Pastor John Wright's opening address

Opening Address to "Is the Reformation Over? A Conversation between Friends"Opening Address to "Is the Reformation Over? A Conversation between Friends"

“Is the Reformation Over?” Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom asked this question a few years ago – and cautiously answered no. Stanley Hauerwas, one of our guests here, asked a related question in the Spring 2006 volume of the Wesleyan Theological Journal: “Is Protestantism Over?” Hauerwas states, “I think . . . that we may be coming to a time when the story we call the “Reformation” will not determine our understanding of where we are as Protestant Christians. Bluntly put, we may be living during a time when we are watching Protestantism coming to an end. . . . When Protestanism became an end in itself, when Protestants became denominations, we became unintelligible to ourselves. Our inability to resist the market, our inability as Protestants not to become consumers of our religious preferences, is but an indication that we are in trouble. Of course, Roman Catholicism is also beset by the challenge of choice, which helps explain why Catholicism in America may now be a form of Protestantism!” If Roman Catholics have become Protestants, a recent article in the Christian Century wrote about significant Protestant theologians who have joined Roman to become Catholic because they found there the commitments to an evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith in a way that they did not find supported in their mainline and evangelical Protestant denominations. These are strange times. Is the Reformation over?

More