SUNDAY SCHOOL: Sola Scriptura

The Dark Age Before the Reformation

Welcome back to the Shepherds Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. All right, well, I think we should probably get started.

Let's go ahead and pray and we will begin. Father, thank you so much for today and thank you for all that you've done for us Lord, thank you for the legacy of the Reformation and for all of the truths that you brought forth out of a dark season and brought them forward.

And for all the missionary movements that have happened since then and for the spread of the gospel and the advance that's happened, Lord, we thank you for that. We pray that one aspect of the Reformation that would be healed is the fracturing of the church.

We do pray, Lord, that you would bring your church back together into one church again and that she would be one church in truth. So Lord, we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.

All right, so before the dawn of the Reformation, Europe was a continent that was smothered in a kind of spiritual malaise. The Bible had been entombed beneath layers of Latin locked away from the common man and treated more like a relic than the living, breathing word of God.

The church, once a pillar and a buttress of truth, had become a brothel of idolatrous tradition where the gospel was traded like currency and heaven could be bought with coin. It was a time when salvation no longer thundered but echoed very faintly from the papal treasuries in Rome.

Popes no longer shepherded with the rod of Christ but they ruled with the sword of Caesar. Councils no longer searched the scriptures like the noble Bereans but contradicted one another with impunity.

Roman effectively replaced thus saith the Lord with thus saith the Pope and tradition. It was a religious empire not built on apostolic teaching but on human decrees, what Christ once called the traditions of men.

A new Pharisaical priesthood had arisen, not preaching repentance any longer but selling pardons, claiming divine infallibility and trafficking in fear. The gospel was not denied outright but it was buried alive.

The Lord's Supper became a spectacle of superstition. The word of God was read in Latin to a people who spoke German and the sacraments were twisted into tools of manipulation designed to keep the masses docile and the priests dominant.

Salvation had been transformed from free grace to a carefully guarded commodity dispensed at the church's discretion and yet in the darkness of all of this, the Lord was preparing a torch. He didn't raise up an emperor or a general but a angry monk with a Bible.

A soul tormented by Rome's failure to deliver peace, a mind sharpened by study and conscience bound by the word of God and when his hammer struck the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, history snapped back awake again.

Martin Luther and the Recovery of Scripture

That monk's name was Martin Luther and his cry that would echo down through the ages, what we're gonna talk about today, which is sola scriptura, which is scripture alone. Now Martin Luther's story doesn't begin in rebellion.

Actually, it begins in bondage. He wasn't a young revolutionary at first but a terrified soul who was trapped under the crushing weight of medieval Roman Catholicism. Martin Luther was born in 1483 to a stern Saxon father and Luther himself was driven towards a career in law, towards success, towards discipline, towards worldly ambition.

But in 1505, as a lightning storm tore through the sky near Stotternheim, it also tore through Luther's heart. Falling to the ground in fear, he cried out, not to Christ but to Saint Anne, the supposed patron of minors.

And he said, help me Saint Anne and I will become a monk. The cry of a frightened sinner revealed the absence of a savior at that point. But true to his vow, he entered the Augustinian monastery and if salvation could come to you by monkery, then Luther would have been a saint a thousand times over.

He starved his body, he slept on stone floors, he confessed obsessively and saw peace in penance, pilgrimages and performances. But the more he tried to earn God's favor, the deeper his despair actually grew.

Rome had given him tools that could never cleanse a guilty conscience. He later wrote, I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say, if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I. All my companions in the monastery who knew me will bear me out.

If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, readings and other work. This is what happens when a church loses the gospel. The sheep are not fed, they're flogged. But the providence in this is not random because in 1508, Luther began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg.

It was here in the quiet study of the Psalms and of Romans and of Galatians that Luther encountered the word unfiltered by the papal gloss. And in Romans 117, everything changed for Luther and even in some ways the world.

For it is in the righteousness of God, it is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Martin Luther had always understood the righteousness of God as God's terrifying holiness, his perfect standard that condemned every sinner.

But now the veil was lifted for Luther. The righteousness of God was not the mere standard anymore, it was the gift that God had given to us by faith through Jesus Christ. And it was the righteousness that God provides that is received by faith alone, which is what we'll talk about in a future week called Sola Fide.

For Luther, the shackles fell, the cell door opened, the wretched monk was finally set free, and it was this theological earthquake that was unleashed upon the Roman system of indulgences, penances, and priestcraft that brought the entire system to the ground.

Now Luther had not found a new truth, he had found an old one that was buried beneath the rubble. And around 1517, Luther started organizing these truths in what we call now the 95 Theses. His soul had been liberated by scripture, and what he saw was a Roman church that had become a religious cartel, trafficking grace as a commodity.

And the chief salesman of this soul-trafficking scheme was a man named Johann Tetzel, who was a Dominican friar who was preaching through the German lands, and he was making a mockery of the gospel. He was standing beneath the Pope's papal banner, and he was stirring up the crowds, saying as soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory Springs.

And he was telling people that if you want your dead grandma, and if you want your dead grandpa, and if you want your mother and father to go to heaven, then you have to pay X amount of dollars to get them out of Purgatory, to expedite them through that process.

And what Rome was doing in that was, they were funding the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Luther, when he saw this, could not stay silent anymore. Armed not with a sword or a shield, but with a pen and with parchment, he composed a list of 95 theological grievances, protests against the abuse of indulgences and the errors of papal authority, and he nailed those 95 Theses on the castle door in 1517.

Which was a common academic practice. We tend to glamorize it, and make Luther out to be some rebel. Actually, this was common. He posted it there so that he could have a debate, so that he could have a discussion with the theological professors of that day.

Now, thanks to the newly invented printing press, his ideas actually started spreading like wildfire. And that year, the echo of the hammer and nail was heard in the halls of power, it was heard in the dungeons of despair, and it spread quickly to where the world would never be the same.

He thundered, when our Lord and Master, this is the very first Thesis, when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he willed that the entire life of believers would be one of repentance. He's saying that everything that we do is undergirded and established by a life of repentance.

And he was saying that Rome had turned repentance into a transaction. In Thesis number 82, he said, why does not the Pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love if he could do it for filthy lucre? He's pointing out that the emperor had no clothes, and now the people finally saw it.

Luther Versus Rome

That leads us to sort of this increasing intensity that happened in that season between Martin Luther and the Church of Rome. The battle lines at that point had been drawn, and Rome, who was accustomed to silencing its dissidents with threats and fire and exile, underestimated the power of a man who could be captivated by the word of God.

As Luther's writings began spreading across Europe, the Vatican turned from indifference to this chubby little monk to outrage. The papal machine lurched into action. In 1518, Luther was summoned to Augsburg in order to defend himself and answer to Cardinal Cajetan.

I don't know how to pronounce that. Cajetan? Thank you. Cajetan. Now, that meeting wasn't a dialogue, but it was a demand. And they demanded that Luther would recant, but he refused. Now, what I find interesting is if you read through this, Luther was not a man of absolute courage.

Luther was a man who had to go back and pray because he was terrified at having to make this stand. He appealed to the Cardinal. He appealed to the bishops. And in 1519, at the Leipzig debate, he faced Johann Eck, who was a skilled debater and loyal son of Roman.

Under pressure, Luther made the boldest claim of his life. He said that councils can err, popes can err, but only scripture is infallible. And that moment, Luther renounced the entire scaffolding of the Roman papal authority system, not out of arrogance, but because his conscience was now held firmly to the word of God.

Rome responded with fury. In 1520, Pope Leo issued a papal bull titled Ex Serje Domini, threatening excommunication to Luther. The bull condemned 41 of Luther's teachings and gave him 60 days to submit.

And then Luther's answer was, obviously, no. In the presence of his students and colleagues, he publicly burned the bull, which is awesome. With it, he consigned the pope's threats to the same flames that had consumed faithful martyrs for centuries.

And he was declaring that scripture alone is supreme. And that same year, Luther unleashed a trio of theological canons. In his address to Christian nobility of the German nation, he called upon secular rulers to reform the church.

In Babylonian captivity of the church, he struck at the heart of Rome's sacrificial system, dismantling it as a twisted grip upon the conscience. In the freedom of the Christian, he articulated the paradox of gospel liberty.

A Christian is most free, Lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is the most dutiful servant of all and subject to all. And then that's when he's called to the very famous Diet of Worms. Or you can say worms, it's okay.

In April 1521, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to the city of Worms to appear before an imperial council. And the purpose was pretty clear. It was a tribunal, it was not a conversation. It was not a debate, it was submit or be killed.

The empire wanted conformity and Luther's friends were fearing for his life. But he came anyway. Luther entered the hall surrounded by the princes and the prelates and the powers. The walls were lined with churchmen and imperial officers who were waiting to hear what this little stubby monk would say.

And they asked him, are these your writings and will you recant? And Luther's voice trembling under the weight of the scriptures confirmed that the books were his. But at the request to recant, he said it was too big of a request for him to give a hasty reply so he begged for a little bit more time and they granted him a single day.

That night Luther wrestled not with the Pope or the emperor but with his own soul. He knew what awaited him, fire, shame, death. He knew that the same death that had just happened to John Hus was marked out for him.

But he also knew that the truth was not a matter of votes or crowns. It was written in the word of God. And that night prayed the same prayer that Christ prayed in Gethsemane, strengthen me. I'm ready to lay down my life for you are truth.

The next day he stood before the most powerful men and this is one of the most famous quotes from the Reformation. This is what Luther said. Unless I'm convinced by the testimony of scripture or by clear reason, since I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone for it is well known that they have often erred or contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures that I have quoted and my conscience is held captive to the word of God.

I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If here I stand, I can do no other. God help me, amen. Some of my favorite. These are not the words of a man who was trying to protect his reputation or protect his image or even protect himself.

These are the words of a man who feared God and feared his word and knew that God's word alone could be trusted. Now, that leads us to what idea actually had captured Luther and that's what we call now Sola Scriptura, that it is scripture alone that is the authority and it is worth dying for.

Martin Luther, when he said that his conscience was held captive to the word of God, what he was saying is that scripture alone is worthy of dying for. This was the foundational axiom of the entire Reformation, the belief that scripture alone is the final sufficient and infallible authority for all matters of faith and life and that idea was not born in Wittenberg, but it was recovered there.

This is a idea that the apostles taught, the early church fathers echoed and medieval Rome had buried underneath of centuries of ecclesiastical sediment. Sola Scriptura was now being unleashed upon the church again, smashing the idols of the church fathers that God speaks through men and through councils and through tradition.

Instead, the idea is that God speaks with divine authority through his word. Sola Scriptura is the conviction that the Bible is the very breath of God, 2 Timothy 3, 16 through 17. It's inspired, it's inerrant, it's sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work.

It is the affirmation that scripture interprets scripture, not popes, not councils, not mystics, not cultural trends. It's the understanding that scripture is not obscure, it's clear. There's a theological word called perpiscuity, which I think this is hilarious.

The word means that scripture is easily understood, so they picked the word perpiscuity to describe that concept, isn't that funny? Let's pick a very difficult word to describe a very easy thing. Sola Scriptura is that the word of God can be understood and it does not earn, it does not fail.

What Sola Scriptura Is and Is Not

Now, I wanna be clear what Sola Scriptura is not. It is not solo scriptura, which is a kind of modern individualistic error that rejects creeds, confessions, and catechisms in the historic church, and it just says that all we need is the word.

We're not saying that nothing teaches us truth. We are a confessional church. We love the Westminster Standards, but to the degree that something points to the word is to the degree that we accept or reject it.

That Sola Scriptura is not anti-authority, rather it recognizes that all authority, whether it's church or civil or anything, is derivative authority coming from God and coming from his word. It's also not a rejection of tradition, which is a huge thing in the American church, that we create churches that are new and novel and don't stand on the shoulders upon anyone, why?

Because we have this tendency of rejecting tradition. Tradition itself is not bad. It's what kind of tradition is it? Is it a tradition that honors the word of God or is it a tradition that undermines the word of God?

Rome had invented a tradition that undermined the word of God, and therefore it was worthy of being rejected, but tradition itself is not bad. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, not because they had traditions, but because their traditions were wicked.

He said, you nullify the word of God for the sake of your traditions. You see the point? Tradition's not the problem. It's what your tradition is either emphasizing or nullifying. Paul warned the Corinthians, do not go beyond what is written.

What a great verse. What a great verse for everything in your life. Do not go beyond what is written. The Bereans themselves were called noble because they didn't submit blindly to Paul. They checked what Paul was saying based off the scriptures.

Why?

Because they had a doctrine, sola scriptura. Sola scriptura levels every pulpit, every pope, and every presumption to an authority, and that authority is not us or our opinion. It is God's word. And in an age of moral relativism and truth is what you think it is, your truth, my truth, their truth, we need to recover this now more than ever.

Sola scriptura, and if you studied sort of the way that the church has gone over the last 40 years, sola scriptura seems like the battle of 20 years ago, and yet it is still the battle today. Now, I want to pause here for a moment.

I kind of went through the history pretty quickly. Any questions that you have on sola scriptura? Yes, sir. No, I don't know. I would have, I don't know. I wouldn't want to answer.

The reason why it sticks out of my head.

Yeah.

Ken, ask your assistant. My guess would be, my guess would be it was in Latin because he was intending to have a debate among the intelligentsia of the church, but one of the things that people, one of the things, yes, sir.

Okay.

So my assumption was good,.

But one of the things that's remarkable,.

Luther gets this persona of just being a kind of driven rebel, like kind of like a bull in a china shop, and in some ways, Luther earns his reputation justly. He is a man who says very strong things, but in other ways, Luther really did actually try to honor the system and tried to work to reform the church from within.

It was only basically when they resorted to killing him that Luther began working outside of the church establishment to establish a reformed church. When Luther left the Diet of Worms, he had a death sentence on his head, and if it was not for his friends who orchestrated a kind of secret plot to kidnap him, Luther had no idea that it was happening.

So he, bag was put over his head, and he was taken to a castle somewhere in an undisclosed location at the time for Luther. Luther thought, all right, I'm going here to be killed. They're going to kill me, but what had happened was they took him off the grid for a long time so that he could write, and it was there that Luther translated the scriptures into German, which was probably the most consequential act that Luther did, which was translating the scriptures into the language of the plowman, the average German.

They say that Luther even, by translating the Bible into high German, Luther codified the German language and stabilized it. So before that, the language itself was more oral and didn't have like a, kind of like the King James language sort of looks to us like a high mark of English.

It was a high mark of German language for centuries. It was the work in German.

Yeah.

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

Yeah, he, if I remember correctly, he left fairly quickly and then was kidnapped and taken to this castle where he spent a lot of time working and writing and pursuing things, and then he didn't stay there.

He actually did come out and live a fairly open and public life and died of natural causes. He was not killed by the church. He married a nun named Katarina von Bora. So wonderful story. Luther was a, if you read about Luther's home life, Luther was an excellent husband, his wife, and he had a kind of jocular relationship where they would go back and forth with each other and rib each other.

It's actually pretty sweet to read about them.

So according to the movie, and I think, so I think they realized princes, that was very much for him, yeah.

Right.

And the government in Germany was for him.

Right, right.

And I think Frederick, wasn't it Frederick who organized the kidnapping?

Yeah, right.

I think it was. Yes, sir.

Because of the printing press.

Yeah.

The Printing Press, German Scripture, and Luther's Legacy

Yeah.

Went all over the place, yeah.

Right, and Luther was brilliant in some ways. Luther understood, he was a man of his time, and he understood the common man well, and he understood what appealed to them well. And he, for instance, in music, I don't think Luther reformed far enough in music with the regulative principle versus the normative principle, but one of the things that Luther did so brilliantly is he took tunes from the bars, the piano tunes from the bars, and he would write theological lyrics on top of those tunes, because the men already knew the tunes from singing them in the ale houses.

So he wrote theological tunes that align, or theological lyrics that aligned with the tunes they already knew. So that's a pretty brilliant move, actually, to get the word of God to the people. He also, maybe little known fact, he was a cartoonist.

He drew pictures because he was like the original meme king. He knew that people would respond to those things. One of my favorite ones, and I can't find it anywhere, but I've seen it. He drew a picture of a rear end, and a trumpet sticking out of the back of it, and he put something like, this is the Pope's words.

So Luther was fascinating, but he got the attention of people, and he got this topic on everyone's radar, even people who weren't theologically trained. I don't think it was the Catholics. I think that would have undermined, it would have also still undermined their whole view of councils, and all of that, say, solo scriptura.

So it would have cut them off at the ankles, basically. I think the impulse for it started in the counter-reformation of the Anabaptist, who began basically rejecting the magisterial reformation, and began doing kind of their own thing, and moving in Anabaptistic ways.

I think that that's the seedbed of it there, and then you get to a place in modernity where you have churches that are like, well, we have no creed but the Bible. So that sort of happened over time, but it wasn't a Catholic church movement.

It wasn't a counter-response by the Catholics. In fact, they doubled down on their traditions, and their papal authority, and all that stuff.

I think that's what he was getting to,.

Because that would have been,.

Their characters hadn't believed.

Oh, yeah, sure.

That epithet, the Catholic response, oh, that's a good question.

Is it a mocker? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or is it?

Yeah.

That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that.

So did the five souls actually?

I don't remember. I know that over time, the system started becoming, the system of thinking started becoming systematized. Beza was helpful in some of that, in codifying some things that Calvin taught, and Luther taught, and Boothser taught.

But I'm not sure, I don't know if Calvin himself actually coined the phrase, the five souls. I'm not sure.

Well, it's very similar to the canons of Dort.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is against them, you know.

Right.

So maybe that was.

Most good theology in history came out of a response to bad theology. Yeah, we've actually not been as proactive in having good theology as we have been in reactive to respond to heresy. So that's just been the way that church history for 2 ,000 years has gone, is good theology has come out of responding to heresy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's an enculturation that happens where we live and breathe and walk and talk in our societies and our culture, and we can become sort of blind to the error that we have. It's very easy to do.

Like for instance, my wife, if she were to ride with me in the Honda Civic, which we don't make a habit of doing, but if she were to ride with me, my seatbelt is broken and the noise, the beep, beep, I don't even hear it at this point.

Like I don't hear it. I don't know it exists. You tell me that it's beeping, but I don't believe you. Everyone else who rides with me or anyone who talks on the phone with me when I'm in my car, you know the noise because it's just there all the time.

So we can become blind to things that are around us, and sometimes it takes, and the Lord uses, grievous things to wake us up and to cause us to reexamine the scriptures again. And it's a grace from God.

And that's like love.

Yeah.

Right, right.

And all throughout church history, Ron, to your point, God doesn't use impressive men. God uses men who are captivated by him, men who are fairly broken, fairly weak, but they have become obsessed with the things of God.

And that's the kind of men that God delights to use. He says he uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

Yeah, amen.

That's a really good point.

I think, yeah, to be proactive is best case is.

Yeah, and I think to that point, I think that's a really well stated way to say it. But also, the church can protect itself from becoming a kind of purity police where we're always in attack mode. The church can put forward the positive case for what we know and what God has revealed to us.

And those things that God has not yet revealed to us, we will have to wait until something grievous wakes us up. And just having faith that God is sovereign over those things, yeah. Well, any other questions before we close?

All right, we'll go get some coffee and then we'll meet again in Zion. Lord, thank you for today. And thank you for the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Thank you that your word alone is sufficient for everything that we need, for faith and good works.

And your word is sufficient to teach us and to sanctify us and to grow us. Lord, we ask that our love for the scriptures would be like Luther. Lord, we pray that we would come under a kind of holy conviction for your word.

And that Lord, we would have the courage that flows downstream of that conviction.

That Luther had.

Lord, help us in our day when so much of Christendom feels like that it's collapsing and there's so much that needs to be rebuilt. Lord, help us not to focus on our particular castles, but to remember that yours is the kingdom and yours is the power and the glory forever.

So Lord, let us work, let us build, let us labor, and let us be faithful in our lives. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.

All right, well, next week we'll come back and we'll do another one. It's either sola gratia or sola fide, let me see. Sola fide.