读书笔记·宗教改革 序言
读Peter Marshall "The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction" 所做笔记与摘录，即《宗教改革：牛津通识读本》，目前无中译本
原书及其作者
牛津通识读本系列丛书，或者“A Very Short Introduction series”，一个非常高质量的学科入门读本系列，质量和语言难度比翼齐飞，读中译版的话甚至还要受到渣翻译的二次伤害。但是平心而论，以阅读所耗精力和入门扎实程度来看性价比的话，没得挑剔。而且如此体系完备，门类齐全的书系，本身省下的找书成本就不可计量。
拐回正题，我是个乱翻书的，为什么要读宗教改革我也不知道，但是一路读下来收获很多。16到17世纪左右，宗教改革从近乎偏执于原教旨的圣经解读出发，最终却落在了催生多元社会的终点上。原书难读的原因之一也在于能感受到它把许多复杂深入的学术成果融为一体，虽然已经极力体贴入门级读者了，但是其中的思维难度是无法消减的。
Introduction
P1
Scholars used to know the answers to these questions, though different scholars knew quite different answers, the Reformation having been as divisive for subsequent historians as it was for those who lived through it. This is because it has always seemed a foundational moment, raising questions of origins and parentage, the culturally and politically contentious issues of who we are and where we come from.
首先，无论是对当时的民众还是现代的研究者，对于宗教改革的看法都是不一的。但无可置疑的是，宗教改革极其深刻的塑造了现代的欧洲。
P1-2
It is a story of spiritual liberation, of people casting aside the shackles of theological and moral servitude. The movement initiated by the renegade German friar Martin Luther brought an end to corrupt and oppressive rule by the clergy of an institutional Church, a Church that had maintained its power by imposing superstitious and psychologically burdensome beliefs on ordinary (lay) worshippers. It was also a return to the pure sources of Christianity, after centuries in which the stream was polluted by the dripping pipe of man-made traditions.
宗教改革中的圣经白话翻译化让平民也可以自由解读圣经，不必经过教会的解释，这一对真理垄断的破除是宗教改革的一大现实。
本身出发点是回归圣经本源，但实际上在一些方面上起到了把人从教会阐发的清规戒律里解放出来的效果，在另一些方面又埋下了原教旨和极端化的种子。
P2
Luther’s protest was a first strike against authoritarianism in many areas of social and intellectual life, a hammer blow against the kind of religion that ‘tells you what to think’.
宗教改革中反抗教廷权威的情节衍生出了许多的叙述和看法，比如认为现代的个人主义源自于鼓励人人自己解读圣经，现代资本主义源于新教商人的打拼精神，现代科学源于宗教改革破除迷信等等。
宗教改革开始后，基督教在原有两大分支，天主教和东正教，的格局下再出一支，即新教。宗教改革的带来的冲突主要发生在新教和天主教之间。
同时宗教改革也伴随着大量毁弃文物和破坏传统的行为，不同评价颇多。
P3
These are all myths, which is not to say they are completely untrue. Myths are not lies, but symbolically powerful articulations of sensed realities. It is probably safer to believe that all the myths about the Reformation are true, rather than that none of them are.
就像绝大部分历史事件一样，宗教改革并不是一个可以清晰界定的事件。时间和地理上的分布散漫到让人怀疑它能否被视为一个整体；特殊性也值得怀疑，因为基督世界内部的改革诉求也几乎没有断过。
P6-7
The doctrinal teachings of Protestant and Catholic reformers were inimical and anathema to one another. But their broader aims and aspirations could at times look remarkably similar. Both hoped to create a more spiritual Church, and a more godly, disciplined, and ordered society. And both confronted similar obstacles, in the ignorance, apathy, or sheer bloody-mindedness of local communities who might see little reason to change their ways at the behest of high-minded idealists. …… Common folk in 1520s Germany selected and adapted aspects of the reforming programme that spoke to their needs, demonstrating in the process a capacity for ‘agency’ which an older tradition of scholarship was not always prepared to allow them.
宗教改革是一场深彻骨髓的社会运动，每个人社会生活的每一方面都在动荡中被改变了。
带领着宗教改革的推进的精英们对社会生活有许多想法，但是普通的民众对于自己的生活该怎么样，需不需要怎么改变，自有自己的认识。宗教改革是一场社会运动因为在根基上点燃了最广大民众的共鸣而成为了某种早已存在的情绪的突破口，而得到广泛的支持和传播的典例。
P8-9
Traditional ecclesiastical historians insist on the primacy of ideas, the real transformative power exercised by new theologies and ways of seeing the world. By contrast, Marxists, as well as subscribers to trendy sociological and literary theories, instinctively want to ‘deconstruct’, to discern the ‘real’ political, class-based or economic motivations behind assertions of religious principle or forms of ritual action. The truth is that any approach which begins with a rigid – and fundamentally modern – distinction between the religious and the secular is unlikely to get us very far.
神学家总是坚持宗教改革是一个宗教事件，而许多其他理论的支持者则多有认为宗教改革只不过是其背后“真正的”社会经济进程的表象。
但实际上回到当时的社会情境，生活是与神的世界深切结合的，而宗教活动又是深刻和世俗生活混合的，现代所做的“宗教”和“世俗”的划分在那个时代根本就不成立。单从神学理论或者政治经济角度审视这一场宗教改革，可能视角都有偏颇。
P9
But – to return to an earlier niggle – if Reformation was multiple interlocking reformations, and the sum of political, social, and religious interactions in Europe and the wider world over the course of two centuries, does the concept of ‘The Reformation’ really stand up? Has the label simply become a cover-all blanket for a convenient era of history, an alternative to that still woollier historical coverlet, ‘early modern’? This book stands by the usefulness of the term, for a simple but crucial reason. ‘The Reformation’ designates both the period and the process through which a key principle established itself at the heart of European culture: the formation of identity by means of division and conflict.
“宗教改革”到底能不能被这一个名词概括为一个整体，终究也很难说，但这本书选择的观点仍然是用这个名词来代表这一场模糊的大潮。
原因在于原书作者认为，作为一个整体的“宗教改革”运动，是一个确立了现代欧洲的一项核心原则的节点——在冲突与对立中形成身份认同和身份认识的边界。
参考文献
Marshall, P. (2009). The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-923131-7