REFORMATION DAY: THE DAY WHEN THE CHURCH RECOVERED TRUTH.

In a hunched over position in a stone-cold cell sits a man deep in thought. A writing desk, a wooden chair, paper, an ink pen, and a myriad of books is all there is in this dank room. The room flickers dimly in the candlelight. No one today would think this was a professor’s office at a university. That hunched over figure is the university’s professor of theology. His coal-miner’s build and humble beginnings betray his love for theology. This man knows his stuff. He has committed to memory almost all of the writings of the church fathers. Yet he slouches as a man in torment, bearing an unseen weight that only a few know about. He finishes writing something on a long sheet of paper and puts the ink pen down. It appears to be a list of statements in a strange language. He hesitates for a moment, then rises up and meets the Autumn afternoon air. He darts quickly across the university plaza and arrives at a large door that serves as the university’s chapel. He wears the black cowl of an Augustinian monk. His hand is shaking. In it he holds a hammer, a nail, and that piece of paper. Other notices hang randomly on the door which served as the newspaper of the day, announcing various events. Finding a vacant space he nails the paper to that large wooden door of the Schlosskirche, the castle door. Clang, clang, clang . . . the sound echoes through the abandoned square. Dusk is rapidly encroaching, the air typically thick and German. On this cold and damp evening no one is around to witness the event. History alone bears witness to it. The obscurity of the scene belies its importance. But this obscurity lasts for only a day. The next morning some of the professor’s students gather around the billboard and read the professor’s paper with keen interest. How could they not read it, for the man who wrote it was their highly esteemed and beloved teacher. They seem awestruck by its contents but very much encouraged. Their interest in this paper will one day be justified. They quickly rip the paper down, translate it into the native tongue, and deliver it to a local printer who is quite new to the idea of moveable type. Thanks to Guttenberg’s recent discovery, the paper is copied en masse and is soon flying on unseen wings to every Germanic city and town and finding its way into every nook and cranny of society. Princes and housewives alike begin devouring this piece with gusto, shouting a loud hurrah! Within weeks the northern Germanic cities are abuzz with excitement. The propositions on the paper have struck a nerve. There is something forceful, truthful, about them. Whoever had written this piece was certainly speaking for their collective minds.

What then was on this paper that caused so quick an uproar? Why would common people be so zealous to publish it everywhere? And how did this list of propositions resurrect years and years of pent up German angst? These questions and many more have been asked and debated for five hundred years. This we know, that ideas, like intimate conversations, have their time. And the time for the ideas written down by the monk had come. These propositions, Ninety-five of them, have long since garnered a name. We call them the Ninety-five Theses.

But why were they so popular? Nothing on the surface would lead one to predict the impact they would have on the Medieval world. Many biographies have been written about Martin Luther and his famous theses. Their importance simply will not go away. Their popularity, however, both then and now, seem to make no sense. Both the man and the writings are rather unremarkable. Luther was well-known in his own little world but certainly not an earth-shaker. His complaints against some practices in the Medieval church, the essence of these propositions, had been raised numerous times before without much effect. For example the humanist Erasmus had written a piece in 1511 called The Praise of Folly. In it he castigated the abuses of the Medieval Church. Several decades earlier, Savonarola, another disgruntled monk, had also raised his voice against the abuses of the religious juggernaut and paid the ultimate price but little changed. No doubt, many had seen the lavish lifestyle of the priests and the worldly practices of the church, practices such as Simony - the purchase of religious offices, and Nepotism, the practice of awarding favored relatives with high church positions. Luther himself had seen the worldliness of the church in his trip to Rome in 1510. To Luther and to many others, the Holy Mother Church was the least holy place in all the world. Righteousness had long ago become an outdated commodity inside the church walls.

Ahh, righteousness. That seemed to be the very issue that Luther was struggling to understand. Being a student of Scripture he believed that he must be righteous to see God. This topic occupied much of his thinking… and it crushed him. The idea of God’s righteousness presented a barrier to the young monk’s peace. Righteousness as he understood it was an extension of God’s holy character. The Bible clearly taught this. To a man like Luther with a sensitive conscience this was a daunting truth. God was perfectly holy and Martin Luther was not. How could he ever hope to stand before such a God? And how could he tell his people how they could stand before God if he wasn’t sure about himself? As a result the tortured monk lived in a continual state of anxiety and fear. He hoped he could earn God’s favor by working harder and suffering more than anyone else. Often he would lie on the stone-cold floor of his cell, eschewing the comforts of a bed, hoping God would look favorably on him. He fasted, held long vigils, confessed his sins for hours at a time, and flagellated his body in order to find peace with God. But nothing satisfied his conscience. Luther had tried harder than anyone else to be righteous. He once said,

“I kept the rules so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got himself to heaven by his sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept on any longer I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work.”

But few others seemed to care about righteousness, especially in the clergy. Luther sensed this.

Perhaps this gives us a clue as to why Luther’s protests were different than all those that came before. He knew deep in his soul that there was more at stake than fighting a corrupt system. He was fighting for his own soul. By adding layer upon layer of expectations on the people of God, the church had done exactly what the Pharisees had done to the people in Jesus’ day. Through a complex system of gaining righteousness by works they had “shut up the kingdom of heaven against men.” The church had made obedience to the priests the only sure way of salvation. If one remained in the good standing with Rome, heaven was assured. But Luther knew that nothing short of perfection was sufficient to bring a soul to heaven. Obedience to the church did not work in man the righteousness required by God. Yet many believed this and by this were deceived. In addition, the proliferation of these many added requirements laid on the people had caused many to lose hope of ever gaining eternal life. These facts drove Luther to investigate the doctrine of the righteousness. He did so for his own peace and for the peace of others.

As this internal battle was going on in Luther’s mind, it so happens that a priest by the name of Johann Tetzel had swung by the borders of Saxony, bringing with him a dog and pony show that promised to sell salvation to all who would pay for it. This act of blasphemy and deceit was justified by the selling of indulgences, authorized “limit your time in purgatory cards” signed by the pope himself. To a man struggling with how to obtain the righteousness of God, this free ticket to heaven was seemed to be the height of blasphemy. So Luther decided to write his propositions attacking the use of indulgences and other church practices thinking the pope would see the error and thank Luther for his observations. Alas, no. This would not be the first time in history, nor the last, when one you thought would be your greatest ally would become instead your inveterate enemy.

The pope, of course, knew exactly what was going on, having authorized the sale of these indulgences to help fray the mounting costs of building his beloved St Peter’s Cathedral. Luther discovered that the pope could care less about how one could go to heaven. All he cared about was his own name and glory. Early on Luther could see the handwriting on the wall. He knew he would soon have to live the life of an outlaw.

But Luther stayed strong. For remember, Luther was fighting for his own spiritual sanity. What he didn’t realize was that his own internal struggle matched that of many of the Germanic people. For years there had been a slow boiling resentment among the Germans against the pope and his cronies in Rome. They had been abused, overtaxed and generally overlooked by church leadership. They too saw the pathetic level of morality among the clerics. They rightly asked, “How could the pope, the vicar of Christ on earth, care more about hunting and collecting earthly toys, than living obediently before God?” In their back alleys they asked each other, “What gives the pope the right to tax us mercilessly in order to build himself a cathedral?” The Germanic people had long been a silent juggernaut of resistance against Rome. Now they had a leader who could voice their complaints by scripture and by reason. Luther had never planned to be a national hero. He simply wanted a calm debate among his peers. But as history has since shown, the truths he uncovered left a lasting legacy that changed the European landscape and removed the hold of Rome on most of Northern Europe. But let us not forget the Reformation was a movement not of one man, but a movement of God’s truth. Nor was it the movement of one visionary but a movement of the people. Luther was merely the one who turned the flashlight on God’s Holy Word.

So what truth or truths did Luther stumble upon that caused the religious world to tremble?

On October 31, we celebrated (at least some of us) the 507th anniversary of the posting of those Ninety-five Theses on the castle door of Wittenberg University. It is good for us to remember courageous human efforts that help shape the world. Agree with Luther or not, we must at least acknowledge that what he said moved the civil and ecclesiastical worlds in a profound way. So as we celebrate this great day let us not demean its importance by making it too much about Luther. He was a great man, no doubt, but he was also a flawed sinner. To be sure, not all of his ideas were correct. But in two important areas Luther uncovered two bright lights of truth that set the spiritual world ablaze. And it is those truths we have come to celebrate on the 31st of October.

At first Luther didn’t know what to believe. He only knew that the righteousness of God was inflexible and that he as a sinner stood on the wrong side of that attribute. He also knew, though not clearly, that the church had obscured the doctrine of God’s righteousness and seemed to be aiding and abetting the trek to hell for many. But over time Luther got a clearer vision of what this Protestant movement was all about. Not in 1517, but somewhere around 1519. did the light begin to break in upon Luther’s mind. The first light to break through was his clear thinking on the issue of authority. Luther realized that for centuries the church had buried the voice of Scripture under the rubble of church tradition, canon law, papal proclamations and the decrees of church councils. The Bible had been relegated to a secondary source. Not surprisingly, the knowledge of how one is to be saved - the gospel - had long been forgotten. By embracing multiple sources of truth, the Medieval church had actually forfeited the one mission they had been called to do, teaching all the nations the will of God. The great accomplishment of the Reformation is that it brought the Bible back to the center of God’s program on earth. No longer would men have to obey a convoluted morass of do’s and don’ts but simply believe on the One whom God had sent. But in order to bring the Bible to the place of centrality it was necessary that it be translated into the vernacular. This reminds us that perhaps Luther’s greatest work was the translation of the Bible into the Germanic tongue. Second, the Reformation made the conclusion that the central tenet of the Christian faith was the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Luther would come to call this truth “the article by which the church stands or falls.” This doctrine, according to Luther, was the essence of the gospel itself. It taught that man can do nothing to save himself and that salvation comes by believing in the finished work of Jesus and nothing else. Luther came to understand that the gospel was an announcement of what God had done through Jesus Christ, His life, His death, His burial, and His resurrection. The “good news” was what God had done outside of the sinner, and not anything resident in the sinner. This rendered vain many of the doctrines the church had called important. Things like the sacraments, good works, acts of penance, lighting of candles, prayers for the dead and indulgences actually eclipsed the true message of the gospel of salvation by faith alone.

It is interesting to see how Luther came to this great truth of justification by faith alone. Remember, Luther’s big challenge was to discover how he, or any other sinner, could have a righteousness sufficient to bring him to heaven. We must again go back to his early years in the monastery. The vicar general of his monastic order, Staupitz, saw this struggle in Luther and knew that in order to save Luther from his constant introspection, decided to move Luther to the University of Wittenberg to teach theology where he would be busy and have little time to overthink things. The unforeseen result of this move was that Luther began studying the Bible. Over the course of several years he poured over the texts of Psalms, Romans, Galatians, Hebrews and Psalms again. Peace to his soul did not immediately come. Luther did not yet understand how he could be made righteous before a holy God. Even as he posted the Ninety-five Theses he was still unclear about this. It would take several more years of enlightenment by the Spirit before he arrived at the truth. It was the phrase “the righteousness of God’ that terrified him. Then around 1519, Luther began to study again Paul’s letter to the Romans. As he read Romans 1:16-17, he noted that Paul considered the gospel to be “good news” and the good news was was a proclamation of the “the righteousness of God.” But Luther wrestled with this. How could God’s character of being righteous be good news to anybody? As Luther moved forward to chapter three, he again came upon that phrase, in the gospel “the righteousness of God is revealed” (3:21). But now Paul had added a clause that said this righteousness came “apart from the law.” That is, it was a righteousness that did not come from any human obedience to the law. This righteousness was not the righteousness of God’s character, but a righteousness that came as a gift. The light began to shine in Luther’s mind. It was a righteousness, as Paul said, that came through faith. Both in Romans 1:17 and 3:22 the apostle had said that faith was the instrument whereby one received that righteousness. To prove his point Paul had quoted an obscure text in Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous shall live by faith.” The apostle had used the words of this ancient prophet to show that it was faith in God’s works of salvation that would save the people of God. Hebrews chapter 11 also confirmed this. Luther further noted that in Genesis 15:6 God had linked the faith of Abraham to his being righteous. In other words the righteousness of God did not come through legal obedience, but through the work of God in Jesus Christ. Righteousness was therefore a free gift given to all who believed in the Righteous One. Luther’s life was being turned upside down. Was this truly what the Bible taught? He scurried to his favorite church father, Augustine, to find confirmation. And he found it. As he poured over the bishop’s treatise, The Spirit and the Letter, he found these words.

“The righteousness of God is manifested. He does not say the righteousness of man or the righteousness of own will but the righteousness of God, not that whereby He (God) is righteous but that with which He endows men when He justifies the ungodly.”

Augustine had wrestled with the same issue that Luther had wrestled with over a thousand years earlier. The good bishop had noted that the righteousness spoken here in Romans was not the righteousness of God’s character, but a different kind of righteousness, a passive righteousness, a righteousness that came to the sinner through faith.

It finally made sense. God was not only “right” in His character, but he was “right” to give salvation as a gift to needy sinners through the work of His Son. Luther now had a cause that was much larger than mere external reform of the church. He had rediscovered the truth that could actually save souls. Luther’s own words written shortly before his death detail this quest.

“At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of words, namely, ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely the passive righteousness with which a merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘he who by faith is righteous shall live.’ Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scriptures showed itself to me.”

It was this truth that lay at the heart of the Reformation. And five hundred and seven years later nothing has changed. It is this doctrine, justification by faith alone, that set the church free in the sixteenth century and it is that same truth that will set the church free today. Simply put, it is a truth that announces that God has done all the work of salvation, bequeathing to humanity a righteousness sufficient to spend eternity in glory through faith in the merits of Jesus Christ. When we think of the Reformation, let us not think about church reform so much as a reform in how we think about the two truths that the Reformation uncovered. First, the Bible alone is the source from which we receive the will of God. And second, that His will of salvation for humanity is wrapped up in believing in the doctrine of justification by faith in His Son. On Reformation Day we celebrate a recovery of the supremacy of the Holy Scripture. We also celebrate the truth that there is a perfect righteousness that comes to us apart from our performance, a righteousness that comes through faith. And if we get these two principles right, outward reforms of the church - which are needed - will necessarily fall into place. So let us preach on from the word of God alone and let us preach that great message of justification by faith; that if anyone will put their trust in the completed work of Jesus Christ he will be saved. Amen.