Written by Patrick J. O’Banion |
Monday, September 20, 2021
Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).

How we understand the church’s missionary past has everything to do with how we will proclaim Christ to the nations right now. If the great theologians and practitioners of our ecclesiastical tradition—whoever they are—taught that our Lord had commissioned his church to share the gospel with all people, then we who live downstream of them are likely to embrace that mission. The reverse, of course, is also true.
The Missiological Legacy of the Reformation
One of the stories told about the Reformation in missiological circles is that the reformers weren’t interested in seeing the gospel go to the ends of the earth. Those who make this claim propose a variety of reasons for the failure. Perhaps the Reformers’ horizons were limited to Christian Europe or they were too busy arguing amongst themselves about minute points of doctrine to worry about the millions perishing abroad. Maybe their exegetical method caused them to limit the Great Commission to the apostolic era. Or maybe something inherent in Reformation theology works at cross purposes with global evangelism.
Whatever the rationale alleged, one important source of the claim that Protestants were missionary failures is the founding father of academic missiology, Gustav Warneck (1834-1910), who took the Reformers to task. Warneck concluded that Luther’s “view of the missionary task of the church was essentially defective” and Calvin’s comments on the Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20) had “not a word to say of a continuous missionary obligation of the church,” but instead used the text as a launching pad for an attack (yet another!) upon the papacy. [1]  Even in its second edition, Ruth Tucker’s popular biographical history of missions implicitly follows Warneck’s interpretation of the Reformation, and a recent missiology textbook claims that “the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation did not produce any missionaries.”
To state the obvious, the theological vision of Protestants draws heavily upon the reformers. If Warneck is right that they didn’t have time for missions, will those of us who locate our confessional roots in the Reformation find that they don’t nourish and support an effort to take the gospel to the nations?
Now, in their kinder moments, Warneck and his many followers concede that Luther, Calvin, and their fellows simply couldn’t do everything. They had their hands full with reforming the church and avoiding arrest and execution. To expect them also to have focused their limited energy on reaching the ends of the earth, which admittedly felt much further away in the sixteenth century than they do today, is presumptuous and a bit unfair.
But as more and more scholars reexamine the data, the story of a Reformation that wholly ignored mission is being replaced by one in which the “Reformation as a whole was mission,” to borrow historian Scott Hendrix’s lapidary phrase. [3]
Vermigli and the Psalms: Reformation Meets Great Commission
By way of example, consider Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), for whom the notion that the Reformers didn’t care about the global spread of the gospel would have come as something of a surprise. In his earlier days, Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).
One of Vermigli’s most popular works is his Sacred Prayers from the Psalms of David, which provide a unique window into his theological heart.
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Predestination and election are not a result of the Fall, of Adam’s sin. As Romans 9 makes clear the Father’s designs for Jacob and Esau had nothing to do with who they became. They became who they were, one elect the other rebrobate, before anything was done by them. The more we mine the beauty and power of these truths the easier it becomes to be built up in love regardless of what failures men and women pile up in our faces. We look above and beyond the personal slights to see the glory of the one who has called us out of darkness and into the wonders of His marvelous light.

Frustration seems to be a large part of life. We often find ourselves in that emotional position because people who we expect things from, usually fairly minor things, can’t seem to meet even that low of a bar. Trust is not an easy thing to earn, but it is an easy thing to lose. Yet like most situations we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are not meant to allow the failing of expectations to keep us from the kind of peace we see in our Savior throughout His earthly ministry. Did Jesus get mad at the disciples sometimes for their lack of faith or understanding? Sure. But one of the things we learn from Him in those moments is that Christ understood something far more important about each of the men He had called to follow Him. They were made in God’s image and they belonged to Him. They were sinners in need of grace and mercy. However, even in this our Lord’s discouragement with His disciples motivated Him not to abandon them, but to love them more, and to build them up in faith through the witness of love. He strove with them even unto the end, and beyond.
In today’s prayer and worship help we are going to think some more about how to be Christlike in a world where there seems to be so much disappointment. Paul’s testimony to this effect can be found in his letter to the church at Colosse. While they weren’t as bad as the Galatians or the Corinthians who received a tongue lashing from the Lord’s apostle there were still matters that he felt like needed to be pointed out to these young Christians. In most of chapter two the subject is false teaching, both from the Judaizers and the Greek philosophers. As we come to the third chapter Paul moves the conversation along to remind the folks here that as newborn believers in Jesus Christ their whole visage has changed and they no longer are to see themselves as they once were. This being born again is a necessary part of the salvation we have received. If we act, think, do, etc… the same as before we claimed the named of Jesus then it becomes clear that we know not Him. There has to be fruit born of repentance or there is no new heart or no grafting into the life-giving vine of Christ. A Christian tree bears Christian fruit. An unbelieving heart produces unbelieving fruit and we can see this primarily in how we react to the negative effects of sin in the world around us.
Do we pray for those who persecute us? Do we seek the redemption of the lost? Do we hope in all hope for those who sin against us?
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“Described as a ‘godfather to the [humanist] movement’ by the New York Times Magazine, Epstein was also named ‘one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States’ by Faithful Internet, a project coordinated by the United Church of Christ with assistance from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, for his efforts to bring together atheists, agnostics, and allies, as part of an ancient and ever-evolving ethical tradition that can be called humanism.”

The new chief chaplain at Harvard University is an atheist, the New Your Times reported.
What are the details?
Author Greg Epstein, the 44-year-old writer of “Good Without God,” is the Ivy League university’s new chaplain and will “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious communities on campus.”
Epstein said of his appointment, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.”
Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household, has been the university’s “humanist chaplain” since 2005 and previously educated students on how to center their relationships around themselves and one another rather than with God.
Epstein says that people ought not look to God for answers because “we are each other’s answers.”
Students, according to the outlet, are mainly lauding Epstein’s appointment.
“Greg’s leadership isn’t about theology,” one student said. “It’s about cooperation between people of different faiths and bringing together people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves religious.”
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