Reformed Theology 101

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We’re grateful that you joined with us.
Thank you for watching this in our ongoing series,
Presby What, as we try to unpack what
it means that we call ourselves Presbyterian,
how we got the word,
what is the history of this denomination,
and what does it mean.
And today, we embark on our second of two so far.
Our first one was kind of the history.
So, if you haven’t watched that one,
you may want to pause,
you may want to go back,
pick that one up on our website.
It’s kind of the history and origins of what became the Presbyterian Church.
Today, we continue with that discussion,
though we narrow in on the idea of our theology.
Theology means the study of God.
What do Presbyterians think about God?
And we recognize that we have inherited that.
And so,
this first part of the discussion,
this will be a two-part discussion,
and today, the first part, we’ll really focus on some historic doctrines coming out of a period called the Reformation.
Again, we talked about the Reformation in broad terms last week,
but specifically, some of the thoughts that guided that movement theologically,
and then later, we will overlay those with what Presbyterianism did with them.
But today, Michael,
we start at the, I would say,
the cornerstone when we talk about Reformation theology.
And as we make our way into that,
Clint, I think it’s good to just name from the start
here that Reformation theology does take a new path and not a unique path.
It’s an emphasis on certain doctrines of the church,
and I think we should start with the
recognition that the Reformers were committed to the historic theological traditions of
the church, even if they saw them differently.
So, things like the theology of who Jesus was,
the importance of the historic creeds of the church,
there was some disagreements,
theologically, with some of those things,
but the Reformers saw themselves as being connected to the larger tree,
the trunk of the Christian faith throughout all time,
even if they thought that in some places it went wrong.
So, if you’re wondering, you know,
is this a brand new thing?
It wouldn’t be fair to say that the Reformers were trying to create a new theology or understanding
of who God was.
They thought that the church took some wrong turns and we needed to recourse direct.
And that’s an important thing.
And one of the ways in which they did that is they started to look at some of what they
thought were core understandings of who God is and how God relates to us as humans.
And they thought that in some key areas,
the church had made wrong left turns and they
sought to write it.
And they had a wide body of writings that became sort of centralized around some central
themes, some things that they called the solas,
or what that would be in Latin,
the alones.
And those are the things we’re going to track through today.
There are five things,
three that were original,
a couple other things that they added.
And as we look at those,
I think you’ll see a little bit of what makes Reform theology
distinctive from some of the things that they inherited.
And they very much thought they were going back to something the church had lost.
They appealed to the writings of ancient theologians,
ancient in their day,
like Augustine specifically.
Luther is a big fan of Augustine,
as would Calvin be.
And they really had the sense that they were recapturing or re-clarifying something that
had been lost through the years in the Catholic church of their day.
And so, this is less a Protestant versus Catholic than it is to say,
as we emerged in that line
that left the Catholic church,
which was unintentional on Luther’s part but became clear early,
we look back and we try to highlight those things that were a part of that shift.
And we do so with these five solas.
So, the first we get to is grace alone,
sola gradia.
And what they meant by this is that they felt like the church had watered down or perhaps
polluted the message that Jesus Christ alone gives salvation through grace.
That grace is unmerited.
It is not by one’s status in the church,
it is not by one’s goodness,
it is not by one’s favor.
It is not a matter of status,
it is a matter that God through Christ has given us grace.
And this is it.
In the discussion about how we are saved or why we are saved,
grace is the only word in that conversation.
And Michael, I would have to say that if you are going to understand the Reformation,
the word grace is probably the fundamental word because it is the word that captured Luther.
It is the word that first sparked Luther to this idea that so much of what he had inherited
was at odds with the Scripture and with the true nature of the Gospel.
And I think it would be fair to say that grace becomes for him the driving force of his thought
in regard to the Reformation.
Completely, yeah, absolutely.
Clint, I don’t know if you would resonate with this.
It seems to me,
times when I’ve either taught or tried to preach the theme of grace,
it seems particularly difficult because of how much taken for granted it is in our tradition.
When we,
as people who stand in the Reformed line,
it is so fundamental to who we are.
I think in some ways,
it’s almost hard to hear it again,
to hear the fresh, how radical that
emphasis was and to what extent it was a departure from its day.
Luther very much,
he didn’t come to it per se,
but he found a great center of his understanding
of grace from the biblical,
the New Testament book of Romans.
And for him,
his reading of that book led him to see that the only way forward is a
way in which God gives us a gift that we didn’t earn for ourselves.
And modern scholarship of the book of Romans would say that Luther missed some key points
in Paul’s argument, that Luther didn’t see it.
But what Luther saw and saw rightly is that human action does not result in eternal salvation.
And when he looked around at his current context,
and this is, I think, where we maybe find it
difficult to understand the context,
is there was very much this sense that there was expectations
on human behavior in the role of faith,
at least faith, and the Reformers would say,
in the reception of salvation.
So things like almsgiving,
we today emphasize that we should give,
right?
But one of the Reformers’ critiques was that people were believing that their giving
resulted in essentially advantageous,
salvific work, that if you gave a certain amount,
it could atone for a sin that you had committed,
that the priesthood had the ability to do that.
People went on pilgrimages in which the idea would be that they could be completed
because of the action that they took,
because they were faithful to go on the journey,
and because they went to holy sites,
or people,
and we’re going to get to this a little bit later,
people believing in the sainthood would take a saint and they would pray to that saint,
and they believed that those actions that they took moved them forward or had the potential
to move them backward in their ability to be saved.
And the Reformers, Luther,
to begin,
read the book of Romans and saw that the ultimate work of salvation,
the only thing that matters,
the sola gratia,
it’s grace,
that it’s the gift of
God for us that’s the only thing that’s capable of moving the bar in the eternal story of salvation.
And that is, I think, if you don’t start with grace,
you’re going to misunderstand
the Reformation, but if you don’t understand the critique that they were making,
the force of it may be lost on us.
Darrell Bock Yeah, I wonder, Michael, is it overstated to say that simply put Luther and those who followed in the path
were against the idea that anything we did could somehow affect God’s favor towards us,
that we could add to our account by status or by church attendance or by whatever.
And this becomes the bridge.
That understanding becomes the bridge to the next
sola, which is sola fidelis or faith alone.
And this is not an – in some ways they’re so connected
that it’s very difficult to draw distinctions between them.
But essentially,
faith argues Luther
is the way that we access grace.
Grace is that gift of God given to us,
and it is faith,
it is trusting in that,
that enables us to understand how gracious God has been to us.
It doesn’t create the grace,
but it accesses the grace.
It opens a bridge
by which the grace makes its way into our life.
And the primary pushback here is against the idea of works.
It’s against the idea that we had to do things in order to earn grace.
And Luther and the
former would argue it cannot be grace if you have to earn it.
It is by definition not an
unmerited gift if you have to do things that merit it.
And so the struggle was later on,
the question gets raised,
“Well, how do you keep faith from becoming the thing you have to do?
How do you keep faith from becoming a work?” That’s not a large problem for Luther and Calvin because
they’re in the first generation of this argument,
and their plates are full with many,
many other pressing questions.
And so faith alone primarily means for us that we access God’s goodness,
not by our own goodness.
In fact, any goodness we exercise is only because we first understood
God’s goodness, and therefore it doesn’t affect grace,
but it allows grace to lead and guide our lives.
Yeah, it’s interesting.
That fans out in lots of different ways.
I think maybe a concrete
example of it, Clint, is if you look at John Calvin’s seminal theological work, The Institutes,
in that the very first topic that he addresses is knowledge of self and knowledge of God.
And this is how this is very practical.
The Reformers were concerned with identifying the importance of
putting God’s action ahead of human action.
And so this idea of human agency,
that humans do things,
and that sort of pushes God in a certain direction,
is abhorrent to the Reformers.
God cannot be pushed.
God is the ultimate creator,
and therefore the creation can never usurp God’s place of the ultimate authority,
the ultimate power,
the ultimate knowledge, right?
God occupies a place
that is substantially different than those who are created.
But they want to say that if you know God,
and how do you know God by faith,
you don’t know God because of some inherent knowledge.
It’s because of the,
Calvin talks about the inner working of the Holy Spirit,
that God actually helps cultivate within us the eyes that we need to see God who is both within,
but even by greater
measure outside of us,
that God is the creator.
And because of that,
salvation then is a gift
given to us.
And we can’t overemphasize that we’re gifts because at the end of the day,
when you have faith in God,
this idea of Abraham’s righteousness,
that it was credited,
that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness,
the Reformers say that’s exactly
what we hope for,
that the faith that has been given to us will be credited to us in
righteousness, that God will look upon our faith,
and that God will determine by God’s own choice
to give us grace,
a gift that we don’t understand.
So though these two things are nuanced in their differences,
they’re connected because both of them are concerned with what’s God’s role,
and what’s our human role.
And the answer to that in both cases,
grace and faith, is that it is
ultimately God’s work that matters and our trust and reliance on God that is therefore credited towards moving us.
Yeah. And I think, Michael, that trust is a helpful word.
We may be inclined
to understand faith as the big practice of our faith.
But specifically in this moment,
I think the word trust is helpful because faith is that moment when you see your own shortsightedness,
when you recognize your own sinfulness,
when you understand for Luther,
and especially for Calvin
after him, the moment that you understand that you are broken and unworthy to stand before God,
and yet you trust that the grace of God has given you a path in Jesus Christ to become righteous,
to be loved, that God has overcome our sin,
and we are able to trust in that.
Now keep in mind,
this is vitally important as Luther pushes back on the church of his day that says
that your standing before the church is somehow linked to your salvation,
whether you have
taken confession or enough times,
whether you have taken communion,
that these church things,
and to some extent that the proclamation of church officials has some say in your eternal condition.
And for Luther, the answer is no.
The answer is absolutely not.
That faith alone, and the power of a word alone,
the word alone means nothing else.
Faith alone,
not pope,
not papal declaration,
not how many times you’ve had communion,
not when the last time you went to confession,
that faith alone,
grace alone,
secure our salvation and nothing else.
Not our works,
not our cardinals, not our bishops,
not our priests,
not our practices.
It is the working
out of God’s grace in our life through trusting that promise that ultimately brings us to knowledge
of what God has done for us and the grace God has given us. Yeah, and I think it’s important that you mention the structural hierarchy of the church.
That once again I think isn’t natural to us who maybe haven’t grown up in a very institutionalized
structural understanding of the authority.
But what we might miss is that at the same time that
there’s these theological structures,
these theological structures in Luther’s day are
intertwined with the political structures.
The king is appointed by the church,
and so therefore the church has these differing ways of influencing public policy.
How is this applicable?
It becomes absolutely real in people’s lives when the priest becomes the most important spiritual person.
When what the priest says about you,
it determines whether you can have
grace or not.
People begin to think that religion’s been outsourced to someone who’s
in the professional clergy at some level.
And the reformers are at their core people who want to
pull down that structure and to reveal what they think has been true all along.
That the church is
universally the priesthood of all people.
That the church is each and every person in the pews
who has individually and collectively received the grace of God.
And they perceived in their
time that to be lacking in the teaching of the church and the administration of the church.
So when we see grace and faith,
I think we have to recognize that they’re revolutionary not because
they’re somehow new to the church.
Those terms existed far before the Reformation.
Luther thought that he was returning to teachings of Augustine,
to the very teachings of Jesus Christ,
but as that played out, it very much became opposed by this more institutionalized church that saw it as a
threat to some of the structures and orders that had been taken for granted for thousands of years.
Yeah. And I think, Michael, we can see that the central battleground of that becomes our next
sola as we move to sola scriptura or scripture alone.
And this really, I think, provides a good way to access this struggle and this tension.
What Luther argues when he says scripture alone,
and again, as those who stand in hundreds of years of history of thinking this way,
this does not sound surprising to us.
But what Luther is pushing back against is the idea that the church structure
had a voice equal to or by some accounts superior to the voice of scripture.
So what does that mean?
It means that the doctrine of the Catholic Church of the day was that the Pope was the final word
on all matters.
That if the Pope said it,
it essentially canonized his words.
It made them binding for everyone.
And so that the Pope was the final voice on how scripture was interpreted
and what it meant,
not the scripture itself.
And so that the average person way down the chain
didn’t need the Bible.
They simply had to follow what the Pope said.
And Luther finds this appalling.
Luther begins instead to argue that only scripture is the binding voice for the church.
Only scripture is the authoritative voice over the church,
not the Pope, not the Cardinal, not the Bishop.
And that not only that,
but that people should have access to scripture.
In the church of
his day, virtually no one owned a Bible.
Some of that’s the expense of printing it.
Some of that is the illiteracy rate was outstanding,
amazing, and nobody really could read outside of universities.
But Luther begins to argue that people must know the scripture because it’s in the scripture
that even the most common person could hear a direct word from God that didn’t need to be filtered
through all of the pastors and priests and whatever in the church structure.
But that God could speak to anyone at any time in the words of Holy Scripture and therefore it needed to be known
and practiced and read by everyone.
Right. And the emphasis upon scripture and what scriptures in
particular should be canonized,
should be given authority in the administration,
life, teaching of the church.
That conversation had been happening for a long time.
And within the Catholic
church, there had been concern on what scripture,
but what you’re bringing out really well,
Clint, is that fundamentally both sides agree that scripture matters,
but the Catholic church,
it claimed a kind of interpretive power for people within the structure.
Ultimately, the Pope was the supreme interpreter,
and they linked that back to Peter and this idea of this lineage and
that Jesus intended for Peter to sort of begin that tradition of interpreters,
which Luther and Calvin and later the reformers disagreed with.
That what you have happening is you have this
return to not only scripture,
but this idea that one should come to it without this whole structure
of authority, this idea of the theological tenants of the Catholic church,
and that you should come
to scripture open for your mind to be transformed.
There was very much in the idea of Reformation,
this idea of going back to scripture and skipping over hundreds of years and going back to 200,
not prior to 200 AD,
and getting to a point before Christianity was the official religion of Rome.
There was this appealing idea that you could get back to the very words written by the original
apostles and disciples themselves,
and that you could see in those words that that very
thing that testifies to Jesus Christ,
and that was revolutionary and moved the church forward.
I think there’s one thing to note here though,
and we actually see this in the Protestant tradition,
even to this day, Clint,
it also introduces a strange yet dangerous aberration of what they
meant.
They did not mean that anyone can access scripture and read it and immediately understand what it’s saying.
The Reformers were very much believers in study,
in context,
in recognizing that scripture has many voices.
They were not afraid of the idea that some scriptures seem to
speak against each other.
Some scriptures don’t fit evenly.
They weren’t afraid of that.
They thought that scripture is enough for life and faith,
but they weren’t overly simplistic.
I think sometimes Protestants come to this solo,
and we flatten it beyond what they intended it.
They meant it to raise scripture’s authority above other authorities so that we might turn to it.
They didn’t mean, though,
that it was just some simplistic process of opening a Bible and pointing
a finger, and somehow that would be imminently clear of what we were supposed to think and do.
That’s not what they meant.
No. In fact, I would say that we see in their doctrines of scripture a connection to faith and grace.
They both understood that the interpretation of scripture was itself a gift of God,
one which we prepared for.
Both of these men studied the languages.
They’re fluent,
or they’re very capable with Greek,
with Hebrew, with Latin.
They’re deeply learned.
They’ve studied hours upon hours the texts,
and the languages, and the words, and they can do all of that.
Yet,
they do have this rather simple belief that when it comes to
scripture, that’s the mechanism through which God speaks.
In order to be prepared for that,
people needed to have access to it.
I think,
on the other hand,
Michael, I would argue that
maybe what the reformers did is they kind of demystify.
The Church of Luther’s Day,
and this would continue for quite some time,
had the scripture read in Latin.
The people didn’t speak Latin.
But there was this idea that if the priest was reading scripture,
there was this kind of magical thing that happened.
Well,
Luther said, “No.
People need to be able to access the Bible in their own language so they can hear from God directly,
and they do not need this intermediary to tell them what it means.
That’s the work of God.”
But it’s not as simple as,
“I read this text,
and I understand it.” They were not literalists.
They were not arguing for a kind of,
“It says it, that’s the end of it.” Both of them understood
that it was much more complicated than that.
And the Reformation family, at our best,
has always
understood that the work of interpreting scripture is this process in which we put in as much effort
as we can in hopes that the gracious gift of God will dawn on us,
and we will be able to recognize
it when it does.
And so, scripture alone is a wonderful concept that comes out of the Reformation,
the Reformation, and we have tried to be guided by the idea that the Word of God is a revelation
to us. Yeah, and we can see this in just a very practical way today.
So, if one Sunday you were
to go to a Catholic Mass,
maybe here in Spirit Lake somewhere else,
and then you come to the
Reformed Church the next Sunday,
what you’re going to find is, generally,
a much shorter homily.
The pastor’s preaching moment is much shorter in the Catholic Church,
much longer in the
Protestant Reformed Church.
And the reason for that is because the Reformers,
and even within our own polity, I should say,
that one of the few things that the pastors give an authority to do
is the choosing of the scripture text for that morning.
The leaders of the congregation are
given a lot of authority and power in the governance of the church,
but the Presbyterians give the pastor the responsibility.
They get to choose the text.
And this is a holdover of this very emphasis,
Clint,
that in worship we should read scripture,
and scripture should be taught and preached rightly.
And we have put so much of our emphasis,
if you were with us last week,
even in our historical training of pastors,
so much of our time is dedicated to the right
interpretation and proclamation of scripture.
Even to this day,
if you want to be a Presbyterian pastor,
you need to learn Greek and Hebrew.
That’s a core fundamental belief.
Well, not belief, it’s a value that we have in the education of our pastors.
So I just think we carry with us this
idea that when you have a theological disagreement with someone,
you should not appeal to previous church tradition,
but you should appeal to scripture.
Scripture is the ultimate authority
on what Christians should do and believe because it points us to the ultimate revelation of Jesus Christ.
And so therefore we put it above other forms of theological authority.
Yeah. And not to oversimplify, but the Reformers essentially believed that when it came to scripture,
God could literally speak for himself.
Right.
And that anyone could hear God speaking
in scripture, and that’s a different,
and I don’t want to oversimplify this.
There are many wonderful Catholics who know their scripture,
know their Bible backwards and forwards,
but in general, if you attend the Catholic Mass,
you will find very few
people carrying a Bible.
And I have had Catholic friends tell me,
“We don’t need a Bible.
The priests
read it.
The priests tell us what it says.” And so that’s a very different thing in the Protestant Presbyterian tradition.
We’re always trying to get more people to bring their Bible to church.
We’re not always great at that as Presbyterians,
but historically, that is a marked difference
between the church of Luther’s day and the church that he ends up piloting as they move away from that.
And so, Michael, I think we could talk about grace alone,
faith alone, and scripture alone as
the three archetypes of the Reformation.
It’s really these three themes in which the bulk of Reformation thought lay.
There are a couple of others.
I would say they’re probably better
found looking back,
and they exist because really,
Luther and Calvin, I think, would have believed that every argument they made could have been found in grace, faith, and scripture.
However,
I do think there are a couple of others too specifically that may be helpful as we understand
the movement.
And the first is Christ alone.
And this, again, sounds so obvious to us that it could be misunderstood.
The Catholic Church did not disbelieve that.
They didn’t think Jesus wasn’t
enough, but as they grew the practices that became the way they did things,
Luther pushed back on some of those.
And so specifically,
you have this over against the idea that Christ is over against the priesthood,
so that the priesthood has the means of grace by who they will give the sacraments to,
that they can declare people clean from their sins in confession,
that the Catholics can prescribe the penance when someone confesses their sin,
that the Catholic priests
can tell them then what they need to do in order to be forgiven.
And for Luther,
this sets up the
idea that the church functionally believes Jesus isn’t enough.
And so he argues against that at every turn.
And out of that,
we get this theme that looking backwards,
we label solo Christus, Christ alone.
And I think it’s one of those things that is pretty obvious looking back.
I mean, Luther lands there over and over and over again,
and probably some of his most heated fights
with the church of his day land in this arena.
Right.
And this is directly connected to these three previous statements.
And just to make that clear,
really, what’s at stake in this is the idea of atonement.
That’s the theological word.
But really,
what’s at stake is the mechanism by which humanity and God,
that relationship that is broken in sin,
how can that relationship be restored?
And the Catholics very much conceive of the priest
as standing in between the people in God.
The idea, even in worship, by the way, the priest will stand in between the communion table and the people facing the table.
So this is the table,
the priest will be here facing this way,
and the people will be looking over the shoulder.
That’s a practice in worship that reflects that commitment,
that the priest stands in between God and the
people so that then it makes sense that the priest can say on behalf of God.
They wouldn’t say a more
nuanced theology.
They wouldn’t say that the priest is forgiving the sin.
They would say that the
priest is speaking for God who enables that,
but God’s doing the work.
Calvin and Luther look at
that and say God doesn’t need people in between to affect salvation.
God doesn’t need our help.
Jesus was enough.
Christ alone is enough for God to bridge this gap.
So what happens is they start rethinking,
well, should we call pastors priests or should they stand on the
other side of the table and be inviting people to participate in what Christ has done for them?
So in our own theology,
this gets worked out every time we have communion.
Remember those days when
people just came forward for communion,
but when people come forward,
the language is that this is
Christ’s table.
You are invited by his invitation.
That’s a reflection of Christ alone.
Christ’s own action is enough to invite you to partake of the sacrament of communion.
The pastor is merely
in reform thought, simply just helping to invite people and provide the mechanism
for people to come and do that.
So this idea of Christ alone may on its surface,
Clint, seem like one of those, yeah, well, obviously,
but it’s significant and it is
very much reflected even to this day.
And I think maybe a nuance that helps see that is that
both the Catholics and the Protestants declare things to be true,
but there is this idea in the
Catholic church that they’re not true until the priest declares them.
The sanctity of the elements,
for instance,
the moment of proclaiming forgiveness in confession.
There is this idea historically that the priest is imbued with some power,
is given some power,
and at the moment
of declaration, that thing becomes true.
In the Protestant church,
the idea is very much different.
The idea is we’re declaring something that’s already true.
We don’t do it.
We don’t make the
elements holy.
We don’t have anything to do with that.
The elements are holy because they represent Jesus Christ.
We’re just reminding ourselves and everyone else that that’s true.
And so while in
both traditions there’s declaration,
they function very differently.
And I think in the difference
of function, you see the Catholic and the Reformation tension between them.
Yeah, I think it’s worth noting here to circle back around as we close this to what you started with,
because I think it’s important.
We’re not saying that the Catholics,
as both the current modern Catholic
church or the historic Catholic church,
ever rejected the idea of Christ as the only Son of God, Christ’s authority.
The debate is far more nuanced than that,
and it works itself out in
lots of different ways.
But what we are saying is there was a substantial difference in the
understanding of how that is affecting the life of the church and what it demands of us as both
leaders and as followers of Christ.
And so where Luther began his Reformation conversation thinking
that it was a Reformation from within,
he discovered not that much time that his difference of
theological understanding was substantial enough to divide that church moving forward.
And this,
the Christ alone,
is significantly part of that even,
you know, it’s not one of those first three that we named.
Yeah, and I think we could unpack this further,
and we will if there are questions.
But,
you know, it’s probably in this general set of ideas,
Michael, that we see the difference of
non-married priests and married clergy.
We probably see the difference in the practice of
confession, which Protestants largely left behind,
at least private confession.
We still hold on to the idea of confessing sins,
but we generally don’t do it as a kind of ritual or as
a kind of meet with the pastor,
and it is understood that that can largely be accomplished on one’s own.
And some of those substantial changes in how the church functioned,
many of them live
under this heading, I think, and we continue to see how that plays itself out.
Well, finally, we move to the last that we’ll consider today,
Solodeo Gloria,
glory to God alone.
And again, this is one that sounds Protestants.
This is one that we simply go,
“Oh yeah, we’ve always sought that.” And the Catholic Church believed that as well.
But again,
as Luther surveyed the church,
he was troubled by the value and I guess the
adoration given to saints,
the idea of relics where I could hold some holy object that some saint had possessed,
and it could give me good luck or good fortune,
that we could appeal to
those who had gone before us.
We could pray to saints,
we could pray to Mary,
we could pray to
the apostles, we could pray to important figures in the church,
and that they not so much influenced
our life, but perhaps they could have some influence in our life indirectly because of
their standing before God.
And Luther was deeply,
deeply troubled by these things.
And so this Solodeo Gloria Deo,
glory to God, is really in opposition to the idea
of the veneration of saints and making people holy.
Right.
And with this kind of distance between us and that original debate,
I think it’s easier for
us to sort of parse these out as clear and we can critique either one.
I think though this is
important that we notice this,
is that realistically,
there’s some pros to recognizing those disciples
who have been faithful,
who have followed faithfully,
who God has done great things through and with.
And even as Protestants,
Reformed, Presbyterians today,
we have saints, whether we call them saints or not,
people who have been faithful,
who God have worked through,
and we celebrate them in their lives.
Well, Michael, we’ve done series on heroes of the faith, real people.
Clearly, we look with admiration to those we think lived out a faithful life.
Absolutely.
Where this is important in the disjunction is what what the Luther and the
Reformers were concerned about is this very theme that’s been running through this whole conversation has been,
where is God in this?
Is God second place or is God first place?
And what Luther saw,
and if we are going to be honest,
it exists even today,
it is easy to become confused about,
am I praying to God through this person or am I praying to this person?
And Luther thought that that misunderstanding was so fundamental that it was so easy for humans to make idols out of
things that we needed to get rid of that, that people were,
we were misunderstanding,
the common person was misunderstanding what was intended.
And now it had just turned into
Christians appropriating a whole bunch of bunch of different things,
and God not even being left in the conversation.
And so the idea was we need to clean ship,
we need to make sure that God is 100%
without question, above all,
that, that in any way that we might elevate humans,
or we might elevate things, or we might elevate places,
that all of this needs to be completely scrubbed so
that we recognize and see and know that God is creator,
and we are created,
and that that gap can
only be bridged through grace,
faith,
scripture, and our understanding of who God is.
Yeah, and
you know, this is a moment where we,
there’s sort of an historical footnote here.
At times in our zeal to try and do the right thing,
we may have overdone it a little bit.
And
there is this moment where in the Reformation,
this idea of ridding ourselves of anything that
could be worshiped instead of God,
led some of those people to ransack sanctuaries,
even destroying organs,
and pulling down pictures,
and tapestries, and smashing stained glass windows.
And we started our Reformation history in this idea of simplicity, which
has its own kind of beauty.
But unfortunately,
in our rush to zealously make sure that God got all the glory,
we may have gone overboard in some of that,
Michael, as we lost, you know,
literally treasures of the faith,
old religious art and statues,
and those things that were destroyed
in the name of not letting them become idols.
It would have been nice if we’d have just
understood that and still appreciated the value of those things.
But we at times got the cart
ahead of the horse, maybe.
You know, I think it’s interesting,
the children’s sermon that we did
about the idols going on an idol hunt.
You might not know this if you haven’t lived in the Reformed tradition,
but that’s a very Reformed children’s sermon,
the idea that humans can make idols out of anything,
and that as we survey our own church,
and of course we were joking,
but all of these
different things that we could or could not make into an idol,
this is a core Reformed concern,
is that humans are,
by nature of our own hearts and our own core sinfulness,
we are quick to turn
things, people, and stuff into idols,
and therefore to lose focus on the one who saves us,
whose work of salvation can only be a gift done from within,
that the only way to rid ourselves of idols isn’t
to burn the organ,
but rather to have our sin sick hearts healed by Jesus Christ alone.
And so you see how all of these themes are synchronous,
they all fit together,
and to tease them out we can
sort of see the different threads, Clint,
but really that sits at the core of it,
is that God doesn’t need our help,
and whenever we try to give God help,
God’s going,
God doesn’t need it,
that gets destroyed, right, oh God is,
to use Jesus’s language,
right, the pure,
right, and we are the wheat and the chaff that gets burned away,
that this is the the core of the Reformation,
that the church had come to a place where we had overemphasized the people,
and the stuff, and the systems, and the structures, and that we needed to return to an understanding of God being central,
and everything needed to reorient around that.
Yeah, and I think if we understand
the Reformation, if we can envision that process in these big bullet points,
we begin to see
where that split happens,
and how it is initially that Luther and those who followed
begin to forge their own path.
You know,
Luther undertook that whole endeavor,
hoping to reform the church,
to stay in the church,
and quote-unquote address the ills
of the Catholic Church of his day.
He didn’t intend that he would start something new,
he certainly couldn’t have imagined that the thing he started would then break off in multiple paths,
and he would end up starting hundreds of movements of separation and splits.
And had he known that,
I wonder what he would have done with that information.
I suspect he would have argued
far more strenuously about
staying together, but it’s hard to argue staying together when you are, in fact,
splitting from something else.
And so we stand now in the lineage of what we call
the Reformation, and we trace it back to Luther and to Calvin,
who we’ll discuss in depth next week,
and then to countless others along the way.
And each of those branches have branched off in
some significant ways as well.
But what we hoped today is that in looking at these five solos,
you begin to get a sense of what facilitated the movement,
what gave it some momentum,
where were the major points of contention with Luther and the church,
and how did they play
themselves out as this new thing began to take shape and form and find its footing in a time
where it was pioneering nearly everything.
You know,
again, Luther is a genius.
He’s a very intelligent man,
and he does understand himself to be trying to recapture something lost,
but he knows he’s doing that in the present.
He knows that he’s forging new paths in the future,
even as he tries to reestablish what he thinks has gone before him.
And it’s a fascinating movement,
Michael, and one that I think we can learn a great deal from.
Not that we’re captivated
by it, we’re not held captive by it,
but I do think there’s a great deal to learn as we think
about what it means to call ourselves the Presbyterian Church.
One has to know where
they’ve come from, I think, to understand where they are.
Yeah, next week we’re going to talk about the Presbyterian theological distinctives,
the emphasis that the Presbyterians carry out of this.
I think it’s worth noting as we close this
conversation that the Reformation,
these five solas, are carried by a very wide and diverse
group of Christians.
The Anabaptists are doing something way different than what the Presbyterians end up doing.
Ultimately, you get down the historical road a little ways.
Wesley’s going to take this a different way in the Methodist Church.
The Lutherans start having significant
disagreements with the Presbyterians about worship stuff,
namely communion and sacraments.
So what’s interesting is, though,
what we have talked about today can be a lens that you can
look at all of these Reformation groups.
They are all responding to these five things in different ways.
They’re emphasizing this aspect or they’re emphasizing another.
And so as you look at maybe
you are Presbyterian your your entire life,
maybe you have come through the Catholic Church or the
Lutheran Church, you could really trace the theological movements of your own life by these
five solas.
And I would just recommend that maybe you write them down and you journal.
Maybe take a little time to reflect on how has faith,
how has grace, how has scripture been a part of your own
understanding of faith, both early in your faith and maybe now.
Because I do think these help us
as we try to map not only the Reformation at large,
but these are very personal if we’re
willing to take some time with them as well.
Yeah, and they do become metrics by which the
rest of the developing church has to weigh in.
So for instance,
there were people who took this idea
of Christ alone and they said we shouldn’t even have pastors.
We should just all get together and
pray and worship and we don’t need a leader because Jesus is our leader.
And Calvin and Luther
said no, that doesn’t make any sense.
There were those who said we should not,
we should glory to
God only.
We should only sing Psalms.
We shouldn’t sing hymns.
Luther wrote a ton of hymns.
Luther loved music.
Luther said no, that’s not what I mean.
And so they are these starting points and then people,
as people do,
even begin arguing about those things and they branch off in several ways.
But I do think if you’re looking at a map,
they are good starting points by which to trace
what happens next.
And that’s what we’ll turn ourselves to next week,
trying to trace some of what happens next with a particular emphasis on our road through it and where it led us.
Absolutely.
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Thanks for your time.
Blessings.
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