Fred Zaspel:
Hi, this is Fred Zaspel, executive editor here at Books At a Glance. Today we’re talking with the well-known church historian Dr. Timothy George about his excellent book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was nothing if not an attempt to restore scripture to its rightful place in the church. The impact was massive and we still feel its effects today. In his Reading Scripture with the Reformers, Dr. George explores how the reformers viewed and understood scripture and today he talks to us about his book and about his massively important subject. Welcome Dr. George, thanks for being with us.
Timothy George:
Thank you so much Fred. Glad to be here.
Zaspel:
Alright, perhaps we could begin simply by introducing the book to our listeners. What’s it all about? How did it come about? And what’s the contribution you hope to make?
George:
It’s published by Intervarsity Press and several years ago Intervarsity Press decided to publish a new series building on the earlier series Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, the ancient Christian commentary on scripture. That was so well received, they thought, well we should also extend this idea into the Reformation. So we began a 28 volume series, Reading Scripture with the Reformers is the title of my book, but it’s a part of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture, and we’re going through the whole canon, that is, the Protestant canon. We’re not including the Apocrypha. We will include books that encover the whole Bible, selected excerpts from various reformers of the sixteenth century. Well, they said we need a book to kind of introduce this to our readers and they asked me to write this book, Reading Scriptures with the Reformers. So that’s the origin of the book. It’s intended to introduce the theme of how the Bible functioned in the life of the Reformation through the commentaries and writings of the great reformers.
Zaspel:
How many of those volumes are out now?
George:
I think we have seven. We just published the first volume on Psalms, edited by Professor Herman Selderhuis from the Netherlands, and every year we have a couple of new volumes coming out until we get to all 28.
Zaspel:
Great. Now those are commentaries, more or less. Your book is different though. What are you doing in your book?
George:
Yes, this is a narrative story. It’s a history of the role of the Bible in the Reformation and so what I wanted to do was to really look at how the Bible functions through the lenses of some of the great reformers who were commentators on Scripture. So you’ll find Erasmus here, you’ll find Luther, you’ll find Zwingli, Calvin, Bucer…Tyndale has a little place in here, though he unfortunately was martyred before he was able to write too many commentaries. So it’s an effort to kind of tell the story, I would say, of how the Bible actually functioned in the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation.
Zaspel:
What were the historical circumstances, unlike previous attempts at reform, that helped to bring the Bible to center stage in the reformation?
George:
It’s a good question because it presupposes that the Bible was not invented in the Reformation, of course, several thousand years before that we have the whole completed canon of Old and New Testament, and it had functioned as a center piece in the life of the church all through these centuries. Although at certain points it was obscured by various church traditions and practices and superstitions that really are not scripturally rooted. Part of the Reformation job was to bring the Bible out from that obscurity and let it shine in its own full splendor. But what were the circumstances that gave this a special impetus in the Reformation? There were two I would single out. One was the invention of printing. This happened in 1455, and the first book was printed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg. It was the Bible, in the Latin Vulgate edition. It was a remarkable, significant achievement in the history of human invention and science. The closest analogy I can think of to our own day is the invention of the computer and the internet. So it was a revolution in information technology. What it meant was this: before the printing press it took upwards of an entire year or more for one copy of the Bible to be delivered, hand written, word for word, line by line, often by monks in monastic scriptoria. Now all of a sudden, in a matter of hours you could have that whole text available in a very usable format. It was just a remarkable thing. That meant that when Luther comes along in the early sixteenth century, and he is able to take advantage of printing, that there are hundreds of thousands of copies of the Bible circulating in Europe for the first time in human history. The other thing that made this possible was the Renaissance. That is, the discovery of ancient texts of manuscripts, and a renaissance in the study of the ancient Biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. This was all a part of the revival of learning, they called it the new learning that was happening at the time of the Renaissance. The Reformation picked up on that, extended it and refined it when they came to the study of the Bible.
Zaspel:
Fascinating.
What is meant by the saying, I think you mentioned this in your book, Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched?
George:
Yeah, Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. That’s actually a phrase that comes from the early Reformation. It was, as far as we can tell, first said by a group of Franciscan friars in the city of Cologne, and they did not mean it as a compliment. They were anti-Protestant, anti-Luther and they yet sensed that Luther was able to do what he did only because Erasmus had sort of broken the ice, so the saying was that he laid the egg that Luther hatched.
What it raises is the question, what is the relationship of Erasmus to Luther and the reformers? In some ways you have to give him a lot of credit. He produced in 1516 in the city of Basel, from the publisher, Froben, the first ever printed critical edition of the Greek New Testament. That was an amazing achievement that made possible a lot of the advances in Biblical studies in the sixteenth century. We are still in debt to Erasmus for that. There are many other wonderful things. He was against a lot of the abuses in the church. He had been a monk, but he had left the monastery and so when Luther began to protest indulgences and things like that, Erasmus said, “Yes, sir! Go forward!” He supported Luther, but there came a time, of course, in their relationship when he drew back. He never became a Protestant. He never left the Catholic church, and so he and Luther had this great debate in 1524 or 1525 on the freedom of the will, predestination, and after that the two never spoke or wrote to one another again. Other reformers like Melanchthon, and like John Calvin and Zwingli, picked up on a lot of Erasmus’s ideas and some of his technology and insight and drove the Reformation forward with a strong Erasmian tenor, but there was a parting of the ways over some of the fundamental issues of grace.
Zaspel:
Interesting.
In what specific ways did the Bible become the centerpiece of the Reformation? And what I mean is: all sides agree that the Bible was inspired, that it’s from God, so what were the differences with regard to scripture? What’s the role given to the Bible by the reformers that made this an issue of debate? That’s a big question, but maybe you can summarize for us.
George:
Yes, I’ll give it a shot.
You’re right. Some of the issues about the Bible that have been hotly debated, let’s say in the last two hundred years, like the inerrancy of scripture for example, these were not really in contention in the Reformation. Catholics and Protestants alike believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, that it was accurate and faithful in what it reported, it was not filled with mistakes and lies and distortions, that was common agreement – the veracity and accuracy of the Bible. What they differed on was the relative role of the Bible in the life of the church. The Catholics had this idea of scripture and tradition. Which at least as the Council of Trent put it, and there’s much, much debate even by Catholic scholars, but the idea that scripture and tradition were kind of on an equal par, that they were to be held with equal reverence as the Vatican II says about it, or even in some construals, that tradition, church councils, the decrees, the statements of the popes were above scripture, and that scripture was to be judged by them. Well, the reformers rejected that out of hand, and they said no, that’s the meaning of sola scriptura which we might call the scriptura primeria – it’s primary. The scripture is first, it’s primary. As Luther said, it’s the touchstone by which tradition, church statements, conciliar decrees, everything else – all the writings of the theologians, including the Popes, has to be judged by the scripture. So the scripture is the lord and master over these, if you will. And we place the Bible above church tradition, above theological statements, which means in a practical sense, that all of our ideas, all of our theologies, all of our statements of faith, have to be judged by the scripture, and are in that sense, revisable in the light of scripture. We do not believe in the infallibility of the church or much less of popes or teachers or theologians. That was the big issue I think, Scripture and traditions. It was a question of theological, spiritual authority.
Zaspel:
I was just looking through your book again this morning, and I was struck again by the opening line of the book where you quote another historian saying that if there’s a single thread running through the whole story of the Reformation it’s “the explosive, and renovating and often disintegrating effect of the Bible.” That’s a fascinating statement.
George:
That was G.R. Eldon, a historian of the English Reformation, not a particularly religious historian, but he was sharp and keen enough to see that this was really the nut of the matter. When he uses that word “disintegrating,” you can see why people were fearful for the Bible to be placed into the hands of the common people, because if they would read that and begin to apply it to their lives it would have all kinds of implications of how they understood their role in society as well as in the Church. So in some ways it was revolutionary and had great effect all across Europe.
Therefore those who were in charge of the status-quo were very fearful of having the Bible. You see this with Henry VIII for example. Henry, eventually in 1539, agreed for there to be a public English officially sanctioned translation of the Bible. It’s called The Great Bible. Thomas Cranmer was involved with that. But even then he wanted to keep the clamps on the Bible. You don’t just give this to everybody. Put it in the churches. Keep it in very defined circumstances so it doesn’t get too loose among the people. And that was because he was sharp enough to see that the Bible turned loose could wreak great havoc with some of his prerogatives.
Zaspel:
It’s fascinating to consider the Bible a dangerous book!
Was the translation of the Scripture into the common language a concern that was shared by all the Reformers alike, and can you describe the effect and impact they made in that regard?
George:
Going back to Erasmus, he thought the Bible ought to be translated into the common languages of Europe so that the farm boy at his plow or the milk-maid at her pail could hold the Bible, read it with their own eyes and have access to the Word of God. Erasmus himself did not do much translating of the Bible in the vernacular. He was from Holland and you’d think at least he would’ve given us a Dutch translation, but he did not. He was much more interested in Latin. That was the lingua franca and he was a scholar so even though he was supporting the idea he didn’t actually do very much of it.
It actually started with really Luther, who in 1522, holed up in the Wartburg castle and translated in a matter of weeks, the entire New Testament from the Greek text. He used Erasmus’s critical edition when he was doing that. So it was Luther in German. It was Calvin and his associates, a man named Robert Olivétan, who gave us the French Bible.
It was William Tyndale who was a pioneer of the Bible in English. About a year or two after Luther had translated the Bible into German, Tyndale gave us the first ever English translation of the New Testament, published in 1526. It was smuggled back into England where it began to circulate widely beyond the ability of the authorities to quench it. So it was a great movement of giving the Bible, the Word of God, into the common language of the Bible. You didn’t have to know Latin, you didn’t have to be a learned cleric or scholar to have the Bible available to you in your native language. And of course it had another effect. It encouraged the spread of literacy. People wanted to read so they could read the Bible. These two things went hand in glove.
Zaspel:
That plays back to the quote from Elton and the explosive effects of reading the Bible and turning it loose.
George:
Yes. There was man in Edinburgh who had the Bible in English and he said “it was so precious to me I leave my wife alone at night so I can sneak away and read the Bible.” And that “sneak away” is important because it was a day when it was dangerous to read the Bible. Very often it was regarded as illegal or a kind of clandestine activity. You didn’t want people to know you were reading the Bible. So in these early years it took a great deal of courage for people to come together to read the Scriptures, so they had to meet in out of the way places. Sometimes it was in open fields, away from the cities, where the authorities couldn’t intervene, or in the hull of a ship or sometimes in the cemeteries they would gather together. John Foxe talks of this, people huddled together reading the Scriptures, the light of God’s Word shining in the midst of darkness.
Zaspel:
Fascinating! Well it follows doesn’t it, if you believe in sola Scriptura that it is the norming norm and the supreme authority, what you want to do is turn it loose.
George:
Absolutely! And you know this comes back to the Bible itself. Paul says the Word of God is not chained, it’s not bound. The last word in the book of Acts is “unhindered.” This is an impulse that comes straight from the Scriptures themselves.
Now it was not totally lost in the intervening centuries. You have groups, for example, the Waldensians, who come from the Alps who spread across Europe carrying their translations of the Scriptures. There is Wycliffe and the Lollards in England doing the same thing. The difference was that these early translations were all made from the Latin text. It was the only thing they had. What was new in the Reformation was that you now have Greek and Hebrew originals available in a critical edition that you can use as a basis of translation. That radically changed what was actually being done.
Zaspel:
This leads into my next question. How did their view of Scripture shape their view and the role of preaching?
George:
There is a statement that comes from the second Helvetic confession of 1566, probably written by Heinrich Bullinger who was the successor of Zwingli, the reformer of Zurich. It says, “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” That’s a powerful statement! So the preaching of the Word was really what this was all about. If I can use this in a qualified sense so your readers don’t misunderstand me, the Reformers believed that preaching had a “sacramental” efficacy. In other words, when the Word of God is preached something really happens. The Holy Spirit is at work changing the hearts and lives of people, in some ways, like the medieval Catholics thought happened in the Eucharist. When the priest said certain words, some miraculous change happened. This doctrine of transubstantiation was something all the reformers rejected. But they did believe that the Holy Spirit came and was alive when the Word of God was preached in power. So it had, what I would call, a kind of sacramental effect. So the Word of God and the preaching of the Word of God became the centerpiece of Christian worship. Now again, preaching was not invented in the Reformation. There were great preachers all through the middle ages, but it does change in the Reformation. In the late middle ages a lot of preaching, when it was done at all, was done out of doors. There were big preaching festivals where these roaming preachers would come and hold services. In the Reformation preaching is brought into the church, and the pulpit becomes the centerpiece, liturgically, of the sanctuary where the people of God are gathered around the preaching and teaching of the Word. That’s a new thing, and it really changed the way people understood what the worship of God was all about. It was not a spectacle that you could see and be drawn away by all kinds of distracting ways, like music or icons or paintings. It was hearing the Word of God proclaimed, preached, taught with power. So Luther would say, quoting Paul in Romans 10, that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God: fides ex auditu. Luther was saying the central organs of the Christian man are his ears. So he could hear what God’s Word says as it is proclaimed.
Zaspel:
Enormously important. Well one more question. How are the 16th century reformers important for us today? Which of the reformers are most important to read today and why?
George:
Well I’d say read them all, but I will answer your question. I think you have to begin with Luther. Now I’m a Calvinist so in some ways I would agree more with Calvin, say on his Eucharistic theology than I would with Luther. But Luther was the real genius in the Reformation. There’s a passion in his writings. There’s a sense of engagement with the deep things of God that you don’t find with the other reformers.
So I would say start with Luther, but don’t stay with him too long before you migrate over to Geneva to read Calvin. Calvin’s commentaries are wonderful. We think of him as the author of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and we have all our students here at Beeson Divinity School read that great book, but you have to read it really in tandem with his commentaries. So if you’re not familiar with the reformers, Luther and Calvin are good places to start, but they’re not the only reformers. All the reformers were engaged in the preaching and teaching and writing and commenting on Scripture. And that’s one of the things we’re trying to do in the Reformation Commentary on Scripture is to bring in some of these neglected voices. There are writings of the Reformers that are just now being translated for the first time into English. So to sit alongside and read alongside what the reformers were saying and finding in the Bible is a wonderful enlightening and very deeply edifying practice.
We need to get beyond this idea that the way to study the Bible is to take the Bible in one hand the most recent commentary in the other. Sometimes the most recent commentaries are not the best commentaries. God was saying some wonderful things to His people in the 16th century that we need to listen to and hear again today.
Zaspel:
Amen. Great. Well thanks for being with us. We’ve been talking to Dr. Timothy George about his 2011 book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers. It’s an excellent book. I loved reading it myself. I highly recommend it and hope you’ll get it and read it. Thank you Dr. George for being with us.
George:
Thank you so much, Fred. God bless you.
