Well, I'm humbled and honored to see you all here on a Friday night. Do you have anything better to do? I am thankful for pastors like Pastor Reese, who are faithful to the Word of God and through whom the Reformation continues to live. It's a historical event, and we'll be talking about that tonight, but it's much, much more than an historical event. It's a living reality that ministers and elders and congregants make a reality by faith, by trusting in the Lord, and by doing as a consequence of having trusted him, doing what he says. I thought I would begin this evening Just reading a brief bit from Galatians 2, this being Reformation Day, this always seems appropriate. Galatians 2, just verses 11 through 14, the Apostle Paul reflects on a difficult time in his own life when he was forced to confront a serious challenge to the gospel. But when Cephas, and by that he means Peter, But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned for before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct, and I want you to notice this, was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? And it seems to me that when we think about the Reformation, we need to think about the courage that Martin Luther exhibited many others exhibited, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, and that courage is positively Pauline. I'm a church historian. I'm a pastor, but I'm a church historian. And when I when I reread this in preparation for this evening, my first thought was that the spirit of Luther was on the Apostle Paul. But then I thought, well, No, maybe it was the spirit of the apostle Paul, but you know what I mean. When do I have to stop? Oh, great, fabulous. So, we're here tonight and then tomorrow, and then on the Sabbath, if you're able to be here with us, to think about and to talk about the Reformation. And tonight, I want to raise with you and think with you about the question, was the Reformation a mistake? Was the Reformation a mistake? Should it not have happened? Was there another way around the Reformation? What was the Reformation about? Could it have been avoided? Lots of folks have thought so. Lots of folks have said so. And today, a good number of people seem to think that, in fact, it was a mistake. It was avoidable. And maybe more to the point, they seem to think it ought to be avoided now. And so they are avoiding it now. There are about 60 million American evangelicals, according to the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism. Evangelicals, I think it is. 60 million. About 60 million Roman Catholics and about 60 million evangelicals. I had, on the plane ride over from the length of Phoenix to the Springs, had a lovely conversation with a young woman who's not long married. comes out of a mainstream mainline Methodist background, but for several years, I think, has been in evangelical congregations of various kinds. And now in a very sort of it actually sounded to me like a fairly solid E-free congregation somewhere in the state. But as I was talking about, you know, she was asking what I do. And I said, I'm a professor of church history. And I mentioned it was Reformation Day. And And she had no awareness of what that was or or even who Martin Luther is now to her credit and to her congregation's credit. She did know what the gospel is. And that's the most important thing. But it is I don't think I'm not saying this to pick on this young girl. It's not I don't think her fault at all. And I don't think that she's atypical of what's happening in American evangelicalism today. I think she's very typical of what's happening, and I think she's typical, because I used to teach at Wheaton College, which is really right at the heart of the American evangelical movement. And every year when I would get to every in a certain course, when I would get to the Luther story as part of the course, I would tell the Luther story. And more than once, I had students come up to me after class with tears streaming down their face. And they said, That's the most amazing thing I've ever heard. And I've never heard that story before. The story you described when you told the story of Martin Luther, the life you described, that's that's my experience. That's my life. I wasn't raised, they would say, in a Roman congregation, but in my home congregation, I was taught the very same things that Luther was taught before he became a Protestant. I didn't have any idea they would say that we were Protestant or even what it meant to be a Protestant. Most evangelicals today quote unquote evangelicals. If you ask them what the gospel is according to the surveys they will tell you it has something to do with being a good person and perhaps believing in Jesus. So the circumstances in which we are today, which we find ourselves today, are not terribly different from the circumstances in which Martin Luther found himself in 1517. In fact, as I was going to explain, trying to explain a little bit about the Reformation on the plane trip, however long the flight is from Phoenix to the Springs, I said, well, there was this fellow, Tetzel, and he was selling indulgences. And I had to explain what indulgences are there and get out of purgatory free. card for a small donations and now before midnight slightly higher Western Rockies no COD only $29.95 but wait there's more I said you know this Tetzel fellow he's a lot like the TV preachers you see in fact if you if you if you look if you read a little bit about the Luther movie that I think was Ralph Fiennes did some years ago now If you look at the back story to that movie, when they were looking for prototypes to play Tetzel, how do we portray Tetzel, the fellow said, I just imitated the slimy TV preachers. It's exactly right. When you watch it, you'll say, that's Tetzel. That's exactly what was happening. Please don't think that our times are profoundly different from those times because they are all the evidence is they were not. So was the Reformation a mistake. A lot of evangelicals have either consciously well consciously on some level and maybe on another level decided that yeah I think it was and lots of other people have thought it was a mistake. Certainly Rome thought it was a mistake. Rome in their polemical literature and in their catechetical literature routinely described Luther as a devil. He's routinely painted in 16th century paintings as a devil replete with horns and demons and all of the getup. The Anabaptists, the radical Anabaptists in the 16th century thought it was a mistake. The radical Anabaptists, and I don't know if you know this, in fact radical Anabaptists is redundancy. All the Anabaptists were radicals, but not all the radicals were Anabaptists. The Anabaptists, these would be the forefathers of the Mennonites and the Hutterites that you may know today, depending on where you live. The Anabaptists in the 16th century looked at the Reformation and they said, it's a mistake. I'm not sure if you know this, but the Anabaptists categorically, to a man, rejected the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone and they rejected it for the very same reason that the Roman Church rejected it because they said if you say that justified by the unmerited favor of God. If you say that and if you say that it's through faith alone that is through resting and receiving to use the exquisite language of the Westminster Confession Chapter 11. If you say it's through resting in the finished work of Christ, if you say it's through receiving that finished work alone, if that's the sole instrument of justification, you will never achieve the sanctification of God's people that they should have, because they don't have sufficient motivation to obey God if their eternal welfare is not hanging in the balance of their behavior in this life. Both Rome and the Anabaptists agreed with that assessment. You'll never get people to behave themselves with this message of grace alone through faith alone. It's a mistake. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the liberals and the modernists and the Enlightenment philosophers all said that human beings are at the center of the universe, and this Reformation theology that came to be summarized in the slogan, to God alone be the glory, it's entirely too God-centered. No modern, reasonable person, no modern person who makes decisions on the basis of sense experience, that would be in philosophical terms, that's called empiricism, what I know with my eyes, what I know with my fingers, what I know with my ears, What I know with my senses, that's empiricism. Or, what I can figure out with my mind, that's called rationalism. No modern person, whether an empiricist or a rationalist, who says, if my neck can't catch it, it isn't a butterfly, and I'm the measure of all things, and so if it doesn't make sense to me, or if I can't put it in a laboratory and test it, it's not real. Those people all said the Reformation was a mistake. those people believe in a God that we cannot know, and who does not know us. We have to re-describe the Christian faith as a kind of metaphor for the human experience of the transcendent, that which is beyond. A metaphor, a way of talking. It doesn't really correlate to real historical truth because modern reasonable people cannot be expected to believe in the stories that are in the Bible. Those stories, the modernists said, were written by people who saw the world through mythological lenses. I'm aging now and so I have to use I've always had glasses, but now I have contacts in and then I have reading glasses so I can it makes the letters big enough so I can I can see them. And they said that that that the Bible writers saw the world through lenses that were colored with mythology. And so they wrote mythological stories that we have to then decode and just explain as metaphors for people's religious experience. The Reformation was a mistake, because they believed in a real God, whom we really know, and who really knows us, and who really holds us accountable for our actions, and in a real Savior who really died and was really raised for our justification, and in whom we really believe. All of that, they said, that's all got to go. And that's the story of all of the seven sisters of the mainline churches in the United States and all the mainline churches in Scotland and England and I suppose in Wales and across Europe and the churches all particularly in Europe but in England and in Scotland the churches are. Fifteen years ago they were empty. Now they're either mosques or Internet cafes. They're not empty anymore but they're not churches. Well, if it's not true, and if we can't believe it, why show up? The American mainline churches, the Seven Sisters, the PCUSA, the Episcopal Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the UCC, the Churches of Christ, and I probably left some out too, I guess. As units, as bodies, as ecclesiastical bodies, they all have fundamentally accepted the modern story about Christianity. And for them, the Reformation was, in many respects, a mistake. The ecumenical writers and theologians have all concluded that the Reformation was not only a mistake, it was a tragic mistake. Joseph Lortz wrote a little book booklet really about the Reformation in which he argued, and again this takes us back to the mainline churches, the Seven Sisters, which largely accept this account of things. The Reformation was a tragic mistake because Luther simply misunderstood the teaching of the medieval church. Because he was raised, they say, in an idiosyncratic approach to theology, and had he been raised in a more mainstream approach, they blame it all on a school of theology, which is commonly known as nominalism, and he certainly was trained in nominalism, and he certainly was trained in nominalist theology, and there were schools of theology that were probably more representative of the tradition prior to the late medieval period. But the argument is that it was all a big misunderstanding. Not only did Luther misunderstand the medieval church, but they say that the Council of Trent misunderstood the Reformation. They were simply talking past each other. And that's a tragedy because the Reformation really never had to happen. We didn't have to have a split. There doesn't have to be a Protestant church and a Roman church the Reformation was a mistake and they've been very busy particularly since the mid-seventies following Vatican II ended in the mid-sixties. In trying to convince people that the Reformation was a mistake and now that Vatican II has happened the argument goes. We can overcome a leading evangelical scholar. who was the external reader of my doctoral work in the UK, argued in a Christianity Today essay several years ago that with the publication of the then new Catholic Catechism in 1994, that the Reformation was over. Mark Knoll and Carolyn Nystrom have published a book asking the question, is the Reformation over? And they have also concluded that yes, it was really. Whatever use there was, it's gone. and it's over and in our own circles in conservative reformed circles, NAPARC circles, that is the North American Presbyterian Reform Council, accounts for about five or six hundred thousand people out of the sixty million American evangelicals. And in that NAPARC world, which includes the RPCNA, the PCA, the OPC, the URCs, and the whole alphabet, sue if that means anything to you. If it doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it. But in those circles, then, those are, as my Dutch brothers and sisters say, onze volk. Those are our people. There is a growing movement that sees the Reformation as a mistake because it is an obstacle to social progress. You can see it in evangelicalism, not only in the Noel Nystrom book, but you can see it in Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which was, I think, first published. The first one, they've gone on to do, I think, four or five or six. What they started the first two were focused on the question of justification. How are people, sinners, right with God? and the first one that they published that listen we're in basic agreement on these things. Yeah, there are a few things left to be worked out like exactly how people were justified, but really we're in broad agreement. And so some people screamed and yelled about this. Mike Horton, Bob Godfrey, and R.C. Sproul and others. And Mike got his friend Jim Packer on the phone and said, we learned the gospel from you. What are you doing and Jim said then and then wrote later in Christianity today seemed like the right thing to do. And that was his argument. It seemed like the thing to do. That's still Jim Packers argument. The need when you ask what motivated people from a confessional reform point of view and a confessional Lutheran point of view to sign away the gospel and evangelicals and Catholics together, and there were, by the way, people in the Neapark world. I won't name names, but if you go and look at them online and look at the list of signatories, some of whom, one of whom, at least I know this body knows fairly well. And others might be known to you as well as ministers in Neapark denominations. So, it wasn't just those people out there, it was also folks, some of whom were signed, both evangelicals and Catholics, one, and two, which both addressed the doctrine of justification. And what's behind it all? The Reformation is an obstacle to the union of socially conservative Bible-believing Christians. We need to band together to form a common social front to confront the social ills of our day and to form a wall against the rising tide of secularism. That's what was behind it. The fear of the rising tide of secularism. So the Reformation was an obstacle to them to social progress. The new perspective on Paul comes to some degree out of the United Kingdom, but also out of mainline circles and some conservative writers in North America, in which they see the same thing, a rising tide of secularism, a need for an ecumenical common front against, particularly in Europe, Islam and secularism. and so in order to facilitate that it turns out that we have grossly, according to the new perspectives on Paul, grossly misunderstood what it was Paul was saying. He wasn't really setting out a distinctive doctrine of justification, that is, how sinners are right with God. He was simply laying out a way of understanding boundary markers in the covenant of grace, and he's really only explaining how you how it is the case that having gotten into the covenant of grace by grace, you stay in through works. Of course, the tragedy of the new perspectives on Paul is that it's not new at all. There were rabbis in Paul's day who were teaching exactly that, and Paul was well aware of it. And Paul repudiated. And in fact, what is being peddled as the new perspective on Paul is very familiar to anyone who knows medieval theology, because it's exactly what the medieval church taught. And it was the message that was rejected by Martin Luther. And so, there's nothing new at all, but the new perspective wants to undermine the Reformation and it wants us to think that it was a mistake. It was a tragic reading of Luther's own religious insecurities back into the Apostle Paul. And unless you think this is just an academic thing, this is widespread. The emergent church I don't know how aware you are of these movements, the emerging church movement and the emergent movement, which is even more radical. The emergent church movement has embraced the new perspective on Paul heartily. They like N.T. Wright because the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone is an obstacle to reaching across barriers in building an emergent church. And by the way, so is the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement. And eventually, so will the doctrine of the Trinity, and so will the doctrine of the two natures of Christ. As the liberals like to say, when they came for this group, I didn't say anything because I didn't belong to that group. When they came to that group for that group, I didn't say anything because I wasn't part of that group, and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up. Well, in the same way, you may think that, well, they can come for justification, and maybe that's not so bad. But they're not going to stop with justification. They're coming for the Trinity and the two natures of Jesus. You just try having Christianity without the Trinity and two natures of Jesus. There's a name for that kind of religion. It's called Unitarianism. I know I was a Unitarian. That was my first religious training. And I know the history of the church, because that's exactly how the Unitarian movement began, was by coming first for justification, then the Trinity, then the two natures of Jesus, or the deity of Jesus, and then the substitutionary atonement. And then, finally, in our own movement, there's a small, I think a smallish, but noisy, and I can't tell how influential, but I fear more influential than it should be movement, which a pastor mentioned. That's the federal vision movement and and then a sort of adjunct to that reformed Catholicism. And they are repudiating the Reformation and some of them becoming some of them actually becoming Roman Catholics. and most of them socially conservative. And so for many of the same reasons that that other people are finding the Reformation an obstacle and a mistake. So, too, they are finding it a mistake. So so all this is to say there's a reason for talking about this and for asking this question, because if you're in case you're not aware of it, there are a lot of people who've concluded that the Reformation is a mistake. And if you look at your outline, you'll see that it's if you look at the history of the church. There is a way in which I wouldn't say that the Reformation was a mistake, but the Reformation was highly improbable. The Reformation was highly improbable. If you asked any medieval theologian in the 13th century, the 14th the 15th century, the 12th century, the 11th century, the 10th century, the 9th century, the 8th century, the... Stop me, before I get back to the patristic church. If you'd ask any theologian in that period, how is a sinner right with God, they would have told you, that theologian would have told you, a sinner is not right with God. A sinner, they would say, cannot be right with God. They would have said, if you ask the question, how is a person right with God? Now, that's a better question, they would say, and then they would say, a person is right with God by having been baptized, initiated into what we would call the covenant of grace, having their sins washed away. and then if they don't die right away and that they have time to commit, let's say, venial sins, they need the grace of the sacraments in order to cooperate with grace and to create within themselves by grace and cooperation with grace. And please don't be confused here. If you ask any medieval theologian, if you should happen to run into one, or if you ask If you ask any knowledgeable Roman Catholic, that person will tell you that we believe in justification and salvation by grace. They probably won't say it alone, but they will say by grace. But what they mean by that is that we are eventually accepted before God by an infusion of grace. When I say infusion, I mean an injection. Children, when you go to the doctor, sometimes what does he or the nurse, what do they want to do to you? They want to give you a shot. That's an injection. That's an infusion. I'm sorry for bringing up shots. No shots tonight. But an injection or infusion. When your mom and your dad takes the gas, pump the nozzle and put it in the car. That's an infusion of gas. When your parents bring home a paycheck and they put it in the bank, that's an infusion of cash. Well, in the Roman Church, it was considered that you received infusions of grace in the Holy Sacraments. And you got the first one at baptism. You got the next one at confirmation and communion and in absolution. and so forth. And so Rome developed this sacramental system, seven sacraments. Most people weren't eligible for all seven, ordination being one of them. Either you were married and had that sacrament or ordained, usually not both at the same time. So you have all these sacraments, right? So that Rome is like a filling station, constantly filling people up with grace so that they can cooperate with that grace. Now they have to do their part, but grace comes first. Grace in the Medieval Church always comes first. Grace in the Roman Church always comes first. God acts first. So when people say to me, I believe in prevenient grace, I say, Amen, brother, you're almost ready to join the Roman Church. Because the Roman Church believes in prevenient grace. And they say, well, I believe in predestination. I say, great, you're ready to become a Thomist. Because Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, also believed in predestination. But I believe in reprobation. Well, Thomas Aquinas says amen too. But I believe in limited atonement. Well, Thomas is right there with you. So far, you haven't done a thing to distinguish yourself from the mainstream of medieval theology. You're ready to become a Roman Catholic. What is it that distinguishes us from the Roman Catholics? It's that ugly little four-letter word, S-O-L-A, sola. Sola gratia. It's not a medicine. The medieval theologians routinely described grace as a medicine with which the church dispenses to people, with which they are infused, with which they are morally obligated to cooperate in order to create righteousness within themselves, which God then will recognize and say, It's almost as if in the Roman system and in the medieval system you have, you know how sometimes on public television they have fundraisers? Sometimes, all the time. Have you ever noticed lately that when they raise money they put on programming that you actually want to watch? Or at least that they think you want to watch. That's another thing. So, sometimes you see the fundraising thermometer. Well, you could you could be in a Roman Church and have a sort of grace and sanctity thermometer. Sort of showing where you are and how sanctified you are and how close you are to being ready. And, of course, in the Roman Church, no one's ever ready because you go and you confess your sins and you never remember all your sins. Even the most devout Roman Catholic can't remember all his sins. And then you're given penances, which you are meant to go out and do perfectly and thereby to satisfy for your sins. Did you hear what I just said? To go out and satisfy for your sins. Good luck with that. And if you don't complete those penances and you won't, then all of that piles up and that all has to be burned off literally in purgatory for hundreds of thousands of years. That was the system in which Martin Luther was raised. That's the system that's still being taught today. Whatever the ecumenists want us to believe, I say read the sources. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It's online. It's at the Vatican website. It's free. www.vatican.va. Just type in catechism. Bang, it'll come up and you can read it. It's a big book. otherwise you can go to my website and just type in Catholic Catechism and you'll find stuff in there about it. But read the Catechism for Yourself on justification and you'll see that nothing has changed. What Rome taught at the Council of Trent, she still teaches. Whatever the ecumenists want us to believe, the facts are to the contrary. How do I know that? Because I've looked at the footnotes of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And what does it say in the footnotes. See Council of Trent. Session 6. 1547. See Council of Trent. Session 6. 1547. Again and again. You say, well, Session 6. 1547. In Session 6. 1547. The Roman Church said that if anyone says that we are justified through confidence in the finished work of Christ. Not many years ago, the Pope, prior to Benedict XVI, went to Trent and said, here we stand, in effect. We can do no other. Whatever noises the ecumenists make, the facts are to the contrary. The constitutional, magisterial doctrine of the Roman Church as to how people are right with God is unchanged. and so that was the doctrine in which Luther was raised. There was an enormous consensus on justification. There was a tremendous consensus on the authority on the question of authority. Relative to sacred scripture, according to the Roman Communion, and there are good historical reasons for this. namely, the threat of Gnosticism in the second and third centuries. In response to the threat of Gnosticism, the Church began to stress not only the succession of bishops, but also the authority of the Church, the visible institutional Church, as the arbiter of truth, and that move which wasn't was in and of itself, not necessarily a wrong or bad move, but that move led to an idea that, in fact, not only is the church the arbiter of truth, the visible institutional church, it is the source of truth. God revealed himself through the church. Orally and in written form, and the church in a sense is mother of all forms of revelation, whether written or unwritten. So that in the Roman view and in the medieval view, the church is the source of scripture. And so authority comes from God through the church, unwritten and written. The Protestants, on the other hand, said no. We agree that authority comes from God, but it comes from God, and it comes through Scripture, and it's Scripture that norms the Church. And there's the debate. You see, if you ask virtually anybody in the medieval Church, from where does authority come? They would all say it comes from God. through what or whom does it come? Well, it comes through the church, and the church gives us the word of God. The church gives us the word of God. The church forms the word. The church norms the word, because in a very real sense, the church is the word. Have you ever wondered why some of your Roman Catholic friends don't read the Bible? We were discussing this on the plane today. and I was trying to explain, well, Roman Catholics frequently, not say never, there are Bible reading movements in the Roman community. There are Pentecostal movements and charismatic movements in the Roman community. But in a typical sort of urban Roman congregation, old line Roman congregation, people don't feel any need to read the Bible because they're members of the church and they have revelation or they have what they need from God through the church. The Church mediates everything to them. And so there was a tremendous consensus on that. Not only that, there was a tremendous consensus on what the Word teaches. And the consensus was the Word teaches that there are two kinds of law in the Bible. The Bible as a whole is made up of two kinds of law. There is old law, and that's Moses. More broadly, Abraham, Noah, everything before Jesus, but particularly Moses. They described that as old law. Now, we describe it as the Old Testament, but for medieval writers and theologians leading up to Luther, they routinely described it as old law. In fact, some of the fathers described it as the old law. and then they said the other section of Scripture, if you will, is the new law. Why did they describe it as old law and new law? They described it as old law and new law because they were reacting to immorality which had been produced in the church by the influence of ideas such as Gnosticism, which had sort of arisen from time to time in different movements in the medieval church. But it occurred in the early church and it reoccurred in the medieval church. And the big problem, one of the great problems of the Gnostic movement was it divided the world into sort of being and non-being. And the point of of being a Gnostic or being a Christian influenced by Gnosticism was to overcome the physical world. Your problem, they said, is that you are physical. You have a body, and you need to overcome that, because the body is evil. The material world is evil. Creation is evil. The problem is creation. The problem is physicality. There's nothing... You may have run into this. This teaching still exists. It's called religious science. mind science, Christian science. This is just plain old-fashioned Gnosticism. And lots of American fundamentalists are imbued with Gnosticism. That the faith is construed as a message for overcoming, a way of overcoming your body. The Reformation said there's nothing wrong with your body. The Bible says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and it was good. Nothing wrong with material world, nothing wrong with being bodily. Jesus was bodily. The Gnostics, of course, said, no, Jesus wasn't bodily. He just looked like he had a body. It's called docetism. He looked like he had a body, but didn't really have a body. And that's widespread today, that teaching. There are evangelicals embracing that teaching. Well, at any rate, in reaction to that kind of teaching, the Roman Church said, listen, you people behave yourself, and the way you behave yourself is by obeying the law. And the whole Bible is law. There's law under Moses. There's law under Jesus. And what's the difference? There's more grace under Jesus to keep the law than there was under Moses. The whole Bible is law. It's old law and new law. What's the gospel? The gospel is law. The good news, according to Rome, is that you've been given enough grace so that you now have the power. If you make the choice, you have the power to become good. To become right, to become righteous, to become just, so that when God looks at you, he says, right, I recognize your goodness, your justice, your righteousness. That's the good news. If you ask any medieval theologian, they would have said yes. After Augustine, they would have said, yes, we are sinful, but we're not so sinful. We're sinful, but we're not so sinful. We are simple and Adam's fall, and we all like the Puritan said, but the effects of the sin of the fall and of sin aren't really that bad. And you've been given grace in your baptism, and since the effects of sin aren't so bad, you you can do what you need to do. It's within your power. If you just choose. Jacob Arminius in the early 17th century said, Yeah, that's about right. and most American evangelicals. And virtually everyone agreed on that, except towards the end of the Middle Ages. There was a troubling movement of fellows who began to read St. Augustine again, and as they began to read St. Augustine again, and they began to read his later writings, and as they read his later writings, they found St. Augustine teaching a doctrine of sin that didn't just say we are sinful, it said that we are dead in sins and trespasses. That we're not able to do anything, and that the power of grace is far greater than we had been led to believe for the previous several hundred years. There's not only a consensus on what the Bible is and on the nature of authority, but there was a consensus before the Reformation on what Greece is. If you ask any medieval theologian, if you ask a lot of patristic ancient church theologians, they would have told you that grace is a kind of medicine, as I mentioned before, with which we are rejected. And the purpose of grace, they said, is to perfect nature. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, said grace perfects nature. That's the function of grace. That's the relationship between nature and grace. Why? Because nature is inherently defective because it's finite. And to this very day, if you look at the Roman Catechism, if you open it up and look very early on in the first few pages, you will see an article in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that says, in effect, that very thing, that human beings and God both participate in being. In the Roman conception, and frequently in the modern evangelical conception, God is at the top of a ladder and we're at the bottom of a ladder. And you need grace. You need being. You need to become more like God. You need divinity to climb that ladder. The problem, you see, is that you are not like God. And you need our help to become like God. You need the stuff that only we can give, this kind of magical stuff. And people like magical stuff. And that story that we are inherently defective and that in a way God's holding out against us, that should sound familiar. In the beginning, a salesman came around and said, Say, I've got something that you might like to have. How would you like to know what God knows the way he knows it? Listen, I've got some fruit, no charge, right? I just want you to taste this fruit, and I want you to see that God's holding out. When you eat this fruit, then we'll talk. Just eat this fruit, and then you'll know what God knows. And you, you'll see that God's holding out on you, that He's afraid of you, and then as soon as you know what God knows, you'll have Him right where you want Him. That story should sound somewhat familiar. Has God really said you shall not eat? That was the story of the medieval church that in effect, they never put it this way, but in effect, they said God made us broken. The Bible says God made us good. The Bible says that God made us good, and he made a law that we have the power to obey, and that's what we confess in the Belgian Confession, that's what we confess in the Heidelberg Catechism, that's what we confess in the Westminster Standards. We confess the doctrine of the covenant of works that's premised on the idea that God made us good, and we have the power within ourselves to obey the law that God, the very good law that God issues. Now, in fairness, the medieval theologians were trying to explain how the fall could have happened. How could the fall happen? We Protestants say we don't know. God made us good, we're made in righteousness and true holiness, that we might rightly know God our Creator, heartily love Him and live with Him in eternal blessedness. In the Belgian Confession, in my tradition, we say that God issued a commandment of life and that Adam failed to keep that commandment of life. Why did he fail? Well, we don't know. It's through the instigation of the devil. By willful disobedience, he deprived himself of all his posterity, of all of those benefits that he would have had by virtue of obedience. But the Roman Church said, well, the reason he fell is because he was defective. We know why he fell. We've got an explanation. So there was a medieval agreement on scripture, a medieval agreement on the nature of grace. that is a medicine dispensed by the church to help you climb a ladder to make your way eventually into heaven. There was a consensus in the medieval church that God can only approve of the righteous, and of course we agree with them. But the medieval church rigged the game. They rigged the game by speaking of merit in two different senses. We agree, by the way, with the medieval church that God that God respects merit. We're not afraid of the word merit. Sometimes people say, well, we're Protestants, we don't believe in merit. Nonsense. Anybody who says that doesn't know his Protestant theology, he hasn't read his Reformed confessions or catechisms, and he hasn't read Reformed theology. Reformed theology absolutely believes in the doctrine of merit. It's not a question of whether we believe in merit, it's a question of who has merit and how do we get it. church, and there are two kinds of merit. There's sort of full merit, merit that God has to recognize, and they call that condign merit. And what happens is that when the Spirit works within you and you cooperate with that Spirit, with the Holy Spirit working within you through the sacraments and by His grace, When that happens, and that may result when it's done properly, in as much as it is the work of the Holy Spirit, that results in a kind of merit, a condign merit, that God has to recognize, because it meets the terms of justice. But there's another kind of merit, and that's called congruent merit, and it's kind of a gracious merit. God says, and this is how a late medieval theologian put it, to those who do what is in them. God does not deny grace. You know this slogan from Ben Franklin. You know this slogan from Ben Franklin, which, by the way, I hasten to add, is not in the Bible. God helps those who help themselves. If you do a survey of Americans and ask them, where do you find the slogan, God helps those who help themselves, many Americans will tell you it's in the Bible. It's not in the Bible. go to Bible gateway.com do a search for yourself. You'll find out that it's not in the Bible. But it was a medieval slogan that in effect God helps those who help themselves. That is, if you do your best, God will look at that and he will say, you know what? Mary has done her best. I'm going to reckon to her as if she has met the terms of righteousness, and they call that congruent merit. And so through your life, you're gradually climbing this ladder up to God, accumulating merit, receiving grace, sinning, falling, confessing your sins, being absolved, given penance, doing some of them, burning off some of your sins, but collecting more and gradually climbing this ladder to heaven. No one in medieval theology No one in this life, except for an extraordinary case. No one leaves this life justified. And I want you to understand that. No one, and to this very day, this is the Roman doctrine. No one leaves this world alive. You've heard the slogan, no one gets out alive. Well, in Roman theology, and in much of evangelical theology, no one gets out justified. You're on a progressive ladder-climbing journey. In fact, we were described in medieval theology as pilgrims. And that's right, we are pilgrims. But what kind of pilgrims are we? Are we pilgrims climbing a ladder up to God? And is God helping us a little bit, inasmuch as we're willing to help ourselves? Is He reaching down and giving us grace, and then recognizing our best efforts? Is that how it all works? So that eventually We die, we go through purgatory, we burn off those sins after a few hundred thousand years. And then and only then, having been truly intrinsically made good, holy and righteous, can God look at us and say, just righteous. And of course, it might not work, you see. It doesn't necessarily have to work. Rome doesn't teach a perseverance of the saints. You might not make it. So, you had better get to work. I tell my students when we get to the Luther story in the Medieval Reformation course, and after I've laid it out, I say, now listen here, this is the Protestant faith. And if you can't tolerate it, I've had some students who sat through those lectures, and I've seen the sweat beat up on their foreheads. And I've seen their faces get red. And I've said, listen, I want you to decide right now, if you honestly before God, if you can't tolerate the Protestant doctrine of justification. You need to decide now and get out. Here's what I'll do. If you decide this isn't for you, come and tell me and I will drive you to St. Timothy's. I will drive you to St. Timothy's and I will enroll you in catechism class so that you can be received as a member of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. because you've got a lot of work. You better get started soon. Purgatory is hard. And if I were you, I'd be going to mass three times a day. And in fact, I would hire a priest on retainer. And I would be in that guy's confessional every 10 minutes. Father, forgive me for it's been 37 seconds since my last confession. Because if you believe God is an awesome and righteous and holy God, who is a consuming fire, if you really believe that, you wouldn't mess around. And if the Roman system is right, you'd better get busy. But the Roman church, the medieval church, even equivocated on that. They said on the one hand, God is an awesome and consuming fire. But they also sent another message that's parallel to this doctrine of congruent merit. where they said, God is like your Irish uncle. And when you sin, if it's not a mortal sin, he says, oh, I faint now. Go to confession. Confess your sins. And go have a beer. And don't worry about it. It'll be fine. There won't be worry in us. That's what the priest said, you know, the father confessor said to Martin Luther. Always in here confessing your sins. Get out of here. Come back when you've got something to confess. Because it's you see on the one hand God is an awesome fire, but he's also half drunk Irish uncle. Eugenio Irish uncle who overlooks things. I'll read the Bible. Ask that poor schmuck who caught the ark when it tipped off the cart. Ask Uzzah. Which is God, Uzzah? Is he a consuming fire? Or is he an Irish uncle? I think we know what other would say. I touched the ark and I died. I think I have to go with the holy thing. The Roman Church said that you are as justified, that is accepted before God, as you are sanctified. How are you doing today? any, any, don't raise your hand, any entirely sanctified people here today. Anybody here without sin? Some of you people have sinned while I was talking. I've seen your faces. I can see it in your eyes. I know what you're thinking. When will we ever stop? That might not actually be a sin. The Roman Church says that you are as justified as you are sanctified. God accepts you to the degree that you are sanctified. Justification is sanctification. Justification, acceptance with God, is contingent on sanctification. And just like sanctification, it's progressive and it's future. You know, remarkably, there are Protestant theologians ostensibly Protestant theologians today talking about a two-stage doctrine of justification. They say you are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, in this life. But when you stand before God, you had better have a sufficient degree of intrinsic sanctity. And some of them have even said that the finished work of Jesus Christ impunity is not sufficient for future justification. The finished work of Jesus Christ is not sufficient for your future justification. It's as if scripture says there is now therefore no condemnation in this life for those who are in Christ Jesus. But in the next, you better be ready. That's what they're teaching. And it's in the Napalm churches. I've had extensive email conversations about it and with people who were either tempted by it or were holding to it. And that was the Roman doctrine. Except in the Roman doctrine, there's no present justification. At least in this version, there's a present justification. But in the Roman doctrine, there's no present justification. No one's ever justified in this life. It's all future. Finally, there was a necessity of reformation. And all of this is the background to the necessity of the Reformation. All of this justification by sanctification. All of this infusion of grace, all of this reading of the Bible as old law, new law, all of this, all of this doctrine, all of this piety, it issued in a perfectly righteous and sanctified church, right? In the late medieval period and in the early 16th century. not according to a Roman council that met in the early 16th century. I think it was the 5th Lateran Council. I don't have my Reformation notes in front of me, so I may have missed that. But I believe it was the 5th Lateran Council. I believe it was around 1506 or thereabouts. And it concluded, now this is a Roman council. This isn't a dissident group. These are bishops, these are cardinals, and they declared that the Roman Church, the Western Church, we were all Roman Catholics then, was corrupt, and here I'm quoting verbatim, in head and members. When Martin Luther went to Rome in 1510, he expected to see a city shining on a hill, and instead he found a steaming dung heap. He said, if there's a hell, Rome is built on it. He saw priests going into brothels. He saw a sale of indulgences on a scale that he couldn't imagine. He saw corruption, ecclesiastical corruption, moral corruption, in the highest levels of the Roman Church. In the late medieval period, among the Renaissance popes, corruption was so bad that even the most hard political observers of the time were shocked. Popes were murdering people. Pope's were beginning multiple children. Remember, these are supposed to be priests who have taken a vow of celibacy. Keeping multiple concubines. Medieval church was a mess. Congregations were without priests. It was in many ways a wholesale disaster. There was a moral crisis in the late medieval church, in the church, in the pews. in the episcopacy in the papacy in the civil realm. There was an authority crisis that had existed. Since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when there had arisen a series of anti-popes, and it was impossible for ordinary people to determine who was actually the pope. There were certain points at which there was not only one pope, and not only two popes, but even even three popes, each of them excommunicating the followers of the other, so that all of Europe was excommunicated. There were Roman theologians, one of whom was named William of Ockham, declaring that the papacy was anti-Christ. This is hundreds of years before the Reformation. So this isn't just Protestant polemics. There was, and perhaps most importantly, there was a spiritual crisis. And the spiritual crisis was exactly that faced by Martin Luther when he went for his first communion, when he went to administer his first communion, his first Mass. He realized that he was standing before an all-holy God who does, and he realized that the God of the Bible, the God of the Christian faith, is not a genial Irish uncle. He's a consuming fire. And he realized that he was attempting to stand before God as a priest to administer or mediate or dispense, is the best way to think of it in those terms, to dispense grace to sinners so that they might, might possibly one day stand before that all holy God on the basis of intrinsic Sanctity wrought by grace in cooperation with grace. If you've ever been in that kind of a situation, if you've ever been in a congregation where the minister only preached the law, you haven't done enough. God is not pleased with you. I don't know if you've ever experienced that. But lots of people have. It happens all the time. It happens every Sabbath. I get emails all the time from people all over the United States. They say, Clark, you tell us to find a reformed church. I keep trying and no one can preach the gospel. All I ever get is do this and do that. And you're not good enough and God's not pleased with you. When you live under that kind of preaching, what happens to you? You begin to doubt, you begin to fear, you begin to wonder, well, maybe God really isn't pleased with me. And the truth is that outside of Jesus Christ, he isn't pleased with you. And if you attempt to present yourself to him on the basis of your internal spiritually wrought spirit, wrought sanctity and righteousness, I guarantee you the thermometer is not going to make it all the way to the top. And there's no such thing as purgatory. It doesn't exist. It's not in the Bible. It's not in our faith. It's a myth. And that when you die and if you die without perfect righteousness, If you get hit by a car on the way home tonight, and if you die without perfect righteousness, I guarantee you that the same God that Uzzah met is the God that you will meet. The God who caused the earth to open up and swallow up people. The God who without compunction and a second thought set afloat and destroyed the world that then was except for Noah and his family. who without a second thought, without any hesitation, without any qualms, and no doubt, destroyed Pharaoh and his hosts. That's the God who is, and no other. And Luther knew it. Was the Reformation a mistake? Not for Martin Luther. Not for Martin Luther. Was the Reformation a mistake? No. It was a matter of life and death. And it was a matter of eternal life and eternal death. The good news, historically speaking, is that there was a Reformation, despite all the improbability, despite all the consensus against what became Reformation doctrine. There was a Reformation anyway. Because of fat, beer drinking, Bible believing, God fearing, German monk stood up and preached the Word of God. He said, people keep talking about Luther this and Luther that. He said, I didn't do anything. I drank beer with Philip in Wittenberg. The Word did it all. Was the Reformation a mistake? The Reformation was only a mistake if the Gospel is a mistake. And I'm telling you, the Gospel is not a mistake. If you've put your trust tonight in Jesus Christ and in His finished work for sinners, you are right with God. Don't leave here tonight without knowing that. that if you've trusted in Jesus, when God looks at you, and He always looks at you, He only sees the righteousness of Jesus. It is as if you have done everything that Jesus did. It's all credited to you. And you receive that only by trusting in that Jesus and in His finished work. Was the Reformation a mistake? Only if that message was a mistake, was it a mistake for the Apostle Paul to confront the Apostle Peter and say, Brother, you are contradicting the gospel. I don't think so, not according to Galatians 2 and not according to the Apostle Peter, how do we know? Because the Apostle Peter stood up later at the synod in Jerusalem and he said, Brothers, why are we trying to impose this law on the Gentiles? We can't keep it ourselves. If Rome will have Peter for her pope, she ought to listen to it. Because the first pope, if he was the first pope, preached the gospel. Pope Peter doesn't think it's a mistake. Because it isn't a mistake. Thanks for your attention. We'll see you tomorrow morning and tomorrow evening. Thank you very much.