7. Reformation in Post-Reformation Times. The
classical Reformation of the sixteenth century made
such a tremendous impact upon the Western mind that
the religious idea of reformation was thereafter con-
sistently conceived in terms derived from it. Two spe-
cial emphases predominated in modern times. The one
was traditional in nature, namely, criticism of abuses
or of indifference within the Church accompanied by
a new call to revive the faith and fervor of the early
Christians and of the classical reformers or founding
fathers of each denomination. The second was the
persistent effort to apply religion to the reformation
of society.
In the second half of the seventeenth century and
into the eighteenth century, Pietism flourished as a
religious movement in Germany, Switzerland, and the
Netherlands. It was reformatory in the sense of making
an earnest, practical application of the abstract stand-
ards of orthodoxy to private life and to Christian com-
munity. When the Enlightenment and a loss of ardor
within the Church of England proved to be corrosive
of personal piety and lively faith, John Wesley's
Methodism served to revive religion in a way not
unlike the manner in which Puritanism in its day had
quickened religious fervor, largely within the structure
of the official Anglican church. The Moravian Brother-
hood served as a link between Pietism and Methodism.
The evangelical revival in the Church of England was
reminiscent of Luther's own reform efforts. Wesley was
a classical reformer late in time.
The Society of Friends with its Spirit-driven move-
ment was analogous to some of the small sects of the
sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century various
members of the Oxford Movement referred to the effort
of the Tractarians to rekindle the flame in Anglicanism
as a “reformation.” In America the Great Awakening
(especially in 1830-31), following the indifference to
religion of the revolutionary war period, was conceived
of as a reformation in the sense of an evangelical
revival. It, too, was influenced by Pietism's stress on
feeling. Charles Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Reli-
gion (1835) was the most powerful theoretical state-
ment of the revival experience.
Within the Roman Catholic communion there have
been two large-scale efforts to renew theology within
this century prior to the second Vatican Council. The
first was the movement known as modernism which
started before the turn of the century and was cut short
by Pope Pius X in 1907. The second came right after
the second World War, the so-called “new theology.”
This theological revival now in progress may well be
more lasting, for it has a broader base throughout the
Church and the seriousness of the Church's situation
in the world is more clearly recognized. In Catholicism
as in Protestantism, the Ecumenical Movement has
been hailed as an important part of the “New Refor-
mation” of the whole Christian church on earth, the
una sancta. The council Vatican II in its “Decree on
Ecumenism” referred “to that continual reformation
of which she [the Church] always has need.”
The application of religion to the reformation of
society was a more characteristic expression of the
Anglo-Saxon world than of continental Christianity. In
England one by-product of the new Methodistic piety
was pressure against slavery, child labor, and other
social ills. The Sunday School, Bible Society, and mis-
sionary movements were effects of religion's power to
reform the world. The wedding of nondogmatic
Christianity with American pragmatism in American
Christianity—e.g., in John Fiske's
Cosmic Evolution—
produced such efforts as the social gospel movement.
Following the lead of such nineteenth-century
theologians as Samuel Harris and Horace Bushnell, who
believed that America had a special destiny and mission
in realizing the kingdom of Christ on earth, the advo-
cates of the social gospel undertook the application
of the “social principles of Jesus” to American urban
and industrial society, de-emphasizing personal justifi-
cation and religious experience of a traditional kind.
Washington Gladden (1836-1918), Josiah Strong
(1847-1916), and, above all, Walter Rauschenbusch
(1861-1918), author of the highly influential lecture
series
A Theology of the Social Gospel (1918), conceived
of the Church's task as the reformation of society
according to the will of God, whose kingdom is one
of peace, justice, and love. The Christian socialist
movement in Europe was a response to similar reform-
ing impulses, although in part apologetic in aim in that
it was offered as an alternative to Marxist materialism.
In the late nineteenth century American Christianity
joined hands with Europe in pressing ahead with a
worldwide program. John R. Mott, founder of the
World's Student Christian Federation (1895), called for
the “evangelization of the world in this generation”
and offered to mankind Protestant Christianity and
democracy as two sides of the same coin. In the
twentieth century churchmen have turned to solving
problems of a social nature with energy, pressing for
involvement in issues of peace, civil rights, race rela-
tions, education, and income for the underprivileged,
urban renewal, farm labor, and a host of similar issues.
In the words of the American theologian Robert
McAfee Brown, the Reformation of the sixteenth cen-
tury consisted of the rediscovery of the Church, while
the Reformation of the twentieth century centers in
the rediscovery of the world.
While history shows that the content of the religious
idea of reformation has through the ages been subjected
to varying modalities, certain elements have been
recurrent, if not constant. For reformation in Western
thought has indeed stressed man's intentional efforts,
multiple, repeated, and variegated, to reassert good old
values and by personal regeneration and individual
reform as well as by the restoration and improvement
of community life in the Church and the world to lift
man above low levels to which he has periodically
fallen. If one were to take a bold look at the whole
sweep of history, one might venture to conclude that
in the early centuries of the Christian era renewal
elements were very strong in combination with ideas
of personal reformation; that in the medieval and Ref-
ormation eras reformation of the individual and of the
Christian communities, regular and secular, was prom-
inent; and that in very modern times the reform of
society seems to loom large as the primary concern
of religious men in the West. The religious idea of
reformation has at all times been a powerful force in
history. Luther, the magisterial reformer, caught the
paradox implied in the religious idea of reformation.
He emphasized strongly that God “works within us”
but not “without us.” Reformation is God's work, but
at the same time it is man's work. To Luther the world
was “the sphere of faith's works,” one of the most
powerful organizing thoughts, Wilhelm Dilthey ob-
served, that a man has ever had (Gesammelte Schriften,
4th ed., Leipzig and Berlin [1940], II, 61).
