Reforming the Protestant Reformation for the 21st Century: Getting Past Fundy-Fear and Pressing into the Faith of the Gospel

I don’t think folks really appreciate, fully, what we as Evangelical Calvinists are attempting; some do, but most I would suggest don’t. It isn’t that we are trying something brand new, but instead the attempt is to expose folks to phenomena that have been present in the history of the church. It’s an attempt that in the best of ways engages with the spirit of the Protestant Reformation, and the attendant Christian Humanist approach of ad fontes (back to the sources).

The aforementioned noted it is also an attempt to remind people that we live in the 21^st century; it’s to remind people that we are located and conditioned by the period we live in no matter how hard we might try to extricate ourselves from it. And this brings something up: Why is there this seemingly incipient belief that the further away we get from the first advent of Jesus Christ that there is apparently more decay and degradation in the realm of ideas relative to the Gospel? This seems to be an inner-formative belief among many who are constantly calling us back to the ‘old paths’ in order to correct the errantly ‘new paths’ (meaning modern). Why is the present seen with so much suspicion; is this more of a commentary on our own locatedness than it is on the ideas most immediate to us in our own periodized lives? Is it because we look around at the universe within which we live and see all of the moral decay, and associate such decay with our modern and postmodern age which then poisons any ideation we might find present in our period of experience?

What Evangelical Calvinism is alerting folks to is that the modern period is not inherently evil; we all, indeed, in one way or another are products of the period. This does not mean that we cannot critically distantiate ourselves, to an extent, from our locatedness (at least intellectually), but what it does suggest, I would contend, is that we should look and see what modes of thought are most immediately present and see if any of those modes and categories might help orthodox Christian dogma to advance closer to the one faith once for all delivered to the saints; the faith of Christ. This is not only what us Evangelical Calvinists are wanting to invite people to, but, indeed, it is an alert that much of this work has already been done; particularly for the Reformed faith of Protestant Christianity. This is why Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance are such important figures for Evangelical Calvinists. These two guys, in particular, represent minds and hearts that saw the good in our locatedness, recognized its inescapability, and sought to engage with the ideational categories their age presented them with and use those to help translate the Reformed Christian faith, and help to grammarize the good-news of the Gospel, for their 20^th century context. In step with this Evangelical Calvinists (like myself) are hoping to do the same by working from the examples of Barth, Torrance, et al. in translating the Gospel for the 21^st century Reformed church. Thomas Torrance describes this approach better than I can when he writes the following in regard to Barth’s approach to distilling and engaging with the Reformed Christian faith:

The theology of Karl Barth is to be understood as a rethinking and restating of Reformed theology after the immense philosophical and scientific developments of modern times which have supplied us with new conceptual and scientific tools. While seeking to articulate Christian theology within this world of new thought-forms Barth has had to wage a fiercer war with modern philosophy than ever the medieval and Protestant schoolmen had to with ancient philosophy, but he has been no less appreciative of the contributions of scientific and philosophical thinking to the task of theology, which, just because it operates within the same world of speech and thought as they, cannot and must not isolate itself from them. One of the interesting results of this new positive and dynamic theology in the modern style is the parallel between its method and that which has emerged in quantum physics. This is particularly evident in the way in which both physics and theology have had to treat the old antinomies between object and subject, thing and motion, being and act, determinism and freedom, etc. Since Barth began to work out his rational method and develop his Dogmatics in a sustained integration of content and method, modern science has made even greater strides toward the clarification of the deep objective rationality in the nature of things, e.g. in the periodicity or mathematical structure of the elements, and the effect of this upon theology is to challenge every attempt to transcend the subject-object relationship as an irrational flight from objectivity and rigorous, exact thinking.[1]

Even though many in the resurgence and retrieval of Reformed theology movement are very intelligent and sophisticate about the way they frame things, and in their approach to culture and theology in general, what I sense is still yet a type of ‘fundamentalist-fear.’ There seems to be a fear and insecurity about what the modern period has produced, ideationally, and so there is this retreat back to the ‘orthodox’ days; whether that be back to the 16^th and 17^th centuries or the 3^rd and 4^th centuries of the church’s development. If you share this fear then Evangelical Calvinism will be mostly off-putting to you. I personally, as an Evangelical Calvinist, do not share the belief that God periodizes himself; that he limits himself to speaking to his church in a few periods strewn throughout church history. I think he still speaks, and is able to use the categories we have present to us in our period in effervescent and fruitful ways towards translating the Gospel in a grammar, and even form that fits with this particular period; and maybe even allows for the Gospel and its reality, Jesus Christ, to be understood in even more proximate ways than the 16^th and 17^th centuries allowed for. This is not to say that we cannot, nor should not constructively engage with the past, but it is to say that we shouldn’t demonize or ‘second-class’ the present as if the past was sacrosanct and the present is inherently defunct and polluted.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969),