Burying the Reformation


It is high time that Christians everywhere dropped our unfruitful habit of debate over minutiae. It has not added a whit to our grace, peace or service to the cause of the gospel. I refer to the arguments and polemics of the Reformation era, and I specifically include in that the decrees of the Council of Trent. It is, for instance, time for Calvinists to allow the bare possibility that some people are predestined to be Arminians, and move on.

There were wrongs on both sides, and on every side, in the sordid period that gave us a fractured Western church and the Thirty Years War. What happened? We placed too much faith in reasoned argument. We were seduced by philosophy, to the point that we even believed that having a superior argument (as we see it) justifies uncharity, division, and even hatred, war and murder. If your zeal for the gospel leads you to hatred or arrogance, you have not understood the very thing you are arguing about.

The fruit of this tree is bitter. Shall we continue to eat of it?

Something that comes to mind in this connection is the warning in Hebrews 12:14-15:

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.


I think there is a parallel here, and quite possibly a conscious allusion by the author, to Deuteronomy 29:18, "make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison." It is useful to read that passage at fuller length. You may do so here, but pay particular attention to the admonition at verse 29: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law." What we know we should do, but we don't know everything.

If I am at all right about this, the Reformation and its mistakes owed a great deal to overreaching on what we all thought we knew. We went prying with our reason into areas where nothing was revealed, or not enough for our guidance, and as we reasoned farther and farther from revealed truth, we grew farther, and disastrously far, from one another.

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