There are some parts of the world that you simply never expect to see. A number of years after the Iron Curtain fell, my parents took me out of faculty to go to Russia. My dad was taking pastoral study leave and was involved within the missionary outreach foundation of our denomination.
Our first days were spent in Moscow, an austere but extraordinary city that was home to soldiers, beggars, and the Bolshoi Ballet. Our overnight sleeper train from Moscow to St. Petersburg required bodyguards to guard our travel group from train robberies. Tourism was latest, so we were a few of the first Americans to set foot within the Kremlin and the Hermitage Museum. Statues memorializing past regimes had been toppled and moved. Tour guides were still checking out the complexities of explaining their past in a fast-changing and sensitive present. We felt exhilarated (and overwhelmed) by the food, the language, and the customs, but most of all, we were drawn to the churches.
Stepping into St. Basil’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg’s Red Square was a lesson in Christian unity and variety. We three American Presbyterians were surrounded by the familiar and the strange. For the primary time, we saw an iconostasis—a screen of icons that divides the sanctuary from the nave—and encountered the stories of Christian faith, suffering, and wonder depicted there. Later within the trip, a visit with an embattled Protestant missionary added layers to my young adult perspective on faith. Through these and other experiences, the Eastern Orthodox branch of the church was making itself known to me in the guts of the “Third Rome,” a moniker used to indicate Moscow because the heir of Byzantium (or Eastern Orthodox) Christianity. I started to understand that the church was much greater and much more complex than I knew.
These years later as a scholar, I see now greater than ever how the interconnections of the worldwide body are historical, present, and eschatological all of sudden.
The Reformation, particularly, gives me a place to begin. When the Reformers checked out the Bible, not only did they see the Word of God; they saw the worldwide church. They saw the familial bond that stretches across time, space, and culture. Some Christians minimize the Protestant Reformation based on their perception that Reformers blazed their very own trail without regard for the worldwide church or church tradition. But primary sources offer a distinct story. The Reformers didn’t view their work in isolation from historical and even contemporary global Christianity. They saw the broader church as right at the guts of their efforts. In fact, one among the principal inspirations for the Reformation movement got here from somewhere far faraway from Geneva and other centers of Protestant thought: the Ethiopian church.
Orthodox Christianity and the Protestant Reformation
As the Protestant Reformation began to unfold, global Christianity was grappling with an unprecedented crisis. At the onset of the sixteenth century, a little bit over 90 percent of the world’s Christians were living in Western and Eastern Europe (including Russia). Up until that time, Christianity had thrived as a tricontinental faith, flourishing in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The movement of Christianity’s center of gravity from the East to the West was probably the most troubling consequences of the rise of Islam and the lack of Constantinople (1453).
In 1526, because the conquest continued, Eastern European rulers lost a critical battle to the Ottoman Empire at Mohács. The defeat of King Ludwig II of Hungary and Bohemia left the path to the gates of Vienna open to Turkish armies, and with that the door to central Europe. Early Modern Europeans were living through a rapid geographical shrinking of Christendom just because the Western Church also began to crack. It shouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that they felt just like the world was ending, and the Turks were God’s apocalyptic agents. Nevertheless, the Eastern branches of the Christian church weren’t removed from Protestant minds.
Protestants engaged with each the Eastern Orthodox tradition and Oriental Orthodox traditions in just a few consistent ways. To Protestants, it mattered immensely that Eastern branches of the church didn’t follow the Catholic practices of preaching purgatory, selling indulgences, or observing petrine supremacy. Luther marveled at how the churches of Armenia, Ethiopia, and India had avoided the private masses that developed within the West since Gregory the Great’s time. Luther also regarded it significant that, before there was a “pope,” there have been the bishops of Ethiopia, Syria, Antioch, and Rome. The Orthodox branches were a link back to a purer, more apostolic era.
The church of Ethiopia, especially, was mentioned amongst early modern Christians. Some scholars have noted that Luther mentions Ethiopia a minimum of 85 times in his written works. (It was a standard though mistaken belief to view Ethiopia as the primary Christian kingdom. That belief was based on a selected reading of Acts 8.) Luther’s esteem only grew after he was visited by Michael the Deacon, an Ethiopian cleric, in 1534. As Daniels explains,
For Luther, the Church of Ethiopia had more fidelity to the Christian tradition. … Thus, the Church in Europe needed to be reformed within the direction of the Church of Ethiopia. Possibly for Luther the Church of Ethiopia was proof that his reform of the Church in Europe had each a biblical and a historical basis.
To Luther, “Ethiopia” symbolized the church, and probably the most valued legacies that the Reformers identified throughout the Ethiopian church was its insistence on maintaining the Bible within the common language.
Emulating Ethiopia
In an effort to remodel the way in which people experienced worship, the Reformers drew inspiration and precedent from the eastern African church and from the primary to the third generations worked diligently to remodel the way in which during which people experienced worship. Imagine going to church in a foreign language, day in and day trip, without ever learning the language. It shouldn’t be a stretch to say that it will have a limited impact in your maturation as a considering Christian. To the Reformers, then, carving out a spot for vernacular language in church worship was essential for hearing and receiving the Gospel. Shifting the language of worship meant transforming liturgy, introducing congregational singing, altering the observance of the sacraments, elevating the sermon, and promoting the reading of Scripture to an oral form. In other words, the Reformation was in some ways a language event, and the worldwide church was right at the middle of that event.
When the Reformers checked out the Bible, they saw the worldwide story of the church represented through languages. They rediscovered Greek and likewise got here to learn Hebrew as step one toward restoring the true gospel. By their very own accounts, the Latin language had change into a Tower of Babel that would only be overcome by translating the entire of Scripture into vernacular languages. The Reformation was a Pentecost moment of their minds, restoring what God had originally intended for a worldwide church. They desired to uncover the muse of Scripture for one principal purpose: pastoral ministry.
We see this considering play out in John Calvin’s commentary on John 19:19–20. There, he gives a theological interpretation for the choice to print Jesus’ name in three different languages: “For it shouldn’t be probable that this was an odd practice,” he writes, “however the Lord showed, by this preparatory arrangement, that the time was now at hand, when the name of his Son must be made known throughout the entire earth.” A multilingual church was in reality the true church.
When the Council of Trent (1545-1563) responded to Protestantism by insisting on the need of the Latin Vulgate in worship—something that might not change until Vatican II—the third-generation Reformer (and successor to John Calvin) Theodore Beza turned to the Eastern branches of the church. There, he found a forceful precedent that was each historical and contemporary.
Beza made his case for vernacular Bibles within the preface to a very powerful French translation of the Bible that was printed in Geneva: the 1588 French Geneva Bible. Its impact on Bibles throughout Europe was tremendous. For Beza, the Bible’s preservation in diverse languages—Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Latin—was a wonderful sign of God’s faithfulness to the church over the centuries. It was material evidence of how God’s power could overcome the machinations of the Devil. Like Luther before him, Beza treated the rediscovery of the unique languages of Scripture as a God-ordained transformation for the church.
None of this was touted as a strategy to disparage the Latin Bible. Beza, in reality, dedicated his entire scholarly profession to revising the Latin translation of the Bible. Rather, the variety of language was an indication of God’s intention to bring salvation to a diversity of individuals. Beza took care to emphasise that each single person was intended to “hear” God’s speech, irrespective of their nationality, condition, sex, or age. With this point, Beza meaningfully stressed the inclusion of ladies and kids, and he cited a litany of support from other church fathers.
Which churches were living this out? For Beza, the Western church needed to take a page out of the practices of the Eastern side of Christianity, particularly in Ethiopia, Greece, and the Levant. They were fulfilling Christ’s command to transmit the Good News, and their example was price emulating.
What did the church of Ethiopia, particularly, must do with the Reformation? According to Beza, quite quite a bit. Ethiopia was a model of what it meant for the church to conserve Scripture’s true purpose as God’s Word for all people. Eastern churches were a part of the apostolic re-rooting that Western Reformers sought.
The Conservation of Scripture
Even today, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church continues to encourage and compel. Some of the nice wonders of our world are surely the church forests of Ethiopia, where faith communities have made a concerted effort to plant and cultivate trees as a part of their congregational space. Orthodox Ethiopian theology and forest conservation are proving to be a life-giving pairing within the midst of Ethiopia’s barren landscape. The green circles of church forests that pepper the Ethiopian landscape are a striking marker of the stewardship commitment of the church in a context stripped by agricultural overdevelopment. In fact, without the intervention of the church, the native trees of Ethiopia could be nearly extinct.
In an analogous way, the Reformers believed that the church within the West had overlooked its calling to conserve Scripture. Their solution was to follow the Ethiopian model and translate the gospel for listeners (as a substitute of readers, given the low percentage of literate people) within the worship lifetime of the church. They knew that was how the church would grow and flourish.
When the Reformers checked out the Bible, they saw the vibrancy and variety of language as a vital vehicle for communicating God’s speech to the church in every single place and times. They saw the unbroken witness of the worldwide church reaching all the way in which back to Christ and to God’s revelation before Christ. For the Reformers, conserving the Bible in common languages was not only a primary mission of the church but in addition a mirrored image of the church itself: one rooted in time and likewise destined for eternity.
Jennifer Powell McNutt is the Franklin S. Dyrness Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, parish associate at First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and co-president of McNuttshell Ministries Inc.
