Tradition in the Modern World: The Reformed Habit of Mind

Brian Gerrish

The aim of education should be the same for all. . . (i.e. everywhere and always, in every mode of society, every condition of life, etc.). . . . Education should aim at the formation of good habits. —MORTIMER J. ADLER

The theme of this conference requires me to change hats. I am more often asked these days, not: “What can Reformed theology do for the seminaries?” but: “Does any theology, Reformed or not, belong in a university?” Though I did teach for seven years in one of our Presbyterian seminaries, for the last quarter of a century I have worked in a secular, pluralistic, research-oriented university. Perhaps it hasn’t made much difference to what I do, but it has made a difference to the way I am expected to justify what I do. The university and the seminary both tend to operate out of values and expectations that are seldom submitted to questioning, and they are not the same values and expectations in each institution. No doubt, it is risky to generalize; seminaries and universities come in several varieties. But my impression, at least, is that the two types of educational institutions have drifted further apart in recent years, and there is a double stereotype at work.

On the one side, the seminaries are suspicious of what they call the “academic theology” of the university. They perceive it as addressed to the wrong audience and the wrong situation; namely, to supposedly enlightened colleagues in other departments of the university for whom theology has become a quaint anachronism. A vital theology will not trouble itself with apologetics for the cultured despisers but will rather address the oppression, injustice, racism, discrimination, and exploitation that threaten to tear the human community apart and make our planet uninhabitable. A university theology, by contrast, is remote, philosophical, scholastic, inaccessible, and—from the church’s viewpoint—insular, irrelevant, and uninteresting. It is a theology that has lost touch with the things that really matter.

On the other side, the universities, when they notice theology at all, gladly turn it over to the seminaries because it is not a serious intellectual discipline: it lacks rigorous norms of argument and inquiry, is helplessly captive to passing fads and fashions, and trades critical reflection for mere ideology—to underwrite whatever cause is currently or locally in vogue. To address the latest burning issue becomes the whole theological task and the only reason for the seminary’s existence, until the next crisis takes over.

Divinity school theologians, like myself, are caught uncomfortably in the middle: under fire from either side, depending on which of their friends they are eating their lunch with. For, while their seminary colleagues chide them for doing academic theology, their colleagues from other parts of the university seldom differentiate between academic and church theology. Van Harvey, of Stanford University, for example, is writing simply about Protestant theology when he says: “It could be argued that, particularly in the past two decades, Protestant theology has been characterized by narcissism and faddism that have virtually destroyed it as a serious intellectual discipline and deprived it of any respect it might thus claim.”¹ He goes on to quote the verdict of Gordon Kaufman, of Harvard Divinity School, on the recent theological scene: “Theology apparently had no integrity of standards or demands of its own; its symbols could be used as a kind of decoration for and legitimation of almost any partisan position found in the culture.”² For Van Harvey, this means that theology, even if physically located on a university campus, is “marginalized.”

By now, I have probably given offense to just about everyone who has an interest in theology, whether in the seminary or in the university. I do not doubt that the opposition between academic and ecclesiastical theology, though the current stereotype overdoes it, will be one of the issues we have to face in the twenty-first century, along with the marginalization of theology in American intellectual life. But it is not my intention to explore the ramifications of these issues here, although I shall touch on them briefly later on. I want to begin, rather, from the interesting fact that, for all their undoubted differences, the university and the seminary suffer from a common educational malaise. Perhaps they can have recourse to a common, if only partial, remedy. The malaise is disintegration: the loss of a sense of being engaged in a single, coherent enterprise. The remedy is education viewed as imparting not information or skills, but good habits. From this beginning in the first part of my presentation I shall go on, in the second, to ask: What good habits ought theological education in the Reformed tradition to impart? For, as Thomas Aquinas says, a good habit is “one which disposes to an act suitable to the agent’s nature.”³ We want to arrive eventually, then, at the habit or habits that will dispose to acts suitable to the nature of a Reformed theologian, whether he or she is a university professor, a seminary professor, a pastor, or a layperson.

I.     Good Habits and the Goal of Education 

Permit me to return briefly, first of all, to ancient Greece. The notion that education is about good habits has its roots in Aristotle’s Ethics. Moral virtue or goodness of character, he believed, resembles the health and fitness of the body; it is a condition built up by rigorous training. Those who care for the well-being of the young, like the coach and the team doctor, know what regimen of exercises to prescribe. To begin with, the pupils are directed by the wisdom of their mentor, until they grow up to recognize (ideally) that all the discipline they endured rested on a sound moral principle. So, for instance, generosity is demanded of them, and by repeated acts of compulsory generosity they acquire a disposition to be generous and an ability to see for themselves that generosity is right. They actually come to take pleasure in being generous instead of being either stingy or extravagant (the opposite vices between which generosity is the mean). Generosity has become their second nature; they have been made virtuous by growing accustomed to performing right acts. A moral virtue, in short, is a habit: a disposition, induced by custom, to act in a certain way, much as the hands of a budding musician are conditioned by constant exercises to play the piano.⁴

Now, along with the moral virtues Aristotle recognized certain intellectual virtues.⁵ He was pessimistic about the likelihood of communicating them to very many people. He didn’t think that men and women, by and large, are governed by their own reason. But some people must have intellectual virtues, otherwise there would be no way of knowing what is in fact the right moral discipline to impose on everyone else, who can only be moral by proxy. And Aristotle suggests that for the most part the intellectual virtues are acquired not by custom but by instruction.⁶ He must mean, I take it, that the mind cannot be programmed to intellectual virtue in quite the way the desires can be programmed to moral virtue. The goodness of the mind is always inner-directed: it has to come from within, or it isn’t really goodness. And yet Aristotle does call it, too, by the same word (in Greek) that the Romans translated as habitus (habit). So virtues in general are habits, dispositions to act in one way rather than another, well rather than badly, since, as Thomas Aquinas says, they are “productive of good works,”⁷ and intellectual virtues are good habits of the mind, productive of sound thoughts, which are the good works of the mind.

Leaving aside the details of this famous theory, let’s borrow from Aristotle just the basic notion that what education imparts are good habits of mind: good ways of thinking that have become second nature to us, not unlike the virtues of decency and honesty drummed into our souls since childhood or the facility with which the pianist’s trained fingers run across the keys of the piano. I am not concerned, for now, with Aristotle’s own list of intellectual virtues, which would raise more questions than we could hope to answer.⁸ Let’s just pursue a little further the tradition of educational theory he inspired, and then ask whether it has a place in theological education.

The view that education’s goal is to turn out a certain kind of mind, or character, or person, has cropped up again and again in Western thought. But let’s jump straight to a fairly recent author, John Henry Newman. In his classic study The Idea of a University (1852), he argues that the university must provide a home for every field of human knowledge. But the result cannot be a mere pile of information; there must be organization of what is learned, an ordering of it that assigns things their proper value in relation to one another. Hence the communication of knowledge becomes a matter of the formation of the person: it imparts a virtue, a habit of mind, to be esteemed for its own sake and not as an instrument for getting or doing something else.⁹

It was Cardinal Newman, along with Aristotle and Thomas, who inspired the educational program of Robert Maynard Hutchins and his associates at the University of Chicago. Hutchins’s provocative book The Higher Learning in America (1936) is particularly important for the way in which he sets the habit view of education against what he takes to be the two destructive alternatives. If the sense of the university as one single community of learning has vanished, the chief culprits are empiricism and vocationalism. By “empiricism” Hutchins means the mere piling up of information; and by “vocationalism” he means the functional subordination of learning to practical and professional goals. Where these two hindrances to education dominate, the university disintegrates into independent centers of research and training. And that is what has happened in the American universities. The burden of remedying the situation, in this view, falls initially on the “general education” offered in high school and the first two years of college. But the ideal of a general education must carry over into the academy as a whole:

Please do not tell me [Hutchins writes] that the general education I propose should not be adopted because the great majority of those who pass through it will not go on to the university. The scheme that I advance is based on the notion that general education is education for everybody, whether he goes on to the university or not. It will be useful to him in the university; it will be equally useful if he never goes there. I admit that it will not be useful to him outside the university in the popular sense of utility. It may not assist him to make money or to get ahead. It may not in any obvious fashion adjust him to his environment or fit him for the contemporary scene. It will, however, have a deeper, wider utility: it will cultivate the intellectual virtues. . . . The intellectual virtues are habits resulting from the training of the intellectual powers.”¹⁰

Naturally, I do not pretend that this view of education is self-evidently true or beyond debate. But its applicability to theological education is worth considering. My own first exposure to theological education was as a student at Cambridge, England. “Training for the ministry,” as we called it, was divided into four fields: Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and systematic theology. Despite a very interesting introduction to theology, of which I still have very happy memories, I don’t believe any of us really began to grasp the unity of the enterprise we were engaged in: there were simply four more or less independent bodies of information to be learned (and corresponding exams to be passed). Even the functional unity of preparation for ministry was largely ignored. There was no “practical field,” as Americans call it. And when we protested, the best the faculty could think to do was to invite the local Presbyterian minister once a week to chat with us about the ministry. Perhaps I am being too hard, and perhaps I shouldn’t let on that when I was a student I, too, grumbled at the education I was getting, as students always do. But was it perhaps a firsthand experience of “empiricism,” as Hutchins understood the word?

When I was invited to join the faculty of an American seminary six years after leaving theological college in Cambridge, I looked—fascinated—through the catalogue that was sent to me (we didn’t have such things in Britain). I noted that again there were four fields. This time Old and New Testaments were combined; but something called “the practical field” was added, and I was amazed to see that its course offerings ran to about three times the length of any of the others. And how, exactly, the four fields were related to one another remained even more mysterious than the interrelations of the four Cambridge fields. Just about the best theological curriculum I have ever seen was designed and proposed while I was on the faculty of the seminary (not by me, I hasten to add). As every creative curriculum must, it transcended the barriers between the three so-called academic fields, and at each step it maintained a continual interchange between reflection and practice. But the proposal did not win the support of the faculty; it was emended beyond recognition. Reflection and practice tended to separate, and there simply wasn’t much interest in conversation between the fields except when we were off duty. Empiricism won again, only this time side by side with vocationalism. The junior faculty formed their own discussion group and proved that young professors can be just as rebellious as students.

Hutchins proposed to deal with the evils of empiricism and vocationalisrn by promoting the establishment of research and technical institutes outside the university; they would be “so planned as to draw off the empiricism and vocationalism that have been strangling the universities and to leave them free to do their intellectual job.”¹¹ But it would be a disaster for theological education, I think, if this counsel of despair were followed. What we should rather learn from the educational theory he so energetically advocated is that there is more to being educated than assimilating information and acquiring skills: we have to set our minds on good habits that don’t belong to any one field but rather to them all. We must learn to think more about the person who has the information and the skills, more about what it is that integrates the fields of study.

Some good habits of mind are, of course, generic: they cut across disciplines, not just across the field within a discipline. If, as Thomas Aquinas says, the good of the intellect is truth, then only those habits are intellectual virtues by which we tell the truth and never tell a falsehood.¹² Absolute truthfulness, however inconvenient, would be my candidate for the first generic virtue of the mind. Diligence, perhaps, should be the second. As Lessing wrote: “A man’s worth consists not in the truth he possesses, or thinks he possesses, but in the honest trouble he has taken to pursue the truth. His powers are extended by the search for truth, not by the possession of it.”¹³ 

A third generic virtue of the mind is independence, thinking for yourself; that, according to Kant, is what it means to come of age.¹⁴ And so we might go on, filling out the picture by identifying the opposite intellectual vices: dishonesty, laziness, plagiarism, etc. But my question now, to which I want to move, is whether there are any specific good habits, or intellectual virtues, that a theological education in the Reformed tradition should seek to nurture, coordinating the practical skills and the knowledge of Bible, church history, and systematic theology.

I should perhaps mention in passing, before I turn to part II, that I have found a great deal to agree with in Edward Farley’s influential book, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (1983), although my actual debts are to other, older writers. Farley reminds us that the word theologia was itself once used to denote a habit, and he advocates a recovery of theology as understanding: “the personal, sapiential knowledge… which can occur when faith opens itself to reflection and inquiry.” Only theology in this sense, he believes, can remedy the fragmentation of the seminary curriculum, which is presently held together merely by the ends of equipping clergy for clerical jobs. “In the clerical paradigm [as he calls it], ‘theology’ is not something attendant on Christian existence but something clergy need in order to function as leaders of the church community.”¹⁵ I am wholeheartedly in sympathy with the main lines of Farley’s argument, and I commend his book to you, but it will become evident that in part II of my presentation I am trying to make a more specific application of the Aristotelian term “habit.” I invoke it in order to address the question of theological education in our Reformed tradition.

II.   Theological Education and the Reformed Tradition 

There are many churches and many ways of doing theology, not all of which are options for myself. If it is not permitted to do constructive theology out of a tradition, I don’t know how else I could do it. I remember talking some years ago to a mixed group of students about the way the Lutherans and the Reformed try to theologize out of their respective confessional heritages. One student raised his hand and said: “I don’t come from a confessional tradition. How do I theologize?” I thought for a moment, then gave him my honest answer: “I haven’t the faintest idea.” 

I shall not ask in part II whether Reformed theology is a good thing, or whether the world would be a worse place if there were no Presbyterians in it (a difficult question). I shall simply try, in the light of part I, to answer the question put to me: How do I see the future of theological education in the Reformed tradition? The question presupposes that there will be a future and that it is possible to characterize the Reformed tradition. Had I been asked whether or not the world really needs Presbyterians, or whether the survival of humanity requires Reformed theology, I would have had to take a different tack. But I dare say it will be plain enough to you that I do believe the Reformed churches have a contribution to make to the many-sided theological conversation of the present day, and perhaps I should ask your indulgence in advance in case I preach a little before I’m through. 

The usual approach to discussing the Reformed tradition is to catalogue some distinctive beliefs or doctrines. We have, for instance, the so-called Five Points of Calvinism, which we don’t like to talk about as much as we used to: total depravity unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance (TULIP). Or there’s a list of five essential doctrines drawn up by the General Assembly in 1910, when the fundamentalist controversy was gaining momentum: (1) the inerrancy of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth, (3) substitutionary atonement, (4) the bodily resurrection of Christ, and (5) Christ’s miracles. The alliance of Old School Presbyterians with the dispensationalists usually added heaven and hell and Christ’s second coming to the list of “fundamentals.” Or, again, there’s the list provided in our present Constitution: one central theme, the sovereignty of God, and four related themes in the Reformed tradition: election for service as well as for salvation, covenant life marked by a disciplined concern for order, faithful stewardship in the use of God’s gifts, and—in recognition of the human tendency to idolatry and tyranny—the call to work for justice.¹⁶ 

One recent writer, John Hesselink, presents his account of what it means to be Reformed, somewhat unusually, by first listing a dozen common misunderstandings of the Reformed tradition. A dangerous approach, I should think. His list is very comprehensive, and he admits that where there’s smoke, there’s fire: each of the criticisms brought against the Reformed rests on a degree of truth. A reader who needs converting may be surprised to find out that there are more objections to being Reformed than she or he had dreamed of. But Hesselink has few equals as an interpreter of the Reformed tradition. His insights are always worth reading, and in the final chapter he reverts to the more common approach of listing distinctive “emphases.”¹⁷ 

The difficulty with all these checklists, as is only too clear, is that they change. Or perhaps that’s the good thing about them. Puritan Calvinism was not Calvin’s Calvinism, and the Westminster Divines were not fundamentalists. The reason why a separate Reformed church first emerged from the Reformation conflict was because no agreement could be reached between the Lutherans and the Reformed on the Lord’s Supper. But there wasn’t perfect agreement among the Reformed either. Zwingli’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper was not Calvin’s, and Calvin’s was not reproduced in the Westminster Confession, even though the Westminster Divines were supposed to make the English church more Calvinist. The Westminster Confession was brought to America and became the hallmark of Presbyterian orthodoxy. Yet not even the strictest of American Presbyterians wanted to keep the Westminster Divines’ view of church-state relations (“the civil magistrate”), so the confession was edited. Later, the doctrine of double predestination, which had long been identified as the central dogma of Calvinism, was found embarrassing. The Declaratory Statement was added (1903), which pretends to interpret the doctrine but actually dismantles it. 

And so we might go on. The list of Reformed beliefs changes. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to find a single Presbyterian anywhere these days who wants the same list as the Westminster Divines had, and there probably aren’t many Presbyterians who are even aware of how far we have moved from John Calvin. This is all the easier because our Book of Confessions still doesn’t have a confession that stands close to Calvin himself. 

What’s the alternative, then, to a list of “Reformed distinctives” (as we sometimes say)? Well, it’s interesting that Calvin himself thought it important to acknowledge some articles of faith as necessary but didn’t venture to give an exhaustive list of them. He says: such as that God is one, that Christ is God and the Son of God, and that our salvation rests on God’s mercy.].¹⁸ (You will notice that he forgot to mention what is supposed to have been his central dogma: predestination.) Elsewhere, Calvin names but one fundamental doctrine, which it is not possible to break: that we cleave to Christ, the only foundation of the church.¹⁹ Now, cleaving to Christ is not strictly a doctrine at all. Might we say that it’s the habit of mind on which every Christian doctrine, without exception, rests?

It certainly does not follow that we do not need doctrines, or even lists of fundamental doctrines. It would be mere feeblemindedness to say: “We must cleave to Christ. Let’s leave it at that.” What follows, rather, is first that we try to write new confessions of faith for every generation, and second that we appeal to something more constant and even more fundamental than fundamental beliefs; namely, good habits of mind, all of which rest finally on the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ.

Here, then, are what I myself would propose, not as the five points of Calvinism, but as five notes of the Reformed habit of mind, out of which we make our confession as the times require of us.

The first is at once the most obvious and perhaps the most difficult to commend. Like the ancient Athenians and their guests, we are conditioned to like novelty: we would gladly spend our time telling or hearing something new (Acts 17:21). In a way, I suppose that Paul obliged the Athenians: he spoke of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. That, certainly, was something new. But for us it is the now old apostolic message of the crucified and risen Lord, as perceived in our Reformed tradition, that defines our existence and gives our existence whatever justification it may have.

The Reformed habit of mind, then, is first of all deferential: a habit of deference to the past. I use the word “deference” in its dictionary sense to mean “respect and esteem due to a superior or an elder.” That is not a habit of mind that is very highly prized these days, but, as far as I can see, the very notion of “tradition”—whether Reformed or anything else—presupposes it. If there is to be a Reformed tradition at all, there must be a deference to the apostles and fathers of the church: This is not to suppress the energy and excitement that we must bring to each new cause. It is simply to recognize that even after the triumph of Mount Carmel we are still no better than our fathers (I Kings 19:4): we draw our strength, in part, from them. We pass the torch on. To stand in a tradition is to hand on a sacred trust that, in the first instance, we have simply received. The fact is that the tradition is there, in the history books, means nothing. But if we receive it and accept the duty to pass it on, then we permit our existence to be defined by the tradition: it makes us, in large measure, who we are.

“I am not better than my fathers. ” Let’s put it in practical, down-to-earth terms. It’s partly a question of which books I reach for first when I want to think as a Reformed theologian. Next to the Scriptures themselves, I reach for the confessions and the testimonies of the fathers, or let’s say forebears, of my church. I am not yet being genuinely Reformed even if I manage to keep up with the latest thing in the Reformed church. Many seminarians of my generation thought they needed to know about Karl Barth; very few realized that they ought to know what he knew. Barth knew his Calvin. In the preface to his Romans, he advised the twentieth-century reader to go back to the commentaries of Calvin:

My complaint is that recent commentators confine themselves to an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary. . . . [H]ow energetically Calvin [by contrast], having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to re-think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and the reader moves round the subject-matter, until a distinction between yesterday and to-day becomes impossible.²⁰

And Barth knew the old Reformed “schoolmen,” too. When he began his first dogmatics lectures at Göttingen in 1924, it was in Heppe’s sourcebook of the old Reformed dogmaticians that he found the help he was looking for.²¹ Barth even, after a fashion, knew his Schleiermacher—better, certainly, than most who repeat his criticisms of Schleiermacher. In the same year that he began his career as a professor of theology, Barth recalled the opinion of Alexander Schweizer that it was Schleiermacher who brought about the revival of Reformed theology in the nineteenth century. “Awkward for Brunner and me,” Barth wrote, “if it were so! That it is not so—I should like to be fully persuaded of that! But this is not, for now, raised so far above all doubt one can without further ado build his house on it.”²²

We are not better than our forebears! We owe them deference, and we need a Reformed theological education, first of all, to impart to us this particular habit of mind. It does not come easily to us these days: few seminarians expect to acquire it when they apply, and many resist it sullenly or vehemently in the classroom. But if we once lose that habit of mind, we may as well close up, sell the buildings, and leave them to someone who can put them to good use.

Second, however, the Reformed habit of mind is just as essentially critical—even of the fathers. And how difficult it is to be both deferential and critical! We run up against that problem every time we open the pages of Calvin’s Institutes. I bought my first copy of the Institutes in 1949, the year I went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate. I knew immediately that Calvin was to be my theological mentor, and in the forty years that have passed since then I have found no one else who can so overwhelm me with the vision of a world filled — or yet to be filled — with the glory of God, or who can so move me with the reassuring sense of the fatherly goodness (or, as we might say, the parentlike goodness) that always surrounds me. But that’s only one side of it. Calvin also disturbs me with his rhetoric of disgust at the human condition, embarrasses me with the meanness of his polemical ardor. Even among friends he could be cool, formal, distant, censorious, to the point of tactlessness (the quintessential Presbyterian?). A French refugee who greeted him enthusiastically on the streets of Geneva as “Brother Calvin” received the chilly rebuff that the correct form of address was Monsieur Calvin.²³ A complicated man, to say the least: a deep thinker, a faithful laborer, and a loyal pastor and friend, but flawed and fallible like the rest of us; and even when he was not exactly flawed, we don’t necessarily find him attractive.

Our attitude toward tradition, which likewise is a living and human thing, is bound to have in it something of the same oscillation between attraction and aversion, so that we learn by conversation with the past: neither going our own separate ways nor merely listening and absorbing passively. A Reformed-tradition needs no hagiography, and it needs no set of immutable “points” written in stone like the Ten Commandments. Calvin himself wrote to a Roman Catholic opponent who wanted the Genevans to return to the old ways: “The safety of that man hangs by a thread whose defense turns wholly on this — that he has constantly adhered to the religion handed down to him from his forefathers.”²⁴ And to another Roman Catholic critic who accused the Protestants of disloyalty to tradition, he replied: “Our constant endeavor, day and night, is not just to transmit the tradition faithfully, but also to put it in the form we think will prove best.”²⁵

Without criticism of tradition, there would have been no reformation of the church. Now there is a Reformed tradition, but it cannot be a Reformed tradition without continuing self-criticism. The full original title of the Reformed church was indeed “the church [or churches] reformed according to the Word of God.” And yet, in faithfulness to the spirit of the founding fathers, we have learned to say: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. And we had better make it a habit of mind, not an empty motto. Otherwise, we will reduce living tradition to the narrow limits of our favorite shibboleth, or checklist and cancel our pledges whenever someone says something we aren’t used to hearing. To be Reformed is to invite criticism, not to be forever on the defense. The open invitation of the authors of the old Scots Confession (1560) is that,

if any man will note in our Confession any chapter or sentence contrary to God’s Holy Word . . . it would please him of his gentleness and for Christian charity’s sake to inform us of it in writing; and we, upon our honour, do promise him that by God’s grace we shall give him satisfaction from the mouth of God, that is, from Holy Scripture, or else we shall alter whatever he can prove to be wrong.²⁶

The Reformed habit of mind, to be true to the founders, must be deferential and critical. Deference will keep the buildings open. But without criticism they will become not seminaries but cemeteries.

Thirdly, the Reformed habit of mind is open: open to wisdom and insight wherever they can be found, not simply among fellow Presbyterians. The original genius of the Reformed church, I believe, was that it borrowed gratefully from both the Lutherans and the Renaissance humanists, creating a “Christian philosophy” (as Calvin called it) that was at once faithful to the gospel and deeply committed to learning. I have no doubt that dependence on secular learning has sometimes led Reformed theology to make mistakes, but Zwingli and Calvin apparently considered it a worse mistake to isolate the gospel from secular thought. In his great treatise on providence (1530), Zwingli writes:

Some people do not hesitate to make the truth odious by attributing it to the philosophers, not noting that the truth, wherever found and by whomever it is brought to light, is from the Holy Spirit. . . . All that I have said and all that I am going to say in this book is derived from one source, namely from the nature and character of the Supreme Deity. This source Plato also tasted, and Seneca drank from it.²⁷

Calvin was a bit more cautious than Zwingli because he didn’t want the mistakes of the philosophers overlooked. But he still calls it mere “superstition” not to risk borrowing anything from non-Christian writers. His reason is the same as Zwingli’s: because all truth comes from God, whose Spirit is the one fountain of truth.²⁸ He thinks “there can be no doubt that . . . God sowed, by the hand of philosophers and profane writers, the excellent sentiments which are to be found in their writings.”²⁹ We know from recent Calvin scholarship that he not only wrote his first book on a treatise by the Roman philosopher Seneca but was still reading and annotating his classical authors in the turbulent 1540s, when one would have expected him to be too busy reforming Geneva.³⁰

There is no need to be shocked, then, that I began my remarks on Reformed theology by referring to Aristotle’s Ethics. It may betray the fact that I was a classics major before I became a theology student, but so were Zwingli, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and many others of my Reformed heroes. I am in good company. A part of the precious heritage of the Reformed church is its firm commitment to secular, as well as sacred, learning—to what Schleiermacher called the “eternal covenant” between living Christian faith and completely free scientific inquiry. “It is my firm conviction,” he wrote, “that the basis for such a covenant was already established in the Reformation."³¹

Theological education in the Reformed tradition cannot be insular, ingrown, defensive, or (in Van Harvey’s word) “narcissistic.” This brings me back—all too fleetingly, I’m afraid—to where I began. I cannot conceive of a Reformed theology that is not open to the academy as well as committed to the church. But I suspect that in the foreseeable future two somewhat different types of theology are likely to be nurtured in the university and the seminary respectively. Insofar as they are genuinely Reformed types, the differences between them can only be relative. It will be important for them to keep in touch and to avoid mutual recriminations. Perhaps the special responsibility of those who work in the seminaries will be to ask their university colleagues how the scientific ideal is related to other human values. On the other side, I don’t see how the seminaries can responsibly address social, economic, medical, legal, moral, or ecological problems, as the church surely must, without the knowledge that comes chiefly from the academy. And this brings me to my fourth “note.”

The Reformed habit of mind has always been unabashedly practical. Truth, the old divines used to say, is “in order to goodness.” I’m not sure I would be willing to admit that of all truth, but certainly of theological truth: the good works of the theologian’s mind are not just true thoughts, but thoughtful actions. In our tradition, this has meant two not unrelated things: knowledge of God is for the sake of both personal and social change.

Calvin made it clear that he had no interest in any knowledge of God that did not have to do with “piety,” and this repeatedly led him in his Institutes to set a question aside if he judged it to be merely inquisitive or speculative (“academic,” as we say). He called his Institutes not a summa theologiae, but a pietatis summa (a “summary of piety” or “godliness”), and he wrote: “Properly speaking, we cannot say that God is known where there is no religion or piety.”³² He determined to do theology within the limits of piety alone, and the result is that again and again he sets boundaries for the doctrines he discusses. On God, for instance: we do not need to know what God is in Godself (that would be cold speculation), but only that God is the fountain of every good. For the sense that we owe everything good to God is to our benefit and to God’s glory.³³ Again, on the angels: we have no need for idle questions about how many angels there are because

in reading the Scriptures we should constantly direct our inquiries and meditations to those things which tend to edification, not indulge in curiosity, in studying things of no use. . . . The duty of a Theologian . . . is not to tickle the ear, but confirm the conscience, by teaching what is true, certain, and useful.³⁴

Similar words of caution mark Calvin’s chapters on the Trinity, predestination, and so on.³⁵ Piety, godliness, is what counts.

But no one is likely to conclude that he was therefore shut up in a narrow world of private devotion! History proves otherwise. For Calvin, the practical knowledge with which theology has to do is directed to nothing less than the transformation of society into a mirror of God’s glory. There is an interesting difference of emphasis here between Calvin and Luther. For Luther, reformation meant preaching. As he himself put it in a famous sermon: he preached the Word, drank beer with his friends, and slept; and while he did nothing more, the Word did it all.³⁶ Calvin thought there was more to be done. As he lay on his deathbed, he reminisced with the ministers about the course of his life and remarked: “When I first came to this church, I found almost nothing in it. There was preaching, and that was all. . . . There was no reformation.”³⁷ What we find in Calvin, at the very source of the Reformed tradition, is a powerful sense of the duty to reform every department of public life, not just to preach—much less (in a phrase of James Luther Adams) just to manicure our own souls. Here, too, it is not so much a doctrine as a fundamental Reformed habit of mind that is at stake: theological education in the Reformed tradition has to nurture it if the tradition is to remain true to itself.

The Reformed have not been willing, of course, to leave the preaching to their Lutheran friends, any more than the Lutherans have left social responsibility to the Presbyterians. For my fifth and last note of the Reformed habit of mind, I come back to the full historic title: “the churches reformed according to the Word of God” (which, actually, the Lutherans sometimes claimed for themselves).³⁸ There, surely, is  the foremost note of all, and even if it sounds terribly self-satisfied, and may even be self-satisfied, it has to have the final say. From the very first the Reformed consciousness was dominated by the overwhelming prophetic sense of standing, like Jeremiah, under a Word of the Lord that we dare not tamper with, and which does not let us remain silent (cf. Jer.1:1-9; 23:28-36). The Word is not something we discover, or read about, or decide to listen to. It comes—comes to us even when we are not listening, would rather not hear it, and would just as soon not have to talk about it. “Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones . . .” (Jer. 20:9 KJV; cf. Amos 3:8). I admit that (happily) there’s nothing uniquely Reformed about that consciousness; but there’s no Reformed consciousness without it either.

And what is this Word? For us it is the gospel — the good news that the Word has come, come in human flesh (John 1:14). It is not, after all, smugness or self-satisfaction to claim that one preaches this Word. “For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16 RSV). That is the very heart of the Reformed habit of mind, even if it is not peculiar to the Reformed. Let’s call it the evangelical habit. And I mean “evangelical” in its good Reformation sense, as distinct from its misappropriation by the fundamentalists. The first Protestants called themselves evangelicals because they put one thing only — the gospel of the Word made flesh — at the center. “The real treasure of the church,” as Luther announced in his Ninety-five Theses (1517), “is the sacred Gospel of the glory and grace of God” (thesis 62). To be an evangelical is to think everything in relation to the Word of the gospel.

With this, Zwingli’s Sixty-seven Articles (1523) were in full agreement. He begins: “All who say that the Gospel is nothing without the approbation of the Church err and slander God. The sum of the Gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, has made known to us the will of His heavenly Father, and by His innocence has redeemed us from death and reconciled us unto God.”³⁹ In the same spirit the Ten Theses of Berne (1528) begin: “the holy, Christian Church, whose only Head is Christ, is born of the Word of God, abides in the same, and does not listen to the voice of a stranger.”⁴⁰ Allow me just one more example! The preface to the Scots Confession declares: “We call on God to record that . . . with all humility we embrace the purity of Christ’s Gospel, which is the one food of our souls and therefore so precious to us that we are determined to suffer the greatest of worldly dangers, rather than let our souls be defrauded of it.”⁴¹

So much has been written about the appropriate image of the Christian minister: priest, pastor, preacher, counselor, pastoral director, reflective practitioner, and (heaven help us!) chief executive officer.⁴² But in the Reformed tradition, at any rate, not one of these images however valid as far as it goes — makes any sense apart from the title by which Reformed clergy once styled themselves: verbi divini minister, “servant of the Word of God.” It goes with the evangelical habit of mind, and it explains how the Reformed habit of mind can be at once deferential and self-critical: because tradition, as Calvin says, is nothing other than a handing down of the Word of God.⁴³

Conclusion

The general theme of our conference and of the Moore Lectures has been formulated in more ways than one. The leading question on the brochure is: “Seminary—What shall be taught, and why?” My answer is: Information, of course, skills, of course; but above all the good habit of mind that first created the Reformed tradition, and without which it has no future in the modern world. The end product of a seminary education in the twenty-first century may very well be a master of divinity, or a doctor of ministry, or even a doctor of divinity honoris causa. Let us hope so. But as long as there are Reformed pastors and theologians, they will understand themselves first and foremost, whatever their degree, as servants of the Word of God. 

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