Another Reformation
One Last Thought About The Widening of God's Mercy
Happy Reformation Day Everyone! We’ve just celebrated the last of 2024’s Birthdays with fondue since that is a delicious way to commemorate the occasion. That is why I am so very late again. And scattered because everyone is digging through bins looking for ways to dress up for the trunk and treat. And guess what! I didn’t buy any candy. Well, shoot.
Anyway, I kind of wish Martin Luther would rise up from the dead and yell at me to stop Doom Scrolling. Wouldn’t it be fun for the heroes of the faith to appear just as the votes are being counted on election night? It’s hard to imagine would the great fathers of the Reformation would think of the world as it is now. What would Calvin or Cranmer think of the state of Christianity in Europe or America? Would there be anything to encourage them? Would they be appalled?
The strange thing about the Reformation, looking at it from the far distance of a post-Christian world, is to try to remember what it was like to live in a culture where people all agreed that God is God. Imagine bustling along to market on a Thursday morning and not meeting a single person who didn’t know that Jesus died on the cross or needed persuading to go to Church. All the existential tumult of Martin Luther’s hammering his theses to the door unfurled in the context of a culturally shared view of reality. And here we are, a mere five hundred years later, and the only way to know anything is to toggle back and forth between the New York Times and Twitter/X becoming distracted by clips of TikTok influencers posting receipts of how much money they could have earned for going to a political rally.
I finally finished my review of The Widening of God’s Mercy, a book that some might think represents the culmination of a new and needed reformation of theology and scripture. Finally, the Church is poised to come into a golden age of affirmation and love! All you have to do is squint vaguely at the Bible, taking each text and sifting it through the grid of what “we,” who barely remember God, think is most important.
At the end of the book, Richard Hays says this:
I offered that chapter on homosexuality as a thought experiment, a proposal for how to think about a certain type of methodological problem in theological ethics: the problem of how to adjudicate a contested moral issue in a case where explicit scriptural teaching was scanty but univocal. The proposal was intended to stimulate conversation, not to end it. Unfortunately, many readers and many churches took my proposal as a definitive pronouncement—a buttress for walls of separation, for rigidly restrictive policies and condemnations. I bear some responsibility for that, and I am grieved by it.
I am grieved too, though for the opposite reason. I am grieved that Christians did begin to think of the task of faith as “a head trip” as Hays calls it. Get all of your theological ducks in a row, ascent to the correct propositions, and some kind of ethical system—a Biblical Sexual Ethic don’t you know—will emerge out of the mist. How ridiculous for Hays to think that “many readers” would apparently miss his desire that they not look for a “definitive pronouncement.” In a world battered by apostasy, where all Biblical knowledge about a truly happy existence had been thrown away, where God was already forgotten, Richard Hays wanted desperate and disoriented Christians not to tether themselves to the only sure anchor in such a storm—the Scriptures.
I mean, imagine reading the whole Bible and thinking what it says about human sexual behavior is “scant.” Are we even reading the same book?
A Reformation is something you do when you realize you have gone the wrong way and need to stop, backtrack, and find the better and truer path. It’s honestly the most Christian thing to do. In a world where everyone thinks they need to be affirmed, the person who submits to be corrected and ultimately renewed will necessarily be an alien and a stranger. And yet, in the tempest of spiritual ruin, you will also be the only person truly at home, for all you have to do is linger in the one place that doesn’t change—the Scriptures. Your mind, body, soul, and heart can all abide in the strange and yet familiar stories of Salvation. You can read it over and over again, piecing the images together so that your life is bound together with God’s. Sure, you’ll have to leave a lot of stuff behind—your pride, your arrogance, your selfishness, your devouring of other people, your sexual immorality, your sin. But none of that was worth much anyway. Better to cling onto the hope of the world, the Word made Flesh.
Have a lovely evening!
I read this article three times because my simple mind is not accustomed to such clear thoughts describing what we are led to believe is very complex. My heart was warmed by Anne’s description of resting in God, trusting His Word, knowing His Son. Along with the coziness of feeling truly at home, I would add the excitement of new realizations every day in understanding His Word, seeing better how perfectly the pieces fit together. Also in knowing this will continue tomorrow and forever while I am safe and sound.
I could be wrong, often am, but I think what Hayes views as a "scanty" number of texts about the contested topic in question is a measure of said topic's significance to the original audiences. It's a matter of proportion. People who read or were taught the Bible didn't need that information dinned into their heads, in other words. They needed comfort, fortitude, and the sure knowledge and experience of Jesus' goodness so much more. Only in a post sexual revolution world would the quantity of texts be weighed in the balance and found wanting, and that only because so many people's perception of what constitutes The Most Important Thing has changed so radically.