The Protestant Reformation of the Church and the World

John Witte, Amy Wheeler

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611647624
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

From a distinguished assembly of twelve internationally acclaimed scholars comes this rich, interdisciplinary study that explores the Protestant Reformation and its revolutionary impact on the church and the world. The Reformation revolutionized the church and spiritual life as well as art, music, literature, architecture, and aesthetics. It transformed economics, trade, banking, and moreâ€"transformations that shifted power away from the church to the state, unleashing radical new campaigns for freedom, equality, democracy, and constitutional order. In this authoritative but accessible study, the authors analyze the kaleidoscopic impact of the Reformation over the past 500 yearsâ€"for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for the West and increasingly for the world.

Chapter One

The Gift of Sola Scriptura to the World

Mark A. Noll

The Protestant principle of sola scriptura, like the Reformation itself, has been a great boon and a great bane to Western civilization. It has both abetted and retarded the development of secular modernity; it has both strengthened and undercut the cause of Christ. As the Reformation revived segments of the Western church, it also split that church. As it unleashed great Christian energy, it also unleashed other forces that disempowered Christianity. As it liberated individuals and communities from thralldom to the pope, it also delivered them into the control of kings, emperors, city councils, and a host of lesser earthly powers. And as it liberated the Scriptures to speak the words of God without fear or favor, it also trivialized those words through multiple iterations of what a sharp-eyed contemporary sociologist has called “pervasive interpretive pluralism.”¹

This chapter presupposes the tight intermingling of bane and blessing that has accompanied the Protestant exaltation of Scripture, especially in league with Protestant insistence on the interpretive authority of the individual conscience. It begins by reviewing definitive statements about the authority of the Bible from the earliest years of Protestantism, followed by a rapid survey to show that the ur-Protestant vision of a liberated Scripture leading to liberated selves has endured to the present. In the interest of interpretive balance, the chapter pauses to summarize weighty contemporary accounts of the damage, both unintended and deliberate, wrought by the notion of sola scriptura. It then sketches three moments in Protestant history when reliance on sola scriptura exposed admittedly large difficulties, but also produced beneficial results. The chapter closes by outlining some of the discriminating questions that should be asked to obtain a clearer understanding of how sola scriptura has actually functioned, leading finally to ecumenical reflections arising from an assessment of that history.

The Bible Alone

As is widely known, Martin Luther informed the Holy Roman Emperor at the imperial Diet of Worms in 1521 that he could not recant what he had published to condemn the sale of indulgences and other abuses he perceived in the late-medieval Catholic Church. The basis of his refusal was crystal clear. He told the emperor, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”² Within less than ten years, a host of other earnest seekers would follow Luther’s reliance on Scripture and so receive divine grace, discover fresh motivation for godly living, or find the courage to stare death straight in the face. For some, it was nearly the same as for Luther, who, again famously, reported many years later that when his conscience became captive to the word of God, he experienced “the mercy of God” and “felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”³ In England, as a prime early example, Thomas Bilney, who was almost as scrupulous about his own need before God as Luther, reported that he had not “heard speak of Jesus” until he read Erasmus’s Greek New Testament. But from that source, Bilney experienced “God’s instruction and inward working” that first left him “wounded with the guilt of my sins,” but then brought “a marvelous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.”⁴ Significantly, Thomas Bilney maintained this testimony even when it led to his execution as a lapsed heretic, taking him to the flames.

Others used different terms to describe the dramatic impact of personal encounter with the Scriptures. In Switzerland, the systematically minded Heinrich Bullinger, in David Steinmetz’s summary, “read Luther and Melanchthon and concluded that their position was more in harmony with the teaching of the Bible and of the Fathers than was the doctrine of the Catholic church,” which conclusion “led to his conversion in 1522.”⁵ In France, William (Guillaume) Farel published the first edition of his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in 1524, a work that would be reprinted fourteen times over the next twenty years. In it, as Carter Lindberg reports, Farel “emphasized the biblical basis for faith” with an exposition that “echoed Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith by grace alone, faith as the free gift of God, complete human dependence on God, and the scriptural basis for these evangelical positions.”⁶ In 1527, Michael Sattler told the court in southwest Germany that would sentence him to death, “I am not aware that we have acted contrary to the gospel and the word of God. I appeal to the words of Christ.”⁷ Only a few years later, in the 1539 edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin identified “the godly” as those who “know the true rule of righteousness is to be sought from scripture alone.”⁸

Sola scriptura, or the equivalent, was becoming a battle cry for Bilney, Bullinger, Farel, Sattler, Calvin, and many more because it had become a life-giving reality. The key was personal appropriation of the Bible, freed from what they considered (in the words of an early Anabaptist, Conrad Grebel) “the great and harmful error” of Catholic authorities.⁹

The conjunction of Scripture and spiritual liberation rapidly became mythic in Protestant self-definition, especially among Protestant evangelicals, as numberless individuals experienced that combination. In 1675, when Philipp Jakob Spener published Pia Desideria, a crucial work for sparking Pietism on the European continent, he appealed to “that true faith which is awakened through the word of God, by the illumination, witness, and sealing of the Holy Spirit.” The first of Spener’s six remedies for Germany’s spiritual torpor demanded a return to Scripture, since the good news of the gospel and “the rules for good works” that pleased God could be found nowhere else.¹⁰

Even more famously, John Wesley, throughout the daylight hours of May 24, 1738, pondered 2 Peter 1:4 (“There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye shall be partakers of the divine nature” [cf. KJV]) and Psalm 130 (“Out of the depths have I called unto thee, O LORD…. For with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption” [Ps. 130:1, 7 KJV]) before he attended a Moravian society meeting in Aldersgate Street. There, when someone read from Martin Luther’s preface to Romans, “About a quarter before nine, while [the speaker] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”¹¹

All sorts of ordinary people out of the limelight underwent something similar. John Wesley’s contemporary Susanna Anthony, of colonial Rhode Island, reported that she suffered from despair brought on by assaults of the devil until she was rescued by meditating on Hebrews 7 and Colossians 3: through them “the Spirit of God … [did] powerfully apply these truths to my soul.”¹² Later in the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano organized the narrative describing his journey from chattel slavery to manumission around a parallel narrative of Bible-delivered spiritual liberation: “In the evening of the same day I was reading and meditating on the fourth chapter of Acts, twelfth verse, under the solemn apprehension of eternity…. In this deep consternation the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light; and in an instant, as it were, removing the veil, and letting light into a dark place, Isa[iah] xxv.7.”¹³

And so it has gone to this very day, but now with instances coming from far beyond Protestantism’s original homelands. In China, the civil rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has explained how his life was changed when, in 2004, he defended a fellow Chinese citizen against the charge of “illegal business practices.” The illegal practices included possession of Bibles. In Zhisheng’s own words, “While handling the legal defense of Pastor Cai Zhouhua … , I first read Scripture. At the time, it left me cold. My attitude changed when the Beijing authorities began to persecute me. In time, I came to know God and join the brotherhood of Christians. Since then, God has given me great strength through difficult times. He has also given me visions, the first coming after I was abducted in August 2006.”¹⁴

The way in which Protestant loyalty to Scripture has easily accommodated other spiritual resources is well illustrated in Gao Zhisheng’s visions. Another variation appears in a report from Uganda by the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Mark Labberton. When he visited a nighttime refuge for children in a region menaced by the Lord’s Resistance Army, he met a middle-aged woman who supervised hundreds of children each night. To Labberton’s question concerning why she performed this duty, she replied, “Well, I am what you call a Christian. I read the Bible every day, and every week I go to a church where we eat something called the Lord’s Supper. I can’t read the Bible every day and share in that meal and not come here at night.”¹⁵

In Iran, a cab driver gave the artist Banafsheh Behzadian a copy of the New Testament in Farsi. She read it and soon afterward joined a church, which led to her dismissal as a professor at the University of Tehran. With her husband she then fled to Turkey and eventually emigrated to Canada, where she has recently painted The Song of Salvation, a series of portraits depicting women at various stages of life’s journey, each accompanied by the biblical text that inspired the image.¹⁶

These latter-day testimonies to Scripture as the source of spiritual quickening sustain the tradition that the generation of Martin Luther did so much to propel. If the anti-Catholicism of historical Protestantism has fallen away from these contemporary witnesses, they nonetheless echo the liberating themes that have remained central throughout Protestant history. The Bible as an antidote to authoritarian oppression, tribal violence, and personal anomie remains a tonic almost as bracing in the twenty-first century as it was in the sixteenth.

Collateral Damage

Yet, as has been the case since Martin Luther’s dramatic entrance onto the world stage, a personal elixir can easily become a social poison. As much as sola scriptura, functioning as a lodestar for personal redemption, has given hope to many individuals, it has also acted as an engine of self-assertion, leaving disorder in its wake. From the start, the foundational principle of sola scriptura that inspired the history of Protestantism (“My conscience is captive to the Word of God”) also produced other effects. These effects included unprecedented controversy in biblical interpretation, unprecedented wrangling among personal consciences in conflict, and unprecedented strife over what it meant to follow the Word of God. Any attempt to highlight the benefits that have come from the Protestant reliance on sola scriptura—trusting the Bible as chief authority for individuals and the church—must also acknowledge the multiplied difficulties created by the same reliance.

To be sure, a focus today on the Protestant idea of sola scriptura takes place in a very different ecclesiastical context from when Martin Luther faced the emperor Charles V at Worms in 1521. It is also far from what such a consideration would have entailed in the mid-sixteenth century, when Catholic authorities issued a brief “Profession of Faith” that encapsulated the anti-Protestant conclusions of the Council of Trent. That Profession urged Catholics to “embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions, and all other observances and constitutions” of what the document called “the Holy Roman Church.” Foremost in that guidance was a pledge directly repudiating sola scriptura: “I … accept Holy Scripture according to that sense which Holy Mother Church has held and does hold, to whom it belongs to judge of the true meaning and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures; I shall never accept or interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the fathers.”¹⁷

Today, however, is not 1521 or 1564, when the Profession was issued. Beginning in the mid-twentieth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: The Protestant (Re-)Reformations of the Church and the World
• 1. The Gift of Sola Scriptura to the World
• 2. Luther and the Gospel of John: A Wisdom of Surprise for Our Time
• 3. An Awkward Witness in a Worded World: Music and the Reformation
• 4. The European Reformation: Advocacy of Education and Liberation
• 5. Faith in Law: The Legal and Political Legacy of the Protestant Reformations
• 6. “There Will Be No Poor among You”: The Reformation of Charity and Social Welfare
• 7. Worldly Worship: The Reformation and Economic Ethics
• 8. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism
• 9. The Reformation and the Future of Europe
• 10. The Challenges of Sixteenth-Century Europe and Our Global Challenges Today
• Postscript: The Need for “Reformed Repentance”
• Bibliography
• Index
• Excerpt from A Brief Introduction to Martin Luther, by Steven Paulson