Well, greetings. It's good to be with you again. I trust our evening last night of, as I said, riding the bullet train through church history at near blinding speed has been enough for you to catch a few glimpses out the window of important men and movements used by our Lord, sometimes unexpected men and unexpected movements to build and advance his church and his gospel. As one brother put it to me afterward last night, that we were able to see a few mountain peaks. And I think that's maybe the best way to think of our journey through church history. As you ride a bullet train, it's hard to get attention to the detail up close to the tracks, as it were. But maybe we can fix our eyes on a few peaks in the distance as we pass. Again, as I say, contemplate revisiting some of these places on your own. I'll give you later this morning a few recommendations on some resources that can help you do that, some more advanced, some very introductory, and Lord willing, those will be of benefit to you. This morning, for the next just under an hour, we want to consider the Reformation, primarily the Protestant Reformation, but also, toward the end of our time, a consideration also of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, or as some historians, particularly Catholic historians, want to tell us, just the Catholic Reformation. Probably a little bit of truth in both. those descriptions, and we'll get to that in our course of study. For Protestants, it's easy to imagine, though we know better, that the church began somewhere in the early 16th century in Germany. That all things important in the history of the church began with, as what one author says, a monk and a mallet. One who nailed his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg and started this grand reformation. A great architect of reformation was driving in the first nail of this new edifice called the Protestant Church. You can tell possibly by the tone of my voice that I'm a bit more cynical as to whether it was so well conceived in the minds of the early reformers like Martin Luther. uh... or even of of all works when we When Martin Luther writes his 95 Theses in 1517 for the reform of indulgence abuses or the abuse of indulgence sales within the Church of Rome, it's not at all clear if you read the 95 Theses that he is yet broken free of the notion or theology of indulgences. It's simply their abuse that primarily occupies him. He also seems to think that the Pope, Leo X, might actually be sympathetic to his pleas and to his theses. It's sometimes difficult to tell because Luther can be somewhat humorous and wry and coy in his own way, whatever word you want to apply. Was he really opposing the Pope and buttering him up with false platitudes and compliments? Or did he sincerely think the Pope was going to listen to his proposals and reform the Church? I think we'll never answer that question. But suffice it to say, it doesn't seem that there is a well-conceived, clear notion of what we now know as the Protestant Reformation of the Church in the mind of Martin Luther. He was simply, as he entered into that period, he was simply the latest in a long line of calls from within the Roman Church for internal reform of the papacy, of church practice, and of canon law. That is, in Luther's mind, probably where he stands in 1517. We'll see in a few moments, in a very short space of time, he finds that he is not going to be allowed to stand comfortably there as yet another reformer. He's going to either have to retract from some of his propositions and come back into a more agreeable relationship with Rome, or he's going to have to be excommunicated and take his chances out there in the wide world all by himself. And we know how that history goes. The same is also true in the mind of Ulrich Zwingli. He doesn't seem to have thought in 1521 that it was now time to declare himself and to reform the church, but he simply slowly through a slow process began to have different convictions about the church. We'll investigate those in a moment. Probably John Calvin, more than any of the other first generation reformers, did have some concept of the Reformation of the church in a Protestant direction by the time he began to write. But by the time he began to write, Theological works in the middle of the 1530s, the work of Reformation, the excommunication of Luther and the rise of Lutheranism was already a well-established fact by 14 or 15 years at that point. So in that case, Calvin might have had the clearest sense that what he was doing was actually moving himself definitively outside of the Catholic Church. Well then let's open up with a consideration first of Martin Luther. This would be the first point on your outline. Luther was born in 1483, died in 1546. He was born to He was born into a family where his father was a working class man, but made provisions for him to be well-educated, first in law, but then in a traumatic moment, in a thunderstorm, Luther famously cries out and makes a vow that he will, I think, St. Anne, that he will enter the monastery if he will be delivered from this thunderstorm. He was, in fact, delivered and promptly entered the monastery, much to the dismay of his father. There was no money or future in the monastery. But in the field of law, certainly there were prospects to be had. Anyhow, Luther gave himself to the life of the monk in great earnest. He was not a doubting or cynical monk, as some might assume because of his later activities in reform effort. He was, in fact, a very fastidious and sincere monk. And he had maybe an overly rosy view of the Roman church upon his entrance, but that soon began to crumble for two reasons. First was the course of his own studies. He studied what we call in academic circles late medieval nominalism. Late medieval nominalism put a great deal of emphasis upon man's capabilities to muster up his energies, both intellectually and morally, to know and obey God. And Luther was not immediately put off by this. In fact, he threw himself wholeheartedly into that effort to make himself right with God, both intellectually and morally, through doing what was in him, a catchphrase of nominalism, doing what is in him. He found, though, in the course of years, now between, let's say, 1509 and 1517, as a monk, that his soul was increasingly tortured. And of all the monks in the monastery at Erfurt, it was certainly Luther who was the most tormented about the condition of his soul. His overseer at at the monastery thought that the best course of action for Luther to resolve these doubts, to get an end to the matter, was to be trained in the Scriptures and become a professor of theology. To our minds, that might sound a little bit backward. That being a professor of theology should most certainly follow upon having a settled sense of your spiritual condition. Certainly, becoming a professor of scripture and of theology should not be considered the way in which one might eventually be converted or find peace for their soul. As wrongheaded as that advice might seem to us, it turns out that it was good advice. Luther took his doctorate and began to lecture first on the sentences of Peter Lombard, which is basically a summary entry into the history of the church's teachings up to that point. Later, once he was a doctor, he was allowed to lecture upon scripture itself. Luther seems to have been lecturing on the Bible, Psalms and Romans, Galatians, others of the Pauline epistles, but especially Romans, Galatians, and the Psalms for years before it seems that he was actually converted. He's wrestling with the text now in his hands that Erasmus had produced in Greek, and he's reading for himself the Greek text, no longer the Latin Vulgate primarily. And what this does is this creates not the peace that he was seeking, but reading the Apostle Paul seemed to compound the problem of medieval nominalism. Medieval nominalism says man is right with God by doing what was in him, and what he found in the Apostle Paul was a God who accepts for our righteousness nothing but absolute, but an absolute sort of righteousness. The kind of righteousness he realized he would never attain by doing what is in him. The other thing that scandalized Luther and sort of shook up his life within the Roman Catholic Church in the Augustan order in which he was, was his visit to Rome. Now, as I mentioned briefly last night, when he visits Rome, he's absolutely dismayed at the lack of earnestness among the official structure and leadership of the church. They don't seem to have anywhere near the kind of earnestness about spiritual things that tortured his own soul. He also finds that a lot of the order that he would have imagined to be there was actually a sham. He talks about meeting, again, the children of popes and of bishops, obviously something that was flagrant abuse of church practice and standard then that all these illegitimate children of the Pope should be cared for by these abuses in Rome. He returns really jaded by his experience in Rome, but all the more determined to get an end to the matter of his soul. In 1512 to 1517, the Pope had called, first one Pope and then Leo X continued, the Fifth Lateran Council of the Church, which was for the purpose of, again, an effort after 150 years of many efforts to internally reform the Church. And there were proposals. by some Catholic priests that there should be a thorough reform of the church in terms of its canon law and that the powers of the papacy to give away different bishoprics and official positions in the church at will should be taken away. The canon law should be rewritten. The majority prevailed over that sentiment and said, no, no, we just need to bear down and be more faithful with the canon law that we received. That was shown to be, within six months of the close of the Lateran Council, very ill-advised. And as much as six months later, Luther was nailing his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg. Again, issuing a call for reform. Again, not something new, not even particularly radical in his proposals. In fact, prior to that time, Luther had, just a month earlier, proposed something much more radical than any proposal we find in the 95 Theses. In his September disputation against Scholastic theology, he had nailed theses to the door in which he refuted and wanted to make an argument with Aristotle and with other certain philosophies as totally useless to the Church. If you want to get a sense of which is a more highbrow, dogmatic attack on the system of Roman Catholic theology, certainly the theses against Scholastic theology are much more radical than the 95 theses. So why didn't that rankle Rome? Why didn't that cause any trouble for Luther? I think probably one reason in particular. It was an elusive and kind of esoteric argument in the minds of the populace. There was no way that you were going to mass publish the theses against Scholastic theology and distribute them to the barely literate society and expect them to appreciate and understand the sophistication of the argument and jump on board for theological reform. That wasn't going to happen. But indulgences, you see, they understood that. They understood that because that was in their face. Tetzel was in their town selling these indulgences saying that once the coffer rings with the coin out from purgatory, the soul would spring. They understand what's being sold to them and they suspect maybe that it's a bill of goods. When Luther says, it is in fact a bill of goods, that doesn't take a lot of heady contemplation to grasp the argument and to see clearly the abuses in Rome. The theological reforms that Luther was beginning to experiment with gained absolutely no traction. His 95 theses for disputation about indulgence abuses were not actually written or intended for the populace to read. They were simply to be theses to be debated within the University of Wittenberg. Nailing them on the door of the church was not this kind of dramatic event in all likelihood. It was simply the normal process in which professors would post the theses for discussion. When these were taken down and published and sent around within a month's time, they were in the hands of the populace and it was immediately far beyond anything like an academic disputation. We should say on the political side That the reason that Luther is able to carry this off initially without much repercussion is that his immediate protection came from Frederick the Wise. Frederick the Wise was not answerable ultimately to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Frederick the Wise was the, for lack of a better term, the top dog in that area and what he said went. In the case of Luther, Luther was the star lecturer at Frederick the Wise's own university in Wittenberg that he had founded. He was proud of his university. He was proud of the faculty that he had assembled, and he was not about to let Charles V, a Spanish king, a Holy Roman Emperor, or the Pope in Rome, come and disrupt the good thing that he had created in Wittenberg. And so for a lot of Frederick's own self-interest, he opted to protect Luther from the calls in Rome that Luther should be shipped away and appear before certain councils and needed to come and do penance before the Pope in Rome. Frederick the Wise said, you're not going to get my monk, in other words. And in a purely secular way, Luther was protected in order to advance his theses. The next year, something probably even more profound for Luther's theology later on takes place. Again, he's still a Roman Catholic monk teaching in the University of Wittenberg. The next year, in the city of Heidelberg, he put forth theses for yet another disputation. Again, this was the normal activity of an academic in that day. In the Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation, he names what he calls a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. And he sees these as two different ways of doing theology. Now, stay with me for a moment because this is important for Luther's entire movement toward what we might call a reformed or reforming approach to theology. The theology of glory, as he understood it, was the theology that was carried on by those scholastics in the universities who thought that through the power of intellect and reason, by, as what the nominalists said, doing what was in them, they could, as it were, ascend to the very knowledge of God as he is in himself. And Luther saw in this a connection between both their intellectual aspirations of waxing eloquent on mysteries of theology by virtue of their own intellectual power with the assumption also that man could muster up from that same source the power to keep and obey the law of God. The same thing that caused the theologians of glory, those that thought they could achieve the heights of glory by the powers of their intellect, the very thing that caused them to be so arrogant in their theologizing was the same thing that caused them to teach a workspace salvation. That man could dig down within himself and muster up the resources that were native to him and achieve the thing that God desired, whether it was the knowledge of God or whether it was the obedience of God, this could be attained by doing what was in Him. Luther calls these the theology of glory, and he contrasts them to what he calls the theology of the cross, or probably better, theologians of glory and theologians of the cross. The theologian of the cross looks for the wisdom of God not within his own discoveries, he looks for the wisdom of God in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. He looks at Christ and he doesn't see glory, he sees shame. He looks at the cross of Jesus Christ and he doesn't see the wisdom of man, he sees the wisdom of God which seems to be to man foolish. And he'll ask the question, would any man have ever conceived of the cross as a way of salvation? And he sees a kind of enigma in the gospel that flouts the wisdom of man and shows us wisdom hidden under foolishness. That is the gospel. And he wants to say this. As much as we must submit and humble our intellects and allow God to reveal Himself in His way, rather than thinking that we can climb up to Him in the power of our own intellects, but rather come to Him intellectually through the means that He has chosen, in the same way we also must come to Him in terms of law-keeping and obedience. Just as we can't mount up to the wisdom of God with our strength, we can't mount up to the obedience of God with the strength native to us. He gives this account of his conversion, and this lies back of his theological discovery. He says, For a long time I went astray in the monastery and didn't know what I was about. To be sure I knew something, but I didn't know what it was until I came to the text in Romans 1.17. He who through faith is righteous shall live. That text helped me. There I saw the righteousness Paul was talking about. Earlier in the text, I read righteousness. I related the abstract righteousness with the concrete, the righteous one, and became sure of my cause. Basically to say this, I discovered that the righteousness, those that are righteous before God, are made righteous by the one who is himself righteous. I learned to distinguish between the righteousness of the law and the righteousness of the gospel. I lacked nothing before this except that I made no distinction between the law and the gospel. I regarded them both as the same thing and held that there was no difference between Christ and Moses except the times in which they lived and their degree of perfection. But when I discovered the proper distinction, namely that the law is one thing and the gospel another, I made myself free. What he's saying is this, as a theologian of glory, he looked at the law and he saw a ladder by which he could, as it were, morally climb up into heaven. When he comes to see what he comes to see through a theology of the cross, that it's not he who climbs up to God through the law, but it's actually Christ who comes down from God and makes us through his own work righteous before God. Not a ladder by which we climb, but God Himself condescending. So the theology in his mind changes more from one of personal ascension to divine condescension. in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I think this is probably one of the most important theological contributions that Luther made. For all the things that he espoused in his theology that we may not agree with, this is one that in particular becomes a very centerpiece of Reformation theology, both among Lutherans, but also among the Reformed later on. The other thing that we find in Luther is that he sees righteousness as imputed to him and alien from him, so that the righteousness that we receive comes from another. He says, by the righteousness of the law, man is not pronounced righteous in the sight of God, but God imputes the righteousness of faith freely through his mercy for the sake of Christ. There is no doubt that the law is holy, righteous, and good. Therefore, the works of the law are holy, righteous, and good. Nevertheless, man is not justified in the sight of God through them. In 1520, Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. Luther, in fine Lutheran fashion, with all the drama that was Luther, burned the papal bull on the very day in which the deadline set by the Pope ran out. Rather than return to Rome and penitent and making nice with Rome, he burns the Pope's bull and he casts himself, at least for his earthly life, on the goodwill of Frederick the Wise. Charles V, at this time, is the Holy Roman Emperor and he sees a division now between Frederick and the religion there in Frederick's reign in Germany and the religion of the Pope in Rome. And Charles V, out of political interest, is very concerned that none of these priests like Luther, began to break off and cause a disruption with the Mother Church in Rome. Not because Charles unnecessarily has these deep, rich, sincere Catholic ambitions, but he needs to keep his empire in order, and a disruption of this sort between Wittenberg and Rome was unacceptable. In 1521 then, Charles V calls for a council in the city of Worms and he gives Luther promise of safe conduct, safe passage. If you come to the council, we assure you, you will not be harmed, you will not be shipped off to Rome to fend for yourself. You're not going to be taken away from Frederick and his protection. Luther famously declares at the end of his defense in Worms, Unless I am convinced by the testimony of scripture or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience, May God help me, amen. Other versions have his famous here I stand passage. Whether he said that or not I think doesn't matter. In effect he says exactly that. My conscience is bound to the word of God. He's striking off in these sort of startling ways in a direction of the primacy and soul and final authority of scripture. Whether he, again, is conceiving this as a well-planned path to reformation or whether he's just saying these things as God has dealings with him in his own experience, I think probably the latter is the more plausible explanation. It's not exactly clear that for years after he's already having these thoughts, Luther is eager to break with Rome. Eventually, though, once he's excommunicated and once the Lutheran churches begin to take on a life of their own, it's very clear that there's going to be no reconciliation. with Rome after that. failed to bring Luther under control at the Council of Worms on his return to Wittenberg. He was kidnapped, but graciously by friends, taken and basically put in the Wartburg Castle for some time in order to protect him from those that would want to physically do harm to him. He redeemed the time in the Wartburg Castle by translating the New Testament from Greek into German, and when he came out of that When he came out of that exile and posed upon him by his own friends, he came with a version of the New Testament in German. I think some of these events signal to us why the sort of rising tide of Protestantism was never going to be beat back by Rome. Once the people had the scriptures in their hand, once appeals were being made before imperial diets to the scripture and the scripture alone, we had effectually moved this monk out of that old sphere of authority which was popes and councils and placed him now to answer to God for himself. Equally massive in the way that it rattled the assumptions of the late medieval church, which is itself sort of hobbling along and going to have to reinvent itself within 30 years. I might say as an aside, A few years ago, I took a course at Villanova University with a Roman Catholic historian, and he was surprisingly very sympathetic to a lot of the concerns about church corruption and others that Luther voiced. But his comment was to me, if you Protestants had only waited 30 years for the Council of Trent, we would have resolved many of your difficulties. And in a certain sense, he was right. The Council of Trent does answer a lot of the concerns of Luther, but the abiding and profound concern of being captive only to Scripture and being made righteous by a righteousness not his own. A theology of the cross against a theology of glory is the thing that I think most Catholics don't understand when they think about church reform in terms of the orderliness of the institution. Yes, those were right concerns, but by the time the Council of Trent came along, those concerns were much lesser in comparison to these others that had emerged. In 1529, at the Marburg Colloquy, there was a meeting between Luther and Zwingli from Zurich, and Aquilin Patius, another lesser reformer. On many articles of faith, they agreed so that the early reform movement in Zurich and the Lutheran movement in Germany found many points of agreement, but they could not come to an agreement on the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. Luther did not ever divest himself of this belief that Christ was present in his body in the Lord's Supper, though he rejected transubstantiation. He developed an equally absurd notion of consubstantiation in its place, which was supposed to remove some of the more odious aspects of transubstantiation. Zwingli, on the far other end of the spectrum, argued that the supper was purely memorial, that there was no presence of Christ there, but it was for memorial purposes. Luther refused to find a way to compromise or to compromise toward each other or negotiate that relationship, and he effectually cut off Lutheran ties to the budding reform movement by declaring of Zwingli and Akhlampadius, we are not of the same spirit. This is radical language. That's the kind of language that's so incendiary, it becomes a great embarrassment for any Lutheran to try to reconcile himself, to reform Protestantism as it was growing up in the certain cities in Switzerland at that time, without basically saying, Luther botched the Marburg Colloquy. Lutherans don't like to say Luther botched things. That's different than Calvinists. Calvinists, Presbyterians, Baptists, we're more than happy to say Calvin was wrong on this or that. Lutherans have a more difficult time. It's a little more personality-centered. And Luther was a personality in a way that no Reformed person ever was. He was, in his own day, larger than life. And I think this is important. When he was good, His personality, when he was good in theology, carried a force that was overwhelming and persuasive. When he got things wrong, I think obviously his statements with respect to the Jews, but also with respect to the Zwinglians, which are at times equally severe and radical, He could also be bombastic and divisive as well. When you get Luther, you get Luther warts and all. There's nothing dignified with Luther, but also there's no pretense with Luther. What you see is what you get. I think in some ways that type of Rough-around-the-edges reformer was exactly the kind of was exactly the kind of person even with his inadequacies That was that was useful for the advance and for the declaration and the boldness needed at this juncture in history That's not to excuse any sins of Luther, but simply to say The the Lord will you the Lord will use us in spite of ourselves and even turn our turn our weaknesses to the advantages of the gospel True of Luther true of us as well, I should say. Moving on then, Luther obviously gets the lion's share because of the dynamic work of reformation. In Switzerland, the city of Zurich first received reform in the personal work of Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli died in 1531. That is a relatively early death for a first-generation reformer. Zwingli never lives to hear the name of John Calvin. His successor, Heinrich Bollinger, of course, becomes a good friend of Calvin, but Zwingli himself is gone by that time. Also, Zwingli does not seem to have left behind any documents of massive importance like Luther's bondage of the will or his commentary on Romans or his disputation against scholastic theology or the 95 thesis. We don't have this kind of body of literature with Zwingli. What we do have with Zwingli is a very different kind of motivation for reform. Luther's motivation for reform comes from a reaction against his late medieval scholastic nominalism, that doing what is in you philosophy of life. That is not the training of Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli was trained as a humanist. He was trained not in the scholastic method or dogmas of Luther, but he was trained to investigate texts. And the way that this and played into his early reform motivations was that in recovering the New Testament text in good humanist fashion, he desired to get back to the original and uncorrupted source of Christianity. When he went to the New Testament, he saw Christianity in a kind of pristine glory, and this moves him with his humanist inclination to insist that the church do nothing more than what the New Testament prescribes. I guess if I could put it this way, there's almost a kind of regulative principle that isn't primarily, or at least initially, biblically motivated, but it's probably motivated from his humanism. But the way it translates into his approach to the text is a version of sola fide in which the New Testament regulates the worship of the church. When he can't find transubstantiation or consubstantiation, but he certainly finds do this in remembrance of me, Well, then we can just change our doctrine of the Lord's Supper to bring it more into line with what we see in the text of Scripture. This is the importance of Zwingli. He is very unencumbered by certain errors in the history of the church. It also maybe can cause him to pass over some of the church's accomplishments as well, but it also keeps him from having a number of assumptions that might have held Luther back. He died in what one historian calls a pointless little civil war in 1531. He died basically defending the city of Zurich, not defending the cause of Christ, not defending the Holy Roman Empire, defending the interest of Zurich against Catholic cantons in Switzerland. In some ways, that's where we can leave the record of Zwingli for our purposes. John Calvin, the third-pointer outline, much like Luther before him, was sent by his father to study law. And Calvin, if you read Calvin, you can see his training in legal studies. He's a very well-reasoned, argumentative, make-a-case kind of reformer. And it also gives him a kind of patient persistence via his training in law. We know very little comparatively about Calvin's life as opposed to someone like Luther. Luther's life was an open book. Calvin was, by contrast, very reserved in relating any points of personal narrative. We know this much, that he seems to at least have been converted by 1533 as a student in Paris. In 1534 and 1535, he had openly allied himself with the Lutheran-friendly group there in the university in Paris. He had begun reading a lot of Luther's works, appreciated what he read. Again, he doesn't tell us much about this except the fact that it happened. In 1534, the king of France, Francis I, came down decidedly on the side of the Roman Catholics against this creeping Protestantism, or Lutheranism as it probably would have been called then, in the country of France. In 1535, Calvin flees France basically to preserve himself from the opposition to Protestants that were growing in his home country. Converted probably by 1533, I think a fascinating thing to see is that he writes the first edition of the Institutes, over 500 pages of it, by 1536. He's 26 or 27 years old when the Institutes is published. He probably begins to write it when he's 25. A fascinating fact is that though the Latin version of the Institutes goes through five revisions, the last one being in 1559, he changes virtually none of the substance from the 1536 edition. Calvin's theology, and again, because he doesn't tell us much about how this happens, Calvin's theology seems to come to him in a very full and comprehensive way, such that he can, in his old age, look back on something from the earlier part of his life, from when he was in his mid-twenties, and say, that's where I stand, and I think that's still good theology for the churches. Again, that's not because of hubris or arrogance, but simply that the Lord gave him the kind of mind that was so given to clear and comprehensive expression. He was so unlike Luther, not saying much off the cuff. But everything quite deliberate, purposeful, maybe this is the lawyer side, everything is a good case when Calvin seeks to make it. Maybe for that reason we find that he retracts virtually nothing through the course of his life and his later theology doesn't seem to undo any major point in his early theology as a man in his mid-twenties. I've passed my 20s into my 30s, and there are things that I thought and said when I was 25 that I already would not say again. That's a drastic comparison myself to Calvin, obviously, but you can see there's an amazing There's an amazing simplicity and coherence of thought in this young man and he's raised up to be really a champion of sophisticated expression of biblical and reformed conviction. His desire is to, as every young student I suppose, to really escape the world and become a writer and a thinker in Basel. In fact, it's in Basel that he first produces his institutes. As he's traveling on for this life of academic ease in Strasbourg, he stays over famously in the city of Geneva, and he's approached by a Protestant preacher in the city, Pharrell. And Pharrell, upon threat of praying down imprecatory psalms and prayers upon Calvin, says that if you leave this city and don't take the leadership of the Reformation here, this is what I'm going to pray for you. It terrifies Calvin. Calvin is 27. years old at that time. So he's still a young, unmarried bachelor who's going to live a life of academic ease. And Pharrell really grips him by the collar and says, don't you do it. We need boots on the ground as well. For most people, this would have meant the end of an academic career. Becoming a public churchman in this way, taking the lead of the care of souls, the preaching of sermons, the writing of letters and consolation, would have more than exhausted any normal man. In the case of Calvin, His academic work continues and flourishes even as he faithfully carries out those other things. If you can look at the works of Calvin, some of you have these on your shelves, and you look at the commentaries alone, which are nearly 20,000 pages in English translation of biblical commentary. This is a man who died at 57 years old and isn't writing until he's 25. 20,000 pages of biblical commentary. volumes upon volumes of recorded sermons, lectures to his students, seven volumes of tracts and letters that we have in English translation, to say nothing of the institutes that in the critical edition is 1,500 pages of very close and excellent theological prose. All of this while raising children, giving counsel to people in marital strife or who had lost children to death, disease, and himself afflicted with numerous bodily afflictions, obviously, definitely gout among others that afflicted him. In 1559, He founds the Genevan Academy and that is run by his successor Theodore Beza. The Genevan Academy becomes essentially ground zero for all robust reformed theological education that's going to spread out to the continent and even up into England. and to Scotland. One thing I should say before we leave Calvin behind, there is a caricature of Calvin as if he were a kind of king in Geneva, as if he ruled Geneva with an iron hand. And yet the record seems to show that Calvin was living in the times as anybody else. He has a tug of war for control of the church with the city council for most of his career. I'll give you an example. Calvin advocated for a weekly observance of the Lord's Supper. That was his preference. When he arrived in Geneva, they observed the Lord's Supper once annually. The compromise with the city council was that they would be allowed to observe it quarterly. And as best we can tell, that's as far as Calvin ever got in insisting upon his theological preference in the church. I think that miniature anecdote just explains that Calvin was not sitting on a throne in Geneva ruling things with an iron fist in the way that sometimes he's caricatured. He's having to negotiate a relationship of the church with an imperial free city. That is to say, this is a city that's completely autonomous within the empire. It can make its own law and rules. He's having to negotiate that relationship with the protection of the city council. Maybe this is a time to say this. Much of these early Reformation movements that succeeded were closely allied to the protection of some either council or magistrate. And for this reason, some have called this the magisterial reformation, that is to say the reformation as it was under the magistrates. Though we may believe in our hearts in the separation of church and state and that the church should not be a wing of the state, there is a certain sense in which that relationship was to the advantage of the Reformed faith for a considerable amount of time. Free churchmanship does not seem to be a Reformed ideal until sometime in the 17th century. Calvin's insistence upon submission in church practice to the secular rulers is probably not one that would resonate not only with Baptists, it wouldn't resonate with American Presbyterians either. That way of conceiving the church's relationship in society may seem foreign and unbiblical to us, and yet It was within that context that true reformation in life and doctrine was able to be propagated throughout Europe with some success. Now a few words about the English Reformation. The joke among Reformation scholars is, what English Reformation? Some who acknowledge it and there is an English Reformation call it, I think appropriately, the Long Reformation. There is no monk Rattling the world by nailing a set of controversial theses on a door There is no Calvin who sort of appears on the spring as a on the scene as a kind of almost strangely fully developed 25-year-old giving theology to the Church of England. The Church of England's Reformation does not even begin as really a spiritual matter whatsoever. It begins very unauspiciously as almost a crass political seeking of the monarch, Henry VIII. Henry famously sought a divorce from his Spanish wife, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Catherine of Aragon. The Pope wouldn't give him the divorce. The reason the Pope would not give Henry the divorce, the Pope was known to annul marriages for potentates when it was convenient both for them and for him. He wouldn't give one to Henry VIII. The reason was because Henry VIII's wife, Catherine of Argonne, was the aunt of Charles V, who was the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Pope desperately needed the favor of Charles V. Therefore, he's not going to grant a divorce for Charles V's aunt, who doesn't want to be shamed and divorced. That's just politics down and dirty, so to speak. But it creates the situation in England in which Reformation can begin to take hold. Not because Henry ever has a change of heart. He, in 1535, with the approval of the Parliament, breaks from Rome and he is declared by Parliament to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. He's a massive ego and he rather likes this position of supreme head so the thought of going back to Rome doesn't attract him. He freezes all the money in England that was going to support Rome. He also takes over all the monasteries and all their lands become royal lands at that point. So he becomes in all of this massively wealthy, also supreme head of the church, but he doesn't want to break with Roman practice. He doesn't want to break with the mass. He demands that the monks and the nuns continue to keep their celibate vows even after he had taken their monasteries. So there's a kind of irrationalism in Henry VIII. In God's providence, he was surrounded by a number of men who, though they played into the facilitation of his multiple divorces until he could eventually produce a male heir in Edward VI, Though they had their part in that political maneuvering, they were also men of sincere interest in the doctrine of Luther, of Heinrich Bollinger in Zurich, and of Calvin in Geneva. Most notably among these was his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Upon Henry's death, His son, Edward VI, at the age of nine, assumed the throne. This is in 1547. Edward VI's handlers are all thoroughgoing Protestants, and not so much now of the Lutheran stripe, but much more of the Calvinist and Bollinger stripe in their convictions. In 1549, Cranmer rewrites the Order of Service and Worship for the Church of England. Again, this is a top-down Reformation. This is a Reformation approved by the state, carried out by churchmen who are essentially ministers of the state in this connection. But what you get in the 1549 prayer book, and then its revision in 1552, is a thoroughly reformed emphasis upon the grace of God. The sacramentalism of Rome is virtually stripped out of this. And you have a more Zurich and Genevan approach to an understanding of the Lord's Supper. In many ways, he rewrites a liturgy for the church that is full of evangelical grace. If you could read Cranmer's 1552 prayer book, you would find it profoundly devotional. and theologically sound. All that changes. Again, England is not steady for a number of years. In 1553, Edward VI dies at the age of 15, and his Roman Catholic half-sister, Mary of Tudor, later called Bloody Mary, for the reason that she sought to reintroduce Roman Catholicism in force back to England. Nearly 300 Protestants, including Cranmer and all the leaders of Reformation effort in England, were executed during this time. These executions were not popular with the English people. Maybe at first they could look aside, but after a time, these executions were increasingly unpopular. During her time as queen, a number of Protestants went down onto the continent for exile, and they wound up not in Lutheran cities, but in Reformed cities, most notably Zurich and Geneva. In Zurich and Geneva, whatever Reformed conviction had been growing in England became hardened in a very fast way, in that now they were actually sitting in these places and under these teachers, under Bollinger, striking up a relationship with Calvin. And when they returned after the death of Bloody Mary in 1558, they brought with them back to England a much more robust and informed Reformed conviction. This was understood by Elizabeth, a 25-year-old half-sister of Mary, I might say as a point of historical irony. All of the executions and divorces against wives that Henry VIII carried out in interest of gaining a male heir did him no good. In fact, every one of his children eventually sat on the throne. First his son and then both of his daughters sat on the throne, the very thing that he had initially sought to avoid. Elizabeth is overall friendly toward the Calvinistic doctrine that comes back from the continent, and she settles the church. And she's willing to meet these puritanical types coming back from the continent halfway. And she meets them with a compromise in which the Episcopalian structure of the church and herself as head of the church, or she doesn't take the title supreme head, she calls herself the chief governor of the church, not head of the church. But still, the church is under her thumb, and it's run in an Episcopalian form. She also keeps a lot of the liturgical baggage from Rome in terms of kneeling to receive the Lord's Supper and crossing oneself in the sanctuary, these sort of things that were detested by probably the Reformed majority within the church. But she insisted upon it. But she also allowed, in settling the church's dogma according to the 39 Articles, the Church of England to become to become robustly Calvinistic in its doctrine. That was to change within a century's time in terms of what was actually believed and taught. But for this time, we might call this a kind of sort of reformation of the church in that there's still a lot of Roman-esque looking baggage still attached to the church, but also the true gospel is preached. Now, I'm going to pass over, in the interest of time, the issue of confessionalization, number five, and just move straight on to Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Catholic attempts to reform itself, as we have said, have been going on for a long time before the Protestant Reformation comes along. Only the latest and greatest failure at this was the Fifth Lateran Council, and then Luther appears on the scene. After Luther appears on the scene, the whole issue of Rome's internal reformation of itself becomes very difficult. And it becomes difficult because any attempt to reform from within automatically makes one a suspect for Lutheran sympathies. You see, before 1517, calls for the reformation of the church were common and usually people were sympathetic to those calls. After 1517, it becomes to be very suspicious if you're calling for a reform of the church. Maybe you have reconciled yourself to Lutheranism, at least that's the suspicion. Luther didn't try to quell that. In fact, every time that the Roman Catholics produced a piece of literature calling for the reform of the Church and pointing out its corruptions, Luther tended to be the first one to get hold of the document and put it to press. And then he would intersperse his own comments along the way. It was a lot of, see, I told you so. type of literature going on. So this creates a very difficult problem for Rome. How do we reform ourselves, which desperately needs to happen? These Protestants are literally walking over us in certain parts of the Holy Roman Empire. So everyone knows reform needs to happen. How's it going to happen? About this time, a group rises up within the Roman Catholic Church following the person of Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius is the first Jesuit. And when Ignatius is converted, he actually converted to Roman Catholicism and most especially converted to adherence to the Pope. When he's converted, he has almost the exact opposite experience of Luther. Luther was the fastidious monk seeking liberation from works righteousness. Ignatius is exactly the opposite at about exactly the same time. He's the licentious, profligate young man who wants to be a knight, who wants to be a warrior. He wants to kill dragons and enjoy women and what life has to offer. He's severely injured in a battle in Rome, and as he's convalescing, he has this great conversion, as he would describe it, in which he realized what a waste his life was and that he needed to devote himself to good works and to the service of the church. He's not an educated man. He's simply a zealous man. He is granted a charter to found the Jesuits, initially to be only 60 members. Within his lifetime, the Jesuits grew to over 1,000 members. If there is a works righteousness in Rome in the 16th century, the Jesuits are the perfect embodiment of it. Their very rule of faith or the spiritual exercises that Ignatius wrote are essentially works righteousness writ large. Luther was crushed by those things, by that whole approach to life. Ignatius in all of his self-confidence celebrates works righteousness. Now the Council of Trent. In 1545 to 63, over the course of 18 years, the Council of Trent convened three times to rewrite the dogma, to rewrite the doctrine of the church. In doing this, let me just focus particularly on what they say about justification. First in Canon 1. If anyone saith that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature or that of law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema. That sounds pretty good. No good works without the grace of Jesus. Canon 9 shows a new spirit, though, that's rising within Rome. It reads this. If anyone saith that by faith alone the impious is justified, in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will, let him be anathema. At that point, I submit to you that Rome has effectually, at that moment, placed itself outside the gospel of grace. When we talk about reconciliation with Rome, I might say this. There's a lot in Roman Catholic theology that you would find wholly agreeable. When they write on the Trinity, when they write on the Incarnation, when they write on the Resurrection, some of these particular pieces of dogma, they have not broken in any way with the historic testimony of the Church. I think the discipline for us is to understand that for all of that, For all of that, in terms of a church that has the gospel and guards the deposit given to them, at this point in history, they let go definitively and officially of that dogma. Certainly many of them had done it years before the Council of Trent. There were other Catholics though that were absolutely scandalized and distraught by the Council of Trent because this work's righteousness was against the things that they read in Thomas Aquinas and in others. So I think the question of when did Rome become Rome, the church that has not the gospel. Certainly it was coming on for some years through the Middle Ages, but it becomes officially the condition of the church when in their canons of the Council of Trent they set down an anathema on Sola Fide. Let's close ourselves there on Reformation. Again, every one of these men are massive in their own right. I had meant to bring us into a discussion of Calvin's Institutes, but I'm going to, on that count, I'm just going to say Read Calvin's Institutes for a couple of reasons. Calvin's Institutes are not a traditional systematic theology. They are a robust and theologically informed guide to Christian piety. That is what he conceives. They're also intended as a guide for your reading of Scripture. so that you have a kind of proper theological orientation when you approach the words of Scripture. This was a particular problem, not a problem, but a challenge for Protestants. If we're going to put the Scripture in everyone's hand, how can we be assured that they're not all going to run off into excesses with their interpretation of Scripture? Isn't it dangerous to give Scripture to the common man? Look, folks, every heretic has his text. Yes, there is a danger when any sinful man has the Word of God in his hands and there is a question as to what kind of rule and guide and instruction is he going to submit himself to as he interprets the text. There's no such thing as an uninterpreted Bible. Calvin is keenly aware of that and he's doing a service to the church and his institutes to say these are in the broad strokes the things that are going to keep you sound as you read the Word of God for yourself. You do not read, Calvin is insistent, you do not read the Institutes instead of the Bible. You read the Institutes to really keep you within bounds as you read the Bible. I think all of us would have to confess that Being kept within bounds is not an oppressive thing. In fact, that is the whole purpose of the ancient creeds and confessions of the Church, to ensure that the people of the Church and her ministers do not run off into heretical excesses. That's the purpose. And the other reason is to give people a dogmatic framework into which to pin their piety, to understand the work of God's grace, both in man's knowledge of and relation to God and God's work for man. in salvation. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and go into our last session of the modern era. Thanks.