A Survey Of Post-Reformation Church History (part 1)

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A Survey Of Post-Reformation Church History (part 2)

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Well, we'll be starting a two -part series this morning on church history, the history of the church since really the
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Reformation forward. Maybe you've heard a lot of these names, maybe you've heard of the Reformation before, but it's all a blur to you.
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You know Martin Luther, and that's about it. Or maybe you know a little bit more, like some of you have taken courses and done some reading.
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Well, hopefully today what we'll do is we'll give you a good overview of the Reformation. Due to time constraints, unless you want to stay through the morning service, which
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I don't think is going to happen, we have to move quickly really through the major Reformers from Martin Luther to the
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English Reformation. So I'll open us in prayer. If you didn't get a handout, by the way, there's handouts on the table, and we'll just work through the handout this morning.
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Let's go to the Lord in prayer this morning. Heavenly Father, thank you for our time together this morning.
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Lord, thank you that we do get to study the men and the issues of the
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Reformation this morning. And Lord, I do thank you that it shows us your providential care of your church throughout the ages.
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Lord, thank you that you move the church from a dark period into your light through the study of your word and the preaching of your word.
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And I pray this morning that as we go over this, we'd be edified by it. And Lord, that we would perhaps be better informed to live for you today.
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And I do pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, if you'd take your handout.
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The first verse I have up there is from Romans 1, 16 and 17.
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And it reads, For I am not ashamed of the gospel. Many of you have memorized this. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the
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Jew and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, but the righteous man shall live by faith.
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This is the verse that God used to awaken Martin Luther, the lightning rod, if you will, of the
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Reformation. Martin Luther is the first person we'll go over today. But first what
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I want to do is go over some background, precursors, if you will, to the Reformation. And what had happened, some of you were here a month or two ago when
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Pradeep did the history from the death of Christ of the church, the death of Christ up until this period now.
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And just by way of review, I want to ask you to give those back to me. But doctrinal and moral corruption of the church, the moral corruption, basically your popes were nothing more than Renaissance princes.
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They had become patrons of the arts. They had become political figures.
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And they had moved away from being the spiritual leader that the original apostles and a lot of the early popes were.
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You think of some of the great church fathers. You think of men like Athanasius and the
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Arian heresy and how they battled heresy. And they were true spiritual leaders, true men of the word of God, true men of character.
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But what happened in the Middle Ages is you started to move away from that and it became political. And actually, some of the popes were quite corrupt.
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You'd be shocked at some of the things that some of the popes had done, throwing parties that we'd be ashamed to discuss in polite company at the actual headquarters in Rome.
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Also, the doctrinal corruption, some of you are aware. I went looking for a book by Lorraine Bettner.
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Some of you are familiar with it. It's called Roman Catholicism. In that, I couldn't find it, in that he gives a list of all the doctrines and the years that they became doctrines, things like celibacy of priests, things like praying to the saints, worship of Mary, use of relics.
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These are things that people believed were bones of saints or little portions of hair or clothing that they would use.
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They felt it had spiritual power. Of course, the doctrines of purgatory and other things.
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You can each date these hundreds and hundreds of years after the New Testament that the church decided by their own tradition that we would add, and this now becomes a part of belief, so that by the end of the
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Reformation, what you ended up with was a works righteousness in the Catholic Church. I think
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Pradeep did a great job of discussing that several weeks ago. Now, there are several historical developments that were key in getting ready for the
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Reformation. One of them, I've mentioned the medieval Roman Catholic Church. When I do RC, that's
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Roman Catholic, or RCC, that's Roman Catholic Church. You see that in the notes. Economy of space.
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What you had, one thing, and this is in light of today's current events, should strike home.
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Constantinople fell in 1453. It might not ring any bells with you, but what happened there, you had pretty much all of the
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Greek manuscripts and a lot of the ancient manuscripts were kept in modern -day Turkey in a place called
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Constantinople, also known as... Constantinople, what's that?
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Istanbul today, but it went from... I forget the name. It changed from Constantinople, I believe, to Byzantium.
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Yes. And so those manuscripts, especially the New Testament manuscripts from there are known as the Byzantine manuscripts.
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But what happened, the Muslims conquered in 1453 Constantinople.
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All of these scholars, what they did was they took all their manuscripts from Aristotle, Plato, New Testament, you name it, all these works of antiquity in Greek, and they came to Europe with them.
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And so this is one of the things, along with the next item there, Gutensberg Printing Press in 1455.
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I mean, these were almost at the same exact time that you had an explosion of learning.
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You had really what we call the Renaissance. And what the Renaissance was, the
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Renaissance was an increase in learning, not only in learning of biblical manuscripts and so forth and the biblical text and the return to the text, but also of a lot of these works of ancient philosophy and history and so forth.
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So this is very key in getting people aware of these sources and allowing them to go back and just explore the roots of a lot of what they believed.
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And it was quite eye -opening. As I said, the printing press allowed people to, instead of handwriting all these manuscripts, or if you wanted to track, you'd have to handwrite every one, you can now print it, and you could disseminate anything widely.
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This was not available before. Very, very important development there. A lot of political upheavals, the rise of nationalism, explorers.
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If you think of Columbus, it was 1492. This was just prior to 1500, all of these events, and they were very, very important.
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There were also, in addition to these historical developments, there were key early reformers that I want to bring to your attention.
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One is John Wycliffe. He died in the 1300s. He lived and died in the 1300s. Died of a natural death.
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The Roman Catholic Church decided years later when they had
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Jan Hus of the Hussites, they had martyred him and later William Tyndale.
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When they martyred Jan Hus, leader of the Hussites, they also excavated
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Wycliffe's bones and burned them. So it wasn't enough to burn a live guy.
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They had to excavate the bones of somebody they hated and burn his bones as well. So they were really committed to squelching any kind of reformation or any kind of reform or anything that would challenge their authority, the
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Roman Catholic Church. William Tyndale is very important. He had translated the
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New Testament for the first time into English. Now, this wasn't from the original sources. This was actually from the Latin Vulgate, the entire
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Bible into English for the first time. Some people had done portions or the Psalms or other things. It's the first time
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Tyndale, a very important figure, and his followers are known as the Lollards, you see right there. And they continued throughout
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Europe. This all is happening in Europe, by the way, just to give you sort of a geographical orientation.
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The Waldenses, followers of Peter Waldo, also a European leader, more evangelical than the
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Catholic Church at the time, and they were early reformers. Finally, biblical and classical learning, as I mentioned earlier.
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Just a little bit more on that. That term there, ad fontes, you see there, that's a Latin term. And what that means, you think of fontes, sounds like fountain font.
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It means back to the sources. And this was the cry of the Reformation, whether you were a secular scholar, a humanist, or whether you were a
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Christian. The goal was to go back to the sources, go back to the original Greek manuscripts of the
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New Testament, particularly in a Christian arena, so that you could find out, is this what the
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Bible really says? Is our translation reliable? And are the practices of our church consistent with what
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I'm seeing here in Scripture? Very, very important. The early Bible translations I've just mentioned. And finally,
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Erasmus' Greek New Testament in 1516. Erasmus was a Dutch humanist, the illegitimate son of a
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Roman Catholic priest. And I believe his first name was
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Darius Erasmus, Dutch. And he translated the whole
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Greek New Testament for the first time. And with a printing press, they were able to print these, and scholars were finally able to study them.
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And that's exactly what Martin Luther, and if you go down your list there of major Reformers, all of those major Reformers had access to their own
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Greek New Testament, thanks to Erasmus, a very important figure in the
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Reformation. Well, let's discuss the major Reformers. Any questions on that in the early
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Reformation, precursors? John? Hard to say.
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Probably. He was the one, in fact, who Martin Luther, when he wrote his Bondage of the Will, he was writing in response to Erasmus.
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So, I would say probably he was not a believer, but God used him.
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And that's another big lesson from church history, is God uses people who aren't necessarily believers.
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He used scribes who probably weren't even believers to preserve the manuscripts and preserve the original text through all of ancient time.
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So, very important to know that even God uses unbelievers.
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I would say Erasmus was probably not. Okay. Let's move to Martin Luther.
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Martin Luther was born in 1483, and he was a
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German monk. What happened was a great scene where he's caught, he's studying to be a lawyer. His dad wanted him to be a lawyer.
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I'm sure we can relate to that. A lot of us who've spent more time doing ministry things and our parents would rather have us be rich and famous and powerful.
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But, you know, he, at this time, that's what his dad wanted. He wanted to be a lawyer. He had secular goals for him.
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Well, Martin Luther was caught in a thunderstorm, a violent thunderstorm, and he prayed to St.
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Anne. He said, St. Anne, deliver me, help me, and I'll become a monk. Well, St.
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Anne didn't deliver him, but God did, and he did become a monk. That's exactly what happened. And he studied and he became an initiate to become a monk.
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At that time, you withdrew from society and you went into these monasteries. That's exactly what he did.
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And Luther was scrupulous. He was incredibly zealous to do the things you're supposed to do, the good works you were supposed to do.
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And pretty much like Paul said, you know, he was a Pharisee of Pharisees. If anybody was a better Jew than Paul, you know, show them to me.
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That was his attitude in Philippians, right? Well, here, that was the same thing with Martin Luther. Basically, nobody was a better monk than Martin Luther, but still he was convicted of his own sin.
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He knew down deep that he could not measure up, and he viewed
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God as vengeful and hateful and spiteful, and he couldn't get over that at first.
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And so what he would do, you see this name there, Staupitz. That was the man who Luther confessed to. That was what we call a confessor.
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And he would spend, I'm sure you've heard Pastor and others say, six hours at a time confessing.
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He would go walk away, remember, oh, I forgot this one, and come back and confess for another half hour or an hour. It completely drove him crazy.
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And what Staupitz said, he said, well, bring something that really is worth confessing. Martin, don't obsess over these little things.
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Well, he also is the one who assigned Martin to become a University of Wittenberg Bible teacher.
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And that was key because what he was able to do then to teach books like Galatians and Romans, he had to get into and study and meditate on the actual text, the
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Greek text of Scripture and on the Bible. And what that led to was his awakening, and he came across this verse, but the righteous man shall live by faith.
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And what that prompted in Luther was a, what we call being born again, or he was regenerated, because he understood at that point that justification by faith.
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And if we look at Martin Luther, his main contribution to the Reformation is that he recovered biblical theology and the understanding.
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Well, he was converted and continued to teach at the University of Wittenberg. And there was a man named
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Tetzel. A lot of you have heard of Tetzel. Tetzel was basically a salesman of indulgences for the
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Roman Catholic Church. And let me give you a quick view of what indulgences were.
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Indulgences were the selling of the merits of the saints for people on earth and people who had already died to shorten or get you out of purgatory.
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We say, well, what are the merits of the saints? Well, these were people like the apostles, like the saints that had been canonized.
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They had gotten enough righteousness for themselves. Again, this is according to Roman Catholic doctrine. So they had extra to give to everybody else.
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And all this extra good stuff and good works was put in what's called the treasury of merit.
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So if you have, let's say I'm good enough. I have my treasury of merit is maxed out. It goes into the bank account in Rome.
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I don't need it anymore. So I might as well loan it to somebody else. So that's exactly what indulgences were where the church was officially selling to you these extra good works so that you could either get to heaven earlier or not spend any time in purgatory, which is the
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Roman Catholic doctrine of punishment after death, between death and heaven to work off these bad things you did.
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Well, Tetzel was a seller of indulgences. And I'm sure you've all heard the phrase, the minute the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.
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Well, this is Martin Luther's Here I Stand. If you want to learn about the Reformation, read this book. It's really, really good.
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And it gives in here, he gives, I'll just briefly read a passage to you. This is actually Tetzel's sermon.
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And let me give you the context of that coin in the coffer phrase. Imagine having this preached to you.
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And by the way, before I read this, the reason they were selling these indulgences so aggressively is that they wanted to build
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St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. If any of you have been to St. Peter's Basilica, beautiful, beautiful structure, but it's kind of like the lottery.
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You know, it was built on the backs of the poor people who wanted to get their loved ones out of purgatory.
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But let me read this passage. This is Tetzel's actual sermon. Listen now,
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God, and St. Peter call you. Consider the salvation of your souls and those of your loved ones departed. You priest, you noble, you merchant, you virgin, you matron, you youth, you old man, enter now into your church, which is the church of St.
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Peter. Visit the most holy cross erected before you and ever imploring you. Have you considered that you are lashed in a furious tempest amidst the temptations and dangers of the world and that you do not know whether you can reach the haven, not of your mortal body, but of your immortal soul?
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Consider that all who are contrite and have confessed and have made contribution will receive complete remission of all their sins.
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Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives in beseeching you and saying, Pity us, pity us.
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We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance. Do you not wish to?
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Open your ears. Hear the father saying to his son and a mother to her daughter, We bore you, nourished you, brought you up.
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Talk about a guilt trip, huh? Left you our fortunes and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little to set us free.
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Will you let us lie here in flames? Will you delay our promised glory? Remember that you are able to release them for as soon as the coin in the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs.
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Will you not then for a quarter receive these letters of indulgence through which you are able to lead a divine and immortal soul into the fatherland of paradise?
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What a great salesman! Come on! Excuse Pastor Mike's phrase. Come on!
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Would you, after that guilt trip, how could you not give something? And so this is what Tetzel was doing.
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And in fact, he, due to Frederick the Wise, I mean, it breaks my heart to read that even because, you know, people are believing that they're actually helping when it's doing no good and it's just getting money to build a great structure.
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Well, he was preaching this and Martin Luther was incensed, understandably so.
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And Tetzel wasn't actually allowed to go to Wittenberg because there was other people there, but he was across the border.
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It's kind of like when people go to buy, you know, whatever tickets in Rhode Island or people go to Rhode Island buying these super jackpot tickets.
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He had to go across the border. Well, he had to go outside Wittenberg but still Luther knew of him and he was preaching against him.
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And what he wrote was his 95 Theses. You see there October 31st, Halloween or All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day Eve, 1517, very important date.
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And a lot of what he wrote in these 95 Theses, these were 95 points for debate is really what they were.
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And he nailed them to the church door at Wittenberg and at that point the die was cast, the
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Reformation was begun and because the reaction to the Theses were swift because his followers copied them and sent them all over the place.
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So the people had these writings and they started to question, wait a minute, this is not right.
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He talked about things like repentance. Repentance, does anybody know what repentance was and still is today in the
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Catholic Church? Dependence, that's exactly right. The Latin was mistranslated when
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Jesus and John the Baptist said repent, it was translated due repentance. And so what you do and you do it today,
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I did it as a young child in Catholic Church. You would go to confession and you would be given these prayers to say as your punishment.
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Imagine saying prayers as punishment but you would have to do your Our Father and your Hail Mary's and all these other things as punishment.
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And so that was one of the things that Luther said was no, it means a change of mind and heart.
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This is what repentance truly is biblically because he studied the word and he knew that that's really what it meant.
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Well, you had the Diet of Worms there is the next thing on the outline.
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That refers to a diet. Worms was a place, it was not worms. It was a place in Germany and a diet was called by the
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Pope in order to debate or in order to take up an issue formally and Luther was called there.
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And here's where he issues his famous, they said repent, recant of your statements Martin Luther. And he said unless I am convinced by the word of God in consciousness,
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I cannot repent. Here I stand, I can do no other. And that's the name of his biography here by Roland Bainton is
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Here I Stand and that's where that comes from. And so he did not repent. He had the support of Frederick the
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Wise, one of the folks in Germany at that time who was a civic leader and he was able to be preserved and really the church and state, the state actually helped the church survive at that time.
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It was a very important part of allowing the Reformation to continue without being attacked directly by the
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Roman Catholic Church and have everybody like Tyndale and Wycliffe burned and taken away. But that didn't always happen as we'll see with the
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English Reformation later. Philip Melanchthon was an important helper.
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He was sort of Luther's right hand man and he took over the Lutheran movement after Luther.
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Frederick the Wise is there. Again, he's the patron. He was the person who protected Luther and at first he was reluctant to do so but eventually he understood what was at stake and he supported
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Luther fully and was very key in getting the Reformation in Germany not only started but also preserving and keeping it going.
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His key contributions are Martin Luther. Again, I wish we had time to spend a whole day on Luther but let's just quickly move through these.
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His 95 Theses, you should know that. That's something fundamental to any Protestant. That's really what started the
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Reformation. Bible translation, he translated the entire Bible into German in the common tongue for the first time.
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Prior to this, it was only available in Latin and if you didn't know or understand Latin, you were lost.
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You couldn't read the Bible. Biblical preaching, that's one of the marks of the church. The Roman Catholic Church built up these seven sacraments.
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They still have today including penance and infant baptism for regeneration but here he said that biblical preaching is one of the marks of the true apostolic church.
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We believe that here. All Protestant churches believe the preaching of the Bible or at least believing
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Protestant churches is central to what the church is and what the church should do. He also had the doctrine of justification by faith alone for which
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Luther is best known and rightfully recognized as recovering that.
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Monergism. What's monergism? That means justification by faith alone that God does a sovereign work in a person's life and that the reception of that work is passive.
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It's a one way. It's not you do your part, God does his part and you kind of work it together. It's nothing like that at all.
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That really recovered Augustine's what we call that word there, soteriology or the doctrine of salvation.
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Augustine had the wrong view of the church quite honestly. He really developed the church form and a lot of the doctrines of the middle ages and the
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Roman Catholic Church but he had an exact right view of salvation.
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Augustine didn't. So what Luther did, he went back to Augustine's writings and he understood, yes, this is what
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I'm seeing in the Bible too and he recovered that after hundreds of years of being really buried.
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He started the Lutheran Church as I said earlier. He had the doctrine, the next item there of what we call consubstantiation and it's kind of a hybrid doctrine but basically what it means, instead of the transubstantiation
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Roman Catholic doctrine, what you have is that the wafer and the wine actually turn into the real body and blood of Christ.
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They didn't have modern science but they believed this is actually Christ's body, this little piece of bread right here. And what
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Luther said, transubstantiation was, well, it doesn't become the body and blood but the body and blood of Christ are in and under and around these elements.
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So it was sort of a, just where is the body and blood? It's still the body and blood of Christ. They still believe that today. It's called consubstantiation.
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So that was a doctrine we disagree with him on and in fact the other reformers also disagreed with him on. Finally, the priesthood of believers and the singing of hymns.
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A lot of our great hymns, Mighty Fortresses, Our God, and many others. He brought congregational singing back to the
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Christian church whereas before you had paid performers up front here. That's all you had. The rest of you would all be sitting there and you'd have
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Charlie and the rest of them doing their thing and you'd just sit there and listen. That's all they had. But he returned the congregational singing so we can thank
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Luther for that as well. All right, let's move on to the next person, a major reformer, Ulrich Zwingli.
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Fun name to say. Ulrich Zwingli. He lived in Zurich which is part of Switzerland.
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He was a Swiss priest and he became converted and became a pastor after his conversion.
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In other words, again, like Luther and Calvin and the others, he had studied the sources. He had gone back to the
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Greek New Testament and he understood what the scriptures really said and as he studied them he began to understand that the
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Roman Catholic church had gone astray. And so he personally became converted. He says he wasn't influenced by Luther necessarily but he was a little later than Luther in terms of his conversion and it's pretty certain that he had some influence or some knowledge of Luther's teachings anyway.
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He became convinced, won a bunch of debates in Zurich against very, very worthy
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Roman Catholic debating opponents and he outlawed the mass in Zurich.
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He had the blessing of the local civic leaders and he outlawed the mass and icons and relics.
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Zwingli had a very important role because he actually applied these things in a very direct and straightforward manner to reform the church in Zurich.
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He was more politically involved. Luther was too politically involved but he believed that the church should have really overtake the government and reform society through government but basically the church should run the government almost.
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So he was very politically involved. He had a memorial view of communion which is the view that basically we have although he modified it somewhat later and was closer to Luther but not quite.
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But he modified Luther's position on communion and the Lord's Supper a little bit. He was killed in war versus Roman Catholic forces.
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Because he believed in being involved in society more than maybe a Luther, he was actually part of commanding forces.
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He rode out on a horse and there were Roman Catholic forces that came in and he was killed. Not only was he drawn and quartered which is a violent death but he was burned and then his bones were mixed with cow dung so that people wouldn't be tempted to use his ashes were mixed with cow dung so people wouldn't be tempted to use his bones for relics.
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Very strange people these middle age Roman Catholic persecutors. But they really meant business and they went all the way.
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So that was Zwingli. His follower was Bullinger. If you ever hear that name
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Bullinger he was Zwingli's protege. Key contributions he rejected more or less consubstantiation.
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He was an ally of Luther but at the Marburg Colloquy what we call a meeting with Luther and Melanchthon they agreed on 14 .5
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out of 15 points. This was obviously before his death. 14 .5 out of 15 points and this one sticking point was that Luther wouldn't budge on this idea of consubstantiation unfortunately.
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And it was one of these unanimous things that we agree unanimously or I can't sign this. So even though they agreed 90 whatever it is percent of the time here they could not agree and they didn't sign it.
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But he had a more appropriate biblical view of the Lord's table. And biblical scholarship
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Zwingli was a great scholar as I said he was a great debater. Let me ask has anybody in here ever memorized
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I'm sure we've all memorized a verse of scripture let's assume that. Has anybody ever memorized a chapter of the Bible? You don't have to raise your hand.
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I don't know if anybody's ever memorized the whole book of the Bible. That's pretty impressive. Has anybody ever memorized the whole
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New Testament? I know I've heard this in Protestant men today who maybe have memorized the whole New Testament. Well Zwingli had the whole
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New Testament memorized but the incredible thing about that is that it memorized in Greek. Pretty incredible stuff.
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Well so you had Martin Luther you had Ulrich Zwingli and the third figure we'll discuss this morning is
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John Calvin. We have to sort of whiz through the end of this outline a little bit but let's cover what we can.
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He was born in France he was a French scholar and his father wanted him also to become a lawyer but he was willing to say he could become a lawyer and a priest.
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And so he really began his study of the Bible early. He wrote the
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Institutes. His Institutes were in four volumes. He revised them about four or five times as he went along and the version we have today of Calvin's Institutes are actually his fourth or fifth revision of those.
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But a very important person in developing Christian doctrine.
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And he wrote these for the King of France, Francis I. He was exiled and he went to Geneva in Switzerland and Strasbourg.
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He was a very studious pastor and theologian. After his conversion he became converted and wrote the Institutes. That next name is on there you see
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Farrell and Busser. This man Farrell was very important because he had Calvin.
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Question Daniel. Was he banished because of these? Yes, he was.
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It's unclear whether he was exactly sent or whether he went on his own but pretty much he knew either.
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It's kind of one of those either you quit or you get fired kind of things. He knew he had to leave. And so Farrell, not
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Colin Farrell, but Farrell, I can look up his first name if you like, but he was very important because Luther arrived in Geneva and his intent was to have the life of a solitary scholar, to have a quiet life, he didn't want any controversy.
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Well, he was in Geneva and Farrell heard that Calvin was there and he had already heard of him. Well, Farrell comes in and says, we don't want you to go to Strasbourg, we want you to stay here and work with us in Geneva.
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And Calvin basically politely refused. He said, no, I don't think so. And Farrell pretty much got in his face, big man,
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Calvin was a little guy, got in his face and said, pronounced a curse, said, if you leave
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I pronounce a curse on you. And Calvin was shaken by this. He didn't know what to do with it.
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And Farrell basically in his preaching to Calvin to stay, talked
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Calvin into staying. And he stayed in Geneva for a number of years and led the reformation there.
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He started what's called the consistory. Basically, he was in Geneva first, just to give you a little bit.
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The government there was very fickle and he ended up going to Strasbourg for a little while but came back. You've heard Pastor Mike talk about how
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Calvin was preaching through Ephesians. He left for a few years. And when he came back, he picked up right where he left off in the next verse.
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Well, this is that period. He left to go to Strasbourg for a few years but they realized they needed him and called him back.
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And so, you had consistory. What that was, that was basically the
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Presbyterian form of church government. Not only within the church where you have elders leading the church but outside the church.
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So, you would have a bunch of like -minded churches like us and one representative from each of those churches would meet in a form of representative government.
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And it was really a very great, great influence in our governmental formation and form.
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John Calvin and his idea of representative church government. And you also have there after the consistory of Servetus.
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This is Michael Servetus. He was a heretic. He was one of the radical reformers. And the
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Roman Catholic Church was after him and the reason I put his name in there was he was executed in Geneva when
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Calvin was there. And he's pretty much blamed for Servetus' death. It's really not fair because what he did was pretty much he realized that Servetus was teaching heresy.
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And in our view, if we had somebody who had killed hundreds of people, murdered hundreds of people, even in our day, we'd say, yeah, put him to death.
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You know, remove that hazard from the community. Well, in Calvin's view and the reformers' view of church and state, they believe that guys like Michael Servetus were committing spiritual mass murder.
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By that I mean they were sending hundreds and thousands of people to hell by their teaching. So although he didn't order
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John Calvin, wasn't that involved in the government? Even though he didn't order it, he gave approval to the death or didn't protest.
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But in his view, it was justified. Michael Servetus was leading so many astray and leading them to an eternity without Christ.
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And so that's sometimes used if you hear that name to besmirch the name of John Calvin, but don't buy it.
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It's not true. By the way, let me just as an aside, this is one of the reasons we learn church history is you get a lot of people make statements like that.
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Well, he had this guy Servetus executed and, you know, he was just a bad man.
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Well, if you know church history, you can say, well, actually, no. I know history and here's something different and that's not true.
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So you look at the... what's the book out now?
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The Da Vinci Code. And they make all sorts of twisting and turning and made up history. So you have to be aware that this is one reason that we learn church history.
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Yes, Louis. That's his idea.
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The answer, even if he did have Servetus killed, and how does that affect the rightness of his...
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Right. ...non -theological matter? Right. And yet, that's the argument. Well, this is not a good man, therefore his arguments are...
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Right, right. Exactly correct. It really is a phony argument. Good point, good point. An ad hominem attack, ad hominem argument does not address the issue at hand at all.
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That's correct. And so people take the low road and try to undercut somebody's character by doing that. Well, Calvin's bishop,
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Sadaletto there, is the one who talked him into coming back from Strasbourg. That's another name to be aware of.
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Key contributions of Calvin, he wrote the Institutes and a lot of commentaries. Today, if any of you have used Calvin's commentaries, phenomenal.
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They are just so on track. They are very devotional and right to the point.
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He simplifies things. Apparently his preaching was not in his commentaries. What he would do is he would preach more devotionally and he would say, if you have questions on the doctrine of predestination, check my commentary, 15 paragraph
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C, and he would just go on. He wouldn't spend all that much time, but if people really wanted to go deep, he showed them and he helped pastors be able to study the
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Bible and know biblical doctrine. Just a great man, a godly man, physically had some issues that he worked through, but we are much richer for having
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John Calvin. Church government. Again, I mentioned the Presbyterian church government. He was very important in constituting that.
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A theology of regeneration. That was one important thing. Even though Luther understood justification by faith, the other reformers hadn't quite yet worked out, well, how does regeneration work?
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How does the Holy Spirit regenerate someone? Well, Calvin did work that out. And you had predestination, his study of predestination, the biblical doctrine.
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He really developed that well. And the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He's kind of known as a theologian of the Holy Spirit.
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How the Holy Spirit worked. He encouraged people to understand what the
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Bible had to say about the Holy Spirit, whereas the others were more practical. They were all born again, they were all godly men, but Calvin really wanted people to understand what is the
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Holy Spirit's role in salvation and in sanctification. And he developed that and we can be thankful for that.
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Social reform and his ideas pretty much in Scotland and America were taken and applied to civil government and a lot of church governments as well.
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The Presbyterian Church is pretty much Calvin's idea. And those ideas were used and applied and we can thank
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Calvin again for our form of government. The next point on the outline, we had Luther, Zwingli, Calvin who moved to the
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Anabaptists and the Radical Reformers. And I'll quickly move through this, but some key people were Menno Simmons or Simons.
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I'm not sure how you pronounce it. My professor didn't even know him in seminary. But most people call him Menno. So we get the
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Mennonites came from this group. He was born in 1496 and some other reformers were
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Felix Manns, Conrad Grebel, Hubmeier, Blaurock.
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It was kind of a small Bible study group and they became convinced that baptism was for believing people only.
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Up to that time, you had all the other reformers kept the idea of infant baptism, that we had this sort of covenant community because it was so entrenched in the church for 1 ,500 years.
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They fought and they won a lot of battles. This is not a hill they wanted to die on, however, on infant baptism.
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So they kept infant baptism. However, the Anabaptists and Radical Reformers, what we call radical, some of them were more radical than others, decided that they were going to die on this hill.
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And they stood their ground and Felix Manns was the one who had a child.
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He had a little baby and he decided, I'm not going to baptize this baby. Totally scandalous act because baptism also made you a person in that society.
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So what he was saying, not only in the view of a lot of the people in that society, was you're going to damn your child to hell because you didn't baptize them and they're an outcast from our society.
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So that was basically an act of treason if you think about it. And this man, Felix Manns, decided not to baptize his child after a study of the
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Scripture and a Bible study with these other folks, decided that he needed to be baptized. He asked himself to be baptized.
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They didn't dunk him back then. They poured or they sprinkled. It wasn't until a bunch of years later that they actually did immerse people for baptism.
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But this was a step in the right direction. At least you're baptizing believers which is what baptism is supposed to be. And so he baptized the others and they were persecuted.
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They were orthodox in their belief, evangelical, but they scandalized society at that time.
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The four main groups, you had your revolutionary reformers, your really revolutionary wing of the radical reformation.
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I believe it was Felix Munzer. He wanted to overthrow the government and become king. Very radical, violent man.
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And he was killed and a lot of his followers were also killed. You had the quietists who basically they had the opposite tact.
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The revolutionary reformers, by the way, you know the people that say they have a word from God. Well, these revolutionary ones, instead of the Bible as their authority, the
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Holy Spirit, the word of, will bring me the word. And that's why this guy, this fine man,
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Munzer, this is why Munzer believed what he did is that God had told him
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I need to overthrow the government. Well, these other folks, the quietists, had personal contact with God. They believed that was their main authority, but they believed in separating.
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You know, your Quakers and your Shakers and folks like this were quietists. You had your rationalists.
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This is Michael Servaitis who was a rationalist. He put his rational mind, not the Holy Spirit like these other folks, but his rational mind above biblical authority.
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And he was a heretic, plain and simple. And Socinius, if you've heard of the heresy of Socinianism, again, these are mixing and rationalistic thought with the
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Bible and you come up with something completely different. And he led, basically if you think of Socinius, he was probably one of the earliest liberal theologians out there.
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And there were evangelicals. That was the fourth group of the Radical Reformation. Now the Anabaptists, why were they called
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Anabaptists? It comes from the word meaning to re -baptize. They didn't believe they were re -baptizing.
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They believed this was the real baptism. But from the outside looking in, the Anabaptists were re -baptizing people who were already baptized.
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The key ideas of the Anabaptists and Radical Reformers, they rejected what's called the Magisterial Reformation.
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Now the Magisterial Reformation was the Reformation should take place with the assistance, basically arm in arm with the civil government.
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That's what a Magisterial Reformer is. The Anabaptists weren't like that. Calvin was, Zwingli was,
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Luther was, but the Anabaptists were not. In fact, they believed in a separation of church and state.
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That's where we get that term today. And the idea was we don't want your interference, we don't want your help state, thank you very much, we'll be over here, you'll be over there, and kind of separated themselves from society.
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They believed, again, in believer's baptism rather than infant baptism. They took a memorial view of the
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Lord's Supper. They didn't bend on that. Whereas Luther and even
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Calvin to a certain extent and Zwingli did believe there was a spiritual significance and spiritual nourishment in the
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Supper, the Anabaptists took a pure memorial view of the Lord's Supper. They believed in recovering primitive church faith and practice.
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Things like church discipline, the ban it was called. They practiced this. To people who would fail morally, who they felt needed to be put out of the church, they would do that.
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They weren't as strong theologically and this is one of the reasons even today the Mennonites and others theologically they're what we would consider a little bit off in many ways.
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They're not as biblically strong as we might like. We have...
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Yes. Yes. Yes.
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Yes. Yes. That's correct. Yes. Correct.
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Yes. Pacifists. That's a very important point. That's right. Yes. They... If you've seen the movie
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Witness back in the 80's you get an idea of the big verses come out from them and be separate from the
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Old Testament and that's what they practiced. Key events, persecution. They were the most highly persecuted reformation group by the government.
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Many were martyred by drowning. In an irony, they'd say, okay, you want to be baptized? Here you go. Stay under for about a half hour.
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They would hold them under and that's how they would execute many of these Anabaptists. Very cruel and very awful way of dying but that's how they were executed.
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Let's quickly whiz through the English Reformation in about five minutes and finish up here. The early leaders,
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Henry VIII was the leader of the English Reformation. Basically, he wanted to be married his way and live his own life.
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The Catholic Church didn't like that so he said, I'll start my own church. That's how the English Reformation started. Because of that, you had a very different Reformation than in the other countries.
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This was sort of started by the state. You still had the king as the head of the Christian Church in England and more or less today with some modifications with Charles or whomever who knows what he's the head of.
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He's indicated he wants to be the head of mosque or something. I don't know. He's very off there.
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That illustrates the problem though. Because when you had a Protestant believing king or queen, great.
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Protestants were happy the Catholics were running for their lives. When you had Bloody Mary, Mary the queen, she was
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Roman Catholic. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and the
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Protestants were running for their lives. Like John Knox out of Scotland, he went to Geneva, met
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Calvin, studied with him, translated the Geneva Bible and that's what the pilgrims brought with them. They didn't like the
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King James Bible because King James translated it. They took the Geneva Bible with them. That was translated by John Knox.
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What you saw was whoever was in charge, whatever their religion was, was in favor at the time.
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That led to a lot of up and downs which is why the English Reformation was something that was a lot more topsy -turvy than a lot of the other reformations.
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You had Thomas Cranmer. He was really the spiritual architect of the Reformation in England, Cranmer.
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He's the one who was responsible for the 39 Articles. He didn't have the
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Westminster Assembly but that was kind of the precursor to it. He had the Common Book of Prayer, it was Thomas Cranmer. He really wanted people to become spiritually reborn and spiritually built up.
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That was Thomas Cranmer. He was Henry's advisor by the way but he was the spiritual side of that.
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It was kind of a two -pronged English revival. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was martyred.
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If you read Fox's Book of Martyrs, you read about Cranmer, you read about Latimer, Hooper, and Ridley. They met at the
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White Horse Inn and really started the English Reformation. Cranmer actually signed a recantation of his faith before he died.
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When he was martyred, burned at the stake, he said he wanted to put his right hand in first because that is the part of his body that had denied the
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Lord by signing that recantation. So these others said that their being burned at the stake would lead to a flame which would never be extinguished in England.
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And you read that, Fox's Book of Martyrs, you can read all about that. Just an incredibly faithful group of men that we can be thankful for today.
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In Scotland, you had John Knox. He was a little bit later. I should also mention that John Calvin was a second generation reformer.
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It is out of order here, but he was really, you had the Anabaptists, Zwingli, and Luther at the same time. And Calvin was sort of a second generation reformer and so was
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John Knox. They were contemporaries. You had, as I said, Bloody Mary and you had
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King James who is the author of the King James Bible. He was so controlling on the church in certain points that we had your separatists and your
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Puritans who wanted to separate from the church and purify the church. Different groups wanted to do different things, but they were prompted to do so by King James.
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And I put here the English Reformation was the most magisterial of all with great impact on the course of Reformation events.
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Let's summarize here. Out of this Reformation, you have what are called the five solas of the
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Reformation. Those are sola gratia, sola fide, sola christus, sola scriptura, and sola deo gloria.
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And I've put what those mean behind them. By grace alone, through faith alone, through Christ alone, scripture is the alone authority, and to the glory of God alone.
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And those were the main ideas that came out of the Reformation. Five points of Calvinism, tulip, they actually came out later.
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They're from what's called the Canons of Dort. It was a meeting. I get a kick out of some of these names. They sound funny. But the
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Canons of Dort were a response to Arminius's points of remonstrance. He had his five points, so Calvinists, second, third generation
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Calvinists, came up with their five points, and they were in opposition. It's important to remember that these five points of Calvinism are a biblical response to this challenge to the sovereignty of God and salvation.
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And we need to understand that context. Sometimes we try to apply them more broadly than they're really meant to apply.
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But if you study them, they do speak to the character of God and salvation and His sovereignty.
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My third point there, the first generation of reformers returned the church to a more biblical pattern of faith and practice.
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That phrase there, that Latin phrase, semper reformanda, means always reforming.
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So what it means is we have to continue to test all things by scripture. And each generation has to do that. I can't have my father's faith.
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This church has to always be reforming. If we find we're out of line somewhere, we have to always be willing, like the reformers, to reform our faith or our practice to bring it in line with scripture.
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And finally, the Reformation would eventually lead to the end of the
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Reformation. The Reformation lead to the end of the
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Reformation. The would lead to the end of the
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Reformation. The would lead to the
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Reformation. lead to the end of the
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Reformation. The would lead to the end of Reformation.