Lecture 1: Five Questions to Set the Table: What the Reformation Really Was

The lecture, section by section

1. Bigger than one date or one man

   Nearly everyone dates the Reformation to 1517, when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the Wittenberg castle door on the eve of All Saints' Day. Busenitz broadens the frame: 1517 is when the Reformation reached its climactic impact, not when it began. Luther himself would have said he stood on the shoulders of generations before him, and Reformation principles were recognized, championed, and even died for centuries before the sixteenth century.

2. The reformers before the Reformation

   The men usually called pre-reformers were reformers in their own right, living before the movement reached its zenith. Peter Waldo and the Waldensians preached Scripture in French and Italian in the 1100s. John Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation, led the first translation of the whole Bible into English in the 1300s. Jan Hus preached in the Bohemian tongue in Prague until the Council of Constance burned him in 1415, and Girolamo Savonarola sought to purify Renaissance Florence until he was hanged and burned in 1498, roughly twenty years before the Ninety-five Theses.

3. The issue underneath: who is the head of the church

   Ask what sparked the Reformation and most will say justification by faith alone. Busenitz argues sola fide was a fruit, not the spark. The central issue in one word was lordship: is the pope the head of the church, or is Christ? Every other Reformation doctrine flows from that headship. If Christ is the church's head, his word is her authority (sola Scriptura), and the gospel in that word is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.

4. Hus, Luther, and the headship of Christ

   A reading from the story of Jan Hus makes the point concrete. Forbidden by archbishop and pope to preach, Hus declared he dared not obey, since obeying men against God would offend against God and his own salvation. His major work, De Ecclesia, argued that Christ alone is head of the church and that papal utterances bind only when they agree with the law of Christ. Luther later named the same issue as the chief cause of his break with Rome: the pope had made himself lord of the church. Spurgeon carried the theme forward, and the same principle confronts churches today whenever opinion polls and trends, rather than Christ and his word, set the agenda.

5. The writing that sparked it: the Scriptures themselves

   The famous answer is the Ninety-five Theses, translated and spread by the new printing press in what Busenitz calls the first blog war. But the text truly responsible for the Reformation is the Bible in the language of the people. Waldo hired priests to translate it; Wycliffe's Lollards hand-copied it; Hus preached it in Bohemian; Luther put it into German, Lefevre into French, and Erasmus supplied the Greek text Tyndale used for English. Rome had outlawed vernacular translation at the Synod of Toulouse in 1229, and wherever the ban was defied, reformation followed.

6. Revival cannot be manipulated

   The lesson reaches the present: revival is not something a church can schedule or engineer. The greatest revival in the history of the church is the Reformation, and what sparked it, people being exposed to the truth of God's word, is the same thing that stirs genuine revival now. There was no orchestration, only God's sovereign work as his Spirit used his word, one soul at a time.

7. Nothing new: the recovery of something very old

   Did Luther invent justification by faith alone? If so, evangelicals are in serious trouble. The word evangelical itself comes from the Reformation: Luther called the true church the church of the gospel, euangelion, germanized to evangelical, and Tyndale carried the term into English. Busenitz points to roughly sixty-five citations from church fathers, Clement of Rome through the Venerable Bede, articulating justification by faith, and to Martin Chemnitz, the second Martin, who defended sola fide from the fathers alone. The sacramental gospel Rome defended was the invention of the high Middle Ages, made official at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

8. Calvin's challenge on the church fathers

   In the preface to his Institutes, addressed to the Roman Catholic king of France in 1536, Calvin insisted that Rome unjustly set the ancient fathers against the Protestants: if the contest were decided by patristic authority, the tide of victory would turn to the Protestant side. Calvin debated Roman opponents using primarily the fathers and prevailed. Two solas stand as pillars of the rest: sola Scriptura, the formal principle that forms everything else, and sola fide, the material principle, the substance of the gospel; together they trace not five hundred years back, but two thousand, to Pentecost.

9. Was it necessary? Indulgences and the treasury of merit

   The medieval system had made the sacraments official doctrine in 1215, and around 1230 a theologian proposed a treasury of merit: the surplus good works of Christ, Mary, and the saints, banked in heaven, with the pope authorized to dispense them. Selling that dispensation became the indulgence system, which financed St. Peter's Basilica from the pockets of the spiritually desperate, promising less time in purgatory, a middle state found nowhere in Scripture. The Ninety-five Theses were aimed squarely at this traffic: if the pope truly could forgive sins from an infinite treasury, Luther asked, why not forgive everyone freely and give the money to the poor?

10. A broken papacy everyone could see

    Beyond doctrine lay open decay: the Babylonian captivity, seventy years of weak French popes at Avignon in Wycliffe's lifetime, then the papal schism with two and eventually three rival popes, each excommunicating the others. When Hus told thousands in Bethlehem Chapel that the papacy was broken, everyone could see it was. Luther, an anxious monk desperate for peace with God, visited Rome in 1510 expecting a spiritual haven and found a den of corruption, where even citizens joked that if there is a hell, Rome is built on it. Within a decade he, like Wycliffe and Hus before him, would call the papacy antichrist.

11. Four quadrants of church history

    The course's map divides two thousand years into four five-hundred-year quadrants. The patristic period runs from Pentecost, about AD 30, through the apostolic age, the persecuted ante-Nicene centuries, Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313, and the empire's official Christianity. The medieval church spans 500 to 1500: early medieval centuries when pagan habits were christianized and seeds of corruption were sown, then the high Middle Ages with the rise of Islam, the East-West schism of 1054, the Crusades, and the pre-reformers. The 1500s are the Reformation century, and everything since is the modern period, where this course will live.

1. Busenitz argues that every other Reformation doctrine flows out of the headship of Christ. Where do you see churches today letting something other than Christ and his word function as the real authority?

2. The Reformation was sparked by ordinary people finally reading Scripture in their own language. What would it look like to prize that access, rather than merely possess it?

3. Hus said that when commanded to stop preaching, he dared not obey men against God. How do you weigh submission to authority against faithfulness to Christ when the two collide?