Reformation Theology

Prepared for Integrity Seminary

Instructor Lee Martin D. Min., Ph.D.

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THE DOCTRINAL UNITY OF THE REFORMERS

A. Doctrine

1. Bible Only (Sola Scriptura): The Reformers declared the Bible to be the only rule of faith and practice. They believed that God had made a revelation in written form to men in the Bible. They taught that the Bible was inspired by God and authoritative, and that it took precedence over the declarations of popes, church tradition and church councils. They asserted that men, under the illumination of the Holy Spirit, are to study the Bible to learn about God, Christ, salvation, and church government and practices. They encouraged Christians to read and study their Bibles in a scholarly way so as to form a biblical theology based on the authority of the Scriptures alone. The Bible, hitherto written in Latin and read only by the clergy, was translated anew into the vernacular tongues of Europe and made a book of the people. 

2. Christ Only (Solo Christo): Salvation is located not in the church, an organ-ization, but in the person Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ actually secured and pro-cured the salvation of all who are saved by grace through faith in Christ. 

3. Grace Only (Sola Gratia): The Reformers believed that salvation was caused totally by God's grace. Man is not saved by works but by God's grace in Christ. No man deserves salvation, and if he is saved it is because of God's uncondi-tional grace. 

4. Faith Only (Sola Fide): Faith alone is consistent with God's grace in calling to salvation. Thus the Reformers taught that salvation was appropriated by faith alone. Good works could not save but only Christ can save those who believe in Him. Every and any person who trusts the Saviour will be saved, but even a person's faith is a gift from God. 

5. God's Glory Only (Soli Deo Gloria): The underlying, foundational doctrine of the Re-formers was that God's glory was the ultimate purpose of all things. They held tenaciously to the doctrines of God's sovereignty in election, predestination and the efficacious call of God in salvation, and saw how these contributed ultimately to God's glory rather than to man's or to the church's. The Reformers taught supernaturalism and the necessity of a new birth from God.

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THE DOCTRINAL UNITY OF THE REFORMERS

A. Doctrine

1. Bible Only (Sola Scriptura): The Reformers declared the Bible to be the only rule of faith and practice. They believed that God had made a revelation in written form to men in the Bible. They taught that the Bible was inspired by God and authoritative, and that it took precedence over the declarations of popes, church tradition and church councils. They asserted that men, under the illumination of the Holy Spirit, are to study the Bible to learn about God, Christ, salvation, and church government and practices. They encouraged Christians to read and study their Bibles in a scholarly way so as to form a biblical theology based on the authority of the Scriptures alone. The Bible, hitherto written in Latin and read only by the clergy, was translated anew into the vernacular tongues of Europe and made a book of the people. 

2. Christ Only (Solo Christo): Salvation is located not in the church, an organ-ization, but in the person Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ actually secured and pro-cured the salvation of all who are saved by grace through faith in Christ. 

3. Grace Only (Sola Gratia): The Reformers believed that salvation was caused totally by God's grace. Man is not saved by works but by God's grace in Christ. No man deserves salvation, and if he is saved it is because of God's uncondi-tional grace. 

4. Faith Only (Sola Fide): Faith alone is consistent with God's grace in calling to salvation. Thus the Reformers taught that salvation was appropriated by faith alone. Good works could not save but only Christ can save those who believe in Him. Every and any person who trusts the Saviour will be saved, but even a person's faith is a gift from God. 

5. God's Glory Only (Soli Deo Gloria): The underlying, foundational doctrine of the Re-formers was that God's glory was the ultimate purpose of all things. They held tenaciously to the doctrines of God's sovereignty in election, predestination and the efficacious call of God in salvation, and saw how these contributed ultimately to God's glory rather than to man's or to the church's. The Reformers taught supernaturalism and the necessity of a new birth from God.

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Table of Contents

Session O1 - What’s This Got to Do with My Ministry?

Session 02 – What Does it Mean to be a Protestant?

Session 03 – The Breakdown of the Medieval Synthesis

Session 04 – Erasmus

Session 05 – Martin Luther’s Biography

Session 06 – Luther’s Theology

Session 07 – Luther’s Theology 2

Session 08 – Zwingli

Session 09 – The Ana-Baptist

Session 10 – John Calvin Biography

Session 11 – Calvin’s Theology

Session 12 – Anglicanism

Session 13 – The Catholic Reformation

Session 14 – The Results of the Reformation

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Session 01 - What's This Got To Do with my Ministry?

Intro.: Recently we had gathered at the beginning of a Clarion Seminary weekend, all of us

sitting at the desks in one of the lecture rooms before the Friday evening class. A student

sitting in front of me was speaking to a friend, and said something like this: “I thought I was

going to come up here and learn some things about the Bible that I can use in my preaching.

I don’t know why they make us learn this history stuff.” (Word to the wise: it’s probably a

good idea to know who the instructors are before unburdening yourself of these thoughts in

public.) I don’t doubt that many of you have asked a similar question as you’ve contemplated

taking this class. It’s a fair question, and I want to give as fair an answer as I can.

I. A preliminary answer: Because we are not always the best judges of what we need.

II. A more substantive answer: The types and sources of theology

A. Embedded theology:

1. Embedded theology is the set of ideas, assumptions, perspectives, and opinions2. we carry around with us about who God is and how God acts in the world.3. This is the theology that has been forming in us since our earliest experiences;

everything we have ever heard or read about God has gone into it.4. The good thing about embedded theology is that it’s always there,

ready to bring to mind. When we say the word “God,” we don’t have to stopand think about what that word means, because our embedded theology isthere to tell us.

5. The bad thing about embedded theology is that much of the time it’s not a theology wechose for ourselves; it came to us from someone else and just stuck, whether we wanted it to do so or not.

a. Example of growing up with a fundamentalist pastor. When I began to form myown, different theology I had to argue with his theology in my head for years,because it had been embedded there.

B. Deliberative Theology

1. This is the theology that we choose; it’s what happens when we

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take our embedded theology out of whatever nook and cranny of our

mind it’s residing in and ask the question: “Is this what I genuinely

want to believe, or is it something somebody told me once and it

just stuck?”

a. Example: When a child dies in your congregation, atsome point somebody is going to say some version of“Everything happens for a reason.”

b. That statement is a kind of neutral, hedging-your-betsway of saying that everything happens because God willsit to happen.

c. That is a valid theological position to hold (although it carriesa lot of baggage), but did the people who say“everything happens for a reason” choose that theological position and everything that goes along with it, or are they just saying somethingthey’ve heard other people say?

2. Deliberative theology, then, happens when we examine

our theological assumptions and ask hard questions of them.

The result is a more mature theology that we choose for

ourselves, rather than the other way around.

C. Tradition

1. Simply put, no one reads the Bible or comes to Christian

faith on their own.

2. When we read and interpret Scripture, we depend on the

interpretations of those who have taught us. They did the same thing.

3. Tradition is unavoidable; none of us approaches Christian belief

with a clean slate. The way those who have gone before us

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believed decisively shapes the way we believe.

D. So what’s all this got to do with why you have to study history?

1. Your embedded theology is Protestant. If you want to

understand what you believe, you have to understand the

story of the Protestant movement.  If you don’t know this

story, if you don’t know why

a. Luther, or Calvin, or the Anabaptists, or theb. Anglicans believed as they did, then you don’tc. understand your own beliefs.

b. Equally importantly, if you don’t understandwhat the various branches of the Protestant movement were sayingthat were different to one another, you won’t be able to make informeddecisions about the theology that’s best for you.

(1) Example of the UM pastor who ran acrossthe phrase “irresistible grace,” thought itsounded interesting, and used it in an ordinationessay. He didn’t know that the term has aspecific meaning in the Reformed/Presbyteriantradition, and that John Wesley had explicitlyrejected the theological idea it conveyed.

d. Something many UM pastors don’t realize is how potentand pervasive Calvinist theology has been in thedevelopment of Christianity in the U.S. Not justthe direct descendants of Calvin (Presbyterian andReformed churches) but indirect descendants (Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ) adhere todifferent versions of Calvinist theology.

(1) Go to any nondenominational church and listen long enough and you will be far morelikely to hear strands of Calvinist theologythan Wesleyan/Arminian theology.

e. Given the denominational mixing and matching thathas become the norm in the U.S., you are goingto have members in your congregations whoseembedded theology is very diverse in tone.

d. How are you going to minister effectively to thosepeople, how are you going to lead them in

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a single way of discipleship, if you don’t knowanything about where they’re coming from?Finally, many of you have varying denominationalbackgrounds and embedded theology almostcertainly contains some mixed elements as well.How are you going to choose between those elementsif you don’t understand them?

III. Why have I been using the word “theology” so much, but not the word “history?”

A. Because this is a theology class, not a history classB. The term “theology” covers a lot of ground, which means there are

a lot of ways to approach it:

1. Biblical theology asks how the Bible shapes our Christian beliefs

2. Pastoral theology asks the same question of our day-to-day

experiences, especially as they relate to life as part of a

Christian community.

3 Systematic theology looks at each of our beliefs (in God, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, in salvation, in creation, etc)and asks how they fit together and how each teaches usabout the others.

4. Historical theology asks how we can better understand our

beliefs by understanding how those beliefs got started and what

they meant to our Christian fore parents.

C. This last way of doing theology–historical theology–will be the focusof our class, especially as it relates to the Reformation period.

1. This means that we will be talking about history a lot in here,but for the purpose of understanding the origins anddevelopment of our own beliefs.

D. Put as simply as I can: It’s not about a bunch of dead people fromthe 16th century; it’s about you and your congregation today.

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[1]This discussion of “embedded” and “deliberative” theology relies on the work of

Howard Stone and James Duke in their book How To Think Theologically

I. Introduction And Background

A. The Reformation which began in 1517 did not start like a bolt out of the blue. �

There were many religious, economic and political factors that had been brewing

for centuries during the medieval period that set the stage for the Reformation.

B. The Roman Catholic Church was a corrupt, sterile and wicked organization

as a whole. Genuine believers were crying for reform within the Roman Church.

Most of these who were unhappy with the condition of the Roman Church never

thought of starting a new church, but rather wanted reform of the old so that

Christ could be glorified.

C. To challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval

period was a serious thing, almost always ending in death to the opposer.

We owe much to the Christian martyrs of the Middle Ages who dared to

stand up and be counted for their faith in Christ! The reform before the

Reformation never really accomplished much for it was almost always squelched,

but it did, set forth an attitude and a spirit that was to come to fruition under Martin Luther.

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II. Reforming Groups Who Broke with the Roman Catholic Church

A. Albigenses: This group had its beginnings in Bulgaria and was sometimes called Cathari. �The Albigenses opposed the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, butthey certainly were not orthodox in their doctrine. They held to Manicheandoctrine, accepting a good god and an evil god; they were also dualists.However, it should be said in defense of these apparently heretical groups thatmuch historical research is still called for in order to bring out the true storyand theological positions of these numerous bodies. Most of the things weknow about these groups come from their enemies in the Roman Catholic Church.The Dominican Order applied the Inquisition against this group, and after 20years they were almost exterminated. By the middle of the fourteenth centurythere were probably few Albigenses left.

B. Waldenses: This group followed Peter Waldo, who believed that the Bible wasto be the ultimate authority for the Christian. The Waldenses were very orthodoxin doctrine and committed much of the New Testament to memory. They believed in lay preachers, and would not take an oath or shed human blood. They opposedthe concepts of purgatory and prayer for the dead. The Waldenses grew greatlyin number in Northern Italy and Southern France. The Roman Catholic Churchterribly persecuted the Waldenses and they, too, were threatened with extinction,but many fled to the high valleys of the Alps. They still live there today. At thetime of the Reformation, they accepted its teachings and became Protestants.The Waldenses paid a terrible price for their faith, for we are told that for 20years their blood flowed like water. Peter Waldo himself may have never�become fully evangelical as we would think of it today, but many of hisfollowers were very evangelistic. The Waldenses were very strong on the sovereigntyof God, and believed that the true church was made up of God’s elect. A strongbelief in the sovereignty of God makes great martyrs for the Faith. Of the Christianswho broke away from the Roman Church during the Middle Ages, they are the onlygroup that has survived to the present time.

III. Reforming Men

A. John Wycliffe (1320-1384): Wycliffe was born in England in the year 1320. He studiedat the University of Oxford. In 1376 he began to criticize the clergy and thecorruption of the Roman Church, called the pope antichrist, and rejected�confession, purgatory, pilgrimages, and the worship of saints. It is nowonder that he is called The Morning Star of the Reformation. Wycliffe wanted�a return to simple, first-century Christianity. He believed the Bible to be the supreme

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authority for the Christian. Although a priest of the Roman Church to his dyingday, he declared that the only head of the church is Christ. Those who followedWycliffe were called Lollards, and they went about the country of England preaching the gospel. Wycliffe is best known for the Lollard translation of theLatin Vulgate into the English language. Many attempts were made by the RomanCatholic Church to try Wycliffe for heresy with the hope of putting him to death,but various secular nobles protected him from the Inquisition. Wycliffe diedin peace in 1384. The reception given by the laity to Wycliffe’s writingsreveals how widespread was the desire for reform of the Church.

B. John Hus (1360-1415): Hus, who was trained for the priesthood, became the headof the theological faculty at the University of Prague in the capital of Bohemia.He was greatly influenced by the teachings of Wycliffe, but was also a diligentindependent thinker. There were many in Bohemia who were sympatheticwith the teachings of the Waldenses, so the ground was prepared for Hus.He preached against the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, andbelieved that the Holy Catholic Church consists of the total number of thepredestined. He distinguished between being in the church and being of thechurch. He taught that one could be in the church and yet not be a realmember of it. He also taught that popes and cardinals are not necessary tothe government of the church, although he would not have opposed theepiscopal form of government. The whole nation of Bohemia followed Hus,even after he had been excommunicated by the pope. When the popesummoned Hus to the Council of Constance, the Emperor Sigismund orderedhim to go and promised safe conduct to and from the Council. But when theCouncil condemned him as a heretic and burned him at the stake, Sigismunddid not interfere. On the day of his martyrdom, Hus was dressed in full vestmentsof a priest. Then, one by one, every article of clothing was stripped from him withleud remarks made about him. A paper cap was placed upon his head which said,Here is the Heresiarch. A crusade was organized against the followers of Hus,and for many years Bohemia was ravaged by war. But the spirit of reform livedon, and when the Reformation began in Germany, opposition to the RomanCatholic Church was still strong in the land of Hus. Hus had a profound influenceupon Europe, and his teachings spurred Luther to take his stand against the Roman Church.

C. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98): He was a monk who became an itinerant preacher.His greatest ministry was in Florence, Italy. There he led a reform movement; andin the midst of turbulent political conditions which resulted in the overthrow ofthe government of the city-state, he became religious spokesman of the city with the opportunity of reforming it as he wished. He began to attack the corruptionof the Roman church and the authority of the pope, and to preach salvation apartfrom submission to the Roman hierarchy. This led Pope Alexander VI to interfereand ultimately to obtain Savonarola’s condemnation and death sentence. As

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he was being burned at the stake by the Roman Church, he said, I warn you,O Italy, I warn you, O Rome, the only thing that can save you is Jesus Christ! �

IV. Reforming Groups within the Church

A. The Councils: There were some attempts to reform the Roman Church from within,but they were not at all successful. The Council of Pisa (1409) deposed the rivalpopes in the Great Schism. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) accomplishednothing in the way of reform, but it was responsible for having John Hus put to death.This council did declare, however, that the council received its authority from Christ,and that it was authoritative over the pope and other members of the church. Thisrefutes the Vatican teaching that the pope is infallible. The Council of Basel (1431)did nothing but try to deal with the Husite revolt in Bohemia.

The councils were a failure in the area of reform, but their very existence showed

the great need for reform. Others after them were to tinker with the matter of

reform, for everywhere its necessity was realized. It took Martin Luther finally

to bring it to pass by laying an axe to the roots of the whole papal system.

B. The Brethren of the Common Life: Around 1350 this group sprang up in theNetherlands and Germany. They believed in Christian education and hoped toaccomplish reform by this means. This group was founded by Groote, but itsmost famous sons are John of Wessel, Erasmus and Thomas a Kempis. Johnof Wessel taught justification by faith alone. He said, He who thinks to bejustified through his own works does not know what it is to be saved. �He also taught the closely related doctrine that the elect are saved by grace alone, and wrote,Whom God wishes to save He would save by giving him grace, if all thepriests should wish to damn and excommunicate him. He was tried for�heresy and recanted. However, they threw him in prison anyway and he diedin 1489. Erasmus was a great scholar and his pen “smoked” against the corruptionof the Roman Church. But that was as far as he went. He never joinedLuther in the great Reformation movement. It was said, Erasmus laid the egg[of the Reformation] and Luther hatched it.

V. Conclusion

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A. During the last part of the middle Ages, and due to the increased emphasis of the

Renaissance, men began to look back into the history of the early church by studying

the church fathers. They noticed that these fathers knew nothing about many

teachings that were taught by the Roman Church. They began to read

Scripture in the original languages and found that the Bible itself frequently

contradicted teachings which the Roman Church had proclaimed as basic.

Doubts arose in the minds of many, but there were none that had the learning,

personality and leadership ability to spark a continent-wide reformation.

C. When the Reformation broke over Europe, it came as a climax to the voices of theseearlier reformers, and at a time when the social, political and intellectual climatewas ready for a change. At this point Luther entered the scene and led the movementthat shook the Roman Church to its foundations.

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Session 02 - What Does It Mean to Be a Protestant?

Intro: While not every religious movement we’ll look at in this course will be Protestant,

the vast majority of them will be. This means that it makes sense to spend some time

introducing ourselves to the basic contours of the Protestant movement.

I. To be Protestant is to be a descendent of the Roman Catholic tradition.

A. How many of you here have church members who complain

about and/or will refuse to say the word “catholic” in the apostles Creed?

B. This is evidence of the long-standing animosity that Protestants

hold toward Roman Catholics.

1. If you go back about 75 years, all Protestants(or at least most)were united in their dislike and distrust of the Roman

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Catholic church. In the church I grew up in, about the most tolerant thingyou could say about Catholics was that “some of themwill probably get to heaven” – by which we meant, “inspite of being Catholic.”

2. This ill will toward Catholics was particularlyrich in the southern United States.

C. And yet we have to admit that as Protestants we are, each and

every one of us, children of the Roman Catholic Church.

Had it not been for the medieval Catholic Church –

had Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and all the others not been

formed in and by it – there would be no Protestantism.

E. The thing to remember is that Roman Catholics and Protestants areboth the inheritors of the Western Christian tradition, whose greatfounding figure was the early medieval theologian Augustine of Hippo.Thus, Protestantism is not Catholicism’s opposite; we are, indeed,merely feuding siblings.

1. Up to the middle of the 20th century, that feud was strident, loud, and all too often bloody.

2. With the pontificate of the Pope John XXIII and the secondVatican Council, Catholicism’s attitude toward its waywardyounger sibling softened considerably.

3. There have been ups and downs in the relationship since;as recently as a few years ago Pope Benedict declared thatthe Protestant churches were not in fact true churches.

4. However, it seems clear that relations between the two groupswill continue to get better.

5. Therefore, it makes little sense in the 21st century to continue tothink of our Roman Catholic neighbors as though we were bothback in the 16th century.

II. To be Protestant is to believe first and foremost in the authority of Scripture

A. Scriptural authority is the starting point for the differencesbetween Protestants and Roman Catholics.

B. We will be looking at this a lot more, but suffice it to say that RomanC. Catholics and Protestants each have paid their money and made their

choice when it comes to Scripture:

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1. Roman Catholics have chosen to emphasize church unityat the expense of the final and absolute authority ofScripture (ask yourself: how many Roman Catholic denominations are there?)

2. Protestants, on the other hand, have chosen the final and absoluteauhority of Scripture at the expense of church unity(ask yourself again: how many Protestant denominations are there?)

III. To be Protestant is to insist on the absolute primacy of grace in the economy of salvation.

A. When we speak of God, we always speak by analogy tohuman experience, because those are the only tools we haveto get the job done, inadequate though they may be.

B. This is why one way to talk about salvation is the languageof commerce or exchange--hence the term "economy of salvation."

C. In the interchange we call salvation, therefore, there are two partiesinvolved: God, and us.

D. The question becomes, what does each party contribute to the transaction? What part does divine grace occupy, and what part human effort?

E. All Protestants are going to insist that divine grace occupies,not simply the most important part, but the only one.

1. In the church where I grew up, we would claim that thishad to be true because it's what the Bible says.

2. It is, in fact, close to what Paul says, but if you think about it,the Gospels say something a bit different. In the words of Jesus,the quality of our actions, the nature of our discipleship,play a decisive role in our salvation (see Matthew 25, for example.

3. This means that to be Protestant is to read some parts of theBible through the lens of other parts--the gospels through the lens of Paul.

IV. To be Protestant is to insist on the universal priesthood of all believers.

A. As we're going to see, Luther believed that pastors exercise theministry of Word and Sacrament on behalf of the congregation,having been set apart specifically for this task.

B. All other ministries belong to all members of the congregation,and all the baptized are called to them equally.

C. This has changed since Vatican II, but in Luther's day the RomanCatholic Church placed the clergy on an entirely different levelthan the laity, making them, in effect, a separate and (implicitly)superior order of Christians.

V. To be a Protestant is to practice only 2 sacraments: Baptism

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and Eucharist/Communion/Lord's Supper.

A. Roman Catholics practice 7 sacraments, but ever since Luther Protestantshave practiced only 2.

VI. To be Protestant is to be "always reforming."

A. "Reformed, always reforming"(“Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda”) is a slogan of the Reformed tradition, but it applies to Protestantism as a whole.

B. The history of Protestantism is of new expressions and formsof the Protestant impulse arising.

1. The Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches grewout of a reforming impulse toward Catholicism.

2. The Mennonite (Anabaptist) churches grew out of areforming impulse toward Roman Catholicism and theProtestant bodies, notably Reformed and Lutheran.

3. The Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker, and Methodistmovements grew out of the reforming impulse toward Anglicanism.

4. The Campbellite churches (Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ)grew out of a reforming impulse toward the other Protestant bodies,notably Presbyterians.

5. The Holiness and Pentecostal churches grew out of a reforming impulse toward other Protestant bodies, notably Methodism.

6. The nondenominational churches of today have grownout of a reforming impulse toward the other Protestantdenominations, often Baptist and Pentecostal.

VII. To be Protestant is to endorse the Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy

of the fourth and fifth centuries.

A. None of the Protestant denominations and traditions I have named, starting with Luther and going down to the major nondenominationalcongregations of the 21st century, have rejected or questioned thedoctrines of the Trinity or the full divinity and humanity of Christ,as those doctrines were hammered out in the great ecumenical councilsof the early church.

1. This is why groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnessescannot be counted as Protestant.

VIII. Finally, to be Protestant is to live out the Protestant Principle.

A. The Protestant Principle is like a planet that revolves around two stars:

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1. On the one hand is Scripture, the fundamental belief that

the Bible points us toward God's revelation in Christ.

a. Everything we do and say has to be tested against that foundation.

2. On the other hand is a spirit of probing, challenging,and questioning in matters of belief and practice.

a. Protestants can never be satisfied with settledorthodoxies and habitual ways of doing things.We must always be following the Spirit into thenew thing God has planned for us.

3. In a binary star system, the two stars balance one another.Take one of them away, and the planets/satellites either spinout into space, or they crash into the remaining star and burn up.

a. Similarly, to be Protestant is to hold onto boththe idea of Scripture, and the idea of the Spirit's new thing.

IX. Implications for your ministry:

A. Your congregation follows a Protestant way of discipleship.For better and worse, that is your identity.

B. You can’t get away from Scripture; it is the unavoidablecontext for everything you do.

C. You don't get to just decide what Scripture says; you areaccountable to the Protestant tradition's way of reading Scripture.

D. But neither are you a slave to the way we've always done things.E. To be a Protestant pastor is to question conventional wisdom and received authority.

F. As a Protestant pastor, you are less than a servant. You are theservant of the servants of God.

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Session 03 - The Breakdown of the Medieval Synthesis

Intro: As we said in the last session, we study history here in order to understandwhere our theology comes from. In other words, we want to find out what was onpeople’s minds that led to the rise of this new thing called Protestant theology.

In order to understand that theology, we need to know what was going on in theyears leading up to the dawn of the Reformation, so we can see why the Reformationseemed so necessary in so many people's minds.

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I. The medieval synthesis: a definition

A. The term "medieval synthesis" refers to the sense that many of thethings we in the modern period consider as disconnected wereseen as connected during the Middle Ages.

1. Faith and Reason

2. Church and State

3. Belief and the Arts

4. Christian discipleship and state citizenship

B. The thing to remember is that these things weren't in truth unitedin perfect harmony. There was plenty of tension, disagreement, andoutright conflict between all of them.

C. However, there was the expectation that these ideas or realities wouldfit together regardless of how good or bad a job people were doing of making it happen.

D. Fundamentally this was a synthesis between church and society.

1. The culture wars that have been a feature of American lifeat least since the 1960s are a result of the enduring belief

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that such a synthesis is both possible again, and desirable.

D. Notice that the medieval synthesis is founded on a theological idea:that the sovereignty of the one God should be reflected in society.If God is the creator and sustainer of all that is, then human life –including human society and culture – should be united under God’s sovereignty.

1. Take a moment to discuss the class’s reaction to this idea: is it desirable today? Is it even possible? Why or why not?

a. Note how important this idea remains within certain branches of Islam.

II. The exemplar of the medieval synthesis: the theology of Thomas Aquinas

A. Proof of the existence of God: the cosmological argument

1. Begins with the principle of causation: every effect hasits own cause, which was itself the effect of a previous cause.

2. Rejects the possibility of an infinite regressionof causes as contrary to reason.

3. Therefore, there must have been a 1st cause, a Prime Mover, who is God.

4. Outline of the argument from perfection.

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5. Outline of the argument from the order of the universe.

B. Natural and revealed theology.

1. Begins with a distinction in truth:

a. Truth that is available through the use of reason alone:the proofs of the existence of God outlined above are of this nature.

b. Truths that must be gained through revelation.

2. Note that the two are not contradictory to one another:

a. Revealed truths do not contradict reason;none of Tertullian’s credo quia absurdium(“I believe because it is impossible”)

b. Reason may be used to understand revealed truth more fully;c. similar here to Anselm.

(1) Natural theology and philosophy lead toward revealed theology

c. Objection: must one not then be an intellectual to be a Christian?

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d. Response: No, because only revealed truth is salvific.

C. Aquinas on nature and supernature

1. Many Christians in Aquinas’ time (and ours) based their belief on miracles

2. Aquinas by no means denied the reality of miracles.

3. Yet he insisted that nature discloses God just as much as supernature

D. Conclusions on Aquinas:

1. Presents the highest example of the medieval synthesis of faith and reason.

2. Prefigures the dissolution of that synthesis in his separation the two.

III. First attack on the medieval synthesis: Nominalism

A. Note: We have to spend some time here talking about philosophy.For a lot of folks philosophy has a bad connotation, but in truth it’s just a way to ask questions about how the world works.To be afraid of philosophy is to be afraid of thinking.

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B. Aquinas and other theologians of the Middle Ages believed insomething we call philosophical realism.

1. The starting point is language, and its relation to reality.

a. When I say the word chair, you have a picture inyour mind of what that means. That picture allowsyou to distinguish between a chair, a stool, a desk,and a banana, for example.

b. That image of a chair in your mind isn’t there byaccident; it’s there because God implanted it there.

c. The reason we know what a chair is like is becausebefore God created the world and the things in it,God created ideal versions of those things within the mind of God.

(1) Thus, in spite of the remarkable diversity of size,shape, color, texture, materials, etc that can gointo making a chair, we know what a chair iswhen we see one because our minds, createdin the image of God, have a dim sense of theideal chair that exists in the mind of God alone.

2. So what’s this got to do with theology?

a. Philosophical realism imagines a fundamental

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continuity between earthly and divine realities.

(1) As Thomas Aquinas reminded us, everythingwe say about God is by way of analogy.

(a) God is so far above and beyond ourexperience that we cannot speak of God directly.

(b) The best we can do is to compareGod to earthly things.

i) Thus, were I to refer in prayerto God “our Rock,” you would not conclude that God is a mineral.

ii) Rather, you would make anassociation; you would know that by calling God “our Rock,” I am saying that God is steadfast, that God’s character is dependable.

(2) In other words, in order to say anythingabout God, I must engage in some kind of analogy like this.

(3) But how can I know that these analogies

are adequate? How can I know that they’resaying something true about God?

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(4) Here’s where philosophical realism comes in.(5) If the world and things in it fundamentally

eflect the mind of God; if we know what achair is because God gave us the idea of a chair,an idea that existed first in the mind of God,then we can be confident that our languagefor God is saying something true about God.We can have confidence in the way our reasonworks to make sense of the world, because thatreason reflects the mind of God.

C. But what if that agreement between our language and ideas forearthly reality and heavenly reality didn’t correspond? What ifhuman language and ideas are simply that–human, and nothing else?

1. This is what the philosophical school known as Nominalism,which gained prominence in the later years of the Middle Ages, said.

2. In contrast to idealism, Nominalism says that our languageand categories for things don’t depend on ideas in the mind of God;they simply come from human convention.

a. Hence the way I know that two different objects areboth chairs is simply because I grew up hearingobjects that possess certain characteristics andfunctions referred to as “chairs,” and I extrapolatefrom them to new objects like them when encounteredfor the first time.

3. In other words, there is no consistency between divine and earthly realities.

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4. What does this mean for the analogies on which we must rely to speak of God?

a. Nominalism doesn’t deny that these analogies are necessary.

b. It does deny that they are true because of any inherentcorrespondence between the way we speak and think,and the mind of God.

c. The reason I know that God is like is Rock is simplybecause God tells me so in Scripture.

d. In other words, all knowledge of God comes throughrevelation. Our reason will not get us one step closerto understanding and experiencing God.

e. Everything we know about God comes from revelation.

f. And who is in charge of that revelation? The Church.

e. Since the earliest centuries, the church insisted that its leaders,the bishops, were the official interpreters of Scripture,the official custodians of revelation.

f. Now we come to the heart of the matter: Under Nominalism,our certainty that we can know God thus depends

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entirely on the extent to which we can trust the church.

(1) If that trust is strong, then there’s no problem.

(2) But what if it isn’t?

III. The second attack: The Avignon papacy and the “Babylonian Captivity”of the church.

A. The first thing to say is that throughout the Middle Ages thepopes engaged in endless controversy with various kings and nobles over the relative authority of political vs. church leadership.

1. This sounds strange to us, but remember that at this timethe concepts of separate church and state was not in force.Instead, they believed they lived in one Christian society,with both kings and popes as leaders.

2. The kings believed it was their responsibility to protect thechurch (which frequently they took to mean running it), and the popes thought the same about the “secular” government.

B. Just such a disagreement lies behind the Avignon papacy.Boniface VIII was pope from 1294-1303. He got into a tusslewith Philip the Fair, king of France. Boniface tried to use thetools at his disposal to bend Philip to his will, but Philip resistedsuccessfully. When Boniface pushed back harder, a group ofFrench mercenaries captured the pope and held him hostage.He was released in a few days, but because he’d been in ill health,he died a month later. The result demonstrated the weakness of thepopes in the face of the rising power of the kings.

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C. While all this was going on, the elections of the popes in Romewere increasingly at the whim of local Italian politics, leadingto the election of some unqualified popes.

D. Thus, the next pope after Boniface, in order to escape Italian turmoiland to avoid Boniface’s fate, basically never settled anywhere,although he did spend more of his time in Avignon, a town acrossthe Rhone river from France.

D. After him, the popes from 1305-1377 took up residence in Avignon,even though they were supposed to be the bishop of Rome.

E. When Gregory XI finally returns to Rome in 1377, incidents ensuethat lead eventually to the existence of two popes, one at Rome,one at Avignon, both claiming to be the true pope. This period isknown as the Great Schism.

V. The hope, and failure, of conciliarism.

A. At this time a movement arose to save the church from the messthat it was in through church councils. Important figures in this movement were Jean Gerson and Pierre D’Ailly.

B. In 1409 a council met at Pisa, which elected a new pope and deposedthe two who were there from the Great Schism.

1. The problem, of course, was that the other two popes

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refused to step down, and hence for a time there were three popes.

C. Finally the Great Schism ended when, in 1414, the Council ofConstance met and straightened out the problem of rival popes.

D. The other great achievement of the Council of Constance was todeclare that only when the whole church was meeting together, in a church council, was the authentic authority of the church present.

1. Although the bishops were the ones who could vote, this positionwas a big step forward, in that it sought input from others in thechurch, including the laity.

E. The council, and the movement known as conciliarism, came tonought, however, because they failed to address a fatal flaw in their plan.

1. Even though they had decreed that a church council wouldbe held every 5 years, they failed to set up a system for howthe council would be convened.

2. In the past, it had been convened, or called into session,by the popes.

3. Thus, all the popes needed to do away with conciliarismas a threat to their power was neglect to call the council together–which is precisely what they did.

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F. So it was that throughout much of the 15th century, during the yearsleading up to the Reformation, it seemed like the church was in a mess,with no way to fix itself.

VI. So why tell this story? Simply this: In the 14th and especially the 15th

centuries, the church went through a number of changes, the result of which

was to render everybody eager for reform, but no one certain of how it could be achieved.

A. Note theology and history come together here. The changes intheology led to a much greater emphasis on the role of revelationover reason in Christian belief. And who was in charge ofsafeguarding that revelation, teaching and preaching it? The church.Thus, the changes in theology made necessary a greater reliance onthe roles of the church in helping us be certain that what we believed was true.

B. At exactly that same historical moment, the church was going througha set of convulsions that made it less trustworthy and reliable than it had ever been.

C. As we will see, this was made all the more acute by the church’stheology of salvation, meaning that not only your ideas aboutGod were suspect, but your very salvation itself.

VII. Implications for contemporary ministry.

A. There’s a lot to learn from this story, but the thing I most takeaway is just how much depends on the integrity of pastors.

B. You and I know that the truth andreliability of the gospel don’t depend on how well we do at living it out.

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C. Yet so many people harbor this misconception.

1. In some ways, it is inevitable that people will bedisappointed with us, and thus that their faith will be shaken.

2. But it is neither inevitable nor necessary that we will violate someone’s trust.

Lying, breaking a confidence, or simply failing to dealwith someone with honor and integrity–these happen inministry all the time, but woe to us if, because of one ofthese things, we should cause a fellow Christian to stumble.

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Session 04 - ErasmusIntro.: Over the course of this weekend you’re going to encounter a lot ofnames that you haven’t heard before. This, I fear, is unavoidable; when we’re talkingabout the 2,000-year history of a global church, we’ve got to toss some names around.But I hope to keep the name-dropping to a minimum, in order to focus on thetheological developments of the Reformation and what they mean for your ministry.

The figure with whom we’ll start will probably not be a familiar one to you.

That’s true for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact that he didn’t actually

see himself as one of the Reformers, an assessment with which most of the Reformers

agreed. Yet you can’t understand their work with first taking account of his, which is

why we’ll begin with this study of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

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I. Who was he?

A. Erasmus was born around 1466 in the Netherlands.

B. His study early on introduced him to the work of the humanists,

about whom we’ll say more in a moment.

C. As was common in his day he entered monastic life early,although later he left it.

D. He was also ordained a priest, but (also like many of his time) he did not serve in a parish.

E. Instead he followed the life of a scholar, beginning at the University of Paris,the preeminent institution of higher learning of its day.

1. He wasn’t at home at Paris, however, largely becauseof his distaste for scholastic theology, the dominant wayof studying theology at the time. He finished his doctorateat the University of Turin, Italy instead.

F. Traveling, working for different leaders and teaching at different schools was pretty much how he lived his life from this point on.

G. The most important thing was his writing. He wrote books on anumber of timely subjects and issues, to which we turn now.

II. Rejection of scholasticism

A. To understand not only Erasmus, but the whole theologicalconversation of the time, you have to understand this thingwe call scholasticism.

B. Scholasticism refers to the primary way of studying theologythat arose during the Middle ages, and that dominated theologicalstudy at the beginning of the 16th century.

C. Scholasticism starts with the fact that there’s almost always morethan one way to look at something in theology.

1. With that assumption in mind, the scholastic theologianswould draw together, usually from important theologiansof the early church, a set of contradictory statementsabout a theological question.

2. They would place these contradictory statements alongsideone another and, using a predefined set of rules, would applylogic to them until they either harmonized the contradiction,or came up with the “winner” among the differing statements.

D. The value of scholasticism was that it sought to make theology arigorous study, with rules and guidelines for how to arrive at the

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truth of disputed theological ideas.E. But the problem was that it failed to recognize that theology is more

art than science, that it begins with narrative, and thus can never bereduced to a set of logical propositions.

1. As an aside, you may have noticed that Jesus didn’t make lists;he told stories.

F. Furthermore, as scholasticism came to dominate theologicalconversation, it became more and more narrow-minded, returning to the same questions again and again, hoping to wrestle newmeaning from them.

1. The preeminent theological textbook of the late Middle Ages was Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a catalog ofcontradictory statements from various theologians.

2. There was nothing wrong with Lombard’s book, exceptthat it was so often used, that the attempt to find new meaningfrom it led to increasingly minuscule and disconnected interpretations.

G. The final problem with scholasticism was that it de-emphasizedthe study of Scripture. The basic idea here was that Scripturehad divulged almost all of its secrets, and hence further studywas no longer as important.

IV. Acceptance of humanism

A. A preliminary note: Back in the 1980s and 90s the term “secular humanism” was tossed around by a lot of folks as theleading danger to our civilization, and especially to Christianity.

1. This represented a misunderstanding of the term “humanism.”

2. The term itself means a couple of things:

a. First, it’s about studying and examining hard

questions for yourself, rather than simply accepting

someone else’s word for it.

b. Second, it says that human beings–our values,our aspirations, our achievements–are worthyin and of themselves, and thus that human cultureis worth getting to know and understand.

c. Contrary to the term quoted above, humanism isnot inherently secular.

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(1) Some say that human life is worth studyingbecause it’s the only thing there is; this isgenuinely secular humanism.

(2) Others, however, say that human life is worthour attention because humans have been created,and are being guided, by a loving God. This isreligious or Christian humanism.

(3) Erasmus was the preeminent Christian humanist of his time.

B. Humanism, as it developed in the 15th and 16th centuries, had to

do both with what you studied, and how you studied it.

1. What: Throughout the Middle Ages, theologians did readsome of the great philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome,but their curiosity about these ancient sources, their desireto learn more about them, was limited.

a. Interestingly, it was among Muslim theologiansthat study of the classical figures was greatest.

With humanism, that changed in Europe. People realized that not only the philosophers, but also the poets, playwrights, and historians of the ancient classical world were sources of wisdom and inspiration, for Christians as much as for their ancient contemporaries.

2. How: For centuries Europe had relied on old translationsof the classical thinkers, many of them so poor as to be unreliable.

a. Humanism insisted on going back to the originalsources, learning how to read them in the languagesin which they were written.

b. The humanists also inaugurated the scientificstudy of texts, in which the goal was to followthe clues in the copies of ancient manuscripts tocome up with the most accurate version of a text possible.

3. Now, unless you think this is all historical trivia, can youthink of an ancient text where it would be really importantto know what the original version of that text said?

C. Erasmus the humanist:

1. The first thing to note about Erasmus was that he was

the greatest humanist scholar of his age.

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3. He applied the methods of humanism, particularly it’sinsistence on going back to the sources of our knowledge,to the study of Scripture.

4. Thus the importance of his critical edition of the GreekNew Testament.

a. For the centuries prior to Erasmus, Christianshad been reading the Vulgate, the Latin translationof the Bible made by St. Jerome back in the 5th century.

(1) The Vulgate wasn’t a bad translation, butlike all translations sometimes it got things wrong.

(a) As an example, recall the KJV’stranslation of John 3:16: “only begotten Son.”

(b) That term “only begotten” isn’t actually inthe Greek text. The Greek term in theoriginal is best translated into English as “unique.”

(c) Thus, the Vulgate got that wrong,and the KJV perpetuated the error.

b. Erasmus thought it best to leapfrog over the Vulgateand get back to the New Testament in its original Greek.

c. Equally as important, he thought it necessary to compareseveral versions of the Greek text, in order to come upwith the most accurate reconstruction of the Greek NT possible.

d. This was hugely significant for the Reformation,in that a return to the Bible as the source of Christianfaith was one of its central concerns. How can you dothat if you can’t have confidence that the version of thebiblical text on which you rely is accurate?

D. Erasmus and Certainty of Belief:

1. To say the very least, the 16th century was a doctrinaire age.

The fights over the new theology of the Reformers were so

fierce because just about everyone on every side was convinced

that her or his beliefs were entirely right.

2. More to the point, just about everyone believed that Scripturewas on their side of any given argument.

3. Here, for Erasmus, was where skepticism came in.

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a. Erasmus was willing to admit that Scripture doesn’t

spell out the answer to every question.

(1) If Scripture doesn’t give us a clear answeron a question, then we can still consider thequestion settled if a consensus on that questionexists within a large part of the church, and if theanswer was supported by longstanding church tradition.

(2) This is why Erasmus was not, in the end,one of the Reformers. One way to characterizethe difference between Catholicism and emergingProtestantism in the 16th century is this:

(a) The Protestants chose to emphasize the priorityof Scripture, and in so doing were willing tocompromise the unity of the church.

(b) The Roman Catholics chose to emphasize church unity,and in so doing compromised the authority of Scripture.

E. Erasmus’ Theology of the Word

1. As we’re going to see. The idea of God’s self-revelation, in both Jesus

Christ and in Scripture, became a central point of belief and debate for the

Reformers.

3. Like the Reformers, Erasmus placed a great deal of emphasis on theencounter with God’s word.

3. His theology of the Word focused on two ideas:

a. First, encounter with the word by diligent study in the original languages.

(1) We’ve already seen how Erasmus’ work as a humanist

led him back ad fontes, to the source of Christian belief in Scripture.

(2) Because of that humanist training, Erasmus

insisted that theology cannot take Scripture for granted.

All theology, all preaching and teaching starts

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with as clear an understanding of Scripture’s

meaning as possible, facilitated through study

of the Bible in Hebrew and Greek.

(3) This idea was hugely influential on theReformers, especially Luther

b. Second, the idea of the persuasive power of Scripture.

(1) The power of words, said Erasmus, lay in

their ability to persuade and transform.

(2) Study of Scripture must always have thegoal of changing someone’s thinking andmoving someone to action.

(3) Thus Erasmus’ theology of the Wordhas a much more practical character thanthat of the Reformers; rather than focuson the preached Word as the sign of thetrue church, he planted his feet a bit moreon the ground and said simply that theword must do its work in the human heart.

F. Erasmus’ spiritual theology

1. Ever since he was alive, there’s been tremendous debate

over whether Erasmus was a Reformer or not.

a. On the one side, his work with the Greek textof the NT and his theology of the Word seemto point at least to a fundamental sympathywith the Reformation’s aims.

(1) He expressed that sympathy on more than one occasion.

b. On the other hand, he never believed it necessary

to found a new church, or to align himself with one

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of the Protestant churches.

4. Both the Reformers and the Roman Catholics distrusted him,

because he seemed unwilling to commit himself to eitherside of the debate.

5. Rather than indicate indifference, this tendency demonstratesa central element in Erasmus theology: The relative importanceof a spiritual center vs. the relative unimportance of outward structures.

a. While not denying the worth of external signs of piety,Erasmus believed that the goal of every Christianshould be to grow from outward to inward things.

b. Thus the pilgrimages, special services, and otherforms of exterior religious observance so popularin late medieval Christianity should give way to prayer,meditation, and internalization of the Word.

5. Simply put, Erasmus cared about the problems so rampantin the “visible church” because they prevented people fromachieving a more inward and mature faith. For this reason,he was never as driven to reform the visible church as Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the other reformers.

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Session 05 - Luther's BiographyIntroduction: In the words of one historian, at the dawn of the 16th century “everyone

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that mattered in the Western Church was crying out for Reformation.”[1] In spite of this fact, inspite of the nearly universal recognition that the church was broken and needed to be fixed, itremained for one person–an obscure monk from Saxony, a part of Germany, to get the whole thing rolling.

I. How much did Luther contribute to the Reformation?

A. Historians have gone back and forth on this.

1. One side rightly points out that, in spite of the fact that

everyone else wanted the church to be reformed, Luther’s theology

and preaching were the necessary ingredients to get everything moving.

1. The other side points out that the Reformation was at leastas much a political as a religious event, and that withoutthe involvement of his ruler, the Elector Frederick, Luther’stheology would have been just one in a thousand argumentsamong the clergy over theology.

2. A third side points beyond both theology and politics to thesocial and technological developments happening at the time,and how they contributed to the social revolution we call the Reformation.

3. In fact, all of these perspectives are true, and none of them tellthe whole story by themselves. As for Luther, the thing to say is this:

a. Without Luther, the Reformation as we know it would not have happened.

b. Without the political, social, and technological developments

mentioned, Luther’s theology would never have gained the

prominence that it did, and we wouldn’t be sitting here asking

these questions about him.

II. Luther’s early life.

A. Born in 1483 to Hans and Margarethe Luther. His father was aminer who had done well in business, so much so that youngMartin was able to attend good schools, on his way to trainingto become a lawyer, in fulfillment of his father’s wishes.

B. He was, in fact, already enrolled in law school when, in July of 1505,

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he entered a monastery, joining the Augustinian order. Why did he do it?1. One version of the story, told by Luther himself, was that

earlier in the summer he had been caught out in a thunderstormand, in a prayer to St. Anne, promised that if delivered he would become a monk.

2. More likely was the fact that he had always been a sensitiveand religious young man, and that he came to fear for thestate of his soul, and saw monasticism as the best way toensure his own salvation.

3. Regardless the reason, his decision disappointed his father,who wanted Martin to become a lawyer in order to supportthe family in his father’s old age.

C. He continued his education, earning degrees (including a doctorate) in theology and biblical studies.

D. He soon joined the faculty of the University of Wittenberg, where he became famous as a teacher of Scripture.

E. All the while Luther was still a monk. In that role, he distinguishedhimself by his acts of devotion. Prayers, fasting, study, begging forthe poor; all that a monk could do, he did.

1. Nonetheless, he found the sense of security he sought elusive.To understand his struggle, you have to understand howRoman Catholic theology of the time approached the question of salvation.

III. Luther and the Roman Catholic understanding of salvation.

A. The first thing to say is that Roman Catholicism in Luther’s timewas not focused on a form of works righteousness, as Protestants(and even Luther himself) have often claimed.

B. They realized that, in the divine-human relationship salvation wasprincipally something that God did for us. In other words, theyunderstood that salvation is about grace.

C. Yet late medieval Roman Catholic theology insisted that humansmust also contribute, in their own way, to their salvation.

1. The basic idea: God has given us the gift of free will,and requires us to use it. Those who have been baptized,and thus freed of the debilitating effects of original sin,are called by God to use their free will in acts of love and charity.

a. Note that in Catholic theology the use of our free willis undergirded by grace, in that free will is itself a gift of God,and also through the church and the sacramentsGod’s grace is operating in our lives to make suchworks of love possible.

b. Nonetheless our genuine involvement is necessary;we are called to do all within our power to show God’s love to others.

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c. God knows, however, that what we do will neverbe enough to make us fully capable of lovingGod and neighbor with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

d. Therefore, when we’ve done all we can do, whenwe’ve gone as far as we can go, God’s gracecomes to us completes what we’ve begun, making it possible to love God and neighbor fully.

2. This was the theology of salvation that Luther, the medieval monk,inherited.

3. Its intent was to encourage Christians to participate in their own salvationby performing acts of love and service, while assuring them that, ultimately, their salvation was in God’s hands.

4. The problem for Luther, though, was that he couldn’texperience that assurance. Why was that?

a. First, because Luther had a much livelier sense ofGod’s judgment than of God’s forgiveness.I wouldn’t doubt that you’ve run across folks like this in your ministry.

b. Also, Luther discovered the one glaring flawin the medieval Catholic understanding of salvation.Remember when we said that it required a person todo all he or she could to love God and neighbor,and that God would then do the rest? Well, how do youknow when you’ve done all you can do?

c. This was the question that plagued Luther. He simplycouldn’t find rest in the idea that he’d done all that was in his power.

d. so, he kept trying to do more and more, all along findinghimself no closer to the peace he sought.

e. In fact, he constantly experienced bouts of desperateanxiety (in German, Anfechtungen) in which he wasconvinced that he was under God’s judgment, and that God would soon snatch him away to hell.

(1) This happened when he celebrated his firstMass as a priest. He was so fearful of handlingdivine things unworthily that his hands shook the whole time.

5. Try as he might, Luther could find no comfort in the medievalCatholic theology of salvation.

6. This led him, as a teacher of Bible and theology, to lookfor a better understanding, and to start that search in Scripture.

IV. Luther’s theological breakthrough: the Gospel and the Righteousness of God.

A. To appreciate this part of Luther’s story you have to know that throughoutthe history of the church, certain biblical passages and books

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have inspired transformations and indeed revolutions in people’sunderstanding and experience of God.

1. This is no more true than with the book of Romans.

B. Beginning in 1512, Luther lectured on several books of the Bible,

including Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.

B. In wrestling with this weighty epistle, Luther came to the newtheological understanding he sought.

1. It began with Romans 1:16-17: “For I am not ashamedof the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyonewho has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith;as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’”

a. These verses–especially 17–had always interested Luther,in that they equated the gospel with the righteousness of God.

(1) Luther was willing to concede that the lawrepresented God’s righteousness, which healways conceived of as God’s active and justcondemnation of sinners for their failure tolive up to God’s calling.

(2) Yet to hear that the gospel = the righteousness of God,as these verses seem to say, meant that eventhe good news of the gospel focuses on God’sjudgment, rather than God’s mercy.

(3) But in studying the rest of Romans,Luther came to a surprising insight about these verses:The righteousness that Paul refers to here isn’tGod’s justice in condemning us for our lack ofrighteousness ; it’s the righteousness that God imputesto us through faith.

(4) In other words, the good news of the gospelis that God accounts Christ’s righteousness to us,through the agency of saving faith.

(5) This understanding was revolutionary for Luther.It helped him see finally that he did not need to fearGod’s judgment as he always had.

(6) More especially, it helped him realize that,contrary to what he’d been taught, there was noplace for human effort in the economy of salvation.If the gospel is about the gift of Christ’s righteousness

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through faith, then the only and best thing we cando is respond in loving acceptance of and trust in this gift.

V. The indulgence controversy

A. The event that launched Luther onto the world stage was an argument

about a relatively minor point of theology that grew bigger and bigger,

until finally all of Europe was consumed by it.

C. It had to do with the sale of something called indulgences.To describe these, I have to spend a bit of time explainingthe medieval Roman Catholic sacrament of penance.

1. In the early church, Christians confessed their sins(or, at least, the more serious ones) to the whole congregation.

2. Those who had committed the most serious sins(generally murder, adultery, and apostasy) were requiredby the congregation to submit to a penitential discipline,some difficult task that took years to fulfill.

a. The obvious question about this practice was whetherthey thought in so doing they were earning God’s forgiveness.They did not.

b. Rather, they believed that by committing these sinsa person violated the fellowship of the community,harming their communion with one another.

(1) In other words, when a Christian sins thereare consequences that go beyond the individualsinvolved in the sinful act. This is because of theirstrong sense of the interconnectedness of the Christian community.

(2) Therefore, in order to overcome the harm andpain that their sins had introduced into the community,these Christians had to demonstrate that theyunderstood the gravity of what they had done,and the manner in which they had broken the fellowshipof the church.

(3) Always they understood that it was up to Godalone to forgive our sins.

c. This introduced into Christian theology the distinctionbetween the eternal and the temporal (earthly) consequencesof human sin. Only God could deal with the former,but the church was allowed to mediate God’s work of healing the latter.

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d. After the conversion of Constantine, when the churchesgradually gained more and more members, it becameimpractical to hold confession before the entire congregation.Therefore they began the practice of private confession and penance.

e. In the Middle Ages the church realized that most of us commitso many sins that we will never be able to deal with their temporal,or earthly consequences in the course of one lifetime.

f. This accounts for the development of the doctrine of Purgatory,the state into which the redeemed enter after death, not to bepunished for their sins, but to “burn off” the excess of thetemporal consequences or punishments for sin.

g. Originally the way one addressed the temporal consequencesof sin were acts of repentance and charity.

h. The church was in possession of the means to offer healingand release from these temporal debts for sin.

i. Late in the Middle Ages a system evolved whereby monetarygifts could take the place of these acts of repentance and charity.

j. In exchange for money the church would use the “power of the keys”to release a soul from Purgatory early, with a certificate issued bythe papacy called an “indulgence.”

k. I think you can see the potential for abuse and misunderstanding here.

C. The deal that got the ball rolling.

1. 1510: Pope Julius II announced a special sale of indulgences to

be held in Northern Germany. He did so in large part because he

needed to pay for construction and expansion work on St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.

a. His successor, Pope Leo X, continued this policy,and made Archbishop Albert of Magdeburg andMainz the papal commissioner for the sale of theindulgences in his territories.

b. Albert agreed to push the sale of the indulgences,largely because he had paid a great deal of moneyin order to secure permission to be archbishop of two territories.

(1) Thus, Albert and the pope agreed to split the proceedsfrom the sale of the indulgences between them.

c. The Fuggers bank–one of the largest in Europe–had loanedAlbert the money to purchase this exemption from the rules,andso they, too, had a financial stake in the sale of the indulgences.

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d. Whoever was archbishop of Mainz was, by virtueof that office, one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire.Thus, secular politics as well as ecclesiastical politicswere involved in the sale of these indulgences.

e. Simply put, there were a lot of important peoplewith a lot riding on the success of the sale of these“get out of Purgatory free” cards.

f. Albert hired as his right-hand man in this deal aDominican friar named Tetzel, who was extremelysuccessful at motivating people to buy them.

(1) His famous line from a sermon about theindulgences was “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings,a soul from Purgatory springs.”

VI. Luther responds to the indulgences.

A. As you’ve no doubt figured out, the problem with indulgenceswas that people were prone to misunderstand and think that theycould actually buy God’s forgiveness, either for themselves or a loved one.

B. This was exactly what happened when Tetzel came to townselling indulgences near where Luther lived.

1. Luther’s prince, the elector Frederick, had not allowed theindulgences be sold in his territory.

2. But Wittenberg, where Luther taught and ministered,was close enough that when he heard confession andtried to assign penance, folks pulled out their indulgences.

C. Luther had never been a big fan of indulgences, and to seethem pushed so hard for such worldly purposes was too much.

1. In protest he decided to initiate a theological debate inthe university about the appropriateness of the sale of indulgences.To do so he posted a document containing 95 theses(we’d call them talking points) to the door of the Wittenberg church.

2. The 95 theses, which Luther never intended for broad publication,soon circulated widely, making him a well-known figure in a very short time.

VII. The dawn of the Reformation

1. Initially, the papacy reacted to Luther’s writings as just acontroversy among a bunch of obscure German monks.

2. However, word of Luther’s questioning of some of the coredoctrines of medieval Catholicism–not to mention the annoyanceof his challenge to the sale of indulgences–led the papacy toput increasing pressure on him, and eventually to condemn him as a heretic.

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3. During this period he did a great deal of writing, teaching,and preaching, and always he gathered more attention.

4. Most famous of his writings during this period are threethat he composed in 1520, often referred to as the “Three Reformation Treatises”:

a. “An Address to the Christian Nobility of the GermanNation Regarding the Reform of the Christian Estate,”in which he deals with the difference in status between monks,clergy, and laity, insisting that baptism is the only thing that bestows any status on a Christian. Here also he lays out hisfamous doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, a coredoctrine for practically all Protestants.

b. “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in which hereviews the 7 sacraments of Roman Catholicism,concluding that only two of them–baptism and theEucharist–were instituted by Christ (he was favorabletoward penance, but recognized that Jesus did not institute it).

c. “The Freedom of a Christian,” in which he argues thatChristian freedom comes only when we realize that wecan in no way contribute to our own salvation. Givingup the desire to save ourselves frees us to serve others,not because we think doing so helps us, but because theyare beloved children of God.

5. With these and other writings Luther began to move further andfurther away from the papacy and from the heritage of medievalCatholic theology.

6. He staked out ever bolder theological positions, basing them largelyon the Bible, the writings of St. Augustine, and certain of the otherearly church theologians.

7. While all this was going on, his political position became increasinglyfragile. Because he liked Luther, and because Luther was the starprofessor at his prized university in Wittenberg, the elector Frederickprotected him from the arrest and trial for heresy that almost certainlywould have befallen him had he ventured out of Saxony.

8. In June of 1520 the pope published a papal bull (decree) of excommunication,declaring Luther a heretic and demanding that within 60 days herepudiate all his books and recant all his heretical beliefs.

9. Luther refused, which meant that on January 3, 1521 the popeofficially excommunicated Luther and declared him a heretic.

a. This should have been the end of him, because at the timeexcommunication and condemnation for heresy madeone an outlaw, subject to immediate arrest and execution.

b. Fortunately for Luther, the Holy Roman EmperorCharles V needed the support of Luther’s prince,

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elector Frederick, and several of the other Germanprinces among whose people Luther was quite popular.

10. Thus, instead of execution Luther was summoned to theImperial Diet (or court) to be held in the city of Worms inApril 1521, to appear before the Emperor and answer the charges against him.

11. In spite of the fact that it was outside Saxony and Frederickcouldn’t protect him, Luther went to the Diet in order to have his day in court.

12. At the Diet Luther was confronted, before the Emperor, with two questions:

a. Are these your books?

b. Do you recant what you’ve written in them?

13. Seeing that he wasn’t going to be given an opportunity to present his case,

Luther asked for 24 hours to decide what to do, which he was granted.

14. He came back the next day and read a prepared statement,

in which he offered reasons for what he had said. He was told that

he hadn’t answered the question, so this is how he responded:

a. “Since then your serene majesty and your lordships seek a simpleanswer I will give it in this manner, neither homed nor toothed:Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures orby clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone,since it is well known that they have often erred andcontradicted themselves), I am bound by the ScripturesI have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neithersafe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise,here I stand, may God help me, amen.”[2]

15. After some more inconclusive debate Luther was dismissed,

and left the city to return to Wittenberg. While on the road an edict

was written against him, declaring him an outlaw.

a. However for political reasons the Emperor neglectedto sign the edict (and thus make it official) for several days.

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b. In the interim, The Elector Frederick sent some soldiersto kidnap Luther from the road and carry him away to theWartburg Castle, so he would be safe from the imperialjudgment against him.

16. While at the Wartburg Luther continued to write, and most importantly,

to work on his German translation of the Bible.

17. After about 18 months he decided he had to return to Wittenberg,

in order to preach, teach, and lead the movement of reform from there.

Much more happened in his life, but now we will turn from his biography

to an examination of the core teachings of his theology.

[1]Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (New York: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 13.

[2]Translation by Lewis W. Spitz in The Protestant Reformation: 1517-1559 (San Francisco:

Harper and Row, 1985), p. 75.

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Session 06 - Luther's Theology 1Intro: we shift now to a more in-depth look at Luther’s theology. While we can say this of everything

we do in the Course of Study, it is especially true here that we will only be scratching the surface of

this subject. Luther wrote on an amazing breadth of subjects over the course of a long career. I will do

my best to capture some of the most important points, but as I do let me say that there is so much more

we could talk about here.

I. Salvation

A. The starting point: The bondage of the will

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1. At its best theology is a counter cultural exercise, by which

I mean that the things we say as Christian theologians about the

world and humanity’s place in it are not what the world tells itself.

2. This is no truer than when we’re talking about the human predicament.

3. Christian theology has always insisted that at the heart of the

human condition lies a tragic flaw, something about us that has gone wrong,

that overshadows everything we do and are. The theological term for this is sin.

3. The world doesn’t want to hear this (I don’t want to hear it either,truth be told), because we want to think better of ourselves.

a. Implication for contemporary ministry: The imperativespeak of sin only in the first person: “My sin, our sin.”

4. Theology’s job is always to dig deeper, to keep asking “why.”In the case of the human predicament, theology wants to knowthe source of this problem we call sin.

5. At least since Augustine, Christian theologians have pointed tosomething we call “original sin.”

a. Note that this can have both generic and specific meanings.In the broadest terms, “original sin” refers to the fact that sinis a universal part of the human condition. For whatever reason,it is an unavoidable element in the human story.

(1) Belief in original, or universal, sin is not theprovince of Roman Catholicism alone. Luther,Zwingli, Calvin, and most Christian leaders all subscribed to it.

b. Having established the universal reality of human sin, Luther(like other Christian theologians) went on to ask a simple question:How does it work? What does it do to us?

c. The answer is the bondage of the will.

(1) First thing to note: This idea is profoundly

counter cultural in an American context. The great

American myth is that we are all capable of making

anything of ourselves we choose, that we are the

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captains of our own fate.

(2) Luther knew that this was not the case.He knew that sin exercised a hold on usfrom which we are incapable of breaking free.

(3) Following Augustine, Luther believed that weare “born in sin.”

(a) Note that Augustine’s understandingof this was based on a model of humanphysiology and genetics to which scienceno longer subscribes. Nonetheless, the theological point still stands: We are allunder the power of sin.

(4) The principal result of having been born in sin isthe bondage of the will. To understand what hemeans by this, you’ve got to follow his conceptionof free will, and how sin binds the will.

(a) For us, free will means essentially moralautonomy, being free to choose either good or evil

(b) Again following Augustine, Luther thought of free will differently. Rather than the abilityto freely choose what we want, true freedom ofthe will is the ability to choose what God wants.

i) In other words, genuine free will is the powerto live the way we were created to live, fullyloving God and neighbor.

ii) This freedom–the freedom to be the peoplewe were created to be–is what our sindeprives us of.

(5) Our will still functions after the Fall; we are still ableto distinguish and choose between good and evil. Luther, in spite of his frequent penchant for overstatement, didnot deny this.

(6) What we can’t choose to do, however, is the one necessarything: We cannot love God and neighbor fully. This is whatLuther meant by the bondage of the will.

(7) Sin has so messed us up that something is alwaysblocking us from choosing to love as we know we should.We are capable of brief moments of self-transcending love,but the moments always pass and we find ourselvesthinking again about “what’s in it for me?”

B. The paradoxical problem of works.

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1. As you’ll remember, Roman Catholic theology in Luther’s day insisted that,

while salvation was chiefly due to the grace of God, humans needed to

contribute as much as we can to our salvation. In essence, for Roman Catholic

theology salvation results from a cooperation of grace and human acts of love

and charity. What so troubled Luther about this arrangement was the inability to

know whether we’d done everything we can do.

2. This uncertainty led to a kind of extension of the bondage of the will:

a. Again agreeing with Augustine, the problem with the bondage

of the will for Luther was that it trapped us in this never-ending

cycle of self-regard. We are rarely capable of genuinely unselfish

acts, and then only briefly. Even the best of us, as we said above,

carry around the question “what’s this going to do for me?”

b. The bondage of the will thus turns us “inward upon ourselves.”

c. Luther thought that when we are trying to contribute to our own

salvation, that acts of love and charity become just another expression

of the bondage of the will. I help you, not because I

am moved by love and your need to do so, but because

I’m trying to earn “get into heaven” points. In other words,

it’s not about you, it’s about me.

c. More especially, it’s not about me seeing you as God sees you.d. Rather, it’s about me seeing you through the lens of my

own needs and desires–in this case, the desire for heaven.“But what’s wrong with that,” you might say, “as long aswe’re responding to another person in need. It doesn’t

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matter to them whether we genuinely care about themor are only helping them to earn brownie points with God,as long as in the end we’ve helped alleviate their suffering.

f. To this Luther would say two things:

(1) First, to view another’s needs through the lens

of our own wants is to distort our understanding

of those needs. To genuinely help someone we need

to understand what they really need, which we can’t

do if our perception of that need is colored by our own desires.

(2) Second, in doing acts of charity out of a desire toearn our own salvation, we have fatally misunderstood acrucial fact: that salvation is God’s business, and God’s alone, to which human effort can only contribute negatively.

3. From his study of Scripture–especially Romans and Galatians–Luther had concluded that acts of love and charity couldcontribute nothing positive to our salvation.

a. In fact, works aren’t even neutral in the economy of salvation;they are a detriment. Why would he say that?

(1) If the truth is that only God can save us, thenthe idea that our efforts somehow contribute toour salvation is a dangerous one, because itblinds us to that truth, giving us a false sense of security.

(2) Further, since Adam and Eve’s little jauntin the garden a central part of the humanproblem has been our desire to substituteourselves for God. If given a choice betweencreating our own salvation for ourselves, andhumbly accepting God’s gift of salvation,most of us are going to choose the former.

(3) This, according to Will Willimon, is the meaningof the parable of the Good Samaritan: We’re that guy bleeding to death in the ditch, and we’d ratherlie there and die than be saved by this guy Jesus.

b. This explains Luther’s lifelong theological hostility toward works.

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5. So, if it’s not about acts of charity and love, then what is it about? Faith.

a. For Luther, the only appropriate human response

to the predicament of sin starts with recognition of our inability.

(1) Simply put, we’ve gotten ourselves into this mess,but we can’t get ourselves out.

(2) Because of the bondage of the will, we are simplyincapable of loving God and neighbor fully.

(3) While it does not lie within our power toremedy this situation, we are capable of recognizing it.

b. Sola fide

(1) Having seen this, we are also capable of

recognizing God’s provision of salvation in Jesus Christ.

(3) Once we’ve done that, once we’ve seen thatGod has “made a way out of no way,” thenwe can respond in faith, confessing our sinand fully trusting in God’s gracious offer of salvation in Christ.

(4) This is the meaning of the term sola fide, by faith alone.The only role that humans play in their own salvationis to accept it in faith.

c. Does this happen all at once?

(1) As children of the American camp meetings,

American Christians often speak of the time when they

came to salvation, of the moment when they “got saved.”

(2) This implies that justifying faith is a one-time event.

(3) Nothing could be further from the truth for Luther.

(a) Baptized Christians are always in the process

of repentance, justification, and conversion.

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This is a daily struggle between our old natures

and our new. We require constant conversion

away from our sinful natures, we constantly

must accept in faith God’s offer of salvation in Christ.

6. So what about acts of love? Do they have no place in Luther’s theology?

a. This is exactly what he was accused of by his Roman Catholic opponents.

(1) The theological term for it is antinomianism,

the belief that, since salvation is God’s business and

God’s alone, we don’t have to worry about our behavior.

b. Luther whole-heatedly rejected the idea of antinomianism.

c. He maintained a central role for works of love, assigning

them what he considered their proper place.

(1) Remember that he said that works can in noway contribute to our salvation.

(2) But having been saved by faith, having experiencedthe gracious forgiveness of God, our hearts areled to respond in gratitude.

(3) Out of gratitude for what God has done for us,we are empowered to live the kind of life God intended for us all along.

(4) This is what Luther meant in “The Freedom of aChristian” when he said the Christian is the freelord of all, bound to none; and the bound servant of all,subject to all.”

(a) We are freed from the self-defeatingidea that our acts of love can contribute to our salvation.

(b) But when we realize this, wewillingly bind ourselves in service toGod and neighbor out of gratitude for God’s gracious gift.

(5) Thus, Luther was all about the proper form ofthe Christian life, so long as we understood properly

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what it is that motivates us to love God and others.

7. Declared righteous or made righteous?

a. Another hallmark of Roman Catholic theology in

Luther’s day was the idea that our acts of service and

mercy could, in some way, actually change our sinful natures,

making us gradually more like Christ, and in so doing adding to our salvation.

b. Because of his antipathy toward good works, Luthercould not go along with this idea. Simply put,he didn’t want anyone to get the notion that their works would save them.

c. Which gave birth to what we can call his forensic model of justification.

(1) For Luther, the grace of God works this way:

(a) At the cross, God treats our sin as though it were Christ’s.

(b) At our baptism, and throughout our lives,

God treats Christ’s righteousness as though it were ours.

(2) In short, God’s grace represents God’s decisionto change God’s mind about us.

(a) Note who gets changed here: God does.

(b) While our sin is forgiven and our guilt

taken away, our sinful natures are not actually transformed.

c. This is what Luther meant by the famous phrased. simul justus et paccator, “at the same time sinful and righteous.”e. Implications for contemporary ministry: If you

remember nothing else about Luther, you shouldremember this: Christians are simul justus et peccator.One of the first things you discover in ministry is thefact that coming to church and even admitting one’sbrokenness often does little to heal that brokenness.

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It is part of everyone with whom we deal, and sooneror later if we get to know folks on anything more thana superficial level, we’re going to see it in them.

(1) Equally true, of course, is the fact that they’re likewise going to see it in us.

7. Luther and Wesley on Foernsic justification (We’re going to bring in John righthere)

a. Up to this point, Wesley would agree with everything Luther had said.

b. But, unlike Luther, Wesley believed in the power of God’s grace,

not just to declare us righteous, but actually to make us righteous

(1) The difference between Wesley and Roman Catholicismis that Wesley believed we are made righteous only afterwe have first been declared justified by God’s grace.

(2) The transformation of our sinful nature in no waycontributes to that justification.Unlike Luther, Wesley believed that the Spirit works inour lives after we have received justifying grace,bestowing on us the grace of sanctification, which makesus objectively more holy.

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Session 07 - Luther's Theology 2Intro.: having looked at the core of Luther’s theology–his understanding of the divine-humanencounter in salvation–let’s expand our view to see other ways he contributed to the rise of theProtestant movement, and especially to Protestant theology.

I. Scripture

A. To start, let us remember a couple of things about the Roman

Catholic context in which Luther’s theology of Scripture arose:

1. First, we’ve already mentioned Scholastic theology, whichtended to downplay the direct study of Scripture. This wasthe dominant form of theology in Luther’s day, although hewas by no means the only person aware of its limitations.

2. Second, Luther’s theology of the Word developed against thebackground of the Roman Catholic magisterium.

a. In the early church period, theologians had concluded that although Scripture was our most authoritative recordof God’s revelation in Israel and Jesus Christ, it was possibleto interpret Scripture in a variety of ways.

(1) Most such interpretations are valid examples ofwrestling with Scripture’s deep message.

(2) Some, however, are off base and even harmful,as seen in Gnosticism and other types of theologythe early church deemed heretical.

b. If Scripture is to be a reliable guide, then, the early theologiansreasoned that it must have an authoritative interpreters.

c. The bishops of the church, as the heirs of the apostles,were believed to fulfill this function. Chief among the bishops,of course, is the bishop of Rome, the pope.

d. Thus, in Roman Catholicism the bishops and the pope stand as the definitive arbiters of the biblical message.

A. From early in his theological career, Luther reacted to and rejected theseRC approaches to the Bible.

1. To be fair, he was hardly the first person to criticize scholastic theologyfor its lack of attention to Scripture. As we’ve seen, Erasmus and theother humanists did the same.

2. However, Luther was clearly one of the most dynamic teachersof the Bible of his time.

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a. This is because Luther insisted on a deep engagementwith the theological message of Scripture. Unlikethe scholastics, who treated Scripture as a sourcebook to be mined for pithy quotes they could useto prove their point, Luther appreciated the sweepand scope of Scripture, seeing in it the drama of God’smighty acts in history, and especially the mysterious,practically incomprehensible choice of God to becomeincarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

3. Yet even more important to him was to reject the Roman Catholic practiceof the magisterium.

a. Please note in starting that Luther did not reject theteaching office of the bishops, and especially not that of the pope.

b. Nonetheless, he recognized a central, dangerous flaw in thewhole idea of authoritative interpreters.

(1) Regardless of how important these individuals arein the life of the church, the fact remains that theyare human beings, and as such subject to human error.

(2) As the sordid history of the popes in the lateMiddle Ages had shown, often these officialinterpreters had all-too-human motivations forthe ways they read Scripture.

c. Luther insisted that to establish an official interpreter ofScripture was to substitute the authority of flawed, fallenhuman beings for that of the Bible.

d. To him and to the other Reformers, Scripture was its own interpreter.

(1) All of the reformers employed strategies that used

the new testament to interpret the Old testament, seeing

in Jesus the fulfillment of the stories of Israel.

(3) As we will see in a moment, Luther developed a highlysophisticated approach to the core of the biblical message,and the way that core message assisted one in makingsense of Scripture’s sometimes puzzling or disturbing passages.

d. The outcome of this, of course, was that Protestantism prettyquickly split into different factions and traditions, each basedon a separate set of interpretations of Scripture. The priceProtestantism has been willing to pay for insisting on theauthority of Scripture has been church unity.

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(1) Many see Protestantism’s lack of unity as a weakness,a sign of sinful inability to come together in harmonyand fellowship. To a degree, this is certainly the case.

(2) But at the same time Protestantism’s diversity is also a strength, in that the gospel is far deeper and broader than any one denomination’s abilityto embody it. Thus, between all of us Nazarenes, Pentecostals,Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans,Episcopalians, and Nondenoms, we might just make up onegood Christian.

C. The central biblical dynamic: law and gospel

1. To understand Luther’s theology of Scripture, you have to

see what he meant by the difference between law and gospel.

a. The whole message of Scripture, he thought, couldbe summed up by these two central biblical categories.

b. Both are rich and deep concepts within Luther’s theology;what we’ll do here is simply get started in describingwhat he meant by them.

3. “Law” for Luther centers on the attempt to live up to therighteous demands of God through human effort and human behavior.

a. The law, as seen in the OT, has an essentially ironic purpose.

b. According to Luther, when one reads the law at a surface level,

one thinks that it’s there to tell us how to live a godly life.

In this sense, the law is seen as a set of guidelines pointing

to the lifestyle that pleases God.

c. However, Luther said, anyone who has ever read theOT law will recognize that keeping it faithfully andfully is an impossibility. There are just too many rulesand regulations, with too much intricacy, to work.

d. It makes no sense, he said, that God would give a set ofrules like this so hard that no one could follow them.

e. Thus, the law has to fulfill another purpose, which itdoes brilliantly: prove to us our utter need of God’s grace.

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f. Thus it is that the law is both the necessary precondition of,and the antithesis to, the gospel.

(1) The precondition, in that we need to see thatthe attempt to live up to the righteousness ofGod through human effort is pointless.Understood rightly, the law accomplishes this for us.

(2) Antithesis, in that when we fail to understand thelaw in this ironic way, taking it literally and seekingto earn God’s favor through human effort, then wehave done exactly the opposite to what the gospel teaches.

g. In the same way the law delivers both God’s good newsand God’s judgment.

(1) When we understand the law’s true purpose,we are freed of the human desire to create ourown salvation, and thus are for the first time ableto truly hear the good news of God’s salvation in Christ.

(2) When we misunderstand that purpose and try toearn our reconciliation to God, the law becomesa vehicle of God’s judgment.

3. Excursus: Where Luther got it wrong about the law

a. First, Luther completely misunderstood Judaism.

This wasn’t an uncommon thing; almost everybody

at the time did the same.

(1) The problem was thinking that, becausehe’d read about Jews in Scripture, he understoodcontemporary Judaism.

(2) But it’s hardly surprising that the Judaism of the1st century and that of the 16th would be different.

(3) Most especially, he misunderstood the function ofthe Torah (law) in Judaism.

(4) He thought that the law was a laundry list of rulesJews tried to check off, but never could.

(5) But in Judaism the Torah isn’t a burden in this way;it’s a gift. In the Torah God has graciously shownGod’s people what a life lived in the presence of God looks like.In Judaism the Torah isn’t a destination that no onecan ever reach; it’s a journey, accompanied by God and other believers.

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(6) This is what happens when you build your understandingof another religion or culture on biased, incomplete, oroutdated information.

(7) The same thing goes on today, of course, most oftenamong Christians about Judaism and Islam.

4. Gospel has a similarly rich and complex meaning

a. To start with, it means much more than simply

“the Gospel of . . ,” in other words one of the four

canonical books describing the life and ministry of Jesus.

b. Gospel means God’s gracious provision of reconciliationthrough the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

c. At the heart of Luther’s concept of gospel is the idea of grace.d. “Gospel” in Luther’s theology means God’s free gift of salvation

in Jesus Christ.(1) Anything that suggests that humans can somehow

save themselves is contrary to the gospel.

  The Gospel starts with the insistence that:

(a) We cannot earn our salvation

(b) Any attempt to do so is not only wrong-headed,

but actually sinful.

(c) This is what Karl Barth meant when he said that“before we can hear God’s yes, we must first hearGod’s no”.

(2) Once we know that we cannot, through our own efforts,save ourselves, our hearts are prepared to receive the Gospeltruth that God saves us in Jesus Christ.

(3) As we’ve discussed, the only proper human response to this isfaith, a joyful trust in God’s promise of forgiveness.

D. “Gospel” as the key to reading Scripture

1. Was Luther a Biblicist?

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a. The term means someone who makes the Bible itself,

rather than the God it proclaims, the object of their faith and worship.

b. I suspect you’ve known, as have I, people who spend far moretime talking about how much they believe in the Bible thanthey do actually reading it.

c. The term biblicist also applies to someone who feels compelledto defend the Bible, to insist that it presents no hard questions,tensions, or contradictions, that it is perfect in every detail.

(1) The theological term for this belief in “inerrancy.”

d. The answer is no; Luther was neither a biblicist, nor did

he believe in what we would call inerrancy.

3. Luther was more than aware of inconsistencies and difficultpassages in Scripture.

a. He knew that the Book of Revelation, for example, wasfrustrating and hard to decipher. A Revelation, he said,ought to reveal something, and this book hardly did.

b. He referred to the Letter of James as an “epistle of straw,”due to its seeming contradiction to the insistence on salvationby faith alone.

c. He found similar problems in other New testament books.

d. When confronted with questions about how to understand a

difficult passage or text, the key was to compare its message to the Gospel.

e. Not all biblical books, he knew, preached the gospel equally.

f. Yet when a book or text did not seem to preach Christ, then the

question to ask was in what way did the book point toward the gospel?

h. We’ve already seen this principle in operation in his interpretationof the law.

(1) Where the law seemed, on the surface, to present a messagecontrary to the Gospel, Luther knew to look deeper.

(2) Spurred on by Paul, Luther realized that the impossibility

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of keeping the law meant that its purpose must be morethan what a surface reading would indicate.

E. Sola Scriptura

1. Luther’s insistence on the Bible as the sole and final guide to Christina

belief and practice can be summed up in the Latin phrase sola Scriptura,

by Scripture alone.

II. The Church

A. Luther and church reform

1. Luther did not intend to found a rival church to Roman Catholicism.

However, he was keenly aware of the Roman Catholic Church’s flaws,

and hoped to remedy them.

2. More important to him, though, was restoring a properly biblicalunderstanding of the church

B. Luther’s understanding of the flaws of RC ecclesiology

1. It elevated monastics and priests into a special category of disciple,

effectively making the church’s leaders the source of its holiness.

2. It had become too worldly.

3. It had based its theology on human understanding, rather than on Scripture.

4. It had falsely inflated the number of sacraments.

C. Luther’s response:

1. Where is the true church? If the unity of Christendom was

going to break up (as indeed it did), then on what theological

basis could you decide what was a true church, and what was a false one?

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3. The Roman Catholics said the true church was the one that wasin communion with the church of Rome, because it was therethat the successor to Saint peter (the rock upon which Christhad built the church) presided.

4. Luther wanted to remain in communion with Rome, but hebelieved that, over the centuries, the Roman church and thepopes had seriously erred, falling away from the true faith.

4. Thus, for him the signs of what constituted a true church were two-fold:

a. Wherever the Word was rightly preached, by which he meant the

true doctrine of the Reformation preached and taught.

c. Wherever the sacraments were rightly administered,by which he meant only those sacraments that hadgenuine biblical warrant, and were not simply subsequent developments.

d. Having already seen what he had to say about the Wordrightly preached and taught, let’s turn to his thoughts on the sacraments.

D. Luther on the sacraments

1. The first thing to note is that early on Luther took the bold step

of declaring most of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism invalid.

a. The RC sacraments are:

(1) Baptism

(2) Confirmation

(3) Eucharist

(4) Penance

(5) Marriage

(6) Ordination

(7) Prayers for the sick (formerly extreme unction)

b. Of these, Luther claimed that only baptism, Eucharist,

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and (maybe) penance were valid.

d. His basis for making these judgments was to look forthose observances that Christ had specifically commanded in the NT

d. He found only baptism and Eucharist

(1) While penance wasn’t specifically ordained by Christ,

it bore witness to Christ’s command to repent and seek

God’s forgiveness, so he was willing to keep it as a central;

practice of the church, albeit not one on the same level as

the other two.

(3) Luther did reject, however, the Roman Catholictheology of Purgatory, and thus insisted that penancewas about restoring sinful believers to the full fellowshipof the church, rather than releasing one from thetemporal penalties for sin, and hence from Purgatory.

e. The rest, while valid functions of the church, could not beconsidered sacraments.

2. Baptism:

a. Luther maintained much of the Roman Catholic theology of baptism,

maintaining that

(1) It brought about remission of sin

(2) It broke the bondage of the will.

b. In keeping with his rejection of the clericalism of the

RC church, Luther highlighted baptism as the central rite

of Christian discipleship.

c. When a believer was confronted by temptation or hardship,Luther’s advice was always to “remember your baptism,”

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by which he meant remember God’s claim on your life,and your vows (undertaken by your family on your behalf)to live a Christian life.

d. His theology of baptism undergirded his insistence on thepriesthood of all believers, one of the central doctrines ofall Protestantism.

(1) Because of baptism all Christian are called to teach,to bear witness, to engage in the care of souls, to evangelize.

(2) All the baptized, in other words, are called to ministry.

e. Implication for ministry: Today, most Protestants understand

the priesthood of all believers to mean that they can have direct

access to God, that they need go through no human intermediary.

Two things wrong with this belief:

(1) First, Roman Catholicism says the same thing.RC priests do not mediate the prayers of the faithful to God;that is a Protestant misrepresentation.

(2) Second, for Luther the priesthood of the believerwas foremost a call to ministry and service,not the bestowal of a privileged access to God.

3. Eucharist

4. Luther rejected much of the Roman Catholic theology and

practice of the Eucharist:

a. He denied that the sacrament was a sacrifice of Christ.

b. He restored communion in both kinds (RC’s only partake

of the bread; the priest alone partakes the wine).

b. He rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, whichwe will discuss further when we talk about Zwingli.

c. He insisted that the Eucharist be celebrated by the pastorfacing the congregation (RC priests faced away from the congregation).

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E. Luther on the church and ministry

1. As we’ve already seen, Luther insisted that the most important

vocation of ministry was the one that all Christians receive at their baptism.

However, even though all ministry belongs to the baptized,there are two ministries that the congregation delegates to its pastors:the ministries of Word and Table.Like the priesthood of all believers, this is an aspect of Luther’steaching that has been passed down to just about all Protestants.

III. Church and Society

A. To understand the Reformation, you have to see that it was at leastas much a political as a religious and theological event.

1. Without the involvement of political leaders like theElector Frederick, the reform of church belief and practicethat Luther and others brought about would never have gotten off the ground.

2. While this sounds strange to us, you have to remember that inthat day and age church and society were completely intermingled,meaning that reform of the church would never be simply a“churchly” affair, as it would be for us.

3. This gave Luther’s message unavoidably political overtones.When he was criticizing the power structures of the RomanCatholic Church, he was implicitly criticizing the secular powers as well.

4. The problem was that Luther was inherently conservativewhen it came to politics. His message of freedom in Christinspired many who wanted to throw off the shackles of late-medieval class-based society, yet when they turned to him for inspiration intheir struggle for greater economic and political freedom, he rejected them.

B. The Two Kingdoms doctrine

1. Luther believed firmly that secular government was one of

God’s principal means of working God’s will in the world.

Cognizant of what Paul said in Romans 13, he insisted that secular

government is here for our benefit, and that we must obey it as we obey God.

a. Here he forgot Rev. 13, where the secular government

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is depicted as the Antichrist.

2. Thus he came up with the two kingdoms theory:

a. On one hand God rules the world through the exercise of law,

restricting the practice of evil and ordering the world.

The chief agent of this rule of God is secular government,

and its principal tool is coercive force.

b. On the other hand God rules the world through grace,whereby the redeemed submit themselves voluntarily to God’s will,and in so doing work to bring about the fullness of God’sreign on earth. The chief tool here is loving example.

c. Notice that both are necessary, and both are equal expressions ofGod’s providential care of the world.

C. Luther and the Constantinian settlement

1. Although he disagreed with the Roman Catholic church on a

great number of things, in one area he was in complete agreement

with them: The need for the church and the state to be united

into one civil society.

3. In the parts of Germany and then elsewhere in Europe towhich Lutheranism spread, it always did so from the top down.That is, always the prince or other political ruler would chooseto align himself with the new Lutheran understanding of the gospel.

a. As a result, all of his subjects would also become Lutheran.

3. Luther endorsed this situation completely, believing that if the

church were not essentially an organ of the state, then the moral

underpinnings of society would be torn away.

4. It was thus left for others than him to work out the separation of church and state.

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I. Brief Recap of Luther’s Theology

A. The Bible: Luther had great convictions about Christianity and they were founded upon the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice. Luther, being raised in the Roman Church, was never able to shed completely his background. Some ignorance and superstition can be seen in his theology. 

B. Justification: Luther brought back the concept of justification by faith alone and opposed any works in salvation, for he believed that salvation was completely and totally of God. 

C. Grace: Luther was very strong on sovereign grace in salvation, and taught the doctrines of unconditional election and predestination with power. Luther learned the doctrines of grace from the Bible and from his own experience.

D. Priesthood: Luther believed in the universal priesthood of all believers and rejected the Roman Church and its ecclesiastical priesthood.

E. Lord's Table: He believed in the sacrament of the Lord's Table. Luther rejected the idea of transubstantiation (actual body and blood of Christ in the elements) and held to consubstantiation. He believed that Christ was in the elements (in, under and above), but did not believe that a miracle took place so that the bread and wine actually became the blood and body of Christ.

F. Government: Luther was not very interested in what the Bible taught on church government, and adopted a form that was expedient for his own situation. Lutheranism was for all practical purposes a modified congregational form of government, and the leaders were called superintendents. But the whole of the Lutheran church was run by the state. Luther, to a great extent, adopted the principle that the state should be above the church. He did this largely under the influences of circumstances because he needed the state to make the Reformation in Germany a success. His own personal safety he owed, humanly speaking, entirely to the protection of his prince, the Elector of Saxony. It was possible for the Protestant Church to exist only in those German lands which were ruled by leaders who had accepted Protestantism. Due to these circumstances, Luther gave these

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Protestant princes a great deal of authority in the affairs of the church.

II. Another Side of Luther

A. His Religious Life: He was a man of deep devotion and had a heart for God. His passion for Christ can be seen in the beautiful songs he wrote, the most famous being, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He was a man of courage and strong conviction. Nothing could crush this man. God knew his man, he had made him, he had prepared him, and he had filled him with his Spirit. Luther was God's man for the hour. He came under frequent attacks by the devil, and tradition tells us that once he threw an inkwell at the devil. 

B. His Personal Life: Sometimes we forget that great men are also human and fallible. Genius, brilliant brain that he was, he was subject to terrible bouts of depression. Not only did he suffer from attacks of depression, he was a notorious hypochondriac. Also, he was often crude and tactless in his dealings with men. People either loved him or hated him, but this is true of many great leaders. 

C. His Marriage: Luther had to struggle with the idea of marriage, for he had taken an oath of celibacy. He soon realized, however, that this was not scriptural. On June 13, 1525, Luther received a very special helper, for on that day he married Catherine Von Bora. She had been a nun. 

D. His Mistakes and Weaknesses:

1. Luther had been criticized, and rightly so, for his mistakes. He did not go far enough in his reform. He retained the crucifix, candles and other elements of Romanism. 

2. He also placed the church under the control of civil authority, which led to corruption. 

3. He is most criticized because he failed to cooperate with the Swiss Reformers and thus to present a solid block of Protestants against Catholic power in Europe. At Marburg, the Swiss Reformers drew up fifteen points of doctrine on which they wanted the German Reformers to agree. Luther agreed on fourteen points wholeheartedly, but disagreed on the single issue of the sacrament of the Lord's Table. Zwingli, a Swiss Reformer, held that the elements were symbols and

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there was nothing mystical in the elements at all. Luther disagreed and the Reformation stayed a splintered movement, losing much of its effectiveness.

III. Melanchthon, Luther’s Companion in the Gospel

A. His Person: Phillip Melanchthon was Luther's co-laborer, companion and successor in the German Reformation. He was the mildest of the Reformers, but a genius. He was a superior Greek scholar who studied under the famed Catholic humanist Erasmus. A Catholic historian said of Melanchthon, "The most brilliant phenomenon which proceeded from the Erasmian school, equal to his master Erasmus in many respects, superior to him in others." He became the professor of ancient languages at the University of Wittenberg, and this is where he met Luther. Melanchthon had a quiet conversion, and his moral and religious character was above suspicion. He was a master of ancient languages."He taught two or three times every day a variety of topics, including ethics, Greek and Hebrew grammar; he explained Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Titus, Matthew, Romans, the Psalms. In the later period of his life, he devoted himself exclusive to sacred learning" (Schaff, History of the Christian Church).Melanchthon was never seminary trained or ordained to the ministry. He never ascended the pulpit, but he did much private teaching of the Bible outside the classroom. 

B. His Contrast with Luther: There was great love between these two men. Melanchthon was over-awed with Luther's courage for God, and Luther sat at Melanchthon's feet and learned Greek. Melanchthon said he would "rather die than be separated from Luther," and, "Martin's welfare is dearer to me than my own life." He had great loyalty to Martin Luther. This relationship was somewhat impaired in the later years of Luther because of doctrinal differences, but the relationship was never destroyed. However, there was a great contrast in personalities. Luther was a man of war. Melanchthon a man of peace; he was gentle, pious and conscientious. These two complemented one another, but Luther was the stronger of the two. Luther animated Melanchthon; Melanchthon moderated Luther. Luther said of Melanchthon,"I am rough, boisterous, stormy, and altogether warlike. I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils. I must re-move stumps and stones, cut away thistles and thorns, and clear the wild forests; but Master Philippus comes along softly and gently, sowing and watering with joy, according to the gifts God has abundantly bestowed upon him" (Schaff).

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Melanchthon's strength was also his weakness. He was a man of moderation and amiability, and was always seeking compromise and peace as far as his honest conviction would allow. He opposed the controversies among the Christians of the Reformation, and grieved over the "fury of theologians." Sometimes he went too far in his compromise. 

C. His Importance: Melanchthon was the founder of systematized German theology, not Luther, and he was the primary author of the Augsburg Confession. Melanchthon was a great complement to Luther."Had Luther been without Melanchthon, the torment might have overflowed its banks; when Melanchthon missed Luther, he hesitated and yielded, even when he ought not to have yielded" (D'aubigne). 

"Without Luther the Reformation would never have taken hold of the common people: without Melanchthon it would never have succeeded among the scholars of Germany. Without Luther, Melanchthon would have become a second Erasmus, though with a profounder interest in religion; and the Reformation would have resulted in a liberal theological school, instead of giving birth to a Church. However much the humble and unostentatious labors and merits of Melanchthon are overshadowed by the more striking and brilliant deeds of the heroic Luther, they were, in their own way, quite as useful and indispensable" (Schaff).

D. His Theology

1. In his later years, Melanchthon modified his position on predestination and free will. In the beginning he held to the convictions of Luther, but later changed. He made this change to appease Rome and to find common ground with the papal system, for Rome was violently opposed to election and predestination. Melanchthon had many conferences with Reformed and Roman divines, and wanted peace at all costs. It was the influence of Erasmus, the humanist, that caused him to abandon what he thought was fatalistic theology. He taught a cooperation (synergism) of the divine and human wills in the work of con-version. He went back to semi-Pelagianism and laid the ground for Armenianism in Lutheran theology. He believed that God had to take the initiative to convict of sin, but man could accept or reject divine grace. Thus he said, "God draws the willing" to salvation. He would not, however, condemn the doctrines of unconditional election, predestination and total depravity of the human will because Luther had always held to these so tenaciously.

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He tolerated Augustinianism as a theological opinion, but rejected it himself. The Augsburg Confession, which is the basis for all Lutheran theology, is a product of Melanchthon and not of Luther. 

2. Melanchthon also gave up the corporal presence of Christ in the elements of the Lord's Table (consubstantiation) for a spiritually real presence view. This was to compromise with Calvin who held this position. Melanchthon never accepted the Zwinglian view of a mere commemoration. 

3. Melanchthon never gave up the teaching of justification by faith in Christ alone for salvation, but he added a form of works to justification to prove one's salvation. He reacted to the antinomian (against law) tendencies of some Lutherans who felt belief in the gospel was enough and a changed life was optional. 

4. Melanchthon was very willing to compromise with Rome. He was willing to admit certain supremacy of the Pope, providing he would tolerate the free preaching of the gospel.

IV. Germany after the Death of Luther

A. After Luther's death in 1546, the leadership of the German Reformation fell into the hands of Melanchthon. He is often called the teacher of Germany, for he was interested in establishing Christian education at the primary and secondary level. He did all he could to train the German clergy. He was a scholar, but not the leader or thinker that Luther was. Melanchthon was not a man of passion or conviction like Martin Luther, but he was a tremendous organizer. 

B. Schmalkald League: Roman Catholics and Protestants lived side by side in Germany, and this led to great unrest. The first Diet of Speier (1526), called to solve this problem, came up with a toleration act — each state in Germany was to be allowed to hold the religion of its ruling prince. The second Diet of Speier (1529) concluded that Protestant States must stay Protestant with no Roman Catholic teaching and that Roman states should stay Catholic with no Protestant teaching at all. The evangelical minority in the Diet protested against the finding, because no Diet had the right to bind the consciences of men in matters of religion. Because of their protest, they were called "Protestants" (the origin of the term). Thus, the Catholics formed the Catholic League and the Protestants formed

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the Schmalkald League, which was a necessity for protection against the Catholics who were out to destroy Protestantism in Germany. This was the time when Lutheranism needed the help of the Swiss Reformers and Luther could not agree with one point out of fifteen. War broke out in 1546, the year Luther died. After initial victories by the Catholics, the Protestants finally pushed the imperial forces out of Germany. The Diet of Augsburg in 1555 ended the struggle and provided for a recognition of Catholicism and Lutheranism as legal religions in Germany. 

C. Spread of Lutheranism: Lutheranism spread from Germany into Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and was eventually recognized as the state religion in these countries.

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Session 08 - ZwingliIntroduction: This is a name I’ve been tossing around a lot that you’ve probably not encountered

before this course. Zwingli was roughly a contemporary of Luther, who came to similar theological

conclusions to Luther while ministering in the Swiss canton of Zurich.

Intro.: I want to mention again the substantial agreement among the reformers on matters such

as justification by faith, authority of Scripture, etc. Their differences are often those of emphasis and

temperament, rather than substance, and seeking to overplay such differences easily results in distortion.

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I. Opening question: Why did the Reformers not agree more?

A. In studying Zwingli we come upon one of the most important realities

about trying to understand the Reformation: At least among the major figures,

there was a remarkable degree of agreement on matters of theology.

Justification by faith, the authority of Scripture the absolute primacy of

God’s grace in salvation–all of these were common elements you’ll find in

almost all of them. This makes it harder for contemporary Christians to

understand why the Reformers went their separate ways, rather than

providing a common front in the face of hostile Roman Catholicism.

B. The reasons are principally two:

1. Politics: While basically agreeing on most points of theology,

the Reformers lived in vastly different political situations. Because

the Reformation was as much a political as a religious event, these

differences conspired to keep them from joining forces.

2. But even when they did try to work together, they found that therelatively minor number of things that divided them outweighedmuch larger number of theological points on which they agreed.

II. Zwingli

A. Background:

1. 1484─1535 dates.

2. A RC priest (as w/Luther), came in 1518 to serve as the

city preacher in Zurich.

3. Reformist sentiment was strong there already, and Zwingli's

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leadership of the reform movement was cemented w/hiselection to a seat on the town council.

4. Between 1522 and 1525, the city made a remarkably smoothtransformation from Roman Catholicism to Reformed Protestantism.

B. Backgrounds for Zwingli’s theology: reason and Spirit

1. Zwingli was deeply influenced by humanism, especially its

insistence on rationality.

a. Remember our discussion of nominalism, the movementthat said that in the end human reason is not capable oftelling us much about God.

d. In answer to this, the humanists (like Erasmus) insisted thathuman reason was a valuable tool for understanding God’sworld and our place in it.

(1) Luther was far more influenced by nominalism; healways distrusted reason.

(2) Zwingli was on the other side of this debate. It showsin the rationalist character of his theology, by whichI mean his emphasis on the mind, at least asmuch as the heart, in the human encounter with the divine.

2. Because of his reading of Erasmus, Zwingli also placedmuch emphasis on the role of the Spirit.

a. For Luther, the Spirit’s primary role was ininspiring Scripture.

b. For Zwingli, apart from the work of the spirit in ourminds and imaginations, Scripture cannot become the Word of God.

C. Zwingli's starting point: Biblical Authority

1. Focused more on Scripture as an authoritative guide to

Church practice and less on it as a witness to the Gospel.

a. Note the rationalist tendencies here. For Luther,the primary purpose of the Word is to bear testimonyin the human heart to the work of Christ.

b. But for Zwingli, it was to teach us how to live.

2. Proscriptive vs. Prescriptive understandings of reform.

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D. The point of contention w/Luther: The Lord's Supper.

1. The occasion: The Marburg Colloquy, 1530.

2. The spectrum:

a. RC: transubstantiation.

b. Luther: Asserts the Real Presence, denies transubstantiation.

c. Zwingli: Memorial view.

(1) Note again the rationalist element here. The grace

of the sacrament comes only when, through an act of memory,

we bring to mind what Christ has done for us on the Cross.

E. A disciplined church

1. Luther's marks of the church: Word rightly preached, sacraments rightly

administered.

2. To this Zwingli added discipline

a. The visible church, though a mixed body, does have the

responsibility to weed out sinners.

b. The whole church, and not simply its ministers, responsible for this.

III. Implications for ministry

A. For Luther, Scripture’s primary task was to preach Christ, to confrontus with the gospel, the good news of God’s saving activity in the life,death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

B. For Zwingli, Scripture’s primary purpose was to serve as a guide for life,to show us the path we should walk as we make our way toward the Kingdom.

C. In thinking about your own ministry, which of these two do youemphasize most (don’t say both)?

D. Wesley, like Zwingli, clearly believed in accountable discipleship.Is this possible in your congregations? If not, why not? If so, how do you make it work?

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Menno Simons 1496-1561

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Session 09 - The AnabaptistsIntroduction: You may or may not have heard this term before. Of course, it reminds you ofthe term “Baptist,” which you certainly have heard. The two are not the same, although theyshare some common beliefs. You’ve also probably heard of Mennonites, who are the most numerousmodern-day descendants of the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists represent very much a minority viewamong the reformers, and they were distrusted and persecuted by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike.Their witness, in spite of their small numbers and oppressed status, has been extremely important inthe history of the Protestant movement. Much of what they adopted as principle, the rest of Christianityhas come to accept as necessity.

I. The Swiss Brethren

A. There was a group in Zwingli's congregation who so thoroughly applied

his prescriptive criterion as to seek, not a reform of existing church structures,

but a restitution of the church in its original form. They believed this necessary,

having concluded that the church had been essentially lost in the Constantinian settlement.

B. The leadership of this group was composed essentially of 4 individuals:Balthaser Hubmaier, Conrad Grebel, Felix Mantz, and George Blaurock.In January of 1525 a group met in Mantz's home and constituted themselvesinto what they considered a true church by baptizing one another. Theirmovement spread to several of the local villages, and soon others werecalling them Anabaptists, meaning rebaptizers.

C. The local authorities viewed this practice as a threat to the very fabric ofsociety itself, so they declared that all unbaptized infants be brought to baptismwithin 8 days. This netted them the leadership of the group, and Hubmaierwas tortured, Grebel died shortly before being executed, and Grebel was drowned.

D. As a result of the efforts of Hubmaier and others, Anabaptist communitiesarose through much of Switzerland, producing in 1527 a short statementof faith known as the Schleitheim confession. They also spread through Southern Germany, and in the mid-1530's Anabaptist ideas entered theNetherlands through the extremely capable agency of Menno Simons, farand above the movement’s outstanding leader. Anabaptist groups wereoften the victims of persecution during the Reformation, bearing the bruntof Protestant as well as Catholic opposition.

II. Anabaptist beliefs

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A. Discipleship

1. Whether it is the logical starting point, it probably is the case

that the chronological   starting point of Anabaptist theology is discipleship.

3. That is to say, the earliest Anabaptists arrived at their Protestant,and then their radical, conclusions on the basis of their perception—a perception they shared with practically everyone in the 16thcentury—that the moral life of the church was in dire need of reform,and that the practice of discipleship had fallen to a perilously low ebb.

B. Church

1. Yet accompanying this was a related concern about the nature

of the true church. 2 things going on here:

a. The true church is where discipline takes place, becauseonly where discipline is administered aright can there bea disciple church. . Note Klaasen's statement: In Roman CatholicChurches, the cross becomes present in the Mass; in ProtestantChurches; in the preached Word; and in Anabaptist, in the livesof its members.

b. The true church is distinct, even separate from the world.Note Schleitheim's statement that our citizenship is in heaven.

c. Note that this often led to excessive legalism, particularlyin the exercise of discipline.

2. This explains why the church must be a voluntary associationof the redeemed.

a. Voluntary because when "discipline" is exercised in anon-voluntary community, it is almost always punitive,rather than redemptive, as it was intended to be among the Anabaptists.

b. Redeemed, because the starting point was always assumed to be grace.

3. The result of this was the insistence in the visible purity of the church.

The church was called to be objectively different than the rest of society,

because it sought to live out the law of love.

C. Baptism.

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1. 1st assumption: Baptism as entrance into the church.

2. 2nd assumption: Regenerate church of conscious disciples.

3. Conclusion: believers baptism

4. Note here the individual and communal character of believers baptism.

D. Church Order:

1. The ban

2. Governance by consensus.

E. Civil Govt.

1. Ordained by God, yet on the basis of the Fall

2. Purpose: to contain human wickedness

3. Yet Christians live according to a different set of rules,

sometimes referred to as the "perfection of Christ":

a. Active nonresistance (note that the context for this wasrejection of the notion of holy war).

b. Essential moral ambiguity of serving in the government led most Anabaptists to reject it.

3. According to the Swiss Brethren, the true nature of the churchmust be a voluntary association of the redeemed. Since baptismwas the sacrament of entrance into the church, and since churchmembership was only for those who had experienced regenerationthrough faith, it followed that baptism was for adults. Note that itis the doctrine of a regenerate church membership which lies behindthe Anabaptist insistence on adult baptism, a fact which others oftenfail to grasp.

III. Implications for ministry:

A. One of the reasons we remember the Anabaptists is their power oftheir witness to society. Rather than accept a “watered-down” churchin which everyone in society becomes a member of the church, theyadvocated for a pure church that by its difference gave witness to the

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rest of society, often through the suffering of its members.B. The questions they raised for the best way for Christians to engage the

rest of society are very much with us still.

I. More on the Anabaptist

A. The Anabaptists were separatists who rejected infant baptism and

believed that the outward, external church should consist only of

saved and baptized believers. They would rebaptize those who

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professed Christ who had previously been baptized as infants.

The preposition ana means "again," thusAnabaptists were those

who "baptized again."

B. The Anabaptist movement officially began around 1522 in Zurich,

Switzerland, when certain men wanted the Reformation to proceed

more quickly and to be patterned more along New Testament

lines than along those pursued by Ulrich Zwingli. Thus, there was

a break between Zwingli and these more radical reformers.

C. It is very difficult to classify the Anabaptists as a single group,

for there was wide diversity among them. Some were fanatics

and heretics who brought great shame to the work of the Reformation,

but others were not nearly so extreme and fanatical. Some were

pantheistic, some extremely mystical, some anti-Trinitarian, some

extreme millennialists, while others were quite biblical in most areas

of their theology. A good majority of the Anabaptists were spiritual

people, dedicated to Christ. They were devoted students of the Bible

who felt the Reformers were not purifying the church quickly enough

or properly applying the principles taught in the New Testament. The

original Anabaptists were called "Brethren" or "The Company of the

Committed."

D. The Anabaptists were probably the least understood and most persecutedof all the groups of the early Reformation era. The Catholics, Lutheransand Calvinists opposed them violently.

II. Famous Anabaptist Leaders

A. As a whole, the Anabaptist movement centered around

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the common people who wanted the simplicity of New Testament

Christianity. However, some outstanding, educated men were leaders

among the Anabaptists.

B. Conrad Grebe: Grebel was a prominent member of the church

in Zurich. He had been led to the evangelical faith by Zwingli,

and heartily approved his work of reforma-tion. But he soon became

disappointed with Zwingli and Luther because he felt the church was

not being reformed along New Testament lines. In January, 1525, a

man named Blaurock asked Grebel to baptize him again, although he

had been baptized in infancy. Grebel complied. Thereupon, Blaurock

rebaptized others. Thus the Anabaptist movement had its beginnings

with Conrad Grebel.

C. Balthasar Hubmaier: Hubmaier was one of the better educated men

of his day, having received his doctorate in theology. He was a priest,

D. and, during his pastorate in Walshut, a great change came over him as

he studied the New Testament. He found many things he had been doing

were not biblical, and he began to preach reform. Hubmaier's conscience

began to bother him about the Bible's teachings about baptism, the purity

of the church, the new birth, discipleship, and evangelism. Hubmaier

rebaptized his entire congregation of 300, and the church renounced all

fellowship with Rome. He believed in evangelistic preaching, and went

into Moravia where thousands were saved. Hubmaier was probably one

of the few Anabaptist leaders who believed in election and predestination.

He died a martyr in 1527, and two years later his wife was strangled

and thrown in a river.

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E. Jacob Hutter: Hutter was a godly man who preached in Austria,

Moravia, and Poland until his martyrdom in 1536. He founded a sect

called the Hutterites,

F. Menno Simons: Simons was a humble man who lived a hard life.A priest of the Roman Catholic Church, he left by his own choicearound 1536, believing he could no longer live with his conscienceas a Roman Catholic, He felt that neither the Catholics nor the ReformedChurch did much for the inner life of a man, that it was all externalismand hypocrisy. He opposed the fanaticism of his day, and could notunderstand why Christians persecuted one another. He had manystruggles over discipleship and holy living, and truly believed thatdedicated Christians would receive persecution from the world.Followers of Menno Simon's teachings came to be called Mennonites,and their work later spread to Russia, the United States and Canada.The Mennonites have always been pacifists, and are earnest, industriousChristians, who have often lived in communal settlements.

The Theology of the Anabaptist compared to the Reformers Theology

G. Introduction: On the basic issues of Christianity, most of the

Anabaptists and Re-formers were in total agreement. They held to

the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the authority of the

Bible and the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Anabaptists were

neither deep theologians nor interested in forming doctrinal creeds,

although they did set forth their beliefs about the church in the

Schleitheim Articles (1527).

H. Church and State: The Anabaptist movement was actually a reaction

against the close ties between church and state in both Catholic and

I. Protestant domains. In the Protestant churches great masses of people

would come into the church when a city council or prince would join

the Reformation. Because most of the citizens of the state were also

members of the church, the bond between church and state was very

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great. In many cases, even though the Reformers took away the external

aspects of Roman Church ritual, the personal lives of the people in the

external church were not touched. Also, many used the teaching of

justification by faith as a license to sin. The Anabaptists demanded a

strict separation of church and state, for the purity of the church and

for the protection of the church from persecution by the state. This

was carried to such an extreme that they were completely pacifistic,

opposed to all military service, and took no oaths and held no government

offices.

separation of Church and State, stood for liberty of religion and for a

"free church." They opposed the establishment of any faith by law,

asserting freedom of religion, and believing that there should be no basis

for persecution whatsoever. They taught that a man was free to believe

according to the dictates of his conscience, even though he may be wrong.

A person was free under the Reformers in their different domains only as

long as he agreed with them. Simply put, there was little or no religious

liberty under the Reformers.

J. Purity of the Church: The Anabaptists believed that the external,

visible church, as nearly as possible, should be made up of regenerate,

baptized people. For them, the church was not an institution as the

reformers held, but simply a local fellowship of believers. They

believed in "voluntarism" — that a man comes into the church

because he knows he is saved, and that he cannot be born into the

church. Often, the Reformers thought that to renounce Rome was

enough, but the Anabaptists demanded that a man know that he was

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saved before entering the external, local church. 

Anabaptists believed in the "ban," which gave the church the

right to discipline its members. A Christian came into the church

by his own choice and voluntarily placed himself under the

government of the church.

K. Believer's Baptism: Anabaptists were inflexible on this point.

They opposed infant baptism as unscriptural, and felt this was

the basic reason that so many inside the Catholic and Reformed

Churches were not really saved.

L. Immersion: The Anabaptists in their early days did not make any

issue over the mode of baptism. We know that many practiced

pouring for years before they came to the conviction that immersion

was the mode of baptism in the New Testament. They also believed

that any Christian could baptize another Christian, and that this was

not the responsibility of ordained ministers only.

M. Millennialists: A great many of the Anabaptists believed in the

premillennial return of Christ, in which Christ would establish

a kingdom on this earth for 1,000 years. A few Anabaptists were

fanatical about prophecy and brought a bad name on the Anabaptist

movement as a whole. On this point, the Anabaptists opposed the

Reformers who were held to amillennial theology. These Anabaptists

may have been the only group in the Reformation that was looking

far the imminent return of Christ.

N. Separation: The Anabaptists stressed holiness of life and the

need to keep unspotted from the world. Sometimes this bordered

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on legalism and caused isolation of certain groups, but they also

opposed worldliness in the local church. They held to complete

nonconformity to the customs, thought lives and habits of the world.

Being a cultured Christian held no value for an Anabaptist.

O. Free Will Theology: Although it would be difficult to classify all

the Anabaptists, the great majority of them probably held to some

form of freewill theology, as opposed to the Reformers who strongly

held to the sovereignty of God in election and predestination.

P. The Lord's Table: Unlike the Reformers, Anabaptists saw the Lord's

Q. Table simply as a memorial in which Christ was in no way present in

the elements.

R. Evangelism: The Anabaptists zealously carried out the Great

Commission and were missionary-minded.

S. Discipleship: Discipleship was a major tenet in the Anabaptist

code of Christian ethics. They wanted to know how it was that

many of the Reformers, who held such pious doctrine, lived such sorry lives.

T. Pattern of Reform: The Anabaptists felt that it was impossible toreform the Roman Church, arguing that one could not put life into aspiritually dead organization. They wanted to start a new church basedentirely on the New Testament.

III. The Munster Kingdom

A. One of the most tragic episodes in the entire history of the

Christian Church was the attempt of certain radicals to set up an

Anabaptist kingdom at Munster in Westphalia, Germany.

B. Melchior Hofmann, a radical on prophecy, predicted that Christ would

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return to earth in 1533. Hofmann was bitterly opposed by the Reformers

and the Swiss Anabaptists, but multitudes in the Netherlands followed his

teaching, including Jan Matthys. Hofmann was imprisoned in Strassburg,

and eventually died there.

C. Matthys declared that he was the prophet Enoch, whom Hofmann had

said would appear just before the return of Christ. In 1533 the followers

of Matthys made themselves masters of Munster, and Matthys soon took

charge. He proclaimed that Munster was going to be the New Jerusalem

with community of goods and without law. 

These Anabaptists preached a wild millennialism, and insisted that God's

day of wrath was about to break in which the saints would dominate the

governments of the world.

D. Soon Munster was besieged by an army of Catholics and Lutherans.

After granting a short period of grace in which to leave the city, the

Munsterites killed without mercy all those they suspected of being

unsympathetic to them. Matthys was killed in battle in April, 1534,

after which John of Leyden took charge. He introduced the practice of

polygamy, and in the autumn of 1534 assumed the title of king.

E. Munster lay under siege for more than a year while these radical

Anabaptists held out with great courage. Their sufferings were indescribable.

On June 24, 1535, the city was taken. A terrible massacre followed in

which the leaders of Munster were maliciously tortured.

F. Munster is the "black spot" in Anabaptist history, but most of theAnabaptists were not so radical. Many were actually godly Christians.

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IV. Persecution of the Anabaptist

A. While many of the persecutions were invited on the Anabaptists by

their own fanatics, others who were sound in faith were persecuted

for their convictions on the Bible. The doctrinal, political and social

views of the Anabaptists were obnoxious to both the Catholics and

the Lutherans.

B. Anabaptists were fined, drowned, burned at the stake, tortured, and

persecuted in all the manners of the day for such crimes as refusal

to pay tithes, refusal to attend church, refusal to refrain from Bible

study groups in private homes, refusal to refrain from preaching, and

other offences against the church-state. Thousands of Anabaptists were

put to death.

C. These Anabaptists were most severely persecuted by the Roman Church.In fact, because many believed in immersion, many were put to death bydrowning. The Lutherans also put many Anabaptists to death by one formof execution or another. Even John Calvin, though he did not persecutethem, could see little good in them.

V. Contributions of the Anabaptist

A. The Anabaptists stood for religious liberty at a time when neither

Protestants nor Catholics fully appreciated the importance of freedom

of conscience. The Anabaptists made their mark on the world for

religious liberty that, indirectly through the Baptists, impacted even America.

B. Their emphasis on the purity of the external, outward, local church

was also very important. Until the Anabaptists, almost every one accepted

the idea that a local church should have many unsaved in it.

C. The Anabaptists had only an indirect influence upon the modernBaptist movement. Modern Baptists who want to place themselves

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in the Anabaptist tradition need to remember that comparativelyfew Anabaptists were truly biblical. Furthermore, many of them,while they insisted on water baptism after a conversion experience,did not baptize by immersion. Moreover, the doctrinal position ofbiblical Anabaptists is more closely related to the modern Mennoniteviewpoint than to Baptist theology. Anabaptists were quite ascetic,tended to communism of goods, were pacifistic, opposed the use of oaths and capital punishment, and favored the free will of man asopposed to God's sovereign predestination.

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Session 10 - Calvin's BiographyIntroduction: When talking about Calvin and the Reformation, it’s impossible to avoid thecomparison with Luther. Because they are the two most important theological figures of the era,it’s just easier to define the one by comparing and contrasting him with the other.The interesting thing to note is that, while their theology is similar in so many ways,their personalities could hardly have been more different.

I. Calvin’s biography

A. Born in 1509, the son of a minor church official. Note that his name

in French is spelled “Jean Cauvin.”

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B. Early on he was ordained and sent to Paris to study theology. However,because of a political feud of his father’s, he switched to the study of law.As a law student, he encountered humanism, which was applying itself tothe study of ancient Roman law.

C. He was drawn in gradually to the Reformation that was making its way through France.

1. In Luther’s Saxony and Zwingli’s city of Zurich, the political

authorities had embraced the Reformation, which is why it flourished there.

3. In France it was embraced by some nobles and local leaders, but itnever gained a foothold among the kings, who were far more powerfulthan in Luther’s Germany.This meant that the Reformation was often something of anunderground movement, alternately neglected and resisted bythe political authorities.

4. If you were sympathetic to it, you could be in danger of arrest.

it was likely sometime in the early 1530s.

C. Affair of the Placards: October 18, 1534, someone used the new technologyof the printing press to put up signs and pamphlets all over France, includingthe door to the king’s bedchamber. The signs contained anti-Catholic slogans,and created a sensation, resulting in a crackdown on the Protestant movement.

D. Calvin had to leave France, winding up for a time in Basel, Switzerland.E. There he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion,

one of the greatest documents of the Reformation and one of the most notabletheological books ever written.

F. In 1536 he was on his way to Strasbourg, and happened to be stopped in Geneva.While he was there the leader of the reform party in town, named William Farel,came and implored him to stay and help with the movement of reform there.

H. The situation in Geneva:

1. Geneva was at that time a city that had been under the political

dominance of other regions, princes, and bishops, and was trying to

assert its political independence.

3. Therefore, the cause of the Reformation in Geneva was, as always, tied up

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with politics. Many wanted the city to undergo a reform like that ofZurich and elsewhere as a way to assert its political independence.

4. While this seems to be a goal that most of the leaders and populationagreed upon, just what “reform” would mean, and how far it would go,was an open question.

4. Calvin knew how he wanted to answer that question.

I. 1536-1538: Beginnings of Calvin’s leadership

1. Calvin moved quickly to place the Reformation in Geneva on

what he considered a more solid footing.

3. In addition to many of the changes that Luther, Zwingli, and otherreformers had instituted (abolition of the Mass, celebration of theEucharist in both kinds, marriage of clergy, and the like), Calvinset about trying to reform the organization of the Genevan church and society.

4. Central to this effort was his intention to empower the clergy to exercisechurch discipline. When the offense was great enough, the punishmentwould require the civil authorities to carry it out. This, of course, representeda shift in the age-old medieval balance of power between sacerdotum(church authority) and regnum (civil authority).

5. In 1536 Calvin wrote and presented his Confession of Faith which allthe citizens and inhabitants of Geneva and the subjects of the countrymust promise to keep and hold.

6. True to its title, the intent was that this document would serve as theofficial guide to belief and practice in Geneva. The town council initiallyvoted to make it so, but it proved controversial because anyone who didnot subscribe to it could not be a member of the church–and if not a memberof the church, they couldn’t be a citizen of the city.In the spring of 1538 a new town council was elected, and itsnew majority kicked Calvin and Farrell out of the city.

7. For the next 3 years Calvin lived in Strasbourg. His life there wasquite agreeable to him; he pastored a church of French refugee Protestants,he married for the first and only time in his life (his wife died lessthan 10 years later), and he spent much of his time teaching, preaching,and writing.

8. In 1541 the political situation in Geneva had changed again, and thecouncil asked Calvin to return.

a. My favorite Calvin story: Calvin did a great deal ofwhat we sometimes call expository preaching, goingthrough the Bible verse-by-verse. The Sunday before

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he left in 1538 he was about midway through a versewhen the sermon ended. When he returned 3 yearslater he ascended the pulpit and picked back up atexactly that same spot, never mentioning the three-yearinterval between the two sermons.

9. As you can imagine, from that time on Calvin’s leadership of theGenevan church was firmly secure.

10. He remained until his death in 1564 the most influential personin Geneva, but that influence was always indirect; he never held civil office,and his work in the church was always as preacher and teacher.

I. Calvin’s Temperament

A. Calvin, at times, could be quite irritable, but much of this can be

attributed to his ill health. He was plagued with constant headaches

which hardly ever left him. The pain was so intense that many nights

he could not sleep. He also had some kind of disease of the trachea

which, when he spoke too much, caused him to spit blood. Several

attacks of pleurisy prepared the way for consumption, of which he

finally died. He had acute hemorrhoids, the pain of which was unbearably

increased by an internal abscess that would not heal. Several times

intermittent fever got him down, sapping his strength and constantly

reducing it. He had gallstones and kidney stones in addition to stomach

cramps and wicked intestinal influenzas. To top it all off, he had acute

arthritis. In one of his letters to a friend he said, "If only my condition

were not a constant death struggle."

B. This man was able to accomplish great things even though he was sicklymuch of his life.

II. Calvin’s Work

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A. Calvin was an incessant worker who was always doing something

for his master Jesus Christ. He wrote The Institutes and commentaries

on almost every book of the Bible. He wrote other works and carried

out prolific correspondence with most of the prominent Reformers in

Europe and England. Calvin was the chief administrator for the church

at Geneva, and he carried out his pastoral responsibilities with great care

and concern. He rarely refused anyone counsel if it was a serious need.

Calvin also preached or taught twice a day, and three times on Sunday.

Even on his death bed, he continued to work on unfinished material and,whether orally or by correspondence, he took part in the affairs of the church.He would often whisper, "O Lord, how long?" Men begged him to rest, buthe refused, saying, "Bear with me that God find me watching and waitingand busy at his work until my last sigh."

III. Calvin’s Courage

A. We have often heard of the bravery of Luther as he faced the

enemies of the gospel, but we forget that Calvin was just as

brave as he stood for his biblical convictions.

B. Calvin came very near to losing his life several times because of an unbending attitude towards the free thinkers and libertines in Geneva."The heroism of Luther is well known. Let us look at the equallycourageous actions of John Calvin for our examples. On December16, 1547, the Libertines, sworn enemies of Calvin, gathered in theSenate House in Geneva determined to destroy the Reformer. Unusualcircumstances made it appear that they would succeed. At the risk ofhis life, Calvin appeared in the midst of the armed crowd. Amidst loudcries for his death, he stood with folded arms and looked the agitators inthe face, No one struck him down. Then, advancing through their rankswith his breast bared, he challenged them, ‘If you want blood, there arestill a few drops here; strike then!' No arm was raised. Calvin slowlyascended the stairway and addressed a meeting of the Council of TwoHundred which was in session. Descending the stairs, he faced thecrowd again accompanied by one of the city councilors. He calledfor silence and addressed the people with such energy and daringthat tears flowed from many eyes and the crowd retired in silence. 

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"The opposition soon made other plans to destroy or discredit the Reformer.One of these resulted in a direct confrontation between Calvin and theCouncil of Two Hundred. The issue was the excommunication of PhilibertBerthelier, the Council's secretary, by the consistory of the Church ofGeneva in 1351 and his absolution by the State Council in 1553. Thefollowing Sunday was communion. Calvin preached in St. Peter's,and at the close of the sermon declared that he would never profanethe sacrament by giving it to an excom-municated person. Over hishead on the pulpit his emblem was set: a heart aflame in an outstretchedhand offered to God. His famous motto was embossed on the dark-redvelvet pulpit cover: Soli Deo Gloria. Raising his voice and lifting up hishands, he exclaimed, in the words of St. Chrysostom: "I will lay downmy life before these hands give the sacred things of God to those whohave been branded as his despisers. 

"A crowd of Libertines surged forward to the table. Calvin, descendingfrom the pulpit, stood before the table. With drawn sword a Libertine cried,Administer communion to us or you will die.' His head thrown back andhis arms extended over the sacred elements, Calvin responded that althoughthey might cut off his arms, shed his blood, and take his life, they wouldnever force him to give holy things to the profane and dishonor the tableof his God. The crowd was stunned, and a long silence followed the dramaticmoment. Perrin, one of the city syndics opposed to Calvin, quietly orderedBerthelier not to approach the table. After the crowd withdrew, Beza reports,communion was celebrated ‘in profound silence and under a solemn awe,as if the Deity Himself had been visibly present among them'" (The BannerOf Truth; "The Reformers: The Secret Of Their Greatness";Eugene Osterhaven).

C. Until 1555, Calvin never had free reign in Geneva. He had manyenemies who hated him, and he was open to constant ridicule thatmost men would not have tolerated. A wife of a leading statesmanin Geneva was disciplined for dancing at a wedding (secretly shewas a Libertine). In response, she called Calvin a "pig" and a "lowdown liar.""He could not walk across the street without being mocked,‘There he goes, neighbor. I prefer to hear three dogs barkingthan to listen to him preach.' ‘Did you know, hell has only twodevils, and there goes one of them!' Children called after him,twisting his name, ‘Cain, Cain!' More than one dogto the name ‘Calvin!' (Stickelberger, John Calvin).

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(Not really Calvin’s –Developed from His Theology)

Session 11: Calvin's TheologyIntroduction: The first thing I want to make plain here is that no one, (during this period) has sufferedas much at the hands of his followers as John Calvin. Much of what you might have heard about Calvinis actually stuff that his followers said. He is by no means always guiltless in this situation, but justbecause you’ve heard something that “Calvinism” says doesn’t mean that he said it. Thus, he shouldbe taken seriously by all Protestants, you and I included.

I. Scripture

A. Starting point: the coherence of the Testaments

1. Calvin was convinced that both the Old and the New Testaments

speak equally of God.

a. What’s more, he thought that both books are equaltestimonies to the revelation of God in Christ.

(1) The OT does this through prophecy, foreshadowing, and image.

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(2) The NT does it openly and plainly.

2. Thus, the Testaments speak a coherent message about the grace of God in Christ.

B. Law and gospel

1. Remember that for Luther, there is a fundamental (and intentional)

disjunction in Scripture between law and gospel.

a. For him, “law” means any attempt to achieve reconciliationwith or recognition by God through human effort.

b. Thus, for Luther, law and gospel are polar opposites; whilenecessary to one another, they exist at the same time as opposedto one another.

4. Calvin did not share this understanding. The best way to summarizethe difference is to consider what they called the “3 uses of the law”:

Use of the lawLuther Calvin

First: To contain the wicked X X

Second: To point us toward the need for grace

X X

Third: To guide us in our Christian life

X

5. Both agreed that God intended the law (and here you could pretty wellinclude any criminal code, not just the OT law) as a mechanism for catching,prosecuting, and punishing the lawless or wicked.

6. Both also agreed that God gave the laws of the OT to show us that wecannot, on our own, earn God’s forgiveness.

7. But unlike Luther, Calvin believed that the OT law can serve as a guidefor Christian life–which is why God gave it to us.

a. Luther distrusted this, believing it would tempt Christians

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to think that they were following the OT laws in order to earnforgiveness.

C. The center of Scripture

1. Remember that Luther saw the gospel as the lens through which we

should see the rest of Scripture. The gospel was the yardstick by which he

measured the rest of Scripture

2. Calvin possessed no such tool. Thus, for him, all Scripture is equally inspired,and speaks the Word of God to us equally.

3. Two ideas fill out this aspect of his theology:

a. First, Scripture’s authority does not reside in the fact

that God inspired the original writers (which is what the

fundamentalists of the 20th century would later say). Rather,

Scripture becomes authoritative only when the Holy Spirit

bears witness to our spirit of Scripture’s truth.

b. Second, Calvin clearly saw Christ as the centerof the Testaments. As we said above, both bookspreach Christ. This doesn’t function as an interpretivetool for him in the same way that gospel functionedfor Luther, but preaching the saving life, death, andresurrection of Christ is the reason God gave us the Testaments.

E. Implications of ministry: Why do you think the OT is part of Christian Scripture?Does everything, or even most things, in the OT point toward the Christ who is tocome, as Calvin said?

II. God’s Sovereignty/Providence

A. To start with, we have to recognize the importance of Calvin’sunderstanding of Divine sovereignty has had in the theological storyof the church in North America.

1. The idea that everything that happens does so because of theexpress will of God is thoroughly ingrained into the American

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consciousness that even people who never darken the door of achurch will talk about the will of God when tragedy strikes.

2. It’s there because of the outsized influence of Calvinist thoughtin American life.

B. For Calvin, the world and everything in it–most especially humans–arehere to reflect and magnify the glory of God.

C. Calvin understood God’s glory and divine rule to be, in many ways,God’s primary attributes.

1. But notice, the purpose toward which God’s glory is moving,the end toward which everything tends, is God’s love of humanity.Divine glory and divine love are, for Calvin, inextricable.In other words, that which most displays God’s glory is God’s love.

D. Calvin believed that God is not only the Creator of all that is, but itsSustainer as well.

1. Every day, every second, God is working in and through bothnatural and human events to bring about God’s will.

2. That will is actively engaged in everything that happens, leading, guiding, directing, punishing, rewarding.

3. Again, the purpose that lies behind God’s providence is love;God’s love of the world, and especially of humankind.

E. So, does this make God the author of evil? When the murderer takesthe life of a child, is that because God willed it? Calvin would say two things:

1. First, God’s Providence allows room for human freedom.God allows us to use the freedom God gave us, even for evil purposes.But this in no way limits or thwarts God’s will.

2. Second, to say that God’s Providence is at work in allthings is to affirm that God’s glory and righteousnesswill be magnified in us one way or the other: eitherwhen by God’s grace we do the will of God, or wefall under God’s judgment for failing to do God’s will.

a. This, by the way, is why Calvinism has alwaysbeen an activist theology.

(1) Some say that in a Calvinist system weshould just sit back and let God do all the work,because that’s what God is doing anyway.

(2) Calvin would respond that God gives us thechoice to be God’s agents in the redemptionof the world and the coming of the Kingdom.Whether we sign on or not means nothing forthe ultimate outcome, because in God’s willthe Kingdom is going to arrive. But oh, howsad for us if we had a chance to be the onesby which God created the Kingdom on earth

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as it is in heaven, and we said “no thanks.”

F. Notice, finally, the pastoral nature of what Calvin says about Providence.

1. The purpose of the whole discussion is not, as some have thought,

paint an exhaustive picture of who God is and how God works.

3. Rather, it is to assure Christians that God is in control of their lives,and that, even when they suffer, they know that God is at work tobring about their salvation.

III. Justification

A. In his understanding of justification by faith, Calvin is little different from Luther.

1. The text that you read by Calvin–his response to Sadoleto–is probably

the single best Reformation document on the question of justification by faith alone.

E. Like Luther, he was convinced that the Roman Catholic understandingof salvation as a cooperation between divine grace and human effort ledonly to fear, uncertainty, and a false desire to do good works in order toearn one’s place in heaven.

F. Like Luther, he insisted that the belief that one could even partiallycontribute to one’s own salvation by human effort only led us to seeGod and our neighbors falsely.

D. He has a great analogy for this, involving servants and children:

1. For servants to receive reward, their work must be perfect,

because perfect obedience is only what they owe (as Jesus explained in Luke 17).

The master only sees what the servant hasn’t done.

a. If we think we can earn God’s forgiveness we have madeourselves servants to that task. And which of us, flawedand fallen as we are, are capable of fulfilling the task perfectly?

2. A child, however, is free to offer something less than perfect,because the basis of the child’s relationship to the parent is love,not obligation. The parent sees only what the child has done.

a. Through faith we are freed of our bondage to the law,

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and made the children of God.G. The only real difference between Luther and Calvin is their respective

beliefs about what happens after we have received the grace of justification.1. Remember that for Luther, justification means that God has declared

us righteous, even though we’re not. We continue as the sinners wealways were, except that we no longer live under the power of sin,because God’s forgiveness has broken the fear that bound us to theneed to seek our own salvation.

2. Calvin agrees with this, but says more.

a. As a result of our justification, the Holy Spirit works in us,

transforming us bit by bit into the image of Christ. Having

declared Christ’s righteousness to be ours, the Holy Spirit now

goes about the work of regeneration, remaking our nature so

that it looks more like Christ’s.

b. If you’re remembering your other theology classes,this might sound a bit like the doctrine of sanctification.It’s similar, but at the same time different.

(1) Similar, in that for both figures the Holy Spiritworks in you to transform our nature so that it is more Christ like.

(2) Different, in that for this should be ahighly visible process. Calvin believed that regenerationwas gradual, and he was very cautious about thinking any of us could point to our own lives as evidencethat it was happening.

IV. Election

A. Here we arrive at the doctrine most associated with Calvin’s name.B. Before we launch into an examination of it, some things to remember:

1. He was not the first believe in election; Augustine, Aquinas,Luther, Zwingli, and many others had all held to some version of it.

2. None of them ever taught it as explicitly or as thoroughly as he did. This could mean that it was more important to his theologythan theirs (which it was), or it could mean that he was alwaysmore concerned with drawing his beliefs out to their inevitableconclusion than they were (which he also was, with the possible

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exception of Aquinas).3. While you can’t deny its importance to his theology, you can

argue about how it fits.a. Some would say that it is the natural extension of

his doctrine of Providence, and thus that electionis a way for God’s glory to be manifest and magnified.Calvin certainly uses this language.

b. On the other hand, it is equally possible to see it as anoutgrowth of his doctrine of justification, and thus toassert that its real place in his theology is to help insistthat we need not fear for our place in God’s kingdom.

B. Starting point: the bondage of the will.

1. Like Augustine and Luther before him, Calvin believed that sin

renders us incapable of loving God and neighbor fully.

a. It’s not that we can do no good whatsoever, but that weare not capable of doing good with all of our heart.

(1) The bondage of the will means that there is anelement of self-interest in everything we do, no matter how good.

(2) Sin thus bends our concern inward uponourselves, making it impossible for our hearts to move outsidethe circle of our self-interest and give ourselves wholly to God.

C. At the same time, our response to our situation is to try to do good(“keep the law”) in order to earn God’s forgiveness.

1. This is just another expression of our bondage, in that evenour attempt to serve God and neighbor have a fundamentallyselfish purpose: to gain our own salvation.

2. If salvation means loving God and neighbor with all of ourheart, then we are incapable of finding it, because all of our attempts have by necessity an element of self-love in them

D. Therefore what is needed is God’s grace. God must come to us in such away as to overcome our divided and selfish will, empowering us to love God and neighbor fully.

1. Calvin calls this operation of grace the “effectual call.” Godworks with each one of us in such a way that we will respond.

2. The effectual call involves the gift of saving faith. Just as Luthersaid, Calvin asserts that this faith, this complete surrender to andtrust in God, can come to us only as a gift; it is not somethingwe can bring about in ourselves.

E. Pause to review: Sin leads to the bondage of the will. The bondage

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of the will turns us inward upon ourselves, making it impossible tolove God and neighbor fully. God issues the effectual call whichour will to move beyond this situation, and also grants us the giftof saving faith. So far so good, right?

F. But here’s where it gets sticky: to whom does God issue theeffectual call? There are 3 options:

1. To no one. To say this would be to say that we’re allgoing to hell, and I doubt we want to say that.

2. To everyone. More people have actually agreed with this,but it does seem to contradict our experience, in that somefolks do seem to be irremediably lost in sin.

3. To some, but not all: This does seem to match our perceptionthat some have come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, but not all.

4. However, it begs the question: To whom does God issue the call,and why them and not others?

G. Calvin’s answer to this, of course, is the doctrine of election.

1. According to Calvin, God chooses to rescue some from

the consequences of their sin by extending to them the effectual call,

thus moving them from a state of just condemnation to one of gracious salvation.

3. His understanding of this is based on the OT idea of the electionor choice of Israel. God did not choose Israel becauseof their worth, but because of God’s grace.

4. Note that, just as with the choice of Israel, God’s decisionto choose some to salvation brings with it, not privilege and special blessing, but a call to service of God and neighbor.

5. The majority of the time that Calvin is speaking about election,it’s in terms of those whom God has chosen for salvation.However, Calvin was nothing if not consistent.He realized that if God had chosen some for salvation, it also must mean that God had chosen others for damnation.

5. This is called “double predestination,” for it means thatGod actively chooses, both to save some, and to damn others.

H. Response to objections

1. The classic objection, of course, is that this makes God the author,

not only of human salvation, but of human damnation as well.

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a. Calvin’s response was to ask: When you sinned, who was itwho chose to do so: you, or somebody else?

b. As we said before, even though we are subject to the bondageof the will that doesn’t mean that our will has no freedom at all.Day-by-day, minute-by-minute, we exercise our freedom to choose between loving God and others, and loving ourselves.And all of us use that freedom to love ourselves more thanGod and neighbor.

c. In essence, our damnation is a fate that we willinglyand gladly ratify by our actions all the time. Thus,for Calvin, God is wholly right and just in condemning us for it.

3. Second classic objection: the doctrine produces only fear and uncertainty,how can we ever know if we are among the elect?

a. Calvin’s response is to remind us that the opposite of faithis not doubt, it’s indifference.

b. Concern over our standing before God, even fear thatwe won’t be one of the elect, is a sign of the convictingwork of the Spirit in our lives.

c. In short, if you’re worried about this, you’re o.k.

I. The purpose of the doctrine of election

1. As I mentioned above, there are a couple of ways to

understand Calvin’s doctrine of election

a. The first is to locate it within his understanding ofGod’s sovereignty. Found here, it basically is a wayof saying that God is bigger than us, God is in control,and we’re never going to be able to understand the workingsof God’s glory. There is no denying that Calvin frequentlyused just such language.

b. The second way, however, is the one I choose: To tie itto his doctrine of justification. Doing so looks like this:

(1) Our natural response to our sin is to try to earnGod’s forgiveness with our works.

(2) Down that path lies only failure and fear, however, because we can never know ifour finite attempts to earn God’s favor will eversatisfy an infinite God.

(a) This, according to Luther and Calvin,was exactly what the Roman Catholic

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doctrine of salvation did to people.(3) God responds to this situation by a sheer act

of grace, becoming human in Jesus Christ anddying to bring about our reconciliation with God.

(4) Because, salvation is God’s business, and God’s business alone.

(5) This is so much the case that nothing–not

even human freedom–can thwart God’s intention to save us.

(6) This leads to his idea of an effectual call, inwhich God essentially works in and throughour will to bring us to saving faith.

(7) This, he thought at least, required a doctrine ofelection if it’s going to make sense.

(8) Thus, Calvin was willing to live with theproblematic idea of election because he sawit as the only way to insist that salvation issomething God does for us, not that we do for ourselves.

(a) As in Providence, it’s important to seethe pastoral concerns that drove this.Calvin wanted people not to be fearfulfor their salvation. He thought–probablyrightly– that the Catholic understandingof salvation did this.

V. Faith

A. Calvin’s doctrine of justification was, as we’ve seen, quite similar to Luther’s.

B. However, he introduced an element into his definition of faith that I think is quite helpful.

C. For Luther, faith was primarily an encounter and a response.

In the preached Word we encounter the claims of Christ upon our lives,

and are required to respond. This response Luther calls faith.

D. The focus of this encounter is on its subject: us.

E. For Calvin, however, the focus of the encounter of faith should always

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be on its object: Christ.

G. Thus, to the question of whether we should doubt our salvation,Calvin would invariably answer no, because to do so would beto doubt the one who saves us.

H. This extends as well to his understanding of the sacraments,especially baptism.

1. The reason we baptize infants is because the grace of baptismdepends on the one who commanded us to baptize in his name,not on the understanding of those who receive the sacrament.

2. Helmut Thielecke’s analogy of the woman who touched the hemof Jesus’ garment: was she healed because of the completenessof her faith in or understanding of Jesus? No. She was healedbecause of the grace of God in Christ. So it is with all of us.

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10.11.12.13.14.15. Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising the16. Church of England and churches which are historically tied to17. it or have similar beliefs, worship practices and church structures.

Session 12 - AnglicanismIntroduction: So far, we’ve talked about the Reformation in Germany (Luther) and Switzerland(Zwingli, the Anabaptists, Calvin). In each case, the political context was important; you just can’tunderstand these movements without knowing something about the political world into which theywere born. But when we turn to the Reformation in England the political dimension of things reallycomes into its own. Simply put, without the initiative of the government and certain political leaders,it’s doubtful whether the Reformation in England would ever have happened. Nonetheless theReformation there did bring about a substantial change in how the Christian faith was believed andpracticed in England, and we will now look at the process that made that happen.

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I. The background

A. England was a deeply conservative country religiously.

1. This doesn’t mean that they were unthinkingly faithful

and supportive of the papacy. In fact, there was a long history

of independence by the English church that frequently got it

into trouble with the popes.

3. There was no galvanizing religious leader, like Luther or Calvin,who could move both the political leaders and the people to reformthe English church.

4. There were leaders, both religious and secular, who were interestedin the reforms taking place in Germany and Switzerland, however.

5. The majority of the nobility, and especially the crown, were not infavor of reforming the practice, and especially the doctrine, of theCatholic church in England.

a. King Henry VIII wrote a defense of the traditional RomanCatholic doctrine of seven sacraments, in opposition to Luther.

II. The problem that started the ball rolling: Henry’s divorce.

A. Henry VIII, the English king, was married to Catherine of Aragon,a Spanish princess. When it became apparent that she would bearhim no sons (their only surviving child was their daughter Mary),Henry wanted to divorce her and marry his mistress, Anne Boyleyn.

B. Normally Kings and princes could obtain a divorce or an annulmentfrom the pope, but in this case Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor,was Catherine’s nephew. Afraid that Charles would invade Rome anddepose him if he granted Henry’s request, the pope (Clement VII) refused.

C. In searching for a way to get what he wanted, Henry decided that he wouldmake the church of England a national church, with the king (rather than thepope) as its supreme head.

D. Thus began a roller coaster ride through the rules of 4 kings and queens thatsaw the English Reformation veer this way and that, until it finally evenedout and became the Anglicanism today. Which just Split into Anglican and New Wine.

III. 2 kings, 2 queens, and a lot of trouble

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A. Henry VIII: 1529-1547

1. When the pope wouldn’t grant his divorce, Henry responded by

having himself declared the supreme Head of the church in England,

in essence replacing the pope.

2. Originally Henry’s reforms were mild, with the exception of dissolvingall the monasteries and appropriating their property to the crown.Other than that, he essentially intended for the church in England tocontinue in doctrine, worship, and order as it always had.

3. Nonetheless reform was in the air, and many of the bishops, nobles,and university teachers wanted to take up many of the reforms thathad already been going on in Europe.

a. One example of this was that a copy of the Bible,translated into English, was placed in every parishso the church-folk could read it for themselves.

b. Another important development for reform was thenaming of Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop ofCanterbury. Cranmer had strong reform sentiments.

4. Toward the end of Henry’s reign the church conservativesgot the upper hand, and many of the reforms that had begun were rolled back.

B. Edward VI: 1547-1553

1. Edward, Henry’s son, was nine years old when he became king,

and never became king in anything other than name.

2. Instead England was ruled by a regency council dominated by Protestants.

3. During Edwards reign a number of changes were made,

most of them from the Protestant side.

a. Images–artistic representations of the members ofthe Trinity or the saints–were outlawed. This wasin keeping with the stricter versions of Swiss Protestantism,many of whose leaders exercised influence on Protestants in England.

b. First in 1549, and then in 1552 Cranmer introduced theBook of Common Prayer, a guide to both private and public worship.The 1552 edition leaned much further in the Protestant

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direction than did the first.c. These reforms, because they felt sudden and one-sided,

alienated much of the population, and contributed to thebacklash that followed Edward’s death in 1553.

C. Mary I: 1553-1558

1. Mary was Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon. Like her

mother she was intensely Catholic, and tried to return the country

to its Catholic past. However, various obstacles stood in her way:

a. Political developments on the Continent deprived herof the support of Rome she should have been able to expect.

b. Changes in church life instituted by Protestant leaders,including those that allowed priests to marry and thatappropriated church property and money for the crown, proved hardto undo.

c. A determined Protestant opposition went underground,preparing for the day when it could reassert itself, andseeking by various means to thwart Mary’s Catholic restoration.Cranmer was tried for heresy and, in a dramatic scene, diedgiving testimony to his Protestant faith.

3. Mary died in 1558 without an heir, which meant that Henry’s other,Protestant daughter Elizabeth would take the throne

D. Elizabeth I: 1558-1603

1. Although a Protestant, Elizabeth moved quickly to establish

a more conciliatory tone toward Catholics than had previous Protestant rulers.

a. She had herself named “Supreme Governor” of the church,which placated thought that a woman couldn’t be “head” of the church, and others who thought that no one butChrist should be seen as the church’s head.

b. She had a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer drawn up,one that was theologically more like Protestantism, but liturgicallysimilar to the old Catholic ways of worshiping.

c. She subscribed to the 39 Articles, a list of theologicalpropositions that was basically Protestant, yet tried tosteer away from the hardest Protestant positions (on things

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like the Eucharist, the use of images, and the like).3. In all, Elizabeth’s policy was to chart a Via Media, a middle way

between radical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.a. The result was that most of those sympathetic to Catholicism

returned to the Anglican fold, albeit determined to give nofurther ground to the radical Protestants.

b. The radical Protestants, however, were never satisfied withElizabeth’s compromises, and they continued to be a thornin her side throughout the rest of her reign. Afterward theyemerged as the Puritans, of whom I assume you’ve heardsomething before.

IV. The Theological pillars of Anglicanism

A. The first thing to note is that, unlike any of the Protestant movementswe’ve seen so far, Anglicanism had no central founding theologicalfigure or figures. Thus, it was left in many ways to chart its own course,always dealing with the twin influences of Roman Catholic tradition and radical Protestant reform.

B. This is the reason why the central pillar of Anglicanism is a book:The Book of Common Prayer. Throughout its founding and eversince, the BCP has been the glue that holds the tradition together.For this reason Anglicans love and hate it, and invariably haveargued and fought any time it’s been revised.

1. You can still find plenty of Episcopalians who think thatthe 1979 revision of the BCP is garbage, and cling to the1928 version, for example.

2. As mentioned above, the theology of the BCP is broadly Protestant,while retaining much of the feel of Catholic worship.

3. Its great strength has always been the power and beauty of its language.4. Listen to this section of the prayer of confession:

“Almighty and most merciful Father,

we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,

we have followed too much the devices and desires of our

own hearts,

we have offended against thy holy laws,

we have left undone those things which we ought to

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have done,

and we have done those things which we ought not to

have done.

But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,

spare thou those who confess their faults,

restore thou those who are penitent,

according to thy promises declared unto mankind

in Christ Jesus our Lord;

and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,

that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,

to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

C. The Thirty-Nine Articles

1. While the other Protestant groups of the time were

developing detailed and lengthy confessions of faith, the

Anglican Church has the Thirty-Nine Articles, a much

briefer statement of faith.

3. Never intended to be a broad statement of doctrine, thearticles address (in no particular order) certain theologicalquestions that were being debated in Anglicanism’s tumultuous early years.

4. For this reason, the Thirty-Nine Articles don’t function asa definitive guide to Anglican Theological belief.

D. The Episcopacy

1. Anglicanism maintains a belief in apostolic succession,

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insisting that each of its bishops can trace his or her line of succession

back to one of the apostles.

4. Thus the bishops of Anglicanism are not only superintendentsand overseers, but also symbols of thechurch’s unity through both space and time.

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Session 13 - The Catholic ReformationIntroduction: The final sixteenth-century movement for reform we’ll look at is the one that took placewithin Catholicism itself. By the end of the century two facts were obvious: First, that two branchesof Christianity, antagonistic to one another, would be a fixture of the European landscape for theforeseeable future. And second, that Roman Catholicism would emerge from the refiner’s fire of itscompetition with Protestantism stronger, more focused, and more militant than it had been in centuries.

I. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit order.

A. As we’ve said before, the Protestants weren’t the only ones who

knew that the Roman Catholic Church was in trouble, and in need

of significant change. The first half of the 16th century saw many committed sons

and daughters of the Catholic Church who were dedicated to reforming it from within,

rather than breaking away as the Protestants had. No better example of this

kind of Catholic reformer can be found that Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the

Society of Jesus, a.k.a. the Jesuits.

C. Roughly a contemporary of Luther, Ignatius was born of a noble in 1491 in Castile,a region of Spain.

D. Trained as a soldier, he was grievously wounded in battle as a young man,requiring of him a long period of convalescence in 1521. While doing so, heread various books on the spiritual life, and heard God’s call to lay aside hisprevious life in order to dedicate himself to Mary and the saving of souls.

E. Much like St. Francis before him, dedicated himself to this mission in a smallChurch, hanging up there his dagger and taking on the garb of a beggar.He traveled to the Holy Land supporting himself with alms.After about a year he returned to Europe to study theology to prepare himfor the mission to which he’d been called, eventually winding up at theUniversity of Paris.In 1535 he and a group of 6 followers committed themselves to form a newmissionary religious order, calling themselves the society of Jesus.In 1540 their order was recognized by the pope.

F. From its beginnings the Jesuits were an elite order, requiring rigorous

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and lengthy period of study and preparation (9 years!) before a personcould become an official member of the order.

G. They emphasized mission work to convert non-Christians to the faith, playinga large role in the conversion of the indigenous populations of theSpanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World.

H. They also distinguished themselves as teachers, founding universitiesin Europe and especially in the New World.

I. In addition to the common three-fold monastic vow of poverty, celibacy,and obedience to one’s superiors in the monastic life, the Jesuits addedobedience to the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. This made themespecially important in the papacy’s attempt to combat the message of theProtestant movement.

J. Ignatius wrote a guide to the Christian life, intended for membersof his order but of value to other Roman Catholics, called the Spiritual Exercises.

1. These were spiritual disciplines intended to focus the Christianheart on God alone, structured around the sayings of Christ.

2. In a later appendix entitled “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” Ignatius proposes a series of ways to conform one’s understandingof the gospel and the Christian life to that of the Church.

K. The result of Ignatius’ ministry was two-fold:

1. First, he provided Roman Catholicism with the image of a

spiritually renewed, vigorous, and mission-minded organization

of loyal followers of the Church. To the Protestant claims that Roman

Catholicism had lost all validity due to the spiritual and moral failures

of its leadership, he presented a dedicated, holy, and accountable

organization of ardent believers.

3. Second, he provided a theologically sophisticated and learnedleadership dedicated to service of the Church, and the papacy.The Jesuit Order was a gift that the Roman Catholic Church sorelyneeded as it set about to define its belief and practice in competitionwith Protestantism.

II. The Council of Trent

A. What you have to realize about Roman Catholicism is that, prior to the

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Reformation, much of its theology was not official.1. Of course the major doctrines of the Trinity and the Two natures

of Christ were established in the fourth and fifth centuries, respectively.2. Other church councils had pronounced on specific issues

of theological controversy in their own day as well.3. However, a thorough, explicit enumeration of Roman Catholic

doctrine on things such as justification and the sacraments had never happened.4. Thus, the Protestant Reformation pushed the Roman Catholic

Church to confront a host of ill-defined and open questions aboutwhat it actually believed.

5. This took place at one of the most important gatherings in thehistory of Roman Catholicism: The Council of Trent.

B. Politics:

1. One of the answers that people had

proposed back in the 14th century to the mess that the church was in

was the regular meeting of ecumenical (or world-wide) church councils.

a. The popes always resisted this, because they feared itwould limit papal power.

5. However, as the Protestant Reformation spread, voices from aroundthe Catholic Church continued to call for a council, in order to answerthe Protestant’s indictment of Catholic theology, and to address themoral decay that everyone in the church recognized as one of its mostserious problems.

6. The point came when the popes could avoid a council no longer,recognizing that if they didn’t call it someone else (Like the HolyRoman Emperor Charles V) would call it instead.

7. Thus, from 1545 to 1563, meeting in three separate sessionswith breaks of several years in between, the council gatheredto decide on a wide variety of matters related to the beliefs andpractices of the Roman Catholic Church

C. Decisions regarding Roman Catholic Belief

1. It’s easy to summarize here by saying that on no point of

major doctrine did the council accept any theological position

that was intended to conciliate the Protestants. Again and again

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the council reaffirmed, focused, and strengthened distinctly

Roman Catholic positions:

a. On justification by faith, they reiterated, in a detailed and nuanced theological statement, the Roman Catholicunderstanding that salvation comes by a cooperationof divine grace and human works of love and mercy.

b. Scripture: For the first time the council explained fullythe relationship between Scripture and church tradition,stating that, while tradition is not a source of Catholicteaching of equal weight to Scripture, it does supplementScripture and thus should be considered authoritative.

(1) On the canon of Scripture, reaffirmed the full equalityof the books known by Protestants as the Apocrypha.

c. The Eucharist: Reaffirmed the medieval Catholic idea thatwhen the Mass is celebrated, because the real body andblood of Christ are present Christ once again offers himselfin sacrifice for human sin. They also denied the attempt toinclude communion in both kinds for the laity.

d. Reaffirmed all seven sacraments: baptism, Eucharist,confirmation, penance, ordination, marriage, last rites.

(1) Insisted that, like baptism, ordination imbues onits recipient an indelible character, rendering theordained a separate class of Christians.

D. Decisions Regarding Roman Catholic Practice

1. Here there was more give and take. Many of the practices and

abuses to which the Protestants had objected were either changed,

reigned in, or abandoned.

a. Indulgences were not banned, but the circumstancesunder which they could be offered were restricted,with the result that they gradually die out over time.

b. Clerical celibacy was reaffirmed, but greater oversightand stiffer penalties were instituted.

c. The practice of buying and selling benefices–the financialsupport one received by being named pastor of a specificparish–was outlawed.

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Additional Thoughts:

A. Some men have wrongly called the Protestant Reformation a Protestant

revolution because much of the Reformation was political and economic.

Men forget that because the Roman Church controlled everything, it was

necessary for the Reformation to include political and economic elements.

If Protestants were to survive, they had to have political and economic power

to hold off Rome. Also, it was common for a prince and his whole province to

turn Protestant. Later, even kings and whole countries embraced the Protestant

faith. Providence forced the Reformers to participate in politics and economics.

While some secular rulers used the Reformation for their own greed, many

more threw in their lot with the Reformers from a deep religious conviction

of serving the one true God through Christ.

"For the Reformation was neither a revolution nor a restoration, though including

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elements of both. It was negative and destructive towards error, positive and

constructive towards truth; it was conservative as well as pro-gressive; it built

up new institutions in the place of those which it pulled down; and for this reason

and to this extent it has succeeded" (Schaff). 

"There are two leading aspects in which the Reformation, viewed as a whole, may

be regarded; the one more external and negative, and the other more intrinsic and

positive. In the first aspect it was a great revolt against the see of Rome, and

against the authority of the church and of churchmen in religious matters,

combined with an assertion of the exclusive authority of the Bible, and of the

right of all men to examine and interpret it for themselves. In the second and

more important and positive aspect, the Reformation was the proclamation

and inculcation, upon the alleged authority of Scripture, of certain views in

regard to the substance of Christianity or the way of salvation, and in regard

to the organization and ordinances of the Christian church" (William Cunningham,

The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation).

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Session 14 - Results of the ReformationIntroduction: As we pass out of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth and beyond, we’ll look atthe religious world to which the Reformation gave birth. Some of these are positive, some negative,but all are necessary to understand what it means to be a child of the Reformation, and subsequentlyof the Protestant movement.

I. Religious Wars and the Enlightenment

A. We’ve said all along that the Reformation was as much a political event

as a religious one. This fact is no more evident than in the religious warfare

to which it gave rise.

B. One fact about the Reformation that we’ve neglected to mention is theprinciple of “whose region, his religion.”

1. You’ll remember that, with the sole exception of the Anabaptists,every religious group in Europe wanted to continue the old Constantinianmodel of the relation of church and state.

2. This meant that your religious identity was not something you,or even your family, chose.

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3. It was chosen for you by the political authority under which you lived.Whether that was an emperor, a prince, or a town council, they decidedthe religion of their territory (“whose region, his religion”).Thus, if your prince were Lutheran, you couldn’t choose to be reformed,Anglican, Catholic, or (especially) Anabaptist.

4. These religious choices were often made more for political than spiritual reasons.If you were the prince of a small territory and your larger neighbor nextdoor were Lutheran, then if you chose to remain Catholic you were justinviting him to invade you.

5. Thus, religion became a political football. More to the point, religiousdisagreements were used to justify political disagreements, often to thepoint of going to war over them.

C. Whenever religion did become involved in political arguments like this, it wasused to absolutize your position. When you say you are fighting for God, then thereis no need to seek compromise, because religious commitments are about whatmatters ultimately.

D. This led to the mother of all European religious wars, the Thirty Years War,from 1618-1648. Although religion wasn’t the real reason these folks fought,one side was Catholic and the other Protestant, and hence the fighting took onreligious undertones.

1. It was a horrible war, depleting the population and resources of Western Europe.When it was all over, it led to a collective soul searching across the continent.

2. One conclusion people reached was that religion was a lousy foundationon which to base social and political policy, because people could claimthat the same religion justified diametrically opposite policies, and theywould use those religious beliefs as the justification for killing people withwhom they disagreed.

3. This soul searching and questioning of religion contributed strongly to thenew movement coming along called the Enlightenment.

4. The Enlightenment stated that reason, a universal human capacity, shouldfunction as the basis for social and political judgments, not religion. Becauseof the religious wars this argument won the day.

5. The result has been that religion no longer is seen by most people inWestern culture as a valid justification for engaging in warfare.6. Implications of this fact for Christianity and Islam in the modern world.

II. Protestant Scholasticism

A. The problem of the founders vs. the followers

1. Founders: brilliant, dynamic, able to keep competing ideas in their heads

at the same time; “both-and” thinkers.

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11. Followers: Not as brilliant, more static and settled in their thinking, ableto focus only on part of the synthesis the founders were able to achieve; “either-or” thinkers.

a. BTW, we’re among the followers.

3. This problem played itself out thoroughly and completely in the life of

Lutherans and Reformed Christians in the 17th century.

a. Among the Lutherans:

(1) Manifested itself primarily in an over-emphasis on

Luther’s teaching on justification by faith, not works.

(2) Maintained Luther’s aversion to any suggestion thatsalvation could come by works

(3) Incapable, however, of holding on at the same timeto Luther’s insistence that acts of love and servicewere the natural expression of one’s gratitude to Godfor the gift of saving faith.

(4) Thus, their whole spirituality lay in two places:

(a) Denying any role to good works.

(b) Making certain that people understood how this

works--in other words, teaching the theology without

is grounding in religious experience here.

i) The difference between first-order religiousexperience and second-order theologicalreflection. The Lutheran Scholastics forgotthis distinction.

b. Among the Reformed.

(1) Remember that Calvin’s vision of the grandeur of

God’s sovereignty was tempered by his insistence that

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our belief in the manifestations of that sovereignty--especially

Providence and election--we’re intended to comfort us, to

assure us that we were God’s children, and thus that we

needed worry neither about our temporal safety nor our

eternal security.

(2) Yet Calvin’s followers focused solely on God’ssovereignty, using it as a club to frighten thosewho didn’t agree with them.

(3) Providence was used to demonstrate thatthose who suffered in this life did so becausethey were under God’s judgment.

(4) Election was used to point out to everyonebesides themselves that we’re in the club, and you’re not.

(5) As with the Lutheran scholastics, these folksforgot that theology is intended to bring sometimescontrasting and distinct ideas together.

(a) Calvin (following Augustine), spokeof the divine sovereignty seen in electionas working in and through the human will.In the effectual call, God speaks to us in sucha way that we will respond.

(b) The 17th-century Calvinists spoke ofGod’s grace as irresistible. Note thatyou only try to resist that which youdon’t want--implying that the call overpowersour reluctant will. These are not the primaryterms Calvin used.

12. Note that in both cases the scholastics were not contradictingwhat the founders had said. They could easily find justificationin the works of Luther and Calvin for what they believed.

13. Nonetheless, they were not including everything the founders said.In their selective emphasis, they were In a very real way betrayingthe theology they sought to preserve.

B. Reaction and counter-reaction: Arminius and Dort

1. Calvinism was a supremely theological tradition. The good side

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of this is that it continues to generate new theological thinking.

The downside is that all this innovation and rethinking leads inevitably

to controversy, with those who don’t like the new ideas loudly rejecting them.

2. Such was the case with Jacob Arminius, Dutch Calvinist theologianwho’s pried with the framework created by Calvin, while at the sametime taking Calvinist theology in a new direction.

3. Essentially, Arminius wanted to maintain Calvin’s insistence onthe primacy of grace and the divine initiative in salvation, whileat the same time making more room for human response.

4. Thus, to summarize his theology:

a. Like Calvin and Luther, he believed that All humans

are lost in sin, and that it is outside their power to contribute

to their own salvation by their own efforts.

b. Like Calvin, he believed in election, but in a modified form:

(1) Election is conditional on human faith; if a person

comes to faith, only then is God’s decree of election made operative.

(3) Especially in later years, when Arminius talked aboutelection he focused more on the how(election in Christ) than in the who(election of individuals). Most modern-dayPresbyterians, when they talk about election at all,speak of it in these terms.

d. The Atonement is for all, but applies only to those whohave come to faith.

e. Like Calvin, he believed that only those guided by theHoly Spirit are able to respond to God.Prevenient grace overcomes the effects of the bondage of the will,making it possible to respond to God’s offer of salvation freely.This was Wesley’s position as well (later on), although it’s not clear thathe got it from Arminius.

f. This means that grace is resistible; because of prevenient grace, it is possible to say no to God’s offer of salvation in Christ.

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g. Finally, it is also possible to fall from grace.

5. The Reformed Scholastic response: The Synod of Dort.

a. After Arminius’s death, his followers offered a series

of objections to the prevailing Calvinist theology of the day.

b. This was in turn answered by a meeting of Dutch Calvinistsat the city of Dortrecht, or Dort, in 1618-19.

c. They utterly rejected Arminianism and put forward adefinition of Calvinism that has had enormous influence,even down to today. It’s known by the Acronym TULIP.

(1) Total Depravity: Humans can do no good apart from God.

(2) Unconditional Election: God chooses who will

receive the effectual call with no reference to foreknowledge

of their response, and not conditioned by their coming to faith.

(3) Limited Atonement: The Atonement took place only

for the elect, not for all.(4) Irresistible Grace: Those whom God calls must submit;

God overpowers their will in bringing them to salvation.(5) Perseverance of the Saints: “Once saved, always saved.”(6) Those who seem to fall away from grace were

never in grace to start with.(a) And yes, this is where some Southern Baptist

friends get this. The fascinating thing is that,up to recently, they’ve rejected the other four points.

d. The consequences of Dort

III. Pietism

A. As you can see, 17th and 18th-century Protestantism didn’t offermany options for what we would call a deep and rich life of the Spirit.

1. Protestant Scholasticism focused almost entirely on rightbelief: making certain that you understood just what aProtestant was supposed to understand.

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2. The Enlightenment likewise was a rationalist intellectualmovement, focusing almost entirely on the life of the mind.

3. Thus, a vacuum existed for a more authentic and heart-felt spirituality.

4. This is what happened in the movement known as Pietism.

a. The Pietists rejected the Scholastics’ theological hair splitting,

insisting that it was the commitment of your heart, not the knowledge

of your head, that made you a Christian.

They didn’t denigrate knowledge, but they wanted toplace it in service of genuine devotion.

Their focus was on feelings, on an encounter with Godin one’s emotions. If you didn’t feel that your heart hadbeen touched (“strangely warmed”?) By God, then youshould seek a deeper, closer experience of God.

5. Important Pietist figures:

a. Philip Jacob Spener: Lutheran pastor and theologian, leading light

of the movement.

c. Count Zinzendorf, who donated the land upon which theMoravian community was built.

6. Pietism

I. THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION

A. It is impossible to understand modern history apart from the Reformation.

We cannot understand the history of Europe, England or America without

studying the Reformation. For example, in America there would never have

been Pilgrim Fathers if there had not first been a Protestant Reformation.

B. The Reformation has profoundly affected the modern view of politics and law.

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Prior to the Reformation the Church governed politics; she controlled emperors

and kings and governed the law of lands.

C. The meaning of much western literature is really quite meaningless apart from

an understanding of the Reformation. Moreover, for all practical purposes Martin

Luther stabilized the German language.

D. In the realm of science, it is generally granted by modern historians that there

never would have been modern science were it not for the Reformation. All

scientific investigation and endeavor prior to that had been controlled by the church.

Only through sheer ignorance of history do many modern scientists believe that

Protestantism, the true evangelical faith, opposes true science.

E. The Reformation laid down once and for all the right and obligation of the

individual conscience, and the right to follow the dictates of that individual

conscience. Many men who talk lightly and glibly about "liberty" neither know

nor realize that they owe their liberty to this event.

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Charts

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THE FOLLOWING LIST is based on extensive surveys with scholars belonging to several groups: a professional society of church historians; the Christian History Institute; and the editorial advisory board of Christian History magazine. It should be remembered, however, that such lists are never exhaustive and they reflect the particular interests of those who write them—in this case, church historians from North America and Western Europe. And many dates, especially from the early centuries of the church, are approximate.

We hope the list provides an enlightening overview of the fascinating history of the church and sparks further discussion and study.

—The Editors of Christian History

THE AGE OF JESUS AND THE APOSTLES30: Crucifixion of Jesus; Pentecost

35: Stephen martyred; Paul converted

46: Paul begins missionary journeys

48: Council of Jerusalem

57: Paul’s Letter to the Romans

64: Fire of Rome; Nero launches persecutions

65: Peter and Paul executed

THE AGE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY70: Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus

110: Ignatius of Antioch martyred

150: Justin Martyr dedicates his First Apology

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155: Polycarp martyred

172: Montanist movement begins

180: Irenaeus writes Against Heresies

196: Tertullian begins writing

215: Origen begins writing

230: Earliest known public churches built

248: Cyprian elected bishop of Carthage

250: Decius orders empire-wide persecution

270: Anthony takes up life of solitude

303: “Great Persecution” begins under Diocletian

THE AGE OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE312: Conversion of Constantine

312: Donatist Schism begins

313: “Edict of Milan”

323: Eusebius completes Ecclesiastical History

325: First Council of Nicea

341: Ulphilas, translator of Gothic Bible, becomes bishop

358: Basil the Great founds monastic community

367: Athanasius’s letter defines New Testament canon

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381: Christianity made state religion of Roman Empire

381: First Council of Constantinople

386: Augustine converts to Christianity

390: Ambrose defies emperor

398: Chrysostom consecrated bishop of Constantinople

405: Jerome completes the Vulgate

410: Rome sacked by Visigoths

431: Council of Ephesus

432: Patrick begins mission to Ireland

440: Leo the Great consecrated bishop of Rome

445: Valentinian’s Edict strengthens primacy of Rome

451: Council of Chalcedon

500: Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite writes

524: Boethius completes Consolation of Philosophy

529: Justin publishes his legal Code

540: Benedict writes his monastic Rule

563: Columba establishes mission community on Iona

THE CHRISTIAN MIDDLE AGES590: Gregory the Great elected Pope

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597: Ethelbert of Kent converted

622: Muhammad’s hegira: birth of Islam

663: Synod of Whitby

698: Lindisfarne Gospels

716: Boniface begins mission to the Germans

726: Controversy over icons begins in Eastern church

731: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History published

732: Battle of Tours

750: Donation of Constantine written about this time

754: Pepin III’s donation helps found papal states

781: Alcuin becomes royal adviser to Charles

787: 2nd Council of Nicea settles icon controversy

800: Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor

843: Treaty of Verdun divides Carolingian Empire

861: East-West conflict over Photius begins

862: Cyril and Methodius begin mission to Slavs

909: Monastery at Cluny founded

988: Christianization of “Russia”

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1054: East-West Split

1077: Emperor submits to Pope over investiture

1093: Anselm becomes archbishop of Canterbury

1095: First Crusade launched by Council of Clermont

1115: Bernard founds monastery at Clairvaux

1122: Concordat of Worms ends investiture controversy

1141: Hildegard of Bingen begins writing

1150: Universities of Paris and Oxford founded

1173: Waldensian movement begins

1208: Francis of Assisi renounces wealth

1215: Magna Carta

1215: Innocent III assembles Fourth Lateran Council

1220: Dominican Order established

1232: Gregory IX appoints first “inquisitors”

1272: Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae

1302: Unam Sanctam proclaims papal supremacy

1309: Papacy begins “Babylonian” exile in Avignon

1321: Dante completes Divine Comedy

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1370: Catherine of Siena begins her Letters

1373: Julian of Norwich receives her revelations

1378: Great Papal Schism begins

1380: Wyclif supervises English Bible translation

1414: Council of Constance begins

1413: Hus burned at stake

1418: Thomas á Kempis writes The Imitation of Christ

1431: Joan of Arc burned at stake

1453: Constantinople falls; end of Eastern Roman Empire

1456: Gutenberg produces first printed Bible

1479: Establishment of Spanish Inquisition

1488: First complete Hebrew Old Testament

1497: Savonarola excommunicated

1506: Work begins on new St. Peter’s in Rome

1512: Michelangelo completes Sistine Chapel frescoes

1516: Erasmus publishes Greek New Testament

THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION1517: Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses

1518: Ulrich Zwingli comes to Zurich

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1521: Diet of Worms

1524: The Peasants’ Revolt erupts

1525: Tyndale’s New Testament published

1525: Anabaptist movement begins

1527: Schleitheim Confession of Faith

1529: Colloquy of Marburg

1530: Augsburg Confession

1534: Act of Supremacy; Henry VIII heads Eng. church

1536: Calvin publishes first edition of Institutes

1536: Menno Simons baptized as Anabaptist

1540: Loyola gains approval for Society of Jesus

1545: Council of Trent begins

1549: Book of Common Prayer released

1549: Xavier begins mission to Japan

1555: Peace of Augsburg

1555: Latimer and Ridley burned at stake

1559: John Knox makes final return to Scotland

1563: First text of Thirty-Nine Articles issued

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1563: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs published

1565: Teresa of Avila writes The Way of Perfection

1572: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

1577: Formula of Concord

1582: Ricci and Ruggieri begin mission in China

1589: Moscow becomes independent patriarchate

1598: Edict of Nantes (revoked 1685)

1609: Smyth baptizes self and first Baptists

1611: King James Version of Bible published

1618: Synod of Dort begins

1618: Thirty Years’ War begins

1620: Mayflower Compact drafted

1633: Galileo forced to recant his theories

1636: Harvard College founded

1636: Roger Williams founds Providence, R.I.

1647: George Fox begins to preach

1646: Westminster Confession drafted

1648: Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years’ War

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THE AGE OF REASON AND REVIVAL1649: Cambridge Platform

1653: Cromwell named Lord Protector

1654: Pascal has definitive conversion experience

1667: Milton’s Paradise Lost

1668: Rembrandt paints Return of the Prodigal Son

1675: Spencer’s Pia Desideria advances Pietism

1678: Bunyan writes the Pilgrim’s Progress

1682: Penn founds Pennsylvania

1687: Newton publishes Principia Mathematica

1689: Toleration Act in England

1707: Bach publishes first work

1707: Watts publishes Hymns and Spiritual Songs

1729: Jonathan Edwards becomes pastor at Northampton

1732: First Moravian missionaries

1735: George Whitefield converted

1738: John and Charles Wesley’s evangelical conversions

1740: Great Awakening peaks

1742: First production of Handel’s Messiah

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1759: Voltaire’s Candide

1771: Francis Asbury sent to America

1773: Jesuits suppressed (until 1814)

1779: Newton and Cowper publish Olney Hymns

1780: Robert Raikes begins his Sunday school

1781: Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason

THE AGE OF PROGRESS1789: French Revolution begins

1789: Bill of Rights

1793: William Carey sails for India

1793: Festival of Reason (de-Christianization of France)

1799: Schleiermacher publishes Lectures on Religion

1801: Concordat between Napoleon and Pius VII

1804: British and Foreign Bible Society formed

1806: Samuel Mills leads Haystack Prayer Meeting

1807: Wilberforce leads abolition of slave trade

1810: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

1811: Campbells begin Restoration Movement

1812: Adoniram Judson begins mission trip

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1816: Richard Allen elected bishop of new AME church

1817: Elizabeth Fry organizes relief in Newgate Prison

1819: Channing issues Unitarian Christianity

1827: J. N. Darby founds the Plymouth Brethren

1833: John Keble’s sermon launches Oxford Movement

1834: Mueller opens Scriptural Knowledge Institute

1835: Finney’s Lectures on Revivals

1840: Livingstone sails for Africa

1844: First Adventist churches formed

1844: Kierkegaard writes Philosophical Fragments

1845: John Henry Newman becomes Roman Catholic

1845: Phoebe Palmer writes The Way of Holiness

1848: Marx publishes Communist Manifesto

1851: Harriet Beecher Stowe releases Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1854: Immaculate Conception made dogma

1854: Spurgeon becomes pastor of New Park St. Church

1855: D. L. Moody converted

1857: Prayer Meeting Revival begins in New York

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1859: Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species

1859: Japan reopens to foreign missionaries

1860: U.S. Civil War begins

1864: Syllabus of Errors issued by Pope Pius IX

1865: J. Hudson Taylor founds China Inland Mission

1870: First Vatican Council declares papal infallibility

1878: William and Catherine Booth found Salvation Army

1879: Frances Willard becomes president of WCTU

1880: Abraham Kuyper starts Free University

1885: Berlin Congress spurs African independent churches

1885: Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis

1886: Student Volunteer Movement begins

1895: Freud publishes first work on psychoanalysis

1896: Billy Sunday begins leading revivals

1901: Speaking in tongues at Parham’s Bible School

1906: Azusa Street revival

1906: Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus

1908: Federal Council of Churches forms

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1910: International Missionary Conference begins

1910: The Fundamentals begin to be published

1912: Social Creed of the Churches adopted

THE AGE OF IDEOLOGIES1914: World War I begins

1919: Karl Barth writes Commentary on Romans

1924: First Christian radio broadcasts

1931: C. S. Lewis comes to faith in Christ

1934: Barmen Declaration

1934: Wycliffe Bible Translators founded

1938: Kristallnacht accelerates Holocaust

1939: World War II begins

1940: First Christian TV broadcasts

1941: Bultmann calls for demythologization

1941: Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man

1942: National Association of Evangelicals forms

1945: Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

1947: Dead Sea Scrolls discovered

1948: World Council of Churches organized

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1949: Los Angeles Crusade catapults Billy Graham

1950: Missionaries forced to leave China

1950: Assumption of Mary made dogma

1950: Mother Teresa founds Missionaries of Charity

1951: Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison

1960: Bennett resigns; charismatic renewal advances

1962: Vatican II opens

1963: King leads March on Washington

1966: Chinese Cultural Revolution

1968: Medellin Conference advances liberation theology

1974: Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

1979: John Paul II’s first visit to Poland

1985: Gorbachev General Secretary of Soviet Communist Party

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