According to MacCulloch's The Reformation, a big factor of the Reformation taking place was the hysteria caused by the constant pressure of Islam in the east (conquering Constantinople, for example) and various battles and wars that broke out between Europe and the East.
I just read this blog that put forth the following idea about the Reformation and how it led Protestant Christianity to view Scripture:
The movement from authoritative Church to authoritative book that occurs over the 15th and 16th centuries (the Protestant Reformation), should not be considered apart from the dialog with Islam in the two or three centuries that preceded it.
Essentially, the author's argument is that Islam and Catholic/Orthodox Christianity viewed Scripture differently. For Islam, it is THE authority. For the Pre-Reformation Christian Church, it was authoritative of course, but was not the foundation of the faith (that would be the apostles and tradition and the Church itself). Due to dialogue in the Middle Ages between Islam and Christianity, the Reformers were (unknowingly?) influenced by how Islam viewed Scripture and adopted the same point of view.
Is there any validity to that argument?
(Note: I realize this is a "devotional" blog and that the post in question is an apologetic work for Orthodox Christianity, but it was an idea I hadn't heard before)
I think it's a poor thesis, and there are a few reasons for my argument.
Firstly, and perhaps most strongly, there is a very strong lack of evidence that reformers were influenced by Islam. All the key players, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, etc., emerge in the context of Germany and the surrounds. Their intellectual influences are not Islamic.
Now, the article acknolwedges that, but rather claims that Islamic ideas influenced them via Medieval scholasticism. But this is itself problematic. The re-injection of Aristotelian philosophy via Islamic scholars did influence scholasticism, but the immediate influences on the reformers was not entirely scholastic. Rather, more immediate influences can be found in Renaissance Humanism, particularly northern Humanism of the type espoused by someone like Erasmus. While the reformers weren't quite Humanists either, but they show signs of both influence and engagement.
Here's where the article's logic goes, and is at fault:
The Orthodox view of Scripture is not like Islam's view of the Quran.
The Protestant view of Scripture is closer to Islam's.
Ergo, the Protestant view is a product of Islamic influence.
I hope it's clear that 3 does not follow from 1 + 2 without quite a few more premises.
Secondly, what pushes the reformers to new positions in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic church of the time? Close reading of Scripture that gives them ideas that are at variance with contemporaneous church dogmas. The practices of close attentive critical reading that was partly a produce of humanist practices created a cognitive dissonance that split what was previously seen as a single authority: the church and its scriptures, into two, the church against its scriptures. Given that dichotimisation, reformers chose the scriptures as authoritative. I would argue that this better explains how their 'new' view of the nature of Scripture emerged, rather than an adoption of Islamic-via-Scholastic views.
Thirdly, one would have to explain why Islamic views of Scripture did not have more influence in medieval Scholasticism, particularly those schools that continued on within the Roman Catholic Church. Why didn't they move towards a Quranic-type view of Scripture? Why was it only Reformers that supposedly did so?