Nick Bogardus

(Those are jello cubes by the way.)

What can we learn from even the briefest glimpse of history?

Every year, John Piper performs a great service to the Church and does a biographical message on the life of a significant figure from church history. He’s done Augustine, Athanasius, Luther, John Newton, J. Gresham Machen, and Charles Spurgeon among many others.

They are a great service to the Church at large, especially laypeople, because of the tremendous perspective you can gain from even the slightest grasp of history.

For example, what can the life of William Tyndale - a martyr whose legacy is the very English Bible you have - teach us? More specifically, what can the controversy between Erasmus & Thomas More on one side, and Martin Luther & William Tyndale on the other, teach us about the current state of the church?

Here are a few excerpts from the message notes of nearly identical message that Piper gave two years ago:

“Daniell puts it like this:

Something in the [Erasmus’] Enchiridion is missing… . It is a masterpiece of humanist piety… . [But] the activity of Christ in the Gospels, his special work of salvation so strongly detailed there and in the epistles of Paul, is largely missing. Christologically, where Luther thunders, Erasmus makes a sweet sound: what to Tyndale was an impregnable stronghold feels in the Enchiridion like a summer pavilion.

Where Luther and Tyndale were blood-earnest about our dreadful human condition and the glory of salvation in Christ, Erasmus and Thomas More joked and bantered….

…I linger here with this difference between Tyndale and Erasmus because I am trying to penetrate to how Tyndale accomplished what he did through translating the New Testament. Explosive reformation is what he accomplished in England. This was not the effect of Erasmus’ highbrow, elitist, layered nuancing of Christ and church tradition. Erasmus and Thomas More may have satirized the monasteries and clerical abuses, but they were always playing games compared to Tyndale.

And in this they were very much like notable Christian writers in our own day. Listen to this remarkable assessment from Daniell, and see if you do not hear a description of certain emergent church writers and New Perspective champions:

Not only is there no fully realized Christ or Devil in Erasmus’s book … : there is a touch of irony about it all, with a feeling of the writer cultivating a faintly superior ambiguity: as if to be dogmatic, for example about the full theology of the work of Christ, was to be rather distasteful, below the best, elite, humanist heights… . By contrast Tyndale … is ferociously single-minded; the matter in hand, the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediary, is far too important for hints of faintly ironic superiority… . Tyndale is as four-square as a carpenter’s tool. But in Erasmus’s account of the origins of his book there is a touch of the sort of layering of ironies found in the games with personae.

It is ironic and sad that today supposedly avant-garde Christian writers can strike this cool, evasive, imprecise, artistic, superficially reformist pose of Erasmus and call it “post-modern” and capture a generation of unwitting, historically naïve, emergent people who don’t know they are being duped by the same old verbal tactics used by the elitist humanist writers in past generations. We saw them last year in Athanasius’ day (the slippery Arians at Nicaea), and we see them now in Tyndale’s day. It’s not post-modern. It’s pre-modern—because it is perpetual.” [all emphases mine]

This particular message is available in it’s entirety at the Desiring God website.