The Necessity Then

Today on Renewing Your Mind... Paul has to write to the Corinthian church to reform them, to get them back in shape. And so the notion that the church constantly needs to be reformed shouldn't be a huge surprise, and that's what we want to try to study.

What if you discovered that the priorities of your church and the priorities found in God's Word were different, in fact, worlds apart? That's exactly what happened in the 16th century when men like Martin Luther and John Calvin worked to bring the church back to a biblical standard. All this week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey will make the case that Reformation is needed today just as much as it was then. We're beginning a new topic today, and the topic is the necessity of reforming the church then and now. And we're taking that title largely from John Calvin. Calvin's good for so many things.

Stealing a title is another good thing to do. John Calvin wrote a treatise, about 120 pages, entitled The Necessity of Reforming the Church. And we'll talk about why he wrote it and why he wrote it the way he wrote it, but it seems to me that it is a helpful treatise to get us thinking about the church, the importance of the church, the centrality of the church. We all remember that Christ said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, establishing the church as the very center and heart of what Christ was setting out to do in His redeeming work.

Jesus is gathering a people. Jesus is creating a new humanity, and that is the church that He is building. And when you look at the history of the church, you very soon discover that over and over again, the church needs to be reformed. The church needs to be reordered, renewed, revived, restructured, reshaped, all the res.

Re comes from Latin, meaning again. Well, we have to do this again. We have to form it again. We have to make it new again. And this is a continuing need, not because Christ's work wasn't finished and perfect, not because God's Word isn't clear in directing the church, but because, and this will come as a terrible shock to you, the church is composed of sinners.

You probably never knew that, but it's true. The church is composed of sinners, and sinners not only get things wrong morally, but they get things wrong intellectually and theologically and liturgically and ecclesiastically and every other kind of lie. It's a problem that the church is constantly going off track. We see that in the Old Testament, Psalm 80 gives voice to that, where the psalmist wrote, Restore us, O God, let your face shine that we may be saved. O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers? The people in the Old Covenant experienced that alienation from God that occurred from time to time and had to pray.

That they might be restored. And we see it already in the New Testament, don't we? That Paul has to write to the Corinthian church to reform them, to get them back in shape. It should come really as a as a surprise to us that a church founded by an apostle who spent protracted time with them could so quickly get so much wrong. And yet that's exactly what we find in the New Testament. And so the notion that the church constantly needs to be reformed shouldn't be a huge surprise. And that's what we want to try to study. The case being made by John Calvin in the 16th century in the 16th century on the reform of the church and what we can learn from that for our day.

Because again, I don't want to shock you. The church isn't perfect today. The church isn't perfect today. But not only is this treatise about the church and the centrality of the church and the reform of the church to bring it closer to God's ideal for the church, but Calvin is talking about the necessity of the reform of the church. What Calvin is saying is there are times in the history of the church where the deformation of the church has become so serious, so problematic, that we can't wait for reform.

We have to do it now. There is a necessity for reforming the church now. And one of the questions we'll want to look at is, are we persuaded that there is that necessity for the reform of the church now? So we're going to try to follow the mind of John Calvin in looking at his day and then try to take the insights of John Calvin from his treatise on the necessity of reforming the church to look at the church for our day. And one of the things we'll see is that Calvin lived in a very different day from our day. Calvin's world was a different world.

Calvin's society was a different society. And while that sometimes makes it a little difficult for us to get back into that world and understand entirely the argument he's making in light of that world, it also means that this treatise coming from another world, not quite another planet, but from another time, comes to us with a quite different perspective, which I think will help us see ourselves more clearly. You know, it's sort of like if you've had the opportunity to spend some time in another culture or another part of the world. Suddenly you see yourself more clearly than you had seen yourself.

And your very presence causes the people you're visiting perhaps to see themselves in ways they'd never seen themselves before. And that's what I hope will happen for us as we think along with Calvin on how and why he wrote the necessity of reforming the church for his own day, and then how that helps us see the church in our day and what we should aspire to in terms of the reform of the church today. So we need to begin by looking at the setting for this treatise. The treatise was written in 1544. 1544. Now you all remember all that was happening in Europe in 1544.

So there's, oh, maybe I should review just a little bit what's happening in Europe in 1544. Calvin is a relatively young man, about 35. He's already been a pastor in Geneva and then been exiled to the city of Strasbourg and gone back to Geneva. So he didn't have a glittering success first time around as a pastor. But he's already established himself as a marvelous theologian, as one of the most talented of what we might call the second generation reformers.

And so he's a rising star, we could almost say, in the horizon of theologians amongst the Protestants. Luther is still alive. Luther dies in February of 1546.

So at the beginning of 1544, Luther is nearing the end of his life, the end of his career, but he's still very much a presence and a power. And things have been extraordinarily complicated and difficult politically in Europe. And 1544, the two greatest political powers in Europe are at war with each other. The Emperor Charles V is at war with King Francis I of France. And they are at war a good deal of the time that they're on the thrones with each other.

This is a regular problem. And it's a regular problem because Charles V as the Holy Roman Emperor rules not only of what we usually think of as the Holy Roman Empire, namely Germany and Austria and that region, but he also rules the Netherlands and Spain and a significant part of Italy. So there's this sort of circle of imperial power in Europe.

And what's at the center of the circle? France. So France is feeling very much encircled and threatened. And France has the advantage of being a single concentrated country. And Charles has the disadvantage of vast lands, but they're very spread out.

All these various lands have their own traditions, their own politics, their own ways of behaving, their own languages. And they all expect Charles to be living with them. So when he's in Spain, the Dutch are upset. When he's in the Netherlands, the Spanish are upset.

When he's in Italy, everyone's upset. And it's a huge problem of governance. And there's constant, almost constant war between the Emperor and the King of France. And that's going on right there in 1543. A new war had broken out. And France, so desperate in this situation, has made an alliance, a military alliance with a Turkish Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. This is outraging Europe. A Christian king has allied himself with the Muslim ruler who is constantly threatening Europe. Suleiman has already overrun Hungary.

He's almost to the gates in Austria. Europe is threatened in a very serious sort of way. And the King of France has made an alliance with this man against the Holy Roman Emperor.

So there's sort of all these scandals going on of political alliance, of warfare. And Charles is also facing the growth of Lutheranism in the empire, particularly in Germany. There are now significant numbers of Lutheran territories in the empire.

And Lutheranism seems to keep growing. And the Emperor is very upset about this. There's a wonderful new biography of Charles V that's just been published called Emperor. It's really quite readable and interesting.

My wife always says, Bob, what you find interesting, not everyone finds interesting. But if you're interested in history, it's by Jeffrey Parker, wonderful historian, wonderful writer. What comes through in this biography is that Charles apparently never seriously thought about Protestantism as an option. He was never tempted to think about religion. He was a traditional, rather pious, putting aside the issue of women, pious Roman Catholic. So he was persuaded that the Roman church was the true church and that these heretics needed to be opposed. And so he would regularly return to his German territories to a meeting of what was called the Diet. The Diet is roughly like a parliament.

It's a gathering of princes and leaders of various territories and cities. And the Diet has to meet because the Diet has to approve taxes and the levying of troops. Now, if you're at war, you need money and you need troops.

These are foundational. And one of the things that really strikes me in reading this biography of Charles V is that in the 16th century, governments, by and large, had to pay for wars with ready money. There wasn't paper money. They couldn't print money. There were limits to what they could borrow. And so you could only fight a war if you had money and you had to get then the Diet to approve the collection of taxes. They actually had to stop wars because they ran out of money.

I mean, it's a whole new thought to me, but that was the problem. So he's coming in the midst of war, facing the enemy in the east and the enemy in the south, in France. And he's desperate for money and for troops. And the Lutheran princes know he's desperate. The Lutheran princes know he's desperate.

And that means they have leverage. And that means that the religious question is going to be talked about again at the Diet. The Diet's going to meet at Speyer. There was a meeting of the Diet in Speyer, not far from Vorms. Back in the 20s, 1526, there was a meeting at Speyer. And that's where the Protestants got their name. They offered a protestation to the emperor and they became known as Protestants after that.

And they were granted at Speyer in 1526 a measure of toleration. The game they played at these Diets is the emperor would say, well, you're all heretics. And the Protestants would say, who says so? And the emperor would say, the pope says so. And the Protestants would say, well, you know, this really needs to be discussed at a general council. We'll present our case to a council.

Let's see what a council says. And the emperor would say, okay, we'll postpone this until a general council, if you'll vote me taxes and troops. And so this game had been played several times and now we're coming back to Speyer 1544.

You thought I'd forgotten all about this, didn't you? We come back to Speyer in 1544 and it's exactly the same situation. The Protestants are looking for toleration. The emperor doesn't want to grant toleration, but he's willing to delay opposition in order to get money and troops to fight against to fight against the French and the Turks. And so in preparation for this Diet, Martin Bucer, the great reformer at Strasbourg says, we need a written document to make our case before the Diet.

And who could we get to write a defense of what we've been doing? And Bucer says, let's ask Calvin to do it. Now it's an interesting choice because there were not always good relations between the Lutherans and the reformed.

But Calvin was not all that well known in 1544, so he was not as controversial to some of the Lutherans as he would become later. And in any case, Bucer asks and Calvin writes the treatise and later Calvin's right-hand man, Theodore Beza, will say it was a brilliant treatise, a brilliant treatise. So here we have laid out a brilliant treatise to be presented to the emperor at the Diet on the necessity of reforming the church.

Now this setting is crucial because it very much influences how Calvin writes the treatise. If you're smart and you're asked to write something, you'll ask the question, for whom am I writing? To whom is this directed? Who's going to read it?

What's the outcome we want from this? And we have to be really clear as we approach this treatise, Calvin is not being asked to explain the whole of the Reformation. He's not being asked to present a careful theological argument for all that the Reformation is about. He's being asked to write to write basically to lay people, not to theologians or ministers or priests or bishops. He's not being asked to offer a closely reasoned biblical exegesis or theological argument. He's being asked to lay out the case why the church must be reformed now.

And that's what he does in a really rather intriguing way. But as we go along, we need to keep in mind he's addressing non-theologians. Now I know everyone's a theologian, but some people are more self-consciously theologians than others. And he's addressing people who are not very self-consciously theologians.

And he's trying to move them, get them thinking. Near the beginning of the treatise, he even says, I'm directing this at the moderates. Now, I wonder if he smiled when he wrote that, because there weren't very many moderates left. Most people had made up their minds. We don't know anything about living in a polarized society, but 16th century Germany was very polarized. You had the Catholics on the one side and the Lutherans on the other. And most of them were pretty convinced of their point of view.

There wasn't a huge amount of movement anymore. And so I think Calvin is trying to express a desire to be reasonable, to address anybody who might be thinking about the problem of the church. But he's laying out a case then kind of on the most obvious issues. He's going to talk about things that laymen would notice. And that's going to be his focus. And we need to bear that in mind.

It's a very deliberate and a very interesting strategy that he pursues. And we're going to try to look at that and then try to apply it to our own time. So he writes this treatise and he divides it into three parts. The first one is the present evils of the church. What's bad? And then he looks at the remedies the Protestants have introduced.

What's changed? And then he looks at the reason they've had to do it right away without waiting. So he looks first at the evils, then at the remedies, and then at the necessity for change. And we're going to try to follow him in that, except we're going to sort of put evils and remedies together. And we're going to ask, what needs doing? That's sort of the evils and remedies part. What needs doing in the church then and in the church now? And then we're going to look at the how to do it, the necessity of reform without waiting. So what to do?

How to do it? Interestingly, for me, that second part, how to do it, the necessity of reform without delay, Calvin gives 45% of the treatise to that. We might have thought he'd give a lot more attention to what needs doing, but he gives a lot of attention to how to do it.

And then he gives a lot of attention to how to do it. So we're not going to spend quite as much time on how to do it. Our how to do is maybe not as complicated as it was in Calvin's time, but that's what we're going to try to do together. We're going to look at what needs doing, how to do it. And Calvin, in each of his sections, talks about four topics. So if you think about four topics of what needs doing, what four topics would you look at? What would be your topics?

That would be a fun enterprise. If we were to write down what are the four topics that we'd want to address if we were writing a treatise on the necessity of reforming the church, what would we address? Calvin addresses four topics. First of all, he addresses worship.

It's kind of interesting. Worship, of course, is not a controversial topic in our day. Well, we'll come back to that. Worship is the first topic. Salvation is the second topic. Sacraments is the third topic. And church government is the fourth topic. Now, you might pause and think a minute, what's not on that list? Well, we might immediately think biblical authority is not on that list.

Well, it comes in at several points. But these are points that Calvin calls the soul and body of the church. The soul of the church, Calvin says, the soul, remember, is what makes church body of the church. The soul of the church, Calvin says, the soul, remember, is what makes you alive. What's the difference between a living body and a corpse? Calvin would have said a soul.

That's the difference. When the soul leaves, the body becomes a corpse. It's the life-giving element. That's what soul is. And the life-giving element of the church is worship and salvation. And the body then, which is the instrument through which the soul works, are the sacraments and the government of the church. And we will study those elements of the church in the coming days here on Renewing Your Mind. Ligonier teaching fellow Dr. W. Robert Godfrey is leading us through this study.

His years as a church historian really shine through in this series as he explains important periods of Reformation in the church. This is the first time we're airing these programs, so I hope you'll contact us today to reserve your copy of this series. We'll send you the six messages on one DVD when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343.

You can also make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. The theology that grew out of the Reformation points to the foundation on which the church was built. It's interesting to note that by and large, the Reformation did not reach the Spanish-speaking world. And so the announcement that the Reformation Study Bible has been released in Spanish is truly monumental. It's a study Bible that contains more than one million words of verse-by-verse and topical explanations, plus theological notes, articles, and historic Christian creeds and confessions.

We're thankful for your donations, because you are the ones who make this work possible. Well, throughout history, the church has drifted into confusion on many topics. Tomorrow, Dr. Godfrey continues his series with a look at the importance of reforming our understanding of salvation. If we get that wrong, we get everything wrong. We hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind.