I really only have an amateur's
knowledge of Reformation history and
most of what I know comes from the
rather feisty Scottish reformed
tradition of John Knox and Andrew
Melville and other characters like those.
But even with my deficit of knowledge
and the biases that I have as sort of a
Scottish reformed person I'd like to
dwell for a few minutes on what I think
are some principles of the Reformation
that are widely agreed upon and that
it's helpful for us to be reminded of,
and there are three of these principles.
The first is the constant need to reform
the church according to the scriptures.
We'll talk about that at length. And then
secondly the centrality of God's grace, we'll
spend a little bit less time on that, and
then finally and most briefly, the courage
to suffer for the Gospel without
bitterness. So let's begin by thinking
first of all about this first principle
of the Reformation and how we can keep
it alive at Beeson Divinity School. The
constant need to reform the church
according to the scriptures. I think I'm
right to say that this is the most basic
principle of the Reformation. The
Reformers were like members of a ship's
crew who realized that the captain, the
first mate and the ship's helmsman
were not reading the map or at least
weren't reading the map correctly and
that the ship was dangerously off course.
The Reformers agreed with their officers
that the map needed to be read.
It wasn't as if the captain thought the
map was unimportant, but it was the
deckhands who realized the map was
being read incorrectly or being
neglected at crucial points, and it was
only by pointing back to the map that
their crazy idea that the ship was
actually headed for disaster could carry
any conviction with anyone. The map of
course was the Holy Scriptures, and the
Reformers were determined to measure the
Church of which they were a part and the
culture in which they lived by the
scriptures and to put the church insofar
as it was a voice within the culture
back on course. When Luther nailed his 95
theses to the castle church door in
Wittenberg, and I have a little pamphlet
here that has those 95 theses in them
that I bought at the castle Church
there. Probably many of you have been
there and they sell these for a you know
just a a modest price and it's got all
95 theses here. Thankfully this copy was
in English and thesis number 54, you know
they're pretty much all about
indulgences, at least indulgences
dominate them and thesis number 54 was
really interesting to me in light of
this conviction that the Reformers had
about bringing the church back to
conformity with the Word of God.
Luther says 'Wrong is done to the Word of
God if one in the same sermon spends as
much or more time on indulgences as on
the word of the Gospel. Luther was
concerned about preaching in the church
He was concerned that the preaching of
the church was given over too much to
the fad of the day, indulgences,
in light of the building of St. Peter's
Basilica in Rome, and not nearly enough
attention was being paid to the word of
the Gospel which he would identify very
closely with its Revelation in Holy
Scripture. Well I don't think I've ever
heard a sermon in an evangelical church
that dwelt on indulgences, but I have
heard lots of sermons in evangelical
churches that dwell on the fads and
needs of the time to the neglect of Holy
Scripture.
Lots of sermons that have spent huge
amounts of time telling me about time
management, marriage improvements, child
rearing, financial planning...
none of those bad topics to think about
and try to figure out biblical
principles for working through... but doing
this to the neglect of the clear
exposition of the Scriptures themselves
so that people go away from church
understanding a passage of Scripture,
what it says and how they should apply
it to their lives, the principle's also
there in Luther's famous statement at
Worms on April 18th in 1521. Nobody
knows exactly what he said but Roland Bainton and his delightful biography of
Luther puts it something like this.
Luther said, "I must be convicted by
Scripture and plain reason," by which I
think Luther meant just the clear
obvious meaning of the text, just what it
seems to mean according to the reasoning
powers that God gave me. "I do not accept
the authority of popes and councils for
they have contradicted each other. My
conscience is captive
to the Word of God." I think you can see
that principled principled emphasis on
Scripture and plain reason also in
William Tyndale in his much less
voluminous writings and especially in
his comments on why he translated the
New Testament. In a little preface that
he attached to the translation of
Genesis from Hebrew that was published
separately, apparently, he comments at
length on why he began his work of
translation and he's talking in
particular about his 1526
translation of the New Testament. He says
in that preface basically that despite
the hard work that it entailed, despite
living as a fugitive and the intense
criticism that he endured, he translated
the Scriptures into English so that the
common people of England would know the
truth about God and the gospel of Jesus
Christ. He wanted to free people from the
self-serving hypocritical avoidance and
misinterpretation of Scripture that was
the norm among the priests in places
like Gloucestershire where he lived in
the Cotswolds. He was surrounded by
priests, he was an ordained priest
himself and he was surrounded by priests
who really did not have a concern for
the discipleship of the people in their
flock or their real knowledge of God, but
who were more concerned that they might
keep their positions of comfort and
prestige and who knew very little of the
Scriptures themselves. And the little bit
that they did know was derived from
secondary sources in Latin, everything
was in Latin, of course for the people.
They understood very little of what they
heard
Sunday by Sunday from these priests. And
so Tyndale says in this preface, "As long
as they these priests can keep the light
of Scripture down, they will so darken
the right way with the mist of their
sophistry and so tangle them that either
rebuke or despise their abominations
with arguments of philosophy and with
worldly similitudes and apparent reasons
of natural wisdom and with wresting the
scripture into their own purposes, clean
contrary to the process order and
meaning of the text, and so delude them
in descanting upon it with allegories
and amaze them expounding it in many
senses before the unlearned laypeople,
when it hath but one simple literal
sense whose light the owls cannot abide,
that though thou feel in thine heart and
are sure how that all is false that they
say yet couldst not solve their
subtle riddles." He's talking there of
course about just sort of the
obfuscation of what the Word of God
actually means by all kinds of fancy
footwork. People knowing something's
wrong here, this really doesn't sound
like what God would say to me but not
really being able to determine why it
didn't sound right and so this is why
Tyndale produced his little New
Testament. He had to publish it in Germany
because he was persona non grata in
England and had to flee England to
Germany where his New Testament was
published and then packed into the
products that the English merchants in
Belgium were selling and shipped back
across the channel there to England. And
there are only three copies of this New
Testament in existence.
Awhile back, not too long ago, the
British Library bought one of
the three copies from Bristol Baptist
College. Paid over a million pounds for
it, it was the largest amount that the
British Library had ever paid for an
acquisition and our library has a
facsimile of it, this is it. I'd love for
you to take a look at it if you have an
interest. I think the physical form of
this New Testament is really interesting.
You know, Tyndale was not only heavily
involved in the the translation, which he
did and worked hard on, but he also took
a great interest in how the translation
was actually published in the actual
physical form in which it would appear.
It is a very simple book you can see
that it's got wide margins it's got very
clear type. Deep, bold, clear type so it's
easy to read and it doesn't have a lot
of helps. It has chapter markings, it has
a few little notations in the margin. It
tells you the titles of the Gospels. No
verses, just chapters, and before each New
Testament text at the beginning it has a
nice little color illumination. And of
course it's pocket-sized, not accidental,
so that a farmer can slip it in his
pocket. If you were caught with one of
these you could die in this time in
England. Slip it into a pocket, could
easily be hidden, it could easily be
smuggled around. Why did Tyndale produce
his New Testament that way? Because he
trusted the Word of God. He felt that if
people could only read the Word of God
in the everyday language that they used
in the fields and in the pubs
and in everyday life, in their homes... if
they could do that then the power of the
word of God, the Living Word of God which
[Dean] Timothy [George] says in his wonderful chapter
on Tyndale in the Revised Theology of
the Reformers. He brings out that Tyndale
believed the Word of God was alive, it
had power, so you didn't need to engage
in a lot of fancy footwork in
presenting it to people. If you just gave
it to them in a language they could
readily understand, it would go to work
in their lives.
And so you open Tyndale's New Testament
and you start reading it and it's
absolutely amazing how much of it is
perfectly understandable 491 years later.
"When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a town
of Jewry, in the time of King Herod
Behold, there came wise men from the east
to Jerusalem saying 'Where is he that is
born King of the Jews, we have seen his
star in the east and are come to worship
Him.'"
Four hundred ninety-one years later we
can understand that perfectly, because
Tyndale was such a gifted translator and
committed to the idea of putting the
Bible into the language of the people in
a simple way that they could understand
and that would preserve its power.
Tyndale trusted the Word of God to do
its work. Well this sort of approach to
the Bible led the reformers to a
rethinking of Christian worship,
especially the Swiss reformers. The
preaching of God's Word became the
centerpiece of the Sunday gathering of
Christians, the Lord's Supper was
important. Calvin believed it should be
observed every week, the Geneva
authorities wouldn't let him observe it
every week. He thought it should be, felt
like it was important, but the
proclamation of God's Word was even more
important. If we want Beeson to train
Christian ministers according to the
spirit of the Reformation, then the study
and the reasoned interpretation of the
Scriptures will always need to be
central to our mission and to the
curriculum that arises from it. Helping
our students to understand what Tyndale
called the 'process, order, and meaning of
the text.' And that little phrase Tyndale
gave a lot of thought to, he repeats it
twice in that preface to his translation
of Genesis, 'the process, order, and meaning
of the text.' Helping our students grasp
that will aid them to cut through the
cultural, political, and religious fog of
rhetoric in which we live and speak the
truth both to themselves and to their
congregations. I hope as a faculty we'll
never turn back from our commitment to
the biblical languages and the study of
both Testaments Old and New as a
critical part of the curriculum. I don't
see this commitment as in any way in
competition with parts of the curriculum
that are not directly related to the
teaching of Scripture,
rather those other parts of the
curriculum are crucial to to our
commitment to Scripture. The history and
doctrine sequence should keep students
from flights of fancy in the
interpretation of Scripture, study of the
church's interpretation of Scripture
over history and the church's
understanding of Scripture's doctrinal
implications is critical to avoiding the
mistakes of the past, and faithfully
interpreting the scriptures in the
present and the future.
Preaching classes teach students how to
teach the scriptures and faithfully
apply them to the life of the church.
Courses in the practice of ministry
shows students how to lead congregations
in obeying the
scriptures. But a large, stable foundation in
the knowledge of what the Scriptures
actually say and in how we know what
they say is critical to our whole
curriculum. To be a reformational
seminary, then, we've got to retain this
commitment. As the reformed wing of the
Reformation and its work on the
covenants of Scripture has taught us, it
is necessary to value equally both the
Old and the New Testaments, both the
Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures and the
Greek scriptures. It's a good thing in my
opinion that Beeson has four Old
Testament professors and three New
Testament professors. The proportion
shows that we intend to honor the
Testaments equally in proportion to
their size and complexity. So a
reformational seminary is going to stay
focused on the scriptures as the
foundation of what we do in training
pastors. Well my second point, you'll be
relieved to know, is much briefer. It's no
less important, but it's it's a lot
briefer. A Reformational seminary needs to
be focused on God's grace. It would
probably be easy to find hundreds of
illustrations of how the biblical
doctrine of God's absolutely free grace
was a central and personally
transformative doctrine for the
Reformers. I've been impressed in reading
back through some Reformation documents
at just how the Reformers operated out
of their heart. What they did came not
from a kind of joy in intellectual
engagement primarily, I mean there's some
of that. It's hard to come away from
Tyndale without thinking he just didn't
enjoy languages, yeah, but the heart of
what they were doing was so important.
They absolutely believed the
Gospel down deep in their hearts, which
is why they were willing to die for it
if necessary. So the doctrine of God's
grace was not just a doctrine, it was
personally transformative for them, but
I'd like to focus out of the hundreds of
examples of how it was both doctrinally
and personally important to the
Reformers, I want to just focus on one
example from my own tradition, the
reformed tradition, and specifically from
John Calvin in his commentary on Romans
which I've been interacting a lot with
over the last seven years.
Calvin's commentary on Romans was
published just three years after William
Tyndale was murdered for his translating
activity. In 1539, Calvin's commentary
came out, and this commentary makes a
finely nuanced but critical distinction
between Calvin's own and the Reformers
own understanding of justification on
one hand and Augustine's understanding of
it on the other. Now of course Augustine
was very important to the Reformers and
they had a deep appreciation for Augustine.
It's no accident that Luther was an
Augustinian monk. But when it came to
justification, Calvin had some
differences with Augustine. Calvin is
commenting on the great turning point in
Paul's argument in Romans 3:21, where
Paul has described the sinfulness of all
humanity without exception both Jew and
Gentile and then utters those wonderful
words "But now apart from the law a
righteousness of God has been revealed.
Although it is witnessed by the law and
the prophets, that is the righteousness
of God through faith in Jesus Christ to
all who believe." And in Calvin's comments
on that passage he
he talks about Augustine. Augustine, he says,
interprets what Paul says here to mean
that God renews the lives of those who
have faith by his spirit.
Both Augustine and Calvin believed people
were so sinful that they could not do
enough of the law to be saved, but
Augustine believed that God in His grace
and by his Spirit gave people the power
to live lives that would make them
righteous people and therefore morally
acceptable to God. Like other reformers
however Calvin correctly reads Paul as
denying to humanity, even divinely
transformed humanity, any role whatsoever
in becoming acceptable to God. "The
Apostle," says Calvin, "excludes from man's
justification not only works which are
morally good, as they're commonly termed,
and which are performed by the natural
instinct, but also all those which even
believers can possess. Calvin here is
making a very careful distinction
between justification and sanctification.
Even though sanctification is a reality
that Calvin will talk about when he
comments on Romans 3:31 where Paul says
"Do we then nullify the law by faith? No,
we establish the law." Calvin will say the
law has a proper use for believers, it
shows us God's will and empowered by the
Spirit we will grow more and more to be
in conformity with the law of God. So
Calvin's definitely not against
sanctification or the use of the law for
the believer in determining God's will
and measuring one's life according to it.
But in Romans 3:21 sanctification plays
no role. Justification and sanctification
are sequestered from one another in a
very important
way, and I think Calvin and the Reformers
got Paul exactly right here, you could
see it in the text that Grant referred
to in his devotions for us as well.
Justification is a free gift of God's
grace and places us right with God. God
then goes to work on us by the power of
His Holy Spirit and works in us a work
of sanctification. Well this characteristic
emphasis of the Reformation has several
implications for the way a Reformational Seminary functions. I think a
Reformational seminary committed to
the doctrine of God's grace toward
sinners
will keep the focus of its curriculum
on God's gracious initiative and
salvation and the human response to
God's grace as the expression of spirit-empowered active acts of grateful
obedience to God. I think the Heidelberg
catechism that we've already recited in
our devotions this morning in it's
question-and-answer 36 that gets this balance
exactly right. Here's Heidelberg
Catechism question-and-answer 36. It's
already talked about justification the
question goes like this
since we have been delivered from our
misery by grace through Christ without
any merit of our own. Why then should we
do good works? And here's the answer
because Christ, having redeemed us by his
blood, is also restoring us by his spirit
into his image, so that with our whole
lives we may show that we are thankful
to God for his benefits so that he may
be praised through us, so that we may be
assured of our faith by its fruits, and
so that by our godly living our
neighbors may be won over to Christ. That
pretty much says it all doesn't it? It
talks about our
justification, it talks about our
sanctification and it talks about our
mission to the world to live lives in
which the gospel is proclaimed to others
so that they may be won over to Christ.
Well, a Reformational seminary should be a
place that not only teaches the
theological centrality of God's grace,
but that as a community has a gracious
character. It should be a redemptive
community in which we are quick to
forgive each other. Are generous in
our assessments of each other and slow
to find fault. Our should be a community
that takes its mission with utmost
seriousness but does not take itself
seriously, in the best sense of that
phrase. We should devote our very best
efforts to our mission but have the
humility to realize that God will
accomplish his purposes even if we fail
to get things right without ever
laughing at others or making light of
the importance of what we're trying to
do, we should be quick to laugh at
ourselves when we make mistakes and take
real joy in God's willingness to use
funny, foible-filled creatures like us to
accomplish his purposes. All this counts
not only for us as colleagues with our
relationship to each other, but also and
maybe even especially for us in our
relationships with our students.
Third, finally, and most briefly a
Reformational seminary is a seminary
that knows how to suffer for the gospel
without bitterness. The Reformers
convictions did not make their lives
easy. That may be is the understatement
of the last 500 years. Here's what
Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, said
about Lutheran the Edict of Worms: "This
devil in the habit of
monk has brought together ancient errors
into one stinking puddle and has
invented new ones. Luther is to be
regarded as a convicted heretic,
no one is to harbor him, his followers
also are to be condemned, his books are
to be eradicated from the memory of man.
Now if grant says something like that in
his response to your faculty activity
report this year, I would say you've
probably got a problem. None of us likes
to hear language like that from anybody,
much less people in power, with the power
of life and death over us. Dean George
in his chapter on William Tyndale says
that Thomas Moore called Tyndale a
hellhound in the kennel of the devil. Wow.
In May, 1535 William Tyndale, who was a
very trusting man apparently. He
liked people, and he liked to like people
and he was a very trusting, open, honest
person. In the language of Foxe's Book of
Martyrs he was a rather simple person,
which means he just was trusting and
open and honest and transparent. Well, in
1535 he was betrayed by a young
Englishman about the age of many of our
students who had stolen money from his
parents, gambled it away, was in big
trouble
with the folks back home and who made
his way to Belgium hoping to somehow
recoup the money and have a good time in
the process. Somebody seems to have hired
him knowing that he was in difficult
straits, was a greedy person and somewhat,
more than somewhat, was a treacherous
person. Someone in England seems to have
hired him to hunt down William Tyndale
and bring him to the authorities so that
he could be arrested.
So, this young man made enquiries and
found Tyndale in Antwerp in Belgium, not
far from the University of Leuven, where
this young man seems to have hung out a
good bit of the time and he very
dishonestly befriended Tyndale. He sat
with him in the pub and let Tyndale pay
for his food and befriended Tyndale and
got into his confidences and then he
tricked Tyndale after several days
perhaps weeks, I can't remember the time
exactly, but tricked Tyndale into following
him down a little alley where he made
sure there were two officers of the
government on either side and as Tyndale
was going forward this man got behind
Tyndale as if in deference to him so
that Tyndale who was short could go
first
and as Tyndale was walking down one of
these little narrow alleys this man was
doing this with his finger above
Tyndale's head to point to the
authorities this is the guy, it's not me,
it's him
behind Tyndale, and they jumped on
Tyndale. One of the officers who arrested
Tyndale said it was it was really
pitiful. Tyndale was just startled, didn't
know what was going on, didn't put up any
resistance but just went along with him.
Well, he was imprisoned in a cold, dark
dungeon for nearly two years and then
taken out, tied to a stake, strangled by
an executioner at the stake, and his body
was burned. His last words were
apparently "Lord, may you open the eyes of
the king of England."
Well stories like this could be
famously multiplied. I suspect that those
who work at an American Divinity School
in the Reformation tradition don't need
to fear this kind of suffering for our
convictions.
I think our trials are more likely to be
like those of the cultural
marginalization that Obstinate inflicted
on Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, when
he said to Pliable after an unsuccessful
effort to get Christian to turn back
from the path of salvation, Obstinate
turns to Pliable and says "Come then
neighbor Pliable, let us turn again and
go home without him. There's a company of
these crazed-headed cockscombs that,
when they take a fancy by the end, are
wiser in their own eyes than seven men
that can render a reason." That's more
like the suffering I suspect that we're
going to endure for our convictions in
years to come in our culture. But I think
the courageous group of men and women of
the Reformation can teach us how to
suffer well for the gospel, whether that
suffering is light or hard, they can teach
us how to suffer. We don't know what
Tyndale felt about the man who betrayed
him, we have very little information
about Tyndale in this period of his life.
We don't know exactly how he felt about
the circumstances in which he found
himself as a result of his work at the
end of his life. Did he grow bitter and
resentful at his fate as he sat in the
darkness? And by what all historians say,
accounts say, was a horrible place to be
imprisoned a dungeon not unlike the
Bastille. Did he question his
convictions and the resolve that had led
him to this painful end? Well in the 19th
century in the archives
the province of Brabant in the Flemish
section of Belgium a letter was
discovered from Tyndale to the governor
of the prison in that province where he
was being kept.
It's a remarkable artifact from history.
It's written in Latin, in Tyndale's own
hand.
So what we find in that letter is not
the report of a Hagiographer, it's not
Foxe's Book of Martyrs or what people who
love Tyndale said he must have thought,
this is from Tyndale himself in that
dungeon to the governor of the prison.
Well in this letter
Tyndale asked that some of his clothing
be brought to him from his confiscated
possessions, and that he be allowed a
lamp in the evening, for he says "It is
tedious sitting alone in the dark." But
the letter, as it builds, you can sense Tyndale is making these requests, first
for clothing and then for a lamp, but
then it kind of builds to what you get
the sense is his main request at the end,
if you don't grant anything else please
give me this. "But most of all," he goes on,
"I earnestly entreat and implore you to
ask the officer to allow me by Hebrew
Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew
dictionary, so that I may spend my time
in those studies. But if, before the
winter is over, any other decision has
been made about me" -- I'm not really a
historian of this period and I don't
know exactly what that means, but I
suspect that's Tyndale's reference to
the possibility that he may be executed --
Tyndale says "I shall be patient abiding
the will of God to the glory of the
grace of my Lord Jesus Christ, whose
Spirit I pray may ever direct your heart."
Written to the governor of the dungeon
that he's located in. These are not the
words of a bitter man who's lost faith
in the task that God had given him, but
of someone who expected to suffer for
the sake of the gospel and does not want
to waste time on self-pity and revenge
but is even there in that dungeon
strategizing about how to get on with
the good work that God has given him to
do, the translation of the Old Testament.
Most of us will probably not be called
to suffer like Tyndale, but rather, like
Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. But here, too, there's much to
learn.
After Obstinate calls him a 'crazed
cockscomb' and leaves, Christian comments
to Pliable, "I'm glad you're persuaded to
go along with me and had even Obstinate
himself but felt what I felt of the
powers and terrors of what is yet unseen,
he would not thus lightly have given us
the back." Christian spends no time on
vindictiveness, he spends no time on
self-pity, he doesn't get angry and upset
with Obstinate. If anything, you sense
some compassion for Obstinate here, 'I
used to be like him myself'
lies under the words. And of
course, you have to remember, as we all
do, that this was being written in prison.
Instead, Christian simply turns to
Pliable and appeals to him to 'please
come with him,' the mission is the crucial
thing,
not how other people not on board are
treating us. Well similarly, a Reformational
Seminary, I think in years to come,
will not spend a lot of time worrying
about our cultured despisers who think
that the positions we take on this, that,
and the other are not correct positions
or urbane positions or highly educated,
sophisticated, cultured positions, but
rather with a healthy biblical view of
human depravity we will simply get on
with our mission of training pastors who
can and will preach the Word of God.
