For some, October 31 is a holiday to get dressed up and get some candy, we call it Halloween. For some Protestants, October 31 is a holiday to celebrate Martin Luther’s triumph over the evils of the Roman Catholic Church. But is that how it really happened? Did one “courageous, crazy little monk” actually intend to destroy the Roman Catholic Church? The answer is a resounding no. Luther discovered the importance of grace and attempted to reform the wrongs he saw in Catholicism. Hence the name, Reformation; Luther wanted to reform, not completely break with the Catholic Church. It was only later when he was excommunicated from the RCC that Luther started his own branch of Christianity.
As I watch my Twitter and Facebook feeds fill up with posts about Reformation Day this morning, it strikes me that, as usual, Protestants prefer to see this issue as a black and white issue. Law is bad, Gospel is good. Catholicism was wrong, Luther was right. We like to ignore the many complexities that brought about the Reformation. Sure, theology was a central issue, but politics and social reform were driving forces as well. Luther was not the first to point out the errors of the RCC, nor was he the last or even the most well-articulated. But for the sake of your time and the length of this post, I just want to focus on what I think is a central misunderstanding of the theological issues surrounding the Reformation.
It is unhelpful and unbiblical to say that Law and Gospel stand in direct opposition. We must maintain a dialectical tension between the two. We are saved by grace through faith, as Luther said, but we show our faith through works, as James said. James 2:14-18 reads, “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” Luther really didn’t like this passage, and considered for a time removing James from the canon of Scripture. Let’s not make the same mistake he did.
One other issue that seems to always creep up for Protestant’s is the issue of Church tradition. We use the rallying cry of Sola Scriptura to argue a form of Biblicism. This is interesting to me in that it is a form of works based salvation, something most advocates of sola scriptura would be firmly against. Church Tradition is full of incredibly helpful men who devoted their lives to Christ and to the study of theology and Scripture. I love the Church Father’s, men like Irenaeus and Athanasius. We would be reaching into the heights of arrogance to claim that we can understand the things of God better than these great saints. We need other Christians to help us understand our faith, and to keep us from heresies.
So let us not fall into the Protestant mistake of drawing strict black and white distinctions in issues that are complex and require prayer and exegesis to even begin to understand. Learn about our history and tradition, read the great saints who came before us, don’t give in to a strict biblicism that destroys theological probing. Nothing goes against the Reformation tradition more than blindly accepting and simplifying complex theological issues.
