Calvin Synod Herald, 2017 (118. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2017-09-01 / 9-10. szám
6 CALVIN SYNOD HERALD The 500th Anniversary of the Reformation Scripture: Mark 12:28-12:31 The last Sunday of October is traditionally marked as Reformation Sunday, being the Sunday nearest to when Martin Luther nailed up his ninety-five propositions on the Castle Church in Wittemberg Germany, and began the popular movement of the Reformation. This year marks the 500th anniversary of this great spiritual awakening of the 16th century. It was something that Reformed Churches marked regularly, but has fallen out of the agenda in recent years. This year is five hundred seventh years since the birth of John Calvin, the father of Refonned theology, in 1509, so it seems an ideal year to revive this sadly neglected area. Calvin and Calvinism have something of a bad name today. We need to be clear that Calvin was doing the right thing in the situation and circumstances in which he was living. We don’t live in those situations and circumstances today, and we shouldn’t adversely judge the actions of a different historical age solely because we can’t make sense of it in our own age. The biggest alleged horror of Calvin is predestination. Nowadays every sane person knows that the suggestion that some people are automatically saved and some automatically damned is total nonsense, and no-one seriously suggests that is what Christian faith is all about. In preaching predestination, Calvin was doing nothing different from everyone else five hundred years because, as we heard from Ephesians, predestination is in the Bible. We should not condemn those who did was natural in their day, but might do things very differently, had they lived in our age. Moving on, I like to mention - in simple terms - a few important aspects of what Refonned theology has to offer and why it’s relevant to our faith today. 1. The sovereignty of God. An important characteristic of Reformed theology is that God is in charge. God reigns over all, in charge of everything. The Reformed philosophy is that each and every one of us at all times, lives before our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. We’re all living under God. We place our lives before God, whose glory and purpose are more important than anything else. Religion is not something that exists to satisfy our needs, or to give meaning to our lives, but how we acknowledge, praise, and serve our God. God is the beginning and the end of all things. God, is utterly indescribable, sovereign of all, but also immediate and everywhere. We can only come before God with empty hands and open hearts. This is a tall order. There are many pressures on us from so many different directions. Do we always give God the place that he deserves in our pecking order? Is God the most important person in our lives, or someone or something to which we turn when we remember, or when other avenues are exhausted? And is our church a community in which we gather under God, always seeking what God wants? Or do we stray into being a club? God is sovereign over all, and includes each and every one of us. 2. The authority of the Bible. All Reformed churches believe in the importance, the centrality, of the Bible. The Hungarian Reformed Church expresses it this way: The highest authority for what we believe and do is God’s Word in the Bible, alive for his people today through the help of the Holy Spirit. This is quite important. In no way are we, or should we be, fundamentalists. We do not believe or suggest that every word printed in the Bible is literally true. What we are saying is that with the help of the Holy Spirit to guide us, we can interpret the Bible to understand how God speaks his Word to us through scripture. Within the Bible there are some passages that contradict each other, and some passages that are bizarre. We do not suggest that the authority for God’s Word relies upon any individual verse, but the whole of scripture and its overall message, along with the Holy Spirit to guide us. One author describes the authority of the Bible with this analogy: “a trusted friend, on whose impressions and interpretations of an all important event or experience we place reliance”. How do we use, rely upon, and seek to interpret the Bible in our own lives? How much do we read the Bible outside of worship? How do use the Bible in our church, and where do we look for God’s Word to us? 3. God’s grace. Grace is something of an old-fashioned word. It was very popular until the eighteenth century, but isn’t something we use much in the twenty-first. It means that God loves us all more than we can measure, understand, or appreciate. God’s love is much bigger than we can imagine, much wider, taller, and deeper, than we can imagine. And it applies to each and every one of us. I’m not sure whether the biggest challenge is to accept how God loves the people we can’t stand, or whether it’s actually harder to accept that God loves us, ourselves, so much. The word grace may be antiquated, but the concept certainly isn’t, and it can challenge our faith and our humanity at the deepest level. 4. Our Holy Communion. This might seem an unusual choice of a final aspect - perhaps at first glance it seems more peripheral and less important than the others. But Reformed theology challenges us to give greater prominence and much more significance to this than many of us do. T
