You know the other gentlemen are a lot more sanctified than I am. Did you notice that Pastor Titus said we have two not normal things tonight before? They didn't seem to be offended. So, pretty sanctified I guess. Tonight the teaching and not a preaching. We won't be examining the Word of God. What I'd like to do this evening is talk about the period right before the Reformation, and try to enter into that world, try to understand that world, and see if there are lessons that can be learned from that time that can help us to walk with Christ today. And that world was radically different from our own but that world was also similar to our own. Right before the time of the Reformation, the Church was in a crisis. The mission work of the Church, now this is the Roman Church, the mission work of the Church had been successful for about a hundred years before the Reformation, particularly in the Far East. Places like Japan had been, missionaries had been, Catholic missionaries had been sent there. But the mission work of the church was suffering and eclipse. There was a stagnation theologically, which was reflected in the mission work as well. And at the same time, and here's an interesting parallel, as the church and her efforts to reach the unreached began to flag, the power of Islam became stronger and stronger. So at the time, about a hundred years before the Reformation, for example, in the great city of Vienna, Vienna itself was facing attack by Muslim armies. So the time in that sense was not so different from our own. There were vast political changes going on. The medieval society was changing. and nations that had been less powerful were becoming more powerful. Those that had been strong were becoming weak. But most fascinating and probably most important for the Reformation were the changes that were occurring in the cities. Now in terms of western Pennsylvania, some of us remember a time when Pittsburgh was a dirty city. when there was smoke in the air, and that smoke represented economic strength. Well, Pittsburgh's clean now, but it's also rather sterile economically. Beaver Falls used to have industry. Do you remember those days? Things have changed in urban centers in the United States, and things were changing then. In the time right before the Reformation, there were basically two classes of people. There were the people who owned the land, And there were the people who worked the land for the people who owned the land. But a change occurred as merchants, for example, began to make quite a bit of money. And they learned how to use that money to advance their class of people. So people who had for generations been in the lowest class started to ascend in their economic power. and life became, well, a little more fragile for those who had the land. The people who had been the great kings and the great nobles found that the vast income that they used to receive from the rents on their lands couldn't pay their bills any longer. But the upcomers, the new rich, had lots of money but no titles. And that's very similar to the United States, say, at the beginning of the 20th century, where you have, here in Western Pennsylvania, men like Andrew Carnegie, who came from a low-class background, being able to retire back in Scotland and buy Scebo Castle with 20,000 acres, I think. He went from a poor man to becoming, really, a noble baron back in Scotland. So similar but different, economic change, turmoil, the nobility were in big trouble, the peasants were doing much better. Also there was a great technological change and here the parallel is very clear. I wrote my dissertation on a typewriter. Some of you don't even know what a typewriter is. I mean, I was really advanced when we got those, with those IBM, you could have those balls that had Greek characters and you could take it off and your hand would get all full of ink and you'd stick on the new one and then you could type the Greek and then you'd take it off. That was high technology back then. Some of you actually learned how to do things with what's called a slide rule. You can find them in antique stores. That's before there were calculators. A lot of the technological change, we just had the screen there and here's the address www. 25 years ago, could that presentation have been done that way? Things have really changed in terms of technology. And the technology changed right at the time of the Reformation too, with what we call movable type printing. In the old days, again going back to the time of the Reformation, to have a book of Psalms for singing you would have a vellum book. That is, each page was made from the skin of a sheep. And some Irish monk or some guy would be sitting in some room and he would hand do every single page. So the cost of a Psalter would be astronomical. And that's why the books, you see these old books and they're chained to the pulpit or they're chained to the front because they were worth thousands and thousands of dollars. They weren't easily replaced. By the time Luther writes his Bible with movable print, you know what a Bible costs? What was one cow? You know what a cow costs? Like a thousand dollars. Cows aren't cheap. But that was really cheap. You could get a Bible with a reasonable expenditure of funds rather than having to mortgage your entire home. But more than the whole Bible, pamphlets were able to be distributed and parts of the Gospels were available. Most of the people couldn't read anyway. Only about 10% of the population could read, but without television, without radio, there wasn't much to do except listen to people read to you. So the Bible was printed, copies of at least parts of the Gospel could be purchased, and people would hear the Word of God read to them. Well, in this time of turmoil, there was economic turmoil, there was political turmoil, but there was theological turmoil during these days as well. The Roman Church had a monopoly on the truth. And don't be mistaken, the Roman Church still claims to have a monopoly on the truth. But scholars, as text became more available, began to see discrepancies between the claims of the Church and, for example, the text of the Scripture. They began to see discrepancies between, for example, claims that certain things were given by the Emperor Constantine to the Pope, and there seemed to be lacking historical validation for these claims. As they began to read parts of the scripture, well, you know what happens when people read the Bible? They get saved. But in between there was turmoil, and there were people who read the Bible who didn't get saved, and some did get saved, and conflict was natural. It was inevitable. So about a hundred years before Luther, a group of men came, particularly in the German lands, whom we call forerunners of the Reformation. That is, men who had a little bit, some a lot, but some a little bit of the truth. And they pushed against the monolithic teaching of the Roman Church. One of these forerunners has a great name. You'll be able to remember all these names because they're all strange and I haven't made any of them up. Most of them are named John. And the first John is John Popper. Think of a little puppet, John Popper. Now John Popper died in 1475, before Luther is even born. And he had an interesting job. He was the head of nunnery. It would be a good job for a single guy. And they had a lot of time on their hands and some limited passages of scripture. And he began to read and he began to read to the women. And they noticed that there didn't seem to be any teaching in the scripture, for example, that to be holy meant that you had to be a celibate nun or a celibate priest. But they had just given their lives to being celibate. They began to see some problems. As a matter of fact, became convinced, as they looked back historically, that the movement of the church to imprison these women was in fact a movement of control. And that it was less than biblical. That they took these vows to be celibate thinking that it would earn them a better place in heaven, and it wasn't really going to. So there was a spiritual dissatisfaction from within the church, and John Popper was one of the guys who helped to push this on. Another one is another John, John of Wasell, he died in 1479. He was a great preacher. It was sort of like being the preacher at College Hill, you know, one of the prominent pulpits in the United States. People would come from all over, even from Chippewa, to hear him speak. And he was also a university professor, he was actually a great theologian, and he read the Word, and he was convinced, for example, that salvation came by grace alone. He was convinced that God was so big that he controlled our lives, and he predestined all the events of our lives. Now, that doesn't sound very strange to any of us, but that was actually against the teaching of the Church. He became what we'll call an Augustinian, and he got in trouble for that. As a matter of fact, he was so convinced that God predestines our lives, that he believed that God's predestination could actually trump the Church's pronouncement. Isn't that amazing? Again, it doesn't sound very strange to us, but that was a direct affront to the authority of the Church. In other words, if the Church says you're excommunicated and God says you're beloved, God wins, Church loses. The Church didn't like that very well. So, he got in some trouble. He questioned indulgences. Now, he's dead before Luther was born. He rejected indulgence. He rejected this notion called the Treasury of Merit. Now, the Treasury of Merit, that's in the registrar over at the college, they have the Treasury of Merit. You can make with... No, it's not really there, but... Do you know what the Treasury of Merit is? It's when men and women like the priests and the nuns do so many good things that they get extra good stuff in their holiness bank account. You know, they're so pious. I mean, there's Mary McCracken. I mean, he's so pious that he needs a hundred merits to go to heaven, and he's got 150. And so he can give 50 to the Pope. or the Pope can freely take his 50. And so now I'm the Pope, and I've taken McCracken's 50, and Schaeffer's got 100, if McCracken has 50. So Schaeffer gives me 100, and now I have this great deposit of merit, and Titus, Titus is, he's in need, and he can come to me, the Pope, And for a price, for a price, Titus, I can send you some. Basil got in so much trouble, he was cited by the church for heresy, and he did what he should have done. He immediately said, let me give up. He recanted, said sorry, but it wasn't good enough. They threw him in jail where he died. So he backed out, but it didn't save him. and he died before Luther was born. Now, the next guy, why the names are real easy, you have John Popper, John Wiesel, now you have this next guy whose first name is the same as the last guy's last name. His first name is Wiesel and his last name is Gansfort. He died in 1489, 10 years later. Now, I like this guy because on his own, And Dr. Curtis is here, he's one of Dr. Curtis's favorite too. On his own he studied Greek and Hebrew. And, I mean, he didn't have a test, he just wanted to learn these things. And he studied Greek and Hebrew, studied at all the great universities, for a while was on the theology faculty in Heidelberg. He got in trouble, was thrown out of that position. But it's his works that Luther published in 1520. And very clearly, Wiesel Gansfort was a Protestant in terms of justification by faith alone, the predestination of individual believers. He even held to the priesthood of all believers. He believed that there was an invisible church within the visible church. In other words, men and women who really were united to Christ, even though they were members of the visible church. and that the two were not necessarily the same, that were saved by the Holy Spirit in His work alone. He rejected the notion that the Pope himself holds the keys to heaven and hell. He said the strange thing that God and God alone holds those keys. He held to the infallibility of the Scripture. And he's dead in 1489, before Luther's doing anything. Why think about these three men? Because God in his goodness raises people up in a context. These men who, of course, the names are not well known to any of us, had been preaching against some more purely, others less purely, the doctrines of grace before God used Martin Luther and the Reformation. So God was planning these things through these other faithful leaders in the church. But at the same time that these things were going on, another movement occurred, a movement that's better known to us, what's called humanism or the Renaissance. Now, for most of us as Protestants, ever since Francis Schaeffer did his writings, when we think of humanism, we think of a bad adjective like secular humanism being connected to it. And while there was a lot of Secularism in humanism, particularly up in Germany, the humanism wasn't very secular at all. And it's very easy to understand why, let me explain. The cry of the Renaissance is two Latin words, and the session here, there's going to be a little extra in my check because I use Latin, it sounds very good. The cry of the Renaissance is ad fontes, which means back to the sources, back to the roots. So you've got humanism starting in Italy and they go back to their literary sources, which are what we call the Greek and Latin classics. Now that stuff's pretty pagan, but there was a revival of interest as they tried to understand themselves by looking to the past. Now as humanism spreads north into Germany, and its cries ad fontes as well, but there's a problem for the Germans. Because, as you think back in European history, when the Romans came north and were way up in what we would call Holland and Northern Europe at that time, for example, it's documented that the Frisians, who are a subcategory of the Dutch, they were still cannibals while the Romans came up. So, go back to the sources for the Frisians. Now, I'd love to do this in Grand Rapids because then half the audience are Frisian. So, what resources do the cannibals have in terms of literary resources? Well, to speak plainly, there isn't any. Matter of fact, the first piece of printed literature in the German or Germanic language was by a guy named Ophelia and it happened to be the Bible. So, northern humanism went back to its source, which was the scripture. And so that humanism wasn't always secular. As a matter of fact, without that humanism, there would have been no Reformation. So yes, we can talk about secular humanism, but humanism made the Reformation possible. And the humanists at that time looked for a change. There's a discontent in the economic scene. There's a discontent in the political scene. There's a spiritual lack of contentedness. And the humanists thought if we could just revive the joy of early Christianity, this would be a good thing. If our lives could be changed And so, for example, one of the favorite themes of the early European Renaissance scholars were passages like the Sermon on the Mount, which seemed to have been forgotten. So there was a movement with humanism in the Renaissance of a recovery of a biblical Christianity, Christianity as a way of life. And this Renaissance was actually also an anti-doctrinal movement. gave us the Jesuits and crossing T's and dotting I's and getting everything right, but perhaps having no life. So this movement was a movement of life. And by the way, in terms of our coming to our own time, we feel those tensions today as well, don't we? I mean, we feel the tension between Christianity as simply memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism, but no fruit in life. Sometimes we feel those same tensions. So it's not so strange to see that at times doctrine can produce a deadness. Now, not true doctrine, not good doctrine, not the doctrine that you get across the street, for example. But they saw that and they wanted a vibrant Christianity, which was a good thing, I think. But as there was this struggle, the Church, the Roman Church, reacted in every possible wrong way. As there was a revival, for example, in learning, as Greek and Hebrew was being studied again, some of the theologians in the universities didn't want students, for example, learning Hebrew. Now that doesn't make any sense, does it? We might as well learn it now, because we're going to speak it in heaven, right, Dr. Curtis? So learn it now. It gives you a leg up in heaven. They didn't like that. And as a matter of fact, one great Hebrew scholar was condemned by one of the faculties. And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And these cheap pamphlets started to be produced. You know, political cartoons have always been sort of popular. And in 1515, a group of pamphlets came out, anonymous pamphlets, called Letters from Obscure Men. Well, they weren't obscure, they were the greatest humanists at the time, and everybody knew who wrote them, but they kept their names off it because nobody wanted to go to prison. And they started to ridicule the theologians. And this helps set the field. For a few years later, when Martin Luther comes, at first he will be embraced by the humanists because, well, he's speaking against the Roman Church, and if he's a Gnome, I'm for him, right? But that doesn't mean that they were saved. But initially, Luther will be supported by these humanists who are in favor of anybody making fun of the Church. But tonight I want to focus on a great humanist, a guy named Erasmus of Rotterdam. I bet some of you have heard about him, right? Erasmus of Rotterdam died in 1536, so he dies during the time of Luther. And he is a transitional figure. Now, Erasmus was never a Protestant. I don't believe that he's in heaven. He was born near Rotterdam around 1466 and his life is a great microcosm of what life was like in those days because his father was a priest who lived with his mother. He was the fruit of their living together but because his dad was a priest they could never be married and so he was a bastard. His dad couldn't support him, he had no rights and he's sent to the the schools for the poor kids. And the schools for the poor kids were the monastery schools. Now the rich kids could have their private tutors, but not the poor. So the only way to get an education was to begin the process of becoming a monk or a nun. And that was where Erasmus began. But he was so smart. Very quickly, the people saw, we've got to take him out of this monastic school, and he became the personal secretary of one of the powerful bishops. And from there, he began to build his career and build his career. But Erasmus always hated monastic life. Now, of course, no one would like monastic life if you didn't have to do it. He goes to England right at the end of the century, 1499, spends time there, gets to know the great English humanists, spends time in Oxford and Cambridge, comes back, and he can smell a good story, he can understand what's happening. So Erasmus was able to write the kind of books that would sell. and he wrote many, many books, and they sold hundreds and thousands of copies. And some of his writings are really a hoot, really fun to read even today. There's a snappy little three-volume work by Erasmus called the Adages. Three volumes explaining some of the things that my father told me, and then I told my kids, and my kids will probably tell their kids, you know, these little bits of wisdom. You know, well, you know some of the bits of wisdom. We all have them. And the thing is, as you read them, here is Erasmus writing in the 1500s, and it's the same thing that your father told you. So it's three volumes of adages, and they sold well. He wrote another book called In Praise of Folly, where he, of course, makes fun of the Pope. Now, Erasmus did something that's very important for us, and I'll close it up with this part. He knew that there was a great interest in studying the scripture, ad fontes, back to the sources. And in the early 1500s, Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament. And that was the one that was used by Luther and by many people to do translation work, so that an accurate Bible could be available to us. So God used a man like Erasmus to who was not a believer, to still aid the Reformation. Now the same can apply to England, people like Sir Thomas More, and there's a movie, A Man for All Seasons, right? And that's a great movie, it just doesn't have anything historically to do with Sir Thomas More. But it's a great movie, it's just, it would be nice if it had some historical accuracy. The things were going on in England. The Renaissance was going on in France, for example. In 1509, a wonderful French Psalter was produced that Calvin will use for his work in Geneva. So the bottom line for us, as we look back in time, we ask ourselves, how did the Reformation come about? And it was clearly a work of of God, but it was a work of God that is couched in a complex weaving of politics, of economics, of social change, and God was in control. And we ask ourselves, by looking at the past, can we see how God is moving today, and what role do we play in all of this? Men like John Pupper, I mean they're known to a few scholars, but no one knows of him. John of Wesel, Wesel Ganz Fort. These men helped in quiet ways to advance the good. Now they weren't perfect by any stretch, but they played a role. And God would use a man like Erasmus. to produce a greater good, a good that went beyond what Erasmus himself had imagined. God's in control of our lives as well. And the situations that we face, we need to learn also to read the times. Erasmus read the times and produced for his own benefit some works that are helpful. How about us today? No one will face persecution for the church for standing for justification for faith alone. And for that, we have got to be thankful. No matter how critical we can be of our own denomination or the evangelical church in general, no one's being burned for saying that we're saved by faith alone. And we've got to be thankful for the change as a result of the Reformation. Nevertheless, against the standard of God's Word, There is room for criticism. There is room for change. And what's God calling us to do? He's calling us to think about the past, to see where we fit in, the great flow of God's history. And what role does God have for us? I'd like to ask those of you particularly who are younger, those college age, what task does God have for you? in His great suite. Probably, none of you will be a Martin Luther. And really, I don't know that there's a need for that kind of a figure today. But what role will God have you play as we seek to be obedient to Him each and every day in the more common things of our life? Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for a few minutes to reflect upon the past. And we see your finger moving in history. Lord, as we think about the present, we think about upcoming elections and things that seem to be so far beyond any of our control. We're humbled and we're grateful. We're thankful that you, O God, are in control. that all the details of our lives, of our nation, of our world, all of those details are in your hand. So we thank you. We thank you that in your Providence, for example, Calvin College's recreation facilities are shut down and, well, the brothers who made their presentation face problems. But those problems come from your hand, and we ask you to bless them as they work through these things on our behalf. That type of quiet work on behalf of you, serving others. Lord, will you make us each one to be faithful in the callings that you have given to us. Lord, as we close, we remember Martin Luther's quote that, well, that's still true today. Lord, if we knew that you were coming tomorrow, would you help us to plant a tree today? In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.