A Linking of Heaven and Earth by Scott K. Taylor Emily Michelson

Author:Scott K. Taylor, Emily Michelson [Scott K. Taylor, Emily Michelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409473503
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2012-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Lutheran patterns

Evenius’ concern that all people, but especially children and young people were not receiving Christian training was a main theme in his works after the destruction of Magdeburg. The world, as he saw it, was filled with profound problems, which he described in the Necessary and Important Question and catalogued in the Mirror of Depravity. To these problems, he offered his Picture School and Catechism School as solutions. These books sought not just to teach laypeople the words of Christian doctrine, but to inform their understanding. In the case of the Picture School, Evenius created the environment for encouraging an emotional attachment to faith through images. Together the books were aimed at producing intellectually and emotionally mature Christians.

Towards the end of the Mirror of Depravity Evenius warned that if people did not heed his advice, the perils of the war and the desolation of land and people, which he had witnessed at close quarters in Magdeburg though never explicitly described, would continue. Even worse, God might withdraw his pure and holy word, as had already happened in other places. In the 1630s Evenius rarely mentioned Catholics in his writings, but this comment seemed to threaten the readers with returning or being returned to Catholic practices, thereby losing their salvation.38 As in most of his works after Magdeburg, the Mirror of Depravity dwelt on the negative; it did not describe the alternative, a positive picture of what might happen if his readers grew in their faith. The book simply ended with a prayer that God would rescue his people from disaster. Perhaps events of the 1630s were so grim that it was impossible for Evenius to imagine a flourishing Christian life. Whatever the reason, he left few clues what it would be like if his readers followed his advice.

Nevertheless, by examining the opposite of Evenius’s warnings it is possible to imagine the right course: war would end, lands and peoples would flourish, and the knowledge of God’s word would spread. While the benefits would be widely enjoyed, this healing was rooted in individual improvement; it presupposed a direct relation to the divine, that humans could learn to confess, study, and grow on their own.39 Even though it was based in solitary activities, this positive alternative was meant for everyone. Recognizing God’s punishment, acknowledging one’s own sin, teaching the Picture School to one’s children, and studying the Catechism School privately could bring healing for the whole land. Evenius left his readers to speculate that if all of one’s neighbors shared your conviction that warfare expressed God’s anger and, in response, were studying the catechism and confessing their shortcomings, individual private practices joined together would create a new social order.

Those following Evenius’s diagnosis of contemporary problems would share their conviction that suffering demonstrated divine displeasure with Christians throughout the ages. Both Catholic and Protestant authors could equate the destruction of Magdeburg with God’s anger.40 Almost two centuries earlier Christians in Perugia had created a banner that showed God the Father punishing the city with the plague.

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