The Roots of the Reformation
Jer. 3:6-15,
22–4:2
6 The LORD said
also unto me in the days of Josiah the king, Hast thou
seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is
gone up upon every high mountain and under every green
tree, and there hath played the harlot.
7 And I said after
she had done all these things, Turn thou unto me. But
she returned not. And her treacherous sister Judah saw
it.
8 And I saw, when
for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed
adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of
divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not,
but went and played the harlot also.
9 And it came to
pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she
defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and
with stocks.
10 And yet for all
this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned unto
me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the
LORD.
11 And the LORD
said unto me, The backsliding Israel hath justified
herself more than treacherous Judah.
12 Go and proclaim
these words toward the north, and say, Return, thou
backsliding Israel, saith the LORD; and I will not cause
mine anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith
the LORD, and I will not keep anger for ever.
13 Only acknowledge
thine iniquity, that thou hast transgressed against the
LORD thy God, and hast scattered thy ways to the
strangers under every green tree, and ye have not obeyed
my voice, saith the LORD.
14 Turn, O
backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married
unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of
a family, and I will bring you to Zion:
15 And I will give
you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed
you with knowledge and understanding. . . .
20 Surely as a wife
treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye
dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith
the LORD.
21 A voice was
heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of
the children of Israel: for they have perverted their
way, and they have forgotten the LORD their
God.
22 Return, ye
backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings.
Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the LORD our
God.
23 Truly in vain is
salvation hoped for from the hills, and from the
multitude of mountains: truly in the LORD our God is the
salvation of Israel.
24 For shame hath
devoured the labour of our fathers from our youth; their
flocks and their herds, their sons and their
daughters.
25 We lie down in
our shame, and our confusion covereth us: for we have
sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers,
from our youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed
the voice of the LORD our God.
4:1 If thou wilt
return, O Israel, saith the LORD, return unto me: and if
thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight,
then shalt thou not remove.
2 And thou shalt
swear, The LORD liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in
righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in
him, and in him shall they glory.
This passage recounts
Jeremiah’s second message of his book (the first in
2:1-3:5). He tells the story of two sisters, Israel (the
Northern Kingdom) and Judah (the Southern Kingdom).
Israel had committed spiritual adultery against God,
that is, the worship of idols, specifically, the
fertility cult of the ancient world. God waited for her
to return, but she refused to do so, so He gave her a
bill of divorce and sent her away (v. 8), a clear
reference to the destruction and the Assyria captivity
in 722 BC. In spite of the object lesson that this
provided Judah as she watched this scene, she did not
learn from it, would not turn away from idolatry, and
also was taken into captivity, this time by the
Babylonians in 605-602 BC.
Two words stand out
in this passage. One is the word backsliding, which
appears seven times (vs. 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 22 [twice]).
The Hebrew words used in these verses (shôbab and
meshûbâ) are very strong, indicating apostasy,
backsliding, and turning away from truth, not
occasionally but rather as a way of life. The other word
that stands out is return (or returned), which appears
five times (vs. 7, 12, 22, 4:1 [twice]). In its simplest
sense, the Hebrew (shûb)
means to return, to restore, to go back, as when, for
example, Abraham’s descendants in their fourth
generation would return to Canaan (Gen. 15:16).
While this passage is, of
course, Jewish, it nonetheless provides a picture for
the church to consider. As we will see in a moment,
before the Protestant Reformation, the Church had
drifted far from God and His revelation in Scripture. In
his commentary on Revelation, Harry Ironside provides us
with one of the best summaries of Roman Catholicism ever
written:
Romanism is
Christianity, Judaism, and Heathenism joined together;
and the Lord abhors the vile combination. God gave Rome
space to repent, and she repented not. Go back to the
days of Savanarola (Italy), Wickliffe and Cranmer
(England), John Knox (Scotland), Martin Luther
(Germany), Zwingle (Switzerland), Calvin (France)—all
those mighty reformers whom God raised up throughout the
world to call Rome to repent of her iniquity, but she
repented not. If she had any desire to get right with
Him, she would have repented in the sixteenth
century [emphasis
added].
That last statement is
extremely important, as we will see. Contrary to popular
thought, Roman Catholicism is not Christian and has
never repented from her idolatry. As the passage before
us illustrates, then, the Church, like Israel, was
apostate in the extreme and was in need of a return to
God.
At the root of the
Reformation were five key truths, all of which began
with the Latin word sola,
meaning “alone.” They were:
·
Sola
Scriptura, the Scripture alone
·
Sola
Gratia, grace alone
·
Sola
Fide, faith alone
·
Solus
Christus, Christ alone
·
Soli
Deo Gloria, to God alone be glory
We could put these
together in one statement that summarizes the true,
biblical Christian faith:
It is
Scripture alone that declares that salvation
comes by grace alone, through faith alone,
in Christ alone, by which God alone is glorified.
The Reformation, and
Christianity itself, in fact, can in no way be
understood apart from these truths.
That is what this
series is about—it is about the very core of the
Christian faith. Without these truths, Christianity
does not exist. To pervert even one of them, is
to destroy all of them, for they are, indeed, one
indivisible truth. These truths also enable us to
evaluate the church as a whole and individual churches
in particular. The existence of these truths reveals the
orthodoxy of the church (or a church),
while their absence, on the other hand, reveals, to use
a biblical image, ichabod,
“the glory is departed” (I Sam. 4:21). As we will see,
much of the glory of God has departed from the church
(and churches) simply because these truths have all but
vanished.
Before dealing with these
five principles, however, it is absolutely essential to
examine briefly the state of the church prior to the
Protestant Reformation. Sadly, few Christians even know
what the Reformation was, much less the issues involved.
If you asked the average Christian, “What was the
Reformation?” appallingly few would be able to define
it. If you asked them, “Well, are you a Catholic or a
Protestant?” they would no doubt say “Protestant,” but
they would not be able to tell you why. If you
investigated further by asking, “What exactly are you
protesting?” they might say, “The Catholic Church,” but
they would not be able to elaborate on what is wrong
with Catholicism, especially because many evangelicals
are saying that Protestants and Catholics are the same,
that we are all “brothers and sisters in Christ.”
What, then, was the
Reformation about?
To say that the church at
that time was in sad condition is the height of
understatement. Just as it is darkest before the dawn in
our physical world, there was a thick veil of darkness
over the church and even society itself. Gone were the
simplicity of faith, the fervency of love, and the
assurance of hope that was true of the Apostolic Age.
There was no joy, no peace, no certainty, and certainly
no truth. Outwardly, there was pomp and regal display,
but inwardly there was emptiness. Worship was hollow and
“preaching” was devoid of content. Sermons were not in
the language of the people but were in Latin, which
amounted to little more than “profane and vain
babblings” (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 2:16) because only
scholars understood it, leaving the people in ignorance
and superstition.
Beautiful cathedrals
were built in the Middle Ages (more accurately the Dark
Ages from the 5th to the 15th
centuries), but within their walls lived no truth
whatsoever. The gravest of errors were taught (and are
still taught) by the Roman Church. Added to the
two simple ordinances establish by the Lord Jesus (which
were never meant for a means of salvation but were only
memorial in nature), the Roman Church founded a
seven-fold sacramental system that it says is the way
God’s grace and merit are earned by the sinner. Those
sacraments are: holy order of the priesthood, infant
baptism, confirmation as a youth, marriage as an adult,
receiving mass (eating Christ’s literal body and
drinking His literal blood) regularly throughout life,
penance for confessed sin throughout life, and extreme
unction on one’s deathbed (also called anointing the
sick and Last Rites). As is made clear in its own
Baltimore Catechism, Catholicism teaches “that
among the chief means provided by Christ for our
sanctification are the sacraments. They are outward
signs instituted by Christ to give grace. . . . When the
sign is applied to the one who receives the sacrament,
it signifies inward grace and has the power of producing
it in the soul.” Salvation in Catholicism, therefore, is
not by faith but by works, by the infusing of grace into man by means of
his practicing the sacraments.
Added to the sacramental
system was (and is) the teaching concerning purgatory,
adopted into the Church about 600 AD. Here is a place,
somewhere between heaven and hell, in which the soul
passes through the fire of purification before it enters
heaven. All believers, it is taught, even the highest
clergy but excluding the martyrs, are still encumbered
with some degree of sin and must go to purgatory for a
certain amount of time, usually several thousand or even
millions of years, until all sin is purged, after which
they are translated into heaven.
This lead to another
teaching, limbus
patrum, that is, “limbo of fathers.” The literal
idea of limbus is “fringe or border,” and the
basic idea in the word “limbo” is “a state or
place of confinement.” So the teaching in the term
limbus patrum, which was chosen in the Middle
Ages, refers to a place on the border of Hell that, as
the Catholic Encyclopedia
puts it, was the place where “the just who had lived
under the Old Dispensation, and who, either at death or
after a course of purgatorial discipline, had attained
the perfect holiness required for entrance into glory,
were obliged to await the coming of the Incarnate Son of
God and the full accomplishment of His visible earthly
mission. Meanwhile they were ‘in prison’ [awaiting] the
higher bliss to which they looked
forward.”[i]
A similar
teaching is limbus
infantium
(“children’s limbo”), which is the place where
unbaptized infants go, according to Rome; since they
weren’t baptized, they can’t go to heaven, but because
they have done no wickedness, they go a place of
happiness and no “positive pain.” This is why infant
baptism is so strongly emphasized to parents, so that
they will be able to see their children again in Heaven.
If I might go from preaching to meddling for a moment,
we have adopted practically the same thing in the
Protestant ceremony called “baby dedication.”
One’s time in
purgatory can be reduced, Rome taught (and still
teaches), by doing penance to make up for sins committed
and to try to gain “indulgences,” that is, remissions of
sin. Just prior to the Reformation, the selling
of indulgences had reached epidemic proportions. By
paying a fee to the Church, one could buy forgiveness of
sins not only already committed but also even for
sins not yet committed. Most
of Luther’s famous “95 Theses” that he nailed to the
church door in Wittenberg dealt with the unconscionable
abuse of indulgences by infamous John
Tetzel.
Particularly troubling was
(and is) Catholicism’s teachings concerning Mary. She is
considered to be the “Co-Redemptrix” with Christ, that
is, she cooperates with Christ in the work of saving
sinners. While the Vatican II council (1963-65) brought
certain reforms, it changed nothing of Catholicism’s
underlying theology. In that council it was stated that
Mary was “used by God not merely in a passive way, but
as cooperating in the work of human salvation through
faith and obedience. . . . She conceived, brought forth,
and nourished Christ. She presented Him to the Father in
the temple, and was united with Him in suffering as He
died on the cross.”[ii] In other words, while the
Church does not teach that Mary literally died for our
sins, it does teach that by giving birth to Christ,
nurturing Him through life, and even suffering with Him
on the cross, she indirectly contributed to the work of
salvation. Putting it bluntly, Mary was elevated to
goddess status, just as Semiramis was in Babylon, Ishtar
in Assyria, Astarte in Phoenicia, Isis in the Egypt,
Aphrodite in Greece, and Venus in ancient
Rome.
Further still, Mary is
also considered to be “Mediatrix,” that is, she now
dispenses God’s grace and blessings to the spiritually
needy. Again, Vatican II reaffirmed:
This maternity of Mary in
the order of grace began with the consent which she gave
in faith at the Annunciation and which she sustained
without wavering beneath the cross. This maternity will
last without interruption until the eternal fulfillment
of all the elect. For, taken up to heaven, she did not
lay aside this saving role, but by her manifold acts of
intercession continues to win for us gifts of eternal
salvation.
By her maternal charity,
Mary cares for the brethren of her Son who still journey
on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until
they are led to their happy fatherland. Therefore the
Blessed Virgin is invoked by the Church under the titles
of Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix, and
Mediatrix.[iii]
Not only was (and is) Mary
central to the Roman system, but also of great value is
the veneration of and prayers to the saints, something
that again comes from paganism. There are almost as many
saints and saints’ days as there are days in the year.
There was a saint for virtually every business, age,
calling, and vocation. Even nations had their patron
saints. These saints, it is taught, have a surplus of
good works that can benefit people on earth and can be
prayed to and asked for aid in sickness and
misfortune.
As if all that were
not appalling enough, nothing was (and is) more
characteristic of the Roman system, however, and more
typical of paganism, in fact, than the veneration
of relics and statues of the martyrs. Blatantly shaking
its fist in the face of God, who commanded, “Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image [or] bow down
thyself to them” (Ex. 20:5-6), Catholicism does just
that. Relics include supposed pieces of the cross, bones
of martyrs, pieces of the silver coins Judas took for
betraying Christ, pieces of cloth woven by the Virgin
Mary, and even vials of milk from her breasts. By
visiting and venerating such relics, worshipers are
promised less time in purgatory. There is also the
veneration of statues of Mary and the saints by kissing
them, bowing down to them, and burning candles and
incense before them. And if I may meddle a little
further, what do we do in churches today? We have
“candlelight services.” What is the matter with us? Are
we ignorant or just rebellious? All of this is
without argument totally
pagan in origin. Among the Egyptians, for example, the
God Osiris was venerated by relics. There were
sepulchers of that martyred god all over Egypt, all
containing an arm, a leg, or even a skull, all of which
were claimed to be genuine. Idols! And if I may meddle
one more time, what do we do at Christmas time? We pull
out our “nativity scenes” and place them on the church
lawn.
Doctrine always
works out in practice, so it is not surprising that the
lifestyle of the clergy at the time of the Reformation
was as perverted as its theology. Elated upon seeing the
city of Rome in the distance on his journey there in
1510, Martin Luther fell to his knees and cried,
“Salve! Sancta Roma [Hail to
thee, Holy Rome!] thrice holy for the blood of martyrs
shed here.” But upon touring the city the next day, his
estimation soon diminished. While he had pictured
streets filled with Christians and holy sites teeming
with godly pilgrims, what he found was the very
opposite, a city permeated by wickedness, a place
overflowing with vice and corruption. The clergy was the
worst of all. He saw no poverty or self-denial among
them, just money and luxury. Cardinals lived in sin with
their mistresses, while some considered themselves
virtuous simply because they confined themselves to
women. Pope Julius II lived in splendor, was at the time
waging war with France, and had just returned from
laying siege to another town.
The light, however,
was about to dawn. In southern Europe, the
fifteenth century Renaissance, which means the rebirth
of culture or learning, finished setting the stage for
the Reformation. While it brought about intellectual
development, the movement turned to Humanism to try to
find meaning to life. The cry of the Renaissance was
man is the center of all things; he can do
whatever he wills and can accomplish anything to which
he sets his mind. The seed of this was actually planted
in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas (1227-74), the
Roman Catholic Schoolman who mixed Christian thought
with pagan thought, especially Aristotle (a pagan). By
teaching that while man fell in his will, his
intellect did not, the inevitable result was the
idea that man could think his way out of his problems.
This tainted the Church as well. No longer was the Bible
the authority; rather the Church became the authority.
We should also interject that that idea is still with us
today, even among Evangelicals. While we give the Bible
lip service, it is far from being the
SOLE authority in all that we
believe and do in the Church; we look to our intellect,
our understanding, and our ideas. We have never wholly
escaped Thomas Aquinas, who is still studied today as
one of the greatest thinkers of Church History.
Additionally, right in line with Humanism, Renaissance
thought further tainted the church by adding human works
to the work of Christ for salvation.
At first, Humanism
seemed true and workable. The art and architecture of
the Renaissance, for example, especially in Florence,
Italy, is breathtaking to this day. Michelangelo’s
statue David still stands as
the ultimate statement of the Renaissance. It pictures
man as supreme in his own strength and breathtaking
beauty. Likewise, the incredibly brilliant Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519) truly epitomized Renaissance man; he
was not only an artist, but also a chemist, musician,
architect, anatomist, botanist, and mechanical engineer.
His accomplishments still stagger the mind 500 years
later. It’s especially significant, however, that
Leonardo himself, near the end of his life, saw the
inevitable failure and ultimate defeat of Humanism.
There is a
staggering paradox here that truly sets the stage for
the Reformation, namely, thinking does not lead to
the Truth. While René Descartes (1596–1650) said, “I
think, therefore I am,” that means nothing. While a man
might “be,” he is still lost in his “being.” Truth is
not discovered; Truth is
revealed. Man can never
discover Truth; only God reveals Truth, and He reveals
it in one place only. He reveals it not in visions,
dreams, or “meditative states,” rather in Scripture
alone.
While this was
happening in the south o f Europe, however,
another movement was arising in the north. Men
there struggled with the same questions of morals and
life, but they came to a conclusion, and
therefore results, that were the polar opposite
of Renaissance man. As had the forerunners of the
Reformation—John Wycliffe (c. 1320–84) and John Huss
(1369–1415)—the Reformers started with
God, not man. As Solomon
tells us, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of
knowledge” (Prov. 1:7), so unless we begin with that
presupposition, we can know nothing. So by starting with
God, no man, the reformers first realized that man is
not the center of all things but rather is a depraved
creature who fell in his entire being. That principle,
in fact, is at the very foundation of biblical salvation
doctrine. If one does not believe that, he does not
believe in biblical salvation doctrine. Every false
teaching—whether it be Arianism, Pelagianism,
Arminianism, or any other—has at its core an unbiblical
view of man. Every one, in fact, views man as having
either not fallen at all and is basically good, or that
his fall was only partial, that there is at least a
little good in there somewhere. In stark contrast, the
Reformers recognized the biblical teaching of man’s
totally fallen and perverse nature, that his entire
being—his intellect, emotions, and will—is hopelessly
depraved.
No passage sums this up
better than Ephesians 2:1-3. When it says that man is
“dead in trespasses and sins,” it means that he is in a
hopeless state. Can he respond to God in his own
strength? No, for he is dead. Can he in and of himself
believe the Gospel without God’s intervention? No, for
he is dead. Man must be regenerated before God then
gives him the faith to believe (Eph. 2:8-9; cf. Jn.
6:65; Acts 18:27; Phil. 1:29). Unless we start here, we
do not have the Christian faith.
The reformers also
considered the Bible as the Word of God and the only
authority over men’s lives. By removing Humanism from
their thought, the Reformers rediscovered the Truth of
the Gospel. The leaders of the Reformation were men such
as Martin Luther (1483–1546) in Germany, who nailed his
Ninety-five Theses on the church door in Wittenberg
(Oct. 31, 1517), John Calvin (1509–64) in Switzerland,
who wonderfully outlined biblical Truth in his
monumental Institutes of the Christian
Religion in 1536, and John Knox
(c. 1513–72) in Scotland, who said the Catholic mass was
idolatry and whose preaching turned that country upside
down. Indeed, these men called Catholicism what is was
(and still is).
When one reads the
reformers, the Puritans, and their descendants, he gets
the impression that when those great leaders used the
word “papacy,” they spit it out of their mouths because
they understood its true nature. I am convinced beyond a
shadow of a doubt, if I may be so bold, that anyone who
does not truly and deeply loath Roman Catholicism is not
a true, biblical evangelical. It is the worst perversion
of Christianity ever conjured up by Satan himself and
fostered upon man, but still there are those who while
calling themselves evangelicals still want to embrace
that satanic system.
While the Reformation was
far from perfect, it truly did bring the Church out of
the darkness that had ruled for 1,000 years and was the
first major attempt to return to biblical Christianity.
Its primary accomplishments were the bringing back of
salvation Truth and a return to the authority and
sufficiency of Scripture. Neither is this series meant
to glorify the reformers themselves, rather to point out
that they returned to Scripture and its doctrines of
salvation.
Disastrously, those
truths are again being challenged in our day even from
within the ranks of Evangelicalism. Some so-called
evangelicals maintain that the Reformation was the most
tragic mistake of Church History, that it split the
Church and destroyed unity. Such teaching from so-called
evangelicals is beyond comprehension. When we advocate
embracing a system that is pagan in its origin and
blasphemous in its practice, we have abandoned true
Christianity. “Pastor, do you hate Catholics?” you might
ask. Certainly not! On the contrary, they are lost and
in need of salvation. They are a true mission field. No,
it is not Catholics we hate, rather the Catholic
system we loathe, for it is
Satan’s greatest tool of blinding men of the truth of
the Gospel.
So, what drove the
Reformation? What were the key truths that powered it?
It was the “five solas.” It was the return of the core
truths that
Scripture
alone declares that salvation comes by grace
alone, through faith alone, in Christ
alone, by which God alone is
glorified
that fueled the
Reformation and returned light to a world that had been
in darkness for a thousand years. In a day when even
so-called evangelicals are saying that the Reformation
was a mistake, these truths need to be reemphasized and
proclaimed loudly like never before since the sixteenth
century. To abandon these truths is to return to
darkness and even to deny the work of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
In the remainder of our
series, therefore, we will examine these five solas to
see what they provide for us:
·
Sola Scriptura, the Scripture
alone — our Only Model
·
Sola Gratia, grace alone — our
Only Method
·
Sola Fide, faith alone — our Only
Means
·
Solus Christus, Christ alone —
our Only Mediator
·
Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be
glory — our Only Motive
As these biblical truths
fueled the Reformation, they are desperately needed
again today to revive a dying evangelicalism.
[i] “Limbo” in
Catholic Encyclopedia,
Classic 1914 Edition (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen).
[ii] Walter M. Abott,
S.J., General Editor, The Documents of Vatican
II (New York: Guild Press,
1966), pp. 88, 91.
