So, we were gone for a week or so on vacation, but we are back and sharing once more.
It is the historic theological battle of the Reformation, about how they were thinking about their faith in God
Almighty. Martin Luther, the first and
perhaps best known reformer, rediscovered the central truth of the New
Testament of “sola fide”, faith alone.
It is only by faith in Christ that salvation can occur. What that means is that Jesus does everything
on our behalf. His death on the cross, his
resurrection on Easter morning, that is sufficient to our salvation.
The importance of this rediscovery is when we set it against
the political reality of the day. The Roman
Catholic church, well, the Church, was universal across Western Europe. Its power was unparalleled in human
history. So politics, economics,
military events and preparations, all of these mixed into the faith structures the church governed.
It had also grown far from the original biblical
message. There was a point where the
rich could purchase ‘indulgences’, essentially pay to have their sins
forgiven. In our day and age, that may
sound underwhelming. But imagine a time
where an essential part of the political and religious landscape is the ongoing
worry of whether our souls would end up in heaven or hell? That part of the work of the divinely appointed monarch was to work for the salvation of their subjects?
Among all the pieces of the Bible that Martin Luther was
reading and studying were the words we have from James, “faith without works is
dead”. This, in a time where works all
but bypassed any faith as a portion of the Christian experience. It is said that he would have removed James
from the New Testament if that were up to him.
It is virtually impossible to understand the political power
of the Church at the time of Martin Luther. Yes, the Roman Catholic Church still exists
around the world. It is still the
largest denomination of Christianity, but to consider that it had the power to
call for war? That it had the power to
deprive kings of their kingdoms through excommunication? That the authority of the church was
sufficient to declare an entire nation going to hell as a political means of influence to bend a king to its will?
The declarations of America as a Christian nation by certain
lines of theological thought are tame in comparison. But the results are not so different. Whenever the church aspires to political and economic
authority in the world, it is attached to a moral agenda that the legal authority
is pressed into service to enforce. It
takes a Reformation to push back against such power-grabbing.
Today’s situation is different however. Yes, there is a push for a certain moral
framework to be the law of the land. But
it is no longer a monolithic agenda. The
church is diverse, blessedly so. There
is a wide swath of how people think through what it means to act as a
Christian. To what our ‘moral agenda’
encompasses. To how we act on our moral
impulses.
For me, the guiding principle is to love our neighbors as
ourselves. And the way we are called to
love ourselves is how God loves us. And
God so loved the world that God gave us Jesus to die on our behalf. That is ‘sola fide’, by faith alone. God’s faithfulness is sufficient. The counterbalance of James is then not to
sit back on our laurels and wait for salvation.
It is the call to live out love in a world in need. Yes, God did everything we need to be saved
from our sins. And we, in turn, are called
to do everything we can to demonstrate this love to a world in need. We are all Children of God. We are all loved. We have realized that love in our lives. Our call is to see that love realized in the
lives of all.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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