Reformed theology perceives God as one who is worthy to be worshiped and also
seeks friendship and fellowship with humanity. Additionally, Reformed theology is
sensitive to the reality of human brokenness through sin, God’s gracious initiative to
redeem and restore all of creation, the centrality of union with Christ, a balanced
reliance upon Word and Spirit, the importance of integrating head and heart, and a
ministry of compassion and social justice to those in need.
The second step of the retrieval process recognizes that by retrieving Ambrose’s
piety a person is also retrieving his sources. This may be problematic for some
readers since Ambrose made frequent use of Western Catholic writings. However,
the previous chapters confirmed that Calvin, Ambrose, and his fellow Puritans were
willing to embrace and even strongly endorse medieval sources, especially those of
Bernard of Clairvaux. David Cornick accurately affirms a central characteristic of
Reformed piety, maintaining its “continuity” with the early church and that “[to] be
Reformed was to be Catholic”^218 and Richard Muller asserts that “Reformed orthodox
theology” gives witness to “a conscious catholicity.”^219 This should not imply a
homogeneous theology or an indiscriminate reception of all Western Catholic
scholastic theology. Chapter 4 illustrated Reformed authors always filtered these
writings through their own theology.^220 Additionally, the same chapter revealed that
Ambrose and other Puritans developed a strong resistance to the post-Tridentine
writers such as Ignatius of Loyola. However, moving into the eighteenth and the
early portion of the nineteenth-century a sharper cleavage of discontinuity emerges.
This is a complex matter to sort out and obviously there are numerous factors
(^218) Cornick, Letting God Be God (^) , 131, cf. 132-3.
(^219) Muller, After Calvin, 47, cf. 51, 53, 54.
(^220) See for example Hambrick-Stowe, Early New England Meditative Poetry, 13, 18-
20, 61 and B. R. White “Echoes of Medieval Christendom,” 84.