This quick study on Reformation History was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on August 13, 2017. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
Any discussion of the Reformation and how it, and we, came to be, has to begin with the Church. The Church is the Bride of Christ. And just as a bride is expected to be chaste, which is to be true only to her husband, for the husband is to also be faithful forever, so is the Church only to seek after the things of Christ in all of His truth and purity. The Church is never to seek after the idolatries and falsehoods that would creep up in her, but to reject them completely.
So it had been for centuries prior. Since the Early Church, faithful Christians met to discuss the heresies that had risen up within her. There is no heresy that comes from outside the Church; they only come from within. Over the centuries, the Church would come together by sending all of her bishops to a single place to discuss great matters of importance. These meetings are called the Ecumenical Councils, meaning that they were all the congregations of the Church together, deciding whether to follow the Word of God or their own hearts. So, in 325, the Church met together in the First Ecumenical Council in a town called Nicaea to discuss the new belief that almost the entire body of Christ believed: Arianism.
Arianism was named for a man, Arius, who taught that Christ was the first creation of the Father, being a similar substance as Him, though not the same substance. If this sounds somewhat familiar to you, it’s because the Nicene Creed was composed after much debate and we end up with the familiar formula: “…one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father…,” the same substance.
Most of Christianity fell into Arianism at that time, but through a thorough study of God’s Word, through debate, through prayer, but most of all, through the guidance and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, the Church prevailed, Arianism was rejected, orthodoxy was returned, Jesus was confessed to be true God, not a creation. There were six other councils that met throughout the centuries. They would discuss things like did Jesus have a rational human mind, was there only one person of God or three, how did the humanity of Christ and the divinity of Christ interact, was Mary the mother of God, do we cooperate with God in matters of salvation, will all creatures, including the devil, return to God, and can we have images of God and the saints in the Church. We won’t get into all the councils. They’re important, but what is most important is the dates. These happened from 325 AD through 787 AD. That was the last of the ecumenical councils. After that, the Church would never be the same.
In 1054, the Great Schism occurred. Through a confluence of circumstances, the Pope of the Church of the West, which is Rome and most western European churches, and the Patriarch of the Eastern Churches, which includes Asia, most of Africa, and some eastern European churches, ended up excommunicating each other. This separated the Church for the first time in a way that would never really be rectified. The whole of Christendom was injured that day, and the Church prayed for its reconciliation, they hoped for it, but it would not come, or at least, it hasn’t yet.
The two churches then developed on their own for what is now a thousand years. That’s why the western churches still look so different from the churches of the east. If you walk into either one today, you’ll see the artwork is different, the space is different, the music is different, and even the theology is different. That’s because the Church was not united, it was not ecumenical, and there was no council that would bring it together.
That was the world of Martin Luther, the world leading to the Reformation, a world where the Church did want to be united, but couldn’t find the way there. Their theology had become too different, their disagreements too deep, and there was no way to have any more ecumenical councils because the congregations could no longer agree on anything. They each wanted their power, they each wanted the other to submit to them, they wanted to be in charge. Neither one would submit to each other because neither one would submit to Christ. And that was why so many abuses of the Roman Catholic church began to happen in the west; there was no one there any more to hold them in check. They could do whatever they wanted and because the pope and the mini-councils of the Roman church were supposedly infallible, there was no one who could do anything to stop them. Enter Martin Luther.
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