Why No One Understands the Reformation Confessions Anymore

Protestantism has been in crisis mode since the early nineteenth century. The effects of the Enlightenment began to affect Protestant theology in the eighteenth century, but after Kant knowledge of God became increasingly problematic and Christianity in general began to pall as a result of the philosophical naturalism that settled over Western culture like a blanket snuffing out faith. This trend accelerated after the Darwinian revolution in mid-century and Protestantism was most affected. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the result.

Another Religion Altogether

Protestant liberal theology was a desperate attempt to save as much Christian content as possible from what Walter Lippmann would later term “the acids of modernity.” The liberal project involved restating Christianity within the constraints of modern metaphysics and modern metaphysics was essentially the rejection of the broadly Platonist metaphysics that had formed the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition for well over 2000 years.

In what sense are we in communion with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas? Click To Tweet As the philosopher Lloyd Gerson has demonstrated with great scholarship in a series of books, the main alternative to Platonism historically has been philosophical naturalism and, in the nineteenth century philosophical naturalism triumphed decisively over Platonism. This was the context in which liberal theology attempted to preserve at least some elements of the Bible and theology. Even though many Christian words such as “sin” and “redemption” were retained, their meaning was dramatically changed. The definitive judgment of the failure of the liberal project was pronounced by J. Gresham Machen in 1923 when he said that liberalism is not Christianity, but another religion altogether.

From the Fundamentalism on though the period of Neo-orthodoxy to the rise of Evangelicalism, the search for a Biblical and orthodox expression of Christianity has been intense. If liberal theology is no answer, what is to be done? If modernity excludes Christian orthodoxy how can we live in the modern world as Christians?

What it Means to be Protestant

Our problem today is that we do not understand the Protestant confessions and so we do not really understand what it means to be Protestants. We believe that the Reformation recovered biblical teaching after centuries of decline in the late Medieval Roman church but we cannot give an account of how the content of the confessions expresses biblical truth. Contemporary Evangelicals are not really Protestants; for most of them Protestantism is a movement in history.

That in turn means that the great Evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon, trans-Atlantic world is cut off from its own heritage. Some of us may read Calvin and Owens occasionally, but we do not comprehend them on certain points and much of their depth escapes us. We do not grasp what some have termed “reformed catholicity.” In what sense are we in communion with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas? We cannot say.

Soft Theistic Mutualism

If you doubt me, consider the sad decline in the doctrine of God that we have seen over the past 50 years as documented in James Dolezal’s little book, All That is in God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017). There Dolezal shows that “soft theistic mutualism,” a view of God in which God is in time and affects and changes the world and the world, in turn, affects and changes God. This is essentially a pagan, mythological understanding of God and yet it has wormed its way into otherwise orthodox and evangelical writers. This is astonishing!

It indicates that something very deep and fundamental is malfunctioning in contemporary theology and the danger is that this view of God will – if not corrected – metastasize into a spiritual life threatening cancer in a generation or two. Every confession of the Reformation and post-preformation period, including the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augusburg Confession, the Westminster Confession and the Second London Confession, teaches that God is immutable and impassible. And none see any contradiction between affirming those attributes of God and simultaneously affirming the God speaks and acts in history to judge and save. Moderns cannot, for the life of them, comprehend how they can be so inconsistent.

Moving Forward

Every confession of the Reformation and post-preformation period teaches that God is immutable and impassible Click To Tweet My contention is that conservative Protestant theology today needs to undertake an alternative to the liberal project that is comparable in scope. We need to channel a great deal of time, energy and resources into a project of ressourcement. This French term brought over into English means a return to the classic sources of Christianity including the church fathers, Thomas Aquinas and other forms of premodern faith. Recently, in an encouraging development in the work of a number of theologians, many inspired by John Webster, the project of ressourcement has taken the form of looking back to the post-Reformation, Reformed scholastic tradition.

This movement is growing and spreading among many who find the shallow biblicism and ahistorical forms of evangelical faith that are so common today to be unsatisfying.

Scholars like Richard Muller and Carl Trueman have led the way in recovering the riches of seventeenth century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism. We may not understand their philosophical assumptions, but we can see that they took the Bible seriously and wrote doctrinal treatises that need to be taken seriously by believers.

The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction. But how do we get from here to there?

We need to do whatever it takes to break out of the cave of modernity and breath the free air of the premodern period where philosophical naturalism is not stifling the truth. Click To Tweet One practice John Webster urged on his students was that of reading sympathetically the great texts of the tradition. Even better, he suggested, was the practice of apprenticing ourselves to one of the great masters for a time by seeking to immerse ourselves in their thought. C. S. Lewis pointed out that reading old books is important, not because ancient writers never made mistakes, but because they tended to make different mistakes than our contemporaries do. We can spot those mistakes because they stand out to us, whereas the mistakes we and all our contemporaries commonly make seem like common sense to us.

So what to do? I believe that we need to do whatever it takes to break out of the cave of modernity and breath the free air of the premodern period where philosophical naturalism is not stifling the truth. But how? One way do it is to engage in the study of ancient philosophical texts so as to be initiated into the great conversation that has gone on between the greatest minds in the Western tradition for 2000 years.