond. By mid-century, Antwerp provided a full 75% of trade revenue for its imperial overlord, making it vitally important to the financial health of Charles V’s enormous empire.1 The city fathers were well aware of Antwerp’s importance to Charles, and they used it as leverage in their attempts to maintain autonomy over the city. Realizing also that the merchants resident in their city came from all religious backgrounds, Antwerp’s civic rulers were particularly reluctant to impose Charles’s laws against heresy.

Their opposition to the religious laws of the emperor took three forms: passive resistance, meaning that they failed to impose legislation on the books; illegal leniency, meaning that they conducted trials, but then handed out sentences far less stringent than demanded by law; and direct confrontation with the emperor, always a path of last resort. Two examples will serve to illustrate these first two methods of quiet resistance to the emperor’s demands for religious conformity. Both involve bookmen in Antwerp, which is unsurprising, since the book industry was among the most lucrative for the city.

The first bookman, Adriaen van Berghen, was actually named in the 1529 edict that introduced capital punishment for book-related offenses.

His publishing house was responsible for the production of a vernacular Bible, which was illegal at the time, 34

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and possession of this Bible was one of the offenses for which a person could be put to death. Van Berghen himself was no stranger to the Antwerp court.

He was tried several times during the early sixteenth century for offenses related to his publishing house and the heterodox and heretical publications it produced. On every occasion, however, the Antwerp counselors found a way to set van Berghen free, ignoring completely the terms of the emperor’s laws. His good fortune eventually ran out, however, when he relocated to the northern Low Countries. Up to his old publishing tricks, he was arrested and eventually executed by the provincial court of Holland.2 The second example involves a heterodox printer named Outgheert Janssens. His trial occurred in 1536, seven years after Charles had introduced the death penalty for religious crimes.

As a printer of heretical books, Janssens should have been in line for such a fate.

The evidence against him was hard to refute, so the magistrates of Antwerp found a creative way to avoid imposing the letter of the law. Janssens was arrested in April 1536, and the court records tell us that he was released almost immediately and without penalty, simply because his trial fell on Good Friday!3 These are two cases of dozens that could be used to demonstrate the Antwerp court’s reluctance (even refusal) to impose Charles’s harshest penalties for religious crimes. Together, they demonstrate the many loopholes that existed in this early legislation, and the chaotic nature of its enforcement.

From a legal vantage point, it appears that Charles was on top of the religious situation in the territory. He introduced a plethora of laws against religious heterodoxy, and punishments could be as lenient as a verbal reprimand, or as harsh as death. Yet a close look at the situation on the ground reveals that in cities such as Antwerp, which had financial leverage with the emperor and were able to maintain a significant degree of autonomy, the harshest terms of these laws were rarely enforced. The result was a form of pragmatic toleration. It was nowhere

encoded in law or documentation but was frequently employed in practice.

It was a non-ideological form of tolerance, followed for reasons that were motivated not by religion or theology, but by the pragmatic desire to keep the peace and maintain the financial health of the city. And for a full half-century or so, it was enormously successful.

Post-1648 Traditionally, scholars of Reformation history have pointed to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as having laid the foundation for lasting religious tolerance in Europe. The treaty was signed at the end of the brutal wars of religion that raged throughout the continent for the 30 years prior to 1648, and far longer in some areas. In addition to establishing the “United Provinces” of the Netherlands as an independent country, the Treaty legislated religious tolerance throughout the continent.

Once again, however, if we look at the situation on the ground in these municipalities, it was often the case that its effect was the opposite of that intended.

If the text of the Treaty of Westphalia were the only document we had from this period, it would indeed seem that Europe had turned a significant corner in terms of religious tolerance. Among many other provisions, the treaty affirmed the Cuius Regio, Eius Religio principle, first established in 1555, which meant in essence, that a territory must follow the religious dictates of its ruler: His Realm, His Religion. Within this principle, the Treaty of Westphalia even extended tolerance to Calvinists, whereas previously only Lutherans and Catholics had been included. There were also certain liberties that were established or affirmed related to private worship, liberty of conscience, and rights of emigration, albeit with some territorial exceptions. On the books then, the Peace of Westphalia seemed to establish a far more tolerant society, in which religious pluralism was not only possible, but was legally enforceable.

But the legal record does not always reflect the lived reality, then as now.

When social historians look beyond the legal record, what we find are the many

ways in which individuals navigated this new religious situation and found ways to transgress the boundaries newly established by those in power. Two particularly pertinent examples illustrate this point. The first comes from Emily Gray, an historian focused on the city of Augsburg in what is now southern Germany.

Augsburg’s history is extremely interesting in large part because it was a traditionally Catholic city that developed a significant Protestant minority as a result of the Reformation.

During the Thirty Years’ War, Lutherans were expelled from city, and their churches were commandeered by Catholic worshippers. However, the terms of the Peace of Westphalia dictated that the Lutherans were readmitted, granted political parity in the running of the city, and that six of their church buildings were returned to them.4 In celebration of the Peace, the Lutheran community initiated an annual “Peace Festival” (hohes Friedensfest) to celebrate the end of military hostilities and restoration of religious freedom in the city. Despite the fact that this celebration was ostensibly created to celebrate the new municipal unity, it was a uniquely Lutheran celebration. Indeed, the churches that were returned to the Lutherans under the terms of the treaty were in fact removed from the Catholics who had been using them and given to their Lutheran enemies. The Catholics found little to celebrate in this arrangement.

For many years, the Peace Festival took place on the same day each year, with roughly half the city (the Lutheran half ) taking part while the other (Catholic) half went about their work day as normal. Over time, the Lutherans became more partisan in their celebrations. They sang hymns in public spaces, held services in the churches with the doors open, so that the loud organ music could be “enjoyed” throughout the city, and had processions through the streets. The Festival remained peaceful, but it was clearly provocative. Over time, it became polemical.

By the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Lutherans actually out-

numbered Catholics in Augsburg. Yet at the centennial celebration of the Peace in 1748, the numerical tables had turned, and Lutherans again found themselves in the minority. In this new demographic situation, the Lutherans intensified the polemics in their celebration, using the Peace Festival as a moment in which to assert their “victory” in Augsburg, and to remind the city of their presence, and the religious rights they had been granted.

In images created for the children who participated, the skyline of the city was depicted. In these images, the Catholic churches were actually omitted. That is, the Lutherans created a map of the city devoid of all Catholic presence.

While open hostilities did not result from the events of the Peace Festival, the gradual movement toward a more entrenched confessional identity on the part of the Lutherans, and an outright disavowal of their Catholic counterparts demonstrates a failure on the part of Westphalia to bring about the kind of religious harmony that the composers of the treaty initially envisioned.

The Peace of Westphalia similarly backfired in another Germany municipality, this one the tiny village of Welver in Westphalia. In this case, historian Beth Plummer discovered an increase in religious hostilities between a group of Catholic nuns and the newly-Protestant lay community of Welver in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia.5 As was the case in Augsburg, Welver became a plural community during the Reformation, with a population divided between those who remained loyal to the Roman church and those who converted to the new evangelical faith.

As was also the case in Augsburg, the Protestant population in Welver came to outnumber the Catholics, in this case fairly early on in the Reformation.

But Welver is a small village, and in its case, there was a pre-existing municipal law that prevented the construction of a new church in the town. For that reason, the residents compromised in the early years of the Reformation, and used the single church building to house a variety of confessional services, Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist. One

group worshiped at the high altar, those of a different confession at a side altar, and in the raised mezzanine a group of nuns held their services, completely separated from the lay congregations below.

This arrangement served the various religious adherents of Welver for over 150 years. The nuns were not thrilled that their parish church was being used by the Lutherans and Calvinists, and nor were the Protestants happy to have groups of Catholics surrounding their worship space. But somehow, these competing congregations managed a peaceful coexistence in this uncomfortable space for over a century.

This was a form of active and successful toleration, born of forced coexistence.6 In 1649, after the signing of the Peace of Westphalia, the parish church of Welver was formally “restored” to the Lutheran congregation of the village.

The nuns were confined to their cloister, where all of their services took place from thenceforth. The physical separation of the confessions led to an increase in the hostilities between these formally peaceful communities of believers. The post-Westphalia ruling left the lay Catholic population without a priest or church, and the nuns attempted to help their confessional brethren by providing sacramental services to them (openly and secretly), using their own confessor. Over the ensuing years, the two religious communities fought over a variety of issues, the nuns refusing to relinquish control over what they still saw as their parish home.

Both sides engaged lawyers in the dispute and finally, in 1672, a religious settlement was reached that restored the pre-Westphalia practice of simultaneous worship in the one church building.

Now unsatisfied with this former arrangement, the nuns took matters into their own hands, and actually built a new church (decidedly Catholic in all its baroque glory) just fourteen feet away from the Lutheran one, within the walls of their cloister. The intolerance spurned by the “Peace” of Westphalia therefore came to take physical form in the village of Welver.

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In both of these cases, the Peace of Westphalia was implemented in a manner that prevented physical aggression, but encouraged an intolerant form of religious strife, and cemented confessional identities. In both cases, legislating religious tolerance actually discouraged the practice of it. In Augsburg and Welver, legislatively carving out physical space for the Lutheran community seems to have reminded both the Lutherans and the Catholics of their differences. They “tolerated” one another on some level, but they did not learn to truly “coexist.”

Indeed, the peaceful coexistence that had previously developed was destroyed in both situations. Interactions between the two communities became less fluid and more entrenched than in early sixteenth-century Antwerp, where coexistence was not legislated, but dayto-day life demanded it as a practice.

In our own world, in which religious pluralism remains a challenge in many communities, it seems worth asking whether legal enforcement of tolerant principles is the most successful path to peaceful coexistence, or whether community-level pragmatic practices might not in fact be a more successful road to a truly pluralistic society.

Notes 1. See An Kint, The Community of Commerce: Social Relations in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996), 2. These figures are based on a one-percent tax levied by Charles V on all exports between 1542 to 1545.

2. Records of the trials are transcribed in P. Génard, Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 30 vols. (Antwerp, 1864-1893), vol. 7: 290-92, 298-303, 323-4, 345-6, 350, 354, 363-4, 367, 372, 374, 378.

3. “Obtinuit (mids den heyligen tydt ende den goeden dach van heden, wesende Goet Vridach) graciam suorum delictorum.”

AA, 7: 392.

4. For details of the history that follows, see Emily Gray, “Celebrating Peace in BiConfessional Augsburg,” in M. E. Plummer and V. Christman, eds., Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018 [forthcoming]).

5. For details of what follows, see M. E. Plummer, “Parish Clergy, Patronage Rights, and Regional Politics in the Convent 36

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Churches of Welver, 1532–1697,” in M. E. Plummer and V. Christman, eds., Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018 [forthcoming]).

6. Although they have not received a great deal of scholarly attention, such shared religious spaces were not completely uncommon in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Referred to as “Simultaneum” congregations, these shared spaces existed in several locales.

See, for example, Hans-Georg Aschoff, “Simultaneen im Reich zwischen der Reformation und dem Westfälischen Frieden.

Ausgewählte Beispiele,” Römische Quartalschrift 103 (2008): 113–146.

Fugue as Reformation: J. S. Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”

by GREGORY PETERSON, Professor of Music and College Organist and KATHRYN REED, Instructor in Music

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he celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation would not be complete without music by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the consummate composer and performer of music for the Lutheran church. While Bach would not have been considered a “reformer” in his own time—his music was considered by many to be old fashioned—he has come to be understood in the centuries that followed as a composer who changed everything; he transformed music through intellectual genius, theological depth, and an unimaginable level of creativity. Last spring, Luther College presented one of Bach’s final masterpieces, the Mass in B Minor.

Today, we offer music and discussion of another of his last great works, Die Kunst der Fuge (“The Art of the Fugue”), BWV 1080.

Background (Greg) The Art of the Fugue is a monumental work that invites more questions than it provides answers. It is believed to have been composed during the last decade of Bach’s life, begun in 1740, and (nearly) completed in 1749. It contains some twenty fugues and canons all derived from the same theme or subject.

Bach simply titled each of these pieces Contrapunctus (meaning a contrapuntal work or exercise) or Canon. The title of the collection, first published in 1751 after his death, was probably added by his son Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach (1714-1788). What is evident from the music itself is that J. S. Bach composed these pieces as a comprehensive and encyclopedic demonstration of the heights possible in the ultimate contrapuntal discipline: the process of composing multi–voice pieces based

on a rigorous set of rules, all based on a single melodic idea.

What is not evident is almost everything else. On what instrument(s) should these pieces be played? Organ?

Harpsichord? Chamber ensembles?

Scholars have argued all of these possibilities.1 The four voices were written on individual staves and in the clef specific to the range—Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass. Much of the work is idiomatic to the keyboard so it is often performed on the harpsichord or organ; however, there are numerous performances and recordings that use brass and/ or strings, or even full orchestra. Bach was a composer who often wrote what was in his head, whether or not it was idiomatic to the instrument for which he was composing. For example, in Contrapunctus XV, there is a low B pitch in bar 20 that cannot be found on the organ keyboard, so in order to make it sound the organist needs to play that one note on the pedal with a sixteen-foot stop sounding an octave lower. A harpsichordist would not have had that pitch available at all. Was The Art of Fugue a theoretical abstraction, composed just for the sheer musical and mental exercise of it? 2 Moreover, if it was indeed intended for performance, did Bach intend this entire collection of pieces to be performed as a set? There is nothing else like it in his output. For one thing, every piece is in the key of D Minor. Most of Bach’s large-scale collections of keyboard music—such as the Clavierübung, chorales of the Leipzig Autograph, and The WellTempered Clavier—all contain pieces in various keys. Listening to well over an hour’s worth of complicated counterpoint all in the same key seems a bit esoteric, illuminating

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Introduction (Kathy)

Johann Sebastian Bach, aged 61, at the time he was composing “The Art of the Fugue” (1748). Portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (1695-1774). as it may be to an aficionado! Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940), an eminent British musician and scholar, posited in his 1931 “A Companion to The Art of Fugue” the possibility of preceding individual contrapuncti with a corresponding or contrasting prelude from Bach’s keyboard output as a practical way of adding variety and interest to the performance of The Art of the Fugue.3 Bach scholar Hans David argued strongly in favor of performing the work in its entirety, but suggested that varying the instrumentation can make a performance of the complete work more listener–friendly, providing “a sense of variety and increasing contrapuntal density that is hard, if not impossible, to obtain with a string quartet or a keyboard.”4 An additional mystery surrounds what appears as the last, incomplete Contrapunctus of the collection.

According to the notation on the autograph score, added by his son C.P.E., J. S. Bach died while composing Spring 2018/Agora

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[Title]

this fugue. The fugue stops after 239 measures, at a point where Bach had signed his name, B–A–C–H, as musical notation in the countersubject of the fugue. In German, the letter B represents the pitch B-flat, A is the pitch A, C is the pitch C, and H is the pitch B–natural. Bach often used these four pitches in a place or moment of some significance. However, there is little evidence to support C.P.E’s dramatic claim.5 While composers have attempted to finish the final Contrapunctus as Franz Süssmayr did with Mozart’s Requiem, it has become conventional when performing the entire Art of the Fugue to play the final Contrapunctus to the point where it stops in mid–air, which is both dramatic and deeply moving. In its first publication, C.P.E. Bach appended his father’s final completed composition, the chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (“Before Thy Throne, My God, I Stand”), to the end of The Art of Fugue, and when organists perform the work they customarily conclude with this moving and beautiful chorale prelude.

We’ll end our program with Vor deinen Thron, but we won’t include the unfinished Contrapunctus today. We have chosen just six representative pieces from The Art of the Fugue, demonstrating some of the many ways in which Bach could reform a fugue subject. We’ll divide them between organ and harpsichord, and include one piece performed on two harpsichords.

Following Tovey’s suggestion, we’ll pair some of the fugues with preludes chosen from other works of Bach to compliment and set up the fugues.

Throughout, we’ll share our thoughts on how some of the fugues in this collection work, and finally, how fugue itself can be an act of faith and reformation.

On fugue (Kathy) First, you may ask, what is a fugue? It is a composition for multiple voices, based on a “subject” or melodic theme. Here is subject for The Art of the Fugue :   

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The opening of a fugue must follow a set plan. Think of a choir with sopranos, altos, tenors and basses—most often three or four distinct parts in different ranges. In a fugue, one of these voice parts—in Contrapunctus I it is the alto—starts out with the subject, all by itself. When it has completed the subject, a second voice—here it is the soprano—comes in and states that same subject, while the alto continues with some other music that goes nicely with the fugue subject. When the soprano voice finishes with the subject, it goes on with some other music that fits nicely with the alto. Then, before very long, the third voice—here it will be the bass—comes in with the subject, while the soprano and alto continue along with complementary melodies.

Eventually, the final voice—in this case, the tenor—comes in with the fugue subject, and you’ve got all the voices in the stew. When all of the voice parts have entered and stated the subject in full, you have heard the fugue exposition.

Following the exposition, there will be a brief episode, that is, a period during which the subject is not present. But before long, one voice will come back in with the subject. When we hear it, there is a sense of fulfillment, of the backbone returning. Throughout the remainder of the fugue, there will be an alternation of sections where the fugue subject enters in various voices, alternating with episodes where the subject is on vacation. But it can’t be away for long; we start missing it, and listening for it, and when it does return—sometimes sneaking in without fanfare—the music finds its anchor again. The fugue will typically end with one final, grand entrance of the subject. Here is the brilliant demonstration of that basic strategy in Bach’s opening Contrapunctus from The Art of the Fugue.

[Greg performed Contrapunctus I on the organ.]

From here, the possibilities for fugue composition are endless, and Bach explores them exhaustively. The fugue subject is malleable—it can and does undergo countless transformations. For example, it can be turned upside down.

[Composer]

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Or the length of each note can be doubled, or halved. Sometimes, in the exposition, the subject needs to be modified by just a note or two in order to keep the music in the right key. We heard that happen at the beginning of Contrapunctus I. In our next example, things get far more complicated: Bach has combined two different fugue subjects into a double fugue. The piece begins with a full exposition on a new subject, characterized by a leaping octave up, and a running scale down. Then, after an episode, our old friend, the Art of the Fugue subject, enters in augmentation; that means that the note values are made longer—here lasting a full measure each. We get a full exposition of that subject—soprano, bass, alto, tenor. At the same time, we still hear the new subject with the octave leap, which it turns out, fits perfectly with the old one. Not an accident. For the rest of the piece, the two subjects always appear together. ©

As you might imagine, the effect of all of this going on at once is a bit dizzying, but at the same time, thrilling. The octave subject is an attention grabber, while the original subject, in its long, patient version, makes itself heard in a subtler way. The episodes provide moments of relaxation—for both the listener and the player!

[Kathy played Contrapuctus IX, preceded by the Bach G Minor Sinfonia, BWV 797, on the harpsichord.]

The next example is not a fugue per se, but a very strict relative of fugue, the canon. In a canon, there is only one composed melody, and all of the other voices reproduce that exact same melody with adjustments according to the “canon” (literally, “rule” or “law”).

The rule in this two–voice canon is that the second voice starts four measures later, an octave lower. The melody for this canon is an ornamented inversion of the Art of Fugue subject. The original subject is turned upside down, then Bach adds decorative notes in between the main notes, to give it a nice jaunty,

loping character. See if you can pick out the notes of the inverted subject in this canon.

[Title] [Composer]

                              

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    

[Kathy played Canon alla Ottava, preceded by the D Minor Prelude from The Well Tempered Clavier, Book Two, BWV 875.]

Perhaps the most astonishing intellectual feat in the Art of the Fugue is the two “Mirror Fugues” of Contrapunctus XII and XIII. Each of these is a pair of fugues in which the second one turns the first one inside out. Not only are the melodies inverted, but the order in which the voices enter is reversed. We are performing Contrapunctus XII on two keyboards, as arranged by C.P.E. Bach for the 1751 publication; as a piece for one keyboard player—notated in open score just as J.S. Bach notated all of the other contrapunti—it is virtually unplayable. We have chosen to perform the “Inversus” version, where somewhat confusingly the fugue subject begins right side up, with lots of extra notes in between each note of the original subject. There are so many notes, in fact, that we really don’t hear the subject at all. Yet it remains there, as a hidden message. The result is a wonderful, busy, orderly cacophony of sound, with surprisingly peaceful and simple moments during the episodes. ©

[Gregory and Kathy played Contrapunctus XII as arranged for two harpsichords, preceded by the A Major Prelude, Book Two of The Well Tempered Clavier, BWV 888.]

Demonstrating one more twist, Greg will perform the two-voice Canon in augmentation in contrary motion. In this piece, the leading voice plays a decorated version of the subject, where the added chromatic notes (sharps and flats not in the key signature) give it a slightly ominous A oftone.

F (#1)     

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When the second voice enters, each note is doubled in length (augmented), and each interval moves the opposite direction of the original (contrary A of F (#2) motion).        

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After performing this remarkable canon, Greg will conclude the program with the Chorale Prelude Vor deinen Thron. As in the first publication of The Art of the Fugue, it is presented as a benediction, a great blessing for the life and work of a great composer.

[Greg performed the Canon in augmentation in contrary motion, followed by the Chorale Prelude Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668.] ©

Concluding thoughts (Kathy) While this music is complex and heady, sometimes thorny, it holds tremendous beauty and power. The fugue subject provides a structure that is sound, reliable, and enduring. Yet it can and does adapt; it is interpreted in varying ways, it is stretched, turned upside down, and embellished.

This could be a metaphor for the Reformation. Something fundamental remains constant, while the world around it changes, and it adapts accordingly.

On a personal note, I have always been a lover of clear structures in music … and in church. I love liturgy, even when I do not accept every word of the content. I find in J. S. Bach a mind that holds fast to structure, while finding every possible way to understand and find meaning and beauty—and truth— in it. The occasional “episode” where we temporarily break loose from the anchoring is all the more enjoyable for knowing that you will find your way back to harbor.

Concluding thoughts (Greg) Clearly this music is not simply dry, theoretical notes on a page. It possesses surpassing beauty and evokes real emotion. It is a wonder!

The late Lutheran systematic theologian Robert W. Jenson (1930-2017), Luther College class of 1951, ended the first volume of his Systematic Theology describing God as a three–voice fugue.

He wrote: The phrase “the one God” directs us finally to the sheer perichoresis of Father, Son, and Spirit, and that is to their communal music.

We close the doctrine of God with this evocation of God’s being, beyond which there is no more to say: God is a great fugue.

There is nothing so capacious as a fugue.6 Suffice it to say, Bach’s Art of the Fugue can be godly and certainly manifests the composer’s steadfast belief in the Triune God and his desire that music give the highest honor and glory to its Creator.

As Bach often signed his scores, SDG. Soli Deo Gloria!

Notes 1. The great harpsichordist and conductor Gustav Leonhardt made a case for performance on harpsichord in The Art of Fugue, Bach’s Last Harpsichord Work: An Argument, published in 1952 and no longer available. In a review of the book, renowned Bach scholar Hans David blasted Leonhardt’s “argument” and made the case that Bach probably composed the work with the hands and mind of a keyboard player, but deliberately without specifying any one instrumentation.

2. In Hans David’s review of Leonhardt’s book, he noted the idea that The Art of the Fugue “was to be taken as an abstract work has been set forth over many a cup of coffee or glass of beer, but those most violently against a desecration of The Art of the Fugue by actual performance have not, it seems, ventured to express their opinion in print” (464). David, Hans T. The Musical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1953): 463-66. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/740009.

3. Tovey, Donald Francis. A Companion to ‘the Art of Fugue (Die Kunst Der Fuge): [of ] J. S. Bach. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966.

4. David, 466.

5. Wolff, Christoph, and Walter Emery.

"Bach, Johann Sebastian." Grove Music Online. 16 Mar. 2018.

6. Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God, Oxford University Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/luthercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=272771.

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Reformation Cantata

by BROOKE JOYCE, Associate Professor of Music and Composer-In-Residence

The Reformation Cantata is a new multi-movement work in the Lutheran liturgical tradition, created in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. The cantata is anchored by four choral movements, composed by Luther alumni Daniel Kallman (’78), Sky Macklay (’10), Mark Petering (’95), and Daniel G. Raney (’92). Four instrumental interludes are interspersed throughout the work, composed by Luther students Pablo Gomez-Estévez (’18), John Kuntz (’19), Caleb Linville (’19) and Hunter Prueger (’18). The work was premiered on October 31, 2017 at 7:30 pm in the Center for Faith and Life on the Luther College campus. The project was initiated by Luther’s Composer-in-Residence, Brooke Joyce, with funding provided by the Marilyn Roverud Endowed Fellowship for Lutheran Studies. Above are short musical excerpts in the composers’ own hands, in the tradition of AMQS (autograph musical quotations signed).

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