The Historical Elephant
From the Series: The Elephant in the Church
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: November 9, 2008
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Transcript
This week I’ve been part of a gathering of a dozen thinkers and leaders from around the world. We gathered in Wittenberg, Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, and I’m actually here on Reformation Day. We’ve been talking about the future of the church and I want to take a few minutes to share a few thoughts.
In 2 Kings 22, the Jewish temple had fallen into disrepair and King Josiah orders a renovation. During that renovation, the construction crew made a fascinating discovery; maybe they were cleaning out closets or rummaging through the attic or going through filing cabinets, but one way or the other, they discovered, or rediscovered the Book of the Law. This is absolutely astounding. The people of Israel were a people of the book, this Book of the Law was the heart of Israel, it was the history of Israel, it was the revelation of God. And they lost it. We don’t know how or when but one day, the book got buried and it gathered dust, and eventually the Israelites completely forgot about it and a new generation grew up and the Book of the Law wasn’t even part of their consciousness. Well, during the reconstruction, they rediscovered the book and the secretary of the temple took the book to King Josiah and he read from it in the presence of the King and when the King heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes.
We read a story like that and we think to ourselves, how in the world could they have lost the Book of the Law in the temple? But I think the same thing happens and has happened multiple times throughout history. The truth gets buried, it gathers dust and we have to rediscover the truth.
I think that’s what happened in the Middle Age, truth got buried, it gathered dust, and it was Martin Luther, a parish priest, a monk here in Wittenberg, Germany that made a discovery that changed the course of history. Martin Luther was an incredibly religious man, he got up at 2:00 a.m. to pray. He prayed seven times a day. When he heard the cloister bell at 2:00 in the morning, he’d jump out of bed, make the sign of the cross and put on his robe. Well, each of those seven periods of the day ended with the cantor changing the Salve Regina and Luther would often fast for three days and he had 21 patron saints and he would pray to three of them each day. He spent up to six hours a day confessing his sin. In Luther’s own words, he said, “I was a good monk, I kept the rule of the order that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it is I.” But here’s what happened, in the fall of 1516, Martin Luther was teaching through the book of Romans at the University of Wittenberg and he came to a passage in the book of Romans where it says the just shall live by faith. It was a paradigm shift, he said that one passage became to him the gate of heaven and that one truth came into conflict with a common practice that had crept into the church called indulgences. It was like a spiritual low pressure and high pressure system coming together and it created this internal storm within Martin Luther. So here is the deal. Pope Leo the tenth had put a price tag on various religious relics. By 1509, there were 5,005 relics accumulated. They ranged from a thorn from the crown of Christ to a tooth of Saint Jerome, a twig from the burning bush, a piece of swaddling clothing, a piece of gold from the wise men, a piece of bread from the last supper and 19,013 holy bones from saints. Now, obviously not all of those relics was legitimate, but each one was given a value, each one was equated to a reduction of time spent in purgatory and it was once a year on All Saints Day that all of these relics were made available to the people and it was the day before, on October 31, 1517 that Martin Luther came here and he nailed 95 Theses to the doors of the castle church.
Now let me make an observation. I think every generation needs Martin Luther. Every generation needs Wittenberg. Every generation needs 95 Theses. In a sense, what we need to do is deconstruction and reconstruct Christianity. We need to rediscover and redefine and re-imagine that truth that has been buried and that’s what I want to talk about this weekend.
I’m going to miss this series. We wrap up the Elephant in the Church series and I want to talk about the Historical Elephant. You could call it the Doctrinal Elephant, you could call it the Protestant Elephant, but what I want to do is talk a little bit about where we come from and basically unpack all the Christian history in about 30 minutes! Good luck! I know that some of you are super-excited when you hear the word history, like in Trivial Pursuit when you can pick your category and you pick history, that’s your thing. Some of you are right now having flashbacks to World History II and you are falling asleep. I think that doctrine and history are exciting things, and I think that even though this is something we don’t talk about a whole lot, it is incredibly important. You may have heard this in one of those history classes if you were awake, George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is important for us as we move into the future and even imagine what the future of Christianity looks like and that excites me. I think there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet, and we are a pretty future oriented group, but I think we also have to be careful that we really rediscover where we come from and to really appreciate who we are and where we, I think we need a history lesson every once in a while.
I’m not going to lie, it was awesome being in Wittenberg, Germany. For what it’s worth, I had set a goal, a life goal, to visit the Catholic Church in Wittenberg and it was about a week later that this group that I’m part of called and invited me to be a part of this. Like, ah man! To be there on Reformation Day was amazing. Wittenberg is kind of a sleepy little German town. The main street is like literally a mile long and that’s it, but it came alive on Reformation Day. There was a Medieval Festival, pretty good bratwurst, they are a foot long and the bun is 3 inches, I don’t know, it’s a little different. I got this warm waffle with whipped cream on it. I want to go back to Germany just for that. Just to be part of that atmosphere, that environment was a pretty profound thing, and so, you saw the video, right in front of the doors to the Catholic Church. The crazy thing is that our meetings actually went a little bit late and we lost our daylight and we thought we weren’t going to be able to shoot any video, but fortunately there was a German film crew there with these lights set up, and we just set up our stuff, and they thought we were American media. Dave Clark was with me and Dave is American and he is our media pastor, so I figured it fit the bill, and it was pretty cool to be able to be there. There is something about being some place where something of incredible historical significance happened. Here’s the deal, we are a Protestant church, I don’t know if that’s a news flash for anybody. Many of us have no idea what the Protestant Reformation was or was about or how it happened. Do you know what the word ‘protestant’ means? To protest. So we are an outgrowth of something that happened hundreds of years ago and I think it is significant that we know where we come from.
The gathering that I was part of revolves around this question - do we need another reformation? I think the answer is yes, and I think every generation needs another reformation. Every generation needs a Martin Luther and a Wittenberg and a 95 Theses. Here’s what I would suggest and it’s the premise of this weekend, that I don’t think that reformations are the result of discovering something new, those are called cults. Reformations are the result of rediscovering something old. Reformations are born out of simple truths rediscovered, reimagined and reapplied to our lives. For Luther, it was Romans 1:17, somehow this passage, this simple truth came off the pages of his Bible and got into his spirit, the just shall live by faith.
We don’t have time to talk about the 95 Theses, but I want to talk about the five solas. Do you know the five solas? If not, you will. These five simple truths are the fabric and foundation, the rally cry of the Protestant Reformation and I want to talk about these five.
- Sola fide - by faith alone
- Sola Scriptura - by Scripture alone
- Sola Christus - by Christ alone
- Sola gratia - by grace alone
- Sola Deo Gloria - to the glory of God alone
Let me put a frame around it first then we will talk briefly about these five.
My kids are at a stage in their mathematical journey right now where they are learning about prime numbers, and as a parent, that means that I’m relearning about prime numbers and every other math concept that I have forgotten. A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself. It has this indivisible quality to it and the property of being prime is called primality. If I can borrow that metaphor, I think these five solas are prime truths. They are truths that are indivisible. They form the fabric and foundation of Christianity and since we are a Protestant Church, we probably should know them.
Number one: sola fide - by faith alone. It is the belief that justification is received by faith alone. You can’t earn it, you can’t work for it and you certainly can’t buy it, but that’s what was happening. There were indulgences that were being sold by the Catholic Church. I have visited St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, an amazing cathedral but was largely funded by these indulgences. There was a medieval preacher by the name of Johan Tetzel that coined a catchy little jingle, “When the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” The idea as these people looks at these relics, and I saw one of these coffers, one of these indulgences boxes where these indulgences were received, the idea was that you could pay down the time you spend in purgatory, which is a whole ‘nother discussion, is not a biblical concept, but the idea was you could pay down the time you spent in purgatory either for yourself or for a loved one. Basically, salvation was for sale. A price tag was put on it. How is it that one guy, the guy who stood up and said, “Something’s not right here.” I know part of us want to think, “Those silly medieval people.” Right? Like how could you be duped into something like that? It will it make a little more sense in the next point, they didn’t have Bibles. I would suggest that we make very similar silly mistakes. I think that there is this fundamental misunderstanding about what salvation is. I think if you asked the average American how to get to heaven. You die. I think there is this idea that if I did more right than I did wrong, I’ll be alright. Right? This subconscious assumption that somehow at the end of our lives, we will be weighed on the scales of justice, if you did more right than you did wrong, then you’re ok. But nothing could be further from the truth, because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and according to James 2, if you break the law at one point, you are guilty of breaking the whole thing. Translation - we are in trouble. The good news is that Jesus lived a sinless life and died a substitutiary death on the cross, paid the penalty for our sins. When He said, “It is finished,” it is a word that means a final installment. It has a monetary sense to it, which to me is so cool. You don’t need to pay indulgences because the price has already been paid for us. It is finished. And the way we experience forgiveness is by simply putting our faith in what Christ has done for us.
2 Corinthians 5:21 says: God made Him who had no sin to become sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God. I love it because it describes this fundamental transaction that happens when we put our faith in Christ. Essentially, out sin’s death is transferred to the account of Christ and He paid for it. What’s beautiful about it is more than that, the righteousness of Christ, everything that Jesus did right is transferred to our account, and God says, ‘Let’s call it even.’ That is so good! But we have a hard time accepting. Why? Because we are human and we want to earn it. I think the hardest thing for us to do is to receive things by faith. I think sometimes it is pride, sometimes it is control. The bottom line is this, you can’t earn it, you can’t buy it, but you can simply receive it. Faith is an amazing thing, I don’t understand all of how it works. To me, faith is like the three-digit number on the back of your credit card. You give them your number and your expiration date, but the final key, now, is that wthree-digit number security code. You give them that security code and somehow a transaction happens somehow. I don’t understand this stuff, do you? But a transaction happens somewhere out there. Faith is like that. You confess your sins, He is faith and just to forgive your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. How exactly does that work? There is an element of mystery to it, and that’s why it is called faith. I think Martin Luther realized that they got way off base. They had forgotten the very simple truth. Like losing the Book of the Law, the truth had gotten buried. And I think we run the risk, if we aren’t careful, of getting really complicated and really smart and forgetting that the just shall live by faith. Sola fide.
Number two. Sola Scriptura was the second prime truth, if you will. The teaching that the Bible is the only inspired and authoritative word of God. Now, what was happening is there was this conflict between church tradition and the teaching of Scripture and Luther said the tradition needs to bow to Scripture, and if you can’t find a scriptural basis, maybe what you are doing is actually wrong.
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
In 1521, Martin Luther stood before the diet of worms. This was several years after he posted the Theses, and by the way, this is wild, he was in danger of being kidnapped and assassinated and excommunicated, and he finally appeared before the diet of worms and he was told to recant what he had written. He prayed about it, it had to be a long time, but when Luther was asked to repent, he said, “Unless I am convinced in Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes and counsels for they have contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” Is your conscience captive to the Word of God? This is such a powerful statement. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God, I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” I want to see the instant replay on that. What a moment. It was only a handful of people but it is almost like one guy standing against the entire church. It is profound. He said that I stand on the Word of God. The B-I-B-L-E, that’s the Book for me. One of the things that deeply concerned Luther was this divergence between human tradition and biblical teaching, and so what he did was he just said something of the things happening are not right. Indulgences were just he tip of the iceberg, there were several other things that he came against. By the way, as a Protestant pastor I’m grateful, one of them was the forbidding to marry a priest. I love my wife! I’m so glad I can get married.
1 Timothy 4:3, the Bible explicitly says that marriage shouldn’t be forbidden. So what happens is, tradition gets layer upon layer upon layer and before you know it, after hundreds of years, traditions are very difficult to break, even if they are unbiblical. I think we need to look in the mirror. Are there any traditions that we practice that aren’t really biblical. And I think what we need to be careful of is if there is something that is unbiblical, like you should not do them because they literally violate the principles or the teachings of Scripture. I think there are also things that are abiblical, the Bible is not explicit on those. But we’ve got to make sure that we line up with Scripture.
One practical application here, a bit of a challenge, we live in a culture with lots of Bibles. Bibles all over the place, different translation, KJV, NIV NASB, New Living, the Message, I have a friend who just did a translation, edited called the Voice and asked me to work on that project. We have every kind of translation imaginable and you can get them in about any size, shape or color. You can get a camouflage Bible, you need to hide it, camouflage. You can get a Bible that looks like a magazine, or you can get a metal Bible. I’ve got dents all over this bad boy. If you forget your Bible, you can read a Gideon Bible, or you can just download a version of the Bible to your cell phone. We are surrounded by Bibles, and because of that, I think it is tough for us to appreciate the situation in the Middle Ages, until a German goldsmith named Johan Gutenburg invented the printing press in 1439, copies of the Bible were few and far between. And because Bibles were few and far between, they were often chained to the pulpit of the church and they weren’t even written in the common language of the people, so the people were totally dependent upon the parish priest to translate and teach the Bible.
Here’s what Luther did, he translated the Bible into the vernacular, into the common language, the common tongue of the German people. The first New Testament translation came out in 1522 and he was working on revisions until the day he died in 1546. Many believe it was his greatest achievement, his greatest contribution. Now, here’s a little observation, if we aren’t careful, I think the church can foster a subtle form of spiritual codependency. I love to teach, I feel called to teach, but if my teaching becomes a teaching for you studying the Bible, something is not right. I am not the ultimate authority, Scripture is the ultimate authority, and to be blunt, sometimes people leave churches because they say they aren’t being fed, have you ever heard of this, and I understand the frustration, I think you need to be in a church where you are being fed, so I want to be fair-minded, but my kids learned to feed themselves when they were two years old. It wasn’t pretty, it was messy, but they learned to feed themselves when they were two years old. What’s up with this? Have we created a church culture where we are dependent upon one person preaching? I think that is so far from what God originally intended. We have Bibles, we have the ability to study them for ourselves and we need to feed ourselves. So what I’m saying is it is really nice to talk about sola scriptura, that Scripture is the final authority, but here’s a thought, read it, study it, meditate on it, nothing can take the place of you reading the Bible for yourself. We probably owe it to Luther to do that, oh and God too.
Number three. Sola Christus - the teaching that Christ is the only mediator between God and man, that there is salvation through no one else. That’s what 1 Timothy 2:4-5 says: For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the Man, Christ Jesus. I think one of the greatest issues facing the medieval church was something called sacerdotalism. It was the belief that without the services of the priest ordained by apostolic succession under the authority of the church, that there could be no sacraments in the church. In essence, the priest had become the mediators between God and the people. They were the middleman, the conduit of forgiveness by indulgences. They were the final authority, and what it did was create a huge divide between clergy and laity. One of the things we talked about at the Reformation gathering was how much we disdain the word laity. It is not a biblical word, it is not a biblical concept, we ought to ban it. Because what it has done is create a mindset that the minister is the one who does the ministering. I know we’ve tried to create a culture that is very different than that, but would you agree with me? The church at large is very easy to fall into this false idea that the minister is the one who does the ministering but what Luther said and discovered in I Peter 2 was this thing called the priesthood of believers. I think when, in Luther’s day, when people looked at the priest, they saw a priest and when they looked at themselves, they saw someone who wasn’t a priest. But if we really believe that Scripture, when we look in the mirror, we ought to see a priest. I know that is an identity shift for a lot of us but we are trying on a lot of different levels to create a culture where, I can’t be all things to all people, I’m terrible at some many things, there are so many spiritual gifts that I don’t have, but we are a body, a priesthood of believers. Every one of us in invaluable and irreplaceable. It is one of our core values because we believe everybody brings something to the table, a spiritual gift, a God-ordained passion. It is why we’ve created small groups and by that, what we mean is, yes we train leaders, yes we hold them accountable, but essentially, we say get a vision from God and go for it. We want a culture where we empower people to be the priesthood. It is why we say plug into a small group and plug into a ministry. It is how we are going to grow spiritually as we use those gifts to serve other people
My second observation is this, John 14:6: Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” Have you found that it is more difficult to make that statement, because we live in a very relativistic society, in one where being inclusive is the order of the day. I’ve read lots of books on lots of different religions, dialogued with a lot of different people, and I think there are a lot of different faiths and a lot of different religious leaders that have said a lot of really good things, good ideas, but here is what it comes down to for me. No one else stakes claim like this - I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, you can’t get to the Father without coming through Me. The reason He said that is because He was who He said He was, the Son of God, and the very fundamentals of our faith, Jesus lived a sinless life, He died on the cross, no one else died for me, and no one else was raised on the third day. No one else stakes claim to that, no one else did that. You can have good ideas, but there is only one way to the Father, and I think by saying Sola Christus, we are saying He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. There is one mediator between God and man.
My kids go to Catholic school, we felt like it was the best option we had for them when they started school years ago. For us we decided to do that and for us it has created some interesting conversations, because our theological beliefs don’t totally line up, and so one night I was talking to Josiah a few months ago and we were talking about prayer and he told me that they were praying the Hail Mary at school. So I told him that he didn’t have to pray that and he asked me why and I said, “Because Mary isn’t God, and that there is one mediator between man and God.” That’s a little much for a six-year-old’s head but, ok. So I told him that because the Bible teaches us that we pray to Jesus because Jesus is God and He can answer our prayers, and he said, “Yeah, because Mary didn’t create the world. I said, “You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that.” And he said, “But she did appear to someone named Juan Diego.” I thought that was cute.
To speak candidly, I think that in Luther’s day, there were lots of mediators, there were the priest, the saints, there was Mary, and I think the saints ought to inspire us. I think in the Protestant tradition, we probably don’t have as many heroes, but we don’t pray to them, the Bible doesn’t say to pray to them. Mary was a great lady, but she is not God, so we don’t pray to her. I’m grateful that there is a mediator between God and man and his name is Jesus.
Number four. Sola gratia - by grace alone. Ephesians 2:8-9: For it is by grace you have been saved through faith and this not from yourself, it is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast. It is the teaching that salvation comes by grace alone. One of the participants at the Reformation gathering was George Barna and probably no one has a better pulse on statistical Christianity and he shared something that was enlightening and disheartening at the same time. He said that 83% of Americans claim to be Christians. He said that according to his estimate, probably 16% meet the biblical criteria or the biblical definition of what it means to be Christian. Now, obviously I don’t know exactly about those numbers, but that means that 67% of Americans might think they are Christians but might not be. That’s a staggering number. This is not for shock value, but it is possible for two-thirds of Americans to someday hear Jesus say I never knew you. That’s a scary thought, and I think that’s why we have to work out our salvation in the word of Paul, and make sure we know what we believe, and why we believe what we believe.
I think the confusion over Christianity reminds me of a line from the Princess Bride, Fezzik, uses the word ‘inconceivable’ and Indigo Montoya says, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” There is tremendous confusion over what it means to be Christian, but what I know is this - if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved. Confessing with our mouths is the proclamation that we believe Jesus is who He said He was. We believe it in our heart, and to those who believe, He gave the right to become sons of God, John 1. And it is by grace that we are saved.
Finally, Sola Deo Gloria - to the glory of God alone. I think there is a lot of veneration of the saints, Mary and others in the medieval church, and so what Luther wanted to correct was the fact that God is the One who deserves all the glory at the end of the day. Now here is another little piece of Christian history. I had an 8-hour layover in London, England a couple months ago on a tri to Ethiopia, so I’d never been there, I hopped on the rail and spent the day exploring the city, and one of the stops was Westminster Abbey. An amazing place. It was there that on July 4, 1643 that the Westminster Abbey convened to discuss matters of doctrine, and they were appointed by Parliament, 120 clergymen and 30 laymen, they produced several doctrinal statements including the Westminster Shorter Catechism, consisted of 107 questions. I love the very first question and this is where we are going to end. It captures the essence of what life is about. What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to forget what life is all about? It is not about us, and if you make it about you, I have a prediction to make, you will be miserable. It is about God, about his glory, and I think to honor the tradition that we come from, we need to make sure that our lives are being lived to that purpose.
Lord we come before You this weekend and pray that You would help us to truly live out these simple truths, that we would live by faith, that we would receive your grace, that Scripture would be the authority in our lives, that our lives would be Christ-centered, that they would revolve around You, and that Lord we would live for your glory. Lord I pray that You would speak to us and help us see where maybe the truth has been buried and that those simple truths rediscovered, redefined, reimagined would reform our hearts, our minds, our lives. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
