The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

by Michael Reeves

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.

Erasmus was the sort who was always saying how things in the Bible were so much more complicated than they appear at first sight. Thus the masses would either need a great mind like his to understand them, or, if even he could not understand them (and this applied to many things) then they must be numbered among the countless mysteries of that obscure text, the Bible. Given how unclear the Bible was, he deemed that Christians should not try to settle doctrinal questions such as the Trinity, God’s role in salvation, and other such tricky issues. God had left them vague, and therefore they must be unimportant and probably unhelpfully distracting from the more important business of getting on with Christian living. ‘The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity,’ he once said, ‘but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible’. Christianity, to Erasmus, was essentially morality, with a minimum of doctrinal statement loosely appended. . . . Luther’s attitude was very different.

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.1 Bluntly, any attempt to say what ‘all Puritans’ were like is going to be misleading, given what a large, and often diverse, group they were. So, of course, some were quite dour: William Prynne, for instance, could write that ‘Christ Jesus our pattern . . . was always mourning, never laughing’. But what might be true of one is by no means necessarily true of another.

In St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, as soon as the newly appointed bishop tried to read out the new Prayer Book, a member of the congregation threw her stool at him, precipitating a riot in which the bishop was lucky to get away with his life. Up in Brechin, the bishop was taking no such chances: he led the service from the new Prayer Book with a pair of loaded pistols pointed at the congregation.

the Reformation was not, principally, a negative movement, about moving away from Rome; it was a positive movement, about moving towards the gospel.