Praying for the Nations in Reformation Europe
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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What’s the Difference between Venting and Lamenting?
Occasionally I hear people say that we see the psalmists venting, but that is to mistake the raw honesty we see in the Psalms with our experience of venting. In the Psalms, believers honestly vocalize their pain and suffering. But we don’t see sinful venting; we see believers talking to God through their pain. Moreover, the Psalms don’t only model how to express our feelings. Crucially, they teach us what things should arouse our feelings!
Christians today are increasingly aware of the importance of emotions. This growing emotional awareness is a positive development—especially when we learn how to process those emotions with God! At the same time, and perhaps even connected to this heightened emotional awareness, there is a growing recognition of the importance of lament.
But as we think through processing our emotions and practicing lament, there is an important distinction to make. That distinction is the difference between venting and lamenting.
Let’s consider each in turn.
What Is Venting?
To vent is to give vigorous or emotional expression.[1] Venting is expressing your views or emotions, often to obtain some relief or get attention. The opposite of this is the habit of “bottling things up,” where we suppress or stifle our thoughts and feelings. Viewed in this light, we can see the value of venting—it is important to identify and communicate our thoughts and feelings to those around us.
However, although we can all readily acknowledge the value of communicating our thoughts and feelings, we must be aware that, from a Christian perspective, the mere expression of those is not necessarily helpful. It is possible to express ourselves in destructive ways. In fact, the book of Proverbs issues a warning we ought to keep in mind:
“A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back” (Prov. 29:11).
Commenting on this verse, biblical scholar John Kitchen writes that “such a person is subject to every whim of passion and makes everyone in his life ride the roller coaster to the peaks and through valleys of his emotions.”[2] Colloquially, we might say that this person is controlled by their emotions. And as Kitchen points out, that can have destructive results for those around us. In fact, I think we see that all the time. It is easy to connect personal venting and the toxic reactivity that increasingly defines Western culture.
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Count It All Joy
Written by Guy M. Richard |
Sunday, September 18, 2022
Trials, according to James, are not scheduled or planned. They come into our lives when we least expect them to. They so often catch us by surprise. We don’t know when we will face trials; all we know is that we will face them, and we must be ready. There is, therefore, both a certainty and an uncertainty associated with all our trials.In exhorting us to “Count it all joy…when you meet trials of various kinds,” James is laying before us one of the most difficult challenges in the Christian life (James 1:2). It is an other-worldly challenge. How can we “count it all joy” when we are going through the most heart-breaking or heart-wrenching of circumstances? How can we rejoice when the world as we know it is falling apart?
I once heard a story about a friend of mine who went to visit a member of his congregation in the hospital. The member had a young son, around 2 years old or so, and the son was dying. When this friend of mine walked into the hospital room, he saw the mother of the child sitting in a rocking chair holding her son in her arms. Almost as soon as he walked in the child took his last breath and died in his mother’s lap. As tears were streaming down her face, the mother looked up at my friend and, in the midst of incredible grief and pain, asked my friend to lead them in singing the Doxology.
It is relatively easy to “count it all joy” when things are going well around us. When God’s will matches our own will for our lives, it is easy to be a Christian and to “count it all joy.” But when those two things don’t add up—when God’s will for our lives and our will for our lives don’t match—that is when things get hard. We all marvel at those occasions, like the one described above, when we see brothers and sisters in Christ rejoicing in the midst of incredibly difficult circumstances. But how do we actually begin to do it ourselves when things fall apart in our own lives?
I think James 1:2-4 helps us to answer this question. It doesn’t do so comprehensively to be sure, but it does give us a real answer as to how we can “count it all joy” in the midst of heart-breaking circumstances. This passage has at least three things to teach us about trials and how we can consider them worthy of rejoicing in. We will look at the certainty and uncertainty of our trials; the consistency and inconsistency of our trials; and the regard and disregard we should have for our trials.
The Certainty and Uncertainty of Our Trials
The first thing we can see is that James is highlighting both the certainty and the uncertainty of our trials. Notice that James is mentioning trials right from the beginning of his epistle. He could have started out talking about sin or temptation or wisdom or the tongue or a variety of other subjects. Why start with trials? I think the answer is because he is writing to “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (v. 1) who are living as strangers in foreign lands and, therefore, are undergoing trials and tribulations accordingly.
But, if that is true, who exactly are the “twelve tribes in the Dispersion”? The phrase is similar to one that Peter uses at the beginning of his first letter: “elect exiles of the dispersion” (1 Pet. 1:1). We know that Peter is clearly speaking of Christians who have been scattered throughout the surrounding nations, because he then goes on to describe them by way of their “obedience to Jesus Christ” and by the fact that they have been washed “with his blood” (1 Pet. 1:2). James would seem to be using Old Testament language—“the twelve tribes”—in order to connect the Old Testament people of God to the New Testament people of God. Christians are not a separate people but, as Paul says, we are “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16), those who are also children of Abraham by way of our faith in Jesus Christ. By referring to Christians as “the twelve tribes,” James is focusing attention upon the certainty of the trials and tribulations that would have been experienced by Christians in the dispersion. They would be similar to those experienced by their Jewish forebears as well.
We can also see this emphasis upon the certainty of trials in James’s use of the word “when” in verse 2. He doesn’t say, “Count it all joy, my brothers, if you meet trials of various kinds” but “when you meet trials.” The trials are certain. They will happen. We can take that to the bank. It is not a question of “if” but of “when.”
James also highlights the uncertainty of our trials by speaking of them as something we “meet” (v. 2). This word occurs two other times in the New Testament: once in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 and once in the account of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27. In Luke 10, we read about a man who is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho and, on the way, “meets” robbers who strip him and beat him and leave him for dead.
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Institutionalised Envy: How the Tenth Commandment Can Make or Break a Country
Every form of government is fallen, but not in the same way or to the same extent. Constitutional democracy and a free market are rooted in many biblical principles, when rightly applied. Socialism (and its end-goal, communism) is rooted in envy, greed, and covetousness. It has bred all kinds of theft and trampling over private property rights (as enshrined in the eighth commandment against stealing), and discourages a biblical work ethic. As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
You shall not covet” (Exod 20:17). How many Christians realise the political significance of those four words (only two words in Hebrew)? Consider with me for a moment the widespread implications of the tenth commandment. This awful sin and deadly vice of “coveting” includes all forms of greed, envy, and lust—any selfish desire for what is not ours. How different our world would be without coveting!
My Zambian friend and Christian author, Lennox Kalifungwa, recently summed up well the broader ramifications of the 10th commandment for our day:
Socialism is the politicized envy of wealth.Feminism is the politicized envy of patriarchy.Post-colonialism is the politicized envy of western civilization.Statism and globalism are the politicized envy of divinity.Envy produces great evil, and is inevitably never satisfied.
Biblical Summary
“The leech has two daughters: Give and Give!” (Prov 30:15). “The eyes of man are never satisfied” (Prov 27:20; cf. Eccl 1:8; 4:4). As our Lord Himself warned, “Beware of covetousness!” (Luke 12:15). Paul summed it up best: “covetousness . . . is idolatry” (Col 3:5; Eph 5:5), bringing us back full circle to the first commandment, showing how everything begins with right worship.
In recently catechising our youth in our home-school co-op, the tenth commandment has hit home to our hearts and our society with striking relevance:
Question 80: What is required in the tenth commandment?Answer: The tenth commandment requireth full contentment with our own condition, with a right and charitable frame of spirit toward our neighbor, and all that is his.
Question 81: What is forbidden in the tenth commandment?Answer: The tenth commandment forbiddeth all discontentment with our own estate, envying or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.
Heart Diagnosis
Other ancient law codes cover the morals prescribed in the first nine of God’s commandments. But none have anything like the tenth commandment, climbing into the depths of my being, confronting my desires.
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