Beeson Podcast, Episode 324 Dr. Timothy George January 24, 2017 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/The-Tragic-Necessity-of-the-Reformation Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Kristen Padilla: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I'm Kristen Padilla, the Director of the Beeson Podcast, and it's my privilege to introduce this very special podcast. Normally, our Dean, Timothy George, is the one interviewing our guest, but today he will interviewed by Collin Hansen. Collin Hansen is a friend of Beeson Divinity School. He's a member of our Beeson Advisory Board. He's also the Editorial Director of the Gospel Coalition. So thank you, Collin, for being here today to interview our Dean, Timothy George. Collin Hansen: Thanks, Kristen. It's an honor for me to serve in this way, which I've had the privilege of doing on other occasions as well. It's always fun to turn the tables on our esteemed Dean, and especially on a topic, talking about the Reformation, for which Dr. George, you are world-renowned as one of the leading experts and as one of the kind of leading advocates for the principles of the Reformation. So thanks again, Dr. George, for giving me the privilege of being able to interview you. Timothy George: It's an honor to talk to you, Collin, especially on this theme. Collin Hansen: Let's talk just about an overview of the Reformation. I know a lot of our listeners, especially those who've walked through the halls of Beeson Divinity School, are going to be pretty familiar with that, but did Martin Luther actually nail his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, because that's what we're celebrating in this 500th anniversary year, coming up later this fall. Did that actually happen? Timothy George: Short answer, yes, although I have to quickly say, it's debated as to whether or not it really happened. He himself never referred to it, and so we get this from later witnesses and people who were there. Some people say he posted his Theses by mail rather than nail, that he sent it out that way. At the end of the day, it probably really doesn't matter. It was the substance of what he was saying rather than the way it was advertised, let's say, but I myself looking at it think that yes, this is very much something that he did on October the 31st, 1517. Collin Hansen: How did we get from that relatively minor protest ... I mean, in retrospect we realize there was nothing minor about it, but Luther was not a globally-renowned figure of high esteem or high authority in the Roman Catholic Church of his day. It wasn't even in Rome, for that matter, not at the center of the Western Church, so how do we get from that relatively minor protest to a full-fledged break in the Western Church? Timothy George: You know, Luther came to this protest against the sale of indulgences through his study of the scriptures and from the fact that he was a pastor, and he was concerned that his parishioners ... He was a regular preacher at St. Mary's Church, the town church, in Wittenberg, and his parishioners were going and buying these indulgences. He felt that they were getting spiritually ripped off, and so he issued this protest really as a kind of protection, a pastoral voice of concern for them. But it grew out, it bubbled up from his own study of the scriptures. He was a professor at the University of Wittenberg, as well as an Augustinian monk. He'd been lecturing on the Book of Romans for some time now, digging deep into the texture of what Paul really means there by "grace" and by "faith" and by "justification", all those words. It has to be said, if you've ever read the 95 Theses, they don't contain full-blown, mature Reformation theology. It's a work in progress. Luther had some insight, he had made some breakthroughs at that point. There was still a lot more to come. But what it was, it broke the ice. How did it get to become such a European-wide event? The humanist scholars, led most of all by Desiderius Erasmus, got on this case, and they began to spread his Theses and news about Luther all over Europe, so you're right, he was not very well known. He was a unknown professor in a backwater university town, but suddenly, within a matter of a few months really, everybody's talking about Luther, what he had written, what he had done, so he becomes a household word all the way from Lisbon in Portugal to Lithuania over in Eastern Europe. Collin Hansen: And a lot of the media developments of this time, technological developments of that time, enabled that in a way that would not have been possible say a hundred years earlier. Timothy George: Most especially, the printing press, of course, which had been invented in the mid-15th century in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg. Now there were presses flowing all over Europe, books coming off the presses. It was becoming a really great going concern, and Luther was the first major public figure to take full advantage of that new technology. He was also the first person in human history to author a best seller. He translates the Bible into German in 1522, the new Testament, and later the Old Testament too, 1534 the whole Luther Bible is available, and this sells hundreds of thousands of copies during Luther's lifetime, unheard of before that, when it would take more than a year to produce just one Bible. So not only the Bible, but Luther's writings, his 95 Theses, his early treatises from 1520 on the freedom of the Christian, all of these things become available very rapidly, and the Reformation becomes a sensation. Collin Hansen: It goes without saying that around Beeson Divinity School we celebrate this 500th anniversary of the Reformation, but as the Church of England's leading bishops have recently pointed out, the Reformation led to division and unleashed violence, leading to in some ways a mixed legacy. So why shouldn't we instead be mourning this division in the Church 500 years later? Timothy George: It has to be said, Collin, that the Reformation was a multivalent event. It was a multifaceted event. It was many things, and you can study the Reformation this way. You can study the Reformation as a economic event, talk about the influx of gold from the New World. Remember, 1492 Columbus sails the ocean blue. Gold begins to flow back into Europe. Inflation rises. There is poverty. There is famine. There are riots. There are peasants' revolts. You can study the Reformation any of these ways, sociologically, economically, politically, new things are happening. But I think as a Christian believer, which is really what drew me to the Reformation in the first place, I think it's important to see the Reformation as a movement within the history of God's people. It's a movement that is admittedly not easily defined in one simple way. Your question points to the fact that there are both positive and negative aspects that happen in the 16th century around the Reformation. The best way of describing this that I've ever come across was by the great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, who wrote an essay, I think back in 1958, called "The Tragic Necessity of the Reformation". I like that phrase, because it gets at the fact that maybe the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were talking about this. You look at Henry VIII chopping off not only his wives' heads but a lot of other people's heads, it was a bloody event. It was an event that had a lot of things in it that we would want to regret and repent of if we could, because they led in very negative directions. I'm thinking about the martyrdom of William Tyndale, for example, who translated the Bible into English. So there is a lot to be regretful for, but also in the midst and through it all, there is a renewal of the gospel. That's really what the Reformation was about. It was a spiritual and ecclesial renewal that took place in a very turbulent time and brought about changes for the good, as well as some negative things that we're still living with today. Collin Hansen: You alluded to this earlier, but what initially inspired you to study the Reformation, and who are some of your favorite figures? Has that list changed over time as you've studied the Reformation? Timothy George: Well, first of all, how did I get interested in the Reformation? I have to say, I'm a Southern Baptist, and so growing up in Southern Baptist land and Sunday school, vacation Bible school, the Reformation was not a real big theme. Maybe every now and then a preacher would mention Martin Luther or something, but it was in passing, and so unlike some other traditions, where the Reformation is deeply ingrained as a part of the catechism, as a part of the instruction, it was not true for me. It was really only after I became a student, went to college, and I read one book that turned me on to the Reformation. It's still, I think, one of the best books I've ever read on the Reformation. It was published in the year I was born, 1950, by a great historian named Roland Bainton. It was a biography of Luther. It was called "Here I Stand". I'll never forget reading that book on the first trip I ever made to Europe. I took it with me on the airplane and read it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. "Here I Stand", it's a gripping story, and Bainton was a great historian-storyteller. He tells Luther's story in a way that makes him come alive and makes you feel something really is at stake here, something's important. Here were issues people were willing to die for. Here were people who were willing to put their lives on the line for something they thought eternally important. That gripped me as a young student. Later when I went to Harvard, I had the privilege of working with some other great historians, including Heiko Oberman, a great Dutch reform scholar, including my major professor there, George Huntston Williams, who wrote a wonderful book called "The Radical Reformation" published in 1962. It's still in print today. So these historians really expanded my horizons and encouraged me to dig deep into the sources of the Reformation. And the more I dug, the more I felt I needed to know and want to go deeper. Collin Hansen: So has your appreciation for certain figures associated with the Reformation risen or fallen over this time? Timothy George: There is a way of telling the story of the Reformation that is focused almost exclusively on Martin Luther, and it's not just Lutherans who sometimes do that. I mean, Luther is a volcano of a personality, and there's no way to tell the story of the Reformation, I think, legitimately without giving a lot of attention to Luther. At the same time, there would have been a Reformation whether or not Luther had ever existed. The forces were at work. Luther was a spark plug that ignited that, but he was also a lot more than that, because he brought a great deal of theological substance to the Reformation. So number one in my canon of Reformation worthies has to be Martinus Lutherus; however, he's not the only one. Certainly you think, almost in the second rank, of John Calvin, who really never met Luther. They corresponded once or twice by letter but never really met one another. But John Calvin was able to take Luther's insight, repackage them, reframe them in a way, add his own distinctive voice to that, and make it come alive in an urban setting. Luther was largely a rural reformer, if we could think, a territorial reformer way up in Wittenberg in northern Germany. Calvin lived in Geneva, a bustling city in Switzerland, and so you began to get the Reformation taking on a new social setting with new capacities and new influences. So those two, I would say, one and two. But then the other figures that kind of hover around them are people like Martin Bucer, not as well-known as he ought to be, I think. He was the reformer of Strasbourg, a Dominican friar who became a reformer and met Martin Luther in 1518 at the Heidelberg Disputation and was swept off his feet theologically by Luther. And then I would say Huldrych Zwingli, you've got to mention him in Zurich. He was the reformer of Zurich, who beginning in 1519 started to preach, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through the Gospel of Matthew. And when you go to the Grossmünster, his church in Zwingli today, then there you can see written, I think it's in brass or bronze letters, "This is where the Reformation began on January 1, 1519". Well, that's just as justifiable a date for saying when the Reformation began, in a way, as October 31, 1517. So you have the Swiss context as well as the German context. And then other figures, Philip Melanchthon, who was Luther's kind of lieutenant, his right hand helper in Wittenberg, was a great scholar himself, a friend of Calvin's. You've got Cranmer in England, who's really responsible for the Book of Common Prayer. As I was writing my book, "Theology of the Reformers", there were five figures I wanted to focus on, and some of those were hard to choose. It was not hard to choose Luther, it was not hard to choose Calvin, but then you get down to these others. The figures I chose were people who are at the headwaters of an ongoing Reformation tradition, and whose influence lives on today in their disciples: Luther; Zwingli; Calvin; Menno Simons, who was an Anabaptist; and I've gone back and added for the recent edition William Tyndale, who stands at the headwaters of the English Reformation for both Puritans and Anglicans. So these five figures had an influence whose ... their legacy still lives on today. Collin Hansen: Why do you think that book, "Theology of the Reformers", perhaps your best-known book and widely-read book, why do you think it's had such a significant influence? Timothy George: Well, you know the Reformation has been studied in many different ways, especially in recent decades. There was a time when the Reformation was told as a story of these great figures, and it was biographical and dramatic and a lot of pageantry, and then we kind of went through a phase in historiography where the Reformation was studied primarily as a social and economic event, as a political happening. As I've said already, I think, these are all legitimate ways of investigating the Reformation, but my book came along at a time when it harked back in a way to an earlier modality of thinking about the reformers, of focusing on these individuals, and the question I asked myself as I was writing that book, what made these reformers tick? I wanted to get under their skin. I wanted to see their motivation. I wanted to understand why Luther did what he did and said what he said, and Calvin and Zwingli and these people. And so I think that met a need, maybe, in the life of the church for a new approach to the Reformation that in some ways took seriously their own self-understanding. That's what I was after. Collin Hansen: Do you think also it's helped to fill that void of Southern Baptists in not knowing their Reformation heritage? Timothy George: I hope so. I mean, I wasn't just thinking only of Southern Baptists, although it has to be said, "Theology of the Reformers" is published by Broadman and Holman. That's the main publishing arm of LifeWay, the Southern Baptist Convention, and so I'm very grateful for the good endorsements that they've given to it and publicity they've given for it. It continues to sell largely because I think it's been a textbook. A lot of people have used it as a textbook. A lot of pastors tell me they use it in their churches and in teaching and thinking about the Reformation. And so I'm very grateful. I wouldn't want to be limited to Southern Baptists, because the Lord's body is greater than the Southern Baptist Convention, but I am a Southern Baptist, and so I'm very happy when Southern Baptists and others tell me they find it helpful. Collin Hansen: It seems that one of your great causes in life has been to help Southern Baptists with a problem that you've identified, that there's something that happened between their grandmothers and Jesus. I've heard you say on many occasions, and I know that that book has been part of that, certainly at Beeson Divinity School, which is not a Southern Baptist School but includes Southern Baptists. But that's something that we put a big emphasis on as well. Another thing that you're widely known for has been dialog with the Roman Catholic Church, and I'm wondering how do you simultaneously hold such high regard for the 16th century Reformation, but then also hold out hope in dialog with the Roman Catholic Church for reformation today, because I would say that most of the people I know who are the strongest advocates of the Reformation legacy tend to be the most anti-Catholic today. So how do you handle that? Timothy George: It's a good question. I would say this, the Reformation itself was an event of retrieval, of recovery. The reformers were not out to start a brand new church from scratch. I can't say that emphatically enough. Now there were a few, I would call them restitutionists, among the reformers of whom that might have been true. I'm thinking, for example, of a figure named Caspar Schwenckfeld, who said the Lord is going to descend from heaven, and until he does we don't need to do baptism, we don't need to do the Lord's Supper, it's just the individual piety and spirituality of one sole individual. There were restitutionists, but they were a very small and minority group within the radical Reformation even. And so the reformers wanted to recover, they wanted to restore in some ways, the true New Testament church as they believe it had been shown to be in the holy scriptures and in the early centuries of the church. That led them to be very critical of the medieval Catholic Church, of which they were a part. Luther was, after all, an Augustinian monk, and the Reformation happened when this Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, began to pore over the text of holy scripture. It happened within the Catholic Church, which led eventually to a break between Luther and the Roman Catholic Church. So I think it's important to see the Reformation as a renewing process within the one holy catholic and apostolic church. Luther and Calvin both saw themselves to the day they died as nothing more or less than faithful ministers of the gospel within the one holy catholic and apostolic church. Now today, we're several centuries down the road from that, and I think it is a mistake for us to think nothing has happened, nothing has changed within the Roman Catholic Church. One thing that's changed is the Catholic Church now has the Bible, and Catholics are encouraged to read and study the Bible. And so my hope and prayer in all of my dialog with Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ is that we will come together through our study of the reformers and other great figures in the history of the church, to a deeper, truer understanding of the gospel message that they proclaimed. Collin Hansen: Let's talk now about another one of your legacy projects, "The Reformation Commentary on Scripture". You talked there just about your excitement about the Catholics now having the Bible. This is a very evangelical-type enterprise in the reformational spirit, a focus on scripture but to go back into a retrieval of Reformation era commentary on it. You're the general editor of this series. What's your hope for how this series will be used? Timothy George: Let me say a word about the RCS, as we call "The Reformation Commentary on Scripture", and the first person I want to talk about here is Tom Oden. Tom Oden just passed away a few months ago, and we miss him very much. He was a great theologian. He was a Methodist, but a person who greatly appreciated the whole church, including the Reformation, and he began a project, he was the general editor of a project published by InterVarsity Press called "The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture", which involved bringing together selected passages, pericopes we call them, from the writings of the early church fathers on every book in the Bible. Well, it was a very successful series for the press, InterVarsity Press, and so some people said we ought to have a series like this, focused on the Reformation, and I was asked to be the general editor and help devise this series. I have a great helper in my associate general editor, Dr. Scott Manetsch, who teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a wonderful historian of the Reformation. We shared a common teacher in Heiko Oberman. What are we trying to do? We would like for this series to be a resource, particularly for pastors and teachers and students of God's word, so that when you're charged to teach, even if it's a Sunday school class, maybe it's a sermon you're giving or a retreat you've asked to lead, and you're looking at a particular passage of scripture. Of course, you're going to go to the Bible, hopefully in Greek and Hebrew. If you've been a student here at Beeson, we'll shove that down your throat, but then not only the New Testament or the Old Testament but also the commentaries that are written today. There are some good ones, as well as some that are not so good. But what about the great gap in between the first witnesses and the most recent witnesses? What about those who have studied the Bible all throughout the long history of the church, 2000 years now? That's where the RCS comes in. What we do in the RCS is to enable our readers to read alongside, not just Luther and Calvin and the great names, but also minor figures who are also serious students of the Bible. The insights, the exegetical wisdom that you can glean from that is just tremendous. Doesn't mean they're always saying the same thing, singing from the same hymn book. Nope, they're different voices, but engaging with the way scripture has informed and shaped Christian life in the church and in the hearts and lives of God's people is a spiritual experience. It's an exercise that will help you grow in your own faith and help you minister God's word to God's people. That's what we're about. Collin Hansen: Let's talk about what this looks like at Beeson. How does Beeson recognize and celebrate its Reformation heritage, and maybe you could give us a little window into what's planned for this year. Timothy George: Yeah. If you've ever visited Beeson Divinity School, you know that the Reformation is present in all kinds of ways, in the iconography in Hodges Chapel. We have there figures from the reformers of the Reformation. We're reminded of their message in chapel often. This year, 2017, because it's the 500th anniversary of Luther's posting of his 95 Theses, we're devoting especially the fall chapel series to the Reformation. We'll have some outstanding speakers and themes of the Reformation, the great solas of the Reformation. I'm sure most of our listeners know those: sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, soli Deo Gloria, solo Christo, the great solas of the Reformation that point us, all of them in one way or another, back to Jesus Christ. Then during what we call Reformation Week, we will actually be experiencing, we hope, a great number of our alums who return to campus and help us to celebrate what we're calling Finkenwalde Day/Reformation Day. Finkenwalde was the name of the seminary that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had for his students in underground Germany in Nazi times, and we use that as a way of reminding us, not only of Bonhoeffer and his legacy, but of how that connects back to the Reformation. So we're hoping we'll have a lot of friends and visitors from days gone by who will come back to remember Beeson and their experience here, and to help us think about what the Reformation means for us today. It's wonderful to sort of sit back in revelry and think about all the great things of the past. I like to do that. I'm a historian, after all. But we have to think about the Reformation as an ongoing project. It's not something that's once and for all done with. When we study the Reformation, even if we understand it perfectly well, and we never do that, but even if we could, that's not enough, because we are called ourselves to be reformers in our own day, and that wonderful phrase that comes a little bit later than the time of Luther, the Reformation, once and for all reform, but also always reforming. Semper reformanda, that's a very important notion here at Beeson. Collin Hansen: Before then, at least before that fall chapel series, this coming April, you'll be appearing in Indianapolis at the Gospel Coalition 2017 National Conference. That's going to be April 4th, where you'll be giving a couple workshops. The theme is "Reformation: 500 and Beyond". Give us a preview of what you're going to be speaking about there. Timothy George: Sometimes people ask me, "Where do you see Reformation themes, Reformation theology at work today in the life of the church?" One of the places is the Gospel Coalition, which is, I think, a movement of the Holy Spirit in our times. God has raised it up, and I understand from someone who, I think, knows, namely you, Collin, that there'll be maybe over 8,000, we hope, people or so gathered in Indianapolis in April 2017 for the Gospel Coalition. A lot of young people. I don't know if you do an age study, but these are younger people who are interested in substantive things for their faith, and they come together to study the great theme of the Reformation this year. That's this year's conference theme. What am I going to do? I've been asked to talk a little bit about some of the pre-reformers, those who paved the way for the Reformation. I'm thinking here of figures like Jan Huss and John Wycliffe in England and maybe Savonarola down in Florence, Italy, these great pre-Reformation figures who didn't get everything right, we have to say, but they pointed forward to a recovery of the gospel message in the 16th century, and in some ways, we really cannot understand the Reformation without understanding them and the figures that they were involved with. Another figure that probably should go in there, maybe with a slight question mark around his name, is Desiderius Erasmus. Now, the more I study Erasmus, the more I like him, although I have to say I have a lot of disagreement with Erasmus. He falls far short in some ways, but here is a person whose whole life was about getting the Bible out, getting people to study the scriptures, and in that I think we can find a common ground with even the great humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus. And then I'm going to focus in another presentation on some of the great debates of the Reformation. We should all think, the Reformation was a great controversial event, not only between Catholics and Protestants, that's what we think about, but also within each of these two great traditions. For example, within the Protestant movement, you have debates between Luther and Zwingli, focused on the Lord's Supper, coming to a head at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529. You have debates over baptism, obviously, between the Anabaptist reformers and the mainline reformers. You have debates over predestination and free will. You have debates over church governance, what's the best way for the church to be organized. So I'm going to talk about some of these more famous debates of the Reformation. What can we learn from them? Why were they not able to come to agreement in the first generation or two? Well, we haven't quite made it there yet. We've been trying for now these many centuries. So I think that's instructive for us to learn from not only where they agreed and stood together, but also some of their debates and disagreements. Collin Hansen: We're eagerly looking forward to that, but besides the Gospel Coalition National Conference, what other events are you participating in with this special year? Timothy George: Well, I have a number of different lectureships I have been invited to give in different places around the world, throughout this country and beyond. I'll just mention a few of these, because I don't have the whole list in front of me, but Baylor University is one of them. Liberty University is another one of them. Campbell University in North Carolina. Hope College, which is in Michigan. So there are a number of different places where I'll be going to speak on the Reformation. Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando, a number of others, as well as in churches. I love to give lectures. I'm after all trying to be a scholar at this point in my life, but what I love more than giving lectures are preaching sermons. God called me to be a preacher of the gospel. That's what I was called to do, and so I'll have the occasion to preach in a number of churches, and that'll, I trust, build up the body of Christ and edify God's people. So I'm excited about that. I'm looking forward to spreading this word. Then in the fall, among other things, after our own Beeson celebration of the Reformation during Reformation Week, I'll be giving one of the three plenary addresses for the Evangelical Theological Society, which will be meeting this year in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm looking forward to that as well. I haven't decided what I'm going to speak on, but I tell you, it'll be about the Reformation, and it'll be good. Collin Hansen: You're going to be in Europe as well. Timothy George: Yes, this summer. We're leading, my colleague and friend, Dr. David Dockery, who's the President of Trinity International University, and I are leading a Reformation heritage tour, which will take place during late June and early July. We're actually going to visit some of the great sites of the Reformation, including Wittenberg, including Geneva, including Zurich. It's just a wonderful time to be together in that place where so many great events happened that shape our lives today. I'm really looking forward to that. Collin Hansen: We're also excited you're going to be giving the Reformation Heritage Lectures at Beeson this fall as well, which I think is only appropriate. Timothy George: Thank you. Collin Hansen: Which is an annual event at Beeson, but just takes on special importance this year in 2017. Dr. George it's grateful for the scholarship you've contributed, the church leadership, and your ongoing simple inspiration that you pass along to all of us. I don't know if you remember this, but the first conversation you and I ever had was about the Reformation. I don't recall exactly how I came across to you as a Reformation scholar, though I know it had to do with Christianity Today magazine, when I was writing a piece for a magazine I helped start in college about the differences between Protestants and Catholics, so this is something I've been learning about from you for going on a couple decades now, and so just grateful to continue to learn from you and appreciate you allowing me to interview you here today for the Beeson Podcast. Timothy George: Thank you so much, Collin. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an inter-denominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast. https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/The-Tragic-Necessity-of-the-Reformation