Justified by faith

Romans 4: 13 – 5:2

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 04 Nov, 2007
 

ON 31 October 1517, an Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, nailed a list of propositions for debate to the Wittenberg Church door. The Reformation had begun.

Today is the day to celebrate that event and what it has achieved, not only for Protestant Christians, but also for Catholics.

But, first, let’s understand what was happening here.

Martin Luther was a lecturer at Wittenberg University. As he studied the New Testament, he was struck by how God is presented there, not as an angry God, waiting to pounce on every sin, but as a loving Father who wants to bring us back to himself.

Then something happened. A monk named Tetzel began preaching in and around Wittenberg. Luther couldn’t actually stop him, because he was authorised by the Archbishop.

Tetzel was selling indulgences. If people paid him a sum of money, he would issue a document, signed by the Pope, guaranteeing that the person named in the document would get a reduction in time that they had to spend in purgatory to cleanse them from their sins.

Luther was outraged, because this was so contrary to what he had been finding in the Bible. It was not so much the idea of purgatory that worried him, though this is not in the Bible. What got to him was the exploitation of people by misrepresenting what God is really like.

Don’t picture Luther marching up to the Wittenberg Church door with his hammer and nails, and aggressively banging his poster into place. It’s not about being angry and aggressive about religious matters, even though Luther certainly was angry.

Here’s how things were.

We are used to the idea that you go to the University, perhaps Sydney University or the University of Technology. They are roughly in Sydney. You drive along, you see a wall or a familiar building, and that’s the University.

In Europe it is often not like that. The city is the University. In one street there may be a solicitor’s office, a hotel, the Tropical Medicine lecture hall, a general store and Tutorial rooms for the Department of Linguistics. Around the corner is a coffee shop and the Administration office for the University. Everything is just mingled together.

And, in Wittenberg, the church was the student church, so all the students went there. If there was a seminar or a social evening, the notice was nailed on the door. And Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door, setting out the terms of a debate he planned to arrange. The door was just the notice board.

It all grew from there. The printers who printed the first copies for Luther were so excited that they passed it on. Within a fortnight, handbills about Luther’s debate had spread the entire length of Germany, from the North Sea to the Swiss border. When you think that most people travelled on foot or by ox cart, that was phenomenal.

But it is important for us to think every now and then about what it really all means.

CHANGES IN THEOLOGY

There were three great discoveries in the Reformation period. The Bible, Grace and Faith.

Luther didn’t discover the Bible. Some people already did read the Bible — in Latin, of course. A few famous scholars, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, had even begun working on Greek and Hebrew texts. But there were few good interpreters of the Bible.

Many Priests had only a vague idea of what the Bible teaches. Some knew more about liturgy or philosophy or the Church fathers of the early Christian centuries. The Bible squeezed in there somewhere.

Preaching was often moralistic rather than evangelistic. Much was said about behaviour, but what of faith in Christ, the Saviour?

People quoted expressions from the Latin Bible without understanding them. But the Bible’s authority was neglected.

When Luther read the Bible in its original languages and saw how greatly it was misunderstood, even by leading teachers, it opened his eyes to an important and basic truth, that the Bible is the foundation for all that we know and believe about our faith.

This had implications. In Luther’s time, people debated about whether the final authority in the church lay with the Pope or with the church Councils. After all, it was only a bit over a century since there had been two Popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon in France. That tended to damage Papal prestige.

Luther had a shockingly radical answer. If the Pope disagreed with the Bible, then the Pope was wrong; if a Council disagreed with the Bible, then the Council was wrong. Any authority held by any Church leader was only valid if it was in line with what Jesus and the Apostles taught in the Bible.

One reason why we Baptists have so few rules as a denomination is that we believe in the supremacy of the Bible. We believe that Christian people are duty bound to find principles for their life together and in society by reading and applying God’s Word. We have taken that basic truth and we seek to apply it in the most thorough and radical way.

Again, Luther emphasised that we are saved by God’s grace, and not by our works. This was the core of his argument with Tetzel. Tetzel’s trade taught people that their standing before God depended on how much they could give. It’s the old God–as–a–whore theology. Pay well, and God will give well.

Luther totally rejected this idea. Luther said that God is a God who

...justifies the ungodly.

Jesus died on the cross to pay the full price for sin. God laid on him the sin of us all.

So whoever adds good or religious deeds to the mix takes away from Jesus’ finished work on the cross. It says, “Jesus started it off, but you have to finish it by getting better than a pass mark.” What a travesty of the Gospel! God has graciously done it all for us, while we were still sinners, while we were far from him.

Although the Catholic Church has moved far from its position at the time of Luther, there are still elements of this dependence on works in official Catholic teaching.

However, it was in response to Luther and those who followed him that the Catholic Church began moving. And I know for certain that there are many born–again Catholics today who believe just like we do, that Jesus’ death is fully and perfectly effective.

Luther’s third great reformation principle was the principle of faith.

If our works can’t save us, how do we access a right standing with God?

One of Luther’s most famous sermons had the title, Wie findet man einen gnädigen Gott? (How can you find a gracious God?) And Luther’s answer was Paul’s answer: if you can’t do anything to earn God’s approval, all you can do is to trust that he has graciously accepted you.

Being justified by faith we have peace with God.

Three basic principles come from the Reformation: scripture, grace and faith: key ideas!

CHANGES IN SOCIETY

I’m sure Luther didn’t realise what he was unleashing on the world. It meant that any person who reads the Bible could potentially disagree with and argue against the Pope. This was a world where no one did that!

It meant that kings and princes were also bound by a higher authority, the authority of God. One of the strands that led to constitutional monarchy was the Reformation.

In a sense, the Reformation was one of the strands that led to the execution of King Charles in England. Charles refused to listen to Parliament. He said, “Kings are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone.” But he acted unjustly and unethically, the people rose against him. The principle of the supremacy of scripture, the principle that you and I can read and learn what God wants of us is a liberating principle, a principle that sets us free from oppressors of every kind.

The principle of supreme Biblical authority means that people in positions of rulership have no right to rule apart from Biblical standards of justice and righteousness. There is no divine right of kings, Popes, bishops, Prime Ministers or anyone else. Everything has to be referred back to the revealed will of God, as it is revealed in the Bible.

That doesn’t mean that all rulers must be Christians, or even believe in God. But it means that we have a right and an authority to speak up for justice, for righteousness, for love, for faithfulness, and we can speak without any sense that we are on someone else’s lawn.

The rediscovery of grace has also had a major impact on the world, because it drove a stronger sense that, if God reaches out to all people regardless of merit, then so should we.

If you think of the strength of Christian involvement in care of the poor, all the kinds of things done by rescue missions, the renewed concern for prostitutes, prison reform, the movement against child labour — perhaps the anti-slavery movement, too — you can see how much the Reformation has influenced social attitudes. Today there are many people who assume that these attitudes are part of everyday life, without ever realising that someone had to turn the world around to bring them into being.

Without Martin Luther, the world would be vastly different from what has become.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TODAY

There are some important issues for us to confront today.

Many Protestants these days insist that they accept the supremacy of scripture, but I would have to say that that is not entirely true.

Many have a doctrine of the supremacy of scripture, but are more committed to a set of doctrines than to the Scripture which should be the source of all doctrines. When I was in College there was that Sydney College of Divinity issue — some of you may remember it. The big problem was that the churches which were causing so many problems in the denomination tended to be churches which were more committed to a set of theological ideas than they were to basic Biblical principles. It really created massive problems for months, and nearly split the denomination.

There are others which so happily admit totally unbiblical ideas that you wonder how they could dare accept them. Some guru, some teacher, some local prophet says the world, and the church takes an entirely different direction in ministry when the Bible screams out to do something different.

It is really important for us to know and to understand our Bibles. That means not only reading them in private, but discussing the Bible together with each other, so that we teach each other.

All the great movements where the Christian Church has really had a big impact on the world, it has come from people with a strong commitment to God’s Word.

If we can’t back up what we say with the Word of God, we say to our world, “What we are doing is just our own good idea, not something God has told us to do.”

It is also important for us to really understand and experience God’s grace, which we can only do by faith, by trusting that God actually loves us and has reached out to us in that love when we had nothing in ourselves to merit such goodness.

People with the Word but without grace become harsh legalists.

I am greatly troubled when an issue arises, the newspapers go to some Bishop and report him saying, "There should be a law against it!” It doesn’t matter what that it is. There is no grace. People read the report and write to the Herald saying, “If Bishop A is what Christianity is like, I don’t want anything to do with such an uncaring attitude!” It happens so often!

As Christians, we certainly oppose easy abortions. But where are the Christian voices calling for help for women who are pregnant and don’t want to be? Where is the grace?

As Christians, we certainly oppose homosexual marriage. But where are the Christian voices calling for justice for homosexual couples, so that if one partner dies, the other one can receive the superannuation of the other one? Why do we support a State which steals what a person has saved, just because of his or her sexual orientation?

As Christians, we certainly oppose drug abuse, but where is the grace that recognises that drug abuse is a medical symptom of an emotional problem, and treats the medical aspect medically and the emotional and spiritual issues in psychological and pastoral ways?

As Christians, we worry about foetal stem–cell research, but where are the Christian voices of grace and care, of recognition of the desperation which is driving experimentation?

As Christians, we face many, many social issues where we may urge caution or even prohibition, but, without grace, without care for the hurting and acceptance for the fallen, we are ugly caricatures of God, and deserve not to be heard.

And I want to remind us that it takes faith to stand up for the way of Biblical grace. When we speak up for the poor and downtrodden, we will be reviled for it, we will be attacked. And we will need faith to persevere.

When the Liberal State Government proposed shutting down hospitals in this area, with sick elderly people being sent to Balmain Hospital, I spoke at a local public meeting, and called it warehousing of the elderly, comparing it to the Nazi isolation of people who didn’t fit their ideal of strong, healthy German humanity.

I was phoned the next day by a State Member of Parliament, who really abused and bullied me, and it was hard for me to stick to my guns. It took faith to get up and keep going with the campaign against closing hospitals.

I got a bit of a pushing around even by other local ministers over my views on brothels in the area, and it took faith to keep pressing on with that, too.

You have to look to God, say, “Is my position Biblical? Am I showing grace?” And — if the answer is, ‘yes’, then you get up and keep going, just like Martin Luther did.

As we remember the Reformation and look at the world we live in, and its need to hear of a loving God and a dying and risen Saviour, let’s never forget Martin Luther’s famous words,

“Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nichts anders, Gott hilf mir! — Here I stand, I can do nothing else, God help me!”

That’s what it is like: standing on God’s Word, relying on his grace, and hanging on by faith, even when it seems that way leads to death.

Though I walk through the valley of death’s shadow, I will fear no evil...

Let’s hang onto the Bible, trust in God’s grace, and press on towards the goal of a transformed society in Jesus’ name!

AMEN!

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)