Some time back, I wrote “In defence of Reformation and Reformed Theology” following ‘Reformation Sunday’. In that sharing I traced church history and referred to the various church councils over those years:
Notably:
The council of Nicaea (AD 325) which proclaimed that Christ is God (the Nicene creed is recited in many church);
The council of Constantinople (381) which claimed that the Holy Spirit is God;
The Council of Ephesus (431 which proclaimed that human beings are totally depraved from birth;
The Council of Chalcedon (451) which proclaimed that Christ is both God and man.
We need to realise that the proclamation of the various Councils followed from extensive study of the alternative ‘wrong’ teachings and the conclusion came about after much discussion from the church leaders.
The Council of Ephesus was called in response to a prominent false teaching known as Pelagianism, named after its founder, Pelagius, a British monk. He denied that the human race fell into original sin with Adam. Babies, he said, are not born corrupt but innocent. They become bad when they grow up through the bad examples of others – it is the environment that makes them bad, not original sin.
The Council of Ephesus eventually agreed, declaring the teachings of Pelagius to be heresy. Today, many churches may not be conscious that they are, in some ways, upholding the teachings of Pelagius.
In contrast, the Reformed faith declared, “We believe that our first parents, being tempted, chose evil, and so fell away from God and came under the power of sin, the penalty of which is eternal death, and we confess that by reason of this disobedience,, we and all men are born with a sinful nature, that we have broken God’s law, and that no man can be saved but by His grace.” (Rom. 3:23, 6:23).
About one hundred years later, Cassian developed what is known as Semi-Pelagianism. This taught that man is able to take the first steps toward conversion with his own powers; God’s grace is available to all men, but the final decision in each individual case is dependent on the exercise of free will. Semi-Pelegianismm,in 529, in the Synod of Orange, was condemned as heresy. What took place in the history of the church are now almost completely forgotten. The doctrine of Arminians (which rehashed the views of Pelagius and Cassian and was also condemned as a heresy) became popular in the modern church, while Reformed Theology (called ‘Calvinism’) which was called a synonym for biblical Christianity is now upheld by a minority.
As a movement of the Spirit of God, the Reformation has an enduring significance for the church of Jesus Christ. We must ask not only what it meant but also what it means. How can the theology of the reformers (like
Augustine,Calvin, Zwingli, Martin Luther, Tyndale) challenge and correct and inform our own efforts to theologize faithfully on the basis of the Word of God?
Just as the reformers found it necessary to return to the Bible and the early church in order to address the spiritual crises of their time, so, too, we cannot neglect the great themes of the Reformation as we seek to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in our time.
This does not mean we can merely parrot the theological formulae of the reformers as if we ourselves were living in the sixteenth or seventeenth century instead of in the twenty-first. To be sure, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Likewise, the anxieties of guilt, death, and meaninglessness plague modern men and women as severely as they did princes and peasants in the late Middle Ages. But the way we process those anxieties has changed. Furthermore, we face new and even more dreadful realities such as the possibility of sui-genocide by nuclear self-annihiltion. The specter of multiple holocausts has jarred the sensitivity of the most optimistic humanists.
The reformers remind us that God is to be found by us only where it pleases him to seek us. All of our efforts to find God from within ourselves issue only in baseless speculation and projection that, ultimately, becomes idolatry. The abiding and continuing validity of Reformation theology is that, despite the many varied emphases it contains within itself, it challenges the church to listen reverently and obediently to what God has once and for all said and once and for all done in Jesus Christ. How the church will respond to this challenge is not a matter of academic speculation or ecclesiastical gamemans ship. It is a question of life or death. It is the decision of whether the church will serve the true and living God of Jesus Christ, the God of the Old and the New Testaments, or else succumb to the worship of Baal.
We can examine the abiding validity of Reformation Theology in various themes and spiritual areas.
We begin by looking at Sovereignty and Christology:
The theme of the sovereignty of God resounds unmistakably throughout the writings of the reformers. The mainline Reformation doctrine of election or predestination stood out as a clear witness to the sovereignty of God in human salvation. It was and has remained a major stumbling block for those who see in it a pernicious undercutting of human freedom and human morality. The reformers, however, found in this teaching a tremendous liberation from the intolerable burden of self-justification. They understood humans to be so deeply enthralled by sin that only God’s sovereign grace could make them truly free. None of the reformers had the slightest intention of denigrating human participation in the process of salvation. Augustine had said that while God does not save us by ourselves, neither does he save us apart from ourselves. The doctrine of justification by faith presupposes the subjective appropriation of the divine gift of salvation, but it also recognises that even the faith by which we are justified is itself also a gift.
God is the sovereign Lord not only in redemption but also in creation.The reformers were willing to concede that we do not always understand how the providence of God is at work in the tragic sufferings and vicissitudes of our earthly existence. But they acknowledged that God would use the sufferings and persecutions of believers in his redemptive purpose for humankind. Indeed, who could have guessed that in the great miscarriage of justice at Calvary God was at work reconciling the world unto himself? Our modern disquiet with the Reformation doctrine of providence ste4ms in part from our inordinate craving for clarity – we cannot understand how a sovereign God could permit innocent suffering. We prefer a God we can understand or at least a God we can hold accountable, or a limited God who struggles with us against the chaos but who finally is too impotent to prevent it or even possibly to overcome it.
Calving himself admitted that there is no true faith that is not tinged with doubt. In the end, however, angry outbursts against heaven are, as Calvin puts it, like spitting into the sky. The God with whom we have to do is not a God we can explain or manipulate or domesticate. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). The reformers provide no more adequate ‘answer’ to the problem of evil than did the prophets or the apostles. Instead, they point us to the God who sustains in the midst of trials, theGod who does not just ‘do something’ but who indeed ‘stands there’ in his sovereign compassion, the God who stands beside us and goes before us, who promises never to abandon us even – especially when all of the evidence is to the contrary.
Christ is the actual realisation within space and time of God’s sovereign decision to be our God, to be for us and not against us, to save us from ourselves and from the powers that aim at our destruction, and finally to receive us into partnership and friendship with himself.
THE ABIDING VALIDITY OF REFORMATION THEOLOGY (B)
RIGHTLY APPROACHING PREDESTINATION WITH HUMILITY
“God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:13).
We need to approach ‘predestination’ in the right spirit, taking to heart Calvin’s warning that we must not go an inch beyond what the Bible says, for if we do, we can expect to find our heads going dizzy, our balance being lost, and ourselves falling over the edge of an intellectual precipice ino ruin. Stay within the limits of Bible teaching.
The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8 about God’s plan of election to encourage believers under pressure. In Ephesians 1, he celebrates election in order to evoke praise of God from his readers. In 1 Thessalonians 1:2,4 he presents it as a doctrine which brings Christians assurance “We give thanks to God always for all of you….For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you.” The doctrine of election is a matter for worship, encouragement and praise.
The Lord Jesus himself enunciates the truth of predestination (John 6:37-39,44-45; 10:14-16, 27-29). A doctrine which the Lord Jesus himself expresses should not be taken lightly by us, especially when the very heart of it is that the Father through his plan of predestining grace is securing a people for the Son, thus furthering the glory of the Son, which is his final purpose. The glory of Jesus Christ as Saviour is directly bound up with this doctrine of predestinating grace.
Personally, the doctrine of predestination resolves three important questions.
Firstly, I am a Christian today because God chose from eternity to make me one (not dependent on my merit or choice) . He went the first mile when he sent his Son from heaven to die on the cross for my sins (we cannot save ourselves). He went the second mile when he called me by grace, working in my heart so that I responded to the gospel message in a way I would not have done had he not so worked (dare we insist that our free will determined, in varying degrees, our salvation; do we realise that we would never have come to Him if we are left in our wretchedness and sin?). It is thanks to God’s predestination that I am a Christian.
The doctrine of predestination says that once we have believed, God promises to keep us believing. Once he has brought us to faith according to his predestination purpose, he will complete that purpose. It is all his doing, and it is guaranteed by his sovereignty (which includes his enabling and his transforming power in our lives). So I am safe in his hands, and my hope is secure.
I owe God thanks for my entire Christian life – for the fact that I have been converted no less than for the fact that there was a Saviour for us to turn to. The doctrine of predestination teaches us humility, the humility which acknowledges every spiritual benefit as God’s gracious gift to me. Also, it reveals my security, telling me that God’s purpose guaranteed final glory for me. Finally it prompts doxology and deep gratitude, praise to God for the greatness of his grace to me, and deep heartfelt gratitude that God can forgive a wretched sinner like me and even adopt me to be his child and to be among his people, in the body of Christ, in his holy temple, not just now but for eternity! Those who embrace predestination praise God far more than others do, for they recognise more as God’s gifts to them.
Personally, this doctrine has stirred much emotion in my life and heart, often bringing tears of gratitude and worship for such a great loving God and such a wondrous unexpected plan of salvation. It also behoves me to be forgiving to others and to love them as God has loved me, despite their negative and hateful attitudes towards me. It encourages me to press on, in my Christian life, through all and every circumstance, knowing that God is working out his plan and desire for me despite the designs of the evil one and the perplexity and setbacks of life on earth. Praise be unto the Triune God who chooses to save me and many others in his loving and gracious plan of salvation!!
THE ABIDING VALIDITY OF REFORMATION THEOLOGY (C)
We have looked at the abiding validity of Reformation and its theology from a brief survey of church history and the various declarations of church councils during those early years. Notably, we noted that Reformed theology was tantamount to biblical theology in that period.
We then reviewed a theme that is prominent in this theology -‘Sovereignty and Christology’.
Following that, we considered the biblical support for this theology from the writings of Paul in the epistles and the teachings of the Lord Jesus Himself.
We now consider other important themes in this theology:
SCRIPTURE AND ECCLESIOLOGY (considering the church)
The reformers were unquestioning in their acceptance of the Bible as the unique, divinely inspired Word from the Lord. They were not so much concerned with an abstract or formal theory of inspiration but rather with the power of the Bible to convey a sense of encounter with the divine and to elicit a religious response from the hearer (contrast this with the ‘academic’ study of the Bible in Bible colleges today).
John Bunyan, one of the most spiritually perceptive heirs of the reformers (the author of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’), asked, “Have you forgotten the close, the milk house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your soul? Remember also the Word – the Word, I say, upon which the Lord hath caused you to hope?”
All the reformers accepted the divine origin and infallible character of the Bible. The issue which emerged at the Reformation was how the divinely attested authority of Holy Scriptures was related to the authority of the church and ecclesiastical tradition (Roman Catholics) on the one hand and the power of personal experience (Spiritualists) on the other.
Sola Scriptura was not intended to discount completely the value of church tradition but rather to subordinate it to the primacy of Holy Scripture. Whereas the Roman Church appealed to the witness of the church to validate the authority of the canonical Scriptures, the Protestant reformers insisted that the Bible was self-authenticating, that is, evidenced by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. The dignity and authority of the canonical books in the Bible is not accepted so much because the church receives and approves them as such, but more especially because the Holy Spirit witnesses in our hearts that they are from God, whereof they carry the evidence in themselves.
It is interesting to note that the quotation “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was quoted by a cardinal in the Roman Church who objected to the traditional teaching that the Pope was infallible in his declarations of the church’s teachings. In this regard, the reformers were in agreement that the authority is from the Bible and not from church’s traditions although traditions are not without value.
By insisting on the correlation of Word and Spirit, the mainline reformers also distanced themselves from those Spiritualists who placed their own private religious experience above the objectively given revelation of God. To them, the privatized visions and revelations ran counter to the expressed will of God in his written Word (this is mostly forgotten in the current context where some church leaders proclaimed their privatized visions and revelations as the biblical truth and placed experience above the objective Word of God in Scripture; and they seemed to forget that the devil can dress as an angel of light with devious deceptions and distorted truths).
To the reformers, all human traditions are not binding upon us except so far as they are grounded upon or prescribed in the Word of God. In their perspective, the church of Jesus Christ is that communion of saints and congregation of the faithful that has heard the Word of God in Holy Scripture and that, through obedient service to its Lord, bears witness to that Word in the world. The church did not begin with the Reformation. The reformers intended to return to the New Testament conception of the church, to purge and purify the church of their day in accordance with the norms of Holy Scripture. To them the church is ever in need of further reformation on the basis of the Word of God.
Hence the reformers were master exegetes of Holy Scripture. Their most incisie theological work is found in their sermons and biblical commentaries. They were convinced that the proclamation of the Christian church could not be derived from philosophy or any self-wrought worldview. It could be nothing less than an interpretation of the Scriptures. No other proclamation has either right or promise in the church. We owe much to the reformers in this respect; unfortunately, it is not uncommon today to hear speakers on the pulpit expounding their own thinking, certain worldviews, and doing it with much rhetoric and ‘finest’ speech to congregations which are not keen to check what is communicated with the Holy Bible, or are entirely or partially ignorant of what is revealed in Scripture by the Holy Spirit.
The reformers did not invent the sermon but they elevated preaching to a central role in the divine service. The solemn and articulate reading of Holy Scripture was also given a prominent place. At the same time they believed the audible Word of God in the Bible should be met with the corresponding ‘visible words’ of God in the sacraments. The Augsburg Confession (1530) put it succintly: “Where the gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered in accordance with the divine Word, there is the true church.” As Christ gathers his people in remembrance around pulpit and table, we will be able truly to worship him in spirit and in truth.