RESTORATION AND RENAISSANCE

In this series on the restoration mind we are seeking to present a larger and more meaningful understanding of the term restoration as it relates to the effort to restore primitive Christianity to a modern world. We trust that the reader will come to see the significance of our use of mind in this context, for part of our thesis is that the Restoration Movement is, or should be, a matter of attitude or a kind of character more than a plea for form, ritual or institution. It has more to do with heart and mind than with externals. External forms may be important as means to the higher end of binding man back to God, which is the meaning of religion. It is also the meaning of restoration as it describes our movement: restoring man to God by means of the Living Pattern, Jesus the Christ.

History has its lessons to teach when it comes to both restoration and renaissance. Our thesis in this essay is that there are values in the ideal of renaissance that are transferable to our concept of restoration, and that they bear close affinity to each other both as movements in history and as descriptions of the ideal. The restoration mind is thus the renaissance mind, and the “Renaissance Man,” who has even found his way into the dictionary, enriches our concept of what a Restorationist should be. Or to put our thesis another way, a better understanding of the Renaissance will enrich our concept of the possibilities of the Restoration.

If one starts with the dictionary, he finds that these terms have more in common than that they both are found under the R’s. “Renaissance” is defined as a new birth, rebirth, revival, coming as it does from a French word meaning “to be born anew.” This fits with an idea that we have long emphasized in this journal: the dawning of a new day for the brotherhood of disciples. It is the call for a renaissance, a new birth. It is a plea for renewal through recovery.

“Restoration” is defined as reinstatement to a former position, restitution for loss or damage, bringing back into a former or unimpaired condition. This makes restoration too a call for renewal through recovery. In both ideas there is regard for the past, for today’s revival is based upon what has gone before. They both reach into the past, laying bare the original foundations, in order to renew the present. Even if restoration is limited to its meaning in English history, referring at it does to the restoration of the monarchy after the Puritan rule under Cromwell, it is still an effort to recover the values of the past by disturbing the present.

The Renaissance is especially significant in history because it marks the transition from the medieval world to the modern age, coming as it did in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Beginning in Italy, it spread throughout Europe, and then went on to influence the entire world, including nations not yet born. In observing its chief characteristics we will notice the striking parallels it has to the restoration ideal.

1. The Renaissance found its sources for renewal in the rich cultures of the past, especially Greek and Roman.

Erasmus, the star of the Renaissance, insisted that Greek culture was the supreme achievement of Western civilization, and that Roman culture was a close second. Drawing upon these sources, he produced new biblical texts in both Greek and Latin and laid the groundwork for modern biblical research. It was Erasmus who declared that the problem with Luther was that he had hit the priest’s belly and the pope’s pocketbook. And it was he who flatly turned down Pope Paul III when he offered to make him a cardinal. He is a good example of the way things were changing by 1536, the year of his death. In those days art and science, as well as literature, were experiencing a new birth, inspired by the foundations laid by the Greeks and Romans long centuries before. So it is with the restoration mind.

It does not ignore history lest it has to repeat the mistakes of the past. It reverences the story of man’s struggle to be free, and it is eager to learn whatever history has to teach. He sees the past as the prologue to the present, and that in all history there is a continuity of events. Ours cannot be a cut flower civilization, cut off from the soil and climate that gave it its character. “The church, for better or for worse, is what it is because of what it has been. And what the church can be now and in the future depends in part on the vast resources that can be drawn from her past.

2. The Renaissance was a slow, gradual transition from the darkness of the medieval world.

Historians call the medieval age “the dark ages” because men were not free to be creative and exploratory. Science was hampered by the dictates of ecclesiastics. Scholarship was limited to the obscure and abstruse thinking of Scholastic philosophy. Education awaited the invention of printing, which could not be until men were free to think and write.

But the light of the Renaissance did not burst forth suddenly. There was an affinity with the best of the past, and seeds of reform had long been planted in men’s hearts, though slow in germinating. This is to say that “the Dark Ages” had some light, for there were always some brave souls working for a better day. It was a work of patience. The restorationist too realizes that men and events need time, and that renewal is the gradual unfolding of the contributions of many sacrificial people over a long, long time.

3. The Renaissance restored the dignity of the individual and the spirit of humanism.

It was a time when even monks, like Rabelais of France, cried out against monasticism, which placed its system above the individual. True scholarship makes a man more humane and enlightened, and should free him of superstition and fanaticism. In criticizing monastic life Rabelais described the glories of what he thought would be an ideal education, anticipating what we have in a modern university. Humanism is the very opposite of the ecclesiastical mind that prevailed before the Renaissance, for it stresses knowledge and reason rather than authority and ritual. It believes in the goodness of man and in man’s ability to build a free and responsible society, once it is liberated from the impediments of ecclesiasticism. The humanists of the Renaissance criticized the popes and priests for their love of power and for their hypocrisy.

Humanism is of course a form of atheism, for it goes so far as to exalt man to the neglect of God. It is man-centered rather than God-centered. Yet it made an important contribution to Christianity in that it helped to rescue the individual from the indignity of an ecclesiasticism that insisted that man is made for its institutions rather than its institutions for man.

4. The Renaissance turned man’s thought to this world and restored the secular spirit.

The medieval world was shut up within the confines of the Roman church with all its demands for authority and tradition. Little thought was given to building an enlightened society, for man was taught to be other-worldly in his thinking, if he thought at all. Politics and economics, literature and art, science and education were all under the control of the church, and no new idea had any chance of survival unless it conformed to tradition. So non-conformist scientists like Copernicus and Galileo had a hard time of it.

The Renaissance mind was this-worldly in that it wanted to renew man’s situation in this life, leaving the next world to take care of itself. It was secular in that it was concerned for human problems here and now, and it sought solutions based on reason, science, industry. It considered the church to be an obstacle to human progress, married to its traditions and hampered by the superstition of “a pie in the sky by and by.”

The restoration mind is also secular and this-worldly, and it owes much to the Renaissance for saving Christianity from an obscurantism that is blind to human misery while counting its heavenly blessings. We are in this world even if we are not of it, and since God loved this world so much as to give His son, we too love it and seek to be a blessing to it.

5. The Renaissance conquered the whole of culture, changing its character by giving it a new freedom.

The Renaissance man was a man of culture, which included the whole of what man can and should be. Leonardo da Vinci excelled in almost all fields of knowledge. Michelangelo was poet, painter, architect, sculptor. Kepler gave us a new science, writing a treatise on Mars even as early as 1609. Machiavelli explored political science while Balboa and Magellan explored the world.

It was a cosmopolitan spirit, for men thought of themselves as citizens of the world rather than of anyone country. Artists and musicians created works that transcended racial and geographical lines. They began to think in terms of the basic unity of man and of man’s conquest of nature for the building of a better world.

The restorationist accepts Paul’s view that believers are to “take every thought captive to obey Christ:” We are to capture the culture of the world and turn it to the glory of God. News media, television, cinema, publications are all too often left to the devices of Satan. These we are to capture, and by capturing them we do not kill them, but preserve them, inducting them into service for Jesus. So with all of science, industry, technology, education, government, art, literature. We bring them into obedience to Christ, to whom they rightfully belong anyway since he possesses heaven and earth.

If there remains any doubt as to what the Renaissance has meant to us, it only remains to be said that the Renaissance fueled the fires of religious reform that resulted in the Reformation. It set the stage for the Industrial Revolution, ushering in the modern world such as we know it. We only need to look at the underdeveloped countries of the world to realize what these enlightening centuries have done for the Western world in particular. Here is part of our challenge, for much of the world has yet to experience a renaissance. We have enough believers that we could create a Christian renaissance that would have its impact on all the world, but especially on the malnourished, illiterate, deprived nations of earth.

The spirit of renaissance-restoration must first be realized in our own out-look and our own personal culture. We must be a free and open people, bound only by the constraining love of Jesus. We must restore the concept of God’s people as the salt of the earth and thus become the renewing power that actually changes men’s lives and their institutions. As commandoes of Jesus we conquer everything from families to universities for him.

A world-wide renaissance, inspired by Christian love and service, will redeem the world and usher in the millennium. The world is ours to inherit, but only as we reach out and claim it for Jesus, whom God has made the heir of all things. — the Editor