Kindle Notes & Highlights
present-day Lutherans represent only one of those strands and cannot be regarded as Luther’s only, or even principal, heirs.
all his efforts were poured into purifying scholarly Latin so that those who mastered it could speak to one another with an elegance that harked back to the glory days of ancient Rome. But try as they might, Erasmus and his colleagues could not revive Latin as the spoken language of Europe.
This universal bilingualism of the scholarly world must be understood if we are to make sense of the Reformers’ writings. What they composed in their own languages was principally intended for domestic consumption by a popular audience. Their Latin works were meant for other scholars and for an international clientele.
Charles V (I of Spain) dreamed of establishing a universal Christian empire, but his dream would be shattered by the divisions caused by the Reformation.
Ordination was different.
To qualify, a man had to know the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed by heart and expound them orally.
Until 812 the clergy were expected to preach in Latin, but the futility of this was recognized in that year when Charlemagne gave them permission to address their flocks in the lingua rustica (country language), whatever that was.
bonfire of the vanities.”
The content of worship services followed a general pattern, but there were many local variations, and the evidence we have for them is far from complete. The Lord’s Supper was central to them all, of course, and its importance was greatly enhanced in the later Middle Ages.
a sacrament was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
they claimed that baptism removed original (or birth) sin, opening the door to a spiritual life that would be strengthened by constant recommitment.
In the Christian world, baptismal regeneration was more important than physical birth, which usually went unrecorded.
It was only around the year 1000 that the church began to advocate marriage in facie ecclesiae (in front of the church), probably because it was the best way of ensuring that it had actually taken place.
How, then, can we summarize the education of a typical Reformer?
The papacy as the Reformers knew it was really the product of the eleventh-century reforms spearheaded by the monks of Cluny, a Benedictine monastery in Burgundy.
the two Testaments were joined together as the “catholic religion” (catholica religio), to use the term found in the Athanasian Creed, composed about AD 500.
For the most part, Christians had to resort to a kind of interpretation that we now call typology, which regards the main characters and events recorded in the Old Testament as prefigurations of what Jesus Christ would do for the salvation of his people.
In that world, it was the Bible that did not (and could not) change. By contrast, tradition was always adapting to meet new needs as they arose. It was a progressive force that was often regarded as God’s gift to the church.
At the First Council of Nicaea in 325, a primacy of honor was granted to the three main cities of the Roman Empire—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, in that order.
At the First Council of Constantinople in 381, it was decreed that the new city’s bishop would occupy second place in the hierarchy and that the bishop of Jerusalem, the site of the first church, would be added in fifth place.
None of the ancient ecumenical councils were held at Rome, but three of the seven met at Constantinople, one at Chalcedon (across the Bosphorus from the capital), and two more at Nicaea, which was only a short journey away.
In the interval between the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and the convocation of the Council of Trent, a new religious order emerged that was determined to shore up the papacy and do all in its power to defeat and eliminate “heretics.”
in 1540 the Society of Jesus, as it was called, was given the pope’s blessing.
When the Geneva Bible was published in 1560, it contained a footnote to the word Antichrist pointing out that this term referred to the pope.
The Canons of Dort are still widely recognized in Reformed circles as the classic expression of what we now call Calvinism, but only in the Dutch world have they been accorded official status.
Utraquist controversy
Before the Reformation, infant baptism was a universal practice, so much so that little or no provision was made for the baptism of adult believers.
For much of the seventeenth century, Socinianism was regarded by orthodox theologians as a major heresy that threatened the health of the church, and they combated it without mercy.
Socinianism as such declined in the late seventeenth century, but a modified form of it reappeared as unitarianism, which soon became popular among freethinkers who were opposed to any form of divine revelation or ecclesiastical authority.
As Luther understood it, the basic message of the Old Testament was to proclaim the law of God, the standard by which he measured human conduct and found that it falls short of what he requires of us. In contrast to this, the New Testament is a message of grace, by which we learn that our sins have been paid for by the sacrifice of Christ who has now reconciled us to God.
Luther believed it was necessary for God to reveal his law first because otherwise people would not know what he expects of us, nor would they realize that they are incapable of measuring up to his standards.
His main concern was to point out that the gospel is the fulfillment of the law and that on no account should Christians try to turn it back into a rule book.
If we look at the way the Reformers read and interpreted the Bible, we can accept many of their methods—for example, the appeal to the original languages and the need to establish the correct text.
The Reformation was not primarily about education, important though that was and still is. It was about transformation—a change that is possible only in and through the working of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of believers.
as the medieval systematicians demonstrated, their theology was far from being based on Scripture alone. It was a compendium of biblical texts, theological statements, decrees of various popes and councils, and their own reflections.
before the sixteenth century, nobody had ever constructed a systematic theology based on Scripture alone, and it was by no means clear how that should be done.
a law is fulfilled by works, even though there is no heart in the doing of them. But God judges according to what is in the depths of the heart.
If the law were for the body, it could be satisfied with works. Because it is spiritual, however, no one can satisfy it—unless all that you do is done from the bottom of your heart.
The gospel was a message of deliverance from sin and therefore from the power of the law, which brought that sin to light.
Christ as an example exercises your works. These do not make you a Christian. Actually they come forth from you because you have already been made a Christian.
On the relationship between the two Testaments, Melanchthon agreed with the then traditional view that the law could be divided into three parts: judicial (civil), ceremonial, and moral.
Those who have been renewed by the Spirit of Christ now conform voluntarily even without the law to what the law used to command.
The Spirit of God cannot be in the human heart without fulfilling the Decalogue.
Our understanding of Scripture is part and parcel of our relationship with God, without which it remains a closed book.
The observance of the ceremonial laws taught the people who Christ was and what he would come to do.
In effect, their persistence in literal observance of those laws was a denial of Christ and therefore an act of disobedience to God, for which they had to be rejected.
The law is not a condemnation that curses them and leads them to spiritual death but rather an incitement to shrug off laziness and the fear that even if we do our best we shall still come short of what God requires of us.
Instead of debating what God is in himself and how his uncreated nature contrasts with what he has created, covenant theologians shifted their attention to what God has done for his people, and that, after all, is the main theme of the Bible.
The New Testament makes it clear that Christ died for the sins of the whole world and that God wants everyone to be saved. But Reformed theologians then asked why, if that is the case, not everyone is actually saved.
The difficulty with covenant theology in the seventeenth century was that those who adopted it believed they had to impose it on society as a whole. In their eyes, a Protestant state was in covenant with God, not just particular individuals within it.
