Reformation Day

Reformation Day, 31 October, should be a day for praise, reflection and contrition. It is barely noticed in Britain, but should be – the echo of the sound of a hammer on a nail on the church door at Wittenberg began the transformation that brought joy to the praise of God on these islands, and turned then into the mightiest power on Earth.

Above the south door of Canterbury Cathedral stand (arguably idolatrous) statues of past Archbishops – Augustine, Anselm, Lanfranc, Cranmer – each piously holding a bible; but only Cranmer is actually reading it. In Cranmer’s sermons echoed the sound of the hammer on the nail.

With Luther’s courage and learning put into English and brought to these shores, there began a revolutionary change. It put a Bible in each home, and taught the nation to read when it did so. The Church of England and the Church of Scotland, and the people of the island, threw off empty ceremony and in place learned what it is to be Christian. It must have been terrifying, and joyful.

Why now are we lost? After accepting the Reformation, the Church swelled to great heights, tearing at itself only over how to do Protestantism properly. It did not, even in the most warring times, depart from the Scriptures. That has come in our own time.

The Kingdom of God will always struggle with the Kingdom of Darkness. From Cranmer’s day, the internal struggle was for purity, and against the lure of Rome’s seductive errors across the sea. Now, with Rome and stranger religions and atheism permitted to build here, the Church of England, and even the once staunch Kirk o’ Scotland, have lost sight of their particular commission.

Blame what you like, and there will be many true and many wild suggestions, but there is no doubt that asserting Biblical rectitude has become unfashionable, and fashion drives all now.

The Prophets of Israel and the Gospel writers understood the base nature of mankind as no humanist has. The love and worship of God, the law and the Gospel are meant to restrain the inherent beast. The heathen religions reflect on man too from the other side, which is to sanctify natural vice. Hobbes observed that their poets devised gods of:

the Faculties, and Passions of men and beasts; as Sense, Speech, Sex, Lust, Generation, (and this not onely by mixing one with another, to propagate the kind of Gods; but also by mixing with men, and women, to beget mongrill Gods, and but inmates of Heaven, as Bacchus, Hercules, and others;) besides, Anger, Revenge, and other passions of living creatures, and the actions proceeding from them, as Fraud, Theft, Adultery, Sodomie, and any vice that may be taken for an effect of Power, or a cause of Pleasure; and all such Vices, as amongst men are taken to be against Law, rather than against Honour.

The making of passions into sacred things, and the actions proceeding from them, is very much the philosophy of our day, and is therefore a reflection of the ancient heathen ages. The Reformation saw the same habits infesting Roman practice and teaching, and repudiated it.

Every so often the Church of England has stopped, lost its mission and needed renewal. It has periodically sunk into sterile ceremony. Hitherto it has been rescued after being shamed by the example of more biblically based non-conformists, and in each generation by an infusion of new evangelical vision. Those with evangelical vision are now barred from the Church. Even the non-conformists have been abandoning the faith, in favour of easier ideas which do not involve the terrifying presence of God.

Luther was terrified of facing God too. His realisation of the grace of God which passeth all understanding gave him the courage and need to proclaim the Gospel faith.

The lesson of the Reformation speaks as loudly to our own day as to Luther’s and Cranmer’s. The Scriptures are sufficient, and all that is inconsistent must be rejected. It takes courage to reject that which has been comfortable, but until we do, we are separated from Christ, and little better than the ancient heathens.

The remedy is there though, as it was in 1511 and repeatedly in the revivals. The courage to grasp it may be wanting in many, but it can be achieved. The Church of England needs to renew itself, in a new Reformation.