Preamble to My Introduction
ACCS is a decidedly Protestant organization. But as you look around the classical Christian world of education, you will notice the involvement of not a few Roman Catholic and Orthodox educators, many of whom we consider to be friends. But—friends or no friends—we remain decidedly Protestant.
My task this morning is two-fold. One is to show how this is possible without being either bigoted or blinkered. The bigoted one is an ecclesiastical chauvinist, blindly holding on to a tradition that he does not understand, while despising all others who hold on to traditions that they don’t understand. A Baptist minister, understanding this all too human tendency, once said with a twinkle in his eye, “We Baptists don’t believe in tradition. It’s contrary to our historic position.”
The blinkered one is simply running on cruise control. He is a Protestant because he grew up Protestant, and nobody ever challenged him on the point. But then he got involved in his classical Christian school, and started meeting the kinds of people who didn’t worship at the Big Box Evangelical Church and Tire Center, and the way they worshiped, even though odd to him, seemed more like a religion. So he soon found himself strangely drawn. And then one day one of his new friends asked him why on earth he goes to that ACCS convention, a decidedly Protestant organization, one that has the anachronistic effrontery to go around giving out Boniface awards. “Boniface is our guy.”
The second aspect of my task this morning is to provide you with a basic orientation regarding church history, one that will explain why that is not the case. I want to give you a mental map of church history, one with an x on it that says, “you are here.”
I must also apologize to the good folks at the Canon table because they specifically asked me if there were any books they should stock up on, and I said no, not particularly. But then this morning I thought of three that you should get if you feel you need to pursue this—and many of you do need to pursue this. These three are all Canon titles. Angels in the Architecture was extremely influential at the founding of ACCS. Then Keith Mathison’s book The Shape of Sola Scriptura is magnificent. And then my book Papa Don’t Pope. If you read those three together, you will start to understand the vision of ACCS, a foundational vision for medieval Protestantism.
So the Protestant Reformation was not the great unraveling. As Philip Schaff once put it, the greatest achievement of the medieval church was the Protestant Reformation. And B.B. Warfield said, correctly, that the Reformation was Christianity come into its own. This is the magisterial Protestant position. We are not restorationists—people who believe that the Christian church disappeared from the earth, and did not reappear until that revival in Kentucky that one time. When asked where our church was before the Reformation, we reply with a question, “Where was your face before you washed it?”
That said, into the fray . . .
Introduction
One of the mistaken assumptions made by modern Protestants is that their faith began at the Reformation. While many good things did begin there, the Christian church was not one of them. Our task therefore is to learn how to appreciate our medieval brothers without minimizing the need for the Reformation. The Reformation was a reformation, and not a do-over.
As we continue to witness the grotesque disintegration of what was once more or less a coherent civilization, many Christians are wondering if there is any possible way for our free fall toward the abyss to be halted, or even slowed down. We appear to have reached terminal velocity, and we are beyond the help of man. Well, that part’s true enough.
We are in desperate need of the next Reformation, but for that to happen we need to get a much firmer grasp of the last Reformation.
Taking History Seriously
At the time of the Reformation, the best patristic scholars in Europe were among the Reformers. Their cry was ad fontes, back to the sources, and they meant all the sources. Not just the New Testament either—they were among the best Hebraists in Europe, having gone to the rabbis to learn Hebrew. They were not daunted by anything, and neither should we be. They wanted it all—the apostles, the prophets, the church fathers, the lot. They interacted with all of it intelligently.
Christ is the Lord of history, and so we do not need to look sheepish when deciding to read something written before 1517.
But because we take history seriously, we also have to realize that history didn’t stop with the Reformation. As modernity has gotten increasingly diseased, as unbelief has metastasized into radical and thoroughgoing forms of unbelief (here thinking of Kant, and Hume, and of course Nietzsche), we are all of us now living in a cauldron of existentialist goo. It is common for our Roman Catholic friends to blame the disintegration of the West on these forces that we unleashed by the Reformation, and they look at us with that “look what you broke” expression.
But in the spirit of what I have already said, I hotly deny it. The only consistent answer that has been made to these radical unbelievers has grown up out of the neo-Calvinist tradition, pioneered by men like Kuyper and Bavinck. This is the origin of what we call Christian worldview thinking. In short, you have all the weapons you need in your arsenal to fight the good fight. You just need to be checked out on them. And they are available in a library near you.
Defining Some R Words
Here are some R-words that I would like to briefly define, and then go on to describe how they might apply in our hot mess of a situation. Those words would be reaction, renewal, revival, and reformation—and I want to tie all this in together with what we can learn from the medieval world that gave us the Reformation.
People always like to rearrange the furniture, but then after a while they get tired of that and want to change it all back. This is reaction. And sometimes the furniture needs to be changed back, and it can be spiritually healthy to do so. But getting tired of certain forms of sinful stupidity is not the same thing as a spiritual movement, although it may contribute to it.
Renewal is what happens when an institution has grown stiff in the joints, with the standards slipping a bit, and then somebody comes along and encourages everybody to get their head back in the game. Renewal has the tendency to rejuvenate what was going on before.
A revival is what happens when a Christian church or people grow moribund to the point of death. In that situation, there is a movement of the Spirit, quickening and converting people, and they find themselves suddenly zealous for the things of God again. The etymology of the word revival indicates a coming to life again, which implies that there was life before, then death, then life again. That is a revival. More is going on than simply redoubled effort. Think of revival as a Spirit-given renewal.
Reformation is a hot combination of all three of these—reaction, renewal, and revival—with the additional component of a radical restructuring of everything foundational that contributed to the earlier disintegration. It is the difference between the renewal of taking the magazines off the floor and putting them on the coffee table and tearing everything out of the living room, down to the studs.
Imagine that all of us were living in a huge house that had gotten horribly run down. Reaction is where we move from room to room, trying to find a part of the house that is not as ratty as the part we just left, or a part of the house we are not that tired of yet. Renewal is where we get out the vacuum, clear off the coffee table, straighten the pictures on the wall, and move the furniture into a more orderly pattern. We tidy up. Revival is where we actually clean up our living space instead of tidying it up—and remember that there is a real difference between cleaning and tidying. But reformation is where we jack up the house in order to pour a new foundation for it, and we take the sheet rock down to the studs, and we rewire everything.
While I am not a prophet, and do not know what the next few years hold, I am an interested observer of history and the human condition, and I do think that if there is anything short of a root and branch reformation, our condition is hopeless. And by root and branch reformation, I mean the sort of thing that ten thousand years from now will be called The Great Reformation by every sensible historian. It will have to be the kind of thing that puts the Reformation of the 16th century—which was indeed a marvelous work of God—into the shade nonetheless. This would not be because we are that much greater than they were, but rather because our decadence has made our desperate need that much worse. They were able to say post tenebras lux—after darkness, light.
After we are delivered, we will be able to say post inanem lux—after the Void, light.
Historical Examples
For renewals, our best examples would be the various monastic movements that started up over the course of the medieval period. There would be a period of intense spiritual activity, and the Augustinian Order was founded. After a bit, that would appear to be inadequate, and the Benedictine Order was established. Then the Cistercians, and the Franciscans, and so on. Sometimes a new order was founded because of a different emphasis, but frequently it was because the previous monastic movement had become lax, or rich, or distracted, or fat and sassy, or something. Over a period of a thousand years or so, these orders had many ups and downs, did a lot of good, then did a lot of bad, and then a new order would soon appear, trying to do better this time.
What we call revivals are largely a Protestant phenomenon. A good example of this would be the Great Awakening in eighteenth century America, just before our Founding Era. The surrounding culture was overwhelmingly Christian, but being a nominal Christian came easily. You could fit right in. Those who were spiritually serious saw that the wineskins were getting old and were zealous to see something done about it.
One of the criticisms of the Great Awakening is that it set the stage for a much more individualistic approach to Christianity, one more suited for the frontier as it was thought, and some elements of this criticism are quite true. But it must be remembered that new wine will burst the old wineskins, and the old wineskins ought not to be so critical. Nevertheless, there were negative downstream consequences to the Great Awakening—the wine got all over, and the floor is still sticky—but there were also massive numbers of true conversions. This awakening occurred in the decades just prior to the American War for Independence, and I am convinced that the Founding would not have happened apart from that Awakening. It was an enormous blessing to the world. But I was once in conversation with a history major, just graduating, and as I was just finishing up Arnold Dallimore’s two volume biography of George Whitefield, I mentioned that I thought we should consider another GW a second father of our country. The history major said, “who?”
The Reformation is the Protestant phenomenon. This was not something that Protestants created, but rather a series of glorious events and movements within medieval Christendom that created the Protestants. Let me say that again. Protestants didn’t rise up and replace medieval Catholicism with Protestantism. Medieval Catholicism produced a vast array of faithful sons and daughters who loved the ship and thought we needed to scrape the barnacles off.
This was a spiritual movement that laid the axe at the root of the tree. It was a doctrinal reformation, a liturgical reformation, a musical reformation, a civic reformation—up and down the entire waterfront. It was all of that, and it was a revival, and a renewal, and a reaction. Everything was entailed, meaning all of Christ for all of life. It is exactly the kind of thing we need now, only multiplied by a factor of some two-digit number, somewhere between 27 and 99.
To understand all of this, you must understand the existence of three groups, not two. There were the Roman Catholics who hardened in reaction at the Council of Trent. There were the Protesting Catholics who wanted to reform the existing church. And then there were the separatist anabaptist movements that wanted to have nothing to do with any of it. So when we say that ACCS is decidedly Protestant, we are talking about the second group, not the third. And neither are we talking about a smudge composite of all three.
A Prophetic Necessity
If this great reformation and revival does not happen, we are all done for. But this is not like a cancer patient saying that if a cure is not found, “I am going to die.” That is not our position. We are the cancer patient, and apart from a cure, we are going to die. But here is the good news—the cure is a promised one. The earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Go out to the middle of the Pacific, and then go two miles down. How wet is it down there? That’s how Christian your town is going to be someday.
Discouraged? Not a bit of it. We have promises. Prior to the coming of the Messiah, every young Jewish maiden on the threshold of marriage could hold the hope that perhaps she would be the one privileged to bring the Christ into the world. Every man of God with a sermon for the people of God should approach the pulpit every Lord’s Day with that kind of expectant hope. Maybe here, maybe now. But if it is not the Lord’s good pleasure to set off His bonfire here in this moment, we rejoice in the fact that He is going to set it off somewhere.
Flammable Doctrine
One of the great errors that grew out of the Second Great Awakening (referring now to Charles Finney and others like him) was the idea that if we just applied certain sure-fire methods, we could have ourselves a revival every time. This plug and chug approach to things was inevitably bundled into a system, and this is why when you drive across the South at certain times of the year, you can see from all the church signs that it is revival season. Somebody connected with the Holy Spirit’s booking agent, and one wonders how that was managed.
What was once the name for a movement of the Spirit of God that came in like a hurricane off the Gulf, we are now content to apply to a week of nightly meetings. These meetings, needless to say, do not come in like a hurricane off the Gulf.
We cannot make a revival and reformation happen. We cannot whistle one up. We cannot manufacture one.
Reformation and revival are the result of the fire of God falling from the sky. What is within our power to do (by the grace of God, always) is the arranging of flammable material. As we labor and pray for reformation and revival, in the meantime we should also be splitting and stacking a lot of tamarack, which burns nicely. That is not the same thing as reformation, but it is a nice anticipation of it. Preparing for the fire to fall is not the same thing as the fire falling, but it shows good sense. We pray for the fire to fall, and we want to prepare as though we believe it is going to.
But A.W. Tozer once said that if revival means more of what we have going on now, we most emphatically do not need revival. If the fire of God today were to fall on the evangelical church of North America, we would witness a continent-wide Kleenex fire. It wouldn’t last that long, but it would be really something while it lasted.
Anticipation
Our screaming need is Reformation. I said that we cannot make the fire fall, but we can cut and stack the hard wood and pray for God to send the fire. In this, we need to be imitating our medieval brothers. If we need Reformation, and they needed Reformation, we should learn from them. We should do what they did. We do not despise them. We thank God for them.
What did Anselm of Canterbury do? He glorified the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. What did Wycliffe do? He labored to bring the Word of God to the people. What did Charles Martel do? He kept the Muslims at bay. What did the Brethren of the Common Life do? They built schools. They built schools that educated some future reformers, and their unsung labors were a very great gift to the church—just like your labors are.
Brothers and sisters, these are our people. The fact that we are convinced Protestants does not make us bigots, or ignorant. It simply means we wake up in the morning knowing what we believe and understanding who we are. And an essential part of what we believe is that our movement is a true heir of the heritage of Christendom. We belong here. We are not some distant cousin at the reading of the will, hoping to get fifty dollars. The true legacy of the church is all yours . . . but this is only true in Christ.
Van Til and Berkof once said that teachers labor in the dawn of everlasting results. This is truly encouraging but remember this also. Teachers also labor in the light of all that has gone before—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are not fastidious, but we are loyal to the truth. One of those truths is that these are our people.
Because they are our people, we know how to respond to Caiaphas, and to Pope Alexander VI. We also know what to think about John Hus, and Chaucer, and Dante, and Bach, and Luther, and Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards.
And this coming fall, you will know what to think of your classroom filled with little fat Protestant faces, looking up at you expectantly.