Reformation Sunday: Scripture Alone

        Today, we celebrate Reformation Sunday. And one of the focal points of the Reformation, of course, came in the year 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. Primarily, Luther sought to contest the practice of the selling of indulgences, this idea that if you donated enough money to the church that you could be granted forgiveness of sins. This practice went against so much biblical truth. Jesus said blessed are the poor, and yet this practice seemed to give the rich extra favors in making it to heaven. The selling of indulgences reminds me of Acts chapter 8 where we encounter Simon the Sorcerer who thinks that he can buy from Peter and John the power of the Holy Spirit. He was of course sharply rebuked. The power of God is not something that can be bought. Neither can salvation be bought. As it says in Psalm 49:7 there is no price that one can give to God as ransom for their lives. Our debt is too big. Only Jesus can pay the price for our soul.

            Now Luther, at this point in his life, was primarily an academic. The posting of these theses was the beginning of a process by which to begin an academic debate among scholars or church officials. Yet soon the whole affair became a matter of great public and popular concern. In part, the 95 theses blew up so big because debates around the topic of the sale of indulgences quickly touched on many other important spiritual matters. For example, how are we to know divine truth? Do we know it by listening to the Pope or other officials of the Catholic Church? Or do we know divine truth by reading what scripture says on the matter? How are we to obtain salvation? Are we saved by doing good works such as pilgrimages and donating money? Or are we saved by the grace of God alone, received by faith alone, when we believe in Christ alone?

            So Luther, the academic, hoped for true and sincere intellectual and biblical debate about the merits of indulgences and other such matters. But unfortunately, what he got instead, which he kind of predicted in his ninetieth thesis, was that the Catholic Church would seek to resolve these arguments not through scripture or reason but through the wielding of force alone. As is still so often the case today, those who cannot win by reason resort to force. Still today there are many who are uncomfortable with a free exchange of ideas and are more comfortable with a coerced uniformity that scares and intimidates people from speaking what they truly believe. Like Luther, we still need great courage to ever speak out of accord with the popular consensus of thought of the present day.

            It is important to note that so much of what allowed for Luther’s ideas to gain such a popular following was because of the recent invention of the printing press. For one, this allowed Luther’s ideas to be printed and distributed to the public in ways heretofore unimaginable. But even more importantly, the printing press allowed for common people to be able to have the chance to afford their own Bible. Before the invention of the printing press, Bibles had to be copied by hand. Can you imagine how long it would take to handwrite the entire Bible? No wonder it was expensive. The common people would have to rely on their priest who was one of the few people who owned a Bible and could read the Latin it was written in to interpret the Bible for them. But now, not only were Bibles being printed more affordably, but Luther would soon set out to translate the Bible into the common German vernacular of the time so that people could read it in their own language. Before all this, on what ground could a common person question the truthfulness of the Pope or the Catholic Church? And yet now, they could go into their own Bibles to find direct quotations by which to contradict the false teachings of the church. What a gift that was!

            Friends, do not take lightly the fact that you have easy access to the Bible and reading it in your own language. This is a luxury that few had for 1500 years. What a waste when we neglect this great gift of the written word and neglect to read our Bibles and neglect to search for the truth within, but instead continue to merely rely on what we are taught by our pastors or by our denomination or by secular media. We fail to live into our reformed heritage if we do not scour the Bible to find all the truth within.

            Indeed, so central was the Bible to the Reformation that one of the five solas of the Reformation was that of sola scriptura, or scripture alone. Basically, the Reformers taught that scripture alone is to be our ultimate guide in faith and practice and truth. Yes, as our scripture readings today from 2 Peter and 2 Timothy both testify, scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, such that what the Bible says is the very words of God.

Initially, the teaching of scripture alone was meant to prioritize scripture over tradition. For example, why should I trust what Pope Leo X says is true over what Paul says or over what Jesus says in the Bible is true? But some protestants have unfortunately taken this too far and thrown the baby out with the bathwater in regards to tradition. It’s true that tradition cannot stand higher than scripture itself, and yet tradition is immensely helpful in helping us to understand scripture. Luther, in most of his sharpest critiques of the Catholic Church, was actually critiquing their tradition by arguing from tradition. He was often critiquing church traditions that hadn’t started until the eleventh century or later, over a thousand years after Jesus. Luther would critique things like how the church required priests to be celibate, a tradition that didn’t start until 1123. The selling of indulgences was a tradition that didn’t start until during the crusades in 1095. But in critiquing these things, Luther would often appeal not just to the Bible, but to older tradition. Luther quoted extensively from the writings of the early church fathers like Augustine, Jerome, Justin Martyr, and Cyprian. These are people who lived in the 100s, 200s, and 300s, much closer to the time of Christ. It was more likely that the true teaching of Christ and the apostles was still more accurately passed down and understood at those early dates. They were more trustworthy guides than church leaders from later centuries. As Vincent of Lerins said in the 400s, in seeking to discern the divine truth of Christianity, we seek to believe “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” If we are out of step with things that have been believed and lived out by the majority of Christians across cultures from all around the globe and across all the centuries of history, we should tread humbly and carefully that we could be in the wrong.

Now, tradition is not an infallible or foolproof guide to God’s truth in the same way that the Bible is, but tradition is a useful tool that helps us in our search for truth. We can disregard tradition if it goes against the clear teaching of the Bible or if the reasons given in the tradition for believing certain things are weak or incorrect, but tradition is a useful interpretive tool.

            So, initially the doctrine of scripture alone first had to stand against those who would appeal to tradition alone, but it would soon have to stand against those who would appeal to reason alone. During the renaissance, many philosophers and thinkers, spurred on by the triumphs of science, became overly optimistic about the power of human reason and thought we could discover all truth without the need for divine revelation, but merely by the powers of human intellect. Though we should indeed seek to hold a reasonable faith, reason alone has proved itself insufficient to unlocking all the deep spiritual truths of the cosmos. We need both reason and revelation to understand God.

Today, many cultural commentators say that sola scriptura is now having to stand against sola feels. Now, more so than we even seek to appeal to the Bible or tradition or even reason, we seek to appeal to whatever feels right to our hearts. Now, it is not wholly wrong to be guided some by our feelings because Romans chapter 2 speaks of how God has written his moral laws into all of our hearts and given us consciences to know right from wrong. The issue of course is that scripture also says in 1 Timothy 4:2 that we can sear our conscience. We can, over time, through sin, dull our consciences and come up with clever justifications for what we previously knew were wrong. And the Bible also says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that the devil is working to darken our minds and blind us to the truth. So, we should consult our conscience and our feelings, but we should not view it as a source of infallible truth. After all, Jeremiah 17:9 says that the heart is deceitful above all things, and Jesus said that out of the heart come evil thoughts. Luther knew he had a conscience but he also declared that his conscience was bound to the word of God. Luther placed the Bible above his own moral intuitions.

            But yes, as stated earlier, the Catholic Church was unfortunately not as interested in debating scriptures as they were with compelling obedience. They brought Luther to trial at the Diet of Worms and demanded that he recant his beliefs. And this is where Luther, in great triumphant courage stated this: “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience would be neither right nor safe. God help me. Here I stand, I can do no other.”

            What commendable boldness and bravery. In Luther’s 94^th thesis, he said that, “Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, death and hell.” Luther, when push came to shove, was willing to live that out and was willing to risk it all to stand firm on the truth of the Bible. Later on, Luther would have to fake a highway abduction in order to have himself hidden in safety.

            Luther’s memorable words at the Diet of Worms have had such a lasting impact that they have influenced our denominations’ constitutional documents in the Book of Order to this very day. Just as Luther said that going against conscience would be neither right nor safe, our Book of Order says that so far as is possible, freedom of conscience with respect to the interpretation of scripture is to be maintained. And yet just as Luther said that his conscience is captive to the word of God, our Book of Order says that our conscience, free as it is, needs to be captive to the word of God, and that God alone is Lord of the conscience. In other words, though we are free, our freedom is not meant to be used to just believe whatever we want to believe or feel like believing, our freedom is to be used to align what we believe with what we believe the Bible to be teaching.

            I want to note one other phrase that people will often speak about on Reformation Sunday. It is the motto of the reformation, which says, “The church reformed and always reforming.” This motto also shows up in the foundational documents of our Book of Order. This phrase inspires us to carry forth the work of the reformation in our own day and age. Unfortunately, Martin Luther did not perfect the church so much in his age that it is no longer in need of more reformation. No, the church needs reformed again and again. This phrase has become the rallying cry of many in the church today who want to change the church in all sorts of different ways. But it is important to clarify the full motto of the reformation, because people so often forget the last portion of the motto. You see, it doesn’t merely say, “The church reformed, always reforming.” The full motto is, “The church reformed, always reforming, according to the word of God.” I point this out because some reform movements are not actually reforming movements but deforming movements, for they are not movements that seek to bring the church back into alignment with scripture, but movements that seek to bring the church out of alignment with scripture. We must be reminded that our reformation task is not to form something brand new or entirely new. Our task is to re-form the church of old. Our task it to help the church be what it was always meant to be from the very beginning: a church living out the truths from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

            So ponder today how you can carry on the Reformation Spirit still today. How can you call the church back to the teachings of scripture? How can you live with the boldness and bravery of Martin Luther? What modern traditions have entered the church today that really are not in alignment with the ancient traditions of the church? And in what ways have we strayed from the central gospel truth that we are not saved by good works but that we are saved by the grace of God alone? O Lord, may you bind our consciences to the word of God.