27 Oct 2022

(A)

The Reformation took place some 500+ years ago. That marked the breakaway of the ‘Protestant church’ from the ‘Roman Catholic church’: however, some of the major reasons that precipitated this ‘break’ and the various theological convictions behind this breakaway may be ‘diluted’ over the years.

Here is a modest attempt to ‘crystallise’ some of these significant ‘factors’ – not so much for historical understanding alone, but much more so for believers today to uphold what are important and significant theological points in understanding and outworking as individual believers and as a church.

On April 18 1521, Martin Luther, previously a Catholic monk, stood before Charles V, the ‘holy Roman emperor’ and defended his understanding of his beliefs, which differed significantly from that he upheld previously as a catholic monk – he was told to ‘recant’ and to renounce his errors.

The following is a record of what Luther said, “Since then your serene majesty and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned and toothed: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by 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 and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

With these words, Protestantism was born. Luther felt Scripture taught clearly were truths about human nature, the way of salvation, and the Christian life – truths that he was certain had been badly obscured, even obliterated, by the very church officials who should have been their most faithful defenders. The foundations of Protestantism were set set out for all to see – protestants would obey the Bible before all other authorities – and what they would find in the BIble was a message of salvation by grace.

Luther himself was never considered a model of Christian decorum; rather, he was a blunt and sometimes crude writer who was almost likely to embarrass his supporters and protectors as to edify them. Yet God used him: it was the vision of God that gripped him, and which he then communicated through sermons, tracts, and treatises, that made a mark on the history of Christianity.

Luther presented constantly the five staple themes: the authority of the biblical Word of God, the greatness of sin, the graciousness of Christ, the vitality of faith, and the spiritual nature of the church – it was here that he made his abiding contributions to theology, holding that ‘the Word’ under God, must reform the church. ‘

‘The Word’ is a key phrase used by Luther – it meant to him not just the Scriptures formally, but something wider – namely the message and content of the Scriptures, that is, the gospel concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the sum and substance of what God has to say to man.

It will do us good to again reflect of these themes and ensure that they are central in our understanding and outworking as individual believers and as the church.

(B)

John Calvin was another significant figure, perhaps the profoundest religious thinker that the Reformation produced. His theology however has been subjected to a great amount of misinterpretation.
Calvin was, in fact, the finest exegete, the greatest systematic theologian during the period of the Reformation. Bible-centred in his teaching, God-centred in his living, and Christ-centred in his faith, he integrated the confessional emphases of Reformation thought – by faith alone, by Scripture alone, by grace alone, by Christ alone, for God’s glory alone – with supreme clarity and strength.

Calvin was ruled by two convictions written on every regenerate heart and expressed in every act of real prayer and worship: God is all and man is nothing, and praise is due to God for everything good. Both convictions permeated his life, right up to his final direction that his tomb be unmarked and there be no speeches at his burial, lest he become the focus of praise instead of his God. Both convictions permeate his theology too.

Calvin was a biblical theologian- an echoer of the Word of God. Also, he was a systematic theologian – the final version of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), in which the consistent teaching of the sixty-six canonical books is topically spelled out, is a systematic masterpiece, one lhat has carved out a permanent niche for itself among the greatest Chrisian books.

Justification, said the Reformers, is by faith only, because Christ’s vicarious righteousness is the only ground of justification, and it is only by faith that we lay hold of Christ for His righteousness to become ours. Faith is a conscious acknowledgement of our own unrighteousness and ungodliness, and on that basis a looking to Christ as our righteousness, a clasping of him as the ring clasps the jewel (so Luther), a receiving of him as an empty vessel receives treasure (so Calvin), and a reverent, resolute reliance on the biblical promise of life through him for all who believe. Faith is our act, but not our work; it is an instrument of reception without being a means of merit; it is the work in us of the Holy Spirit, who both evokes it and through it ingrafts us into Christ in such a sense that we know at once the personal relationship of sinner to Saviour and disciple to Master, and with that the dynamic relationship; of resurrection life, communicated through the Spirit’s indwelling.

(C)

The shaping and pivotal figures of the Reformation were Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564). It is thus very helpful to crystallise their contributions for current believers to appreciate, preserve, and apply individually and together in the church.

Martin Luther broke the stronghold of fanciful biblical interpretation with his commitment to sola scriptura, which stressed not only the primacy of Scripture but also the historical sense of Scripture as the true and only sense that provides a sound framework for thinking Christianly about God and His world.

He, reclaiming the key aspects of the Augustinian tradition, also insisted that the Bible itself is its own best interpreter.
These commitments rested on the foundation of a complete trust in the Bible’s truthfulness and authority. Believing that the God of truth had spoken in Scripture, Luther likewise believed that humans must stand under the authority of the Bible. Scripture provided the framework for seeing all of life and for understanding all human thinking, because, for Luther, the Bible is the very Word of God itself.

Luther thought deeply about the relationship between faith and reason, demanding that the human intellect adjust itself to the teachings of the Holy Scripture. Reason can certainly be used to discern truth, and to explore intellectual pursuits, but it cannot be used to judge the truth value of Scripture. To him, all Christian thinking is to be brought in line with the BIble rather than the other way around.

John Calvin was the finest interpreter of Scripture and the most precise Christian thinker of the period of the Reformation. Even a rival like Jacob Ariminius (who propounded the teaching of ‘Arminianism’) claimed that Calvin’s work was incomparable, saying, “He stands above others, above most, indeed above all.” In 1536, at the age of twenty-six, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. The final edition, revised in 1559, was nearly three times the size of the original. Calvin stressed education, providing a catechetical system that has been carried all over the world. Calvin’s theology influenced large sectors of Europe, Old and New England. He wrote commentaries on almost every book of the BIble. Above all, Calvin appealed to the witness of the Holy Spirit as a guide for understanding both God’s natural and special revelation. Maintaining that the testimony of the Holy Spirit was more important than all reason, Calvin insisted that it was the inward testimony of the Spirit that connected a person’s heart and mind to the Word of God.

While certainly not rejecting the role of reason, Calvin believed that human minds were tainted by sin and the impact of the Fall. Thus, Calvin consistently appealed to the illumination of the Spirit above human judgement.

Luther, Calvin, along with Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), and other Reformation and Post-Reformation thinkers, contended that the Scripture must be believed, rightly interpreted, applied and experienced to truly and redemptively advance the Christian intellectual tradition.

We would realise that failure to believe and interpret Scripture accurately led to wrongful applications and experiences that ‘damaged’ the lives of believers and the advancement of the church – this goes on in the long history of the Church and it is still going on.

It is imperative that believers understand and appreciate clearly and accurately what God desires for His people and not allow the enemy to distort and contaminate the wholesomeness of the revelation of Scripture and the Holy Spirit. We thank God for the Christian leaders who had laboured and even ‘sacrificed’ their lives to translate, and preserve the BIble and the accurate teachings of the Scripture for God’s people in successive generations. Let us not allow their sacrificial contributions to go to waste, and fail to continue to uphold God’s teachings and revelation, not only for ourselves and the church today, but for succeeding generations, until the Lord Jesus comes again.

(D)

In this last sharing on this subject, it might be helpful to briefly outline the teachings of three individuals in church history who were branded as ‘heretics’, teaching heresy.

Heresy is a deliberate perversion, a ‘choice’, to break with the primary pattern of Christian truth and to promulgate a doctrine that undermines the gospel and destroys the unity of the Christian church. A church that cannot distinguish heresy from truth, or, even worse, a church that no longer thinks that it is worth doing, is a church that has lost its right to bear witness to the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ, who declared Himself to be not only the way and the life but also the truth.

The three individuals chosen here for focus on heresy were not individuals who had no sincerity in their lives; they were also individuals who were not ignorant or unlearned – they, in fact, were widely read and sought to propagate teachings which they believed were right teachings and right understanding of the Scripture. Also, notice that some elements of their wrong understanding still permeate the church today and they continue to create ‘damage’ to believers and the church in varying degrees.

MARCION (AD 85-160)

Marcion grew up in the church, the son of a bishop. Having amassed great wealth, he migrated around AD139 to Rome, where he made a large donation to the church. For five years, he wrote and taught in Rome, gathering a large following.
Marcion’s aim was to pull Christianity out of Jewish soil, and to do this he had to divide creation from redemption. The God of the OT, he said, is not the Father of Jesus, and Jesus is not the Messiah promised. Jesus is instead the emissary of the OT God (called the Alien God by Marcion). Marcion claimed that Jesus came to offer an alternative way of salvation, one that bypassed the world of matter. To him, the true Christ could not have assumed a material body – the material body was a curse and an indignity.
Marcion shared his Docetism and anti-materialism with the Gnostics of the day, but he had a different, more radical, way of justifying his beliefs. Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and he concocted his own alternative, a two-part document of his, consisting of his ‘Evangelium’ and ‘Apostolicum’.

ARIUS (AD 250-336)

Arius had a serious theological point: God’s innermost being or essence cannot be shared, or communicated with anyone else.
God, to him, guards his divinity jealously – He is so self-contained in isolation and absoluteness that the very thought of sharing his ‘essence’ with anyone, even with a “Son,” was abhorrent to him.

Against his view, Athanasius and the orthodox fathers who gathered at the Council of Nicaea in 325 challenged him and declared their belief “in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, having one substance with the Father. If Jesus was not one substance with the Father”, the council said, then he was neither worthy to be worshiped nor capable of redeeming the world.

PELAGIUS (AD 354-420)

Pelagian theology begins with the notion that Adam was created mortal: he would have died even if he had never sinned. Thus, we do not inherit death from Adam as the punishment for sin. Nor do we inherit the sin itself. According to him, sin is transmitted by imitation, not propagation; human beings are born without sin, and they commit sins only by following the bad examples of others. That means that perfection in this life is possible; Pelagius did not say that it was easy and he did not claim to be perfect himself. But he did believe that, in addition to Jesus, there were perfect people who always obeyed all of God’s commands.

Even though Pelagius was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in 431, his ideas continue to influence the way we understand the human situation, not only in the optimistic, anthropology of liberal Protestantism and lingering semi-Peligianism of some Roman Catholics, but also in a sort of “can do” fashion, all too prominent in many sectors of American Christianity, which give prominence to positive thinking and self-improvement.

Notice that the teachings of various heresies have some resemblance to the teaching of Scripture; distortions often come about when we use our own human and fleshly minds to concoct our own ‘doctrines’ which seem very reasonable and rational to us and yet, in essence, they contradict the very teachings of Scripture and the Holy Spirit. What is worse is that as we ponder over these new understanding, we become more convinced that we are correct and on the right track – pride and self-centredness may prevent us from being truly open to the truth and we end up propagating ‘heresy’ and causing much damage to the church of God and His kingdom.