1. Reformation and Renewal. The idea of reforma-
tion looms largest and is most persistently recurrent
in Christian thought, but it is a variant of more general
renewal ideologies and has antecedents in pre-Christian
literature, especially Greco-Roman, and even in pre-
literate religious belief. Reformation must be distin-
guished from other types of renewal conceptions which
were more prominent in the pre-Christian era and
occurred sporadically also in later times. Gerhart
Ladner, distinguished authority on the idea of reform
in patristic thought, categorizes the more significant
renewal ideas to be distinguished from reformation and
reform as the (a) cosmological, (b) vitalistic, (c)
millenarian, and (d) conversion ideologies (Ladner,
1959).
(a) Cosmological renewal ideas are very closely re-
lated to and derived from the cyclical patterns of
diurnal and seasonal change and the life, death, and
procreative pattern of organic beings. The myth of the
eternal return reenacted in primitive religious rites and
reflected in early folklore and mythology was derived
from the beliefs in antiquity about the perpetual
cyclical recurrence of identical or at least very similar
situations, persons, and occurrences. The archaic men-
tality sought to negate the inexorable passage of time
and the inevitable corrosion and destruction which
accompanies it by positing a theory of new beginnings.
All archaic and traditional societies seem to have felt
the need for a periodical regeneration of the cosmos
lest entropy reduce all to a state of equilibrium and
usher in the stillness of death (Eliade, 1965). Examples
in classical culture are plentiful, such as the Stoic
doctrine of cosmic destruction and renewal, Hesiod's
myth of the Golden Age at the beginning of time, or
the Platonic cyclical correspondences and the Neo-
Pythagorean notion of a new world year introducing
cosmic renewal. This recurrence idea strikingly
symbolized by New Year celebrations, which in its most
radical form assumed the eternal cyclical and numeri-
cally repetitive renewal of the cosmos and with this
the renewal of humanity, could not be essentially
harmonized with the Christian view of history. It was
cyclical rather than linear, and deterministic rather
than taking into account man's freedom and the mean-
ing of his actions in history.
(b) The vitalistic renewal ideas are related generi-
cally to the human life processes of procreation and
growth. Thus the ideas of renaissance or rebirth and
of upward evolutionary development in social or
cultural history are by analogy based upon these
processes of life. The cosmological and vitalistic re-
newal ideas did at times fuse with each other and
combined with yet a third set of ideas.
(c) The millenarian renewal ideas were utopian and
messianic, looking forward to a period of perfection.
The millenarian expectations were derived from the
eschatological hopes raised by the New Testament
references to the thousand-year reign of Christ and the
saints at the end of time and were related to certain
apocalyptic notions expressed in the Old Testament
prophets (especially Daniel) and developed further in
the intertestamental period and expressed in the
Apocrypha. The millenarian hope anticipates a perfect
kingdom, in contrast to ideas of reformation which
were historically relative rather than absolute, and of
limited objective rather than perfectionist in goal.
(d) Within the Christian tradition the idea of spirit-
ual renewal through baptism, which is a “washing of
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost,” is
related to personal rebirth and a beginning of the
sanctified life. But while a personal reformation with
implications for social improvement is associated with
the regeneration in Baptism, it is a product and is not
identical with the spiritual rebirth itself, given the
divine initiative in the Sacrament.
Various renewal ideologies, because of their deter-
ministic and cyclical nature, proved to be incompatible
with the Judeo-Christian conception of time and his-
tory moving in a linear and irrepeatable direction and
with the assumptions about man's genuine, if limited,
freedom to make history. Yet, at times certain aspects
of renewal ideology were adapted to and fused with
reformation ideas. The idea of reformation held up a
picture drawn from the past of the goal to be achieved
and called for a return to a better condition once
known by man. But it also presupposed that if man's
intentions and will were properly applied, man could
make progress in reforming himself, the Church, and
society in at least a limited but real way.
