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Reformation and Conversion
By David C. Steinmetz

"These four themes from early Protestant thought-the denial of the possibility of preparation for the reception of grace, the insistence on the church as the context in which genuine repentance takes place, the description of conversion as a continuous and lifelong process, and the warning that there is no conversion which does not exact a price from the penitent-are certainly not the only themes which need to be considered by the church in the present as it ponders its own evangelistic mission . . . . But they are insights which cannot be lightly set aside. As Calvin observed, when we deal with repentance and the forgiveness of sins, we are dealing with 'the sum of the gospel. '"

THE Reformation began, almost accidentally, as a debate over the meaning of the word "penitence." I say "accidentally" because the controversy over indulgences which set in motion the first stirrings of the Protestant Reformation seemed at the time far too limited and restrictive an issue on which to hang an entire program for the reform of the church. Only the year before in 1516 Luther had composed a probing series of propositions on the hopeless condition of the human will without grace. He had followed it up in 1517 with a stinging barrage of ninety-seven theses against scholastic theology, theses which questioned with inescapable directness the church's use of the philosophy of Aristotle. But when the reform began, it was not Luther's attack on the method and conclusions of German academic theology, but his criticism of the medieval theory of penance which captured the imagination of Europe.

Luther may only have intended to attack the extravagant claims which were being advanced for indulgences by the Dominican, John Tetzel, who was selling indulgences across the river in the part of Saxony under the jurisdiction of Duke George. But when Luther sat down at his desk to draw up his theses for debate, he found that he could not direct his criticisms against the narrower issue of indulgences

David C. Steinmetz is a graduate of Wheaton College, Drew, Harvard, and Göttingen Universities. He is Professor of Church History and Doctrine at the Divinity School of Duke University and the author of Misericordia Dei: The Theology of Johannes von Staupitz in its Late Medieval Setting (1968) and Reformers in the Wings (1971). He is on leave this year as a Guggenheim Fellow in Cambridge University.

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without discussing the far broader question of the meaning of penitence.

The very first thesis touches the central issue. Jesus Christ announced the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God and invited his listeners to repent. What exactly, asked, did he have in mind? Did he mean to urge submission to the sacrament of penance? Luther The Latin text of the New Testament with its translation of Jesus' word as penitentiam agite ("do penance") certainly could give that impression. Underneath the Latin formula of the Vulgate, however, was the original Greek verb with its Hebrew antecedents. What was demanded by the preaching of Jesus was a "conversion," a "return," a "change of mind or of intention," a fundamental turning of one's life to God, which begins but does not end with the first assent of the will to the gospel.

Debate over the meaning of repentance is basic to Protestantism. From the early and formative decades of the Protestant Reformation through the Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century to the Bangkok Assembly in 1973 and the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, Protestants have returned again and again to the theme of penitence and conversion.

American Protestants are, of course, familiar with the tradition of the Evangelical Awakening which has left its mark on American churches from the time of Edwards and Asbury to the present. Less well known, but no less important, are the reflections of the Protestant Reformers on the subject of repentance. While John Cotton was accustomed to "sweeten his mouth" with a passage from John Calvin before retiring, most American Christians are more familiar with Calvinism than with Calvin. American evangelism has been molded more by Edwards, Finney, Moody, Sunday, and Graham than by the theology of the sixteenth century Reformers.

This article will attempt to redress the balance somewhat by drawing attention to four themes in the theology of the Reformers not found in the American evangelical tradition, or not found in the same degree, but which pose questions for that tradition which it must take seriously.

Common to almost all early Protestant discussions of repentance is a barely disguised hostility to every theory of conversion which stresses proper preparation for the reception of grace. Opposition to the very notion of preparation for grace led Protestants inevitably to reject all medieval theologies of penance, the most Augustinian and restrained as well as the most Pelagian and careless. Nevertheless, it is fair to state that the form in which Luther first encountered a theory of preparation for grace was the form in which it was elaborated by Gabriel Biel in his Collectorium on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

Biel was the first professor of theology at the University of Tübingen, a university founded in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Biel was balanced, judicious, immensely learned, and deeply spiritual.

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He was famous not only inside Germany but outside it as well; his works appeared in French as well as German editions. But his understanding of repentance, about which he wrote learnedly and at great length, was fundamentally defective from Luther's point of view.

It was not that Biel failed to ground his arguments in the Bible or in the Augustinian tradition of the western church. Indeed, Biel's ruminations on penitence are laced with frequent quotations from the Bible: James 4:8, Luke 11:9, Jeremiah 29:13, and above all, Zechariah 1:3, "Turn unto me, says the Lord of Hosts, and I will turn unto you." The text from Zechariah summed up in the briefest possible scope the essence of Biel's theology of penance.

God has established a covenant, the terms of which are proclaimed by the church in the gospel. God has promised to give saving grace to everyone who meets the condition of that covenant. What is demanded of the sinner, quite simply, is that the sinner love God above everything else. Sinners can do this because, while sin has damaged their capacity for loving God, it has not obliterated it. To put it in its crassest form, grace is a reward for exemplary moral virtue, a virtue which Biel, like Kant, thought Jay in the power of the unconverted will.

Luther rejected categorically this understanding of preparation for grace. Morally good acts do not have a claim on the favor of God. The real preparation for grace, if one can use this language at all without occasioning misunderstanding, is the preparation which God has made by his election, calling, and gifts. Luther agreed with Biel that God has established a covenant, but it is a covenant whose basis is diametrically opposed to the covenant recommended by Biel.

God promises to give his grace to "real sinners." "Real sinners" are people who are not merely sinners in fact (everyone, after all, is a sinner in that sense), but who confess that they are sinners. "Real sinners" conform their judgment of themselves to the judgment of God over them and by doing so justify God in a Word of judgment and grace. Paradoxically, it is the "real sinner" who is justified by God and who knows both theoretically and experientially what repentance offers and demands. The gospel as Luther conceived it is both easier and harder than the gospel which Biel offered. Being a real sinner is a condition which, on the face of it, anyone can meet; but it is harder because it demands rigorous honesty in the face of the truth. The penitent cannot prepare themselves for grace because they must be crucified by the Word of God's judgment and die. Repentance has to do with death and life and not merely with the resolute decision of an already good person like Biel to improve his frankly unimpeachable character.

Luther's objection to Biel's theory is not merely that it harbors a thoroughly unrealistic view of human nature, though that is part of his objection. Even more important for Luther than the fact that no one can live up to Biel's theory of repentance is the fact that no one is expected to. The gospel does not demand moral virtue as the preparatory stage of conversion. Biel's view of the matter is not only unworkable; it

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is irrelevant. The sole precondition for authentic conversion is real sin; the sole preparation which matters is the preparation which God has made in the gospel.

The saying of Jesus that the whole have no need of a physician is a saying which the church has always had great difficulty assimilating. It seems so much more reasonable to believe that God will be merciful to those people who meet certain prior expectations: the right ideology, the right sex or race, the right degree of devotion to the causes currently supported by the right elements in society. "But when we were right," Luther observed in one of his earliest writings, "God laughed at us in our rightness."¹ God's quarrel is with the whole human race and not merely with certain factions in it. Judgment falls not only on the theologically heterodox but also on the theologically pure. The one absolutely indispensable precondition for the reception of grace is not to be right-not even in the sense of theological orthodoxy-but to be sick. The gospel is for real sinners.

II

The church provides the context within which authentic repentance can take place. It may seem surprising to lay so much stress on the church in early Protestant thought, since Protestants have often been regarded as religious individualists who affirmed the right of private judgment against the corporate power of the late medieval church. But in point of fact the late medieval church was the home of a very private and individualistic piety, while Protestantism has been hopelessly social from the very beginning. Whether talking of ordination or of eucharistic theory, Protestants have focused on the congregation rather than the individual as the fundamental reality from which theological reflection must proceed. Critics may accuse Protestants of talking about the church too much or of talking about it in the wrong way, but not of neglecting it.

The church can, of course, stand in the way of authentic conversion, and in his Reply to Sadoleto Calvin accused the late medieval church of doing precisely that. In a lengthy bill of particulars Calvin charged the late medieval church with keeping people from repentance and faith by the disunity of its life and the disorder of its teaching. In particular the church had urged upon the faithful a duty of implicit faith in its own teaching authority, while, to use Calvin's vivid language, the "leaders of faith neither understood [the] Word nor greatly cared for it" but taught "doctrines sprung from the human brain." Not surprisingly this "supine state of the pastors" led swiftly to the "stupidity of the people" who thought that the "highest veneration paid to [the] Word was to revere it at a distance, as a thing inaccessible, and abstain from all investigation of it."² Reverence for the church-any

¹ WA 56.449.1-6.
² John C. Olin, ed., John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto, A Reformation Debate (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 82.

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church-in its unreformed state can only impede progress toward the radical change of direction which is demanded by Jesus in the gospel.

Even in the worst of times the church is, to use Calvin's favorite imagery, a Mother and School, which nurtures and instructs men and women in the Christian faith. When confronted by the quotation from Augustine, "I would not have believed the gospel if the authority of the Church had not moved me," Calvin agreed with it, much to the surprise of his conservative critics. The important thing, however, is not to quote Augustine-anyone armed with the Milleloquium can do that-but to know what he meant.

It is obvious what he did not mean. Augustine did not intend to teach that the authority of the church is so great, so metaphysically higher in the scale of being, that the gospel derives its authority in a secondary fashion from the prior and more encompassing authority of the church. Augustine said that he would not have believed the gospel if the authority of the church had not moved him; he did not say-or mean to imply-that he would not have believed the gospel if a committee of bishops had not approved it. The authority of the gospel is primary, and the authority of the church is secondary and derivative.

The authority of the church to which Augustine alluded is the authority of the holiness of its life and the faithfulness of its witness. In a word, Augustine was moved to trust the gospel because he first trusted the people who told him about it. The gospel is better than the church, but it is never found except in the human and therefore touching witness of the church. The church, like the Samaritan woman, tugs at the sleeve of the unbeliever and says: "Come, see a man, which told me all things which ever I did: is not this the Christ?" That is the authority of the church, the authority of a faithful and self-effacing witness.

To this church has been committed the power of the keys, the power to bind and loose the penitent from their sins. Yet it is a power which the church does and does not have. It does not have it in the sense that it is not a power which inheres in the community as a group, as color, weight, texture are qualities of an object. But it does have it in the sense that as a community it proclaims by word and deed the authority of the gospel. The gospel binds and looses from sins, not the church, and yet it does not do so apart from the church which bears it and bears witness to it.

Repentance-at least repentance in the sense in which it is recommended in the New Testament-is not a spontaneous religious emotion which springs up without prior sufficient cause in the human heart. It is a response to the message of God's judgment and grace, a message proclaimed by the church, the community established by God in which faith is formed. While the gospel can and does reach outside the church and while God is never limited in achieving divine purposes to any instrumental means, nevertheless, the church is the principal sphere and context for authentic conversion. Repentance is, if you will not misunderstand me, a churchly function. Indeed, it is the perpetual activity of a church reformed by the Word of God.

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III

The repentance to which a Christian is called is a continuous and lifelong process. While conversion begins, as everything in history does, at some point in time, the process of conversion is not completed until every aspect of the human personality is driven out into the light of God's severe mercy, judged, and renewed. Conversion proceeds layer by layer, relationship by relationship, here a little, there a little, until the whole personality and not merely one side of it has been recreated by God. Conversion refers not only to the initial moment of faith, no matter how dramatic or revolutionary it may seem, but to the whole life of the believer and the network of relationships in which that life is entangled: personal, familial, social, economic, political.

That is why the church is called a school. Faith is not only something we have; it is something we are learning. Mastery of the Greek alphabet is not the same thing as mastery of the Odyssey; yet mastery of the one proceeds from mastery of the other. The first moment of penitence initiates one into the school of faith, but the lessons to be learned can only be grasped by long and patient experience. Conversion, to change the metaphor, is not only the little wicket gate through which John Bunyan's pilgrim quickly passes as he abandons the City of Destruction; it is the entire pilgrimage to the Celestial City.

No aspect of Reformation teaching on penitence is more foreign to the American evangelical experience of the past two centuries than the stress on conversion as a process rather as a crisis in human life. Evangelicals have always emphasized the initial moment of faith in which one passes from death to life, from darkness to light. This is a moment celebrated, recalled, and, when the experiences fades, recaptured. While sanctification may be a process, conversion is the work of a moment.

The Protestant Reformers did not agree, but that was not because they despised the first stirrings of faith or the resolute convictions of people who bore witness to what they had seen and heard. They did not agree because they had a somewhat different doctrine of sin and were convinced that sin was such a complex phenomenon and so intricately embedded in human thinking and willing that only a thousand conversions would root it out.

Or maybe I have put that too negatively. The Reformers were convinced that only those who love God can hate sin. A thoroughly unconverted sinner is a perfect child in the knowledge of sin. Only a saint knows what sin is; and therefore only a person who has progressed in the love of God can see with sufficient clarity what exactly is the character of the sin which is distorting life. It requires some growth in grace to repent property. The more one grows in the love of God, the more perfect one's repentance. Mourners sitting on the anxious bench or filing into an inquirer's room have, unfortunately, only a child's eye view of their own sin. Real repentance, real conversion of life is an activity of the spiritually mature.

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Repentance is consistently portrayed by the Reformers as a return to baptism, a return to the foundation of God's gifts and promises which are generous enough to sustain us throughout our whole life. They must be re-appropriated, reaffirmed; they cannot be superseded. By the process of repentance, of continuous conversion, we appropriate the mercy and gifts of God at a deeper level than we have ever experienced them before.

Perhaps the most striking image of baptism in early Protestant literature is one offered by Huldrych Zwingli. Baptism is like the cowl or uniform which is given to a novice in a mendicant order. The young boy of twelve is a Franciscan or a Dominican from the very moment he accepts the uniform and obligations which wearing it entails. But he is not a Franciscan in the same sense as an old brother of 82, who has worn the brown robe of St. Francis all his long and varied life. The young novice must grow up into the uniform he has been given. So, too, baptism is our uniform; we must grow up into it. It is cut for a far more generously proportioned figure than ours. But we will grow up into it as we are continuously converted at ever deeper levels of our personality by means of the Word of God. Conversion does not by-pass baptism; it fits us to it, so that we take all that is offered and become all we profess.

IV

Every conversion has a price. Something is gained, but something is lost as well and the loss may prove to be painful. There is a tendency in certain circles of American evangelicalism to offer the gospel as the solution for pressing human problems without mentioning that there is another side to the question. The gospel not only resolves problems which trouble us; it creates problems which we never had before and which we would gladly avoid.

Sometimes the problems are vocational. In his Preface to the Commentary on the Psalms, published in 1558, Calvin, who was generally reluctant to offer any information about himself in his published works, broke his silence to talk about his sudden and unexpected conversion to Protestantism. In a brief passage of unusual candor Calvin confessed that his principal ambition both before and after his conversion was to lead the quiet life of a humanist scholar, alone with his books, his commentaries, and his grammars. Against his own personal preferences he was driven by God to assume a role in shaping history.

Sometimes life itself is at stake. It makes sober reading to examine the pages of the Martyr's Mirror and to realize that almost none of the first generation of the leaders of the Anabaptist movement lived to see that movement reach its tenth anniversary. Not all the martyrs were Anabaptist; certainly not all were Protestant. From William Tyndale to Edmund Campion, from Robert Barnes to Thomas More, from Hugh Latimer to John Fisher, conversion to Christ in the sixteenth century could entail the loss of one's own life. The age could, and

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frequently did, exact a grisly price for heeding the radical call of Jesus to turn about in one's tracks and head in a diametrically opposite direction.

Yet most frequently the problems are what one might loosely call moral problems. Every human decision has its moral aspects and since every human decision is qualified by obedience to the demand of the gospel for repentance and conversion, human life is somewhat more complicated than it was before. It is no longer possible simply to adopt the customary attitudes toward war or race or business or marriage or abortion or any other question which affects individual or corporate life. Every decision stands under the question posed by the words of Jesus: "Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand!"

Calvin describes the life of the converted by two ponderous phrases: mortification of the flesh and vivification of the Spirit. The first phrase is clear enough; it means death to the old way of thinking and acting. But the second phrase is the one not to be lost sight of. The death of the old is for the sake of the birth of a new reality.

Luther was fond of talking about the strange and proper work of God. The strange work of God refers to the work of wrath and judgment; the proper work designates the work of mercy and renewal. Both were spoken of in the Bible, but they were not given equal emphasis. Their relationship is dialectical. God does the strange work of judgment and destruction for the sake of the proper work of mercy and love. The old, unrepentant, faithless, unconverted reality must be destroyed, but not as an end in itself. God destroys the old decadent self in order to create in its place a new reality almost too glorious to be imagined. Suffering is for the sake of joy.

V

These four themes from early Protestant thought-the denial of the possibility of preparation for the reception of grace, the insistence on the church as the context in which genuine repentance takes place, the description of conversion as a continuous and lifelong process, and the warning that there is no conversion which does not exact a price from the penitent-are certainly not the only themes which need to be considered by the church in the present as it ponders its own evangelistic mission. Indeed, they may even need to be corrected by insights derived from the Bible or other voices in the Christian tradition. But they are insights which cannot be lightly set aside. As Calvin observed, when we deal with repentance and the forgiveness of sins, we are dealing with "the sum of the gospel."³

³ Institutes, III, iii, 1.