Lecture 9: The Age in Review, and Luther’s Discovery of Grace

The lecture, section by section

1. How to hold three centuries in your head

   Busenitz's study counsel doubles as a method for the whole course: see it big and keep it simple. For every person, event, and place, know two things: why it is significant, and what makes it distinct from its neighbors. Matthew and John were both apostles who wrote Gospels; what separates them is the point.

2. The apostolic circle, sorted

   The four evangelists: Matthew and John apostles, Mark writing down Peter's preaching, Luke writing under Paul. Peter, apostle to the Jews, dominates the first half of Acts; Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, the second. Stephen's martyrdom scattered the church; Philip carried the gospel to Samaria; James the Lord's brother led the Jerusalem church and its council, his brother Jude writing under that oversight; Apollos by tradition pastored Corinth; and tradition, of varying reliability, sends Bartholomew to Armenia and, on much firmer ground, Thomas to India.

3. The witnesses outside the church

   Luke is the first church historian, and after him a chain of outside voices: Tacitus, whose account of Nero's tortures we read; Josephus, the captured Jewish historian and chief source for the revolt and for Masada, where the zealots died by their own hands in 73; Suetonius; Pliny the Younger, the governor who asked Rome how to handle people who worshiped Christ as God; and the fourth century Christian Eusebius, whose Ecclesiastical History is the fullest record we possess of the church's first three centuries.

4. Decades and emperors

   The first century by decade: Pentecost in the 30s, the Jerusalem Council in the 40s, the missionary journeys in the 50s, the fire of Rome in the 60s, Jerusalem's fall in the 70s, John's letters in the 80s, Revelation in the 90s. The emperors to know: Nero, the fire and the deaths of Peter and Paul; Titus, destroyer of Jerusalem and later emperor; Domitian, John's exile; Trajan, at whose accession John died and under whom Clement was killed; Marcus Aurelius, under whom Polycarp and Justin died; Decius, the first empire wide persecution and the crisis of the lapsed; Diocletian, the last and worst; and then Constantine, and everything changes.

5. The heresies in one sweep

   Ebionite legalism descending from the Judaizers; Valentinian Gnosticism with its aeons and Demiurge; Marcion pitting the Testaments against each other with scissors in hand; Mani's light and darkness, the very system that held Augustine before his conversion; Montanus's binding new prophecy; monarchianism in its two forms, adoptionism and modalism; Arianism ahead, the Son demoted to first creature, the Jehovah's Witnesses' ancient twin; Pelagianism ahead too, free will enthroned and depravity denied; and the sister schisms of Novatian and Donatus. The Gospel of Thomas stands for all the Gnostic gospels: late, secondhand collections of sayings, nothing like the four.

6. Places that carry the story

   Syrian Antioch, where believers were first called Christians and missions began, never to be confused with Pisidian Antioch of the first journey. Alexandria, city of the great library, its church traced by tradition to Mark, its scholarship, from the Jewish philosopher Philo onward, the seedbed of the allegorical method. Caesarea, where Cornelius believed and Paul sat imprisoned two years. Damascus and the basket. Pella, the refuge before Jerusalem burned. And Rome, where both great apostles finished.

7. Luther in the storm

   The lecture then turns to its great question through one man's story. Caught in a lightning storm near Erfurt in 1505, the young law student cried to Saint Anne and became a monk, and for years nearly destroyed himself seeking a righteousness he could stand on: endless confession that exhausted his confessor, fasting, self-punishment. If anyone could have reached heaven by monkery, he later said, it was he. The phrase the righteousness of God in Romans 1 he came to hate, hearing in it only condemnation.

8. Rome, and the stairs

   In 1510 Luther walked to Rome expecting the holiest place on earth and found spiritual bankruptcy. On the Scala Sancta, climbing on his knees to shorten purgatory, the emptiness of it broke over him. Back in Wittenberg, lecturing through Psalms and Romans, his eyes were opened around 1512 or 1513: the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel is not only God's righteous demand but God's righteous gift, received through faith. I felt, he wrote, as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise through gates flung open.

9. The five solas, and the two principles

   From that discovery flow the Reformation's confessions: Scripture alone the authority, because Christ alone is head of the church; salvation by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Sola Scriptura is called the formal principle of the Reformation, the foundation everything is formed on; sola fide the material principle, the substance of the gospel itself. Those two convictions, Busenitz argues, define what an evangelical is, and evangelicals so defined existed long before Protestantism had a name.

10. The challenge on the table

    Rome claims the Protestant gospel is a sixteenth century novelty. Francis Beckwith, then president of the Evangelical Theological Society's world, returned to Rome declaring the early church more Catholic than Protestant, and an online challenger named Gerry demanded anyone find Protestant beliefs before the 1500s, a challenge Busenitz took up in an eight day public debate. Even before the fathers speak, the chain of pre-reformers answers: Waldensians in the 1100s, Wycliffe and the Lollards in the 1300s, Hus and the Hussites in the 1400s, Luther in the 1500s. The Reformation was not born in 1517; it culminated there.

11. The biblical bedrock

    The final authority is not history but Scripture, and there the case is overwhelming: the tax collector, not the Pharisee, went home justified in Luke 18, the one place in the Gospels where Christ himself speaks of justification; Romans argues from Abraham and David that justification is by faith; Galatians 3, written in the heat of the Judaizing crisis; Ephesians 2:8 and 9, by grace through faith, not of works; Philippians 3, a righteousness not my own; Titus 3, not by deeds done in righteousness. And in the church's own first council, Peter grounded Gentile salvation in grace and faith. The next lecture will let the fathers themselves testify.

1. Luther did everything his system offered and found no peace until grace found him. Where do people around you, or you yourself, still try to quiet a guilty conscience by performance?

2. Busenitz claims sola Scriptura and sola fide define an evangelical across all centuries. Do you agree that those two convictions are the right test? What would you add or remove, and why?

3. If a friend said the Protestant gospel was invented in the 1500s, what first three pieces of evidence from this course would you offer in reply?