Becoming a Re-Formed Catholic

Were one to judge by recent Protestant publications dedicated to the themes of catholicity and confessionalism, one could fairly conclude that the Anglo-American Protestant world is witnessing something of a “catholicity movement.” (Whether one could conclude the same by appeal to the life and manners of Protestants is not so clear—but that’s for another discussion.) The catholicity of various Protestant traditions has been the recipient of renewed attention of late. There has been much dialogue and debate concerning it. And this, it seems to me, is good.

Over its history, Modern Reformation has been no stranger to these conversations, even a leading participant in them. As Dr. Horton reminded readers in the March/April 2003 issue, “the church’s catholicity concerns all Christians.” And yet, as I pondered these conversations and Modern Reformation’s part in them, I was struck somewhat by a curiosity—what could almost be an irony—in the very title of the magazine. For many in our day, neither the terms “modern” nor “reformation” spring to mind continuity with the past or cohesion with a greater whole. If anything, such a title seems to belie consistency with the magazine’s affirmations of a proper catholicity and its regular promotion of confessional Protestantism.

I’d like to share some of my ponderings on these two terms: How they are often thought of (even by us confessional Protestants) but shouldn’t be, and how they ought to be understood.

Modern

There are a variety of senses of the term “modern,” both common and technical. Let me draw attention here to a pervasive one. To be “modern,” as Charles Taylor has it, is to have a certain historical consciousness, that of “having overcome a previous condition.” It is, in other words, a fairly encompassing sense, even if not always at the conscious level, of a deep disjunction between oneself and what has come before. In such a state of mind, the modern person is, in Joseph Minich’s recent description, “existentially homeless”; any “sense of belonging to and participating in history” has been for him or her foreclosed. And in such a state of mind—considering the past, as it does, just long enough to dismiss it as the problem now overcome—the instinct is to innovate. Any problems of the present, so far as the modern mind is concerned, are new, and so the solutions must likewise be de novo. One does not look to past sages for insight, but to one’s inner genius.

This is decidedly not the sense of “modern” intended in the name Modern Reformation. In the September/October issue of 2017, Dr. Horton argued that it was not the Reformers who promulgated this sense of “modern,” but the Anabaptist Radicals: “Our modern world can be understood at least in part as the triumph of the Radicals. . . . I have in mind a utopian, revolutionary, quasi-Gnostic religion of the ‘inner light’ that came eventually to influence all branches of Christendom.” Horton shows that the Reformers were concerned with God and his work of salvation wrought in history, to which they belonged and in which they participated. This stood in contrast with the “enthusiastic” religion, concerned as it was with the now revolutionary moment, with the “inner” and so immediate connection with the divine. Following the Reformers, MR has sought to show its readers the deep roots of their Christian heritage, enwrapping the globe and spreading through time.

Such a Christian heritage, if I may emphasize the point of the metaphor, is not fragmentary or partitive. “For all things are yours,” Paul reminds the church at Corinth, “and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:21–23). The Christian heritage according to the whole is the birthright of the believer. So, then, “modern” in Modern Reformation refers not to the modern historical consciousness but more simply to this contemporaneous moment, the “now” time in which God has placed us, which is part of a historical whole. The Christian heritage is for this now time as much as any other time. One can see, then, that far from being inconsistent with catholicity, this sense of “modern” is in fact implied by it. Catholicity—inasmuch as it refers to the Christian faith in accordance with the whole, the whole of place and of time—must include our modern time.

In such a time as this—this “modern time” when the once seemingly vast expanse of Enlightenment-style individualism has now proved an arid land indeed and many, seeking reserve, return again to the old tribalisms of blood and soil—Paul’s reminder that all things are ours is once again needed. Christians are members not of a part but of the whole Christ. They belong to what is greater than themselves, greater still than their various tribes or tributary traditions, greater even than their time and place.

Reformation

If “modern” is taken to refer to the contemporaneous moment, and therefore by inference to the Christian tradition according to the whole (catholicity), “reformation” directs our attention toward the what that is according to the whole. That is, reformation has to do with Christian doctrine and practice that is catholic.

Historians of the sixteenth century have noted often enough that at least by intents and purposes, the magisterial Reformers were not after a revolution: an overthrowing of all that had come before. They saw themselves as belonging to the catholic Christian church. They primarily argued this point on the ground of doctrinal continuity. As Aza Goudriaan has put it, the Reformers contended “that the Reformation remained within the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy and thus was a part of the one catholic church in terms of a succession of doctrine (rather than a succession of bishops),” though he notes as well that there were those who argued for liturgical and church order continuity also.

Of course, doctrinal continuity with the past is not so simple as reproduction of the language of the past. Terms as signifiers are conventional; they are modified and altered over time in accordance with the conventions of that time and place. Furthermore, any tradition, so far as it is living, grows and develops. The Reformers saw their task as something like clearing wild growth from a garden in which they wished to propagate native species. Where the growth and development in the Christian garden had in their estimation been healthy—namely, in the early ecumenical councils, the ancient creeds, and some of the teachings of the fathers—the Reformers desired to tend, cultivate, and protect. Where thorns and thistles appeared, uprooting was required.

They carried out this work, perhaps chiefly, in the development of their dogma codified in their confessions. At just this point, one can see where catholicity dovetails with confessionalism. As Richard Muller has demonstrated, the confessions of the Reformation period were intended as the codification of “a complete and detailed system of theology” that included the orthodoxy in the “larger body of received doctrine” which the Reformers believed they had inherited. This received doctrine they “adjusted” to “the needs of Protestantism, in terms dictated by the teachings of the Reformers on Scripture, grace, justification, and the sacraments.”

In other words, for the Reformers, the process of writing confessions was a process of forming identity, an identity that included the pattern of sound doctrine they had received from their predecessors. The confessions then became a primary way of forming the next generation in that identity.

The Reformation era confessions, then, were attempts to codify the deposit of catholicity: orthodox teachings. And inasmuch as they “are still channeling early Christian theology, especially by their acceptance of early Christian creeds,” these confessions shape and form the modern believer in the truth that cannot be shaken.

Such a formation is important for every generation. But it may be particularly so for ours. In that September/October 2017 MR article I referred to above, Dr. Horton observes that the revolutionary spirit of the Radical Anabaptists has so shaped our contemporary theological world that “we are all enthusiasts.” We have all been misshaped by that first sense of “modern” in both our theology and in our practice. We need to be reshaped. The creeds and confessions of the Christian tradition, as witnesses to the word of God, are that by which we may be brought into conformity with the truth. That is, a re-formation of the heritage of the Christian faith is one of the great needs of the hour, so that the modern Christian may be re-formed in the truth.

Conclusion

With these reflections in place, I’d like to call for the cultivation of a catholic instinct and sensibility (or, as the ancients would have put it, an “intellectual habit”). One of the dangers inherent in discussions of catholicity is that it is an abstract noun. Thinking about catholicity takes us to the land of theory. That’s fine so far as it goes. But if we remain only in the land of theory, we may fail, as Dr. Horton warned readers in the March/April 2003 issue, to “recognize with dreadful regularity our own role in compromising [catholicity’s] security, in small and large ways, at the most local and sometimes also at the broadest levels.” We need to think about catholicity, yes; but we need also to become catholic.

Becoming catholic means developing an instinct, a kind of first reaction, an impulse, in our learning the Christian faith to seek the wisdom of the past, the truth of God’s revelation as it has been passed down in Scripture and through the Christian tradition, and to submit to it. This instinct does not come to us naturally, as it were, and so will need to be developed. This is difficult, no doubt. For it requires proper identification of the good to be pursued (truth), often by ignoring the ever-threatening urgency of the moment, and then patience and constancy. It requires that we throw off the delusion that we are the masters, that we are in charge of putting our ideas together for our own self-expression. It requires an act of intellectual submission to a teaching authority, to first become learners so that in time the truth might be more fully formed in us and then expressed by us. But by doubled efforts, this instinct may become for us a second nature.

When it has been developed and its impulse then pursued, a fuller catholic sensibility may flourish. That is, the maturing (and further shaping) sense of belonging to the greater whole of which we are, as God appoints, a significant part—the enlarging sense that the whole of the Christian faith is ours. Not the constricted and combative view that the confessions and creeds of the Christian church are merely the preservation of patterns of words of bygone eras, for which we take up arms. Not the conceited and consumeristic view that says the confessions and creeds are simply the stores of the past theological judgments that we, being heirs of, may sift and sort, taking what we like and discarding what we don’t. Ours is the mounting view that as monuments to the truth of God, as sure guides, these lead us on the way to knowledge of God.

Modern and Reformation are not strange bedfellows with catholicity and confessionalism. Indeed, to be “modern” and “re-formed” in the sense we’ve discussed is really to take our place among the people of God and fulfill the words of the psalmist:

I will utter hidden things, things from of old—things we have heard and known, things our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord. (Ps. 78:2–4)