Can we please stop doing this?

In the wider Protestant world, the term “Reformed” specifically means “Calvinist.” In some circles, the word “Reformed” is even narrower than that – it refers to a specific type of confessional Calvinist.  So when I hear Lutherans referring to American evangelicals (and even Pentecostals/charismatics) as “Reformed”, I cringe a little bit.  Most of those folks are not Calvinists by any stretch of the imagination, and will not hesitate to let you know that.  And I cringe more than a little bit when Lutherans say “the Reformed believe X” when X is a belief that only an American evangelical – and no confessional Calvinist – would actually hold.

I understand why Lutherans use the term in such a broad way.  Sometimes it’s for the sake of convenience when we are speaking among ourselves, as simply using the term “Protestant” to refer only to Calvinists and Arminians and not Lutherans can be confusing to some.  And historically, the non-Lutheran Protestant denominations ultimately – in one way or another – are theological descendants of the original Calvinists of the 16th century.

But neither of these reasons really excuse a practice that is generally unhelpful when one is actually interacting with Calvinists or Arminians.  At best it causes confusion and at worst it can cause unnecessary offense – to the point where the Calvinist or Arminian writes off you and Lutherans in general as being ignorant of what they really believe.

A while ago I was listening to a lecture on the two natures in Christ by Dr. Rod Rosenbladt of White Horse Inn fame, at the end of which (during a question and answer session) he takes Lutheran pastors and professors to task for their use of the word “Reformed” to refer to Wesleyan evangelicals (and conversely, for using the term “evangelical” to refer to Calvinists). Here’s some of what he (himself an LCMS pastor and professor) had to say:

If you’re in a wider Christian circle and you do what our LCMS pastors do – and they’ve been trained to do it – I’m going to be speaking to a group of them back in Minneapolis and I’m gonna tell them to repent of this – if you’re in front of a broad Christian group, and there are a lot of Calvinists there, and you call them evangelicals, they’ll be totally offended.  To them that means Arminian.  They might just walk out of the room because they think you’re an idiot – an uneducated idiot.  And correlatively, on the other side, if you have a large evangelical gathering and you call them Calvinists, their hands will be in the air and they’ll say “I am not – whatever I am, I’m not one of those.”…

So as you say “evangelical” today, it usually means Arminian/Wesleyan….When you say “Reformed”, it means one thing, and only one thing – 120 proof Calvinism.  Now we even have in our books in the LCMS guys – professors – who use (or have used) the word “Reformed” to mean everybody who isn’t Lutheran or Roman Catholic.  Disaster.  Disaster.  We’ve got to stop doing that.  I talk to seminarians – they still blunder into it – and so I try as politely as I can to say, “You want to distinguish those.”  Because if you’re speaking in a broader Christian audience, you want to be precise about that, or you’ll have no idea why fifty percent of the room packs up its briefcases and walks out the back door.  But they will.

You know what I'm talking about.  Those forwarded e-mails that you get in your inbox every now and again.  They range in their content from heartwarming stories or messages of inspiration, to mere collections of animal pictures, to serious warnings about how the government is going to take away all our rights. 

The vast majority of the time, when I receive a forwarded e-mail that
tells some sort of story or makes some kind of assertion, a quick trip
to www.truthorfiction.com will reveal that the story is either not true
or hopelessly outdated.  It amazes me how people will not check to see
if what they are passing on is accurate.  I can't even count the times
I have received the same e-mail about how Congress is going to pass a
bill that will take all religious programming off the air, even though
one version or another of that same e-mail has been circulating for at
least ten years and it is a known hoax.

The one thing that is common to almost all of these e-mails is that they usually use guilt or superstition to induce the person who received the e-mail to keep forwarding them.  The ones that use superstition to perpetuate themselves usually go something like this:  "Make a wish, send this to ten people within the next five minutes and your wish will come true.  If you don't do this, then you will have bad luck for five years!!"  Or the religious version: "Send this to ten people within the next five minutes and you will receive a blessing!" 

The ones that use guilt to perpetuate themselves usually go something like this:  "If you care about America, forward this to ten people.  If you couldn't care less about what happens to our country, then delete."  Or, "If you love Jesus and aren't ashamed of Him, forward this to ten people", of course implying that if you don't forward the e-mail then you don't love Jesus or are ashamed of Him.  There was one e-mail that basically equated not forwarding the e-mail to denying Jesus a la Matthew 10:33.

I am a Christian, and I do love Jesus.  But does my forwarding of an e-mail (a piece of junk e-mail at that) really show whether or not this is true?  Have I really denied Jesus if I refuse to forward junk e-mail that happens to contain a picture of Him, along with some bad poetry?  Why should I clutter up my neighbor's inbox with more guilt-inducing, superstitious, insipid junk mail?  There are better ways for me to demonstrate my faith, thank you very much.  It doesn't take much faith or courage to forward a piece of junk e-mail.

Maybe I will offend some people with this.  I am sure many people who send these things do not think of it this way and don't mean any harm.  But think about it – if I really have something uplifting to share with someone, why shouldn't I do this in my own words or in person, or at the very least without a message of guilt or superstition (be it secular or religious) at the end?  If I really have some important information to share with someone, why shouldn't I send them a link to a reputable website that contains verifiable, factual information about the matter rather than forwarding an e-mail containing information that, for all I know, someone could have just made up?

Just something to think about…

I heard it again today, and I am sure that I will continue to hear it over and over again. But this idea, contrary to popular opinion, is a myth. Here is what sociologist and historian Rodney Stark has to say about the matter:

Even children know that in 1492 Christopher Columbus proved that the world is round. They also know that he doggedly pursued backing for his voyage despite years of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, which ridiculed all dissent from the biblical teaching that the earth is flat. Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), founder and first president of Cornell University, and author of the single most influential book ever written on the conflict of science and theology, offered this summary:

The warfare of Columbus [with religion] the world knows well: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how sundry wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine; how, even after he was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity … the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray … the theological barriers to this geographical truth yielded but slowly. Plain as it had become to scholars, they hesitated to declare it to the world at large … But in 1519 science gains a crushing victory. Magellan makes his famous voyage. He proves the earth to be round, for his expedition circumnavigates it … Yet even this does not end the war. Many conscientious [religious] men oppose the doctrine for two hundred years longer.

Like everyone else, I grew up with this story. It was retold in every account of Columbus’s voyage in my schoolbooks, in many movies, and always on Columbus Day. As for A.D. White’s immense study, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (in two volumes), when I was young, it was required reading for all budding intellectuals, and I cited it in my second published paper.

Trouble is that almost every word of White’s account of the Columbus story is a lie. Every educated person of the time, including Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round. The Venerable Bede (ca. 673-735) taught that the world was round, as did Bishop Virgilius of Salzburg (ca. 720-784), Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), and Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224-1274), and all four ended up saints. Sphere was the title of the most popular medieval textbook on astronomy. Written by the English Scholastic John of Sacrobosco (ca. 1200-1256), it transmitted the standard view that all heavenly bodies including earth were spherical. In the same century as Columbus’s voyage, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly (1350-1420), chancellor of the University of Paris, noted that “although there are mountains and valleys on the earth, for which it is not perfectly round, it approximates very nearly to roundness.”

As for the “sundry wise men of Spain” who challenged Columbus and advised against funding him, they not only knew the earth was round; they also knew it was far larger than Columbus thought it was. They opposed his plan only on the grounds that he had badly underestimated the circumference of the earth and was counting on much too short a voyage. Expressed in modern measures, Columbus claimed that it was about 2,800 miles from the Canary Islands to Japan, when it is actually about 14,000 miles. Had the Western Hemisphere not existed, and Columbus had no knowledge that it did, he and his crew would have died at sea. In any event, Jeffrey Burton Russell found that it was not true that Christian scholars were benighted fanatics clinging to scriptural claims that the earth was flat; rather, during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era “nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherical, and by the fifteenth century all doubt had disappeared.” Edward Grant, in his monumental study of medieval cosmology, noted that in none of the Scholastic writings was there any mention of a flat earth except for a few asides to refute the perceptions of flatness. No contemporary document concerning Columbus, including his own Journal and his son’s History of the Admiral, nor any account of other early voyages including Magellan’s, makes any mention of the shape of the earth. Everyone knew.

Stark goes on:

So why didn’t we know they knew? Why do only specialists know now? For the same reason that White’s book remains influential despite the fact that modern historians of science dismiss it as nothing but a polemic – White himself admitted that he wrote the book to get even with Christian critics of his plans for Cornell…. The reason we didn’t know the truth concerning these matters is that the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three centuries, been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack on faith. From Thomas Hobbes through Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, false claims about religion and science have been used as weapons in the battle to “free” the human mind from the “fetters of faith.”¹

Chapter 2 of Stark’s book For the Glory of God (from which the above excerpts come) is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history of science.

1. Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God. Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 121-123.