How Shall We Then Live 4, The Reformation

The Reformation as a Break from Medieval Roman Catholicism

Reformation, of course, is a technical term, which means the breaking away of the reformers from the church as it had grown up in the Middle Ages, which we call the Roman Catholic Church. Really, what the Reformation was, to understand, was the turning away from the humanistic elements that had entered into the church during the time of the Middle Ages.

This is no ordinary indulgence. This will build St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, and you will share in every mass that is said from now till doomsday. Our Lord Jesus Christ, by coming on earth, by suffering and dying, has already paid for our salvation forever.

How then can any mortal man, monk, prince, or pope extort a further payment? In matters of faith, I think that neither council nor pope nor any man has power over my conscience. And where they disagree with Scripture, I deny pope and council and all.

A simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.

Just as the High Renaissance was coming to its close in the south of Europe, the Reformation exploded in the north of Europe. Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the church door in Wittenberg. Zwingli led Zurich in its break with the Church of Rome.

England broke with the Church of Rome. John Calvin, the Geneva Reformer, wrote his Institutes. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. This broke the ground for translations in other languages, so the people could read the Bible for themselves for the first time.

Scripture, Faith Alone, and Direct Access to God

The Bible showed them that individual people could come directly to God by faith upon the basis of the finished work of Christ. It was grace only. Previously, as people entered into these churches, they were shut away from that which was the center of their worship, the altar which was here in the chancel, by a high screen of wood or of iron.

During the Reformation, these were often removed. This one ran along up there. And then the Bible was placed directly where the screen had been in order to show that the teaching of the Bible opened the way for all people to come to God directly.

In an earlier age, some of the Christians had cut down the sacred groves under which the pagan gods were worshipped. They didn't do this because they despised trees, but because of the particular religious significance of these trees as a sacred grove.

In the same way, in the Reformation, some of the men and the women of the Reformation, sometimes even the donors of the images themselves, destroyed some of the statues and pictures of the saints and the madonnas.

We might wish, at this day, that they had taken them and put them in a warehouse for a hundred years or so, and then they could have been taken out and put into a museum. But at that moment of history, that would have been too much to ask.

To the men and women of the Reformation, these were not objects of art. They were images to worship, obstacles that had come between them and God. They had discovered the biblical stress that there's only one mediator, Christ Jesus.

And these images had come to represent to them that which they had religiously rejected. What had they rejected? First, that the Church had made its authority equal to the authority of the Bible.

There is only one proper interpretation of Scripture, that which the Church has established. What if Scripture were in the hands of common man, for every pot boy and swineherd to read in his own language and interpret for himself?

What then? Then we might have more Christians, Father.

Second, that the Church had added human works that needed to be done to the finished work of Christ for salvation.

For who would see his mother in flames when, with a piece of silver, he can set her free? For as soon as the money clinks in the chest, the soul flies up to heavenly rest.

Come along, good people. And thirdly, since the time of Thomas Aquinas, increasingly the Church had mixed biblical thinking and pagan thought. You remember that to Thomas Aquinas the will was fallen, but the mind was not.

This thinking gradually led to the High Renaissance of the South, which was based on a humanistic ideal. Man had made himself the center and measure of all things. The mixture of biblical teaching and pagan thought showed itself in a number of ways.

Raphael, for example, balanced his school of Athens, here Plato, Aristotle, with his pictorial representation of the Church on the opposite wall. It is called the Disputa, for it deals with the nature of the mass.

Or Michelangelo, here in the Sistine Chapel, making the pagan prophetesses equal to the Old Testament prophets. William Farrell, the early French reformer, preached in this church. Here he is holding the Bible aloft.

For Farrell and the other reformers, it was the Scriptures only. When Erasmus of Rotterdam advocated a merely moderate reform of the Church, Farrell spoke out and made it plain that he stood on principle against humanism from both sides.

The humanism of the Renaissance and the Christian humanism, so-called, of Erasmus. Erasmus did make a contribution to the Reformation in his editing the New Testament in the original Greek, and he urged that it be translated into all languages.

But his Christian humanism was less than consistent Christianity, and Farrell spoke out against it. People needed the answers given by God in the Bible in order to know how to be right with God. But they also needed God's answers concerning the meaning of life and what is right and what is wrong.

They needed an existing God, but a God who had spoken in a way that could be understood.

Justification by Faith and the Authority of Scripture

I think I have found the truth at last. And when I found it, it was as though the gates of heaven were open to me. Romans 1 .17 By faith man lives and is made righteous, not by what he does for himself, be it adoration of relics, singing of masses, pilgrimages to Rome, purchase of pardon for his sins, but by faith in what God has done for him already through his Son.

Dr. Martin, if you leave the Christian to live only by faith, what will you put in their place? Christ. Man only needs Jesus Christ.

When God states in the Bible what he is like, people have truth about God. Because people are finite, that is, they're limited, they do not have exhaustive knowledge about God. What they have is truth about God.

And from what God gives in the Scriptures, they also have truth about morals and meaning and values. The Bible also tells about mankind and about nature. For example, why things exist and why they have the form they have.

The men of the Reformation had no problem trying to derive meaning, universals, from the individual things, that is, the particulars, the way the humanistic men of the Renaissance did. Because the Bible gives a unity between the universal and the individual things, that is, the particulars.

It gives us knowledge both about God as the ultimate universal and about man and nature. I have to stress, however, that the Reformation was no golden age. It was not perfect, and in many things it was not consistent to the biblical teaching in which the Reformers were trying to make their standard, not only religiously, but as a way to live.

For example, we can think of Luther's unbalanced position concerning the peasant wars. In a very different area, there wasn't much zeal shown to take the Christian message to other parts of the world.

Yet, in spite of many and serious inconsistencies, the Reformation people, in their central teaching, did return to the biblical instruction and to the example of the early church. And thus a new door was opened, not only in religious matters, but also in culture and in society.

Reformation Culture, Music, and the Lordship of Christ

This music is the direct result of the Reformation culture, the biblical Christianity of that time. The composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. His work is certainly the consummation of those composers that came out of the Reformation.

Look, here in his own handwriting, the abbreviation in Latin, To God alone be the glory. One must understand that the Reformation had many facets. Though the full results of the Reformation did not come overnight, but gradually.

Yet, nevertheless, from the very beginning, the life forms began to change on the basis of the Reformation teaching. The government of the church, by lay elders of the congregation, opened the way for further democratic development.

People, the Bible teaches, are made in the image of God. Therefore, they have dignity. In Reformation times, this meant that all the vocations of life had dignity. That of the honest merchant or housewife, as much as that of the king.

On the other hand, the Bible says that man is fallen. He has revolted against God. This is how Reformation man had an explanation of greatness and dignity in man, and yet his cruelty. The men of that day did not live in a splintered world as modern man does.

Art was an intimate part of life. The Reformation had a close relationship to culture. The painter, Lucas Cranach, was Martin Luther's friend. Here is Luther himself and his wife, both by Cranach. Luther and Cranach were even the godfathers of each other's children.

On Friday before Whitsunday, in the year 1521, the news reached Antwerp that Martin Luther had so treacherously been captured. For when the herald of the Emperor Charles had been ordered to accompany him with the Imperial Guard, he had confidence in this.

But after the herald had brought...

This comes from Albert Durer's diary. He did not mean it to be published. Actually, the news that Luther had been captured proved to be false. His life was in danger, but his friends had hid him.

He was illumined by the Holy Spirit and professed the true Christian faith. And is he still alive, or have they murdered him? I do not know. In which case, he has suffered for the Christian truth. And should we have lost this man who has written more clearly than any other that has lived during the last 140 years, and to whom you have given such an evangelical spirit, we pray you, O Heavenly Father...

Durer is clearly a man of the Reformation, as we examine the diary which he wrote at the time when Martin Luther was thought to have been killed. And in it, he indicates very thoroughly that he was looking back to the pre-Reformation people.

And these people would be Hus and Wycliffe. Hus had a tremendous influence in Germany at that time. And Durer makes very, very plain in his diary that he's looking to these men, and that his work flows from it.

And as a matter of fact, if you examine his great works on the Apocalypse, for example, which were done before the 95 Theses of Luther, were nailed to the church door, one finds this strong biblical interplay actually in his work itself, between his view of the Bible and the artworks which he produced.

The marks of a man's creativity show his worldview. His worldview almost always shows through. And the art which flowed from the Reformation shows the good marks of its biblical base. To Durer, God's world had value, real value, but not value in itself.

It was a creation of God. Much art flowed from the Reformation culture. For example, the raising of the cross by Rembrandt. Here, Rembrandt painted himself, wearing his painter's beret. He raised Christ upon the cross, stating for all the world to see that his sins had sent Christ to the cross.

His works show that he was a man of the Reformation. Nature was neither low nor was it to be idealized. It was a thing to be enjoyed as a creation of God. Here's Rembrandt's wife, waiting for him. There is love and gentleness here.

Rembrandt understood that Christ is the Lord of all life. From what we have seen, it is clear that to say that the Reformation depreciated art and culture, or that it did not produce art and culture, is either total nonsense or dishonest.

The Reformation had a strong place for culture, both theoretically and also in practice. Theoretically, because these people, if one examines the Dutch thinkers, for example, really believed in the lordship of Christ over the whole of life.

They saw nature as something wonderful. The leaves, the flowers, something beautiful. Because it was God's universe. The practical side, of course, is that it simply brought forth culture. It just flowed forth in rivers.

Dutch Reformation painting is one of the high points of painting in the whole world. These things are coming forth as a gift of God, and especially in the area of music, as far as Luther himself was concerned.

Music, Congregational Singing, and Christian Freedom

This book contains the psalm set to music. It came out of Geneva. Some people thought they were so lively that, in derision, they called them Geneva Jigs. Martin Luther himself was a very fine musician.

He had a good tenor voice, and as an instrumentalist, he performed with skill and verve. When his choirmaster, Johann Walter, put out the Wittenberg Gesangbuch, Luther himself wrote in the preface,.

I am not of the opinion that all the arts shall be crushed to earth and perish through the gospel, as some bigoted persons pretend, but would willingly see them all, and especially music, servants of him who gave and created them.

Just as the screen which separated the congregation from the altar was removed because the open Bible gave the people a direct access to God, so also the congregation was allowed to approach God directly by singing, for the first time in many centuries.

Luther himself wrote the words to this psalm, A mighty fortress is our God. Up to a certain point in the development of the Renaissance, it could have gone in a good direction or a poor one. Freedom was introduced, both in the North by the Reformation and in the South by the Renaissance.

But in the South, it brought forth license. The reason was that the humanism of the Renaissance had no way to bring forth meaning for the individual things, for the particulars, nor absolutes in the area of morals.

Humanism, which began with man being central, eventually has no meaning for man. But in the North, the men of the Reformation, standing under the scripture, regained direction, and the totality of life, as well as nature, became a thing of beauty and dignity.

Man was given a reason for being great, and he was given a reason for freedom, and yet compelling absolute values. Or it can be said this way, the humanistic elements of the Renaissance centered in autonomous man.

The Reformation centered in the infinite personal God, who had not been silent, but who had spoken in the Bible.

Unless you can convince me by scripture, I am bound to my beliefs by the text of the Bible. My conscience is captive to the word of God. Here I stand, do no other. God help me.

When we begin to speak of the results of the Reformation, it did bring tremendous freedom. And we must always say both things together. The first thing, and the primary thing is, it suddenly gave freedom from having to work one's way to God.

No longer was it necessary to merit the merit of Christ. One must understand the terrible psychological slavery. Because if you beat yourself 100 times in order to merit the merit of Christ, how do you know that you don't have to beat yourself 101 or 102?

So there's terrible slavery. So suddenly when we come to the gospel, the good news, that Christ has done it all, and we accept this with the empty hands of faith, we have tremendous freedom from this awful, awful bondage that I've spoken of.

But it brings many other freedoms. Because it is a terrible bondage, really, as a man, as a finite man, to have to act as God and make our own absolutes, or try to, because we really can't. And this is a bondage.

And suddenly when we have in the Bible itself that which gives us the absolutes, we are free then to function, whether in the area of science or morals or sociological things or behavior patterns. We're free to operate within the circle that the absolutes of the scripture gives us.