All Saints Kiwi

I have a pdf of a book which I am going to review in the near future, but somehow I found myself reading Tall Skinny Kiwi today, specifically his iMonk-like Reformation Day post. It has several points, and I’m going to address them here:

1. The Reformers were committed to an ecumenical consensus of unity. They wanted to reform the whole church, not just one break-away segment that became the Protestant Movement. Sectarianism was not the intention.

Um, depend what you mean by “ecumenical unity”.

2. If there is a Babylon the Great today, it is not the Roman Catholic Church. It is probably something closer and dearer to us.

Well, if the Emgerents want to take on that mantle, it’s no skin off my nose – they’ll just wind up owing Ken and Ingrid an apology.

If what Andrew means by this is that there’s somebody in Memphis or perhaps at a megachurch someplace that’s inadvertently but actively supplanting Christ from His position of Lord in the church, fine. The RCC has way worse theological problems today than it had 500 years ago, including the phony ecumenism which include Jews and Muslims as true worshippers of the God of Abraham.

3. If USA and England had as many Czech immigrants as they did German, history would probably show that the Reformation started much earlier and its geographic center was a few hundred miles eastwards of where we currently believe it to be. YES - I am talking about Jan Hus.

Yawn.

Um, Wycliff? Francis of Assisi? You’d think a friend of emergent would be in for Francis. Yes, Hus is fine – he wasn’t the first guy in for reform and confronting the Pope with his big problems. The question, really, is who brought the matters to a head. Luther had a different political environment to work in, which is why he gets more press than Hus – and you also can’t go with #1 on this list and count Hus in as a guy who wanted “ecumenical” reform – again, because of the political environment he found himself in.

4. The Reformation was initiated NOT because of doctrinal purity, as commonly taught, but because of corruption in the use of power and wealth. Doctrinal reform was a bonus, but not the primary motivation.

Wow. My suggestion, Andrew, is that the Protestant reformation was seeking to remove political flaws in Christendom by clearly expressing theological truths – leveraging the truth of Scripture to reform the hearts and actions of men. Doctrine wasn’t a “bonus”: it was the foundation. That’s why Wycliff was the guy the Pope was trying to suppress in Hus’s day.

5. There is reform in the church today because there is corruption in the church today. God still cares about his church. So should we. The way we play with ecclesiastic power and the way we spend the Bride's finances should concern us all, not just our commitment to a common creed.

Agreed in principle. Which is, of course, where the deepest divisions begin ...

6. The emerging church might well be a protest (Don Carson) but it might also be a corrective measure to the excesses and imbalances of the reformation and the Enlightenment.

Which, of course, is the rosiest view of the movement. There’s nothing “corrective” about turning out the doctrine of penal substitution or throwing rocks at the book of Romans because it’s a didactic letter and not a piece of flowery narrative story-telling.

Let the charity police cry havoc and let loose the wiener-dogs of their disappointment …