This quick study on Reformation History was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on December 3, 2017. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
Luther was alive and he was back from Wartburg Castle and stood in his pulpit in Wittenberg. He stood before these people who he knew and pastorally loved, these people who had been lead astray by the false prophets, by Luther’s friend, Karlstadt, even by the failure of leadership from Melanchthon. What would he say? What could he say? He began by undoing some of the damage Karlstadt had done to the church. He told them that the liturgical innovations he had introduced would be repealed. He wouldn’t stand by and let their consciences be broken. But Luther also began to preach against the heresies of these prophets who were just making up their theologies as they went along. While Wittenberg repented, the spirit of these Zwickau prophets, who placed the emphasis on what God revealed to them rather than in the Scriptures, still persists today. Almost every American evangelical church, American protestantism, is beset with this silliness.
Now, there’s so much we could talk about next. There was the Diet at Nuremberg that declared that Luther’s death sentence was unenforceable. That, at least, allowed Luther to travel through Saxony without any danger from Roman Catholic or Imperial enforcers. This way, Luther could visit where he needed, and teach the people of God’s Word freely.
Then, there was Thomas Münzer, a wild priest in Germany who began to preach that infant baptism was evil and sinful and carried no promise of God and that all people needed to be re-baptized because the first, infant one didn’t count (this was the first time the Church had ever heard either such evil doctrines). Münzer’s theology, and Münzer himself, would ultimately lead to the Peasant’s War in 1524, where poorly armed peasants and farmers revolted against the lords and electors of their territories because they felt oppressed. Luther wrote against their revolt, reminding the people that the Lord God has ordained the government over them and they had no right, heavenly or temporal, to try to overthrow anyone. Luther also wrote that the nobility had the duty to put down the rebellion leaders like dogs. He also wrote that the nobility had the duty to make sure all their people were taken care of and that the injustices the peasants suffered needed to stop. The nobility turned around and slaughtered anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 peasants over the course of a single year.
Ultimately, though, the most important thing to mention is how Wittenberg was quickly becoming a model for the rest of the empire and all those who would choose to leave the Roman church. Luther never set out thinking to start his own church; he loved the Roman church, but she had excommunicated him. The Roman church, by her actions, told the world that the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone wasn’t a Christian doctrine. Because Rome stood against the Word of God, and would officially do so, finally, in the 1560s, Rome became a new church, a new sect, a heresy. The church in Wittenberg, influenced by the teachings of Martin Luther, but formed by the Word of God, began to take her place. The Wittenbergians were focusing on God’s gifts through Word and Sacrament and rediscovering the freedom of the Gospel, out from the tyranny of Rome, and everything that would happen from that point on would be because of that. We’ll do more of an overview of that next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment