Reading Scripture with the Reformers

Timothy George

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780830869336
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna temprana

In Reading Scripture with the Reformers, Timothy George takes readers through the exciting events of the sixteenth century, showing how this dynamic period was instigated by a fresh return to the Scriptures. George immerses us in the world of the Reformation, its continuities with the ancient and medieval church, and its dramatic upheavals and controversies. Most of all, he uncovers the significant way that the Bible shaped the minds and hearts of the reformers. This book shows how the key figures of the Reformation read and interpreted Scripture, and how their thought was shaped by what they read. We are invited to see what the church today can learn from the fathers of the Reformation, and how these figures offer a model of reading, praying and living out the Scriptures.

ONE

WHY READ
THE REFORMERS?

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods. . . . A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village:
the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press
and the microphone of his own age.

C. S. LEWIS

THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION WAS A TIME OF TRANSITION, vitality and change that gave us the compass, the printing press, the telescope, gunpowder, the first map of the New World, the revival of the visual arts and letters (Michelangelo and Shakespeare), widespread inflation, the rise of the modern nation-state, wars of religion—and a word to describe all of this, revolution, from Nikolaus Copernicus’s famous work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). The Protestant Reformation was a revolution in the original scientific sense of that word: the return of a body in orbit to its original position. It was never the desire of Luther to start a new church from scratch. He and the other reformers who followed in his tracks wanted to re-form the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church on the basis of the Word of God and to do so by returning to the historic faith of the early church as they found it set forth in the pure teachings of the Scriptures. This led to a fundamental reorientation in Christian theology. Luther’s rediscovery of justification by faith alone, Zwingli’s insistence on the clarity and certainty of the Bible, Calvin’s emphasis on the glory and sovereignty of God and the Anabaptist quest for a true visible church all found expression in numerous new confessions, catechisms, commentaries, liturgies, hymns, martyrologies and church orders. Like a great earthquake that continues to generate seismic aftereffects long after the first shock is over, the Reformation set in motion a revolution in religious life the effects of which are still being felt half a millennium later.

The reformers of the sixteenth century shared with ancient Christian writers and the medieval scholastics who came before them a high regard for the inspiration and authority of the Bible. Already in the New Testament the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which Christians would later come to know as the Old Testament, are regarded as divinely inspired, God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16). On more than one occasion, Paul identified the Scripture with God’s own speaking (see Gal 3:8; Rom 9:17; 10:11). It is God who speaks in the Scripture, and for this reason it has an unassailable validity for the people of God. What J. N. D. Kelly wrote about the early church is equally true for biblical exegetes in the medieval and Reformation eras: “It goes without saying that the fathers envisaged the whole of the Bible as inspired.”1

There were many debates about the Bible in the sixteenth century: Should it be translated and, if so, by whom and into which languages? What is the extent of the canon? How can one gauge the true sense and right interpretation of Scripture? How was the Bible to be used in the preaching and worship of the church? What is the relative authority of Scripture and church tradition? These and other questions about the Bible were debated not only between Catholics and Protestants but also among scholars and theologians within these two traditions. Such disputes should not be minimized, for some of them proved to be church-dividing. But it is also important to recognize that the exegetical debates of the sixteenth century were carried out within a common recognition of the Scriptures as divinely given. Referring to the books of the Old and New Testaments as “sacred and canonical,” the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), looking perhaps backward more than forward, summarized the Catholic view of the Bible in words that would have been warmly embraced by both Protestant and Catholic reformers in the sixteenth century:

These books are held by the Church as sacred and canonical, not as having been composed by merely human labour and afterwards approved by her authority, nor merely because they contain revelation without error, but because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.2

It was a core conviction of the Reformation that the careful study and meditative listening to the Scriptures, what the monks called lectio divina, could yield a life-changing result. For the reformers the Bible was a treasure trove of divine wisdom to be heard, read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, as the Book of Common Prayer’s collect for the second Sunday in Advent puts it, to the end that “we may embrace, and ever holdfast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou has given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” In his commentary on Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,” Calvin declared, “Whenever the Lord accosts us by his Word, he is dealing seriously with us to affect all our inner senses. There is, therefore, no part of our soul which should not be influenced.”3 The study of the Bible was meant to be transformative at the most basic level of the human person, coram deo. It was meant to lead to communion with God.

But for the reformers the Bible had public as well as personal consequences. The Bible was not merely a text to be observed, analyzed and internalized. It was also an event, a “happening” of earth-shattering moment. In 1522, one year after his famous confession, “Here I stand, God help me,” at Worms (April 18, 1521), Luther described, with a twinkle in his eyes no doubt, how the Reformation had been brought about solely by the Bible while he had been taking a snooze or having a drink with his friends.

Take me, for example. I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.4

The reformers knew, of course, that the expression “Word of God” referred in its most basic sense to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the substantial Word, the eternal Logos who was made flesh—verbum incarnatum—for us and for our salvation. And Word of God was also the spoken word, so that the preaching of the gospel is a sacramental event, a means of grace. As Heinrich Bullinger put it boldly in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566): “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”5 Yet the Word of God was also a canon of texts, a collection of books (biblia), something that could be written down, copied, translated, edited, published, disseminated, commented on and taught. In the quotation cited above, when Luther said that he “wrote God’s Word,” he was referring to his recently completed translation of the New Testament from Greek into German. Soon William Tyndale would follow suit in English, and others in French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, even Arabic, so that the written Word of God resounded from the lecture rooms, debate halls and pulpits of all parts of Europe.

IMPERIALISMS OF THE PRESENT

I first came to the study of the Reformation during my undergraduate studies at a state university in Tennessee where I majored in history and took many courses in philosophy and religion. I had wonderful professors who taught me to think critically, to weigh historical sources carefully, to appreciate the long sweep and complexity of what was called in those days western civilization. I remain grateful for what I learned in that institution, but the reigning paradigm was shaped by the assumptions and icons of modernity whose works we read—Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Hume, Heidegger, Husserl, Tillich, Bultmann and (just a little snippet of) Barth. I still have my well-marked, blue-backed copy of John Herman Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind, a major textbook in one of my courses. This book, first published in 1940, offered a sweeping overview of the intellectual background of the modern world. The Reformation was presented as a form of medieval supernaturalism, a regressive reaction against the growing naturalism and humanism that was increasingly to mark the modern age. In this schema, Erasmus was a proto-modernist at once liberal and liberating in his appeal to reason and free will; Luther was a Fundamentalist with a capital F. The book closed with a quotation from Bertrand Russell extolling Thought, with a capital T (read “autonomous human reason”), in exalted religious tones: “Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were Lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”6

When I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the 1970s, I met Harvey Cox, like me a former Baptist youth evangelist. Cox was then in his post-Secular City, pre-postmodern phase and was much enamored with Buddhism and spiritualities of the East. In 1977 he published a book titled Turning East in which he argued for what he called the “principle of genealogical selectivity.”

As late twentieth-century Christians trying to work out a viable spirituality, there are two principal historical sources to which we should look. They are the earliest period of our history and the most recent, the first Christian generations and the generation just before us . . . the ransacking of other periods for help in working out a contemporary spirituality soon becomes either antiquarian or downright misleading.7

Cox’s counsel against “ransacking” the past reflects an attitude common in American culture in general, especially within evangelicalism. It reflects what might be called the heresy of contemporaneity or, in less theological terms, the imperialism of the present. What do I mean by this term? In the Middle Ages, everyone believed that the earth was at the center of reality, that the whole created cosmos was ordered in relation to what we now know, thanks to Copernicus, is a mere speck of dust among myriads of constellations and galaxies. The Copernican revolution was a paradigm shift. It radically altered our view of space. But we have yet to experience a similar revolution with respect to time. We still place ourselves, our values, our worldview at the center of history, relegating whole epochs to the Dark Ages or pre-Enlightenment culture. Thus the Christian past, including ways earlier generations of believers have understood the Bible, becomes not so much something to be studied and appropriated as something to be ignored or overcome.

Reading Scripture with the fathers, the scholastics and the reformers finds no place in the polarizing dialectic recommended by Cox. The dialectic of primitivism or presentism establishes two centers of scriptural engagement—the first Christian generation, which means the writings of the New Testament, and the most recent generations, notably my generation. This dichotomy governs the way Scripture is read in much of the Christian community today, both in liberal mainline churches and in conservative evangelical ones. There is, we might say, a presentist imperialism of the left and a presentist imperialism of the right.

Cox’s statement clearly stands in continuity with the liberal Protestant theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern hermeneutics, who defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence and understood Scripture as a detailed expression of that faith which was present in a feeling of need.8 Schleiermacher displaced the central teachings and dogmas of the church with Christian self- consciousness. This allowed him to relativize the doctrines of traditional orthodox belief by “entrusting them to history for safekeeping,” as he once put it.9 It is not surprising to find Schleiermacher’s entire treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity relegated to a brief appendix at the end of his nearly eight-hundred-page textbook of systematic theology, On the Christian Faith.

If the reader’s own religious self-consciousness and that of the immediately preceding generations form one pole of biblical interpretation, then the other consists in the experience of the first Christians, reconstrued by means of presumably objective and disinterested scholarship. At the heart of this enterprise is the effort to identify what we might call the Bible behind the Bible. In this critical approach, one part of Scripture is played off against another (most obviously, the two Testaments). Discrete units within the Bible are further dissected in terms of competing hypotheses of authorship, literary form, original context, source of origin, and so forth, so that any sense of Scripture as a coherent narrative unity is negated. Historical-critical exegesis arose as an effort to release the Bible from the shackles placed on it by the intervening two millennia of biblical interpretation. In his famous 1885 Bampton Lectures, Frederic W. Farrar so described the critical scholarly enterprise:

And how often has the Bible thus been wronged! It has been imprisoned in the cells of alien dogma; it has been bound hand and foot in the grave clothes of human tradition; it has been entombed in a sepulcher by systems of theology, and the stone of human power has been rolled up to close its door. But now the stone has been rolled away from the door of the sepulcher, and the enemies of the Bible can never shake its divine authority unless they be fatally strengthened by our...