[This post consists of notes and emails sent out to TPC over the years on this portion of the church calendar that falls at the end of October and the beginning of November.]
REFORMATION DAY – OCTOBER 31
On the eve of All Saint’s Day (“Hallowed Eve,” or “Halloween,” as we call it today), in 1517, a young Augustinian monk nailed ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. This was not unusual; the castle church door was something of a community bulletin board or listserv at the time. The monk, named Martin Luther, wanted to debate corruptions he had noticed in the church. That was not an unusual move either; many people had noted problems in the church in those days and suggested ways to correct them.
But there was something unusual about Luther. He probed the church’s troubles more deeply than others. The problems were certainly seen in immoral clergy, rampant idolatry, and the “purchasing” of salvation through indulgences. But Luther saw that the root of the problem was that the church had buried Christ out of sight. Rather than offering Christ to the people of God in Word and sacrament – the means through which Christ promised to be with his people – the church was pointing people to relics, pilgrimages, and humanly devised rituals like penance as a way of finding God. Ultimately, people were unable to know the love of God because they didn’t know if they were good enough.
Luther proved to be the right man at the right time – the consummate “man for the hour.” He sought to unearth Christ, and as he did so, he rediscovered the teaching of the Apostle Paul: God accepts us not because we are becoming better people through our own efforts, or because we adhere to church traditions that are only tenuously related to Scripture. Rather, God accepts (or justifies) sinners freely and graciously because Jesus has died for our sins and rose again on the third day. Luther declared that salvation is found in Christ alone, and received by faith alone.
God’s righteousness is not simply the standard by which he judges us; it is the gift of his own covenant faithfulness to his people, through the death and resurrection of Christ. We are not saved by our works; rather, we do good works because God’s Spirit is already at work in us, applying Christ’s finished salvation to us. At the center of the Reformation was a recovery of the biblical gospel, and with it a biblical understanding of the church and the means of grace.
The Reformers encapsulated their teaching with the well-known solas: solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, soli Deo gloria, sola Scriptura, and sola ecclesia. Salvation is based solely on Christ’s person and work as God-incarnate, our Lord and Redeemer. Salvation is entirely a work of God’s grace alone. We are justified (or forgiven) through faith alone, apart from meritorious works. All of life should aim at glorifying God out of gratitude for the gospel. The Bible is our highest norm, a sufficient guide for faith and practice and the judge of all truth. And, finally, salvation is ordinarily found in the church, through the preached Word and the administration of the sacraments, because the church is the body, bride, temple, and kingdom of Christ.
Other “reformers” before Luther had tried to restore the church’s purity, but none of them had reached for so radical a solution. None of them saw so clearly into the basic issues. Luther’s views caught wind and began to spread over Europe like wildfire. Soon, Reformational churches were popping up all over. Cities and rulers began to declare their allegiance to the Reformed movement. As the Reformation began to spread, it became apparent that God was doing a mighty work of renewal amongst his people. A new era was dawning.
The Reformers returned to the Bible, stripping away the accretions of false traditions accumulated over the centuries, as the church drifted from her biblical moorings. They were not opposed to tradition as such, but declared that Scripture must be our highest authority because it is our only infallible authority. No council or even the Pope could speak on par with the Word of God. The Reformers restored the priesthood of the baptized community. No longer would people gather as spectators to watch the priest do a “magic trick,” transubstantiating the bread and wine. Rather, they would gather to enter God’s presence and worship him together. The people would now be engaged in the work of worship—praying, singing, and communing together at the table.
The lost art of preaching was recovered, as the Reformers insisted that God’s Word be taught with fervor and depth. Images were smashed, the sacraments were restored, and the pastoral office reclaimed.
Luther was essentially excommunicated by the Roman church for his views. His famous “Here I stand!” speech at the Diet of Worms was a bold act of faith and put him in great danger, as a heretic and outlaw. But thanks to help from the German nobility, Luther would live to a ripe old age. However, other Reformers would not be so fortunate. They would spend their days fleeing from one place to another, enduring exile or imprisonment, and even getting burned at the stake. But there were pockets of places where the Reformation was free to develop—in cities such as Strasbourg and Geneva, the Reformed faith began to flourish. With the emerging nationalism and the resultant breakup of Europe, the Reformation was able to take root in several countries, including England, Scotland, Holland, and eventually America.
The Reformation essentially transformed Western civilization, touching virtually every facet of cultural life. Because the Reformers recovered the dignity of work (as an aspect of the people’s corporate priesthood), common folks were more motivated than before to develop industry and thrift. Science and trade flourished, generating technological breakthroughs and incredible wealth. Education and literacy were emphasized. As the people became more involved in church life, they also became more involved in political processes, putting checks on tyrannical governments.
The Reformers and their heirs displayed a tremendous missionary zeal, and began taking the gospel to the far-flung reaches of the globe in greater numbers and effectiveness than ever before. In short, the modern world was birthed from the Reformation.
This is not to say the Reformation was a totally unmixed blessing. While the reforms of men like John Calvin, Martin Bucer, John Knox, Thomas Cranmer, and others paved the way for the birth of a new world order—overcoming a great deal of superstition, ignorance, and false worship—many of the good things about the older medieval civilization (“Christendom”) were lost.
The Reformers were anxious to maintain the visible, public, and governmental unity of the body of Christ, but their Protestant heirs were not so inclined. In many cases, subsequent overzealous reformers went too far, taking liturgical and governmental modifications much further than the early Reformers would have approved of. In many ways the Reformation came to produce a caricature of itself, seen today in our radical secularism, humanism, individualism, and egalitarianism. All of these cultural corruptions are distortions of great Protestant insights, taken to the extreme.
While today’s Protestants generally have a decent grasp of what was wrong with the late medieval church, and thus why the Reformation was necessary, they seem sadly unaware of the possibility of going equally wrong in the opposite direction. The way many Protestants devalue the church, the pastorate, the sacraments, liturgy, interchurch unity, and so on, shows that we have fallen into the ditch on the other side. If the medieval Christians were guilty of a false materializing of the spiritual, modern Protestants are guilty of a false spiritualizing of the material.
Thus, Reformation Day should be more than a celebration of a five-hundred-year-old event. It should also be a time of lamenting the failure of churches and nations in the Reformed stream to stay true to their heritage’s deepest principles and best insights. We should not only look back to the early Reformers with great appreciation, praising God for the way he used them to bring renewal and revival to his church through their labors, sacrifices, and bloodshed; we should also look forward with eager hope and prayerful expectation, begging God to give his church yet another Reformation.
The sixteenth-century Reformation is not an endpoint, but a new starting point for the church.
ALL SAINTS’ DAY – NOVEMBER 1
All Saints’ Day is a glorious celebration of the church. On this day, we remember our unity with all God’s saints, past and present. Contrary to some teaching, the “saints” are not a subset of super-Christians within the church. As is obvious from the New Testament’s epistles (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:2), all Christians have the status of “saint.”
To be a saint means to be a “holy one” – it means you belong to God. More specifically, saints are those with sanctuary access – they serve God in his heavenly temple. In Christ, we are saints because we are members of his royal priesthood (1 Pt. 2:5-10) and minister in God’s presence (Heb. 10:19-25). We offer the Lord spiritual sacrifice before the throne of grace.
All Saints’ Day grew out of the early church’s desire to commemorate Christians who had been especially faithful or who had been martyred during times of persecution. All Saints’ Day is a healthy (and very Reformed!) alternative to celebrating individual saints’ days throughout the year.
Earliest traces of a common saints’ day are found in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. While we celebrate the dead in Christ, we do not worship them, or pray to them. Reformer Martin Bucer explains:
“We teach that the blessed saints who lie in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ and of whose lives we have biblical or other trustworthy accounts, ought to be commemorated in such a way, that the congregation is shown what graces and gifts their God and Father and ours conferred upon them through our common Savior and that we should give thanks to God for them, and rejoice with them as members of the one body over those graces and gifts, so that we may be strongly provoked to place greater confidence in the grace of God for ourselves, and to follow the example of their faith.”
In other words, we should use the history of the church to encourage us in our walk with Christ, through all of life’s trials and tribulations.
All Saints’ is a time to remember all those who have lived before us and through whom God has worked: the old covenant saints, tracing all the way back to Adam and Eve, and running up to John the Baptist; the saints of the apostolic era, including the first disciples; the saints of the early church who stood their ground against the Roman Empire; the medieval saints, who developed a glorious Christian civilization, full of beautiful art, architecture, music, and literature; the Reformation era saints through whom God brought about great renewal in the church and the world; our ancestors in the faith – great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and others who have passed on to us a legacy of faith; and the saints of the modern era, who continue to live out the gospel in our time, however imperfectly.
It is quite fitting and instructive that Reformation Day and All Saints’ Day occur so closely together in the church’s calendar. All Saints’ Day celebrates the church catholic. It celebrates the glory of the universal church. In Christ, we are all one. The church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven form one cosmic covenant family. In worship, we who are on earth enter the heavenlies, and join our prayers to the company of heaven (Heb. 12:18ff). Together with them, we await eagerly the final revelation of Christ and the resurrection of the body.
All Saints’ Day meshes well with Reformation Day because the Reformation was not a break with the catholic church in the true sense. Indeed, the Reformers sought to purify and heal the catholic church from corruption and disease. It never occurred to the Reformers that they were starting a new church or starting from scratch. In fact, they routinely argued that they were recovering the heritage of the church fathers and carrying on the best of medieval Christendom.
Sadly, just as many in the late medieval period were cut off from all that had gone before in the life and heart of the church, much to their detriment, so many Christians today have broken ties with the past life of the church and thus fallen into all kinds of error. All Saints’ Day is a good time to remind ourselves of the importance of knowing church history. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “If you want to know the size of the church, you have to count tombstones.”
While the church’s growth towards maturity is often in fits and starts, taking three steps forward and two steps backwards, overall we must affirm the reality of ecclesial progress in history (Eph. 4:11ff). The church is growing up into the full stature of Christ Jesus. The church’s development through history is often mysterious and veiled from our sight. But there is a deep commonality and continuity within the life of the catholic church.
Properly understood, the Reformation may be viewed as a legitimate outworking of the church’s growth. John Nevin explains:
“In this view, the Middle Ages form properly speaking no retrogression for Christianity. They are to be regarded rather as the womb, in which was formed the life of the Reformation itself . . . If Protestantism be not derived by true and legitimate succession from the Church life of the Middle Ages, it will be found perfectly vain to think of connecting it genealogically with the life of the Church at any earlier point.”
Likewise, Phillip Schaff argued that the Reformation stands in “catholic union with all previous church history.” In other words, just as the early church grew organically out of the apostolic era, and the medieval era out of that, so the Reformation grew out of what preceded. This is an important point: Church history did not begin in 1517 or 1646. Our story traces back through the Reformation, to the medieval era. It traces back through the early church to the apostles, and through them to the old covenant era. It’s all one family line, with one running story.
Our heroes are not only Luther and Calvin, but Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm. Our villains are not only Servetus, Bolsec, and Muntzer, but also Arius, Marcion, and Cerinthus. The Reformation was a glorious chapter in our story, but it is certainly not the first chapter, or even the most important chapter. Each chapter in the church’s story arises out of all that has gone on before.
The Reformers had a good grasp of this continuity with the church of all ages. They traced their church back through the centuries. They did not concede “catholicity” to the Romanists; indeed, they claimed to be “reforming catholics,” desirous of restoring and maturing the same church that had always existed. Thus, they wanted to avoid schism as much as possible. They did not believe they were leaving the old church to form a new one; they believed they were continuing the life and work of the old church, and had been abandoned by Rome’s hierarchy.
All Saints’ Day is a time to rejoice in the work of God down through the centuries. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. Give thanks for the doctrines that have been hammered out in ages past against the encroachments of heresy, the territories conquered for Christ through missionary expanse, the way saints of old stood fast in the face of tyranny and persecution in order to maintain the faith and win our liberty, and all the countless other blessings passed on to us. We have received a great legacy and we should honor our spiritual ancestors by maintaining their heritage and building on their work. Through the church, the story goes on.
All Saints’ Day is also an appropriate time to mourn over the church’s many divisions. If we are all saints in Christ, we all belong together in the same church, under the same confession, and at the same table. Because of sin, the church’s unity is only dimly witnessed in the world today. The world does not know we are Christ’s disciples because our love for one another is obscured. We need to repent and heal the breaches that separate us institutionally and doctrinally, if not organically.
To be sure, there are still boundary lines to be drawn. The church must be pure as well as unified, and false ecumenism always threatens God’s truth and the church’s holiness, especially in a relativistic, pluralistic age like ours. But surely every saint should feel the same burden as Schaff:
“To the man who has the right idea of the Church, as the communion of saints, this state of things must be a source of deep distress. The loss of all his earthly possessions, the death of his dearest friend, however severely felt, would be as nothing to him, compared with the grief he feels for such division and distraction of the Church of God, the body of Jesus Christ. Not for the price of the whole world, with all its treasures, could he be induced to appear as the founder of a new sect. A sorrowful distinction that in any view; and one besides that calls for small capital indeed in these United States.”
Sectarianism is perhaps the greatest American ecclesial sin. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “It has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation of the earth to realize the visible unity of the Church of God.”
Luther’s last words revealed his greatest fears. According to Schaff, “Luther exhibited the doctrine of justification as precisely the true ground of Christian union, and fought with all the strength of his gigantic spirit against the fanatical and factious tendencies of his time. His last wish, as that of Melanchthon also, wrestled for the unity of the church. His most depressing fear was still: ‘After our death, there will rise many harsh and terrible sects. God help us!’”
May we repent of ways we have made Luther’s nightmare come true. But may we also celebrate all God has given to us as his holy people in Christ.
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