Reviewing the Reformation pt. 2
“...we are not to reflect on the wickedness of men, but look to the image of God in them,
an image which, covering and obliterating their faults,
should by its beauty and dignity allure us to love and embrace them” -John Calvin
A humorous picture on the nature of man: A Neapolitan Nobleman fought fourteen duels to prove that Dante was a greater poet than Ariosto. Upon his death bed, a priest, who was a great admirer of Ariosto, desired the man to confess on Ariosto’s superiority. “Father,” he answered, “to tell you the truth, I have never read either Dante or Ariosto.”
We like to fight and quarrel, and in times where physical fighting is punished with the utmost severity, it should be no surprise that verbal fighting has quickly taken its place: directionless, unclear, quarreling-for-quarrels sake, but fighting all the same. We must recover the lost art of “argumentation” a word that now connotes the quarreling mentioned above, but historically meant to “make clear.” Below, is a loose attempt to evaluate some of the developments in post-reformation Christendom: What is bad; what is good, and what sources might help us objectively determine those respecting answers?
A clip from Pastor Doug Wilson documents some of the problem: Wilson, a paedobaptist, spoke of not letting any creedal-Baptist have any possible romantic interest in his daughters, because “bringing our family up in the covenant is a big deal.”
Wilson is *probably not wrong. The early reformers and the plain reading of Mark 16 all suggest that Baptism is the most essential entry point into the Christian Faith. The story is mythic in its understanding of the ~10,000 denominations. After 500 years, there are still friendship-dividing arguments about the direct response to The Great Commission. For a man/woman, who wants to marry, and build a family, would it not make more sense to knock on the door of an institution that has asked, answered, and settled the role of Baptism and its role in The Christian’s response, in Faith, to the Gospel? How do we reconcile Christ’s prayer, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” with the boots-on-the-ground reality that the plethora of “private interpretations” crop up new Fault Lines among the body with each coming generation.
But if there be one final lesson with Doug Wilson let it be this. He is remarkably effective and convincing. His ministry regularly sees families moving across the country (to Idaho, of all places), due to his compelling vision for Christian society. Why is this the case? Do they suddenly start reading Revelation 20 differently? Did they unearth a buried love of Preterism in the recesses of their mind? Perhaps for a few, but for the many, the dynamic of human relations Paul describes in 1 Cor 13 probably has a lot to do with it.
An increasing number of people are “reading the room.” Moral Chaos, economic chaos, and educational chaos (primary and secondary) are leading numerous families to perceive that the waters are indeed rising, and Wilson is building an ark. He might have a few things wrong; he might word things more provocatively than needed, but he is very publicly building the ark, and his visible contributions have compelled many to make significant life changes in order to move closer to what he is building and to submit themselves to his pastorate. For us, it should be no different. Our arguments are only effective insofar that they are attached to a demonstrated “Love.” lest we be merely cymbals who clang the air.
Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen said this: “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” Could this not also be inverted to the millions of mainline Protestants, Non-denom, and Catholics who want nothing to do with Reformed theology? In the past decade, one Protestant teacher declared a need to “unhitch the OT from the NT.” There have been widening rifts in each Evangelical denomination due to various Theological / Political controversies. And even in our own backyard, the works of a civil war are at play. We need not compromise on our own theological heritage to recognize that from an outsider’s perspective, our front porch does not look as inviting as the times of Calvin. We can correctly identify all of the problems on our neighbor’s porch, but that does not compel them to cross the road to ours. Or to put it differently, let us first remove our own denominational log, before concerning ourselves with each other’s.
Let us try to consider an outsider’s perspective of “Protestantism” writ large. The point of the following paragraphs is not to lament that everything is terrible, but to only illuminate the difficulty someone with fresh eyes would have in seeing through the glitz and glamor of the visible evident qualities in “Protestantism” to find something more mature, intellectually robust, and might we even say “Biblical.” Then, we’ll take a look at the beauty of the Reformed Tradition, straight from Calvin himself.
Many of the critiques Luther had for the Medieval church, could be leveled against the Evangelical Industrial Complex today. The propped-up Para-church organizations have unbiblical amounts of influence on the scope of thought in Christendom today. Even for the ministers who say orthodox things, the lucrative book deals, the speaking gigs, and the thousands of “fans.” lead to an intellectual environment where Christian thought now plays by the terms of the Market. Orthodox Presbyterian Carl Trueman laments of his own that:
There is indeed an unbearable, kitschy lightness to so much that passes for conservative Protestant life and thought. The theology that sells is by and large a cheap, rootless imitation of the real thing. Year after year, the same brand names churn out bland, lightweight books on whatever is the topic of the moment, with no regard to authorial competence. It is the names that sell, after all. And thus the same speakers fill the same conference rosters time after time, with the supercharged aesthetics of the platforms distracting the audience from the insipid content of the performances. So much sound and fury. So much signifying nothing.
The most honest and consistent thing a Protestant minister could say today is, “I don’t have a book, The Bible is all we need, Anything I could say, the Reformers said it better. They parsed the weeds from the vines in regard to Catholic decadence and ritualism. I have nothing to add.”
The Reformers were upset that the Catholic church had too much authority. The Catholic critique today is we have too little. Sola Scriptura today can mean as little and as much as “I will submit to a teacher’s understanding of the Bible, so long as they agree with what I already think.” We have rightly rejected Rome’s papal authority, but we are tempted to become little pope’s of our own.
It’s not what the Reformers taught, of course. Sola Scriptura functioning properly is the prescription to the “My Bible, my choice” approach to building our intellectual cathedral of theological categories. The Christian walk is no longer a creed to live, but a fashion to wear. If it’s not what the reformers taught, we must ask ourselves which view is more publicly displayed. Our answer should give us patience with those not immediately seeing the depth and maturity of the Reformed Protestant position.
And the last point will be a cultural one. One of the better Catholic apologetics of the past century has been its defense of marriage from individualism and hormonal contraception. The average Protestant family had 5-7 kids up until the Civil War, and now, our TFR is barely above 2. Surely industrialization and the shifting incentives with child-rearing have some play at hand in this, but increasingly, the only types of Christians that have families resembling anything like the average Protestant family of just 100 years ago, are traditional-rite Catholics.
Catholics may be wrong on sacramentalizing marriage, but we must ask ourselves why it seems to be an effective bulwark against the individualization of marriage and sometimes outright rejection of children as “gifts from the Lord.”
And, let us land in our own backyard with a now infamous tract against Reformed Christianity. In the famous Catholic Apologetic tract, Rome Sweet Home, Scott Hahn documents his journey from Reformed Presbyterianism to “Roman” Catholicism. One crucial step in his journey demands attention.
Scott was tasked with revising his church’s liturgy. In the process, he asked, “Why is our church so pastor centered, why is our worship service so sermon centered?” In answering those questions, he submitted the fact that the only place where Christ said the word covenant is where He instituted the “Eucharist” or “The Lord’s Supper” and proposed that Communion be taken weekly. It was approved unanimously, and the rest of Scott’s journey began.
He documents that
“celebrating communion each week became the high point…It changed our life as a congregation. We started having a potluck lunch… to discuss the sermon, to share prayer concerns. We began to practice communion and to live it as well."
And who can blame him for recovering a long-lost reverence for The Lord’s Supper?
Search the end of Luke’s gospel, and you’ll find the longing of every sincere Christian
As they talked and discussed these things, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them but they were kept from recognizing him….They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Clepas, asked him, “are you only a visitor to Jerusalem
Jesus said to them, “How foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself…
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
They returned to Jerusalem…”It is true!” The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what has happened… and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.
This would then become Scott Hahn’s rediscovery of “The Mass.” While we might lament his crossing The Tiber, The Scriptures testify that the faithful Christian desires that “their heart burn within us” as they encounter The Lord, and that a suitable authority might “open the Scriptures to us.” And indeed, Christians of all walks have had such moments with The Lord. Their arresting tenderness bring the most God-hating atheist to their knees in praise.
But Scott needed to only recover his own heritage. There is a middle ground between “Every interpretation for himself” and unquestioned papal authority: A Sacramental Reformed Presbyterianism. What Scott Hahn “discovered”, Calvin urged:
“They ought, at the very least to have offered our Lord’s Supper to the assembled Christians Once a week, and to have proclaimed the promises which it contains and which feed and nourish us spiritually.”
“The presence of the body which the sacrament requires, a presence which, we hold is there revealed with such great power and efficacy that it not only gives our souls unerring confidence in eternal life, but also makes us certain of the immortality of our flesh, already quickened by Christ’s immortal flesh and already in a way sharing in his immortality” (Calvin is not arguing for Roman Transubstantiation, or Lutheran “Real Presence,” but some complex third thing).
“The ultimate aim of the sacrament is: to keep reminding ourselves of the death of Jesus Christ” (Calvin’s Institutes 641-650).
If a discerning Christian like Scott Hahn were to read Calvin again, would he see a reverent weekly remembrance of Christ’s death in The Lord’s Supper at the average Protestant church?
If not, we cannot blame him for choosing the forest instead of the desert; what Reformed Protestants have pruned from their own heritage, one can find in a crucifix in any given Catholic / Lutheran church: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up,” and for those who view the crucifix properly, a daily signpost to that that eternal sacrifice. Rome might have an impure, overly visual form, but let us heed Calvin, and plant a well-irrigated garden.
Let us see another conversion, this time from Atheism to Catholicism:
Life experience had led me to see the Christian idea of the Fall, and our Lord’s gift of radical repentance, as the most sensible solution to the brokenness all around me. That much was clear. But with Catholicism, there was the added assurance that came with two millennia of continuous authority.
The Church’s hierarchical character, which so repelled my Evangelical friends, was one of its attractions for me. It meant that, having seen off a thousand heresies, Rome would be less likely to permit the Christian idea to be distorted by the passing fads of the day….Then there was the liturgy. I longed for worship that gave full expression to the mysteries of the Christian faith.
Does this sound like someone rejecting The Traditional Presbyterian tradition laid out by Calvin? With all but the “two millennia of continuous authority,” Presbyterians have firm bulwarks against the various property gospels, the every-believer-for-themselves approach to Sola Scriptura, the “continuous” acceptance of worldly philosophies which prop up with every generation, and The Reformed Tradition has much reverence for the profound Mystery The Lord instituted in The Last Supper.
The “full expression” he intents, might connote incense, images, and gothic cathedrals, but surely this man is not rejecting the tradition of a Calvin or a Luther, he is rejecting a pampered-up POP Xtianity, and we should lament his landing in the wrong home, but recognize he has an intellectual mine-field when examining all of varying denominations within Protestantism.
Reaching men like this requires us to remain true to our Presbyterian Convictions, but intellectually charitable in understanding that the choice is not as simple as Historic Reformed faith vs. Roman Catholicism. There are a lot more theological sects to navigate through, and many of their shortcomings are more publicly evident and give “Protestantism” writ large a childish public image.
The difficulty of recovering the thought of men greater than us is adapting their thought to new and advanced categories. The Catholic church today is not the Catholic church of Trent, the Reformed church today is not Geneva, and the general plight of the earnest Christian now has many more options to “see through” in order to get to the substance of Historical, Creedal, Reformed Protestantism.
Let us get on our knees, let us get back to our roots, and let us see what we might grow. Perhaps those very fruits might be what makes someone cross the street one day.
