Happy Reformation Day: Several Small Articles, Posts and a Reformation Polka From the Reformed Baptist Fellowship Blog
http://reformedbaptistfellowship.wordpress.com/
The Reformation was a Divine Movement
We must never lose sight of the fact that the Reformation was of God. In the unfolding of His decree, in which He works all things after the counsel of His will, human instrumentality is used to bring about the divine design. History never escapes the hand of God; it simply reflects His sovereign activity within it. As God used the prophets and apostles of old, so He used the Reformers in the sixteenth century. Luther himself said, “…that I became a monk which brought shame upon me as it bitterly annoyed my father, that I and the Pope came to blows, that I married an apostate nun; who would have read this in the stars? Who would have prophesied it?”[1] The ways of God are past finding out. At least three factors witness to the activity of God during the Reformation era.
Similar doctrinal discoveries
It is no mean fact that two men in relative isolation from each other came to the same conclusion with little help from man. The doctrine of justification by faith came to Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli separately, without the luxury of communicating their ideas with each other and receiving advice. J.H. Merle d’Aubigne comments:
The Reformation of Germany and that of Switzerland demonstrate this truth. Zwingle had no communication with Luther. There was no doubt a connecting link between these two men; but we must not look for it upon earth: it was above. He who from heaven gave the truth to Luther, gave it to Zwingle also. Their bond of union was God.[2]
Similar practical results
The practical results of the Reformation were strikingly similar throughout Europe. Emancipation from Medieval Roman Catholic dogma was a common occurrence on the continent and Great Britain. Some areas retained characteristics of the Medieval more than others, but on the main, a general break with the past occurred. To varying degrees, Church and State were transformed in a relatively brief time.
Similar doctrine and practice with the first century
The first century saw a band of men turn the world upside down. There was a simple devotion to the word of God and to the saints. These and other parallels between the first and the sixteenth centuries give evidence of the divine in both. Commenting on the Reformation, Philip Schaff said, “It was a revival of primitive Christianity, …”[3]
Conclusion
The Reformation was a movement of God unparalleled, except during the days of the New Testament. Let us pray and work in such a way that God might be pleased to bring about such a reformation in our own day!
Richard Barcellos
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Hans Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 22.[2] J.H. Merle d’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, reprinted from the edition issued in London in 1846), 256.[3] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. VII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, re., 1984), 16.
Major Dates and Events Surrounding and Involving the Reformation
1300s Major European Universities established
1378-1417 Roman Catholic Papacy split-Avignon/Rome Crisis of ecclesiastical authority
1400s The Renaissance Quest for knowledge grows. Return to grammar and the classics.
1418 Papacy United
1454 Gutenberg Press Major turning point in the propagation of ideas.
1483 Birth of Martin Luther
1484 Birth of Ulrich Zwingli
1509 Birth of John Calvin
1513-1517 Luther’s Conversion/Justification by Faith
1517 Luther’s 95 Theses
1521 Luther at the Diet of Worms “Here I stand, I can do no other. So help me God.”
1525 Luther marries ex-nun Katherine von Bora
1529 Marburg Conference/Controversy-Lutheran v. Zwinglian view of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper
1533 Calvin’s Conversion
1536 First edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion Written three years after Calvin’s conversion at the age of 27.
1536-1538 Calvin in Geneva
1538-1541 Calvin forced out of Geneva to Strasbourg, Switzerland
1541-1564 Calvin in Geneva: He writes most of his commentaries, massive correspondence, several editions of the Institutes.
1545 RC Council of Trent Official RC response to the Protestants
1546 Death of Martin Luther
1559 Final edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
The Geneva Academy begins: Calvin and Theodore Beza lead
1564 Death of Calvin
1618 Canons of Dort: “Five Points” of Calvinism
1643-47 Westminster Assembly
1644 First London Baptist Confession (1646)
1648 Westminster Confession of Faith
1640-1700 Puritans ministering in England: Goodwin, Owen, Watson, Bunyan, Keach, Kiffin
1677 The Baptist Confession of Faith written
1689 Political and religious tolerance/London Association Assembly/1689 Confession published
Richard Barcellos
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
It is important, not because it was an ending, but rather a beginning. Luther’s 95 Theses, posted that day on the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirke, present to us a picture of a developing understanding of the Gospel in the young reformer’s mind. He had not yet worked out the full doctrine that has characterized protestant teaching, but he was well on the way. The Reformation did not arrive in a moment, rather, it extended over a long period of time. What Luther began was carried forth by many successors, in many places, for over a century and a half. We are the heirs of this movement; our fathers in the faith understood that they were standing on the shoulders of giants, pressing the program of reform into every area of doctrine and practice. October 31, 1517 is an historical marker. It is like a sunrise, the first beam of light after a long gloomy night. Christ’s Church, overwhelmed by darkness, sensed the warmth and brightness of a new day. We thank God that we bask in the sunshine of the fullness of the Gospel of Christ.
James M. Renihan, Ph.D.
Dean, Professor of Historical Theology
Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Escondido, CA
The Tower Experience, 1519
Meanwhile in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: “The justice of God is revealed in it.” I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.
But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?” This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.
I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: ‘The just person lives by faith.’” I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just person lives by faith.” All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.
I exalted this sweetest word of mine, “the justice of God,” with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward I read Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted “the justice of God” in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.
Martin Luther
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
October 31, 1517, was not a big day in the life of Martin Luther. He had no idea that posting a challenge to academic debate (the ancient equivalent of arranging an inter-scholastic football game today) would function as the spark that would ignite the powder-keg of Reform that had been built up, in God’s providence, for literally hundreds of years. It would take some time before he would realize the importance of that day, and he probably did not live long enough to truly gain sufficient perspective to see what that day meant in the history of Europe.
One could argue that there might be other dates we could choose to commemorate God’s great work of providing freedom for the proclamation of the gospel that today we call the Reformation. We could point to earlier events in the life of Wycliffe, or Hus, for example. We could look at the publication of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus. There are so many things that came together to form the foundation of the Reformation.
But history has focused upon the posting of a formal debate challenge by a monk who really had not yet come to a clear understanding of the true nature of the Church of Rome and even of the Gospel itself.
There is great benefit to be derived from digging into the background of the Reformation so that we can fully thank God for what He did not so long ago.
James White
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
The great importance of the Reformation is its clarification of the doctrine of justification sola fide. This is the cardinal doctrine of the Reformation. Building on the foundation of sola scriptura and sola gratia (crystallized by Augustine over a 1000 years before), Luther was used of God to bring a wonderful blessing to souls of sinners. By faith alone–faith resting on the finished work of Christ and receiving all from him–sinners are married to Christ so that their sins become His and His righteousness becomes theirs. Thus, sinners are justified by an alien righteousness and become at one and the same time both sinners and righteous men. In themselves outside of Christ they are sinners, but in Christ outside of themselves they are righteous. In this way those who see and feel themselves to be ungodly are able in spite of this be assured that they are accepted by God and saved in Christ.
Sam Waldron
The Reformation was a Divine Movement
We must never lose sight of the fact that the Reformation was of God. In the unfolding of His decree, in which He works all things after the counsel of His will, human instrumentality is used to bring about the divine design. History never escapes the hand of God; it simply reflects His sovereign activity within it. As God used the prophets and apostles of old, so He used the Reformers in the sixteenth century. Luther himself said, “…that I became a monk which brought shame upon me as it bitterly annoyed my father, that I and the Pope came to blows, that I married an apostate nun; who would have read this in the stars? Who would have prophesied it?”[1] The ways of God are past finding out. At least three factors witness to the activity of God during the Reformation era.
Similar doctrinal discoveries
It is no mean fact that two men in relative isolation from each other came to the same conclusion with little help from man. The doctrine of justification by faith came to Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli separately, without the luxury of communicating their ideas with each other and receiving advice. J.H. Merle d’Aubigne comments:
The Reformation of Germany and that of Switzerland demonstrate this truth. Zwingle had no communication with Luther. There was no doubt a connecting link between these two men; but we must not look for it upon earth: it was above. He who from heaven gave the truth to Luther, gave it to Zwingle also. Their bond of union was God.[2]
Similar practical results
The practical results of the Reformation were strikingly similar throughout Europe. Emancipation from Medieval Roman Catholic dogma was a common occurrence on the continent and Great Britain. Some areas retained characteristics of the Medieval more than others, but on the main, a general break with the past occurred. To varying degrees, Church and State were transformed in a relatively brief time.
Similar doctrine and practice with the first century
The first century saw a band of men turn the world upside down. There was a simple devotion to the word of God and to the saints. These and other parallels between the first and the sixteenth centuries give evidence of the divine in both. Commenting on the Reformation, Philip Schaff said, “It was a revival of primitive Christianity, …”[3]
Conclusion
The Reformation was a movement of God unparalleled, except during the days of the New Testament. Let us pray and work in such a way that God might be pleased to bring about such a reformation in our own day!
Richard Barcellos
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Hans Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 22.[2] J.H. Merle d’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, reprinted from the edition issued in London in 1846), 256.[3] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. VII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, re., 1984), 16.
Major Dates and Events Surrounding and Involving the Reformation
1300s Major European Universities established
1378-1417 Roman Catholic Papacy split-Avignon/Rome Crisis of ecclesiastical authority
1400s The Renaissance Quest for knowledge grows. Return to grammar and the classics.
1418 Papacy United
1454 Gutenberg Press Major turning point in the propagation of ideas.
1483 Birth of Martin Luther
1484 Birth of Ulrich Zwingli
1509 Birth of John Calvin
1513-1517 Luther’s Conversion/Justification by Faith
1517 Luther’s 95 Theses
1521 Luther at the Diet of Worms “Here I stand, I can do no other. So help me God.”
1525 Luther marries ex-nun Katherine von Bora
1529 Marburg Conference/Controversy-Lutheran v. Zwinglian view of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper
1533 Calvin’s Conversion
1536 First edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion Written three years after Calvin’s conversion at the age of 27.
1536-1538 Calvin in Geneva
1538-1541 Calvin forced out of Geneva to Strasbourg, Switzerland
1541-1564 Calvin in Geneva: He writes most of his commentaries, massive correspondence, several editions of the Institutes.
1545 RC Council of Trent Official RC response to the Protestants
1546 Death of Martin Luther
1559 Final edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
The Geneva Academy begins: Calvin and Theodore Beza lead
1564 Death of Calvin
1618 Canons of Dort: “Five Points” of Calvinism
1643-47 Westminster Assembly
1644 First London Baptist Confession (1646)
1648 Westminster Confession of Faith
1640-1700 Puritans ministering in England: Goodwin, Owen, Watson, Bunyan, Keach, Kiffin
1677 The Baptist Confession of Faith written
1689 Political and religious tolerance/London Association Assembly/1689 Confession published
Richard Barcellos
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
It is important, not because it was an ending, but rather a beginning. Luther’s 95 Theses, posted that day on the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirke, present to us a picture of a developing understanding of the Gospel in the young reformer’s mind. He had not yet worked out the full doctrine that has characterized protestant teaching, but he was well on the way. The Reformation did not arrive in a moment, rather, it extended over a long period of time. What Luther began was carried forth by many successors, in many places, for over a century and a half. We are the heirs of this movement; our fathers in the faith understood that they were standing on the shoulders of giants, pressing the program of reform into every area of doctrine and practice. October 31, 1517 is an historical marker. It is like a sunrise, the first beam of light after a long gloomy night. Christ’s Church, overwhelmed by darkness, sensed the warmth and brightness of a new day. We thank God that we bask in the sunshine of the fullness of the Gospel of Christ.
James M. Renihan, Ph.D.
Dean, Professor of Historical Theology
Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Escondido, CA
The Tower Experience, 1519
Meanwhile in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: “The justice of God is revealed in it.” I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.
But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?” This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.
I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: ‘The just person lives by faith.’” I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just person lives by faith.” All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.
I exalted this sweetest word of mine, “the justice of God,” with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward I read Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted “the justice of God” in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.
Martin Luther
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
October 31, 1517, was not a big day in the life of Martin Luther. He had no idea that posting a challenge to academic debate (the ancient equivalent of arranging an inter-scholastic football game today) would function as the spark that would ignite the powder-keg of Reform that had been built up, in God’s providence, for literally hundreds of years. It would take some time before he would realize the importance of that day, and he probably did not live long enough to truly gain sufficient perspective to see what that day meant in the history of Europe.
One could argue that there might be other dates we could choose to commemorate God’s great work of providing freedom for the proclamation of the gospel that today we call the Reformation. We could point to earlier events in the life of Wycliffe, or Hus, for example. We could look at the publication of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus. There are so many things that came together to form the foundation of the Reformation.
But history has focused upon the posting of a formal debate challenge by a monk who really had not yet come to a clear understanding of the true nature of the Church of Rome and even of the Gospel itself.
There is great benefit to be derived from digging into the background of the Reformation so that we can fully thank God for what He did not so long ago.
James White
Why was Oct 31, 1517 so important?
The great importance of the Reformation is its clarification of the doctrine of justification sola fide. This is the cardinal doctrine of the Reformation. Building on the foundation of sola scriptura and sola gratia (crystallized by Augustine over a 1000 years before), Luther was used of God to bring a wonderful blessing to souls of sinners. By faith alone–faith resting on the finished work of Christ and receiving all from him–sinners are married to Christ so that their sins become His and His righteousness becomes theirs. Thus, sinners are justified by an alien righteousness and become at one and the same time both sinners and righteous men. In themselves outside of Christ they are sinners, but in Christ outside of themselves they are righteous. In this way those who see and feel themselves to be ungodly are able in spite of this be assured that they are accepted by God and saved in Christ.
Sam Waldron
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