Sola Scriptura: Martin Luther And The Authority Of Scripture

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We can cut right to the chase here and tell you what the Reformation was about with a drawing.
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Now, I didn't do very well at art, so you'll have to forgive me for this, but that's a cup of coffee.
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I'm pretty sure it's Dunkin' Donuts, but that's a cup of coffee. And this is all you really need to know.
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Now, in 1516, coffee is introduced from Arabia to Europe.
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And also in 1516, Erasmus, I learned this in elementary art, you draw two birds, you put them together, and you have a book.
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See how it works? Clever. 1516, Erasmus publishes his
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Greek New Testament. Coffee, plus the
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Greek New Testament, equals the Protestant Reformation in 1517.
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Historians won't tell you that, but that's actually how it happened. Coffee, plus the Greek New Testament, and you got the
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Protestant Reformation. I think if it were Luther, I'd also have to draw a bottle here, but that's another story.
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This Greek text, though, was in fact influential in Luther.
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In fact, you can sort of see it running on parallel tracks. We could pick up the story of Luther's life at his birth.
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It's always a good place to start with somebody's life. So in 1483, he's born, and he's born into the home of a man who's going to work very hard, middle class.
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Luther, I think, later in life liked to embellish his past and make it seem like he was more poor, but he was more likely sort of what we would call middle class.
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And actually in the 16th century, or late 15th century even, there was an emerging middle class as the old feudal system way of economics was sort of breaking down, and a merchant class was emerging.
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And that was his father, but his father took on extra jobs. He moonlighted, as it were. He was a supervisor of a mine, and he took on a second job of supervising a second mine so that he could afford to send his son to college so that his son could get a respectable job as a lawyer.
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And then as a lawyer, he could get a family crest, and that would bring some sense of honor, nobility to the
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Luther. That's the German, the Luther family name. So his father sacrifices so that young Martin could be sent off to college.
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And he goes off to college again, young, and he graduates from college, and then he enters law school, and he leaves law school at Erfurt to travel home.
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And as he is traveling back to Erfurt, having finished his law and about to take his exam, what we would call today the bar, so that he could then become a practicing attorney, on his way back to the
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University of Erfurt, he is struck in a thunderstorm. Now, Luther is a smart guy.
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In fact, we're going to see this later. He'll translate the Greek text into the German in a span of about six weeks, and it is a remarkable translation.
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Now, anybody who can do that is of possessing a significant intellect.
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But at this particular moment in Luther's life, his intellect is not coming to the surface.
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He's caught in a thunderstorm, and what does he do? He goes to a hill, and he sits under a tree on top of a hill.
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And he grabs a rock, and he says, help me,
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Saint Anne, and I will become. Saint Anne is the patron saint of miners,
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M -I -N -E -R -S. His father's profession. It was their family saint.
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And it shows you something of where we are historically, theologically. When Luther finds himself in a bind, he would not think of appealing to Christ.
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He has to have a mediator. And so his impulse, his reflex, is to his mediator.
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Help me, Saint Anne, and I will become a monk. And as the historian
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Roland Baten says, God kept his end of the bargain, and Luther kept his. So when he goes back to Erfurt, he has a big party.
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Gives away his law books. Gives away his law cap, which was the symbol of his graduation. His entrance into the good life of being an attorney.
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And he enters the monastery. But for Luther, at this stage in his life, it's always one step forward and two steps back.
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Luther's vision of God was that God was out to get him at every turn. It was a popular medieval image coming from the book of Revelation.
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An image of Jesus with a sword coming out of his mouth. And it was typically used architecturally on buildings and on cathedrals.
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And so Luther at Erfurt, on the cathedral at Erfurt, there were two of these sculptures on either side of the cathedral.
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And it was Luther's direct route from his rooms where he was staying to his classes. And Luther would get up a little bit earlier, which is hard for a graduate student.
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Would get up a little bit earlier so that he wouldn't have to take that direct route. So that he could take a long way around the cathedral so he could avoid seeing that image.
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Because as he looked at that image, he thought as if Christ himself was out to judge him. And when that thunderstorm that he was caught in, he felt as if God had unleashed the very heavens to wipe him out.
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And so Luther was terrified of God. And he went into the monastery to somehow think he could find some safety.
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And in reality, he was taken two steps back.
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In fact, early on, he comes to his confessor and he says to his confessor,
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I hate this righteous God. It's not necessarily the thing you want to hear a seminarian say.
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It's not necessarily something a candidate for ministry should be saying. And so his confessor says, let's send this guy to Rome.
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It'll be good for his soul. The monastery there at Erfurt, the credentials were coming to an end.
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And they had to re -up their credentials. And to do that, they had to travel to Rome.
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And of course, this involved a little bit of money as well. And then they would get the approval then of the cardinal.
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And they would be able to continue functioning as a seminarian. This particular moment at the monastery there at Erfurt, it was their turn.
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And so they decide to send Luther to Rome on this task. And as Luther enters the holy city, crossing through the
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Alps, and then coming in through the Piazza del Popolo, and he walks in and there it is in front of him,
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Rome. And he is utterly disillusioned by what he sees.
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He goes to the Sancta Scala. These are the sacred steps that Helene, the mother of Constantine, who was a very pious woman, went to Jerusalem and used all of Constantine, her son's money.
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It's helpful if your son is emperor. You can do some really cool things. And so she takes all this money of Constantine and buys up as much as she can from Jerusalem and literally steals as much as she can from Jerusalem and sends it back to Rome.
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And one of the things she sent back were the steps of Pilate, the very steps that Jesus would have walked up on in his trial and then his crucifixion.
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And they were relocated to Rome. And so pilgrims would flock to these sites all around Rome, and they would come to the
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Scala Sancta, and they would go up and down on these steps on their knees. And there are particular steps where you can look, and if you look closely enough, you'll see the drops of blood of Christ.
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And on those steps you stop and you run through your Hail Mary seven times.
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You continue going up on your knees, up and down on these steps, saying the
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Hail Mary as you go. And each time you do it, you take years off of purgatory. Of course, to do it, there's a table down in front of the steps, and you have to give your coins, and then you can do it.
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You can visit the Scala Sancta. They're still there, and you'll still see the pilgrims going up and down on their knees.
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There are steps built on either side that you can go up around. If you do the Scala Sancta, you're supposed to do them on your knees.
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Luther does this, goes up on his knees, he gets to the top, and as he stands there at the top, he utters his famous words, Who knows if this is true?
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Utterly disillusioned by his church. So he comes back. Rome didn't work. We're in the 1510s.
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What Luther does, or what his confessor does at that point, is he says to him, I know. This guy's too infatuated with thinking about spirituality.
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He's all concerned about his soul. We'll send him off to get his doctorate in theology.
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Because if he goes and studies theology, he'll no longer be thinking about spirituality. That's a joke.
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See, some of you got that, and I appreciate that. So let's have this guy stop thinking about his
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Christian life. Let's send him to seminary. That's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. So he starts studying theology.
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And in those days, to get your doctorate in theology, you had to memorize Peter Lombard's sentences. You had to become an authority on the sentences.
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This was a textbook, a medieval textbook, a theology textbook. And that was what getting a doctorate in theology was about.
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But Luther, reading Lombard, realized that Lombard was quoting Augustine. And this is the era of the
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Renaissance. And the battle cry of the Renaissance is the Latin expression, ad fontes, to the source, to the fount.
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And so this is the Greco -Roman revival of architecture. This is why Erasmus publishes the
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Greek text in 1516. This is the atmosphere of the day. And so if you're reading quotes by Augustine, you know what you do?
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As Luther, ad fontes, you start reading Augustine. And as he reads Augustine, he finds
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Augustine quotes Paul a lot. And so he starts reading Paul. And in Paul, he finds about this righteous
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God. Now the reason he says, I hate this righteous God, is because he is unwilling to go along with what was happening in his contemporaries.
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The contemporaries, and to get this, I think you understand a lot about medieval Catholicism and even contemporary
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Catholicism. If we understand that what they did was, it was not a question of sin, but it was a question of sins.
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And if it's a question of sins, then the remedy is graces.
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And so what we've done here is we've made it an issue of quantity. We've quantified it.
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And so that is really how any system of merits works, oriented system works.
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It's demerits and merits. And don't worry if you don't rack up enough merits, because there are people who have more merits than they need.
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And we call these people saints. And the technical term for what saints have, what the medieval theologians called supererogation, which has nothing to do with irrigation.
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It's E -R -O. It's works supra, above and beyond what they need.
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And those works above and beyond what they need are actually collected in literally a treasure chest in heaven.
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And so what you can do as a Christian is tap into that treasure chest to get extra graces, because you mere mortal, not a saint, need them.
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And at the top of that chain of saints, there is the Blessed Mary.
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And so we appeal to these mediators who have more graces than they need.
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It's all about quantity. What Luther discovered first, though, is our problem is not sins.
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Our problem is sin. We are sinners, Luther says, at the root.
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And the Latin word is radix. Now, the English word radical is not what this means.
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It doesn't mean extreme. The best word to understand this is radish, the root.
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We are sinners at the core. The problem is not quantity.
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The problem is quality. But all
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Luther has in place at this point is sin. And so if it's a question of my sin, no matter how many graces
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I rack up, there's nothing I can do about the fact that I'm a sinner at the core.
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And so this righteous God demands of me righteousness. I can't do it.
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Therefore, I hate this righteous God. That's where Luther is.
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Now, he's not going to go along with his contemporaries because his contemporaries say, hey, our problem is sins.
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Rack up graces and you're fine. And here's ways we can do it. And by the way, a lot of this fills the coffers of the church.
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It's not until Luther realizes, it's a grammar lesson actually, he realizes that the righteousness of God is not active.
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It's passive. At that point, Luther calls it his breakthrough. When he realizes that the righteousness of God is not something we earn, but it's something that is earned for us by Christ and then is imputed to us so we can overcome our sin.
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So it is, in fact, an issue of quality. And it is, in fact, an issue of grace.
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But it's not something we earn. It's something that is earned for us.
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The righteousness of God is passive. It is
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Christ in his active obedience, in his obedient life and his obedient death, who earns for us our redemption.
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This is happening in the 1510s in Luther. And this is also happening as Erasmus is working on his
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Greek text down at Basel and publishes it in 1516. And Luther in 1516 -17 is having all of these ideas bounce around in his head.
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And he reads Erasmus' text. And he finds something very interesting.
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The reigning text, of course, up until this point, is the Latin Vulgate. In fact, that is the official text of the church.
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It is actually illegal to have a text in a vernacular language or a language of the people.
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And so attempts at translation long before Wycliffe, there was Kaidman.
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The Irish, I think you know this Christian group. I think they call themselves Kaidman's Call. But the actual is
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Kaidman. They're named for Kaidman who translated the Psalms into Old English.
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This would be Beowulf English. This would not be English you would recognize. True Old English. Not King James, which is actually modern
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English, but that's another story. And then there was Waldo, Peter Waldo.
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Remember Where's Waldo? Remember that? Where's Waldo? Well, I'll tell you where Waldo is. He's in France. Waldo was in France around 1200, and he translated the
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Vulgate into French. And for that, he was excommunicated as a heretic.
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It was actually a capital offense to translate the
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Bible into a vernacular language. Whenever there is an effort to keep
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God's Word from people, the wheels have fallen off of the wagon.
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It's all you need to hear, and you know that something's not right. Wycliffe, heretic, dies of natural causes, bones exhumed and burned just to prove a point because of his heretical work of the
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Wycliffe Bible. It was illegal to put the Bible into the vernacular.
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The only text was the Vulgate. Rasmus publishes a
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Greek text. Luther reads it, and he finds something fascinating. Repent.
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This word occurs all through the New Testament. Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.
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It's John's message. It's Christ's message. You know how it was translated in Vulgate? Penitentium agitate, which being translated means, do penance.
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That was the translation of the word metanoia, the translation of the word repentance.
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Do penance, that's the Vulgate translation of repent. It is a bad translation.
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And it set, it gave the church a quote -unquote biblical basis for a really bad theology that dominated the centuries.
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When Luther nails his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517, the very first thesis challenges the medieval
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Roman Catholic idea of what repentance is. And after he writes the 95 theses, a few months later, he writes a book called
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The Explanation of the 95 Theses. And there he offers paragraphs to expand essentially what are sentences of the 95 theses.
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And you must read these things, the 95 theses. I put out a little booklet of them, but I'm not only telling you to do that so you get that booklet, but you can find them online.
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You can find them in Latin. You can find them in German. And you can find them in English online. They're fascinating to read.
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And when you get to heaven, you're going to see St. Peter. You know he'll meet you at the gate. He'll ask you, why should I let you into heaven? And you'll say the
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Jesus thing. And then he'll ask you a question. Have you read the 95 theses? Now if you say no, you know what's going to happen to you in the new heaven and the new earth?
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You're going to get New Jersey. If you want like Hawaii or Colorado, you would better read the 95 theses.
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It won't get you into heaven, but it will get you a nice spot in the new heaven and the new earth. And if you don't believe me, how embarrassed will you be?
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You'll be walking around heaven, you'll bump into Luther. Hey, nice to meet you. Hey, did you ever read my, you know, theses, the 95 things that sort of started
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Protestantism? Did you ever read them? You're going to be so embarrassed. You're going to be looking down, kicking your feet.
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Read the 95 theses so you can meet Luther, look him in the eye and say, great work. Thanks for doing that, right?
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But he writes this explanation, turns these things into paragraphs, and in the paragraph he says, penitentium agitate is wrong.
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It's not what the Bible teaches. What we have here is
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Luther landing on a principle that he's going to come to articulate in the 1520s, and it is going to be the bedrock of the
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Protestant Reformation, and we call it, we use the Latin expression, sola scriptura.
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Scripture alone is the church's authority. Luther got there honestly.
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He got there through this decade of struggle, of dissatisfaction with the other basis of authority which dominated the medieval
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Catholic Church, tradition. The church was the authority.
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As Luther began to see what Scripture said, and he got there in a rather circuitous route from being disillusioned by his church and by being led by the hand by Augustine into Paul and then wrestling with Paul and then working through the
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Greek text, we have the discovery of what sola scriptura leads to, which is the sola fide and sola gradia principle, that salvation is by faith alone through grace alone.
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But this bedrock doctrine for Luther is Scripture. Now, Scripture remains for Luther.
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It remains for Luther the center of his work. Many years later, Luther is called to dedicate a church.
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This is a fascinating point in Luther's life. It's the New Castle Church at Torgau.
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The reason why this is significant is because all the other churches had been Roman Catholic, and they just sort of converted over to Lutheran churches.
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But the church there at Torgau had burned, and they constructed a new one, so this was monumental because this now is the very first church built as a
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Lutheran church. In those days, it was called the Evangelische Church, which is what it's still called in German, which is the
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Lutheran church, the gospel church. This Evangelische Church at Torgau, and who better to dedicate the church than Luther himself?
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So Luther is called to preach the dedication of this church. And this is what he says in his sermon.
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The purpose of this new house may be such that nothing else may happen in it except that our
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Lord himself may speak to us through his holy word, and we respond to him through prayer and praise.
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This church is about the preaching of the word. Luther said this on a number of occasions.
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We can spare everything except the word.
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We can spare everything except the word. It is the sine qua non, the essential thing of the church's existence.
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The reformers all wrestled with what were called the true marks of the church. The reason why they had to do this was because prior to the
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Reformation, there was no question of what the true church was. It was the Roman Catholic Church. It was the only church. You had two choices.
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Well, three. You could be Christian, you could be pagan, or you could be Muslim. Those are your three choices.
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Think about this. When Luther is born in 1483, and this is one of these remarkable pieces of history.
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Luther is born in Eisleben. He spends most of his life at Wittenberg after his time at Erfurt, because there at Wittenberg, Frederick the
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Wise had just built a new university, the University of Wittenberg. Again, like in Calvin's case at Paris, he wanted the brightest minds to be at his university.
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He wanted to rival Paris and Oxford and Cambridge. There's Luther, spends most of his life at Wittenberg, enjoying the protectorship of Frederick the
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Wise, teaching at the university, preaching in the castle church. That's the bulk of his life.
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But he not only started this Protestant Reformation, he also, and this rarely happens in history, he also significantly was involved in the institutionalization of it.
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Usually you have the visionary, and then along come the people who sort of put it into place. Luther was the visionary in the 1520s, but he lived until the mid -1540s, until 1546.
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And so he's able to live for 20 years to see this fledgling church get established.
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And like Machen going to North Dakota to settle a church dispute, here the church at Eisleben, Luther's hometown, was embroiled in controversy between the church leaders and the town leaders, and the whole thing was threatened to just fall apart.
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And so they begged Luther to come and try to mend things. And so he travels back to Eisleben and the route takes him across a river and there was significant ice flows that year.
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And so these ice floats had knocked out the bridge. And for Luther to go downstream to the next town and cross the bridge and then come back up would have taken him days out of his journey.
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So the party decides they will just simply cross the river best they could. And of course, in the process, everything gets wet and he gets wet.
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And it's, again, a severe weather and he gets ill. So they stop there and then he recovers and then they make their way on to Eisleben and he recovers and he preaches multiple times and he's meeting with the church and the council and he's bringing them together and in fact they do reconcile.
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And then Luther is struck ill. And they convert one of the chapels, one of the side rooms of the church there at Eisleben into essentially a hospice room for Luther.
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And as Luther is lying there dying, he can literally look through one of the arches of the chapel room that he's in and see the baptismal font that he was baptized in as an infant.
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And the whole world had changed from his birth in 1483 until his death in 1546.
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And humanly speaking, the man who was lying there dying was at the center of all of it.
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I often think, what was going through his head? When Luther was born in 1483, there were no options.
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The only game in town was the Roman Catholic Church. And now at his death, there is this thing we call
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Protestantism. Or as historians like to call, Protestantisms.
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My own denomination, Presbyterian, we like to call it Presbyterian alphabet soup. We've got the
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OPC, the PCA, the EPC, the PCUSA. Churches, Protestantisms.
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Now this raises the question, which is the true church? And so the
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Catholic Church never argued over this question. Peter was the first.
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And since then, there has been a succession. And that's the true church.
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But the Reformers didn't buy that. So what marks a true church?
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Well, they had different answers. Calvin in Geneva comes up with two. Preaching of the word and the sacraments.
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And implicit within that is church discipline. Because in order to have the right ordering of the sacraments, the
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Lord's Supper, there is necessarily church discipline. It's bound up, as Paul introduces, the
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Lord's Supper. In Corinthians, John Knox takes what is implicit in Calvin and makes it explicit.
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So when he takes Calvin's ideas with him, having been exiled in Geneva back to Scotland, and gives birth to Presbyterianism and to Puritanism that has infiltrated even into these
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New England colonies here and has left its mark on American Christianity, he now has three explicit marks of a true church.
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Preaching of the word, right ordering of the sacraments, and church discipline.
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Luther wrestled with this question too. And he came up with two initially in his book, Babylonian Captivity of the
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Church. I love that title. Babylon, as you know, is not necessarily a compliment, biblically speaking.
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So now he says Babylonian, then he calls it captivity. That's not necessarily a compliment either. This is what
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I love about Luther. Luther's like a bull in a china shop. We go back to 1520.
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He was very busy in the fall of 1520. He's getting excommunicated, and he writes three books.
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They come to be known as the Three Treatises. One of them is the Babylonian Captivity of the
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Church. And he also has a bonfire. When he gets the papal bull, he's given 60 days to recant of his views against the church.
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So at the end of the 60 days, what does Luther do? He has a big bonfire, and he burns the papal bull, along with a picture of the pope.
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Isn't that great? Don't you just love Luther? He'd have been a great guest on your NoCo show, wouldn't he?
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Of all the people in church history, the guy I would love to have lunch with and hang out with is
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Martin Luther, hands down. Edwards, I think, would be really boring to eat with. First of all, he wouldn't eat much.
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It'd be like two pieces of lettuce and maybe a tomato. That's enough for me. I'm a
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Puritan. But Luther, he'd be a great guy to eat lunch with. I can't remember what
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I was saying. But anyway... Oh, papal bull burning, and he writes his
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Babylonian captivity of the church. And in there he says, the true church is the preaching of the word and the sacraments.
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And by the way, there's two, and there's not seven. And these are the two, and these are how these two are to function.
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Now, as he moves on in life, he keeps adding things. So he writes a great piece.
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It's one of my favorite pieces. Luther was also very sarcastic. And he writes this great piece against Hans Wurst.
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Now, Hans Wurst was not a person. It was somebody he made up. Literal translation of that is Johnny Sausage.
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So he used that way, Wurst, you know, that's what the Germans eat. If you're ever in Germany and you're not sure what to order, just order
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Wurst. You'll be fine. You'll be full. So it's a sort of character made up of all of Luther's detractors.
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And in there he writes what the true church is, and he expands his list to two to about five. And then later he expands his list from five to seven.
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And then later he expands his list from seven to ten. And like Calvin, we're glad he died, because who knows how long that list, right?
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He keeps adding the true marks of the church. But in every single list, you know what's first?
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The preaching of the Word. We can spare everything except the
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Word. You know it. Where there is no preaching, there is no gospel.
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I meant to mention this last night, but I sort of ran out of time, and I'll talk about it a little bit tomorrow. I've been doing a lot of work with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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The thing about Bonhoeffer is how do you pronounce his name? The Germans actually say Bonhoeffer, but that sounds really weird.
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So we say Bonhoeffer, which is not right at all, or Bonhoeffer, which is even better.
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So I just call him D .B. Or Dietrich, as I like to call him.
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You know, Dietrich came to America in 1929, 1930. He studied at Union University. Too bad he hadn't gone to Princeton, got to know
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Machen, and then gone over to Westminster. But God is in control, I guess. So anyway, he's at Union, and he writes home a letter to his supervisor,
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Max Distel, and he says to him, There is no theology here. It's empty.
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It's liberalism of Union Seminary in New York. There is no theology here. He comes back for six weeks in 1939.
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Niebuhr tried to get him to stay in America. He comes back to America. And as he comes back to America, he comes off the steamship
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Bremen, puts his foot on the docks of New York City, and he says, I've made a mistake.
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I've left Germany at its hour of need. He writes a letter home to his family.
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He says, I fully anticipate God will bring us out of this dark hour, and the church will need to be rebuilt because the
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German church had sold its soul. It had become the Reich Church. And the church will need to be rebuilt, and Bonhoeffer, given everything about him, will likely be one of the figures involved in the rebuilding of it.
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And how can I rebuild it if I abandon it at this hour of need? I've made a mistake. I'm going home. It took him six weeks until he could get a ship to get back, and he couldn't actually get back.
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There were no longer ships going directly to Germany, so he had to book passage to England, and then from England he could get to Germany.
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And in fact, he got on one of the last passenger ships to go from England to Germany. And so he's there for six weeks, and he goes to six different churches, and each
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Sunday it's the same thing. No gospel.
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No preaching. And he writes in his diary. So in 1929, he says, no theology here.
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You know what he says in 1939? There is no preaching here. As the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit.
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And this is why we have to hear what Luther says. We can spare everything except the
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Word. Because when the Word is no longer central, and it is minimal, other things will become the focus.
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So aerobics class in the basement will be about the best thing that a church can offer its neighborhood.
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My wife did her doctoral work in literature, and we didn't have kids at the time, and she was doing a number of courses over the summer, and I was working on my dissertation, and we were in a particular town.
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And she was doing a coursework. We were very busy. I was writing my dissertation. And we made the mistake of going to an evangelical church, and the people just were like on us, and they kept showing up at our doorstep.
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The poor pastor. There weren't many churches in town, so the pastor showed up at our apartment four times that week.
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And I thought, well, if I'm going to get anything done, I'm going to have to go to liberal churches because these evangelicals just are around me too much.
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So I started visiting liberal churches all summer long. It was quite an education. And I had always grown up in theologically conserved churches.
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Actually, it was very fascinating to spend some time in liberal churches. And I remember one church specifically was a
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PCUSA church, and the church began with a processional, and so they would have this massive
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Bible, and they would come out of the back room with the Bible, and behind them would be another altar boy, essentially with holding a cross, and behind him would be a candle, and then there would be the pastor.
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And they'd make this processional, and they would hold the Bible up. This was a very big pulpit
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Bible. This 8 -year -old kid struggling under the weight of this Bible, and he'd walk down the center aisle, and he would ceremoniously put the
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Bible on the altar in front of everybody. And then the whole service proceeded without a single reference to that book.
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Not in the sermon. Not in the prayers. Not anywhere to be found.
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We can spare everything except the Word. This idea of the
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Word of God is developed by theologians under the category of what we talk about, the authority of Scripture, and we use two words to express this.
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The two words we use to express the authority of Scripture, or high view of Scripture, are the words inspiration and inerrancy.
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They go hand in hand. If it is, in fact, God's Word, then it will, in fact, reflect everything we know to be true of God.
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If it is, in fact, God's Word, then it is true.
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Inerrancy is a natural consequence of inspiration. Once we have in place that the
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Bible is the Word of God, the only conclusion that we can draw is the conclusion of inerrancy.
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We call that a high view of Scripture. It is not a view that goes unchallenged.
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It is, in fact, a view that goes challenged. Now, we can look at this in liberal circles.
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We can look at how it was challenged in Luther's day. How the Word of God was superseded by tradition.
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How the Gospel as the centerpiece of the Word of God was superseded by tradition.
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You can see it even today. The Scala Sancta are still there.
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The pilgrims still go up and down on their knees. Those of you that may come from Roman Catholic backgrounds or have
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Roman Catholic family members or Roman Catholic neighbors know what a hold that is on people and how that scaffolding obscures the
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Gospel. In fact, that is, I think, a good way to look at how tradition sort of works.
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You know, you travel to cities sometimes and you find as you travel that these places you go to visit are under construction or they're being rehabilitated.
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In Europe, this is a lot because of all the exhaust fumes that are destroying these old buildings. You go to visit a place and there, all of a sudden, you recognize it's just surrounded by scaffolding.
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Some places, I think, do things that are... They try to help out, but I think it ends up being rather tacky. London is famous for this.
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They'll drop a big screen print over the scaffolding that will be a picture of the building that the scaffolding is covering.
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And it ends up looking tacky. St. Paul's, the dome, for instance, was under this for many years.
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And so over the scaffolding was a screen print image of St. Paul's. I think it would have been better to just have the scaffolding.
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But you don't go to see the scaffolding. You go to see the dome of St. Paul's. And the scaffolding obscures the dome.
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And that's what tradition has done. It obscures what is in there, which is the essence and which is the point of it all.
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And so you don't see the thing. You see the scaffolding. This is what
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Luther was contending with. This is what can erode the authority of Scripture.
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And we see it blatantly in Roman Catholicism, then and now. We see it in liberalism where there is lip service paid to Scripture.
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So it's hailed. It's walked in processional. And then the whole church proceeds as if it didn't even exist.
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But here's the trick. At what point do we ask, how are we affected by this as well?
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So I think the question that we have to wrestle with and the question that we have to engage is, it's one thing to affirm the inspiration and inerrancy and hence a high view of the authority of Scripture.
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It is another thing altogether to live as if it were true. Now, this is challenging for us.
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I think this is challenging. We have three kids. They're young, nine, seven, and four.
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And as a parent, you're constantly banging your head against the wall, asking yourself, am I doing this right?
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How do I do this? This is such a complicated calling, the calling of being a godly parent.
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And our marriages is a complicated calling to be a godly husband or a godly wife.
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In our life, we are called to be a godly employee or a godly employer.
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And to help us do these things, we need advice.
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And so how often is it that our tendency is to think that maybe somewhere else there's more insight and better advice that we could follow than to follow
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God's word? And I'm a firm believer in what's back there, the book table.
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Remember? Buy two, one for the home, one for the office. But there is a temptation lurking back there that those things back there on those tables, which are intended to be aids and benefits to drive us deeper into the word, can become the focus of our attention.
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And it is a danger that we who are committed to a high view of Scripture need to confront.
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It is one thing to affirm theologically, individually, and congregationally of a high view of Scripture and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture.
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It is another thing altogether to live like you believe it, to say that, yes, this book is true.
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And yes, this book is my only guide in life. Peter tells us in 2
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Peter 1 that we have all things pertaining to life and godliness and the precious promises of God's word.
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It's a great text to think about. You know, there is no substitute for the word of God in your life.
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It is the most powerful force. We have tried many things as a family for family devotions.
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I make my kids read my books. Just read this.
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It's good stuff. We have tried the different children's Bible stories. You know what is the best thing to do, we have realized, is to just read the
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Bible together. Chapters. Just read a chapter of God's word.
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And I'm not downplaying that stuff, obviously. But we have to be careful that we lose sight of the centrality of God's word, that all of these things are indeed aids to drive us into God's word.
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Even in our own personal reading of the Bible, our own devotions. It's great to have aids.
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It's great to read things. I would never in a million years diminish that. I make my living off of church history.
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Read this stuff. The best thing you can do for yourself is immerse yourself in God's word.
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There is a desire. We find ourselves wondering what to do in our post -Christian culture, we call it.
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In Lancaster, we're not post -Christian. But I think in Massachusetts, you're post -Christian. In much of America, we're post -Christian.
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In Europe, it's post -Christian. And there is this question now ringing on the blogs and on the gurus that are out there.
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How do we relate to a post -Christian culture? What do we do to show that Christ is still relevant to a post -modern world?
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It's the same question the liberals were asking at the cusp of modernity. How do we make
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Christ relevant in a modern world? Our question now is how do we make Christ relevant in a post -modern world?
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And people are coming up with all kinds of answers. And the only answer to that question is the word of God.
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We can spare everything except the word.
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This is the bedrock principle of the Reformation. It is the bedrock principle of any church that wishes to be faithful to its calling.
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And it is the bedrock principle of a Christian who wishes to be a faithful disciple. We do also, and I just want to say this, we do a great job in our circles as Reformed, whether that's a
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Baptistic Reformed or a Presbyterian Reformed. We do a great job as Reformed on the intellectual side of this equation.
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And if you look at church history from the time of the Reformation on, it really is the Reformed tradition that does all the intellectual heavy lifting for everybody else.
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It's the Reformed tradition that has put out the theologies, the commentaries, the heavy lifting stuff that has been such useful guides for the church and its pilgrimage.
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And in that context of the intellectual heavy lifting, we can sometimes neglect the idea that there is another dimension to Scripture.
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The, as educators call it, the affective domain. Or as the psalmist would just say it, delight in God's word.
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Or as the prophet says, your words were found and I did eat them.
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There is a sense in which we who stress the intellectual side of the equation, because so much of what's going on in American evangelicalism and American Christianity has neglected that, that we also need to recognize that a full -orbed, a truly dimensional, that is truly biblical view of Scripture does acknowledge that knowledge also entails delight and pleasure.
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And so can we say, as a deer pants for the water, so my soul longs for the word of God.
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It's easy to criticize Roman Catholicism. It's easy to criticize liberalism.
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It's easy to criticize secularism. It's another thing altogether to be self -critical and ask ourselves, where does my view, my personally, my view of Scripture fall shy and need some shoring up?
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And I think, as I was trying to say last night, no matter where you find yourself on your continuum of your view of God, there's always room for improvement.
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That's the beauty of the Christian life. That's why we call it maturity. No matter what your view of Scripture or your relationship to Scripture is, there's always room for improvement.
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There's always the need for Scripture to be rooted deeply in your life and change your life.
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The Reformers were after a doctrine of Scripture, but they were also after what Scripture does to the congregation.
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I'll take you back to Geneva. Prior to Calvin's coming to Geneva, the city of Geneva literally voted on becoming
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Reformed. There's a little square in front of the cathedral there, St. Peter's Cathedral at Geneva, which quite frankly is a very ugly cathedral.
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I don't know if any of you have been to Geneva or what you think of it, but I think it's rather ugly. It's one of these things that's sort of Frankenstein -esque.
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Each century adds something to it reflective of that century, so the culminating, the end result is ugly.
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But strip down all that weirdness of it. What a great place. If I could transport myself in time and history,
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I'd transport myself back to Geneva when the city council called the members of the city together in the square there in Geneva to vote on whether or not it would become a
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Reformed church. This was through the efforts of Guillaume, or William, or as I like to call him,
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Billy Farrell. Now, I used to say Farrell, and then everybody else now is saying
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Farrell, and then you go and they pronounce it Farrer, which I don't even think is right.
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But anyway, so I just call him Billy. So, Billy comes from Neuchatel. You know, cheese, but it was actually a city.
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Comes from Neuchatel to Geneva, preaching the gospel, Luther's ideas of Reformation.
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You know what Geneva does? Beats him up, kicks him out of the city, literally throws him outside of the city walls.
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Farrell goes back a second time. They beat him up, throw him out of the city.
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He goes back a third time. They beat him up, throw him out of the city. Goes back a fourth time, now the
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Holy Spirit works. And they hear his message. And then they call everybody into the town square, and they vote.
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All those in favor of becoming a Reformed church, raise your hand. I'm not kidding, this is how it worked. And all around that square, people raised their hand, and they became
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Reformed. And then, a few months later, comes John Calvin into the city of Geneva.
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He has no intention to stay there. He wants to go to Strasbourg. He stays with Farrell. Farrell's house is a few doors down from the cathedral.
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And he spends the night with Farrell. Plans to get up in the morning and head to Strasbourg. And he wakes up in the morning, and Farrell makes him a little sandwich.
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Maybe throws in an apple and a couple of Oreo cookies. And he hands him his brown sack as he's about to go out the door.
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And he says, here, I made you lunch, have fun, go to Strasbourg. Go out the city gate, turn left, head north, you'll find it. But, if you leave, know this.
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God will curse your time of leisure for the rest of your life if you leave this city.
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With friends like that. Now, I don't believe Calvin was superstitious for a moment.
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But, I think something went through his head like this. If this guy is willing to go to these lengths for me to stay here, maybe
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God is telling me something. And so he stays, reluctantly. He becomes the pastor of the church.
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In the notes, the town records, they call him that Frenchman. They don't even name, they don't even call him by his name.
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Elagolicus, that Frenchman. This is what he's referred to in the notes of the town council meetings for the first two years of his ministry.
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They don't pay him, right, for nine months. And the toothache thing. And then, he starts saying, you know what guys, you voted on being reformed.
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But, you know what makes you truly reformed? When the word of God takes root in your life, and it transforms you.
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Voting on becoming reformed is one thing. Being reformed is a thing altogether different.
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He writes a letter to Martin Bootser. Bootser's at Strasbourg. That's where Calvin wanted to go and spend his days in the university at Strasbourg, being a scholar.
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In his quiet closets that God chose for him, the ministry. He writes a letter to Bootser to explain it.
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And he says, I think the bottom line is this. My people want a preacher and not a pastor.
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People of Geneva want a preacher and not a pastor. Now, in the south, they have a term.
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Meddling. And I think what Calvin meant by that was that pastors meddle in lives.
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Geneva was conditioned upon showing up, taking the
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Eucharist, everything then is right, and then they go home and live as they please.
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And sometime during the week, they walk into the confessional, and they get the little chip. And then they can show up at the altar for mass, give the chip, get the grace, go back home, everything is well.
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And they thought this was what Calvin was going to do. We show up for church, we hear a whiz -bang sermon, everything is right with the world, and then we go home and do as we please.
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And Calvin says, I'm not called here to preach. I'm called here to pastor. Because if we're going to take seriously our commitment to the
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Word of God, then it necessarily follows that this Word of God will take root in our life and it will transform us.
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And we will get it wrong, and we will fall, and we will continue to blow it.
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But we will also begin to see God's Word, if we take it seriously, we will see it for what it is, a powerful, living
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Word that transforms us. That's what sola scriptura means.
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It's not just a commitment to the authority of Scripture. It's asking the question, what is
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Scripture doing in my life? How am I reorienting my life around the
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Word of God and seeing it bear fruit in my life?
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That's the heartbeat of the Reformation. That's ultimately the question we have to ask of our doctrine, our
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Protestant doctrine of Scripture and the Reformation principle of sola scriptura.
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We'll talk in our next time about the sufficiency of Scripture.