Retrieved Reformation Quotes

Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man.

a metaphor, visiting the Sistine chapel does more than conceptually advance your knowledge of Michaelango’s view of final judgment, as visiting the Grand Canyon does more than provide you information about the history of the Colorado River. There are sensibilities and emotions that are shaped by the whole experience. So also patristic and medieval theology can function to shape theological values and inclinations we will likely lack so long as we work narrowly within Reformation and modern theology alongside the Bible. It is an enriching, formative experience, comparable to traveling to a foreign country and being immersed in the culture and geography.

It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise. Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives?

Hope there isn’t anyone below us.” “If so, they’re already asleep. I mean, I’d already be asleep if you weren’t licking my ear. Why are you licking my ear?” Lex retrieved her tongue. “Because I feel like something awful is going to happen tomorrow. And I’m really hoping it doesn’t involve my grisly demise, or an even grislier demise for you than your last one, but—” She swallowed. “I want this night to be a happy one, because I think they’re going to be in short supply from now on.” “Yeah, but—” He glanced behind them. “With four friends, one uncle, one Pandora, and a comatose museum curator within hearing range?” “Good point.” Lex nodded thoughtfully, as if they were debating tax reform. “However: this.” She grabbed his hands and slapped them onto her chest. His eyes bulged, then met hers. “Compelling rebuttal.” Lex grinned and dove back into his face while Driggs’s hands reached around her back. “Ah, the over-shoulder boulder holder,” he said in a sneering voice, picking at her bra. “My old nemesis.” “Okay, don’t panic,” Lex said. “Do it just like we practiced.” “Right. The hook faces out.” “The hook faces in.” “DAMMIT.

The various products and processes of church tradition are certainly fallible, and their existence and exercise are certainly accountable to their prophetic and apostolic foundation. Their weak and subordinate nature notwithstanding, these instruments do not stand as obstacles to a knowledge of God that can be gained more immediately through the reading of Scripture without them. They stand as divinely authorized instruments and divinely appointed aids to reading Scripture, part of the fullness of Christ’s gift that he has bestowed in and through his anointing upon the church. Having received this anointing, and the fruits of this anointing, the church and the church’s theology can do no better than to abide in the one who has given by abiding in the gifts he has given (1 John 2:27).

Indeed, sola Scriptura has served for some moderns as a banner for private judgment and against catholicity. In so doing, however, churches and Christians have turned from sola Scriptura to solo Scriptura, a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism. Even the Reformational doctrine of perspicuity has been transformed in much popular Christianity and some scholarly reflection as well to function as the theological equivalent of philosophical objectivity, namely, the belief that any honest observer can, by the use of appropriate measures, always gain the appropriate interpretation of a biblical text. Yet this is a far cry from the confession of Scripture’s clarity in the early Reformed movement or even in its expression by the post-Reformation dogmatics of the Reformed churches. On top of this type of mutation, we regularly encounter uses of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” that ignore or minimize the role of church officers as well as the principle of sola Scriptura to affirm a lived practice of “no creed but the Bible.”25 Right or not, then, many people embrace sola Scriptura, thinking that they are embracing individualism, anti-traditionalism, and/or rationalism. Similarly, right or not, many critique sola Scriptura as one or more of these three things.

Anselm did not just affirm the faith but exhibited its coherence. Lady philosophy was summoned to serve theology.

As severe as the Reformers’ criticisms of medieval Roman Catholicism could be, they always distinguished themselves from the Anabaptists, making clear that their intention was to reform, not recreate, the true church of God.

Luther and Calvin, by contrast, saw the early church as a resource to be utilized and spoke of the goal of the Reformation as its retrieval.

Vanhoozer argues that “the Reformation was a retrieval, first and foremost of the biblical gospel, particularly the Pauline articulation, but also, secondarily, of the church fathers.

That these perceived tensions in Augustine become Warfield’s rubric for engaging the medieval church as a whole is evident in his definition of the Reformation as “the triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.