Michael Reeves
PART I
The Story and Significance of the Reformation
Michael Reeves
[Michael Reeves, President and Professor of Theology at Union School of Theology in the UK (www.ust.ac.uk), was previously Head of Theology for UCCF and an associate minister at All Souls Church, Langham Place, London. His books include Why the Reformation Still Matters and The Unquenchable Flame.]
A Desperate Search for Peace
The twenty-one year old was walking to his university in Erfurt, Germany, when he was caught in a sudden and violent storm. A lightning bolt hit so close it knocked him to the ground. In panic he cried out ‘Saint Anne, help me! I shall become a monk!’ And so the young Martin Luther began the life of a monk.
It was a life he embraced with intense seriousness. For, terrified of death and the prospect of standing before his Judge, Luther was determined to climb the ladder to heaven, however steep it proved. Every few hours he would leave his tiny cell and make his way to a service in the chapel, starting with matins in the middle of the night, then another at six in the morning, another at nine, another at twelve, and so on. He often took no bread or water for three days at a time, and would quite deliberately freeze himself in the winter cold in the hope that that might please God. Driven to confession, he would exhaust his confessors, taking up to six hours at a time to catalogue his most recent sins.
Yet the more he did, the more troubled he became. Was it enough? Were his motives right? Along with all his exhausting external works, he found himself sinking into an ever-deeper introspection. Then, in 1510, he was given the opportunity to visit Rome on monastery business. For him, it was a dream come true: there in Rome he could be closer to the apostles and saints than anywhere else. The place was crammed with their relics, and each one, he had been taught, conferred various spiritual benefits. On arrival, he dashed manically from holy site to holy site, hoping to clock up merit at each. He actually wished his parents were dead so that he could have freed them from purgatory by virtue of all the merit he was amassing.
Then he decided to climb the Scala Sancta. This was the staircase which, supposedly, Jesus had climbed to appear before Pilate, and which had subsequently been brought to Rome. Kissing each step as he climbed, and repeating the Lord’s Prayer for each one, he was assured he could free the soul of his choice from purgatory. Of course, he ran at the chance. Yet on reaching the top he was forced to ask ‘Who knows whether it is true?’
On his return, Luther was transferred to the Augustinian monastery in the tiny town of Wittenberg. The place may have been small, but it was the capital of Electoral Saxony, and the regional ruler, Frederick ‘the Wise,’ had made it the home of his stunning collection of relics. There in the Castle Church, the pilgrim could enjoy nine aisles crammed with more than nineteen thousand relics. Highlights included a wisp of straw from Christ’s crib, a strand of his beard, a nail from the cross, a piece of bread from the Last Supper, a twig from Moses’ burning bush, a few of Mary’s hairs and some bits of her clothing, as well as innumerable teeth and bones from celebrated saints. More to the point, veneration of each piece was worth an indulgence of one hundred days (with a bonus one for each aisle), meaning the pious visitor could tot up more than 1,900,000 days off purgatory.
The Purgatory Industry
Purgatory and indulgences are not familiar concepts to everyone today, but they sprang from the teaching that few would die righteous enough to merit salvation fully. So unless Christians died unrepentant of a ‘mortal’ sin such as murder (in which case they would go to hell), they had the chance after death to have all their sins slowly purged from them in purgatory. Then they could enter heaven, fully cleansed. Few relished the prospect of thousands, or even millions, of years of chastisement after death, and sought to fast-track the route through purgatory, both for themselves and for those they loved. As well as prayers said for the dead, whole services of mass could be said for souls in purgatory. The grace of that mass could then be applied directly to the departed and tormented soul.
An entire industry evolved around purgatory for exactly this reason. The wealthy founded chantries, which were special chapels with priests dedicated to saying prayers and masses for the soul of their sponsor or his fortunate beneficiaries; the less wealthy clubbed together in fraternities to pay for the same.
Most people, then, could expect a stint in purgatory after death. But Luther had been taught that there were saints who had been so good that, not only had they enough merit to enter heaven direct, bypassing purgatory altogether, they actually had more merit than they needed. This ‘spare merit’ of theirs was kept, as it were, in the church’s treasury, to which only the pope had the keys. The pope could therefore give a gift of merit (an indulgence) to any soul he deemed worthy, fast-tracking that soul’s path through purgatory, or even leap-frogging purgatory altogether (with a ‘full,’ or ‘plenary’ indulgence). By Luther’s day, a donation of money to the church was often deemed penitential enough to merit such an indulgence. Thus it became increasingly clear in people’s minds: a bit of cash could secure spiritual bliss. To a monk like Brother Martin, such easy religious trading made a mockery of true repentance. It was a scandal waiting to happen.
Then Luther heard about Johann Tetzel. Tetzel was an indulgence-monger with a lurid style and a travelling quartet. He advertised the indulgences with such jingles as ‘When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs,’ and asked his audiences ‘Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others, who say, “Have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms.”?’ He did not even ask people to confess their sins. Just the money would do.
On All Saints’ Day (1 November), 1517, the merits of the saints were due to be offered in Wittenberg, and Luther saw it as a chance to debate the issue. So, on 31 October (All Saints’ Eve) he nailed to the door of the Castle Church a list of ninety-five theses for debate over the matter of indulgences. Everyone would have to see it the next day. In it he asked questions such as why the pope does not release all souls from purgatory out of love, instead of charging for it. But most significantly, he addressed the practice of procuring indulgences, for they effectively replaced the need for true repentance of the heart with a mere external transaction. Supporting this argument, he soon found that the proof text from the Latin Vulgate which was used to validate the sacrament of penance was a mistranslation of the original Greek. In the Vulgate, Matthew 4:17 read penitentiam agite (‘do penance’), whereas the Greek meant ‘change your mind,’ something internal and not merely external.
Luther could never have predicted the consequences of his action, for, unintentionally, he had started a chain reaction that would turn Europe upside down. The first reaction came, unsurprisingly, from Johann Tetzel. He immediately issued thunderous demands for Luther to be burned as a heretic, and the clamour against Luther only grew. Soon Luther was having to debate far more skilled theologians, and it became increasingly clear that the real issue was one of authority. Which had the final say: the church, or the Bible?
Entering Paradise Itself
During all this time of tumult, Luther’s own understanding of Christianity was shifting. He had posted his ninety-five theses because he believed that indulgences cheapened repentance. But the more he thought about it, the more he saw how superficially he himself had been treating sin. In his schooling he had heard the theologians say that ‘God will not deny grace to those who do their best.’ As a result, he had seen his sin as an outward, behavioural problem—a problem that could be corrected with better conduct. Now, however, he was increasingly aware that the real problem is far deeper: sin is in our hearts, shaping the very grain of our desires. Those who ‘do their best’ are therefore still only acting out the sin that is in their hearts by depending on themselves in their sinful self-love. And that being the case, improved behaviour and religious action will not help. We do not need improved performance, but new hearts.
Yet while his sense of sin deepened, for a long time his understanding of the grace of God did not. For years Luther could only see that God was all Judge and no love, his righteousness being all about punishing sinners, his ‘gospel’ just the promise of judgment. Here was a God he could only ever cower before. ‘Though I lived as a monk without reproach,’ he wrote,
I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.’
All that anguish only pushed him, in his cell in the monastery tower, to study the Scriptures harder. Particularly, he wanted to know what Paul could possibly mean by the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ in Romans 1:17.
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
With this, Luther had discovered an entirely different God and the entirely different way he relates to us. The righteousness of God, the glory of God, the wisdom of God: these are not ways in which God is against us. These are things God has that he shares with us. Here Luther saw for the first time truly good news of a kind and generous God who gives sinners the gift of his own righteousness. The Christian life, then, could not be about the sinner’s struggle to achieve his own, paltry, human righteousness; it was about accepting God’s own, perfect, divine righteousness. Here now was a God who does not want our goodness but our trust. Forgiveness did not depend on how certain the sinner is that he has been truly contrite; forgiveness comes simply by receiving the promise of God. Thus the sinner’s hope is found, not in himself, but outside himself, in God’s word of promise. All the struggles and all the anxiety could be replaced with massive confidence and simple faith.
When (in 1520) Luther came to explain his discovery to the world in a little tract called The Freedom of a Christian, he used a beautiful and revealing illustration. The gospel, he explained, is like the story of a king (representing Jesus) who married a prostitute (representing a sinner). No works of hers could ever win her the right to be his bride. However, when the king made his marriage vow, the prostitute became, by status, a queen. It is not that she made her behaviour queenly and thus made herself the queen. Indeed, she did not know how to behave as befits royalty. But he changed her status when he took her to be his. Thus she found herself to be still her poor old self at heart, and at the same time a queen by status.
Just so, the sinner, on accepting Christ’s promise in the gospel, is simultaneously (i) a sinner at heart and (ii) righteous by status. The Christian is at the same time righteous and a sinner (simul justus et peccator), and will always remain so (semper justus et peccator). For by God’s grace Christians have a righteousness credited to them that is not their own: the righteousness of Christ. As Luther put it, we have a righteousness that is both alien (external, and not our own) and passive (unearned). What has happened is the ‘joyful exchange’ in which all that the believer has (her sin) she gives to Christ, and all that he has (his righteousness, blessedness, life, and glory) he gives to her.
Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by him. And she has that righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast as of her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the face of death and hell and say, “If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine and all mine is his,” as the bride in the Song of Solomon [2:16] says, “My beloved is mine and I am his.”
Here I Stand
Luther was soon summoned to a session (or ‘diet’) of the imperial court in Worms, where most assumed he would soon be burned for heresy. When he arrived he was initially so intimidated by the questioning in the presence of all the rulers and nobility that he could hardly speak. The papal nuncio took Luther to be too stupid to have written all that he had, and wanted to know who really was behind the Reformation tracts. After an order to recant, came Luther’s final answer:
I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen.
It did not take long for the emperor to declare Luther to be ‘an obstinate schismatic and manifest heretic’ who should be harboured by none and read by none, on pain of the direst punishment. Luther, however, was not waiting around in Worms to be condemned. He had already boarded a wagon for Wittenberg.
Then he simply disappeared. What was clear was that he had been abducted from the wagon by armed horsemen; what was not clear was what then happened to him. Most assumed he had been seized for a quiet and summary execution. In fact the kidnappers were in the employ of Frederick the Wise, who had devised the plan to keep Luther in safe custody without incurring the dangers of being seen to harbour an outlaw. Under cover of night, Luther had been secretly escorted to the Wartburg Castle, Frederick’s stronghold in Electoral Saxony.
The castle was Luther’s covert home for the next ten months. He let his hair and beard grow, and introduced himself to people as ‘Sir George.’ Most remarkably, though, there in hiding, and in less than eleven weeks, he managed to translate the Greek New Testament into German. Amazingly, in that short period Luther managed to produce a masterpiece of a translation. The language was so punchy, so colourful, so of-the-street, that it transformed the very way people spoke German. Luther was becoming the father of the modern German language. More importantly, with its publication in September 1522, Luther realised his dream that the people ‘might seize and taste the clear, pure Word of God itself and hold to it.’
It was not a happy time there, however. Cooped up in hiding, Luther suffered from a plague of doubts. Yet it is revealing how he battled them. Often he would write out a relevant Bible verse on his wall, on a piece of furniture, or, indeed, anything to hand. The point was that he knew that within himself there was only sin and doubt. All his hope lay outside himself, in God’s word. There his security before God was unaffected by how he felt or how he did. And so, when facing doubt, he would not look within himself for any comfort; instead, he would hold before his eyes this unchanging, external word.
For the next quarter of a century, until his death in 1546, Luther lived in Wittenberg promoting the reformation of the church in sermons, catechisms, books, hymns, and conversations. Perhaps best-known among his hymns was that battle hymn of the Reformation, ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God,’ the words of which made his ideas familiar to millions:
The Prince of Darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.
To the very end of his life Luther had a red-blooded and brawny personality. Some loved it, others wished he could be at least a little less rude and raw. Certainly he was no stained-glass ideal. Perhaps, though, such a blunt man was just what was needed for the seemingly impossible task of challenging all Christendom and turning it around. He was shock therapy for the world. And, somehow, his personality seemed fit for the gospel he uncovered: he inspired no moral self-improvement in would-be disciples; instead, his evident humanity testified to a sinner’s absolute need for God’s grace.
Three Critical Players: Erasmus, Wycliffe, and Tyndale
Essential to Luther’s story was the work of the great humanist scholar, Erasmus. In 1516, Erasmus had published a critical new Greek edition of the New Testament. Before that, most people had known only the official Latin Vulgate translation that the church used. Erasmus opened up direct study of the original Greek text—and men like Luther found a message in it that had never been clear in the Latin.
But it wasn’t just Luther. In Britain also, scholars were soon being transformed by what they read in the Greek. A century and a half earlier, an Oxford scholar named John Wycliffe had organized a translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, and his followers were still eagerly reading their Bibles and preaching. But what those who could read found in Erasmus’ edition was something else. And even those who couldn’t read it were soon coming across copies of Luther’s books, which had started pouring into the country. In Cambridge, one group of dons was known to gather at the White Horse Inn, where all the Luther-talk made it look so like Wittenberg that it was soon nicknamed ‘Little Germany.’
One such scholar was the brilliant young linguist, William Tyndale. Inspired by his study of the New Testament, he concluded ‘It was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.’ He therefore set about his life’s work of translating the Bible from its original Greek and Hebrew into English. He sailed for Germany, making his way to Worms; and there, where just five years earlier Luther had made his ‘Here I stand’ speech in front of the emperor, Tyndale published his complete New Testament in English.
For over a hundred years, the followers of John Wycliffe had produced and read translations of the New Testament in English, but they were only handwritten, rather wooden renditions of the Latin Vulgate. They were impossible to mass-produce, and still contained all the theological problems of the Latin (‘do penance’ instead of ‘repent,’ for example). Tyndale’s New Testament, however, could and would be printed off by the thousands, then smuggled into England in bales of cloth, and soon accompanied by his Parable of the Wicked Mammon, an argument for justification through faith alone. Even more importantly, Tyndale’s New Testament was a gem of a translation. Accurate and beautifully written, it was a page-turner.
Eventually the wrath of the church caught up with Tyndale, but not before he had managed to translate a good portion of the Old Testament, and some sixteen thousand copies of his Bible had been smuggled into England. This was an incredible feat, given a population of at most 2.5 million, which was largely illiterate. In 1535 he was caught, and the following October he was officially strangled and burned near Brussels, his immortal last words ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!’
That ‘King of England’ was Henry VIII, a ruler whose loathing of Luther had only deepened down through the years, when the Reformer opposed the annulment of his marriage. Indeed, for opposing Luther the pope had awarded the king the title ‘Defender of the Faith.’ He hardly seemed a bright hope for the Reformation. And yet, just two years after Tyndale had died uttering that prayer, it was decreed that an English Bible be placed in every church in the land. In 1538, the king ordered that ‘ye shall discourage no man from the reading or hearing of the Bible, but shall expressly provoke, stir and exhort every person to read the same as that which is the very lively word of God.’
Six English Bibles were placed in St Paul’s Cathedral, crowds immediately thronging round those who could read loud enough to make themselves heard. So great was the excitement that priests complained of how, even during the sermon, laypeople were reading the Bible aloud to each other. Private Bible-reading became a much more widespread feature of ordinary life, as even the illiterate learnt to read, so as to gain immediate access to ‘the very lively word of God.’
The Fiery Trial of the Martyrs
The reformation of the church by the word of God never was—and never could be—a smooth road. When King Henry VIII of England died in 1547, just under a year after Luther, Reformers were filled with hope because of his evangelical son and heir, the new King Edward VI. They were not disappointed: Edward presided over a comprehensive period of reformation in England. Church services were made evangelical in content, preaching was commanded in English, and many notable reformed preachers started to become household names. But within six years it was all over: Edward VI died and was succeeded by his arch-Catholic half-sister, Mary, who would undo all he had achieved. (He had expressed a wish that he be succeeded by his Protestant first cousin, Lady Jane Gray, but she was to be deposed by Mary after a mere nine days.)
As quickly as she could, Mary returned England to Roman Catholicism. Evangelical bishops were removed from office, Bibles were removed from churches, and Roman Catholic worship was restored. Many evangelicals sought refuge abroad; others decided to stay and operate quietly, secretly distributing their ‘naughty books’ and meeting in (often quite large) underground congregations. Those who stayed and did not lie low were imprisoned and burned. In all, and in stark contrast to the tolerance of Edward’s reign, Mary’s reign saw some three hundred evangelicals burned for their faith, not counting the many others who died in the horrendous conditions of sixteenth-century prisons.
Among Mary’s most famous victims were the old Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer; the famous preacher and Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer; and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. In October 1555, Ridley and Latimer were burned together, back to back, at the end of Broad Street in Oxford. Latimer, aged about eighty, was the first to die, shouting through the flames ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Unfortunately for Ridley the wood had been badly laid around him so that he suffered terribly, his legs burning off before the rest of him was touched. The horrible sight apparently moved hundreds to tears.
Five months later in March 1556 Thomas Cranmer was burned on the same spot. The old Archbishop and architect of so much of the English Reformation, now nearly seventy, had, under extreme duress, renounced his Protestantism. It was a triumph for Mary’s reign. Despite his recantation, however, he was such an embodiment of the Reformation that it was decided he should be burned in any case. It was a decision that would more than undo Mary’s victory, for when the day came, Cranmer refused to read out his recantation. Instead he stated boldly that he was indeed a Protestant, though a cowardly one for forsaking his principles. In consequence, he announced, ‘for as much as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished there-for.’ He was true to his word: as the fires were lit, he held out the hand that had signed his recantation so that it might burn first. Having briefly denied his Protestantism, Cranmer thus burned with movingly defiant bravery; and so died the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury.
John Calvin: Reforming the World
In 1509, a few short years before Luther made his stand, John Calvin, the Reformation’s second-most-significant leader, was born in northern France. As a young student, Calvin soon found himself mixing with a group of scholars who were often sympathetic to some idea of church reformation. He even began learning Greek, which by the 1520s had an edgy reputation as the language of the Reformation. Perhaps he read some of Luther’s writings. At any rate, he wrote that around this time ‘God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame.’
Meanwhile, France was becoming an ever more dangerous place for reformers. Calvin’s name was blacklisted and soon he was on the run. He decided to make his way to Strasbourg via Geneva, a city that had recently allied itself to the Reformation. Calvin had no intention of staying in Geneva, but he was waylaid by the fiery Guillaume Farel, instigator of the Reformation there. Farel then asked God to curse Calvin if he did not stay and assist him in the urgent work of reformation there. Terrified, the young scholar agreed to remain.
It was a momentous meeting, for Calvin would dedicate the rest of his life (bar a short exile) to Geneva, turning it into a world centre of evangelicalism. One important early step was the submission to the city council of a list of proposals for the comprehensive reformation of the church in Geneva. Most were accepted. He proposed, among other things, that every household should receive a pastoral visit every year, and that everyone should learn the new catechism that explained the evangelical faith. The proposals are revealing, for they make it clear that Reformation was not about simply breaking from Rome; it meant dedication to ongoing reform by the word. The reformed church must be always reforming.
Evangelicals from across Europe—and especially from persecuted regions—began flocking to Geneva. Yet while they were warmly welcomed, Calvin did not want Geneva to be so much a refuge as a seedbed for the spread of the gospel. Thus in 1555 he established a top-secret programme for the evangelization of his native France. He was already well-established as the leader-in-exile of French Protestantism, in regular contact with many of the underground churches there. But now a secret network was set up, with safe houses and hiding places, so agents of the gospel could be slipped across the border into France to plant new churches (sometimes literally underground). With secret printing presses installed in Paris and Lyons to resource them, it was a stunning success. Demand for the literature soon far outstripped what the presses could supply, and printing became the dominant industry in Geneva in an attempt to cope with the need.
More than ten percent of the entire population of France became reformed, with some two million or more gathering in the hundreds of newly planted churches. Calvinism, as it became known, fared especially well among the nobility, roughly a third of whom appear to have converted, giving the reformed faith a political clout disproportionate to its actual size. Calvin wrote a confession of faith for the church there in 1559, and supported them in whatever way he could. Despite the growth of evangelicalism in France, encouragement was desperately needed: for example, when one church was raided in Paris, more than a hundred believers were arrested and seven burned. And, while he wrote from a position of freedom to fortify them, he never spoke as though from an ivory tower. His letters are splattered everywhere with mentions of the blood he was sure he would soon have to shed as, in Geneva, he felt the imminent threat of martyrdom.
Calvin was, quite deliberately, doing all he could to turn Geneva into an international centre for the propagation of the gospel. He advised Protestant rulers from Scotland to Italy; he trained refugees who came to Geneva and then returned to their native countries; and he dispatched missionaries to Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, even South America. The real engine room for all this was the college and academy Calvin opened in the city in 1559. Starting with a general education and moving on to a detailed study of theology and books of the Bible, it equipped the pastors, who could then be dispatched, fully armed and trained.
Teaching and preaching was for Calvin the heart of the Reformation, as it was for Luther. Calvin devoted most of his time to this, lecturing three times a week, preaching twice each Sunday and, on alternate weeks, every weekday as well. Publishing became a priority, and through amalgamating his lectures, he managed to produce commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible, so as to help preachers elsewhere. These were a very different sort of commentary from what Europe had known before: their aim was ‘an easy brevity that does not involve obscurity.’ As a result of his ‘sudden conversion,’ Calvin had become convinced that God brings life and new life into being only through his word. Proclaiming this became the essence of his life’s work.
What Was at the Heart of the Reformation?
From the moment Luther understood from Romans 1 that God’s righteousness is an entirely unmerited gift, he saw this as the most important truth in the world. Justification was at the heart of the Reformation; its essential matter.
By ‘justification’ Reformers like Luther and Calvin meant a divine declaration that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer because of God’s grace alone (sola gratia). This justification is therefore through faith alone (sola fide) in Christ alone, meaning that all the glory of salvation goes to God alone and not us. ‘Nothing in this article [of faith] can be given up or compromised,’ wrote Luther, ‘even if heaven and earth and things temporal should be destroyed.’ It is the belief, he said, ‘on which the church stands or falls.’
Not everybody grasped this as Luther did, but Luther’s experience with Romans 1 was to be the central thread of the Reformation: and it was through the Bible that this essential matter of justification was discovered. Justification was what made the Reformation the Reformation. And for those who accepted that God freely declares sinners to be righteous, it was a doctrine of comfort and joy. As William Tyndale put it, ‘Euangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy.’ Luther too felt that by it he was ‘altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’ And no wonder: the fact that he, a failing sinner, was perfectly loved by God because he was clothed with the very righteousness of Christ himself gave him a dazzling confidence. As he counselled a friend,
When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: ‘I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.’
It is hardly as though the significance of this message has diminished down through the years. Today we are bombarded with the message that we will be more loved when we make ourselves more attractive. It may not be God-related, and yet still it is a religion of works, and one that is deeply embedded. For that, the Reformation has the most sparkling good news. As Luther put it: ‘sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.’
If justification by faith alone was the essential matter of the Reformation, the supreme authority of the Bible was its medium. To achieve substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura). The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority, and allowed to contradict and overrule all other claims, or else it would itself be overruled. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgement that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for profound and healthy change.
Is the Reformation Still Significant?
If the Reformation were merely a negative reaction to a purely historical problem, then it would not be significant for evangelicals today. But the closer one looks, the clearer it becomes: the Reformation was not, principally, a negative movement, about moving away from Rome; it was a positive movement, about moving towards the gospel. And to move towards the gospel meant unearthing original, scriptural, apostolic Christianity by then buried under centuries of human tradition. That is what preserves the validity of the Reformation for today. For the church must always be reforming and constantly moving ever closer to the gospel. This is encapsulated in two words we often hear: ‘semper reformanda.’ But their context is important, for the full Latin phrase is: Ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei (‘The church reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God.’). The Reformation cannot be over. It must be an evangelical banner, borne with both humility and resolution.
For evangelicals, this is our story. It is a story of brave and eloquent witnesses to the truth of God’s grace found in his word. And as much as it is our story, it must also be our standard. May God grant us the brave faithfulness of the Reformers to work together in evangelical unity for the ongoing reformation and growth of his church!
Notes
. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 34: Career of the Reformer IV, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C Oswald, and Helmut T Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 336–37.
. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 34: Career of the Reformer IV, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C Oswald, and Helmut T Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 337.
. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C Oswald, and Helmut T Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 352.
. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 32: Career of the Reformer II, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C Oswald, and Helmut T Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 112–13.
. William Tyndale, ‘The Preface of Master William Tyndale, That He Made Before the Five Books of Moses, Called Genesis,’ in The Works of William Tyndale (1848; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2010), 394.
. The Second Royal injunctions of Henry VIII, item 3.
. A cross, in cobbles, still marks the place.
. ‘A Pathway into Holy Scripture,’ in The Works of William Tyndale (Edinburgh & Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2010), 1:8.
. To Jerome Weller, July 1530, in Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Library of Christian Classics, T G Tappert, ed. (Vancouver: Regent College, 2003), p. 86–87.
. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C Oswald, and Helmut T Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 57.