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  (CHRISTIAN HISTORY) 14. THE REFORMATION BEYOND GERMANY
  by David Guzik
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Summary: David Guzik's sermon explores the theological foundations and
historical impact of the Reformation beyond Germany, highlighting key
figures like Zwingli and Calvin.

Topics: "Salvation By Faith", "Holy Spirit Regeneration"
Scripture References: Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:16, John 3:16, Acts 2:38, Romans 3:28, Romans 10:9, Ephesians 2:8-9

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DESCRIPTION
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In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of the
Scriptures, Jesus, grace, and faith. He states that man cannot be saved
or choose Christ without the assistance of the Holy Spirit. He also
mentions that God's choice of individuals for salvation is based on his
foreseeing their response to his call. The preacher explains that Jesus'
work on the cross made salvation possible for all, but it requires the
individual's faith to be effective. He also mentions that the Holy
Spirit's regeneration can be resisted by the individual until they
believe. Lastly, he suggests that those who believe and are saved can
potentially lose their salvation if they fail to maintain their faith.

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CONTENT
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The theological ideas of the Reformation spread rapidly through Europe,
by the new media of printing, by academic discussion, and by a revival
of street preaching. I mean, this just became more and more prominent,
where people would do things that hadn't been done for a long time, or
had been done by persecuted groups, such as the Lawlords or the
Valdenzis, but street preaching became more and more prominent, as
people felt impelled to get this message out. And again, because there
was so much widespread dissatisfaction with the Roman Catholic Church,
many people supported the Reformation, not so much for theological
reasons, but oftentimes more for cultural or for political reasons.

But in any regard, there was an important theology behind the
Reformation, and the theological foundation for the Reformation can be
expressed in the sola statements that the Reformers prized so highly.
They stressed these things, and of course this is in Latin, but it's
easy to understand, sola scriptura, sola Christus, sola gratia, sola
fides. The Bible alone, Jesus or Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone.

This is what they believed. They believed that the measure for Christian
doctrine was not the Bible plus Church tradition, not the Bible plus the
Declaration of Church Councils, but they believed that it was the Bible
itself, sola scriptura. Now again, what we would have to say is, in the
Roman Catholic system, they believed in each one of these four points in
a manner.

They believed in Scripture, they believed in Christ, they believed in
grace, they believed in faith, but they did not believe in the
Scriptures alone. They did not believe in Christ alone. They did not
believe in grace alone or faith alone.

You see, it's important to understand that the Roman Catholic Church
would agree with the importance of the Scriptures, with the importance
of Jesus, with the importance of grace and of faith. They simply would
not attach the sola in front of each. You see, they would believe that
God's authoritative revelation came by the Scriptures and by tradition
and the Pope's decrees.

Salvation came by Christ and by Mary and the saints. Salvation came by
grace and by the works of man. Grace is received by faith and by works
and sacraments.

To each of these, the Reformers protested and they insisted on the
solas. There's some quotes from Martin Luther that emphasize this point.
I'll give you the quote that I ended the last lecture with where he
says, did God call me on account of my holy life or on account of my
pharisaical religion or on account of my prayers, fastings, and works?
Never.

Well then, it is certain that God did not call me on account of my
blasphemies, persecutions, oppressions. What prompted him to call me?
His grace alone. And then the emphasis of alone was very important to
Martin Luther.

Another quote from him that sort of emphasizes this says, true faith
lays hold of Christ and leans on Him alone. Our opponents cannot
understand this. In their blindness, they cast away this precious pearl,
Christ, and hang onto their shabby works.

Now, what's very interesting about this emphasis on sola scriptura, sola
Christus, sola gratia, and sola fetus, at least in the three last of
these points, Jesus alone, grace alone, faith alone, according to some
people, the Roman Catholic Church is now in agreement with some of those
solas. The 15th paragraph of what's known as the Joint Declaration on
Justification or Salvation by Faith, composed by Roman Catholics and
Lutherans, signed by Pope John Paul II and the Lutheran World
Federation. They signed it on October 31st, 1999.

They picked Reformation Day as the day to do it. It says this, In faith
we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the
triune God. The Father sent His Son into the world to save sinners.

The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation,
death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Justification thus means that
Christ Himself is our righteousness, which we share through the Holy
Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess, by
grace alone, in faith, in Christ's saving work, and not because of any
merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit,
who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.

Now that's pretty radical, that the Roman Catholic Church would make
such a statement. But you have to say, there are many people who view
this with suspicion. They say, first of all, this doesn't truly
represent the Roman Catholic Church.

That's the first argument made. The second argument made is that you
still have the problem of Roman Catholics defining different words, such
as justification, differently than Protestants would define them. And so
I'm no theological expert before you here today.

I can't tell you for sure whether or not the Roman Catholic Church has
really moved from their denial of the solas. As a matter of fact, going
on in this statement, this is what they say. They say, in light of this
consensus, the corresponding doctrinal condemnations of the 16th century
do not apply to today's partner, in other words, to the Lutherans.

Don't forget, in the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church pronounced
an eternal curse upon people who believed and said, sola scriptura, sola
Christus, sola gratia, sola fides. And so now they say, well, we don't
agree with that anymore. I don't know.

Actually, I've got to say, it's an issue that I haven't researched
carefully enough. I know that there's two sides to this. Some people
say, oh, isn't it a beautiful thing that the Roman Catholic Church has
finally come around theologically to the place where Martin Luther was
trying to bring it, where other people say, well, no, that's not the
case at all.

But in addition to the solas, there was also another important
theological principle, and that was this, the priesthood of all
believers. In essence, the idea of the priesthood of all believers meant
that every believer was his own priest before God and did not need
another mediator. You don't need a priest.

You don't need the saints. You don't need Mary. You have the only
mediator you need, and that is described in 1 Timothy 2.5, for there is
one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

This meant that the individual was empowered to have his own
relationship with God and did not need another priest. He was his own
priest. Now, compared to the way society had thought for centuries, this
was a real revolution.

And in some ways, this emphasis on the priesthood of all believers did
more to change society than any other single principle to come from the
Reformation. There's a real sense in which, through the way that the
understanding of the priesthood of all believers empowered the
individual, there's a sense in which it laid the foundation for modern
democracy. I mean, listen, if you say that a man can deal with God
himself alone, then really you can say, well, why can't he have a say
then in how the government is run? Why can't he have more independence
and self-determination for himself as an individual? You can see how
these spiritual ideas of Martin Luther and the Reformation had a real
and a radical effect, not only upon theology, but also upon culture and
society.

Well, the Reformation would have been remarkable if it had stayed only
within Germany. But it did not stay within Germany. It expanded into
lands beyond.

And so now we want to take a look at a few places where the Reformation
expanded outside of Germany, and the first person we want to look at is
the life of Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli lived from 1484 to 1531. He was born
into a home with a humanist education, and again, that was something
good back then.

He was converted after he entered the ministry as a career. So
basically, here's the case of a professional priest being converted and
being born again. His reforms began to gain steam after he debated a
bishop over current issues in the Roman Catholic Church, and he
basically beat the bishop in the debate.

We should regard Zwingli as a co-reformer with Luther and not a warmed-
over Luther. The best we can understand tells us that Zwingli and Luther
came to their understanding, to their theological appreciation,
separately. They did not come to it together.

They developed their own ideas independently and then were sort of
surprised and blessed in some ways--I'll explain more about that later--
to discover how much they had in common. So it's wrong to think of
Zwingli as a disciple of Luther. He seems to have come to his
understanding on his own, but remarkably similar to that of Martin
Luther.

Zwingli turned against the Anabaptists. Basically, you can say that the
Anabaptist movement began in Zwingli's church. Even as Luther had to
contend with the people who were more radical than he was, so did
Zwingli have to contend with the people who were more radical than he
was? And listen, Luther and Zwingli have only themselves to blame.

They told their people, get back to the Bible. They told their people,
this is the book that should determine our doctrine. And so when they
open up the Bible and look around, and I'll just give you one example
among many, they say, you know, I don't find any example in here of
infants being baptized.

Can anybody justify that for me? They would say, I only see adults being
baptized. Why then do we baptize babies? Well, listen, Luther and
Zwingli, they did not like it. They persecuted these people who were
more radical reformers than they were, but make no mistake about it, you
could point back to Luther and Zwingli and say, it's your fault.

You're the one who started it. You're the one who turned these people
onto the Bible and told them to think outside of the box. Well, we'll
get more into that later as we discuss the Anabaptist movement in a
future lecture.

In the year 1519, Zwingli was called to become the people's priest at
the Great Minster of Zurich. Zwingli immediately began to preach
straight through the New Testament. He rejected the normal texts that
they assigned for a person every, you know, Sunday.

And as his excited listeners heard his careful expositions of the Bible,
verse by verse, chapter by chapter, they began to take his words
seriously and accept his call to reform the church along scriptural
lines. Again, this reform was independent from Luther, although Zwingli
knew what Luther had done and was very encouraged by it. And so from
1519 to 1523, Zwingli taught, reforms were gradually being introduced.

But in October of 1523, Zwingli became reluctant to continue the Mass
because he couldn't find any scriptural foundation for it. Now, why
would somebody like Zwingli have a problem with the Mass? Again, he was
raised up as a Roman Catholic priest. Even when he was teaching the
Bible verse by verse, he was still conducting the Mass.

But there came a time in October of 1523 when Zwingli said, I'm not so
comfortable for the Mass anymore. Why would he not be comfortable with
it? Well, you know what the Mass essentially is. The Mass is a continual
reenactment of the death of Jesus Christ.

It's not merely a remembrance of it, but it's a reenactment. Honestly,
Roman Catholic theology believes that when the priest holds the bread in
front of the altar and says, hoc est corpus meum, this is my body, and
then later on when he breaks the bread, they believe that Jesus Christ
is being crucified all over again. And Zwingli would read passages, for
example, in Hebrews that would talk about the danger of crucifying
Christ afresh.

He'd read other passages in Hebrews that talks about the once-for-all
work of Jesus Christ, right? He made the sacrifice once and that it
doesn't need to be repeated. You could see why Zwingli would say, why
would we mess around with the Mass? It really challenged him. And so
Zwingli took his concerns to the city council of Zurich, said, hey guys,
I'm having real questions about the Mass and about what happens with it.

And you know what the city council said? They said, don't change
anything. We're not ready to change the way that we practice the Mass.
They say, listen, we've heard your arguments, we've read your pamphlet.

Zwingli, we believe that you're right in the theology of it, but this is
a change we're not willing to make right now. Now, you know what?
Zwingli backed down. He didn't want to offend his political supporters.

In December, Zwingli informed the council again that he intended to
change the liturgy of the Mass, but again, the council refused and
again, Zwingli backed down. He said, the speed of reform is in the hands
of the state. What to reform, that's my job, but the speed of the
reform, that's in the hands of the state.

Well, very interestingly about this whole issue of the Lord's Supper,
Luther and Zwingli got together once in a place not very far from where
I live now in Ziegen, maybe a 45 minute drive away, a place called
Marburg. And it's known as the meeting at Marburg, the colloquy of
Marburg. And it was fascinating.

Luther and some of his guys got together with Zwingli and some of his
guys and they said, let's talk theology and see if we really agree on
things. And so they talked about their theology of the scriptures. They
talked about their theology of God.

They talked about their theology about Jesus Christ. They talked about
their theology of salvation. They talked about their theology of this.

They talked about their theology of that. And I tell you, it was all
just down the line. And you can imagine how excited they were to
determine, to discover.

Listen, we come from totally different backgrounds. You come from
Switzerland. I come from Germany.

We didn't really influence one another, but we seem to believe the same
things. You'd think we'd been reading the same Bible, praise the Lord.
And it all came along just wonderfully until sort of late in the
colloquy, late is their meetings together.

There they are sitting together at tables. And it said, you know, that
they sat at tables and there were velvet tablecloths on the tables. And
Luther says, well, what do you think about the Lord's Supper? And
Zwingli says, oh, we really value the Lord's Supper.

He goes, the bread and the wine are a beautiful representation of the
body and the blood of Jesus Christ. And Luther said, what'd you say? And
Zwingli said, well, representation of the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. And Luther said, representation? What are you talking about? He
said, Jesus said, this is my body.

He said, the bread and the wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Now, listen, to be fair to Luther, Luther did not believe in the Roman
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. But what he did believe, a
doctrine known as consubstantiation, is not far from it.

Basically, Luther believed that the bread and the wine in communion were
more than just representations. It's actually a very technical argument
that gets into the whole philosophical idea of the nature of reality.
But suffice it to say that Luther's position on what the bread and the
cup were was actually much closer to the Roman Catholic position than
Zwingli's was, and Luther took great offense.

It is said that Luther kept writing in the velvet of the table cloth
right in front of him, this is my body, this is my body, because that's
what he felt. Listen, how can you say it's just a representation when
the Bible says, Jesus said, this is my body? As a matter of fact, Luther
was so outraged by this one particular point of disagreement between him
and Zwingli that he angrily said of Zwingli, you are of another spirit,
just because of this one disagreement. Again, it shows you the kind of
guy Martin Luther was, right? An amazing, amazing man, but given to
these fits of kind of passion and anger and outbursts.

Well, one thing you should know about this, though, is many years later,
somebody brought before Luther John Calvin's writings on what the nature
of the bread and wine were in communion, and Calvin's point was almost
identical to Zwingli's. Luther looked over what Calvin wrote, and he
said, yeah, it looks okay to me. So who knows if it was the passion of
the moment, or if Luther mellowed in his older age? I can't really say,
but the colloquy of Marburg was a big deal.

Well, sad to say, Zwingli was killed in battle, actually. He was killed
in battle against Roman Catholic armies, serving as a chaplain to the
Protestant militia. In our minds, it's kind of hard to understand this
or comprehend it, but you know, when you had some princes in some
regions that were becoming Protestant and other regions that were
becoming Catholic, it wasn't long until you had actual military battles
between Catholic forces and Protestant forces.

In the early days, it was usually by Catholic forces trying by force to
reclaim areas of Europe for Catholicism. We'll talk more about that when
we talk about the Thirty Years' War. So enough with Zwingli.

Now we want to talk about another aspect of the Reformation outside of
Germany, and that would be in the person of John Calvin. We remember
that Calvin was a second-generation reformer. He built upon the
structure that Luther and Zwingli and others had established.

I mean, after all, Calvin was born almost 20-25 years after Luther and
Zwingli. He was born in the year 1509, and he died in the year 1564. And
so he built upon the foundation of Luther and Zwingli.

You can say that Calvin was a Lutheran, or maybe you could say that
Luther was a Calvinist. You could say that Luther argued more strongly
for the doctrines of predestination and the depravity of man than even
Calvin did. Calvin's interest in the matters of predestination seems,
when you read his institute, to be primarily pastoral.

He presented those doctrines in many ways as a way to comfort the
believer who has doubts about his own salvation. Luther's hold on these
doctrines was more a matter of theological debate. The other thing we
should remember about Calvin is that he was not really an original
thinker.

Instead, he was a great organizer and a good writer. He was also a
devoted pastor. Most people think of Calvin as being a very dour man--
somber, sour, never happy.

This doesn't seem to be a reliable historical picture of him, but
neither was he the guy given to the real big fits of merriment and
laughter that Luther was. You could just imagine what it would have been
like to have Luther and Calvin in the same room together. Luther, the
hard-drinking, happy German.

Luther, the kind of guy who said that it's impossible for a man to do
good theology without beer in his hand. Him next to Calvin, who was a
much more stern kind of guy. He probably wasn't as somber and stern as
people made him out to be, but yet definitely he was that compared to
Luther.

Calvin had a very interesting early life and conversion. He was the
second of five sons, and his father worked for the Bishop of Neues in
France. Through his father's influence, he was appointed to two
ecclesiastical offices, and he drew income from them.

Remember how I told you that each church office would sort of have an
income associated with it? Well, his father was enabled to finagle it to
where Calvin had two ecclesiastical offices, and this basically funded
his scholarship. You know how it worked. Basically, Calvin was hired to
be the priest over two different parishes.

Okay? Well, Calvin didn't want to waste his time doing that. He wasn't
even ordained as a priest, I think. I'm not sure, but I don't think he
was ordained as a priest.

So Calvin said, forget this. I'll hire a couple of chumps, basically, to
do the work of pastoring those small parish churches for me. I'll give
them just a bit of the money that I get for it, and I'll live on the
rest.

And that's basically how he funded his education and his early life. He
went to university, and he studied some theology, both in Paris and in
Orleans. In the beginning, it looked like he might become a priest, but
then he studied more law than he did theology.

We don't know the details of his conversion, but at university in both
Paris and Orleans, he had many Protestant friends and associates, and it
seems that their influence eventually brought him to an understanding
and even an embrace of the Gospel and Protestant ideas. Well, because he
was a young man with such a good mind and such outstanding intellectual
ability, he soon became one of the leaders of the Protestant movement
within Paris. Well, Calvin was a very outspoken leader of the Protestant
movement in Paris.

Not that he was the only one, but he was among the leadership. And his
strong calls for reform of the Roman Catholic Church in France, along
the same lines as what had happened in Luther's Germany, caused a very
strong reaction, and Calvin and a couple of companions had to flee from
Paris for their own safety. Basically, they were run out of town.

He also at this time resigned his ecclesiastical offices in Neues. This
illustrates the idea that Calvin was not really a lion like Luther was.
Now, I don't mean to imply that Calvin was a coward.

No, not at all. He just had a different kind of courage than Luther did.
Luther seemed to enjoy conflict.

Calvin didn't. Calvin was essentially a bookish man. He pretty much
wanted to be left alone with his books to pursue his scholarly ambitions
and his writings.

He didn't want to be out in the forefront sort of fighting the battle
the way that Luther did. Well, because he was run out of Paris, he kind
of had to move from place to place to avoid persecution, and he
continued writing. In the year 1536, when he was only 27 years old, he
published his first edition of the Institutes.

Now, I don't know how old you guys are, but I don't know if you'll be
able to accomplish something like this by the time you're 27 years old.
I certainly know that I never did by the time I was 27. This, especially
in its future editions, would be Calvin's great work, and it showed his
ability especially to explain and organize doctrine.

You know, you can really say that in some ways Luther broke new ground,
right? Luther really did some radical things that weren't new
biblically, but they were new in his culture. Calvin really didn't do
those new things, but what Calvin had a genius for was for organizing
and explaining, and this is really seen very evidently in Calvin's
Institutes. Well, he was forced to travel from place to place because of
the persecution.

He went to Strasbourg, and then he came to Geneva. He came to Geneva and
intended to stay for only one night, but the man who was the leader of
the Reformation Protestant movement in Geneva, which really had only
barely become sort of a Protestant city, the man who was the leader was
a man named Pharrell, and Pharrell was a fiery man. His emblem
illustrated a man holding a sword with two hands, and it was a flaming
sword.

They called it the sword of the true word. You can imagine the kind of
man who would take this as his sort of insignia. He was a fiery man, and
when Pharrell heard that Calvin was spending the night in Geneva,
Calvin, the famous teacher and writer, he said, I gotta see this guy.

And so he went to his room, and Pharrell spoke with Calvin, and he
demanded that Calvin stay in Geneva and take leadership with him of the
Protestant cause in the city. Calvin said, no way, man. You know, I
don't want to do that.

I don't want to be bound to one place. I'm a scholar. I'm a writer.

You know what Pharrell did? Pharrell threatened him with the curse of
God if he didn't do it. With great fear, Calvin agreed. He said, okay,
I'll stay.

Well, at first it didn't go very well. Pharrell and Calvin worked
together to transform a city after a godly Protestant ideal, but they
were strongly opposed. You see, they were basically run out of town in a
short time.

Geneva was officially Protestant, but it was not a godly or an ordered
place at all, and it had a reputation around Europe for being a very
immoral city, and they just didn't want the godly leadership and reform
of Pharrell and Calvin, so they pushed them out of town. Calvin went
back to Strasbourg. Calvin was very happy in Strasbourg, but something
drew him back to Geneva.

It could very well have been that the Protestant cause in Geneva was
threatened. There were real movements by the Roman Catholics to reclaim
it as a Roman Catholic city, and maybe it was that Calvin just felt this
obligation that said, I've got to go back and make a stand. It's my duty
to do it, but he was drawn back to Geneva, and basically, Calvin
returned to Geneva, and through his hard work, through his strong
arguments, and through lots of political and what we would call police
pressure, he transformed the city from a reputation for immorality to a
reputation of outstanding godliness.

Geneva became a magnet for Protestants from all over Europe. They came
there, and they were influenced, and they went back to their native
lands. This was especially true for English Protestants who were
escaping persecution.

But because of this very radical transformation of the society, it
brought Calvin into a lot of controversy. You see, Calvin didn't go to
Geneva just to be a scholar and just to be a Bible teacher, but he went
there literally to transform this wicked city. And so when Calvin
brought his strong leadership and his somewhat forced transformation of
the city, it created a lot of controversy and opposition.

He was accused of being a dictator, and this is partially true, but it's
wrong to think that Calvin ruled Geneva like a king. He had tremendous
influence, but he had to use that influence to persuade the governmental
leaders of the city. He usually succeeded.

But again, it wasn't like he was a king, but yet there's no denying he
was a very strong voice, perhaps the dominant voice of Geneva in his
day. For example, Calvin could not only put persuasion and pressure upon
the civic leaders of Geneva, but he could also shun and refuse communion
to those whom he believed to be ungodly. And so there are famous
instances of Calvin refusing the sacrament of communion to the
libertines, to those who were immoral in the city.

And this was a radical thing because this would essentially exclude them
from normal society. It was one of the things that he used, one of the
tools he used, I should say, to help transform the society. Now, one
example among many of the controversies surrounding Calvin in Geneva was
the case of Michael Servetus, who was an infamous anti-Trinitarian
teacher and troublemaker who traveled around sort of making trouble from
place to place within Europe.

He meant to flee Italy, but Servetus stopped at Geneva where Calvin and
his reformers had denounced him. On the 13th of August in 1553, he sat
in on a sermon preached by Calvin at Calvin's church in Geneva. He was
immediately recognized and arrested after the service, and so they put
him on trial for heresy.

He was condemned on two counts for spreading and preaching anti-
Trinitarian and anti-infant baptism teachings, and those were the two
charges against him. And so this is what he was on trial for, and he was
convicted of these crimes, and he was burned at the stake just outside
of Geneva in October of 1553. Calvin supported the idea of Servetus
being executed, and he did remain open to the idea that Servetus could
have been spared death if he would have recanted, but he didn't.

And so Calvin approved of the very gory execution of this man. Now,
might I say that was not unusual for the times? You could say that
Calvin was within the mainstream of 16th century theologians. Servetus
was definitely considered a dangerous heretic and a troublemaker by both
Protestants and Roman Catholics.

But look, the whole Servetus affair showed that Calvin's Geneva was only
heaven on earth for those who agreed with him. The trial and execution
of Servetus showed that, consistent with most other people at the time,
Calvin thought it was sometimes necessary to execute people for their
ideas and words. I mean, Servetus never launched a rebellion against
Calvin or Geneva.

He never got together an army. He never killed anybody. But they
considered his ideas and his words dangerous enough to execute him.

This is still somewhat of a shadow over Calvin's time in Geneva. But
again, you have to say that it was a remarkable transformation, and
Geneva proved to be, as I said before, like a magnet that drew people
from all over the place. In England, when Protestants were being
persecuted by Bloody Mary and by other people, they fled to Geneva and
they thought it was heaven on earth.

They said, we've come to the most godly, well-ordered, Protestant,
truth-teaching city that we've ever seen in our life. And it was good
for those people who agreed with them. One more aspect about Calvin and
his ministry.

He was a devoted and gifted Bible teacher. He was a verse-by-verse
expositor of the Word of God. You see, for years he would teach a daily,
verse-by-verse study through the Bible at his church in Geneva every
morning.

This is also reflected in his commentaries, which are available on
almost every book of the Bible. So I want you to think about this. I
talked about Luther and his great love of the Bible, Zwingli, how things
started changing for him when he started teaching the Bible verse-by-
verse, and then now Calvin, a devoted expositor of God's Word.

We should just remind ourselves of this theme that comes up over and
over again in the history of the church, of how important it is to bring
the Word of God to people in a way that they can understand and in a way
that they can receive. And so Calvin was a remarkable man, a remarkable
Bible teacher, and obviously a man with great influence even to this
day. Now, I'd like to talk now just a little bit, leaving Zwingli and
Calvin, and talking about the legacy of the Reformation.

Who was going to succeed Martin Luther when he died? Well, Philip
Melanchthon seemed to be the logical choice. He was basically Luther's
lieutenant. Now, Melanchthon was a brilliant man.

In just IQ, he probably was smarter than Luther, although Luther was
very, very sharp himself. But Melanchthon was of an entirely different
personality than Luther. Melanchthon was the kind of guy to try to bring
people together in common agreement.

Melanchthon was a lover. He wasn't a fighter. He wasn't the kind of guy
to make this dramatic break with things.

And for this reason, many people were suspicious of Melanchthon and
thought that he was actually a man who was betraying Luther's ideals.
Melanchthon had retreated from Luther's very strong position on the
human role and will in salvation. He was much more of a person to allow
for human free will and choice in salvation.

Melanchthon also ended up objecting to Luther's idea of
consubstantiation in communion. He parted with him on that. And so the
debate over Luther's succession got so heated that at one stage,
Lutheran university professors were taking guns into their lectures for
self-defense.

But Melanchthon was mocked. People would draw pictures of him as if he
was covered with lice, you know, just to sort of put him down. It was a
vicious age.

But as it progressed along, in the year 1557 at the Colloquy of Worms,
Lutherans were embarrassed before Roman Catholics because they got
together to have this big doctrinal debate, the Lutherans and the Roman
Catholics. And you know what happened? The Lutherans started arguing
amongst themselves. And it was a big embarrassment.

And then later on in 1577, they generally reached an agreement among the
different arguing factions of Lutheranism with as known as the Formula
of Concord in 1577. In the end, you could say that the Formula of
Concord was much more in line with Luther than it was with Melanchthon.
But as Lutheranism went on, it became more and more traditional, more
and more intellectual, and less and less ministering just to the daily
spiritual life of people.

Therefore, there rose up a counter movement, so to speak, within
Lutheranism known as Pietism. Some people pronounce it Pietism. Some
people pronounce it Pietism.

It's spelled P-I-E-T-I-S-M. Pietism or Pietism, whichever one you
choose. Sort of the father of Lutheran Pietism was Philip Jacob Spenner.

As the generations after Luther and Melanchthon went on, there developed
a reaction to this sort of argumentative debating about doctrine and a
generally low spirituality. And Spenner and the other Pietists
strengthened the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus
Christ, not merely church membership through baptism. Spenner even said
radical things like this.

He said, it would be better to be a Calvinist or even a Roman Catholic
who had a living faith in the Lord Jesus than it would be to be a
Lutheran with a dead faith but all the right doctrines. Again, Spenner
and the Pietists, they stressed the importance of Bible study and small
group fellowship. What they essentially became was a church within the
church.

Pietism was not a separatist movement from the Lutheran state church, if
you want to call it that, in Germany. Rather, what they would do was
they would set up what we would call home Bible study groups or small
fellowship groups within every local church. And this would be a group
of people within the church body who would have this sort of extra
commitment unto the Lord and valued the same things that the Pietistic
movement valued.

So that's sort of Lutheranism after Luther. What about Calvinism after
Calvin? Well, after the time of John Calvin, a great challenge to
Calvinism arose from a man named Jacob Hermadzun. I don't know if you
know Jacob Hermadzun.

You probably do, but not by that particular name. He took on the Latin
name Arminius. He lived from 1560 to 1609.

Arminius studied at Geneva under Theodore Biza. Theodore Biza was
Calvin's successor in Geneva, and he was ordained as a Calvinist pastor
in Amsterdam in 1588. In 1589, Arminius was called to defend the
Calvinist doctrine of predestination in a debate.

And so he started doing his research. He said, okay, I got to defend the
Calvinist position. This is what I believe.

But after he started weighing the rival arguments for and against
Calvin's understanding of predestination, he found himself siding with
his opponent in the debate against the Calvinistic idea of
predestination. In the 1590s, Arminius lectured on Romans and questioned
the Calvinistic interpretation of Romans 7 and 9. And for such things as
this, his orthodoxy was strongly suspected by the Calvinistic church of
his day, which he belonged to, and controversy surrounded him until his
death in 1609. He was never charged with heresy.

He was never put outside the Calvinistic church, but basically because
his attitude was to keep his head low in the midst of all the
controversy. Arminius believed that God's grace made salvation possible.
The Calvinists would believe that God's grace made salvation inevitable.

They would say that ultimate choice is made by God and not by man. And
they would say that God's election and predestination is based on his
foreknowledge of our choice for him. That's what the Arminians would
say.

And so Arminius didn't really do a whole lot with his own ideas. He
wrote about them, he taught them, but he didn't lead a movement. That
would happen after his death with the followers of Arminius, who
developed what's known as the five points of the remonstrance by
Arminius' followers.

This was developed in 1610, and this is what they said. Point one, man
cannot be saved or choose Christ without the assistance of the Holy
Spirit. Point two, God's choice of certain individuals to salvation was
based on his foreseeing of their response to his call.

Point three, the work of Jesus on the cross made it possible for all men
to be saved, but it did not actually save anyone. That work must be
coupled with the faith of the individual to work for salvation. The
cross is only effective if a person chooses to accept it.

Number four, the Holy Spirit cannot regenerate us until we believe, and
his work of regeneration can be resisted by the individual. Point five,
for those who believe and are saved, it may be possible that they can
lose their salvation by failing to keep up their faith. Now you should
know that the original order of these points is not in the order that I
gave them to you.

You'll see why I gave you this particular order in a little bit. Now
this teaching of the followers of Arminius started a huge controversy
within the Dutch Calvinist church, and the sides also associated
themselves, as happens unfortunately all too often, with rival political
factions. And for a while, it seemed like a civil war would break out in
Holland over this issue.

And so they called the Synod of Dort in the years 1618 and 1619, called
by the anti-Arminians to settle the issue, and the anti-Arminians
responded with five points of their own. And their five points were the
total depravity of man, unconditional election, the limited or sometimes
called particular atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of
the saints, the famous acronym TULIP taken from the first letter of each
one of these points. And so this is how the five points of Calvinism
came about.

You should know Calvin himself did not draw up the five points of
Calvinism. You can't read his institutes and see where he lists in this
particular order, in this particular fashion. Now I believe that these
people were being faithful to Calvinism, faithful to the institutes when
they wrote this, but we should know that the five points of Calvinism
actually came as a response to what they perceived as the threat of the
Arminians.

Another big change in Calvinism after Calvin was that its center moved
from Geneva to England, and you can argue that later it moved from
England to the American colonies. You see, this came when Englishmen
fled persecution under Roman Catholic monarchs and found refuge in
Geneva, and then they carried Calvinism back to England when the
sympathetic monarchs to Protestantism ruled, and then of course from
England it spread to America. Which brings us up with another point that
we should probably discuss, and this will be our last point of this
particular lecture.

It'll be the point of the emergence of the Anglican Church. You see, we
should understand that the English Church remained in union with Rome
until the reign of Henry VIII. Now Henry VIII happened to be the King of
England during Luther's Reformation work in Germany, but no one should
think for a moment that Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church
because he was excited about Luther's Reformation ideas.

Henry VIII was appalled by Luther's Reformation ideas. As a matter of
fact, he wrote a theological tract against Luther and his ideas, and for
that theological tract, the Pope rewarded Henry VIII and gave him the
title Defender of the Faith, a title that English monarchs carry to this
very day. Now again, Henry VIII was not sympathetic to Lutheranism, he
was not sympathetic to the Reformation, but what he was sympathetic for
was he was sympathetic to his need, number one, to have a son to be the
next Tudor king, and this was a problem, right? He was married to a
woman who could not give him a son.

Now of course we know with modern-day genetics that if a man and a woman
have children, and the woman gives birth to only girls or only boys,
that it's actually the man's contribution to the affair that determines
that, not the woman's contribution, but of course Henry blamed his wife,
Catherine of Aragon, who had given him a daughter but no son. The Pope
refused to give him a divorce. Now you say, why would the Pope refuse to
give him a divorce? This kind of thing happened all the time, right? It
was common works in those days.

You know, well, I want a new wife, and sometimes it was for, at least
this was a somewhat of a noble reason, right? People could understand
why a king would want a male heir to succeed him. It's at least somewhat
of a noble reason. Popes granted divorces for many other lesser reasons.

Then why wouldn't the Pope grant Henry this divorce? Well, the Pope was
sort of beholden to the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, correct? I
mean, the two of them worked together, and he really owed a lot to the
Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor at this time was Charles V,
and Charles V was Catherine's nephew. See, so the personal relationship
between the two said, listen, I can't allow this to happen.

I can't allow King Henry VIII to, you know, divorce my aunt this way and
do this, and so the emperor told the Pope, under no means are you to
grant this divorce. But again, Henry didn't just want the divorce. He
was also bankrupt from fighting wars.

He needed money, and if the church was the source of anything, it was
the source of a lot of income. And then also, Henry wanted to control
the church because, as you know, it was a huge part of English life. You
know, listen, this conflict, right, between kings and popes that we
talked about so much in medieval times, this is just another outgrowth
of it.

So Henry I asked for an annulment in the year 1527, and after various
initiatives failed, he stepped up the pressure on Rome, and by 1529, by
compiling a manuscript with ancient sources proving in law that the
spiritual supremacy rested with the king and not with the Pope, he said,
we are separated from the papacy. And so in different steps, all of this
happened. In 1532 and 1533, all payments to the Pope from the English
church were stopped.

In 1534, Henry became the head of the English church rather than the
Pope. By the way, this was the beginning of what we call the Anglican
church, right? Anglican meaning of the English. So the Anglican church
is just another way of saying the Church of England.

By the way, the Church of England, or the Anglican church, is much
larger than just what's in England. You know what the Anglican church in
the United States is called? It's called the Episcopalian church. And so
anyway, this was the beginning of the Anglican church, and Henry was the
head of the church.

In 1536, Henry closed down the little monasteries. In 1538, Henry had a
son, Edward. He decided that his teachers would be two famous
Protestants.

This had a big influence, because you couldn't really say that Henry was
a Protestant, but his son Edward was. And then in 1539, an act was
passed in Parliament, which meant that Catholic beliefs and church
services were to be followed. It said that Protestants should be
persecuted.

We'll get to that in a minute, but I want you to see was that later,
after Henry's death, everything changed, and things went back to
Protestantism at a later time. Excuse me, after Catholicism. Anyway, let
me get down to this.

I'm not explaining this well at all. Let me roll back and talk about
this. Henry wanted an English church, but he wanted it to be an English
Catholic church.

You understand what I mean? In other words, Henry wasn't against the
mass. He wasn't against the statues. He wasn't against the structure of
the Roman Catholic church, except as it impressed upon him and made the
Pope the head of the English church instead of him.

He wasn't against the worship of the Virgin Mary. He wasn't against
their doctrine of salvation. He wasn't against anything.

He just wanted control of it. And so basically what they said is they
said, in the Anglican church, we're going to follow Catholic beliefs and
practices, and Protestants in the land of England will be persecuted.
And indeed, they were persecuted under Henry's reign, and this was the
time when many of them were escaping to continental Europe.

And so after Henry died, his son took the throne, but for actually a
very short time. He only lived about six years, but under Edward's brief
reign, they made radical revisions in church life. They started making
the English church, the Anglican church, more Protestant.

They issued a book of common prayer. They passed laws. It started
reflecting this making of the Roman Catholic church more Protestant.

So first you have Henry who breaks away from the Roman Catholic church,
but wants a Catholic church. He just wants it to be English. Then you
have his son, Edward, who says, I'm the head of the English church.

We're going to make it Protestant. And then third, you have after the
death of Edward, comes Roman Catholic Mary I. She came to the throne,
and she renounced the changes that were made by Henry and by Edward. As
far as Mary, or as she's known, Bloody Mary, as far as she came to the
throne, she said, forget an independent Church of England.

We're going back to Rome. And as part of the going back to Rome, they
definitely persecuted people. Now, of course, they were persecuted under
the act of supremacy under Henry VIII.

Monks were being killed because they didn't agree with the Church of
England. Other people were martyred in terrible flames at Smithfield,
but it also happened under Bloody Mary as well. Here's an example of a
man named Cuthbert Simmons.

And as they tortured him to death terribly, these were some days... If
you want the lowdown on this, read Fox's Book of Martyrs. Fox's Book of
Martyrs was intended to be a history of martyrdom in the Christian
church from the time of the apostles all the way to this era in England,
and meant to inspire people with the brave stories of these people who
would be tortured to death. And they would tell them, well, listen, all
you have to do is become a Catholic for the pain to stop.

And you have the great case of Ridley and Latimer, where as they were
being put upon the stakes and being burned to death, which by the way,
being burned to death at the stake was a horrible way to die, because it
was not quick. It was slow. And basically, you know, your feet, your
legs would be burned off first, but you would still be alive.

You would live with the horror of that period of time with being burned
to death. And so it was a very fearful thing. You know, they say that as
Ridley and Latimer were in jail the night before their execution, that
there they were all stressed, you know, and thinking about the great
ordeal that they would have to undergo tomorrow.

And there they were, you know, kind of huddled around a candle. And for
some reason, one of them passed their hand near the candle and burned
his finger near the candle. And that freaked him out even more.

He's like, man, I burned my finger and it hurts. What's going to happen
tomorrow? But somehow they took courage and they had peace. And when
they went to the stake, when they were fastened to be burned to death,
they made that great statement.

They said, Master Ridley, we believe that we shall this day light such a
candle by God's grace in England that as I trust shall never be put out.
And it's some amazing stories of the sort of heroism in these days. And
so this battle went back and forth, but it all gets back to sort of a
fundamental problem with the Anglican church.

And this is the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is what is
the Anglican church? Is it more Catholic or is it more Protestant? You
see, since this time, the church of England has often had a hard time
making up its mind. Are we Roman Catholic or are we Protestant? Are we
liberal or are we evangelical? I mean, look, if you take a look at a
Catholic church and all the things and all the ceremonies and all the
accoutrements to it, and if you compare it to what a Protestant church
looks like, well, there's a Catholic church on the inside, you know, all
ornate, all fancy.

And then if you compare it to what a Protestant church looks like, it's
a completely different thing, right? It's plain, it's simple. The
Protestant church is simple. It's engineered for the proclamation of the
word of God.

The Catholic church is engineered more for awe and to see the
awesomeness of God in the architecture and for art and for music. You
know, just a few weeks ago, we were with some of the interns from our
Bible college in London, and we wanted to go take a tour of Westminster
Abbey. And we went to take the tour of Westminster Abbey, and we walk
over there.

And the price to take a tour of Westminster Abbey was something like
either $20 or $25 to just walk in there and walk around. And we said, no
way, I don't want to pay that much. You know, I had already seen it, but
the students wanted to see it, our interns wanted to see it.

So we kind of disappointedly walked away, and then one of our interns
had the great idea, hey, why don't we go there tonight during the
evening service? Every evening in the Anglican church, they have
Evensong. It's the evening service, and we get in for free. Great idea.

So we went in, and we sat through the Evensong service. And let me tell
you, while it had something to commend itself for artistic production
and just kind of the sense of awe, and you could smell the incense, and
you could see the candles, and you had the awesome architecture of
Westminster Abbey all around you, I could see why English people who
were into the Bible hated such things. I mean, it felt virtually Roman
Catholic.

I mean, it did. And by the way, by intention. These are people who
believe that it would be wrong for the Anglican church to break very far
from Roman Catholicism.

So they generally developed two different parties within the Anglican
church. The two different parties were either the high church or the low
church. And there's a pretty big difference between the two.

High church says, let's make it Catholic. Low church says, let's make it
Protestant. High church says, let's make it fancy and artistic.

Low church says, let's keep it for the common man. Now, in the midst of
all these struggles, some people decided to stay in the English church
and make it more Protestant. These people were called Puritans, because
they wanted to purify the Church of England.

Other people left the church and were known as separatists or
nonconformists. These people, for among these people, came the pilgrims.
The pilgrims left England because they would be persecuted, because they
didn't want to be in the official state church.

They went to Holland, but they didn't like it that their children were
growing up speaking Dutch and learning Dutch language. They wanted to be
Englishmen. So they moved to the American colonies because they felt
that they could be Englishmen but still practice their religion there.

Well, in the midst of all of this, of this look of many Reformation
leaders and such, you know, it's interesting to think through them as
some artists have depicted them all sort of gathered around a table
here. Luther and Calvin and Melanchthon and all these other notables
gathered around the table, you know, all around the light of the Word,
opening the Word of Bible. And on the other side of the table, the Pope
and the Papists cowering in fear because of the light but this truly was
a light that was brought to Europe and to the world through the
Protestant Reformation in its many different and complicated forms.

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Audio: http://archive.org/download/SERMONINDEX_SID18569/SID18569.mp3
Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/david-guzik/christian-history-14-the-reformation-beyond-germany/
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