← White Horse Inn
White Horse Inn
Equipped: Defending the Reformation
00:45:35
Was the Reformation a mistake, or did it pave the way for modern secularism? Michael Horton, Justin Holcomb, Walter Strickland, and Bob Hiller address Roman Catholic critiques and Protestant misconceptions about the Reformation’s legacy. This...
Loading summary
Transcript94 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Host/Announcer
It's been 500 years since the Protestant Reformation. Dialogue between Catholics and Protestants has improved, but it's still not where it should be. Every day, debates rage online. Scroll through the comments and you'll find misrepresentations, strawman arguments and recycled soundbites. That's why we wrote what Still Divides Us, a short book that uncovers four key questions that still separate Protestants and Catholics today. How are we saved? How does God speak? Who runs the church? How should we worship? We don't need to ignore our differences, we need to understand them. Especially if we want real conversations, not just arguments. Get your free copy of what Still Divides Us now while supplies last@solamedia.org offers.
- [00:52]
Bob Hiller
The Reformation starts because he has a pastoral and a burden biblical concern that he's been sent to study the Scriptures by his own father Confessor, by Staupitz. He's been made a doctor of the Church and he believes it is his God given vocation to preach what the Scriptures preach. And what he starts to notice, especially with the indulgence controversy, is that what the Church is teaching is not only counter to what you're finding in the Scriptures, it's actually harmful to the people of God. And so he's really making a pastoral move. It's not just Luther saying, it's my conscience versus the church and is it the individual or the collective that matters? What Luther is saying is, did Christ Jesus do enough to save me or not? And if he did, then we've really got to reevaluate how we're doing theology, how we're doing preaching, how we're helping the people of God. Because what Rome is doing is certainly not when he goes to the diet of worms, it's. And he stands up to make his confession. He does. He's very likely that he does not say at the end, here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. That's not what he's doing. What he's saying there is. I've got the word of God and you've got the word of the Church. And they don't seem to be lining up. And unless you can convince us from the Scriptures that what you're saying is biblical, we need to take a stand on what God has to say.
- [02:32]
Mike Horton
Applying.
- [02:32]
Bob Hiller
The riches of the Reformation to the modern church. This is White Horse Sin, a weekly roundtable discussion about theology and culture.
- [02:53]
Mike Horton
Hello and welcome to another edition of White Horse Inn. We're taking a look at a familiar topic to us on this program over the years, the Reformation. But in this program, we're going to look at some of the challenges people have given in recent years. Very important scholarly books have criticized the Reformation as being the origin of secularization, of breaking up the unity of the Church, of leading to our disenchanted age. And we're going to take a look at some of these criticisms on this program. Bob Hiller, Walter Strickland, Justin Holcomb, and I'm Mike Horton. And brothers, first of all, how do we answer Roman Catholic polemics that the Reformation was really the impetus for secularization? Everything was fine. Christendom was, you know, it had its problems, but people all felt like they belonged to it. And then this upstart monk comes in with his 95 theses and the sacred fabric of Christendom is torn.
- [04:05]
Bob Hiller
Well, I would start by saying I'm not sure that's a entirely fair characterization of what took place at the time of the Reformation. I, it's so funny because I, I saw someone the other day criticizing Luther and they were saying something like, Luther was just this sort of debaucherous monk who wanted to get married and abandon his vows, and he just wanted to embrace sort of drinking and, and immorality and all this stuff. And so he tore the Church apart. And I, I couldn't help thinking to myself, yes, it was, it was Luther who really was morally opposite of the Pope in those days. One of the things I think it's very much worth remembering about Luther is the Reformation starts because he has a pastoral and a biblical concern that he's been sent to study the Scriptures by his own father confessor, by Staupitz. He's been made a doctor of the Church and he believes it is his God given vocation to, to preach what the Scriptures preach. And what he starts to notice, especially with the indulgence controversy, is that what the Church is teaching is not only counter to what you're finding in the Scriptures, it's actually harmful to the people of God. And so he's really making a pastoral move. It's not just Luther saying it's my conscience versus the Church and is it the individual or the collective that matters? What Luther is saying is, did Christ Jesus do enough to save me or not? And if he did, then we've really got to reevaluate how we're doing theology, how we're doing preaching, how we're helping the people of God, because what Rome is doing is certainly not, and it's very much worth noting that when he goes to the diet of worms and he stands up to make his confession, it's very likely that he does not say at the end, here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. We love that because it does cast him as this sort of enlightenment hero. Me versus the world, and I'm going to die on my own hill. That's not what he's doing. What he's saying there is, I've got the word of God and you've got the word of the Church, and they don't seem to be lining up. And unless you can convince us from the Scriptures that what you're saying is biblical, we need to take a stand on what God has to say. And so it's not a fight for individualism. It's not a fight for whatever philosophy we want to blame Luther for this week. It's a fight for the faithful preaching and teaching of God's Word for the sake of sinners. And that's what he's after.
- [06:45]
Mike Horton
I find it really interesting, too, that you bring up his initial protest when he issues the 95 theses proposal for debate. If you read through the 95 theses, there's nothing in there about justification.
- [07:10]
Bob Hiller
Right.
- [07:11]
Mike Horton
He's not yet at the place where he understands. He's come to his mature view of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ. He's still an Augustinian and believes in grace alone, but not imputed righteousness yet. And so what actually provokes the whole Reformation, if you're gonna say the 95 theses sparked the Reformation, was repentance, not justification. He thought Rome was being antinomian.
- [07:41]
Bob Hiller
Yeah. They made it too easy. You can purchase it. Yeah.
- [07:45]
Mike Horton
And then go back to the brothel. And so clearly, no one who is characterizing Luther as a profligate monk who just wants liberty, Nobody who says that has actually read even the 95 theses. It's a different kind of dispute. Luther's problem was that he was too good of a monk. He took the whole darn thing seriously.
- [08:14]
Bob Hiller
Yeah.
- [08:15]
Mike Horton
He took it more seriously than Staupitz. He took it more seriously than his fellow monks. He really believed that if he sinned and he forgot to confess that sin, however small, God would condemn him to hell. And so he wore out poor Staupitz, confessing that I looked wrong at my dog today. He was scrupulous. That was why his conscience broke, because he took the law more seriously than the Church did. He took God more seriously than the Church did.
- [08:55]
Justin Holcomb
The other way this plays out with regard to the whole, we blame Protestantism for secularization. Part of the secularization story is, yeah, everything was unified, everything was fine. We had the structures of authority. And then Luther and all these guys show up and disrupt it. They're being rebellious. This radical individualism. And then there's a philosophical piece on nominalism where Luther gets blamed for nominalism when Council of Trent's doctrine of justification is more nominalistic than anything. But that's a whole different story.
- [09:25]
Bob Hiller
What's nominalism, Justin?
- [09:28]
Justin Holcomb
It's. It highlights the. The denies the real independent existence of universal forms like beauty and justice. It also emphasizes the will of God over God's reason and nature. And God can't go around calling things righteous when they're not actually righteous. You know, so and so and so.
- [09:48]
Mike Horton
Basically, you have to. You have to fall on simply the absolute authority of the Bible and the Church, even if it's unreasonable to do so.
- [10:01]
Walter Strickland
Which is really where, like now, if we look at Baptist today, this is, you know, this idea of the priesthood of the believer. You know, it's a rejection of the fact that only priests could mediate the word of God to people. It puts the. And this goes back to the individualization of the Church and sort of taking the idea of, hey, we are not. We don't have to wait on the word of God to be mediated because you are a believer priest, you too can read the Scripture, which we know that part of the story of the Reformation is the utilizing the printing press to offer the word of God to people in a more common vernacular.
- [10:42]
Justin Holcomb
And so which is accommodating to all those individuals who can have the authority in their own hands, some other institution doing it. And it's a fragmentation. And this is what Milbank says is because of Luther, and all this stuff is the fragmentation of society. Sorry, I'm jumping. I'm just. I'm seeing the whole narrative play out. Oh, yeah, I know exactly how this one runs.
- [11:01]
Walter Strickland
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [11:02]
Mike Horton
Let's talk about fragmentation. Here's. Here's an example of fragmentation. This is. One scholar explains what happened just about 50 years before the Reformation, 100 years before the Reformation. And you had all kinds of schisms of a lower status, but this was a big one. From 1305 to 1377, there were three popes. And here's what this authority says. For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another. And in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the Contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation. She had become questionable in her whole objective form. The true Church, the true pledge of salvation had to be sought outside the institution. And the person who said that was Pope Benedict xvi. Clearly it was not a time. The Church had to. The fourth Lateran Council had to decree that every person had to go to Mass once a year, confess to a priest and go to Mass once a year. Now think about that. This is supposedly the age of faith, really the age of faith. I'm commanded to go confess my sins to a priest and go to Mass once a year. I mean, and you have to command people to do even that. It wasn't a time of great faith. It was a time of shared cultural religious ceremony. But it wasn't really an age of faith. And people were scandalized from the Pope down. You have people ringing out in horror at the behavior. Pope Alexander had orgies in the papal palace and said he wasn't even sure if God exists. Robert Bellarmine, the Counter Reformation theologian, said, he's probably in hell. So I mean, people didn't trust the Papacy. The Popes who ran things during the Reformation had scores of illegitimate children. They were fathers of the Church in more ways than one. They had mistresses all over the place and practiced pagan rituals in their gardens. So it was not, let's just say, a high water mark for the period of Church history. And then the people were told that if they had a wicked priest, that sacrament was invalid. Well, he said all of our priests are wicked.
- [14:10]
Walter Strickland
Yeah.
- [14:11]
Bob Hiller
So what hope do we have at all?
- [14:12]
Mike Horton
Right, right, right. So you have a reformation. That really is a reformation. It's not a revolution. It's an attempt to correct all these abuses by putting the Gospel at the center. And that is something people don't, don't recognize.
- [14:30]
Bob Hiller
And I, I think this, this goes hand in hand with this idea that again, the individualization over and against the institution. It, that's. They're the wrong categories, I think, to work with. What the Reformers were saying was spe specifically to that point. You just made Mike about the, the corrupt priests. And like if you have a corrupt priest, you can't get the gospel. No, that's not the case because the word of God and the Gospel is higher than the, the Church. So it's a question of authority. What is the ultimate authority? Is it the church or is it the Scripture? And when the Reformers are accused of saying we're the interpreters of Scripture because anybody can interpret the Scripture, for themselves. What actually happens is you get the reformer saying, no, that's not what we're doing. We're arguing that the Scriptures are higher authority than the church. And we're going to prove it to you from the Scriptures and by the way, from all the doctors of the church. And so the reformers are always going back and appealing to the great teachers in the Reformation. A gentleman by the name of Volker Lepin just released a book last year called Sola in which he walks through the solas of the Reformation. And he demonstrates pretty handily that actually this stuff was either taught or seeds of this stuff had been taught for quite a while leading up to Luther. Now Luther takes it in a more gospel oriented direction. But this idea that like Luther's creating heresy, you know, out of nowhere, no, these guys appeal to the church, our confessions, read the Lutheran Confessions and then join them as they send a Lutheran church. But when you do, what you'll find is, especially with the Augsburg Confession, they'll say, here's our argument, here's the Scriptures to back it up, and here's exactly how the Fathers taught it as well. So, so no one's actually the people who are working against the church are those who are trying to use the church to be authority that it isn't.
- [16:30]
Justin Holcomb
And that's the boogeyman of the Reformation, is that they're all about Scripture and not about tradition. That the reformers, none of them cared about tradition. This is just you and your Bible barely cares about church and it's about some abstract doctrines. And if you. This is from D.H. williams, who is in the Baptist tradition. I think he, and I'm not exactly sure what denomination, but he is a patristic scholar. Historical theology, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism Primer for suspicious Protestants. He has some great articles in there about the misnomers. And you talked about authority. Scripture is magisterial authority. The tradition is ministerial authority. That's the difference that was happening with regard to how the Roman Catholic Church understood authority of the church and scripture. And so it was just saying so when you read, when you read what people say about the reformers about scripture and tradition and then you actually read them, it is shocking. You listen to Calvin talk about the creeds and councils of the authorities of the church that should be revered as holy. I mean, it is not what you're expecting from the boogeyman that people make up that they're schismatic, they don't care about tradition at all. And Mike does this in Justification book where he goes through the Great Exchange and starts talking about how the Great Exchange and the patristics starts quoting them and you're like, was that written by Luther, Calvin Cranmer or someone else?
- [18:01]
Mike Horton
Oh, no, no, no.
- [18:02]
Justin Holcomb
That, that was. That, you know, that was Athanasius. That was, you know, you know, whoever. And I did the same thing recently on Long Gospel. I went back to the patristics on that. This wasn't created by Luther. Fine tuned, highlighted, celebrated, emphasized. Absolutely. And that's the language that I like so much with D.H. williams is retrievals that the Reformers, of course they had some things that were discontinuity from the tradition or emphasized, but there was a lot more of the retrieval of classic Christianity that was being highlighted, polished and celebrated.
- [18:37]
Mike Horton
The Reformers and their immediate heirs were in fact in the vanguard of the patristic's renewal. They were translating patristic texts from Greek into Latin and so forth. Here, by the way, you say magisterial and ministerial. So the Reformers believed that Scripture alone is magisterial. That is the master of our theology. And yet the church tradition is ministerial. It helps us stay on track in our reading of the Bible. Here's what Thomas Aquinas said says, and tell me how different this is from what you've just described of the Reformer's view. The Church fathers are valuable nevertheless. Sacred doctrine makes use of these authorities, the fathers as extrinsic and probable arguments, but properly uses the authority of the canonical Scriptures as an incontrovertible proof and the authority of the doctors as one that may be properly used, yet merely as probable. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the apostles and prophets who wrote the canonical books, and not on the revelation, if any such there were made to other doctors. Hence, Augustine says, only those books of Scripture which are called canonical have I learned to hold in such honor as to believe their authors have not erred in any way in writing them. But other authors I so read as not to deem everything in their works to be true merely on account of their having so thought and written whatever may have been their holiness. And they're learning that.
- [20:43]
Bob Hiller
Aquinas.
- [20:44]
Mike Horton
That's Thomas Aquinas.
- [20:45]
Walter Strickland
Wow.
- [20:47]
Justin Holcomb
Same categories, different words.
- [20:49]
Mike Horton
Also, I'll just mention one more. Aquinas goes on to say, sola canonica scriptur est regula fide. The only rule of faith is canonical scripture.
- [21:06]
Podcast Promo Voice
Introducing Tell Me a Story. A brand new podcast for children and families. Each episode brings Scripture to life with immersive storytelling followed by a short devotional to spark meaningful conversations.
- [21:18]
Justin Holcomb
Let there be light.
- [21:27]
Mike Horton
The serpent. He tricked me.
- [21:31]
Bob Hiller
It is I, Joseph. I am the brother you sold to the traitors.
- [21:42]
Podcast Promo Voice
In a world filled with distractions and declining biblical literacy, our children need stories that anchor them in truth. Tell me a Story weaves the rich narratives of God's promises shown in his Word and the world. Equipping parents for discipleship and helping families reflect on the greatest story ever told. Episode one is available now wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [22:12]
Walter Strickland
Yeah, that really does counter this sort of assertion of a subjective, individualistic, romantic sort of love affair with God that. That was being accused of the. Of the Reformers. I mean, and even still, I would say salvation for the Reformers as a whole was not this sort of subjective thing. It was actually, if we look into scripture, as they were encouraging us to do, it was very objective because it was pointing us to Christ's death. And so, as you're saying, Mike, as they're retrieving the fathers, as they're retrieving and looking back at scripture, it was a lot more objective than that. Oftentimes, the Roman Catholic Church is offering.
- [22:53]
Mike Horton
Well, yeah, that's why Calvin said he wrote to Cardinal Sadaleto responding to a letter Satellato sent to Geneva. He responded, dear Cardinal Satellite, we are assaulted by two sects, the Pope and the Anabaptists. For he said, they both profess their own false miracles and revelations in order to bury the word of God in obscurity. They both look inside instead of outside to what God has revealed. And they were hardly. The Reformers were hardly. They blamed the Anabaptists and the Pope in one breath. They were hardly the Anabaptists. That Protestantism became, namely radical Anabaptists who only relied on their individual inner light. Luther called those enthusiasts. But what's really tragic is enthusiasm became mainline Protestantism. So now when a lot of people look at Protestantism, it's anachronistic. They're looking at 16th century magisterial protestantism as if it were 16th century radical anabaptism and modern Protestantism. And that just. That's not accurate. How about division? So this is a big one. That basically Protestant history proves the Roman Catholic polemical point that if you view Scripture alone as the final authority in all matters of faith and practice, the church will fracture into a million in shards.
- [24:47]
Bob Hiller
Yes and no. Can we do that? What was the. Billy Joel had a great line once where he said everyone was worried that if rock and roll got popular, all the kids would leave their homes and and get caught up in sex, drugs and rock and roll. And turns out they were right. I, I think sometimes we, we, we need, we need to be honest. And I, I think it's fair to say at the time of the Reformation, there does start to be more splintering within the church. There are more denominations that break off. There are two ways to talk about the church. And here is where, in the last episode, we sort of talked about the visible and the invisible church. And that distinction can be somewhat problematic. But I do think here it's worth pointing out that there is only one church. It does still exist as one church. And it is those sheep who hear the shepherd's voice wherever they may find themselves. Yeah, there's denominational distinctions, but let's. The other thing to be fair about here is that it's not as though just because everybody claimed to be under the banner of rome in the 16th century, that everyone who claimed the banner of Rome was united with each other either. There was a great deal of division within the Church.
- [25:53]
Mike Horton
It was just the Pope who held them together.
- [25:56]
Bob Hiller
Yeah, it was the Pope who was holding together. That's exactly right.
- [25:58]
Walter Strickland
It's covert.
- [25:59]
Bob Hiller
Right. So the reality is the only thing that unifies the church is not denominational ties, but the preaching of the Gospel. And so the one true church is created by the preaching of the Gospel. And whenever the gospel is properly preached and the sacraments are administered, there you have the one true church, regardless of denominational banner.
- [26:20]
Mike Horton
But we have a lot of not preaching of the gospel.
- [26:23]
Bob Hiller
Right. And you might have a lot of not preaching of the Gospel under Orthodox banners. Right. And so what matters is the preaching of the Gospel. That's why what the Reformation does matters, is it frees people to preach the Gospel. Yeah, there's denominational distinctions and arguments that we have, but faith in Christ is what makes you part of the church. So there is still only one true church.
- [26:47]
Justin Holcomb
If you go to the Nicene Creed term, one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, we're talking about true church. Now again, many Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic doctrine would say that would have a different interpretation of who is part of the one true church. But the fact that so many billions around the world would say the Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, mean it not cross their fingers. And the one holy Catholic apostolic Church is the work of God, by the way, it's the unified church. It's not us being unified, it's him unifying his church. The unity is a unity that he wins. Holy is not our endeavors, but him making us holy. And sanctifying US Catholic is the general all over universal, his people all over the place and apostolic as he gives us the foundation, he has sent us the apostles and the prophets and they've spoken authoritatively about him. Kind of depends on what do you mean by church if you mean the institution and the structures. Absolutely. There's fracturing. There are lots of Protestant denominations, but the fact that, that just if you go by the Nicene Creed and Apostles Creed, how many people are unified on that as the summary of the statement of faith of what Scripture teaches about the triune God. And then the fact that you have four of us, four very different traditions from confessional tradition. Not different, but different traditions. But confessions that overlap so much. I mean, there's a lot of unity about what we celebrate between the four of us, four different denominational traditions. So structurally, if you're talking about some type of organizational, institutional unity, yes, they're right. And if you're not talking about that, then that's not necessarily the case.
- [28:33]
Mike Horton
I've just finished a manuscript for Crossway on Sola Scriptura in the Church Fathers and was kind of blown away. I mean, I knew had a handful of these quotes, but it was like, where do I stop? They all, from the very beginning said explicitly sola scriptura. They said it outright. They distinguished between, in fact, a classic example Bishop of Jerusalem who said in his catechetical lectures, said to his students, and hey, memorize the creed because you can't read, you know, until you can read, we're going to teach you how to read so you can read the Bible. But right now, memorize the Creed so at least have something to go by. And then I will give you the scripture proofs because you shouldn't believe anything I say unless I give you the scripture proofs. And it's quote like that after, after quote. This is, you know, the Roman Catholic polemic is. Well, no, you have the Pope going all the way back to Peter and you had a central authority and bishops. And that's why. And Justin, I'm not. I know we're on the same page about the exegesis here. I'm only mentioning bishops because I don't mind.
- [30:02]
Justin Holcomb
You don't have to explain it.
- [30:03]
Mike Horton
Okay.
- [30:04]
Justin Holcomb
Since when have you cared to actually explain it anyway?
- [30:06]
Walter Strickland
Isn't that amazing?
- [30:07]
Justin Holcomb
Is there sickness kicking in?
- [30:09]
Mike Horton
I like sick might. I'm getting old, bolder, I think, and soft. I know.
- [30:15]
Justin Holcomb
Bishops. I'm like, okay, here we go, Here we go.
- [30:17]
Mike Horton
Yeah, I don't know. In the 4th century, Jerome, the Great Church. Father Jerome says that bishop and elder refer to the same office in the New Testament, and I'm quoting him here. Before attachment to persons in religion was begun at the instigation of the devil, the churches were governed by the common consultation of elders. And then he goes on to say the introduction of bishops as a separate order above the presbyters was more from custom than from the truth of any arrangement by the Lord. And then making the same point, St. Ambrose attributed the rise of a stronger centralized hierarchy to the failure of presbyters to guard the truth. And yet even at that point, Ambrose said the bishop was only the moderator of the presbytery and could do nothing without the consent of the whole presbytery. End quote. Irenaeus in the second century talks about the presbyterial reading of the Bible, reading together with the church, with the elders. And interestingly, even Carl Ratzinger, Pope Benedict xvi acknowledged presbyter and episcopos are used interchangeably in the New Testament and in the earliest churches. End quote. Here. This is just shocking. On what basis then could he say that clergy have to accept many things not taught in Scripture because of Petrine succession? See, he contradicts his own point anyway. But in the Roman Catholic Anglican Dialogue, the Vatican acknowledged that, quote, the New Testament texts offer no sufficient basis for papal primacy and they contain no explicit record of transmission of Peter's leadership. So even the Vatican acknowledges that there is no Petrine succession, that there is no record of this. Gregory the great in the 6th century, and I'll shut up after this one, Gregory the great in the 6th century was offended when a bishop called him universal Pope, declaring, quote, this is a word of proud address I have forbidden. None of my predecessors ever wished to use this profane word, universal. But I say it confidently, because whoever calls himself universal bishop or wishes to be so called is, in his self exaltation, Antichrist's precursor. For in his swaggering, he sets himself before the rest. And yet, at the Council of Rheims in 1049, the Latin Church claimed for the Pope that very title, Pontifex. Pontifex Universalis. Exactly. The title that Gregory identified as Antichrist's precursor. So is Pope Gregory right? Who's exactly right? Oh, so it's confusing. The Church tradition is a very confusing collection. So who's going to be above the Church to be able to interpret what the Church says about the Bible infinites? Okay, if no one else. If no one else has his hand.
- [33:59]
Bob Hiller
Up, he said universal bishop, and Justin's eyes got real big. Oh, that sounds exciting.
- [34:05]
Mike Horton
But can you believe that the Vatican acknowledges that you don't see that on the news? I mean, I would say that's a pretty newsworthy admission. There's no basis for the papacy, so.
- [34:19]
Walter Strickland
They'Re speaking of no basis for the papacy. My good Baptist brethren are crying out, amen. So just to sort of cheers. We talked about centralization, we've talked about. But now there are people who have taken on priesthood of believer in very, very distinct ways that I think are beyond the pale of what we ought to champion. There are folks who hear of the creeds, the councils. So creedal orthodoxy is assumed to be explicitly Roman Catholic. We ought not to associate ourselves with those sola scriptura in the sense of we only read Scripture, we have nothing to guide our reading of scripture but the Holy Spirit. And so, and I would say that those who completely shuck the, the, the thought and the history and the tradition of the Church as far as helping give us a, a guide to ministering the Scripture and understanding the Scripture, that's also problematic.
- [35:26]
Mike Horton
Yeah. And what it means is you're gonna, you're gonna. If you don't have a way of training and calling men to the ministry, then you're going to end up having charismatic teachers who are under no authority, no accountability. It's going to happen because people rush to teachers and God has given us a way of distinguishing true shepherds from false ones, or at least not appropriate ones.
- [36:01]
Walter Strickland
And this idea of the faithful, once for all delivered to the saints that scripture talks about, this is what we have to proclaim. And this is all we have. You know, this idea of this persuasive person who can provoke people to emotional states where they're going to make decisions for Jesus when they're making decisions to follow a teacher, that's just very persuasive because there's not much bearing to what they're doing. So I say that because there are a lot of sort of independent minded churches, fundamentalist in their sort of interpretation of the text. They are essentially equating the authority with their interpretation with the authority of the text. And it's because they're not sitting with the church as a whole. And then you begin to have this splintering that's exacerbated by our extreme independence from the rest of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
- [36:53]
Mike Horton
Yeah, this idea of the. I'm glad you touched on this, Walter, because this idea of the priesthood of all believers that you're describing is not how it was understood by Luther and Calvin and the rest.
- [37:07]
Walter Strickland
Precisely.
- [37:07]
Mike Horton
The priesthood of all believers meant simply that, just as James says, confess your sins to one another and you can absolve each other. It says that the priest is not a different creature than the ones he serves. We're all priests. We can all hear confessions and pronounce absolution. But it's ordinarily done properly in the context of church life. It never meant that you sit over at your desk, pouring over your Scofield reference Bible and coming up with an entire scheme of building a church around it, gathering a bunch of disaffected folks to sit in your living room. And that was never. Luther, in fact said, well, that would just mean that everyone would go to hell in his own way.
- [38:02]
Bob Hiller
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:04]
Mike Horton
So individualism breaking off from the Church. I don't think anybody, any real historian of the Reformation would, Would ever say that Wittenberg and Geneva were havens of individualism.
- [38:25]
Walter Strickland
Right?
- [38:26]
Bob Hiller
No, no.
- [38:26]
Walter Strickland
Right.
- [38:28]
Justin Holcomb
Nor, nor, nor the Church of England.
- [38:31]
Bob Hiller
Right.
- [38:31]
Justin Holcomb
Granmer.
- [38:32]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Yeah.
- [38:32]
Walter Strickland
Was not, not a.
- [38:33]
Justin Holcomb
Not exactly radical individualism was not rampant.
- [38:38]
Mike Horton
No. And when it was under the radical Anabaptists, the Edwardian articles condemned it. So we have never. The. The Magisterial Reformation doesn't fit the picture that is being portrayed.
- [38:55]
Bob Hiller
It also gets me thinking about this idea. You'll hear this language and maybe we can discuss this phrase a little bit. Semper reformanda or I don't know my Latin. So we'll say always reforming. Right. So that every year around October 31st, I'll see this online. Like, we're always reforming. We're always reforming. And that. That can be a hardly abused phrase. In a certain sense. It's Right. Like we're always reforming. And if we're referring to it in the way the reformers refer to it, what they would mean is something like this. We're always going back to the Scriptures, driving ourselves back to Jesus Christ, looking to repent and believe the good news. Yes. The danger is when you take it in another direction and you say something like this, well, the times keep changing and so the Church needs to keep rolling with the times. And isn't that after all, the spirit of the Reformation, that we're always adjusting the preaching and the practices of the Church to meet the needs of the day, and suddenly the Church becomes this sort of wax nose that fits whatever you want it to fit? But that was never the intention of the Reformers. That leads towards a. More, in my mind, more towards a Protestant liberalism that says the Church has this sort of therapeutic Role within the culture to meet people's needs as opposed to faithfully preach and teach the word of God.
- [40:11]
Mike Horton
Yeah. In fact, the author of that statement was not the reformers, but was a pietist.
- [40:19]
Bob Hiller
They're always ruining everything.
- [40:21]
Mike Horton
Yeah, it was a pietist who said. But he said the church always. The whole phrase is the church reformed and always reforming according to the word of God.
- [40:36]
Bob Hiller
So that was okay.
- [40:38]
Justin Holcomb
That's fine.
- [40:40]
Mike Horton
Well, no, that supports your point, Bob. That sure, we have to always be questioning whether we're preaching, our preaching matches what scripture says. But when you don't have an anchor, when it's just a kind of amorphous. The church is always changing. Basically, that's. Basically that's not Christianity.
- [41:04]
Justin Holcomb
And there's a passage in Acts. I've heard it numerous times when you said it, so I appreciate it. Bob, when you're like, okay, the times are always changing. You got to be on the right side of history. Everything's changing. So now we need to figure out what seems right to us and the Holy Spirit in this moment. And we can kind of like wax nose whatever we want and just bend it however we want to because the times are changing. What are we going to do? And that's how it gets misused.
- [41:28]
Walter Strickland
And what we have to see is there's this parallel between the Protestant liberal and the independent fundamentalist is that there's. They're not accountable to anything.
- [41:37]
Bob Hiller
Oh, interesting.
- [41:38]
Mike Horton
Yep. Their inner light. Their inner light exactly is guiding them.
- [41:42]
Walter Strickland
And that inner light could be culture on the one hand, or that inner light can be their sort of navel gazing reading of the text that is not incorporating anybody else. And so in, in on the sort of individualism side, on the sort of independent side of things, this is why we get a very reductionistic understanding of what the gospel actually is. This is very dear to my heart because there's a lot of people, because they are pushing away from creedal orthodoxy, they're pushing away from the summaries of the Scripture and of the faith that have been poured over for years and proven as helpful by the people of God. There's not that grounding in the faith. So they're forced to redeem, reduce what the gospel is to very simple sort of didactic statements that are outside of a larger narrative of scripture.
- [42:36]
Bob Hiller
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:37]
Walter Strickland
And I think that is also very problematic. There's no authority on. On both sides. It just manifests in two different ways.
- [42:44]
Bob Hiller
Yeah. This is an interesting. And this is exactly what Luther and Calvin are worried about. When they went. When Calvin says to Sodoletto, hey, we've got two problems. We've got the Pope and we've got the Anabaptists. It's the same issue with the liberalism and the independent fundamentalism. You're dealing with a group of people who's following the spirit of the day or an institution with one either charismatic or institutional leader who gets to be the authority. But either way, you're listening to somebody's inner spirit and you're not listening to the objective word found on the pages of Scripture.
- [43:16]
Mike Horton
Folks, let's follow tradition. Let's follow the let's follow the early Church Fathers, guided by the witness of the apostles, martyrs and reformers over two millennia. Let's hold firm to the advice of Gregory of nyssa in the 4th century. Let the inspired Scriptures then be our umpire, and the vote of truth will be given to those whose dogmas are found to agree with the very divine words. Or Patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom in the same century, whose pastoral advice sounds remarkably contemporary. There comes a heathen and says, I wish to become a Christian, but I know not whom to join. There is much fighting and faction among you, much confusion. Which doctrine am I to choose? How shall we answer him? Each of you says, he asserts, I speak the truth. No doubt this is in our favor, for if we told you to be persuaded by arguments, you might well be perplexed. But if we bid you believe the Scriptures, and these are simple and true, the decision's easy for you. If any agree with the Scriptures, he is the Christian. If any fight against them, he is far from the truth. Thanks for listening. This year marks 1700 years after the Council of Nicaea, and the mystery of the Trinity remains at the heart of the Christian faith. Recovering Orthodoxy in our modern context is vital to the unity of the Church worldwide. Which is why I'm so excited that we here at sola, in partnership with credo, are hosting a special two day conference on the Trinity. Please join US in Washington, D.C. this may as we bring together leading Trinitarian theologians for keynote messages and interactive breakouts centered around the Nicene Creed. Just go to solamia.org trinityconference that's solamedia.org.