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Writer's pictureGeoffrey Bruschi

Reforming the Reformation

How Can Viewing Our Core Theology with Pre-Reformation Eyes Lead Us to a More Beautiful Church?

The Christian church has undergone many significant changes throughout its existence. Protestants and Catholics alike have sensed a need for contextual adaptations, while upholding the ancient faith as our one firm foundation. In the words of semiotician Leonard Sweet, however, the church needs to rethink its expression:


But after all the defragging, devirusing, and systems scanning, there needs to be a rebooting. It is not so much that our soul needs an addition or that our church needs three new rooms. It is less that Western Christianity needs a course correction than a character correction. What the church needs is not a clean slate but a clear and clean reboot.[1]


The Protestant Reformation greatly advanced the directions open to the people of God (humanity). Nearly half a millennium later, the Second Vatican Council brought significant liberty to even more. But these reforms have not been enough to guide the “weltkirche” (world church) to embody the ideals of the katholike ekklesia (church catholic), such as that exampled in Romans 12:5, Ephesians 4:5, and the earliest generations of the Faith.


If the Reformation re-discovered that “everyone is a minister,” and “the great discovery of what God is up to today (yet to be named) is that everyone is a missionary,”[2] the reboot needed to guide and shape a new reformation must be birthed from a theological re-discovery of who God really is … along with a practical, relational embrace of who humanity is becoming. This is the sort of reformation that cultivates both orthodoxy and orthopraxy as a means to fueling unity in the world church, while it encourages local expression around the globe.


The shift in Christian demographics toward the Global South not only exposes the myriad internal disagreements, shared among the dying churches of the West, it is also a semiotic of the “last becoming first,” as the Spirit of God pours himself onto all flesh (Joel 2:28). The Western Church can continue to either build fortresses around systematic theologies that do little to incarnate the love of God, or risk further decline and demise. Alternatively, it could (once again) embrace the truth that no one has been, is, or ever will be separated from the love of God (Romans 8:38).


Beckoned beyond the Reformation


The Reformation certainly brought about desperately needed change. With reforms affecting both the culture and the context in which people could know and experience God—at least as a righteous Judge. All the same, it succeeded in stifling what the world long prior appreciated about God as Abba Father. Consider Martin Luther, as described by the historian Mark Knoll:


His sense of sin was great and caused him much distress. Even more distress was caused by the fearsome image of God that predominated in his thought, especially of God as the perfectly righteous Judge who sent his son to show humanity the full and terrible reality of divine righteousness.[3]


Now, it is true Luther’s efforts resulted in a monumental resurgence of the belief in God’s salvation through grace alone (and praise God for that). Yet, Luther and other reformers reduced that grace to a woefully limited, exclusionary, and misguided outlook on election, which currently still plagues the world church today.


If this church is to find a truly ecumenical and catholic reboot as its answer to Jesus’ prayer in John 17, believers must first embrace a more beautiful theology concerning the true nature of God.


Luther, Calvin, and so many others were correct to bind their consciences to Scripture. And when the church of the 21st century does as well, it will discover God nudging it further back in history to a place where it can be restarted at its origins.[4] Yes, God elects and chooses. However, Reformed theology has used these concepts to justify a doctrine of exclusion that reflects a false portrayal of God. Consider Darrin Hufford, who writes:


I believe that because of the lies we have been told about the heart of God, it is virtually impossible for us to truly love Him. He is terrifying. He turns His face from us. He removes His hand of protection from us. He causes bad things to happen in our lives. He’s just not lovable.[5]


Lesslie Newbigin reminds us that the relational nature of salvation requires someone to embody the love of God to another. The gospel does not simply fall from the sky. It is enfleshed and manifested in and through the Church. Think of Israel, a people elected by God “as the instrument of God’s purpose of love for all the nations.”[6] Their mission among the inhabitants of the world was to be a beacon of the mission of God—drawing others centripetally to his light. As to the nature of this divine “mission,” Christopher Wright adds:


[Refusing] to forsake his rebellious creation, [refusing] to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to his original design for it … [Scripture] testifies to a God who breaks through to human beings, who disclosed himself to them, who will not leave them unilluminated in their darkness … who takes the initiative in re-establishing broken relationships with us.[7]


Insofar as this is the mission of God, it is the mission of the Church. A mission to embody and reveal God (as described by Wright) to all the people of the earth. Further, in a great reversal, Israel’s rejection of Christ paved the way for His love to be made plain to the Gentiles.


In its proper understanding, this reveals to us how God consigned all people to disobedience so that he may have mercy on ALL PEOPLE. This reality of the nature of God has been traded away by Western evangelicalism for a shadow of who God really is.


The challenge that continues to plague the church is seen in its insistence on trying to fill old wineskins with new wine … or as Sweet puts it, “attempt[ing] to lay a new template on top of an existing structure that was built for something else.”[8] This is to erect the noble hope of becoming a truly missional, relational, and incarnational church upon the decrepit "gospel" of conformity to slippery slope-resistant beliefs and taboo-avoiding behaviors.


Attracting people to embrace the true nature of God, as revealed in the cruciform Christ, was what the church originally intended to do. Yet, doing so today quickly earns one the label “heretic.” No matter what new template or program we try to overlay onto a church, which mistakes the heart of the Father as something other than it is, only re-embracing God as he is revealed in Christ will bring about positive change.


Despite the tendency among many evangelicals to reduce their inception to events in sixteenth century Europe, our origins beckon to us from well prior to the Reformation. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from Vatican II's attempts to heal the schism between West and East, which in turn sparked a surge of interest for Eastern Orthodoxy across the West—and for good measure. Because ...


A recovery of the Eastern idea of perichoresis (re: the relationship of the three persons of the Godhead to one another) will be required for any genuine reformation within the world church. This one truth will dismantle the delusion of human separation from God (Col. 1:21), along with that heinous belief the Father abandoned the Son on the Cross (Psalm 22:24), and the grotesque Reformation anthropology likening the value of humankind to “snow covered dung.” All three of these views affirm the demonic attempt to destroy all value the Image of God created into each person, holds for humanity more broadly (Ps. 8:5).


The Fraud of Penal Substitutionary Atonement - Pt. 1


Models of the Atonement, based upon penal substitution, must be dismantled, and replaced with the ancient ideas of apocatastasis[9] and anakephalaiosis (Irenaeus’ recapitulation theory of atonement). In so doing, the world will know that before “in the beginning,” the Logos existed with God.


The Logos is God.


And in Jesus … we find the definition of what it meant to be both God and man. It is in Jesus … the express image of the Father … the one in whom it pleased the Father to dwell fully … where we find the triumphant heart of an eternal God victoriously reconciling the cosmos to himself. It's an image strangely traded for a God who broods over his tally of finite transgressions committed by those whom he himself describes as possessing the posture of a blade of grass in comparison to his own glory (Is. 40:7-8).


Of course this does not seek to disregard the comeuppance due transgressors. It does, nevertheless, tilt the way we have succeeded in reducing the Divine Priority.


It is in the radically forgiving, other-centered, suffering love of God where we abandon the tired, old operating system of the church, to clearly see the love of the Father and how it has always been beckoning us to become what we were intended to be, as opposed to what we (as a church) have become.


The second area of focus will lead to a reboot in praxis and point us toward the adoption of a proper understanding of who we, as persons, are to God and to each other. This will inform us to what salvation really is.


His Masterpiece


On May 21st, 1972, a man took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta, severely damaging the nose, left arm, an eye, and the veil. The act left one of history’s greatest masterpieces in need of restoration. If Michelangelo were alive, one wonders how heart sick he would be seeing his grand work so undone. This masterpiece, created for glory and beauty, reflected the image of its creator, Michelangelo. Yet, as remarkable a creation it was it was incapable of repairing itself. On the other hand, while its glory and intended purpose were damaged, Michelangelo’s imprint was untouched.


The New York Times reported, “After a conference of Vatican officials and art experts, Francesco Vacchini, a lay official in charge of St. Peter's technical services, determined Pieta suffered “grave damage” and restoration work would pose many problems.”[10]


Much farther back in time, it wasn’t a hammer, but rather a lie, wielded by another created being that severely damaged God’s masterpiece. He damaged humanity’s minds, hearts, hands, and will, to derail our destiny. Athanasius remarked:


It was not worthy of the goodness of God that those created by him should be corrupted through the deceit wrought by the devil upon human beings. And it was supremely improper that the workmanship of God in human beings should disappear either through their own negligence or through the deceit of the demons. Therefore, since the rational creatures were being corrupted and such works were perishing, what should God, being good, do?[11]


While Athanasius’ inquiry explicates the nature of God, the biblical witness tells us humanity is God’s masterpiece (Eph. 2:10; poiēma). Like Michelangelo’s work, humans are incapable of restoring themselves. But God is alive and so in love with the cosmos he sent his only begotten Son into this space and this time to rescue each of us (Romans 5:8).


The point of the analogy is missed by much of evangelicalism, which would explain the damaged Pieta as the breach of an external law. A law Michelangelo must uphold by either eternally damning the statue or killing himself (or his son?), in order to make it right.


God’s mission is to restore the “cool of the day” relationships inaugurated in Eden. Many have stylized this mission as “saving people from their sins.” And rightly so, assuming a proper understanding of “sin” leads to one knowing what they are being saved from … and to.


The Fraud of Penal Substitutionary Atonement - Pt. 2


The Western presentation of “sin” is typically based on a misunderstanding of I John 3:4.[12] It concludes a breach of God’s Law requiring judicial action, including either eternal punishment in hell, annihilation, or imputed righteousness. In such a schema, Jesus is presented as a blood sacrifice, killed by God, to appease God’s wrath due the sinner. Once a person believes this message, they are “saved.”


Correspondingly, the church then sees its mission to be “evangelizing” the “lost” inhabitants of the world. The current evangelical church mission can be reduced to leaving tracts on bathroom urinals, explaining how to go to heaven after death. Every Sunday service is seen as a Billy Graham style “revival,” during which people are reminded of exactly how horrible they are, then pleaded with to come to the altar and “accept Jesus into their hearts.”


What If ...


But what if all of this is missing a greater point? What if the nature and mission of the church is to enter the life-giving, life-changing restoration project inaugurated by God in Christ? N. T. Wright puts it this way:


But if what matters is the newly embodied life after life after death, then the presently embodied life before death can at last be seen not as an interesting but ultimately irrelevant present preoccupation, not simply as a ‘vale of tears and soul-making’ through which we have to pass to a blessed and disembodied final state, but as the essential, vital time, place, and matter into which God’s future purposes have already broken in the resurrection of Jesus and in which those future purposes are now to be further anticipated through the mission of the church. Life after death, it seems, can be a serious distraction not only from the ultimate life after life after death, but also from life before death... Salvation, then, is not ‘going to heaven’ but ‘being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.’ But as soon as we put it like this, we realize that the New Testament is full of hints, indications, and downright assertions that this salvation isn’t just something we have to wait for in the long-distance future. We can enjoy it here and now (always partially, of course, since we all still have to die), genuinely anticipating in the present what is to come in the future.[13]


The New Reformation for the world church will look like Jesus’ justice. A justice not satisfied merely in the pronouncement of guilt. Jesus’ justice is restorative. It is fixated with a divine desire to set things right. It will, therefore, involve enjoying new and abundant life in the here and now.


As John Behr illustrates, “Life, as zoe, lives when life, as bios, no longer lives for itself, but rather lays itself down for others, in the manner initiated by Christ and exemplified in the martyrs.”[14]


The mission of the world church will embrace the concept of salvation as whole person ministry and not solely limit its “evangelism” to a means for positioning others for the afterlife. In this, the Good News represents the declaration that all have been saved. The invitation of mission, then, stands as a welcoming into the fulfillment of a present life restored in Christ, over against the “good news” of merely working one’s way out of a ghoulishly medieval, classical concept of hell.


And while it may look quite radical, it, of course, will not be radical at all. It will be beautifully original. Because it will be a tidal wave of knowing that the Trinity truly permeates the cosmos. Missions will look more like people loving neighbors gathered around their dining room tables, than imperialistically sending people across the globe.


It matters little whether there will be changes in style because it will be a change in character, like water to wine. New local liturgies will be embraced as expressions of local experiences with God, like the way the Scriptures were written.


I’ve written elsewhere that the coming church must become more like a hospice,[15] centered on small groups of gifted people going out and loving people of all races, genders, and moral comportment.


The world church of tomorrow, as it is re-enlivened by its embrace of God, will embrace all peoples as his masterpieces. It will demonstrate an eagerness to pick up brushes, so as to join with God's cosmic restoration project, finally realizing that this life, and those living it, truly do matter.

NOTES: [1] Leonard I. Sweet, So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2009), 38. [2] Ibid., 56. [3] Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 150. [4] Sweet, So Beautiful, 38. [5] Darin Hufford, The Misunderstood God: The Lies Religion Tells Us about God (London: Windblown media, 2009). [6] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989), Kindle Edition, Loc. 1614. [7] Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (Grand Rapids, MI: Intervarsity Press, 2018), 48. [8] Sweet, So Beautiful, 39. [9] See Ilaria Ramelli's The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (2013) or for a Catholic “hopeful” universal redemption by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (1988). [10] https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/22/archives/pieta-damaged-in-hammer-attack-assailant-with-hammer-damages-the.html [11] Athanasius, Saint, Patriarch of Alexandria. On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius (Popular Patristics Series Book 44) (p. 35). St Vladimir's Seminary Press. Kindle Edition. [12] I John 3:4 is referencing the “Law of Love,” given in John 13:34-35. [13] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York, NY: Harper One, 2018), 198. [14] Behr, John Behr, The Role of Death in Life: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Relationship between Life and Death (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books), 92. [15] Not in the way Tony Evans describes a hospice: “Many churches are hospices, not hospitals. We try to make folk feel good while they die, because folk don’t want anybody cutting on them so they can live. So, what we wind up doing Sunday after Sunday, is making nice beds, with nice air conditioning, with nice nurses, making folks comfortable while they die, rather than cutting, so they live.” –Tony Evans https://www.flickr.com/photos/pastorjoshmw/13995631664

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