Why I’m not Reformed?

Because it makes no sense for Mission. Post 1

Last month I got into a dust-up on fb (you can find my fb page HERE to follow the conversations) with a post entitled “Why I’m not Reformed. If I were to write this book.” I made five points surrounding Reformation emphases like Sola Scriptura, forensic view of atonement, how Reformed theology understands authority and power within the church, and more. I said that these emphases made sense in the context of Medieval Europe, less sense now. Hundreds of thousands of lives and many Euro cultures were transformed in Christ. But when transported across the ocean, many years later, these emphases do not translate well into North America, as we face a multi-cultural post Christianized world. In fact, in some ways, these emphases, 500 years later, turn into hindrances for mission in many of the contexts we’re living in today. If I had been more precise in that post, I would have titled that post: “Why I’m not Reformed? Because it makes no sense for mission.”

Of course I received pushback. And maybe I deserved it? Some said I hadn’t interpreted Luther or Calvin or the Westminster Confession correctly. Some said I was too broad in my critique, that my critique applied mainly to the so-called Neo-Reformed Theo-Bro crowd, whom some Reformed claimed are not true Reformed theologically in the classical sense. Some said I wasn’t precise enough (it was a fb post eh?). All of which has prompted me to write a series of posts being more precise on these matters.

I’m going to do four posts (three after this one) on three aspects of Reformed theology that didn’t translate well into the post Christian context of North America. To each post, I’ll add a riff on why I see the Neo-Anabaptist stream of theology (not necessarily the same as the Anabaptist movement of the 15th century) as the way forward. I’m building on a lecture and journal article I did way back in 2017 for McMaster Divinity School. You can find it published HERE. So here goes “Why I’m not Reformed? Because it makes no sense for mission.” To all my Reformed friends, whom I love, I invite you to join with me and push back on these posts. I’ll try to respond fairly and respectfully. May we be mutually encouraged in the conversation. Here goes.

This Is About Unintended Consequences

These posts are about the “unintended consequences” of the European Reformation, not the Reformed theological doctrines of Calvin, Luther and the other figures of those times that formed the magisterial reformation.

In the last few decades, much has been made of the “unintended consequences” of the Reformation. I put those words in quotation marks because I’m alluding to Brad Gregory’s writing on the “unintended consequences of the Reformation.” For Gregory the “unintended consequences” of the Reformation led to a rampant pluralism in the interpretation of Scripture, consumer capitalism, and even secularism.[i] But Gregory is not the only one to write in this vein. Charles Taylor argues (among other things) that the Reformation’s rejection of sacramentalism led to an evacuation of the presence of the sacred in the world resulting in the beginnings of a modern naturalism.[ii] John Milbank, and a host of others, blame the Reformation for its alignment with the nominalism of Duns Scotus and the metaphysics of Univocity of Being.[iii] Hence we now have the privatization of the sacred and the sociological world has been left to nature, and human life to sheer autonomy and the exercise of power. Scholars as diverse as Peter Leithart and Ephraim Radner attribute certain divisions, antagonisms, and the excesses of denominationalism in today’s church to the miscalculations of the Reformation.[iv] This is not a new argument.

I’d like to throw in (or pile on) one more “unintended consequence” of the Reformation for us to think about: that the Reformation, once transported overseas to North America, specifically Canada and the United States, malformed the protestant church for mission.

The Reformation dominated the shaping of church life and culture in the United States and Canada once it arrived on its shores four centuries ago. Acknowledging the presence of Roman Catholicism in Quebec, Mexico, and Anglo Catholicism in parts of New England and Virgina, Reformed Protestantism has still shaped large parts of Christianity in North America via the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Wesleyans, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Reformed English Baptists. I want to suggest the theology of the Reformation, once transported across the ocean, left the churches most influenced by it lacking in an ecclesiology with which to engage a post-Christianized North America just a few centuries later. Reformation theology, which once worked so well given the backdrop of Medieval Euro Roman Catholicism, would later fail to sustain an ecclesiology in Canada and the United States sufficient to weather the storms of its own post-Christianization. The seeds of current day North American Protestantism’s failure in mission, in other words, were sown in the Reformed theology from four hundred years ago.

As a result, the future of the church in mission in North America—a continent in various phases of being de-Christianization—is not more Reformed theology. Instead it is in the drawing on the wisdom, theology, and ecclesiology of the Radical Reformation and what some now name the Neo-Anabaptist stream of theology. This stream can offer the North American church resources for an ecclesiology that can flourish in its exilic existence via the birthing of communities that witness to the gospel amidst the shifting turf of post-Christendom.

Bonhoeffer’s Observation

To start this series of posts, allow me to riff on an observation made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer after his first visit to America in 1930. In an essay entitled “Protestantism Without the Reformation,” he argued that Protestantism, in coming to America, a land devoid of the cultural habits of Catholic Christendom, had (mal)formed into a church of the individual. Devoid of the state-church synthesis, no longer tied to reforming the “one true church” and without the backdrop of a singular creedal confession, the Reformation church in essence would lose its original reason for being. With the Reformation having landed across the ocean, each Christian had the freedom to choose his or her church, or to even reject church, and the ability to believe whatever he/she chose to believe. There no longer existed a theological social foundation for engaging and/or resisting the culture. And so, in Canada and the United States, the movement that we call the Reformation would be tested as to whether it had the theology sufficient to form a church that could impact the world, not merely appeal to it.[v]

Bonhoeffer was limited in his own theological options at the time. His essay reflects that Bonhoeffer was comfortable within the state church alignments in Europe; and we know how fraught with problems this form of church would be in just a few short years in Germany. In addition, Bonhoeffer did not approve of the historical Anabaptists, sometimes speaking of them as enthusiasts and anarchists.[vi] But in writing Life Together, or in starting the Finkenwalde seminary in response to the Deutsche Christen movement, people like myself (and Stanley Hauerwas[vii] and Mark Theissen Nation[viii]) see in Bonhoeffer his own leaning toward some very Anabaptist themes in the face of the Reformation church’s failure to face Nazism in Germany.

And so it is Bonhoeffer’s observation that drives my analysis. I want to do three posts outlining three examples of Reformed theology that “worked” in Europe 500 years ago, but, when left without the background of the Catholic church to reform, backfired here in Canada and United States several hundred years later, when we find ourselves in the social situation of mission. Each post shows how a doctrinal formulation that worked in the context of Medeival Europe, became in essence a malformation for mission in post-Christendom North America. Reformed theology therefore left the church incapable of engaging a post-Christianized society. In each post I offer a few comments as to how the Neo-Anabaptist theological stream offers some resources to move forward.[ix]

I realize this is putting things boldly. And I am sure I’ll have to clarify, qualify and define, and then define, qualify and clarify even more. But if you’re interested in following these posts and having some conversation, make sure to subscribe to be notified of when each post hits. In the meantime, thanks for reading. I look forward to some gracious and friendly conversation.

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[i] Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (2015)

[ii] This is just one of the themes Charles Taylor is narrating in his magnus opus A Secular Age (2007) On this theme, see pages 72–80.

[iii] See John Milbank’s summary of this issue in his preface to Theology and Social Theory, xxiv–xxvi. For an overview and defense of the Radical Orthodoxy view on Duns Scotus, see Pickstock, “Duns Scotus,” 543–74.

[iv] See Radner, A Brutal Unity and Leithart, The End of Protestantism.

[v] See Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, 92–118.

[vi] DeYonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther, 159–60.

[vii] Hauerwas, Performing the Faith.

[viii] Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin?

[ix] I use the term Neo-Anabaptist to refer to the numerous writings that follow Hauerwas, Yoder, and other Anabaptist writers, who work out of the streams of post-liberalism, post structuralism, post-linguistic turn, and otherwise post-Enlightenment understandings of culture, epistemology, and language. I see within these writers the influence of historic Anabaptism. By using this term, I also hope to include historic Anabaptist influences, but see the extension of many of the historic Anabaptist themes into current socio-cultural and philosophical discussions as most promising.