Westminster Bookstore Blog

Interview with Author Stephen Nichols

Westminster Bookstore recently had the opportunity to talk with author Stephen Nichols about church history, writing, teaching, and his early life of crime. His latest book, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World, earned high praise from Sinclair Ferguson and Michael Horton. When he is not filling up hard drives with his copious writing, Stephen teaches at Lancaster Bible College and Graduate School. He earned his Ph.D. from Westminster Theological Seminary and presently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Heidi, and their two sons.

WTSBOOKS: When did you first become interested in history, and how did that interest start?

NICHOLS: My interest in history began in college and was nourished in seminary by the inimitable D. Clair Davis and the provocative D.G. Hart. Actually, that’s the genesis of my interest in church history. As for history, that started earlier. When I was a kid I wanted to change my name to George Washington. When we visited Mt. Vernon on a family vacation I set off the alarms as I tried to sneak past the ropes to sit at his desk. Fortunately, for me it was a misdemeanor and I was let off.

WTSBOOKS: Why is it important for Christians to know church history?

NICHOLS: Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses rivers as a metaphor to speak of how meaningful connections to our past shape our identity in the present. As a young African-American writing that poem, Hughes found that his soul had “grown deep like the rivers,” as he made those meaningful connections. I think the reverse is also true. Without those meaningful connections to the past, we become shallow, shrivel up.

We are a people with a past. And that past, both for good and for ill, shapes us in the present. I think we need to move away from seeing church history as a luxury or a tack on, and move on to seeing it as a necessity. Else, we risk growing shallow(er).

WTSBOOKS: What do you think is unique or different about your approach to teaching/writing about history?

NICHOLS: I try to make history fun, though I’m not sure I always succeed. I’m also not hesitant to bring history forward and to bring historical figures forward as living interlocutors. Many historians are more comfortable with leaving history in the past. And, while we do run the risk of anachronism or of just plain getting the story wrong, I think it helps people to bring these figures and their ideas to bear upon the issues we face as disciples in the twenty-first century.

WTSBOOKS: Many people think history is dry and boring. What do you do in your writing and teaching to make it more interesting?

NICHOLS: I think too often we forget that these significant figures were people, with foibles and senses of humor. We reduce these figures and the events they were catalysts in to flat, read boring, lists of dates and descriptions. If the historian can bring the full dimension of the character to the surface then I think he or she offers something students and readers, even the historiaphobic among them, want to hear. In the introduction to the Reformation book, I cryptically refer to a niece’s comments on a biography of her famous uncle. She thought it was accurate and got the story right, on the surface of things. But, she thought it failed to get her uncle’s sense of humor. I still won’t reveal the biography. It is, however, a lesson that I as a teacher and writer want to take to heart.

WTSBOOKS: What did you learn while researching for The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World that was a surprise even to you?

NICHOLS: I was impressed with the missionary emphasis of the Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin. I had known it was there, but researching it and writing on it brought it more to the surface for me, even convicting me. I also was impressed with the role of women in the Reformation, and not just in supporting roles as wives. These were formidable theologians and courageous rulers who made a difference. I devoted a chapter in the book to them. They deserve more.

WTSBOOKS: The first chapter of your new book discusses why the Reformation still matters today. Can you summarize for us here why you think it does?

NICHOLS: In the end, the Reformation was about theology. We need that lesson. Many times in church history there were attempts to reform the church by looking at the way the church is administered or by reexamining issues of spirituality. Even the time leading up to the Reformation yields these types of attempts at reform. But, these movements didn’t pull off true reformation. They couldn’t. In our own day, there are pockets of unease about the “institutional church,” reflecting too many modern sensibilities or reflecting too many American sensibilities. Consequently, some are calling for reform of the church on the level of its structure or hierarchy or on the level of how the church functions. These types of reform, however, won’t do. If North American evangelicalism is in need of reform, and I think it could use at least some touching up here and there, then that reform has got to be at the root, at the level of theology. More often than not our attempts at reform tend to be on the surface, when it’s theology that matters.

Also, the Reformation was about preaching. This is what God blesses, the ministry of word and sacrament–the things God ordained for the church to do. The more time we spend with the Reformers, the more we are made aware of how preaching the word is to be our sole task. If Luther said it once, he said it a hundred times, “We can spare everything except the Word.”

WTSBOOKS: What is the main “takeaway” you are hoping your readers will get from The Reformation?

NICHOLS: I hope readers will appreciate the Reformers as people, who laughed and who suffered. I hope they will appreciate the multiplex nature of the Reformation itself, that they’ll have a sense of the various movements which comprised it. And ultimately, hearkening back to Langston Hughes’s poem, I hope readers will be enriched in their lives as disciples by their newfound connections with their past.

WTSBOOKS: How does a busy professor like you find time to write so many fine books?

NICHOLS: I have a gracious wife, who also happens to be a literature professor.