This past Sunday we had a wonderful
celebration in worship marking Reformation Sunday. As I explained in worship, Reformation Day is
actually on October 31, because it was on that day in 1517 that a Catholic
priest/monk/professor in the city of Wittenberg in what we now call Germany
finally got so ticked off at the way the Church was being run in Europe that he
nailed his 95 Theses (or complaints) to the door of the church in town. Now, it should be noted, that Luther isn’t
the only one who would have nailed papers to the front door of the church. It was used as a kind of bulletin board for
the town. But regardless, posting his 95
theses on the town bulletin board was a gutsy move.
As so often happens in history, Martin Luther
was the right person living at the right time.
It also helped a great deal that he found a powerful ally in a local ruler by
the name of Frederick the Wise (a lot can be said for having friends with money and influence as long as that
money and influence is used for God’s purposes).
Perhaps the most important factor, however, was that the printing press was available to Luther in a way that it had
not been available to those who came before him. Because they could be copied rather quickly
(by the standards of the times) Luther’s writings spread like wildfire. It wasn’t long before all kinds of reform
movements, some very different from Luther’s, began to take root in cities in France,
England, and Switzerland. Our tradition,
Presbyterianism, is the descendent of Scottish Presbyterianism, which is in
turn the descendent of the work of John Calvin, a major reformer who was
originally from France but did his work in the Swiss city of Geneva. A fiery Scottish preacher named John Knox
(who spent a good deal of time as a galley slave on a ship because of his
Protestant beliefs) studied under John Calvin and then returned to
Scotland. The main thrust of the Protestant Reformation (in its many various forms) as a whole was generally to get the Church to return to the Bible as the only authority of the Church, as opposed to Church tradition. Many of the Reformers saw themselves as working to return to the ways of the early apostolic church.
I love Reformation history and I have read
hundreds and hundreds of pages written by John Calvin as well as many written
by Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli. I’ve
read some of John Knox’s work (including the Scots Confession) as well as other
documents from other reformers of the era such as the Second Helvetic
Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. Also, I have read
many current authors who write a great deal about the Reformation such as
Michael Horton, R.C. Sproul, and Kevin DeYoung.
These brilliantly intelligent authors look back to the Reformation in a
very similar way that the reformers looked back to the early church—as a kind
of pure era to which we must return.
Although I owe an immeasurable gratitude to the Reformers and I have
learned a great deal from the contemporary writers who call for a return to the
ways of the Reformers, I am not as enthused about the idea of returning to the
ways of the Reformers as some Christians are, many of them my good friends.
But time for both this writer and probably you as the reader is
running short so I’ll have to tell you why I’m not as enthused about the call to return to the Reformation next week.
In the meantime, may you all have a blessed Reformation
Day on October 31 as well as a day of remembrance and God’s comfort on All
Saints Day on November 1. We will mark
All Saints Sunday on November 3.
Grace and Peace,
Everett
