Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn | Rome No Longer Home: Why Luther’s Reformation Was Necessary and Why it Still Matters Today

Saturday Evening, November 15, 2025
Given by Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn | RTS Charlotte
Session 1 

Faithful Conference at Christ Covenant Church

Rome No Longer Home: Why Luther’s Reformation Was Necessary and Why it Still Matters Today

Watch on YouTube

Download our mobile app

Transcript

Well, I'm here tonight in my capacity as a church historian, and it's the worry at any gathering when a historian is asked to speak in public that he might just end up telling stories. In tonight's lecture, your worst fears will be realized. After introducing Martin Luther, I will tell three stories, but because I'm thinking this group is interested in the richness of the Reformation, I will also discuss four texts. And because you want to know about its relevance, I'll conclude with five lessons. 

Martin Luther, born in November 1483, was a student, then a friar, a professor, and a pastor. And it was the move from student to friar that put him at odds with his father. Hans Luther, with his wild hair, furrowed brow, and impressive jowls, was furious that his son had become a friar. Hans was a mine manager, and he was used to people doing things his way. Martin's mother, Margarethe, her hair but not always her emotions neatly kept under wraps, must have grieved, too. So long as Martin was a friar, she would see no grandchildren, for marriage was forbidden of friars. And as everyone knew, once a friar, always a friar. 

We know how Martin Luther's parents looked because of surviving paintings, and we know how they felt because Luther left verbal portraits of his parents and of moments in his own life too. Luther's father had sent him to school to be a lawyer. Martin earned a BA and an MA degree and a preparation for a career in law, but in spite of outward academic success, he wobbled internally between buoyant happiness and deep depression, often living in fear of hell and damnation. The medieval church taught that the God of judgment was always near, but the God of mercy seemed far away. His grace, his assistance, could only be accessed through an elaborate system of saints and sacraments. And the emphasis of the Catholic Church was heavy on rituals to reach God, lighter on the relationship with God. If rituals were helpful, then a monastery with its routines and rigors was the best place to be. Everyone in Europe knew that the best way of securing salvation was to become a nun, a monk, or especially a friar. A serious friary promised an awful time but a better eternity. And Martin described what it was like to see princes and healthy young men entering a local monastery and within too short of a time looking aged and worn due to the hardships that they went under to atone for their own sin. 

Well, Martin Luther was worried about his own soul, and yet, the full weight of his impending doom did not come crashing in on him until one day he was caught in a sky-splitting thunderstorm, and he was nearly struck by a bolt of lightning. In a terrified panic, he cried out to St. Anne, promising to become a friar if only she would spare him. Anne seemed a sensible choice. Saints were said to be more closely united to Christ, and Anne was the patron saint of minors. As well, tradition said she was the mother of Mary, and so she offered a good combination of capability and accessibility. Of course, Mary was a more effective mediatrix than Anne, and neither was as good as Jesus. But Anne was approachable, and so Luther reached out to her in his hour of need as many Roman Catholics might today reach out to a saint in their time of need. Martin was spared during the storm, so he enjoyed a last party with some friends and within a couple weeks had shaved his head and entered a local monastery. His father was deeply disappointed. It was not that a monastery was an embarrassment in itself. A good religious house was a respectable place to deposit surplus children from good families. And if you had enough good sense and eschatological savvy to make a donation, the monks would also promise to pray for you after your death with an earnestness that might be in proportion to your generosity. But Martin's father had worldly hopes, and Martin was no surplus son. And what was worse, he became a friar and not a monk. We often mix up the two. Luther's world would not have done so. Friars begged for their food. Monks at this time in history could enjoy promising careers, power, and wealth. Well, the protests of Martin's parents fell on deaf ears, and after a year of probation, Martin became a full-fledged member of the monastery, and he would wear the clothes of a friar for 19 long years and sign his name “Friar Martin Luther, Augustinian.” 

Our whistlestop tour of Luther's life as a friar needs to pause at least three times, each marking an important milestone in his development. And the first story takes us from the friary to the university. Luther's life as a friar seemed like it was just the ticket needed to get him away from his spiritual depression. But within months, he was back where he had begun. Martin fought depression with devotion. In the early 16th century, many monks were lax in their devotion. Not Martin. As a late medieval friar, he eagerly tried to do his best, and he hoped that God would respond to his best efforts not according to their real value, but according to his generous grace. And yet, he always wondered if he was doing enough. So, what should be done with someone who's depressed and not yet dysfunctional? Well, Luther's monastic supervisor told him to study the Bible, and he also gave Luther work to do. The Augustinians sent Luther on an errand to Rome, although touring Renaissance Rome was not an exercise that tended to strengthen the faithful. The debauchery and irreverence of the priests and rumors about the pope simply staggered Luther. But like most Catholics, he remained faithful to the ideals of the faith in spite of the realities of Rome. 

The Augustinians also trained Luther to teach. After his return from the seat of the papacy, Luther was sent to a monastery in Wittenberg. In 1511, Wittenberg was a mere village – a couple thousand inhabitants, two streets less than a mile long. It felt like a bunch of houses on a strip of sand next to a river. Luther was not impressed. Courtesy of the economic stagnation under 20th century communist rule, Wittenberg was left frozen in time when other parts of Europe developed, so today it remains a humble little place. The monastery and town needed someone like Luther, which is why he was sent there. But his work was also to be focused in a new university, and there, in part because he was paid so poorly, Luther also accepted a post as pastor of one of the churches in town. He would later thank God many times for giving him these positions, both in the academy and also in the church. Luther had been appointed professor of the Bible, and he began his lectures in 1513 on the book of Psalms; in 1514 moved to Romans, and then in 1515 to Galatians. He proved to be a tremendously popular professor. He taught in great depth, and yet his lectures were accessible. Most lecturers on the Bible spoke in Latin and addressed the Latin Scriptures. But Luther taught in German from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. His popularity in the university, in turn, put him in the good books of Prince Elector Frederick the Wise, who had founded the university. Ironically, the popularity of these lectures would ultimately save Luther's life, because in the height of the later Luther controversy, Prince Frederick would not give up his prized professor, even when called to do so by the pope himself. 

These lectures may also have saved Luther's life in a different sense. As a professor of Bible in the university, Luther had a battle going on, as countless people raised in traditionally Catholic homes and countries often do. And it'll be best to put it in his own words as he told the story almost 30 years later: “I used to be contrite, to confess and number off my sins, and often repeated my confession, and diligently performed my allotted penance, and yet my conscience could never give me certainty. But I always doubted and said, ‘You did not do that correctly. You are not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’ The more I tried to remedy a weak, uncertain, afflicted conscience with the traditions of men, the more each day found it more uncertain, weaker, and more troubled.” It was about this time that Luther's frustrated confessor charged him with the sin of confessing too much sin. But as Luther lectured through the Scriptures, and as one can see by reading these lectures today, he began to change. It's a favorite parlor game, by the way, amongst church historians to debate just when Luther began to understand the gospel. It's not a question that seems to have interested Luther himself very much, but at some point he made his first major breakthrough. Romans 1:17 says that in the gospel a justice or righteousness of God is revealed. Luther came to see that the righteousness of God is not the righteous judgment of God against sinners, but a righteousness provided for sinners in Jesus Christ. Arguably, this was his first Reformation breakthrough: the sufficiency of Christ for sinners. All of his discoveries would come because of this, a recovery of a focus on faith, grace, and glory, a return to a trust in the Holy Scriptures. 

The third stop in our tour of Luther's life, and the one that's made him so famous, had to do with penance. The medieval church taught that penance in the form of good works was required as a penalty for sin. Good works could range from good deeds like loving your mother to less productive forms of penance like standing barefoot in the snow. Over time, people found penance to be increasingly inconvenient, and they wanted some other way to deal with the penalty for sin. So, the church sold certificates of indulgence that lessened the need for people to do acts of penance – understood, again, as punishments for sin. A good indulgence could shorten someone's stay in purgatory, where the work of purification continued for the guilty. Almost everybody liked this. Anglican historian Gerald Bray likens it to our common preference for paying a fine rather than going to jail if given the option to do it. 

Well, while in Rome, Luther had seen his indulgence dollars at work, and it wasn't impressive. Everyone knew that the whole St. Peter's Cathedral project was a perfect example of ecclesiastical governmental corruption at the highest level. The contractors were also behind on schedule and over budget. Things were different back then. Worse, the whole of this ecclesiastical pomposity and incompetence was supported through the sin industry, as one historian has put it. At this point in history, an especially obnoxious friar named Johann Tetzel had been commissioned to sell an especially powerful indulgence in Germany. He had been in business since 1505, and he had worked out a little jingle that he used to sell salvation – or at least as people understood him, and it was not an impression that he sought to correct. In English, it would go something like this: “As soon as the coin in the money box rings, the human soul from purgatory springs.” Well, this was a system of indulgence sales that turned every house of prayer into a den of thieves. Earlier I had mentioned that a monk could have a decent career. The fact is there were much more profitable options than monkery. Positions in the church could be worth enormous amounts of money. A medieval financial adviser could explain to his clients that ecclesiastical income was an excellent way of diversifying one's portfolio. And it was an investment that did not actually require much involvement in the work of the church. Historian Alister McGrath recalls one bishop only entering his cathedral once, and even then he contributed very little to the service, a fact for which the congregation forgave him since it was his funeral. At age 23, Archbishop Albert of Magdeburg had managed to collect more positions and privileges, and thus more authority, than most people in the Holy Roman Empire. A year later, after careful planning and coordination with Rome, he bought a second archbishopric, becoming the archbishop of Mainz as well. This was a breathtaking scandal and a blatant violation of church law, but the church at that time made much of its money by issuing fines for clergy who broke church law. Indeed, a major advantage of church law was that it could be broken, and fines could be collected. 

Unbeknownst to Luther and most everyone else, Albert and the pope had pre-arranged the loan that would pay off his fine and had pre-arranged that it would be sold by indulgences or funded by the sale of indulgences, the ones sold by the notorious Johann Tetzel. Furthermore, the pope could see a further kickback for every indulgence that would be sold. When Luther encountered the manual describing the different kinds of spiritual benefits for sale with this new and improved indulgence, the manual used by Tetzel [sills team], his inner pastor was aroused, and he made the most of his professorial position and in 1517 wrote 95 theses or statements on penance, indulgences, and purgatory. He then mailed them to Albert of Mainz, who sent them along to the pope. One way or another, a printer got a hold of the text, and the 95 theses became a best seller. They were scratching an itch in medieval society. People couldn't help but notice and resonate with what Luther was writing. The printing business, which printed the 95 theses, would come to love Luther. He was to become the most published man of the century. In fact, he would dominate the European printing press in the 1500s in a way that no one ever has since. While Luther's 95 theses are important because of the reaction that they sparked, they are also important because the ensuing events led Luther to doctrinal discoveries or at least helped him to refine his understanding of key concepts and identify major problems. 

In our remaining time together, I want to ask how it came to be that Rome no longer offered a spiritual home for Luther, and along the way, I'll be also asking why Luther's Reformation was necessary and why we should think it still matters today. One way to answer these questions is to look at one year of Luther's life and the four major texts that Luther penned in that year between October 1517 and October 1518 with the letters that accompanied and contextualized them. Well, the place where we need to start, of course, is with the 95 theses themselves. The cover letter for the 95 theses that Luther sent to Albert explained that the theses were at once a substantial critique of the indulgence industry and a belated public relations effort on behalf of the papacy, for surely, Luther reasoned, the pope could not know what was going on in Germany. 

The critique itself has two parts. Luther's first concern had to do with decreasing piety and increasing false hope. His concern with piety is evident right out of the gate. His first thesis states, "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Do penance,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of penance.” Now, this was an important statement because one of the problems with those indulgences was that they removed the need for penance. The Roman sacrament that best approximates biblical repentance would be penance. The book of rules that the salesmen used clarified that people did not need to change their behavior or even feel sorry for their sins for these indulgences to work. Luther saw this as a huge blow to any kind of repentance. The indulgences promoted vice, not virtue. This was an appalling doctrinal error and an abuse of power, and surely the Roman church ought to care about this. Luther's second concern was that people believed that the indulgences took away not only the penalties that followed sin but even took away the guilt of sin. If Luther's first concern was that people believed that the indulgences – if Luther's first concern was about what we might call sanctification, his second concern was about what we might call justification. Luther was not at all sure that the pope had access to the treasure store of the merits of Christ and the saints, as he stated in thesis 56 and 58. He and others wondered if the pope really could get people out of purgatory, as he mentions in thesis 82. As he would later explain, the church could at most lift its own punishments. There were grave doubts about whether it could lift divine punishments or remove guilt. And yet, Luther the Friar argued that people could be saved by imitating Christ. That remained his gospel in 1517, and the first and only duty of the bishops, he wrote, is to see that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ. Sometimes we speak about the love of money, and we mean by that not a love that we receive from money but a love that we have for money. This is what Luther meant too. What saves us is a love received not from Christ, but what saves us is our love for him. 

Luther, the medieval theologian, also thought that Albert should know that people were wondering aloud why the pope, if he could forgive sins, wasn't pardoning everyone's sins. And Luther told his parishioners that the pope cared more about their souls than about their money. But like a soldier running out of ammunition, telling his commander that he needs help, Luther told the church authorities that he could not hold off the questions of his congregants for much longer. Well, Luther was surprised by the stir caused by his 95 theses, but he made the most of the moment as he always would, and he wrote a follow-up work, much longer, entitled Explanation of the 95 Theses. He was finished the work in February, but there was a problem. His monastic supervisor said he should print it. Prince Frederick the Wise's resident theologian said he should not. Luther eventually sent copies to both of them and then a third to the pope for good measure. Although the explanation was a commentary on Luther's own theses, it makes many new points. Nonetheless, the main point of the explanation was that the pope was taking to himself what really belonged to Christ. Christ and not the pope is the one who has the power to release sins and remove guilt. Furthermore, it was a problem that the pope was more concerned about money making its way to Rome than people making their way to Christ. The papacy had severe penalties for bandits that waylaid wagon trains on the way to Rome, but nothing for false shepherds. As Luther put it, “If those who hinder people from going to Rome sin so greatly, what about those who prevent them from going to heaven?” 

But what was the way to heaven? In February 1518, Luther's answer is that the cross of Christ gives life to the whole world by the destruction of sin. But what did that mean? If you scratched Luther hard in February 1518, you would find a medieval theologian beneath the veneer of the reformer. The cross is the way of salvation, yes, but the friars still thought that meant our imitation of the cross. Not what Jesus has done, but us being like Jesus. Luther, the traditional theologian, was still in process. Nonetheless, the 95 theses and his explanation were the beginning of something. Indeed, he closed the little book by writing, "The church needs a reformation," and he added, "Only God, who has created time, knows the time for this reformation." What Luther had offered in the 95 theses and in his explanation was at the very least a financial heresy. Luther was throwing a wrench into the financial or the economic machinery of the church. But oddly enough, looking back, it was not a doctrinal heresy, or at least not obviously so. Luther was right to say that there were unsettled questions in the church and in church law about the powers of the pope, over the guilt of sin, and the population of purgatory. And even the Council of Trent, meeting a few decades later, could do no better than to command people not to discuss more difficult and subtle questions and not to make public or treat of such things as are uncertain regarding purgatory. But the fact that Luther addressed these matters so openly, with such frankness and concern, made him a pariah to the papacy. 

Well, in the spring of 1518, Luther was invited to Heidelberg, and he was asked to draft the terms of a disputation for one of the regional meetings of the Augustinian order, and in inviting him, everyone knew that Luther would discuss his ideas. His enemies boasted that in wandering out of Wittenberg, he'd be burned within two to four weeks. His friends warned of likely assassination attempts. Luther chose to go, in disguise, walking. The trip would take 12 days of walking at more than eight hours of walking a day, and after four days of walking, Luther calculated that he had caught up on all his penance. Never a fan of physical fitness, as surviving paintings show, Luther was thankful to be able to join a group of monks in a wagon heading to the same event. Well, to his delight, Luther was received in Heidelberg like a guest of honor. Many people were concerned with the state of the church. Many people resonated with what he had written. He was given a tour of the town. He was admired by many scholars, including a man named Martin Bucer, a Dominican friar who had somehow got permission to attend this Augustinian event. And Bucer wasn't alone. Other ecclesiastical and political figures were present. It was the first opportunity for Luther to discuss his concerns to a wider public than Wittenberg allowed. Well, his focus was Scripture’s teaching on human depravity and on the inadequacy of our works, and he discussed these subjects with such grace that his following grew significantly, even if he made more headway with the young than the old. And while the subject of discussion was not supposed to be on indulgences, but on human depravity, Luther saw a connection, and he sallied forth out to battle on his hobby horse anyway. 

Well, the most significant feature of the articles for disputation are what Luther had to say about the sufficiency of Christ. If February was one small step for Luther, May would prove to be a giant leap for the whole church. At Heidelberg, Luther was expanding and developing an earlier attack against medieval ideas regarding free will and good works. In these theses, Luther was not adopting one school of medieval thought about good works in place of another. He was showing what had gone wrong with all of them. Some theologians thought that one could do our best and then God would respond by giving us grace. Other theologians thought that we can cooperate with God after he's given us grace. In Heidelberg, Luther insisted that the person who believes he can obtain grace by doing what's in him adds sin to sin. So, he becomes doubly guilty. Again, the law condemns everything that is not in Christ. And memorably, the love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it. In the proofs for his articles, Luther spoke directly to the pious group around him, a group of people that either for edification or for entertainment had come to hear a theological discussion. Most of them thought they were pretty good people, and Luther was insisting they were not good enough. It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ. But that left a question. Now you ask, what then shall we do? Shall we go our way with indifference because we can do nothing but sin? I would reply, "By no means! But having heard this, fall down, and pray for grace, and place your hope in Christ, in whom is our salvation, life, and resurrection.” The good news, Luther the reformer explained, is that through faith Christ is in us, indeed one with us. Christ is just and has fulfilled all the commands of God. Wherefore we also fulfill everything through him since he is made ours through faith. 

Luther did not yet know just how much trouble he was in. It was about the time of the Heidelberg disputation that he wrote, "Without Christ's command, not even a pope can speak. Christ is the judge whose verdict I am awaiting through the Roman See." He would soon see what the Roman See really thought. Luther was summoned to Rome, a dangerous proposition that neither he nor his prince liked very much. But since neither the emperor nor the pope, who had temporal and not merely spiritual ambitions, could at that moment afford to offend Prince Frederick, who held a vote in a key deliberation, the meeting was moved to Augsburg, allowing Luther to stay on German, and thus safer, soil. October 1518 saw Luther meeting with the pope's representative, Cardinal Cajetan. We know about the Augsburg meetings because of Luther's letters and because he wrote a paper in defense of his own position. The subject, once again, was indulgences. Cajetan wrote nice letters to Frederick promising to behave but roared at Luther, demanding that he recant without discussion and without debate. Finally, as Luther tells the story, “I started to shout too, saying if it can be shown that the Extravagante” – which is a document sort of related to the church's canon law – “If it can be shown that the Extravagante teaches that Christ's merits are the treasury of indulgences, then I will recant as you wish.” The onlookers went wild, and the cardinal and his team after a frantic search came up with a quote that said that Christ had acquired the treasury by his merits. At that point, Luther interrupted, "If Christ has acquired the treasury by his merits, then the merits of Christ are not in the treasury.” Germans actually know grammar, too, he said. The pope didn't know what was in the treasury. He certainly didn't have any right to hand it out. Friends of the prince and allies of the emperor were finally able to persuade Cajetan to allow Martin a written defense of his position on indulgences, but when it was finished and submitted, the cardinal threw it back at Martin and demanded again that the friar retract his teaching. But he could not. 

And again, Luther made an advance in his thinking about the sufficiency of Christ. In a daring move, he argued that even the saints are deficient in merit. In fact, saints only have a merit, he said, in a figurative sense since the merits of the saints are through their faith in Christ, because the life of the righteous man is not his own but that of Christ living in him. How much better this is than the idea that one can actually draw on the merits of the saints or rest in their intercession, for in spite of the spin placed on this practice by apologists for Rome, these errors persist today. And how much better it is to see that we have a righteousness not because of our own merits, but because of Christ living in us and us united to him. Near the end of his paper to Cajetan, Luther wrote, "I must believe according to the testimony of my conscience. As long as these Scripture passages stand, I cannot do otherwise, for I know that I must obey God rather than man." It was a good note to end on. It would not be the last time that he would need to say it. 

Well, it seems to me that even these three brief stories and these four early texts offer us at least five important lessons – lessons about Christ's patience, his encouragement, his power, his wisdom, and his sufficiency for sinners. The first lesson that leaps out to me has to do with Christ's patience as our teacher. How long-suffering our Lord was with Luther as he muddled his way to a clearer truth about himself. We often think of the Reformation as a defining moment that led to a movement. Luther himself would sometimes write this way, and it's stirring to read. “I greatly long to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans,” Luther wrote, "and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the righteousness of God, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore, I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him, yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant. Night and day, I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement that the just shall live by faith. Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning. And whereas before the righteousness of God had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet. In greater love, this passage of Paul became to me a gateway to heaven.” 

Luther's words reveal when a light entered his life, when he saw that there's a righteousness available to sinners that's not our own. There are few greater joys than discovering that this is for all who trust in Christ. And yet, it's manifestly the case that when it came time to teach this consistently, Luther took years to pull all the pieces together. Scholars debate whether Luther's understanding of salvation through Christ alone fueled his protest against the church or whether his doctrinal disputes with the church helped him to see the sufficiency of Christ. And that's because it took him five to 10 years to clearly articulate what we often call the five solas and even more years to reshape his understanding of saints and sacraments, penance and purgatory, and the papacy. How patient our Lord was with Luther, and how patient he is with us too. Given so much more light, we are often still muddling our way towards the truth. And how urgent it is that we pray for people whom we love to follow this path, because the light that Rome offers is faint, often flickering, and of too little help for those who are in Luther's situation. 

Second, Luther's life story reminds me how encouraging Christ is. The fact that he gave Luther colleagues to support him, a supervisor who understood him, young scholars to receive him is a testimony to our savior's ability to encourage – proof that he's made like us in every way, sin excepted, that he understands us. Our Lord also gave Luther that clarity of conscience and well-timed moments of joy that reformers – in fact, all pastors and Christians – really need in order to press on. After having nailed an appeal to the pope on the cathedral door in Augsburg (Luther may have liked nailing things to church doors), he returned home to Wittenberg, and there he wrote, as it happens, on October the 31st, 1518, “I am filled with such joy and peace that I wonder why my struggle seems to be important to so many and great men.” That's Christ's ministry of encouragement through his holy and powerful Spirit. Where would we be without it? And thus, how sad it is to see many professing Christians in the Roman church turning to saints for solace and not coming to Christ directly but indirectly when Christ himself is all that we need. 

The third thing that stands out in Luther's story is Christ's power. With so many broken doctrines cluttering the road to the cross and with false crosses in which to trust, it's a wonder that he found his way at all. The more one studies the problems of the church, the more marvelous Christ's power is to behold. Medieval soteriology or the doctrine of salvation is bad enough, but medieval church polity was even worse. Since the resources of the church at that time could be bought as an investment by the highest bidder, the actual job of the parish priest was marketed to the lowest bidder. It was a system that favored the least qualified applicants for the ministry. Christ's reform of such a church through men like Luther is a display of astonishing power. How true it is that what is impossible with man is yet possible with God. And since God removed a part of the Roman church once so it could be reformed, we should pray that he would do so again. 

And what more could we say? For doesn't all this only highlight, in the fourth place, the wisdom of Christ? Time would fail me to tell of the revival of education amongst the elite that allowed Luther the resources he needed, or of the European printing press invented just in time to disseminate this rediscovery of the gospel, or of states and empires so tightly bound in political intrigue that the pope was unable to crush Luther and the nascent Protestant Reformation until it was too late. How wise our God is to prepare an entire continent to serve as a stage for a chosen instrument. Might he be preparing another continent for such a reformation today? 

The Reformation was necessary in Luther's day, but while the Roman church has learned to be more flexible and to be more things to more people, it is not in a better position, which is why the Reformation still matters. The church in Luther's day said that by God's grace, our works justify us, and that left most people depressed and a few type-As happy. A few other theologians, all of the mavericks, said that this wasn't true. Even our best works are not impressive. The good news, they declared, is that God has decided that if we only try our best, he'll show us grace anyways – a kind of “God helps those who help themselves” theology. Through its teaching on penance, purgatory, and merit, the Roman church still communicates much the same. But isn't the problem with this that we often don't do our best? Luther saw that, and eventually he declared that there must be another way, and it drove him back to the Scriptures. Luther came to see that in the righteousness of God there is that other way. Our salvation doesn't rest in God turning a blind eye towards our sin. Our salvation rests in the fact that he looks on his Son and sees in him a glorious righteousness that covers over all who trust in him, a righteousness so complete that it promises an assurance of salvation that the Council of Trent cursed and a perseverance in salvation that the current Roman catechism doesn't promise. 

Luther's Reformation was necessary, and it still matters today. Tragically, many professing Christians have drifted into a kind of late-medieval theology. Their vague hope is in a blind benevolence that smiles on everyone trying their best. Too many professing Protestants have a doctrine, too, that has brought them halfway to Rome with such kinds of optimism. And if that observation is true, then the real scandal of modern evangelicals heading to Rome is not that they make the trip, but that their commute is so short. 

Well, thank you for listening for these few moments. Let me close in prayer and then we'll take a break. 

Our gracious God, we come to you this evening. We thank you for the way in which you have revealed yourself so fully in your Word. We thank you too, Father, that you have helped your church to see the Jesus Christ who is revealed in such fullness and sufficiency in that Word. Would you help us, Lord – each one – to see in Christ all that we need, to rest in him, and to find in him our comfort? We pray, Father, as well that by your Holy Spirit, you would help us to live for him and to live in peace with one another. Give us, Father, not only the inner peace that your gospel alone provides, but a joy in our fellowship. And we pray we'd have that joy even tonight. Would you hear our prayers? Would you help us as we most need? We know that you will, because we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.