God

Ultimate Reality

The Reformation was much more than merely a challenge to church practices, it was most fundamentally a restoration of God to the center of meaning and life. A wrong view of God and self is behind every faulty worldview. Because the Reformation marked a unique recovery of God’s word, darkness was invaded by light. Both the church and society as a whole was radically transformed by a biblical view of God.

The claim that a wrong view of God and self lies behind every faulty worldview is not a pious exaggeration. It is where Calvin himself chose to begin. The first lines of the Institutes do not open with a proof that God exists, or a definition of His essence, but with a claim about knowing: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” And Calvin presses at once to the order between them: “man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”1 Every worldview answers the question of God before it answers any other, whether it admits it or not. The Reformation changed the answer, and in changing it changed everything that rested upon it.

The God of the Old Synthesis

The medieval church did not deny God. It believed in Him, worshiped Him, and built cathedrals to His glory. The trouble lay in the way a man was taught to stand before Him. Reason was thought able to climb a good part of the way to God on its own, and revelation was received as the upper story of the house, completing what nature had begun. Cornelius Van Til saw precisely what this meant. “On the Thomistic basis,” he wrote, “the difference between the knowledge of the Christian and the knowledge of the non-Christian is primarily quantitative.” The believer simply “adds to his knowledge of facts obtained by his own empirical research without reference to Scripture, the information about these facts that he gets from supernatural revelation,” so that “for Thomas supernatural revelation is primarily supplementative.”2 On those terms God’s Word is an addition to a world already understood, and grace is a help to a nature still essentially able. The same pattern ran down into the life of the parish. God was approached by ascent and by degrees, through priest and sacrament and saint, and the ordinary Christian stood at the foot of a ladder he could never be sure of having climbed.

Back to the Sources

What broke the pattern was not first a new philosophy but an old text read afresh. The humanist cry ad fontes, “back to the sources,” sent scholars to the Greek and Hebrew behind the Latin Vulgate, and in 1516 Erasmus published the Greek New Testament. “For the first time in centuries,” Stephen Nichols observes, “scholars did not have to rely on a translation of God’s Word. They could examine it in its original language.”3 The consequences were felt almost at once. Lorenzo Valla had already argued that the Greek metanoia, rendered in the Vulgate as “do penance,” meant a change of mind and heart rather than the ritual performance required by the sacrament of penance; Erasmus carried that reading into his Greek New Testament, and Luther found in it, as Timothy George writes, “a basis for his frontal assault on the practice of indulgences.”4 The first of the Ninety-Five Theses turns on the meaning of that word:

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.5 Martin LutherNinety-Five Theses, Thesis 1 (1517)

Michael Reeves and Tim Chester put the Vulgate’s rendering of Matthew 4:17 bluntly: “It is not what Matthew wrote.” The same was true of the angel’s greeting in Luke 1:28. The Vulgate’s “full of grace” made Mary a reservoir from which grace could be drawn; the Greek called her “favored one.” “Mary was not a dispenser of grace,” they conclude, “but a recipient of grace—just like us. As humanism got to work, the holes in medieval Catholic theology were being exposed, and light was beginning to shine through.”6 These were not stray corrections in the margin. Each word was carrying weight. “Do penance” set the sinner before a sacramental system; “repent” set him before God. “Full of grace” placed a mediator between the soul and its Maker; “favored one” placed every sinner on the same footing, receiving what God alone gives. Vishal Mangalwadi notes that Erasmus, intent only on an accurate translation, “had no idea that his translation would undermine a large part of the superstructure of medieval religiosity.”7 Nichols states the dependence plainly: “If there had been no Erasmus with his Greek text, it would have been hard for there to have been a Luther with his Sola Scriptura.”8

Not a Repair but a Revolution

Erasmus himself shows how easily the rediscovered text could have been treated as one more improvement to the old house. He welcomed reform, but, as Reeves and Chester put it, he “believed that what the Roman Catholic Church needed in his day was a few improvements. It was dirty and needed a wash, but nothing more radical or essential needed changing.”9 Luther saw that the matter went deeper. When Erasmus defended the freedom of the will, Luther answered him with a remark that ought to be read by everyone who imagines the Reformation was chiefly about church abuses:

You alone have attacked the real issue, the essence of the matter in dispute, and have not wearied me with irrelevancies about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and such like trifles (for trifles they are rather than basic issues), with which almost everyone hitherto has gone hunting for me without success. You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot.10 Martin LutherThe Bondage of the Will (1525)

The question on which everything hinged was who God is and what He does. Is He a helper who assists a willing man, or the sovereign Lord who raises the dead? John Monsma, writing of the tradition Calvin consolidated, put it in a single line: “The root-principle of Calvinism is the absolute sovereignty of God. All other Calvinistic doctrines and ideas can be deduced from it.”11 That is why Van Til refused to describe the Reformation as a list of recovered doctrines. “The differences between Protestantism and Romanism are not adequately indicated,” he wrote, “if we say that Luther restored to the church the true doctrines of the Bible, of justification by faith and of the priesthood of all believers. The difference is rather that Protestantism is more consistently and Rome is less consistently Christian at every point of doctrine.”12 Change the doctrine of God, and no article of the old system is left untouched. Grace, merit, priesthood, sacrament, and church each have to be rethought from the beginning.

Spectacles, Not a Supplement

The deepest change lay in how God was known at all. Van Til summarized it in terms that answer the old synthesis directly: “This Protestant doctrine of the Bible does away with the dualism of Scholastic epistemology. It is no longer possible for man to have true knowledge about anything apart from the Bible. And especially is it impossible to have any true knowledge about God apart from the Bible.” It was in Protestantism, if anywhere, he concluded, that one would have to look for “a complete antithesis to the antitheistic epistemology inherited from the Greeks.”13 Calvin’s own image for it is the most famous he ever used:

Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.14 John CalvinInstitutes I.vi.1

A pair of spectacles is not one more object in the room. It is the means by which everything in the room is seen. That is the whole difference between Scripture as a supplement and Scripture as the starting point. Van Til, following Calvin and Augustine, compared God to the sun: “All other lights in this world are derived from the sun. One does not first think of other lights as though they shone in their own power, in order after that to investigate open-mindedly whether the sun exists.”15 And because the Reformers took God to have spoken in human words, they read those words as words. Greg Bahnsen observes that they “found their regulating hermeneutic within Scripture itself,” so that its sense “had to be the normal (rather than reconstructed) sense found in historico-grammatical context.”16 The patient labor over Hebrew and Greek grammar that followed was not mere scholarship. It was reverence: if God has spoken, then what He actually said matters more than what the church has long supposed He said.

After Darkness, Light

Rome has long charged that the Reformation set the individual above the church and so opened the door to modern autonomy. Herman Bavinck answered that the charge “is nonetheless in direct conflict with history,” and that the philosopher of modern autonomy belonged to a different world altogether: “Kant is, therefore, not to be mentioned in the same breath as Luther. They each moved in entirely different circles of thought.”17 The Reformers did not move God out of the center to make room for man. They moved man out of the center to make room for God. Luther’s conscience was free only because it was captive to the Word. As Bavinck said of the truth itself, “It does not direct itself toward us; we have to direct ourselves toward it.”18

That recovery of God did not stay inside the church walls. Mangalwadi argues that the Bible translators “had begun a battle for the soul of Europe,” for “every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture,” and the translators “sought to make the pope’s authority subject to the Word of God.”19 Geneva took as its motto post tenebras lux, “after the darkness, light.”20 It was a fitting phrase for what had happened. The Reformers had not found a brighter lamp to hang beside the old ones. They had been brought out into the day, where “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Every other part of the Reformation worldview follows from that face, and from the God who shows Himself there.

Worldview Next: Man

Sources

  1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.i.1, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin”; and in Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, ed. Robert R. Booth (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996). ↩
  2. Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” on Calvin and Aquinas. ↩
  3. Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), chap. 3, “Some Middle-Aged Men and a Sausage Supper.” ↩
  4. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 2, “The Thirst for God: Theology and Spiritual Life in the Late Middle Ages.” ↩
  5. Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses (1517), Thesis 1, as given in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 2. Full text: The Ninety-Five Theses. ↩
  6. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 2, “Scripture: How Does God Speak to Us?” ↩
  7. Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), chap. 9, “Revolution: What Made Translators World Changers?”, on Erasmus. ↩
  8. Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), chap. 3, “Some Middle-Aged Men and a Sausage Supper.” ↩
  9. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 3, “Sin: What Is Wrong with Us?” ↩
  10. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will (1525), conclusion, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 3. ↩
  11. John Clover Monsma, What Calvinism Has Done for America (Chicago, 1919). ↩
  12. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed), chap. 5, “Christian Apologetics (Point of Contact),” §1, “Roman Catholicism.” ↩
  13. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, In Defense of Biblical Christianity 2 (Den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1969), chap. 6, “Historical Survey: Modern Epistemology”. ↩
  14. Calvin, Institutes I.vi.1 (McNeill-Battles), quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5. ↩
  15. Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” §3, “Reformed Apologetics—Calvin’s Institutes.” ↩
  16. Greg L. Bahnsen, “Science, Subjectivity and Scripture” (Covenant Media Foundation, 1979), article PA044. ↩
  17. Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), chap. 3, “Becoming and Acting.” ↩
  18. Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), chap. 3, “Becoming and Acting.” ↩
  19. Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), chap. 9, “Revolution: What Made Translators World Changers?”. ↩
  20. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin.” ↩