by Gary Neal Hansen
Mention the Reformation and what do you think of? Theological opinions? Polemical positions?
The phrase that ought to come to mind is “Christian community.”
Take Geneva, under the leadership of John Calvin. I suspect that brings to mind images of the Consistory, where pastors and elders met with those whose behavior was not thought quite up to snuff for a Christian.
That comes across as restrictive and judgmental in our day – but only because our Christian communities have not been formed in a shared faith and grown into agreement on standards. We tend to approach Christian living as a far more individualistic thing.
But consider John Knox’s famous assessment of life in Calvin’s Geneva. It was, he said, “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles.”
Geneva was a community with ideals: They thought of the church as a school. And a school is a very particular kind of community. Life together was about learning the faith and learning how to live it.
As a school, the church had a curriculum: They taught and learned the Bible, cover to cover and in depth. And they had a variety of classrooms.
If you were a kid getting ready to step into adult faith (or if you were an adult who did not know enough about the faith to really live it), you would attend classes on the catechism. The catechism was the roadmap to the Bible’s teaching, arranged thematically for easy understanding.
The centerpiece of worship was an exposition of a passage of Scripture. You knew what passage was coming because your pastor had been preaching though the same book for weeks or months. He (and at that time it was always a “he”) taught each passage, in the context of the book and the whole of the Bible. You learned how to live your life in light of its message.
If you were training for ministry the same thing happened in greater depth: You went to lectures where Calvin taught a book of Scripture, passage by passage, exploring the original languages, in light of the theology of the whole Bible. (Many of those lectures became his biblical commentaries, by the way, to teach other theological students far and wide.)
If you were a pastor the process continued: You went to the Friday study group called the “congregation” with all the other pastors in town. You worked through a passage of the Bible together, one member presenting and all members debating.
Now lest you think all of this is just that rascally Calvin imposing his ways on Geneva, the same features were found, more or less, in Reformed communities elsewhere. They used catechisms to summarize the biblical faith, and then taught the Bible cover to cover.
Members of a 16th century Reformed Christian community led to a deep, rich, shared, lived understanding of biblical Christianity. What might our communities look like if we did some of what they did?
GARY NEAL HANSEN is associate professor of church history at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. He blogs on Christian community at GaryNealHansen.com, where you can get a free copy of his newest book “Love Your Bible: Finding Your Way to the Presence of God with a 12th Century Monk.”
