Tim Suffield.com

Next Wednesday is one of favourite Christian ‘holidays’. Not that we tend to celebrate it, of course. If our modern church streams were in the habit of recognising dates and celebrations other than those intimately concerned with Christ himself, then I’d like to think that this one would be near the top of the pile.

Next Wednesday is Reformation day. It’s a shame that it also happens to be Halloween, it would be better if the pagan festival of Samhain didn’t intrude on a date which reminds us of the eternal faithfulness of Yahweh to his covenants, of the everlasting, unstoppable, unrelenting, unfaltering march of the purposes of Yahweh.

You might be thinking “Tim, you’re a few days early to be blogging about the Reformation!” You’d probably be right, if it were a once a year sort of thing. It isn’t. Church history is important. Church history allows us to learn from the mistakes of the past, to not forget the victories of the past and to observe the majestic purposes of our God as they sweep through salvation-history.

This is also a cheap excuse for something to blog about - I have recently been teaching at the East Midlands Wordplus course on the Reformations in Europe and England (that’s multiple in both, properly speaking, not one in each). I’m going to turn my notes into a short series.

So without further ado let’s start with the Man of the hour: Martin Luther.

It’s October 31st 1517, you’re in Wittenberg in the Holy Roman Empire (it’s in modern day Germany) and you’re standing in sight of the church door - the town noticeboard of its day. You don’t realise it, but you’re about to watch an event that will cause nations to rise and fall, that will start numerous wars and kill thousands, that will cause untold strife and upheaval in Europe. You’re about to watch an event that will lead to the salvation of countless multitudes, rip the church into pieces, send the gospel flying to all the corners of the globe and return God’s people to his truth. You’re about to witness the unsearchable purposes of the living God unfold.

You’re about to see a monk and a mallet change the world.

Enter Martin Luther, stage left. Luther was an Augustinian Monk who had been struggling with his personal knowledge of the depth of his sin for some time. When alone, agonising over his sin and his inability to live rightly, Luther read Romans 1:17:

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

The ‘it’ referred to there is the gospel. Luther didn’t get this at all, how could the retributive righteousness of God - his anger against sin - be good news? What did this have to do with faith?

His revelations as to what Paul meant shaped his thinking. Luther began to realise that ‘righteousness’ did not refer simply to a judgment, but to a gift attributed to us by faith.

His new understanding revolutionised a continent. On that day in Wittenberg he nailed to that door his ‘95 theses’, a document listing 95 objections to certain practices in the Catholic church, and how these practices had encroached upon the gospel, how these practices were obscuring the gospel and causing a different ‘truth’ to be proclaimed by the church.

The world turned upside down.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Reformation, Church History. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.