Persistent Protest

Protestant problematics about sacraments still run in the background of early modern debates about religion. 

In response to evidence of similarities between Jewish and “savage” Indian religion, some early modern thinkers argued that the ritual similarities were marginal to Judaism.

Some thought of Jewish ceremonies as a kind of prophylactic against idolatry. James Foster (The Usefulness, Truth, and Excellency of the Christian Religion, 1731) argued that “even a ceremonious religion may answer very valuable purposes.” Given their situation and history, Jews “would probably have kept no order, if their national weakness and prejudices had not been in some measure indulg’d. And the best security against their joining in idolatrous rites that prevail’d all around ‘em, and renouncing the worship of the true God, was to divest them, by giving them innocent ceremonies of their own” (quoted in Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 55).

Others protected the purity and spirituality of Christianity by severing its historical ties to Judaism. Summarizing the arguments of Thomas Morgan’s The Moral Philosopher (1738), Eilberg-Schwartz writes, “It was the Jews who were directly or indirectly responsible for the presence of irrational ceremonies in Christianity. Since Jesus brought his mission to a backward people, he had to package the religion of reason in such a way that this people would accept it. The eucharist and baptism, for example, were simply means to this end. Since the Jews customarily partook of biscuits and wine, Jesus gave this custom a symbolic interpretation. He told the Jewish proselytes that in the future this act should serve as a reminder of his mission. But ‘when the clergy had once got it into their Hands they soon made a Mystery, and afterward a Contradiction of it.’ Christ baptized Jewish proselytes because the Jews already understood this practice. But ‘Christ only intended [these ceremonies for] those who at first prosleyted to Christianity not their descendants.’” Christ died as a “martyr for the religion of reason,” but Paul, imbued with Jewish conceptions, turned this into a sacrifice. Morgan saw his task as the effect to “clear St. Paul from the Imputations of Judaism, and Christianity itself from the dead weight of that most gross and carnal Institution which has hitherto been laid upon it” (Eilberg-Schwartz, 57).

Both of these strategies took Jewish ceremony as a strange anomaly. They are heirs of the Reformation, in particular its “radical” wing, and their uneasiness with ritual provides further evidence of the central importance of sacramental and liturgical theology in the formation of the modern age.