The Reformation Story

How can sinful people hope to stand before a righteous God? And, if anyone dares to answer that question, a second one follows: How can I be certain that the answer is true?

Those were the questions that drove the Reformation of the Church, because, for Martin Luther and other conscientious Christians at the time, the answers given by the Roman Catholic Church were just not good enough.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a devout German Christian who initially studied to become a lawyer, but instead became a Roman Catholic monk, priest, and university professor. He asked the above questions repeatedly.

How can sinful people—how can I!—hope to stand before a righteous God? Here are some answers he was given:

Do better at obeying God’s commandments! Stop sinning! Do more good works!
If you sin, do works of penance to atone for your sins!
Pray to Mary and the saints and ask them to share with you some of the extra favor they have earned with God!
Venerate the relics of the saints!
Pay to have a Mass said for you or for your deceased loved ones to reduce their time of suffering in purgatory!
Buy a papal indulgence and have all your guilt—or the guilt of your deceased loved ones—washed away by papal decree!

And how can I be certain that the answer is true?

The Church says so. Listen to the Church!
Listen to the pope!
Listen to the councils!
Listen to the Church Fathers!

Luther did listen. He studied Church history extensively. He read the writings and decrees of popes and councils. He frequented the confessional, did the works of penance, prayed to the saints, and faithfully attended Mass. He also studied the Bible. But the more he studied, the more he found that popes and councils and Church Fathers often contradicted one another and made mistakes. Worse, he found that their teachings often had no basis in the Holy Scriptures and sometimes contradicted the Holy Scriptures. How could he trust fallible men to answer his life-and-death question: How can sinful people hope to stand before a righteous God?

The Bible, on the other hand, he found to be completely reliable. The Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, who cannot lie and who does not make mistakes. As Jesus once prayed to His Father, “Sanctify them by the truth. Your Word is truth.” (John 17:17). If Luther was to have an answer to his first question, only the Bible could be trusted to provide it.

Luther found no basis in the Bible for offering prayers to the saints or for receiving help from them. Instead, he found that “there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5-6).

Luther also found that it’s all or nothing when it comes to earning God’s favor by keeping His commandments. Either you keep them all perfectly and so earn God’s favor, or you’re a sinner, and there’s nothing you can do to earn your way back into God’s good graces. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). If sinful people are to stand before God, it can’t be by keeping the commandments.

How can sinful people hope to stand before a righteous God? Luther found the answer in the Holy Scriptures:

“The just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17).
“We know that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified” (Galatians 2:16).
“By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith…that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith alone, apart from the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:23-28).

In other words, sinners can stand before a righteous God by grace alone, through faith alone, for the sake of Christ alone. And a person can be certain that this is true by the Scripture alone.

Luther finally had answers to his two most pressing questions— answers which, he realized, were the very heart of Christian teaching, and which he had also found in the writings of many of the revered Church Fathers. He imagined at first, perhaps naively, that the Roman clergy and the Roman pope would agree with him that certain abuses and false doctrines had crept into the Roman Church over time and that it was necessary to reform the Church by addressing these corruptions of doctrine and by bringing the evangelical truth to light again.

So Luther prepared 95 Theses or statements to be discussed among the clergy, addressing primarily the sale of indulgences and questioning the pope’s jurisdiction over Christians beyond the borders of Rome, and even over the souls in purgatory. On October 31, 1517, he posted these 95 Theses on the church door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. They were intended as a preliminary “filial correction,” not the beginning of a revolution. But some recognized just how revolutionary it was at that time even to question the pope, so they took the document, copied, printed, and disseminated it throughout Germany (at first without Luther’s knowledge), causing a stir throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Luther also began writing many volumes of theological books highlighting the abuses of Rome and setting forth the clear teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Many of the Catholic churches in Germany and the surrounding countries agreed with Luther’s writings.

In 1521, Luther was summoned to a Diet (a conference) in the city of Worms, where he was ordered to denounce his own writings. When he refused to recant, he was excommunicated by the pope and declared an outlaw by Emperor Charles V.

From there, Luther was hidden away in a castle in Wartburg for about two years, where he finished translating the New Testament into German so that his people could have ready access to the Word of God. When he returned to Wittenberg, he continued his work of reformation.

But Luther’s was a careful reformation. His goal was to rid the Church of the false teachings and harmful practices that had crept in, without discarding the useful traditions that were in harmony with the Holy Scriptures. The historical faith and worship of the Catholic Church was affirmed; the abuses were removed. For this reason, Lutherans consider themselves catholics—not Roman Catholics, but evangelical (that is, Gospel-believing) Christians who hold to the common Christian faith.

Luther was also careful to retain a key teaching of Christianity which non-Lutheran reformers rejected: God works through means.

In other words, God gives the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation by means of the preaching of His Gospel and by means of the administration of His holy Sacraments—specifically, Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of the Altar. These are the instruments by which God gives grace to sinners, works faith in their hearts, justifies and saves them, renews them in love, comforts them under the cross, and preserves them in the faith unto eternal life.

In Luther’s theology, the minister who has been called and ordained by the Church has the authority of Christ to forgive sins in the stead and by the command of Christ (cf. Matthew 18:18, John 20:23). Holy Baptism actually works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this (cf. Acts 2:38, Titus 3:4-7, 1 Peter 3:21). And Christ’s body and blood are really present with the bread and wine of Holy Communion; the bread is His body and the wine is His blood, given and shed on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, and received by all communicants—for the forgiveness of all who believe, and for judgment on all who disbelieve.

The Reformation story continued over the years. In 1529, Luther published his Small Catechism (contained in this booklet) and his Large Catechism for instructing the young in the Christian faith. In 1530, the princes of the German territories came together in the city of Augsburg in support of Luther, and on June 25^th of that year, they presented to Emperor Charles V a summary of the catholic faith held by those who supported Luther. It was called the Augsburg Confession. It remains the foundational doctrinal statement of those who call themselves Lutherans.

Decades of debating and fighting ensued between the Roman and Lutheran territories. After Luther’s death in 1546, the Lutheran churches also had to wrestle with doctrinal issues that arose in their own midst, since they were no longer united under the pope or under any single leader. Finally, in 1580 the Lutheran churches jointly compiled, published, and subscribed the Book of Concord, also known as the Lutheran Confessions, containing ten documents expressing the Christian faith as confessed by Lutherans. They are:

The three ancient creeds of the Church catholic:
The Apostles’ Creed (c. 2nd Century AD)
The Nicene Creed (AD 381)
The Athanasian Creed (c. 5th Century AD)
The following documents written by Lutheran theologians of the sixteenth century:
The Small Catechism of Martin Luther (AD 1529)
The Large Catechism of Martin Luther (AD 1529)
The Augsburg Confession (AD 1530)
The Apology (Defense) of the Augsburg Confession (AD 1531)
The Smalcald Articles (AD 1537)
The Power and Primacy of the Pope (AD 1537)
The Formula of Concord (AD 1577)

There is so much more to the Reformation story, but let this serve for now as a brief summary of the sixteenth century Reformation and the story of Martin Luther.

The Lutherans of the sixteenth century were firmly convinced from the Holy Scriptures that their confession of faith, summarized in the Book of Concord of 1580, was pure and undefiled, and that it was the continuation of the common Christian faith handed down by Christ through His prophets and apostles, in full agreement with the confession of the historical catholic Church.

Over the five centuries since Luther first nailed his 95 Theses to that church door in Wittenberg, the doctrinal agreement expressed by Lutherans in the Book of Concord has largely deteriorated. “The Lutheran Church” is not a single, united institution, as the Roman Catholic Church is. Instead, individual churches with some degree of attachment to the Book of Concord are free to call themselves “Lutherans,” often forming associations or “synods” with other churches with whom they profess to be in communion.

An honest appraisal of modern Lutheranism around the world reveals widespread deviation from the faith confessed by Luther and the Lutheran Reformers. Martin Luther would surely not recognize the doctrine and practice of the vast majority of churches that bear his name. Five hundred years after Luther first posted his 95 Theses, the churches that hold to everything confessed in the Book of Concord are few and far between.

But the Lord Christ promised that this would always be the case with His Christian Church on earth until His return, that it would constantly be troubled from without and from within, hated by the world and filled with false teachers “to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24).

I would humbly but confidently submit that genuine, “Book of Concord” Lutheranism does still exist today in small pockets around the country and around the world. These do not tend to be the large and glorious gatherings of the megachurch, but little flocks of faithful shepherds and sheep, gathering humbly and joyfully around the Word and Sacraments of Christ.

Our church, in fellowship with the Confessional Lutheran Ministerium, seeks to be such a flock. We retain the biblical doctrine and the historic practice of the Christian Church, as confessed in the Book of Concord. The Word of Christ is purely taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered among us, and we seek to grow in knowledge, in faith, and in love. We have the life of Christ and the comfort of His Gospel to give to the world. By God’s grace, we have the truth, and we would like to share it with you.

For starters, we offer you this little booklet, which includes the Small Catechism of Dr. Luther, a beautiful little summary of the common Christian faith.

To God alone be the glory—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

“If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
John 8:31-32

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