Why I’m Not Reformed Post 4 (my last post)

This is my last post exploring the thesis, put forth originally HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations,’ that the theology of the Reformation has not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) emphasized certain truths to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 16^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into the North American multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. I argue it actually works against the church in mission in many ways.

In the previous posts, I talked about the way the Reformation’s ecclesiology – the visible-invisible church distinction doctrine that emerged from Sola Christus emphasis of the Reformers, and the doctrine of Sola scriptura, did not transfer well for the times of mission we’re living in. In this post I explore how the signature doctrine of the Reformation –“justification by faith alone,” or Sola fide, works against mission today in the fields of post Christendom in North America.

The Split: What Luther Did

The Reformation pushed the individual’s justification before God to the forefront of the European Christian consciousness. Salvation now would no longer be mediated via the Roman church by works (according to the Reformers) but directly to each believer by faith in Christ alone. This overcame the immediate problem of a corrupt church, a church which sold indulgences, but it also opened the door to malforming Christians for mission 500 years later in North America.

Martin Luther pronounced at the first Proceedings at Augsburg “no one can be justified except by faith . . . through no works will you be prepared for the sacrament, but through faith alone, for only faith in the word of Christ justifies, makes a person alive, worthy and well prepared.”[i] This flipped the Medieval Roman view of salvation, which was once something to be received as a reward at the end of life. Now salvation was received as something to begin life with in Christ.[ii] The Christian is now liberated from the impossibility of meeting God’s standards and is free to serve God out of the abundance of grace as the overflowing expression of your faith. This is how Luther saw it. And this engaged the world of 16^th century Europe with a part of the compelling good news of the gospel that had been lost in a Medieval Christendom.

Luther’s Solo fide however, in some sense, made possible the separation of one’s salvation from one’s works, or justification from sanctification. In his Galatians commentary he clarified the difference between justification and sanctification and his metaphors for justification developed more towards the forensic direction (under the influence of Melanchthon). So now, even though Luther himself talked in much deeper terms of justification (in theosis terms), as did Calvin, the Reformation as a whole began swerving towards understanding justification in forensic terms: that by faith the believer is imputed with righteousness for the forgiveness of sins through Christ’s sacrificial work on the cross. By the time of the Formula of Concord of 1577, or the Belgic Confession written in the 1560’s or the Westminster Confession of the 1600’s, justification had become more narrowed to the forensic understanding and split from sanctification. Although Luther never meant to do this, Luther set into motion the split between justification and the works that proceeded therefrom, i.e sanctification.

Add on to this, that Luther had already started to split the interior salvation of the soul from the transformation of the socio-political realm beginning with the German Peasants’ revolt. Historian Brad Gregory makes the case that this is where Luther reconfigured external works of the body away from inner workings of the soul (sanctification from justification). Luther overtly rejected the peasants claim that salvation meant external change of social conditions.[iii] Instead, he is convinced that the gospel, faith, and salvation are not to be combined with politics, social realities, or the economy. Works of mercy result from your salvation, they don’t contribute to it.[iv]

Luther’s split is also on display in his two kingdoms theology via his writings in On Secular Authority.[v] God has ordained two governments, he outlines, 1.) the spiritual by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteousness and 2.) the temporal, which restrains the wicked.[vi] Catholic political theologian C. C. Pecknold in his book Christianity and Politics: A Short History narrates how this led to a radical democratization of society where this idealized, individualized, interiorized ecclesiology drives a wedge between the individual and his/her social community.[vii] All of this, I contend, led to problems for a Christian church in mission 500 years later in North American Protestantism.

The Split Transferred Across The Ocean

This splitting, of Christ’s work in the individual soul from Christ’s work in the socio-political realities we live in, all took place from within the Reformation frame of the magisterial reformation. Here the Reformers had confidence in the magistrates, and their respective governing authorities, to lead the culture under God according to and in harmony with Christian principles and the church. The Reformers, in a sense, could allow themselves to ignore the social realities forming Christian lives. These social realities were under the rule of thre Magistrate under God. The church could focus on individual salvation, and let the magistrate rule society under the same God. But when transferred across the ocean, once the established church was done away with, this split between the individual and social, set into motion a series of dynamics which detached the Christian from mission and world all the more.

Bonhoeffer talked about this individualization in the essay mentioned in Post One.“ He said “God granted American Christianity no reformation. He gave them revivalist preachers, churchman, theologians, but no reformation by the Word of God.” The Protestantism that emerged in America therefore, via this same soteriology, “stands in conscious seclusion and detachment from the general life of the church.”[viii] It becomes essentially a private “religion and ethics.”

Whereas in Christendom medieval Europe, Christians could lazily assume their cultural systems were Christian (even though today we see their miserable failings), once across the ocean, several hundred years later, we assume no such thing. And with now an interiorized faith, Christians are essentially left alone to their own individual status with God, quite separated from what is happening in society and culture, to impact the social worlds they live in. In essence, we have been able to see ourselves as souls going to heaven when we die and managing our earthly lives as best we can in the meantime.

In this process, the inheritors of this salvation, in many cases evangelical Christians, can be formed into people who live pious lives in a convenient indifference to the unjust social systems as long as they are working to their own advantage.[ix] Even worse, we separate the social world as a space where Christ is not at work via the power of His Holy Spirit. It then becomes a space we manage restraining the forces of sin as best we can. This becomes a justification for voting for governments that somehow can enforce Christian morals, and prevent sin (like abortion etc.). We might even vote for Trump as the best option.

As a result, we end up enforcing Christian morals upon a people presumed to be without Christ. And this always turns into a coercion that breeds resentment and abject violence. Worse, the church is formed to think it enters the world to manage sin, not bring salvation, except to individuals who must be saved and extracted from the world. This I suggest was all made possible by a Reformed forensic soteriology, transported overseas, that separates our status of justification in Christ from the sanctification of our bodies in the world, extracting ourselves from God’s mission of justice in and among the world.[x]

The Effects of Justification by Faith Alone on Mission in North America

The effects of all this on our formation for mission, some 500 years later, is daunting. At its worst, it shapes Christians to be passive to the injustices in the world, and to manage them, ala Luther in the Peasants Revolt, for pragmatic outcomes. We give up both participation in our witness and God’s work for His justice in the world. We appear duplicitous and dispassionate. This I believe happened in the culture of the Moral Majority in the 1980’s, in the various evangelical voting blocks voting for the Trump presidency.

Theologian Willie Jennings describes this kind of malformation via the experience of Westernized forensic salvation of the African Olaudah Equiano on a British slave ship in the eighteenth century. He says, “His vision of salvation touches the ground, but it cannot do anything about the ground it touches. . . . If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.”[xi] And so Christianity gets absorbed into the evil systems of slavery and inducts Equiano into slavery as part of the process. Salvation becomes a status extrinsic to the injustices we participate in the world. And we lose our witness, nevermind God’s justice in the world.

Jennings goes on to further describe the social dynamic that occurs via a soteriology that extracts the individual’s salvation from the world into an individualized isolated relationship with God. It is powerless to “do anything about the ground that it touches.” This individualization, which started in Reformation Europe, could be ignored as long as there was the backdrop of an assumed Christian society and social institutions. But, when transferred across the ocean, this soteriology becomes the means by which our witness is undermined. It separates salvation from the salvation God is working in the world to make the world right in Jesus Christ. It separates us from mission. In so doing we are malformed to make space for God’s work in the world, to become witnesses/participants to his work of justice in the world. It works against mission in the North American context.

The Ana-Baptist Pentecostal In Me

I don’t think it’s fair to blame Luther for all the above. Luther highlighted “justification by faith” at a time when this insight was sorely needed. It transformed Europe for the gospel. In Luther’s context, though it wasn’t perfect, his theological work made sense.

Neither is it fair to blame Calvin for what has happened 500 years later in the mission fields of a totally different context in North American post-Christendom. Calvin did begin to move salvation in a more forensic direction. He was a lawyer after all. But Calvin, as well as Luther, sought to hold the ordo salutis together. They did not foresee the split that would happen via their elevation of “justification by faith” in the Reformation theologies of the 16^th century.

Having said all of that, the propensity to do the split remains in the camps of those Christians influenced by the Reformed theologies of 16^th century (for a review of the way this theological emphasis continues to this day to split salvation from works from faith, Matt Bates’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 107-112). It is evidenced wherever the paranoia against works righteousness persists or where social justice is only seen as a pre-amble to personal salvation (instead part and parcel of the same work). It is evidenced wherever evangelicals willingly throw all in with a corrupt Trump presidency.

The Neo-Anabaptist soteriology starts from a different place. Its understanding of salvation starts with the whole discipleship of the person into the whole of Christ’s kingdom in a local space and time. This discipleship looks not only to Christ’s atoning death, resurrection, and victory, for an understanding of salvation. That is only part of salvation. Instead we look to Christ’s ascension, his victory over sin, evil and death, and His reign over the world, and the bringing of his kingdom until he returns. To say “Jesus is (my) Lord” is as much salvation as to say “Jesus is my Savior.” The cross is not only the defining moment by which we have been redeemed (past tense) from the chains of sin, it is the sign of the way God works in the world and shall bring in his kingdom. The individual cannot be separated from the arena of lived life in the world when saved, because the same Christ that has saved me, is alive, ruling and working to save and heal the world.

And so the Neo-Anabaptist soteriology cannot separate evangelism from discipleship. To be saved is come under the Lordship of Christ for my life, and what He is doing in the world. In knowing Jesus, we are seamlessly led into a discipleship that follows Jesus into the renewal of all things.

This counters the Reformed impulse to interiorize the life of the Spirit.[xii] It also counters the Pentecostal emphasis to locate the experience of the Spirit to the interior of the individual. Instead, now, the Anabaptist Pentecostal sees the Spirit at work in the world, under the Lordship of Christ, confident He is drawing the whole world to Himself. We now go into the world confident, always being asked to cooperate with God through Jesus by the Spirit to overcome injustice, being witnesses to all of what God is doing through Christ to heal and save the world.

And so Jesus now rules from the right hand of the Father bringing in his kingdom. For “he must reign until all enemies have been made subject” (1 Cor 15:25, my translation). Following Jesus then is not only a personal moral journey, it is becoming a subject of his rule and extending his rule into space and time through his Holy Spirit presence wherever he may be received. Being justified and forgiven is the entry into his kingdom. By entering his very presence, we become a participant in his mission. Salvation is not about forgiveness of sin only. It is about bringing all things—personal and social—under the Lordship of Christ.[xiii] This unites justification and sanctification and mission in the world into one. Amen and amen.

My Last Post

This concludes my writing on “Why I’m not Reformed.” The answer has much to do with how I see the Reformation theology working against mission. It’s a bold statement I know. And there are arguments to be made that another more European form of reformed theology ala Leslie Newbigin, Darrel Guder (influenced by Newbigin) counteracts these propensities outlined in these articles. It’s a fair argument. But of course I’m not talking about Europe. I’m talking about the Reformed theologies that landed across the ocean from Europe, and the propensities it all lead to in the formation a churches (especially within evangelicalism) in North America. I hope these posts have served to promote a good conversation on all these matters.

If you’re interested in more conversations like these, that embrace serious theology and the questions of culture and mission, by all means subscribe to this substack (it’s free!). I write an average of two times a month. And if you’re into podcasts, check out the Theology on Mission podcast. Mike and I have fun as well as serious conversations of all things culture, gospel and mission.

[i] Luther, The Annotated Luther, 143.

[ii] This argument is made by Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 80.

[iii] Instead, in his 1525 On the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, he writes, “It is just when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you.” See Luther, Luther’s Works, 50.

[iv] Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 111.

[v] Luther wrote On Secular Authority (1523) before his Galatians Commentary (1535). Here he said that “Secular government has laws that extend no further than the body, goods, and outward earthly matters . . . but where the soul is concerned, God neither can nor will allow anyone but himself to rule,” . . . [for] “by what right does secular authority, in its folly, presume to judge a thing as secret, spiritual, hidden as faith?” See Luther and Calvin, Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, 23, 25.

[vi] Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 93.

[vii] Pecknold, Christianity and Politics.

[viii] Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, 117.

[ix] This explains the evangelical indifference to Trump’s amoral ethos all the while many of them in US voted for him?

[x] Tim Keller, the famed deceased NYC pastor, sought to overcome this (what I have called) malformation of Reformed theology for mission by making the individual’s experience of being justified by faith the conduit through which God’s grace flows to show love, mercy, and charity to the hurting. Keller says the individual, fully forgiven in Christ, naturally is moved to see victims of injustice differently. In that Christians have received of the grace and forgiveness of God’s love, we cannot help but give the same generously to those who are hurting and in need among us. Much like Luther, Keller sees the works of justice flowing though the saved individual and the transformation that springs forth in each person out of gratitude and love for God. The problem however is that Keller’s approach opens the pathway to make justice the after effect of salvation. Justice is the consequence of God’s Kingdom instead of the very reality that God does in and through his reign. It becomes something we do instead something God does as his reign restructures the way we live in the world. Our good works now become suspect. They become just what Luther feared, our attempts to do good to prove something. This too, in its own way, undermines witness. See Keller, Generous Justice.

[xi] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 196.

[xii] Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Harvard Press, 2007) links the “interiorizing of the Spirit” to the Reformation, arguing that the Reformers abolished the exterior efficacy of the sacraments, and in so doing “disenchanted” the cosmos (Taylor is following Max Weber) of the work the Spirit.

[xiii] For a deeper understanding of discipleship as following Christ in the way of nonviolence, suffering, and his kingdom, read Arnold Snyder, Following in the Footsteps of Jesus. Here through the eyes of historic Anabaptism we find the roots of Neo-Anabaptist engagements with culture through communal discipleship.