The unleashing of the Word of God

Earlier this month, the prominent evangelical Bishop of Rochester in the Church of England, Michael Nazir-Ali, announced that he was being received into the Roman Catholic Church, marking one of the most high-profile defections to Rome in recent years. Nazir-Ali, who had long stood as one of the bulwarks of orthodoxy within the reforming Anglican GAFCON movement worldwide, announced that he could no longer remain in the Church of England, “splintered” as it was into “a loose collection of churches,” often heterodox and animated by left-wing politics.

Faced with such censures, and the often compromised state of Protestantism in the West, we might well ask on this Reformation Day, “Has the Reformation failed?” In reality, though, the only reason such a question seems plausible is because we have come to take its startling success for granted.

To be sure, some of the highest hopes of the Reformers have not been realized. They hoped that by proclaiming a purer gospel of unearned but demanding grace, they would rally not merely millions of followers but reform the whole church, right down to its corrupt center. And they dreamed not merely of an interior renewal of the heart, but a comprehensive renovation of Christian society that would see greed replaced by charity and dissipation replaced with sobriety. Today, however, the pope still reigns on his throne and immorality still reigns in society.

Still, just as even the best marriage never lives up to the perpetual honeymoon imagined by bride and groom on their wedding day, the frustrated dreams of the first reformers should not obscure the stunning triumphs that have marked Protestantism’s 500-year course.

After all, let’s face it: The Reformation transformed the Christian world. When Luther picked up his pen to write the 95 Theses, a Catholic street-preacher was charging exorbitant sums to hand out “get-out-of-purgatory” cards, promising the rich and the poor remission of their sins in return for their help in paying the debts of the church and those who had borrowed money to buy high church offices. The worst megachurch embezzlement scandals have nothing on the kind of corruption that was business-as-usual in the late medieval church. Meanwhile, ordinary Christian worship in Luther’s time consisted of generally illiterate and often promiscuous priests chanting privately in broken Latin at the front of the church, while uncomprehending congregants offered prayers to icons in the side aisles.

Within 30 years, many of the worst abuses that had triggered the Reformation—indulgences, immoral and illiterate clergy, lack of basic Christian education, and much more—were increasingly reined in by an alarmed church leadership at the Council of Trent. Unfortunately, while tackling many practical corruptions, Trent also dug in its heels on key doctrinal points, refusing to budge on the authority of the pope or the doctrine of justification, and anathematizing reformers who continued to protest.

The Reformation’s greatest fruit, however, was the triumph of the Word. When William Tyndale boasted to a Catholic adversary that “I will cause a boy who drives a plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost,” he struck at the weakest point in Rome’s armor. God had revealed himself to his church in a book, and yet even most church leaders in the 16th century could barely read that book.

Within a few decades, Protestant realms in northern Europe had become the most literate societies that the world had ever seen, with young and old, men and women, rich and poor all encouraged to “take up and read”—first the Word of God, and then the immense flowering of other literature and learning that it brought in its train. By the 1590s, Protestant England had produced Shakespeare and Spenser; a century later it stood at the center of a scientific revolution that traced God’s works in the heavens and within the human body. With widespread literacy came heightened political awareness. Protestant citizens began to take an active interest in self-government, driving a profound reconception of the nature and purpose of politics.

Today we swim in the water the Reformation unleashed: the power of the Word and of the word. Of course, the resulting flood is a turbulent one, to be sure. But today, as you read these words, give thanks for that restless monk in 1517 who had the courage to preach the Word faithfully.