The Reformers and their Bible

Of all the contributions of the Reformation, surely at the top of the list was the renewed affirmation of the Bible’s authority, often called sola scriptura. I’m a firm believer in this Reformation contribution and find it most accurately expressed in prima scriptura and not nuda scriptura (as it has sometimes been practiced by some). So I stand up to clap for and welcome the brand new book by Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, because he’s a master of the Reformers and because he focuses on this major theme of the Reformers: how they viewed and read the Bible, and he is fully aware of how the Reformers interacted with the early church fathers.

Translation is one of the major contributions of the Reformation, beginning with Luther’s famous translation of the whole Bible into German and then when Tyndale himself translated from the original languages. The KJV itself is about 90% Tyndale and that means the KJV, especially as it was often accompanied by The Geneva Bible, was a Reformation Bible. (We can avoid the nuances of each for this post.)

And then there was preaching: the Reformation churches stood firm that church services, which they did not restrict to one hour on a Sunday morning, would entail the public reading of Scripture and the public exposition of Scripture and a theology shaped more and more by Scripture. The Reformation and the Bible go hand in hand. And Timothy George’s new book makes this abundantly clear, even if he gives priority to Luther and less attention to Calvin and even less to the Anabaptist Reformers. But they are all here.

But there’s more here than this new book by Timothy George. Folks, I am a huge fan of IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary and I will be just as big of a fan of their next series, the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. Poor Gerald Bray, or some would say lucky Gerald Bray, must have spent — along with his fellow editors Timothy George and Scott Manetsch — nights and weekends in libraries finding the appropriate selections in order to compile an anthology of comments from the comments of Reformers. The first volume of this new series is now sitting proudly on my desk: Galatians, Ephesians (Reformation Commentary on Scripture Series). One way of saying this is that I’m glad I didn’t have to do this task but I’m sure glad someone did.

A perfect beginning, I’d say. How can you begin anything about the Reformation without talking about Galatians? (Romans next, of course, but this a commentary selection and that means Ephesians is next.) So here we go… an adventure with the Reformers through a selection of their comments on Galatians and Ephesians.

What this series will do — and there will eventually be 28 volumes — is save pastors and students and Bible readers hours and hours of work as it will provide judicious selections from the original sources so that modern readers can open to any passage in Scripture and find out what the Reformation era commentators said about a passage. I’m for the selection approach, not the least of reasons being that Luther can be so long-winded and digressory and polemical … that he can wear a reader down. Calvin’s commentaries have always been for me a model of incisiveness (even when I disagree).  But The Reformation Commentary is not just a selection of Luther and Calvin, for they also include stuff from the late 1400s to the mid 17th Century (thus, say 1475-1650) and they include — thank you very much — some Anabaptists like Balthasar Hubmaier and Conrad Grebel. Wow, this is a godsend for all of us.

Dear IVP, can you send someone out to the house to make me some bookshelves? I’m out of space.