If I had to guess, I'd say most evangelicals in America spend little time thinking about the implications of the Protestant Reformation. After all, in the digital age, five hundred years seems like an eternity. Yet, as the oft-quoted adage goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.[1] C. S. Lewis warned against what he called "chronological snobbery," the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.[2] Lest we fall into that trap ourselves, we must, in Lewis's words, "keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds."[3]
"The past is a foreign country," wrote L. P. Hartley; "they do things differently there."[4] Still, we cannot understand ourselves without visiting it. Evangelicalism can only be understood in light of Protestantism, and at the heart of what it means to be Protestant lies that word: protest. The name itself comes from the Diet of Speyer in 1529, where Lutheran princes and cities lodged a formal "Protestation" against an imperial decree meant to stamp out the evangelical cause.[5] So what were Luther and Calvin and their heirs actually protesting?
Nothing less than the eclipse of the gospel itself.
By the late Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was deeply corrupted in doctrine and practice. Indulgences, which promised reduced time in purgatory, were sold to help fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, and preachers like Johann Tetzel hawked them with the jingle, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."[6] It was this trafficking in grace that provoked Martin Luther to post his Ninety-Five Theses on October 31, 1517. Meanwhile, the Scriptures remained locked away in Latin, out of reach of the laity, and political power trumped spiritual power. Pope Boniface VIII had gone so far as to declare in Unam Sanctam that it is "altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff."[7]
But the recovery of the gospel as outlined in Scripture (justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone) still defines what it means to be a Protestant. Paul could not be plainer: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9).
If we forget our heritage, we are prone to repeat the same mistakes as Rome: replacing grace with striving in human works and merit, having no assurance of salvation, and trusting in the words of mighty men rather than in the words of the inspired Scriptures. The Council of Trent taught that no one can know "with a certainty of faith" that he has obtained the grace of God.[8] But John writes, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). And against the authority of popes and councils, the Reformers held up the Word itself: "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16).
Without these biblical truths acting as guardrails for our faith and practice, evangelicalism runs the risk of becoming even more corrupt than Rome was. We see this today in the prosperity gospel, which trades the free grace of Jesus for the promise of material health and wealth. It is Tetzel's coffer with a television studio and a seed-faith offering. Paul warned Timothy about those "imagining that godliness is a means of gain," reminding him that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (1 Timothy 6:5, 10). We see it, too, in the social gospel, which replaces our hope in the heavenly kingdom that is to come with the promise of experiencing the fullness of the kingdom here and now. Walter Rauschenbusch, its leading voice, titled one of his books Christianizing the Social Order.[9] But Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36), and the author of Hebrews reminds us that "here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13:14).
To be an evangelical is to be a Protestant. Though there are many branches on the Protestant family tree (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, etc.), at its root we share these convictions in common. If you or your church veers outside of them, you will cease to be Protestant in any meaningful sense and place back upon yourselves the shackles of Rome. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1).
Like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, complaining to Moses about a lack of meat and longing for the days of Egyptian bondage ("We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic," Numbers 11:5), a modern evangelical who forgets his Protestant heritage will grumble at the manna God has given and begin to romanticize his old chains.
We must not forget that the Reformation was not a revolution. Consider the difference between the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution was, in many ways, more a reformation of the faults in the British system of the time, with colonists claiming their rights as Englishmen. Edmund Burke, who had urged conciliation with the American colonies, nonetheless wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France as a sustained warning against the attempt to tear everything down and start over.[10] The French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, soon devoured its own children in the Terror, gave way to Napoleon's seizure of power within a decade, and set France on a long course of upheaval. Today it is on its Fifth Republic.
In the same way, Richard Muller and others have shown that ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed, always reforming) was not a cry of the sixteenth-century Reformation.[11] Something like the phrase first appears in a 1674 devotional by the Dutch pastor Jodocus van Lodenstein, who longed to see a church already Reformed in its doctrine go on reforming in its piety.[12] It is often given in its fuller form, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei: the church reformed, always being reformed according to the Word of God. Only in the twentieth century, especially after World War II, did the slogan become a banner for doctrinal change.
The Reformation was a conservative movement: back to the standard of Scripture, back to "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), back to the truths captured in the creeds and confessions. The Reformation was not a revolution that sought to dismantle all of the past, all of tradition, in favor of a progressive utopia whose goals and ends are always shifting with the faint promise of progress.
As we celebrate the Reformation this month, let us look back to our Protestant forefathers. Be like them and go back to the sources. Ad fontes, as the humanists and Reformers put it. Make Scripture the norm that norms all other norms (norma normans non normata), and look to tradition as a lesser authority with a critical yet grateful eye. Be like the Bereans, who received the word "with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11). We all stand on the shoulders of giants.[13]
As you seek to reform, seek to recover, to retrieve, to build up using the riches of the past, not to tear down and, like the thief, to "steal and kill and destroy" (John 10:10). To build something up on your own authority is to build your house on the sand, and when the rain falls and the floods come and the winds blow, great will be its fall (Matthew 7:24–27). But "no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11).
[1] George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), 284.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), chap. 13.
[3] C. S. Lewis, "On the Reading of Old Books," in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970). The essay first appeared as the introduction to a 1944 translation of Athanasius, On the Incarnation.
[4] L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), opening line.
[5] The "Protestation" was presented at the Second Diet of Speyer on April 19, 1529.
[6] The couplet is traditionally attributed to Tetzel. Luther alludes to it in Thesis 27 of the Ninety-Five Theses (1517).
[7] Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, papal bull, November 18, 1302.
[8] Council of Trent, Session 6 (January 13, 1547), Decree on Justification, chap. 9.
[9] Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912); see also Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917).
[10] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).
[11] Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017); Michael Horton, "Reformed and Always Reforming," in Always Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey, ed. R. Scott Clark and Joel E. Kim (Escondido, CA: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 116–34.
[12] Jodocus van Lodenstein, Beschouwinge van Zion (Amsterdam, 1674–78). See W. Robert Godfrey, "What Does 'Semper Reformanda' Mean?" Ligonier Ministries. R. Scott Clark notes that van Lodenstein set "reformed" beside "reforming" but never used the word "always."
[13] John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (1159), bk. 3, chap. 4, attributing the image to Bernard of Chartres. Isaac Newton famously repeated it in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke.
