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There were many powerful insights to arise out of the theological crises and reflections of the Reformation period. Liturgically, theologically, and morally, the Reformation is rightly so called a reform-ation of the Western Christian churches of the Late Medieval period. During the period, the Roman Catholic Church was split asunder as groups within it began perceiving the Roman Church’s priestly abuses and theological missteps. A return to the biblical text, to the Fathers, and to a robust liturgy took place which would forever change the face of the Christian West. The two largest branches to arise out of the Reformation period – the Lutherans and the Reformed – nonetheless stood at odds with each other and fought amongst themselves.
The Reformed branch ended up taking the most ground, since the influence it garnered throughout England, Switzerland, the Dutch lands, and eventually North America (where the early evangelicals fled to from England) bequeathed to it major theological sway over the Western world. Many contemporary evangelical denominations of the Presbyterian and Baptist veins owe their heritage to the thoroughly-Reformed Puritans who split from the hierarchical Church of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Church of England itself was influenced heavily by the theological emphases espoused by the Continental Reformed churches. Their figureheads, however, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, did not themselves agree on much and even functioned within largely different liturgical situations. Calvin, in Geneva, largely stayed put, expending his efforts on pastoral, theological, and biblical matters, while Zwingli utilized the authority he gained to wage a bloody war on the surrounding Roman groups which bordered his territory.
As time went on and the Reformed Protestants after Calvin and Zwingli died were tasked with maintaining their Reformed churches, certain further interpretations of their young tradition took place. Roughly one hundred years after the death of Calvin, Reformed theologians of the English churches and the Dutch churches met separately to systematize the work and theology of their respective branches, leaning heavily on the theological writings of their mutual forefather John Calvin. The first document, the Canons of Dort, was written by the Dutch Reformed theologians in the years 1618-19. The second – and much more popular document in the Western world – was the Westminster Catechism, written by the English Reformed theologians in 1646-47. Each document centers its theology on matters like Divine Providence and Election, and makes the enmity between God and Man (and particularly the enmity they believe exists in God towards Man) a focal point of their “theological system.” For the purposes of this post, I will refer to this branch of the Reformed churches – i.e., the branch I am conjoining because of their mutually-agreed-upon foci – as the “Westminster” branch.
*To be transparent, I take my historical-interpretive lead here from theologians like Barth and Torrance, and contemporary theologians like Athanasian Reformed (growrag.wordpress.com).*
I have found that there is another way to be Reformed, however. See, other, better tradition-interpretations took place within just this last century by theologians who were much more in tune with the patristic consensus of the Ancient Catholic Church (to which all orthodox Christians today are heirs). Something which must be emphatically pushed: it is not, not, not a commendable thing to consciously understand one’s Christian faith as consisting of something fundamentally different from that of those Christians living before the time of the Reformation period. So many contemporary Christians today are almost proud of how much more “biblical” their current expression of the faith is compared to those living before Martin Luther, as if the Reformation was only and exclusively some pure renewal movement, as if the Reformation was some divine thing. *For more on this thought, read Jackson Shepard’s new Mere Orthodoxy article.*
The theologian who most influences me in this regard, towards seeing a continuity between the Ancient Catholic Church and contemporary Christian churches of all veins (within the bounds of Nicaea, of course), but particularly of the Reformed tradition, is Thomas F. Torrance. In his lecture, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” Torrance lays out a better way to interpret and utilize the history of the Reformed tradition and Calvin’s writings, a way which decidedly departs from the branch that developed into the Westminster theology.
Torrance writes:
“Built into the foundations of the Reformed tradition, of course, was the primacy given to the Word of God, which was regarded not as some communication about God detached from God but as God himself speaking to us personally. God is known only through God, on the actual ground of God’s self-revelation and gracious activity toward us, for it is only through Christ and the Spirit that we have access to God… For Calvin the primary question became, Who is God? Who is the One who acts in this merciful and loving way toward us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit? This is not a question in which the essence and the existence of God are held apart from one another, but one in which God is allowed to disclose who he is in actual relation toward us, and one in which we are cast wholly upon God’s own reality in presenting himself to be known by us.”[1]
The “distinctly Reformed” character of the tradition is the infinite qualitative distinction between God and Man, where God is recognized as the always-initiator of the union between God and Man. The central feature of the Reformed tradition, parallel to Torrance’s description of God’s initiative, is rightly summarized by Francois Wendel:
“No theology is Christian and in conformity with the Scriptures but in the degree to which it respects the infinite distance separating God from his creature and gives up all confusion, all ‘mixing’ that might tend to efface the radical distinction between the Divine and the human.”[2]
I.e., Barth’s term of God as “wholly other.”
Torrance then distinguishes what he categorizes as a patristically-informed version of the Reformed tradition (“Athanasian Reformed,” see the website above) from the Westminster Reformed:
“Thus predestination is not to be understood in terms of some timeless decree in God, but as the electing activity of God providentially and savingly at work in what Calvin called ‘the history of redemption’… This identity of eternal election and divine providence in Jesus Christ generated in the Reformed tradition its well-known conjunction of repose in God and active obedience to God in the service of Christ’s kingdom. However, if that repose in God is referred, as has happened only too often in the history of Reformed churches, to an inertial ground in the eternal being of God, then there opens up a split in people’s understanding between predestination and the saving activity of Christ in space and time, e.g., in the notion of election as ‘antecedent to grace.’ That would seem to be the source of a tendency toward a Nestorian view of Christ that keeps cropping up in Calvinist theology. This is very evident in misguided attempts to construe a ‘pre’ in ‘predestination’ in a logical, causal, or temporal way, and then to project it back into an absolute decree behind the back of Jesus and thus to introduce a division into the very person of Christ. It is one of Karl Barth’s prime contributions to Reformed theology that he has decisively exposed and rejected such a damaging way of thought.”[3]
The problem with the Westminster theologians, Torrance notes, is that in their attempts to uphold their prized elucidations of the doctrines of Predestination and Election, they so conceptualize that “‘pre’ in ‘predestination'” as something which is fundamentally detached and hidden “behind the back of Jesus,” i.e., as something not ontologically related to Jesus Christ who is the Son of God (the Son within Triune formula of Father-Son-Spirit), and as something they posit exists in the pre-creation planning of God as some choice of some over others without any reference to Christ’s all-encompassing work. Torrance’s chief critique, then, is that the Westminster theologians introduce a hidden element within the life and revelation of God, which in turn means God does not actually or authentically reveal Himself in Christ, but maintains a separation from humanity such that His lofty holiness is untouched by humanity’s filthy lowness. Such a hidden element then adequately qualifies the God “revealed” by Christ as sharing a fundamental similarity of detachment from humanity with the absolute-power deity espoused as the Muslim god, Allah, the god who is decidedly separate from and unknowable by humanity. To Torrance, any god so conceptualized has no claim to true revealing-of-Self as claimed taking place in Christ by the historic Church catholic. If there is no revealing-of-Self, humanity has no authentic claim to be united to God’s inner, Triune life. The Westminster formulation of Predestination then undermines the entire divine program as acted out, embodied, and completed in Jesus Christ.
Any cursory familiarity with the theological language of Westminster theologians (epitomized in theologians like the late R.C. Sproul and in contemporary pop-theology like the Five Points) makes their prized conception of God’s hiddenness from humanity plain. The sort of put-you-in-your-place theological aggression exemplified by Westminsters is remarkably similar to what you see in the innumerable videos of doctrinally-orthodox Muslim apologists whose primary strategy is intimidation and recourse to the sinfulness of the human race.
Tied to all this is the problem that Westminster theology tends to locate that transcendence of God mentioned earlier (Barth’s “wholly other”) in the moral uprightness and justice of God rather than in His factual ontological status as qualitatively other or categorically different than creation. There is this underlying current in Westminster theology, too, that the reason for the Son’s enflesh-ment has to do primarily with satisfying the anger and wrath God harbors against humanity, and nothing else, as if the life and active obedience of Christ is some means to a further end rather than the means and end of the whole Divine program (i.e., an ontological rather than a moral end). Torrance is on to this when he remarks, finally, that:
“For us to be in Christ or for Christ to be in us has to be understood in an ontological way, and not just in a figurative or spiritual way. It is through a real union with Christ in his vicarious humanity that all that Christ has done for us in himself becomes ours and we are made to share together what Christ is. That was Calvin’s doctrine of the ‘blessed exchange,’ which he took over from the Greek Fathers. It was in that incarnational and atoning way that justification has to be understood, not just in terms of imputed righteousness but in terms of a participation in the righteousness of Christ which is transferred to us through union with him.”[4]
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pgs. 5-6.
[2] François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (London, UK: Collins, 1965), 151.
[3] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pgs 6-7.
[4] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pg 10.
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