Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Sunday, August 20, 2006 4:47:18 PM
Escape from Reason – part 8
Reformation, Renaissance and morals
There are many practical results of the differences between Renaissance and Reformation thought. For example, the Renaissance set women free. So did the Reformation, but with a great difference. The women of the Renaissance in Italy were free, but at the great cost of general immorality.
Why was this? It goes back to the then current view of nature and grace. These things are never merely theoretical, because men act the way they think. In the upper storey there were the lyric poets who wrote of ideal love. Then below in the lower storey there were the novelists and the comic poets who wrote of sensuality. There was a flood of pornographic books.
This element of the Renaissance period did not stop with the sensual materials, but worked out into the way men lived their lives. The autonomous man found himself in a duality. He would engage in the sensual with one woman and marry another to bear his children and cook his meals. The autonomous elements flowed over into the whole structure of Renaissance life.
In contrast, the Reformation set women free because the Bible elevates women as co-heirs with men to the grace of life. They have different roles in the family and in the church, but in the area of their state before God and in redemption there is no distinction between men and women. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The whole man
In the Reformation view of man the soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead tells us that God loves the whole man. The Bible therefore opposes the Platonic view which makes the soul more important than the body. The Biblical view also opposes the humanistic position where the body and autonomous mind of man become more important, and grace is reduced to the unimportant.
The Biblical position, rediscovered at the Reformation, says that neither the Platonic view nor the humanistic view will do. First, God made the whole man, and He is interested in the whole man. Second, when the historic space-time Fall took place, it affected the whole man. Third, on the basis of Christ’s person and work on the cross, and having the knowledge that we possess in the revelation of the Scriptures, there is redemption for the whole man.
The great hope of the Christian is that the whole man will enjoy the full benefits of redemption in a resurrected body free from the state of sin. Paul says in Romans 6 that even in the present life we are to have a substantial reality of the redemption of the whole man. This is to be on the basis of the shed blood of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit by faith. Even though it will not be perfect in this life, there is the real lordship of Christ over the whole man.
This is the Reformers understanding of the Scriptures that Christ is equally Lord of nature and grace. There is nothing autonomous, nothing apart from the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures. God made the whole man and is interested in the whole man and has promised to redeem the whole man. The result is a unity of thought. Thus at the same time as the birth of modern man in the Renaissance there was the Reformation’s answer to his dilemma. In contrast, the dualism in Renaissance man has brought forth the modern forms of Humanism, with modern man’s sorrows.