Beeson Podcast, Episode 376 Kevin Vanhoozer January 23, 2018 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Mere-Protestantism-A-Reforming-Catholic-Confession Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. It's my pleasure today to be talking with Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer. Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer is research professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. He's also taught at Wheaton College and the past and at the University of Edinburgh. He's a prolific writer. One of our leading scholars as evangelicals in the field of theology and hermeneutics and biblical interpretation. I could go on and on, but Kevin, it's a joy to have you on the Beeson podcast today. Kevin Vanhoozer: It's good to be here. Thank you. Timothy George: Now, I want to begin by asking you to reflect on a document that you and I and some other friends were involved in putting together this past year. 2017. It's called The Reforming Catholic Confession. Now, some of our listeners will not have ever heard of this and others may have read it. Maybe you could say a little bit about how this came into being and what that phrase, that term Reforming Catholic Confession could possibly mean. Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, I suppose I'm the remote cause of the document as a book I wrote to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation called Biblical Authority after Babel. The book I wrote made an appeal for something I call mere Protestant Christianity. Trying to express that yes, there are differences that separates Protestants, but are the things that unite us are even deeper and more important. Anyway, Jerry Walls, a philosopher at Houston Baptist read this book, liked the direction it was going, but thought that it didn't go far enough because I didn't put my Protestant money where my Protestant mouth was. I didn't actually give the substance of what these things were that Protestants supposedly agreed on. So, he sent me an email out of the blue. I had never met him. He said, "Don't you think we ought to come up with a confession that would actually prove the point you're trying to make? He asked me would I be interested in joining him and several others from different protestant traditions and churches. I said I would be interested. Then, lo and behold, my second role, he asked me to write the first draft. I was impressed by that because Jerry is a confirmed Arminian. Actually writing a book why he is not a Calvinist, and knowing that I was reformed that he would ask me to take a pass at the first draft, I thought that was very significant and really in the spirit of the whole enterprise. Timothy George: Yeah. So, the drafting committee that you and Jerry headed up was 20, 25 people from many different denominations, confessional backgrounds, right? Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. We realized that the whole enterprise would fail if we used this simply as an excuse to push one party's platform. So, even though it was sometimes uncomfortable, we wanted to make sure that there were people from various sizes of various debates in the room, on the committee giving voice to majority as well as minority positions. Timothy George: Yeah. Timothy Tennent my friend who's the president of Asbury Theological Seminary and I were kind of honorary chair I guess of this project. We didn't do much of the heavy lifting, you guys did most of it. I was glad to be a part of it because it seemed to me very much in the spirit of both Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the church in John 17 and the deepest impulses of the Reformation itself. Would you agree with that? Kevin Vanhoozer: I would. We didn't want to do something to commemorate the Reformation that would go against the basic thrust. In fact, we were wondering what would the Reformers perhaps do today if they were here? Again, we're very grateful for you and Timothy Tennent's involvement because before you got on board, Jerry and I were just two guys without a truck. Timothy George: Well, you're underselling your own role, but in any event, it was a collaborative effort and our prayer is that God will use this confession. What do you hope it accomplishes? Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, yes. Let me say first what I think it's not. It's not going to attempt to start a new church as if that were the way forward today. Protestant has been there, done that. That's a gross understatement. We didn't intend it either as a litmus test with which to determine who is a true Protestant and who is not. So, turning to the positive things, what I really hope is that the confession would give a genuine testimony to the core truths of the gospel that we, with the historic Reformers, confess together. Because some people think the perception out there is that there are so many Protestant denominations that this is an indication the Reformation failed or worse, that the Reformation represented a kind of cancer in the body of Christ that resulted in the unchecked multiplication of cells. I've seen that analogy used. So, my hope is the confession witnesses not to waring cells in the body, but rather to the oneness to the body. Since there is only one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one God and Father of all as Paul says in Ephesians 4. So, I think that deep unity of core truths in the gospel, I think that's fully compatible with the diversity of denominations we see in contemporary Protestantism. So long as these denominations can make a common confession and demonstrate their oneness, for example, by sharing the Lord's Supper together. That was my primary hope. My secondary hope is that the confession might be a model of how to negotiate theological disagreement. Perhaps by helping people to see that not every doctrinal difference needs to lead to an ecclesial division. One way to do that was to make the hard judgment as to which doctrines are first order and which might be second and third order. So, I hope that we may be able to model how to do that. Then I suppose another hope I had would be that people would come to see and the year of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation that Protestants are actually catholic. That is, concerned with the broad scope of the reception of the gospel. Timothy George: I'm glad you mentioned that last point. You and I are part of the movement known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Now, not everyone who also embraced and worked on the Reforming Catholic Confession are a part of ECT, but some of us are. What would you say to somebody who says, "How could you possibly be involved in something like ECT and also be a framer of the Reforming Catholic Confession that's so as you put it merely Protestant?" Kevin Vanhoozer: That's a tough question. Some people think it may be we're moving in different directions, but I don't think it is. I didn't answer the original question why did we call it the Reforming Catholic Confession? I think we wanted to hang on to that adjective catholic even though it's controversial and conjures up Roman Catholicism in some people's minds, but we wanted to hang on to it because it means the wholeness and universality of the church. It isn't a matter of one denomination being right and all the others wrong. We wanted to emphasize that the Reformers were cared about catholicity. They didn't want to be a sect. They confessed with Paul in one church. So, I could be involved in ECT because I do think catholicity is important. There is only one church. My dispute with Roman Catholics I think is how we understand that catholicity. I don't understand it as centered in the institution that now exists in Rome. So, it's a lively discussion we have. There are many things we have in common. The gospel. I think we both care about the quality of being catholic, but there's still genuine disagreements as to what that means. Timothy George: For those that are not familiar with the ECT project, it would be important to say that there's no effort there to paper over these differences. We're very open about them, very bold in our disagreements as well as pointing to the unities that we share in Jesus Christ. Kevin Vanhoozer: I agree. For that reason, catholicity shouldn't be simply seen as a synonym for ecumenical. Timothy George: Yeah. Good point. Now, the Reformation 500th anniversary is over. It was completed in 2017. There was a good bit of discussion about how it should be remembered. Some people say it should be celebrated, but Robert Jensen our great friend we just lost this last year, a wonderful theologian. I think the last thing he ever published in the journal Pro Ecclesia, was called What's To Celebrate? His basic point is there's not much that we're fighting over and the way that we used to. What's to celebrate about the Reformation? His answer I think finally was there's Bach. The great music of Bach. That's one of the gifts of the Reformation to the world church. We can celebrate Bach. Kevin Vanhoozer: Amen. Timothy George: We won't all agree with that. I certainly do, but some people want to lament the Reformation. Some people want to apologize for the Reformation. In this confession, I think we were trying to come at it a little different way and that was to reaffirm the basic doctrines and teachings of the Reformation and offer them to all Christians everywhere. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. I think that's right. I wouldn't want to claim that there were no negative outcomes of the Reformation. Every significant event, the people involved, they can't control all the effects of that significant event, but if I were to highlight one thing I would want to celebrate, I think it would be the centrality of God's Word. The gospel. Because the Reformers recovered that in a big way at great personal cost. I would also along with that want to celebrate what Luther did in seeing Scripture so important, he translated it into German. That started off a whole chain of vernacular translations. That eventually led to the Wycliff translator ambition to have a Bible translated in the home vernacular tongue of every significant people group of the world. I don't think I can draw a straight line between this cause and effect, but I do want to celebrate the Reformation as being at least one factor in the fact that now Christianity informs the global south. Timothy George: Yes. Kevin Vanhoozer: How did it get there? I think the Reformation that's part of the story. Timothy George: It's interesting you mention the global south because Philip Jenkins, a great historian teaches down at Baylor University has made the point that the Protestant message, the doctrinal core of Luther and Calvin and Bucer and Zwingli, these Protestant Reformers, if you were to look in the world today and see where it's most vital, it would probably be south of the equator and the global south. It's taken off in places that we would have been not expecting it to have such a response. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yeah. Timothy George: What do you think about that? Kevin Vanhoozer: Couple things. Lamin Sanneh a missiologist at Yale makes the point that in defense of missions, because we tend to think of the Western mission to the rest of the world is a colonizing sometimes violent endeavor. Again, I don't want to paper over what the church has sometimes done in the name of Christ. I'm from California and when the Portuguese came, they did not always treat the Native Americans in the best way, but Lamin Sanneh point is the missionaries in giving indigenous people the Bible in their own language, also gave them leverage to criticize institutional church. In other words, they gave them the ingredients for Reformation. So, I think that's important. That also reminds me of something else I wanted to mention about our Reforming Catholic Confession. One of the things I hope for it is that its vernacular translations. We have it now in Chinese and Portuguese and Spanish and Korean and other languages. My hope is that that document would reach out to the global south and maybe help them get oriented to the Christian faith. Help them to become local instantiations of the catholic church. Timothy George: Yes. Let's move to talk a little bit about your book that's connected as you've already explained with a Reforming Catholic Confession in a sense as maybe part of the stimulus for it—Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity—It’s a new book from last year I believe. It's a book published by Brazos Press. I commend it to everyone. In fact I did commend it. I think I'm one of your recommenders of this book. So, it's a very important statement, restatement in a way of classic Protestant Christianity. Maybe you could say a little bit about the five solas? What are the five solas and how do you use them in this book? Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, as you know, lots of books were written to commemorate the 500th anniversary. A number of good books were on the solas. There's a series of five books on each of the solas that I commend as well. Unlike those books that we're trying to be descriptive of what actually happened though, I'm not a historian and I wasn't simply trying to tell the old story once again. So, I do think we have to know the story, but I was trying to do something a little different. Another way of honoring the past is to show that it continues to have significance and potential for the present. So, my book does treat the solas, not simply to say exactly what the Reformers meant by them, but to show that they still have potential for helping us navigate problems today. So, the word that I use in the subtitle, retrieve, is crucial. I'm trying to retrieve something. Not simply repeat it or replicate it, but reach back in the past and then use something creatively, these solas, in order to move through the present day situation faithfully. I believe I'm using the solas in the spirit the Reformers would have appreciated, but I have to admit I'm using and doing something differently with them. Again, I think that's another way of honoring the past by showing that these ideas, these five solas continue to have potential to meet contemporary problems. Timothy George: Now, we are all indebted to you for your work in biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, helping us to think through how we present and state the gospel in our present moment. I wonder if you could connect in particular two of the solas, sola gratia and sola fide, by grace alone, by faith alone, with the challenges of secularism and skepticism we hear so much about in our world today. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. It was largely those challenges that some critics laid at the doorstep of the Reformers that I wanted to rebut with my book. So, for example, secularism. Grace alone reminds us of the priority of God's action. The Reformers certainly emphasize that. They didn't de-grace the world. They didn't disgrace God. They emphasized the priority of God's action. In my book, I want to focus particularly on how the Bible is read. Because in the university, the process of biblical interpretation has to some extent become secularized. That was the symptom of secularization I was most trying to address. The idea best expressed by Benjamin Jowett of Oxford University in the 19th century that the Bible is to be read like any other book. That is as a product of this worldly causes, only of historical context. So, it may seem a bit of a stretch, but I'm reaching back to sola gratia, grace alone, to remind us that both the biblical text and the process of reading it rightly depends wholly on God's gracious initiatives. It is a divinely given book. If we don't get that, then we've missed the most important thing about Scripture. It's the Word of God. So, what I've tried to do in mining sola gratia is to suggest that we appreciate the Bible rightly and read it rightly only insofar as we acknowledge that it's a gift of grace and only insofar as we, the readers, participate in what I call the economy of God's gracious self-communication. Does that make sense? Timothy George: It does. I think it's connected to another sola that perhaps is even better known by most contemporary Protestants, evangelicals, sola scriptura which is often set in opposition to the tradition of the church. It's often blamed for a kind of radical individualism. As I say every tub sitting on its own bottom. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. Timothy George: Yet, you argue, I think rightly, that the Reformers were moving in a very opposite direction from that. Can you say a little bit about that? Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. So, the first thing to say is that Scripture alone, sola scriptura is not the same as solipsism. That is it's not Scripture in a vacuum as if it has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit or a church or church tradition. It's an exclusionary word in the first sentence. That is Scripture alone is the supreme authority, but it only excludes other claimants to the role supreme authority. I do not think it excludes ministerial authorities or secondary authorities. So, neither Luther or Calvin thought that they were calling for an interpretation that started from scratch and used nothing but Scriptures. Both Luther and Calvin were well read in church tradition. They thought that the creeds had a kind of authority because they got Scripture right. So, I think it's a caricature to suggest that sola scriptura means individuals reading the Bible on their own absolutely that is in isolation from the church and tradition. I think the Reformers recognized that both the church and the tradition are gifts of the Spirit and we would do well not to neglect those gifts. Timothy George: I somewhat whimsically suggested that we add another sola to the five that we usually think of with reference to the Reformation and that was sola crux, the cross alone because that is a phrase Luther uses. He says, "Our theology is crux sola, the cross alone." Now, I know the cross is central to all of these solas in a way. Maybe you could comment a little about that in terms of the theology of the cross. Kevin Vanhoozer: So, when Luther opposed the theology of the cross to the theology of glory, I think he was getting at—it was an attack in part on natural theology. The idea that we can find out about God solely on the basis of reason alone. Really the theology of the cross highlights the significance and the centrality of the gospel. We would never come to this idea that the creator of the universe became one of us and humbled himself even to the point, yes, death on a cross. We would never come to that idea on our own. It's so unlikely. As far as I know, no philosophical theologian has come close to that idea. We need to be told this. The gospel is this news that God has done something wholly unexpected by philosophers and lay people alike and this is what the cross is. It's the entirely surprising news that the creator of all things has humbled himself for our sake. Become one of us. So, the sola crux simply means, I think, the way I'm hearing it, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a short hand for the reminder that Christian thinking has to correspond to this primary story of how God has shown himself to be for us and with us in Jesus on the cross. Timothy George: Yes. It's another way of I think fleshing out a little bit the Solus Christus. Christ alone. Where we see Christ and encounter Christ is in his coming to us as a baby in a manger as a man on a cross. Take that away, hedge that around and you have lost the gospel very shortly. Well, one more question, Kevin. Are you hopeful, you as a Christian, you as a theologian, you as a analyst of this whole Protestant movement? Are you hopeful about the future of Protestantism? Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, we lasted 500 years. Timothy George: Let's meet again 500 years from now, huh? Kevin Vanhoozer: But on the other hand, there's some steam running out of denominationalism. So, I think the 500th anniversary gave us a very good opportunity to reassess Protestantism and to retrieve and hold on to whatever is pure, good, true in this movement. Just as the Reformation itself gave the first Protestants the opportunity to sift through tradition and to try to hold on to whatever was pure, good, true, and corresponding to Scripture. So, am I hopeful? I think it's important that we revisit the Protestant heritage on a regular basis. This is now part of the family album. I think we would be the poorer if we didn't look at the page, the Reformation, and look at the good things and the bad things that have come from it. We mentioned Protestantism around the globe. I think I'm very encouraged to see how a movement that began in Europe has now, we had a global reach. So, my hope is that the Protestants will be able to draw from the strength of their respective traditions. Not to lose the importance of a particular confessional tradition because it's a little bit like a house. You have to be nurtured at a particular house. So, I think that these confessions that the Reformation gave us continue to nurture communities, but at the same time, I'm also hopeful that as we seek to reform each of our denominations in the light of Scripture, that we'll perhaps be more neighborly to other Christians that live on Protestant Avenue. Maybe they will have more block parties too. Timothy George: I've been talking today to my friend and colleague, Dr. Kevin J. Vanhoozer. He is research professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity school with Dr. Jerry Walls. He was co-chair of the drafting committee of the Reforming Catholic Confession. He's also the author of a new book, Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving The Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity. Thank you, Kevin, for this wonderful conversation. Kevin Vanhoozer: Thank you for discussing with me. I appreciated it. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast, with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast. https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Mere-Protestantism-A-Reforming-Catholic-Confession beeson-podcast-episode-376-vanhoozer_01 Page 2 of 8 Need Help? mailto:support@rev.com Get this transcript with table formatting