Let me tell you a story.
A story of the Protestant Reformation.
It may sound to you as something that is history, that is dry and dusty.
It's the stuff of midterms.
But the Reformation is the foundation of the modern world.
It is the foundation of fundamentalism.
The authority of Scripture alone.
Salvation by faith alone.
The independence and authority of the local church.
The priesthood of the believer.
Our direct approach to God through Christ alone.
The Bible in one's native tongue.
The importance of mass education and of mass literacy.
The significance of the individual and a personal relationship to God.
All of these wonderful ideas.
All from the New Testament.
Yet all of them were lost for centuries.
Recovered in the Protestant Reformation.
A movement that is foundational to our faith and to the foundation of the United
States.
Foundational to Western civilization.
A protest that saw its day as deformed and through much trial and bloodshed reformed
to the purity of the New Testament.
The fountain from which all Americans have drunk, but most know only sound bites.
We know images of 95 theses, of a Wittenberg door, a diet of worms,
a place that's fostered Luther and Calvin.
And so let me tell you the story of the Reformation and the story of our roots as
Americans and our roots as Protestants.
First, why was there ever a need in the 15th century for a reform?
Why was there a need for a protest?
We need to know the context of the times.
By the year 1500, Europe was undergoing convulsions because Europe was awakening.
The ancient feudal system was breaking down.
The feudal system was that of man's birth into a set social assignment of landowners
or the set social assignment of the cast of those who served them, lords and serfs.
There was no movement.
There was no change.
You were what you were born.
But what had been accepted since the barbarian invasions now was seen with
discontent, and the reason was threefold.
A new world had been discovered in 1492, freedom to attain position, to attain
wealth, were now possibilities that were a boat ride away for venturesome men.
Literacy, number two, was becoming advantageous as a German named Gutenberg
was making books available to any who could read.
The universities were beginning to flourish, and now education was another
means to freedom.
It was a ticket upward.
And in society, the middle class had arisen, not merely that of landowners and
servants, but that of tradesmen, of businessmen, of craftsmen.
Wealth, position, and comfort were now possibilities for more than just the
entitled.
Social change, social freedom, vertical movement in society were now a
real possibility.
Dreams before were now realities.
The result was that the three established major foundations of the Middle Ages,
culture, religion, and politics, felt the tremors of a medieval world's
awakening.
First, the culture was shaking.
It was the time of the Renaissance.
The rebirth or the return to the ancient classic culture of Greece and Rome,
beginning in 1350, there was a change in the way that Europeans viewed the world as
real.
Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael sought to sculpt and to paint man not as a symbol of
man, but true to the form God gave them, true to nature, that depicted by the
Greeks, man in his glory, because the Greek world had begun arriving from the
east.
And when the Turks seized Constantinople in 1453, Greek scholars fled to the west,
bringing their Greek art, Greek language, Greek manuscripts, and Greek philosophy
with its Aristotelian, Platonic emphases on the place of human reason and of human
life before death.
Life was now worth living and enjoying.
A reform was beginning at the cultural level spawned by the Renaissance.
And religion was shaken.
As with the Greek language came Greek New Testament manuscripts that predated the
Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible.
The Catholic Latin Vulgate Bible could now be compared for its trustworthiness of
translation to New Testament Greek manuscripts.
The Vulgate was discovered to be misleading, and Catholic leadership was
brought into question.
But the Renaissance went deeper than the discovery or rediscovery of Greek
manuscripts.
Humanism had arisen, a new word for the time.
Humanism was the idea that humans were the controlling force of life, that they were
free to direct life.
But the authority of human reason and the centrality of man, both ideas of the
Renaissance, were contrary to Christianity, where faith superseded
reason and God overruled man.
So should the church turn away, it would turn away from the Renaissance in
full swing and be hopelessly out of step with what was becoming European culture.
Should it embrace these ideas, Christian beliefs could become tainted.
The church faced a decision.
The church embraced the Renaissance.
Its message would be compromised.
Aristotle would be studied more than the Apostle Paul.
Opulence and art would be taught more than holiness.
And the political atmosphere gave a sense of reform.
The church had become the dominant political influence for 1,000 years.
When Rome fell to the barbarians in the fourth century, it was the church that
held Roman society together and became the civilizing force of Europe.
And it became Europe's most powerful force by its seeming control of salvation.
The church declared seven church sacraments or sacred moments as the means
of salvation as they accumulated merit, shortening, it was said, the Christian's
time in purgatory where they must be punished for sins insufficiently repented
of in life.
Baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, penance, communion,
last rites, all of these could only be ministered by the Catholic priesthood.
Thus, the church had gained a control of men's souls and thus of men's countries.
From the womb to the tomb, the church controlled salvation.
And should a country resist the Pope's edicts, the Pope would issue an interdict,
refusing communion and the Lord's table to that country, thus supposedly confining it
to hell.
And there was also the rise of the Holy Roman Empire.
As the church established itself as the political authority of Europe in its
recognition of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 A.D.
as the divinely sanctioned Roman Emperor and the Roman Empire lived again.
The church had an enforcer, but the church became entangled in politics as it imposed
its rule on the almost 400 feudal principalities of Germany, the dynastic
Spanish family of the Habsburgs.
By the 15th century, controlled Spain, Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany,
Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the new world across the sea.
But the Habsburgs interfered in Germanic politics and the papacy bled Germany in
taxes and they bled them in tithes.
Germany found itself politically subordinated to the Italian church.
Resentful and seeking relief and ready to challenge.
But the Muslims had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and were
threatening Christian Europe who needed Germany's military support.
Thus Germany's princes had to be treated with leniency, making it easier for a
future protest, hypothetically, to gain root.
And those in authority, the church's leadership, had become decadent,
covetous, irresponsible.
The papacy had become a vast money-making machine.
The current authors, Chaucer, Dante, Erasmus, had made the pope and priest
objects of humor, of satire and scorn.
Anyone who has ever read the Canterbury Tales, the priest tale, has seen that
humor.
Men had arisen within the church to protest.
Savonarola, an Italian priest who was hung.
John Wycliffe, an Italian priest whose bones were burned and cast into the River
Swift in England.
John Hus, a Bohemian priest who was burned at the stake.
Peter Waldo, a Swiss who led a protest called the Waldensians, who successfully
split from Catholicism.
These men were called the morning stars of the Reformation and they blazed a trail
that another priest from Germany would follow and fulfill.
For all of these reasons, an independent culture, politics abused, religion and
church decadence, the church had greatly fallen in the eyes of Europe.
The common man was embarrassed at the church.
Europe was crying for reform.
It just did not know from whence it would come and it did not know who would have
the power not to be burned at the stake.
And none were prepared for how it would come.
It came from no plan, nor program, nor organized movement.
Reform came from one singular German, born for his time in history, one who
cared nothing for reform, one who simply got mad and got all German.
Saxony is a northern province in Germany.
It is quiet and it's rustic.
It's comprised of farmers and tin miners, far removed from the intellectual and
cultural furor of the Renaissance and the moral decadence of Rome.
But near to the hotbed of theological disputation, Jan Hus of Bohemia was a
priest who was burned at the stake as a heretic in the early 1400s because he
denounced the corruption of Rome, calling for church councils to make
decisions and for popes to be held accountable to the law of God.
The Reformation would begin 100 years after him and echo many of Hus's ideas.
Hus, whose name in German means goose, said as he was led to the stake,
you are going to burn a goose, but in a century you will have a swan you
can neither roast nor boil.
One century later, in 1483, in a quiet village of Eisleben, Germany, a boy was
born to an ambitious tin miner named John Luther.
His son's name was Martin, who showed great musical and intellectual talent.
His father, like all fathers, hoped better things for his son, that he might work
with his head instead of his back.
And so John Luther planned for him to become a lawyer.
Martin attended Latin school in Mansfield, law school in Erfurt, walking the miles
home on weekends.
But the boy was also of an acute and sensitive conscience.
He was very aware of his sinfulness and aware of the failure of the prevailing
Catholic system of salvation, of earning and meriting salvation, that it did not
work for him.
It gave him no peace.
And he carried a deep mortal terror of the wrath of God.
In 1505, the 18-year-old law student was overtaken by a thunderstorm on his walk
home from college.
A friend of his had died from a lightning strike.
And amidst the storm, he feared the same fate, and he cried out to the patron saint
of miners, Saint Anne, protect me, and I will become a monk.
He lived.
And he kept his vow, and he quit law school.
And he enraged his father.
He entered the Augustinian order, and he began a study of the Gospels and
worked even harder to rid his soul of sin by his own religious fastidiousness.
He was ordained in 1506 as a priest.
He tortured his body with fastings and became thin and anemic.
He spent long hours in confession, constantly remembering more and more sin
he was guilty of.
He pored over the writings of the church fathers, seeking some comfort from
anywhere by his soul could rest.
Performing his first mass, he trembled so at the holding of the communion bread that
he could not continue.
His mentor at Erfurt was called his confessor.
His name was John Staupitz.
An older man, he admonished his young charge with the simple truth, Martin,
God is good.
In 1512, as a change of scenery for his troubled soul, Luther was assigned as part
of the faculty of a new German university at Wittenberg.
When a man begins to lose his mind, he simply was made a college professor.
He was to teach the book of Psalms and he was to teach the Apostle Paul's letters,
in which case he decided he would need to read them.
Luther's great dilemma was the righteousness of God.
God's holy nature and perfect requirement of man.
The righteousness that God's righteousness requires God to require.
No matter how Luther disciplined himself, searched himself, willed himself,
he was cleaning, he said, a room of dust.
The more he labored, the worse it became.
The more sin he confessed, the more he thought of.
God to him was a harsh, unreasonable deity, requiring of him what no man could
live up to.
Love God, Luther later wrote, I hated him.
But in his studies of the book of Romans, he began to reflect on one verse.
One verse that was enigmatic to him.
Romans 1.16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, because in it the righteousness of
God is revealed from faith to faith, meaning from faith alone.
The righteousness of God revealed from faith.
Luther could not comprehend how the righteousness of God that could not be
achieved or measured to, could nonetheless be revealed to men.
That they might procure it by faith.
As he continued to read and reflect, the Bible's simple message of the gospel,
laying virtually hidden for centuries under a system of works, now became clear.
The righteousness of God was not to be earned or achieved.
It was to be accepted by man from God as a gift by faith.
Man was declared righteous.
Righteousness was imputed or bestowed.
Amen.
Now the righteousness of God went, Luther said, from his greatest horror to
his greatest joy.
It was, he wrote, as though the gates of paradise were opened.
In the attic of study, Luther had unearthed a priceless antique lost to the
world.
Indeed, as John Staupitz said, Martin, God is good.
A reformation had come to one man's heart, a German monk, a university professor in
rustic northern Germany.
And on the Wittenberg campus, Professor Luther soon became a celebrity.
In the Wittenberg chapel, it had to be moved to a church near the university
because students and townspeople crowded to hear revolutionary ideas against the
controlling institutional Christianity of the Catholic Church and of the sufficiency
of the Bible alone and of salvation through faith alone.
They actually heard a man teach not the church fathers nor Aquinas.
They heard a man read and explain the Bible.
Luther became a lightning rod of dissent.
Luther wanted only the Catholic Church to reform, not to lead a movement of protest.
Things came to a head in 1517 on All Saints' Eve, Halloween.
Pope Leo began raising money to restore St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.
To do so, he sold a second church bishop position, a bishopric, to a German prince
named Albert for 10,000 ducats.
Do you know how much a ducat is?
I have no idea.
But Albert borrowed the money from the Fuger family, and to pay off the loan,
Pope Leo sanctioned the selling of indulgences.
Now, an indulgence was the sinner paying money to the church as an act of penance
to remove his time in purgatory, both for himself and for his loved ones.
The ditty went, when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.
And to sell the indulgences, Pope Leo commissioned a German monk named John
Tetzel to sell city to city.
Half the sales would pay Albert's loan, half would go to the Pope.
It was a no-risk means of raising money.
All that was needed was guilt and the superstition that the Pope could forgive
sins for the payment of ducats.
Tetzel came to Wittenberg and began to sell salvation, and Luther was enraged.
He saw men committing sin with temerity because they possess the writ of an
indulgence.
And in response, he wrote one of the most important documents in the history of man.
It was called the 95 Theses, subtitled Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of
Indulgences.
95 particular protests against the theological notion of paying for
salvation.
Luther nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg, inviting anyone to debate him.
Like Popeye, he had all he could stands, and he couldn't stands no more.
His theses said that indulgences are the net by which the church fishes for the
rich.
Each of the 95 points attacked every facet of indulgences.
Luther only intended to spark local debate for relief from what he saw as a harmful
error.
Nailing them to the door was an accepted way of communication, but more than Luther
had problems with harvesting the wealth of Germany by Catholicism.
His theses were printed in nearby Nuremberg and distributed through northern
Germany.
Had the church heeded the dissonance of public opinion that came and backed off,
there theoretically would have been no reformation.
But the church in Rome stiffened because papal authority had been challenged.
The foundation of all that is Catholic is papal authority.
A theological local dispute would become a showdown between countries.
Between Italy, the Pope, and Germany.
And then a rift in the Catholic ecclesiastic dominance or hegemony.
The world would never be the same.
The conflict may have begun over indulgences but went quickly beyond to the
question of authority.
To the church, indulgences were valid simply because the Pope said they were.
That settled it.
The monk from Wittenberg must simply recant and the matter is finished.
But Luther now challenged the deeper idea to indulgences, that of papal authority.
Truth was not subject to the Pope.
The Pope was subject to the truth.
Church authority was found only in Scripture.
Simple to us but revolutionary in the early 1500s.
When the papal edict three years later was delivered to Luther, ordering his
recantation, Luther ceremoniously and openly cast it into an open fire in a
place that in Wittenberg today is called Luther's Oak.
The gauntlet was cast.
The challenge of John Huss was rekindled from a hundred years previous.
Huss's voice was silenced by execution.
Luther's would not prove so easy because Martin Luther had that which no opponent
of the Pope had ever had.
He had the political backing of his prince, Frederick of Saxony.
Luther also had the advantage of a newly invented thing called the printing press
and ideas could now spread like wildfire to a growingly literate society.
Luther was ordered in 1520 to explain himself in Rome to a council of cardinals
knowing the fate of Huss also promised safe passage.
Luther did not appear.
Shortly after, Luther wrote two incendiary pamphlets.
One was called an open letter to the Christian nobility of the German nation.
It was politically aimed as an arrow urging the princes of the German nation to
reject the authority of the church in Rome.
How is it, wrote Luther, that we Germans must put up with such extortion and
robbery of our property at the hands of the Pope?
German nobility frustrated themselves with Rome rallied to Luther.
The playing field was dividing.
His next pamphlet divided it even more.
It was called the Babylonian captivity of the church and he claimed that the church
had been hijacked by the Italian mob.
By presenting the idea of the seven sacraments as essential to salvation and
the church's leadership having sole control of those sacraments, the church
had therefore commandeered the church from Jesus Christ.
An imperial council was called at Worms in Germany to resolve what was becoming a
tension in the Catholic empire.
The emperor Charles V presided, himself a devoted Catholic.
Luther, after days of debate, was called to recant his writings.
His still famous words rent human history.
Unless I am convinced by scripture in plain reason, I do not accept the
authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other.
My conscience is captive to the word of God.
I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither
right nor safe.
Here I stand.
I can do no other.
God help me.
Amen.
And upon this confession, he was excommunicated.
None were to harbor him on penalty of death.
But as Luther went back toward Wittenberg, his company was suddenly surrounded by
what appeared as mounted bandits.
They took him and rode away, away to Wartburg Castle in Saxony, under the
protection of Frederick the Prince, who had ordered the kidnapping himself and
who kept Luther safe in his castle for months.
And during this period, Martin Luther produced perhaps his greatest contribution
to a growing movement, the translation of the Latin Bible into German.
Not only did Germany receive the truth of its own language, but Luther invented
German.
The German dialect at the time was filled with regional dialects.
Over 200 dialects comprised German.
One German city might not know what another German city was saying.
It was Luther's translation that gave Germany a common tongue.
Remember that the printing press was a German invention and Germans were the most
literate nation on the face of the earth.
And now all Germans had the Bible in a common tongue.
All could read it for themselves that there were not seven sacraments,
but only two commanded events, baptism and the Lord's supper.
There was no mention of a pope.
There was no mention of purgatory.
There was no mention of saints or relics or the veneration of Mary.
But Luther had no plans for a sweeping reform, only a protest of erroneous
doctrines.
The, quote, Lutheran church that split off in northern Germany looked much like
Catholicism, except for these doctrines.
The congregation received the wine as well as the bread.
There was no priest, only a pastor who now could marry.
The wine and the bread were not elevated to undergo transubstantiation and
magically become the body and blood of Christ.
The service focused not on communion, but on the explanation of the scripture,
which was in native German, not Latin.
All the congregation sang and all the congregation sang hymns put to common
melodies.
The most famous hymn of the day, written by Luther himself, a mighty
fortress is our God.
And each Christian was regarded as a saint and each Christian was regarded as a
priest.
The Catholic priesthood was abolished.
Luther took numbers of nuns and brought about their marriage to numbers of
priests.
One nun he could not get married, Katie von Bora, so he married her himself.
Mary was no longer mentioned, but most of all, salvation was not gained on
installments by obedience to seven church rituals, but was bestowed by God
declaratively, judicially, imputed as a gift to those declared righteous through
faith alone, sola fide, in the work of Jesus Christ.
Sanctification would be judged not by religious duties, but by purity and by
love.
And the Pope was not recognized, nor the bestowance of authority to the
priest.
The Lutheran belief was pinned in doctrinal form in 1530 at Augsburg.
It was called the Augsburg Confession, the first Protestant confession of faith.
The German princes who followed Luther and turned against Rome saw what was coming.
Catholicism would not yield its territories and its taxes willfully.
And so German princes organized in what was called the Schmalkaldic League and
readied for war with Italy.
The rent in Europe had come.
War loomed on the horizon.
The Turks were threatening the empire in the East, and by the time Charles V had
dealt with them, Lutheranism was established.
The Catholic monopoly of power was broken.
The cat was out of the bag.
Luther died in 1545 to the delight of Rome, who called him the wild boar loosed
in the vineyard of the Lord.
But three pillars had been re-established in Protestantism.
Three pillars had been recovered from ancient Christianity.
The authority of the Bible alone.
No longer was there a teaching magisterium to control what interpretation was to be,
but the Bible was open to all and to their own private interpretation and
enlightenment.
Salvation was now free, no longer merited by works, no longer provided by the church
and the priesthood.
Salvation was a solitary act of God procured through faith alone in Jesus
Christ.
And the individual saint was a priest who could himself read, himself pray directly
to God, confess directly to God without the mediation of a priest, and who could
have a personal relationship with God in his word.
Amen.
But at the same time, to the north, in Switzerland, in Zurich, another
Catholic priest was dealing with God.
It was a priest who had contracted the bubonic plague and lived.
A priest who through it sought God and read his Bible and became converted.
His name was Ulrich Zwingli.
He too denied the authority of the Pope, the transubstantiation of the elements,
and any church ordinance other than baptism and communion.
Zwingli began in his church an unheard of event.
He began teaching his congregation Matthew verse by verse, the exposition of Bible.
In Switzerland, the governing political authority was the canton, or the
independent city.
Zurich, now being Protestant, was attacked by the Catholic cantons.
Zwingli volunteered as an army chaplain.
Catholics and Protestants went to battle in Switzerland.
Zwingli was killed, but from his split came what was called the radical
reformation.
What made it radical?
Because the Bible was now being read by all and by many.
Many felt that the changes that the reformation was bringing had to go deeper
than merely theology.
They had to become more radical, not merely in a purification of doctrine,
but in the governing of the local church, its relationship to the state.
From the fourth century on, the church was joined to the state.
It remained the same with Luther and Lutheranism, with Zwingli, and later with
Calvin, and in England with the Puritans and the Pilgrims.
Religious freedom and church-state separation were years away, but its first
stirrings were with the radical reformers of Zurich, Switzerland.
Those who took the reformation a step further.
First, infant baptism was not recognized, as the New Testament did not speak of it.
Infants could not be saved by parents' faith.
Baptism was only for the singular person able to choose for themselves,
and thus they were called the Anabaptists or the Rebaptizers.
The Baptists refused the title as they did not acknowledge the first baptism as
worthy.
They simply were called Baptists.
They rejected a state church because the New Testament did not acknowledge a state
church, and thus began the concept of church-state separation.
But with no church-state relationship, it was criticized that now the state would
have, without infant baptism, would have non-Christian citizens.
And the state would suffer at the hands of the terror of teenagers.
Because with no compulsory infant baptism, there would now be unchurched,
unconverted, ungovernable people in the country.
The idea of citizens that were not under the authority of the church was unheard of
since the fourth century A.D.
Anabaptists were seen as dangerous and subversive to proper government,
and thus were persecuted by Catholics and persecuted by Lutherans.
As a scorning of their view of adult baptism, Baptists were bound and cast into
rivers and lakes to be drowned.
The man who arose as the leader of the Baptist movement was a former priest named
Minnow Simons.
His followers were Mennonites.
Their church government, as in the New Testament, was at the local church level
alone, with no hierarchy of bishops.
Many Baptists settled in the more tolerant Holland, and their church governmental
ideas became adopted by the incoming Puritans seeking freedom from England.
Many who would become Baptists and bring their ideas to the emerging colonies of
America, where a church-state separation would flourish.
Many Baptists lived communally.
They were pacifistic, the Amish, the Mennonites.
Luther served as the Reformation's point man.
Zwingli and the Baptists were its innovators.
But the Reformation's first theologian, thinker, author, educator emerged in a
Frenchman.
His name was John Calvin, a student studying law in Paris whose education was
paid for by the Catholic Church.
Sided with the rising Lutheran ideas in Paris and fled the country for
Switzerland.
While there in Switzerland, in Strasbourg, John Calvin published The Institutes of
the Christian Religion at the ancient age of 23.
The most impacting Christian work in history, attempting to re-educate the
newly-questioning European mind, it was published when Calvin was only a
young man.
Updated numbers of times and still today is the classic definitive work of
theological explanation of Reformation doctrine.
Where Luther's theology focused on justification by faith, Calvin's theology
focused on what lay behind it, the glory of God as seen in God's
sovereign purposes for all events.
Ideas that had lay smoldering and forgotten in Augustine's theology now took
center stage once again in Calvin's Institutes, soon simply known as
Calvinism.
What were they?
The total depravity of man in his mental darkness and spiritual bondage and
alienation from God.
God's sovereign choice of whomever he predestined unto salvation.
A salvation to be secure, unable to be lost, inseparable from a conversion that
would ensure the perseverance of the saints.
Those who came after Calvin held to limited atonement that Christ only died
for the elect.
You can't get that from Calvin's Institutes.
He wasn't sure.
His followers put it in concrete.
But limited atonement took its place.
Irresistible grace that would succeed in bringing the salvation of all of the
elect.
T-U-L-I-P.
Tulip.
Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace,
and the perseverance of the saints.
A great belief for Holland.
Tulip.
He did in Geneva what Catholicism had attempted from Rome.
In Geneva, John Calvin created a theocracy, a society ruled by the
Protestant Church.
Ruled not by the Pope, but by Scripture through a reformed church government.
Calvin erected a Christian spiritual Israel in Geneva, Switzerland.
But unlike Lutheranism, the reformed church of Geneva would in no way resemble
Catholicism.
The people of Geneva, however, grew weary of Calvin's stringency and
demanded that he leave.
But short years later, as Geneva began to quake under immorality, Calvin was
received back gladly.
He taught Sundays and every day at noon until the end of his life.
Enjoying every Sunday his one leisure in life, he bowled.
The theocracy of Geneva became a model and an inspiration to England and Scotland.
Longing to emulate what was called the most perfect school of Christ since the
apostles, men came from all the countries around Switzerland to study with Calvin.
But Calvin required them to leave after two years and to carry the truth outward
that Europe could be inundated by going back to the Bible.
After his death, a dissenting movement was founded by one Jacob Arminius,
a university professor in Leiden, Holland.
What came to be known as Arminianism was influenced more by what seemed reasonable
than by Scripture.
Arminianism countered Calvinism and a denial of predestination based on God's
free choice.
They said predestination was based on God's foresight of whom he knew would
freely believe.
Arminianism held to a denial of the loss of free will through the fall.
They felt that man was still free to take Christ for himself.
It also brought a questioning of the security of the believer as to whether one
could lose salvation by a free renunciation of the gospel.
And there was a denial of irresistible grace.
With Calvin, salvation was a solitary, monergistic act of God.
With Arminius, salvation was a cooperative act of God and the free will of man.
Protestantism, without the authoritative control of a church hierarchy,
was beginning to fragment.
Arminianism continues today, far more representative of Protestantism than
Calvinism.
Did y'all know that?
But still, Geneva influenced history to come.
Its chief influence was on a group of exiles coming from England, fleeing from a
Catholic queen dubbed Bloody Mary.
These Marian exiles, they would call, would learn from Calvin, return to England
under Queen Elizabeth, become known as Puritans, and produce perhaps the greatest
Christian body of preachers, thinkers, authors in the history of the church.
They would spread into Scotland under John Knox and then to a place across the
Atlantic called Massachusetts under a fellow named William Bradford and a place
called New England.
England had gone through a different sort of reformation, beginning with the
political system and moving downward to the church instead of the church to the
political system.
Henry VIII had so resisted the reformation that he was awarded by the Pope the title
Defender of the Faith.
Until the time that Henry, unable to conceive a male child through his Spanish
Catholic wife Catherine, sought for an annulment that he might marry a woman of
his court named Anne Boleyn.
When the Pope would not compromise with Henry, he simply split from Rome into his
own Anglican or English church, the king replacing the emperor,
the bishop of Canterbury replacing the Pope.
And so across the English Channel, 19 miles from Europe, a new branch of
Protestantism arose, the Church of England, Catholic in everything but the
Pope's authority.
So now there was Lutheranism, Anabaptist, Calvinist known as Reformed, Armenians and
Anglicans.
Europe was fragmented.
When Henry died, his sickly son Edward VI became king.
Edward was too young to rule on his own, but his regents who surrounded him moved
the government decidedly Calvinistic.
When Edward died at age 15, his half-sister Mary, who was the daughter of
Catherine, wife of Henry VIII that deposed her, Catherine of Spain, began to rule and
strove to bring England back to Catholicism.
Mary put to death over 300 English Puritans, inspiring a book known as Fox's
Book of Martyrs.
And she caused many what were called Marian exiles to flee to Calvin's Geneva.
When bloody Mary died, she was succeeded by Henry VIII's daughter by Anne Boleyn,
named Elizabeth I.
Queen Elizabeth steered a religious compromise between Calvinism and
Catholicism and it was called the Middle Way, the Via Media, or the Elizabethan
Settlement.
The Calvinists returned and the returning Calvinist exerted such an influence that
the doctrine of the Anglican Church began to change.
But Catholic practices, ceremonies, the dress of its preachers stayed in
place.
As Calvinists thought of purification of the church, a name came to identify them.
They were called Puritans.
Most irritating to them was Elizabeth's dogged maintaining the episcopacy,
the hierarchy of bishops over the local church.
The Puritans wanted nothing resembling Catholicism.
Some Puritans would refuse Elizabeth's Middle Way and leave the country.
They would leave over the Channel to the more tolerant Holland, from whence would
come a particular group from Leyden, named the Pilgrims, who would seek freedom
across the Atlantic, followed by thousands more who would settle about a place on the
Charles River named Boston, who would form the worldview of the most significant
country for the next four centuries, called the United States of America.
The Reformation in Scotland followed the same pattern, from politics to church,
political to religious.
Scottish political nobility embraced the Reformation, not so much because of truth,
but because it was a rallying point of rebellion against the hated English crown.
The leader of the movement was a student of John Calvin's from Geneva, a man he
discipled, who had served time as a galley slave on a French ship as punishment for
his views.
His name was John Knox.
His conflict with Queen Mary, Mary the Queen of Scots, escalated to open
rebellion and Mary fled the country.
Protestantism claimed the victory, rejected the episcopacy of bishops,
installed elder or Presbyterian rule of the church, the result was called
Presbyterianism, perched to the north above England's Calvinism.
Save for Ireland, Great Britain was now Protestant.
Denmark and Sweden became Lutheran.
The Netherlands became staunchly Calvinistic as it fought to gain its
independence from Catholic Spain.
France developed a strong Protestant following that was militarily crushed on a
pre-arranged day.
Had it not been for this one day, the greatest of all Reformation countries
would have been France.
But on one evening, 50,000 French Protestants called Huguenots were
slaughtered by the Catholic government.
France, Spain, Poland, Italy, Southern Germany remained Catholic.
Their Protestants fled into Switzerland, Northern Germany, Britain, Scotland,
Holland.
Europe was dividing, Protestant and Catholic.
What would follow?
What one might expect.
The Church of Rome would not easily give up her lands, her power, and certainly not
her taxes.
What followed was war, first in Germany as religious disputation became military.
Charles V marched into Germany and for nine years Catholics and Protestants waged
what were called the Religious Wars.
After nine years of war in 1555, the Peace of Augsburg brought a temporary
peace to Germany, stating, quote, he that has the region has the religion.
It was the first edict of religious coexistence of different varying views.
The idea of a state church or a national church was born, but Catholicism conducted
a counter reformation to win back what was lost.
Having lost much of its territory, Spain and Portugal explored and conquered
to the Far East, to India, to Africa, and the West to Canada, to Central and
South America, to Mexico, to a place in the West called Florida.
And they established Catholicism in its conquest.
There arose what was called the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, the followers
of Ignatius Loyola, a former Spanish soldier, who vowed fanatical devotion to
the Pope.
His followers, the Jesuits, arose as Catholic stormtroopers, going into newly
settled areas and establishing Catholic educational institutions.
The counter reformation's high point was the Council of Trent, where Catholic
wagons were circled.
Catholicism would have no theological change, nor would they have a compromise
with Protestantism.
There would be no give and take.
The Council of Trent met for 19 years, off and on.
Catholic doctrine was dogmatized in all of its territories.
The Peace of Augsburg was short-lived, as 1618 through 1648 produced possibly the
bloodiest war on European soil ever, the Thirty Years' War of Catholic and
Protestant.
Not Catholic armies and Protestant armies, but Catholic and Protestant armies seeking
to exterminate opposing beliefs.
The bloodiest war of its time.
One out of four European men died.
It began, the Thirty Years' War, in Catholic Bohemia, in Prague,
as a group of marching Catholics were pelted by on-looking Protestants.
Catholic officials were sent to warn them to relent, but an official was thrown from
a third-story window onto a pile of manure.
Catholic troops then violently suppressed the rebellion in Bohemia, and not only in
Bohemia, but in other lands where Protestant Bohemia had allies.
The Protestants of Denmark intervened in their defense, and then the Swedes invaded
Catholic Germany, and it was on for 30 years.
30 years later, it ended in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia, granting all
countries a begrudged religious freedom, but only to Catholics, Lutherans,
and the Reformed.
Nothing had been solved.
The peace came about because after 30 years, now the children of former dead men
were being killed.
Europe just wore out.
Within years, civil war erupted within the countries of newfound peace.
France and England saw religious civil wars, Protestant versus Protestant in
England, Frenchman versus Frenchman in France, and then the remaining theological
beliefs divided into not military wars, but academic wars in a period that has
been called Protestant scholasticism, where every doctrinal point was endlessly
debated, and the pulpits of the state churches became dry, harsh, academic,
argumentative, condemning, strident, and stringent on the side of its national
church against all other beliefs.
Pastors went to war in their pulpits.
The idea of a citizen not being a part of a national church from birth was still
unthinkable, be they Catholic or Protestant.
Total freedom seemed lawless, but once again, just as with medieval Catholicism,
in time Protestantism became something of a nominal national affiliation and
intellectual ascent.
Are you a Christian?
Yes, I was born in France.
Are you a Christian?
Yes, I am born in Prague.
Are you a Christian?
Yes, I was born in Glasgow, baptized a Presbyterian.
The Reformation was in need of spiritual reform.
There were many attempts to do so.
One of the reactions was the growth of rationalism.
Modern philosophy grew out of the Reformation.
With wars from disputation over Bible doctrine, the thought arose, why not avoid
the Bible altogether and find truth through human reason that any can agree
with?
Because all the Bible has brought us is wars, pillage, and murder.
René Descartes, a Frenchman.
Baruch Spinoza, a Jew.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German.
We're all mathematicians, not theologians.
And they approach truth in the same formulaic way as mathematics.
Rationalism, beginning with the most basic of ideas and progressing beyond them to
final truth.
I think, therefore, I am.
It led to empiricism or proof from experience that led to deism, which sought
to remove all supernatural ideas from the faith and reduce Christianity to its most
simple, non-combative elements.
At least people won't kill each other.
This would ultimately lead to the French Revolution as God was removed from
government and human reason was now enthroned in France.
The first secular revolution.
The bottom line is that Christianity was now seen as being worthless unless it
could agree with human reason or the growing now physical science.
Man had become the bar before which the Bible must answer to.
Reason had replaced faith.
Modern philosophy was born from the womb of the Reformation's disagreements,
ultimately consuming all it could not prove and finally consuming the
reliability of reason itself.
Another path to reform was the emergence of a series of religious positions which
gave importance to experience as well as to doctrinal purity.
Some called this the Second Reformation.
It is my personal favorite part of church history.
It was taking Protestantism into the realm of experience.
Two Germans, Jacob Spiner and August Frenk, reacted to the dry, argumentative
orthodoxy of the day with a spiritual longing for intimacy with God,
for biblical truth to work itself out in a personal relationship.
Revolutionary ideas arose for the day.
The conversion experience.
That you were not a Christian because you were born a Christian.
That you were a Christian because you were born again.
Personal quiet times.
Scripture memory.
Small group prayer and the unheard of home Bible studies.
Christian accountability to other Christians.
And another novel idea that anyone could witness to anyone else.
And out of that that you could witness to what were becoming known as mission
fields.
Carrying the gospel to the 17th and 18th centuries ever-widening, exploratory
world.
The movement was called pietism from a French word for duty.
What is a Christian's moral duty?
Orthodoxy at the level of experience.
Many feel the high point of the Reformation.
So much of the Reformation was spent in fighting.
It was finally a time for peace.
Perhaps the greatest proponent of pietism was Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf.
One undoubtedly known to all of you.
Ludwig von Zinzendorf opened his personal estate for Moravian German pietists
persecuted in their own region by fellow German Lutherans.
They found safety on his estate and the Moravians became another Reformation
denomination.
And then a young Englishman from across the channel visited them.
He was impressed with their discipline and missionary zeal.
He was a young Anglican preacher, an Oxford graduate named John Wesley.
He carried Moravian zeal back to England where he and his brother Charles and a
fellow Oxford convert, a former barkeep who wanted to be an actor, who just
thought he could not be a preacher because he was cross-eyed in his right eye,
whose name was George Whitfield, began preaching unheard of in the open air
of England, calling fellow Anglicans to a conversion experience that transcended
mere theological assent.
As Whitfield preached, ye must be born again, a woman asked him, why do you keep
saying you must be born again?
He said, because you must be born again.
Pietism exploded in what would become the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Pietism exploded in England under Wesley.
It was called Methodism.
In 1800 it became an American denomination and by the 1800s it became the largest
denomination in the United States, capitalizing on westward expansion.
Others frustrated with the spiritually dead national churches sought not the
coldness of rational philosophy nor the discipline of Pietism, but a new movement
that was called Inner Light.
Some called it Quietism.
It was receiving direct
revelatory communication with God apart from the Bible.
Well, the Reformation had gone too far.
It began with another frustrated German named Jacob Boehm who insisted that if one
had the Holy Spirit, no other means of knowledge was needed, not even a Bible.
One could graduate the Bible to a personal conversation with the deity.
His organization became organized.
It was around an Englishman named George Fox.
His persecuted group, known for their emotional outbursts, were known as
Quakers.
They left Europe and England for the safer shores of the New World behind the efforts
of one William Penn who secured a colony in America called Penn's Woods,
otherwise known as Pennsylvania.
An even more radical wing of the New Light were Shakers that were even greater
Quakers than Quakers were the Shakers.
This one was a cult.
It was organized by a woman who called herself Mother Anne Lee.
She felt she was the female incarnation of God.
They outlawed sex.
They outlawed marriage.
Hard to get a new members class in the Shakers.
But they made great furniture and jelly.
Thomas Jefferson said of them, they would have ruled the world if they
weren't just so strange.
But there were some of England and Europe who felt there was no place in their
native lands for an uncompromising biblical stance.
And so men like the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Baptists, Dutch Reformed,
Anglicans, and in Maryland, English Catholics, all left where they were for a
place called America.
America.
Some came for material gain, but many for the free expression apart from persecution
of their interpretation of the scriptures.
A private interpretation freed and open to them by the Protestant Reformation.
And as a quote, new order of the ages began, this country, America, granting
freedom of religion would attract every nationality of the old world.
The United States would become the last expression of the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther was born a man of the Middle Ages, but he died in the beginning of the
modern era.
An era that he would unknowingly help bring a forth.
How?
Number one, the Reformation gave substance to the idea of individualism.
As man's salvation was solely between God and the individual and personal faith,
the priesthood of all believers bespoke of the relationship that individual
Christians have with God through his word.
Modern man was an enterprise of individuality.
The Reformation began that.
And with individualism came capitalism.
As men's individual lives were not just to be spent doing penance or in merely
serving the state, but in knowing God's blessing here and now, material success
could come through working hard and money could be invested, not just given to the
church.
And following this, number three, was the Protestant work ethic.
As part of a believer's priesthood was serving God in the excellence of his
craft, in the excellence of a woman's home, wealth began to be seen as a sign of
God's blessing and reward of the excellence of labor, the Protestant work
ethic.
Fourthly, the national church was born as territories decided on religions.
And thus, number five, the modern nations became solidified by their religious
choice.
Spanish Spain, Spanish Portugal, Spanish Belgium, Dutch Reformed Holland,
Northern Lutheran Germany, Southern Catholic Germany.
Freedom of speech, religion, and the press, though not beginning immediately,
would be set in motion through the Reformation's recognition of the
individual's inalienable freedoms.
As Protestant theology became removed from Aristotle, so did science move from
Aristotle's theorems and speculation to scientific observation, thus the birth of
modern science.
Eighthly, the importance of schooling and literacy as all were felt they should read
and think and learn for themselves.
The Puritans had a law called the Old Deluder Satan Act that any town of 50 plus
had to have a school as the essence of satanic deception was illiteracy and
ignorance.
State free funded education, no longer would education be only for the elite,
but for all men to read, that all men could read the scriptures.
And tenthly, the rule of democracy, where the educated free individual had a
say in his governing.
The modern world was born from a monk's rebirth, but some things arose that were
not good.
Catholicism had maintained a control for a time over orthodox Christian thought.
Catholicism's corruption, failure, loss of confidence, and fracture brought
an end to influence.
With the gathering sense of freedom and individuality, there was no restriction of
human speculation.
The humanism of the Renaissance resurfaced in the Enlightenment and the birth of
secular philosophy.
With nothing to restrict it, the gremlin of human independence reproduced over and
over again, each generation becoming more alien and more alien to scripture,
then alien to morality, then alien to reason itself, and by the 20th century,
alien to the dignity of man.
In the end, the oppression by Catholicism was scarcely worse than the results of a
reason loosed and uninformed by scripture that would become even more barbaric by
the 20th century.
Religious oppression of Catholicism, unrestricted freedom of Protestantism,
which has been worse.
To abuse a child or to leave a child unsupervised, which is worse.
Medieval or modern, the Middle Ages checked the evil of Western man.
The Reformation helped loose it.
This would be the coming chapter in the history of man, unrestricted freedom.
But for one brief moment, one that continues wherever Christians are led by
scripture, for one brief moment of the Reformation, glory dwelt in the land.
And that is our heritage.