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I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen.
The moment of transformation came when the priest spoke Christ’s words in Latin, Hoc est corpus meum (‘This is my body’).
Thus when parishioners heard ‘Hocus pocus’ instead of Hoc est corpus meum, who knows whose mistake it was?
In 1215, the fourth Lateran Council came up with what it hoped would be a useful aid for all those seeking to be ‘justified’: it required all Christians (on pain of eternal damnation) to confess their sins regularly to a priest.
The things he had understood to be sin (murder, adultery, etc.) he now understood to be mere symptoms of the real problem: unbelief.
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, thought Luther, is not some inner resource we must summon up; if it were, it would by his definition be sin! For him, the question ‘Have I got enough faith?’ completely misunderstands what faith is, by looking to and so relying on itself, rather than Christ. Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.
It is testimony to the transformatory power of his gospel-discovery that the once frightened monk in the thunderstorm would now stare them all down with the immovable affirmation ‘Here I stand!’
in less than eleven weeks, he managed to translate Erasmus’ Greek New Testament into German. It took a bit of polishing up before it was ready (and a few illustrations were added, a panorama of Rome next to Revelation’s description of the destruction of Babylon, for example), but amazingly, in that time Luther had produced a masterpiece. The language was so punchy, so colourful, so of the street, that it transformed the very way people spoke German. Luther was becoming the father of the modern German language. More importantly, with its publication in September 1522, Luther realized his dream
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Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small?
‘My temptation is this, that I think I don’t have a gracious God.’ That might seem an odd temptation after everything he had been through, but he saw it as the devil’s assault on him, and it forced him to be an expert physician of doubt. Not that that was always obvious. Sometimes he would roar scornful abuse at the tempter: ‘But if that is not enough for you, Devil, I have also shit and pissed; wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite.’
He knew that within himself there was only sin and doubt. All his hope lay outside himself, in God’s word. There his security before God was unaffected by how he felt or how he did. And so, when facing doubt, he would not look within himself for any comfort (that would be faithlessness and sin, the origin of all anxiety, not the cure!); instead, he would hold before his eyes this unchanging, external word.
Regarding where Martin Luther found his hope:
The problem he saw in the church was not physical images; first, the images needed to be removed from hearts.
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.
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.
Among other changes was the introduction of congregational singing (before, the people did little more than watch the priests). To ensure the content of what was being sung, Luther composed hymns for them (he was a man for whom the ear mattered, loving both words and music).
Within a few years, he reckoned that fifteen-year-olds in Wittenberg knew more about the word of God ‘than all the universities and doctors before’.
she was spirited enough to stand up to the indomitable Reformer. ‘In domestic affairs I defer to Katie. Otherwise I am led by the Holy Spirit.’ As such, Luther would have to resort to bribes to get her to read her Bible more.
Katie ran their sizable private brewery, selling some of the beer to help make ends meet and using the rest to lubricate all those theological discussions over mealtimes and into the evenings. That didn’t stop her from occasionally upbraiding Martin for drinking too freely at such occasions, nor from feelings of annoyance when students spent mealtimes taking notes instead of eating.
The stark difference between them showed that reform of abuses and the Reformation were two completely distinct projects. The former was a call for man to do better; the latter was an admission that he cannot and hence must rely on the all-sufficient grace of God that the moralizers implicitly denied.
On the Jews and Their Lies. In it he argued, first, that being children of Abraham was always a spiritual matter, not one of genetics;
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 for God’s grace.
Zwingli experienced more than the thrill of rule-breaking, though. As he opened his New Testament he enjoyed what hardly anyone in Europe had enjoyed for a millennium: he could read the very word of God, the real thing, the very words the Holy Spirit had given to the apostles to write. He was so excited he copied out most of Paul’s letters and memorized almost the entire New Testament in Greek.
he stepped into the pulpit under the high steeples of the Great Minster and announced that, rather than preach through set readings and fill his sermons with the thoughts of medieval theologians, he would preach his way through Matthew’s Gospel verse by verse. And when he had finished that, he’d keep going through the rest of the New Testament. God’s word would go out to all the people, undiluted, unadulterated, constantly: this was what Zwingli would be all about, and this was how Zurich would be reformed.
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.
the word of God has clarity. By this he meant that, not only is it intelligible, but more, it actually brings its own enlightenment. We do not have to be previously enlightened to understand God’s word, for we do not bring our own light to the word. On the contrary, the word is light and brings light to our natural darkness.
the real change came on Easter Day, 1525. Instead of celebrating Mass, plain bread rolls were placed on wooden plates on a simple table in the middle of the church; next to them was a jug of wine. No Latin was intoned; everything was in the Swiss German the people could understand. Then, for the first time, the people, while still seated in their pews, were given not only the bread but also the wine. And with that, no longer receiving the sacraments of the Roman church, the break with Rome was complete.
It was not just Carlstadt forcing fast-track reform. Once the evils of idolatry had been proclaimed from the pulpit, it was often near impossible to stop mobs from going on alcohol-fuelled shrine-smashing rampages. This isn’t to deny the religious sincerity of the image-smashers. Many were deeply opposed to those images and all they stood for. The thing was, there wasn’t much in the way of exciting recreation in the sixteenth century, but smashing up statues, breaking glass, and burning wooden images was definitely fun. The drunk and the bored didn’t need much to entice them. And the whole
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Anabaptism, on the whole, tended to be more interested in Christian living than theology.
Getting rid of the Trinity had always been more popular at the edges of Europe, where there was more interaction with Jews and Muslims. Life there could be so much easier without the offence of the Trinity. 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. In this religion, Jesus was just a teacher, not a saviour.
During his sermons, people began to try drowning him out, some by coughing, others by making rude noises with their seats.
Tyndale’s New Testament was a gem of a translation. Accurate and beautifully written, it was a page-turner. None of which impressed the English bishops. To them, Tyndale’s work was just plain dangerous, and all copies that could be found were burned, along with their owners.
Henry’s other problem was, having once allowed the Bible to critique the pope and church practice, and having allowed it to be read by ordinary people, even for a few short years, it was almost impossible to stop where he had stopped. Completely unintentionally, Henry had unleashed a whirlwind, and it could be restrained for only so long.
A prayer book in English (the Book of Common Prayer) was written to ensure that every church service was English in language and evangelical in content.
‘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.’
Sermons up to seven hours long were not unheard-of.
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 result, said Thomas Goodwin, was that in their concern for their spiritual state, ‘the minds of many are so wholly taken up with their own hearts, that . . . Christ “is scarce in all their thoughts”.’
Sibbes seems to suggest that, even in reforming the Reformation, the real spirit of reformation could be lost, and all the doubts and anxieties of medieval Catholicism come streaming back in through the back door of a zealous Christian moralism that had lost sight of the grace of God.
the persecution grew more intense, and some twenty thousand Puritans were sent to prison over the next twenty years. In Scotland they had it worse: the death penalty was imposed for such illegal preaching, and torture was used liberally to hunt down suspects.
It was this message that permeated all of Bunyan’s preaching, preaching that was, apparently, of such high order that when Charles II referred to him as ‘that illiterate tinker prate’ in the presence of the one-time Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, John Owen, the scholar replied, ‘Please, your majesty, could I possess that tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would gladly relinquish all my learning’.
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.
The Reformation was, fundamentally, about justification; it was the Reformers’ view of justification, as discovered in the Bible, that shaped and controlled almost every aspect of their disagreement with Rome. Thus if the Reformation is truly over, the principal reason must be that both sides have reached an agreed understanding of justification.
Rome’s view of justification remains just as it was stated at Trent, as does its belief that (as the Catechism puts it) ‘Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.’
How Erasmus has conquered! As we saw in chapter 4, it was he who said, ‘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.
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.
For Erasmus, the Bible was little more than a collection of moral exhortations, urging believers to be more like Christ, their example. For Luther, this viewpoint turned the gospel on its head: its optimism displayed its utter ignorance of the seriousness of sin. As he saw it, what sinners need, first and foremost, is a saviour; and in the Bible is, first and foremost, a message of salvation.
As Luther put it: ‘sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.’ Only this message of the counterintuitive love of Christ offers a serious solution.
