We’ve all heard the same tired truism that those who do forget history are doomed to repeat it. That may be correct, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story about those who do remember history.
Many Christians will soon celebrate Reformation Day. Although evangelicals remember the Reformation with fondness, many people still do not see that they might be repeating similar mistakes that the Reformers sought to rectify.
I’m not exaggerating. I said “similar”, not “same.” And simply because we might not make the precise same mistakes committed by church leaders in the past, that doesn’t mean we should use the comparison to excuse ourselves from error.
4 Ways Evangelicals Need Reformation
1. The Bible
Martin Luther was consumed with the concern about how a holy God could accept sinners like himself. No doubt, this is a good question to ask. However, we must not allow Luther’s guilty conscience get in the way of reading the Bible today.
What do I mean?
Luther’s own personal questions dramatically shaped the theology that emerged from the Protestant Reformation. He turned the Church’s attention back to the question of how individual’s get saved; this was certainly a needed correction. Yet, his reaction to medieval theology was not sufficiently balanced in the decades that followed.
Consequently, evangelicals by and large still read the Bible through a similar set of lenses. Practically, the modern reader’s questions control his or her interpretations and theological emphases. In particular, people assume that the primary purpose of the any given text is to answer this question: How can I be saved?
By contrast, we should prioritize the biblical authors’ questions within their historical contexts. In so doing, we will not forsake the important question of individual salvation, but we will put that question in its larger, cosmic, Christ-centered narrative context. We need to recover biblical theology.
Simply put, evangelicals need a hermeneutical reformation.
2. Tradition
The Reformers rejected the tendency to allow tradition to usurp biblical authority. However, in my interactions with evangelical friends, I am surprised to hear how often they appeal to church tradition when disagreeing with points I try to make from Scripture.
For instance, I will show passage after passage that highlights the important role of honor and shame within the Bible. I urge friends and students to broaden their cultural lens so that they would see all that the Bible has to say (not merely what their tradition has accustomed them to see).
Before long, they will invariably cite this or that Reformer or famous pastor rather than interact with the biblical text. I’ve heard evangelicals say things like “He’s a really smart guy and so I’m not willing to disagree with him” and “We don’t want people to lose confidence in church leaders in history.”
The Bible and tradition –– both were key Reformation issues. I’m grateful to God for the ways that church leaders addressed the Church’s misuse of Scripture and tradition. For that reason, I pray that evangelicals would maintain that original reformation vision. By doing some self-reflection, we will see ways that we overlook our own need for correction.
In the next post, I will highlight two more reasons we need an evangelical reformation.
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