Recovering Its Acids and Spices

“The Reformers not only revered their biblical heritage, but recovered its energies, its acids, its spices, its ‘red wine and cheese’, the sting and zing of the Magnificat. We should therefore be chary of assuming that a more verbal spirituality, which Protestantism undoubtedly was, was necessarily more bookish or intellectual. It commuted between the lofty discourse of the classics and the rude simplicities of the venacular. The living Word which Luther talking about, emerged from a filthy stable and ended on a foul cross. Theology was worked out in the study, certainly, but above all in living, dying, being damned” Theologia crucis” (Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation, p. 127).