Quick Thoughts on Reformation

Happy Reformation Day!  On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed 95 debate points on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, and the rest is history.

Wittenberg Door, October 2011

However, it would not befit the spirit of the Reformation if we took the developments of Luther and Calvin as some new kind of magisterium. As I am a Protestant, I believe that God used Luther and the Reformation to redirect Christian history in a more healthy direction.

But one of the reasons I value coming from the Wesleyan tradition is because I believe we are more of a "via media" between the Roman Catholic tradition and these "high reformers."

Sola fide, sola gratia
"By faith alone," "by grace alone." The Roman Catholic Church has now more or less conceded that Luther was more correct on these issues than they were.

At the same time, I would argue that the Wesleyan tradition is more biblical than the Lutheran or Calvinist traditions in the way they take these slogans. For example, a Calvinist might criticize the Arminian tradition as teaching that works are a part of justification. The reason is that Wesleyan-Arminians rightly interpret the New Testament to teach that a justified person can end up not being saved because of faithlessness.

But I am not a Lutheran or a Calvinist and, in the spirit of the Reformation, I am free to point out that Paul really doesn't care what Luther or Calvin thought on this one. "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad" (2 Cor. 5:10).

In its Greco-Roman context of patronage, grace usually came with certain informal expectations. A person couldn't spit in the patron's face and expect to continue to receive grace.

Solus Christus
"By Christ alone." No criticism here of the Reformation. We come to God only by means of Christ. There are of course debates and nuances. I would argue that this is a matter of God's free choice rather than him being forced in some way to reconcile the world through Christ, even if it makes sense. Similarly, we can debate how much we need to know about Christ in order to be justified through him.

Soli Deo Gloria
This was a later add on. I agree that all glory ultimately goes to God for everything, and the glory of everything else is in some way derivative. However, if this slogan is used to say that God has not given glory to his creation as well, I turn to Psalm 8. In the end, I am a Wesleyan, I am not bound by the slogans of Calvinists.

Sola scriptura
This was a premodern slogan, meaning that it comes from a time when the meaning the Bible was thought to have was in large part a projection of the person reading it. So this slogan, functionally, meant that we will only rely on the Bible for what we believe and do, with the understanding that I am smuggling in a boat load of what I think the Bible means from my own Christian tradition.

Those who were more consistent became heretics. So the Socinians of the 1500s, recognizing that the Trinity was not explicitly spelled out, did away with it in the name of the Reformation getting back to the Bible alone. Protestant Liberals followed this principle until the distinctness of each biblical text caused the Bible to fall apart as dozens of unrelated books.

Rather, because the books of the Bible were not originally one text, we must have (as we see in math with Godel's incompleteness theorem) an outside scaffolding or metanarrative to come alongside the books of the Bible so that we can have a coherent "biblical worldview." Our theology provides this scaffolding, whether we realize it or not.

In short, history has proved Erasmus to be the winner on this one. "Prima scriptura," "Scripture first," is not only a more Wesleyan perspective, but an actually coherent one.

So there you have it, some Wesleyan push-back on Luther for Reformation Day.

Notes on Luther 1

Some day I would like either to blog or write through church history. This was my last week doing the Bible-theology-church history for a leadership class and we ended with a recap of Luther.  I haven't done nearly enough research on Luther for it to count fully, but I thought I would put down some notes from today that I could pick up at some point in the future.

1. In hindsight, we tend to see the factors leading up to a major event out of proportion to their significance at the time. If we are involved in an event, we may get some hindsight. If we are outsiders, we will tend to see the lead up to an event in a skewed way. For example, was there truly any failing in not catching the Boston Marathon bombers beforehand? There may be room for improvement, but was the process of vigilance at the time normal and appropriate? After all, we have to balance the free life we all enjoy as Americans with threats like these.

So it surely could not even have occurred to Luther that he might start a new church or a movement of withdrawal from the Roman Catholic Church. It simply wasn't even conceivable, surely. Luther thought a number of things were wrong with his church--his church, the church, the only church. He hoped they could be corrected. He was not trying to leave. That simply wasn't on anyone's radar.

2. Luther was a medieval person.  He was a decidedly pre-modern individual.  When there was a thunderstorm, he didn't think of barometric pressure, electric charges, or condensation. He thought of spirits and demons. The line that we may draw so solidly with Luther is hindsight.  He was not born in the modern age.

He committed to become a monk in a bad thunderstorm, calling on St. Anne for protection.

3. I imagine Luther's brief encounter with Rome in 1510, before that fateful day in 1517, had a major effect on him. What he saw in Rome was a world that seemed to have little to do with the kingdom of God. He saw the resources of peasants being spent on opulence. He saw a materialistic world that was not focused on spiritual things. Perhaps he saw immorality.

Basically, he saw a building project (St. Peter's) supported by the doctrine of purgatory and indulgences.  You pay money, the Pope gives you time out of purgatory. Our ideas rarely exist in some Platonic vacuum. This experience no doubt had a major impact on Luther's drive to find a way theologically to do away with indulgences. We shouldn't think that his ideas of "faith alone" and "Scripture alone" came out of nowhere. They followed naturally from his concrete hatred of the injustice he saw in papal indulgences.

3. In Luther's own words, he hated the idea of the idea of "righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17 because he heard in it the "justice of God" (iustitia dei).  Perhaps his hatred here also related to his hatred of the idea of purgatory, the place where God's justice was allegedly satisfied. He kept his monastic vows.

It was perhaps somewhere around the year 1516 that he had his breakthrough.  What if Romans 1:17 isn't talking about the justice of God being revealed in the gospel but a righteousness that God gives us, a righteousness from God.  What if the gospel is about God declaring us righteous even though we are sinners?

This was the ideological breakthrough that would allow him to undo purgatory. God is not looking for moral perfection but for repentance, and nothing but individual repentance is required, not some penance administered by a priest. Rather, God justifies us by faith alone.

We should not think his theology was fully cooked at this time.  It is really in his commentary on Galatians in 1531 that his theology here reaches something like its mature form. And of course most Paul scholars would say Luther was wrong on Romans even if mostly right on Christian theology.  The righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 is God's propensity to save his people. And the gospel is the fact that God has enthroned Jesus as king by raising him from the dead, along with all that entails.

4. If you read the 95 Theses he nailed on October 31, 1517, they overwhelmingly address the question of indulgences.  They are not the grand "five solas" of the Reformation. While Scripture played a major role in Luther's argument, we also find an acceptance of the Pope's authority in general. Sola scriptura would evolve later in the fullness of his defense. Again, most of our arguments follow our intuitions, to justify them. Most people do not move from ideas to reality but the other way around.

We can see Luther's hatred of the doctrine of purgatory standing behind his explusion of the "deuterocanonical books" from the Bible. What Protestants now call the Apocrypha had been quoted and used extensively from the very beginning of Christianity. Jerome in the 400s called them a "second canon," not quite as authoritative as the "protocanonical" books but still with some authority.

Luther would demote them, then the RC Council of Trent in 1545 would upgrade them to protocanonical status. Why did Luther not like them? Because 2 Maccabees had the proof-text used to justify purgatory. It may seem nonchalant for Luther to take these books out of the mix, because as Protestants we are used to them being out.  In Luther's day, it reflected that 1) he did not view the canon as strongly as we think he did and 2) it was in the spirit of the same striking freedom he felt not to include James initially in his translation of the Bible into German.

5. October 31, 1517 was the tipping point.  Contrary to Brad Gregory, Luther was not the primary cause of secularism.  Luther could only happen because the church had undermined its own spiritual authority for years and its political power had been waning for years.  Luther represents a critical mass of protests that had gone on for centuries and the Protestant Reformation is part of the Renaissance, which had been going on for a couple centuries as well.

The Reformation is part of the Renaissance.