The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

by Michael Reeves

Luther, ignoring the death-sentence that hung over him, came out of hiding to call for more careful reform. He preached a series of sermons in which he, like Zwingli, argued that true reform comes by the conversion of hearts, not the alteration of external practices. And, like Zwingli, he said that the power to change hearts is found only in the word of God, not in hammers, fire and force:

for Lent, he argued, was just a human institution. Christians are to worship only according to God’s command; to add human commands (about such things as what Christians can eat and when) was to add an unnecessary burden to people that Christ never asked his followers to bear.

They saw baptism as a public testimony to the fact that inwardly they had already been baptized in the Spirit and born again.

‘Swiss Brethren’.

‘Anabaptists’

In many ways, Mantz showed the future for Anabaptism: passive instead of aggressive, separatist instead of revolutionary, led by the Bible instead of the ‘inner word’.

Schleitheim Confession.

As a result he called them the ‘new monks’, for he believed that, like the old monks, they had separated themselves off from the world only to stare at their own spiritual navels.

Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the Rationalists.

How they used to meet was typically Spiritualist: with no ministry, no sacraments, and no formal worship, they contented themselves with prayer and mutual exhortation in private homes.

Socinianism,

Of course, getting rid of the Triune God of Christianity meant getting rid of Christianity and finding a new God and a new religion, which is precisely what Socinianism did.

Calvin would much rather have sat quietly with his books.

Calvin would spend years polishing and repolishing his pièce de resistance. Calvin could never have been a celebrity Christian: a camera-shy intellectual, he always avoided the limelight.

A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.

Presumptuous minds, armed with a knowledge of the biblical languages, might think they could understand the Scriptures for themselves merely by reading the text.

‘True Articles on the Horrible, Great and Important Abuses of the Papal Mass,

against the Anabaptists.

If Christ’s sacrifice for sin on the cross was a complete work, and thus neither need be nor can be repeated, then all our attempts to atone for sin must be both unnecessary and insulting to Christ, in that they suggest his work is not sufficient.

If Christ’s sacrifice was indeed ‘once for all’, then there can be no need for other priests or high priests to offer up more. With that, the Mass, the priests who offered it, and all other acts of atonement for sin were shown to be useless. The only recourse was simple trust in Christ and his complete work.

It was designed as a simple introduction to the evangelical faith (‘Institutes’ means ‘basic instruction’). Published as a small book that could be hidden in a coat pocket, it was designed for the covert dissemination of the gospel. This was how Calvin hoped to bring the Reformation to France.

Post tenebras lux

So, for Sadoleto, salvation by faith alone really means salvation by our own love.

(This particular ‘evangelical’ had clearly taken ‘justification by faith alone’ to mean that he should trust in his own act of faith, rather than in Christ – leaving Christ out of it clearly helped him feel free to live a life of self-indulgence.)

It never seems to have entered his mind that the answer might be Christ.

‘Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished.’ In the Reformation mind-set, salvation is a gift of God’s grace alone (sola gratia), found, not in any pope or Mass, but in Christ alone (solus Christus), and received by simple faith alone (sola fide). And we can know this for certain only through Scripture (sola Scriptura).

forth as purchasing satisfaction, reconciliation, and ablution, how dare you presume to transfer so great an honor to your works?’

Sadoleto’s half-baked idea of a salvation that was the fruit of both God’s grace and man’s love was actually a blasphemous denigration of Christ’s cross and glory.

‘The Lord has certainly inflicted a severe and bitter wound in the death of our baby son. But he is himself a Father and knows best what is good for his children.’

The man cannot be judged by the city. He was, as he said, a ‘timid scholar’ with no desire for despotic power and no chance of ever having it.

Servetus became the voice of that movement, arguing that the Trinity was a later belief added on to the simple, no-frills monotheism of Old Testament religion, where God the Father was God alone.

This was no big deal: all Christendom agreed that death was the appropriate sentence for heresy, and in the decades beforehand, scores of self-confessed sorcerers, plague-spreaders and devil-worshippers (self-confessed while their feet were being grilled, of course) had been tortured and burned in Geneva. This was the sixteenth century.

burned. It is disturbing in what that reveals. The two confessions are poles apart; but the fact that today we struggle to see that only displays how totally the doctrine-light spirit of Erasmus has conquered.

As a result of his ‘sudden conversion’, Calvin had become convinced that God brings life and new life into being only through his word, and so proclaiming that had become the essence of Calvin’s life’s work.

They were never intended to be a summary of Calvinist belief or Calvin’s own thought.

After having looked at God, the world, all that Jesus has done for us, our salvation, prayer, and a number of other topics, it is only on page 920 of the standard version of the Institutes that Calvin starts looking at election – and, out of a whopping total of 1,521 pages, he only gives the topic 67 of them!

‘I have no other defense or refuge for salvation than his [God’s] gratuitous adoption, on which alone my salvation depends’.

Since he had had no desire to become a relic or an idol, Calvin had requested that he be buried in the common cemetery in an unmarked grave. No glamour, no gravestone; it was typical Calvin.

5

Nor were they a crowd of inveterate sourpusses.

Contrary to popular impression, the Puritan was no ascetic. If he continually warned against the vanity of the creatures as misused by fallen man, he never praised hair shirts or dry crusts. He liked good food, good drink and homely comforts; and while he laughed at mosquitoes, he found it a real hardship to drink water when the beer ran out.

Laurence Chaderton, the extraordinarily long-lived Master of that nursery of Puritanism, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, once apologized to his congregation for preaching to them for two straight hours. Their response was to cry, ‘For God’s sake, Sir, go on, go on!’ To people who have never experienced the Bible as something thrilling, such behaviour sounds at best boring, and at worst deranged. But Europe had been without a Bible people could read for something like a thousand years. 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 grey world of religious guilt. It was almost intoxicatingly attractive and alluring.

‘Lord, whatsoever thou dost to us, take not thy Bible from us; kill our children, burn our houses, destroy our goods; only spare us thy Bible, only take not away thy Bible.’

The whole story is quite incomprehensible without appreciating that, for the Puritan, the Bible was the most valuable thing that this world affords. Puritanism was about reforming all of life under the sole authority of the Bible. It was something that would put the fear of God into the authorities.

(the few who did leave in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign are not generally known as Puritans).

wishy-washy

Puritans shook theirs when they compared Elizabeth’s Church of England with Calvin’s Geneva.

The trouble was, while Elizabeth was a Protestant, she disliked what she called ‘new-fangledness’, and instinctively liked the old ways (like swearing, Catholic-style, ‘By God’s Body!’). The sort of things the Puritans squirmed at she thought were entirely inconsequential.

in 1559:

For the Puritans, on the other hand, the idea of a religious ‘settlement’ was entirely against a fundamental Protestan...