The Teaching of the Reformation

In my last post, I looked at Luther's discovery and his desire to spread the message that the Bible was actually about God saving humans by His grace, not about humans earning God's favour through their own works. Now I'm going to look in more detail at Luther's key teaching, and the teaching of the Reformation as a whole.

Luther developed three key slogans:

BIBLE ALONE- as the sole source of teaching authority

FAITH ALONE- as the only way to be saved, not through works as well

CHRIST ALONE- as the head of the church, not the pope

Luther realised, as a pious priest, that he could never confess enough. He saw the utter sinfulness of humans, and our inability to be perfectly pure, despite our best efforts to do so. In studying the New Testament, he suddenly saw the Christ offered free forgiveness for those who would trust in Him. This both liberated Luther's sense of guilt of fears of hell, but placed a burden on him: to spread this message.

Initially, Luther acted against corruption within the church. He didn't really see that his complaint (that no extra grace could be bought or sold) attacked the whole system of church ceremony, which was designed to dispense grace. The medieval church had seven sacraments (which the Catholic church still have today), designed to impart grace in a definite, obvious activity. This is the reason the Eucharist became so important, as the sacrament which all could share on a regular basis as a church community. But it had become something almost magical, where the "host", the bread, was stored in an expensive vessel and venerated in front of the whole congregation. The idea had developed that the bread and wine, once blessed by the priest, actually turned into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantion) in a mystical re-offering of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

Luther, as an early reformer, held a strong belief in the presence of Jesus Christ within communion. Other reformers like Zwingli stressed that the Lord's Supper was meant to be a memorial of Christ's death, and nothing more. All the reformers rejected the idea that the Mass was a sacrifice. This became one of the major contentions of the Reformation, because it stemmed from a deeper doctrinal issue. Reformers were teaching that men couldn't do anything to be saved, and Catholics were teaching in their use of sacraments that men obtain grace by offering God the Mass/devotions/penance.

There were certainly issues with the teachings of the Reformation. Some felt that the emphasis upon salvation by grace alone meant that the reformers were de-valuing the importance of holiness in Christian living, and loving your neighbour. Revolutionary reformers, such as the Anabaptists, stressed personal discipleship and sought to establish a church that was distinct from the state and uncontaminated by the world (the violence of Munster in 1534 showed the more extreme radicals in their worst light). But Calvin emphasised sanctification as well as justification. He taught that we are saved, and then the rest of our life is spent being renewed by the Holy Spirit and striving for holiness. Alistair McGrath points out that one of the major problems was that Catholics used the word 'justification' to mean both salvation and whole-life experience, whereas reformers used it in a narrower sense. Calvin himself wrote that "bad Christians" were the worst enemies of the gospel:

"Of what use is a dead faith without good works?"

Calvin here paraphrases the book of James, a book which Luther had problems in understanding. James' main point is that true faith shows itself in the lifestyle of the Christian. Can someone truly come to accept their sinfulness and trust in Jesus' death for them, without coming to hate their sin and striving to overcome it? Whilst we are not saved by what we do, if we truly believe, we will seek to change the way we live. This was part of Calvin's teaching, and is still part of Protestant thinking today.