Justified by History

Some christians are moved to tears by romanesque basilicas; three stanzas of a Toplady hymn rouse others to emotional heights. As for me, the Reformation era turns me on. Luther before the Emperor or Knox before the Queen sends my blood tingling. I would rather catch pneumonia in Wittenberg than dysentery in Joppa any day. Therefore I am especially sensitive to criticism of the Reformers or of the seventeenth-century Protestant systematicians who followed close on their heels.

Particularly excruciating is criticism of the Reformation that has some basis in fact. That Luther “left the monastery to marry a nun” is an allegation over which little sleep should be lost. But what about the following claim, made by the great Protestant missiologist Gustav Warneck of Halle: “The comprehension of a continuous missionary duty of the Church was limited among the Reformers and their successors by a narrow-minded dogmatism combined with a lack of historical sense. They knew of the great missions of the past, but according to their ideas the apostles had already gone forth to the whole world and they and their disciples had essentially accomplished the missionary task. Christianity, therefore, had already proved its universal vocation as a world religion” (The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, VII, 404).

When Count Truchsess inquired of the Wittenberg theological faculty as to the scope of the Great Commission, the faculty issued an official document declaring that the command to go into all the world was only a “personale privilegium” of the apostles, and had already been fulfilled; were this not so, the faculty reasoned, the duty of becoming a missionary evangelist would fall to every Christian—an absurd conclusion! World evangelism would violate the creative orders (Schöpfungsordnungen) by which God gives each man a stable place in society, sets rulers over their subjects and requires a definite and limited call for ministerial service. In his Abriss einer Geschichte der protestantischen Missionen (Berlin, 1905, p. 65), Warneck states the sobering fact that the Moravian Herrnhutters established more missionary posts in two decades than did all of Reformation Protestantism in two centuries.

But it is possible to miss the forest for the trees in dwelling on such considerations. The historical and cultural situation in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a necessary explanatory backdrop to the facts just adduced. The religious wars of the Reformation era, culminating in the unbelievably brutal Thirty Years’ War that devastated Germany and cast a pall over the whole seventeenth century, attenuated the perspective of Protestants and left them with little energy for world evangelism (cf. C. V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years’ War and Sir George Clark’s War and Society in the Seventeenth Century). The uncritically accepted ideological framework of the “great chain of being” (see Arthur Lovejoy’s superlative treatment of the theme) led to a basic conservatism in social outlook and to a natural predilection for the state church. And the Protestant states, unlike the Catholic ones, were not much engaged in overseas expansion; thus they did not benefit from the alliances between crown and church that led to the early introduction of the Catholic faith into America, Africa, and Asia.

Admittedly, the main thrust of the Protestant Reformation was intensive, not extensive. Lutheranism was an outlaw faith prior to the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555), and Calvinism remained in this unenviable position in the Empire until the Peace of Westphalia, concluding the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Protestants had to fight for their very existence and for the basic truth of the Gospel, that salvation is indeed by grace alone and not by the deeds of the law. Rome had formulated her theology over many centuries; the Protestants were compelled to perform the herculean task of systematizing and competently defending newly recovered biblical truth in a matter of decades. Calvin’s Institutes and Chemnitz’s Examination of the Council of Trent demonstrate how well they succeeded, but this expenditure of energy left little for other tasks, even important ones.

One can legitimately argue that had the Reformers not set Protestantism on so firm a doctrinal footing, the great missionary activities of late seventeenth-century Pietism, the eighteenth-century evangelical awakenings, and what Latourette has called “the great century” of Christian expansion (the nineteenth century) would have been impossible. Like individual members of the Church, who each have their gifts and should not depreciate others or say “I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12), so the eras of church history are part of one body and do not perform identical functions; at the last trump we shall find (as Charles Williams put it) how much the ages have “co-inhered” and been dependent upon one another.

Indeed, the anti-evangelistic criticism of the Reformation seems particularly unfortunate when we recall that the Reformers were above all concerned to recover and proclaim the “evangel”! Werner Elert (The Structure of Lutheranism) has rightly taken Warneck to task for missing this point: “How could Luther, who expounded the Psalms, the Prophets, and Paul, have overlooked or doubted the universal purpose of the mission of Christ and of His Gospel? From Col. 1:23 and Mark 16:15 he concludes that the Gospel is not to be kept in a corner but should fill the whole globe.” Elert cites such orthodox dogmaticians of the time as Jakob Herrbrand: “We are intent, so far as is humanly possible, on winning for the Lord Christ many for eternal life, and we do not want to neglect any opportunity of which we are aware.” Examples of the practical outworking of this zeal included the Jews at home, the Turks in the Balkans, and the Laplanders in Scandinavia.

Though such evangelistic activity may seem small in comparison with Catholic work, in qualitative terms the picture is far different; the recovery of the Gospel among the Protestants eliminated in principle such ex opere operato methods as Xavier’s aspersion (Christianizing tribes by mass application of baptismal water). The Reformers’ stress on lay Bible reading and the priesthood of all believers inevitably led to a sense of personal responsibility for those who had not heard of Christ, and the Wittenberg faculty’s provincialism evaporated as better demographic information replaced the faulty data that had convinced Philipp Nicolai, Johann Gerhard, and others that the apostles had virtually evangelized the globe.

George Forell, in his fine work, Faith Active in Love, has shown how fully the Reformation dynamic impels believers to social action. Precisely the same motive—Christ’s gracious love—constrains heirs of the Reformation (as the Student Volunteer Movement put it) to “evangelize the world in this generation.” For, in the last analysis, who will evangelize our generation if we do not?

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