Church History — Part 3: The Reformation

David Pawson's sermon on the Reformation opens not with a date but with a letter. He reads Galatians chapter 2, from verse 15. It is the epistle Martin Luther loved most, the one on which he wrote a very fine commentary. "A man is justified, not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ… because by works of the law shall no one be justified." Pawson says those words meant a great deal at the time of the Reformation, over 450 years ago.

On October 31, 1517, a monk and professor of theology named Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. In those days that door served as a notice board for public debate. People usually treat this as the beginning of the Reformation.

But according to Pawson, there is a later date, nearly three years on, that matters even more. It is the day Martin Luther had a bonfire.

In those three years, Luther moved from wanting to spring clean the church to wanting to demolish the whole system. At first, nailing up the 95 Theses, he attacked only the abuse, the sale of indulgences, not the system itself. One of his theses read: "If the Pope knew how the sellers of indulgences fleece his flock, he would rather St. Peter's church were burnt to ashes than built up out of the skin and bones of his sheep." Luther naively assumed the Pope was on his side.

He was quickly disillusioned, and by the Pope himself. Pawson tells it this way: when the indulgence money from Germany dropped, the Pope excommunicated him. Only then did Luther grasp it. The fault was not a few bad men running a good system. The system itself was wrong.

So he threw three things on the fire:

1. The parchment with the Pope's signature, threatening excommunication.
2. A book of Canon Law, the code by which he had lived as a monk and priest.
3. A document he now knew to be a forgery, used to claim the papacy's right to represent Christ on earth.

Before, he was giving the Church a spring clean. Three years later, he began to tear it down.

✍︎Kit's note

Reform or Demolish?

Luther's turning point in 3 years (1517–1520)

At first, Luther only meant to spring clean the system. Three years later, he realized the system itself was the problem.

Pawson holds that the bonfire of 1520 was even more significant than nailing the theses in 1517. (On the dating: the bull Exsurge Domine was issued in Rome on 15 June 1520; Luther burned it at Wittenberg on 10 Dec 1520; his formal excommunication followed on 3 Jan 1521.)

What drove a monk to that fire?

To understand Luther, you have to go back to the terror that drove him into the monastery. Pawson tells it: Luther once nearly died in a thunderstorm. It left him afraid to die, afraid to face God with his sins unforgiven. And he searched desperately for a way out of that fear.

He prayed to the saints, prayed to Mary, went on pilgrimages, gazed at relics and images. He did all of it. And none of it gave him any assurance that his sins were forgiven. Later, talking with his saintly superior von Staupitz, he was asked the decisive question: "If you take away all these crutches to a tottering faith, if you take away Mary, the saints, the images, penance and pilgrimages, what will you put in their place?" Luther's answer, as in the film Pawson's congregation had just watched, was one thing only: "Jesus Christ. Man only needs Jesus Christ."

That was the seed of everything that came after.

✍︎Kit's note

Is the Reformation a dead issue?

In his 1967 sermon, marking the Reformation's 450th anniversary, Pawson tells two stories side by side. Once he attended a meeting of Protestant ministers and members, happened to mention the Reformation, and was told in no uncertain terms that Protestants no longer care for it. It is "dead history," they said, and bringing it up is not the done thing. He came away with his ears ringing.

Yet the very next weekend he was invited to a Roman Catholic seminary in the southeast corner of Ireland to speak to the tutors and lecturers, about the Reformation among other things. They wanted to hear what he thought, wanted an open forum. He said: "I think the issues raised then are still alive, and they have not been settled." They replied: "That is exactly what we think too." Three hours of friendly discussion, then a nice tea, then home.

It is an extraordinary position. He could discuss the Reformation with Roman Catholics, but not with Protestants. Pawson's answer in a nutshell: the Reformation is not out of date. Not because we fight people, Catholic or Protestant, but because we fight systems and isms that blind people to the truth. Only, the front line today is drawn very differently than in Luther's day.

Luther's greatness lies in this. He recovered Seven Priorities, seven things that had been pushed into second place, and put them back in first.

Seven Priorities

What Luther put first

Luther's greatness was getting his priorities right. Seven things that had been relegated to second place, he put back in first.

Let us go through the priorities one by one.

1. Conscience before Authority

Luther lived in an age when freedom of conscience barely existed. It was not the state but the church that told you what to believe and how to behave. To picture that world, remember the tragedy of Galileo. He discovered truths about the universe through his telescope, and was told "you must not believe that, you must not teach that."

Luther was a man who dared to say: "My conscience is captive to the Word of God. It is neither safe nor honest to go against conscience." At the Diet of Worms (1521), before the emperor and the whole machinery of church power, he still would not recant.

And this is no matter of the distant past. The very week he preached, someone handed him a newspaper cutting: over 200 dissident Baptists in the Soviet Union jailed or awaiting trial for "infringing" strict religious laws. One had died after torture; their children questioned for hours about their parents' faith. Pawson notes that perhaps half the human race still lives under totalitarian states that claim the mind as well as the body. The freedom of conscience we take for granted, most of humanity still does not have.

Then Pawson says the world is never led by "jellyfish" with no backbone, drifting with the tide. It is led by people who have the courage of their convictions. And he warns, sharply, that even today's self-styled "non-conformists" conform to one another with astonishing ease. What we need are people who genuinely dare to stand alone.

✍︎Kit's note

2. Truth before Unity

One of the gravest charges laid against Luther was that he split the Church, that he was a schismatic. For nearly a thousand years, Western Europe had one Church, one denomination. They told him: recant and leave the Church intact; go on like this and you will break it.

But Luther put Truth before Unity. His conscience was not free to follow every whim, because it was captive to the Word of God. He saw the crucial thing clearly. What saves people is not the unity of the Church but the truth of the gospel. Unite every church on earth tomorrow, and the number of the saved will not rise. What is really needed is the truth of the gospel preached in those churches.

Pawson says it plainly. Our age has one catchword you climb aboard or get hated for refusing, and that word is "unity." A whole world is shrinking through transport, and the Church seems to have caught the echo, crying "unity, unity, unity." He tells a detail he relishes. When the British Council of Churches at Nottingham said the disagreements could be sorted out from within an already-united church, the Baptist Union alone among the denominations wrote back that no, they must be sorted first, and then unite. That is putting truth before unity.

3. Scripture before Tradition

Pawson names a startling detail: Luther was 20 years old before he first held and read a complete Bible. He was raised devout, prepared for a holy life, and yet not until he was 20 did he see that book. And when he read it, he was astonished. So much of what he had been told was a "vital part" of Christian belief and practice was simply not in it. Nothing about praying to Mary or the saints, no relics and images, no purgatory, no penance.

He asked: where did all this come from? The official answer was that it is the Tradition of the Church, and Tradition is as much the Word of God as that book. Luther stood before two "Words of God," one written and one spoken, and was told to accept both. But he came to a conclusion. Only that book is the truth, and every tradition of every church must be brought to the touchstone of Scripture and tested by it. Once he did that, he began to throw tradition out.

Pawson admits candidly that even his own church has unscriptural traditions, and all of them must bow to the Word of God. He tells of a friend (named on the recording as something like "Eduardo Lubinque," a name I could not verify in any independent source, most likely a transcription slip), once a professor of New Testament to the cream of Rome's Jesuit priests. The more he studied Scripture, the less he could keep teaching students that things not in this book were "the Word of God." So he taught himself out of that chair, just as Luther, 450 years earlier, was also a professor of theology. This book had done it.

✍︎Kit's note

4. Faith before Works (Sola Fide)

This is the biggest question a person can ask, and for Luther it was life or death: How do I get right with God? How are my sins forgiven? The old thunderstorm had left him afraid to die with sins unforgiven, so this was no theory.

When John Tetzel came round selling indulgences, Luther was sure that was not the way. You cannot buy forgiveness. Then he took a further step: if you cannot buy it, neither can you earn it by merit. Pawson lays out three answers to the question of how to get to heaven, and every religion falls into one of them:

• The world says: do good deeds.
• The church of his day said: you need faith plus good deeds.
• Luther said: only one thing is needed, and that is to believe.

The manifesto of the Reformation, running from the Old Testament through the New and on to Luther, is: "The just shall live by faith." Not by good deeds, not by faith mixed with works, but by faith, full stop. The Latin sola fide (faith alone) became the great banner of the Reformation.

So what part do good deeds play? Luther put it superbly, and Pawson says it cannot be put better: We are saved NOT BY good deeds, but FOR good deeds. You do not do good deeds to earn the ticket to heaven; you do them because you are going to heaven already.

The Five Solas

Five slogans that distil the Reformation

Luther's seven priorities were later distilled into five Latin “sola / solus” (alone) slogans. To be honest: packaging the “five solas” as a unified list is a later (19th–20th c.) systematization, not a ready-made 16th-c. slogan, but each idea is genuinely rooted in the Reformers themselves.

5. Grace before Sacraments

Luther was raised to believe that grace was parceled up in seven sacraments (Pawson says the number had once run as high as fourteen, then dropped to seven), and that they worked automatically, like magic, regardless of who administered or received them. Baptismal water automatically saved an infant who knew nothing. Bread and wine, at a certain point in the service, automatically became Christ's actual body and blood, then were offered by a priest as a sacrifice, not on a table but on an altar.

Luther thought it through and said: I know I need God's grace, but there is nothing in this book to tell me that grace is wrapped up in sacraments that work automatically. He realized: without faith, the sacraments are no use. "By grace are you saved, through faith," not through sacraments. Grace is not packaged; it flows like a river. The simplest believer, never baptized and without the Lord's Supper, yet with faith, still knows the grace of God. Pawson points to his friends in the Salvation Army. They have no sacraments at all, yet plainly have grace; they are always singing about it.

Of the two sacraments Luther kept (baptism and the Lord's Supper), Pawson honestly admits what even Luther's closest friends had to grant: he never thought the matter through to its logical end, and he got a little muddled on both. What he got right was the order: grace first, sacraments second.

6. People before Priests (The priesthood of all believers)

The church Luther was born into was a pyramid of power. At the top the Pope, then down through Cardinals, Bishops, the orders of monks, to the parish priest. And far at the bottom, the laity. The divide between "clergy" and "laity" was so rigid that even dress and position in the building differed: one end in vestments, the other in ordinary clothes.

Pawson retells how Luther looked at that pyramid and asked, from the top down. What scriptural justification is there for one man up there? None. For bishops? None. For mediating priests? None. Then he came to a wonderful rediscovery: the priesthood of all believers. He made every layman a priest and every priest a layman, seeing there was no division between them at all. There were differences of function, yes, like different organs in one body. So he called them "ministers," not "priests." Every believer is a priest.

That is why he labored to translate the Bible into common German, to put it into the hands of the people rather than the priests. As he said, a maid sweeping a room with a broom could understand the Word better than a priest. Pawson notes that two-thirds of the world's professing Christians still live under priesthood and hierarchical control, so this protest is still needed.

Priesthood of All Believers

Demolishing the pyramid of power

The medieval church was a pyramid: laity at the bottom, pope at the top. Luther declared: There is no middle class. All are priests.

✍︎Kit's note

7. Christ before the Church

This is the climax. Pawson recalls that when he asked the church-history tutor at that Catholic seminary what the biggest issue of the Reformation was, the two of them agreed. The biggest issue was this: Luther challenged the very idea that Christ and the Church are one, the idea that the Church could do for people what only Christ can do. The Body, that is the Church, was taking the place of the Head, that is Christ.

Pawson works it out through three offices:

• I need a prophet to teach me God's infallible truth. Who is my prophet? Rome says: the body, the infallible Church. Luther says: the Head.
• I need a priest to come to God. Who is my priest? Rome says: the body, confess your sins to the Church. Luther says: Christ in heaven, and you may come to God at any time through Him.
• I need a king to rule me. Who is my king? Rome says: the body on earth. Luther says: my Head in heaven.

So Luther dared to call the papacy "Antichrist." Pawson explains carefully: he did not mean the Pope was against Christ. In its root sense, "anti" means instead of, in the place of. Whoever puts himself in the place of Christ is antichrist. Rome told people that to come to God they must come through it, and that is putting itself in His place.

Then Rome countered with an important argument. When the Head is in heaven and someone on earth wants to come, must they not come through the body? Is not the Pope then Christ's vicar on earth, one standing in His place to convey what He teaches? Luther thought it through and answered: yes, Christ must have a vicar on earth to speak for Him, but that vicar is the Holy Spirit, not the Pope. In sum: "No priest but Christ, and no vicar but the Holy Ghost."

Pawson lands it very practically. That is exactly why there is no confession box anywhere around the walls of his Baptist church. "I cannot forgive your sins, and neither can Gold Hill Baptist Church. If you have sins to confess, go straight to the priest in heaven, who is Christ himself."

✍︎Kit's note

The fire escapes Luther's hands

Pawson preaches mostly about Luther, because Luther lit the fuse. But the fire quickly escaped his hands. Within a single generation the Reformation had split into several streams, each with its own city, its own leader, its own emphasis. Some allied with one another; some quarreled so bitterly they never reconciled. If you hear only of Luther, you would think the Reformation was one solid block. It was not.

More Than One Man

The other faces of the Reformation

Pawson preaches mostly about Luther, because Luther lit the fuse. But the fire quickly escaped his hands. Within a generation the Reformation had split into several streams, each with its own city, its own leader, its own emphasis.

Portraits: all public domain (Wikimedia Commons). Knox and Menno Simons are later engravings, as no contemporary likeness survives.

Timelapse · The Reformation Spreads

A spark spreads across Europe (1517–1600)

Press ▶ Play to watch Western Christendom fracture. The gold land is the Catholic world of 1517; each region changes colour in the year a ruler officially established a new confession (dates are sourced). Drag the slider to scrub through time.

Note: the map colours official, ruler-established confession (cuius regio, eius religio, per the Peace of Augsburg, 1555), not what each person believed; populations were always mixed. Region shapes are approximate and are representative milestones, not every territory. Base map: Natural Earth (public domain), rendered with Plotly.

Zwingli and the split over the Supper. In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli led a reform independent of Luther. The two agreed on nearly everything, and hit only one question: what happens to the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper? At the Marburg Colloquy (1529) they agreed on 14 of 15 articles, then jammed on the last. Luther clung to the word "IS" in "This is my body." He chalked Hoc est corpus meum ("This IS my body") on the table and would not budge. Zwingli held it was only a memorial symbol. They would not shake hands. The united Protestant front broke right there. It is a painful illustration of the very principle "truth before unity," showing how fine the line is between defending truth and splitting the Church.

Calvin and Geneva. A generation later, John Calvin, a Frenchman, systematized the whole of Protestant theology in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and made Geneva a "school of Christ" to which all Europe sent its people. He stressed the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation.

“This is my body”

Four ways to read the Lord's Supper and the split at Marburg

Nothing divided Protestants from one another (and from Rome) more deeply than one question: what happens to the bread and wine? At the Marburg Colloquy (1529), Luther and Zwingli agreed on 14 of 15 articles, but hit this one. Luther chalked “Hoc est corpus meum” (“This IS my body”) on the table and would not budge. The united Protestant front broke right there.

From left (most physical presence) to right (pure symbol). This disagreement kept the Lutheran and Reformed branches from ever fully uniting.

The "radicals" and their price. Then some saw that neither Luther nor Zwingli had gone far enough. If Scripture alone is the authority, they asked, where in the New Testament is infant baptism? In January 1525 at Zurich, for the first time, they baptized adult believers, and so were called Anabaptists, meaning "re-baptizers." They held to a Church of voluntary believers, separate from the state, refusing the sword and the oath. Later Menno Simons gave the shattered movement a peaceful, nonviolent identity, and the name "Mennonite" came from him.

The price they paid was terrible, and it was exacted by both sides. In those same years (1524–25), the "Peasants' War" erupted as German peasants used the very slogans "priesthood of all believers" and "Scripture alone" to press their demands. It was a use Luther never intended, and he reacted violently, siding squarely with the nobility.

✍︎Kit's note

Calvin, Arminius, and the war over predestination. Another generation on, the Reformed camp itself split over an aching question: in salvation, does God do it all (whom He chooses is saved), or does man contribute by his own free faith? The Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius challenged Calvin's unconditional predestination. After his death, his followers drew up the Remonstrance of 1610 in five points. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) met, condemned the Arminian party, and framed the "Five Points of Calvinism," later remembered by the acronym TULIP.

Who chooses whom?

Calvin vs Arminius: Predestination vs Free Will

A generation after Luther, Protestantism split internally over an aching question: in salvation, does God do everything (monergism), or do God and man cooperate (synergism)? The Synod of Dort (1618–19) condemned the Arminian party and framed the “Five Points of Calvinism”, later remembered by the acronym TULIP (a 20th-c. coinage).

TULIP = Total depravity · Unconditional election · Limited atonement · Irresistible grace · Perseverance. The Arminian “Remonstrance” (1610) offered exactly five counter-points.

A century on fire

How the Reformation spread (1517–1619)

From one monk in one German town, within a century the fire reached Switzerland, England, Scotland, the Netherlands and forced Rome itself to reform.

The other two chairs: Rome and Constantinople

Pawson preaches from the Protestant chair, strongly and clearly. But he himself says the Reformation's issues "are still alive and have not been settled." And the best way to hear them fully is to pull up the other two chairs.

Rome's answer: the Council of Trent. The definitive Catholic doctrinal response was the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Fairness matters here, because Protestants often caricature Trent as "salvation by works." In fact Trent teaches that grace is the unmerited beginning ("if by grace, it is not now by works"), but that a person must cooperate freely with that grace, and that faith must be a living faith joined to love and good works. Trent condemned sola fide in the sense of "faith alone, nothing further required." It affirmed Scripture and Tradition (with "equal affection of piety"), the seven sacraments, and transubstantiation. On indulgences, the thing that set Luther off, Trent did not abolish indulgences, but abolished the monetized sale of them, exactly what the 95 Theses targeted. The spearhead of this renewal was the Jesuits of Ignatius of Loyola, approved in 1540.

The story does not stop in the 16th century. In 1999 the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation declared a consensus on the basic truths: "by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God." In a June 2016 interview, Pope Francis said Luther's "intentions were not mistaken"; he was "a reformer," though "some methods were not correct." Later that year, on 31 October 2016, Francis and the Lutheran World Federation jointly led a common commemoration of the Reformation's 500 years at Lund, Sweden.

Constantinople's answer: a decisive silence. The third chair is Eastern Orthodoxy, usually forgotten by Protestant and Catholic alike. Between roughly 1573 and 1581, Lutheran theologians at Tübingen sent the Augsburg Confession (translated into Greek) to Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople, hoping to find common ground. He replied in three letters, one by one rejecting the core Protestant distinctives. He rejected sola fide ("the Church demands a living faith, made evident by good works") and sola scriptura (Scripture may not be interpreted apart from the Fathers), then politely ended the correspondence.

For Orthodoxy, salvation is not a legal verdict (being declared righteous) but theosis, that is deification, a real process of participating in the life of God. This is synergy, that is cooperation: "God does not save a person against that person's will." So Orthodoxy regards the very "faith versus works" quarrel as a Western, juridical framing it never adopted. Later, when one Patriarch (Cyril Lucaris) drafted a confession leaning heavily toward Calvin, Orthodoxy condemned it at the Synod of Jerusalem (1672). In other words, Orthodoxy formally rejected both Luther and Calvin.

Three Chairs

The debate is three-sided, not two

Pawson preaches from the Protestant chair. But to hear all sides, set the other two chairs beside it. The surprise: all three teach that grace is necessary and unmerited, the caricature “Protestants believe in grace, Catholics/Orthodox believe in earning heaven” is false on all three counts. The real fault lines are authority and the meaning of justification.

Orthodoxy formally rejected BOTH Luther (the Jeremiah II correspondence, 1573–81) AND Calvin (the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672).

So then, why fight?

By now many will ask the question Pawson himself raises at the sermon's close. Why dig up these doctrinal matters? Why not compromise for the sake of peace and unity, when everyone is friendly and worships the same God? Is this not petty doctrinal quibbling, a return to the dark ages?

Pawson's answer is blunt and heavy: Because the salvation of immortal souls is at stake. If you tell a man that baptism in water automatically saves him, you damn him. If you tell him good works will earn him heaven, you point him down a wrong road. This is not religious pride. It is that nothing matters more than the truth that brings people to eternal life. A false peace on earth is not worth the eternal destination of thousands of souls.

But here is where Pawson makes us stop. The front line today is no longer between Protestants and Catholics. Pawson says it plainly: the battle now runs between evangelicals on the one hand, and many Protestants and Roman Catholics on the other, a line that cuts across every denominational label. He cites a book by a French professor, The Heirs of the Reformation, which asks: who are the true heirs of Martin Luther? Not "Protestants" in general, but those who, whatever their label, put Scripture above everything and Christ above everyone. And so, Pawson says, those who fire in only one direction are out of date. He is clear: "I am not against Roman Catholics, and I am not against Protestants. I am against isms, against systems. I want to love people, whoever they are." He tells how he found a genuine love rising in his heart for the Catholic tutors he spoke with, loving them as people.

✍︎Kit's note

No priest but Christ, and no vicar but the Holy Ghost. Get your eyes off everyone else. When von Staupitz asked Luther what he would put in the place of Mary, the saints, the images and penance, he answered: Jesus Christ. Man only needs Jesus Christ.

That is why Pawson thanks God for Martin Luther, for his honesty, for the courage to stand alone for what he knew was right and true. And he prays God will raise up more such people, who in love will declare the truth and say: Here I stand, I can do no other. It is neither safe nor honest to go against conscience. My conscience is captive to the Word of God.

Conscience before authority. Truth before unity. Scripture before tradition. Faith before works. Grace before sacraments. People before priests, and making every believer a priest. And above all: Christ before the Church, before everyone and everything else.