The Reformation of the Church
The church of Jesus Christ started out as a mission to the world, a mission with a
message of hope and grace that was birthed in weakness and humility. It grew like
crazy, through the faith and love of those who embraced this message and made it
central to their lives. The radical love of the early Christians, and of the many who
continued to welcome the message of redeeming love, was so attractive and so
transforming, that the church grew and grew and began to change the world.
Unfortunately, the world had begun to change the church.
A few years back I became fascinated with the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. I read Tolstoy’s two biggies, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. The most
personally impactful reading was from The Brothers Karamazov, and the poem that
older brother Ivan shared with younger brother Alyosha called “The Grand Inquisitor”.
In this poem, Ivan is trying to explain his doubts about God and religion to his brother
who has a sincere devotion to his faith. He pictures Christ as reappearing in
sixteenth-century Spain, walking the streets and beginning to heal people. A powerful
cardinal arrives and orders that Christ be arrested and locked up. Late that night this
cardinal, the grand inquisitor, visits his prisoner and lectures him on the reasons for
his arrest. He reminds Christ of the three temptations that Satan had offered him on
earth and he characterizes them as comfort (making bread out of stones), power and
the safety that power brings (Satan offering Jesus the kingdoms of the earth) and
superstition (which is how Ivan characterized the temptation to perform a miracle by
jumping from the roof of the temple). The inquisitor then accuses Christ of being
wrong in rejecting these temptations, saying that the result is that he has laid on all
human beings the unbearable weight of free will. But, he says, the church has
corrected these mistakes, has taken away free will, and replaced it with stability and
security, although at the loss of salvation. At the end of the inquisitor’s speech, Christ,
who has said nothing, kisses him, which was the unexpected and loving response to
his accusation. The inquisitor decides to set Christ free, but tells him not to return.
While the kiss does not answer the inquisitor’s arguments, those arguments cannot
overcome the power of love and forgiveness.
In the thirteenth century, Christianity made up 24% of the world’s population, but by the
end of the fifteenth, only 17.9%. Islam was the growing and vital force in the world,
while Christianity had become institutionalized and pretty much confined to Europe,
with small pockets in Africa and Asia. I’ll read you a quotation from Patrick
Johnstone’s 2011 book The Future of the Global Church:
The period 1400-1500 was a desperate time for Christianity . . . A major part of
the church, spanning Asia, was brutally eliminated, while in the Middle East and
N Africa Christians were in steep decline as Muslims subjected them to secondclass status and seasons of terrible persecution. A smaller percentage of the
world population was Christian than a thousand years before. Moreover, a new
Muslim power, the Ottomans, had arisen, destroying the base of Greek
Orthodoxy and rapidly conquering Christian countries in SE and C Europe
one after another. The only remaining bastion of Christianity was Catholic
Europe, but this Catholicism was in desperate straits with a venal, corrupt
and power-hungry papacy that relied more on political manipulation and the
Inquisition to stifle dissent than the exercise of any spiritual gifts. (p51)
But God was not about to let His church slide into a human structure for human power
brokers to exploit for their own advantage. The early years of the 16th century
demonstrated that God was on the move!
Martin Luther was a monk, serving in the Augustinian friary in Erfurt, Germany. His
father had wanted him to become a lawyer, but Luther did not find the certainty that he
was looking for in law -- his quest was to find the certainty of a loving God. But he
didn’t find it in serving as a friar, but wrote about his experience in these words: “I lost
touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of Him the jailer and hangman
of my poor soul.” Luther made repeated visits to the confessional, absorbed with his
sins and trying to make up for them by penance and punishments. His superior
urged Luther to focus his thoughts more on the merits of Christ than on continual
reflection about his sins.
In 1507 he was ordained as a priest and in 1508 was sent to the University of
Wittenberg to teach theology. In 1512 he received his Doctor of Theology degree and
was received onto the faculty of the University of Wittenberg, spending the rest of his
career in this position.
While Luther was teaching there, Johann Tetzel was sent to Germany to sell
indulgences to raise money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The official
Roman Catholic theology stated that no one could be justified by faith alone, but must
demonstrate that faith by doing good works, and especially by giving money to the
church. Luther protested this policy in a scholarly argument that he called,
“Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, which came
to be known as the 95 Theses.
It is unlikely that he ever nailed these to the door of the church at Wittenberg, but, early
in the following year, friends of Luther translated the theses from Latin into German
and used this wonderful new invention, the printing press, to circulate them widely.
Within two months they were being read all over Europe. Luther was summoned to
defend his arguments against indulgencies and managed to turn the controversy into
whether or not the Pope was the Antichrist!
It was downhill from there. After a public debate with theologian Johann Eck in July
1519 in which Luther said that Matthew 16:18 does not give popes the exclusive right
to interpret scripture and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were
infallible, he was branded a heretic. The pope demanded that Luther recant, or back
down from his claims, or be excommunicated, but Luther set fire to the warning and
was kicked out by Pope Leo X on January 3, 1521. He was condemned by the Edict of
Worms to be arrested, with the proviso that anyone who killed him would be held
blameless. He escaped to the protection of Frederick III who kept him at Wartburg
Castle from where he translated the New Testament into German. From there he
also continued to attack certain positions held by the Catholic Church.
Like the Crusades earlier, there were groups ready to take advantage of a situation in
which people were now questioning the long-held teaching of the Roman church.
Among these were the instigators of the Peasant’s Revolt which resulted in great
destruction and outright war against the authorities. Luther opposed their actions, but
was in no position to control the peasants, even though a great deal of what they did
was done in his name.
In the meantime, Reform movements had begun in both Switzerland and France. The
backlash was brutal for both the French Huguenots, 70,000 of whom were
massacred by the Catholics in 1572, and for Zwingli in Switzerland who was killed
while trying to impose Protestantism on the Catholic population. I’ve shown a few of
these pie charts on persecutors and persecuted as we’ve looked through the
centuries, but look at this one, in a century where nearly 4 million Christians were
martyred. Who did the killing? This whole episode of our history shows how far the
church had fallen from its calling and its mission -- there was still need for
Reformation of heart and soul.
The spark of Reformation continued to expand to other areas of Europe. In the
Netherlands, in Scandinavia, in Britain, the desire to be free from Catholicism and
able to read the Bible and worship God in a way that seemed more true to Scripture
and more personally relevant became the great cause of the 16th century all over
Europe.
Without getting into the many stories of how Reformation proceeded, I want to show
you the streams and the general characteristics of this movement.
1. In Geneva, Switzerland, the key figure was John Calvin who attempted to establish
a Christian society, a city-state that was based on Calvin’s understanding of Scripture.
It was a pretty harsh place, including capital punishment for quite a number who didn’t
fit into Calvin’s idea of Christian community. But he argued his ideas quite well, was
a prolific writer, and was influential in the founding of the Dutch Reformed Church as
well as Reformed churches in France and Switzerland.
2. In Scotland, the key figure was John Knox, as he argued and preached for a break
from the worst policies of the Roman church. In August, 1560 the Scottish Parliament
voted to abolish the jurisdiction of the Pope in Scotland, to condemn all doctrine and
practice contrary to the reformed faith and to forbid the celebration of the Mass in
Scotland. Knox and others were given the task of organising the new church which
became the Presbyterian Church.
3. The English stream was different, and it wasn’t a direct result of the Reformation
movement. The Church of England, known to us in Canada as the Anglican church,
looks back to the 6th century mission of Augustine to England. It lived under the
authority of the pope until Henry VIII broke with Rome in order to annul his marriage
and try again with someone else. In 1558 the English Parliament passed the “Act of
Supremacy” in which the separation from Rome was furthered and the “Elizabethan
Settlement” moved the C. of E. in the direction of being both Catholic and Reformed.
To this day the Anglican church considers itself Catholic in the sense of being part of
the universal church in unbroken continuity with the early apostles. And it sees itself
as Reformed in the sense of being shaped by the doctrinal principles of the 16th
century Reformation.
So, the Reformation in Germany produced the Lutheran Church, in Switzerland and
Holland produced the Reformed Church, in Scotland the Presbyterian Church and in
England, influenced, but didn’t establish the Church of England. All of these new
Protestant churches were similar in that they disagreed with some of the worst
aspects of the Roman Catholic church, but they didn’t depart much from the form of
worship or the style of church government practiced in Catholicism. They could be
described as a reformation that kept the church mostly within the perameters of
Catholic doctrine.
In response to this movement, there were two reactions. The reaction from the
Catholic church was called the Counter-Reformation and it involved reforming the
structures of the church, dealing with corruption among the priests and in the
practices of the church, providing better training for the priests and encouraging
spiritual growth among the people. A significant part of this move to reform from
within involved establishing new religious orders within the Catholic church, each with
an apparent “specialty”. For example, the Capuchins were noted for their preaching
and their care for the poor, the Ursulines focused on the task of educating girls, and
the Theatines specialized in revitalizing the priests through language and doctrinal
training. This period also marked the start of the order called Jesuits, which led the
way in the Roman Catholic missions movement, especially in the Americas. This
was also a period of spiritual renewal led by people whose work is still read widely
today: John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila.
But there was another reaction to the Protestant Reforma-tion, and that was from the
people who didn’t think the Reformers went far enough. These were Anabaptists or
“rebaptizers” who felt that infants who had been baptized needed to be baptized again
as a demonstration of their faith. Then there were the Baptists, who wouldn’t describe
the baptism of infants as a real baptism, so they didn’t call the baptism of adults
“rebaptism”. Later there were the Puritans and Quakers and other groups that grew
out of this most radical Reformation movement. Many of these people were martyred
for their determination to worship Jesus outside the confines of the Catholic
institution, to allow the Scriptures to be their rule of faith instead of a pope, and to help
one another live as disciples of Jesus, loving and serving Him. These were the
ancestors of our particular denomination and their courage and persistance helped to
make the way for later generations to worship God according to one’s own
conscience.
It seems strange to us that just over 400 years ago, people would want to take your
life because you baptized a friend, but it wasn’t the same kind of society as we live in
at all. The church and state were so closely linked that baptism was actually the entry
to citizenship in the country. A child born in the Netherlands, for example, would
become a citizen of that country upon their baptism. Parents who refused to baptize
their infant children would be seen as almost traitors to the state. The early
Anabaptists and Baptists were saying that their spiritual allegiance was not to a
political state, but to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, that their ultimate citizenship is in
heaven, and that would stand on Scripture instead of bending to a compromised state
church. It was courageous, and many who made that stand based on principle, were
martyred, often burnt at the stake, for their convictions.
By the end of the 17th century 21% of the world’s population were confessing
Christians, or 129.7 million people. Also in the seventeenth century, the Pilgrim
Fathers left England and settled in America, searching for religious freedom -- they
had a big part to play in establishing a nation that valued such liberty. In 1671, finally,
an Arabic Bible was published, over a thousand years after the life and death of
Mohammed. During the 17th century, the number of Catholics in China grew from
700 to 300,000. The King James Bible was published in 1611 and shaped the
language, culture and spirituality of Britain for the next 300 years. But this was also
the century of great persecution for Christians in Japan as over 200,000 were
massacred and the Church driven underground.
The eighteenth century saw the first stirrings of what we now call spiritual awakening.
Count Ludwig von Zinzen-dorf founded the community of Herrnhut in Germany and
their 24/7 prayer chain lasted for over 100 years. They were one of the first Protestant
mission organizations and sent workers to St. Thomas in the West Indies, to bring the
gospel to the slaves working on plantations there, to Greenland, to Suriname, to
northern Russia, to Ceylon and to Labrador and to West Africa. Over 2000 went out
from this small community which based its life together on prayer and obedience.
The “Great Awakening” in New England began in 1725 with Jonathan Edwards and,
later, George Whitefield doing much of the preaching. In England, the British Great
Awakening began under the preaching of John Wesley and, again, Whitefield. George
Whitefield ended up speaking to over 18 million people on both sides of the Atlantic.
By the end of the century, 22.7% of the world’s population was Christian, but by the
end of the 19th century that percentage had jumped incredibly, to 34.5% or 558 million
believers. The reasons for that incredible growth and the changing face of world
Christianity will have to wait for Murray’s message on missions in two weeks.
What’s important to us about all this history is the lessons we can learn from it and I
want to close with a few of those lessons:
1. It didn’t take long for the church to move away from having a central focus on Jesus
to having a central focus on itself, its leaders, its structure, its rules. It changed from
living in weakness and walking in love, to living with power and walking in a spirit of
control and dominance. The lesson for us is that we can fall into the same trap. We
can lose sight of Jesus in our need for control, for security, for influence on others.
And when we lose sight of Jesus, we have no more hope or joy or reason for living
than those folks who believe that the Creator is nothing more than time and chance.
The writer of Hebrews gives us the word for all time in 12:2:
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy
set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame (and then in verse 3)
Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not
grow weary and lose heart.
Through the centuries it has been these ones who have been willing to share in
Jesus’ suffering who have changed the world with the power of His great love.
2. It didn’t take long for the church to move away from love and servanthood to
competition and control. The wars and inquisitions and political manipulations all
took place because Christians rejected the idea of appearing weak, of preferring one
another in love. We rejected the example of our Master and chose to move in pride
and power ... and we lost the prophetic power of the cross in our own lives and in our
influence in the world. The church is finding it again, and the winds of change are
sweeping our world as Christians again take up their cross daily to follow Him. We
need to be with them, in humility, in grace and in the daily choice to love and serve
others, for Jesus’ sake.