Pardon Me, Reckoning or Rip Van Winkle?
About a century before the Protestant Reformation, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. This unfinished collection of stories revolves around a group of mostly strangers—who collectively represent the three medieval classes or estates (nobility, clergy, and layperson)—riding horseback on an obligatory pilgrimage to the cathedral at Canterbury. To pass the time along the way, they hold a storytelling contest. Before they begin, we are introduced to each pilgrim in the general prologue.1 Each pilgrim’s physical appearance also reveals his or her moral character, in keeping with the medieval belief in physiognomy, a personality assessment based on one’s outer appearance. The pilgrims are also introduced in order of decreasing moral character. The last—and therefore most immoral character on the pilgrimage—is the Pardoner.
In the medieval church, pardoners were laypeople, essentially clerks who carried out the function of raising money for the church by selling indulgences—or pardons—for sins. Pardons were substitutes for penance. While pardons were officially sanctioned by the church, those who trafficked in them often exploited the office for personal gain.
In the prologue to his tale, the Pardoner tells the other pilgrims that his tale will consist of the one sermon he delivers wherever he goes to peddle his wares.2 He may have only one sermon, but it is so well-practiced that it forms, arguably, the most moral and artistically perfect tale of all in The Canterbury Tales.3 Ironically, given the Pardoner’s ignoble character, his tale’s lesson exemplifies the moral teaching that the root of evil is greed (based on the common Latin phrase radix malorum est cupiditas).
But before he tells his amazing tale, the Pardoner confesses (really, brags) openly and unashamedly to the other pilgrims what he’s up to. He tells them that he travels from town to town, delivers this sermon on greed, and uses the guilt it conjures in his listeners to swindle them into buying his indulgences or the alleged magic powers of the fake relics he also carries with him. He openly makes this confession, but it doesn’t stop him from trying to swindle the other pilgrims at the conclusion of his tale. The pilgrims don’t fall for it. But what’s most interesting and revealing is that the Pardoner is seduced and deluded by his own rhetorical powers. He believes he’s so good that he can tell his audience what he’s up to and still convince them to be swayed by the power of his story. He has fooled countless victims along the way (so perhaps we can’t blame him for his confidence). But this is the kind of rampant corruption in the church that Chaucer’s tale exposes. A century before the Reformation, Chaucer—a middle-class public servant, clerk, and poet—saw and powerfully illustrated the need for church reform.
The original aim of what came to be called the Protestant Reformation was not to breach but to reform the existing institution. But rather than face the truth about the church’s egregious departures from the truths taught in Scripture, the leaders in Rome, Martin Luther complained, “protected themselves by these walls in such a way that no one has been able to reform them.” Because of their self-protection, he lamented, “the whole of Christendom has fallen abominably.”4
(If this is true of our evangelical institutions today as it was then, will another reformation be in order? I believe so.)
Upon refusing to recant some of his key criticisms of the church, Luther was excommunicated by Leo X in 1521. Luther was left no choice but to form a church body that would better reflect the Scriptures that he had long studied and that, he saw, the church had abandoned. Other Reformers across Europe followed suit, and what followed was a range of reforms that attempted to restore and uphold the councils and creeds established in the first centuries of the church and make them manifest.
The Protestant Reformation was centered on truth—the truth of biblical doctrine. Yes, the medieval church’s widespread corruption took the form of practices, but these evil deeds—including the sale of pardons and indulgences for sin that expanded the church’s wealth and power to obscene levels by taking advantage of the fact that the illiterate masses could not read the Bible for themselves—were made possible by distorting the truth. The church was able to get away with it because few could read the Bible for themselves and thereby see the lies. The people—who had no political power and no ability to read the Bible even if they were able to gain access to one—were made captive by illiteracy to an institution that grew more corrupt as it grew wealthier and more powerful.
What holds evangelicals—who not only can read but have easy access to Bibles of all kinds—captive today? That is an important question.
Why Johnny Can Read
One answer is that we suffer under a different kind of illiteracy today, another kind of “dark age” created by too much information, too much disinformation and misinformation, and an inability (or unwillingness) to do the labor necessary to “read” information, the times, and ourselves better. Perhaps this kind of functional illiteracy is a crisis of the imagination.
The Reformation’s emphasis on each person reading the Word of God for themselves rather than receiving that Word mediated through a priest brought widespread literacy to the world. This fact is universally recognized and understood. But Martin Luther emphasized not just the importance of the Bible as it existed then. Luther translated the Bible into his own language and thereby, philosopher Samuel Loncar writes, revolutionized the world’s relationship not only to both the Bible and to language but to “the entire system of authority in a culture.” By translating the Bible into his own language, Luther “created both the theological rationale and the institutional impetus for a total transformation through the spread of literacy as a means of access to the Bible.”5 This metaphysical revolution created the conditions for the emergence of the modern individual.
In relation to the Protestant Reformation, the evangelical movement clearly is but a coda, an addendum. Yet, three hundred years after inking its postscript to the Reformation, evangelicalism is in the midst of a reckoning. We will give an account; whether sooner or later is up to us.
If the Reformation was over the Word as written (over who can and should read and interpret it), then this reckoning of evangelicalism concerns the Word as it has been incarnated. If the Reformation was over the truth revealed in Scripture, then this evangelical reckoning is over the way and the life revealed in Jesus—and how the church has failed to follow and embody it.
They—the Word written and the Word incarnated—can’t be separated, of course. But the failure of the evangelical imagination is in failing to see and embody this whole.
Instead, we have developed a false division between biblical theology and spiritual formation. Between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Between religion and politics.6 Jesus showed us the way to unite these—indeed, he was the union of these things.
The Way, the Truth, and the Life
Jesus said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6).
Consider what it means that Jesus calls himself “the Life.” Part of what has always defined the evangelical movement is its focus on the essential gospel message that through Jesus Christ and through him alone one gains eternal life. Evangelicals have tended to focus so much on getting to heaven, however, that the reason for existence in this earthly life is often elusive. Even more often forgotten is that eternal life will be spent here—in a new heaven and a new earth. Eternal life doesn’t begin in the future. Eternal life begins now.
Jesus also says he is “the Truth.” Among the defining characteristics of evangelicalism outlined in chapter 1, the centrality of the Bible is prominent. Evangelicals have always emphasized biblical truth over church tradition (and over personal experience, at least theoretically and until more recently7). Even the spirit of activism that David Bebbington identifies as part of what defines evangelicalism manifests in applying beliefs about biblical truth in a proactive way.8 Eighteenth-century British evangelicals were activists in abolishing the slave trade, promoting animal welfare, and reforming capital punishment and labor laws. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evangelicals became activists in education, voting, and temperance. The concerns may change, but the heart of evangelicalism has always been application of what is understood to be biblical truth to the cultural issues of the day.
Jesus is also “the Way.” No Christian—and certainly no evangelical—would deny it. But when evangelicals talk about Jesus being the Way, it is usually imagined in a straightforward, literal manner: Jesus is the way to God, the way to eternal life, the way to heaven. While this is true, there is so much more embedded in that word, in that image, than simply a path or a road (which is what the Greek word hodos in John 14:6 means).9 Evangelicals tend to emphasize how Jesus is the way to something. But he is also the way, period. Consider the difference between saying, “This is the road into town” and “This is the road.” One is a means to something. The other is something in and of itself. Jesus isn’t only a means to something. He is an ultimate end.
When Jesus invites us to follow him, it means more than just walking behind him on the road toward a destination, or the cross serving as a plank placed over a chasm between you and God. Jesus invites us to adopt his way, and his ways. He invites us to be like him. To imitate him. To call his Father “Father,” too. To die to self as he did. To participate in his nature. To be grafted onto the true vine in order to bear fruit that tastes like him—divine.
The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt among Us
Some philosophers say that Jesus entered the world at the precise historical moment in which a convergence of Jewish history and Greek thought gave birth to modern consciousness, a time when the I AM who revealed himself in the Old Testament became incarnated within a human culture ready to receive him and spread his message to all people.10 Indeed, Jesus says “I am” quite a few times.
Some would even say that the birth of the modern individual—whose conscious existence begins with the expression “I am”—took place all the way back when Christ was born.
For example, it wasn’t by mere accident, Marshall McLuhan says, that “Christianity began in the Greco-Roman culture.” With the invention of the phonetic alphabet, the Greeks made it possible to have a “sense of private substantial identity—a self” that “is to this day utterly unknown” in other parts of the world. “Christianity was introduced into a matrix of culture in which the individual had enormous significance,” claims McLuhan, a concept that was “not characteristic of other world cultures.”11 With literacy, God’s people would have the ability to read longer texts of Scripture to “nurture a sense of divine presence that dwelt internally, in the heart and mind.”12
This interior life is, of course, the site of the imagination.
God, who calls himself I AM, came to earth, united in spirit and flesh, fully human and fully divine, at just the right moment in human history when human language was ready to take a form that would awaken individual consciousness, interior life, and imagination in a way that would forever alter history and humanity. Recall the earlier discussion in chapter 2 on how conscience as we understand it today was introduced by Christianity. Each time we express ourselves beginning with the words, “I am . . .” we express consciousness, the inner life, and imagination in a way that reflects God’s image in us.13
Reckoning or Reformation?
There is much of evangelicalism that is of man, not God. I say that as an evangelical.
A young person, a disillusioned evangelical, asked me recently how I have managed to keep the faith, stay in church, and remain evangelical in a time when so many evangelicals have betrayed so much of what they taught us. I honestly think, I told him, that it’s because I was born before the modern evangelical culture in which so many young people of the last two generations were raised took root. Yes, I had Chick tracts, A Thief in the Night, and “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” But I didn’t have VeggieTales, Adventures in Odyssey, ACE homeschool workbooks, CCM, lock-ins, hell houses, purity pledges, purity rings, or purity balls. I went to secular schools, read what I wanted to read, got to date boys and make mistakes, was encouraged to ask questions, and was never told my life or value would be ruined or lessened by any of those things. But I have taught an entire generation or more of evangelical students whose lives revolve around these things. I am watching some of them walk away from church, from marriages, from families, and from the faith. Yet, I am watching even more of them do the hard, terrible work of extricating Christian culture from Christ—the Christ who transcends human cultures, human time, and human tradition. This work is not without risk. But it is necessary.
As Alan Noble observes, “When we discover error in the church, we return home with good news.” That good news is the opportunity to correct and clarify. In this way, such understanding “does not lead you away from faith but deeper in.”14
Is the church in a five-hundred-year moment? Will the reckoning lead to a new reformation?
In one of the last essays he wrote before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on that quintessential American Revolution-era tale of Rip Van Winkle, who climbed up a mountain and slept for twenty years. King observes, “The most striking thing about this story is not that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution that would alter the course of human history.”15
The church pews are filled with Rip Van Winkles. The pulpits are too.
If the Reformation was a crisis of authority—one that rightly gave highest authority to the Bible rather than the priests—then this reckoning (or perhaps even a new reformation) is one of credibility: Do we who profess to believe in the authority of the Word present ourselves as credible witnesses of that Way, that Truth, and that Life?
The foibles and faults of the church, while always reflecting the fallible and unchanging human condition of the people who comprise it, will inevitably reflect the particular limitations of its particular time and place. Christian leaders of churches in suburban Chicago in the twenty-first century aren’t as likely as those criticized by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales to try to sell congregants the magical healing powers of a sheep’s bone. Nor would the seventeenth-century Puritans have embraced a view of God that is reflected in today’s prosperity gospel or moralistic therapeutic deism.16 And most of us today aren’t going to use the Bible to support chattel slavery.
Like so many other movements, powers, and institutions over the course of human history, the evangelical empire that has reigned in America for so long is, by some measures, undergoing loss—loss of position, privilege, influence, and power. It is easy for those who have benefited from this empire (I count myself among these) to feel a sense of loss. Having something you’ve always had taken away is—at least by human calculations—a loss.
But imagine what might be gained.
Let’s be honest: it’s not that hard to tell the difference between those whose longing is for the good of others and those whose longing is for the good of themselves. To paraphrase the famous line by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart as he attempted to offer a legal definition of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it. There are many who display personal bitterness and anger at the losses they perceive to be at stake—their own rightness, superiority, and ownership in the status quo—and show no joy for the gains being made by others. We may not have pardoners in the post-Reformation church, but we still have grifters. Their wares (and even their tweets) are just fake magical sheep bones.
I exult in the words of Mary’s Magnificat, spoken while Jesus was still in her womb, that our Savior—hers, yours, mine—has “scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51 KJV).
The way of Jesus is not in the power, celebrity, and corruption that has borne the fruit of sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, systemic racism, and imperialism.
A recent example of this reckoning within Christendom writ large is the Catholic Church’s apology in 2022 to Indigenous peoples for abuses committed by the Canadian government in Catholic schools over the course of 150 years. In a homily following this apology, Pope Francis quoted Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, noting the challenge that secularization presents to the “pastoral imagination.” Noting that this secularization requires the church to “look for new languages and forms of expression,” Francis said that the first challenge in such an age is “to make Jesus known.” The second challenge, he said, is to make Jesus known through a witness that is credible.17
A testimony, an image so central to the evangelical imagination (see chap. 4), can meet this challenge of making Jesus known. But a testimony is something you give. A witness is something you are. While we might be called on from time to time to give our testimony (or one of them, anyway), we must always be a witness.
And a credible one at that.
Reformed Imaginations
Among the most known and repeated words of Jesus are these from the instructions he gives his disciples upon sending them out: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39).
Perhaps we’ve heard and read these words so often that they have lost their meaning. Or perhaps we’ve heard and read these words so often within particular contexts that their meaning has shrunk. We might think it means only that we gain eternal life by surrendering our life to Jesus. It does mean that. We might think it means that we find ultimate meaning and purpose in life when we serve Jesus. It does. But maybe it also means more specific, concrete things in our particular lives and times. Maybe it means that when we lose platform, or position, or privilege, or pay, or authority, or respect, or work, or elections, or jobs, or followers, or friends, or health, or limbs, or ease, we might find more of our life in Christ.18
This loss of language, of meaning—whether through overfamiliarity or lack of real familiarity in the first place—is, at heart, what I am hoping to help us recover in this book. What is imagination but an opening of the eyes of our hearts?
Human beings have individual imaginations and shared social imaginaries. Both are filled with the words, images, sayings, stories, narratives, and concepts that surround us. We can’t possibly be aware of them all or the way they shape our thinking and motivate our actions from beneath the surface of our conscious thinking. But what we can do—with awareness and intention—is immerse ourselves more deeply in the stories, images, and words that reflect what is good, true, and beautiful: yes, Scripture, but also the human applications of Scripture that express the fullness of its teaching. We must work to reform our imaginations by filling them with stories, images, and metaphors that are true, lest we be counted among those proud ones scattered by deformed imaginations, as Mary declared in the Magnificat.
As Jesus said of many who were exposed to his parables, “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand” (Matt. 13:13). We must ask Jesus to open our eyes and ears, to renew our imaginations. Indeed, Paul implores the Lord in Ephesians 1:18 to open the eyes of our hearts so that our hearts will be flooded with the light of his truth.
This passage from Ephesians is invoked by John Stott in the Lausanne Covenant, a document drawn up following the First Lausanne Congress held in 1974. The covenant defines evangelicalism within the modern, global context. In the covenant, Stott describes the nature of the authority of the Bible and its role in the life of believers in every culture:
For as the Holy Spirit used the personality and culture of the writers of his Word in order to convey through each something fresh and appropriate, so today he illumines the minds of God’s people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes. It is he who opens the eyes of our hearts (Eph. 1:17, 18), and these eyes and hearts belong to young and old, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, African, Asian and American, male and female, poetic and prosaic. It is this “magnificent and intricate mosaic of mankind” (to borrow a phrase of Dr. Donald McGavran’s) which the Holy Spirit uses to disclose from Scripture ever more of the many-colored wisdom of God (a literal translation of Eph. 3:10). Thus the whole church is needed to receive God’s whole revelation in all its beauty and richness (cf., Eph. 3:18 “with all the saints”).19
Seeing is hard.
Change is hard.
But change (for us fallible humans in this fallen world) is also inevitable.
Change is good: semper reformanda (always reforming).
The complete phrase from which this oft-repeated refrain comes—ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed, always reforming)—emerged following the Protestant Reformation. It expressed the idea that while the church had been reformed in light of the grievous errors that had festered for so long in the church, reforming must also be an ongoing process, not only for each individual believer through the process of sanctification, but for the church itself.
The root of reformation is formation.
Formation speaks of the Way. The way of salvation. The way of living. The way of growing. The way of going (see fig. 15).
The church cannot rest on her laurels. Even the church reformed continues to need reforming.
Unless, of course, we are raptured instead.