Post Series:
1—Imperialism of the Present
2—Reformers as Proto-Postmodernists
3—Ad Fontes, Erasmus, and the NIV

This month IVP launched their new Reformation Commentary on Scripture series with their inaugural title Galatians & Ephesians . Accompanying this release is a book by the series general editor, Timothy George, called Reading Scripture with the Reformers . I received this book to review and thought I would put together a series of posts reflecting on some of the themes in this fine supplement to what I anticipate will be a fine series.

I’m thankful for this supplement and this series because the Reformers get a bad rap nowadays from many who find contemporary adherents to this movement (embodied in people like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Justin Taylor, Kevin DeYoung and the broader YRR movement) to be boorish and curmudgeonly. Thus, all of Calvin and all of Luther and the whole Reformation is dismissed as theologically antiquated and restrictive.

But what the Reformers were doing, and what this book points out—for which I am indeed grateful—is trying to bring about a revolution in the original scientific sense: they were trying to return “a body in orbit to its original position;” they wanted to “re-form the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church on the basis of the Word of God and to do so by returning to the historic faith of the early Church.” (18)

We need a similar revolution, a similar return of the Body in historic orbit to its original historic orientation by returning to the historic faith of the early Church. And what George addresses in his chapter, “Why the Reformers?” is incredibly important for the 21st century Church because of what he addresses and calls the imperialism of the present.

He also calls this phenomenon of American culture in general the heresy of contemporaneity. As George argues:

We still place ourselves, our values, our world-view at the center of history, relegating whole epochs to the Dark Ages or pre-Enlightenment culture. Thus the Christian past, including ways earlier generations of believers have understood the Bible, becomes not so much something to be studies and appropriated as something to be ignored or overcome. (23)

And then the kicker: “Reading Scripture with the fathers, the scholastics, and the reformers finds no place in the polarizing dialectic recommendation” by contemporary Christian thinkers. (23) We find ourselves in this sort of presentist imperialistic disease in which the new and the innovative is trumpeted and embraced and worshiped and celebrated over against the old and trusted and historic. Thus, what I hear in predictably postmodern terms over and over again is that there is no meaning in the text itself—only the reader; local renditions of interpretation are embraced at the expense of the historic; and the Christian faith is simply theological interpretation all the way down, rather than historically bounded—not to mention Textually bounded!

Why the Reformers, one might ask? Because now, as then, we need to be broken of our heresy of contemporaneity, of our imperialism of the present by reorienting ourselves, in mid orbit, around what the Reformers themselves reoriented: the Bible. And in this chapter, George reminds us of five important principles that guided the Reformers reading and understanding of Scripture, and in turn should guide ours: (31-36)

1. The Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God.
2. The Bible is rightly read in light of the Rule of Faith.
3. Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires a trinitarian hermeneutic.
4. The Bible is front and center in the worship of the Church.
5. The study of the Bible is a means of grace.

George ends this chapter by saying, “We read the reformers for the same reason that we pay attention to the church fathers: we share with them a common patrimony in the sacred Scripture…From the Reformers we learn that the true purpose of biblical scholarship is not to show how relevant the Bible is to the modern world, but rather how irrelevant the modern and postmodern world have become in our self-centered preoccupations and sinful rebellion against the God who spoke and still speaks by his Spirit through his chosen prophets and apostles.” (42)

From the Reformers we learn that the true purpose of biblical scholarship is how irrelevant the modern and postmodern world have become…how true indeed. And the way in which the Church does this is to return to the authority of Scripture, which the Reformers help us with. Halfway through this book I am challenged to assess my own presentist tendencies and help provoke the Church to re-orbit and return to the historic Christian faith by learning to read the Scriptures with the Reformers.