Ronald K. Rittgers

I am currently pursuing a book project entitled The Enchanted Word of Early Protestantism. The book seeks to show that during the Reformation, Protestants viewed Scripture—whether read, heard, preached, sung, or inscribed—as a kind of sacrament. Scripture was not simply a source of correct information about God for early Protestants, it was more profoundly a place of encounter with God. Protestant disputes about the meaning of the Bible were certainly a defining feature of the Reformation, and, as scholars have argued, these disputes contributed to the shape of the modern world, albeit in unintended ways. But such analysis threatens to reduce Scripture to nothing more than a source and site of Protestant discord in the Reformation. Yet the Word was much more for early Protestants. Above all else, for them, it was enchanted, that is, it was invested with supernatural or numinous powers or properties.  It is where they sought to find and experience God and God’s grace, especially amid the trials and tribulations of their lives. Thus, my book will not only seek to correct recent depiction of the early Protestant relationship to Scripture; it will also call upon us to revise the traditional Weberian disenchantment narrative and the role of the Reformation in it.