Why the Reformation Still Matters

Ligonier ^ | 10/7/2020 | Michael Reeves

[Gamecock]

On October 31, 2016, Pope Francis announced that after five hundred years, Protestants and Catholics now “have the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another.” From that, it sounds as if the Reformation was an unfortunate and unnecessary squabble over trifles, a childish outburst that we can all put behind us now that we have grown up.

But tell that to Martin Luther, who felt such liberation and joy at his rediscovery of justification by faith alone that he wrote, “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” Tell that to William Tyndale, who found it such “merry, glad and joyful tidings” that it made him “sing, dance, and leap for joy.” Tell it to Thomas Bilney, who found it gave him “a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.” Clearly, those first Reformers didn’t think they were picking a juvenile fight; as they saw it, they had discovered glad tidings of great joy.

GOOD NEWS IN 1517

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe had been without a Bible the people could read for something like a thousand years. Thomas Bilney had thus never encountered the words “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). Instead of the Word of God, they were left to the understanding that God is a God who enables people to earn their own salvation. As one of the teachers of the day liked to put it, “God will not deny grace to those who do their best.” Yet what were meant as cheering words left a very sour taste for everyone who took them seriously. How could you be sure you really had done your best? How could you tell if you had become the sort of just person who merited salvation?

Martin Luther certainly tried. “I was a good monk,” he wrote, “and kept my order so strictly that I could say that if ever a monk could get to heaven through monastic discipline, I should have entered in.” And yet, he found:

My conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.” The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more daily I found it more uncertain, weaker and more troubled.

According to Roman Catholicism, Luther was quite right to be unsure of heaven. Confidence of a place in heaven was considered errant presumption and was one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431. There, the judges proclaimed,

This woman sins when she says she is as certain of being received into Paradise as if she were already a partaker of … glory, seeing that on this earthly journey no pilgrim knows if he is worthy of glory or of punishment, which the sovereign judge alone can tell.

That judgment made complete sense within the logic of the system: if we can only enter heaven because we have (by God’s enabling grace) become personally worthy of it, then of course no one can be sure. By that line of reasoning, I can only have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness.

That was exactly why the young Martin Luther screamed with fear when as a student he was nearly struck by lightning in a thunderstorm. He was terrified of death, for without knowledge of Christ’s sufficient and gracious salvation—without knowledge of justification by faith alone—he had no hope of heaven.

And that was why his rediscovery in Scripture of justification by faith alone felt like entering paradise through open gates. It meant that, instead of all his angst and terror, he could now write:

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.”

And that was why the Reformation gave people such a taste for sermons and Bible reading. For, to be able to read God’s words and to see in them such good news that God saves sinners, not on the basis of how well they repent but entirely by His own grace, was like a burst of Mediterranean sunshine into the gray world of religious guilt.

GOOD NEWS IN 2017

None of the goodness or relevance of the Reformation’s insights have faded over the last five hundred years. The answers to the same key questions still make all the difference between human hopelessness and happiness. What will happen to me when I die? How can I know? Is justification the gift of a righteous status (as the Reformers argued), or a process of becoming more holy (as Rome asserts)? Can I confidently rely for my salvation on Christ alone, or does my salvation also rest on my own efforts toward and success in achieving holiness?

Almost certainly, what confuses people into thinking that the Reformation is a bit of history we can move beyond is the idea that it was just a reaction to some problem of the day. But the closer one looks, the clearer it becomes: the Reformation was not principally a negative movement about moving away from Rome and its corruption; it was a positive movement, about moving toward the gospel. And that is precisely what preserves the validity of the Reformation for today. If the Reformation had been a mere reaction to a historical situation five hundred years ago, one would expect it to be over. But as a program to move ever closer to the gospel, it cannot be over.

Another objection is that today’s culture of positive thinking and self-esteem has wiped away all perceived need for the sinner to be justified. Not many today find themselves wearing hair-shirts and enduring all-night prayer vigils in the freezing cold to earn God’s favor. All in all, then, Luther’s problem of being tortured by guilt before the divine Judge is dismissed as a sixteenth-century problem, and his solution of justification by faith alone is therefore dismissed as unnecessary for us today.

But it is in fact precisely into this context that Luther’s solution rings out as such happy and relevant news. For, having jettisoned the idea that we might ever be guilty before God and therefore in need of His justification, our culture has succumbed to the old problem of guilt in subtler ways and with no means to answer. Today, we are all bombarded with the message that we will be more loved when we make ourselves more attractive. It may not be God-related, and yet it is still a religion of works, and one that is deeply embedded. For that, the Reformation has the most sparkling good news. Luther speaks words that cut through the gloom like a glorious and utterly unexpected sunbeam:

The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it… . Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.

ONCE AGAIN, THE TIME IS RIPE

Five hundred years later, the Roman Catholic Church has still not been reformed. For all the warm ecumenical language used by so many Protestants and Roman Catholics, Rome still repudiates justification by faith alone. It feels it can do so because Scripture is not regarded as the supreme authority to which popes, councils, and doctrine must conform. And because Scripture is so relegated, biblical literacy is not encouraged, and thus millions of poor Roman Catholics are still kept from the light of God’s Word.

Outside Roman Catholicism, the doctrine of justification by faith alone is routinely shied away from as insignificant, wrongheaded, or perplexing. Some new perspectives on what the Apostle Paul meant by justification, especially when they have tended to shift the emphasis away from any need for personal conversion, have, as much as anything, confused people, leaving the article that Luther said cannot be given up or compromised as just that—given up or compromised.

Now is not a time to be shy about justification or the supreme authority of the Scriptures that proclaim it. Justification by faith alone is no relic of the history books; it remains today as the only message of ultimate liberation, the message with the deepest power to make humans unfurl and flourish. It gives assurance before our holy God and turns sinners who attempt to buy God off into saints who love and fear Him.

And oh what opportunities we have today for spreading this good news! Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s recent invention of the printing press meant that the light of the gospel could spread at a speed never before witnessed. Tyndale’s Bibles and Luther’s tracts could go out by the thousands. Today, digital technology has given us another Gutenberg moment, and the same message can now be spread at speeds Luther could never have imagined.

Both the needs and the opportunities are as great as they were five hundred years ago—in fact, they are greater. Let us then take courage from the faithfulness of the Reformers and hold the same wonderful gospel high, for it has lost none of its glory or its power to dispel our darkness.

[Philsworld]

Look at it this way. If you are in a car being driven over a cliff and the driver refuses to change course your only option is to get out if the car

---

You could always shoot the driver in the head. That might work.

[MrChips]

I stand corrected. Nevertheless, there is plenty of historical evidence for stake burnings across Europe on both sides of the religious isle. Certainly, more witches, per se, were burned in Protestant countries than in Catholic. And if I really wanted to expound upon the horrors of the Reformation, I would not have to go the the religious wars it spawned, but rather, just to Henry VIII's England. What a pig he was! In five short years he destroyed what 1,000 years of Catholicism had built: 1,300 abbeys, priories, nunneries, free chapels and hospitals, none of his actions supported by the people (unlike Germany). He was opposed (See: Pilgrimage of Grace), and thousands of people lost their lives, thousands more their livelihoods.

A larger point worth making, too, is by asking this: which church, today, takes a strong stand against any form of capital punishment? Only one that I know of.

[MrChips]

I’ll leave that to BLM. It seems to be one of their favorite pastimes.

[Gamecock]

Luther wanted to Reform it from the inside, “they kicked him out.”

[Gamecock]

Nah.

The Roman Catholic church had been burning their “bad boys” for centuries. Does the Inquisition ring a bell?

Calvin was being swayed by his Roman Catholic upbringing.

[Mom MD]

Luther did not set out to break from the Roman Church. He tried to reform it from within. When he was unable to do that he left and restored the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith to the rest of the world

[MrChips]

If only he had continued to try . . . Alas.

[Mom MD]

There comes a point where energy is better expended in a positive direction. However the LCMS and other conservative a lutheran synods are available if you wish to join us.

[MrChips]

And there’s the rub, determining which direction is “positive.” Thanks, but I will stick with the Real Presence. I can think of nothing in the world more positive than to embrace the miraculous.

[Mom MD]

We also have the real presence along with the assurance of salvation. good luck to you

[ckilmer]

not going to disagree with you but when most people send their kids to most colleges — their kids are indoctrinated by the heirs of servetus and descartes and not the heirs of Luther and Calvin.

[MrChips]

So you think.

[Mom MD]

Have a blessed day

[Cronos]

To address you one by one

Philly — your website is the same that claims that Jesus is the archangel Michael. It’s a wackadoodle site, not worthy to respond to, I’d suggest you leave it aside, along with your tinfoil hat.

Gamecock - regarding the inquisition - as you well know, the Inquisition would hand over convicted people to the state. Technically this wasn’t the Church burning them quite unlike Calvin who burnt them in his theocracy.
Calvin wasn’t “swayed by his Roman Catholic upbringing.” — neither were the Salem witch burnings which were generations later.

As to Jan Hus - again, he was burnt at the stake by the authorities who went after him primarily because he was looking for Bohemmian independence from the Hapsburg crown.

The killings of Catholics by the Tudors, by the Lutheran kings and the Calvinist princes were a mixture of religious and political. Ditto for the Catholic killings of Catholic heretics (note that the Inquisition was only for those baptized Catholic — for folks born into the Calvinist or Lutheran faith, they weren’t subject to the courts).

The killings in Salem and in Germany of the witches was a mix of hysteria and religiousness. One could club it to religion.

But the killing by Jean Calvin of Servetus was clearly and solely religious.

[Cronos]

tell that to Martin Luther --

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.

NOTE -- it's about justification through faith. NOT the "alone" bit this article falsely says that this was when he put it as 'faith alone'

For Tyndale, the article puts a false statement. Where did Tyndale write "merry, glad and joyful tidings"?

“The New Testament is a book, wherein are contained the promises of God and the deeds of them which believe them, or believe them not.

Evangelion (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.
– William Tyndale (c. 1495-1536), “A Pathway into the Holy Scripture”, in Doctrinal Treatises, 8-9

-- this quote was Tyndale's reaction to the gospel not to justification by faith alone

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I don't know the 3rd guy, but for these two, the references in the article are falsely linked to the "faith alone" philosophy

[Cronos]

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe had been without a Bible the people could read for something like a thousand years.

Ok, this is again false

Firstly "could read" -- the literacy rate of the people was about 10% (commonly bandied figure) or lower, so most people "heard" the Bible read to them or saw the enactments in passion plays or in the church tinted glass. People heard these throughout the ages -- even in England, Germany etc. where the Bible was KNOWN to the people

Secondly, the Latin Vulgate bible was fully available in the churches for people to read - we read about them being chained to the altar - but that's because books were valuable then, being so rare, and the Bibles were richly decorated. But people who could read were able to go and read

Thirdly, "Europe"? Let's see - the scholarly language or lingua franca was Latin -- in which language did Isaac Newton write his scientific discourses? Latin - because every educated person in western Europe could read Latin and they could read the Latin bibles freely available in the churches

It must be understood that from the viewpoint of learned Europeans in medieval times, Latin was in no way a “dead” language. .

And of course in the Orthodox portion there were bibles in church Slavonic, which all religious could read and also was understandable to most Slavic speakers until about the 1300s when the Slavic languages diverged.

Fourthly, the reasons given was "a little knowledge (without learning other things) is a dangerous thing" - Readily-available Bibles for all and any who has only mastered basic reading skills have undoubtedly paved the way for a myriad more-or-less wacky reinterprations of the Bible, with kooks and cranks like William Miller, Joseph Smith or Charles Taze Russel originating entire new movements (Adventism, Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, respectively).

Fifthly -- The Bible WAS translated into Old English and other languages in the middle ages - Bede (c. 672–735) produced a translation of the Gospel of John into Old English

King Alfred (849–899) circulated a number of passages of the Bible in the vernacular. These included passages from the Ten Commandments and the Pentateuch, which he prefixed to a code of laws he promulgated around this time. Alfred is also said to have directed the Book of Psalms to have been translated into Old English, though scholars are divided on Alfredian authorship of the Paris Psalter collection of the first fifty Psalms.

And then you have the Lindisfarne Gospels dated toe 715 AD IN English

and it wasn't just into English - The first Catalan Bible , and the Spanish Biblia Alfonsina date from the thirteenth century. All medieval translations of the Bible into Czech were based on the Latin Vulgate. The Psalms were translated into Czech before 1300 and the gospels followed in the first half of the 14th century. The first translation of the whole Bible into Czech was done around 1360. Up to the end of the 15th century this translation was revised and edited three times. In 1478, there was a Catalan translation in the dialect of Valencia . The Welsh Bible and the Alba Bible , a Jewish translation into Castilian , date from the 15th century. Altogether there are 13 medieval German translations before the Luther Bible

========================================

So, conclusively, this statement that "Europe" had been without a Bible the people could read for 1000 years is false, very, very false

[Cronos]

And then I wikipedia'd Thomas Bilney :) -- thanks for giving me that name, I had never heard of him before.

Here's what wikipedia says of him

During his reading in the Epistles, he was struck by the words of 1 Timothy 1:15, which in English reads, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am the chief." "Immediately", he records, "I felt a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones lept for joy, Psal. 51:8. After this, the Scripture began to be more pleasant unto me than the honey or the honeycomb; wherein I learned that all my labours, my fasting and watching, all the redemption of masses and pardons, being done without truth in Christ, who alone saveth his people from their sins; these I say, I learned to be nothing else but even, as St. Augustine saith, a hasty and swift running out of the right way".

- absolutely nothing that this was due to him creating the "faith ALONE" philosophy

And the article you posted is lying about that and also that "Thomas Bilney had thus never encountered the words " -- he DID encounter it, for heaven's sake - he just was struck when he read it again as this would have been read to him in church and he would have encountered it in his studies

Luther, Tyndale and Binley were able to read in Latin as were other educated people - so saying that the Bible wasn't available is flatly a lie.

[Cronos]

it was a positive movement, about moving toward the gospel. - the article states that, but then quotes about "faith alone" are primarily shown from the Epistles, not from the Gospels.

In fact that is an interesting exercise - how similar would various churches be, if say you from a Presbyterian background and I from a Catholic background, only referenced the gospels and the Septuagint OT (as that was the scripture that Jesus used) as "basis for arguments"

I haven't gone down that question path, but it would be interesting to try that with a learned person like yourself.

Is there justification for well justification by faith (or a process of becoming holy) without referring to the epistles or Revelation as "proof" or "counter evidence"? Similarly sola fide, sola scriptura - would arguments for or against them work if one refers only to the 4 Gospels and the 46 books of the Septuagint Old Testament? Or even if one just references the Gospels?

[Cronos]

Yes, it is a very profound verse.

The grace of the Holy Spirit enables our conversion, effecting justification in accordance with Jesus’ proclamation at the beginning of the Gospel: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Mt 4:17

That sanctifying grace is the source of the work of sanctification. In fact the preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace!

[Cronos]

Philsworld hundreds of millions of people who were tortured and murdered by the Catholic Church for the crime of heresy.

Oh, that number is hilarious. I agree that even 1, leave alone the 3000 executed over 350 years (somewhat less than the numbers of Catholics killed by various Anglicans, Calvinists and Lutherans) is too much, but your number of 100s of millions is as hilariously wrong as your belief that Jesus is the archangel michael.