Are there any beliefs worth dying for? Is salvation a gift or a reward? How authoritative is the Bible, and are there other authorities we should heed? These are pressing questions with significant implications. They are also the questions that sat at the heart of the Protestant Reformation over five hundred years ago.
We live in an environment that is both dissimilar and similar to the Reformation period. On one hand, people in sixteenth-century Europe lived in a moral world whose culture grasped the nature of sin and the concepts of right and wrong. Our world today is instead a psychological one, often reducing morality to subjective judgment and denying notions of moral absolutes.
On the other hand, the Reformation dawned at a time when the culture was largely godless. Christianity was buried under layers of ignorance, superstition, immorality, and biblical illiteracy. The parallels between the spiritual climate of that time and today aren’t hard to draw. For this reason, the Reformation’s effects still reverberate in our world today.
The Historical Background to the Reformation
Before we say anything about Reformation theology, we need to understand something of medieval Roman Catholicism. The Reformation didn’t appear in a vacuum but rather was a response to certain aspects of this system.
While Protestants and Roman Catholics today share a common foundation in Christian basics—the Apostles’ Creed, the Trinity, the incarnation, etc.—significant differences remain. The Reformation exposed those differences, drawing a theological line in the sand between biblical Christianity and some aspects of medieval religiosity.
A Fracturing Framework
By the early 1500s, revolution was in the air of Europe over a number of key issues. These are just a few of them.
First was the matter of authority. For Rome, authority lay with the pope. He was regarded as Christ’s vicar on earth. He, together with the bishops he appointed, were the ones who established what was and what was not to be in the Church.
Next there was disagreement over the source of salvation. The Mother Church alone dispensed saving grace through the sacraments. There was no salvation possible (so they taught) apart from the Church. Regenerating grace was through baptism, and sanctifying grace came through the Mass: the weekly, unbloody sacrifice of atonement for sins.
Along with that came the intrusion of extrabiblical dogma. For example, rather than going directly to God through Jesus for confession and repentance, believers were taught to confess their sins to priests as well. But neither the confessor nor the priest could say for certain that anyone could be righteous enough to attain full pardon for sin—hence the necessity of a doctrine of purgatory. Men and women, the Church taught, would have a second chance to purge themselves of their sins after death and before entering heaven.
One Priest’s Discovery
It was within this context that Martin Luther, a medieval Catholic monk, began to point out the dissonance between what he read in the Bible and what the Church taught. He was devout in fasting, depriving himself of material comfort for days at a time. Concerned he might miss confessing any sin, he would confess for hours on end.
Fulfilling his duty as a priest, he declared forgiveness as men and women confessed their sins. But in the back of his mind was the question: Would the sinner trust God’s promise? Forgiveness, Luther observed, wasn’t tied to the depth of the confessor’s contrition but to the reliability of God’s word.
As he pondered these things, Luther often returned to Romans 1:16–17:
I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
The verse scared him, Luther said. It made him angry with God. Within the framework of medieval Catholicism, the Gospel was not always perceived as good news but rather as a threatening message—God driving sinners away in His righteousness and wrath. But then the dam of understanding broke, and Luther discovered from Romans 1 a paradigm-shifting truth. He describes the experience:
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the 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 lives 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 merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
Luther’s discovery lit the match for the recovery of the biblical Gospel, igniting in sixteenth-century Germany and soon spreading like wildfire across the globe.
The Theology of the Reformation
At the Reformation’s heart was a central question: How can sinful men and women be made right with God? The Gospel had been overlaid with centuries of manmade innovations: a pope, a purgatory, a confessional, a shrine, and so on. By the time Luther came on the scene, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to trace his way back to a Galilean carpenter and the eleven men who followed Him.
But as men like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli—among many others—recovered a sense of the Bible’s centrality, the good news once again sprang forth. Ordinary men and women rediscovered the simple Gospel: the revelation by God the Father, redemption in God the Son, regeneration by God the Spirit, and justification by grace through faith.
We might summarize the Reformation’s enduring effects in two statements. First, the Reformation clarified humanity’s need of being put right with God. Each of us has an unalterable past, sin marring every aspect of our lives before God saves us. Only in Christ do we find all we need to be reconciled to God. What we lack Christ gives us. Our sin is imputed to Christ. The judgment we deserve is borne in and by Christ.
Second, the Reformation recovered a theology of justification by faith alone. Rather than God infusing righteousness into us throughout our Christian lives, the Bible teaches that God declares us righteous the moment we trust in His Son. Consequently, there is nothing we can do to change our justification. When God declares us righteous, His declaration is final. Salvation depends on what Christ has done for sinners. Coming to Him ,we bring nothing, we give nothing, and we pay nothing. We simply receive the gift (Rom. 6:23).
The discoveries of the Reformation period remind us that our salvation is all of grace and all in Christ. The Reformation recovered timeless truths of eternal significance. If you have not yet trusted in Jesus for salvation from sin, perhaps you would pray something like this to God right now:
Lord, thank You for the love that drew the plan of salvation. Thank You for the grace that brought it down to us in the person of Jesus. Thank You for Your Holy Spirit, who shows us our need for a Savior. I give up my attempts at self-righteousness. I need You to forgive me and make me new. Meet me today. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Historical Theology” by Alistair Begg.
