Questions And Answers

So, any questions you might have on Luther, Calvin, what we talked about, or the Reformation? Dave. Hey, another Dave. There we go. A driver, in fact. Yeah. Lord's Supper and Baptism. Yeah. Lord's Supper and Baptism.

Of course, the seven sacraments. And he goes through and shows how they're not sacraments. And in the process, he also shows how, like, by making the priesthood a sacrament that kept the laity from being able to do all the sacraments.

And so, now, to respond, though, to some of them, like marriage was a sacrament, to respond to that later, as I said, Luther expanded the marks of the church. One of them was a Christian marriage, like to demonstrate a Christian marriage in the home is a mark of the true church.

And I think it was to respond to some of the criticisms that, you know, some of those aspects were meaningful. Right? But he rejects the seven in favor of the two. It's not just that he goes from seven to two.

He also moves from sacramentalism to seeing the sacraments functioning properly. And the sacramentalism is a way of reducing the sacraments to graces that we partake. So, that's why the Mass is really the lifeline in the Catholic Church.

That's where you get the grace. Right? So, it's not just that he reduces the list from seven to two. He also rethinks what the two are. Right? What baptism truly is and what Lord's Supper truly is. Yes?

In the back and then we'll come up here. Yes, right. Yes, right. Right, right. Oh, yeah. You know, the thing is that, and I think this is difficult for us to grasp. It wasn't Scripture that was at the forefront.

It was the tradition that was at the forefront. And so, Luther is slowly reading. And it's not until he's lectured, when he gets to Wittenberg, and I think actually his conversion is after the 95 Theses.

And by his own account, he writes in a preface to one of his commentaries that it was his second time lecturing through Romans, Galatians, that he has his breakthrough. So it's not really until he has passed his doctoral work and actually lecturing as a Bible professor through these books that he lands on this.

And of course, what he finds in Romans is the quote, the just shall live by faith, which is a repeated thing in Romans that Paul's quoting from the Old Testament. But it's his second cycle through of lectures.

So prior to that, it really is like Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, this is what people are reading. This is what's in the church. And there's no real sermon. It's the mass with occasional homilies, especially on the feast days or particular holy days, holidays.

There's some sort of sermon. But there is a famine of the Word of God here, right, both in the church and among the clergy and at the seminaries, the monasteries. Here first and then I'll catch you, yeah, Brian, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, well, a couple of things to say about Luther and the Jews. One is he was an equal opportunity disparager. Thank you. So, Turks, Catholics, Jews, everybody at one point or another, the text that gets Luther in trouble is his text on the Jews and their detestable lives.

And in that text, he calls that synagogues not only be destroyed but that they be or not only be not allowed but that they be destroyed and burned to the ground. And Luther argued that on the case that if we have a truly state church, then there shouldn't be a toleration of these things.

But Luther was wrong. Feet of iron, legs of iron, feet of clay. Luther was wrong. And there was no place for his vitriolic attack on Jews. Now having said that, I do think we can do two things that are wrong here.

One is to not understand him in context and just slam him. The other is to just give him a pass. And I think we have to mediate between that by recognizing that he's wrong but also contextualizing what he said.

He thought he was following Paul's view when he articulated his views of Judaism. Secondly, Jews in Germany at that time were not allowed to own land. So they made their living through banking, usury.

Luther was actually opposed to usury, thought it was prohibited in the New Testament. So he argued that Jews shouldn't be able to be bankers. Now that is often repeated but what doesn't get repeated is what he argued next.

He argued that in fact Jews should be able to own land. So that was actually very enlightened for some but that piece never gets thrown into the equation. So I think we have to throw Luther's anti-Semitism into the context of it was really theologically motivated not ethnically motivated.

And he actually was trying to pose a view for Jews that was actually enlightened not just anti-Semitic. Then the problem with Luther though is not necessarily Luther, it's what Hitler does with Luther.

And Hitler used Luther very significantly and frequently to argue his case. But it's not necessarily fair to blame Luther for what Hitler does with him because Dietrich Bonhoeffer just as much used Luther and obviously arrived at different conclusions than Hitler in the same context.

But Luther's, I wish Luther didn't talk that way and he shouldn't have talked that way and I think he was wrong and I don't think we gain anything by giving him a pass. But I do think we need to understand him in the full context of what he was saying.

If that helps. There's been a lot written on Luther's anti-Semitism and I think not all of it is fair to him. Oh yes right and it was also not only was it inherited from the Catholic Church it's also reflective of the sort of culture of the day.

I mean we tend to think of ourselves as more humane and more sophisticated and we don't settle things by being so vitriolic and capital punishment when it comes to theological. But that was the culture of the day and again that doesn't give Luther a pass, it doesn't excuse him, but we do have to understand him in his context.

But yeah the Jews were the Antichrist, it wasn't until the Puritans that the Pope became the Antichrist. Prior to that and Catholic thinking the Jews were Antichrist and again there they were thinking they were following Paul's lead theologically in their response to that.

But Luther was, everybody eventually came under the gun of his pen, the Turks, which are the Muslims and the Catholics and the Jews. Oh yeah sure. A couple of things. Number one, Luther, the plague hit Wittenberg in 1527.

That was the year that Luther wrote Mighty Fortresses are God. It was also the year that one of his infant children died and Luther was commanded by Frederick the Wise to leave the city, shut down the university and got the students and faculty out of there so they wouldn't be infected by the plague that was hitting the city.

Luther stayed, turned his home, which was the former monastery, into a hospice. And what's even more compelling about this story is that a number of Luther's detractors, Luther welcomed into his home and essentially nursed them and his family as they were dying or suffering from the plague.

So there's a significant humanitarianism in Luther that doesn't always get told. You can see it on a larger scale when you go down to Geneva. A couple of things. During the Marian exiles, which was Queen Mary in England reverting back to Catholicism after Henry and Edward either put people to death, right, so this is Bloody Mary of history, or they exiled to Geneva.

Geneva was landlocked. The old Geneva still, you can sort of sense of its smallness. It had rather significant walls around it because of its proximity to France, was always sort of under pressure and tenuous in its relationship.

So it had these massive walls so it really couldn't expand much and it had pretty much reached its capacity. And then all of a sudden there's about 1 ,200 Scottish refugees trying to make their way into Geneva in the 1550s.

And when you walk around the old city of Geneva, you can notice that the houses are like four or five stories and the top story doesn't quite fit architecturally. They couldn't build out. You know what they did?

They took the roof off their house and they added a floor. Now I think that's the result of Calvin's preaching of a couple of decades to welcome these exiles. They literally took the roof off their house, built a floor, and that's where they put these exiles.

Geneva was the first city to come up with laws prohibiting wife beating. Wives were just property. Husbands could treat them as they wanted. Geneva put on the books laws prohibiting wife beating and it put on the books laws that favored wives for inheritance.

The laws privileged men. So if a wife died, the brother of the dead husband had more right to the estate than the wife did. And it was very often that widows in this time were very destitute because they were not protected by the inheritance laws.

At Geneva in the 1550s, we have these laws protecting wives. And even to this day, right, Geneva's reputation as a humanitarian city. I think you see the fruit of the gospel at work and those types of things happening.

The other thing, and this is the untold story of the Reformation, is missions. Calvin essentially saw Geneva as a place to bring the gospel into France. And through the 1550s, and these records were kept, they were actually kept in code in case Geneva was attacked, these people wouldn't be found out.

The code has been cracked and what we find out now is that there was a network of underground churches. About 1 ,200 pastors were brought into Geneva, trained in Geneva, funded by Geneva, sent back into France to found churches.

And those pastors created a whole network of underground churches. It was all funded and overseen and directed by Calvin in Geneva. And in the 1550s, Geneva sent missionaries to the shores of Brazil. Think about that.

In the 1550s, Geneva sent missionaries to the shores of Brazil. Luther did the same thing at Wittenberg. In fact, the first hymn he writes, one of his students was from Norway, comes to Wittenberg's studies, goes back to Norway with the intention of preaching the gospel.

He's met at the border. He's asked, will you preach Luther's doctrines? He says, yes. He doesn't have a Frederick the Wise to protect him and he's immediately martyred. Word gets back to Luther. It's 1525 and he writes his first hymn.

It's a 17 stanza folk ballad and the title of it is, A New Song Shall Here Be Begun. And it's a folk ballad commemorating the martyrdom of this former student of his who was trying to take the gospel to Norway.

It's First Tim Luther. So missions, the humanitarian stuff, as they say, all pistons were firing. Worship, Christian ed. I'm sure they got things wrong and they had their faults and we can't give them free passes.

But they had a lot going right because they had the doctrine right. Last question, I think. I'm hungry. I don't know about you. Bruce, is it? Yes, right. If you're going to drink, you might as well drink a lot.

The whole sin boldly is taken out of context as I just did. But I got to tell you, it's a great quote to take out of context. No, I think what he was saying there was trying to remind Melanchthon of this thing we were talking about.

There is a proportionate relationship to the perception of the greatness of our sin to the greatness and grandeur of grace. And so when Luther says sin boldly, he is setting the stage for an embrace of a bold grace to be at work in one's life.

And it's a recognition that in our utter weakness and in our utter despair and our utter inability, that is precisely where we need to be because then we recognize that it really is grace that is at work in us.

And I think that's what he's trying to tell young Philip. Philip was a few years younger than Luther when he got to Wittenberg. He was a very smart Greek teacher. He had written his own Greek grammar, and Luther recognized this in him.

He also recognized that Melanchthon had a different demeanor than him. He says, Philip writes with a butter knife, and I write with an axe. Thanks.