Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (review)

Burning to Read is a deeply troubling book. The point of the book is not troubling; it is straightforward and contains at least some element of truth. Nevertheless, the vocabulary is unsettling, doing an injustice to both the authors of the sixteenth century and to readers in the twenty-first century.

James Simpson challenges the common assertion that the Protestant emphasis on Bible reading was an enlightening and liberating step forward for Western culture. He asserts that it did not free individuals from religious tyranny nor awaken culture to a healthy individualism. It did not create lovers of the Word, but rather haters of the message. Simpson argues that Scripture reading, documented by his assiduous study of the original sources of the English Reformation, produced an introspection that was dark, dangerous, and pathological. He claims that implicit in the act of reading the Bible for oneself is the discovery that the greatness of one’s own distance from God can only be bridged by a God who must take the initiative of predestinating only some to eternal life. Thus, the individual is left with the horror of not knowing if he or she is among the elect. The reader must hate the text—the written contract that God places before him or her verbatim—before he or she can love it. The individual is called to renounce family, tradition, and community in favor of isolated individuality. Thus alone, the individual must search unceasingly for signs that might be understood as God’s favor but, because all such tokens are ambiguous, the individual is left in torment. The result is individualistic psychological violence that leads to social isolation and ecclesiastical fragmentation. Simpson suggests that social upheavals can be attributed to this paradox and warns readers that the same peril exists today. This conclusion is why the book is troubling. One is not sure when Simpson is writing about the sixteenth century and when he is preaching to the twenty-first.

One could spar with Simpson over minor points such as his attribution of predestination to Luther when it can be traced in theological thought back to St. Augustine. He accepts uncritically William Clebsch’s theory that Tyndale’s theology evolved in distinct stages, although the idea has few supporters among Tyndalian scholars. He both criticizes David Daniell’s biography of Tyndale and quotes it uncritically. He documents violence on both sides of the Reformation but blames it all on a fundamentalist reading of Scripture. He does not consider other possible or contributing causes such as the unification of state and Church.

Contending with Tyndale, Thomas More insisted that the choice of words matters and words still matter. Simpson’s use of fundamentalism and evangelicalism weaken his argument. He admits that the term fundamentalism is an anachronism and knows that it did not enter religious vocabulary until the early part of the twentieth century; yet he defends it as descriptive of the Protestant mind-set of sixteenth-century England. Today, however, fundamentalism is applied to diverse elements of many religions and is equated with rigidity, violence, and terrorism (for example, Brenda Brasher’s Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism, New York, 2001 and Leonardo Boff’s Fundamentalismus und Terrorismus, Göttingen, 2007). Likewise, Simpson avoids the word Protestant and insists on evangelical because the former was not used until the Diet at Speyer in 1529. This inconsistency can bring unnecessary confusion to modern readers. Anachronistic terminology is not helpful to conversation in an ecumenical age, nor does it respect the postmodern understanding of individualism that takes responsibility for personal spiritual commitment.