Historical Theology

I invite you to follow along as I read part of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 3 and reading from verse 19. Romans 3:19:

“Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

“Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from [the] works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.”

Amen.

Well, I’ll make reference to various texts this morning, but let me just read Romans 1:16–17, and then we’ll pray. And Paul declares he’s eager to preach the gospel to the folks in Rome, and he explains why. He says, “For I[’m] not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”

Our Father, we thank you that you have preserved for us the Bible. We thank you that as we turn to it, we see ourselves and we meet Christ. And we pray that that which we now consider from the truth of your Holy Word may make a direct impact on each of our lives, to the glory of the name of Jesus. And in his name we pray. Amen.

Well, let me ask you a number of questions. First of all: Do you think there are beliefs worth dying for? Secondly: What will happen to us when we die? Thirdly: How could we possibly know? Fourthly: Is salvation a gift or a reward? Fifthly: Is the Bible our sole authority?

Now, all of those questions and more besides were actually being addressed over five hundred years ago at the time of the Reformation. And since it is Reformation Sunday, as we know it, I want us to consider a little history and a little theology. In fact, the title for this morning is “Historical Theology.” It sounds a little presumptuous, but it’s an attempt, at least.

In saying that, I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody says it out loud, but inside, you find yourself saying, “Are you sure we should really be doing this? After all, think of all the things that we’re facing in our contemporary world—a world that is confused, a culture that in the West is increasingly broken. Wouldn’t it be better to spend time in more contemporary matters—perhaps even, in light of this coming Tuesday, which is the 5th, spending time dealing directly with the most impending responsibility, opportunity, and privilege?”

Well, hold that thought. Hold that thought. It’s a reasonable thought. Why would you go back over five hundred years, given that here we are in the twenty-first century? We’re modern people, we live in a postmodern culture, and so on. We live in an environment very different from the Reformation. They understood the nature of sin. They lived, if you like, in a moral world. We live in a psychological world. In the moral world you say, “I couldn’t do that; it would be wrong.” In a psychological world you say, “Oh, I don’t think I should do that; I wouldn’t feel comfortable about it.” It’s a very different world. And so I want us to ponder the fact that the relevance of the Reformation impinges directly on the world in which we’re living.

Now, that Reformation, of course, we know about, and I don’t need to work all your way down through the lists. But we know names, don’t we? We clearly know Luther. We know Calvin. We know Zwingli from Switzerland. We know John Knox from Scotland. We know about the bishops Latimer and Ridley, who were burned for their faith in the center of Oxford. And you can still see the spot today when you go and visit.

But the Reformation came in these various contexts, and perhaps particularly a word concerning England. Because when the Reformation began to impact England as a nation, the culture at that time was a culture that was godless. It wasn’t absent religion, but it was irreligious. And in fact, the Christianity of the Reformation which was about to unleash itself in that framework, that kind of Christianity, biblical Christianity, was buried—was actually buried: buried under layers of ignorance and of superstition and of priestcraft and of biblical illiteracy and immorality.

The relevance of the Reformation impinges directly on the world in which we’re living.

In fact, the likeness between the pre-Reformation religion in England and that of the apostles was so small—the similarity was so small—that Bishop Ryle said that if Saint Paul (who wrote the epistle to the Romans, amongst others), if Saint Paul had risen from the dead and had emerged in contemporary England in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, he would scarcely have called it Christianity at all. It would have been unrecognizable to Paul, the apostle of the gospel who wrote for us the words that we’ve just been reading.

Now, let me say a number of things, then, briefly and selectively, about the historical background to the Reformation. It’s bound up in medieval Roman Catholicism. And as I address this, let me say two things by way not of caveat but by way of kindness—something I’m not known for, but anyway… I say this with regularity: We have, I have many Roman Catholic friends. And I often say to them, “You know, I have more in common with you than I do with the proponents of liberal Protestantism, insofar as we share in the statements of the Apostles’ Creed. We share in our understanding of the Trinity. We share in the doctrine of the incarnation. We actually share in many, many foundational elements of Christianity as revealed in Scripture.” But it is at these points that I’m about to refer to that our dialogue—an irenic dialogue—begins to identify the fact that when we come to the essence of these things, we’re actually talking differently, and we’re actually proclaiming a different story.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Medieval Roman Catholicism established a framework of popes and priests and purgatory. That was the framework in which men and women were living. But the cracks in that structure of medieval religion were beginning to show, and revolution was actually in the air. In the minds of men and women, the issue of authority was clear: Authority lay with the pope. He was regarded and is regarded by some still as the vicar of Christ on earth. He and then the bishops that he appointed were then the ones who established what was to be and what was.

Along with that, Mother Church was the source of salvation. Salvation was to be found in it and could not be found outside of it. Grace, which was mentioned with frequency—grace was through the sacraments. You discovered grace through the sacraments—seven sacraments, according to Roman Catholic teaching. Regenerating grace—how you actually became aware of God and accepted by God—regenerating grace was through baptism, and sanctifying grace was through the Mass, the Mass being an unbloody sacrifice of atonement for the sins of men and women, whereby on a daily basis, people may hasten to that moment in order to derive grace from that moment, irrespective of whether they themselves were engaged with it or not. It was there to be looked at. It was there to be seen. It was there to be experienced.

Of course, the problem with the idea of a sacrifice, albeit unbloody, was that there was no body. How do you have a sacrifice with no body? Well, that, of course, then, is the genius of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Thereby, we are able to produce by the very elements of the Eucharist the person of Christ—so concerned with that that these very elements should then be placed in a box and secured, since anything dreadful might happen to them.

In that context, there was the opportunity also for the confession of one’s sins, not directly to God through Jesus but directly to one of the priests, who had been set aside to hear that. Neither the confessor nor the priest to whom the person confessed believed for a moment that anyone could ever be righteous enough before death to know salvation. It just wasn’t possible. You would never be able to make it out fully saved—hence the genius of purgatory. So, let’s have an opportunity to help everybody who can’t get through unscathed with a second chance after death so that that which has been left undone by way of cleansing may be done in the context of purgatory.

Added to that there were the shrines and the statues to a variety of saints. This emerged because their view of God—their view, actually, of Jesus—was somehow or another that Jesus was receding into the background—which, actually, of course, he was. Whether he was receding into the background, and so they created the shrines, or whether the shrines made it very, very clear that these things mattered in a significant way, since we couldn’t really know Jesus as we might—irrespective of that, you know that, because you’ve traveled, and so that medieval Catholicism has left its imprint right up until today. Mary was then given a role that she had never been given: as a mediator to be able to make it possible for those of us who couldn’t speak directly to Jesus to speak to her. And if you follow things closely, you know that her mother, Anne, was also introduced to the framework, so that the cult of Saint Anne, which is referred to even to today…

Now, all of these things are there for your personal perusal, and you can read history as easily as I can. You check and see whether what I’m telling you is true.

Now, it’s in the middle of that that Martin Luther, along with others—Martin Luther, who was devout in his religious exercises; Martin Luther, who was not actually trying to start a new church; Martin Luther, who was pointing out the dissonance that he’d begun to feel between what he discovered when he read his Bible and what he knew of this medieval theology, and it began to jar for him. It caused him great concern, because he wanted desperately to be accepted by God, to know God, to know that his sins were forgiven, to understand what that meant.

He was devout in his fasting. History records that he would fast sometimes for three days, to the point of exhaustion. He was known to be so concerned to confess his sins that he wouldn’t miss any at all—that he might have confessed for up to six hours in the context of one day, so desperately concerned to make sure that he was no longer impacted by the things that he knew were true of him: his thoughts, his deeds. He even wondered whether he went to confession because he was concerned about God or whether he was just concerned about feeling better about himself.

As you know, on one occasion he goes up to Rome, thinking that there, in the center of it all, he may be able to go up those sacred stairs, the Scala Sancta, which he did, going up each step, pausing on each step on his knees to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then to the next step and to say it again. Why would he do that? Because of the belief that there was assurance that by doing so, he could free the soul of his choice from purgatory.

Now, if you think about that for just a minute, you can understand this. If somebody told you, “If you go out and run three times around this building and say the Lord’s Prayer as many times as you can, Great-Uncle Bill, who was a bad old rascal, will be saved from all that was marked by his life,” I think you’d probably give it a try. In fact, in the absence of any solution beyond that kind of thing, we all, I think, would give it a try.

What happened to him was, of course, that as he fulfilled his function as a priest, he was responsible for pronouncing the promise of God for the forgiveness of sins. So as he listened to the confessor, he would then declare forgiveness. But as he fulfilled that, as he pronounced pardon, as he pronounced the promise of God’s forgiveness, the question arose for him: Would the sinner trust God’s promise? Would the sinner trust God’s promise? Because forgiveness, Luther observed, was not tied to the depth of the confessor’s contrition but to the promise of God. So he says to himself, “Well then, that means that the sinner’s hope is not found in something within themselves, but the sinner’s hope is found in something or someone outside of themselves.” And then he said, “That makes amazing sense.”

And while he’s pondering these things, he returns to a verse that scared him, he said. He was scared by the seventeenth verse, which I just read, of Romans chapter 1: “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” And he said to himself, “Here is the problem. Here is the standard. Here is the pass mark, if you like, for forgiveness and for a relationship with God. And I can never, ever get there! And frankly,” he said, “and neither can anybody else—even the people that have just come through my confessional booth.”

Now, it is in that context that suddenly, a light, if you like, shines metaphorically onto Romans 1:17, and a verse that had scared him became a treasure for him. Listen to how he puts it himself in relationship to this:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.

So this is the guy that you could go to and confess your sins. He’s the representative of religion. He’s a representative of the forgiveness of God. But in his bedroom, he’s raging against God. He’s angry about all of these things.

Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.[1]

At the Reformation’s heart was this foundational question: How can sinful men and women be made right with God?

Now, as soon as that happens to Luther, then you realize what a problem he becomes—a problem to the establishment, a problem to all who are continuing down that road.

That’s enough history. Let’s just say a word or two concerning the theology that underpins it.

At the Reformation’s heart was this foundational question: How can sinful men and women be made right with God? How can sinful men and women be made right with God? How can I have a sense of pardon and know that God has forgiven my sin? That was underlying it all.

Now, as I said earlier, the sixteenth century, they understood that it was impossible for them to make the words of Romans 8:1 their own, where Paul in Romans 8 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them [that] are in Christ Jesus.”[2] And the people that are in that context of medieval religion, they realize that it’s just impossible for them to say that. There is nothing that they know that enables them to say that. They could never sing Wesley’s hymn, “No condemnation now I dread; Jesus and all in him is mine!”[3] They couldn’t say that. They had no way of knowing whether they would be saved or what might await them in the purgatory to which they were going. That’s the context.

You say, “Well, it’s very different today.” But it’s still true today. Twenty-first-century men and women in our environment, whether irreligious or religious, cannot understand how it would be possible for them ever to say, “There’s no condemnation that I need to face.” Not at all! Now, they might not be prepared to acknowledge it in terms of the biblical statements regarding our sinful condition before God and our rebellion against him and so on, but if you talk with them, they would be prepared to tell you that their lives are marked by anxiety, by a kind of unfilled emptiness, and sometimes, deep down inside, by a dread that they cannot fully explain. It somehow or another cannot be washed away by a party or by a song or by a trip or by a promotion or by anything at all. And at their heart of hearts, they know they have a problem.

But the significance of the death of Jesus for sinners, the actual sufficiency of Christ’s death for sinners, is neither understood or believed. You see, if there is no such thing as sin, then there is no significance in the death of Jesus Christ for sinners. If sin is incomprehensible, then a satisfaction for sin is unnecessary. So anyone who listens to the gospel being proclaimed who isn’t hiding in a religious expression of their own design, they’re going to have to face up to that.

Now, if you think about it, the Reformation is not about starting something new. The Reformation was about going back to something old. Because, you see, when Jesus had been risen from the dead and dispatched his followers out onto the streets of Jerusalem, they go out onto the streets of Jerusalem, as one commentator puts it, picked up by a “waft of the supernatural.”[4] The people think they’re actually drunk on the streets! They are so unbelievably excited about the story that they have to tell: that Christ has borne sin, that Christ has triumphed over death, and that men and women may know the living God through the Lord Jesus Christ. The followers of Jesus were transformed by the very gospel that they proclaimed.

What happened? Well, you need to read more history, but I won’t bore you with more history. But for the first three centuries, the church is persecuted, and as the church is persecuted and moved from place to place, it grows. The more people fight against it, the more it seems to rise out of the ashes of the martyrs. And then, somewhere in the third century, for the first time, one of the leaders, Constantine, professes that faith in Jesus is okay—makes it a kind of established religion. And one of the great questions of church history is: Was that a good day, or was that a bad day? I think ultimately, it was both good and bad. (Hedge your bets; that’s the key!)

And so, as you read on from there, what do you discover? That the good news of the gospel then was overlaid. It was overlaid by all kinds of stuff that people came up with: a pope, a purgatory, a confessional, a shrine. And suddenly, it became virtually impossible for anybody to fight their way through all of that material back to this amazing story of a Galilean carpenter and eleven men.

In the midst of all of that, Erasmus translates the New Testament. The fourteenth century, Wycliffe translates a Bible. And as people begin to get the Bible in their own hands and read it for themselves—because, after all, the Mass was in Latin. The common person could not understand a word of what was going on—which, of course, is a perfect gig if you don’t really want them to understand what’s going on. But as soon as the Bible comes, then the gospel that the apostles proclaimed springs forth: the revelation by God the Father, redemption in God the Son, regeneration by the power of the Holy Spirit—and at the heart of that, the very heart of it all, justification by grace through faith.

Now, I’m not going to go back down the road that Pastor Schillero took us down a few weeks ago and very helpfully so, but let me just give you one definition—the definition from the catechism—of what justification is: “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardon[s] all our sins, and accept[s] us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness … imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”[5]

You see, our Catholic friends are stuck on this, because they are not convinced of the notion of a righteousness that is imputed, and so their issue is with a righteousness that is infused. Now, there are no degrees of justification. You can’t be more justified or less justified. You can be more or less sanctified—made more and more like Jesus. Therein lies the contemporary problem: the fusion of the doctrine of justification and sanctification. And that is why Luther had to argue for it so clearly.

Now, let me say perhaps three things, and just briefly so.

Let us be absolutely clear about our need of being put right with God—of our need of being put right with God. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that “[no one] is righteous, no, not one,”[6] that all of us have sinned and fallen short of his glory.[7] And the fact is that whenever we sin, it enters our unalterable past. We have an unalterable past. And every sin is entered, if you like, in that journal. Every attempt that we might make to turn back time, to start a new page, still leaves the sins of yesterday on our record.

C. S. Lewis:

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing … to the fact or … the guilt of … sin.[8]

So in other words, our condition as sinners before God cannot be fixed by the passage of time, nor can it be fixed by the exertion of our lives—particularly religious exertion. That is why the Bible makes it clear that God has provided for us in Jesus what we could never come up with for ourselves. Everything that is lacking in us is given to us by Christ. Everything sinful in us is imputed to Christ. And all the judgment that is merited by us is borne in Christ. That’s the gospel!

Now, that I quoted to you is from my notes. As I say it out loud, it’s so good, it’s got to be Sinclair Ferguson—but I didn’t put his initials underneath it. But anyway, it’s so wonderfully helpful, isn’t it? Now, all it is is an explication of the gospel itself. “All have sinned”—Romans 3:23—“and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation [in] his blood,” and so on. Jesus, the innocent one, suffered as the guilty one, bearing our sins and paying our debt. Jesus, if you like, went before the judgment seat of God to receive the verdict of “guilty” as the representative and substitute of sinners.

God has provided for us in Jesus what we could never come up with for ourselves. Everything that is lacking in us is given to us by Christ.

When that dawns, everything changes. Until it dawns, you might as well be back with medieval Roman Catholicism. It dawned for one of the men being crucified beside Jesus, remember—the one who says to his friend, “You know, I don’t think we should keep saying these things like this about Jesus.” Remember what he says? “Because after all, we are up here getting what we deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong!”[9]

So why does the guiltless man die in the place of the guilty? Because of the love of God: “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son [to be the] atoning sacrifice for our sins.”[10] “The Son of God though spotlessly pure,” writes Calvin, “took upon himself the ignominy and shame of our sin and in return clothed us with his purity.”[11]

The fantastic thing about it is this: It’s not that our failures in life are just overlooked, that the test is sort of eradicated. No. We actually qualify with a 100 percent. Well, where do you get a 100percent? What about all that stuff, that unalterable past? “Cleanse me from my sin, Lord; put your power within, Lord.”[12] That’s the cry of the person who understands their need. Nothing we can ever do changes our justification. It’s not possible, as I said, to be more or less justified. There’s no second verdict. There’s no need of a purgatory. (It’s an invention in any case.) Because justification—justification—is the verdict of the last assize of God brought forward into the present, so that the judgment that we should deserve and receive was brought forward to be borne by Christ on the cross. That’s why we sing, “Behold him there, the risen Lamb, my perfect, spotless righteousness.”[13] Do you understand what you’re singing? You’re saying, “I am an unrighteous person. I’m a saved sinner. This is my past. But this is my Savior, and this is my song.”

Final word: You might be sitting out there saying, “Well, I’m not sure about all of this, and I’m not sure how it becomes mine.” Well, let me tell you: First of all, it is all of grace. It is all of grace—not a grace that is received through a sacrament, not grace that’s received there, but the grace that comes to us through the Lord Jesus Christ as we meet him in the Bible. Coming to receive what Christ has done for us, we bring nothing, we give nothing, we pay nothing. Instead, we take, we accept, we embrace the gift. Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”[14] It’s all of grace. It’s all in Christ—all in Christ. And we sang it, didn’t we? “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to your cross I cling.”[15] That’s it.

And it’s all of faith—all of grace, all in Christ, all of faith. And when the Bible talks about faith, it’s not talking about simply an assent, an acknowledgment, a sort of intellectual awareness of the validity, if you like, of the Creed. No, it’s personal trust in Jesus. It’s resting in Jesus. It’s in embracing him as our Substitute and our Savior. It’s learning to say, “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.”

Now, Luther—when you read Luther, you realize what a rascal this guy was. I mean, even after he trusted Christ, he says some dreadful things. And people don’t like Luther because of some of his naughty stuff. I find it quite interesting, and… Yeah. But he’s so concerned that his friends might understand what he understood that he writes one day to one of his friends, who’s struggling with the whole notion itself, and he writes to him, and he says,

Friend, learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say, “Lord Jesus Christ, you are my righteousness. I am your sin. You took upon you what was mine. You set on me what was yours. You became what you were not that I might become what I am not—namely, a saved sinner.”

Now, I say to you again: We began by… I said, “Hold that thought.” What was the thought? It was the thought that surely we need something much more contemporary. Maybe we need somebody to help us how to handle the election on the 5th. Those are significant things; they pale to insignificance before the fact that outside of Christ, we’re lost, doomed. And that sense of irreligious dread God uses to stir us, to shake us, to point us to the Lord Jesus himself.

It’s a challenge, isn’t it, if we’re going to go out into the world as the apostles went out into the world, if we’re going to consider the implications of what it means to live in this way? But what a privilege! The task isn’t finished.

Father, thank you. Thank you for the love that drew the plan of salvation. Thank you for the grace that brought it down to us in the person of Jesus. Thank you for the mighty work of regeneration, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to open our eyes, to convict us of our need of a Savior, to show us that Jesus is the Savior that we need, and then to enable us to do what we ought to do—not bring anything in our defense, not clothe ourselves in respectability, not burden ourselves with the mistakes of our past, but just come, come and say, “Clothe me, Lord Jesus Christ. I give up my attempts at self-righteousness. I give up my irreligious endeavors to carve out my own destiny. I need you. Meet me today. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen.”

[1] “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings,” trans. Lewis W. Spitz, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961), 11.

[2] Romans 8:1 (KJV).

[3] Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?” (1738).

[4] James S. Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 45.

[5] The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 33.

[6] Romans 3:10 (ESV).

[7] See Romans 3:23.

[8] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), chap. 4.

[9] Luke 23:41 (paraphrased).

[10] 1 John 4:10 (NIV).

[11] John Calvin, quoted in Bruce Milne, Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1982), 155.

[12] R. Hudson Pope, “Cleanse Me.” Language modernized.

[13] Charitie Lees Bancroft, “Before the Throne of God Above” (1863).

[14] Romans 6:23 (KJV).

[15] Augustus Montague Toplady, “Rock of Ages” (1776). Language modernized.