Why do we need to remember our Protestant heritage?
It is frequently argued from both within and without the church that it is about time that we stopped fighting the battles of the Reformation. Indeed, the events of this year's marching season in Ulster have once again brought such views to the fore, focusing public attention on the tragic consequences of the Catholic-Protestant divide.
Of course, to claim that Ulster is the fault of the Reformation, or even of the Reformation tradition, betrays a woefully inadequate and simplistic understanding both of the Reformation and of Ulster's history. The only truly theological significance of the marching season, if indeed there is one at all, is that it reveals the unbiblical view of God's sovereignty and of church-state relations held by some sections of the Protestant community.
In fact, the church needs to remember the lessons of the Reformation more, perhaps, today than at any point since the 16th century.
First, the Reformation continues to be of crucial doctrinal relevance to the church as a whole, focusing as it did upon the primacy of God's Word as the source and norm for the church's proclamation to the world. Liberal theology in all its forms has always found inherent subjectivity to be its Achilles' heel, and that is why it has tended in each of its manifestations to dissolve eventually into a pragmatic, empty view of truth.
Only sure foundation
The Reformation points to an alternative: God's Word, both as Incarnation and Scripture, is truth and provides the basis for the church's beliefs. For the Reformers, and for the churches that claim to stand in their tradition, God's Word, in both its forms, represents his revelation of himself to the world. As such, and given the Reformers' understanding of the weakness and sinfulness of the human mind to discover God for itself, Scripture was considered to be the only sure foundation upon which to build doctrinal formulations.
Of course, there is a constant temptation even, or perhaps, especially, within Reformed evangelical circles, given our fear that all change must be for the worse, to allow the great statements of the past, whether the Creeds or the Westminster Confession, etc., to become our norms and for us to interpret Scripture in their light rather than vice versa. Not even the Reformers were fully free from this - it is part of human nature - but the lesson of the Reformation is that the only source of doctrine which is non-negotiable is the Bible and, if we claim to be `Reformed', we must constantly strive to discover God's truth for ourselves.
We must not despise the work of the past, but we must not idolise it either: it is unhistorical human nostalgia rather than a biblical understanding of human nature that elevates the theologians of any given age into spiritual giants.
Faith in a Person
All this is not to say that the Reformation stressed truth as pure doctrine, in the same way as one might say that two plus two equals four. Far from it - Christ is the truth. In a deep and mysterious way, a person is the truth, and so truth itself is personal. This was one of the fundamental insights of the Reformers in their reaction against what they regarded as the dry intellectualism of the medieval church. This points to the second area of the Reformation's significance for the church: the central role it gave to faith. For the Reformers, faith is intimately linked to knowledge. Indeed, for Calvin, there can be no proper knowledge of God where there is no faith. This ties in with what has been said about Christ: as Christ is truth, and truth is therefore personal, so the act of knowing the truth must be personal too.
This is where faith comes in. For the Reformers, faith is focused on Christ and, as such, is more than just intellectual assent to truth: it is knowing a person; it is trusting a person. Luther makes the point quite dramatically: faith is not the belief that Christ has died for sins, but that he has died for my sins. Faith then requires the existence of a personal relationship between the believer and Christ. As the truth in Christ is a person, and not to be put on the same level as the truths of mathematical equations, etc., so belief in that truth is a much deeper, more personal thing than assent to mere formulas. You can believe that two plus two equals four without considering yourself to have a personal relationship with that truth, or that it has particular significance for your life, but, according to the Reformers, you cannot believe that Christ is the truth without standing in a personal relationship to him and without it transforming your whole life. Christianity, as the Reformers saw, is all about union with Christ, and that union is a profoundly personal reality. These then are two of the great lessons of the Reformation: the primacy of Scripture; and the personal nature of Christianity. These were two issues with which the Reformers and their successors wrestled long and hard. They did not solve all the problems, they did not exhaust all the insights, but what they did was to place these issues at the top of the church's agenda. Thus, for someone to claim that the Reformation is irrelevant and simply a cause of anti-Catholic bigotry, is not only to betray a lack of historical understanding, but also to miss the whole point. In fact, to argue against the Reformation is actually to argue against the importance of a clear understanding of the nature of truth and against understanding Christianity as a personal religion. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, in light of what has been said, it is to argue against the relevance of Christianity itself.
Dr. Carl R Trueman is Lecturer in Mediaeval and Reformation Thought, in the Department of Theology at Nottingham University. He is also the author of Luther's Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers 1525-1556 (Clarendon Press, 1994).
