10/31/54

Scripture: Romans 1: 7-17.

Text: Romans 1: 17; ... “The just shall live by faith.”

October 31st is not only the evening before “All Saints’ Day,” or “Hallowe’en.” It is an anniversary in Christian history of that day when a young and vigorous priest of the Wittenburg Church nailed on the church door a paper containing 95 theses for discussion and debate. Martin Luther was not the first to feel that some of the practices of the church were in error and even, by some men, corrupted; that certain positions very much needed redefining in new doctrine. Nearly 50 years earlier John Hus had died for his dissent. And other reformers were at work during, as well as immediately following, the time of Luther.

Luther had no notion of what he was touching off. After years of torture in his soul, he had found new assurance in the Holy Scriptures. And he wanted to share that assurance with others. He would debate his beliefs with zest among the church leaders. But he had no notion of seceding from the established church or of creating any division that would separate the church. Years later, Luther exclaimed: “Had I known all in advance, God would have been put to great trouble to bring me to it.”

Thinking of his now-famous stand at the Diet of Worms, where he confronted the Emperor with his refusal to recant his sayings, and with a stand that put his interpretation of Scripture above ecclesiastical or civic authority, he later said: “Truly God can drive one mad; I do not know whether now I could be so daring.” Like Columbus who, a quarter century earlier, had discovered America without knowing very much what he had found, Luther boldly ventured out upon a kind of unknown sea. And the extent of his discovery he did not then know.

We Christian folk of this church, and all other Protestant churches, need to remember those days when it took courage and boldness to be a Protestant. A quarter of a million Protestant congregations cover this nation. More than half the population of the USA are reported as affiliated with some religious group. And of these affiliations, nearly 59% are Protestant Christians, the other 41% being Roman Catholic, Jewish, or affiliates of other religious groups.

There was a time when to be a Protestant meant to be in a minority, ecclesiastically excommunicated, socially ostracized, sometimes cruelly martyred. It can happen in some parts of the world today, but not usually at the present time in the USA. Being a Protestant Christian here can be a part of a good citizen’s conventional, easy-going respectability.

Multitudes find it so easy to be “a Protestant” that they have little abiding conviction about it, and are not in any real sense Protestants. They easily surrender the spirit of the great tradition, if indeed they ever had that spirit. Their heritage has a powerful meaning, if they only know it. If Hus and Luther and Calvin and Knox and their fellow pioneers could speak to us today, what do you suppose they would say?

Surely they would turn our faces forward, point out vital uncompleted tasks, condemn our soft contentment, dare us once more to be reformers of our earth. Probably their positions would make Protestantism difficult and hazardous again, calling for boldness, courage, venture and dedication.

This note we ought to strike now. Too much of our so-called Protestantism is negative -- an objection to something. Our Protestantism should be a dynamic, witnessing, active Christianity. I have heard laymen, in speaking of this afternoon’s meeting, speak of it as an effort, like the laymen’s conferences at Green Lake, to loosen men’s willingness to talk willingly and naturally about their religion. If men and women can learn to do this better, they can put their re-defined beliefs the better into Christian action.

We need, and our times need, a resurgence of positive, witnessing Protestantism. And every essential element in our historic teaching should contribute to our witness. Here are some of those elements, still good, as Harry Fosdick points out, today.

1) First: with all their differences, the early Protestants said one thing unanimously: that Christ is the sole head of the church. They did not, at first, dream of seceding from the Roman Christian communion. Their accustomed loyalties belonged there. They wanted to purify the church from, and fortify it against, spiritual corruption.

There is a wide area of common agreement among Protestant and Roman Christians to this day. We are generally in agreement that there is one God, creator of all things, and Father of our lives; we agree that Christ is our divine Lord and Redeemer; we believe alike, that the church is, as we say, the body of Christ and the sustaining fellowship of believers; that God’s will is revealed in the Bible; that Christian character is the fruit that may be expected to grow on a good tree. But we can not agree on other considerations which certainly do split us, and on which we must be divided so long as we cannot, in deep conscience and earnest thinking, be agreed!

The early Protestants could not accept at least one of the tenets finally made official in the Roman Church in recent times. Pope Leo XI [the eleventh] stated it plainly in 1928: “All true followers of Christ will believe in --- the infallibility of the Roman pontiff ---with the same faith as they believe the Incarnation of Our Lord.” The Reformers dug in their heels on that position in their day. Christ was the sole head of the church, they said. And so say we Protestants of a day 437 [443] years after Luther’s theses. But how commonly we emphasize the negative aspect of it! Some of us say with feeling and vehemence: “We don’t believe in an infallible papacy.” And we put a period, and perhaps an exclamation point there! But what about the positive side of that position -- the affirmation that Christ is the sole head of the Church! That is a momentous testimony. If we believe it we are set not at the end, but at the beginning of a great work.

2) Consider another affirmation in the faith of the Reformation: that every soul has direct access to God. The mystics, and some others among Roman Catholics, would say that too. But the Reformers faced such a vast array of intermediaries -- saints, angels, Mary the mother of Our Lord -- through whom it was commonly thought God must be approached, and whose intercessions were thought necessary to make one’s prayers effective. Early Protestants, at the risk of their lives, said No.

Well, we say “No,” too. And most of us do not now here have to risk our lives to say it. We deny the whole system of intermediaries between man and God. So what! Well, we ought to remind ourselves “what,” lest we forget and neglect the positive conviction we are supposed to be standing for: Every soul has immediate access to God. This is a momentous affirmation. And if we are any kind of Protestant witnesses, we will make that affirmation.

It may be good for us to recall that Luther, when his life was at stake, said: “To go against conscience is neither safe nor right; here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me! Amen.”

If we really believe in that positive Protestantism, we will be part of a dynamic, forward-looking movement. Real Protestantism was not totally achieved by, nor frozen with, the early Reformers. It is still going on!

In 1620, before the Pilgrims sailed for a new world on the Mayflower, Edward Winslow heard a sermon to the Pilgrims by John Robinson. He reported Robinson’s sermon to the Pilgrims in these words: “He was very confident that the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. He took occasion also miserably to bewail the state and condition of the Reformed churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would go no further than the instruments of their Reformation: as, for example, the Lutherans -- they could not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw, for whatever part of God’s will he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they would rather die than embrace it. And so also, saith he, you see the Calvinists, they stick where he left them: a misery much to be lamented; for though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them; and were they now living, saith he, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as that they had received.” Well, that was forward-looking Protestantism of that time. It was what made the Pilgrims as forward-looking then as we ought to be in our time.

3) Consider a third element in the faith of the early Reformers --- that the Bible is the norm of their beliefs and the guide of their lives. From bishop and pope, they turned to the Book for authority, with freedom for each individual to read and interpret the Book. Well, we say it too. But what we had better be doing is to turn from the negative denial of ecclesiastical authority to the positive affirmation and practice of the leadership, the guidance of the Bible.

There are, or course, literalistic forms of interpretation which chain men’s minds to temporary ways of thinking current in ancient times. But at its heart, the Bible is the most forward-looking of all books.

Is the eternal purpose of God in Christ all behind us in the Prophets or the Gospels, the Psalms or the Sermon on the Mount? The urging of the prophets (for instance) that mankind should grow beyond its violent ways to the point at which men may beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks is a condition yet ahead of us, toward which people of good will still struggle until God’s time shall bring it about! Unless we freeze on the past, we Christians still look ahead with Jesus’ commission, “Go ye into all the world.” We Protestants must be witnessing Christians, if we are worth our spiritual salt!

One of the dictionary definitions of a Protestant is this: “Protestant: any Christian not of the Roman Catholic or the Eastern Church.” For pity’s sake! Is that the deepest impression we can make on the lexicographers! Do we have to be defined in terms of what we are not? In Elizabethan English, to make a pro test means not so much an objection as a pro testation, an affirmation, a positive avowal, a statement of live conviction.

Reading and pondering the Bible is likely to awaken some of this active affirmation! A teacher of Martin Luther, in the period of his troubled tumult, advised him: “Brother Martin, let the Bible alone; read the old teachers. They give you the whole marrow of the Bible; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.” Indeed it does breed unrest! Reading the Bible is no formula for complacency! It calls to repentance, it opens the doors to personal and social transformation!

4) One more basic doctrine of Protestantism: justification by faith. Luther had started with a reliance on auricular confession, priestly pardon, veneration of the saints, the merits of mass, indulgences, pilgrimages -- an intricate system of sacred works. He found there no permanent comfort. But he did not rest there with a denial. He discovered that vigorous faith did justify his life with its conscience and its dangers. And that’s the positive note for us, too. It’s a lot easier, and a lot smaller, to say, “I don’t believe in all that ritualistic system,” than it is to search out the profound experience with God that truly liberates and energizes one’s soul.

Reformation Sunday is no mere veneration of the past. It is a personal challenge of our own future. And if we so receive it, we may face several of the practical consequences in which it may issue.

1) For one thing, are there certain areas where all Christians may cooperate without violating or compromising conscience? If there are, let us seek them out and cooperate. I do not refer to any week-kneed deference on the part of one to the other. I do not recommend the shallow, unthinking observation that “it doesn’t make much difference after all since we’re both headed in the same direction.” That’s intellectually infantile and spiritually lazy! It does make a difference! Ask anybody who has really wrestled with the difference! The points of conflict are many and obvious. But not all Roman Catholics are unanimous on all ecclesiastical positions. Nor, certainly, are all Protestants. But where we can find common ground, let us stand upon it. And let us still try to build community together.

2) Another consequential issue is the whole ecumenical movement. Some fear this tendency of the churches to draw closer together in local, state, national and world councils. And some are feverishly impatient for more of it. It was Lutheran Bishop Berggrov of Norway whose closing sermon of the great Evanston meeting of the World Council Assembly insisted on the position that the ecumenical movement is God’s work and that he will bring it about as surely as the growing of a garden. The flowers and fruits may be blighted at times; they may flourish richly at times. But the gardener must work with patient and persistent faith.

Such must be our personal evangel and our social gospel, that mankind, cast down and cynical and frightened and willful may be led to look up. Our Christianity is an imperative. Let’s get together on it!

The story is told of a community where a church building was burning down. Two neighbors found themselves watching the blaze. Said one: “This is the first time I’ve seen you at church.” Said the other: “This is the first time I’ve seen a church on fire.”

The early Reformers fired people of the church with a zeal that was contagious. Our momentous and dangerous times need the same reforming zest.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 31, 1954.

Also in Wisconsin Rapids, October 30, 1960.