The problem with the medieval church was not administrative. The problem was not even their spirituality. The problem was a hollow theological core. And when the Reformation came along, the Reformation analyzed the problem with an acuteness that got right to the heart of the matter. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday.
I'm Lee Webb. Dr. Steven Nichols is our teacher today as we continue our look at the Protestant Reformation. Dr. Nichols is a noted church historian, but in exploring the events and important figures of the Reformation, he'll show us that what happened early in the 16th century is just as important today. As we start talking about the Reformation, I want you to come along with me on a little trip. Let's go across the sea to Germany, and let's go to the city of Wittenberg. And let's make it about the 1530s, and let's try to show up on a Sunday.
Any Sunday will do. And we'll walk into the castle church, and there high and mounted on the wall is the pulpit, and there will be Martin Luther. And let's try to listen in to a sermon by Martin Luther.
He'll be talking about Abraham, and he'll be talking about the sacrifice of Isaac. And Luther's preaching is a very vivid, picturesque preaching. For one thing, he had to.
They didn't have chairs, and people had to stand. And these were German farmers, you know, so they're up early milking the cows, and so he's got an audience he has to connect with. So Luther's telling this story very vividly, very powerfully.
And you know the story. And he takes Isaac up, and he puts him on the altar, and he's about ready to make the sacrifice. And here's how Luther ends the sermon. Then Abraham bound him and laid him upon the wood. The father raised his knife.
The boy bared his throat. If God had slept an instant, the lad would have been dead. I could not have watched.
I'm not able even in my thoughts to follow. The lad was a sheep for the slaughter. Never in history was there such obedience, save only in Christ. But God was watching.
God was watching, and all the angels were watching. The angels cried, the angels cried, Abraham, Abraham, see how divine majesty is at hand in the hour of death. We say, in the midst of life we die.
God answers, no, in the midst of death we live. Now what Luther was doing there at the end of that sermon was actually quoting a medieval saying. And the medieval saying was media vitae in mortem sumus. In the middle of life we are in death. Now we sometimes call it the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages.
And that's a bit of a misnomer. It wasn't entirely the Dark Ages. There were a lot of bright spots. But it was also a pretty dark time. It was a time of death, time of physical death. This was before they had the germ theory of disease. This is the centuries of the plague. And so death really did surround them in the midst of life. And so you can understand why they had this saying. I guess they didn't have bumper stickers back in the Middle Ages, but if they had bumper stickers, it would say, in the middle of life we die. And see what Luther does? He flips that around. So we move from death to life.
We move from death to life. Well, that's our first stop at Wittenberg. Let me take you to another city in our little Reformation tour. We have to go a little bit south of Wittenberg and a little bit over to the west, right at the foothills of the Alps.
You can picture Mont Blanc off in the distance, and there's a nice little lake. And nestled right up against that lake is the city of Geneva, the old city of Geneva. And as you walk around the city of Geneva, you begin to see this Latin phrase all over the city. And if you've hung around Ligonier for any amount of time, you've seen this Latin phrase too. And that Latin phrase is post tenebras looks, after darkness, light. So we go from death to life, and we go from darkness to light. And that's essentially what the Reformation was about.
The Reformation came at a time of intense darkness, of death, at a time when there was spiritual darkness, spiritual death. It wasn't abnormal. That was the normal.
That was the standard situation. And into that time of darkness and death comes life and light. And it comes as the Reformers focused on one thing. Now I failed my art classes, so I stopped taking art after elementary school. But I did learn one thing in elementary art.
If you draw two birds and you put them together, you get a book. So we go from death to life, darkness to light, because we recovered the Word of God. And when we go to the Word, we are very quickly drawn to Christ. And there we have the major themes of the Reformation. We start off with our plight, and our plight is death and darkness.
Now that just wasn't true in 1500. That's true for us today, too, isn't it? But we've sort of numbed ourselves to that, haven't we? We've sort of anesthetized ourselves to that fact that we live in darkness and that death is all around us. But in the Middle Ages, it was hard to numb yourselves to that.
It confronted you head on. And so the Reformers take us to this idea of life and light, and they do it by leading us right to the Word and leading us right to Christ. And that's why the Reformation is such a fascinating time in church history.
That's why we're doing this series, and that's why it's worth camping out for a while in the 16th century. This was an era of death and darkness, and into this era came the life and light of the Gospel. In fact, I mentioned this phrase, in the midst of life there is death. Luther actually not only preached that at the end of the sermon, after he preached that sermon, he was inspired to write a hymn about it. And he wrote this beautiful hymn. It's sometimes called, In the Very Midst of Life.
Let me just read you a few of the stanzas from it. In the very midst of life, snares of death surround us. Who shall help us in this strife, lest the foe confound us? Thou only, Lord, thou only. In the midst of death's dark veil, powers of hell overtake us. Who will help when they assail?
Who secure will make us? Thou only, Lord, thou only. In the midst of utter woe, when our sins oppress us, where shall we for refuge go? Where for grace to bless us? To thee, Lord Jesus, only.
Thy precious blood was shed to win full atonement for our sin. Well, as we spend this time together looking at the Reformation, what we're going to do is flesh out these themes, these theological themes of sin and the consequences of sin, of death and darkness, the theological predicament, the theological plight. We're also going to look at the theological solution. And the way we get at this is what we call the solas. Now, I'm not even sure solas is actually a term, because the Latin word is sola.
The plural is, I guess, solae, which means alones, but I don't think that's a word either, so we'll just fudge and call it the solas. And you've all heard of the five solas, and we'll walk through the five solas. And what we're actually going to do is try to illustrate through a life, a biography, each of the five solas of the Reformation.
So that's where we're headed with all of this. But before we go any further, it might help to just back up and take one more look at why we're doing this, and why we study church history, and why we study the Reformation. Now, I know you all think it's important because you're all here, right? So I've sort of already got you, but I want to make you understand why it's worth your while to spend this amount of time studying church history.
And I'll give you three reasons, three quick reasons. One is, very simply, history matters. History matters. If you stop and think about it, we as Christians are a people with a past.
We are very much a people with a past. Our faith, and make no mistake about it, our faith is an historic faith. If it were not for an historic event, the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ as an historical faith, well then we might as well pack everything up and just go home.
We have no church without it. Beyond that, at the center of our faith, we repeatedly see this in the Old Testament. We see it with that refrain, remember the Exodus, remember the Exodus.
You know the saying, remember the Alamo? Well, the Old Testament saying is, remember the Exodus. And why were they supposed to remember the Exodus? Because it was a time where they could look back and say, this is what God did in redeeming us as his people.
And that matters to us. And Israel was building monuments. Every time something happened, they were supposed to gather stones and build a monument. What were those monuments for?
They were markers to remind them that they were people with a past. Well, we have our biblical past, but we also have our church history past. We can quote Spurgeon, and everybody likes Spurgeon, right? The Baptists like Spurgeon because he's a Baptist, and we Presbyterians like Spurgeon because he's so Reformed, and he even smoked cigars from time to time, so how could you not like Spurgeon? But Spurgeon once said, I find it odd that someone who thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit teaches them, thinks so little of what the Holy Spirit teaches others also.
Now, you see what he was saying? The Holy Spirit is not a unique gift to us as individuals. The Holy Spirit is not even a unique gift to the church in the 21st century. As sophisticated as we are, with all of our technologies and all of our advances, all of our advances, we're not the only century that has had the benefit of the Spirit at work. And what we need to do is recognize that for the last 2,000 years, the Spirit has been at work in building the church. So we don't want to just turn our back on that. So history matters to us. Biblical history matters to us, but also church history matters to us.
It can be very humbling to realize that we're not coming at this for the first time. But not only can church history be humbling, it can also be inspiring to us. So the first reason is history matters. The second reason is that the Reformation really gets at the center of what the church is all about. You know, everybody recognized that the wheels were falling off the wagon in the 1400s. I mean, the church was in bad shape. We refer to this period as later medieval ages or the high middle ages, and that later medieval Catholicism from the 1200s to the 1500s was a time of significant, significant deterioration.
Even Catholic historians need to admit that these were bad times. And there were various attempts at reform. There was a reform attempt called the concealer movement.
And I'll put that up here, the concealer movement. This comes from the word council. And the idea was that this system with a pope had led to a corrupt church. And what the church needed to do was an organizational shift, an administrative change. And they wanted to go back to the early centuries of the church where things were decided in the councils of bishops. And so they were proposing a change, a shift, from the papal line to church councils. John Huss, the famous Czech martyr, was a member of the concealer movement.
The concealer movement made an attempt at reform, but it wasn't successful. There was an attempt at reform called the devotio moderna, and that just means new devotion. And the idea here is that the church needs more spirituality. And a famous text of this, perhaps the representative of this, is the text The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Okempus. And that was part of a movement, that text. And Okempus himself was part of a movement to reform the church by addressing its lackluster spirituality. So we've got an attempt to address the administrative change.
We've got an attempt to address the spirituality. But you know those attempts, while they did make some headway, they weren't successful at reforming the church. And I think they weren't successful because while they were beginning to rightly diagnose the problem, they weren't at all close to the solution. The problem with the medieval church was not administrative. The problem was not even their spirituality. The problem was a hollow, or maybe we could say rotten, theological core.
That was the problem. And when the Reformation came along, the Reformation analyzed the problem with an acuteness that got right to the center of it, and then it prescribed a solution that got right to the heart of the matter. The problem was theological. The solution needed to be theological. And you know, that's true of the church in the high Middle Ages. It's true of the church in any age. You know, the temptation is to say, well, how do we bring revival, or how do we bring reform, and what do we do?
Right? Programs, that's what we do. But we turn to gimmicks, we turn to programs. It's about theology. We need to be led back to theology. And when the theology is right—this is the beauty of the Reformation—when the theology is right, all of the pistons are firing. Now, here's what's happening in the Reformation. Preaching is happening. Preaching is returned to the center of church life. Through the Middle Ages, it was the Mass, an occasional homily. You know, maybe for Advent or Lent, you'd hear a homily.
But it was just the Mass. There was no preaching. The Reformation returned preaching to the center of church life. How about church music, right? Imagine if you showed up in the Middle Ages and you just felt compelled to sing praises to God. You couldn't do it. Only the choir could sing.
There was no congregational singing. You know what the Reformers brought back to the church? Music. If Luther wasn't a theologian, he'd have been a musician.
His instrument of choice was the lute. Luther loved music, and we should be very grateful for that. Every time we stand up in a congregation and sing a hymn of praise to our God, we need to think of the Reformers. Christian education. The Reformers were all about it. Luther said, listen, if we don't train this next generation, all of our efforts are for naught.
He poured all of this energy, all this effort, into training the next generation. Christian education. And then there's missions. We're going to talk about this later in the life of Calvin, but this to me is really one of the untalked about, although we're trying to correct that right now by talking about it, but this is one of the least talked about elements of the Reformation. These guys, Luther, Calvin, they were all about missions.
So here we go back to it. You get theology at the center, and all those pistons are firing. Preaching, missions, Christian ed, even the social engagement. And we'll look at that, too, as we get to Geneva.
I know I'm promising you all this, so you're going to have to keep tabs on me that I actually pay off on all these promises I'm making to you. But as we move further along and talk about Calvin, we're going to look at how the city of Geneva reached out to refugees. So we see all this happening, and that's why I think we want to study the Reformation. Not that they had it all perfect. Not that they got it all right. Not that the Reformers were without flaws, because if we had Luther here, he would tell us, I've got my flaws, to be sure. And they didn't get it all right.
But they certainly, and maybe we need to hear this from time to time, they certainly get it more right, I think, than we sometimes do. Again, that temptation is to latch onto this program or latch onto this gimmick or try this when we have to return to God's Word, return to those doctrines that are at the center of what it means to be Christian. And that's what the Reformation was about. Well, there's a third reason, and it sort of dovetails with what I was just saying, and that is we are facing similar battles in our own day. And we can actually learn from these Reformers, not just be humbled by them and not just be inspired by them, but actually learn particular things.
And that's what we're going to do as the series continues. We're going to learn some of these, not just the solas, but plunge a little bit below the surface about what these solas are all about, how they connect to Scripture, how they connect to being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Well, I said three reasons, but I'll throw in a bonus reason.
And that bonus reason is why study the Reformation? Because these are really interesting people. These are fascinating people.
I think we think of them as sort of flat, you know, like an encyclopedia entry. They only have that one dimension to them, and they had a birth date, and maybe they were married and had a few kids, and they had a death date. But no, these were flesh and blood, fully dimensional people with a sense of humor. They not only had a sense of humor and laughed, but they also wept. They stood by the graveside of their children. They stood by the graveside of their spouse. It's like Dorothy at the Wizard of Oz, right, pulling back the curtain, and there's a funny-looking old man back there. Sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on our church history heroes and see them as husbands and see them as fathers and see them as friends who enjoy life but also recognize that there are times when we mourn and cry and weep.
So we look at these Reformers because they were real people. They give us some insight into what it means to be a Christian. Well, let's get back to the five solas, and let's sort of set the stage for what's coming in our next time together. The five solas, and we start off with sola scriptura, and again the Latin word just means alone. So sola scriptura is the idea of Scripture alone, and the issue here is the issue of authority.
Obviously there are other things. We talked about Spurgeon's quote. There is tradition. The Reformers didn't want to totally—and every time I hear tradition, I always think of Tevye and Fiddler on the roof, you know, tradition, and he's stomping around. There is value to tradition, but the difference between the Reformers and Roman Catholicism is tradition for them is not authoritative. Tradition is always a second order issue, and the first order exclusively belongs to Scripture. We're going to see the sola scriptura principle played out for us in the life of Martin Luther.
The next two go together. Sola gradia, which means grace alone, and sola fide, which means faith alone. And those two go together to get at the heart of what the Gospel was about.
The Gospel is about grace alone through faith alone. We're going to split them up though, and for the grace alone, we're going to go to another city in Switzerland, this time Zurich, and look at the life of Huldrych Zwingli. And then for sola gradia, we're going to cross the channel and go over to England, and we're going to look at a young 16-year-old queen.
She was only queen for nine days. We're going to look at Lady Jane Grey and the principle of sola fide. Well, after Scripture and the Gospel, we come to solus Christus, Christ alone. And for Christ alone, well, we're going to go back to Switzerland, and we're going to go to the life of John Calvin.
And then our last one is soli, and it looks like I need to get a bit of a longer board here, but we'll be erasing a lot, I think, as we go along. Soli Deo Gloria, for the glory of God alone. And for this, we'll go back again to England, and we're going to look at the Puritans and see this principle worked out in the Puritans. On Luther's deathbed, he had one last sermon in him, and his last sermon was quoting two texts. He quoted Psalm 68, 19 to 20. And in Psalm 68, 19 to 20, we're right back to that sermon from Abraham. Though death surrounds us, Psalm 68, 19 tells us, our God is a God of salvation. Even in the midst of death, our God is a God of salvation. And after he quoted Psalm 68, 19 to 20, he quoted, and I kid you not, John 3.16, our God is a God of salvation in Jesus Christ. And we learn that as we return to the Word, to sola scriptura.
The Reformers understood that Scripture was the only remedy for the theological ills of the church, and it still is. Thank you for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Stephen Nichols has provided us with insight into the solas of the Reformation today. His series is titled Reformation Profiles.
In it, he explores the events of the Reformation from the perspective of important figures from four key countries in Europe—Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. We'd like to send you the DVD containing all seven of his lessons. Just give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries, and you can do that by going online to renewingyourmind.org.
Or if you prefer, you could call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. Ligonier Ministries exists to proclaim the holiness of God to as many people as possible. Our founder, Dr. R.C. Sproul, started this ministry with the goal of seeing the historic Christian faith advance around the world. And by God's grace, we are seeing that happen, and your generous financial gifts provide the needed fuel for our efforts. Through the years, we have produced more than 500 teaching series and more than 500 books, plus a magazine that has more than 250,000 readers each month. We also have a free app that has launched millions of times each year around the world. So I think you can see why we're grateful for your continued support of Ligonier Ministries. Well, tomorrow, our president and CEO, Chris Larson, joins me here in the studio. We'll talk about some of the challenges that students in high school and college are facing. And as we heard today, the strength and power to stand in challenging times is always found in God's Word. That's our focus tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.
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