At lunch with a prospective church member, I described the process of joining our church: a six- to ten-week membership class that introduces our church's teaching in its confessions, its worship and life together, and an extensive interview to examine a candidate's profession of faith and knowledge of the catechism. He shook his head and said, "Man, this is a lot of stuff. Do you ever worry that the Reformed church is just for smart people?"
I was slow to answer. I hear this question a lot, and I do have this worry. As a pastor and church planter, I don't want to divide the body of Christ, to minister to one part and not the other. I don't want to preach a white-collar Christ in merely an intellectually satisfying way. Yet this stereotype is pervasive. Sometimes Reformation theology is presented as "solid meat," a high-octane version of the faith that you graduate to when you outgrow’or burn out from’the shallow evangelicalism of your youth. Worse yet, and probably more widespread, is the view that the intellectual substance of confessional Christianity appeals only to a certain subset of believers’those who are wired more toward the head than the heart.
Both of these views are elitist, yet perfectly reasonable in our restless age, when more people are probably "converting" to Reformation churches than growing up and being catechized within them. We have graduated. Why us and not our friends and family? Maybe it just appeals to our type. Even White Horse Inn, that venerable popularizer of Reformation theology, recently encouraged visitors to its website to "feed [their] inner theological geek." That may be a successful ad’especially with the kind of folks that frequent the website of White Horse Inn‘but I wonder whether it feeds the pervasive and problematic stereotype that Reformation theology is just for eggheads.
The Answer
Back to the prospective member's question, and my hesitation. As a card-carrying theological geek with a pile of degrees and eight years of graduate study under my belt, I wasn't in the best position to dispel the "Reformation is for eggheads" myth. I was also slow to answer, because in one sense it is undeniable that confessional Christianity demands a greater engagement with one's brain. The four spiritual laws can be conveyed in handy pictograms; a catechism requires words, lots of them, arranged in a series of questions and answers.
My first thought was to decry the anti-intellectualism of our age and the church's capitulation to it. This is true enough, and it is always useful to attack the premises of a question. Reformation Christianity may seem overly intellectual, but compared to what? The problem with this approach is that it also attacks the questioner: "I'm not too intellectual; you're too ignorant." It attacks and it doesn't answer the question. The justification for a robustly confessional Christianity must be grounded first in the character of our covenant-making God, a God who speaks truth into a world under the sway of the deceiver.
A Literate God
So I began with the fact of the Bible’not the facts contained in the Bible, but the very fact of its existence. I often ask people, who wrote the first words of Holy Scripture and when? Most people correctly answer, "Moses." But we must recall that Moses wrote only after he received from the Lord two tablets of testimony, written with the finger of God.
The Bible exists because our God speaks, and because he not only speaks, he also writes. This is a profound fact at the very core of Christianity, and all the more profound for its historical context. In the ancient world, in which literacy was a newly discovered innovation of the most exclusive caste, Yahweh was an elitist. At the very dawn of alphabetic writing, he carved words in a rock and conveyed them to a royal-bred messenger (probably one of the few people who could actually read them): "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of Egypt." Our God is a covenant-making God, literally. And the people he took for his own were outliers in a religious world of ecstatic visions and idolatrous revelry.
There is no way to know the literacy rates of the Hebrews, but it is likely only a tiny fraction could read the "Ten Words" given to them at Sinai. Yet they were commanded to learn these words, recite them, and teach them to their children. During the ensuing forty years, Moses wrote five books explaining the historical background and details of God's covenant revelation for the following generations’one of the great literary productions of the ancient world. He probably spent even more of his time during these forty years teaching the people to read so these books could be put to use.
Practical Christianity? Think of all the potential converts and adherents of Yahweh who were "ruled out" due to their illiteracy. We commonly speak about Jews and Christians as "people of the book." But Jews were a "people of the book" before there were books. The relative value of a Torah scroll in the ancient world made it a priceless treasure. Even today, a Torah scroll produced in the rabbinical method can cost millions of dollars and is one of the single greatest expenses in establishing a synagogue’yet you can't have a true synagogue without one. Even in the prophetic age, the true restoration of the people depended upon the reading and instruction of this word.
God's revelation demands literacy of his people. Growing up, I remember thinking that my Jewish next-door neighbors had it really rough. Every Saturday, after a week of public school, they had to go to Sabbath school, where they learned, among other things, how to read the Torah in a "foreign" language. Protestants may rightly reject the superstitious tying of God's revelation to a particular language, but the modern Jewish intertwining of language, culture, and faith probably captures more accurately the concept of biblical religion in its original context. There is a steep learning curve to biblical faith.
Instruments of Reform
Beyond the fact of the Bible's existence, we read in it that God raised up learned leaders in his church to instruct his people in the faith. After Moses, the Lord raised up David, whose literary production in the Psalter portrays poetry and learning of the royal court well beyond his rustic origins, not to mention the royal imperative to meditate day and night on the Torah as the Lord's anointed. Similarly, Solomon was wise in the ways of worldly wisdom, and the prophets were trained not only as covenant lawyers, but as poets and historians of the first class.
The New Testament has perhaps given us a bias in our faith toward the unlearned and against the intellect. It can be difficult to balance the steep learning curve of Old Testament religion against the evangelistic faith spread by the twelve apostles. The elders and scribes were astonished by the boldness of Peter and John, who appeared to them as "uneducated and common men" (Acts 4:13). If the waters of baptism could not be denied to the Ethiopian eunuch, what justification do we have to require extended catechesis for church membership?
Counter to these popularizing motifs run the intellect and learning of the Word made flesh. The child Jesus grew strong and was filled with wisdom, and at the age of twelve he was in the temple sitting among the teachers of Israel, listening to them and asking questions. The authority with which he debated the Pharisees flowed not only from his person, but also from his superior knowledge and understanding of the Scriptures. Luke's account of the resurrection suggests that imparting this scriptural knowledge was the primary occupation of the risen Christ during his forty days on earth (Luke 24:27, 45).
Then there are the instruments chosen by the Lord to record the Scriptures of new covenant revelation and to lay the foundation of the faith. Many Christians marvel that the profundity of the writings of crude fishermen demonstrates their inspiration, and to a point this is true in the writings of Peter, John, and James. Yet the vast majority of the New Testament was written by highly educated men: Paul was a Pharisee and Luke a physician (Luke and Acts make up a large portion of New Testament literature). Even Matthew, a tax collector, likely received some training. Apollos was an "eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures," who powerfully refuted the Jews in public and greatly helped those in Corinth who believed by grace (Acts 18:24, 28).
In practice, Paul clearly knew how to proclaim the gospel in a manner suitable to elicit faith from the broadest spectrum of audiences’from philosophers and merchants to jailers and slaves. Yet he insisted that faith came by hearing, and hearing by those preachers who proclaimed the good news. The great exertion of Paul's labors, his travel and writing, shows his concern that there were only so many men competent to bring these tidings of great joy. While faith came rapidly to the cities he visited, he labored for years, often returning in person or by messenger, to build a foundation that would stand the test of time. In passing the baton to men such as Timothy, he urged them to continue in what they had learned and not to depart from the sacred writings known since childhood (2 Tim. 3:14’15).
Catechesis in the Church
In the early church, the period of catechesis often lasted up to three years. Was this a departure from the faith of Jesus and the apostles, or a faithful application and preservation of it? In answering this question, we must note that in many respects the ministry of Christ is not the best model for us. Jesus was calling God's own to repentance, urging a catechized and literate’though backslidden’church to return to its first love. As Christ's disciples took the gospel beyond Jerusalem and Judea to the very ends of the earth, they pursued the twin imperatives of the Great Commission with equal vigor’not only baptizing disciples into the church, but also teaching them to observe all he had commanded.
The foundation-laying era of the church is therefore instructive, showing us that we can and must hold these poles together, maintaining vigorous outreach to all people everywhere, while also laboring to take every thought captive to Christ. The worship of the risen Christ’patterned after the synagogue worship with the reading of Scripture, the proclamation of the Word, and the breaking of bread’was as anomalous in the Roman world as Judaism was in Babylon. Gnostic and ecstatic interpretations of Christianity were quickly ruled out of bounds, as John's Epistles make clear. The worshipers of Jesus were just as much a people of the book as were the worshipers
of Yahweh.
The church, with its sacred text and distinctive language and learning, has remained a literate outpost over two millennia of changes in culture. The rise of the church as a cultural institution and preservative in the Middle Ages is due in large part to the ebb of Roman culture. While the darkness of the "Dark Ages" is often overplayed (it's more a verdict from its "Enlightened" successors than an accurate description), there is great truth to the preservative power of text-based monastic culture. "Scholastic" theology is often derided for its abstract irrelevance, but its name simply reflects the theology of the schools. Schools were associated with theology, because the primary reason for their existence was for the copying and reading of the Word of God.
Reformation Light
While we may decry our anti-intellectual culture, this is nothing new. The light of the Reformation dawned at a time of even greater ignorance and illiteracy. It was a movement led by brilliant humanists and scholars trained in the most advanced learning of their day, but its central thrust was popular, radiating out to the priesthood of all believers. Luther's ideas of church reform were first received by a literate band of fellow academics and merchants. But the movement of reform just as quickly became a movement of education. If faith came by hearing and the Scriptures were the possession of all believers, then it was incumbent upon the church to educate its members. We may well still be riding a wave of cultural literacy with its roots in the Protestant Reformation.
The churches of the Reformation bore fruit in the form of well-catechized and educated laity. For generations, simple farmers and tradesman were versed in the Scriptures and catechized to a degree that would make today's college graduates blush. While a great deal of this education took place at home, much occurred on the Lord's Day through the reading and preaching of Scripture, the singing of Psalms, and instruction in the catechism.
Reformation Christianity and worship’properly understood’shouldn't appeal only to smart people. We are all sinners, and sinners need the gospel in its clarity. Rather, it should make them smart, or more precisely, make them wise in the things of the Lord, kindling in them a hunger and thirst for the true food of God's Word.
