Are there any beliefs value dying for? Is salvation a present or a reward? How authoritative is the Bible, and are there different authorities we should always heed? These are urgent questions with important implications. They’re additionally the questions that sat on the coronary heart of the Protestant Reformation over 5 hundred years in the past.
We reside in an setting that’s each dissimilar and just like the Reformation interval. On one hand, individuals in sixteenth-century Europe lived in an ethical world whose tradition grasped the character of sin and the ideas of proper and mistaken. Our world at this time is as an alternative a psychological one, typically lowering morality to subjective judgment and denying notions of ethical absolutes.
However, the Reformation dawned at a time when the tradition was largely godless. Christianity was buried beneath layers of ignorance, superstition, immorality, and biblical illiteracy. The parallels between the non secular local weather of that point and at this time aren’t laborious to attract. Because of this, the Reformation’s results nonetheless reverberate in our world at this time.
The Historic Background to the Reformation
Earlier than we are saying something about Reformation theology, we have to perceive one thing of medieval Roman Catholicism. The Reformation didn’t seem in a vacuum however fairly was a response to sure features of this method.
Whereas Protestants and Roman Catholics at this time share a typical basis in Christian fundamentals—the Apostles’ Creed, the Trinity, the incarnation, and so on.—important variations stay. The Reformation uncovered these variations, drawing a theological line within the sand between biblical Christianity and a few features of medieval religiosity.
A Fracturing Framework
By the early 1500s, revolution was within the air of Europe over quite a few key points. These are just some of them.
First was the matter of authority. For Rome, authority lay with the pope. He was considered Christ’s vicar on earth. He, along with the bishops he appointed, had been those who established what was and what was to not be within the Church.
Subsequent there was disagreement over the supply of salvation. The Mom Church alone distributed saving grace via the sacraments. There was no salvation doable (in order that they taught) aside from the Church. Regenerating grace was via baptism, and sanctifying grace got here via the Mass: the weekly, unbloody sacrifice of atonement for sins.
Together with that got here the intrusion of extrabiblical dogma. For instance, fairly than going on to God via Jesus for confession and repentance, believers had been taught to admit their sins to clergymen as nicely. However neither the confessor nor the priest might say for sure that anybody might be righteous sufficient to realize full pardon for sin—therefore the need of a doctrine of purgatory. Women and men, the Church taught, would have a second likelihood to purge themselves of their sins after demise and earlier than coming into heaven.
One Priest’s Discovery
It was inside this context that Martin Luther, a medieval Catholic monk, started to level out the dissonance between what he learn within the Bible and what the Church taught. He was religious in fasting, depriving himself of fabric consolation for days at a time. Involved he may miss confessing any sin, he would confess for hours on finish.
Fulfilling his responsibility as a priest, he declared forgiveness as women and men confessed their sins. However at the back of his thoughts was the query: Would the sinner belief God’s promise? Forgiveness, Luther noticed, wasn’t tied to the depth of the confessor’s contrition however to the reliability of God’s phrase.
As he contemplated this stuff, Luther typically returned to Romans 1:16–17:
I’m not ashamed of the gospel, for it’s the energy of God for salvation to everybody who believes, to the Jew first and in addition to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from religion for religion, as it’s written, “The righteous shall reside by religion.”
The verse scared him, Luther mentioned. It made him indignant with God. Inside the framework of medieval Catholicism, the Gospel was not all the time perceived as excellent news however fairly as a threatening message—God driving sinners away in His righteousness and wrath. However then the dam of understanding broke, and Luther found from Romans 1 a paradigm-shifting fact. He describes the expertise:
Eventually, by the mercy of God, meditating day and evening, I gave heed to the context of the phrases, particularly, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it’s written, ‘He who via religion is righteous shall reside.’” There I started to grasp that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a present of God, particularly, by religion. And that is the that means: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, particularly, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by religion, as it’s written, “He who via religion is righteous shall reside.” Right here I felt that I used to be altogether born once more and had entered paradise itself via open gates.
Luther’s discovery lit the match for the restoration of the biblical Gospel, igniting in sixteenth-century Germany and shortly spreading like wildfire throughout the globe.
The Theology of the Reformation
On the Reformation’s coronary heart was a central query: How can sinful women and men be made proper with God? The Gospel had been overlaid with centuries of artifical improvements: a pope, a purgatory, a confessional, a shrine, and so forth. By the point Luther got here on the scene, it was turning into more and more troublesome for the typical individual to hint his means again to a Galilean carpenter and the eleven males who adopted Him.
However as males like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli—amongst many others—recovered a way of the Bible’s centrality, the excellent news as soon as once more sprang forth. Strange women and men rediscovered the easy Gospel: the revelation by God the Father, redemption in God the Son, regeneration by God the Spirit, and justification by grace via religion.
We’d summarize the Reformation’s enduring results in two statements. First, the Reformation clarified humanity’s want of being put proper with God. Every of us has an unalterable previous, sin marring every side of our lives earlier than God saves us. Solely in Christ do we discover all we have to be reconciled to God. What we lack Christ provides us. Our sin is imputed to Christ. The judgment we deserve is borne in and by Christ.
Second, the Reformation recovered a theology of justification by religion alone. Reasonably than God infusing righteousness into us all through our Christian lives, the Bible teaches that God declares us righteous the second we belief in His Son. Consequently, there may be nothing we are able to do to alter our justification. When God declares us righteous, His declaration is ultimate. Salvation is dependent upon what Christ has completed for sinners. Coming to Him ,we carry nothing, we give nothing, and we pay nothing. We merely obtain the reward (Rom. 6:23).
The discoveries of the Reformation interval remind us that our salvation is all of grace and all in Christ. The Reformation recovered timeless truths of everlasting significance. If in case you have not but trusted in Jesus for salvation from sin, maybe you’d pray one thing like this to God proper now:
Lord, thank You for the love that drew the plan of salvation. Thank You for the grace that introduced it all the way down to us within the individual of Jesus. Thank You for Your Holy Spirit, who reveals us our want for a Savior. I quit my makes an attempt at self-righteousness. I want You to forgive me and make me new. Meet me at this time. In Christ’s title I pray. Amen.
This text was tailored from the sermon “Historic Theology” by Alistair Begg.
