Many things in life can shape and mould us into the people we are today. We live and breathe the culture of the day, are entertained by it and enjoy what it has to offer. We strive to keep up with it, to be a part of, to conform to it or resist it’s change. But amid it’s many influences, are we not also impacted by our history, our heritage and experiences? Don’t we so often look back to recall our past to the things we have achieved and reflect on where we have come from?
In Timothy George’s new book Reading Scripture with the Reformers, we are encouraged to look back to the life and times of those living in the historical period known as the Reformation and how they hugely impacted their generation. A period that under God, was to transform the lands of Europe from spiritual death to new life.
In eight informative, intriguing and inspiring chapters we are given a broad and engaging account of the lives of the reformers who, many for the first time, embraced the Word of God and sought to live it out. In a generation fraught with much opposition and adversary we are taken on a journey through the renowned characters of Calvin, Luther and Zwingli and how under God, their work not only rocked the academic world of the day, but transformed the lives of many ‘simple folk’ and ‘idiots’ living in the 15th century.
In this review I hope to use it not so much as a critic of the book, but to introduce some of the main themes that it covers.
The Word of God
One significant achievement recounted in the book in the reformer’s time, was that through the pioneering technology of the printing press, the Bible would for the first time become readily available to the masses. The book comically describes a meeting between puritan believers as they received their own copy of the Bible, as witnessed by a Catholic missionary called Weston. He recounts:
‘Each of them had his own Bible, and seduously turned the pages and looked up the texts cited by the preachers, discussing passages among themselves to see whether they had quoted them to the point, and accurately, and in harmony with their tenets. Also they would start arguing among themselves about the meaning of passages from the Scriptures-men, women, boys, girls, rustics, laborers and idiots – and more often than not, it ended in violence and fisticuffs…. Here, over a thousand of them sometimes assembled, their horses and pack animals burdened with a multitude of Bibles.’ (pg. 103)
Obviously not the most conventional way to respond to a sermon, as it turned into a scene more like that from the film Fight Club! Nevertheless, It showed a real passion and desire to understand God’s Word as they could for the first time begin to experience it for themselves.