A Not So New Reformation?

My wedding ring reminds me not to take my wife for granted, nor the worldview that brought us to this blessed point of 14 years of a happy marriage.  Which relates to this question of a new reformation:

The not so new reformation?

In the last blog post I suggested that a new reformation is occuring in the church, by which folks are suggesting a new means of authority for those who follow Christ as His primary means of speaking to us on Earth; that is through Scientific and Social theory. For them the progression of Christ’s revelation to mankind runs as a single line from the abolitionists to sufferage to the civil rights movement to the current feminist movement to the current understanding of gender and sexual orientation. Now I would not say these are unimportant and that God is not teaching us through all of them, but it’s probably clear to anyone reading these blogs by now that the Scripture is to me the primary means by which Christ exerts His authority on Earth. Thus I am more inclined to say that the earlier movements flow from Scriptural revelation more than the later movements having to do with human rights. But my main concern, again, is not to debate those issues, but to point us to the question of authority and how Christ speaks to us.

So here I want to suggest that this new Reformation is strikingly similar to many movements throughout Church history and therefore not as new as it first may appear. For instance, as the Roman Catholic Church developed, the interpretation of Scripture, for instance, became more and more complex and resided only with a very few elite intellectuals who were said to be able to interpret it properly. They would interpret the written Word based on Latin translations and commentaries, then commentaries on commentaries, justifying all kinds of strange church traditions, such as indulgences and corruptions of that church. The Vatican became sexually deviant and grossly corrupt with greed, violence and power-mongering.

It was this development of interpreting Scripture by the intellectually elite only, with great complexities and strange justifications, that led the Church away from the authority of Scripture. No longer could the people interpret Scripture from its plain meaning and apply it to their lives. It was this that led to the Crusades, this that led to corruption. If people had been able to hear the Word in their own language and interpret it with the help of gifted pastors, Jesus statements about loving enemies and servant leadership might have changed history dramatically.

The same thing happened when certain German theologians and philosphers introduced higher criticism to the interpretation of Scripture. Soon, its true interpretation could no longer be plain to the common person, because of course there were centuries of historical and cultural changes that kept anyone from truly understanding the written Word in any significant way. Once again, the common man could not understand it and the path to what was called Liberalism in the Church was paved. That is not to say that the questions raised were unimportant and that we have not benefited greatly from those challenges that this movement raised to the traditional understandings in the wider Church concerning Scripture, but it dramatically changed the intellectual communities’ trust in the plain meaning of the written Word. All the top universities caved in to this pressure, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton in the United States.

John Calvin and the Reformers brought the Church back to the plain meaning of Scripture based on studying the original languages, which would greatly influence the wider Body of Christ dramatically. Evangelicals also influenced the wider Church towards this understanding, so that the Second Vatican Council changed a great many practices in the Roman Catholic Church in part as a result of Evangelicalism’s growing influence.

And today I have noticed more and more folks within my own denomination and others like them who are claiming more and more complex interpretations of Scripture that reside with their little intellectual groups, in order to justify practices and interpretations that seem much more pleasing to the world and less and less true to the plain meaning of the Sciptural texts in question. It is easy, when we have grown up with plain understandings of these texts, to take that for granted and to be reactionary by choosing the meaning that makes us feel better with the current pressures of the world we live in and the culture of our time. This is done usually in the name of being more appealing to folks that have not grown up with the written Word or a Christian worldview. The temptation is to think that if we couch the Gospel in just the right way, that our athiest and agnostic friends will be so pleased they will join us in our faith as well, because of course nothing would stand in their way. We think our churches will grow in this way and we’ll all be much happier in the end. However, they forget that the reason folks don’t believe in Christ is not because the church just isn’t friendly enough for them. There are much deeper reasons than intellectual obstacles. There is a bottom line that we have been crucifed to the world and the world to us. Until folks’ eyes are opened spiritually they will not believe, however appealing we try to make it sound. It’s either real or it isn’t. No amount of human appeal will change that, only the Holy Spirit of God. By all means let’s get rid of obstacles to the Gospel that are unnecessary to true faith, such as North American Christian cultural assumptions- and there are probably many- but let’s not compromise the true faith in the process.

The other reality in the case of the Roman Catholic Church is that more folks claimed Christianity, but it was simply washed out and thus the true Church was weakened, not strengthened by that movment. Additionally, the liberal churches of mainstream Protestantism have declined significanly while Pentecostal and Reformed churches who hold up what are considered “conservative” views have grown immensely. If we simply become like the world, what is the point of being part of the Church? The world may as well stay as it is and we will be in danger of having a church club for people that don’t really believe anyway, but enjoy having a “church” to belong to because they grew up in it. In that case, we have nothing to share with the world that has any real meaning or life-change. And I daresay that is not the result of the true Gospel. Anyway, that’s my view for what it’s worth.