The concept of purpose in reformation thought

Robert Bretall

pp. 165-195

in: William Horosz, Clements (eds), Religion and human purpose, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

In this essay "Reformation thought" will mean the thinking of the sixteenth-century Reformers, especially Martin Luther; but it will mean also the thinking of those twentieth-century theologians — especially Karl Barth — whose orientation and attitude involve basically a return to Reformation principles, Reformation language, and thereby to Biblical principles and the language of the Bible. Whether or not they succeeded in their attempt, the Reformers wanted to think as the Bible writers thought: they wanted to recreate the Bible language after centuries of mere lip service amounting to neglect — centuries in which, as Luther and Calvin and the other Reformation leaders saw it, the Word of the Bible had been overlaid and obscured by layer upon layer of intellectualizing philosophical dust from Scholasticism. And a similar aim has led contemporaries like Barth and Brunner and Niebuhr and Nygren to a recovery of Biblical language and Reformation language long ignored — if not held in contempt — by a Protestant Liberalism which greatly preferred the language of philosophical Idealism or of Pragmatism.

Cited authors

Luther Martin

Barth Karl