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February 19 - August 9, 2021
And false prophets—wolves in sheeps’ clothing that Jesus warned us would come—may still be with us. There are liberals who deny the Bible, and legalists and moralists who ignore its message, and prosperity teachers who twist it, but there are countless millions who’ve read the Word and understood and believed the gospel.
The gospel-centered church will be with us always .
There are those like Peter James Lee, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, who said in 2004, ‘If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy.’
Such a sad statement.
Such were most Christians on the eve of the Reformation: devoted, and devoted to the improvement, but not the overthrow, of their religion. This was not a society looking for radical change, only a clearing-up of acknowledged abuses.
Before the Reformation:
Over the following months he became increasingly clear that, if Rome held the pope to be an authority above Scripture, she could never be reformed by God’s word. The pope’s word would always trump God’s. In that case, the reign of the antichrist there was sealed, and it was no longer the church of God but the synagogue of Satan.
Who has the final authority , the Pope or Scripture?
Now he saw that forgiveness is not dependent 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.
Luther and forgiveness
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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. All the struggles and all the anxiety could be replaced with massive confidence and simple faith, receiving the gift.
The righteousness of God
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The first main work, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, was Luther’s trumpet blast of reformation against the defensive walls Rome had built around herself. There were three such walls, he said: Rome’s first defence was the claim that the pope was the supreme power on earth; the second, that only the pope may interpret the Scriptures; the third, that no one but the pope may summon a council and thus reform the church.
Rome's heretical theology
Luther came out of hiding, returned to Wittenberg, and, instead of using force to reform, sought to persuade people with the Scriptures through simple, clear preaching. He believed that the word of God must first convince people, and then the rotten old structures would collapse. It was exactly what he had stood for before the emperor, that it is the Scriptures that must drive and dictate thought and practice. As a result, Luther never believed that he should devise any great programme for spreading the Reformation. He simply wanted to unleash the word of God, and let that do all the work.
Luther and sola scriptura
Yet to the end he had a personality that could set the Rhine on fire. 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 red-blooded and blunt man was just what was needed for the momentous and seemingly impossible task of challenging all Christendom and turning it around. He was shock-therapy for the world. And, somehow, his personality seems fit for the gospel he uncovered: he inspires no moral self-improvement in would-be disciples; instead, his evident humanity testifies to a sinner’s absolute need
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Luther's zeal
I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.
Martin Luther on the Word of God
Anabaptism, on the whole, tended to be more interested in Christian living than theology. For the Magisterial Reformers2 like Luther, theology came first, informing how we then live; for the Anabaptists, holiness came first, and theology was then done to spur on Christian obedience.
Anabaptists vs. the Magisterial Reformers
Under his guidance, Anabaptism moved away from bloody revolutions and private revelations. The Mennonites were to be peaceful and biblical. Thus Menno sealed the victory of the Zurich Anabaptist martyr Felix Mantz’s nonaggressive, biblical radicalism.
The beginning of the Mennonites
Calvin could never have been a celebrity Christian: a camera-shy intellectual, he always avoided the limelight. His portraits show a thin face, that often-throbbing head covered with a simple black cap, and strikingly intense eyes. In that, they are quite revealing, for while pitifully weak in body and naturally retiring by temperament, he was dauntingly strong in both mind and will. A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.
A vignette of John Calvin
His purpose, instead, he wrote, ‘was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness’. It was designed as a simple introduction to the evangelical faith (‘Institutes’ means ‘basic instruction’).
John Calvin's "Institutes"
Post tenebras lux
The motto of the Reformation, "After darkness, light"
In Cambridge, one group of dons was known to gather at the White Horse Inn, where all the Luther-talk and beer made it look so like Wittenberg that it was soon nicknamed ‘Little Germany’.
The original White Horse Inn
In 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.’
The Oxford martyrs
Henry’s younger daughter Elizabeth was very much a chip off the old block. Imperious and relentlessly energetic, she had a quicksilver mind capable of lightning-fast repartee, and enough political cunning to survive Mary’s reign without slipping up. And, being who she was, everyone knew she would reintroduce Protestantism.
Queen Elizabeth
If anything, what that difference proves is how the Reformation, at its heart, was about doctrine. It was not a quest for political, social, or moral reform dressed up in theological clothes; deeper down than anything else was a set of theological questions: ‘What is the gospel?’ ‘How can we know?’ ‘What is salvation, and how can I be saved?’ ‘Who are God’s people, and what is the church?’
The doctrine of the Reformation
‘Alas! can we think that the reformation is wrought, when we cast out a few ceremonies, and changed some vestures, and gestures, and forms! Oh no, sirs! it is the converting and saving of souls that is our business. That is the chiefest part of reformation.’
Richard Baxter
Richard Sibbes said, ‘What a joyful spectacle is this to Satan and his faction, to see those that are separated from the world fall in pieces among themselves! Our discord is our enemy’s melody.’
The decline in Puritanism
However, there was a considerable danger for such a fight (one that threatened not only Puritanism, but also its sister-movement in Germany, Lutheran Pietism). That is, the desire to have people respond to the gospel could lead to a focus on the response, not the gospel. So, in looking for reformed lives (the sign that a person had responded rightly to the gospel), it was easy to let a concern for growth in personal holiness eclipse the original Reformation focus on justification. In other words, the danger for the Puritans was that they would be tempted to concentrate on holy living in
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Personal holiness instead of the Gospel
it is a striking feature of Sibbes’s preaching how strongly Christ-focused he is. And that is no accident: Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’.
Richard Sibbes
More, for the first time in nearly four hundred years, Jews were allowed back into England (the idea was that they might be converted, the conversion of Israel precipitating the Second Coming, but they were allowed to worship freely).
The Jewish people in Puritan England
Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory about every Christian (journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City), but it is particularly reflective of Bunyan’s own experience. A tinker by trade, Bunyan was used to travelling from village to village with a 60-pound anvil and hefty toolkit on his back: it became a model for the great burden of sin his pilgrim carries on his back (until he comes to the cross and it is ‘loosed from off his shoulders’ to his enormous relief).
The backstory about "Pilgrim's Progress"
Puritanism, after all, had been a movement concerned with words (and the word of God), and so when Puritans were no longer educated, the muscle of the movement wasted away. Worse, without strong ties to biblical moorings, over the years that followed many found themselves drifting outside belief in such Christian basics as the Trinity.
The decline of Puritanism
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.
What was the Reformation about?
A profoundly relevant, beautiful, and sweet message, a joy-giving message, a death-defying message: it is no wonder Richard Sibbes called the Reformation ‘that fire which all the world shall never be able to quench’.
Semper Reformanda
