By Scripture Alone

Hebrews 4:12-13

October 8, 2017

Reformation Series

Rev. William Carter

This month marks 500 years since Martin Luther sparked a spiritual revolution that we call the Reformation. It began on October 31, 1517, as he posted 95 theses on a church door and invited an academic debate. Neither he nor the Roman church had any idea what that basic act set in motion.

We are going to revisit Luther’s work in sermons and adult classes this month. In the sermons, we will explore three mottos that marked the Reformation: “soli scriptura,” by scripture alone; “soli gratia,” by grace alone, and “soli fide,” by faith alone. Then on October 29, Reformation Sunday, we will sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” and reflect on how the Christian church might need to be reformed in our own day.

So to begin, let us hear the Word of the Lord as it comes to us from the Letter to the Hebrews:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

In the beginning, there was only one church. Now there’s a different brand of church on a lot of street corners. That would have been an unusual situation in the early 1500’s. The western church had its headquarters in Rome, and it was the only show in town, at least in Europe.

The kings and queens gave their solemn allegiance to the pope, who ruled over all Christendom, quite literally the dominion of Christ. The church was the center of all commerce. It was the glue of civilized society. It held the keys to the kingdom of God, and determined who would go to heaven and who would burn eternally. So it was always important to be on the good side of the church.

The church’s power was absolute. Its authority was unquestioned. If anybody misbehaved, they were punished publicly while the church approved. If anybody doubted the faith, they were reprimanded and threatened with fire. If a public tragedy occurred, it was widely believed to be God’s punishment for the sins of the people. And the only way out was to do what the church told you to do, and to believe what the church told you to believe.

Ah, “the good old days!”  Compare that with where we are now. There was no freedom to think for yourself. The church told you what to think. It shaped your entire life. There was no freedom to do as you wished. Life was difficult, and there weren’t a lot of options on how to spend your time. It’s nearly impossible for us to imagine what life was like for the 16^th century Europeans.

And then the Reformation happened. How can anybody explain it?

Intellectually, people were starting to think. Some of their thoughts were new. It would be another 150 or 200 years before the Europeans began to imagine how life might be constructed if the church wasn’t calling all the shots. Yet there was the stirring of a renaissance, a French word that literally means “rebirth.” There was a rebirth of imagination, literature, music, and the arts. Some dared to think freely, on their own time, of course,

But some of the leading thinkers were unshackled by tradition. They could read and write. Certainly this new form of humanism was fermenting across the land.

Economically, the times were changing. The old medieval system of a Lord in his castle and the servants in the fields was breaking down. People were finding opportunities to work in the cities. There was a migration from the countryside to the towns. As they lived closer together, there was more conversation, less isolation. People started to question the autocratic rulers who directed their lives, or tried to.

There was also a new form of technology, something called the printing press, which was the first form of mass communication. Words could be set in type, and then duplicated and sent far and wide. This prompted a desire for literacy – the printing press is no good if people cannot read – and therefore education was increasingly seen as a noble pursuit of the common people.

Things were changing intellectually, economically, and technologically. And into this situation comes an Augustinian monk named Luther. He had joined the monastery in a time of personal anxiety. One day a lightning storm came too close. It terrified him to think that he could die and would not be good enough to stay out of hell. So his way out was to join a strict monastery, to purge his soul before it ended up in purgatory.

Luther was a bit obsessive. He went to confession four times a day, usually for an hour and a half each time. He would unburden his soul to a very patient priest, receive the penance, stand up and step out of the confessional booth, and then think of some sins that he had not yet confessed. Spiritually he was stuck.

We can be certain that he was an exhausting brother to have around the monastery, anxious, zealous, frustrated, and frustrating. But in a smooth move, he was ordered by his superiors to teach at the new University in the town of Wittenberg. He didn’t want to do it, but he was ordered to do it. The task unsettled him even more.

Luther was certain that he was ill equipped to teach. So, in addition to his obsession with confession, he became obsessed with study. His textbook was the Bible. He started studying the Psalms, which he already knew from praying them continuously at the monastery. Then he moved to Paul’s letter to the Romans, and that’s when the light went on.

The year was 1515. Martin Luther started digging into the toughest, densest letter of the apostle Paul, and he got stuck in the very first chapter. He got as far as verse 16, where Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”

Now, wait a minute: his whole life was about shame. He was ashamed of the thoughts in his head, ashamed of the functions of his body, ashamed by how much shame he felt. It never occurred to him to be unashamed, especially of the gospel and the power of God. And then to read that this saving power comes through faith, not by our inadequate thoughts and deeds, but through faith . . . well, the thought of it buckled his knees and drove him to the ground.

Then he went on to the next verse: “The righteousness of God is revealed through faith by faith…” Luther had been convinced of the righteousness of God; he believed it was a terrible justice whereby God was absolutely right and the rest of us are completely wrong. But to have the words “Gospel” and “righteousness” in the same phrase? That was troubling, intriguing, perplexing. It drove Luther to deeper study, deeper reflection.

As somebody says,

“Luther came to the conclusion that “the justice of God” does not refer, as he had been taught, to the punishment of sinners. It means rather that the “justice” or “righteousness” of the righteous is not their own, but God’s. The “righteousness of God” is that which is given to those who live by fiath. It is given, not because they are righteous, not because they fulfill the demands of divine justice, but simply because God wishes to give it… It means that both faith and justification are the work of God, a free gift to sinners.

As a result of this discovery, Luther tells us, ‘I felt that I had been born anew and that the gates of heaven had been opened. The whole of Scripture gained a new meaning. And from that point on the phrase ‘the justice of God’ no longer filled me with hatred, but rather became unspeakably sweet by virtue of a great love.’”[1]

All of that long story is introduction and illustration of our text, from the letter to the Hebrews:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

The word of God is living and active. The philosophers will say the Reformation emerged from free thinking folks who bucked against the Roman system. The economists will say that the feudal system was breaking down and pushing people toward financial freedom. The techno-wizards will say the printing press spread around Luther’s sermons and forged new communities. But at the heart of it all, God spoke.

That’s what the Bible means by “the word of God.” It’s not referring to a Book, it’s pointing to a Voice. The Bible records what faithful people have heard God say through the ages, but what we really need is to hear God speak. And the great miracle of miracles comes when God’s Spirit breathes alive the ancient words that God first spoke.

Now, there’s no other Book that is so accessible to scrutiny and study. The Bible is unique. The Muslims do not scrutinize their scriptures; they recite them, without commentary. But the Bible has been discussed and debated, questioned, explored, and studied, ever since the Jews began to collect the texts of their storytellers, sages, priests, and prophets.

The Christians come out of that tradition. Our Bible is an open book. It’s a human book, with human stories and human literary forms. It is also a holy book, not merely because of what it says, but because of the God that it points to. It is the primary means by which God gets through to us, an open book waiting to be read and studied.

But God will only get through to us if we open the book. And if God gets through to us, it’s like a two edged sword. It cuts away all the distortions and the lies. It frees us from all the tangled deceptions of the human mind and heart. It slices away all the nonsense that we tell ourselves.

So imagine you’re Martin Luther, and your whole life has been an anxious climb to self-improvement. You have tried to claw yourself toward perfection and you know you’re failing miserably. You’ve angered your father who thought you belonged in law school, and you’ve joined up with a monastery that somehow reinforces all your spiritual inadequacies.

And when you’re ordered to teach the Bible, you start to read it, really read it – and you discover at the heart of whole thing is the Word that you are forgiven. Not because you’re good, not because you’re earned it, but solely because God says you’re forgiven. All those spiritual burden that you’ve been carrying are sliced away by the sword of the Lord.

The “righteousness of God” comes by God declaring you are righteous, when you know that you’re not, but you trust that God makes it so.

This is where the Reformation begins, friends, where it begins again and again: as God speaks and slices away all the excessive demands of religion and invites us to trust that we are loved with an eternal, holy love.

For Martin Luther, it sent him on a lifelong trajectory of studying the Bible, reading it night and day, writing commentaries, preaching sermons, teaching classes, and eventually deciding that the Bible is so important that he translated it out of the old churchy language of Latin into the language of his German neighbors. His conviction was that the Bible belongs in a language that can be understood.

And this will be how God speaks to us: through the ancient texts, in our own language.

But beware of the day when God speaks anew: “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword…able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before God, no creature is hidden…”

With that, the medieval church would find itself exposed, its unquestioned authority punctured by the Bible and the German scholar who studied and taught it. Luther would go on to say, “A simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.”

More on that next week, as Luther nails some of his newfound understanding to the church door.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Justo Gonzales, The Story of Christianity: Volume 2 (New York: Harper Collins, 1985) 19-20.