Truth Unites - Why Reformation Was Needed

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

The Reformation was not just a doctrinal corrective, but a spiritual corrective as well. This video shows two areas reformation was needed in the late medieval Western church: (1) indulgences, and (2) persecution. See my previous videon on the historical development of indulgences here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQUKYM6rIn8 Read Ad Extirpanda here: http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/01p/1252-05-15,_SS_Innocentius_IV,_Bulla_%27Ad_Extirpanda%27,_EN.pdf

Hey everybody, I'm recording this video for Reformation Day, and I want to articulate why many of us believe the Reformation was a good and necessary corrective within the church, and in particular, why it was necessary not only doctrinally, but also spiritually. And of course, those two, the doctrinal and the spiritual are interconnected. I'm going to focus on two aspects of spiritual life in the late medieval West that demanded Reformation. Financial manipulation through indulgences and vicious persecution of dissent to that practice. Now, the motive here is not just to attack those things, but it's to defend the Reformation against various misunderstandings

that I hear a lot. In my time on YouTube, I've kind of been amazed at how negatively Protestantism is viewed. I think, you know, for example, you get this common perception that there's the one true church that Jesus Christ founded here, and then the Protestants are jumping off. They're jumping off the ship to start their own church,

and sometimes even bad motives are attributed. to that. Of course, what we believe as Protestants is exceedingly simple, namely there's certain errors in the church that had accrued, and they needed to be corrected. That's it. As simple as that. You have to follow your conscience. You can't submit to what you think are later accretions that are erroneous. So that's why we call it a reformation of the church, not a recreation of the church. But I think a big contributing factor to these negative perceptions of Protestantism is that people simply don't know how bad things had gotten in the late medieval West and how desperately reform was needed. Here's what happens a lot, I think. Because medieval abuses have been exaggerated

and garbled by some Protestant historiographies, you think of like Baptist successionist theories, for example. Many of us have heard of James Carroll's book, The Trail of Blood. Some of us, unfortunately, have read. It's a very problematic book. By the way, if you want a better book about Baptist origins see Matthew Bingham's book, Orthodox radicals. But here's my concern. People respond to those really bad kind of exaggerated historiographies in the other direction. And so they downplay things. But this is a real problem. It's just as wrong to minimize scandals as it is to exaggerate them. And so we need to be historically accurate here as painful as it can be to get into these ugly realities of church history. We have to see them in order to understand why reformation was

necessary. If you watch this video to the end, you'll get an overview of some pretty shocking realities. History is absolutely fascinating and sometimes just brutal. But what I'm going to offer is not drawn from scholarship that has a Protestant bias. And so I'm going to put up lots of books so you can just do your own research to look into this and encourage you to verify all of this. If you make it to the end and you think I've been unfair in any way, leave a comment. But be specific in the comment. If it's just a generic insult that's not productive. But if you think, hey, you know, you misstated something, be specific, and I'll read the comments. Okay, let's talk about indulgences first.

I'll put up a definition from the Catholic Catechism. And indulgence, basically, it's a remission of temporal punishment for sin, okay, given in certain conditions. So in Roman Catholic theology, there's a distinction between eternal punishment, which involves the ultimate consequences of sin in hell, for example, versus temporal punishment, which has to do with the process. of being purified from sin in this life and potentially in purgatory. So indulgences are possible because of the idea of the treasury of merit, which is the supposed infinite storehouse of the merits of Christ and Mary and saints that the church can apply to Christians, either on earth or in purgatory in certain conditions. In responding to the Reformation, the Council of Trent did oppose certain abuses in the practice of indulgences, but it affirmed indulgences as such. And in fact,

it pronounced an anathema on anyone who denies their power or their validity. Now, the challenge for modern people in trying to get a sense of how indulgences were functioning at the dawn of the Reformation is to try to understand how scandalous it was without just dismissing that with skepticism, because it sounds too fantastic, because it really was that bad. So I'm going to put up, what I'm going to try to do again is quote from scholarship that you can see is not biased to a Protestant side. So let me quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which is a word. of early 20th century Catholic scholarship and its description of how indulgences sparked the

Reformation. Some of us will have heard of Johann Tetzel. He was a Dominican friar who eventually became the Grand Commissioner for Indulgences in Germany. He's the one that Luther was opposing. Some of Luther's theses and his 95 theses that he nailed up on the church door in Wittenberg, Wittenberg, we should say on October 31st, 1517, maybe 506 years to the day of when you watch this video, depending upon when you watch it. Well, Luther's responding to Tetzel's preaching among others. For example, thesis 27 says they preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory. He's targeting Tetzel there. Well, Tetzel had been appointed by Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. He was another, someone who became a

great opponent of Luther. Here's how the Catholic Encyclopedia explains what's going on. The immediate cause of the Reformation was bound up with the odious greed for money displayed by the Roman Curia. That's the papal court, and shows how far short efforts at reform had hitherto fallen. Albert of Brandenburg, already Archbishop of Magdeburg, received, in addition, the Archbishopric of Mainz and the Bishopric of Hallerstad, but in return was obliged to collect 10,000 Dukats, which he was taxed over and above the usual confirmation fees. So this is talking about the practice of simony, which is the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices or other benefits.

It's called simony because of the character Simon in Acts chapter 8 who offered Peter money for spiritual power. We'll talk more about simony. The passage continues, to indemnify him and to make it possible to discharge these obligations, Rome permitted him to have preached in his territory the plenary indulgence, promised all those who contributed to the new St. Peter's. He was allowed to keep one half of the returns, a transaction. which brought dishonor on all concerned in it. So just imagine this.

You're a lay Christian in Germany in the early 1500s. You're told, let's say your mother has just died, and you're told by church authorities that giving money will release her from thousands of years of agonizing fire in purgatory, maybe even longer. You know, you hear these astronomical time lengths in the historical records.

And you're told that this will go to fund reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Of course that's going to be motivating for you. I mean, people, especially at this time, people had this very literal understanding of the fire of purgatory. So the thought of releasing a loved one from that kind of horrific suffering for that kind of time scale is very financially motivating. What you don't know is that half of the money is going to pay off Albert for his debts for buying his archbishop brick, despite the fact that he already holds other offices, contrary to canon law. Here's the brutal reality that has to be faced. That was happening a lot.

at the turn of the 16th century, indulgences were a booming industry. Just to give a little bit of immediate context, the Roman Catholic Cardinal who collected funds for indulgences throughout Germany just prior to Tetzel, Raymond Peraludi, during his time in that role, between 1486 and 1503, he was able to raise more than half a million guilders, which was the basic monetary unit in that place to support Crusades. You can read about that in this book. I'll put up on the screen.

That's just one guy over a course of 15-ish years or so, and it gives you a sense of just, you know, we're talking about large quantities of money. What's that money being used for? Among other things, I mentioned Crusades in those cases, but Simony is one of them. Tragically, the clergy are living in luxurious immorality at this time. how do I convey how much this was happening? Again, if I say it, people will just dismiss me if they don't want to accept it. So what I'm going to do is just give you anecdotes and put up the sources.

You can look into it yourself. This was tragically very common. So here's one example. You may have heard of Queen Isabella of Castile. She was a Roman Catholic queen. I don't know if I'm pronouncing Castile right, but you may have heard of her because she and her husband sponsored Christopher. for Columbus's journey to the New World in 1492. She's also famous for her role in expelling Jews from Spain

and for supporting the Inquisition. Well, in the year 1500, she talks about how the majority of her bishops lived openly with concubines and that they couldn't discipline this because the bishops would take up the sword to defend that practice. That's the kind of thing that is going on. And if you want to read more about the problem of clerical concupial, concubinage, that means basically the clergy having concubines. You can read in this book I'll put up on the

screen, you can look into that more. In his examination of the Council of Trent, Martin Kemnitz gives documentation of indulgences offered in the year 1475 in the city of Rome. And he kind of calculates and adds up the seven churches there, other churches in the area, just giving you a flavor of how it's functioning. So he talks about, you know, in this church there's a chapel. The chapel has 28 steps. Whoever ascends these steps with devotion, receive nine years of indulgences, whoever does so on their knees, also releases a soul from purgatory. And he's giving all these examples. And then he notes that if you add up the indulgences of all the stations in the city, it comes to more than a million years. And that's just in the city of Rome. So I'm trying to give people a sense that at the dawn of the

Reformation, this is a massive problem. It's just a financial scandal. And you wonder, how did this happen? How did this start? I have another video on indulgences where I show that it's a slow accretion, bit by bit growing. And I argue that indulgences as such began in the 11th century with the concept of reduced temporal punishment apart from penance. And that's an outgrowth of earlier practices of relaxing penitential requirements. And that goes all the way back into the patristic era, but it's this slow bit by bit accretion. You know, it's almost a case-steading. and how tiny little changes added up can get you from one side of the spectrum to the other, because you go from the third century to the 13th.

Over that millennium, you go from about as much rigor as you can imagine in church discipline to about as much laxity as you can imagine in church discipline, but it's a slow bit-by-bit process. So 11th century emergence for indulgences as such, where it's taken out of the context of penance, and then from the 12th to 16th centuries, you just see this mushrooming up of how indulgences are functioning. And they're getting more and more interwoven with the power of the papacy, with the Crusades, other things going on, and just basically the financial revenue of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. So you get, you start to get, and they're growing. You know, you get plenary indulgences. That is the remission of all temporal punishment for sin toward the end of the 11th century.

And eventually that comes to be applied to purgatory as well as to this life. You get the idea of the treasury of merit in the 13th century. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the practice of indulgences on behalf of deceased Christians in purgatory emerges and then expands greatly, even though it was very controversial. And then you get in the 14th century Jubilee indulgences, which promise full forgiveness for all who visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome under certain conditions. and that starts a tradition. It happens in 1350 and 1390, and then on in the 15th century going forward. So you can watch this video of mine, if you want to get a brief overview of that.

You can also look at this seminal work of scholarship by the German Roman Catholic priest, Nicholas Paulus, back in the early 20th century, which kind of set the table for the scholarship on this question. If you want to get a Protestant evaluation that's more recent and really brings in the European scholarship, you can read this book by Thomas Schermacher. Some people will object to what I said about the 13th century for the Treasury of Merit. You can read this article about that. But what I want to say is this, this general timeline of 11th century emergence for indulgences proper, as distinct from prior penitential reductions, with aggressive expansion and development

over the next four centuries, that is the common narrative in the scholarship, including among Roman Catholic historians. Paulus was a Catholic priest. Here's how Gerhard Mueller, who's a contemporary, where a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church puts it, the indulgence has neither a model in the New Testament nor in public church penance found in the first millennium, be it in practice or insofar as theological grounds are concerned. I quote the scholars and other clerics because oftentimes they're more honest, because I have a lot of people online who try to discredit

me. Someone texted me this tweet recently from Christian Wagner. Basically, I was asked a question about Solofide prior to the Reformation, and I gave Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux, is it medieval examples of where you can find that language. And so Christian misconstrued that as a claim that Thomas affirmed a Protestant view of justification wholesale and made a response video, and then he complained that it was crickets chirping because I didn't respond to his response video. And I get these dozens of these rebuttal videos, and then people fault me for not responding to all of them. It's like, I can't respond to all of them. But the expectation that I would is ridiculous. I have a full-time job. I have a full-time job. I

writing and speaking commitments. I have a large family. I do YouTube on the side, and I get dozens of rebuttals. I can't respond to them all, so it's not just crickets chirping. It's just an unrealistic expectation. Other Catholic apollic, but the language of this comment is just, it's what people try to do. They want to dismiss you. They want to just kind of move you to the side, so they don't have to deal with your arguments. So they give these more wholesale dismissive kind of comments. William Albrecht, another Catholic apologist who does this, he just blatantly makes up lies about my sources, about my scholarship, he's trying to discredit me. And even when I correct him, and it's like verifiably wrong, he just continues to persist. And I'm just astonished that he doesn't

care about the Ninth Commandment. He's just flagrantly making up lies about me. But I go into this. I don't think about this too much. I just kind of ignore it. But I go into it to try to help people not buy into that and be fooled by that, because people will try to dismiss what I'm saying in this video too. I anticipate that. And so, you know, the thing is, the people who try to dismiss my scholarship don't have academic qualifications. My scholarship goes through academic review, you know, blind peer review processes in competitive journals and presses, and it does well in those contexts. So I'm going to trust those contexts more than, you know, online critics as an evaluation of my work. but people watching their videos may not realize that.

And so I'm kind of, I don't want to be defensive, but I need to say this so that people are not fooled into these dismissive comments. The reason I'm saying this is I know people will try to dismiss what I'm saying in this video. Everything I am saying here is standard. That's why I'm quoting from these other books that don't have a Protestant bias, okay?

I'm being historically accurate, and I will too, and the brutal parts are about to get to about violence. So, but people try to, people want to dismiss me and then minimize the extent of the scandal. Here's my challenge for anybody who wants to know the truth. Look into it. Poke around in the scholarship yourself. Or just go back to the historical sources and just read, you know. You will not be underwhelmed. And so the, the question that comes up is this. If you believe that indulgences are a historical accretion that ultimately represent error, what can you do but protest?

we Protestants are not jumping off the ship to start a new church. We are simply trying to be obedient to God. We are simply trying to follow our conscience, and we can't submit to error. So it's in love and service to the one true church of Jesus Christ that we reject the theology of indulgences. That's one example of why reformation was desperately needed in the church. Now, the question comes up. If things were really that bad, I mean, this is a financial scandal. This is financial abuse.

If things were really that bad, why didn't people object? Why didn't people notice? Why didn't stir up controversy? Are you saying the entire church that was just on board with this accretion? Well, the answer to that is people did protest a lot and they often were brutally massacred for it. This is the most painful part of this. The simple fact is, large numbers of people were burned alive for opposing indulgences. Again, this is historically accurate. Everything I'm going to give, I'm going to document. I'm going to show this with specific examples, but it's so painful, I know people will want to dismiss it. I would just ask you, I know I have a lot of non-Protestant viewers who are of good faith and are good people. I'm sorry if

this causes pain. I'm sorry if it makes you angry, but we just need to know what happened. We have to tell the truth about history, and the truth is that the late medieval West, it got really bad. So we need to know about that. Now, one of the objections that that's going to come up here, that I want to address right up front is, well, Protestants persecuted people too. That's just how things were back in the ancient world, or in the medieval world as well. Now, here's what I will say to that. I'm a Baptist. One of my deepest values is nonviolence in the church.

I really admire that about the Baptist tradition, the separation of church and state, and the absolute commitment to, you know, put it like this. We don't advance the gospel of Jesus Christ by coercion and power and threat and violence. We advance the gospel through love, and persuasion and reason. So from those values, I, without any hesitation, fault Protestants when they have sinned against those values as well. Okay?

Absolutely. And I admire this about the early church as well. A lot of early Christians were pacifists. I'm not a pacifist, but I'm close to that. But in the early church, you know, things did change in the fourth century. I'm not saying the church died in the fourth century, but there were changes. So I fall to Protestants as well for historical persecutions and violence and when people take up the sword and so forth when they shouldn't. But it is also wrong to try to neutralize this concern by equalizing the blame on both sides.

That's like saying, well, yeah, Texas might be a big state, but so is Rhode Island. And you're like, that's not the same. for one thing, there is just nothing comparable to the scale of late medieval violence. Some of the medieval crusades classify as genocide. Again, people don't know this. I'll put up this book by Mark Pegg. He uses that term genocide, and he defends that categorization for the Albigensian crusade in the early 13th century.

So you can read that. Again, it's not me who's making this stuff up. But here's the most important difference between where later, Protestants engaged in violence. Medieval persecution resulted from theology promulgated by the highest levels of authority within the Roman Catholic Church, including within allegedly infallible teaching. And there's just nothing like that on the Protestant side. Okay, so this represents a falsification for claims of ecclesial infallibility. Let me give some examples. I've done two videos on Jan Hus, the Bohemian reformer and priest. He's one of my personal heroes. He protested

lots of different abuses in the church, simony and indulgences being two of them. He was tried and then burned at the stake at the Council of Constance. In the early 15th century, Council of Constance is the 16th Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. In those videos, I drew from the outstanding scholarship of Thomas Fudge, who's written almost a dozen books on this subject. Fudge cannot possibly be accused of having a Protestant bias. In the early pages of one of his books, he talks about how he's been accused of being a right-wing Roman Catholic for his refusal to demonize Hus' opponents and because he defends the legality of Hoos' trial, though not its morality, and he defends the conviction that Hoose was indeed a heretic. He admires Hoos, and he says he was a good man,

and he talks about, basically, he says, I admire him, but technically he was a heretic. I'll put up that passage. I'll also put up the passage where he describes Huss's opponents, the Roman Catholic bishops at the Council of Constance, as scheming and treacherous. So I'm not going to go deep into the weeds on Huss. Specifically, I've done that in other videos. You can watch those. But the reason Huss's death is important is because it's a window into the world of late medieval Western Christianity. What must be grasped is this. Huss's execution was not a violation of medieval Roman Catholic theology.

it was its expression, and as shocking as that sounds. Again, I know it's bracing to hear those words, but it's just true. Okay? Let me document that. Let me quote from sources to explain that. Basically, the medieval Roman Catholic Church claimed the authority to exterminate heretics and to do that through the secular authority over which she claimed jurisdiction. So for example, and by the way, before I give my examples, if you want to work

through this yourself. I'm going to put up this book by R.I. Moore. It talks about why persecution increased so dramatically in the medieval church specifically. I'll put up another book that's an introduction to the Inquisition. I'm not going to talk about the Inquisitions very much in this video. It's a whole other issue I don't even have time to get into. But here's a first example, Boniface the 8th, 1302, Papal Ulum Sanctum. Most people think that at least some portions of this would represent infallible ex-cathedra teaching. He's basically talking about the temporal source, which is wielded by the secular authority, and the spiritual sword, which is wielded by the church. But he's insisting that the temporal is subject to the spiritual.

Both, therefore, are in the power of the church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the church, but the latter by the church. The former in the hands of the priest, the latter by the hands of kings and shoulders, but at the will and sufferance of the priest. However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other, and temporal authority subjected to spiritual power. So the important point to note is that, again, the temporal authority is subjected to the spiritual authority. That is why civil authorities were threatened with excommunication if they neglected to follow orders. For example,

Canon 3 of the 4th Lateran Council in the early 13th century, if, however, a temporal lord required and instructed by the church neglects to cleanse his territory of this heretical filth, he shall be bound with the bond of excommunication. Or you can read Pope Innocent the Fourth's papal bull in 1252. This is one that's famous for authorizing the use of torture by inquisitors to extract confessions from heretics and others, but it also threatened secular leaders with various penalties if they allowed themselves to become protectors of heretics. And again, don't think I'm making this up. I'll put a link to that in the video description. You can go read the whole thing online if you want. This is why it is so offensive when people say that, oh, it was the secular authorities rather than the Roman Catholic Church

that burned Hoos at the stake. It's like, no, anybody who's familiar with the trial and how things were preceded in my videos I talk about this. I was a Roman Catholic Archbishop who's preaching the sermon right there at the trial from Roman 6, that the body of sin must be put to death. This is the theology, the reigning theology of the day, the extermination of heretics. During Huss's ceremony of ministerial degradation, where he has the paper miter covered with demons put on his head, it's the same archbishop who puts it on his head with his own hand.

And then they call him Judas and they strip off his priestly vestments and so on and so forth. And his execution is immediately and directly in response to the counsel's verdict. So this was, in other words, Huss's death was done. The agent responsible is an ecumenical council. Okay. So there's more to say about Huss. you can watch my videos, but the important point to recognize is this. Hoos is one example of what was going on.

Now, people, again, I don't think people can take it in. I think they're just going to say, oh, that was an exceptional case. That was a particularly bad instance. I am sorry to have to tell you it wasn't. I am sorry to have to tell you that Hoose is actually not rare. This is why, again, it is so tough on us when people say, you know, oh, you're just arrogant individualist leaving the church. It's like, what do you expect people to do if your conscience is set against indulgences and you live in the 1500s?

What do you do, what do you do with protest? So to document my claim that Hoos is not rare, of course, you can look at other Hoosites. You know, Jerome of Prague burned at the stake, same way, exact same geographical location one year after Hoos. The Hussites alone had a total of five different crusades waged against them by the Roman Catholic Church, starting in 1420 and continuing on. We typically think of crusades as being waged against Muslims, but they were also waged against these separatist groups like the Hussites and many others. Some of those separatist groups were less orthodox, like the Cathars or Albigensians. Others were more orthodox like the Waldensians.

That was a proto-Protestant group that eventually actually united with the Reformed Church, and it's very similar to Protestant in their theology. But here's the thing. Opposition to indulgences was one of the common tenets among these separatist groups. The Waldensians opposed indulgences and denied the existence of purgatory. One of the charges against them is that they maintained that offerings for the dead benefit the clerics who devour them, not the souls who need them. They also opposed simony and ungodliness in the clergy. I won't outline the repeated massacres against the Waldensians that

took place. It happened over the course of four centuries, so just repeatedly, over 400 years. starting in around early 13th century and then into the late 17th century. And many of these occasioned by the promise of a plenary indulgence from the Pope. Look up 1487 or 1685 if you want to get two particularly gruesome examples in which women and children are not spared. The cruelty was unbounded. Okay. And people just don't know this stuff today, but we need to know it. We need to know the history of what happened.

and this happened to a lot of different people. All kinds of people objected to indulgences and were burned alive for it, or massacred in some other, cruel and unusual and inhuman way. You could read for lots of, if you want to go piece by piece through different groups and how many of these, sometimes proto-Protestant groups, sometimes just other separatist groups, sometimes people within the Roman Catholic Church, like Wessel Gansford. He's a German scholastic theologian who was imprisoned for his treatise against indulgences. But if you want to get, like, really work through this, you get this book.

It's an older three-volume Protestant text by Henry Lee, and he just gives all kinds of examples. He talks about the spiritual Franciscans who were tortured in Rome in 1466. They opposed financial laxity within the church. Conrad Schmidt and his followers burned at the stake in 1414, 1416, other times like that. He talks a lot about in northern Italy, some of the separatist groups there, especially those following Girolamo Savonarola. not him himself. He was not burned alive, but many of his followers were in 1502. Now, someone might say, well, this is coming from a Protestant text, so it's biased, but these points are not disputed. You could just Google these people. You know, again, it's not in dispute that this happened.

So it's almost universal as a theme among the different proto-Protestant groups that arise in the medieval ages to oppose indulgences. The only exceptions would be like in France, in the 12th century, There's two different proto-Protestant groups there where I can't identify indulgences as one of their concerns. Henry of Lausanne and Peter of, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. I'll put it up on the screen if I can remember. B-R-U-Y-S, Peter of Bree, maybe, or I don't know. But anyway, these are some early proto-Protestant groups that are in France that they don't, I can't see indulgent, but I think that's because indulgences had not grown to the point where they were such an issue at that time.

That's back in the 1100s. So there's all these groups. I mean, this is one of the reasons why it feels awkward when people say, where were the Protestants before the Reformation? You know, why was your church not here before? And of course, on the one hand, I think there's just a, that assumes a kind of institutional view of the church. But the deeper problem is this issue of persecution makes that such an awkward thing to say. It's kind of like if somebody shoves you in the closet and locks you in there for six hours so you miss the party. And then when you finally get let out, they say, why are you so antisocial? It's like when people say, where was your church before the Reformation in light of the fact that a lot of these groups were treated like cockroaches to be stamped out?

And that's true to history. And it really happened. And it really is that bad. And we need to know that. And we need to be able to talk about that because it affects what Protestantism is. And these charges against us, like we're jumping off the ship. It's like, no, we're trying to serve the church. But we need to know why reform was so needed.

and how bad things really got. Now, let me ward off a misunderstanding here. A lot of times when people hear these things, they might assume I'm offering a successionist theory, you know, as though all these groups were like proto-baptists. No, I'm not saying that. You know, there's greater and lesser degrees of orthodoxy in these groups, like the cathars, you know, a lot of these people are heretical.

Okay. All I'm trying to do is make an exceedingly simple point that there was a need for reformation. The church needed reformation, both doctrinally and spiritually, in the late medieval West. You can put it simply like this. Reformation was needed in the church because, A, the gospel was being obscured by the financial scandal of ever-expanding indulgences that, to some degree, are supporting immoral, luxurious living among the clergy. And B, opposition to that abusive practice is being viciously persecuted by the highest levels of leadership within the Roman Catholic. church. So when people say, you know, why do you leave the church that Jesus established, it's like,

you know, what can we do? Number one, we don't think we're leaving the church Jesus established. Of course, again, that assumes a kind of narrow institutional view of what the church is. But more basically, that question, it just drastically underestimates how badly reformation was needed in the late medieval church. What can we do but protest things like. financial and physical and spiritual abuse. What can we do but stand against that? In the context of Bohemia in 1415, the only way to be faithful to Jesus Christ is to protest. Because what happened to Huss was just sin. It's just bad. It's just wrong. It's offensive. You know, it stinks to God. It's wrong to burn alive people who have godly, reasonable concern.

So, you know, another way to put it, if you think that indulgences are bad and the reigning power is defending them with sword and fire, all you can do is protest and then pray. You know, so that, let me conclude in this way by focusing on the gospel. Ultimately, behind these concerns about financial and physical abuse, there's a lot of the, there's, the deeper concern is that the gospel itself needed to be revitalized and clarified and re-centered. Luther's articulation of justification by faith alone was not a bare formula or slogan. It was an alternative to this entire commercial system that had accrued. Take, for example, the first of his 95 feces. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Now, you might, out of context, just read that as like just giving a general affirmation for the need for ongoing repentance. But in its historical context, it was a protest against this financial manipulation of the laity that had obscured the gospel's call to repentance. For example, one of Luther's colleagues describes how Luther's parishioners came to him with letters of indulgence from Tetzel complaining that he would not absolve them because they did not want to desist from adultery, hortem, usury, unjust goods, and such sins and evil. So, in other words, at the street level, indulgences were coming to function as a substitute for repentance. And so Luther's concern was about the financial abuse, but it was also just about the distortion of the gospel message itself,

both the call to repentance and the consolation and assurance that the gospel is designed to give to a penitent believer. Luther, of course, that's his own experience. In order to understand the Reformation, it's about theology. I'm not minimizing the theology, but I'm trying to also pull back the curtain on the spiritual experience behind the theology that's interwoven with it. Because Luther's own experience was like many of us. You know, the late medieval West was a time of spiritual anxiety, much like today. Luther's own experience was he just could not resolve his guilty conscience.

He lived in dread fear before God. We know these anecdotes of him spilling the wine during communion because he was so afraid. And no matter what he did, it wasn't enough. and then he breaks through and he understands the gospel from Romans 117. He talks about how he felt born again. He entered paradise itself. This is what ultimately is behind, even the deeper concern, even beyond the issues of financial abuse and violence, is that people need to know the gospel.

People need to know how their sins are forgiven. People need to have that anxiety relieved with these wonderful words, peace with God. In Romans 5-1, no condemnation, Romans 8.1. and this is the spiritual experience that was renewed and revitalized in the Protestant Reformation. I'll close this video with one example. You may have heard of Catherine Parr. She was the final of Henry the 8th's wives. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, but she developed Protestant sympathies.

She actually eventually published a work promoting Sola Fide, justification by faith alone. When she's commenting on Matthew 1128, she cites the verse, and then she says, what gentle, merciful, and comfortable words are these to all sinners. What a most gracious, comfortable, and gentle saying was this, with such pleasant and sweet words to allure his enemies to come to him. By this faith I am assured, and by this assurance I feel the remission of my sins. This is it that maketh me bold. This is it that comforteth me.

This is it that quencheth all despair. Thus I feel myself to come, as it were, in a new garment before God. and now by His mercy to be taken as just and righteous. What is the spiritual experience that stands behind those words? What do you feel in your heart? You saw that word, I feel. What is going on in your heart that makes you say words like gentle, gracious, pleasant, sweet, emboldened, comfort, assurance? Do you feel what's going on in her heart when she says these things?

This is what we believe was recovered in the Reformation. not that it had died, but it had been mangled and obscured by various abuses. And it was recaptured and re-centered and put right out in front in the 16th century by the Protestants. And that is the happy truth that we are made right with God simply by repenting and receiving the gospel. That's it. Repent of your sins. Come to Jesus. Place all your faith on Him.

You're right. You're righteous in God's sight. There's no additional offerings or sacrifices to be made. least of all through money. There's no further punishments to be meted out through purgatorial fire. All you have to do is come to Christ and place your trust in Him, surrender your life to him completely, and he welcomes you into citizenship in heaven. He cleanses you of all your sins. He wraps you in his righteousness. He adopts you as a child of God. You are indwelt by the Spirit of God. You are united to Christ. That is the most wonderful truth in all reality. And I

I'm burdened for people today to know that. You know, all my videos are trying to get to that. I want people to experience what Catherine Parr knew in her heart. May I just say it as going to Baptist preacher mode for a minute? You, whoever you are watching this video, you can know that same piece. You can know more certainly than you know anything else that your sins are forgiven. Through the power of the Holy Spirit giving testimony in your heart. That's the gospel.

And that's the assurance. It's not just that God forgives your sins, it's that he'll give you an assurance that he's forgiven your sins. And you can know more certainly than you know anything else in all of reality that when you stand, when you die and you stand before God, he will say to you, righteous in my sight, because you are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And in its recovery of that happy truth, the Reformation brought not only doctrinal clarity, but spiritual renewal to the church.