Reformation Reloaded

Christ’s church is a living thing. It is an organism. An organism is a unified system where the parts and the whole of the system are in a mutually beneficial relationship. This means that the parts and the whole are both and each mutually dependent and mutually beneficial. God doesn’t change, yet God is alive—and all living things grow and mature. This is not a contradiction, but is an antinomy: two opposite ideas that are both logically consistent, justified, and true. An example of an antinomy is the statement “This sentence is false.” If the statement is false, it is true; and if the statement is true, it is false. This means that there is a limit to the intellectual or academic verifiability of logic and analysis. It is at this limit that we must rely on faith.

The Protestant Reformation produced a theological and social improvement among the people of Christendom, a societal improvement. We can see other instances of such progressive sanctification in the Bible. The rediscovery of Deuteronomy by Hilkiah and Shaphan that led to the reinstitution of the Law by King Josiah provided a similar time of progressive sanctification for the ancient people of Israel. Another was the discovery of the ministry of Melchizedek, as described in the book of Hebrews, which tied the New Testament to the Old Testament as an event of progressive sanctification for the historic people of God.

Philip Schaff (1819-1893), a German Evangelical immigrant who was called in 1843 as a Christian historian to the only German seminary in the United States at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, made the same argument about the Reformation. Schaff argued that the Protestant Reformation provided another moment or movement of progressive sanctification for Christ’s church. The Roman Catholic Church didn’t and still doesn’t like that idea. Nonetheless, they engaged in a Counter Reformation (from 1545 to 1563) and have since adopted many of the ideas and practices of the Protestant Reformation. The progress or maturity of the church is never a simple straight line of improvement, but rather new or different ideas are always met with resistance because people tend to get set in their old habits. …