Celebrating the Reformation

Its Legacy And Continuing Relevance

Mark D Thompson

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783595099
• eBook ISBN: 9781783595105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Too often, the Reformers and their doctrines have been caricatured, misrepresented or misappropriated in the service of agendas they would never have recognized, let alone endorsed. Happily, there has been a great deal of fine scholarship in recent years that has exploded some of these myths, but it has not always been accessible to non-specialists.

The intention of Celebrating the Reformation is that Christians today will find new cause to rejoice in what God did in the sixteenth century through weak and fallible men and women. These people sought, in their own context, to submit themselves to the word of God and lead his people in a godly and faithful response to the gospel of grace.

Three sections deal with the chief Reformers, key doctrines and the Reformation in retrospect. Each contribution seeks to connect its subject to the present, making clear its relevance for today. The Reformation is not a dead movement but a living legacy that can still capture the imagination and encourage men and women in their own Christian discipleship.






The contributors are Andrew Bain, Colin R. Bale, Rhys S. Bezzant, Gerald Bray, Martin Foord, David A. Höhne, Chase Kuhn, Andrew Leslie, Edward Loane, John McClean, Joe Mock, Michael J. Ovey, Tim Patrick, Mark D. Thompson, Stephen Tong, Jane Tooher and Dean Zweck.

PART 1

THE CHIEF PLAYERS

1. MARTIN LUTHER

Mark D. Thompson

Martin Luther is the enduring face of the European Reformation. Though in time significant differences would separate him from other Reformers in Switzerland and England, he was recognized by all as the pioneer or fountainhead of the entire movement. After all, it had been Luther who had first challenged the Church of Rome on the basis of Scripture’s plain teaching. He was the one who had seen, more clearly than those before him, that the abuses so many deplored arose from a distorted and unbiblical theology. Even before the Disputation on the Power of Indulgences (the Ninety-Five Theses, October 1517), Luther had publicly and stridently attacked the scholastic theology which supported this practice, in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology (September 1517). He did not hold back from challenging the abuses. He would do that all his life. Yet in the end these were mere symptoms of something far more serious and Luther knew it. An avalanche of writing from his pen, together with sermons and lectures, letters and even his table conversation, called men and women all over Europe back to the teaching of Scripture and the gospel of an entirely sufficient redemption in Christ. In many ways, to celebrate the Reformation is to celebrate what God did through this spectacularly gifted German monk, who translated the entire New Testament into German in just eleven weeks, bested the most accomplished debater of his age (Eck in 1519) as well as its greatest scholar (Erasmus in 1525), and stood with seemingly iron resolve against the combined might of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. He bore the cost of such notoriety. When he died in 1546 it was as one excommunicated by the Roman church and outlawed by an edict of the emperor.

It is the stature of Luther, a giant in the history of the church, that makes the study of Luther such a complex activity. How can we be sure we are dealing with the ‘real’ Luther? Which portrait of him is true to this flesh-and-blood figure of human history? Luther has been made and remade over the centuries in the image of individuals and groups who want to claim him and his imprimatur for their own purposes. His own self-understanding oscillated between a ‘poor stinking bag of maggots’ and the second Noah, seeking to rescue as many as possible before the imminent deluge of divine judgment was visited on the earth.1 His contemporaries, though, preferred to draw a comparison with Elijah, the prophet who stood against apostasy and idolatry.2 Melanchthon is reported to have greeted the news of Luther’s death by exclaiming in front of his class, ‘the charioteer of Israel has fallen’, an allusion to 2 Kings 2:12.3 Others later minted a coin with the inscription ‘Martin Luther: the Elijah of the Last Age’.4 In subsequent centuries Luther has been claimed as the prototype German intellectual,5 the prototype German nationalist;6 the cause of National Socialism,7 the cure to National Socialism;8 a revolutionary,9 a voice of the people against the tyranny of their rulers,10 the man who simply replaced one bondage with another;11 a mystic,12 a rational individualist;13 the true progenitor of biblical criticism and liberal theology,14 an evangelical inerrantist.15 It is too easy to see your own commitments in Luther and by so doing justify them. However, there have also been those who have seen in Luther ‘a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization’.16 Not everyone looks to Luther for inspiration.

Yet was Luther really any of these things? He was, undoubtedly, a sixteenth-century northern German male, an academic of extraordinary capacity and yet always a Christian and a pastor first, a man who knew nothing about Descartes’ revolution or Newton’s, Germany as it would later be forged by Bismarck, Tridentine Catholicism, or even the International Council for Biblical Inerrancy (though he did on many occasions appeal to the concept, if not the language, of biblical inerrancy).17 He had a remarkably high sense of his calling as a doctor of the church; but in the midst of the battles he insisted, ‘I did nothing; the Word did everything.’18 His last words, scrawled on a piece of paper beside his deathbed, half in German, half in Latin, read, ‘We are beggars, that is true.’19 The battle today and always is to let Luther speak for himself. As a man, he was strong and weak at the same time. He was plagued with constipation, gout and kidney stones. On top of these he endured crushing bouts of depression and despair, his Anfechtungen. But he also transcended his own time as a man of tenacious courage, seeking faithful discipleship in the light of the word which God has spoken and which centres on a precious saviour. His theology was deeply interwoven with his life and, if it is to be properly understood, needs to be read alongside it. When that is done, it becomes clear that while our questions may not have been his questions, his legacy continues to be relevant though five centuries have passed since it all began.

Miner’s son, monk, magister

Martin Luder was born on 10 November 1483 in the north-eastern German town of Eisleben. The aspirations of his father, Hans, who managed a copper mine, led him to arrange for Martin’s education first at the Cathedral School at Magdeburg and then at the University of Erfurt. The plan was that he would pursue a career in the law and so, after matriculating in 1501, he began the preparatory studies. He completed his BA in 1502 and his MA in 1505. However, Hans Luder’s plans were undone when Martin was caught in the midst of a thunderstorm while travelling near the town of Stotternheim. When one bolt of lightning struck terrifyingly close to him, Luther cried out to the patron saint of miners and travellers in distress: ‘Help me, St Anne, I will become a monk.’ Others might later have dismissed the vow, but Luther’s conscience could not. As he explained,

Later I regretted that I had made the vow, and many tried to dissuade me. But I persevered, and the day before St Alexis’s day I invited some of my very best friends to a farewell celebration, in the hope that the following day they would escort me into the monastery . . . And my father was angry about my vow, but I persisted in my determination. I thought I would never leave the monastery. I was quite dead to the world until God thought the time was right, and Squire Tetzel provoked me and Dr Staupitz incited me against the Pope.20

By now the surname Luder had been Latinized to Lutherus (from which would come Luther), a standard conceit of the Renaissance scholar. The story of Martin Luther the conscientious and troubled monk is well known. He was troubled by his own sinfulness and unworthiness, and sadly the monastic regime did not help. This would remain his burden right until the time of his ‘Reformation discovery’:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.21

The religious life did not bring peace but instead new opportunities for despair as Luther came to realize that he was alone in this experience. Nevertheless, it was in the monastery at Erfurt that Luther encountered Johann von Staupitz (1460–1524). Staupitz was a scholar as well as the Vicar General of the Observant Augustinian friars in Germany. He directed Luther’s life in the monastery, became his father confessor, nurtured his love for Scripture and pointed him to the wounds of Christ.22 Luther testified to this again and again. He wrote to Staupitz in September 1523, just over a year before the latter’s death: ‘it was through you that the light of the gospel first began to shine out of the darkness into my heart’.23 He would tell those gathered at table ten years later, ‘I got nothing from Erasmus. I got everything from Dr Staupitz.’24

It was most likely soon after Luther’s ordination as a priest in April 1507 that Staupitz arranged for him to begin the formal graduated process of theological education. He began his studies under the theologians and philosophers of the University of Erfurt. However, in 1508 he was called by Staupitz to the relatively new University of Wittenberg to lecture in Moral Philosophy for a term while the usual lecturer was preparing for his doctoral examination. Staupitz was the dean of the Wittenberg theology faculty that year and so most likely took direct responsibility for Luther’s continuing theological education while he was there.25 Luther received his Baccalaureus Biblicus while at Wittenberg on 9 March 1509, which conferred responsibility to teach briefly on select biblical texts. Also while there, he received his Baccalaureus Sententiarius, which required him to lecture on Peter the Lombard’s The Sentences, the standard theological text in late medieval scholasticism. He did not have time to deliver even the first of these lectures in Wittenberg before he was recalled to Erfurt to complete his studies there. Nevertheless, despite objection from the scholars at Erfurt, it was at Wittenberg that Luther was received as a Doctor of Theology on 19 October 1512. He began lecturing there as Professor of Bible (succeeding Staupitz himself) almost immediately afterwards.

Right from the start Luther decided to do things differently. He lectured directly on the text of Scripture, rather than working his way through one of the great tomes of scholast...

Table of contents

• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION:WHY THE REFORMATION STILL MATTERS
• PART 1
• 1. MARTIN LUTHER
• 2. HULDRYCH ZWINGLI:A TRULY QUINTESSENTIAL REFORMER
• 3. PHILIP MELANCHTHON:THE HUMANIST WHOSE LOCI COMMUNES SYSTEMATIZED LUTHERAN THEOLOGY
• 4. JOHN CALVIN:THE REFORMER AND THE NECESSITY OF REFORM
• 5. SALVATION ACCOMPLISHED:HEINRICH BULLINGER ON THE GOSPEL
• 6. MARTIN BUCER:THE CATHOLIC PROTESTANT
• 7. THOMAS CRANMER:THE REFORMATION IN LITURGY
• 8. KATHERINE ZELL:THE VARIED MINISTRIES OF ONE REFORMATION WOMAN
• PART 2
• 9. SALVATION THROUGH CHRIST ALONE
• 10. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE1
• 11. SCRIPTURE ALONE
• 12. THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS:NO MEDIATOR BUT CHRIST; A ‘NEW’ SHAPE TO MINISTRY
• 13. DISCIPLESHIP IN ALL OF LIFE:RETURNING TO BIBLICAL MODELS OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
• PART 3
• 14. THE REFORMATION A CENTURY LATER:DID THE REFORMATION GET LOST TWO GENERATIONS LATER?
• 15. SEMPER REFORMANDA:THE REVIVALISTS AND THE REFORMERS
• 16. THE REFORMATION:A VICTORIAN VIEW
• 17. ALWAYS REFORMING?REFORMATION AND REVOLUTION IN THE AGE OF ROMANCE
• 18. THE REFORMATION IN AUSTRALIA
• SEARCH TERMS
• NOTES