GODFREY: If we look historically, we can say that part of the reason "reformation" became the label
of what happened in the sixtenth century is a great deal of time and energy had to be
devoted to the reforming of the externals of the life of the church -- how the church worshiped,
how the church educated, how the church catechized -- almost everything had to be
redone. But when the Reformation was over, particularly Reformed people thought the
external life of the church now was conformed to the Word of God, the question is, are hearts
really connected to this purified external form of religion? And so the focus shifted away from how
do we -- I mean the Reformation was very much concerned about hearts as well as externals,
but once those externals were properly reformed according to the Word of God,
then the great concern tended to be, are people going to Reformed churches just going through the
motions? Is it just formal religion or are hearts really engaged? And that's where the
concern became more of the renewal of hearts rather than equally the reformation of externals.
DEYOUNG: Yeah, so again we're dealing with some categories that are useful but aren't going to
allow for, you know, dogmatic definitions, but I've always found that to be the basic,
helpful definition. You would think of the Reformation as a kind of awakening,
an awakening that is moving in a direction that is, as you said, doctrinal and external,
and the revival as opposed to a reformation, in just general terms, internal and subjective,
again not to say reformation doesn't have a heart and the revival isn't concerned with
doctrine but it is, as you said, moving people from a place of religious stagnation with to
a large degree the right forms to a place of now personal appropriation of that piety and of those
convictions. Both are necessary in our day, both require a work of the Spirit, both require the
powerful preaching of the Word, awakening in a different sense, reformation versus revival.
FERGUSON: You know, the Reformation so clearly changed the face of the church
that we have categorized it as a reformation, but I'd be willing to categorize it as an awakening
and in fact many of the characteristic marks of the later awakenings you see
taking place at the Reformation, one of them like the way in which
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries God seems to bring together a kind of
brotherhood. The same would be true of the Puritan period, just this unusual coalescing of
individuals whom God uses in unusual ways, and you see that at the Reformation with -- for example,
the more you read about Calvin as a person, the more you realize he was really, really closely
connected to a group of friends and brothers upon whom God had laid His hand in a very unusual way.
The more you read his sermons, the more you realize what I called "the dialogical mode of
preaching" where this is why his preaching is so surprising to people. He's speaking,
it seems, in the power of the Spirit right into where the Geneva people are, and there
is a lot of "you," and there is a lot of close application, and there is a lot of resistance,
and there's an extraordinary spread of the gospel, an amazing spread of the gospel. Not
only the change of the face of the church, but the change in the hearts of the people. Thousands,
hundreds of thousands, I mean, has anyone ever done the statistics of the number of people who
do seem to have been genuinely converted during a period from, you know, 1520 through 1550?
It's just that the actual obedience of people to what God commands us to do with
respect to the life of the church has gained a great prominence in the sixteenth century,
more than, for example, in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
GODFREY: You can think of that in terms of Geneva's having preaching
every morning in the church. Well, presumably somebody was there, I mean,
even Reformed ministers don't preach to an empty building, so there was such an eagerness for the
Word of God that there were people coming every morning to hear sermons. That's an
eagerness for the Word that represents a changed heart, not just changed externals.
FERGUSON: Well, at one point they had to move Calvin's Old Testament lectures into the church,
because so many people wanted to hear him lecture on the Old Testament. You know,
wow! I mean you can understand people crowding in to hear a
church history professor because it's full of stories, but the Old Testament, you know?