In Reformation scholarship today it is common to recognize two types of reformation emanating from the Sixteenth Century: “Magisterial” and “Radical.” Though there are many helpful distinctions and turns of historical development in this classification scheme which we cannot go into here, generally speaking, Magisterial reformation seeks to maintain an existing Faith while cleansing it of gross errors. By contrast, generally speaking, Radical reformation seeks to tear down an existing Faith and restart it from scratch.
Reformation scholarship today generally refers to Reformers such as Luther and Calvin as “Magisterial,” and contrasts them with “Radicals” such as the several Anabaptist groups, the Zwickau prophets, and anti-Trinitarian heretics like Michael Servetus. There are two reasons for this classification scheme. First, the Magisterial reformers tended to be supported by the civil authorities, or the magistrates. Second, they emphasized the authority of official teachers (magisters, in Latin). By contrast, the Radical reformers deliberately stood outside of the civil authorities, and very often emphasized the individual common man as the authority for his own religion.
The Magisterial reformers were far more appreciative of the Christian past than the radicals. Luther in particular believed that the Church had not seriously gone off the rails until the time of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085)–a thousand years after Christ–and that the grossest of errors were directly related to deep corruption in the papal system which had begun to act parasitically on the Church. The Radicals, by contrast, often believed that the Church went seriously off the rails very early, perhaps as early as the second or third century, and that errors on everything from the approach to Scripture to basic Christian praxis had been multiplying like rabbits, unchecked, for twelve or thirteen centuries.
Thus, for Magisterials error crept in far slower than for the Radicals, and the Magisterial solutions, while dramatic, were not as drastic as the Radical ones. All the Magisterials, for instance, retained infant baptism, a high view of the institutional Church, and a healthy respect for good traditions. Luther himself, though purging it of “Romish” accretions, retained the ceremony of the Mass. Speaking of the institutional Church, Calvin claimed that to go against her decrees was to commit treason against Christ. The Radicals could stand none of this, and sought in every way they could to strip the inheritance of the ages down to the ground and rebuild it all entirely from scratch.
With the foregoing discussion in mind, let us look at the Radical vision of reform in more detail. Recently, one adherent of that vision wrote:
Error can creep in during a single generation (Jude 4). If this could happen when the apostles were still on the scene, then “casting away” errors when they creep in is absolutely necessary in every generation of the church to prevent those errors from growing into something that is then held by subsequent generations of the church as some “great tradition.” That is the precedent set for us in the OT via the prophets, and it is just what we are commanded to do by both Jesus and the NT apostles.
Let us examine this view of error and the solution it proposes, which it calls by the time-honored name “reform.” The English word “radical” comes from the Latin word radix, or “root.” Accordingly, the Radical vision of reform always seeks to return to the root of the matter, to strip away all growths beyond the root, for all growths beyond the root are by their very nature extraneous to the root and subversive of its pristine simplicity. Thus it is seen that for this view there is almost a one-to-one correspondence between “growths” and “error.”
Such a program is biblically untenable. The Bible is full of plant and growth metaphors, and they are very often metaphors for the life of faith and the progress of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, man’s task in the world as given by God in Genesis 2 is to cultivate the earth—that is, to bring things out of their primitive state and develop their innate potential. There is no biblical mandate for always remaining in—much less always seeking to return to—the primitive state. On the contrary, the primitive state is immature and is something to be surpassed, not endlessly cherished and mimicked. It requires careful, attentive gardening to develop its potential, and the response to problems arising in the growth is not to attempt to return to the initial, undeveloped state. Such a thing can no more be done, in fact, be than a man can be regenerated by returning to his mother’s womb (Jn. 3:4).
The purpose of a seed falling into the ground and dying (Jn. 12:24) is so that a mature plant can grow up into the world—so that fruit can be produced. This truth is hardly compatible with a method that seeks always to strip away growths and return to the root on the grounds that the root is “pure” and the growths “impure.” A root taken all by itself bears no fruit; consequently, to attempt to return a fruit-bearing tree to its root condition (and keep it there!) would be to return to immaturity, to passivity, to sterility. Indeed, to borrow from another biblical metaphor, the servant who buries the talent in the ground on the pretext of preserving it in its pure state for the master’s return (Mt. 25:14-30) is condemned, not praised, for his radicalism. The perceived virtue of always remaining at (or, once “error” has arisen, always returning to) the root condition, the primitive state, is not a biblical one. The way back to Eden is barred (Gen. 3:24); our destination is a redeemed, renewed heavens and earth, not the original, unfallen one (2 Pet. 3:13).
Of course, in the fallen world which is in the process of being redeemed, there is the matter of weeding. The Radical reform program might avoid some of its usual rhetorical offensiveness by presenting its ideas as just a means of weeding the garden, of cutting out parasitical growths that actually damage and not help the healthy plants. To be charitable to the Radical program, this does seem to be its intent. For instance, the constant appeal to Christ’s condemnations of Jewish “traditions” which “make the Word of God of none effect” (Matt. 15:3) is surely indicative of a noble, biblical desire to hold fast to the faith once for all delivered (Jude 3).
Nevertheless, is there not a vast difference between weeding the garden (helping it to thrive) and defoliating it (preventing it from thriving)? The history of Radical reforming movements more easily lends itself to the defoliation metaphor than to the weeding one. Some Anabaptist groups dumped everything that had been handed down to them from previous generations and reformulated the Faith from scratch on the basis (they claimed) of “the Bible Alone.” Rationalists such as Michael Servetus eliminated the doctrine of the Trinity and sought a Faith that was so pure it was no longer even Christian. Centuries later, groups from the Campbellites to the Mormons severed themselves from all existing churches on the pretext that they were all “corrupt.” Their answer to the “corruption”? Restarting the Faith from scratch, in its pristine, pure, root form (as they, unaccountable to anyone outside of their own generation, understood that).
Parallel groups can be found in abundance today, not only in backward Fundamentalist sects but in many Evangelical groups as well. The citation above, from a major Evangelical advocate of the Radical program, reveals a concepts of “reform” more akin to defoliation than weeding. For all the appeals to Christ and the Apostles VS. “tradition,” the polemic against “tradition” seems often shallow and forced because of the assumption that “tradition” is all of a piece and always to be suspected of trying to sneak in while no one is looking and “make the Word of God of none effect.”
In reality, “tradition” in the New Testament is not quite so simple an affair. Sometimes it is something added to what has been written, something done in contradiction to the written Word by people who nevertheless represent the written Word correctly and who are to be obeyed on that score (Mt. 23:2). Other times “tradition” seems to be verbal teaching purporting to give the sense of the written Word but actually entirely distortive of it (Mark 7:13). Still other times Christ Himself enjoins actions which appear to be contradictory to the written Word, but which actually correctly give the sense of it, even apart from its “plain” meaning (Mt. 12:1-8). “Tradition” is not automatically a suspect category.
In other words, Christ did not command His followers to spend their lives frantically looking for creeping error and always trying to restore things to an original, pristine, undeveloped condition so that said errors would not become a “great tradition” that, just because it is a “great tradition,” makes Scripture of none effect. On the contrary, Christ did not command suspicion of tradition as a mere category of thought and life. Whatever one may think of the content of Paul’s “traditions” in 2 Thess. 2:15, the fact that he positively speaks of things handed down and enjoins obedience to them runs contrary to the Radical’s ingrained habit of instantly suspecting anything which he himself does not see when he “compares it with Scripture.” Indeed, it may be that this entire way of thinking is itself a “great tradition” and an instance of an error that has crept in and failed to be recognized by those who most deeply believe themselves qualified and able to recognize such.
In conclusion, then, the Radical manifesto cited above is untrue to the Scriptures. Watching out for error does not automatically entail defoliating the plant of “tradition.” There is more going on in the New Testament polemic against bad traditions than the defoliation metaphor can handle. This is the fundamental problem with the radical mode of reform. Digging ruthlessly for the root it carelessly uproots the fruit. Nobly seeking reformation it ignobly produces deformation. Chasing hard after purity, it at last grasps only sterility.
