Reformation: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

Carl R. Trueman

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845509903

THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE The Relevance of the Reformation today

To some, the idea that the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could have anything to teach the church of today would be regarded as nonsense. After all, the sixteenth century happened four hundred years ago. Since then, we have witnessed the birth and death of modernity, the rise and fall of empires, the rapid secularisation of society, the decline of great parts of the West, and the increasing cultural dominance of science and the television. What can some cluster of events from three to four hundred years ago which took place in societies dominated by white European males possibly teach us today, living as we do in the age of mass communication, cosmopolitanism and advanced consumerism? Surely these things are irrelevant?

In addition to this, we live in times when the answer to contemporary problems is always seen to lie in the new and the different. Whether the cause of this constant need for novelty is that consumerism which always needs more and is never satisfied with what it has, or is the result of the impact of ideas of progress and evolution, whereby the best is always yet to come, the result is clear: the past is simply not looked upon as a source of wisdom or guidance for the present and the future. The ubiquity of the epithet ‘post-’ added on to everything, from postmodernism to postevangelicalism, is symptomatic of this tendency, as is the rhetoric used of those who are always seeking to break with past ways of doing things: they are the radicals, the visionaries, the risk takers. Those who defend any aspect of tradition, whether in belief or practice, are likely to find themselves tarred with the brush of reaction, bigotry, thoughtlessness and fear. The idea that new is good and old is bad runs deep in contemporary society, and this affects the evangelical church as well as the wider culture. The underlying assumption in many quarters is that the past is of no use to the church in the present. We need to bring in new management, repackage ourselves in a more attractive wrapper, and market ourselves in a slicker fashion.

RESCUING THE REFORMATION

I hope that in what follows I am able to persuade at least some who might consider some sympathy with such a position that the past is perhaps not as irrelevant as we might be tempted to feel. I want to argue that key insights of the Reformers are as relevant today—and as applicable to situations today—as they were in the sixteenth century.

Unhelpful friends

But my intention is not simply to rescue the Reformation from its detractors; it also needs to be rescued from some of its friends. There is a brand of Christian for whom the fact that ‘it’—whether an aspect of practice, a form of words, a particular doctrine—was held by the Reformers is a straightforward knock down argument for saying that ‘it’ is right for today. We all know such people. They are often those who have reacted (and rightly reacted) against the marginalising of the Reformers in church life which has been going on now for decades. The dominant role taken by the ecumenical movement throughout a large period of the twentieth century undoubtedly played a part in this. The Reformation was, after all, the time when the western church split right down the middle, Protestants and Catholics, and then fragmented some more, as Protestantism divided into Lutheran and Reformed. Such a tragic period in church history was, from the ecumenical viewpoint, something which needed to be dealt with in order to re-establish unity; and so it was dealt with at various times by regarding the theological disputes as either misplaced from the outset or of no contemporary relevance.

Against such a background, it was right and proper that many chose to take a firm stand. It is indeed still right to assert the central significance of an issue such as justification by grace through faith, and to portray attempts to undermine this in any way as necessarily involving changes of fundamental theological significance in how Christianity and its history is to be understood. Nevertheless, I suspect that for many of this group, as they reacted against the ecumenical agenda, the Reformers and the Reformation came to hold the status of supreme icons or authorities, whereby any questioning or criticism of them was viewed as tantamount to heresy.

In addition, the agenda of reaction was always doomed ultimately to be the agenda set by the ecumenists: if justification formed a central focus of the ecumenical attack, so it formed a central part of the conservative defence; and the result was that the emphases and concerns of the Reformers themselves and of the Reformation as a whole came to be read through the lens of debates that were going on within the twentieth-century church. This was not necessarily a bad thing; but it was somewhat restricting. If the Reformers had things to teach outside the immediate debates generated by ecumenism, how were we to see it when the questions we brought to the great texts of Reformation theology said as much about church politics in our century as about anything that had gone on in the sixteenth? Other issues of central importance, such as assurance, the sacraments and the person and work of Christ, were only discussed along the narrow lines determined by the ecumenical movement, and much of value was thereby lost.

An identity crisis

My task here, then, is not to disparage those who have defended the Reformation heritage so valiantly over the last fifty years. We should be grateful to them, particularly at the present time when evangelicalism seems less sure of its identity than at any point in its history. I never cease to be shocked by how little I have in common with many others in the United Kingdom who now claim the name evangelical. One can deny that God knows the future, one can deny that the Bible is inspired, one can deny that justification is by grace through faith, one can deny that Christ is the only way to salvation—one can do all of these things and still remain a member in good standing of certain high-profile evangelical bodies.

The confusion such a situation represents indicates both the doctrinal and, perhaps more importantly, the moral void that lies at the heart of so much British evangelicalism at this time, when few if any are willing to take the difficult decision to stand firm on the non-negotiable aspects of the faith. We desperately need a deeper grasp of the importance of these issues if we are not to sell our heritage for a pot of stew.

A biblical agenda

Nevertheless, we should not let the heterodox, the heretical and downright blasphemous positions of the various cuckoos in our evangelical nest set the agenda. Instead, I would argue that we must allow our agenda to be set by biblical priorities. For that reason, I want in these chapters to broaden the discussion, to come to the Reformation with fresh eyes, looking not just for evidence that, say, justification by grace through faith was a very important doctrine and was indeed repudiated by the Catholic Church, but also to seek out other lessons which may be learned from this most important of periods in church history.

DEFINING THE REFORMATION

Our first task is therefore to produce a working definition of the Reformation which will serve as a formative guide for what is to follow. Now, this is, of course, impossible in an absolute, final and definitive sense since the Reformation embodies so many elements—theological, political, social, cultural and economic—and none of these elements is entirely separable from any of the others, if for no other reason than that real life does not break down into neat, discrete categories. What I wish to do is somewhat more modest, that is, to offer a definition of the Reformation in terms of its broad theological contribution to the thought of the church. I hope thereby to open up avenues of theological reflection which the various popular stereotypes of Reformation thought have missed. By doing so, I trust that I will provoke the reader to think about how the principles of the Reformation might be applied today in a manner which neither misses their timeless theological import, nor simply indulges in a mindless doctrinal reductionis.

The broad definition I propose is as follows: the Reformation represents a move to place God as he has revealed himself in Christ at the centre of the church’s life and thought. In subsequent chapters, I will expand upon three particular aspects of this: the church’s emphasis upon Jesus Christ and him crucified; the emphasis upon Scripture as the basis and norm for the proclamation of Christ; and the church’s accent on assurance of salvation as the normative experience for all Christian believers.

Parameters

In expounding on the theme of the Reformation in general, and on these three themes in particular, I want to make it quite clear from the outset that I am specifically not trying to do two things which some may perhaps be expecting me to do. First, I am in no way providing a text which will bypass the need for reading the Reformers first hand. Their thought is so vast, rich, and complex that it cannot even begin to be summarised, let alone expounded in any depth, in four brief chapters. You must read them for yourselves if you wish to mine from them the nuggets of theological gold which their vast writings contain. These texts are not obscure, and they are easily available today. I would suggest that, just as the Reformers read the works of the medievals and the early church Fathers in order to sharpen their own understanding of the Bible and of Christian tradition, ministers and thoughtful lay people should today read the Reformers. From the exhilarating and fiery prose of Luther to the cooler, more thoughtful writings of Calvin, there is much in the vast literary output of these men that is both theologically useful and devotionally humbling. They are in many ways good models of learning and commitment, and are worth studying for these things, particularly in the present day when the temptation to regard ministers as the godly equivalent of social workers can be so strong.

Second, I am not trying to make the case that we should simply go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see what was done then, and bring those practices straight to the present day as if such a move were straightforward. All Christian practice is shaped by the time in which it occurs, and it would be naive not to acknowledge that fact at the outset. I am interested in the theological principles underlying the Reformers’ work and in understanding how those principles might be applied in practice today, given that God has not changed, our theology has not changed, but certain aspects of our culture and society have changed. In this, I confess my debt to the men of the Sydney Diocese and Moore College who have sought for many years to bring Reformation insights to bear upon the modern church in the modern world. These chapters are intended as my own tiny contribution to a project which is, I believe, of pressing importance in the present cultural atmosphere of consumerism and eclecticism. To stress the value of Reformation thought today without giving due weight to the difference between the society of the sixteenth century and our own will have the result of unwittingly condemning the Reformers to irrelevance of persuading our postevangelical gurus of the wisdom of their own position. We need to make sure that our defence of the Reformers does not merely demonstrate how outmoded and useless they are.

Theology the driving force

To return to my working definition of the Reformation then: the Reformation represents a move to place God as he has revealed himself in Christ at the centre of the church’s life and thought. This is extremely important because we must remember first and foremost that, if the Reformation is a significant moment in church history, and if the Reformers are significant theologians for us today, it is only to the extent that they represent faithful attempts to place God in Christ at the centre. It is beyond dispute that many Reformers were brave men; that they achieved many great things; that they attacked many manifest theological, ecclesiastical and moral abuses; and that some of them died terrible deaths for their beliefs. Yet none of these things, either individually or taken together, means that they have anything to teach us today. Many non-Christians have been brave; many have achieved wonderful things; many have spoken out against abuses; and many have died heroic and steadfast deaths for their beliefs. But, as the old saying goes, a good death does not sanctify a bad cause. Moreover, none of the other actions listed makes any individual of perennial relevance to the church. It is only to the extent that they brought God and Christ to bear upon the church of their day that the Reformers have any ongoing relevance for us today.

Luther himself hinted at this when he described the difference between himself and his precursors, John Wyclif and John Hus. They, he said, attacked the morals of the papacy, but he attacked its theology. It is vital to grasp this: Luther’s crusade was not ultimately a moral one; it was theological. Of course, the two are intimately related. His attack on indulgences in 1517 was in large part an attack on abusive pastoral practice driven by church greed; but it was also rooted in his changing theology which saw the sale of indulgences as cheapening God’s grace, trivialising sin and misleading the laity. He did not attack the practice simply because it was abusive in its practical outworkings but because it rested upon a false view of God and of humanity’s status before God.

In the years prior to the protest, Luther had come to see how radically sin affected humanity, that its power was not broken at baptism, that it was so all-consuming that nothing short of death could cure it—and that death he found in the death of Christ on the cross, Thus, when Tetzel appeared in the neighbouring parish, offering time off purgatory for the payment of a few coppers, Luther was outraged. Here was a man selling God’s grace in a way which was not simply financially cheap but was also spiritually cheap. The practice of indulgence sales in the hands of Tetzel had come to bypass the human heart and make salvation something which affected the wallet, not the soul. For Luther this was outrageous in its pastoral implications, because it conned people into a false sense of security; but it was also outrageous theologically, because it reduced the value of Christ’s death to a casual financial transaction. Corrupt belief and corrupt practice went hand-in-hand, and the one could not be reformed without the reformation of the other.

This was something which the Catholic Church of the time never seemed to grasp. We must beware of those who always paint the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century in unremittingly dark colours. It was certainly in a state of great theological confusion, and it certainly tolerated a large number of moral abuses; but it also contained many men who wished to see the corruption within its ranks cleared up. There was indeed a Catholic Reformation which sought to purge the Church of the corrupt and dishonest. But there was one fundamental difference between the Catholic Reformation and its counterpart which came to be known as Protestantism: the Catholic Reformation focused on practical, moral abuses; it did not seek to reform the theology of the church. This is why the Protestant Reformation was so important: it sought to address the theological foundations of the church and to reform the whole, root and branch.

God first and foremost

We must be aware that the usefulness of Reformation theology lies in its emphasis upon God. The theologies, the catechisms and the liturgies which flowed from the Reformers’ pens all indicate that theirs was a piety which was concerned above all with God. The emphasis of the Reformers was always much more upon the identity and action of God than upon human experience of him. The two are, of course, inextricably linked, but the accent always falls upon the divine half of the equation. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why Calvin’s works give so little insight into the man that he was: he talked little of himself because he was concerned with the proper subject of theology, and that was God.

It is true that Luther was somewhat more expansive on personal themes, but again there is an interesting emphasis in his writings which puts the incarnation, not the action of the Spirit, at the centre. Indeed, his major objection to the Anabaptists and the radicals was their obsessive talk of the Spirit and what the Spirit had taught them or how he had affected them. In contrast, Luther wanted to talk of his own experiences as they related not to some subjective influence of the Spirit on his soul but to God in Christ.

This is in marked contrast to much of what we witness today. I will say more about this in subsequent chapters, but one of the elements which most marks contemporary evangelical piety is the ob...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1. The Pearl of Great Price
• 2. Meeting the Man of Sorrows
• 3. The Oracles of God
• 4. Blessed Assurance
• Christian Focus