The Christian Scholar in The Age of The Reformation

by E. Harris Harbison

Scholarship as a Christian calling has been a subject relatively neglected by both historians and theologians. Justice has been done to the saint and the prophet in Christian history, but seldom to the scholar. Through a study of a few Christian scholars of the Reformation period, these pages suggest what a Christian scholar is like, how he comes by a sense of his calling, how he many reconcile his scholarly zeal with his Christian faith, and how his work affects the development of Christianity. This period has been selected because the Protestant Reformation was in a sense a learned movement which began in a scholar's insight into the meaning of Scripture, and because the prestige and influence of Christian scholars probably never stood higher in all Western history than during the two generations which embraced the lifetimes of Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin.

The author's approach is through human personality. Chapter 1 deals with St. Jerome, St. Augustine, Peter Abelard, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Chapter II discusses Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola, and John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's in London, who had great influence on Erasmus. With these sketches as introduction, Dr. Harbison then devotes a full chapter each to Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. These great figures of the Reformation become vivid personalities, for the reader sees their human qualities and understands the tensions under which they lived. Each of them had a different conception of the scholar's role. Erasmus was a scholar turned Christian; Luther, a Christian turned scholar. Calvin, left to his own inclinations, would have retired from society to his study, but faith to him was an active thing that thrust him out into the world of events and engendered pangs of conscience about his love of learning. Each came to his own conception of scholarship as a Christian calling and of the relation of faith to learning.

Genres: History, Religion, Church History

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teased out good insight between Colet, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. I especially appreciated the author's conviction that some points of each scholar were notable, but Calvin was best at both appealing to and educating intellectuals AND the common people. I wholeheartedly agree with the author's assessment that Calvin thought of knowledge as a primary instigator toward useful Kingdom activity, and that knowledge for its own sake is a waste of time.

Good quote from Mutianus Rufus of Germany: “The peasant know much that the philosopher does not know.”

Even better from Pascal: “The knowledge of God is very far from the love of him.” page 111

The medieval scholastics had a problem of perspective, as summarized by Gordon Clark. They saw Old Testament and New Testament as fragmented, "treated as an 'arsenal of texts', a collection 0f propositions 'whose logical implications were to be elicited and reconciled into self-consistent dogma." That's how I see Gordon Clark's work in general - not much different in approach - but it would take one scholastic to critique another, I suppose.

Summary: “The truest way, then, to describe the beginning of the Reformation is to say that it originated in a scholar’s insight, born equally of spiritual struggle and hard intellectual labor.”

[Doctor VanNostrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable, accessible, and thought provoking.