Lutheranism - Part 1

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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00:00

Father in Heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to continue our discussion of theology and looking systematically at various theological systems.

00:12

And as we, Father, turn today to that one who was used by you to be the fire of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and the subsequent denomination which flowed from his teachings, I pray that we would be fair in understanding the context that Luther was in, but also to be discerning to understand that there were things that we would see as unbiblical and things that tied him back to Rome.

00:44

And Father, again, just help us to be gracious in our understanding, help us to seek the word, seek the truth, and to be faithful to both.

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In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

00:59

Well, if you'll open your books, if you brought your books today, I'm sorry that I didn't make copies, but I will say this, this is stuff that's pretty well-known, I think, by you guys, and there's not a lot.

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I'm gonna be using the board a lot, so not having it's not going to be that big of an issue.

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I'm sorry for not having copies, though I do apologize for that.

01:27

First of all, I think that you'll notice right in the very first page here under the Lutheran Theology section in our textbooks, it says theology builds around three fundamental doctrines, the doctrine of sola scriptura, sola gratia, and sola fide.

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Now, we would say there are two more solas that came out of the Reformation, as you may know what the other two are.

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The ones that I gave you were sola scriptura, sola gratia, and sola fide.

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Solus Christus and? Sola Deo Gloria.

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Sola Deo Gloria.

02:10

But again, looking just at the textbook, it's bringing up three of those five, and the three specifically referencing how we understand both our participation in faith and what it means to be a Christian that kind of revolves around these three.

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Sola scriptura, sola gratia, and sola fide.

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Now, before we even address those, I wanna sort of just take a step back and mention that we are studying Lutheranism, so we have to first understand who it is we're talking about.

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We're talking about Martin Luther.

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And I know for the first few years of being really confirmed in my Reformed view of salvation and my Reformed view of what it means to be saved, Martin Luther was very influential in helping me understand quite a few things.

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However, at the same time, I would say that at this point, there are probably more things that I would disagree with Luther on theologically than I would agree with him on.

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And so it kind of becomes an issue when I talk about Luther, because I will say Martin Luther is one of my all-time great heroes, and yet I disagree with him on quite a few things.

03:43

We're gonna talk about some of them in a little while.

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But he's a hero of mine.

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I find Martin Luther's character to be one of great passion and great concern for truth, and he was willing to battle what seems to be an insurmountable foe in the Roman Catholic Church.

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He was willing to battle for something that he believed in.

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He was willing to even go to his death.

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His statement at the Diet of Worms, where he said, unless I am convinced by sacred scripture, I am bound by the truth, and I'm bound by my conscience, and to violate my conscience is neither right nor safe, and I cannot and I will not recant.

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I mean, those words are just so powerful, and yet historians tell us that he said it in somewhat of a monotone and muted way.

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He didn't shout it like we've seen in the movies, I will not recant, you know, it's how we see it in the film, but historians say, he kind of said, I will not recant, because he knew what that meant.

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Not recanting was death, and yet he was not killed.

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God spared his life.

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God took him and used him mightily, translating the scriptures into German, and then bringing about the Reformation.

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Martin Luther, as an individual, has a very interesting life.

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Martin Luther was not brought up with the hopes of becoming a priest or becoming a monk.

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He was brought up with the hopes of his father, Hans Luther, and I know you want to mention that.

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Luther is his actual name.

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Luther is the more Americanized version, but Hans Luther desired that his son would be a lawyer, and so he was trained in that, but yet once when Martin Luther was returning home, he was on a horse.

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There was a lightning bolt.

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The lightning bolt struck very close to where he was, knocked him off of his animal, and as he fell to the ground thinking he was going to die, he said, saying, and if I am saved, I will become a priest.

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So it was his Roman Catholic theology kind of spitting out there, calling out to Saint Anne for protection, and he said, if I am saved from this, I will become a priest, and so he was, and he was saved from death in this violent storm, and as a result, he did move into the priesthood.

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In 1505, he became a monk.

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In 1505, he became a monk, and two years later, he became an ordained priest.

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His first mass that he held, he actually bobbled the elements because of his fear.

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He was not a man who was given over to light concerns about the nature of God.

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He was very concerned about God's holiness, God's justice, God's anger, God's wrath, and he, when he was holding up the bread, he shook because of his fear, because he said, this is Jesus's body.

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How am I? I'm a sinful man with sinful hands.

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I'm holding up the body of my Savior, and of course, because he had obviously been taught Roman Catholic theology, that this is physically Jesus's body, he was, he bobbled the elements and to much of great embarrassment to his family because this was his first mass.

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This was the first time that he was doing the very thing that he was supposed to be doing, and so he was somewhat of an embarrassment in that way.

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It was after this that it became clear to him that his theology was not soothing his conscience because Luther began to realize that he was never going to be good enough to be judged a righteous man.

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He began to confess his sins as much as he could to his leaders because he had to give confession.

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That was part of what it meant to be a monk, and so he would go to confession, and he would confess for hours, and he would confess for so long that his leaders would say, Brother Martin, don't return until you have a serious sin to confess.

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As he would confess, I mean, when you live in a monastery, what can you do? I was coveting Brother Brian's piece of bread.

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I don't know, what are you gonna do in a monastery? What can you do? But he was so overwhelmed with the sinfulness of his conscience, the sinfulness of his heart, that he was almost driven mad to the point to where he couldn't love God.

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He felt like he hated him because he couldn't find any way to satisfy him.

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And so Luther began his studies, and it was in Romans where he found his piece.

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There in the first chapter of Romans, it says, the just shall live by faith as it is written, or it says, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

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And Luther added to that the word alone.

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Now, he didn't make that alone.

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Actually, I do think it is in the German text, but I would have to look that up.

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But what he said was it's assumed that it's not, it would almost be like today if we were giving a paraphrase of a text.

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He would say, the word alone is not in the text, but the word alone is assumed in the text because man is justified not by works, but by faith.

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And if it's not by works, but by faith, it must be by faith alone.

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It can't be faith plus anything.

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It must be faith alone.

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And so thus was coined the term sola fide.

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And he saw works as the outgrowth of faith, but not the standing for justification.

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And thus we come, we see the idea of sola fide is very much something that Luther coined.

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And the idea that it is by faith alone because of grace alone.

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Grace is what gives us the ability to have faith.

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Grace is what gives us the ability to be saved.

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And so it's by faith alone because of grace alone, or by grace through faith alone, whichever way you want to say it.

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And then the other thing that became the real sticking point in Luther's theology was sola scriptura, because the issue was the issue of the papacy.

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You have the popes and you have the bishops and the cardinals.

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You have these people that are bringing in man-made theology, unbiblical theology.

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What do you do with that? You reject it if it doesn't agree with scripture.

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And so those three, as I said, were really the most important things for Martin Luther.

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And he posted the 95 theses in 1517.

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This is why oftentimes you will see references.

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You'll hear me say that the reformation really began in 1517.

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It's not true.

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The reformation, you could argue, goes all the way back to, well, you could say the Waldensians had a hand in it.

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You could say that Wycliffe was the morning star of the reformation.

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You could say that Jan Hus was very powerfully used of God in the reformation.

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He, of course, was a great influence of Martin Luther.

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But it was the day that the nail went into the door at the castle church at Wittenberg that the battle began to rage.

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Yes, sir.

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That wasn't on October 31st, was it? Yes, it was.

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And yes, it was on September.

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November 1st is All Saints Day.

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So October 31st is All Hallows' Eve or All Saints' Eve, as far as where the term Halloween comes from.

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October 31st, 1517.

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And that's why every year we have a reformation celebration, which is our Bible conference.

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And it's always the week after October 31st.

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We celebrate this as a watershed moment in the history of Christendom.

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Now, after this happened, we know about the Diet of Worms.

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We already mentioned that.

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Martin Luther is brought before this council.

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The council condemns him, condemns his work.

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And he is excommunicated in 1521.

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He is excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church.

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So from 1505 to 1521, 16 years.

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That's really a relatively short time in the lifespan of a man.

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I've only been married 16 years.

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I say only, but I mean, 16 years for me, I remember when I was 18.

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I remember right before I got married.

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I remember, you know, it doesn't seem that long ago.

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But think of the battles and the change that went on theologically, mentally, psychologically in the heart of Luther in a short period of 16 years.

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You know, the older I get, the less 16 years seems, right? You know, it's a drop in the bucket at a certain point.

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But all of this happened.

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And when he was excommunicated, four years later in 1525, the Lutheran Church begins to be developed.

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People begin identifying themselves, especially there in Germany, which is where Luther was, as Lutherans.

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We are followers of the teachings of Luther.

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Now, some people take great issue with identifying yourself with a man.

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And sometimes they'll go back to scripture and they'll see where the Apostle Paul says, some Sam of Paul, some Sam of Apollo, some Sam of Jesus, you know, and they'll use that as sort of a negative and say, this is wrong to ever identify with a man.

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So to identify yourself as a Lutheran or a Calvinist or a Wesleyan or whatever is simply unbiblical.

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Well, you know, I guess that point can be pressed in much the same way that you could argue that you shouldn't put up crosses because the Bible says not to have any graven images.

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You know, so I mean, I'm just saying you could press anything to a point, but you have to understand the historical context these people are in.

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If you weren't a part of Rome, you were excommunicated from the church, which identified itself as the only avenue by which you could receive the sacraments, the only avenue by which you could receive salvation.

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And so you were either a Roman Catholic or you were out and now has come this new way, this new opportunity where it's not by the church, but it's by grace through faith alone.

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And who is the proponent of that? Luther.

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And so, well, of course scripture, but I'm saying at the time, so people identify themselves as Lutheran because they're identifying themselves with these doctrines much in the same way today.

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If I might call myself a Calvinist, I don't do that because I think Calvin was infallible.

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Neither do I do that because I agree with everything Calvin taught.

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I disagree with several things Calvin taught, but there are things that Calvin taught that I think are so biblical and so true that it would be well enough for me to identify myself at least in a sense to have a Calvinistic view of salvation.

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Sort of theological of shorthand.

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Yes, it is.

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It's like, it's kind of like I talked, some people say, I don't ever like to use these titles.

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I say, well, you know, if you see a big animal come, it's got a long face and big floppy ears and a tail, you don't say, hey, there's a big long face animal, big floppy, you say it's a horse, because that's what it is.

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You give it a name so that you can shorten all that down.

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I don't walk around saying, I believe in total privacy, unconditional, limited, unlimited, irresistible, grace, personal, religious, and sacred.

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That takes a while.

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But I'll say I believe in Calvinism because that's what most people identify, the five points with that.

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In the historical, about that time, wasn't the Catholic Church also backed by the governments and by the military? Yeah, it was.

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Where if you went up to it, it was problematic if you were Lutheran.

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Yes, there was not a separation between church and state.

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And you see, that's the thing that people often get a bit upset about.

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They say, we shouldn't have separation between church and state.

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Separation between church and state is actually something that the church wanted.

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The church wanted there to be a separation of power so that the state was not able to have the power of the church.

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Neither was the church to exercise power over the state, but that both were instituted by God as having authority in their spheres.

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But in Roman Catholicism, the church had the authority to excommunicate even the king.

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And so who has the authority then? The church is ruling over the state.

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Some people say that's great, but we see that it's a power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely situation because they see the corruption that entered in to the Roman system.

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Not just because of bad theology, but because of absolute power.

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Then you have England where the king just makes his own.

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Well, the king makes his own church.

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Yeah, he establishes his own church because he doesn't like the rules.

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Yeah.

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So after 1525, five years later, 1530 approximately, because this is one of those times where I can't even exact dating.

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Approximately 1530, you have what's called the Augsburg Confession of Faith.

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The Augsburg Confession of Faith.

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That stands to today as being the confession of Lutheran theology.

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That is not to say that all Lutherans would agree with everything in it any more than all Presbyterians believe everything in the Westminster Confession.

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We know a whole bunch of PCUSA people that would repudiate much of the, you see what I'm saying? Because just like in the Presbyterian church, there are wide divergences in Lutheranism, there are also wide divergences.

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But generally and by and large, the Augsburg Confession is held as the esteemed confession of faith among the Lutherans, much like in the Reformed Baptist circles, you have the 1689 Confession in Presbyterian churches, you have the Westminster Confession in Lutheran churches, you have the Augsburg Confession.

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So understanding that, let's look back.

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Any questions so far? I know there's a thousand things you could probably ask.

19:31

Huh? Yeah, I didn't bring a video.

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I should have.

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When? I don't have the date.

19:37

I would have to get that for you.

19:39

I know that again, it's involved in this excommunication here, but I believe it was prior to this, but I'm not certain.

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How long is the Augsburg Confession? Is it a short confession, or is it just as long? Is it a book? Let me find out.

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I think it's about 27 pages online because I was looking at it.

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So it's not short, but it's not like, it's not a book.

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It's not like a short profession of faith.

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No, it's not like a one-page thing.

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It's a confession of faith.

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Typically, something that's short like that would typically be referred to as like a creed, like the Nicene Creed or Apostles' Creed.

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And they would.

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Lutheran churches hold to the- It's long.

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Yeah.

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The Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, and the Athanasian Creed are three creeds which are upheld in the Lutheran Confession.

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And I would agree with all three of those creeds.

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I think that there is some confusing language about Christ descending into hell that has to be understood within those creeds.

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But other than that, I would say that those creeds are biblical and expressions of what Christians believed at the time that they were written.

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Of course, the Apostles' Creed very early, Nicene Creed 325, and the Athanasian Creed about 100 years after that.

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So we have very powerful theology in those creeds.

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I don't have a problem with the creeds at all.

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But like I said, they're normally snapshots of a faith, whereas a confession is a more lengthy expression of what the faith teaches.

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Yes, sir.

21:08

I was gonna ask about what the purpose of a confession is, because I'm not used to that.

21:14

Statement of faith, isn't it? A confession of faith, just like the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the one that I would say is closest to what I would believe and teach, is a way of expressing theological principles more fleshed out than a standard statement of faith or creed, which is typically very short.

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The confession is longer and more fleshed out.

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The only thing I can relate to is like the 2000 Southern Baptist Statement of Faith.

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The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 is a confession of faith.

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And this is what's interesting, because a lot of Baptists will say we're anti-credo.

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No, you're not.

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You have the confession of faith? You haven't.

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Just like the guys who say, we have no creed but Christ.

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That's a creed, Bubba.

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Yep, you can't get, you can't.

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No creed but Christ is a creed.

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They'll say, no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.

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I'll say, stop.

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Which Christ, which Bible? You can't have a creed so simple that it says nothing.

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But you do.

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Because you say, no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.

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Which Christ, which Bible? That's why confessions exist.

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They tell us which Christ.

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They tell us which Bible.

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That's why they exist.

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All right, and they're very important.

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And that's why I don't shy away from them.

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I like to teach them.

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They also provide systematic theology because they show, and throughout this course we may look at some, because they show how certain theological things are understood among various Christian groups throughout the years, throughout the centuries.

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All right, looking back at our book, we looked at the theology.

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Next to Christ, it says, Christ is the center of scripture.

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His person and work, especially his substitutionary death, are the basis of Christian faith and the message of salvation.

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Lutherans do believe in substitution.

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They believe in substitutionary atonement.

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At least Luther did.

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And again, there are things I'm gonna say today that Lutherans believe, and I'm going to address that as what Luther believed.

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Because there are things, obviously today, that some Lutherans believe that Luther would never have conceived.

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And that's just the nature of how things tend to evolve.

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But as far as substitutionary atonement, that is something that Luther believed, and that's where he understood sola fide.

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He understood sola fide.

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Why is it by faith alone? Because we're trusting in what Christ did, not in what we have done.

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It goes back to, can somebody give me the time? I really gotta put a clock in here.

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I'm not gonna get through this today.

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We're gonna go through this, we're gonna finish next week.

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Because I wanna share something with you that's very important.

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Luther has a analogy that he uses that I've always really liked.

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But it does come with its own baggage, which has to be unpacked.

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Much like a lot of things have baggage.

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So Luther said that we are like piles of dung.

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Luther was a very expressive man, and he wouldn't mind using the word for dung that we probably wouldn't use.

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But he was a German orator.

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Have you ever heard German, it's so guttural.

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There's a video online that's hilarious.

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It's like all these things that are very beautiful in other languages.

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I love you, I love you, da-da-da-da-da.

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And German's like, I still have, yeah, it's very funny.

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They sound like they're trying to expel something when they're talking.

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So anyhow, in the German fields, they would pile up their manure, and they would use it for fertilizer when it was the time to seed their fields.

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So they would pile the manure up into big piles, and they would use that as fertilizer.

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Obviously, this is before you could go down to Home Depot and buy fertilizer.

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So in the wintertime, you would look out in the fields, and you would see the snow fall, and you would see these beautiful mounds of white, pristine snow that had fallen over these mounds of dung.

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And Luther used that as an analogy for imputed righteousness.

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He said that snow-covered pile of dung is what we are.

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He said because we are sinners, we are dung, we are, as we sing in our song on Sunday mornings, we are worms, we are offensive to God, but God clothes us in the righteousness of Christ.

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He covers us in the veneer of Christ's righteousness, and thus when He sees us, He sees not our sin and our failings, but He sees the beautiful, perfect, white, though your sins be as crimson, He will wash them whiter than snow.

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And so this was Luther's analogy for salvation.

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He said salvation is God covering over our sins.

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Now, the Roman Catholics totally disagreed with this.

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They believe that righteousness is infused, where Luther believed righteousness is imputed.

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You might say those two things sound really weird.

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What do they mean? In Roman Catholicism, the belief was the way you become righteous before God is God makes you righteous practically, physically, really.

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You become righteous, and it is that righteousness whereby you stand before Him.

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Luther said, no, we don't become righteous.

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We are declared righteous.

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God makes a forensic, the forensic simply means legal, He makes a legal declaration of righteousness, and thereby we stand before God.

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As Paul said, not having a righteousness of my own which comes from the law, but a righteousness which comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

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I am done.

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Christ's righteousness covers me.

27:50

Yes, yes.

27:51

That would be where people get the idea that they're no longer sinners, wasn't it? Well, yeah, and what they would say, this is how I've heard a Roman Catholic scholar address Luther's argument.

28:03

He says, no, we're not piled up with snow covered.

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He says, God takes the dung, pushes it into the ground, and grows flowers out of it, and that's, and while that's an interesting analogy, and at least he is addressing what he said, basically he says we are, it's infused, not imputed.

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Now, here's where I want to say I do like Luther's analogy, and I've used it before.

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I have called people snow covered piles of dung even though they probably didn't like it.

28:30

No, but I do think, though, that there is a problem in Lutheran theology, and we'll address it more next week, because we're also going to address some of the, I think, some of the things that are really negatives in Lutheran theology, such as the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, which is clearly taught in the Augsburg Confession, but before we get to all that, I just want to address this.

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The snow covered pile of dung, there is one thing in Lutheran, at least orthopraxy, meaning how they practice their theology, their, how they work it out, their understanding of sanctification is different a lot of times than what the typical Calvinist or Reformed view of sanctification would be, because if you, and I remember the first time I ever heard a man who was a Lutheran preacher preach on, he preached on the Christian life, and while I would agree with a lot of what he said, because so much of what he said was so passionate about the grace of God and the mercy of God and how the relationship that we have is fully and completely because of the work of Jesus Christ and nothing that we have done can change the relationship that we have with God because it's so firm, it's founded on the rock and not on the shifting sand of our own opinions, our own positions, our own decisions, but it's Christ alone and it's in Him and on Him that our, you know, all that, I was like, yeah, amen and amen, but then he said something.

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He said, he said, so I know that in this life, I can do nothing that can change the way God sees me.

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I can do nothing that can interrupt my relationship with God or affect my fellowship with God because it's absolutely static.

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I'm not gonna say the pastor's name, but he was very, very popular for a while.

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Now, he is not as popular.

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He left his wife after she committed adultery on him, he committed adultery on her, and he abandoned the ministry.

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Now, I'm not saying his theology caused that, but I am saying this, he had such a view of the grace of God in justification, but such a low view, he had such a high view of the grace of God in justification, but such a low view of the grace of God in sanctification that he didn't see that there is a very real way in which God does grow flowers out of the dung, and I'm not agreeing with the Roman Catholic and saying that's what makes us justified, but I am saying this, God does change us.

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If we don't think that God changes us, then how do we understand what Jesus says when he tells us that our lives will be different, we will bear the fruit of righteousness, and if we don't, if we don't depart lawlessness, if we don't bear the fruit of righteousness, that we're not in him.

31:43

Yes, sir, you.

31:45

You're going right into a very major area, and of course, you're very into this, but about Luther and his comment on the book of James.

31:56

Yes, Luther called James the epistle of straw, which we're gonna address that, we're teaching on James on next week.

32:03

You addressed that very issue right now.

32:05

Yeah, he did not, and I think, and again, sometimes our theology tends to come out of our experience more than we wanna agree.

32:16

Sometimes our experience tends to influence our theology, and because Luther had such a difficult time finding any righteousness in himself and trusting fully the righteousness of Christ, which we're supposed to do, he didn't see the power of the practical righteousness that does come by grace through faith, through sanctification, and so this is an area where I think we have to be careful.

32:44

Yes, we are saved by grace through faith, but we're not saved by grace through faith for nothing.

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We're saved by grace through faith because we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.

32:56

That was a Catholic baggage he carried, because a lot of Catholics have so much baggage.

33:04

Well, there's a lot, we're gonna talk next week about some of the, I think, the theology of baptism that he had in regarding the baptismal regeneration was a baggage that he carried from Rome, because that wasn't something that Calvin taught.

33:18

Calvin's view of the baptism of infants was different than Luther's and the purpose and reason behind it, and it remains to this day to be a division point, at least in understanding why we baptize infants or why they do.

33:30

We don't, but why they do.

33:33

So yeah, there's so much here.

33:35

I knew I wasn't gonna get to only spend one week on Luther because he's one of my favorite, and again, I give Luther a lot of grace, because even in areas where I think we disagreed, I think that he was a mighty hand of God.

33:47

Yeah, he was used in the hand of God, if you will, to bring about major change, and change doesn't come easy, folks.

33:54

You think it's hard to change a 50-year-old Baptist church? Think of a 1,000-year-old woman Catholic church.

33:59

You know what I mean? It's hard to bring change, but Luther was used of God to bring change.

34:06

And one of the points is he was coming from the basis of Scripture, even if we may have differences.

34:13

He's coming from within the Bible.

34:16

Yeah, he's seeking to find it, and the one thing we're gonna talk about next week, too, is the difference in the regulative principle.

34:24

I'm gonna make myself a note, because I need to, and the normative principle, because in classic Calvinism, we have something called the regulative principle.

34:34

In Lutheranism, there's more of a shift towards the normative principle, and that's simply how we worship.

34:42

Should our worship be bound by Scripture alone, or should our worship be that we just don't do anything? Should it be that we only do what Scripture commands, or can we do anything that Scripture doesn't forbid? And that's the difference between regulative and normative principle, and that is a division between typical, between Presbyterian and, more conservative Presbyterian, and more conservative Lutheran.

35:08

So there's a lot to get through here.

35:11

I hope you guys are learning.

35:12

I hope this has been beneficial.

35:15

Well, let's pray.

35:16

Father, thank you for this time of study.

35:18

I pray that we would give men like Martin Luther a lot of grace and understanding that they are men who were in a much different time than ours, and they're heroes, Lord, because if it were not for men like him, and John Huss, and John Wycliffe, and John Calvin, and Yurik Zwingli, God, we wouldn't have the clear teachings that we have that show us where Rome had erred, and where the Scripture is so clear about salvation by grace through faith alone.

35:47

We thank you for that in Christ's name, amen.