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December 10 - December 14, 2018
Confusion often comes when calls for truth are not denied, but rather are attempted to be drowned out by calls for unity.
With a Bible in English in their hands, his followers in England dedicated themselves to the illegal practice of secret group Bible reading.
they were known as ‘Lollards’, a term that probably meant ‘mumbler’, in reference to their habit of secretly reading out the Bible.
Hus is said to have uttered the words ‘You may roast this goose [‘Hus’ means ‘goose’ in Czech], but a hundred years from now a swan will arise whose singing you will not be able to silence’. Almost exactly a hundred years later, Martin Luther unleashed the doctrine of justification by faith alone on the world.
Now, for the first time in his life, he would have to speak directly to the Judge of all the earth. He had never dared do so before, always praying instead to the saints or Mary. How could he, a sinner, address the Judge?
Instead of calling God a liar by pretending to be righteous and loving, the sinner’s task is to say ‘Amen’ to God’s accusation.
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.
This is the sin of the world: that it does not believe on Christ. Not that there is no sin against the law besides this; but that this is the real chief sin, which condemns the whole world even if it could be charged with no other sin.
It might be more helpful to describe what Luther discovered as ‘justification by God’s word’ instead of ‘justification by faith’, because it is God’s word that justifies here, not our faith.
Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.
From that moment, Luther faced the wrath of the emperor, the pope, burning at the stake and the prospect of hell ever after if he was wrong.
‘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.
Zwingli knew that getting the hammers out, however exciting, would not effect real change. Rather, he believed, the true secret of reform is to change individual hearts by the application of the gospel.
Thus, instead of campaigning for change, Zwingli dedicated himself to preaching God’s word.
Having primed the people, he would then wait for them to demand the change God’s word requires.
he starts by looking at Genesis 1:26, where he sees the three Persons of the Trinity working together to create humanity in their likeness. Because this happened, Zwingli says, humanity, being made in the image of this God, always secretly longs for the word of God. We aren’t aware that we long for this, but this is the desire behind all our longings: we crave the life and light that the word of God brings. It is these two characteristics of God’s word that Zwingli really wants to look at: that it is a word of life-giving power and a word of enlightenment.
God’s word, he said, is like a mighty, unstoppable river. It can be preached with the utmost confidence, for it is God’s effective power to create, save, and change the world.
Even organs were taken out, for Zwingli disapproved of instrumental music in church, fearing that its beauty would lure people to idolize music itself.
Anabaptist confession of faith, the Schleitheim Confession.
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.
Though historically all radicals got called Anabaptists, historians today tend to divide the Radical Reformation into three camps: the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the Rationalists.
Socinianism sowed the seed of rational, moral, modern religiosity.
10 July 1509: Luther and Zwingli had just become priests, one terrified, the other itching for battle, and Jean Cauvin was born in the agricultural market town of Noyon, some sixty miles north of Paris.
Calvin wanted much more frequent Communion: instead of once a quarter, once a month.
Then Calvin and Farel were ordered to use the old-style wafer-bread that left no sacrilegious crumbs in Communion. They refused and were thus banned from preaching.
Sadoleto’s problem, said Calvin, was exactly this: ‘if the blood of Christ alone is uniformly set forth as purchasing satisfaction, reconciliation, and ablution, how dare you presume to transfer so great an honor to your works?’
‘Wherever, therefore, that righteousness of faith, which we maintain to be gratuitous, is, there too Christ is, and where Christ is, there too is the Spirit of holiness, who regenerates the soul to newness of life.’
Calvin wrote to a friend, ‘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.’
Not everybody grasped or shared this: men like Erasmus thought reformation could be a mere moral spring-clean; radicals took it to be a simple revolt against the old ways; Zwingli just opened the Bible, but not really to find Luther’s idea of justification there; and some, like Martin Bucer and Richard Baxter, understood justification differently.
Justification was what made the Reformation the Reformation.
‘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.’
He was, then, the perfect man for the pope to send when, in 1541, a conference was arranged to meet at Regensburg, where, it was hoped, Catholics and evangelicals could end the schism. To his great delight, they did actually manage to come up with an agreed statement on justification.
Sinners are justified by faith, the statement held. That satisfied the evangelicals present. However, it explained, that faith must be active in love. That satisfied the Catholics.
While Luther and Calvin were emphatic that true saving faith would always produce such works of love, they were equally emphatic that such works were the consequence, and not the cause, of justification.
Canon 9: If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone . . . let him be anathema [eternally condemned]. Canon 11: If anyone says that men are justified either solely by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness or solely by the remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and charity which is poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit and stays with them, or also that the grace by which we are justified is only the good will of God, let him be anathema. Canon 12: If anyone says that justifying faith is nothing else than trust in divine mercy, which remits sins for Christ’s
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‘The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible.’ Simply put, we do not like theological precision, for it causes division over issues that, we feel instinctively, are not the most relevant.
‘You with your peace-loving theology. You don’t care about truth.’
For as long as doctrine is ignored, we must remain captives of the ruling system or the spirit of the age, whatever that may be.
a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgment that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change.
