Posted 1:53 PM by Sarah G.
A Review of
The Theology of the Reformers

written by Timothy George
published by Broadman
reviewed by Duane Garner



Whether it was “the worst century since Jesus Christ” , as Erasmus stated it, or as Scottish Presbyterian William Cunningham would have it, “the greatest… series of events that has occurred since the close of the canon of scripture” , the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is one of the most written about and studied eras in history. Whichever analysis is correct, it is difficult to debate the fact that all of Western civilization is still living in the shadow of the Reformers and building upon the foundation which they laid. What is remarkable and sometimes forgotten by some modern historians is that this tumultuous time was not brought on primarily by a swell of cultural, political or scientific issues, though those concerns certainly and mightily influenced the Reformation in key areas, the Reformation was rather spurred by theological matters. At the heart of the Reformation laid weighty questions about man and his relationship to God, and the men who are most noted for their endeavor to answer those questions were not kings or artists or scientists. They were theologians. To understand the Reformation, one must understand their theology.

Timothy George takes on the task of expounding for us the particular theological issues most important to the four of the most important men of that day in Theology of the Reformers. Rather than providing yet another detailed account of Martin Luther’s harrowing escape to Wartburg after the Diet of Worms, of Huldrych Zwingli dying with sword in hand, or of John Calvin’s detour through Geneva, George has written an insightful and valuable summary of each man’s particular positions on the doctrinal points which drove the Reformation on in each man’s own part of the world. This volume covers the theologies of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Menno Simons sandwiched between a brisk overview of the social and political climate of the late medieval period and an analysis of the abiding work of the Reformation.

George takes on Luther to begin, separating the German reformer’s theology into its biblical, existential and dialectical elements. First, he points out that Luther’s theology was biblical in that it was fiercely anti-philosophical. Luther spat epitaths at “reason” calling it “the Devil’s Whore”, “beast” and “enemy of God”, rejecting the arrogance of rationality which had displaced the primacy of divine revelation in scholastic theology. Luther’s theology was, secondly, existential in its unashamed dependence upon the “personal, experiential and the relational”. True faith and theology, according to him, is hammered out in the life-long processes of struggle, conflict and temptation. Thirdly, the theology of Luther was dialectical. George writes, “Luther… seemed to revel in paradox.” , usually speaking in sets of two seemingly opposed ideas, such as “wrath and grace”, “faith and works” or “flesh and spirit”. He sought the truth that lied within the tension of two contrasting principles.

From there, our author details Luther’s positions on several of the central themes of the Reformation such as justification, predestination and the role of the state. What I found most interesting was George’s statements concerning Luther’s positions on the church. He writes that a major thrust of Luther’s ecclesiology came from his essentially spiritual and noninstitutional understanding of the character of the church. This supposition, among other things, influenced the reformer to conclude that the sermon, rather than the eucharist, should be the best and most necessary part of Christian worship, “investing it with an almost sacramental quality and [making] it the central focus of the liturgy.” He attacked the sacramental system of the medieval Church, and at some points it seems he sought to relieve the sacraments of their covenantal and efficacious significance. George writes that in Luther’s system, the sacraments “are not efficacious in their being celebrated but in their being believed in.” and that “they must be personally received, believed and appropriated.”

If George is correct (and is not simply projecting a Baptist sentiment upon the reformer), this author gives us the impression that, at least in some of his work, Luther was given to a certain amount of individualism. However, taking into consideration the great volume of his writings that have been preserved and the fact that almost every word he uttered was recorded, we ought to grant a measure of grace here and there and attempt to balance what we are reading at the moment with the Luther we have read in the past. This one point notwithstanding, George does as fine a job of balancing the dialectical theologian as can be expected in the hundred or so pages he devotes to Luther.

The theology of Zwingli is next in line, set against the backdrop and consistently flavored by George’s description of this reformer’s Swiss patriotism and Erasmian humanism. “Zwingli stands with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other.”, he writes, “This posture dramatically symbolizes not only the tension in Zwingli’s career which led to his tragic death but also his desire to bring every realm of life, [such as] church and state… into conformity with the will of God.” What exactly Zwingli understood to be the “will of God”, however, is the subject of our author’s investigation.
Zwingli’s early exposure to humanism seemed to color everything else he taught and believed throughout his short-lived career. True to the Christian humanist movement’s “back-to-the-sources” mantra, he memorized in Greek all of the Pauline Epistles. He exhibited a strong distaste for “externals” in religion and disdained the mysterious and sacramental. Zwingli’s cry of sola scriptura left almost no room for any human element in the teaching of the Scriptures. He claimed, “I did not learn my doctrine from Luther, but from God’s word itself.” and said, “I understand Scripture only in the way that it interprets itself by the Spirit of God. It does not require any human opinion.” and further remarked that there “will be a day when neither Jerome nor any other will mean much among Christians except scripture alone.”

This deeply rooted conviction lead Zwingli in a primitive and slightly gnostic direction as he attempted to strip the church of all of its worldy “extra-scriptural” entanglements. George relates how that even though Zwingli was an accomplished musician, he had the organ at the Great Minster in Zurich dismantled and removed out of a conviction that whatever is not strictly commanded in Scripture must be eliminated. It is unfortunate that tales like these are almost the sum of what we know of Zwingli’s ministry, being so relatively brief that he had time to do not much more than make a break with Rome and tear down some idols. George gives us the impression that this reformer’s theology was never as fully developed as the other reformers on key soteriological, ecclesiastical and sacramental points. He suggests this is at least partly due to the fact that not only did Zwingli not have the same number of years that were granted to Luther and Calvin, the time that he did have was spent on a war with a political and patriotic front rather than a purely ecclesiastical front.

The largest portion of this book is a survey of the theology of John Calvin. Granting a few brief sections to Calvin’s biography, George fleshes out the character of a man who, while desiring to live in scholarly seclusion “at peace in some unknown corner” found himself writing his treatises and sermons not “in an ivory tower, but against the background of teething troubles” in a house full of children. With such affirmations of the Genevan reformer’s character and personality, George works to soften the edges of this man that many readers might otherwise view as at best austere and at worse, as some called him, “the great black phantom”.

We get the idea from George’s analysis that Calvin’s theology was intensly pastoral and we see that a chief motive of Calvin’s pastoral concern was his love and respect for the Church. The author writes, “He had no patience with those who claimed they could worship just as well at home as they could in church. As his understanding of the Scriptures grew, and as the length of each successive edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion grew, he devoted an increasing amount of attention to the study of the Church and to working out the nuances of the relationship between the elect of God and the visible congregation. George writes, “The two poles of Calvin’s ecclesiology, divine election and the local congregation, are held together in the closest possible connection, frequently in the same sentence.” In this, Calvin certainly took no greater liberty than St. Peter (1 Peter 1:2) or St. Paul (Ephesians 1:1-6), and certainly held a robust understanding of the relationship between covenant and grace. To further affirm this, George quotes Calvin’s commentary on Titus, “God does not play games with us with empty figures but inwardly accomplishes by His own power the thing He shows us by the outward sign.”

George takes a number of pages to hoist up a strong apology for a Calvinist soteriology, acknowledging that though many have attempted, this doctrine cannot be reduced to shorthand formulas and simple acronymns. At once Calvin affirms God’s “watchful, effective, active, ceaseless engagement with the governance of the world He had created” and man’s “exercise of faith and the means by which we daily receive God’s benefits.” In attempting to sort out what Calvin taught about God’s eternal elective decrees and justice, George offers perhaps one of his most interesting comments in the entire volume. He writes, “To judge God’s providential acts by criteria of justice and wisdom applicable to humans only is to compare apples and oranges; it is like asking how many inches are in a pound.”

Turning from the magisterial reformers, George takes on one of radical reformers, Menno Simons. This is a man whose theology is almost as frightening as the engraving of him which the publisher included in this volume . Certainly some pity is due those who might have been disenfranchised by both the Catholic and Protestant parties in the Reformation, and perhaps the reaction of the reformers against those was more harsh than necessary, but it cannot be overlooked that their theology was extremely weak in a number of areas and bordered on outright heterodoxy at certain points.

Simons was the most prominent Anabaptist of his day, and as such provides us with probably the most accurate example of Anabaptist thought and doctrine. Though George seems sympathetic with Simons’ struggle against the more established branches of the church and with his inwardness to a degree, he does not have a problem pointing out his obvious errors. First, he indicates the strong anti-intellectual sentiment of the Anabaptist. “[Simons] chided the reformers for tempering their appeal to Scripture with human traditions and vain learning.”, writes George. Secondly, Menno tiptoed close to the heresy of Marcion, teaching that the New Testament took radical precedence over the Old. Strangely enough, in contrast to this concern, he accepted the apocryphal writings as canonical. Finally, the gnosticism inherent in the Anabaptist system poured out into his rejection of all “externals” even eventually including adult baptism. For Simons the guidance of the Spirit was to take precedence over the objective historical aspects of the faith.

In his final section, George explores some of the abiding effects of the reformation has had on the church and theology throughout the last four hundred years. He concludes that traces of each tradition, the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist and Anabaptist, has loaned its own influence to the modern Church, though some more prominantly than others. Not satisfied to pick one tradition as the best model, George is comfortable in proposing that the Church take the best from each model and continue to add to it as she matures in her understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

Timothy George’s work provides a simple and lucid overview of the theological positions of the most important men in the time of the Reformation, and as such brings into clearer focus those matters which eventually shaped theology in the west for centuries following.

Posted 1:51 PM by Sarah G.
A Review of
The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century

written by Roland Bainton
published by Beacon Press
reviewed by Duane Garner


Roland H. Bainton’s brief survey of the Protestant Reformation duly titled The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century is a tight, pithy analysis of the men and events both prominent and influential during that pivotal time in Western history. The Yale University Professor of Ecclesiastical History gives great insight into exactly how Renaissance thought and culture increased the tension between various late-medieval churchmen and set the stage for the rift that would eventually fracture the Christian church for centuries beyond. Seasoned with more than a score of interesting woodcut illustrations from the period, this work certainly provides an excellent starting point for any study of the period.

Bainton’s introduction to this work provides a broad overview of the societal and ecclesiastical sentiments of the day. He writes, “The Renaissance shifted interest from heaven to earth, while geographical expansion enlarged the known earth. The Renaissance manifested more enthusiasm for classical than Christian antiquity.” This time was marked by revival of interest in all things Hellenistic concomitant with a renewal of commerce and exploration, sparked in part by the growing mysticism, corruption and therefore distancing-from-“reality” of the church. Luther remarked that the church against which his critique was directed was fewer than four hundred years old, which would indicate that the ecclesiastical shift which had begun centuries before predicated the cultural shift that produced the struggles of the sixteenth century. Papal schisms and the regent’s common use of bishops as pawns undercut the scholastic’s trust and respect for the Church, giving birth to an air of individualism with regard for matters of religion. Long before the German drove nails into the door of the Castle Church, the Church was facing a growing competition for the hearts of the people. The universal man, a product of the Renaissance, was discovering interests outside the bounds of the Church’s dogma and pursuing those interests quite freely. The church began its drift toward the periphery of the culture. Our author sets upon the task of how both the Roman church and the Reformers set about to carry the day and re-establish the Church at the center of society in the West.

Devoting three meaty chapters to the biography and an overview of theology of Martin Luther, Bainton begins with a look at Luther’s Faith. He provides us with key insights into the internal dialectical struggle that shaped Luther and led to his explosion onto the late medieval scene. We are told that as a young monk, Luther laid on himself all of the austerities he could handle , and that all of his rigorism lead him not to a more secure sense of the love of God toward him but to greater and increasing despair. Realizing that he was failing to earn God’s favor by his own piety alone, he turned to Augustinian doctrine for an answer at which point he was shocked even further by the suggestion that man’s fate is not ultimately in his own hands. Luther response was, “What fairness is there in this? What justice? Is not a God who so acts to be considered base, cruel, despicable? Who can love such a God? ‘Love him?’ said Luther. ‘I do not love him. I hate him.’” His monastic brothers, running out of answers to his questions and solutions to his problems, convinced him to pursue a doctorate and become a preacher. This had the effect of driving Luther to the source book of Christianity and of his giving himself completely to the study of it.

Because no study of the Reformation can go without referencing all of the abuses and extravagant claims of the late medieval Church, Bainton heads into his chapter on Luther’s reform with a quick recapitulation of the events which lead the Reformer’s initial protest against the traffic of indulgences. From there Luther was swept into the center of a conflict that had been simmering for years just waiting for the right moment to boil over. Bainton proposes that Luther was not inventing a new form of Christianity with which to assail the Church, nor was he even re-discovering some primitive expression of Christianity, but rather, “Luther was really pitting one type of Catholicism against another, Augustinism against Thomism.” With such a perspective we see Luther as less of a revolutionary, and more as a conventional theologian who simply wanted to see the Church set back on the proper path. Bainton writes that this is evident in how Luther responded when confronted by radicals, “He would take the middle way between Rome and the firebrands.”

Bainton reveals that Luther’s opponents did not reside only in Rome. While Luther was certainly a man of his day, a child of the Renaissance who benefited from the earlier work of the Christian humanists, yet he “lived to rail against Erasmus almost more than against the pope.” Our author illustrates how the German reformer confronted the primitivism, rationalism and individualism of both the humanists and radicals throughout his ministry to the end. While Bainton is kind to Luther, he does not overlook his warts, and provides in his exposition of the life of Luther a foundation for the rest of the study of the Reformation.

Moving south from Germany, Bainton lands in Zurich, Switzerland, home of Ulrich Zwingli. He provides the important insight that “Wittenberg, Zurich, Geneva and Canterbury were sisters rather than lineal descendants” during the time of the reformation, ensuring that the reader understands that Zwingli’s reformation was not a product of Luther’s, nor was Calvin’s in the fullest sense. These all developed somewhat concurrently, and thus we see that all were colored and nuanced quite a bit differently on certain points of application and doctrine, and, as it would seem otherwise, each was not a more highly developed expression of the theology of the Reformer that came before.

Bainton’s work on Zwingli in this volume centers around the Swiss reformer’s rabid hostility toward anything that could have been possibly engineered by Rome. Through his careful lectio continua method of study and preaching, he arrived at the conclusion that many of the common practices of the Church were not warranted in Scripture, such as veneration of images and clerical celibacy. He sought to test every single practice of the Church by Scripture, placing Scripture as the final authority, believing that the established Church was the innovator and reformers like him were he restorers of the truth faith. Bainton shows how Zwingli eventually bled the sacraments of all their real significance and sought to establish an aggressive theocracy in Zurich, all in an effort to make the sort of severe theological and geo-political break with Rome that the other Reformers did not really wish to make. This further separated Zwingli and Zurich from the Lutheran Reformation, for Luther feared that if he were to unite with such a radical personality, it would close the door on any further reconciliation with Rome. Such was the state of things as Zwingli left them when he died, sword in hand, defending his theocracy against its attackers.

Spending just a few short pages on John Calvin, Bainton is content to fold the full history of the Reformed branch of the Reformation into the bigger story of the events of the years that followed the deaths of Calvin and Luther. In the space he does allow Calvin, however, he makes a few interesting statements concerning Calvin’s life and ministry. He calls Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion the book which made Protestantism intellectually acceptable. Bainton shows how only Calvin in those days produced an acceptable test by which God’s people could be known; a test that no other group, reforming or radical could seem to develop. Finally, our author presents this stirring conclusion: “For Calvin the doctrine of election was an unspeakable comfort because it eliminated all such worries and freed man from concern about himself in order that he might devote every energy to the unflagging service of the sovereign Lord. Calvinism therefore bred a race of heroes.” [emphasis mine] The professor thus describes John Calvin in a way that would lead us to think of him as the most clear-headed leader and most precise theologian of the reformation.

Bainton eventually finds his way to the curious reformation of England, a land that before the time of the Reformation (and even for a good period of time after) produced no distinctive confession and no great work of theology. Our author helps us muddle through the difficult history of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance in England through the political and papal maneuvers of King Henry VIII until his death, at which point England was left in ecclesiastical chaos. “This is the time when England passed from schism to heresy, first to Lutheranism, then to Zwinglianism, and even to Calvinism.”, writes Bainton. “No new English theology emerged… The movement of the Reform under Edward and Mary exhibited no so much combinations of diverse elements as zigzagging first to the left and then to the right, until a certain stabilization was achieved in the settlement of Elizabeth.” What was produced was the conglomerate theology of Anglicanism, proudly called, “The Middle Way” . It was meant to provide that belief about God be left to the individual, while the state regulated public aspects of religion. The Book of Common Prayer and Thirty Nine imprecise Articles of Faith were produced in order to find establish some commonly held ground among the churches and to put an end to the bitter wrangling that had been characteristic of Christianity in England.

At the close of this volume Bainton explores the effects of the Reformation on the political, economic and domestic spheres of life. While the Reformation was at its very core religious, a man’s faith has obvious implications for all other areas on his life. Lutheranism and Calvinism could not change a man’s mind about God without also changing his mind about himself. All areas of society and culture were impacted in each of those European cities touched by the work of the reformers.

The sixteenth-century upheaval of political, societal, and ecclesiastical establishment will likely be closely studied and researched for centuries to come, at least until some greater event takes its place in history. The fact that we can still be so gripped and fascinated by the re-telling of these events, as Bainton has done, demonstrates how deeply our culture has been impacted by the work of a handful of Christian men who loved the Church enough to set her back on the right path. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century is an essential starting point for any student hoping to understand the important people, events and ideas of the Protestant Reformation.

Posted 1:46 PM by Sarah G.
A Review of
The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures
in the Worship of the Christian Church
Volume 4: The Age of the Reformation


written by Hughes Oliphant Old
published by Eerdmans
reviewed by Duane Garner

Princeton Theological Seminary’s Hughes Oliphant Old continues his study on preaching in worship throughout the history of the Christian Church in volume four of his planned-seven-volume series on the subject, titled “The Age of the Reformation”. It is important to note right from the beginning that in this volume Old actually spends more space dealing with the direct descendents of the Reformation and those participants in the counter-Reformation than he does with the preaching of the Reformers themselves. I doubt this is an oversight on his part, for both the trends in worship and preaching which arose as reactions against the preaching of Luther and Calvin, and those trends that represented Lutheran and Calvinist practices wrongly applied all have had as much impact on the history of the Church as those practices of the magisterial reformers themselves, if not a greater impact. Throughout, Old provides consistent and thorough analysis of each preacher he investigates and has done good work to further preserve elements of Church history which might otherwise be overlooked.

Poor preaching was a prominent ill among the many sicknesses the Reformers sought to medicate. Luther mocked the preachers of his day, contending that they “run through the gospel superficially and then follow it up with a fable... or a story..., or he mixes in something from Plato, Aristotle or Socrates.” , and that in their sermons they put a stronger emphasis on the moralistic aspects of the Christian life than was appropriate . Luther in turn set the course for the preaching style of the Protestant Reformation with his determination to make all preaching evangelistic in the sense that it should aim to proclaim the gospel, rather than to rehearse the classics of antiquity, and that it should be done within the Church directed to Christians, not to pagans. Old provides fine examples of how Luther sought to achieve such in his preaching by relating for us a few of the German reformer’s catechetical sermons and some his sermons on the Gospel of John. For Luther, preaching was an act of worship , and by hearing, believing and following the preached word, he believed that we worship him the most profound sense possible.

Old, in his section on Zwingli, gives us a brief history on the revival of the practice of lectio continua preaching, which was a systematic method of preaching through one book of the Bible after another . The Zurich reformer’s love for the lectio continua preaching of Chrysostom, lead to the first true liturgical reform of Protestantism . Though not many of Zwingli’s sermons remain, we do know that he was first in line to scrap the traditional Christian liturgical calendar favoring instead to lead his congregation through the books of the Bible he selected to preach. Zwingli’s efforts in effect pushed the pulpit to a place of prominence in the liturgy and pushed the communion table off to the side. Though not all of the reformers of his day followed him in this regard, many of those who proceeded in the next generation did.

John Calvin maintained a higher regard for the Lord’s table, desiring a celebration of Holy Communion every Lord’s Day , and yet he worked alongside the other reformers in cleaning up a Church calendar filled with feast days and fast days and days devoted to an innumerable host of saints . Concerning the Genevan’s preaching, Old writes, “Calvin believed it very important that the preaching of the Lord’s Day pass on Christ’s teaching. To the observance of the Lord’s Day belonged the hearing of the Lord’s Word.” Calvin was so intensely devoted to passing on the teaching of the Word of the Lord that he sometimes preached every day of the week for a month at a time. Our author gives us detailed accounts of this reformer’s holy week sermons, showing the pastoral care and concern that Calvin poured into each of them.

Old turns briefly to the subject of the reformation efforts in England which were so odd in nature, one is led to question the nature of that reformation and whether much change was ever achieved at all. The scholar comments that when one reads about the English views on subjects such as the special presence of Christ at Communion, one often gets the feeling that they rarely penetrated to the heart of the discussion as it developed on the Continent. Old provides one example of the ecclesiastical climate of in the sixteenth century, writing, “The system of benefices had left the preaching and teaching ministry of the church of Gloucester in the hands of vicars, many of whom could scarcely recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostle’s Creed, let alone teach their congregations the basic rudiments of the faith.” Into this age came Hugh Latimer and John Hooper, whose work lead to the development of The Book of Common Prayer which became the chief means of bringing about reform in Britain.

Moving forward in history to the preaching of the Counter-Reformation, Old comments that after the Council of Trent, “Catholic preaching went a very different direction from the preaching of the Reformation... quite intentionally” , and that it “all seems much more Roman than Catholic.” Our author relates the preaching styles and the sermon content of such Spanish Roman Catholic preachers as Thomas of Villanova and Juan of Avila, Jesuits like Francis Xavier and some of the French humanists among others proving that in every regard, “The Counter-Reformation was intent on bringing the classical philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome into concord with the teaching of Christ and the apostles...” which lead to a definition of “salvation in terms of deification.” If there is any benefit we Protestants may gain from a study of their preaching, it is their preservation of the liturgical calendar, kept as it was through the centuries as a tool of summarizing the gospel through holidays and celebration. Old provides a few good examples of the sermons they preached on such occasions, along with a schedule of the days they observed.

Summarizing the early English Puritans, Old succinctly states “Puritanism produced profound preaching.” The Puritans picked up the reform of England and the reform of preaching in particular where Latimer and Hooper left off. “If the reform of preaching was a major concern of the Puritans, it was because the English church had failed to produce in sufficient quantity the kind of preaching that would make the Reformation more than a mere institutional reform.” , writes Old. The author supplies ample biographies of such men as William Perkins, Thomas Goodwin and Dr. Thomas Manton who preached sermons “a good hour or two long” , detailed and systematic, aimed at “the conversion of those who were only nominally Christian to full Christian faith.” , and sometimes bringing their congregations “to question their salvation”. While this sort preaching might have certainly been necessary for that hour and place, its effects on Protestantism, particularly in American Protestantism, have not been all for the better. Such scholasticism as was prominent in Puritan preaching places the sermon outside of the liturgy altogether and gives it a life of its own apart from worship. Obviously sympathetic to the Puritan style, Old remarks, “Preaching does not, after all, have to be enclosed in the liturgy in order to be worship.” On this point I depart from him. A two-hour- long address set apart from the liturgy goes by a different name. We call it a lecture. Validating the divorce between sermon and sacrament leads one naturally in a revivalist direction, and away from a sound ecclesiology.

Old presents the distinctives of Anglicanism as the product of a courtship between the churches of England and the Baroque spirit . Having a general distaste for both Calvinism and all such “gloomy-minded religion” , the Anglican preachers of the seventeenth century were known for their liberal humor, charm and eloquence in their sermons . Old gives us one interesting example of the day, Robert South, who while it is told that he had a devastating wit which amused the courtiers and entertained His Majesty Charles II, profound he was not. His drippy, romantic sermon titles hung over his “rather racy” preaching. Like his colleagues, his aim was to produce a public morality which he hoped would bring salvation to the kingdom of England. Such was the sort of preaching in an age where people were developing higher interests than the Word of God.

Briefly encompassing the growth of Protestant Orthodoxy in Germany, France and the Netherlands, Old details the peculiar nuances that Reformation theology developed in each part of the Continent. The preachers of the German baroque period furthered the work begun by Luther in developing textbooks on preaching, writing hymns and elaborating on Lutheran theology . The Germans seemed pleased to remain in the Gothic age for a time, eschewing the flourishes of the Baroque, retaining a simple, unassuming oratory style. The French Protestants grew in a rationalist and slightly moralist direction as a minority in their rocky and arid field of labor. As such they demanded serious, well-thought-out preaching. The origins of the Dutch tradition is seen in the theological growth in the Netherlands in the century-and-a-half following the Reformation. Old writes, “It somehow belonged to the very nature of Dutch Christianity that the inward experience of worship was taken to be of the greatest possible importance.” The Dutch preachers focused so extensively on the “inward life” that “one often looks at the worship of Dutch Protestantism and gets the impression that nothing is going on.” The Dutch preachers engendered such sentiments with their consistent preaching on the concern of deepening the piety of the faithful.

In his final section, Old surveys preaching in the age of King Louis XIV. He suggests that “pulpit eloquence reached an unparalleled height during the reign of the most splendid of French kings.” Toward the beginning of that age, Roman Catholic preachers Jacques Bossuet and Jean-Baptiste Massillon represented the highest and best of French elocutionary skills and their preaching achieved a sort of high art status. Their preaching seems to have had little more effect than the opera on the morals of both the aristocracy and the society. While their sermons could bring men to tears on several occasions, the congregations continued right along with their insensitivity , lasciviousness and adultery. Toward the end of that era, French Roman Catholic preaching joined the Puritans, the Germans and the Dutch, in developing a pietistic concern for holiness, manifesting itself in preaching on the intimate, inward matters of personal faith and life.

Thus, Old’s volume ends abruptly, with no conclusion or final analysis. Though his work is plodding and slow in sections, Old has done the necessary job of setting down the work of some relatively obscure pastors and preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, in order that we may learn from the words spoken from the pulpits of the past, thank God for their truths and seek to improve upon their errors.

Posted 8:42 AM by Sarah G.
Exploring the Relationship Between Church and Culture
Duane Garner

From the earliest days of the primitive church to the present day, the Christian Church has struggled with the matter of how intimate it should be with the present world, its systems, governments, arts and culture and how it should operate in the societies in which it is placed. The first century gnostic answered that the Church should withdraw as much as possible from everything material and fleshly, and focus only on the introspective spiritual aspects of religion. Both the apostles and the Church fathers strongly rebuked this view since it at once truncated the mission of the Church and fundamentally denied the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Another answer presented itself with Constantine the Great, who as emperor of Rome in the early fourth century after claiming to have been converted by Christ, put an end to all persecution of Christians in the empire and declared Christianity to be the religion of the state. By entrusting some government functions to the Christian clergy he effectively made the Church an agency of the imperial government. Though some scholars say that no more than a fifth of the population could have been Christian at that time, by Constantine’s decree the Church was given a foothold in Western Civilization that it has never completely relinquished since. Still, there were major challenges that arose between the Church and the Empire that could only be resolved by compromise on the part of the Church. What would be an ideal for many, this Christian Empire was far from perfect.

Since the time of Constantine, the position of the Church in Western culture has been steadily eroding, and has that erosion has only quickened in the last three hundred years. In the post-enlightenment era various factions within the Church responded in a number of different ways to the problems that arise when Christians live, work, play and worship in a world seemingly dominated by all that is anti-Christ. These issues have only intensified in the post-modern world. Whereas at one time the Church might have at least have been seen as the nanny of the state to be deferred to at times and manipulated when needed, the Church now more often than ever is seen as the state’s outright enemy. The Christian religion competes with the religion of nationalism for the hearts of men and the two are not compatible. Modern Western governments understand that the Church and State have a difficult time peacefully co-existing and have fought to drive Christianity out of the culture at large and into the heads and hearts of people where it can do little damage and stay out of the way of national progress.

The Church has been kicked off the field and is no longer even allowed on the sidelines of culture. No matter how we may try to spin it, the reality is that the Church has been evicted from its place in society. As a result, Christians have begun to feel desperately useless, feeling as if they have nothing left to offer this post-Christian world. Churches have developed all sorts of strategies to stem the losses and turn the tide, but those strategies are nothing more than fads, changing as soon as a new book can be published advocating yet another method of cutting through the post-modern haze and reaching the apathetic and unchurched.

As gloomy as it may seem, even as I write these words the most popular films of our day, screened in movie theaters all around the world are based on the literary work of a unabashed professing Christian. J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings trilogy, written fifty years ago is gaining a new generation of readers and leaving an indelible mark on the history of Western literature. This is most remarkable because of the fact that the Rings trilogy is profoundly Christian. Tolkien and his Oxford colleague C. S. Lewis, one of the most prominent voices for evangelical Christianity of the past century, often discussed the ways in which the Christian faith could be expressed in alternative shapes and forms. They believed that one can communicate the content of Christianity without explicitly repeating Bible verses, or words lifted from the creeds or confessions. Tolkien in particular wanted to create a literature in which the Christian faith was implied rather than imposed, and suggested rather than lectured. In the Rings trilogy, the words "God" or "Christ" or even “Providence” never appear, but the reality to which these words refer is communicated in every passage of the text, much in the same way these things are seen in the Old Testament book of Esther where the name of “God” is never mentioned, but His hand is clearly seen.

Tolkien’s literature demonstrates exactly how the Christian faith can be incarnated into a well-crafted, beautiful, intelligent cultural context, and sets the bar high for other artists to follow. Unfortunately, many of our contemporaries have not been as skilled as Tolkien nor have they been as subtle in the way they marry the Christian faith to their art and translate it to the culture. The strategy that most Christian authors and musicians seem to employ is to jump onto decade-old pop fads and to do them with slightly less quality than the secular artists with whom the fads originated. To any discerning reader or appreciator of music, a work described as a Christian song or novel is to say that it is a poorly written and preachy song or novel. A Christian film is a film with an invitation to salvation by Billy Graham or some other c-list actor at the end. A Christian painting is an oozing sentimental religious artifact that only belongs in grandma’s spare bedroom. To say something is Christian art is to say that it is bad art.

Twentieth century Christian culture has become not much more than a subset of camp culture. For the past century or so, it has sung the single monotone note of revivalistic decisional regeneration. Because it has not grown or developed beyond that, it remains a culture only for the one debating about whether to convert to Christianity and for the intellectually and spiritually stunted. It provides virtually no substance for the mature, thinking, “meat-eating” Christian. What it does provide is a syncretistic form of religion as it fuses the worst that the culture has to offer with a distorted view of the Christian faith.

This has driven many Christians into a form of secular-cultural hedonism. Because the “Christian” schlock on the shelves at bookstores and music racks is so mind-numbingly worthless and there are no Christian film producers to speak of, and because God has created us with a hunger for beauty and music and creativity, culturally starved Christians gorge themselves silly with the best that pagan artists have to offer. The danger lies in the effect of the constant, penetrating bombardment of athiestic themes that is characteristic of modern twenty-first century popular culture. For a mature Christian to enjoy and benefit from anything produced by most modern artists and authors, there is a reserved part of him that is vigilant and wary of the worldviews and messages being communicated in modern art. The Christian can never abandon himself to a full-bodied appreciation of modern art in the same way he can to the artistic expressions of those who lived long ago in a more ecclesiocentric society. What oftentimes results is that the Christian who allows himself to enjoy popular art develops an almost schizophrenic approach to the Church and culture. He separates the two into firm categories of sacred and secular and the two never overlap. When he is in the one, it is difficult to relate to the other.
Other, more fundamentalist, Christians opt for a more severe rigorism in cultural matters. They refuse to own a television and have not seen a movie in thirty years. Put-off by the errors of what is offered in Christian culture, and mortified by the explicit athiesm in popular culture, they simply choose to ignore all forms of modern music and literature. Few have an idea of how to make things better, and see the society around them irreparable and un-redeemable. They retreat into their own reality and equate their asceticism with true holiness.

Must we choose between syncretism, hedonism and retreatist rigorism, or is there a better way? While each of these positions might have a good argument here or there, each is weak in that they fail to provide the means or the strategy for the Church’s eventual success and dominion over all the earth. Sycretism puts the Church in a position where it is indiscernable from the world. The culture of the Church will look exactly like the culture of the world, only somewhat dated. The Christian cultural hedonist builds a thick dividing barrier between the sacred and the secular and makes it difficult to influence the one with the other. The sacred rarely makes it over the wall and when it does, it feels quite embarrassed to be there, much less does it find itself in a position to effect much change. The retreatist dares not engage the culture at all, fearing that he will become contaminated by it. What happens to the world outside of his walls is really of no consequence to him, because it is all passing away into oblivion, and good riddance.
At the heart of each of the most popular approaches is the individualism that plagues the Church in so many key areas. Every man does for himself what seems right for him and his family with no broad view of how his position affects the broader concerns of the Church and of the society in which he lives. This is no surprise, because if he were to ask of his church what should be his position as it relates to his culture, his church would likely have no well-conceived thought or direction on the matter. Even worse, the Church as a whole, splintered and divided as it is in our day has no single initiative or vision of how the culture should be transformed and reclaimed by the Gospel. Without a common ecclesiastical strategy there can be no lasting impact on society.

Any solution to these problems that we might mention must take into account the fact that no solution can be effectively implemented until the Church can act and move as one body. It is quite wonderful for someone like me to say the Church ought to do this or that, but until there is unity of vision and objective within the body of Christ it is nothing more than another academic exercise. Such unity may be achieved if one congregation, fueled by an aggressive catholicity and a zealous regard for the culture, is able to influence those churches nearest it in geography and denominational affiliation, which in turn could influence other churches in an ever-expanding circle of influence. Such a vision may be too broad for this generation, but the path to accord must begin somewhere and perhaps the seeds can be sown today in hope of an abundant ecumenical harvest in the future.

In stating this, I dare not be so bold as to assert that I have the answers for all of the ills of the Church. As the great Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder stated, “… culture is certainly something that Christianity is concerned with. But… historical Christianity has never been able in the course of the ages to lead one specific cultural idea to victory, neither has it ever fully completed any of its mandates regarding cultural life. One will find here the most extreme variations: there is a vast difference between cultural imperialism – as it was developed by the Church of Rome in certain periods – and the isolated position, separatism and asceticism of the ‘pious’ – shy people and congregations that are of the opinion that they represent true Christianity only in this sort of shyness. Who would be able to derive a cultural standard from such a ‘Christianity’?”

It is with great caution that we should proceed to draw any absolute conclusions on these issues given the past two-thousand years worth of men much greater than we who were unable to completely resolve the conflict. While we can be sure that we do not have all of the answers, we may also learn that we do not even know all of the questions. The best we can hope for is to build on the wisdom of our fathers and learn from their errors in order to develop a better picture of what our relationship is to the world around us.
There are at least three roles the Church must fill and which should be kept in tension as she seeks to relate to the culture. The Church is to at once rival culture, plunder culture, and be the source of culture. Each focus must be kept concomitantly with the others in order to steer the Church away from wandering too far in any of the extreme directions detailed above.

The concept of the Church as rival of culture has as its greatest apologist the Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, who lived in what some could regard as the golden age of Christianity. Yet, in that post-Constantinian Roman empire, Christians still struggled with the problem of evil. They assumed that an empire ruled by Christianity should enjoy peace, protection and prosperity. St. Augustine’s answer was that the limitations of human institutions and nature prevent Christ’s teachings from ever being fully implemented. In Augustine’s terminology, the City of God is not the same as the City of Man. Consequently we cannot and should not expect from the kingdoms of this world what they are not capable of providing. The two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, are constantly at war, St. Augustine warns us. But we know to whom the final victory belongs. Augustine wrote The City of God to show how the hordes of heathens who were invading Rome were part of God’s plan in the eventual, inevitable fall of Rome and to teach that Christ, not the empire, was the salvation of mankind. In other words, according to St. Augustine, history has direction, history has meaning - the unfolding of God's grand plan.

If we analyze our present condition using Augustine’s model, it does not take much effort for us to see the evident truth that the Church and the kingdoms of men are antithetical systems. They are not in league and they cannot be synthesized. They are enemies. The tragedy is that the heathen know this very well, but very few Christians understand it. The Church is at war with human societies and human institutions. They are anti-Christ and athiestic, and no matter how glowingly they may frame their position on the Church, it is a mask to hide their self-serving interests.

If the Church would thus realize her true orientation toward the world, she would no longer so quickly ally with every politician who glanced her way to be used and discarded after each election. She would establish policy and initiatives to correct the ills of society and politicians would come to her to validate their own existance.

She would understand that it is not her task to continually search for some magic golden key to unlock the hearts of men so that they would finally accept her for what she really is, and for her message to become plausible to the world. The Church would instead take the rank of authority on all matters of life, refusing to reduce the great mysteries to pabulum for the post-modern palate and render the world irrelevant unless it came to the Church for the answers.

Knowing that the kingdoms of men are her enemy, the Church would go on the attack against the institutions that compete against her for the hearts of men, rather than sit in her defensive position, ever retreating. She would seek to actively undermine and subvert the athiestic principles of the university, the courthouse and the mass media wherever they can be found. Such a perspective is necessary to transform the Church sedentary into the Church militant once again.

To understand the Church’s role as plunderer of culture and the significance of that function, it would be profitable to review the construction of the “tabernacle in the wilderness” in the book of Exodus. After giving them the Law at Mt. Sinai, God commanded His people to construct for Him a transportable house of worship, and to build it out of the most rare and expensive materials available. An inventory of sorts is provided in Exodus 38 – 39. Every precious metal was employed in the building and the furniture a wells as exotic jewels and textiles; everything from acacia wood to badger skins. We might ask how a nomadic group of people, fleeing slavery in Egypt, now journeying through the middle of the Arabian desert could produce such an abundance of costly resources. We can only presume that they took all of these items from the Egyptians as they left: “And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.” (Exodus 12:35-36)

I certainly do not want to make more of this event than is prudent, but neither do I want to make less of its significance than is necessary. What is the significance of the fact that God’s people built a tabernacle out of the spoil that they had taken from the heathens?

This is a decidedly anti-gnostic exercise the Israelites undertake. The things that were taken from the Egyptian culture might have rightly been considered tainted or unclean, yet God commands them to take the spoils of the Egyptian artisans and to sanctify them by using them as the building materials of His tabernacle. God redeems the best art and artifacts of the Egyptian society by incorporating them into His design, declaring that the things in and of themselves are not unholy or to be despised, but that their use can be changed to fit a holy purpose.

Herein lies one answer to the question of whether a Christian can rightly enjoy the fruits of clever pagans and artistic heathens, and whether the Church may learn and gain insight from them and incorporate their work into her own mission. Rather than completely being given over to the culture or entirely retreating from it, the Church has the latitude to see beauty and quality where it exists, enjoy it, utilize what is useful and discard the rest. The Church can effectively engage the arts, culture, and philosophy only if it has a good understanding of the major trends and influences in those arenas, thus it is required that the Church be involved in them. Christians will continue to have only minimal influence upon the culture if they continue to define themselves only by how loud they boo from the worst seats in the stadium. The playing field belongs to the Church and it must get down out of the stands in order to engage the enemy and win the contest. We cannot with much credibility sneer at the worst art, movies, music and literature produced by this present culture, while the best the Church has had to offer over the last century is DC Talk and Thomas Kinkade.

The Church is now in a position where she must first plunder the culture and take the best of what is there in order to create something better, more glorious and beautiful. In order to make beautifully crafted movies, we have to first learn how the pagans operate cameras. For Churchmen to write plays that are straightforward about right and wrong and show the true consequences of each, they have to learn their craft from other playwrights, and precious few of those are Christian. If the Church is ever going to compose great music again, it will first have to learn from the good and bad of all the great composers, both heathen and holy, before it can move the art form forward.

In Luke 16, Jesus concluded the parable of the shrewd steward with the statement, “the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” We stand to learn much from the wiser and more talented men of the world in the way that they operate and manipulate the world’s systems to their own advantage. There is a cunningness and an aggressiveness that is present in the most successful men in the world, but is lacking in the Church’s leaders. Our message and our mission in the world could be helped greatly by marrying the shrewdest political and business tactics with the truth and integrity of the Gospel. We plunder the culture in order to enhance our own culture and deck the household of God with the best materials available.

Finally, it is correct to view the Church as the source of culture. The Church’s purpose in history does not terminate with the conversion of individual souls. The scope of the mission of the Church contains all facets of life and human existance, transforming everything from government to education to the arts to the home, and bringing it all under the Kingship of Jesus Christ. The Church completes this mission by subverting the culture that is, plundering it of all of its worth and then establishing itself as the only culture capable of maintaining consistency, justice, truth and beauty.

One only has to compare the cultures of non-Western nations to those of Western European nations where there is still a residual effect of the influence of the Church as source of culture. Non-Western countries can, as a rule, be classified as unfeeling, brutal and squalid. The regard for human life in many of these places is nearly nil. Some of them torture and execute criminals in the most cruel and hideous manner right in the middle of the public square. Such would be unthinkable in a Western culture. Illiteracy is high and industrial productivity is low. Art, where it can be found, is ugly, representative of the twisted and demonic passions of the culture. Music is discordant and aimless, paintings and sculptures are disproportioned and disfigured, and literature is non-existent. Without Christian missionaries there would be no hospitals, orphanages or programs to feed the hungry. People would die like dogs, as they have for centuries and their bodies piled on trash heaps. Ethiopeans and Indians produce nothing beautiful because they are too busy starving and dying of disease. They perish because their gods are made of stone and cannot hear their cries.

Only a Christian culture will build a university, a hospital or a symphony hall. Christian cultures invent cars and computers and televisions. Even though non-Christian cultures can manufacture those things, they can only rotely copy the original. Nearly all innovation that makes inventions better comes from the West. It takes a Christian culture to produce a Hamlet, an “Ode to Joy” and a Mona Lisa. Only artists living on the interest of the Church’s equity are free enough, and have a great enough sense of beauty and truth to produce such masterpieces.

The Church must realize that she has been the source of everything good and comely and productive over the last two-thousand years, and return to building up her own culture rather than pandering to the post-modern. Christianity must reclaim its center. Instead of merging with the society and using only its language and symbols, the Church must reclaim her heritage as a “peculiar people” with her own language, symbols, customs and sacraments. Instead of trying to be relevant to the culture, it must be a culture.
A significant component of a culture is a sense of community, and this is the one thing the Church can do better than all of her competitors. The Church must rebuild her community by properly practicing the liturgy, celebrating the Eucharist, participating in the corporate reading of Scripture, building the members up through aggressive hospitality and encouraging mutual dependence between her members. Acting as a community, the Church can meet the needs of her people the way that no human institution can ever hope, to the envy of all the world.

These three perspectives on the relationship between Church and culture are essential to the Church’s survival and success. Because we know that the Church will ultimately survive and succeed, all that is left to ask is whether we will work toward its survival and success in our lifetime, or whether we will allow her flame to flicker and her people to be driven underground for a few generations before she can rise again to her place of prominence.

The Church is no longer the chaplain and sponsor of Western civilization, and is not likely to regain that position ever again. Now is a good time for the Church to reevaluate herself and regroup. The fact that postmodern factors have pushed Christianity from its center position in society should shock the Church into a serious assessment of her health and effectiveness.

Before she can go on attack, the Church must resolve the bitter sectarian and schismatic in-fighting that has been raging for four hundred years. The Churches that can, must work to unify as much as is possible, and those that cannot must be left behind. Following that, the Church must understand that her struggle is not between flesh and spirit, but between Christ and anti-Christ. The Church cannot take hold of the reins of the culture so long as it believes that the antithesis is placed between itself and the physical world. The Church must then produce an atmosphere for the cultivation of thinkers, industrialists and all manner of artists. When more Christians than non-Christians are writing, composing, building, inventing, painting and creating the culture will be turned and redeemed.

Jesus’ promise to Peter that He would build His church, “and (that) the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” has often been interpreted as a promise that no matter how fierce the attack of the armies of hell, the Church would stand and endure. This interpretation simply does not make sense for the very fact that gates are not offensive measures. Gates are defensive. Jesus’ promise is that the gates of hell will not stand and endure the fierce withering attacks of the Church.

Christ has not put his Church on the defense, but on the offense. The Church is marching against the gates of hell as rival of the cultures of men, plundering them for anything of worth and establishing itself as the source of all that is good and beautiful among men.