One could say (given all that has been argued here) that I might be a prime candidate for swimming the Tiber (or Crossing the Bosphorus) and I have been forced to acknowledge the weight of such arguments and to a degree I can understand why many have abandoned the Reformation (and especially Evangelicalism) for Rome or Constantinople. But this is folly of an even greater magnitude as Rome and Constantinople are false systems – false and counterfeit manifestations of Christianity. This doesn't mean that every last thing Rome holds to or proclaims is wrong – as even the heirs of the sixteenth century Reformation will acknowledge, though there is little agreement as to what that all means. Those who defect to Rome have already embraced erroneous assumptions and then when the weight of everything is else is factored in – they make the perilous move and thinking they do Christ service, they join with His enemies. Unlike most contemporary Evangelicals, I still argue that Roman Catholicism is antichrist and at least a manifestation or a component of the Whore-Beast imagery of New Testament prophecy.
For my part, as I've written elsewhere, I advocate a new
Reformation and a recasting of the narrative regarding Church History. The
Protestant Reformation was in fact a Second Reformation and one that erred on
many points and in the end represented a kind of Second Constantinian Shift. In
this case it swept up the majority of the dissident groups associated with the
First Reformation – which had emerged centuries earlier. The First Reformation
has some similarities to the Second and I would argue actually had (in most
cases) a more robust view of Sola Scriptura than did the Second. And yet there
are critical differences in terms of not just theology but how theology is
approached and how this translates into everything from ecclesiology to ethics.
The Magisterial or Second Reformation represents (at these
critical points) a combination of innovation and perpetuation. In terms of
soteriology, and in terms of the general embrace of Renaissance Humanism, we
see innovation – and in some cases quite harmful and manifest departures from
Scripture. In terms of perpetuation, we see many of the errors of Rome being
carried forward. Some of the reforms were good but partial – such as in the
realm of ecclesiology.
And please understand I do not say this in some kind of
Fundamentalist mold. I'm not a Baptist in any shape or form and that specific
teaching (craedobaptism) was quite rare in pre-Reformation contexts. If
anything at these points my beliefs and (in many cases) the discernible beliefs
of groups like the Waldenses are actually in some respects closer to Rome than
what we find among today's Evangelical heirs of the Magisterial Reformation.
The issue then was not infant baptism, or a supernaturalist view of the
sacraments (both being Biblical positions perverted by Rome), but a question of
authority and epistemology, an accumulation of syncretistic tradition, and
theological innovation – and yes, ethics. The shift in values and ethics that
came in the wake of Constantine was rejected by groups like the Waldensians and
the Magisterial Reformation did nothing to correct this deviation from
Scripture, but simply perpetuated and built on what Rome had developed. And
where the Magisterial Reformation actually did address these issues – in many
cases it made the issues even worse by over-reacting or opening up the doors to
everything from usury, to new forms of statist Christianity, to sacralizing
bourgeois values and wealth and even legitimizing and encouraging political rebellion.
The barrier to the Apocrypha discussion is not for most
Protestants a real existential question over Scripture. Rather it is connected
to questions of adherence and commitment to the Magisterial Reformation, its
narratives, its truncated view of Sola Scriptura, and its many defective
claims. When I finally realized the Magisterial Reformation wasn't what it
claimed to be, and its leaders were not heroes or even real champions of
Scripture, but mere men, deeply flawed and often in error – I was compelled to
break with this heritage and its narratives. Consequently it opened up the door
to exploring some new questions, this being one of them.
At one point in time back in the 1990's when I still was a
zealot contending for historical Reformed Theology vis-à-vis modern Calvinism
and Evangelicalism, I wrestled with not just the Reformation but the scholastic
epoch of Protestantism and that of the Confessions. I eventually came to reject
what took place during this period and while I've been critical of the
sixteenth century Reformation and no longer have the same affinity for Luther
or the veneration for Calvin that I once possessed, there are still many
encouraging aspects to what took place during this period. I still find it
stirring at times. I am not for a moment suggesting the Magisterial Reformation
or its legacy is of no value. My primary grievance is probably more with the
Confessional heritage and the rationalist re-casting of Protestantism and its
many nineteenth century compromises – the ethos that all but dominates today,
and the one that played an important role in birthing the disease of twentieth
century Evangelicalism.
Paedocommunion also played a role in my own thinking as I
came to that view back in the 1990's as well, and then learned that the
Reformation had embraced Roman categories of thought on this issue – even while
rejecting Rome's actual eucharistic theology. And then to discover that groups
like the Hussites actually revived the Early Church and Medieval practice of
paedocommunion added a layer of interest as well as scrutiny regarding the
Magisterial Reformation's position on these points. I'm not one to worry about
'lining up' with historical figures but for me to line up with Cyprian,
Augustine, and the Hussites on this point carries more weight than sharing the
views of the Reformers.
All of these issues and more played a part in leading me to
ultimately reject much associated with the Magisterial Reformation and to
revisit these points and question these claims. Textual issues and the defective
views of Princeton and twentieth-century Evangelicalism, and now the majority
of those within the Confessionalist sphere, spurred on a great examination of basic
questions concerning the Bible, its authority, and how issues like canon,
transmission, and preservation have played out, as well as how the contemporary
Church has all but written Providence out of consideration. The weight of the
break with the historic text has gnawed at me for years – the notion that suddenly
in the nineteenth century a new and supposedly older text of the New Testament
was discovered and under the new inerrancy/textual reconstruction canons
developed at that time, the historic text was abandoned. That's a problem that
few today seem to understand.
But then I realized there was a similar problem related to
the Old Testament that emerged in the sixteenth century – one that has largely
been misunderstood and thus forgotten. It is noteworthy that the Anabaptists
retained the Apocrypha – in keeping with the First Reformation legacy, even if
on other points they departed from it. Interestingly (maybe ironically) many of
the Anabaptists such as the Amish utilise Luther's German translation which originally
included the Apocrypha – though at this point in time, apart from the Amish,
the Anabaptist community has largely turned away from it.
There are those who will argue – why now? Why generate such
questions at this time and create new division? And once again we're back to
the question of context.
The real question is – why not now? As we see so many things
disintegrating before our eyes and people floundering and landing in what must
be described as dark ideological places, the need for a re-grounding is as
pressing as ever. I'm not suggesting this view is going to gain ground in
Protestant congregations or that those who embrace this way of thinking (and
not just about a question like the Apocrypha) need to go in and stir the pot. I
realize that few if any are going to hear what I'm saying especially on an
issue like this. And more likely, I'll probably lose even more readers, but so
be it.
The road to reform is a long one and as I've often argued,
the story of Church history is one of defeats and dashed hopes – very much in
keeping with Old Testament patterns as we were told to expect. And yet, despite
this, the Truth lives on and we are (even in defeat) more than conquerors.
To briefly summarize my proposed (admittedly revisionist)
narrative that I've been writing about for some time - The First Reformation which
emerged into the historical spotlight during the time of the Gregorian Reform survived
centuries of persecution but was effectively swallowed up by the cultural
upheaval and politicised Christianity that emerged with the Magisterial
Reformation. After centuries of war and decline, a moment of hope emerged in
the nineteenth century with the rise of Free Churches and some of the impulses
within the larger Restorationist movements. This even bled over into the first
decades of the twentieth century with early Fundamentalism's simplistic and yet
zealous attempt at Scriptural fidelity. But the roots were shallow and between
the sweeping changes brought on by the Second Industrial Revolution and what it
did to society, along with the World Wars, and the rise of Communism – the
momentum was lost and in some cases evaporated.
During the second half of the twentieth century these Kingdom
impulses have all but collapsed and the various aforementioned movements have
been swept up into the greater paradigm of what was then described as Neo-Evangelicalism
– when it emerged in the late 1940's. Today it is simply known as
Evangelicalism and this largely pernicious movement represents the same syncretist
and worldly theological cancer that produced Roman Catholicism in the Dark Ages.
It is the same false religion in a different cultural matrix. Today it's in the
context of contemporary techno-industrial liberal and consumerist culture. As
such it looks rather different that what appeared in Late Antiquity and the
synthesis of the Romano-Hellenistic and Germanic cultural matrix that produced
Roman Catholicism. But once probed, the similarities are remarkable.
Evangelicalism teaches a theology, ethos, and ethic of acculturation and
sacralisation. It did not arise ex nihilo but represents a poisonous amalgamation
of extant views within the Protestant spectrum along with significant philosophical
influences that could only have arisen in the context of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This movement has affected the entire spectrum of not just
global Protestantism but even that of Rome and in more recent years the
Anabaptist sphere. The handful of groups that entered the twentieth century
still committed to Biblicism in some form and the kind of antithesis and
separatism taught in the New Testament, have been effectively swallowed up by
the movement and as such it represents a kind of tragic and highly destructive Third
Constantinian Shift.
There is very little witness in the world right now to the
kind of Christianity represented by the Ante-Nicene or Early Church and the
First Reformation. Such Kingdom Christianity has been all but eliminated and
thus I write – not in the hope of seeing change in my lifetime but with the
desire that these ideas can be kept alive and that if and when they bear fruit
in a generation to come, a real Reformation can occur, rather than future
believers simply picking up and re-hashing some new permutation of the errors
made by the Magisterial Reformers or God forbid – the Evangelical movement of
the twentieth century. And along with many other points, the nature of
Scripture needs to be once more revisited – we need to turn once again to historical
and theological questions concerning text and canon which have been muddied and
obfuscated over the centuries. The Bible is a miraculously produced and
preserved supernatural collection of inspired writings that belong to the
Church and not the academy. Few today can agree with that statement – if
they're being honest. Even fewer will then grant the New Testament the place of
authority as the active, decisive and final canonical revelation for this age.
It's a lonely time to be sure but I take comfort knowing that
past Christians have found themselves in similar and worse circumstances in
other periods. Just as then, there are still viable Churches out there – though
deeply flawed and in almost every case moving in a less than positive and
Scriptural direction. The one congregation I found in the last twenty years
that (though flawed to be sure) gave me reason to hope and was actually moving
in a positive direction was quickly broken in just a short time and succumbed
to the poisons of the Christian Right and the heresy of Christo-Trumpism. It
was both sad and startling and yet reminded me of the spiritual warfare that is
taking place all around us.
My concluding statements have strayed from the direct
question of the Apocrypha but there's a context for this discussion – the
reasons why I argue this point, and why I bring it up now. As such, I wish to
place it in the context of my larger reasons for writing about such issues. I doubt many have been convinced by the arguments presented here but hopefully the position has at least garnered some respect and will not be immediately dismissed as baseless or heterodox. I believe few people have properly wrestled with these questions. I know I hadn't. If I have spurred some curiosity, thought, and reflection, then I am content.