This interview took place between Susan Dunn-Hensley, Sharenda Barlar, and Jennifer McNutt while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. This is the first part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SD, SB, and JM, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview took place between Susan Dunn-Hensley, Sharenda Barlar, and Jennifer McNutt while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. This is the first part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SD, SB, and JM, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SB: We've talked about how Luther said that pilgrimages should be stopped, that there's no good in them, and that there’s no virtue to them. But, after his death, Protestants were walking on a pilgrimage to his house. So what do you think about this ingrown need in a person to travel, this need to experience where someone lived?
JM: I think what happens with Protestant pilgrimage is that it becomes more memorialized for the sake of faithful emulation and inspiration. Memory seems to reside there in that space, and you're tapping into it somehow. There are some interesting Eucharistic connections to that way of thinking.
SD: I almost wonder if that's what happens to pilgrimage today though, even for Catholics, that there’s more of a sense of memory than of repentance. Some people go to get penance, but pilgrimage isn't as arduous as it used to be. I wonder how much pilgrimage is a memorial for most people.
SB: Susan and I participated in a conference last week, and several people who are pilgrim scholars would not even consider themselves to be religious in some ways. But this idea of memory and walking in the same steps as someone else puts them in sync with this veiled “thin place,” a place where something has happened and something could happen again. This idea of memory is powerful.
JM: Yes, and I was just trying to think about some specific historical examples to mention. One really interesting one has to do with the relationship between Protestants and the Virgin Mary based on work by Bridget Heal. The way Protestants treated the Virgin Mary is representative of how they came to treat Christians of the past. When iconoclasm surged against statues in the Protestant Reformation, it is surprising to look at places like Nuremberg and how Protestants there had different ways of treating their statues. They shifted the statue's role from intercessor to memorial, and they did that by removing the veil, the jewelry, the food-- all the things that they put before the statue to humanize it—they worked to remove the superstitious elements in order to elevate the values of historicity and emulation.
SD: We saw a very interesting statue of the virgin Mary in London in an Anglican church. She was bending over to comfort the toddler Jesus. She's up at the front of the church like a traditional statue, but she's clearly the mother comforting the child.
JM: So an exemplar mother, right? Motherhood was elevated by the Reformers as the highest form of female piety, but not every Protestant context treated the statue of the Virgin Mary with such respect.
SD: I think if we're talking strictly theologically and historically, one way to read Mary would be as an exemplar, because that's how the Bible presents her. This shift is interesting to me. Women rulers in medieval period modeled themselves on Mary in her elevated role as Queen of Heaven. They could use her to justify their own roles. When the Reformation happens, Mary becomes once again the humble handmaid.
So I think this shift is really interesting--it's very positive in some ways, but also it emptied the imagery that queens consort had used to justify their power. Elizabeth I tried to use that powerful imagery but couldn't in quite the same way, because the theology wasn’t there to back it up in the Protestant model.
JM: Speaking of Mary as the humble handmaid, I am just so fascinated, theologically speaking, about how this makes Mary exemplar of justification. That's really the way Luther talks about it, although of course there's variation among the reformers. She becomes the quintessential justified believer because she receives God’s grace despite her lowly state. That is the true basis of her elevation since it rests in God’s power rather than her own.
SB: Luther famously embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome before he jumpstarted the Reformation. How does he talk about pilgrimage in his later writings and how do you think his pilgrimage impacted the future of Lutheranism/the Protestant Reformation?
JM: I think it’s so interesting to see where Luther's pilgrimage to Rome fits into his own self-discovery. It was very memorable to him. In the movie, Luther, the filmmaker portrays the moment where he just bought the indulgence for his grandfather and is climbing the Scala Sancta in Rome. He gets to the top, looks around with a critical eye for the first time, and crumbles his indulgence. So, the movie portrays the pilgrimage to Rome as this transformational pivot for him. But according to Luther’s own account, the pilgrimage was evidence of how attached he was to the papacy and willing to do anything for the pope. He called himself a mad saint, running around trying to administer communion, etc. He had a disturbing experience of being shooed aside at the moment of administering the mass while in Rome due to a long line of priests waiting their turn behind him. For him, the act of buying indulgences was still part of a vibrant pious marketplace. So, the pilgrimage did not transform his thinking about the papacy, which makes his transformation through the reading of the Bible all the more powerful. Only the Bible was able to tear him away from a system that he was steeped in.
SD: I'm very interested in the way Protestant reformers addressed the statues of Mary. They may have loved Mary herself, but they had little love for the individual statues, who were often thought of as individual Marys, so that’s already problematic. Latimer called the Mary statue in his cathedral a sibyl, which was not a positive term in this case (even though sometimes sibyls were represented in positive ways.) I think he was alluding to the witchcraft associations with the sibyls. Do you know any examples of reformers, English is what we're looking for, who had similar thoughts about the statues of Mary and saints being evil or connected to the devil in some way?
JM: In many ways, the differences between the reformers comes down to the distinction between Lutheran and Reformed. The Reformed regarded statues as facilitating idolatry. Scotland is a great example. John Knox preached the first Reformation sermon in St. Andrews and the townspeople respond with iconoclasm. Side note: I like to say that there's different ways to show you have embraced Reformation. The clergy defied their role by eating meat during Lent and getting married. The government secularized church land and introduced vernacular liturgy, and the populace basically broke stuff. Back to your question, yes, the people truly believed that they were being deceived into participating in idol worship rather than giving them access to true worship in a language that they could understand.
SB: I'm just thinking about what's happening with the land reforms in England, and now trying to restore these pilgrimages when everything is privatized. Even when we did the Irish Camino, we were going through private property, which was clearly private property, but the pilgrims on the Camino from Ireland had gotten special consideration to be able to go through private land. There were times that Susan and I were literally walking through fields. The [farmers] were just looking at us like 'OK," but they knew we were on pilgrimage or walking through, and we were going over fences of private property. We were going up little ladders.
JM: That's so interesting! There is an economic dimension to their iconoclasm that’s hard to capture when just thinking theologically about it. In the beginning of the Reformation, there was a real sense of the church’s deception, that it had pulled people into the worst possible sin, which was idolatry, so that the only way to break that habit was to break the image itself. That's an important part of the popular destruction of relics, for example. Then I saw that they were also taking down the wooden cross and distributing it for firewood. A redistribution of wealth was also taking place through iconoclasm, and it was terribly shocking at the time. The best example is the “Wonder Year” (1566) in the Netherlands.
SB: It seems like from some things I've read since I've been looking at pilgrimage from a Catholic perspective, is that even though Protestants would tear down symbols of idolatry, at times, Protestants would then find other forms of material culture to hold on to, because it's a human thing. Then the Bible would become a symbol.
JM: That’s very true, and the Bible does take on a new role. It replaces the function of relics in many fascinating ways including in oath taking. Protestants even still have their superstitions well into the 18th century. On the whole, this narrative has really changed because of what we know about religion during the Enlightenment now. The whole story had been that the Protestant Reformation leads to a disenchantment of life, which turned to secularization during the Enlightenment. Eucharistic theology is usually cited in support, but of course that rendering doesn't at all take into account how robust the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was in the sixteenth century. In the case of Eucharistic theology, there has been a real lack of connecting the dots between what Protestants were saying in rejecting transubstantiation, and what they were affirming about the power of the Holy Spirit to be at work. As an aside, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has kind of been an undervalued theological element of the Reformation. Making the very act of pilgrimage even less assured since the Holy Spirit is at work and free to do what the Spirit will do. Meaning that as a believer you are supposed to be faithful in your activity and you’re supposed to get your heart right, but it may not be efficacious unless the Holy Spirit deems it to be efficacious.
Nevertheless, getting back to Pilgrimage, there is still a sacredness that emerges over certain places like Wittenberg and Geneva since is where pure worship is able to be practiced.
SB: Is that because something happened there and so Protestants wanted to go back to a place where they knew that revelation took place?
JM: In a way. It’s because they see those places as reintroducing the apostolic times. Calvin actually pushes back against this thinking because Geneva is called the “New Jerusalem,” and Calvin is very uncomfortable with that description and explicitly denies it. But the reference lasts for 300 years. On the other hand, if you have a Protestant group that is facing persecution, then there are two facets at work: the chance to participate in pure worship and the fact that worship can happen anywhere when the Bible is present. The Bible becomes the sacred space.
SB: Well, when you think of people like John Knox or the Anabaptists, they did not feel like they had a welcoming space where they were, and they felt like they almost had to take a pilgrimage to escape.
JM: Exactly! Pilgrimage is often a refugee story, which is my research at the moment. The pilgrimage is a refugee journey. You are embracing the exilic life, but not necessarily voluntarily, and so it's a different kind of pilgrimage. Equating pilgrimage with an immigration journey rather than a refugee journey tends to communicate the idea of a choice when often the people I am studying are fleeing under threat for their lives and livelihoods.
I am currently piecing together the story of the French Bible from the 16th through the 18th century, and I am finding that the Bible becomes a kind of sacred space for the believer so that now you can worship outdoors, in a meadow, in a cave, in a riverbed. If you have Scripture with you, wherever you are is inconsequential. Scriptures presence is what is sacred.
SD: In a strange parallel, when England becomes Protestant, Catholics established sacred space by having a priest with them. If you have a priest hiding with you, suddenly that's a sacred space because he can bless everything.
SB: There's some things that we've found in diaries and wills about women who would get together and embroider. You look at a lot of the embroidery and they were actually vestments made for the priests that would come in secret. Other Protestants would make a regular salt shaker and they would put Holy Water in it. But it was just water, but it became holy.
JM: Yes, fascinating! One of the most famous examples I have come across of material objects becoming holy even in the Protestant tradition is the image of Luther. There's a really good article called “The Incombustible Luther." It tells the historical story of people’s experiences with Luther’s image not burning, and viewing that as a sign of his genuine calling by God. Lived theology is always a bit messy and complex at the popular level.
SB: Looking at today, I really appreciate how you talked about the historical application of Protestantism through the Enlightenment, and I understand about what you’re saying about why the Reformers believed in the need to destroy imagery and pilgrimages--the negative aspects of it at that point.
What do you say is the draw for so many Protestants to pilgrimage? Evangelicals are seeing the value of going on pilgrimage, even if it’s not for an act of penance or justification. I think that Protestants have used the form of retreat for years, so now they’re using pilgrimage as a form of retreat. What are your thoughts on that? Why suddenly this interest in returning to an ancient route?
JM: I like your point about Protestants treating pilgrimage as retreat. I think that makes a lot of sense. I imagine it differs according to denomination as well. To me, there's an impetus to live out one’s sanctification through retreat or pilgrimage. Luther certainly claimed in his treatise on good works that he was trying to restore good works to their rightful place rather than to remove them. And it is essential that we seek maturation as believers through faithful discipleship, and some of those approaches to discipleship from Christian history have endured and are worthy of recovery or re-appropriation. From the Protestant angle, since that’s what I primarily study, reflects a focus on the interior life as supreme so that if your interior life is focused on doing these actions for the right reasons, then there's a lot of traditions that you can participate in.
In fact, the candle is an interesting example because lighting a candle--such a simple act—was nevertheless a controversial act in the 16th century. Luther especially taught that it was neutral so you could participate in lighting a candle with the right motivations. The point was to realize that its not because you lit a candle that God heard your prayer. Even the Reformed tradition emphasized the value of engaging the material in the spiritual life. That it helps us to have something tangible. Calvin talked about the common elements, as in, bread and grapes, and God given gifts that we need since we're human and physical beings with bodies. We need objects for enhanced understanding but we must appreciate how the object functions and how it does not.
SD: I think that's pretty key to understanding the difference between contemporary evangelical pilgrimage and medieval pilgrimage. Thinking “I have a terrible sin, I have to walk this much to be right with God” would be a very different thing than thinking "I feel disconnected from God, I just want some time to be with God.” That desire makes a different pilgrimage.
SB: I would say that the majority of people who go on pilgrimages are not doing it for a sin. Most are doing it for big life events, a death, a divorce, retirement, losing a job, disruption, and you want to re-center and get back to God in some ways. It’s not just evangelicals thinking that way. It’s across the board. I think as an evangelical, I try to instill this within my students. We still try to do as many of the same practices that they would have done in the medieval times that really don’t go against our Protestant theology. One of the things that we do is take a small stone from our homes that represents a burden. That stone in itself is not something sacred, that idea of letting go of your burden is powerful. That's exactly what they were doing. Taking your stone and then getting to `Cruz de Ferro,' this cross of iron, this huge cross. There are stones leading up to it, you have to climb these stones. And you have to know that those stones have been left for centuries by people who have thrown their burdens down.
There's something that is so powerful in not just seeing the cross but climbing it and taking the time to pray and saying “I’m going to leave this at the foot of the cross,” in recognizing that all of these people who have come before me have done the same thing…
JM: To me, this signals how actions may change in Protestantism, but the underlying idea of needing to proclaim what God has done for us in action does not. We see that in believers’ baptism, for example, since that’s the ultimate proclamation of laying your burden at the cross. Singing the psalms is another important act for Reformation Protestants that reflects a passing on the burden to God. Often, singing the Psalms was an act of political defiance as well.
SB: It’s a form of protest, really.
SB: The closest thing that we have found showing us that yes, there were still practicing Catholics but in secret, was in their last will and testaments. When they’re about to die, after the English Reformation, you’ll see in the last will and testament, “I want so and so to go on pilgrimage to Santiago.”
JM: I think there's a significant shift that happens in this regard with Elizabeth’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. She becomes nationalized in a way –to be English is to be Protestant- and so I wonder if the wills reflect that shift.
SD: At that point, you definitely have people hiding Jesuits, but that's a very---it’s almost as if Jesuits were a foreign threat.
SB: We know that the English Catholics were going to places like Spain, for example, and they were fighting against England because they felt so strongly about remaining Catholic.
JM: And then meanwhile, I'm studying the French story, which involves hiding Bibles in your hair, furniture, and on your body.
SD: Meanwhile the English Catholics were hiding their images and their priests.
JM: The dangers of being the minority tradition are always apparent. For the Reformed side, acting as a Nicodemite was the worst kind of Protestant because their outer worship life did not align with their inner worship life. Calvin actually encouraged people to leave France (rather than embrace martyrdom) and was critical of those who would not while maintaining their convictions.
SD: And I'm sure they’re very critical as well of those who shift from one confession to the next in England.
JM: Yes, this is challenging to navigate for so many. The assumption is often that Reformation happened over night. Really they are still the same people, the same clergy that were there the day before. Even the church building tells the same story since it takes quite a while to alter the architecture so that it reflects the transformations of the tradition. These things just don’t happen overnight. In the same vein, Protestant pilgrimage is altered but not lost.
The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt is the Franklin S. Dyrness Associate Professor in Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, a Fellow in the Royal Historical Society, and a Parish Associate at First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn. Dr. McNutt received her Ph.D. in History from the University of St. Andrews (Reformation Studies Institute, 2008), M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary (2003), and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Westmont College (2000). Dr. McNutt’s research specializes in the history of the church and Christian Theology from the Reformation through the Enlightenment with particular expertise in John Calvin and his clerical legacy, the Reformed tradition, the relationship between Christianity and science, and the history of the Bible and its interpretation. Current contracted projects include co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation (OUP) with Prof. Herman Selderhuis and editing the 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude volume for the Reformation Commentary on Scripture series (InterVarsity Press Academic). She recently published the co-edited volume, The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible (IVP, 2017), for the Wheaton Theology Conference series. She is currently researching and writing two monographs: the history of the French Bible from the early-modern period through the Enlightenment and a social history of John Calvin’s thought. Her research has received international grants including the Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship (2015-2016) at the Huntington Library and the Huntington Trinity Hall Exchange Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2015-2016). Her publications include academic journal articles and book chapters as well as popular ecclesiastical pieces for Christianity Today and Christian History Magazine. In 2017, Dr. McNutt was awarded first place in Christianity Today’s essay contest for her article on how clergy during the Enlightenment contributed to the advancement of modern science.
Dr. McNutt is also an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and is co-president of McNuttshell Ministries, Inc. with her husband, Rev. Dr. David McNutt. She enjoys preaching at churches and on college campuses, writing for popular outlets, and conducting podcast and video interviews.
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