What is the relevance of the Reformation for the 21st century Christian? For you and me today, how is the Reformation relevant in our lives? In everyday living? In our thoughts and activities? In the things we believe and give ourselves toward? In the things we do?

Well to answer that question we must first answer two fundamental questions. What is the Reformation? What is a Christian?

What is the Reformation

493 years ago, on this day, October 31st 1517, Martin Luther marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation by nailing his famous 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Church in Germany (Back then Germany was a part of the Holy Roman Empire). Prior to this event however, the path to the Reformation began three to four hundred years before the time of Martin Luther. It started when the visible church began it’s decline in regards to Scripture and in regards to life and worship.

Slowly but surely the Medieval church assumed the place of Christ as mediator between God and man. No longer were all things that pertains to salvation, faith and practice mediated by Christ and found in His Word. Now, for men and women to be saved, according to the Medieval church, we must go through the sacraments for grace to be poured into the soul of the believer. So then it is not anymore a transaction between man and God through the mediation of Christ’s perfect sacrifice, but it’s a transaction between man and God through Christ and the working of the sacraments as administered by the Clergy.

Through this shift of authority from Scripture alone to authority now equally being placed in the Medieval Roman Church, the Pope and the Magesterium, the abuse of authority soon followed. Such abuses eventually led the decline of morality in the Medieval Church. Luther in his book “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church”, he described the Roman Church to be a brothel of brothels, in that the Medieval Church has become so corrupt that a real brothel pales in comparison to what the Church has become.

How then did one man, Martin Luther, sparked the beginning of the Reformation?

Before we can appreciate what Martin Luther did, we must know who Martin Luther was. Martin Luther was born and bred by his parents, Hans and Margarethe Luther to become a man of law. They enrolled him into elite schools of rhetoric, speech and logic. Through his schooling and perhaps through his inborn character, Luther had an other-worldly sense of justice as it applies to reality.

After experiencing a near-death experience of a lightning strike just beside him, Luther gave his life to the monastery, saying, “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” Luther then immediately abandoned his pursuits of law and became a monk. Luther dedicated himself to monastic life, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage, and frequent confession. He would later remark, “If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them.”ⁱ Luther described this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul.”ⁱⁱ

Luther, as a man being much acquainted with the strictness of civil law, received utmost despair when he encountered the strictness of the moral law of God. He had a heightened sensitivity to God’s requirements. He labored to do anything and everything to appease God’s wrath against his sin. Hours upon hours would he spend in confession rather than study and perform his other tasks. He took his sin so seriously that his mentor, Johann von Staupitz, finally grew angry at him and scolded Luther:

‘Look here’, he said, ‘if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parracide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes . . . Man, God is not angry with you. You are angry with God. Don’t you know that God commands you to hope?’ⁱⁱⁱ

Of course, Luther failed to understand that concept of a God that commands believers to hope. His greatest dilemma, even as a monk whose sins are so microscopic as compared to the average man in the world today, was how can a just God possibly accept and forgive such a sinful man as he was? He was caught in a trap, in that he realized that no works of obedience that he could ever do, works that included walking up and down the tower on his knees among others, could ever coerce God to forgive sinners like himself.

On a fateful day, however, while studying Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Luther recounts:

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by faith.’ (Rom 1:17) Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate of heaven.^iv

By the sheer grace of God as is in salvation, Luther rediscovered the doctrine of justification by faith.

This rediscovery of this central doctrine of Scripture could have been just an isolated event in the life of Luther and perhaps those in his small sphere of influence. But when he made the pilgrimage to Rome and witnessed first hand the great abomination it has become, and when Pope Leo X commanded Johann Tetzel, in 1516, to make a sale of indulgence to raise money in order to rebuild St. Peter’s Basillica in Rome, Luther was completely outraged and could no longer contain himself.

He wrote 95 theses, 95 points of controversy against Roman teachings and nailed them publicly in the door of Wittenberg’s Church. This, then, marked the beginning of the protestant Reformation. Though Luther only sought a theological dialogue concerning these issues presented in his 95 theses, issues that include contentions against the selling of indulgence and the authority of the Pope among others, through the printing press, in two weeks time, his 95 theses was spread all throughout Germany. In two months, Luther’s 95 theses was spread all throughout the whole Roman Empire.

And since then, the battle for the Gospel and the authority and sufficiency of the Word of God began, and is still continually being fought for to this very day.

Coram Deo

As we live before the face of God this day in an age half a millenia removed from the time of Martin Luther and the Reformation let us not take for granted our past. Through the providence of God, by His grace, it was through this mark in History by Luther on Wittenberg’s door that the Reformation began. It was the time when the flames of war for the Gospel was kindled in the brightest of displays with the blood of the Reformers and the martyrs.

Let us repent if perhaps we have taken for granted this Gospel that the Reformers fought for and died for. And let us come in utter humility in prayer, asking God to grant us greater faith and grace that we too may be able to give our lives to that same Gospel, to that same Christ Jesus that the Reformers believed in.

May God, through the mediation of our Perfect Savior, in the power of the Holy Spirit, add His blessing, Amen.

Relevance of the Reformation for the 21st Century Christian

I. What is the Reformation?
II. What is a Christian?
III. Relevance of the Reformation for the 21st Century Christian

Footnotes

1. Kittelson, James. Luther The Reformer. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishing House, 1986), 53. [↩]
2. Ibid., 79. [↩]
3. Bainton, Here I Stand, 41 [↩]
4. Bainton, Here I Stand, 50 [↩]