The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane on his Reformation research

The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane, an alumnus and Affiliate Professor of Church History at Nashotah House, received the 2022 Meeter Family Fellowship at Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary. The Meeter Center is one of the leading centers for the study of the Reformation in North America.

Alumni Associate Rebecca Terhune recently caught up with Lane to discuss his fellowship and research interests.

Tell us about the fellowship.

The Meeter Center in Grand Rapids is one of the premier research archives for the study of the Reformation in North America. On the campus of Calvin University (formerly Calvin College), it draws a number of scholars each year and often hosts conferences for those working in early modern religious history. It also offers a number of fellowships and grants, but I’m fortunate to have been awarded their principal fellowship, the Meeter Family Fellowship, for 2022. So, I’m spending a considerable portion of the summer there using their archives and other resources.

What will you be working on?

My current project is a history of the feast of Pentecost in the Middle Ages and Reformation. This book examines competing claims about the relationship between the proclamation of the Gospel, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the relational reality of the Church in sermons, commentaries, theological treatises, art, music, drama, and liturgical material for the feast. Even those Reformed communities that discarded the calendar nevertheless had to account for the event itself in exegesis and sermons. Questions central to the sixteenth-century reformations (questions which remain relevant today) were inescapable when approaching Pentecost. Does the Holy Spirit teach new truths? What is the relationship between the Spirit and the fixed text of Scripture? To what extent does the visible church draw its identity as church from its evangelical proclamation? In other words, the handling of Pentecost is a major yet unexplored vantage on the intersection of pneumatology, ecclesiology, and the place of Scripture and evangelical preaching.

How did you get started in your discipline?

I finished my PhD back in 2010, and I was blessed to have had a number of teachers who paid attention to both ideas and practice in Christian history. Good historians weave together the story of practice and the story of belief. Also, several of my teachers, though certainly not all of them, were faithful Christians. My hero, many years ago as an undergrad, was the medieval historian and priest Richard Pfaff. Twenty years ago I knew I wanted to be Dr. Pfaff when I grew up. I’m still working at it. At UNC, at Iowa, and likewise at Nashotah House I was blessed to sit and listen to good storytellers who often took my interests seriously. I’m grateful for these people, for example Fr. Klukas and Fr. Peay.

How have your academic interests grown over the years?

The thread that finds its way through all of my work – and this is my third monograph – is the way Christians tell stories and what this tells us about how Christians understand themselves in the world. We are story-telling creatures and we inhabit these stories; we climb into them and they help us make sense of the world.

We are storytelling creatures. And we inhabit these stories, we climb into them, and they help us make sense of the world.

In my senior year as an undergraduate, right after being confirmed in The Episcopal Church in 2001, I became absorbed with the question of authentic Anglicanism and claims about what it meant to be faithful to the tradition. When I arrived in graduate school I wanted to explore all of that. And what I found (and what became my first book in 2013) was the way that Church of England conformists in the 17th century crafted an historically oriented narrative about what it meant to be faithful to the Church of England. The story they created then legitimated their contemporary designs for the established church, especially during the Restoration in the 1660s. Their rather plastic narrative was subsequently absorbed into the Anglican self-imagination. Consider the rather thread-bare but comforting elements we toss out as constitutive for our tradition, e.g. “via media.” Where did all that come from? My second book did something similar. I looked at the intersection of reform movements and practice (“spirituality”) from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and I tracked the language of “primitivism,” i.e., claims about reviving something lost, bringing back some mythic golden age. But it’s invariably a creative and imaginative task. Again, we crave a narrative, personally and corporately. It’s how we move through this world. This is something that pops up quite a bit in the courses I teach for Nashotah House too.

What do you do when you’re not engaged in research or ministry?

I try to be a half-way decent dad and husband. A few years ago, my son became a Cub Scout, and I’ve walked beside him in the program. This is good for me on two fronts: (1) I’ve never had any aptitude for sports, and I find it very hard to fake an interest; (2) scouting was enormously influential for me as I was involved in the BSA through college. Now I serve as the Committee Chair for the Pack (when we showed up, there was already a Den Leader for my son’s grade). And we’ve built up a very strong program in the past few years. A good deal of it is relationship building. But in general, I’ve found that walking in the woods – especially if I get to talk with my wife who is both my friend and my colleague; she teaches at Bethany Seminary – is like washing my head out.

The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane is an Affiliate Professor at Nashotah House Theological Seminary. He is the author of two books on the Reformation. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Lane was ordained deacon and priest in 2011 in The Episcopal Church and has served parishes in Louisiana and Ohio. He has been Associate Rector of St. George’s Church in Dayton since 2014 and is currently a member of The Episcopal Church’s General Board of Examining Chaplains. Originally from North Carolina, Lane is happily married to Dr. Denise Kettering-Lane, Associate Professor at Bethany Theological Seminary, and they have two children, Daniel and Elizabeth. He is proud also to be a son of the House (class of 2011). †