During my senior year of high school at Black Forrest Academy our class made two trips that are forever memorialized in my mind. The first was our senior trip to Rome, with stops in Florence and Venice. It was in Rome that I first felt the magnitude of how Christianity has shaped Western thought and culture. For example, Rodney Stark, a noted historian, argues that Christianity or monotheism (belief in one all powerful and knowing God) united the western world several beliefs. Here are a few;  the world is orderly and knowable, which led to the scientific revolution; human beings have inherent dignity, which led to slavery being understood as morally corrupt and babies and the elderly as being worth protecting; the education of each individual, male and female as being best for a flourishing society. Even though some of these ideas took a while to take hold as common beliefs, we naturally assume many of these in our culture today, but that was not always the case. Christianity has shaped the modern western mindset in a fundamental way.

It was my trip to Rome that I begun to understand how history had changed because of Christianity, but it was another trip, to Geneva, I began to see how Christianity always needs to be reforming. After many years the Church, headquartered in Rome, had become so corrupt and stagnate that God raised up some theologians and pastors who desired to reform the church. They believed the church, society and culture, was in such darkness that it needed a fresh breath of light. This mainly began as a reformation project within the church, but led to a group of people called protestants who were also called “the reformed church”. Geneva is where one such important reformer lived and pastored, John Calvin. While there are many other reformers, John Calvin was the one who gave the most articulate version of reformed theology in his book, “The Institutes of the Christian Religion”. This book formed the principles in what we now think of as the Presbyterian Church. One of the first areas the reformers started with was the worship service. Preaching was now going to be in the common language instead of Latin, which only a few educated wealthy congregants could understand. Singing was now going to be done by the congregation, not just a few monks in choir lofts. This lead Bach, Handel, and Hayden to write many of the greatest pieces of music we still know today. Communion was now going to be offered to each individual instead of only consumed by the priest. The pastorate would not be looked at as an elevated office, or mediator between God and man, but rather there was a priest hood of each believer. In reformed churches Grace is believed to be dispensed from faith in the cross of Christ, not from a priest or ecclesiastical body. Accountability structures should be in place for both the congregation and the pastors, or elected elders from the congregation.