Hi, my name is Tim, and I am a Christian. But what kind of Christian am I? Are there different kinds of Christians? And if there are, is there value in knowing what the differences are? I believe that there is, because it helps us to identify the things that we have in common with each other, thus bringing us closer to one another. It also helps to anchor our beliefs to what is important, and thus stop us from drifting.

Over the next three weeks, I hope to explore three of the most important anchors of the Christian church over the last 2000 years, and in the process explain to you why I am a protestant, reformed, evangelical Christian.

What is a protestant?

‘Protest’ is a funny word much abused in our culture. When we hear on the news about protests, it is usually people protesting against something. But the root meaning of the word is more about being in favour of something. Thus people don’t protest against war they protest for peace; not against abortion but for the foetus’ right to live… and so on.

In Christian circles, to be a ‘protestant’ means to be a ‘protester’ for a specific set of beliefs, and it is these beliefs that I hope to survey this week.

The birth of protestantism

In the summer of 1520 a document bearing an impressive seal circulated throughout Germany in search of a remote figure. “Arise, O Lord,” the writing began, “and judge Thy cause. A wild boar has invaded Thy vineyard.”

The document, a papal bull – named after the seal, or bulla – took three months to reach Martin Luther, the wild boar. Long before it arrived in Wittenberg where Luther was teaching, he knew its contents. Forty-one of his beliefs were condemned as “heretical, or scandalous, or false, or offensive to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds, or repugnant to Catholic truth.” The bull called on Luther to repent and repudiate his errors or face the dreadful consequences.

Luther received his copy on the tenth of October. At the end of his sixty-day period of grace, he led a throng of eager students outside Wittenberg and burned copies of the Canon Law and the works of some medieval theologians. Perhaps as an afterthought Luther added a copy of the bull condemning him. That was his answer. “They have burned my books,” he said, “I burn theirs.” Those flames in early December, 1520, were a fit symbol of the defiance of the pope raging throughout Germany.¹

Martin Luther² was a German monk, theologian, and church reformer. He is generally considered to be the founder of Protestantism.

Luther first came to be famous when he vocally opposed the sale of ‘indulgences’, a kind of pardon for sins that one could buy for themselves or for a dead relative to escape purgatory. According to Luther, salvation was attainable only by faith in Jesus as the messiah, a faith unmediated by the church. These ideas helped to inspire the Protestant Reformation and changed the course of Western civilization – and it is these ideas that we will explore tonight.

Whilst Luther’s teachings on indulgences were the spark that set the fire of the Reformation, they are not his most important teachings. Rather, his most abiding legacy is his recovery of a teaching long lost to the church: that faith – and only faith – is the means by which justification (and hence salvation) may be achieved.

Faith alone

This revelation came to Luther whilst he was meditating on and wrestling with a particular word of Scripture. The Scripture was from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it goes like this:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Rom 1:16–17)

Luther himself writes:

I hated that word “righteousness of God,” which… I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the… righteousness… with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.³

To Luther, then, the gospel was that God punishes sinners, and by punishing removes guilt. The only way out, then, was to be as good as one could in doing good works, to confess and do penance, and thus ‘pay for’ bad works, and if all else fails, purchase indulgences to make up any shortfall. Since Luther had become convicted that indulgences were not biblical, this meant that he was left to his own devices; and, though he thought of himself ‘as a monk without reproach’ he nevertheless felt himself a ‘sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience’.⁴

The turning point came when he considered the words surrounding this phrase, ‘the righteousness of God’. In his own words:

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.'” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me.⁵

Here is the lesson that Luther had learned, the teaching that had been lost by the church for centuries: justification comes by faith alone. This is crucial to protestantism and, indeed to Christianity… but to understand it we need to know what those key words, ‘justification’ and ‘faith’ mean.

Justification is interpreted in Protestant theology as, “being declared righteous by God”. Only those who are righteous may have a personal relationship with God and thus enter eternal life. In all of history there has ever and will only ever be one person who is righteous on their own account, Jesus Christ; for the rest of us, we rely upon justification. So you see, this is a big deal. But how does justification happen? What must happen in order for justification to occur? The answer is: faith.

Faith is another word for ‘trust’. But faith needs to have an object. The sentence “I have faith” is not complete; you need to say “I have faith in something”. You wan this object to have two qualities. Firstly, it needs to be reliable in proportion to the amount of trust you place in it. Second, it needs to be capable of achieving the thing(s) for which you trust it. For example, I have faith in my car. It is generally reliable, and it is capable for the task of getting me to and from work each day. But if I needed to get across the Gibson desert, or up the Oodnadatta track I would be in real trouble because it is not that reliable, nor is it that capable.

In the context of justification, the object of your faith refers to who or what you are trusting in for justification. Here’s a quick test to help you determine where your faith for justification lies. Complete this sentence: “I have a relationship with God because…” Whatever the next word is, it is likely that that is the object of your faith. Here are some examples of ways people today might finish that sentence:

• I am basically a good person, or at least I’m better than average;
• I do good things – I give to charity, serve in a soup kitchen etc.;
• I hang with the right crowd;
• I prayed the ‘sinner’s prayer’ when I was young;
• I read my Bible and other Christian books, and I pray every day;
• I go to church, have been baptised and take communion every week.

Do you notice the theme here? If your answer to why you have a relationship starts with “I…”, then you are probably relying on works – things that you do or are. But this is not very reassuring, because if you are anything like me you have good and bad days; what happens if you have too many bad days? And that is assuming that even on your ‘good’ days you are ‘good enough’, which the Bible tells us is not true: ”There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one’ (Rom 3:10–12). Your own works – you yourself – are neither reliable nor capable, especially when it is eternity on the line!

It is important to understand the relationship between justification and works. Justification is received by faith only, not good works. Having said that, in classical Protestant theology saving faith is automatically accompanied by good works. As one theologian puts it:

[T]hough we are justified by faith alone, the faith that justifies is never alone. It produces moral fruit; it expresses itself “through love” (Gal. 5:6); it transforms one’s way of living; it begets virtue.⁶

The point is this: our faith requires an object much more constant and effective than us or our works. So if our faith is not to be in “I”, who is worthy of our faith? Who is reliable and capable enough to be trusted? The answer is Jesus Christ, and him alone.

Christ alone

We know that Jesus is reliable because he was sent by God to accomplish the very thing we rely upon him for.⁷ The Bible assures us that God is ‘not a man, that he should change his mind’ (1 Sam 15:29).⁸ Having sent Jesus to save us, then, he is not going to turn away and do something else.

If Jesus had simply declared these things then we could possibly dismiss him as all talk and no action. He demands attention, however, by the miracles that punctuated his ministry speak for both his authenticity⁹ and his power; or, to put it another way, his reliability and his capability.

For these reasons and more, the apostle Paul speaks of our salvation as an accomplished fact when he writes:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. (Rom 5:1–2a)

It is Jesus Christ who makes us at peace with God if we have faith in him. We know that he is reliable because he has already died in our place.¹⁰ And we know that he is capable, because God has honoured him by raising him from death!¹¹ As Paul argues:

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (Rom 5:9-10)

If Jesus was willing to go to the cross for us, do you think he will now let us slip through his fingers? That would be like someone studying really hard for their HSC and then not bothering to show up to their exam! Or getting engaged, buying the ring, doing pre-marriage counselling, planning the wedding… and then not showing up on the wedding day!

But just because Jesus is one capable and reliable object for our faith, that doesn’t mean that he is the only such object does it? Could there be another?

We should take Jesus very seriously when he says ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6b). He is the only one who knows the Father, and has always known him, since before the creation of the world.¹² He is the only one who has ever lived entirely without sin, and thus can come into the Father’s presence based on his own righteousness.¹³ The entire letter to the Hebrews is intent on showing how far superior Jesus is to any other ‘alternative': he is superior to prophets¹⁴ (including the greatly revered prophet Moses¹⁵) and angels;¹⁶ he represents a greater salvation,¹⁷ for he is a greater high priest¹⁸ who serves in a greater tabernacle¹⁹ as mediator of a New and better Covenant,²⁰ offering a greater sacrifice for sins.²¹ The old ‘is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves’ (10:1) and that ‘what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear’ (8:13). If you place your faith in something that ‘will soon disappear’, then you are in a lot of trouble!

The church in Martin Luther’s day thought to place itself between people and Christ, as though to say: ‘No one comes to the Son except through us’, much like the disciples who thought to control access to Jesus by preventing children from coming to him.²² What things do we put between us and Jesus today? Do we feel closer to God when we sing the right songs, pray the right prayers, hang out with the right people, go to the right camps or conferences? But with these people and these things, Jesus is just as furious as he was with the disciples those many years ago, saying ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these’ (Mark 10:14).

What is a protestant?

So we finally have an answer to the question we started with: ‘What is a protestant Christian?’ A protestant Christian is a person who, with Martin Luther (and the apostle Paul), proclaims the great truth that the only means of achieving justification, peace with God and, ultimately, salvation is faith. And the only object of that faith is Jesus Christ, for he is the only one who is both reliable and capable of accomplishing that justification.

That is why I am a protestant Christian… and why I hope that you are too.

Bibliography

Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works Vol. 34, Career of the Reformer. Saint Louis: Philadelphia : Concordia Publ. House ; Fortress Pr., 1960.
Packer, J. I. Concise Theology : A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1993.
Shelley, Bruce L. Church History in Plain Language. Updated 2nd ed. Dallas, Tex.: Word Pub., 1995.

Endnotes

1. Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, Updated 2nd ed. (Dallas, Tex.: Word Pub., 1995).
2. b. November 10, 1483. d. February 18, 1546.
3. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Vol. 34, Career of the Reformer (Saint Louis: Philadelphia : Concordia Publ. House ; Fortress Pr., 1960), 336. The immediate context of this quotation refers to the death of Johnn Tetzel, the indulgence hawker, which occurred in 1519. This would put Luther’s ‘conversion’ some two years after his posting of the 95 theses.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 337.
6. J. I. Packer, Concise Theology : A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1993), 160.
7. John 6:57; 10:25-30.
8. cf. Num 23:19.
9. See especially Matt 3:16-17 par.; John 10:25.
10. Rom 5:6.
11. 1 Cor 15:17.
12. John 1:1; 10:15; 14:9.
13. Heb 4:15; cf. 1 John 1:8.
14. 1:1-2
15. 3:3
16. 1:4
17. 2:3
18. 8:1-2
19. 9:11
20. 8:13
21. 9:14
22. Mark 10:13-16 par.