Protestanism's Fathers

Protestantism's Fathers

Who are the Fathers of Protestantism? For a series of lectures (at Jewish Theological Seminary of America) on "Classics of Western Religion," Canada-born Church Historian John Thomas McNeill had to choose carefully from Protestant history. The McNeill lectures, now expanded and published under the title Books of Faith & Power (Harper; $2), may stimulate many a layman to re-examine the heritage of his faith. McNeill's six Fathers:

Martin Luther, one of whose most important works, says Historian McNeill, was no theological treatise, but a small essay introduced by a letter to Pope Leo X, who had been trying to persuade Luther to retreat from his stand. Luther himself said of his essay On Christian Liberty : "It is a small thing if thou regard its bulk, but unless I am deceived, it is the whole of Christian living in brief form." As in all his work, Luther named faith as the sole key to salvation; faith alone-- not works--justifies the soul and frees it from bondage to the Law and to Sin. But the faithful Christian, though he puts no trust in good works, nevertheless performs them as the result of his faith. Luther expressed this concept in a paradox: "The Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none . . . [but] . . . the Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all."

John Calvin, who was barely 27 when he sent to the printer his famous Institutes in 1535. But, says McNeill, he never substantially altered his doctrine thereafter. An ardent humanist before what he called his "sudden conversion" to Protestantism, he carried his love of truth for its own sake over into his religious teaching: "If we hold that the Spirit of God is the one fountain of truth, we shall neither reject nor despise the truth itself, wherever it appears, unless we wish to be contemptuous of the Spirit of God." Of his central doctrinal position he wrote: "Predestination we call the eternal decree of God by which He has determined with Himself what He would have to become of every man. For they are not all created in an equal condition; but eternal life is foreordained for some and eternal damnation for others."

Richard Hooker, whose name few modern laymen recognize. Author McNeill calls Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity "the crowning literary expression of the English Reformation. . . ." McNeill credits 16th Century Theologian Hooker with being the "primary inspirer" of the rationalistic approach to theology, whose views on church government might well be useful to the present-day church-unity movement: "It is far from impossible that the future reunion of the churches of the Reformation . . " will follow the lines of Hooker's broad-church episcopal theory. . . .But even if he should fail to win us to agreement with him, the reading of his pages cannot fail to put us in a frame of mind in which we shall be more disposed to agree with one another."

John Bunyan, whose great work is as famed as Richard Hooker's is obscure. The zealous tinker, who won his youthful struggle against the sins of swearing, Sunday afternoon games and dancing, spent twelve years in the filth and squalor of Bedford jail for refusing to stop his "unlicensed preaching." But it was probably during a second, briefer imprisonment, in 1675, that he "fell suddenly into an allegory" and produced his well-known work, Pilgrim's Progress.

William Law (1686-1761), who wrote his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life largely for the guidance of those who are "free from the necessity of labor or employments." The son of a British grocer, he managed to live most of his life among the well-to-do, whom he naively regarded as a "great part of the world." But his spiritual teaching was no less exacting for all that. "Hold this therefore as a certain truth," he once wrote, "that the heresy of heresies is a worldly spirit." The Serious Call, says McNeill, has been criticized for its "one-sided emphasis on good works" and "lack of stress on Scripture." But it influenced many. No less a critic than Dr. Samuel Johnson called it "the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language."

John Wesley, the sturdy little founder of Methodism, who began "field preaching" in the open air to whatever plain folk would listen. He wrote in his Journal: "I look upon all the world as my parish...." By 1791 he had traveled some 250,000 miles, most of it on horseback over miserable roads, often braving angry mobs, to "preach the Gospel to the poor." Wesley's Journal, sixth of the writings selected by Professor McNeill, is a detailed and vivid record of the rough, violent, unequal world which was 18th Century England to all but the privileged few. It is also, says Author McNeill, "the book of a saint, whose devotion was not the less complete for lack of protracted contemplation. He was often in prayer; but the impression conveyed by this record is that of a sustained spiritual exhilaration in ceaseless activity!"

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