John H Armstrong

An Anniversary Celebration for Two Great Men

It is known by most that I think two of the greatest men who ever lived were John Calvin (1509-1564) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). In so many ways they are widely different characters but in others they both represent the kind of greatness that defines historical epochs and movements. You will notice, by their birth dates, that we celebrate their 500th and 200th anniversaries of their respective births this New Year. Both lived into their 54th year, Calvin dying from physical infirmity and Lincoln from assassination.

You may be inclined to think that these two giants have almost nothing in common. I would disagree. Calvin was a minister, a theologian and a writer. But his views have shaped human government in the West right down to the present time. Lincoln was never even a church member and had a very bad encounter with a form of hyper-Calvinism as a young man. For most of his life he was not interested in formal religion, though he often thought and wrote about God in various ways. What intrigues me is that Lincoln had a strong view of divine providence, a doctrine most associated with a person like Calvin. I would argue that Lincoln actually lived his life more like a Calvinist than almost any American president we have ever elected. He saw God's hand in much of what happened to him and around him. I would also argue that he became a serious believer prior to the end of his life, though he never accepted water baptism and became a church member.

Few men in human history have had so much written about them as these two. There is more written about Abraham Lincoln than any other person in history besides Jesus. Think about that. It is staggering really.

And John Calvin has to be up there somewhere on the list of the most-written-about figures in history. And both men are misunderstood by friends and foes alike. Plus, both left a written legacy that is far more important and readable than most realize. And both died in faith and hope having accomplished much more than they realized. America would not be what it is today without Abraham Lincoln. Western history, and Protestantism in general, would not be what it is without John Calvin.

I am a member of several societies that deeply interest me. One is the John Calvin Society. Another is the Abraham Lincoln Forum. I have read both of these men for a lifetime. I will read them even more in this anniversary year. Lincolns papers and letters will be read carefully in 2009. Calvin's Institutes will again be studied. Few figures in history have influenced me like these two. I look forward to the various celebrations that will happen this year in honor of them. I do find it more than curious that we get to celebrate both their lives in the same year. Happy birthday John Calvin and Abe Lincoln. I thank God he gave to humankind the two of you.

Protestantism and Natural Law Theory

Protestantism has an odd history, at least over the last two hundred or so years, with regard to the doctrine of natural law. Catholics, on the other hand, have a rich intellectual history with regard to this subject. One of the excellent seminars that I attended at Acton University yesterday was taught by Dr. Stephen J. Grabill, a staff member of Acton who is also a research scholar in theology with the Institute and the editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. His most recent book, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, was recently published by Eerdmans and is an important contribution on the natural law debate.

What then is natural law? Dr. Grabill defined it as “the foundational principles of morality that are not only right for all, but at some level known to all.” It equates, in some sense, with the biblical reference to “a law written on the heart.” It is an appeal to all mankind that establishes foundational principles of morality known to reason and conscience. Christians do not believe that men know God savingly through natural law but they have generally believed that natural law makes moral truth public, universal and nonexclusive.

Dr. Grabill demonstrated that both Luther and Calvin, as did their immediate theological heirs, clearly believed in natural law. Martin Luther believed we were born with a common judgment about God inscribed on our souls and Calvin defined this as “that apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes sufficiently between just and unjust, and which deprives men of the excuse of ignorance while it proves them guilty by their own testimony.” Man is a social being, thus the “seeds” of law are planted in his mind. This is why nothing can destroy the primary idea of justice that results from this law in our soul.

The famous twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth, in doing battle with liberalism and state socialism, came to embrace a very anti-natural law position that then came to dominate much of intellectual Protestant life for almost a century. Barth rejected the idea that God can be known, even in part, through creation. When Emil Brunner challenged the great Barth a huge controversy ensued. This put natural law on the back burner of serious Protestant theology for decades. Recently, this position is being rethought and Dr. Grabill is a leading thinker in this recovery.

Grabill argued that the rejection of natural law leads to a false division between nature and grace. He believes that we lose the basis for a real moral apologetic in the wider culture if we surrender the doctrine of natural law. Truth can be known in creation, conscience and reason but this truth will never rise to the level of redemption. What it will provide is a public record of God’s power and divinity that allows serious Christians to pursue both evangelism and virtue formation. Evangelism is the priority but we need both. I believe Grabill gave good and compelling reasons to rethink the modern Protestant response to the natural law argument. I look forward to reading his book and going further with these arguments. I was not taught a strong natural law position in my own theological training so I have work to do.

The Issues Change But the Disputes Remain

Some of my friends embrace what I call "Reformation romanticism." This notion generally colors everything they see and do in the modern world. In this romantic spirit the modern is generally bad, while things from the sixteenth and seventeenth century are mostly good! A little reading and a great deal more honesty would help to cure most of this nonsense.

On April 6 Dr. Raymond Mentzer helped me to see more of it through a public address presented as the Meeter Center Biennial Lecture (Calvin College, Grand Rapids). The lecture had the arcane title, "No Benches Are Reserved: Seating Disputes in the French Reformation Church." Dr. Mentzer’s lecture actually focused on sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant France. He showed that during this pristine time period benches and chairs first became part of the physical provision of Christian churches in France.

The choice to bring seating into the churches actually came from the emphasis of John Calvin on preaching. In order to support the Reformed style of worship church buildings in France were built, or renovated, to include a pulpit surrounded by pews and chairs. Though seating, in theory at least, was open and unassigned, in reality it was segregated according to age, sex and social status. Benches and chairs were built by church members and thus became coveted and disputed possessions. Consistories (elders and deacons) had to regularly deal with church disputes and divisions that resulted over this new seating.

In one instance an inheritance dispute over a pew was resolved when the consistory locked the contested bench in the church bell tower! Both parties, demonstrating real piety and grace, quit attending the church as a result. Dr. Mentzer argued that these disputes were very often severe and continued for over a century.

So, there you have it. An effort by the earliest Reformed Protestants to renew the church ended in division and strife. Mentzer argued that "something as mundane as seating actually caused more division in the community of believers than attempts to control dogma and theology." Some things never change!

I see issues in our day that parallel these bench disputes much more than really important theology. (I have Reformed friends who have bene run off from jobs and pastorates for being too modern in their approach to music, worship and related issues, as just one example!) Our big theological disputes really look and sound more like "bench disputes" than really necessary ones for renewal. A little reading and preaching of James 2:1-13 might help us here a great deal. I pray Reformation romantics will soon see the silliness of their near worship of the early Protestant era as pristine and driven only by important theology. I also pray that they, and all the rest of us, might seek the greater good of the church without falling into more modern "bench disputes." What a tragedy such history reveals. May God open all our eyes.

The Reformed Church Reforming

The Reformation was not a movement that created a new church. It was a movement that led one part of the church to reform itself by the Word of God and another to reject the particular work of the Spirit's renewing ministry in the sixteenth century.

When Luther walked to the University Church in Wittenberg, around noon on October 31, 1517, he did not think to himself, "Today I am going to reform the church. I will make claims for biblical renewal and the result will be a great church split, resulting in a new Protestant Church." He not only had no plans for a new church he still wasn't even sure whether or not indulgences were right or wrong. He simply knew that profiteering in spiritual things was wrong!

The magisterial Protestant Reformers were most definitely not innovators. And they never desired two churches. They wanted to correct a number of moral and doctrinal abuses by the Word. And they understood that the Word was the gospel of Christ, not just any word from any text. These were not proof-texting radicals. They were faithful sons of the church who longed for new mercies to break upon the visible church and their age with gospel power.

The separation that came about in the sixteenth century needs to be considered much more carefully. Luther never left the church, nor did he ever desire to leave it. The European division resulted in two great streams of Western Christianity, Protestant and Roman Catholic. But the Protestant stream is much better understood as Evangelical. The Reformers used this word, more than any other, to describe what they saw and believed. In their view the church was to be defined by the gospel, not the reverse. So it is to this present day. When the church, Protestant or Catholic, defines itself by itself, or defines the gospel by the church (by its confessions, creeds, traditions, liturgies, etc.) it shuts out the power of the gospel.

This does not mean that creeds, confessions and liturgies are unimportant or irrelevant. Quite the opposite. But it does mean the Word (Christ in the gospel) judges the traditions and confessions of the church! The danger modern Reformed and Lutheran conservatives face is very real at this point. They have a strong tendency to judge everything by their creeds and pratices. Reformation is then seen as restoring our creeds, reacting to "seeker" churches, and in general being oppositional to anything modern and deemed too friendly to popular culture.

The Catholic Church Reformed

There are a number of different ways by which Protestants speak of themselves, of their origins and development, and of the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. I think it is more important than ever that we understand ourselves correctly. We are not simply a "protest" movement, or a prickly splinter group. We are "the Church of Jesus Christ reformed according to the Word of God," to quote one modern writer. This self-understanding means several things.

1. We did not begin in the sixteenth century. Our churches are not the creation of human reformers. The Reformers didn't believe this and we shouldn't believe it either.

2. Our churches are the work of Christ, thus they are an expression of his one body in the world.

3. The goal of the Protestant Reformers was to purify the one church by the Word of God. They desired to give back things that had been lost and to remove things that went contrary to the witness of Scripture and the faith of the earliest Christians.

4. The patristic heritage of the church was not rejected by the earliest Reformers. They argued, faithfully and cogently, that the church fathers were, in the big picture, sympathetic to their reform movement. This means the Reformers were not "reinventing" the church as they went along. For that matter they were not tearing down every liturgical, doctrinal, or moral development that had occured over the previous sixteen centuries.

The word "Reformed" is not the same as "restored." The name "Reformed," as Howard G. Hageman has written correctly, "implies continuity." He adds, "A tree which is reformed is not cut down; it is pruned. Just so with our church; one with the historic church of Jesus Christ, it has been purified and restored by that keenest of all instruments, the living Word of God" (Our Reformed Church, Reformed Church Press, 1995, 1).

I am a Reformed Christian in my ecclessial relationship to church history. But I am a Christian first. This understanding includes the great tradition, the continuity of the creeds, and the faith of Catholics in the West, and Orthdoox in the East. We who are children of the Reformation did not arrive de nouveau. We are part of a historic family, albeit a part that longs to see even further reforming of the older church bodies, as well as the ongoing reforming of our own church bodies. What are not "cut off" from the historic tree of the church. Such an argument is one made by many modern separatists but not one made by the earliest evangelical Reformers. Most conservative Reformed and evangelical churches in America do not understand this important point of self-identity and the results are catastrophic for faith and practice.