Piety and Spirituality in the Reformed Tradition
Having discussed what piety and spirituality are according to Scripture, the best window in to the Reformed view is that same Word. Given the place that the Bible has occupied in those Protestant churches from the sixteenth century onward, to speak of the “Reformed view” of piety and spirituality is to speak of what has been an attempt at faithfully applying that biblical conception. We might also see a parallel here with the recent scholarship that shows continuity between the Reformation and elements of medieval Christian thought, even while recognizing significant discontinuity. If that is true of things such as the scholastic method, we should not be surprised that it would also be true of models of piety and spirituality. Elements of medieval piety were not utterly discarded. However, we would expect that Reformed models would be more intentionally grounded in the heart of the gospel that was being recovered.
In the late Middle Ages, piety was monastic, which is to say it was atomistic. One spiritual giant among monks was Bernard of Clairveaux. He became a late Medieval source for the Reformed on many issues. Calvin quoted him with great approval. In his Sermons on the Song of Solomon, we can see precursors to affectionate theology of many Puritans. However, he was not the exemplar when it came to the life of the body. Meditation was a chief discipline, but this was done in solitude. Thomas à Kempis had this same basic mode of thought in his Imitation of Christ.
Where monks got together, their piety was together in a more or less coincidental fashion; and this does not begin to address the problem for lay piety. If one defines spirituality in this “higher order” way, then it draws one away from the church.
This ought to prompt the insight that individual spirituality is not owing entirely to late modern alienation. There were already forced divisions in the spiritual life well before modernity. What the Reformation spirituality contributed here was to “re-church” this Godward emphasis. The trouble with monasticism was not the intensity of its pursuit of holiness, but in its segregation of the actors and their parts in what was designed to be one script and one stage of God’s glory.
One concept that translated very nicely in Reformed piety was Augustine’s famous distinction between those things we love and those we use. This pair shows up in several of his writings. It is this tension between the use of things in this world and the inordinate love of them that occupies Chapter 10 of Book III in Calvin’s Institutes. God “tells us that to his people the present life is a kind of pilgrimage by which they hasten to the heavenly kingdom.”1 The reason for the “haste” is precisely the charms that “the gifts of providence,” if plucked from “the end for which their author made and destined them,”2 begin to anchor our hearts into this world. The key to overcoming this he had already discussed in the disciplines of self-denial and meditating upon the future life.
The Puritans only expanded upon these same themes. Most famously there was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; but it was taught in devotional literature that excelled that of any other tradition in church history. “A man who loves the world grows, little by little, to be a stranger to God and Christ,” wrote Greenhill. “We cannot simultaneously have our eyes on both heaven and earth.”3 In reflection on such statements, the Puritans may be accused by some of being overly pietistic, perhaps even escapists at points; yet as J. I. Packer said,
“There was for them no disjunction between sacred and secular; all creation, so far as they were concerned, was sacred, and all activities, of whatever kind, must be sanctified, that is, done to the glory of God … the Puritans prayed and laboured for a holy England and New England, sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns national judgment threatens.”4
The believer’s union with Christ was a concept basic to virtually all Reformed reflection on spirituality. Luther especially emphasized suffering here. This is an element of his theology of the cross, so that the Christian begins to see all things through the lens of the sufferings of Christ. And he put it most provocatively, as Luther so often did, “It is through living, indeed through dying and being damned that one becomes a theologian, not through understanding, reading, or speculation.”5 Now of course Luther read and sought understanding; and I do not think he sought being hunted down by the agents of the pope.
So it is a paradoxical point that we learn best when God removes the comfortable veils that lie beyond the way of the cross. Many of the Reformers would view suffering for their faith as a marker toward assurance. For centuries it was assumed that if one suffered at the hands of the Church, it was because such a person was a heretic. Now those who had come to the Reformed faith were threatened with excommunication or even death. Calvin refers to the bearing of suffering for the sake of the gospel. He takes it for granted that it is common to the Christian experience. One ought to prepare for a toilsome life, filled with evils.
Regardless of what means God used, since He most frequently uses the means of grace in the church, and “especially the Word,”6 it is no surprise that their writings were occupied with the business of heaven. One such practical area regards our assurance of salvation. Bunyan’s Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ, launches off from John 6:37, knocking down every objection the devil or our own noisy conscience throws at us. What if I do not come to Christ for his glory? we ask. Bunyan replies,
“Where does Christ Jesus require such a qualification of those that are coming to him for life? Come for life, and trouble not your head with such objections against yourself, and let God and Christ alone to glorify themselves in the salvation of such a worm as yourself.” Further, “He has no need of your designs, though you have need of his.”7
Nor was it only the Puritans who so applied their minds to the care of souls. Among the Dutch, Jean Taffin wrote The Marks of God’s Children (1586) during his third flight into exile. Here he gives a systematic treatment to the subject, dividing between internal marks and external marks. Of external marks, he devoted his main attention to membership in the church, so long as it is a true church (itself with three marks). Of internal marks, the fruit of the Spirit and faith are preeminent. He then makes a distinction between 1. the assurance of faith and 2. the assurance of sense. The former is based on divine promises. It never changes because God’s word never changes. The latter is our ability to sense that God is with us.8
Assurance then translates into the rest of piety. Why is this? If we do not know that we are children of God, then we will have no peace. We will have to choose between either despair or pride. We will either be sidelined from His service, or else praying the prayer of the Pharisee; and so in either case without the joy of living unto God.
There was among the Puritans especially what has been called an “affectionate theology.” It was determined to focus on personal affection toward God. One criticism of this is that they were given to mysticism: Sibbes, Goodwin, and Rutherford being exemplary, as Baxter referred to Sibbes and others as “affectionate, practical English writers.” This emphasis carried forward into New England in the preaching and writing of Jonathan Edwards. He would defend the Great Awakening on these grounds, that
“True religion, in great part, consists in the affections … In nothing is vigor in the actings of our inclinations so requisite, as in religion; and in nothing is lukewarmness so odious”9
Many criticisms have been made of Reformed conceptions of spirituality and piety. I will mention only one, and that is the predictable focus on the “cerebral” dimension of Calvinists especially, but it can even apply to Lutherans because of the fact that the sola fide emphasis still seems to make the passageway into eternal life “getting a doctrine right.” Many who look back to Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy, or even Anglicanism have something of this logic in mind: 1. All are drawn to Christ and into the church by grace; and 2. There just is an objective reality of different personality types. Therefore, the Reformed tendency to bring all into the faith through the intellect seems to exclude everyone who is not the intellectual type.
How should we reply to this? First, all souls still receive truth via the intellect, and this does not contradict the truth that the cause of it is by grace. The Spirit and Word cause us to behold Christ rightly (2 Cor. 4:6). Second, Evangelicals have their own alternatives (contra Rome) to intellect, and they have largely been a disaster. Experientialism is no infallible antidote to legalism. Third, where Evangelicalism has administered means of grace that have appealed to aspects beyond merely the intellect, it requires intellect to properly define and situate those means in the church. Each group believes they are “right” about the sacraments or the worship “style,” or any other number of allegedly less contentious, less exclusionary measures.
____________
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.10.1
2. Calvin, Institutes, III.10.2.
3. William Greenhill, Stop Loving the World (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 21.
4. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 23-24, 25.
5. Martin Luther, Operationes in Psalmos, quoted in Kelly M. Kapic, A Little Book for New Theologians (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 41.
6. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q.88.
7. John Bunyan, A Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2011), 36.
8. Jean Taffin, The Marks of God's Children (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 45.
9. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Volume One (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009), 238.
