In the fall of 1993 I took a class on the 16th Century Reformation. I was a sophomore at Milligan College in Johnson City, Tennessee. I was also a two-month old Calvinist. I had taken the nickname without knowing very much about the man with the name.

I loved that class; it is one of my top three favorite classes ever. Six students met for a few hours every Thursday evening. Our professor, Dr. Craig Farmer, was the only professor on campus who leaned Calvinist. When we read the debate between Erasmus and Luther on the bondage of the will, it was great to watch the other students try to defend Erasmus’ inconsistencies only to be frustrated by the weakness of his/their arguments. None of the other students were Catholic or even had Catholic sympathies, and yet they could not appreciate what drove the Reformers and Protestantism as a whole.

Durning that semester I had also started a small Bible study on Wednesday nights on the five points of Calvinism. Within a couple weeks news spread about a new “cult” on campus. I got comparisons to David Koresh, and got called a false prophet as well as “antichrist” by one passionate Arminian in the lunchroom. In the spring semester, the church history professor invited me to be a guest speaker for an entire class period when they started to study the Reformation era because he had students who couldn’t believe that anyone still believed like the Reformers.

I did. I do. We do, as elders, and it is reflected in our church statements of “What We Believe” and “What We Believe in Brief.” There is wider appreciation of the Reformation and of Reformed teaching in Evangelicalism today than there was in 1993, yet there is still a sizable group of professing Christians who do not know about, or who know and cannot agree with, the truth or relevance of the Solas and/or TULIP.

Reformation doctrines and emphases are important enough that we almost named our church: Trinity Reformed Evangel Church or Trinity Evangel Reformed Church (TERC for short). After some discussion we decided to leave “Reformed” out of the name but to give it prominent second place on the website. So we are “Reformed and still reforming disciples of Christ.” We embrace the adjective.

What difference does it make? Does it detract from the gospel? Does it (inappropriately) elevate men and men’s teaching? Do we believe everything every Reformer believed? What were they reforming and how does that relate to Protestantism?

October 31, 2017 will be the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the bulletin board at the church in Wittenberg, Germany. It is usually recognized as the turning point toward the Reformation age in church history, though Luther was not the first to see problems and abuses in the Roman Catholic Church. And, while the reformers agreed on many things, the Reformation was not a well-coordinated movement. Many countries in Europe had their own men and their own battles for a few generations.

Because of the upcoming anniversary, because it is so near to our doctrinal heart, and even because a few of our men who went to the last T4G conference said that they wanted to learn more about it, our Sunday evening series for 2016-17 will be on the Reformation. We’ll cover the five sola slogans, the five doctrines of sovereign grace, and biographies of some of the key preachers.

What does it mean to be “reformed”? Why are we still reforming?

What does it mean to be “reformed”?

Informed Christians—let alone ignorant ones—disagree about the definition of this adjective. Perhaps everyone can agree that it has something to do with the division of the church that cracked near the end of the 15th Century and finished splitting in the 16th Century.

For the previous 1,000 years or so the Christian church in the West didn’t have denominations. Some larger cities had larger gatherings of believers and had more influential pastors/leaders/overseers, but it was just the Church represented in local churches everywhere. As many things do over time, churches became a place for deceivers and power hungry, unspiritual men to seek control. The forces combined until eventually the Pope in Rome argued for his preeminence, and he gathered enough “theologians” around him to explain why God gave him authority over all the other congregations and individual Christians. The Roman Catholic Church wasn’t built in a day, but council by closed-door meeting by bargain with a king established the self-protecting and self-perpetuating structure.

Where there are chickens there are broken eggs, so where there are sinners there are rotten folk. There were a number of believers who smelled the stink. They wanted, if not to unscramble the egg, at least to stop adding more rotten ingredients. Erasmus is one of the more well-known Catholic reformers. He and Luther agreed on the behavior problems polluting the church. They disagreed, though, on the heart of the problem.

That said, at the start, Luther didn’t want to break up the church either. He desired reform not revolution, to reshape the beliefs and behaviors to be as they should be, not to start something new. But men in power see reform as a threat to their power.

Authority was a key issue. As William Tyndale and Luther and other first-wave reformers read the Bible, they grew into the biblical conviction that God’s Word has the ultimate authority. The Pope claimed that his teaching had equal authority to the Bible, that he could both pronounce new doctrines and that only he could give the correct interpretation of any Bible doctrine. The reformers didn’t deny that tradition could be helpful or that there were other authorities in the world. They believed that Scripture alone has the ultimate authority. Everything was to be seen in light of Scripture. This was the material cause of the reformation: sola Scriptura. Both sides agreed on the noun, the adjective caused the shakeup.

Roman Catholic leaders also strategically kept the Bible out of the people’s hands, only in the Latin Vulgate. They feared that the people might start reading their own copy of God’s Word.

As men read the Bible they realized that the Catholic Church had added to, and therefore abandoned, the way of of salvation. There were an assortment of problems on every doctrinal aisle, including undue liturgy and use of icons and abuse of clerical power. But the darkest cloud hung over the gospel. Instead of seeing obedience as a result of salvation, obedience was necessary to earn salvation. They taught that a number of works were necessary to prove righteousness to God and be accepted by Him.

But this is no gospel at all. It is not good news when there is always more money to give, more holy places to visit, and more rules to follow. A certain class of unconfessed sins meant loss of justification not just loss of joy. Luther especially targeted the sale of indulgences and the teaching about purgatory where men supposedly paid for their own sins (or their relatives) by money or by minutes of punishment before then going to heaven.

The reformers believed that salvation is in Christ alone; His sacrifice was enough. Jesus paid it all. Judgment is finished for Christians. He saved us by grace alone; He does not look for merit in us or give salvation as a reward. We receive salvation by faith alone; we believe the good news and boast in Him, not in our works. So God gets all the glory alone. The percentage is not split.

It’s not Christ and the Christian by grace and merit through faith and works. Scripture reveals the gospel of salvation by solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli Deo gloria. This little adjective caused a great upheaval.

Closely related to the solas is the sovereignty of God in His saving grace. God saves sinners. The Bible doesn’t teach that man is merely sick in sin, he is dead. He can’t do good, he doesn’t want to. He is incapable of desiring or doing righteousness let alone of perfect holiness.

The Father must choose from among the spiritually dead whom He will save by His mercy because men are totally depraved. The Son laid down His life for those elected by the Father, a decision that was unconditional because none are worthy; one dead man isn’t more deserving than another. The Spirit irresistibly regenerates, opening their eyes to see the light of the gospel of the glory of God in Christ Jesus. The Trinity works together, in power and grace to give eternal life which, by definition, cannot be temporary. God causes new life and the perseverance of that life.

So we embrace the doctrines of Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. These are the five petals of TULIP, the five points of Calvinism.

At Liberty University a friend of mine and I had to meet with the Dean of the School of Religion and the Dean of the Seminary because we had written a letter to Dr. Falwell. Dr. Elmer Towns told us that he could be a Calvinist as well as long as he could define the adjectives. Sure, but that means he wasn’t actually a Calvinist. The adjectives change everything.

The sola slogans and the petal points go together. The reformers didn’t invent any of these truths, nor were these the only truths they taught, but they recovered these doctrines as they read and taught the Bible. These doctrines, the adjectives in particular, wrecked the man-centered, hope-gutting, wallet-emptying, this-worldly religion of Roman Catholicism. Men were captives to false teaching and the worldview that went with it.

When we say we’re “reformed” we mean that we stand with the protestors not the Catholics, and also that we believe in the sovereignty of God and His grace not in the sovereignty of man and his will.

Why are we still reforming?

We keep reforming because there are always bad eggs. A sulphuric stink still rises from our own hearts, let alone in a room full of sinners. Sanctification means growing-repenting and maturing—and the Bible reveals that process won’t be complete on earth.

We also acknowledge that the 16th Century reformers missed some things, either because they were busy trying to avoid being killed, or they were tired, or they were stuck in their perspective, or they were just wrong. Depending on which reformer, we don’t agree with their understanding of the relationship between the church and the state, or between the church and Israel. We don’t agree with most of them on baptizing infants, or with many of them about what’s happening in communion. But we wholeheartedly identify with their love of God’s Word and their love of God’s sovereign grace in the gospel of salvation.

There are a number of ways to read the reformers wrongly. One way is to make them saints who can do no wrong. That’s wrong. Another is to ignore them altogether. That’s ignorant. And another is to read selections in such a way as to defend dualism. What I mean is that those guys loved sentences, and they realized that preaching and writing changed living, transformed individuals and families and churches and nations. Justification by faith alone is an abstract doctrine, but the who are justified don’t think about faith in the abstract alone.

The reformation is filled with peasants reading the Word and working to the glory of God. Poets and painters and song-writers made new art. Some reformers went too far in their iconoclasm, rejecting beauty rather than rejecting the abuses.

But they did not throw the baby out with the baptismal water (though they shouldn’t have put the baby in the baptismal water in the first place). We have tended to make the Reformation a thinking man’s game. We can try to take glory for ourselves about our Reformed theology which says all glory goes to God. We make justification by someone’s reformed understanding of justification by faith alone. These are our Protestant and Reformed sins, and if we don’t repent from our sins, we will cause a different set of problems.

Conclusion

Though we do not formally subscribe to the Canons of Dort or the the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Confession of Faith (which came later), those guys are our people. We are their sons and daughters and it is our joy to acknowledge God’s gift of them to us.

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. (Hebrews 13:7)

This year we will celebrate the heritage of the reformed world-and-life theology that includes love for God, belief in Jesus, and submission to the Word. We owe a debt to these men. We don’t worship them. But we are free to worship in truth because of their sacrificial work and we ought to give thanks to God for them and imitate their faith.

The ultimate reformation came about because of a refreshed, a renovated, a revitalized, and, for many, a Spirit-regenerated view of God in His greatness. Being reformed (rightly) not only doesn’t detract from the gospel, it highlights the gospel.

Though he was after the Reformers, Charles Spurgeon wrote:

Everybody admires Luther! Yes, yes; but you do not want anyone else to do the same today. When you go to the…gardens you all admire the bear; but how would you like a bear at home, or a bear wandering about loose in the street? You tell me that would be unbearable, and no doubt you are right.

So, we admire a man who was firm in the faith, say four hundred years ago; the past ages are sort of a bear-pit or iron cage for him, but such a man today is a nuisance, and must be put down. Call him a narrow-minded bigot, or give him a worse name if can think of one. Yet imagine that in those ages past, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and their (friends) had said, “The world is out of order; but if we try to set it right we shall only make a great (racket), and get ourselves in disgrace. Let us go to our chambers, put on our night caps, and sleep over the bad times, and perhaps when we wake things will have grown better.

Such conduct on their part would have entailed upon us a heritage of error. Age after age would have gone down into the infernal deeps, and the pestiferous bogs of error would have swallowed all. These men loved the faith and the name of Jesus too well to see them trampled on. Note what we owe them, and let us pay to our sons the debt we owe our fathers.

It is today as it was in the Reformer’s days. Decision is needed. Here is the day for the man, where is the man for the day? We who have had the gospel passed to us by martyr hands dare not trifle with it, nor sit by and hear it denied by traitors, who pretend to love it, but inwardly abhor every line of it.

Look you sirs, there are ages yet to come. If the Lord does not speedily appear, there will come another generation, and another, and all these generations will be tainted and injured if we are not faithful to God and to His truth today.

Stand fast, my beloved, in the name of God! I, your brother in Christ, entreat you to abide in the truth. Quit yourselves like men, be strong. The Lord sustain you for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

For us to be bored by the precision of an adjective is to allow generations to come to be swallowed up by error. Some errors are more than unpleasant, some error lead to eternal destruction. Our opportunity to study reformation truths and teachers is not only so that we would be more informed, but so that we will want to be more reformed.

Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever!
Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,
whom he has redeemed from trouble.
(Psalm 107:1-2)

It’s not too much to also say: Let the reformed of the Lord say so!