A NOTE TO NEW PAID SUBSCRIBERS:WE ARE NEARING THE END OF THE SUMMER CHURCH HISTORY SERIES
IF YOU ARE JUST NOW JOINING IN, you can begin here — or start with whatever you like! We’ve been going through my book, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story.
You can watch all the previous videos, listen to the interviews with Beth Allison Barr and Jemar Tisby, read the excerpts and selections, and catch up on the lively comment sections by going to the FRONT PAGE of the Cottage website and looking for all the posts with “VBS” (Vacation Bible School 😉) in the title or subtitle. Everything is open to all paid subscribers on both the front page and in the Cottage Archive.
During these thrice-a-year special series (Lent, July, and Advent), we have a modified schedule (either M,W,F or daily) with more content than usual!
We’ll be back to a more regular schedule in August — along with a few special surprises.
We don’t jump right into the modern world today.
Instead, I take some time to reflect on the similarities of the world 500 years ago and our own situation. There’s also a nice discussion in this video of “usable” history.
There might seem to be little difference between propaganda and usable history. But usable history isn’t propaganda because it is committed to telling the truth about the past. It doesn’t avoid critical history — and always stands willing to be corrected. But “usable” history does have agendas — it is an exploration of history intended to support particular issues, ideas, or communities, usually by lifting up some aspect of history that has been ignored or dismissed.
At the end of today’s video lecture, I return to the Reformation itself and explain the tension between orthodoxy and orthopraxis — a binary that still haunts contemporary Christianity.
I liked sharing these further thoughts on the book and the “end” of the Reformation. Hope you enjoy them too!
Questions: What did you learn from this section in the reading, video presentations, or comments? What ideas or people inspire you? What surprised you?
Please leave your insights in the comments! And feel free to respond to others as well.
EXCERPT, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY”The Unfinished Reformation,” the end of chapter 9
One of my favorite professors in seminary was Richard Lovelace, a church historian with a gracious spirit. Although he served on the faculty of an evangelical theological school, he was a deeply committed mainline Presbyterian and one of the most thoroughly ecumenical people I have known. He believed that Christianity was a generous way of life, a process of on-going personal and communal reformation centered in the love of God. “Reforming doctrines and institutions in the church was futile,” he wrote, “unless people’s lives were reformed and revitalized.”[1] The reformed church, he insisted, must always be reforming. As a scholar, he studied Christian renewal movements and taught several popular classes in the history of spirituality and post-Reformation church history.
Shortly after Martin Luther’s death in 1546, Professor Lovelace explained, Protestants began to fight over the particulars of their revolutionary movement. Second generation leaders demanded theological clarity and ecclesiastical order. In response, Lutherans and Calvinists developed precise systems of theology and clear boundaries as to what constituted the church. They started to fight among themselves, while, at the same time, continued to argue with Roman Catholics and Anabaptist Protestants. Instead experiencing the word as fluid, Protestant leaders made their faith rigid, concretizing the passions of their ancestors into dogmatic intellectual systems. They fought real wars—like the English Civil War or the Thirty Years’ War—over words.
The post-Reformation theological turn is known as “Protestant Scholasticism,” a method “that insisted legalistically on the acceptance of precisely worded doctrinal confessions” as the basis of faith.[2] People lost the sense that words resided in human wholeness, they enlivened the heart. Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, thus redefining faith from a way of life into intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions, with books filled with “quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling.”[3] They used words as weapons.
“By the end of the sixteenth century,” Professor Lovelace told us, “Protestants in both Lutheran and Reformed spheres were referring the ‘half-reformation,’ which had reformed their doctrines but not their lives.”[4] Hence the historical stage was set: modern Christianity would struggle between the head and the heart, orthodoxy and piety had been severed.
While he lectured about this tension in the classroom, we witnessed it at the seminary. In the mid-1980s, the seminary was racked with controversy between those faculty members that insisted upon creedal purity and those committed to spiritual liveliness. The seminary “scholastics” launched a crusade against their colleagues who, in their view, were guilty of sloppy thinking or questionable orthodoxy—a charge that lead to a heresy trial, some firings, and a good many faculty retirements. For those of us who were students, it was a fearsome object lesson in church history. Inquisitions are ugly things. In the battle of orthodoxy versus piety, at my seminary at least, orthodoxy won. And, in the pitch of battle, the love of God vanished from the place.
In 1675, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), a Lutheran minister, lamented the state of the church and hoped for better days, in a small book entitled Pia Desideria. Disillusioned and divided by the violence of religious wars, people found little in the church to inspire them. “There are probably few places in our church in which there is such want that not enough sermons are preached,” wrote Spener. “But many godly persons find that not a little is wanting in many sermons.” The clergy were largely trying to impress their congregations with their learning, their “suitably embellished” orthodoxy, and dry presentations of Christian teaching. Such sermons failed “to awaken the love of God and neighbor.” Spener believed that Lutheran Christians had lost their capacity to experience the transforming Word, “It is not enough that we hear the Word with our outward ear, but we must let it penetrate to our heart.” [5]
Spener diagnosed the problem in simple terms: an ecclesiastical elite cared more about theological purity than the “universal priesthood” of God’s people, who constituted the real church. Leaders had directed their attention to church “disputations” and were more concerned with “human erudition” and “artificial posturing” than the pursuit of Christian wisdom. Spener warned that this turn of affairs harmed the church. Quoting one of his colleagues, Spener stated, “The consequence is that the theologia practica (that is, the teaching of faith, love, and hope) is relegated to a secondary place, and the way is again paved for a theologia spinosa (that is, a prickly, thorny teaching) which scratches and irritates hearts and souls.”[6] Why would anyone even want to be a Christian in such circumstances?
So, Spener reminded his readers that “it is no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice” and that “love is the real mark” of Jesus’ followers.[7] The church could never be reformed on right belief alone. Rather, “love is the whole life of the man who has faith and who through his faith is saved, and his fulfillment of the laws of God consists in love.” Christianity is not assenting to a creed, “conviction of truth is far from being faith”; but true Christianity is the “practice” of love.”[8]
Not surprisingly, his “orthodox opponents” attacked him, saying that Spener’s theology was questionable because it was too subjective. It would weaken ecclesiastical authority, they warned, if the laity truly embraced his radical ideas. They accused Spener of taking the Reformation too far in letting the Word penetrate the heart.
Will words prick and irritate? Will they inspire hope? Is faith a way of dogma, or a path of love? At the end of the course, Professor Lovelace asked his students, “If you have to pick, what kind of Christianity would you rather have: a Christianity with the right answers that was dead; or a Christianity, loose around the intellectual edges, that compelled people to act in love?” We sat and stared at him. No one wanted to answer. We really wanted both, but we also knew how seldom that has happened in Christian history.
I hoped that Professor Lovelace’s question was relegated to the generations immediately following the Reformation—or to a cranky evangelical seminary north of Boston, Massachusetts. But the questions of the “half-reformed” Reformation still resonate. As I write, in the summer of 2008, Anglican bishops from all over the world are meeting in Canterbury having an argument over homosexuality, biblical interpretation, and the nature of the church. It is a nasty dispute, as scratchy an ecclesiastical quarrel as has ever been, made worse by instant communications and the Internet. The whole thing brings to my mind some words uttered by Martin Luther to the people of Erfurt in 1522:
Beware! Satan has the intention of detaining you with unnecessary things and thus keeping you from those which are necessary. Once he has gained an opening in you of hand-breath, he will force in his whole body together with sacks full of useless questions.”[9]
I don’t suppose I can do anything to quiet the din from Canterbury.But I do have an overwhelming desire to board an airplane bound for London with a suitcase full of copies of thePia Desideria.
[1] Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of the Spiritual Life, p.13.
[2] Peter Erb, ed., Pietists: Selected Writings (Paulist, 1983), p. 3.
[3] Spener, Pia Desideria, (Fortress, 1964) p. 53
[4] RL, Dynamics, p.34
[5] Spener, Pia Desideria, pp. 115-117
[6] Ibid., p.53.
[7] Ibid., p. 95
[8] Ibid., p 101, 96
[9] Quoted in Spener, 51; from Luther, “Epistle or Instruction from the Saint to the Church in Erfurt,” 1522.
INSPIRATION
All praise and thanks to God most High,The Father of all Love!The God who doeth wondrously,The God who from aboveMy soul with richest solace fills,The God who every sorrow stills;Give to our God the glory!
The Lord is never far away,Nor sunder'd from His flock;He is their refuge and their stay,Their peace, their trust, their rock,And with a mother's watchful loveHe guides them wheresoe'er they rove:Give to our God the glory!— Johann Jakob Schütz, “All Praise and Thanks to God Most High,” 1673
Schütz was Spener’s closer friend and colleague.
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