Stripping the altars

The Reformation, it is charged, secularized and de-sacralized European culture with its iconoclasm, its attack on relics, its revisions in sacramental theology.

Isaiah 3-4 suggest a different assessment. Isaiah describes the stripping of priestly ornaments from the daughters of Zion (3:16-26), but then identifies the remnant as a “holy” remnant (4:3). By the Spirit, Yahweh cleans the “filth” from the daughters of Zion (4:4) – and in context, the “filth” can only be the ornaments that have been taken away. The ornaments are not sacred but impure.

From this angle, the Reformation is not a de-sacralization but the opposite, a re-sacralization, a stripping of altars that re-consecrates the altars as tables, which is what they were meant to be.