Archive for February, 2008

In a recent review of Bill Griffeth’s By Faith Alone: One Family’s Journey Through 400 Years of American Protestantism (Harmony, 2007), Chris Scott notes Griffeth’s assertion that his family roots, which are among the New England Puritans and their journey from England to America, would “never have happened if Henry VIII’s request for a divorce had been granted’ [“Religion: Faiths of the Forefathers”, Bookpage (January 2008), 30]. In other words, if Henry VIII had been able to coax Pope Clement VII (Pope, 1523-1534), the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, into giving him a divorce then the English Reformation would not have taken place.

This is an intriguing thought—one of those that delight those who enjoy the pastime of reading of alternative histories. It is like the question: What if JFK had never been assassinated? Or this one: What if Hitler had invaded England in 1940? This Reformation alternate history then is this: Was the English Reformation so dependent on state support that if Henry had not gone into schism over his desire for a new wife, then the Reformation would have been stillborn?

Any close study of the period I think would reveal that men like William Tyndale would have pursued their programme for Reform—could the Reformation have succeeded, though, without state support? And if Henry had stayed within the orbit of Rome, would his children have done the same? It might be the case, that what might have been produced would have been the Reformed Church the Puritans longed for—in which case there would have been no need for the Puritans to venture overseas.

But this is not what happened. Clement stalled for time, not wanting to alienate either Henry or the nephew of Catherine of Aragon—Henry’s wife—who was Charles V, before whom Luther stood at Worms and who genuinely scared the Pope. And in the providence of God there was a Reformation in England—and how thankful we are to God for such. Whatever England may be now, her sons and daughters were once at the cutting edge of the advance of the Kingdom of God in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And their American evangelical cousins performed a similar service in the twentieth century and are still, by God’s grace, at the heart of the expansion of that Kingdom. Long may it be so!

According to a Fox News passed on to me by a friend, “1 in 4 Britons Think Winston Churchill Never Existed”! I know—it sounds ludicrous! One of the most powerful memories of my childhood in England was Churchill’s funeral—I can almost see the headlines now announcing his death. What are we coming to? If this is an accurate assessment of the state of historical ignorance, it is no wonder tripe like the Da Vinci Code seems plausible to so many. This is one of the key reasons for studying and teaching history: there is so much bad history out there. And the idea that Churchill never existed is bad history at its worst!

So perverse is the human heart that even when a person grows up under the constant sound of the gospel and hears the Word preached regularly, and has surrounding him or her godly models of the Christian life, unless God acts in sovereign grace, there will be no saving faith in the heart. Well did John Calvin put it in his Treatise on Eternal Election (1562): ‘It is not within our power to convert ourselves from our evil life, unless God changes us and cleanses us by his Holy Spirit.’[1]

[1] CO 8:113.

One of the great griefs here in this vale of tears is that God’s people—those blood-bought brothers and sisters who will spend eternity with the Saints and with their heavenly Lord with whom they have union—cannot get along. Sometimes, the issues are major—the nature of gospel preaching, for instance. Sometimes, they are minor—I think some of the divisions over worship today fall into this category. I dare not say all, for worship is an important matter.

What shall be our attitude to all of this? I can recommend none better than that of John Calvin, that lover of church unity, who feared to leave Rome lest he was engaging in schism! When Martin Luther was “flaming against the Zurichers,” Calvin said the division between Luther and the Zwinglians of Zurich caused him “no little grief” and he “lamented in [his] own breast in silence.”[1]

Sometimes separation must take place—but it must be deeply lamented and all done to secure unity before such a step taken.

[1] Second Defence of the Pious and Orthodox Faith Concerning the Sacraments, in answer to the Calumnies of Joachim Westphal [Tracts, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1859), 2:253].

What prevents human reasoning from proving the existence or non-existence of God?

Human logic and reasoning are flawed and not infallible and are shaped by all kinds of reasons that do not accord with Reason. We are like people then trying to speak about something that lies outside of our complete ken—or like Plato’s cave dwellers.

But I shall never forget that day in the fall of 1972, when, in my first year of university, I sat down to prove the existence of God with pen and paper. I was new to the halls of academia and I was filled with the love of philosophy and philosophical books and the love of words and reasoning. I had gathered a small cache of books, maybe twenty–in them my world of thought was confined. And I often regretted that one day I would die and could peruse those books no more. Little did I know what awaited me that golden autumn. For that day, there in a room in a house off Richmond Street in London, Ontario, where I was boarding with a very elderly couple, before I could put pen to paper, I knew…I knew God existed. Oh, my world was changed. He existed.

I did not yet know him as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who is as burning fire, the God of glory revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. But I was being turned from the confines of human reason to Truth above. I was starting on that road–rather, he was taking my hand down that road–that would lead to a church pew in Stanley Avenue Baptist Church, Hamilton, Ontario, where I heard the Gospel really for the first time and a one-room apartment in Toronto on Dundonald Avenue, where the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, my Maker, revealed himself in the fire of revelation and I came to the point where I could say, without any philosophical hesitation, Christianus sum.

I then knew, as I had never known before, the limits of reason and why I was alive and I was given a reason to live forever. To enjoy his presence and to bathe in his glory with the saints of his Church: philosopher saints like Augustine and Anselm and humble saints like Augustine’s mother Monnica.

“Who is this that hangs there dying while the rude world scoffs and scorns
Numbered with the malefactors, torn with nails, and crowned with thorns?
‘Tis our God who lives forever mid the shining ones on high
In the glorious golden city, reigning everlastingly.”
(William W How)

At one point in John Calvin’s earliest publication after his conversion, the 1534 treatise Psychopannychia, the French theologian reflected on what life is like without a saving knowledge of the living God. While his comments are not autobiographical in form, they can, as Heiko Oberman has pointed out, be interpreted as a commentary on his own life prior to his conversion.

“Do you want to know what the death of the soul is? It is to be without God, to be deserted by God, to be abandoned to yourself. …Since there is no light outside of God who lights our darkness, when he withdraws his light then our soul is certainly blind and buried in darkness; our soul is mute because it cannot confess, and call out to embrace God. The soul is deaf because it cannot hear his voice. The soul is crippled since it does not have a hold on…God…”[1]

If Calvin is right—and I passionately affirm that he is with all of my being—oh what a sorry state all men and women are in without the Lord Jesus. And oh what bliss to know the Lord Jesus.

Reader: into which category do you fall? If the former, think hard about the folly of putting off commitment to the Lord Jesus. Passion for any other—be he the Buddha or Confucius or Muhammad—will do you no good in that day when fates are sealed. Then only One—yes only the great God and Saviour, Jesus—will be able to save your soul.

If the latter and the way sometimes proves hard, remember whose you are and the glorious joy of being loved by him and known by him.

[1] Trans. Heiko A. Oberman, ‘Subita Conversio: The Conversion of John Calvin’ in his, Ernst Saxer, Alfred Schindler and Heinzpeter Stucki, eds., Reformiertes Erbe: Festschrift für Gottfried W. Locher zu seinem 80. Geburtstag (Zwingliana, 19/2; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1993), 2:295, n.4.

For a translation of Psychopannychia, see Tracts and Treatises, trans. H. Beveridge, 3:413-490. For Beveridge’s rendering of the passage that Oberman has translated, see Tracts and Treatises, trans. H. Beveridge, 3:454-455. For the Latin behind this translation, see CO 5:204-205.

For a study of Psychopannychia, see George H. Tavard, The Starting Point of Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 2000).