Bible Stories

Martin Luther (1483-1546) and his most distinguished admirer, John Calvin (1509-1564), the two chief architects of Reformation theology, were Bible men. Their theology, like the New Testament’s, revolved round the themes of sin and saving grace, Christ and the church. They avoided commitment to any particular system of philosophy; that was not their interest. And they rejected scholasticism, which they knew well, as unbiblical. Their great aim was to let the Bible, the living word of the living God, speak for itself.

From the Bible they proclaimed the God of the church’s faith — transcendent, three-in-one. They set him forth as the holy judge of sin, who graciously gives sinners peace with himself, through faith, on the basis of the death and mediation of Jesus Christ.

Luther and Calvin revived Augustine’s sense that true self- knowledge only comes as we listen to God’s word in God’s presence, and as our conscience learns to echo and apply it, judging our conduct in the light of it. They focussed on the crucified and risen Christ as our priest and king (and prophet, Calvin added), who came down from heaven to endure agonies in this world for our salvation.

Faith, they said, is trusting Jesus Christ and his cross to establish us before God as the reconciled and forgiven children of a loving heavenly Father. They focussed also on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who by and with the word enlightens believers, convinces them of their need, evokes their faith, vitally links them with the living Jesus Christ, and sustains them in the struggles of the Christian life. Luther has been called the theologian of justification, and Calvin the theologian of the Holy Spirit, for their epoch-making exposition of these themes.

The medieval picture of the institutional church was as the channel of the grace that strengthens sinners to climb up ladders of merit and devotion to find God, just as Jack climbed the beanstalk to find the giant. This had created the feeling

That the transcendent God is also remote: ‘a doctor who refuses to come into contact with his patients so long as they are ill, but is sufficiently well- disposed toward them to send them medicine through the post (sacramental grace!) with a promise that he will see them when they are recovered’

Nothing in medieval theology could correct this impression, though there were teachers of mystical prayer who knew better. But the Reformers stressed that the Son of God fully entered the human condition by his incarnation and his suffering; that the Spirit of God now searches, breaks and establishes hearts by means of God’s biblical word of law and gospel. Thus they brought back into theology and devotion a biblical awareness that the transcendent God is close: a God not far off, but near at hand.

So when the Reformers revived (as they did) Augustine’s Bible-based teaching on God’s sovereignty in providence and grace, and the decisiveness of his predestination, the sense of God’s aliveness and closeness gave their doctrine traumatic impact. In people’s religion, it became a matter of first importance to come to terms with predestination, or else to deny it, and so it continued to be for centuries among folk in the Reformation tradition. Puritan religion in Britain and America, with its quest for assurance that God has chosen us, and the Arminian revolt against personal predestination in both its original and later Wesleyan forms, both testify to this.

The God of the Deists

Deism was an English product of the seventeenth century, which, when exported to

France and Germany, became the theology of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment. Recoiling from narrow dogmatism and naive superstition, its exponents sought to banish mysteries and miracles and to affirm a ‘natural’ religion— that is, one rationally based and non-sectarian, that could be demonstrated to everyone without appeal to anything supernatural.

Deists accordingly denied the need for (and sometimes the authenticity of) the biblical revelation. Also, they denied ‘particular providence’, God’s active direction and control of all that comes to pass. They pictured the universe as a complex machine which God, the celestial Mechanic, made, started, and now watches run. Trinity, incarnation and redemption meant nothing to them. Their ‘natural’ religion was to live uprightly in honour of God the Creator, who after death would reward the good and punish the bad.

The Creator’s total remoteness was basic for them: no one meets God in any sense till Judgement Day. God’s love was thus, at best, reduced to a distant and uninvolved benevolence (God does not love people enough to come to them, or show himself to them, directly), and at worst it was dissolved away entirely. John Toland and Matthew Tindal in England, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine in America, Voltaire in France and Lessing in Germany were representative Deists.

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