Desiring God Ministries has a wonderful series to help us celebrate the 500 year birthday of the Reformation. You can look for the series by the title Here We Stand on the Desiring God website. It features short, daily readings/audio of key reformers. You may consider reading them or listening to them with your children and they will provide stimulating conversation for your family.
We pick up this discussion from the point that Luther was interrogated by Johan Eck and when he courageously sided with Jan Hus rather than the Catholic church...
Interestingly, siding with Jan Hus put Luther exile of the church and it was this two year journey that led him into the heart of true Christianity in 1519. The ninety five theses addressed what he saw as a cheapening of repentance. In the two years after he nailed the thesis to the door Luther had come to realize that his understanding of repentance was completely unbiblical in the first place. To quote from Reeves again:
"Luther had begun to see the extreme naivety of the medieval teaching that 'God will not deny grace to those who do their best.'
This notion is premised on the quagmire that "doing our best" would be acceptable to God. This led to a greater issue that Luther noticed: "self love shapes the very grain of our desires. As a result, our 'best' can be nothing more than self-love."
Thus, the resolution to self-love was self-hatred and self-condemnation. The prevailing understanding of God at the time was that "God, in his righteousness, hates and punishes the sin of self-love. if we wish to be saved, we must accept that judgment on us...the sinners task is to say 'amen' to God's accusation. Only when you admit you are worthy of hell can you be ready for heaven. This was salvation, not by trusting God's promise of salvation, but by accepting his damnation. It was salvation by humility" (Reeves).
The real driving force behind the Reformation was Luther coming to a fundamentally different understanding of God himself. Luther had understood God as an unloving judge, equating God's righteousness to his punishing sinners. In other words, the church had done something so much more damaging than selling indulgences, they had warped the character of God to fit their paradigm in which indulgences would make sense at all. This point could be argued but I commend this to you: however bad you think the selling of indulgences was it pales in comparison to what the church did to hide the glory and majesty of the almighty God. If Luther was operating under the conviction that God is inherently angry and salvation comes merely by agreeing with God's judgment in self-accusation then how much more were all people under the spell of a woefully dilapidated understanding of God's character?
Luther began to see that "every authority from the Bible to Augustine taught the importance of loving God, but this scheme had no room for loving God. How could one love such a God?"
In fact, Luther had admitted to his real feelings towards God being feelings of hatred and anger. It makes sense, doesn't it? If God so loathes the sinner and salvation is equivalent to the individual joining him in agreement of this, it begs the question, how can love sprout in this toxic soil? Here is what Luther described:
"Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience...I was angry with God and said: 'as if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!' Thus, I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, 'in it the righteousness of God is revealed,' as it is written, "he who through faith is righteous shall live" (Romans 1:17). There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, 'he who through faith is righteous shall live.' Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates."
It was through meditation on the Apostle Paul in the book of Romans that Luther "discovered an entirely different God and an entirely different way he relates to us" (Reeves). Luther began to see that the righteousness of God, the glory of God, the wisdom of God were not ways he was against us but things he shares with us as a gift that we are to receive by faith. Luther began to see that God does not want our goodness but our trust in him. In this, Luther's struggle with anxiety could be replaced with "massive confidence and simple faith, reviving the gift" (Reeves).
This happened in 1519 and we can trace our steps back to 1517 when the original ninety five theses were nailed to the door. Is it right to mark 1517 as the beginning of the Reformation instead of 1519? Yes, it is. It is right because it was at this time the authority of the Catholic church began to be challenged. When it was challenged it gave way to allowing the Bible to speak. Wherever the Bible rises in authority above the Pope or any other human tradition the majesty of a loving God is revealed and allows the human being to respond to him in faith as he truly is. This is life. This is worth living for and as it was proved, dying for.
However, 1517 was only the first step in the chain reaction that proved to be more significant. When the domino of the authority of the Catholic church fell it allowed Luther and the protestant church to know who God really is. We can see that 1519 was when Luther truly grasped the good news as revealed from Scripture instead of the Pope. It was 1519 when Luther truly became a Christian and it was when Luther truly began to love God that the reformation found it's heartbeat: "it soon became clear that this discovery not only gave him joy and a quite remarkable confidence; it gave him what can only be seen as a quite superhuman burst of energy to make all this known" (Reeves). It was at this point that Luther "went into overdrive with his writing." Thus, you could make the case that without 1519, 1517 would not have meant anything, especially not for us today.
We can thank the reformers for their courageous stand against the Catholic church. It is easy for us to appreciate not having to live under a church that would take our money to grant us redemption it can't grant to release souls from purgatory that doesn't even exist. I want to make the case that this should only be the beginning of our thankfulness. Where our gratitude really hits its stride is the true gift the Reformation gave to us some 500 years later: the authority of Scripture and the revelation of our glorious God. Luther's experience of agony and hatred towards God only shows that the soul of an individual isn't in bound or free because of the powers that be but because of the God they worship, and that God has everything to do with the way we understand him and is dependent upon whether or not he is properly revealed to us. Luther called the Catholic church the "synagogue of satan" not so much for the injustice of indulgences but because of the blinders they kept on the people's eyes which kept them from seeing the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).
How The Reformation Lives Today
This calls us to question ourselves. Which do we feel more grateful for? On what do we place more importance on? Is it God's glory or is it our freedom from oppression. Sure, the two do go hand in hand, but it is still worth exploring.
Second, in the errors of history we find our call to wrestle with our own faulty views of the gospel. Do find ourselves in anxiety where we should find confidence? Do we embrace a view of God who demands us to join him by self-condemnation? Do we equate his righteousness with our responsibility to self-hate or do we think of his righteousness in sending his son forth to be a propitiation for our sins and by so doing, his righteousness is ours as a gift to be received by faith?
These are important questions and we shouldn't assume we have them down. If the first two years of the Reformation (1517-1519) teaches us anything it is that we are all and always in the process or reforming, cleansing our minds on God's truth and orienting our hearts under his authority. Since no one can say these two things happen perfectly or have happened absolutely, the reformation must live on in our lives until Christ returns.
Last, we do give thanks to God for the likes of Luther and Calvin for their insights and courage. However, we can see how it was God who used these men. None of them set out to spark the Reformation. None of them were planning for Reformation 500 parties in 2017. The Reformation is something that God did. For us, we must be careful to gain our identity as a church or a people by the God that we worship and the God who loves us rather than an event in history. We are thankful for the Reformation and for what it means for us today but for our God, this event is par for the course for the kinds of things he had already done and will continue to do. In other words, The Reformation is only one event that proves what Psalm 46:10 teaches: "be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth!" Indeed, this wasn't the first time God acted for the glory of his name. It isn't the last either!
Psalm 113
Praise the LORD!
Praise, O servants of the LORD,
praise the name of the LORD!
Blessed be the name of the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore!
From the rising of the sun to its setting,
the name of the LORD is to be praised!
The LORD is high above all nations,
and his glory above the heavens!
Who is like the LORD our God,
who is seated on high,
who looks far down
on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes,
with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home,
making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the LORD!
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