One of the problems that Protestantism addressed at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the gap between monastic piety and the lives of ordinary Christians. The expectations in the Roman church were for the laity, without the support or environment of a monastic order, to maintain levels of holiness that monks and clergy supposedly embodied. So what Lutherans and Reformed did was to devise a piety for the laity that did not bind them to artificial and unbiblical priestly standards. An important piece of this new lay piety was the doctrine of vocation – the idea that secular work was valuable for serving God.
Later in the sixteenth century came a body of practical divinity that appears at times to micro-manage the life of the ordinary Christian. Folks like Lewis Bayly and William Ames and Richard Baxter wrote guides for holy living (available on line at Calvin College’s ethereal library) that walk lay folk through the ordinary parts of daily life and infuse these activities with religious significance. It is not unlike the efforts of neo-Calvinists, under the banner of world-and-life-views, drenching every thought with sacred purpose.
What experimental Protestants sometimes forget is that Roman Catholics and pietist Lutherans were engaged in similar enterprises at roughly the same time – endeavors to make Christianity practical and to make ordinary life extraordinarily devout. According to Philip Benedict, “the tradition of practical divinity . . . may be seen, as it has been by German historians of spirituality, as simply the Reformed manifestation of a larger phenomenon of these years: a ‘new piety’ illustrated as well by the vogue for Granada and de Sales in Catholic lands and by the publication in 1605 of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity, a staple of Lutheran devotion for centuries to come.†(Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, p. 319)
When you compare these manuals of devotion to biblical teaching on the ordinary life of believers the differences are stunning. Here for instance are the final instructions (ch. 13) to lay folk from the author of Hebrews:
1Keep on loving each other as brothers.
2Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.
3Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
4Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
5Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.”6So we say with confidence,
“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?”7Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
8Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
9Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them.
10We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat.
I submit it is hard to find here (or in similar passages in the New Testament) walking papers for the kind of comprehensive piety or outlook that experimental and neo- Calvinists promote. The authors of Scripture seemed to be content with covering the important parts of faith and practice, and let the laity make the rest up as they went along. (A similar pattern seems to exist in the Old Testament which goes into great detail about religious practices but says almost nothing about how pottery or bread signify the creator of the universe, or how the choice produce bespeaks God’s electing purposes, or how the best practices for managing sewage say something about holiness and profanity – let alone how to think Judaically about math or grammar.)
I will also admit that I like order and instructions for achieving it as much as the next anal person. I understand that some of the instruction for piety and thinking is appealing to people who want to know how to serve God. The motives are indeed usually wholesome. But the question is whether they are necessary (or biblical). If you judge by the New Testament writers, they are willing to allow for great freedom in ordinary life without micro-managing the saints.
Old Life 