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The Reformation. Is because it wasn't simply a moral renewal that had happened over and over again in the Middle Ages, but it was indeed a doctrinal renewal, and it was a profound church renewal. Lots of people just prior to the Protestant Reformation thought that the church was in need of some kind of renewal, with sellers of indulgences proclaiming things like, "When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs." The question was, what kind of renewal was needed? For the Protestant reformers, the church in the early 16th century wasn't just plagued by immorality and corruption, but by doctrinal error. And the solution?
A reformation of the church's doctrine based on the plain teaching of Scripture. Hello, and welcome to this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm glad that you're joining us today as we continue to hear messages from Dr. W. Robert Godfrey's series on church history.
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Well, let's join Dr. Godfrey now as he helps us to understand the historical context of the Protestant Reformation.
Well, welcome to this beginning session of our study together of the Reformation. We've been going through a history of the church. And I'm finding it a little difficult to figure out how I'm going to move from doing a thousand years in 12 lectures to a hundred years in 12 lectures. And frankly, I'm finding it harder to figure out how to boil down the Reformation material than I did to figure out how to boil down the medieval period. The 16th century, the time of the Protestant Reformation, is a time of such remarkable change.
Progress, development—a time of such amazing, huge personalities of talented leaders—and the fact that I've spent my life studying it makes it really hard to think. How do we boil it down? How do we reduce it? But we'll do the best we can. In this first lecture, I want to begin by setting the situation in which the Reformation takes place.
Sometimes, as Protestants, we move so quickly to an interest in the theology of the Reformation that we forget that it was a much broader movement than just a theological movement. It was a Reformation—that's sort of why it got titled that. It was a reformation. Interestingly, frequently in the medieval church, there were movements of reform that called themselves reformation[s] or movements of reform. The idea that the church needed to be reformed was not a new idea.
The reason the sixteenth-century reformation comes to be known as the Reformation. Is because it wasn't simply a moral renewal that had happened over and over again in the Middle Ages, but it was indeed a doctrinal renewal, and it was a profound church renewal. So it is the combination of the theological, the moral, and the ecclesiastical elements that contributes to making this the Reformation. But its importance in Western history is even greater than that, because it happened at a time, and perhaps in part happened because it was a time where tremendous changes were beginning to take place in Europe more broadly and more generally. There were significant political changes beginning to happen.
The 16th century is the time of The centralization of nations in Europe. Through much of the Middle Ages, political power was significantly decentralized. If you think of France as an example, there was a king of France, but for much of the Middle Ages, some of the dukes in France were actually more wealthy and more powerful than the king of France. Political power was significantly decentralized, but in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, French kings would become more and more successful in centralizing power in the nation and decreasing the power of the nobility throughout the realm. And this reality took place not only in France, but in many of the countries of Europe.
Certainly in England, in Scotland, in a variety of places, this centralization of political power was more and more taking place, which had the effect of reducing the significance of the universal empire as an ideal. You remember during the Middle Ages. There was this great stress on the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, and you know what the students have always said: the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. It was holy in the sense that it was a Christian empire. The emperor was a Christian; he promoted Christianity.
It was Roman only in the sense that it imagined itself to be the continuation of the ancient Roman Empire. And it was an empire whose emperor actually had limited power as emperor; much more power by other titles and authorities that he bore.
Now, that ideal of a Christian empire that encompassed all of Europe was an ideal that was never realized in the Middle Ages. But by the sixteenth century, was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking as an ideal. Certainly, the King of France didn't want to acknowledge the authority of the Emperor over him. Certainly, the King of England didn't want to acknowledge the authority of the Emperor over him, and so the Empire, which had for a long time been centered primarily in Germany and Austria, became much more German and Austrian in the 16th century because of these rising nation states. And as the nation states rose, the question became: How will they be governed?
What is What is the government and authority in those states? In the Middle Ages, the authority of kings was often limited and checked by certain other powers—the powers of the great aristocrats. But often the the power of what we would call parliaments that had certain restraint on the emperor because they had to often approve taxes, they often had to approve raising armies, and so. The power of rulers in the Middle Ages was often checked by other sorts of authorities. Part of the ideal.
To which monarchs strove in the 16th and 17th century was to consolidate more and more power in their own hands, just as states were being centralised. And so, the ideal of many monarchs was what came to be known as absolutism: the absolute authority ought to be in the hands of the king who ruled by divine right. And therefore, could not be resisted by any other authority in the realm, and in a sense, France became the most successful experiment in that absolutist experiment, that absolutist push. And the King of France over the sixteenth and seventeenth century managed to limit the authority of the great aristocrats, to eliminate the authority of the Parliament. And to establish more and more power in his own hands, this worked well until the little matter of the French Revolution in the 18th century, when the whole thing collapsed.
But that's getting ahead of our story. What what I'm trying to to help you to see is that the 16th century was not just a time of huge religious change; it's also a time of significant political change. It's a time of significant economic change, where increasingly towns are beginning to have economic and political importance. In much of the Middle Ages, economic life was very decentralized into farms and into local regions. With the rise of the 16th century, Europe is beginning to move towards more trade, more international trade, more importance to towns as places of production.
We're not anywhere near the industrial revolution yet of the 18th and 19th century, but things are beginning to change, and that will affect power as economics almost always does.
So that's that's what we want to keep in mind. And we'll want to look at how much political reality plays into the success or failure of the Reformation. The Reformation will fail in some countries, even though there's a lot of popular support, because the monarch will effectively oppose it. That's what will happen in France. The Reformation will succeed in some countries, even though the monarch consistently opposes it, as is the case, sort of, in the Netherlands and in Scotland.
The Reformation will succeed in some countries because the monarchy supports the Reformation. That's what will happen in Scandinavia and in England, ultimately.
So the interchange of religion and politics is really profound and important. Not so much to the theology of the Reformation as to the ecclesiastical success of the Reformation. That's why, to this day, in Europe, you have established churches in Scandinavia. To this day, the Lutheran Church is the established church. In Norway today, I think they estimate that somewhere about two to three percent of the population goes to church, but almost all of it is baptized in the Lutheran Church.
In England today, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, is still the established church. In Scotland, the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church, is still the established church. It's supported by the government. The church itself in the early 16th century is undergoing. Changes and challenges, and we can perhaps say, although this is of little interest to most people, that the state of the church in the early 16th century remains a challenge to historians.
In the sense that we know a lot about what was going on in the early 16th century, but there's a debate amongst historians as to whether the church was healthy or unhealthy in the early 16th century. And it depends a little bit as to how you judge health or lack of health. Is the church in America healthy today?
Now you see, that's a hard question to answer, isn't it? If you judge health by attendance, by contributions, by building activity. We could probably say that the church is pretty healthy in America today. A lot of people going to church, certainly compared to Europe. A lot of money going to Christian causes, a lot of building going on.
And that was true in the early 16th century. A lot of people went to church. A lot of money being given to churches. A lot of building going on. But was the church spiritually healthy?
Of course, that's a matter of whose notion of spirituality you hold to.
Some historians want to say the church wasn't really very healthy because piety was so external. People just thought by going through the motions, they were getting closer to God, and that wasn't healthy. And and that's certainly true. To a significant extent, but there were a lot of teachers in the church who were teaching people that that kind of externalism was in fact healthy. And one of the places at which we can measure that a little bit or or sense it is in the Roman Catholic doctrine of penance.
You all remember perfectly from the medieval course. That the Roman Catholic Church had defined seven sacraments, seven channels by which the grace of God flows to the people, and one of the most important of those medieval sacraments was the sacrament of penance. It was called the plank by which baptism is restored. If you fall off the boat of the ship. And lose the grace of baptism, you can climb back on the ship through the grace of penance.
So penance was very important in the life of the Catholic Church, the medieval Church, and that sacrament of penance was understood as having three parts. The first part was you had to have genuine contrition in your heart. You had to be genuinely sorry for your sin.
Now, this led to a great deal of discussion. How sorry do you have to be? Is it enough to be sorry that you've been caught and maybe punished? That was called attrition by the theologians, and generally, the theologian said, "No, that's not adequate." It's not enough to be sorry that God's going to send you to hell for your sins. You have to be sorry that you've offended God.
So that was the first thing. You have to have contrition. You have to have sorrow for sin. Doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be genuine. There has to be a genuine element of sorrow for your sin.
And this is why you see it's so difficult to go to confession if you're doing something that you plan on continuing doing. That's why in the Roman Catholic Church to this day, if you're divorced and the Church hasn't recognized the divorce and you're remarried, you're in a continuing state of adultery from the Church's point of view. You can't confess that because you're not contrite. You're not sorry. You're not going to change.
You have no intentions of changing. Same as with birth control, you see, which Rome says is a serious sin. You you can't confess that if you have no intention at all of changing your practice. You're not contrite then.
So contrition is the first element. The second element is oral confession. You have to go to a priest and confess your sins. And of course, that's so the priest can evaluate the state of your heart, can offer you spiritual advice. And can absolve you of your sin.
The priest declares at the end of confession, if you're contrite, if he's heard your confession, that your sins are forgiven. If you perform the satisfaction required, the priest imposes, as part of the sacrament of penance, a satisfaction to be performed, which is usually a certain matter of. Prayer, or a certain amount of giving of alms to the poor. Bearing in mind that the church is always poor, and and so depending on the seriousness of the sin, there has to be satisfaction done to demonstrate your contrition, but also to pay for the temporal penalties, not the eternal penalties, but the temporal penalties for your sin. It's all kind of complicated.
Now, what happens is that by the early 16th century, the church has begun to commercialize penance.
Now, when you think about this sacrament, you can see how really personal it is. You're supposed to examine your heart. To find out how you've offended God, you're supposed to go to the priest and confess very privately, very personally, the intimate affairs of your heart and life, and then you're supposed to be forgiven as a spiritual exercise. But the church began the process of commercializing this sacrament by allowing you to buy. Indulgences.
Indulgence. What is an indulgence? Technically, an indulgence is the church forgiving the satisfactions you owe in the sacrament of penance.
So, if you obtain from the church an indulgence, that means you are exempted from a certain amount of praying, a certain amount of giving. For the sacrament of penance, satisfaction element. The problem was that for many common people, they were left with the impression that the indulgence guaranteed the forgiveness of sins. In other words, they thought they'd gotten the whole sacrament, not just one part of the sacrament. And some of the salesmen of indulgences weren't very concerned to make that very clear.
And you you have lots of examples of people being buried with their plenary indulgence. You could buy a full indulgence, which meant you were exempted from all past and future satisfactions. And people, pious Catholics, were buried with this indulgence, so they could show it to Peter when he came to examine them. And many of them thought this was a free pass into heaven. And there were a number of people concerned about this in the church.
What is this doing to what was intended to be a very spiritual sacrament, and now making it increasingly external and commercial? In the middle of the fifteenth century, a pope came up with a great idea. You know, any good marketer knows that the critical thing in marketing is to increase the market. And so, a pope declared that indulgences. Just in the latter part of the fifteenth century, so only fifty years before Martin Luther's protest, the pope declared that indulgences could now be bought.
Not just for the living, but also for the dead.
Now, if you want to increase market potential to include the dead with the living, boy, you know that's a great way to go. And you can you can almost imagine, can't you, the religious hucksters out there selling the indulgence? Is your mother in purgatory? How long has she been there? How long will she yet suffer there?
Don't you realize that by purchasing this indulgence immediately, your mother will be delivered from purgatory to enter heaven? Purgatory is all about paying off the satisfactions you didn't pay in life. That's why Tetzel, whom Luther would later oppose, his Kind of marketing slogan was as soon as the coin in the coffer clings, another soul from purgatory springs.
Well, it doesn't get more externalized or commercialized than that, and that's what was going on.
So, lots of people were buying this indulgence. Is that a sign of spiritual health that they were concerned about their soul? Maybe. But it also is a sign that the church is willing to commercialize what used to be a very intimate spiritual matter between penitent and priest.
So is the church healthy on the eve of the Reformation? In some ways, is it unhealthy? In some ways, that's why historians should never be asked questions. They're an unreliable lot. You can never get a straight answer.
But it certainly was a church. That from a Protestant point of view, from a biblical point of view, and even from a sensitive Roman Catholic point of view, was seriously corrupted, and seriously in need of change. And the great debate of the 16th century was: Is the change needed simply a moral change, so the church won't be so corrupt, won't be so commercial, return to being more spiritual, or is The need, a spiritual need, a doctrinal need, is it the doctrine that is the problem? And it is into this situation that comes the figure of Martin Luther.
Some historians have wanted to, in recent years, diminish the role of great persons in history. That's a new kind of historical thing in the last decades. Its movements, its forces. I want to say that Martin Luther is one of those great figures who was used by God to change history, to make things different. Could there have been a Reformation without Martin Luther?
Possibly. These things are in the hands of God. Were there forces that would have led to some kind of change? Almost certainly. But the character of the Reformation, as it developed, was uniquely stamped by the person, the work, the theology of Little Brother Martin, as he liked to refer to himself, because he is so critical.
Now he he's also controversial. When he died, his dear friend and longtime colleague Philip Melanchton preached a funeral sermon and said. God has given this violent age a violent physician, and Melanchthon was thinking about the kind of language Luther used to promote the Reformation.
Now, when your best friend has to apologize for you at your funeral, you know there's some excess involved in your life. But as we conclude this lecture today, we want to bear in mind that Luther was uniquely used of God in a powerful way to shape. To focus, direct, and lead the Reformation, and we are all, as Protestants, deeply indebted to him, and we ought to know more about him. It is truly amazing how God uses the unique personalities and giftings of people to accomplish His sovereign purposes.
Some have said that Luther's personality was akin to a hammer. While Calvin's was more like a scalpel, yet God used both men powerfully to spread the truth of the gospel and to bring renewal to His church. And praise God that He still uses weak and faulty people like you and me to accomplish His purposes today. You've been listening to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. If you enjoyed today's message, you can find hundreds of teaching series exploring a range of topics on the Grow app from Liganiere Ministries.
You can also use this app to read or listen to the Bible and listen to thousands of messages from R.C. Sproul and other Bible teachers. Just go to Grow.Liganiere.org to download the free app and start studying today. If you wanted to learn how to pray, who would you ask?
Well, for Martin Luther's barber, the answer to that question was obvious. Join us next week to hear R.C. Sproul read "The Barber Who Wanted to Pray" here on Renewing Your Mind.
