I have noticed in recent years that fewer and fewer PC(USA) congregations celebrate Reformation Sunday, choosing instead to observe All Saints’ Day. Sometimes we may sing Martin Luther’s well-known hymn “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” but that is frequently the extent of the remembrance. I have wondered why this is so.
Perhaps it is because we live in a much more ecumenical time, and it seems in poor taste to celebrate the occasion that led to a tragic division among Christians. Or perhaps the Reformation obsession with sin and grace – the terrors of conscience before the judgment seat of a holy God and the reassuring word of justification by faith alone – doesn’t preach in our time. In some ways, it is hard to find people now who spend a lot of time worrying about hell and divine wrath or the quest to find grace through confession and penance.
I have received feedback more than once in my 30+ years of teaching in Presbyterian seminaries that “dead, White, male, European” thinkers have little to offer us today: the problems that occupy us are different than those that worried them. Is celebrating the Reformation in our churches and studying it in our seminaries still valuable?
Is celebrating the Reformation in our churches and studying it in our seminaries still valuable?
It is worth remembering that the 16th century in Europe was an era with many similarities to our own. Society was going through upheavals because of new science and technology that was upending daily life. There was political instability, war and armed rebellions. Thousands of people were being forced to flee as refugees to escape the violence. The church in both East and West had struggled for centuries to exert its power in secular politics. There was economic inequality and crushing poverty, exacerbated by natural disasters and social violence. It was an anxious time, a time when everything seemed up for grabs.
Not surprisingly, many people believed the end of the world must be at hand. Apocalyptic preaching captivated people’s minds, anticipating the horrific final battle between good and evil that would destroy the earth and usher in the Kingdom of God. It was in this milieu that a young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther began to have some serious doubts about the theology he had learned in university and about the practices of the church to which he had devoted his life to fulfill the rash oath he had made to God in a life-threatening emergency. It was in the crucible of the concerns of his time that Luther eventually heard again the radical meaning of the gospel as good news for his contemporaries.
The Presbyterian Church arose in the second generation of the Reformation, and we look to the Genevan reformer John Calvin and his Scottish disciple John Knox as our founding fathers. To explore the question of the Reformation’s modern relevance, I’d like to draw out three basic teachings in Calvin’s theology that can still speak powerfully to us when interpreted in our context.
First, Calvin argued that theology as a discipline could be reduced to two topics — the knowledge of God and of ourselves. He thought these two bodies of knowledge were at every point reciprocally related: the more we know about who God is and what God does, the more we can properly understand ourselves in detail (and vice-versa). God the Creator-Redeemer defines humans as sinful creatures who are redeemed. This creating and redeeming God is in relation not only to us but to everything that exists from the smallest subatomic particle or single-celled organism to the largest plants and animals on earth — and even to the galaxies and billions of stars that make up the cosmos. Along with all God’s creatures, we are parts of a diverse, dependent web. This view of reality, when unpacked, has a lot of promise to help us think with hope, realism, and creativity amidst our anxieties about climate change, mass extinctions, and even the search for life on other planets. It can also powerfully critique ideologies that try to argue for the supremacy of any creature that is not God (e.g., race, nationality, class, economic philosophy).
Second, Calvin like Luther takes the heart of the gospel message to be the sovereign grace of God. Although in our quotidian lives we may feel we live in a meritocracy where people are rewarded according to their efforts, God’s realm is not like that. From the moment anyone begins to exist until the moment they return to the Creator in death or nonbeing, every human (and everything that is) lives by God’s free goodwill alone. There is nothing we can do to “earn” our being, nor to control and determine our final destiny. These are secured only in God’s overflowing love and grace. The doctrine of grace has always been astonishing to everyone — to the rich and powerful, but also to the poor, those down on their luck, and even to those with hardened hearts. It is a word that speaks against the values embedded in the neoliberal capitalism that dominates economics around the globe today. It says that God cannot be bought and owned by any of God’s creatures. And it says that the value of each person is secured not by work or net worth but by God’s love alone.
Amidst the anxieties of our age … we, like Luther, Calvin and Knox before us, can leave the outcomes to the powerful God of glory who is at the same time the good and loving God of grace.
Third, since we all exist by sheer grace, our appropriate response is gratitude. We are to be grateful for the time and space we are allotted to use our gifts in service of others as a mirror of God’s glory and grace. Amidst the anxieties of our age — new technologies, income inequality, crushing poverty, racial/ethnic/nationalist hatred and violence, endless natural disasters, wars, refugee crises, failing governments and politically corrupted churches — we, like Luther, Calvin and Knox before us, can leave the outcomes to the powerful God of glory who is at the same time the good and loving God of grace. And we can engage in the challenges and opportunities of each day with all the energy, creativity and hope we can draw from the recognition that we are not our own — we belong to God. As Calvin puts it in the opening questions and answers of his Genevan Catechism: “What is the purpose of human life? It is to know God. Why do you say that? Because God has created us and put us in the world to be glorified in us. And there is a good reason why we should devote our lives to God’s glory: because God is the author of them. And what is the highest good of humans? The very same thing.”