Reformation History

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And good afternoon, welcome to the Dividing Line. Last Dividing Line until well into November of 2010, which is only next week, of course.

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I will be in Lima, Peru next week with HeartCry Ministries doing some pastoral training down there and probably not going to be attempting to do remote dividing lines while doing that.

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So we'll just have to pick it back up a week from next

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Tuesday. And that's exactly what we'll do, Lord willing. Looking forward to that.

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Of course, it is the 28th of October.

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And for those of you who aren't aware of this, there's something special about this coming

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Sunday. And if you think that has anything to do with candy or costumes, you're missing the point.

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This coming Sunday is October the 31st. Now, anyone in costumes looking for candy wandering by my house on that evening is going to be sorely disappointed, as they always are.

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But especially so because I won't be there, I will be preaching, in fact, at the

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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. But far more than all of that silliness in our society,

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October 31st is, of course, Reformation Day. October 31st, 1517, the date that history tells us, was when

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Martin Luther nailed the Ninety -Five Theses to the Wittenberg door. And so we are going to be talking about the

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Reformation some today. I'm going to be joined here in a few moments by our good friend, Turretin Phan, and we're going to be talking about a later

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Reformer, his, well, he's a fan of him.

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Francis Turretin, we're going to be introducing him to you. Then the rest of the program, I'm going to be talking about some of the backgrounds of Reformation.

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But before we get started today, I wanted to play something for you.

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I'm taken aback a little bit. Some of you may recall, just over a year ago this past summer,

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I blogged about meeting with Lecrae, Tadashi, and some other guys.

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They are Christian hip -hop artists, rappers. I honestly don't even know the difference between hip -hop and rap is,

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I'll be perfectly honest with you about that. I'm more of a Bach, Beethoven, Rimsky -Korsakov, acoustic guitar,

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Doug Smith type guy when it comes to musical tastes. But I discovered, right as I started tweeting at that point in time, that Lecrae and the tour, and I was amazed, got a chance to get together with them, have been in contact with Shai Lin, and these guys are all

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Reformed, and they all listen to the program and things like that. And so I was contacted recently by Javon McKenzie, and Javon asked me to record something for him.

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And out of the book of Hebrews, I've been preaching through Hebrews, I'm not to chapter 11 yet, it was from chapter 11, for an album that he's working on.

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And so I did that. And so I sent that along.

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And yesterday, he sent me, it's not the song that that's going to be used for, what we recorded here using the studios from Hebrews 11,

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I think is going to be ending the album. But he sent me one of the songs called Pilgrim from this album, and it is one of my sermons.

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I assume it is my sermon from Hebrews chapter 2 at PRBC. I'm not 100 % certain, but it's on Hebrews chapter 2, and it is, well,

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I'm going to play it for you. He said I could, so I'm going to play it for you. This album is not yet out. I obviously will blog when it is.

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But here is what happens when you take, I'm sorry, I'm making history.

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Oh, OK, that's good. We do that a lot in here. So here is a

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Reformed Baptist sermon on Hebrews. Well, you just have to listen to yourself.

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Listen to the lyrics that Jevon has provided after my presentation.

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Here is a song called Pilgrim. Here you have Jesus. We see him crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death.

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The world sees. The world doesn't see him.

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It is important, verse 8, we do not yet see all things under his feet. We see there's all sorts of people in this world that do not bow to Jesus Christ.

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We see all sorts of evil in this world, but we see Jesus, we see him crowned with glory and honor.

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Who is this? We seem to me that Hebrews two nine is referring to the redeemed, those with a spiritual insight into the gospel itself.

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Christ ain't defeated. He came to earth and defeated death. He gave us salvation. Now he's our

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Sabbath. You see, we rest and now you see we bless. Only because he was cursed, we're justified by grace through faith, not by any works.

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Bless any man, Shabbos, read Ephesians two and nine. Christ came and opened our eyes, homie, cause we was blind.

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The world is blind too. They don't see God's anger. They don't see Jesus as Lord, just a baby in a manger.

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See, there's a debt to pay. We can't afford to pay him. For God's people, Jesus came down and made our payment was made lower than angels.

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He came to suffer death, but he will resurrect and secure all his elect, eternal security.

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Salvation ain't temporary. Yes, we are walking with God, but yet we're being carried.

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Although we don't see all things, but under him now, every tongue shall confess every knee and we bow.

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It's a radically different message to say that God makes it possible for us to bring ourselves to glory.

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Put the plan together, but ultimately it's up to us as to whether we get to glory.

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That's a different statement as the one bringing many sons to glory, to bring them to glory means the whole process.

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The captain of our salvation, perfect new sufferings. Jesus won't lose any sheep, man.

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There's no such a thing. See, he is not ashamed to call his people brethren. He is bringing many sons under glory up in heaven.

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God gives his people to Jesus. We don't just give ourselves. We don't just decide to love them. We don't repent by ourselves.

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He has to grant us repentance from his own free will. He has to quicken our spirit. If he wants, he will.

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And man is so evil, just like the son of Sam. See, we were born wicked. We need the son of man to take our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh just to let the truth be known.

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We was all out seeking death, but then he breathed and breath was there. But now we live.

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If you are saved today, that means you were always his. When Jesus died, he took the full cup of God's wrath.

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When he was crucified, it was on our behalf. Not just to get it started, not just to get him on the road to complete it.

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Bring him all the way. And every form and you blend them together in every form of synergism.

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The result is it is made. I need

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God's grace. But what he won't confess is grossly misrepresented.

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Well, there you go. The book of Hebrews has been grossly misrepresented. And there you have a song called

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Pilgrim, Javon McKenzie. I will link, obviously, on the blog to that one.

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It all comes out because, like I said, I I didn't know about that one. I had just had a request to read section

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Hebrews 11, which I did. So that's a different song. And so the words are great.

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I wouldn't be able to make them fit into that. Like I said,

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I'm Scottish. What do you want? We have bagpipes. So that's a completely, completely different world there.

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Anyhow, so I wanted to play that for you because I've like I said,

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I've had folks coming up to me at places all over the world. I had a couple at a black couple come to my presentation.

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Thanks, Rich. Rich just just showed up with a hat on sideways. I appreciate that.

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It's still got the tag on it. That's really good. That looks good. I've never worn that hat before.

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Had you? All right, good. I had him show up. Where was I? Great Falls, Montana, right?

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Is it Great Falls, Montana? Yeah, I think Great Falls in Montana. Yeah, I think that's where it is. It's in one of those really unpopulated states up there is where I was.

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And how did they know I was there? They had heard about it from because they were fans of Lecrae, as I recall.

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So it's been pretty, pretty amazing. It's it's good stuff. All right. Reformation Day coming on the 31st.

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And so we wanted to do some historical stuff today. We do have one call.

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Try to get to that call. It is somewhat relevant to the topic. But let's go ahead and bring on our friend

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Turretinfan. Hi, Turretinfan. Hello there. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I've got a little bit of a high pitched sound with Turretinfan.

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I'm not sure what that is. I don't think it's Turretinfan. It just sounds strange in my headphones. But evidently, you're too old to hear that out there.

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That got his attention. Now he's listening very carefully. So Turretinfan, we really wouldn't necessarily call

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Francis Turretin a reformer, but we would certainly call him one who carried on the work of Reformation.

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Would that be a fair way of looking at him? I believe so, yes. If you look at his family tree, his grandfather was born, although also by the same name,

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Francis, was born in 1547. Right. So it's 30 years after the 1517 date that's popularly used for the date of the

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Reformation. Right. So he's third or fourth generation. And yet he is part of that process that begins with people like Theodore Beza, the successor to Calvin there in Geneva, of taking what was laid out in the foundation and synthesizing it, thinking it through, dealing with the controversies, of course, that had arisen since the days of Calvin in regards to Reformed theology.

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Would you accept the idea that these later men changed fundamentally the message or that they were just filling it out?

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Which do you think would be an accurate way of seeing it? My view is that the more accurate is filling out.

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It's not a matter of reinventing anything, but filling it out and also dealing with controversies that the first generation

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Reformers didn't face, like the Arminian controversy. Calvin didn't see that. Later generations saw it.

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And the Amaraldian controversy would be one that would be closer to Turgeon's time.

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What would you say was his primary? Well, actually, before I go to there, we know him primarily from what sources today?

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I mean, we know the Institutes of Atlantic Theology is the primary source.

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Is that pretty much the only way we know him or do we have other writings as well? Well, the official works of Turgeon are four volumes, of which three are his institutes.

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And the fourth volume is a collection of various treatises. But the fourth volume isn't translated into English.

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So by far, most people in the English speaking world know him only through the Institutes or through an essay on justification or something like this, which would be perhaps taken not only from the

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Institutes, but also some part of it gleaned from his other works. But there's also a few other works that have been translated into English from that fourth volume, but generally very short items and the bulk of how he's known is through his systematic theology in this form of the

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Institutes. Well, what drew you to adopt your moniker that you use?

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What about him? Why not Calvin Fan or Beza Fan or, you know, what was particular about him?

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One aspect that I liked about him was that he was a little bit more obscure than Calvin or Beza.

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And you're looking for obscurity. Is that the idea? Well, he's one of his his son -in -law,

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Benedict Victor, gave a eulogy for him, sort of a eulogy, sort of a memorial message about him when his when his relative took over the academic position that he had held there in Geneva.

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And he spoke very highly of him. But one of the things he emphasized is his own personal humility. And I think that that trait of Turretin is quite admirable.

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But as well, one nice thing about about having as as you're to be the fan of someone, it's nice to be the fan of someone obscure and that you'll be one of the few fans of that person, although actually there's there's quite a lot of fans of Turretin out there.

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Yeah, there are. Now, describe for folks that might not be familiar with it. Not many of us have the

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Institutes of Atlantic Theology in our in our library. So we're talking about a work that's longer than the

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Institutes of the Christian Religion. What kind of form is it in and what was its importance?

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Well, the form that it takes generally is that it poses questions and gives an argument in response.

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That's why it's called the Institutes of the Atlantic. The Atlantic means in the form of an argument, the

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Institutes of Atlantic Theology there. Some people mistakenly think it's eclectic theology, but it's certainly not eclectic.

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It's sort of like the guy I debated who thought synergistic was syncretistic. And I had to sort of correct him on that.

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But anyway, sometimes a small, small difference in words can make a big, big difference.

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Yes. But in any event, so the so the Institute's generally the format he follows is he states the question.

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He then says we affirm or perhaps we deny against the so and so where he'll fill in the blank, maybe it's the

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Sassanians, maybe it's the Romans, maybe it's the Romanists, whoever it is, he fills in the blank with, you know, here's who we affirm it against or here's who we affirm it with.

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If he wants to be more positive. And then he gives an explanation of why very briefly and in a very concise form.

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So sometimes it's just a matter of stating here's what our position is. Other times he spends more time and argues the position.

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So he's addressing a lot wider, a much wider variety of objections to Reform faith than Calvin even would have faced.

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Yes, yes. He faces more objections and he spends time on areas maybe that Calvin hadn't spent as much time on because perhaps

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Calvin's work had already become fairly widely accepted and already widely known.

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So he didn't have to spend as much time on some of the fundamental aspects that Calvin spent his time on and was able to get into some more nuances that Calvin hadn't had the pleasure of working on.

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But also keeping in mind that the Institute's Calvin's Institutes were written quite early, initially written quite early in his career.

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Oh, yeah, he was quite young when the first edition came out, but it grew a lot. Now, the issues that he is primarily focused upon, you've mentioned some of them, but the vast majority of evangelicals today wouldn't know what most of them were.

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You mentioned the remonstrants. Flesh that out a little bit for us.

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Well, the remonstrants, of course, are the spiritual ancestors in some ways of the

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Armenians today. They were generally reformed initially, but then adopted certain non -Calvinist principles with respect to God's decrees.

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So they began to assert that God's saving grace was resistible.

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And they would also question whether or not those who were blessed with saving faith could fall away.

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And some, of course, then ultimately didn't absolutely affirm that such people could, whereas maybe the remonstrant movement didn't have all those characteristics.

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The five points of the remonstrants, the five issues they raised, were responded to by the

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Synod of Dort. And that's where we get our acronym TULIP from, those five points. Those are the Calvinistic responses to the five points of the remonstrants.

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Even though historically they didn't put them the same order, it would have not even made a nice acrostic the order they put them in.

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But be that as it may. And then you also mentioned the Sassinians. Why would that be relevant to him?

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Well, I think that's an interesting question. Sassinianism is it's a non -Trinitarian system.

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And it became popular among what we'd call the

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Radical Reformation. That would go beyond the Reformation to a point that's sort of a point of absurdity.

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The Sassinian himself was apparently quite a vehement writer.

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And a lot of his works ended up serving. Sometimes it seems to me when

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I'm reading some of the Reformers, almost as though that's a scarecrow that you want to steer people away. Now you're starting to sound like one of those

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Sassinians and help to try to steer people away from that kind of view.

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In fact, one place that I read indicated that Sassinianism had sort of become later, later in time, had sort of become a catchphrase for any kind of dissenting belief any kind of any non -orthodoxy, you start to call them just Sassinians.

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Yeah, it really is. It's a rationalistic system pretty, pretty early on. And it's denial of the deity of Christ and and things like that.

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Yeah, it was easy to sort of use as a catchphrase. And then you also mentioned one that's important to a lot of folks.

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And that is something you've done a lot of work on, and that is the subject of Amaraldianism. Yes, yes, he was.

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He was one of the leading, one of his instructors, Friedrich von Spanheim, was one of the leading opponents of Amaraldianism.

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And he seemed to have picked up that torch and carried it on in terms of defending the

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Reformed doctrine of the atonement. That that seemed to be the breaking point at which the Amaraldians broke away from the

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Calvinistic view and the scriptural view was on this doctrine of the atonement. They wanted to make some aspect of the atonement a universal aspect, though they wouldn't say that everyone was redeemed.

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And in terms of having been having actually had their sins removed by the blood of Christ, they did want to say that in some sense

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Christ died for everyone. And and one of one of the favorite sections of Turdson's works is his section on the atonement.

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And that section was sort of separately translated into English quite a while ago.

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And it has been in circulation for a long while. I think you can even buy a separate volume from from at least two publishers on the just a section on the atonement.

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But it's a very good read. It has a very thorough, systematic discussion of that topic. And that remains something rather important to this day.

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You've had a fair amount of interaction with modern Amaraldians. Yes, yes.

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They they still don't like it very much, but they do at least appreciate that he was although he was very firmly opposed to their doctrine, he was still willing to count.

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He was willing to count them within the taxonomy of reformed as opposed to Sassanian or Romanist or something like this.

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He didn't he wouldn't classify them that far apart. But he certainly didn't accept their view of the atonement as as being the correct one.

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Right, right. So what would you say? Wrap up here a little bit. What would you say to those who would say that people like, well, starting with Beza, but especially someone like like Francis Turretin is is the scholastic version of Calvinism that Calvin himself would not have recognized.

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What do you say to those who make that kind of an argument? Well, one, it's important to remember that although there's a there's an academic aspect to this, it's far from being purely scholastic.

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It's not if you're familiar with the categories that people talk about in this, there's the humanist side and the scholastic side where the humanist emphasizes learning the original languages, studying the

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Hebrew and Greek books and deriving our theology from those.

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And the academic or the scholastic side is academic, but it's more focused on use of reason and sometimes reason almost spinning off in circles by itself.

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He he's very academically rigorous, but he's always tied back to the Bible. If you read through his treatise on the atonement, for example, it's constantly going back to here's what the

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Hebrew word is for covering. Here's the Greek word that's used to represent covering.

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Here's what here's what each of these words mean. Here's why the argument needs to flow the way that it does.

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And he does draw scholastic distinctions. He will say there are only two kinds.

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There are two kinds of knowledge that God has. There's natural knowledge and free knowledge.

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And there's there can be no middle knowledge. So he's an opponent of that. And, you know, but he draws those types of distinctions the way a scholastic author would.

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But but, of course, Calvin was familiar with those authors. And Calvin was not opposed to drawing distinctions, even if, you know, sometimes his he wasn't maybe as systematic as Turchin was in terms of making everything into a branched group of distinctions.

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But I think that's just because Turchin's building on prior generations of work. All right. Yeah. I sort of get somewhat upset when

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I hear people like Beza or Turchin dismissed out of hand.

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And this is very popular amongst academics. They just dismiss them out of hand as sort of spiritless, crusty, shallow formalizations of the more powerful, spiritually vibrant earlier generations, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah.

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You get that a lot in seminaries. And I think one of the reasons that people like Francis Turchin are as unknown as you indicated on the part of most people is because they're they're dismissed as just sort of, you know, well, they were just formalizing and systematizing.

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And and, you know, they they had pocket protectors and slide rules and who likes people like that basically is how it's normally presented.

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And I don't think that's an accurate way of viewing them at all. And it can be just as you can be just as passionate about a systematized presentation.

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Sure, we all know that there can be people like that. It doesn't mean that everyone who is is very concerned about crossing their

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T's and dotting their I's is necessarily lacking in passion or anything else. And I think that would be descriptive of of Turchin's work.

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You get far from being completely without passion. He was when the city of Geneva during his time ran into a budget problem and they couldn't repair the city walls.

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They needed they needed money to do this. The funds of the state couldn't support it.

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What they did is they sent Turchin on a fundraising mission to throughout Europe, but primarily to Holland, which was better off.

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And he went there. He was well -received. The people loved him. They tried to get him to stay there.

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They would they didn't want him to get back to back to Geneva. But he insisted he wanted to come back. That's where he had basically what he considered his home.

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And then he eventually came back. We have a few of his sermons left. I think there's around 100 that exist in mostly are there in French, but not many have been translated into English.

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And there is a project underway to translate them. Oh, good, good, good. Excellent. Well, thank you very much, brother, for joining us today.

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The people were noting in channel that I wasn't asking you easy questions and yet you were handling them with aplomb.

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So but of course, anyone who calls themselves Turchin fan should probably be able to do that.

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That's that would be a good thing. I mean, if I called myself Rimsky -Korsakov fan, then I would expect people to ask me tough questions about Rimsky -Korsakov, which

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I would not be able to answer. That's why I don't call myself Rimsky -Korsakov fan. But anyway, appreciate you joining with us today and always appreciate all the work you do.

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Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. All right. God bless. Bye bye. All right. So there you got some historical background.

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Where else would you be able to get that kind of information than here on the dividing line?

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We're going to go ahead and take this call and then I'm going to spend the rest of the...

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Well, let's take this one call and then I'll spend the rest of the time doing some background on the

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Reformation. If you all are going to be having maybe your church... If you're in a church that even recognizes that it's

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Reformation Sunday, count yourself blessed because the vast majority of Evangelical churches this

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Sunday will be passing out Halloween decorations. They won't be talking about the

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Reformation, unfortunately. But we'll be doing that after we talk with Hussein in Florida.

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Hi, Hussein. Hey, Dr. White, thanks for taking my call. Yes, sir. You guys are having fun tonight. Dr. White, I am very, very new to a

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Reformed view of theology. I have a question. In John 17, 12, when

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Jesus is praying and says, and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the

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Scripture might be fulfilled, I'm trying to relate that to John 6, 44. Was the son of perdition originally drawn to Christ by the

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Father? And if so, why was he lost? No, the context of the two is completely different.

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The point is that John 6 is talking about the elect of God and John 17 is talking about the disciples.

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And one of those disciples, we know, it even says at the end of the verse that the Scripture might be fulfilled, is called the son of destruction.

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He has a specific name that is assigned to him because there is

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Old Testament prophecy concerning who he is and what his function is going to be in the betrayal of Christ.

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And we see that the early church recognized very early on, if you look at Acts 4, 27 and 28, that the roles of everyone from Pilate to Herod, the

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Jews, the Romans and Judas had all been clearly a part of divine revelation in prophetic form prior to this.

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And so the context of the two is different. In John 6, you're talking about the people as a whole that are given by the

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Father to the Son for salvation. In John chapter 17, verse 12, you're talking specifically there about the 12.

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And then as you go down from that particular discussion, because it talks about that they may have joy and so on and so forth,

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I've given them your word, they are not of this world. But then you'll notice after the prayer that they be sanctified in the truth, so on and so forth.

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Then you have, in verse 20, a transition. I do not ask for these only, that is the 12, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you,

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Father, are in me and I in you. So verse 20 then recognizes that by means of the disciples, that gospel is going to be preached, that is going to be used to draw all of God's people together into that one that you have in John chapter 11.

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So it's just a recognition that the discussion of Judas, even though he was amongst the 12, he saw the miracles of Christ.

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Can you imagine what it was like to be Judas? I mean, Judas is an incredible example of the fact that you can see all the miracles in the world.

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But if your heart is not changed, none of that will change anything at all.

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I mean, what was it like to have such darkness? I think

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John was specifically trying to communicate something. When Judas went out to go betray

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Jesus, there is this little phrase that John adds, and it was night. And that is descriptive of the time of day that it was.

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But I think there's more to it than that, because here is a man whose darkness was so deep, his love of money so controlling, that in spite of walking with the very incarnate

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Son of God for multiple years, he could betray him for 30 pieces of silver, and then even upon recognizing what he had done, does not know him well enough to realize, as Peter did, that there could be repentance.

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He was the son of perdition. This was what was prophesied of him. And it's amazing how many

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Christians I've encountered over the years that are just absolutely insistent that Judas is in heaven, because they cannot begin to wrap their minds around the justice of God in having someone called the son of perdition, the son of destruction.

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They can't see how that could be a possibility. So he is a very interesting case study.

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No two ways about it. Okay. All right, well, I will replay this episode of Dividing Lines 47 times and study it.

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I understand it a lot better. Thank you so much. God bless you, Chuck Norris. Thank you, sir. Thanks for calling in. God bless.

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Bye -bye. All right, a little bit of background on the subject of the

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Reformation. And I do this primarily so that if your church does do something this coming

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Sunday, if, you know, I'm going to be preaching on the solas, and I'm going to be talking about some Luther and so on and so forth on Sunday morning, if that happens to your church,

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I think one of the reasons that the Reformation seems so distant to many of us, and I sort of started this last evening at PRBC.

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I spoke in the Wednesday evening service, and I did some background issues primarily on Luther. I'm going to continue that on Sunday morning with some of the historical background.

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I think one of the reasons that we sort of have Reformation Sunday, and then we just move on, part of it's because we're going into the holiday season and we get distracted with other things.

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I understand that. But part of it is because we struggle to really appreciate the historical context of the

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Reformation. And as such, the danger is that we end up having these slogans.

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And that's what they become, is just slogans. Sola Fide, and Sola Gratia, and Sola Deo Gloria, Solus Christus, and Solus Scriptura.

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They just become slogans to us because we don't realize, we have a hard time understanding how it could be, and why it would be, that men would be willing to risk their lives for these things.

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Now, most people don't realize that out of the academy in Geneva, a steady stream of men came forth during the 16th century, trained in the

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Scriptures. And they, many of them, marked a straight line south.

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A straight line south. You know what's south of Geneva? Italy. And the vast majority of them were murdered by the

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Roman Church. They became martyrs, seeking to proclaim the

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Gospel in that very dark land. Which remains a very dark land to this day, by the way.

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And we wonder why. We wonder why people were willing to go to the mat, to risk their lives, to place everything out there for these slogans.

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If that's all we think they are. One of the things you need to understand,

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I should have brought the book in with me, it's actually sitting at my desk, but that's okay. Al Mohler repeats a story from Heiko Obermann.

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I attended a graduate seminar at Heiko Obermann's house way, way back.

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This was 89, 90, somewhere around there. He was teaching Church History at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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And that particular session was on Satellito's letter to the

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Genevans. It was fascinating. But Heiko Obermann was a real scholar in the period of the

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Reformation. And Al Mohler tells a story about Obermann lecturing one day to his students.

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And he stopped and he said, I can discern that you all do not understand what

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I am saying. You don't get what I am saying about Luther and his motivations.

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And the reason is that you go to bed at night with a full stomach, primarily thinking about what you're going to wear the next day, where you're going to go, what's going to be happening.

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You are Westerners and you don't live the life that Martin Luther and everyone else in Europe lived in the early 16th century.

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When Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses to the castle church door at Wittenberg, the average person in his day, when he went to bed at night, did not go to bed with a nice full stomach, unless you were in the ruling class.

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And your primary hope was that you would not die during the night. The plague had swept through Europe only a few hundred years earlier and taken a third of everyone.

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Imagine what that was like if one third of everyone you know disappeared, died of a horrible plague and it kept popping up.

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The plague was still around. Calvin survived the plague in Strasbourg.

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Ulrich Zwingli survived the plague in Zurich. Normally, when the plague would strike, everyone would leave the cities.

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They didn't know why that was necessary. They just knew that you had a better chance living out in the outlying areas than you did in the city.

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We now know why that was the case, how the bubonic plague was spread, but they didn't know that then.

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And so, in many areas, a woman would have to have ten live births to get one child through to maturity.

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The infant mortality rate was sky high. You saw death regularly.

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You knew about death. Death was all around you. And as a result, you thought about eternity.

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You recognized your own mortality. We live in a day where our society has managed to produce spiritual

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Novocaine. It's spiritual Novocaine. It is not, by the way,

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I'm not, Heiko Obermann didn't say all this stuff. I've gone well past that now, but he was making the point, the reason that the issues that motivated

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Luther don't motivate us today is because we live in a different world. And we live in a world where, as I was saying, we have developed spiritual

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Novocaine. We don't think about eternal things. We don't think about death.

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We hide death away. And so, issues of eternity mean nothing to many of the people in our society.

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We find them to be cold to discussions of sin and judgment and justification because we're primarily concerned about our next vacation and the clothes we're going to wear and the car we're going to drive.

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We do not think about eternity for many reasons. For many of our secularist friends, it's because we don't think there is an eternity.

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We're nothing but a highly evolved mammal. And therefore, there's no reason to talk about eternity or judgment or standing before God.

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But even in our most honest moments, when we admit that we know that there's going to be a judgment, we have placed these things so far beyond us.

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Death is not something that's imminent, even though we have to admit that every time we get into that car and go down the road, somewhere in the back of our mind is the recognition that we might not make it home.

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I remember an intersection that I go through regularly. I remember once, many years ago, there was someone who just went barreling down Northern Avenue at about 70 miles per hour and just plowed into a car that was just sitting at the red light.

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They were just doing what they were supposed to do. Plowed into him and killed him. Last night on the 101 here in Phoenix, I saw in looking at my

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RSS feeds, last night on the 101 in Phoenix, a drunk driver got onto the wrong side of the freeway at 100 miles per hour, plowed into a 36 -year -old woman and killed her.

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The drunk driver, of course, is fine. But there you are doing what you're supposed to do and death comes quickly and suddenly.

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But we don't think about these things. In fact, even as Christians, we tend to live our life like we're all just going to live to be 70, 80.

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What's life expectancy for me? We don't know that. We shouldn't live that way.

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We, of all people, should know better. We should know that eternity for any one of us is right around the corner and we should be prepared to enter into it knowing the one that we believe who has redeemed us from death.

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So, the issues of the Reformation, they ring hollow to many people today because we don't know the backgrounds.

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We don't know what was going on. And when we think about Luther nailing the 95

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Theses to the Wittenberg door, I don't know about you, but when I first saw a picture of that, here's

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Luther, bigger than life, a big old hammer and a big old nail. And I figure, you know, if we show up to, if we show up to work tomorrow morning here at the office and someone has nailed a hundred

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Arminian Theses to the front door of our office, we're going to realize this is a protest.

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We're going to start looking for a guy named Troy hiding in the bushes. But, because you don't nail things to people's doors unless you're protesting something.

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But the reality was that's not what Luther was doing. I hate to ruin your ideas here.

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That's not what Luther was doing. He was not protesting anything at that point.

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And in fact, if you've read the 95 Theses, you've probably been disappointed by the 95 Theses. They are not some manifesto of the

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Reformation. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk when he wrote them. And had no earthly plans of starting his own church or starting a

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Reformation. In fact, folks, you need to understand that when the world woke up on November 1st, 1517, nobody, absolutely, positively, nobody had any earthly idea that anything earth -shattering had taken place the day before.

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And anyone who had been standing there watching Martin Luther post those 95 Theses would have had no idea what the significance of that act was.

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Luther had no idea. If it had not been for an enterprising German printer and the invention of printing in the

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West only about 70 years earlier, now the Chinese had had it for a long time, but the invention of printing, if it hadn't been for that enterprising

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German printer who read them and went, hmm, these are interesting, these might get some comments, copied them down and printed them, probably nothing ever would have happened of all this.

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Because, you see, what happened was all Luther was doing was inviting academic debate.

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Remember, they didn't have ESPN back then. There was no sports center. And there were no football teams.

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There were no soccer teams. And so when universities wanted to have some competition and do something exciting, they had debates.

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Yes, indeed. Seriously, you'd get together at the other university and students would come and you'd have debates all day long and then the students would go out and paint the town red at night.

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And that's how you had your entertainment. Remember, this was the 16th century. And all

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Luther was doing was challenging someone to defend these things.

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He was not the first person to say the things he said in the 95 Theses. He was not the first person to be offended at the gross sale of indulgences and all that that meant.

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He wasn't the first one. In fact, if I wanted to choose who should have started the

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Reformation, I wouldn't have chosen Luther. Luther was a little bit weird. Luther was strange, okay? Ask James Swan.

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He's become somewhat of a Luther scholar. And Luther was a little bit imbalanced in things.

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He was a little weird. I mean, when you go to confessional for six hours as a monk, there's just not that much to get into in a monastery, folks, to take six hours to confess.

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He had some issues. And I'm sure someone down in New Orleans doesn't like that issues thing, but he likes issues.

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He had issues. That's the problem. And I would have picked other people. I mean, Wycliffe strikes me as the best person to have started the

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Reformation. He said a lot of the things that Luther said before Luther said them. Jan Hus said many of the things that Luther said before Luther said them.

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But no Reformation resulted in the 1480s or the beginning of the 15th century.

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And Jan Hus found himself dying in the flames of the Council of Constance. You see, the reason was that there were all sorts of things that had to come together for the

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Reformation to happen. And I see God's providence in all of this.

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Printing had to exist. It didn't exist in the days of Wycliffe. It didn't exist in the days of Jan Hus.

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It was coming, but it wasn't there yet. And the Reformation could not have happened without the printing press.

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These ideas had to be spread far and wide. Printing comes into the

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West in the middle of the 15th century. There also had to be a development of nationalism.

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Up until the time of Luther, most people just viewed themselves as Christians.

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But around this time, you begin developing what's called nationalism. And the

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German Christians started to resent Italian Christians for basically lording over them just because the

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Pope was in Rome. And indulgences were in reality a religious tax.

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And to get the idea of how much religious tax there was, all you gotta do is go look at St. Peter's Basilica today and go, wow, this took a little money to build.

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And that's what the indulgences were. And the German Christians started realizing that, going, you know, how come this indulgence money doesn't build something in, well,

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Germany? Why does it always go to Rome and Italy? You also had to have the degradation of the papacy that had been going on for hundreds of years.

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There had been a period of time called the Pornocracy back in the 10th century. And that had been a really low point.

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And then you'd had some of the great medieval popes that had sort of brought things back. But there had been a real degradation of the papacy.

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And especially it had a great weakening of the papacy due to what was called the Babylonian Captivity of the

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Church. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church was when the papacy left

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Rome and went to Avignon, France. And it was there for a number of years.

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And this is in the 14th century. And then when the desire to return to Rome manifested itself, you ended up with two popes.

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And you had a papacy based in Avignon. You had a papacy based in Rome. And Italy was divided between these two, mainly along political lines.

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And both, of course, ended up condemning the other. And to the person in the pew, it became quite obvious that this monolithic infallible leadership really wasn't monolithic and really wasn't infallible.

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Because if you've got two guys who both claim to be the Vicar of Christ and are condemning each other, who knows which one is the right one?

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And even if it's the Roman one is the right one, he's only back there after the papacy having been in Avignon.

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And all this idea of succession and all the rest of that stuff, really it started... I mean, anybody who knows history realizes that the claims of succession are really just so bogus.

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It's just so silly. From the beginning, you don't have just one uninterrupted line.

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There were anti -popes, and politics were involved early on, and all the rest of this stuff.

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But now you had not only the Babylonian captivity, but you had people like Julius who rode around in Rome wearing his armor at the head of armies.

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And Luther would see this in 1510 at his visit, and it really, really, really turned people off.

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But something else you really needed to have was the Renaissance, and Renaissance humanism. Now, humanism is normally a bad word.

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We don't like that word. But humanism just simply was the study of ancient documents. Erasmus, in his providing the

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Greek New Testament, he was the prince of the humanists. Ad fontes, to the source, was the cry.

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And it was absolutely necessary that a growing body of people have access to the

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Greek and Hebrew. And you need to realize that very few people had access at the time of people like Jan Hus or John Wycliffe.

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But Luther had his own printed edition of the Greek New Testament because the first printed and published edition of the

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Greek New Testament came out by Luther, I'm sorry, by Erasmus in 1516.

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And it is in studying that Greek New Testament, the availability of that language now, and the pressing of John Collett and Desiderius Erasmus for grammatical historical interpretation of the

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New Testament text that you have the very soil out of which sprang the defense of justification by faith.

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And it was in reading that New Testament from Erasmus' hand that Luther could compare the

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Latin Vulgate and he could see that phrase ponatentium agate, do penance.

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And then he could look over the Greek New Testament and there is the original, what the apostles actually wrote, metanoia te, repent.

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Not do penance, repent, a change of heart, a change of mind. And Luther wouldn't be the only one.

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The availability due to the Renaissance and the rise of humanism, Lorenzo Valla's work, the availability of the

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Hebrew thanks to Johannes Reuchlin who risked his life. Now, all these people, by the way, all these names

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I'm mentioning, I'm not elevating them to some status of perfection or sainthood because all of them had weird beliefs.

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Reuchlin got into Kabbalism and weirdness like that. But Reuchlin risked his life to sneak at night to learn

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Hebrew from a Jewish rabbi. And by the way, if you have ever learned

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Hebrew and you're thankful that Johannes Reuchlin wrote the first Hebrew grammar so that the rest of us could learn

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Hebrew too, think about that Jewish rabbi who risked his life to do what he did.

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They were both risking their lives during the days of the Inquisition. He risked his life to teach this

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Christian Hebrew and Johannes Reuchlin risked his life to teach other people

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Hebrew. And aren't we glad that they did. All these things form a tapestry, a historical tapestry.

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And if you've seen tapestry, you know that on the one side you have the beautiful pattern that has been created.

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The backside isn't quite so pretty. But these things are woven together and there has to be, well, there has to be the weaver's providence to bring these things together.

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And we see these things coming together at one particular junction in history.

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October 31st, 1517. A monk who had no idea of the ramifications of what he was doing.

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But you see, as those theses went out, and people started seeing what this meant.

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Indulgences were sold with the approval of the Pope. And you see, when

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Luther finally debates these things against Eck at Leipzig, it is then he begins to see what the deeper ramifications.

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He saw, he had learned through his study of the Psalter and Romans. He was starting to see the truths of justification by faith.

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He was starting to see that the righteousness of God is not just something that you have to try to live up to. It is something

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God gives. He was seeing these things. But then as you're pushed, as you're pressed by someone intelligent like Eck, you begin to see the foundations of the errors of purgatory and indulgences and the errors of the papal system.

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It didn't happen overnight. Luther was still a Roman Catholic on October 31st, 1517, but the seeds had been sown and the light was dawning.

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Would Luther go to his grave still holding beliefs that were unbiblical?

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You better believe it. But let me tell you something. If you think you would have done better, you're foolish.

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We stand on the shoulders of giants. We have history to provide us with light.

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It's so easy to find the warts on Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, all of them.

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But would any of us have dared to go as far as they did?

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It's easy to criticize. It makes me mad when I listen to people like Dave Hunt who don't know anything about church history willing to condemn based upon these things that they didn't get everything right.

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But oh my, the light that burst forth. Folks, if you're listening to this program right now, you are so indebted to them.

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And so I hope and pray on this Reformation Sunday that's coming this Lord's Day that you will thank

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God that he shed a light across Europe and by Europe into the whole world at that time that we have all benefited from.

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Like I said, no dividing lines next week because I'm not even going to be on this continent. Pray for me while I'm down there.

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We'll be back the week after that, Lord willing. We'll see you then. God bless. AOMIN .org