Bad History + Bad Theology = Bad Historical Theology (VanDrunen Review III.1)

May 8, 2010

Van Drunen’s third chapter, “Reforming Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: John Calvin and His Contemporaries,” is longer than either of the previous two, considerably denser, and much more important to VanDrunen’s project, and so I am afraid it will take quite a commodious review to do it justice.  Before I start, I ought to admit up front that I am going to do something very un-kosher in this review--I am going to take a historian to task on theological grounds.  I know, you’re covering your ears with horror at the very suggestion! 

Historians will of course claim that theirs is an objective task of simply trying to figure out what historical writers said, and reserving judgment on whether what they said was right or wrong, to what extent we should imitate it today, etc.  Theologians may argue over whether Calvin was wrong or right, but the historian is solely interested in uncovering what Calvin said, for good or ill.  Of course, such claims are not altogether true of any historian, but in my mind, they are particularly disingenuous when dealing with historical theologians (or theological historians?), particularly ones working within very confessional traditions like the Reformed.  When someone is taking the time to write a book on the history of a doctrine, odds are that they have a strong interest in the doctrine; and if they have a strong interest, odds are that they have a strong opinion; and if they have a strong opinion, then, human nature being what it is, odds are that they want to be able to show that their opinion has been supported by key historical figures.  This is particularly true of Reformed theologians, who, despite their anti-Catholicism, have a strong affection for “tradition,” and are almost obsessive in their attempts to prove that their pet doctrines were held by the great Reformed theologians of ages past, particularly Calvin.  In fact, it is a useful rule of thumb that if you ever see any Reformed guy arguing that Calvin has been misunderstood on a certain point, and what he really said was X, you can be quite sure that his interest is not merely historical, but stems from the fact that he strongly believes X himself.  

Such is the case with VanDrunen; he has let us know right from the start that he thinks that the modern craze for extending Christ’s lordship to all of life is a mistake, and he wants to recover a tradition which keeps Christ’s lordship in its proper ecclesial sphere.  Therefore, although he purports to be pursuing the merely historical task of telling us what Reformed theologians said, it is clear that he is also trying to recommend certain ideas to us rather than others, and so in this review I will not merely be questioning aspects of his historical narrative, but also the theological value of the position he attributes to Calvin.  This is particularly reasonable since VanDrunen does not really seem very interested in history in this chapter, as I shall consider in a moment.

Given that I am sounding so negative, I should add another caveat--VanDrunen does some really solid work in this chapter.  I’m about to make some objections about the way he handles the history, but I should say up front that he makes some very solid historical points, particularly against other Reformed folks who have manifested the same annoying tendency to try to prove that Calvin is on their side, whatever that side might be.  Modern neo-Calvinists have got to face up to the fact that Calvin said some rather silly things, that they must be willing to renounce from time to time.  And so, my biggest beef with VanDrunen in this chapter is not “Calvin never said that!” but rather, “Ok, Calvin said that...so what?  The Bible clearly says the opposite, so let’s gently correct Calvin and move on.”

With these caveats out of the way, let me address three methodological problems with how this chapter is set up, from a historical standpoint.  First, in the title of the chapter, “John Calvin” should have been written in size 24 font, and “and His Contemporaries” in size 8.  In a 52-page chapter, Calvin’s contemporaries get 3 pages--1/2 page of intro, 1 page for Bucer, 1/2 page for Vermigli, and 1 page for Zanchi.  For a study purporting to tell us about the origins of Reformed social thought, this is simply irresponsible.  VanDrunen seems a little nervous about it himself, acknowledging in the chapter’s introductory pages that of course it was a common error to act like Calvin was “the one measure by which later Reformed theology must be assessed” (67), and that recent historians have highlighted both the importance of other early Reformed figures and the discontinuities between Calvin and later Calvinists.  Yet, having raised these objections, VanDrunen dismisses them with a casual wave of his hand: “Though his influence on the later Reformed tradition was not exclusive, it was certainly not surpassed by any of his contemporaries” (68).  Therefore, in a study which is necessarily selective, “granting Calvin the spotlight seems well justified” (68).  

Now, let’s examine this for a minute.  Let’s grant that Calvin exercised more influence on the subsequent Reformed tradition than any other single figure among his contemporaries; that does not mean that he exercised more than all of them combined.  It might be fair to say that if we were to try to quantify influence, and oversimplify the picture a lot, we might say that Calvin’s influence on later Reformed thought was 35%, Bullinger’s 20%, Bucer’s 15%, Vermigli’s 10%, Knox’s 10%, and others’ 10% (sorry, I have a weakness for using statistics).  Does this preponderance justify him receiving 49 pages and everyone else receiving 3?  

In particular, VanDrunen has ignored an important point, which is that this study is not about Reformed theology in general (over which Calvin has had an unmistakably strong influence), but about Reformed social and political thought, which is a somewhat different matter.  I’m sure that there’s a lot of literature on the subject that could offer a more well-informed opinion, but based on my knowledge, it seems quite certain that, compared to his influence on other issues, Calvin’s political theology had much less of an impact on subsequent Reformed thought.  In France, the Huguenots, as a persecuted minority, never had much opportunity to put a political and social ideal into practice.  In England and Scotland (and thus later in America), despite the name of Calvin being held in high regard, political theology and indeed ecclesiology was dominated either (among the Dissenters) by Knoxian and proto-Puritan strains of thought that differed dramatically from Calvin, or (among the Establishment) by Erastian, and, as Torrance Kirby shows, Tigurian (that is, from Zurich) political theology.  In Germany and Switzerland, the latter influences held sway.  The Netherlands I know too little about to say, though I think it would be fair to say that here Calvin’s influence was fairly strong, though alloyed with other elements.  Even in Geneva, subsequent political and social thought was molded as much by Beza as by Calvin himself.  

Now, to point all this out is not merely a quibble of historical methodology, as it would be if Calvin and his contemporaries shared basically the same paradigm (as VanDrunen seems to try and say, though without much conviction).  Bucer’s De Regno Christi portrays a richer, more complex, and maddeningly ambiguous picture of the relation between “the kingdom of Christ” and “the kingdoms of this world” than does Calvin, as I shall hopefully discuss a bit more when I get to the end of the chapter.  Knox and the Presbyterians, with their notion of a theocratic “national covenant” are certainly far from Calvin and even further from what VanDrunen wants to advocate.  Vermigli and Bullinger (enormously influential upon many strands of early Reformed thought), while drawing a sharp “two kingdoms” dichotomy, did not draw it in anything like the way VanDrunen wants to, since their paradigm made the oversight of religious affairs the foremost duty of the civil magistrate (see Torrance Kirby’s The Zurich Connection for a fascinating discussion of the unique and bizarre blend of Gelasianism and Augustinianism that these two theologians propounded).  All of this means that, whatever VanDrunen is able to prove about Calvin in this chapter really proves rather little about the “Development of Reformed Social Thought,” since it leaves 2/3 of the foundations of Reformed social thought out of the picture.

The second methodological problem is perhaps another to which the Reformed seem especially prone.  We Reformed have an obsession with order, logic, systems.  (Perhaps this is why--to indulge a thought that just struck me--we seem so prone to go head-over-heels for Austrian economics.)  This has its uses, but it can really get in the way of doing good history, because it means we are always looking for people to be orderly, logical, consistent.  And people aren’t!  How many real thinkers, thinkers with interesting thoughts worth studying, were consistent in all of their thinking across different contexts, different genres, different debates, different decades?  If you can point me to an example (Francis Turretin, maybe, or the dime-a-dozen Reformed systematicians of the last century) then to me that’s just proof that they aren’t thinkers with interesting thoughts worth studying, because they’re not thinking like real people.  Real people change their minds, real people get passionate about something and overstate their case, real people get caught up in a debate and over-emphasize just one side of an issue, only to over-emphasize the other side the next year in a different debate.  

VanDrunen seems terribly reluctant to admit that Calvin was “inconsistent,” as if this were to accuse him of the unforgiveable sin.  He hems and he haws and he gives various explanations, before finally admitting that yes, perhaps, Calvin was inconsistent at points.  This way of looking at it also means that, since inconsistency is an odd aberration, VanDrunen can identify what the “heart” of Calvin’s “real” position was, and then dismiss other aspects as lamentable inconsistencies.  This, I submit, is not good history.  The fact is that even a man as systematic as Calvin thought many different things over the course of his life and simultaneously wanted to do justice to a number of different intellectual and practical ideals, which led him to sometimes assert, for instance, a radical discontinuity between church and state, and sometimes a close partnership between the two.  The Calvin that VanDrunen gives us is a rather inhuman, disembodied Calvin, a mind whose true ideas we can identify if we can succeed in disentangling them, as Calvin himself couldn’t quite do, from earth-bound issues of practical life.  This perhaps makes sense, when we consider VanDrunen’s Gnostic paradigm of the Christian life, in which the Christian’s true identity is “spiritual” and “heavenly,” separated from the mundane earthly affairs in which, as a human, he must still be engaged.  (You know, that came across rather harshly; I didn’t really intend for it to, but, there it is--maybe my true feelings are harsher than I thought.)

Third, and closely related, VanDrunen seems to have very little interest in the historical context within which Calvin and the Reformers formulated their statements on social and political issues.  For someone seeking to do historical work in any period, this is a significant oversight, but when dealing with a period as tumultuous and conflicted as the Reformation, it is grievous indeed.  At one point, after introducing Calvin’s rather shockingly dualistic statements in the Institutes (e.g., “For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside”) VanDrunen says, “I turn now to describe Calvin’s view of the nature of these two kingdoms and thereby to explain why he drew this contrast so sharply.”  “Aha!” I thought, “Here it is; he’s going to explain to us why, in historical terms, Calvin felt compelled to state things this way, about the context of anti-papal polemics and so on.”  Alas, no.  VanDrunen proceeded to explain Calvin’s view in terms of other theological commitments of his, with absolutely no mention of the historical, polemical context.  

This approach explains why VanDrunen finds himself so flummoxed when he comes to the fact that, in actual practice in Geneva, Calvin did not seem to abide by the radical disjunction that he had asserted in the Institutes; in fact, even in the Institutes, Calvin appears to contradict himself, very quickly moving to give civil magistrates charge over religious affairs.  We can see this same phenomenon, even more vividly, in the work of Bullinger and Vermigli--they will make the most shocking, unqualified statements about the incommensurability of civil and religious affairs, of church and state, on one page, and then, a couple pages later, they’ll be saying how silly people are who think that spiritual and ecclesial matters aren’t the province of the civil magistrate.  Part of the explanation for this lies in understanding the polemical context.  They don’t like the way in which the popes and the Catholic Church have claimed a plenitude of power over all affairs, spiritual and temporal,  so that the Church has become in many respects indistinguishable from a worldly kingdom.  In reaction to this, they will in certain contexts argue forcefully for the separation of civil and religious affairs, but then it becomes clear, when they turn to consider the civil magistrate, that they don’t want anything like a complete separation.  Rather, they want to separate civil affairs from ecclesial authority, but they don’t necessarily want to separate ecclesial affairs from civil authority; the independence of the Chruch is simply not a high value for them at this point.  We all do this sort of thing all the time, and in the polemically-supercharged setting of Reformation theology, it stands to reason that they did it even more.  VanDrunen, though, gives almost no attention to the historical context or causes of the claims Calvin makes, a critical oversight in a book purporting to give us a history of Reformed social thought.

Now, all that was prolegomenal--good heavens!  I told you this would be a long review.  

"The Sweet Odor of Gain"

February 25, 2010

The Protestant ethic may have been a friend of capitalism, but Martin Bucer certainly wasn’t.  Some of the most interesting passages in his De Regno Christi are the extensive advice he gives magistrates about economic affairs, and in which he rants against the profit-seeking proto-capitalists.  Two sections in particular intrigued me.  

First was his treatment of the issue of the enclosures, a matter of which I’d never heard before last semester, but which came up a number of times in Theology and the Global Economy class.  The enclosures were the expropriation of small landowners by larger magnates, who wanted to use their property to expand their sheep herds for the lucrative wool industry.  This took place as a result of the breakup of the monasteries, and the distribution of their enormous lands to the members of parliament who supported the king.  These were thus in a position so superior to the surrounding small farmers that they could readily buy them out.  Hilaire Belloc argues that it was these expropriations, transforming England from a society of free small landholders to one of a propertyless working class and a propertied upper class, that enabled capitalism to take root in England, and in such a vicious form as it did, because a division between the capital-owners and the laborers had already been created.  

Bucer was almost as upset as Belloc about what was going on, although he had only just come over from Germany to live in England.  It was clear to him that the land was to be used for the sustenance of the maximum number of men, not the generation of maximum profit: 

“Now, it is apparent that this island has been adorned by the Lord with such good soil and climate that it should be able to produce far richer farm products than it now does, if the fields would be cultivated with a right diligence and if all land were cultivated which used to be and should be cultivated on its own merits and for the good of the commonwealth, at the expense (at least partial if not entire) of the profit in wool.  Insofar as this profit provides only harmful pomp and luxury, it should be turned over tot he purpose of giving sustenance to human beings who are the sons of God.  They say that this trade in wool has now so increased that in most places one man uses as much land for the pasture of his sheep as was used a short time ago to support the life of more than a thousand men.  But what person not completely destitute of the mind of Christ can fail to acknowledge that Christian princes must make it a major project that there should be as good men as possible everywhere who live for the glory of God; therefore, such princes must in every way be on guard lest their own interests more than those of the commonwealth, excited by the infinite stimulus of greed, should displace men from the lands, and rob the state of its greatest riches and ornaments, namely, good citizens....”

To solve this problem, Bucer recommends dramatic state intervention to divide up land for cultivation and to set fair prices:

“It will be necessary: first, to designate for the pasture of sheep that portion of land which the Lord himself seems in his generosity especially to have provided for this work and which ancestral followers of God adapted to this use; secondly, that lands fit for planting should be rented for cultivation at a fair price.  For this price really began to increase enormously after the lands of the monks had come into the power of those men whose insatiable avarice for everything necessary for the sustaining of present life increases daily.”

Second, Bucer also has many other recommendations to the king about how he should restrain a capitalistic greed and the proliferation of luxury in the realm of commerce:

“Marketing is a business which is honest and necessary for the commonwealth if it confines itself to the export and import of things that are advantageous to the commonwealth for living well and in a holy way, but not those which encourage and foster impious pomp and luxury.  In order to benefit men’s piety, this purpose ought never to be absent from the thoughts and deeds of Christians but should always be considered and weighed as scrupulously as possible.”

Notice here that Bucer believes that those involved in “marketing,” which is to say, commerce, cannot plead the excuse that they are merely bringing to market those items which the market demands--an excuse that is sacrosanct in our society--but that they have a responsibility only to bring those items which promote good morals and piety.  He will later insist that the magistrate also has a responsibility to make sure that they do so, since they will probably be too greedy to exercise such responsibility themselves:

“Inasmuch as merchants pretty commonly reject this purpose, they burst forth with wickedness and greed, so that next to the false clergy there is no type of men more pestiferous to the commonwealth.  For, in the first place, for the sweet odor of gain, of which they accumulate an immense amount with little work through their nefarious skills, and for the splendor of pomp and luxury, of which they recognize no measure or limit, they attract the more outstanding talents, which if they were dedicated to philosophy, could be of very great use both to the State and the Church....For they cover their minds with the darkness of perverse judgment, so that they judge nothing to be important but to excel in the accumulation of wealth, through good and evil means, and in the expenditure of what has been accumulated in all kinds of worthless ways of life.”

C’mon Martin, lay off it--can’t you appreciate someone who’s got a good head for making profit?  And if he doesn’t have the incentive of a few well-earned creature comforts, what else is going to make him work?  

“And since they must often live immoderately, they perpetrate frauds in business, multiply profits wherever they can, increase monopolies in order to make a gain not only for their limitless luxury but also for the constant increase of the interest they are taking.  It also happens frequently that they influence the councils and impede the law courts of the princes for their own ends, so as to remove the obstacles to their artful trickery.”

No way, Martin!  You think that good profit-seeking free-marketeers would try to form monopolies, or would lobby the governments to change regulations in their favor?  Don’t be such a cynic!

“Furthermore, they daily invent astonishing enticements for the purchase of their trifling wares, which are designed and prepared only for impious luxury and pomp, and they seduce nobles and other wealthy men of little thrift into buying them.  And when they do not have enough money for these trifles which are esteemed as the ornaments of the nobility and its social status, there is at hand the money of the merchants, but at interest, and such a poisonous interest that within a very brief time whole families are destroyeed and overthrown.”

Oh come now!  Now you have a problem with advertising too?  C’mon, every merchant has a right to tout his product to consumers, and if they choose to buy it, that’s their choice.  They’re responsible individuals, so how can you blame the marketer if they choose to go into debt to buy his products?

So what does Bucer suggest should be done about all this?

“It must be ordered, first, that nobody should be allowed to enter merchandising whom officials have not judged suitable for this sort of thing, having found him to be pious, a lover of the commonwealth rather than of private interest, eager for sobriety and temperance, vigilant and industrious.  Secondly, that these should not import or export merchandise other than what Your Majesty has decreed.  And he shall decree that only those things are to be exported of which the people of the realm really have an abundance so that their export may be of no less benefit to the people of this realm, to whom these things are surplus, than to those who take them to foreign countries and make a profit on them.  So also he should permit no merchandise to be imported except what he judges good for the pious, sober, and salutary use of the commonwealth.  Finally, that a definite and fair price should be established for individual items of merchandise, which can easily be arranged and is very necessary (so fiery is human avarice) for conserving justice and decency among the citizens.”

Wow...certainly not what you’d call laissez-faire.

And to think Christians call Obama a “socialist”!  

(In case Davey should misunderstand, that is meant as a criticism of us, not of Bucer.  And in case others should misunderstand that, I do have criticisms of Bucer.)

Bucer on Capital Punishment

In one of his less charming passages, Bucer acknowledges that the civil laws and penalties of the Old Testament are not binding in detail, only in substance, but goes on to insist in a thorough, across-the-board application of their stringent standards of capital punishment in a Christian commonwealth:

"For inasmuch as we have been freed from the teaching of Moses through Christ the Lord, so that it is no longer necessary for us to observe the civil decrees of the law of Moses, namely, in terms fo the way and the circumstances in which they are described, nevertheless, insofar as the substance and proper end of these commandments are concerned, and especially those which enjoin the discipline that is necessary for the whole commonwealth, whoever does not reckon that such commandments are to be conscientiously observed is certainly not attributing to God either supreme wisdom or a righteous care for our salvation.

Accordingly, in every state sanctified to God capital punishment must be ordered for all who have dared to injure religion, either by introducing a false and impious doctrine about the worship of God or by calling people away from the true worship of God; for all who blaspheme the name of God and his solemn services; who violate the Sabbath; who rebelliously despise the authority of parents and live their own life wickedly; who are unwilling to submit to the sentence of a supreme tribunal; who have committed bloodshed, adultery, rape, kidnapping; who have given false testimony in a capital case."

That should give some great material for the theonomists to pounce on....if any of them are left....

Bucerian Totalitarianism?

February 15, 2010

Since moving to Europe, and also reading more widely in the Christian political tradition, I've become increasingly convinced that American Christian opposition to a wide-ranging role for the State is rooted not primarily in Christianity, but in Americanity (not that there aren't good Christian reasons to oppose the state, but it seems to me that those are not the reasons generally given these days).  Americans, from our political founding, have a powerful suspicion of civil government, and are very jealous to protect the freedom of our private lives from its grasp (a lot of good it's done us!).  This is simply innate in our disposition, and is simply not shared by Christians in Europe, despite the fact that they have suffered plenty from over-grasping States as well.  Also, despite the fact that all our conservative narratives tell of this explosion of state authority in the past 200 years that was part of a godless messianic impulse in the State that wanted to take over the whole of life and drive Christianity out, almost all of the state functions that Christians protest against have been around for a very long time, and were advocated strongly by Christians, going at least back to the Reformation.  At the moment, my interest is not in discussing why Americans and Europeans have had the attitudes they've had, nor in pinning the blame on the Protestant Reformers for initiating this fondness for statism (though they certainly played a big role), but simply to show how much of what American Christians decry in the State is neither new, nor, apparently, alien to Christianity.  

I use Martin Bucer's On the Kingdom of Christ to illustrate my point.  This treatise was written to King Edward VI of England, explaining to him how he should found a Christian state, and there is remarkably little about the institutions or officers of the Church in it, except for the discussion of how the king ought to oversee that good church leaders are appointed, that evangelists should be sent out, that they should teach good doctrine, and that if they do not, he should remove and punish them.  My concern on that point is not what interests me here.  Rather, I am interested by the ensuing discussion of how the king should ensure that the poor are provided for, and oversee the diaconal ministries in each town; should make rules about who should and should not be married, and what family agreements regarding marriages are valid, and should provide for divorces of those who cannot be happily married; should introduce compulsory education throughout the realm and ensure that every child is prepared for a useful profession that he is appropriately gifted for; should regulate industry, shutting down those industries which are unsuitable for the nation and introducing those which he things will be beneficial; should carefully regulate the foreign trade and make sure that only upright men are allowed to engage in merchant activity and only goods deemed useful are imported; should license only upright men to run public inns; should see to it that edifying recreations and entertainments are fostered in the commonwealth; and should make sure that no one in the country is allowed to be idle, but is put into some pursuit beneficial to the commonwealth.  Bucer's Christian kingdom is at least as intrusive as Plato's Republic--assigning citizens to their most useful occupations, making sure that only the right kind of art and dancing are fostered, etc. 

Here we have, long before Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, the advocacy of a welfare system, trade regulation, a command economy, state licensing of professionals, compulsory public education to prepare children to fill roles deemed useful in society, art censorship and sponsorship, oh, and of course, state oversight of marriage and family issues.

The point here is not to endorse either Bucer or our modern conservative Christian horror of this, but simply to point out how deeply embedded in our Christian tradition this sort of role for the State is.  

Spiritualizing the Kingdom (or, "No, Don't do it, Martin!")

Martin Bucer's De Regno Christi (On the Kingdom of Christ) is an utterly fascinating book, revealing better than any text I know the tensions and contradictions that dogged the Reformers' attempts to simultaneously retain a strong ecclesiology and strong view of the civil authorities' role in promoting the kingdom.

The chief question I brought to this text was: Is the Church in itself the kingdom of Christ, or is the kingdom the joint work of Church and State under Christ's lordship?  Bucer begins by unequivocally stating the former, and articulating what seems to be a robustly political idea of the Church--it is itself a kingdom, analogous to, but set over against, "the kingdoms of this world," which refers to all political powers, Christian or secular.  The Church too is a kingdom that seeks to unite its citizens in a community peace, in the pursuit of a common good that affects every area of life, and which seeks to order the lives of each to assist the whole, but it does so through the word, not the sword.  With the Church as such a seemingly autonomous political entity, standing over against even Christian civil governments, one wonders how Bucer is going to take this treatise in the Erastian direction that we all know he is going to.

But then he begins citing Scripture passages that describe the kingdom, and what seemed so solid, physical, corporate, and political begins to vanish into mist.
The Church/Kingdom is depoliticized by becoming increasingly spiritual, inner, and individual in Bucer's description, even as he comments on Biblical prophecies where it is robustly tangible and this-worldly.  As he came to each verse, I waited with bated breath, hoping he wouldn't vaporize it; when he started exegeting Is. 61:1-6, I even scribbled in the margin, "No, don't do it, Martin!"  But he did.

Here's the passage from Isaiah:

"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, for the Lord to anoint me; to evangelize the meek he has sent me, and to heal the brokenhearted, to announce liberty to captives and the opening of prison to those who are bound.  To announce the year of the good pleasure of the Lord, and the day of the vengeance of our God, to console those who mourn.  To propose consolation to the mourners of Zion, to give them a glory instead of ashes, an oil of gladness instead of mourning, to mantle them with praise instead of a grieving spirit, to call them trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord for glory.  They shall build up the places which have been waste for ages, and they shall raise up buildings which have been from their beginning desolate, and they shall restore cities which have been waste and desolate for many generations.  And foreigners shall stand and feed your flocks, and aliens shall be your farmers and vinedressers.  But you will be called the priests of the Lord; they shall say that you are the ministers of our God; you shall enjoy the wealth of nations, and in their esteem you shall be lifted up."

Here's some excerpts from Bucer's remarks on it:

"Second: it is the sum and substance of the gospel to proclaim the forgiveness of sins through Christ to the penitent, for those who do not yet have this in faith are captives of Satan, detained in the prison of eternal perdition.  Third: only those who have a contrite heart, i.e., regret their sins with true repentance, receive the gospel of salvation....Fifth: whoever are true citizens of the Kingdom of Christ should plainly manifest that they are trees of righteousness and plantings of the Lord, planted to show forth his glory, so that all may see this clearly and proclaim accordingly....And so the light of faith should shine forth in every church of Christ from every Christian, so that all, 'seeing their good works, may glorify the Father, who is in heaven.' ... Sixth: it is the duty of the citizens of the Kingdom of Christ that they restore all the old ruins that have lain waste for many ages, i.e., that they lead many peoples who for generations have been deprived of any knowledge and love of God to faith in Christ and the development of righteousness."

Of course, all these things are true about repentance of sin, faith, and individual righteousness, but if this is all you can see even in a passage as robust as this one, then yours is a poor and ethereal gospel indeed.