Mark Noll with Carolyn Nystrom raised a bit of a kerfuffle some years back with a book that explored the ways that the cause of Protestantism has declined in the face of fewer and fewer differences among evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Yesterday, I learned that scholars who study the Reformation at colleges, universities, and seminaries also worry that Reformation studies are on the decline.
The occasion was a pleasant seminar sponsored by the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, which brought together scholars from the region to discuss the prospects for Reformation studies and to become better acquainted. No matter how much I may lament the loss of the CRC from the ranks of militantly Reformed Protestants, I continue to be impressed by the scholarly resources the denomination and its constituency are willing to sponsor. The Meeter Center provides scholarships and stipends for scholars and studentds access to their wonderful holdings and collection. A lot of “evangelical” colleges may talk about the life of the mind, but Calvin does embody it in some important ways.
Be that as it may, the mood was generally despondent yesterday as professors and graduate students pined for a day when history and religion departments regularly designated one slot for a historian of the Reformation. Now, Reformation scholars cannot be certain that if they leave or retire the department and administration will not appoint someone to study East Asia or depictions of animals in movies from the 1920s. One comment did put this problem in perspective. As the history and culture of the West declined as a topic that gave coherence to the humanities and social sciences — to be replaced by world history — the import of the Reformation became less obvious. At the same time, at schools like Hillsdale College where a course on Western Heritage is still required of all students, undergraduates have more of an appetite for studying the Reformation. Some are even taking a seminar on Calvin’s Institutes this semester.
I had trouble but I did avoid the temptation yesterday to promote a book I wrote over a decade ago about the place of religion in American higher education. This books goes some way in explaining the difficulties today’s Reformation historians face. Rather than simply blaming the status of Reformation studies on secularization or multi-culturalism, just as significant was the way by which religion itself became an academic discipline. It did so in the United States at a time when the nation was in the early stages of a Cold War and when recovering the religious and cultural roots of the West seemed to be much more important. It didn’t hurt that mainline Protestants were ready with scholars trained at university divinity schools to staff the new departments. Here is an excerpt from the book (self-promotion alert!):
. . . the teaching and study of religion emerged from the efforts of mainstream Protestant ministers and educators who wanted to retain a religious influence in American higher education. In the first phase of those efforts, from roughly 1900 to 1935, Protestants worked mainly through such extracurricular agencies as the Student Volunteer Movement, the YMCA, and campus chaplains. They also saw that courses in religion, especially the Bible, would be crucial to gaining academic credibility. Consequently, the churches founded Bible chairs at the same time that individuals independent of the churches Protestant set up agencies and schools of religion that would teach students what they needed to know about the Bible and Christianity. This instruction was designed to insure religious literacy and to provide spiritual guidance to the sons and daughters of the church.
In the second phase of religious studies, from 1935 to 1965, a variety of circumstances made Protestant efforts more successful. America’s involvement in international politics, both in World War II and the Cold War, underscored the need for understanding and preserving Western culture at the nation’s colleges and universities. No longer did scientific and technological developments hold the promise they had during the first fifty years of the research university’s dominance of American higher education. Instead, through a renewed interest in liberal or general education the humanities recovered a certain measure of importance in the academy and the culture more generally. Religious studies fit well with the mood propelling the humanities’ resurgence. Not only was Christianity important to European history and likewise Protestantism to the development of the United States, but many educators regarded religion as an important ingredient in the West’s stand for liberal democracy against the tyranny of fascism on the right and communism on the left. The recognition of religion’s importance gave Protestants significant leverage in establishing programs and departments that taught the Bible, theology, and church history, all with the understanding that such instruction contributed to the well-being of students and American society, and fit with the university’s mission of preserving Western civilization.
In the most recent period, after 1965, religion faculty and administrators discovered that the older spiritual and cultural reasons for teaching and studying religion were inadequate in a climate where America’s religious and political ideals were, to put it mildly, contested. . . . Once the close fit between Protestantism and liberal democracy became debatable, religious studies had to find another rationale, one more academic and less dependent on the mainline Protestant churches or the political and economic order that they supported. Religion professors were no longer able to count on the cache of Western civilization, affinities to the humanities or the prestige of the Protestant establishment.
If scholars are worried about the future of Reformation studies just as conservative Protestants are worried about evangelicals’ declining allegiance to the Reformation, perhaps the reason is that both the academy and churches are suffering the side effects of a culture that in the name of tolerance, equality, and open markets has lost its bearings and does not know or care about its heritage.
Old Life 
Mark Noll and Stan Hauerwas tell us
the Reformation is not needed anymore
was never needed, was sin
only sectarians deny that each atom of the bread
contains God completely,
and now we know it makes no damn difference
what sectarians think, it happens
because history tells us, the priests, Christendom
all signs that the narrative works, has worked, will work
only the establishment narrative stands between us
and the chaos of secularism
if you want to avoid apocalypse, you must become
at least Anglican
nostalgia for before the Reformation
assures us continuity, and sacramental liminality
no there and no then
And we will tell you sectarians one more time
there is only one church, the church, our church
for all times and all places.
and protestants are atheists posing as
Christians
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I guess some of the Roman Catholic trained historians are going to have to find jobs in seminaries.
http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=301&cur_iss=Y
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I teach at a PAC12 (nee 10) university and to the extent it reflects trends, one contributor to the decline in support is general reorganization of departments built around academic disciplines into “centers” (they go by other names, too) which are multi-disciplinary collections of “programs” built around funding sources. Sociology disappears as a department; geography disappears. History disappears. And religion disappears (or is disappearing) and in its place centers for the study of world culture, conflict and resolution (for example). It is much easier to get a funding organization to support work in conflict resolution than in religion, which may sound sectarian to some and almost akin to funding work in just “conflict.” As universities reorganize themselves around generating funding, charging higher fees, and attracting larger audiences, the old academic structure is disappearing and smaller bits of it — like Reformation studies — will likely have to wait until the dust settles to figure out where they can best fit back in. [One of the many unique aspects of Hillsdale is its financial situation — the college itself is to some extent built around funding sources. It isn’t representative of some of the types of organizational changes that many large universities, both public and private, are being forced to consider these days.]
A trend that is potentially very positive is the rise of “customized learning” (a Sunday NYT article in December of last year extolled this) via virtual programs. Every major university has been making large investments in this area over the past decade. Once the infrastructure is fully developed and the means of production made cheaper, this may prove to be a greater contributor to allowing scholars and students to have access to each other, to instruction and materials, and for collaboration. As virtual education continues to evolve, it is possible the end results will be broader access and engagement than before; not the same, of course, but not gone, either. I pray it will be so.
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“Mark Noll and Stan Hauerwas tell us the Reformation is not needed anymore”
Actually, they do nothing of the sort. Noll at least has mainly highlighted the extent to which evangelicals have become unaware of their Reformation heritage – rather than the ‘Reformation never being needed’ he’s merely shown that increasingly for large swathes of evangelicals the Reformation might have never happened.
As CB alludes to above, as higher education has become more necessary and less useful, the focus of universities has shifted into that of vocational training. There are all sorts of areas under threat, there are subdisciplines in ever department that aren’t in vogue any longer purely because of the be published or be damned mentality adopted by the bodies in which the yare in.
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Hauerwas: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/stanley-hauerwas-on-reformation-sunday/
Carl Trueman on Noll’s book: “The major problem with the book, and one which significantly skews some of the analysis, is the central place it accords to the relationship between Catholicism and evangelicalism. Thus, at the outset, we have an institutional church, with clearly defined authority structures, creeds, and an identifiable history – in other words, a self-conscious identity – being discussed in relation to a movement which lacks all of these things and is really only unified by a somewhat nebulous and ill-defined field of family resemblances which have, over the years, become increasingly vague. This is at its most obvious, and acute, in the ECT discussions. In these, while both groups of participants were arguably self-appointed, the Catholics did at least stand as representatives of a church and knew for whom and for what they stood; whom exactly were the evangelicals representing? From their very inception, therefore, the ECT discussions were built upon an important category mistake: Catholics came to the table committed by church affiliation to a clear set of doctrinal principles; that commitment gave them a place to stand from which they could engage. The evangelicals had no such thing, no place to stand, nowhere from which to engage. This probably goes a long way to explaining the fact that, in terms of doctrinal agreement, the discussions appeared to achieve so much but actually did little more than demonstrate the “mere Christianity” perspective to which an eclectic, parachurch movement like evangelicalism inevitably tends; and thus they exposed the inability of such a movement to be truly distinctive when faced with a coherent, comprehensive, and self-conscious church body.”
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Darryl:
An exceedingly painful question in the title of your blogpost. You put is so…painfully. Anquishingly so.
From deep with the Anglican exile, the Babylonian exile, on the Tigris-Euphrates River, the preponderance of evidence (e.g. a civil v. criminal case) suggests a very strong affirmative. This represents 30 years of exposure in varied formats to Anglicanism, actually about 32 years, come to think of it. Of course there are pockets where this question is alive, but not many in the US.
I suspect the Confessional Lutherans haven’t foregone Reformation studies. LCMS and WELS are pretty Confessional.
I do wonder, however, about the Rev. Mr. Not. Dr. Frame’s recent work on “Escondido Theology?” How does he advance Reformation studies? After dissing Dr. Scott Clark rather peremptorialy and unconvincingly, while affirming Scott’s historical studies, one is left with many questions. As a former student, I just don’t remember John being terrible Confessional or catechetical. But alas, maybe he matured in later years.
But alas, the anguish of the losses exist for Calvinistic Anglicans, at least in the US.
Never mind the non-Confessional uber-evangelicals, e.g. T4G, SGM, ACE, Ligonier Baptyerians, etc. I don’t pay em’ much mind, frankly, since they don’t much advance Reformation studies or confessions, Creeds or good liturgies, insofar as this scribe sees.
My perspective is severely limited. The local man-cave and bat-cave and Anglicanism. Darryl, your question is painful.
Donald Philip Veitch
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This Stanley Hauerwas dude seems well dodgy. I’m glad he’s not in my denomination. I like unity in my church!
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And as we all know: unity = uniformity.
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Carl Trueman, Reformation 21
Empirical fact: The Papacy as an authoritative institution was not there in the early centuries.
Never mind. Put together a doctrine of development whereby Christians – or at least some of them, those of whom we choose to approve in retrospect on the grounds we agree with what they say – eventually come to see the Pope as uniquely authoritative.
Empirical fact: The Papacy was corrupt in the later Middle Ages, building its power and status on political antics, forged documents and other similar scams.
Ignore it, excuse it as a momentary aberration and perhaps, if pressed, even offer a quick apology. Then move swiftly on to assure everyone it is all sorted out now and start talking about John Paul II or Benedict XVI. Whatever you do, there is no need to allow this fact to have any significance for how one understands the theory of papal power in the abstract or in the present.
Empirical fact: The Papacy was in such a mess at the beginning of the fifteenth century that it needed a council to decide who of the multiple claimants to Peter’s seat was the legitimate pope.
Again, this was merely a momentary aberration but it has no significance for the understanding of papal authority. After all, it was so long ago and so far away.
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This is scary stuff! Unfortunately, it’s all too real. A couple of weeks ago I overheard a conversation between an older man and a young student just prior to the start of a Sunday AM class. The young fellow had asked the elder one about the congregation’s use of the word “catholic” in Apostle’s Creed, the term meaning “universal.” The older one, describing himself as a former Roman catholic, told the younger one that the Papists do not really consider the term applicable only to their system of beliefs and that they acknowledge the existence of true believers in other denominations around the world.
I had to pull the young fellow aside after class and explain the error of what he had been told – the Augsburg Confession (he’d never heard of it), the Reformation in general (he was vaguely familiar with it), the Council of Trent and the Counter-reformation (he’d never heard about that, either) during which the Papists officially declared their system of beliefs to be the ONLY true Christian church, hijacked the term “catholic” for their hierarchical system ONLY, and declared anathemas (he’d never heard of that term, either) on all forms of protestantism.
To the best of my knowledge neither Vatican II, nor John Paul II, – nor Benedict XVI have ever rescinded anything declared at the Council of Trent, not to mention anything put into print in either ECT 1 or 2.
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Gee, I wonder if this trend might not also be connected to the increasing popularity of 2K thinking which essentially treats Christianity as just another religion to be observed on Sunday rather than as a way of life — foreign to the non-heavenly citizens of this temporal world — for every day of the week.
No, I must be an anti-secularist.
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Don, wrong again. It is the neo-Cal’s and radical orthodox who have trouble defending the importance of studying Europe and its culture (including its outworkings in N. America). Because the NT says there is neither Jew nor Greek, most evangelical colleges, interested in integrating faith and learning, are squeamish about the West. If you take the book of nature seriously, and don’t simply give it a spiritual gloss, you have a better case for explaining the West’s value and the import of the Reformation.
But nice shot.
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George:
One aside re: the Council of Trent and JP2. I lived in Naples, IT in the build-up to the close of the millenium. Perhaps some will recall the hoopla about the Y2K bug. But, more to the point, JP2 explicitly and repeatedly reaffirmed the Council of Trent several times and offered “plenary indulgences” to those making the pilgrimmage to Rome in 2000. JP2 held a ceremony in Milano, IT in support and for the advance of Trent. Of course, the Bavarian German Shepherd, that well-read scholar and the Head of the Congregatio Fidei, that sponsor of the 1994 “Catechism,” Cardinal Joe Ratzinger was ever in the background. Again, Trent was repeatedly and publicly affirmed.
Rome is Confessional.
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