Peter Witkowski Church History

Did the Reformation Destroy the ‘Church?’

Catholics, academics, and some protestants view the Reformation launched by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517 as being a less than helpful historical development. Prior to the posting of the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel, seemingly one unified Christian church existed. Our Christian friends in the East who assemble under the banner of the Greek Orthodox Church take issue with this Western view of church history. Almost five hundred years before the Reformation, they broke with the Bishop of Rome on July 16, 1054. But the great schism did not destroy the unity of the Western Churches. Luther and the second generation of Reformers deserve the credit or the blame for that development. Baptists have a president, Methodists have bishops, and Presbyterians have presbyters in part because Luther walked off the field and refused to play with the historic and unifying expression of Christendom, the Roman Catholic Church.


Did Luther and Sola Scriptures Destroy the Church?


But is this truly what happened? Did Luther’s quest for a purer church destroy “The Church,” dividing that which God has always intended to be unified?


Those who view the Reformation to be primarily schismatic in nature, point to the most famous line of the Reformation. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, the representative of Pope Leo X demanded that Luther recant of his errors and his teaching. His errors included such things as Thesis 36 which stated, “Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.” Luther asked for an adjournment of the meeting to form his response. When he returned to the hall the following day, he replied:


I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”

Here I Stand

Protestants champion Luther’s statement because it encapsulates the idea of Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. Instead of looking to Rome for truth, protestants can scan the Bible and discern God’s truth through plain reason. Luther had shifted the authority of the church from the Pope’s throne to the pew. Protestants rejoiced.

Christendom quaked. The democratization of the church’s authority threatened to destroy all authoritative claims. Any man or woman with access to the Bible could reason himself or herself to a variety of doctrines that may have no relation to the doctrines proposed by other Christians. Essentially Luther and the Reformers who followed the pugnacious monk had turned theology into a subjective experience that seemingly undermined the idea of truth, leaving no place for cultural much less spiritual unity. Interpretive anarchy reigned.


What Did Luther Really Do?

Though Luther and those in the Reformed camp turned the world upside down, they were not seeking to create a new church, modeling a theological paradigm of unending evolution and progress. The Reformers were inherently theological conservationists who wished to lead the Church back to the historic, apostolic faith. Luther had said his 95 Theses aligned, “with what is in the Holy Scriptures…and then what is in…the writings of the church fathers.”

Luther had not advocated for theological anarchy. He and those who followed him believed that the Holy Spirit that had inspired the New Testament text, converted the lost and sustained the church as the caretaker and protector of the evangelical witness. Christians were free to interpret the text according to their own conscience as long as that conscience aligned with the Scriptures and the testimony of the historic church that affirmed the apostolic witness. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer correctly noted that for the Reformers, “Tradition was not the Word of God; it is the testimony to that Word.” Luther took issue with the Pope not because the Vatican championed tradition. He took issue with Rome because it advocated for theological positions that ran counter to the Scriptures and the testimony of the historic apostolic faith. Vanhoozer helpfully describes what Luther did, writing,

Protestantism is not the virus that divides and attacks the body; it is the antibodies that set to work attacking the body’s infection (e.g. late medieval Roman Catholicism).

Luther had not protested the authoritative nature of apostolic tradition as taught in the Scriptures. He protested against the commands of the Pope because the Pontiff, “distorts the Holy Scriptures.” He was not an theological anarchist. He was theological purest, Sola Scriptura.

Why Is the Church Fractured?

The church lacks unity not because the reformers protested the authority of Rome but because men and women of every age refuse to acknowledge the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition of the Church as Rome has done. The ancient church father Irenaeus whom Luther knew well described schismatics as follows:

When we refer them to that tradition which originates from the apostles, which is preserved by means of the succession of presbyters in the Churches, they [the schismatics] object to tradition, saying that they themselves are wiser not merely than the presbyters, but even than the apostles, because they have discovered the unadulterated truth.

The unity of the church fractures when men and women walk away from the apostolic witness of the Scriptures, preferring new sources of authority ranging from prophetic dreams, to religious traditions, to personal feelings. Regardless of their claims, the new traditions always produce schism.

Luther did not infect the church with schism. He reintroduced the church to the cure for division, the gospel once delivered for all and attested to be all true believers. May we be wise stewards of the cure.

Peter Witkowski Church History

Why The Church Will Always Be the Same: A Coronavirus’s History Lesson

merry go round

The coronavirus has spun the world around like the vindictive kid standing next to an old merry-go-round. As humanity has hung on for dear life, some church leaders have declared that the violent spins will fundamentally alter the when and how people assemble. To survive, pastors and their congregations must learn to navigate the spinning wobbles of the coronavirus world through appeals to leadership coaches, political theories, sociologists, psychologists, and biologists.

Though the rotations of the 2020 merry-go-round have given the riders the impression that the they are moving across the playground, the foundation of the church has not moved and will not move. It remains forever anchored to the unchanging God of the universe. The mission of the local church which is comprised of redeemed men and women who have convenented together to live out the gospel in community is and forever will be to glorify God. The church will always assemble to worship the one true God. The historical record proves the fixed nature of the church, revealing that plagues, masks, and social distancing have not fundamentally changed the church.

A Brief History of Churches and Plagues

The coronavirus is not the first virus that has spun around the people of God with all the care of a ten-year-old bully. Church has withstood past challenges which threatened to ‘radically’ alter the bride of Christ. In 165 A.D. and again in 260 A.D plagues ravaged the world of the early church fathers, killing as much as 30% of the Roman world’s population according to historian Rodney Stark. The Bishop Dionysius was able to successfully pastor his generation through terror that “prevails over all hope.” When the plagues subsided, the church remained. Dionysius believed the plague of 260 A.D. had been a positive “instrument for our training and probation.”

In addition to medical issues, the church has wrestled through the secondary challenges and moral dilemmas that the coronavirus has brought to the church’s attention. During the plague of 1527, Martin Luther harshly condemned Germans who knowingly exposed their neighbors to the plague as “prank like putting lice into fur garments or flies into someone’s living room.” During the Cholera Outbreak of 1866, Spurgeon had to remind Christians that science did not threaten their faith. He said,

I am thankful that there are many men of intelligence and scientific information who can speak well upon… the laws of cleanliness and health. So far from being angry with those who instruct the people in useful secular knowledge, he ought rather to be thankful for them…The gospel has no quarrel with ventilation, and the doctrines of grace have no dispute with chloride of lime.

The particularly challenging topic of whether or not to meet during times of biological peril has also been address by the church of old.

Spurgeon kept holding services because his church’s neighborhood was not quarantined during the second cholera outbreak.

Similarly, Luther encouraged his followers to attend church so that they could “learn through God’s word how to live and how to die.” But, he also thought Christians had the freedom to leave cities struggling with the plague and believed the sick should avoid large gatherings. He wrote.

It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best his is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have. He is thus responsible before God for his neighbor’s death.

Richard Baxter who lived through the great London plague of 1665, leaned toward the side of caution. He encouraged the church to suspend operations when facing medical and civil crisisses not tied to gospel proclamation. He wrote,

If the magistrate for a greater good, (as the common safety,) forbid church-assemblies in a time of pestilence, assault of enemies, or fire, or the like necessity, it is a duty to obey him….[we] omit some assemblies for a time, that we may thereby have opportunity.

Ashbel Green concurred, encouraging the churches of Philadelphia to suspend their meetings during the plague of 1798 which claimed 3,400 lives. He refused to meet with his congregation from a “conviction to duty.” He believed that the “long and tedious” interval between services would help would perfect the church while she waited for divine deliverance.

Lastly, Francis Grimke who pastored in Washington D.C. during the Spanish Flu of 1918 supported the temporary closure of churches, theatres, and schools though other evangelicals grumbled. He wrote,

If as a matter of fact, it was dangerous to meet in theatres and in the schools, it certainly was no less dangerous to meet in churches…it was wise to take the precaution and not needlessly run in danger and expect God to protect us.

By God’s grace, the church of the past has successfully weathered spins on the pandemic merry-go-round, arriving in the form we recognize today.

Though some church leaders clamor about declaring the challenges of the coronavirus to be earth shattering, the history of the church proves the opposite to be true. As Ecclesiastics 1:10-11 notes,

Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.

If anything, the writings of Grimke, Spurgeon, and Green have revealed that plagues never substantial changed the nature of the church. Once the coronavirus merry-go-round stops spinning, history indicates most Christians and people will forget that the church was ever spun about. This is the greatest challenge the church faces today.

The Greatest Threat to The Church

The greatest threat of a pandemic resides not in is ability to change the church but in humanity’s ability to forget it ever occurred, missing the divine lessons which God promotes through trials.

In 1918, Grimke hoped the Spanish flu would, “beat a little sense into the white man’s head” because no one could deny that “White and black alike are dealt with indiscriminately: the one is smitten as readily as the other.” The need for the civil rights movement and the social unrest of 2020 have revealed that this lesson has not been taken to heart. Similarly, Spurgeon had wished that the plague of 1866 would usher in a revival, calling the people of London to forsake drunkenness, fornication, their lack of church attendance and their fascination with Catholicism. But the plague of 1866 like the plague of 1854 produced little change. Spurgeon later lamented,

Alas! for your piety! It was as the morning cloud, and as the early dew it passed away…We prayed; we sent for the minister; we devoted ourselves to God; we vowed, if he would spare us, we would live better. Here thou art, my hearer, just what thou wast before thy sickness.

Ashebel Green concurred, noting that populations often forget the lessons learned during plagues, returning to their earlier sins. He lamented:

We have actually grown worse, and not better, by all the chastisements we have been made to endure feel for this past five years.

Spurgeon feared that the church’s inability to heed God’s displeasure would result in the people of God being “ravaged by a pestilence worse than the plague: I mean the pestilence of deadly soul-destroying error.” Sadly, his warning has proved prophetic.

The merry-go-round will not change the church but it may afflict the church with gospel amnesia which will blunt the spread of the kingdom of God. Instead of strategizing about how to prepare for future changes that will prove insignificant in a few months time, believers should plead with God to bless the trials of today with gospel fruitfulness. Green reminds us:

Our past experiences has surely been enough to convince us, that no providence, however afflictive, awful or awakening in themselves, will make us any better, but rather much worse unless God accompany by the influences of his grace.

May God be with us all!

Peter Witkowski Church History

Spurgeon’s Advice To Christians Living in Troubled Times

spurgeon unrest

Charles Spurgeon knew the horrors of disease and social unrest. Being attuned to the needs of his church, he provided his listeners with a biblical framework which helped them to understand and respond to the tragedies that flooded over them. Spurgeon’s insights still blossom with benefits for modern the Christian. Let’s take a look.

In his 1866 sermon on the cholera outbreak, Spurgeon noted that “Disease…is a trumpet that must be heard.” The sounds of death touched the beggar on the street corner and the politician in her country home. None could escape its noise. Events like cholera, the coronavirus, and riots crash through the barriers of luxury and security that bread “pride, heathenism and forgetfulness of God.” They revealed humanity to be weak, vulnerable, and in need of a savoir. When asked why God sounded that trumpet of death in 1866, Spurgeon replied,

If you ask me what I think to be the design, I believe it to be this—to waken up our indifferent population, to make them remember that there is a God, to render them susceptible to the influences of the gospel, to drive them to the house of prayer, to influence their minds to receive the Word, and moreover to startle Christians into energy and earnestness, that they may work while it is called to-day.

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-voice-of-the-cholera#flipbook/

Similarly, Spurgeon viewed social unrest as gospel trumpet. He said,

 I feel persuaded that there are such things as national judgments, national chastisements for national sins—great blows from the rod of God, which every wise man must acknowledge to be, either a punishment of sin committed, or a monition to warn us to a sense of the consequences of sins, leading us by God’s grace to humiliate ourselves, and repent of our sin.

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/fast-day-service#flipbook/

To press the gospel forward into their often spiritually deaf nations and churches, Spurgeon encouraged Christians to call sinners to repentance and to pray for their nation’s deliverance when storm clouds appeared.

Call For Repentance

Though Spurgeon thanked God for blessing England with political, social, and economic success, he knew England would not remain favored if her sin continued unchecked. God had crushed Syria and Babylon and would in time deal with Great Britain. Since the people of England still had time, he called every Christian to “try to shake off the sins of his nation from his own skirt, and let each one to the utmost of his ability labor and strive to purify his land of blood and oppression and everything evil that still clingeth to her.”

Before God would once again bless a nation, the nation had to wrestle with her sins. The nation that refused to repent should expect nothing other than judgement. Spurgeon noted,

“Even so must it be with every nation of the earth that is guilty of oppression. Humbling itself before God, when his wrath is kindled but a little, it may for awhile arrest its fate; but if it still continue in its bold unrighteousness, it shall certainly reap the harvest of its own sowing….There is no God in heaven if the iniquity of slavery go unpunished. There is no God existing in heaven above if the cry of the [black man] does not bring down a red hail of blood upon the nation that still holds the black man in slavery… The Lord God is the avenger of every one that is oppressed, and the executor of every one that oppresseth.”

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-scales-of-judgment#flipbook/

Flushing out his convictions, the Prince of Preachers addressed, the “great public” sins of his day that continued to threaten England after she abolished slavery. Spurgeon called the rich to repent of having “down-trodden” the needy and the poor. He pleaded with the working classes to work as unto the Lord. He lamented drunkenness which had swept through London. He called for the end of prostitution and sexual sin, noting “there can be no..doubt that amongst all classes and ranks of men there is enough lewdness to bring down Heaven’s wrath upon our city.” He identified the “Constant neglect of the worship of God” as another grand sin that needed to be repented of. He also addressed the gross sins of the church, fearing that pastoral neglect of the gospel would bring God’s wrath upon England. As the trumpet of affliction sounded, Spurgeon believed Christians should bang the drum of repentance calling both sinner and saint to flee from sin.

Intercessory Prayer

After the saint had address the sins in his or her own life and called other to repentance, Spurgeon believed the Christian should intercede for his or her nation.

When England groaned under the strains of war, economic depression, and a bad harvest in 1879, Spurgeon downplayed the importance of national prayer days. He knew that God would reject the petitions of sinful men and women who cried out for blessing while refusing to turn from their sins. He noted “Many a public prayer will be regarded as absolutely ridiculous.”

The Prince of Preachers feared such secular prayer could harm the gospel because sinners thought they had prayed when they had not. Because their prayers went unheard, sinners often laid the ineptness of their pleas at God’s feet, deeming Him to be either powerless or careless. Yet the fault lay not with God but with unholy men and women who did not realize that their sin separated them from the presence of the Holy God. Jesus would not bless unholy men and women so that they could continue to feast on sin. God only heard the unrighteous if they called out for the saving power of his son. The sinner’s other request never made it past the no-mans land of vague spirituality.

Instead of asking the world to pray, Spurgeon thought , “All hope for a country lies in the true believers who dwell therein.” He wanted Christians to pray for their nation. Though the world knows not how to approach heaven, Christians do know how to pray for they have been clothed in Jesus’ holiness. Like Abraham, Moses, and Aron, they should intercede with God for their nations, pleading with God to forgive their neighbors’ sins. “Confess the sin of this nation before God. If it will not repent, repent for it,” Spurgeon pleaded. Unless the church intercedes for her nation, the Christian has little reason to expect that God’s providence will smile upon their land.

When Spurgeon lead the national prayer services following the military revolt of 1857, he tied his prayers for justice to prayers of forgiveness. He said, “We are a sinful nation; we confess the sins of our governors and our own particular iniquities. For all our rebellions and transgressions, O God have mercy upon us!”

Christians could not wash their hands of their nation even if their personal lives were above reproach. The believer could not expect to escape her nation’s sorrow through personal piety. Spurgeon thought the Christian who benefited from the privileges and protections afforded to her by her government would also suffer under her government’s divine judgement. The Christian had every reason to pray for her nation as the gospel and a her instinct for self-preservation demanded it.

Such intercessory prayers were also pregnant with hopefullness, proving to be an antidote to the despair that came with sickness and social unrest. Spurgeon noted, “The hour of prayer is often the hour of deliverance.” When the church prayed, God acted. Spurgeon concluded, “it was God that gave Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation to “Emancipation”…it was God that gave Wilberforce.” To initiate social and political change, the church must pray. Spurgeon remained ever hopeful for he knew God heard the intercessory prayers of his people.

I believe that a country can never have a larger blessing, a truer safeguard for the present, or a firmer security for its future greatness, than a band of praying men and women who make mention of it before the throne of God. 

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-present-crisis#flipbook/

Spurgeon also offered encouragement to the oppressed. He knew Joseph went to jail unjustly. He knew Jesus and the apostles were unfairly slandered. He knew that

“God’s people may sometimes be so oppressed that they scarcely able to speak for themselves at all…They dare not speak, they have to confine their language to a sigh…they dare not go and tell a friend their wrong, lest further mischief should come ot it.”

Like Hannah who pleaded for a son, the believer today maybe able to do little more than sigh because he feels crushed by oppression. Yet God hears our sorrows. Spurgeon said,

When we think we have not prayed at all, we have often prayed the best. When we imagine that our groanings have been empty, they have often been the fullest. When we sigh because we think we do not sigh, God…hears the grief when the grief has no voice, he hears the sorrow when the sorrow cannot find a tongue.

https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-power-of-a-sigh#flipbook/

God responds to the prayers of his people.

When the trumpet of adversity sounds, Spurgeon called his listeners to examine their hearts and to evaluate the faults of their nation, calling for repentance. Then, they were to take their knowledge of their hearts and of their land to the Lord, confessing sins and expecting the blessing of God. How are we doing?