Our first session in this course was lead last Wednesday by Idlewild’s Senior Minister, Jim Lowry.  He traced the history of the people of God from the time of Abraham to the establishment of the Jewish religion through Moses and the prophets, in the tabernacle, the temple and the synagogue.  With the coming of Jesus, the Christian Church emerged, the heir of her rich spiritual treasure of Judaism, and the church spread from its Palestinian homeland into Asia, Africa, and Europe, taking on the differing forms of dogma, worship and government found in the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.  Jim signed off on the historic time clock at approximately 1500 A.D.

It’s my responsibility now to pick up from there and carry on the story of the church from 1500 to the bringing of Presbyterianism to America by the first colonists from Europe.  Tonight we are taking a brief look at that segment of church history referred to as “The Protestant Reformation.”

A fairly good time fix for us to get hold of linking the European Reformation times to our American continent might be this: “When Columbus discovered America in 1492, Martin Luther, one of the first and most prominent of the Protestant Reformers, was nine years old.  On the day that young Luther was being tried for his views as a protestant holding heretical views, Ponce de Leon was looking for the Fountain of Youth in Florida.” (H.E. Fosdick – Great Voices of the Reformation)

The Protestant Reformation in Europe was a movement in which many sincere, devout and courageous people were caught up.  They were clergy and lay people of the Roman Catholic church, scholars and princes, merchants and laborers.  And early on they all were labeled “Heretics and Rebels.”

For Protestants were the ones who raised rebellion against the constituted authority of the church established with headquarters at Rome.  Protestants revolted against the mother church and went off to set up their own house of worship. “Rebels” they were called, and indeed, “rebels” they were.

Let me read you this definition and description of the Protestant Reformers as set down in The Catholic Dictionary (Quote)

But really the distinctive thing about those Protestant rebels was not so much that they rebelled against something as that they ran away to something else.  G.K. Chesterton said of Francis of Assisi that “as most boys run away to sea, Francis ran away to God.”  That, we Presbyterians believe, was the flight our rebelling forefathers took:  they ran away to God.  That came first, then, rebels they became here on earth because they had become patriots on a higher plane.

They were driven to rebel and protest against what they saw as the status quo in existing institutions because they believed those institutions to be contrary to and in conflict with what they saw of God and His will for His people.  They had put their trust in the Eternal One, therefore, they could no longer abide some things in the temporal sphere.  They had seen the Lord in His righteousness, so they would not follow a multitude to do evil.

The word “protestant” comes from the Latin, “protestari”, meaning “to proclaim one’s faith”, “to testify to one’s trust”, “to act on one’s convictions.”  Having espoused a higher allegiance, having engaged in a more noble alliance, Protestants must of necessity then “rebel” against whatever in the temporal sphere that stands opposed to that high faith.

One of the first and most famous of the Protestant Rebels was Martin Luther, the German monk, who could no longer tolerate an ecclesiastical system which raised funds to build a great cathedral in Rome by selling for so much cash in hand writs of pardon for sins committed or about to committed.  His knowledge of God, gleaned from studying the Bible, convinced him that sin could not be dealt with in such a way.  Luther could not receive as valid the authority of ordained servants of the church whose morals were worse than infidels.  Luther rebelled against a corrupt church and a formal faith.

A second famous Rebel among the Protestant Reformers was John Calvin of France.  It is to the life and labors of Calvin that we Presbyterians look as we search for our origin and founder.  Calvin’s Reformed views got him into trouble with the established church in his native land, and fleeing for his life he sought sanctuary in the free city of Geneva.  There, he was confronted by a man named John Farel who appealed to him to stay in Geneva and found a church and a city built on the divine plan laid out in the Holy Scriptures.  Calvin stayed.  His influence was all-pervasive throughout Geneva:  in church, in the school he founded, and in the city government he overhauled.

From all over Europe people whose hearts and minds were aflame with the Reformation’s new hopes for a cleansed church and a reformed social order flocked to Geneva to study in Calvin’s school.

Up to Geneva to company with Calvin and learn of him went John Knox, and when he came home to the highlands of Scotland, there was born the church of Scotland and of the Covenanters.

What was the secret of the energizing power propelling the Protestant Reformation?  Scholarship is unanimous in attributing that amazing social and religious revolution to the discovery, or rediscovery, of an ancient book.

You see, the Bible, in the established church of Christendom in the 15^th century, was largely lost, unknown and ineffectual in shaping the rites and practices of religion.  The common people knew little of the Bible.  It existed only in the Latin and Greek manuscripts of the monasteries and with the clergy.  The forms of worship in the churches had departed far from the standards of the church described in the New Testament.  Pagan ideas and ecclesiastical tradition, not Biblical ideas, governed the worship services.  The moral code ordering the behavior of the people was not the laws of scripture but rather the rules imposed by high officials in the church.  For all practical purposes the Bible had become a lost book in Christendom at the dawn of the Reformation.

But suddenly, this lost, forgotten book was rediscovered and momentous events began to transpire.  Christian scholars like William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others, began to translate this rediscovered book from the Greek and Latin and Hebrew manuscripts into the languages of the common people of that day.  The Bible appeared in English, French, German, Dutch, and all current European languages.  The art of printing had been invented shortly before and copies of the Bible were put into the hands of the people.

But the privilege of possessing and reading this rediscovered book was not easily procured.  The sale and use of Bibles in the vernacular was prohibited by law in nearly every nation in Europe.  Charles Dickens records in his, Child’s History of England, an incident occurring at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1558.  “One of the courtiers presented a petition to the new queen praying that, as it was the custom to release some prisoners on such occasions, she would have the goodness to release the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and also the Apostle Saint Paul, who had for some time been shut up in a strange language so that the people could not get at them.”

Transgressors of the laws banning the printing and reading of the scriptures were persecuted, burned at the stake, beheaded, drowned.  But in spite of all persecution the common people courageously and devotedly clung to this liberated book.

One famous historian of the Reformation (D’Aubigne’) tells us that the publishing of the Bible in the speech of the common people produced an immense effect.  He wrote: “When the reading of the Bible was commenced in the families of Christendom, Christendom itself was changed.  There was from that time instituted a new order of customs, of manners, and of conversation that ensured new life.  With the publication of the New Testament, the Reformation went out from the school and the church and took possession of the homes of the people.  The effect produced was immense. . . The most simple men. . . carried this book everywhere along with them and they soon knew its contents by heart.”

Having found and brought the Bible out into the light of day and put it into the hands of the common people, the Reformers did not stop there.  They proceeded to enshrine the scriptures in the place of supreme authority over people, as “the only infallible rule of faith and practice.”  The established Church of Rome had claimed the full authority of God in its canons and decrees.  But “they (the Reformers) held that the Roman Church was not the sole and infallible medium of God’s authority in the world.  The will of God was not revealed in any human institution but was made known to men in the Holy Scriptures read by faith.  The Bible became the final source of authority for Protestantism, and although the Reformers differed in their interpretation of it, they were at one in belief that God speaks through it to the individual soul.   The ultimate authority was not the scripture as a barren record, but the scripture read by faith, illumined and made alive by the Spirit of God.” (C.S. Richardson – Church Through the Centuries)

It was on this Reformation doctrine of the supremacy of the authority of the word of God over the words and wills of men that Martin Luther took his stand at the historic Diet of Worms.  Summoned before this Council of high officials in church and state, headed by Charles V, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Luther was confronted with a stack of books he had written on scripture and reformed principles and asked whether or not he would recant them.  He admitted that in the heat of controversy he had expressed himself too strongly against persons, but the substance of what he had written he would not recant unless convinced of its wrongfulness by Scripture.  The Emperor was astonished at the temerity of a man who would thus deny the infallibility of a church council.  But Luther rested his whole case on the Word of God as the sole authority in human faith and practice.  It was then he uttered his memorable words: “I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.”

Laying hold on this doctrine of the authority of scriptures as the Word of God, the Reformers used it as a yardstick for measuring all church elements of faith, forms of worship, and systems of church government.  The Reformed Church emerged as one patterned after the church described in scripture, stripped of all the evil accretions of paganism and traditionalism.

The Reform doctrine of scripture as the supreme authority – the only infallible rule of faith and practice – not only shaped the forms of worship and the system of government of the church, but it also mightily influenced the governments of states and nations.  For what was this Reformed principle of authority but a manner of claiming the “Sovereignty of God” over all human life and institutions?  If the scriptures are God’s word, and we appeal to them as the supreme authority over the lives of men and women, this makes God King of kings and Lord of lords.  This doctrine blasted the old theory of the divine right of kings.  It deposed tyrants.  It pulled down thrones.  From it are derived the conceptions of the dignity and freedom of the individual soul.  That tyrant, James I, was right, when on his English throne he said, “A Scottish Presbytery agreeth as well with the monarchy as God with the Devil.”

The Reformation was born and its benefits applied to Western civilization all because a lost book was rediscovered and put into the hands of the common people, and its teachings, as the Word of God, made the supreme authority over the lives of human beings.

The life struggles of the intrepid Protestant “Rebels,” courageously contending with the powerful, entrenched, and often cruelly relentless officials of the Roman Catholic Church secured great victories for their descendants in the faith.  And furthermore, these “Rebel Leaders” left a rich treasure in their writings which have continued to influence the life and destiny of their spiritual children.

Luther’s translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into the language of the German people; Calvin’s Institutes and his Geneva Catechism; John Knox and his colleagues’ Scotts Confession and The English Westminster Standards – comprising a Confession of Faith, two Catechisms, and a Book of Church Order, have all poured the life blood and spirit of the Reformers into our Presbyterianism in America, as we shall be discovering in later sessions of this class.

Summing up:  It can be clearly seen that the whole Reformation can be described as a movement to deliver the Church to the people.  To take the Holy things, the Kingdom of God, the rule and authority of the church, and deliver all to the laity, the people of the church.  This lay movement which was the Protestant Reformation can be clearly discerned in three phases:

First, the Reformation delivered the Holy Scriptures to the laity.  For hundreds of years the church had believed and taught that the Bible belonged to the clergy.  Only the trained ecclesiastical functuaries should be trusted to read and to interpret the scriptures to the lay people.  But Martin Luther, soon after breaking with the established church, translated the Bible into the German language with the avowed intention of making Moses sound more German than Jewish.  Printing had been invented less than a hundred years before.  Learning was already being democratized all over Europe.  Soon Luther’s Bible became widely distributed and avidly read.

Thus it came about that for hundred of years the congregations of Reformed churches were characterized by their thirst for Biblical knowledge.  John Calvin established in Geneva his famous academy where the Bible was the principal textbook.  To his school came students from all over Europe.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote of the famous stool in his great, great grandfather’s house with a Bible fixed by straps to its underside.  When the stool was held upside down on his great, great grandfather’s knees the Bible was easily read to the reverently listening family, but when a knock came at the door, the stool could be hurriedly turned upright, the Bible hidden, lest some chance caller see and report to the authorities that a forbidden Bible was being read in that house.

But with the passing of the years the possession of the scriptures by the laity has become commonplace.  There are no longer bans on Bibles.  The once prized book has become despised.  The churches founded by Calvin, Luther and Knox over four hundred years ago are now filled with people who have plenty of Bibles and suffer no constraint on reading them, but who confess their scriptural illiteracy and yet care little about correcting it.  Have we become like Peanuts in the Funny Paper who said: “I don’t read anything.  If it’s not on video.  Forget it!”

A second phase of the Reformation was delivering church government to the laity.  For centuries the church had been run by the clergy, the ordained officials of the church, who determined the doctrine, celebrated the sacraments, instructed and governed the people.

But John Calvin in Geneva and John Knox in Scotland organized the Reformed Church according to New Testament standards.  Elders were elected from the laymen of the congregation to govern the affairs of the church and deacons were elected to administer church finance, charity and benevolences.  This Reformed principle of delivering the government of the church gave laymen the right to speak in church affairs for the first time since the days of primitive Christianity and prevented any possibility of ecclesiastical tyranny.

From the establishment of representative democracy within the Reformed and Presbyterian churches spread the avid desire for the same freedom in the political world.  So the democracies of Europe, the Western hemisphere, and now of Asia and Africa, trace their origins to the liberating spirit of the Reformation.

Finally, the third phase of the Reformation delivered to the laity the privilege and responsibility of making religious, social, and ultimately, political decisions for themselves.  You see, for centuries the clergy had kept the people in leading strings.  Common men and women were not allowed freedom of thought and action.  The people were told what they must believe about God, what they must do to and for their fellowmen, how they must order their family life, what was permitted and what was forbidden to read and think and say.  To depart from the explicit order of the church in areas of thought, word, or deed was to sin, and sin could be forgiven only after confession to a church functionary and expiated for by carrying out penance as imposed by church order.

But the Reformation “Rebels” declared that God alone is the Lord of each person’s conscience; that in matters of faith and practice the church can admonish, advise, instruct, and plead, but it has no authority to bind.

Since the beginning of the Reformation the Protestant gospel has laid heavy responsibility upon the individual to weigh all evidence, seek trusted and competent counsel, than make his or her own decision in the court of his or her own conscience and act thereon.

What then is the role of the pulpit in the Reformed tradition?  Has the pulpit been stripped of all authority?  Does this Presbyterian doctrine that God alone is the Lord of the conscience prevent every Presbyterian clergyman from discussing controversial political, social and moral questions?

No, but it definitely sets the framework in which he discusses all things.  A Presbyterian minister never climbs into a pulpit and says: “Thus saith the church.  The church speaks for God.  Obey.  To refuse is sin.”  Rather, from the pulpit of every Presbyterian church the minister speaks to his congregation in this vein; and the congregation understands him so to speak: “My study of God’s Word, and my understanding of the Holy Spirit’s direction in the midst of our times, points to this.  Consider these things which I believe are God’s truth.  If, in your conscience God’s Spirit vindicates this counsel, then act upon it.  But the decision must be yours.  You are your own free moral agent.  God does not want slaves, but sons and daughters.”

As we assess today the Protestant Reformation – its gains and losses, view its strengths and weaknesses, can we not see that all this Reformation freedom:  Freedom for every person to read and interpret scripture; freedom for everyone to take part in governing the church; freedom for everybody to make their own moral, religious, social and political decisions – do we not see that such freedom can be safely entrusted only to people who have committed themselves unconditionally to God?

Not without reason did A.C. McGiffert write that it was “not liberty but bondage that was dear to the heart of John Calvin.” And in the Scotts Confession John Knox and his men wrote: “We confess and acknowledge one only God, to whom only we must cleave, whom only we must serve, whom only we must worship, and in whom only we must put our trust.”

Yes, in the 15^th century, in the 20^th century, and if by God’s grace there come a 25^th century, still only men and women reformed and remade by God’s grace in Jesus Christ can be entrusted with all this stupendous Reformation freedom, for only they can find in the binding bondage of God’s holy will the perfect freedom of His love.