This quick study on Reformation History was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on December 10, 2017. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
Wittenberg stood at the precipice. They could hear the Word of God and keep it, or they could bow to the pressure being put on them from all sides. There were the Roman Catholics, who attempted to bring people back under their umbrella by force. There were, and I love the German word for it, the schwärmeri, the enthusiasts who tried to show people that what mattered was a feeling of devotion to God and depended on revelations from Him into their hearts. There were even, what would be called, the Reformed, eventually led most famously by John Calvin, who pushed Wittenberg to keep reforming and get rid of anything that looked, smelled, or tasted Roman Catholic.
But Wittenberg, led faithfully by Martin Luther’s theology, the theology of the the Word of God, held fast. I put it these terms, that Wittenberg held fast, because what would come next would place the need to hold fast to doctrine squarely on the shoulders of the leaders of all of the towns and cities, the elected officials, the mayors, town councils, princes, and electors. In fact, really, while the theologians kept bring the Church back to the Word of God, it was those who were in power who ultimately had to lay their reputations and, literally, their necks on the line for that confession of faith.
What was happening in Wittenberg was incredible, and led by Luther under the protection of Frederick the Wise, gave rise to what we even have in the Church today, where the people of God are called to listen to His Word with open ears so that they may know when their theologians, their pastors and teachers, are deviating from His Word and turning toward any of the groups we’ve mentioned today.
People came to Wittenberg from all over to see these changes, to see how its done. There was a group of nuns, who in 1523, escaped from their convent, abandoned their vows, a capital offense in that day, to seek the freedom of which they heard tell. Eventually, all of those nuns would be married off to good, Godly men, except one hard-headed nun who, no matter with whom she was matched, refused to marry, unless it were Luther himself. Luther, worn down by trying to match her up, desiring to show how much he valued marriage, and, perhaps, even having had fallen for her a bit, finally relented and married the former nun, Katherine von Bora, in 1525. The world watched their marriage, an ex-monk and an escaped nun, and saw that this was good.
When Frederick the Wise died in the same year, just a month before Luther married, the world held its breath. Who would defend the faith now? Could anyone step up? Would the whole Reformation collapse under its own weight? God saw fit to elect Frederick’s brother, John the Steadfast, to that role. And he did well. He guided his region into peace, organizing the Lutherans into a bit of power both at the state and the administrative levels. He even worked to organize pastoral visits all over Saxony, where pastors would go out and evaluate what was being taught in the churches that left Rome behind. It wasn’t always good news, but it was a start, and this led directly to Luther writing his beloved Small Catechism, which was intended to help parent teach the faith to their children, so the Word of Christ would live in each parish. This led to the Lutherans finally saying the whole mass, the service, in German in 1525, having the Lutherans ordain their first pastors on their own, working on new hymnals and church instructions. Ultimately, Wittenberg’s courage would inspire many other cities to follow suit, and the Lutheran movement began to build up its steam, all the way to Augsburg, which we’ll talk about next time.
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