What the Reformation gave us
An honest accounting of Volume 4
The Reformation is over, at least in the sense that the wars of religion are ending and the fractures are hardening into denominations. Stand at 1650 and try to see what has been gained and what has been lost.
Gained: the Bible in the languages of the people — Tyndale's English, Luther's German, the vernacular translations that put scripture in the hands of the plowboy and the fishwife and the merchant. The recovery of the gospel of grace — the Reformation's central theological achievement, the rediscovery of Paul and Augustine, the insistence that salvation is God's gift from beginning to end. The priesthood of all believers — the demolition of the wall between clergy and laity, the insistence that every person has direct access to God. The tradition of congregational singing — Luther's hymns, the psalter in the Reformed churches, the music that gives ordinary people a voice in worship. The catechisms — Heidelberg, Westminster, Luther's own — that hand the faith to children in forms they can carry.
Lost: the unity of Western Christianity — permanently, irreversibly broken. Perhaps forty thousand people burned, drowned, or beheaded in the religious wars. The sophisticated synthesis of faith and culture that the best of the medieval church achieved — gone, replaced by competing confessional cultures that are often narrower. Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa caught in the crossfire of European religious conflict they did not choose and did not cause.
The Reformation gave us the Bible and took away the table. It gave us grace and took away unity. Both things are permanently true.
“The church is always reforming — semper reformanda.”
— Reformed tradition, attributed, 17th century
“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
Semper reformanda. Always reforming.
The phrase is not a license for endless revision. It is a recognition that the church is always in the process of being conformed more fully to its head — that the work is not finished, that the distance between what the church is and what it is called to be is always real and always being worked on.
The Reformation gave us the word semper reformanda and then spent a century demonstrating how hard the reforming actually is — how the reformed church needs reforming as urgently as the church it reformed.
This is not cynicism. It is honesty. And honesty, in the tradition of those who nailed theses to doors and burned the bulls that condemned them, is where the reforming always begins.
Volume 5 opens tomorrow. The story is not over.