p. 747 | THE REFORMATION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, November 25, 1884

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 61, No. 47

THE REFORMATION.

THE Reformation, the historical name for the great convulsion which characterized the 16th century, was originally neither a political nor a philosophical, nor a literary, but a religious and ecclesiastical, movement. It started with the practical question: How can the troubled conscience find pardon and peace, and become sure of personal salvation? It retained from the Catholic system all the objective doctrines of Christianity concerning the Holy Trinity and the divine-human character of the work of Christ—in fact, all the articles of faith contained in the apostles’ and other ecumenical creeds of the early church. But it brought the believer into a direct relation and union with Christ as the one and all-sufficient source of salvation in opposition to traditional, priestly, and saintly intercession. The Protestant goes directly to the word of God for instruction, and to the throne of grace in his devotions; while the pious Catholic always consults the teaching of his church, and often prefers to offer his prayers through the medium of the Virgin Mary and the saints. Schleiermacher states the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism in the formula: “Catholicism makes the believer’s relation to Christ depend on his relation to the church; Protestantism makes the relation of the believer to the church depend upon his relation to Christ.” In other words, Catholicism gets to Christ through the church, Protestantism gets to the church through Christ; the former proceeds from the body to the head, the latter from the head to the body; with the one, churchliness is the measure of christliness; with the other, the degree of christliness determines and conditions the character and value of churchliness.

From this general principle of evangelical freedom and direct individual relationship of the believer to Christ proceed the two fundamental doctrines of Protestantism,—the absolute supremacy of the word of Christ, and the absolute supremacy of the grace of Christ. The former proclaims the canonical Scriptures (to the exclusion of the Apocrypha of the Old Testament), and more particularly the word of Christ and the apostles, to be the only and sufficient infallible source and rule of faith and practice, and asserts the right of private interpretation of the same; in distinction from the Roman Catholic view, which declares the Bible and tradition or church authority to be two coordinate sources and rules of faith, and makes tradition, especially the decrees of popes and councils, the only legitimate and infallible interpreter of the Bible. In its extreme form Chillingworth expressed this principle of the Reformation in the well-known formula: “The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.” Genuine Protestantism, however, by no means despised or rejected tradition and Church authority as such, but only subordinated it to and measured its value by the Bible, and believed in a progressive interpretation of the Bible through the expanding and deepening consciousness of Christendom. Hence, besides having its own symbols or standards of public doctrine, it retained all the articles of the ancient Catholic creeds and a large amount of disciplinary and ritual tradition, and rejected only those doctrines and ceremonies of the Catholic church for which it found no clear warrant in the Bible, or which it thought contradicted its letter or spirit. The Calvinistic branches of Protestantism went further in their antagonism to the received traditions than the Lutheran and Anglican Reformation; but all united in rejecting the authority of the pope (Melanchthon for awhile was willing to concede this), the meritoriousness of good works, the indulgences, the worship of the holy Virgin and of the saints and relics, the seven sacraments, with the exception of baptism and the eucharist, the dogma of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass, purgatory and prayers for the dead, and the use of the Latin language in public worship, for which the use of the vernacular languages was substituted.

The other fundamental doctrine of the Reformation has reference to the personal appropriation of the Christian salvation, and has for its object to give all glory to Christ by declaring that the sinner is justified before God, i. e., acquitted of guilt and declared righteous solely on the ground of the all-sufficient merit of Christ as apprehended by a living faith; in opposition to the theory then prevalent and substantially sanctioned by the counsel of Trent, which makes faith and good works the two coordinate sources of justification. Genuine Protestantism does not, on that account, by any means reject or depreciate good works; it only denies their value as sources and conditions of justification, but insists on them as the necessary fruits of faith and evidence of justification. To these two prominent principles of the Reformation, which materially affect its theology and religious life, must be added a third, the doctrine of a universal priesthood of believers, and the right and duty of the laity not only to read the Bible in the vernacular tongue, but also to take part in the government and all the public affairs of the church. We now present an outline of the history of the Reformation in the various countries in which it

finally succeeded, leaving out Bohemia, Italy, and Spain, where it was suppressed by the combined opposition of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

1. THE REFORMATION IN GERMANY was directed by the genius and energy of Luther, the learning and moderation of Melanchthon, assisted by the princes, especially the electors of Saxony, and sustained by the majority of the people in spite of the opposition of the bishops and the imperial government. It commenced in the University of Wittenberg with a protest against the traffic of indulgences, Oct. 31, 1517 (ever since celebrated in Protestant Germany as the festival of the Reformation), and soon became a powerful popular movement. At first it moved within the bosom of Catholicism. Luther shrank in holy horror from the idea of a separation from the religion of his fathers. He only attacked a few abuses, taking it for granted that the pope himself would condemn them if properly informed. But the irresistible logic of events carried him step by step far beyond his original intentions, and brought him into irreconcilable conflict with the central authority of the church. Pope Leo X., in June, 1520, pronounced the sentence of excommunication against Luther, who burned the bull, together with the canon law and several books of his opponents. The diet of Worms in 1521, where he made his memorable defense, added to the excommunication of the pope the ban of the emperor. But the dissatisfaction with the various abuses of Rome and the desire for the free preaching of the gospel were so extensive, that the Reformation, both in its negative and positive features, spread in spite of these decrees, and gained a foothold before 1530 in the greater part of Northern Germany. Among the principal causes of this rapid progress were the writings of the reformers, Luther’s German version of the Scriptures, and the evangelical hymns, which introduced the new ideas into public worship. The diet of Spire in 1526 left each state to its own discretion concerning the question of reform until a general council should settle it for all, and thus sanctioned the principle of territorial independence in matters of religion which prevails in Germany to this day, each sovereignty having its own separate ecclesiastical establishment and organization in close union with the state. But the next diet of Spire, which convened in 1529, prohibited the further progress of the Reformation. Against this decree of the Catholic majority the evangelical princes entered, on the ground of the word of God, the inalienable rights of conscience, and the decree of the previous diet of Spire, the celebrated protest, dated April 20, 1529, which gave rise to the name of Protestants. The diet of Augsburg in 1530, where the Lutherans offered their principal confession of faith, drawn up by Melanchthon and named after that city, threatened the Protestants with violent measures if they did not return shortly to the bosom of the church.

Here closes the first and most eventful or religious period of the German Reformation; but its political history was not brought to a final termination until after the terrible 30 years’ war by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which secured to the Lutherans and the German Reformed churches (but to no others) equal rights with the Roman Catholics within the limits of the German empire. These two denominations, either in their separate existence or united in one organization (as in Prussia and other states since 1817), are to this day almost the only forms of Protestantism recognized and supported by the government, all others being small, self-supporting sects regarded with little sympathy by the popular mind. But within these ecclesiastical establishments Germany has bred and tolerated during the last 50 years almost every imaginable form of theoretic belief from the strictest old school orthodoxy to the loosest rationalism and skepticism. Since the third jubilee of the Reformation, however (1817), there has been a gradual and steady return from neology to the original evangelical Protestantism.—American Encyclopædia.

(To be continued.)