How the Reformation Changed the Church

How the Reformation
Changed the Church
Dr. Peter Hammond

In the book of
Judges we read
about
another generation
which arose,
which knew neither
the Lord nor
what He had done
(Judges 2:10).

Today, it appears that a generation has arisen, which, like
Israel under the Judges, knows little of either the Lord
nor of what He did during the time of the Protestant Exodus
and the struggles in the wilderness,
which followed in the 16th and 17th century

Sometimes this is from a cowardly dislike of
controversy and confrontation.

But few people seem
to understand
either the evils
of the Roman papacy
& it’s Inquisition
from which the
Reformation
delivered us

or the blessings which the Reformation won for us.

The Reformation delivered the Church from gross
ignorance and spiritual darkness

The church, before the
Reformation,
was a church without
the Bible.
And a church without a Bible
is as useless
as a lighthouse without light,
a candlestick
without a candle,
or a motor vehicle
without an engine.

The priests and
people knew scarcely
anything about
God’s Word
or
the way of salvation
in Christ.

Bishop J.C. Ryle described the situation:
“The immense majority of the clergy did little more
than say masses and offer up pretended sacrifices,

repeat Latin prayers
and chant Latin hymns
(which of course most
of the people could
not understand),
hear confessions,
grant absolutions,
give extreme unction,
and take money
to get dead people
out of purgatory.”

Bishop Latimer
observed:
“When the devil
gets influence in a
church, up go
candles and down
goes preaching.”

Quarterly sermons
(that is, once
every three
months)
were prescribed to
the clergy,
but not insisted
upon.
Latimer noted that while the mass was never left
unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be
omitted for 20 Sundays in succession.

Indeed, to preach & teach the Bible was to incur
the suspicion of being a heretic.

Bishop Hooper, who along with Bishop Latimer
was burned alive at the stake under Queen Mary,
did a survey in 1551 and found that:

out of 311 clergy in his Diocese,
168 were unable to repeat the
Ten Commandments,
31 of those 168 could not even
say in which part of the
Scripture
the Ten Commandments were
to be found,

40 could not tell
where in the Bible
the Lord’sPrayer
was written,
and 31 of the 40 did
not even know who
the Author of the
Lord’s Prayer was!

Bishop Ryle summarised the situation:
“Before the Reformation was a religion without knowledge,
without faith and without lively hope – a religion without
justification, regeneration and sanctification – a religion
without any clear views of Christ and the Holy Ghost.

Except in rare instances,
it was little better than an
organised system of
Mary worship,
saint worship,
image worship,
relic worship,
pilgrimages,
alms giving,

formalism, ceremonialism, processions, penances,
absolutions, masses
and blind obedience to the priests.

It was a huge higgledy-piggledy of ignorance and idolatry, and serving
an unknown God by deputy. The only practical result was that the
priests took the people’s money and undertook to secure their salvation.
And the people flattered themselves that the more they gave to the
priests, the more sure they were to go to Heaven!”

The Reformation delivered the Church
from childish superstitions

The Roman Catholic church,
before the Reformation,
taught its members to seek
spiritual benefit from
so-called relics of dead saints
and to treat them
with divine honour.
Calvin’s
“Inventory of Relics”
and Hobart Seymour’s
“Pilgrimage to Rome”
catalogue some of the
ludicrous swindles
which were perpetrated
by the church of Rome.

This included pieces of wood
“of the true cross”
enough to load a large ship,
thorns professing to be part of
the Saviour’s crown of thorns,
enough to make
a huge faggot,
at least 14 nails said to have
been used at the Crucifixion,
four spearheads
– each purporting to be
the one which pierced
our Lord’s side,

at least three seamless coats of Christ, for which the soldiers
cast lots, Saint James’s hand, bones of Mary Magdalene,
toenails from Saint Edmund, some bread, purported to have
been used by Christ at the Last Supper, a girdle of the Virgin
Mary and milk from the Virgin Mary!

The Royal Commissioners
of Henry VIII examined
a vial at the Abbey in
Gloucestershire, which
was said to contain the
blood of Christ!
The Commissioners found
that it contained the blood
of a duck.

There were literally thousands of profane and vile inventions,
fabrications and deceptions, which Roman priests imposed on
the people before the Reformation.

They must have
known that they were
deceiving the people,
yet they persisted in
presenting these lies
and
requiring that
the ignorant
Laity
believe them.

Sometimes the priests induced dying sinners to
give vast tracts of lands to abbeys and
monasteries, in order to atone for their bad lives.

In one way or another, they were continually
separating sinners from their money and accumulating
property and wealth in the hands of the Roman church.

The power of the priests was practically despotic and was used
for every purpose except the advancement of the Christian
faith. It seemed that their primary object was power.

To them confession had to be made. Without their absolution
and extreme unction no professing Christian could be saved.
Without their masses no soul could be redeemed from
purgatory. In short, they were, to all intents and purposes, the
mediators between Christ and man.

To please and honour the Roman church
was a devout Christian’s first duty.
To injure them was the greatest of sins.

One of the indulgences
issued in 1498,
with the authority
of the Pope, claimed:
“To absolve people
from usury, theft,
manslaughter,
fornication and all
crime whatsoever,
except smiting the
clergy and conspiring
against the Pope!”

A starving man in a famine may be reduced to eating rats
and rubbish, rather than die of hunger. Similarly, a conscience-
stricken soul, deprived of God’s Word, should not be judged
too harshly by us, if they struggled to find comfort in the most
debasing superstition.

However, we must never forget that it was from
such superstitions which the Reformation
delivered us.

The Reformation delivered the church from blatant
immorality
Before the Reformation, the lives of the clergy were simply scandalous.
There were brothels in the Vatican. The Popes, Cardinals and Bishops
openly consorted with prostitutes and engaged in the most debauched
orgies.

As Bishop Ryle pointed out:
“To expect the huge roots of
ignorance and superstition,
which filled our land, to bear
any but corrupt fruit, would
be unreasonable and
absurd.”
The local priests became notorious for
gluttony, drunkenness and gambling.

Contemporary art depicted friars as foxes preaching
with the neck of a stolen goose peeping out of the
hood behind; as wolves giving absolution, with the
sheep partly concealed under their cloaks; or as apes
sitting on a sick man’s bed with a crucifix in one hand
and with the other hand in the
suffering person’s pocket!
Such public contempt in art
reflects the scorn with which
the clergy were held at the time.
The Pope depicted as a goat playing
a false tune.

Bishop Ryle pointed out: “But the blackest spot on the
character of our pre-Reformation clergy in England is
one of which it is painful to speak … their horrible
contempt of the 7th Commandment … the
consequences of shutting up herds of men and women
in the prime of life, in monasteries and nunneries,
were such
that I will not defile my
paper by dwelling upon
them …

if ever there was a plausible theory weighed in the balance
and found utterly wanting, it is the favourite theory that
celibacy and monasticism promote holiness … monasteries
and nunneries were frequently sinks of iniquity.”

The report of the Royal Commissioners, under Henry VIII,
declared: “That manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable
living, is daily used and committed in abbeys, priories, and
other religious houses of monks, cannons and nuns,

and that albeit many continual
visitations have been had, by
the space of 200 years or more,
for an honest and charitable
reformation of such unthrifty,
carnal and abominable living,
yet that nevertheless, little or
none amendment was hitherto
had, but that their vicious
living shamefully increased
and augmented.”

It was observed that: “There is no surer recipe for
promoting immorality than fullness of bread and
abundance of idleness.” (Ezekiel 16:49)

It is from such superstition, corruption,
immorality, ignorance and idolatry that the
Reformation freed the church.

The Reformation gave the Church back
the Bible

In 1519, six men and a woman were burned at
Coventry for teaching their children the Ten
Commandments,

and
The
Apostle’s
Creed
in English.

Nothing seems to
have alarmed
and enraged the
Roman priesthood
as much as the
spread of Bibles
in the local
language.

It was for the
crime of
translating the
Bible into
English that
the Reformer,
William
Tyndale,
was burned
at the stake.

Of all the aspects
which combined to
make up the
Reformation, no
other aspect
received such bitter
opposition as the
translation and
circulation of the
Scriptures.

The translation of the
Bible struck a blow at
the root of the whole
Roman Catholic
system.

The Bible, as the only rule of faith and conduct,
freely available in the local languages,
was a threat to all the superstitions and abuses of the
medieval Roman popery.

With the Bible in every parish church, every thoughtful man
soon saw that the religion of the priests had no basis in Holy
Scripture.

The
Reformation
opened the
road to the
throne of
Grace

The way of salvation had become blocked up and made impassible by
heaps of superstitious rubble. “He who desired to obtain forgiveness had
to seek it through a jungle of priests, saints, Mary worship, masses,
penances, confession, absolution and the like, so that there might as well
have been no throne of Grace at all.” J.C.Ryle

The Reformation restored Biblical simplicity
to worship

Before the Reformation,
the laity were only
present at church services
as passive, ignorant
spectators.
The elaborate, theatrical
presentations of the
sacraments were a
solemn farce because
the ceremonies and
prayers were in Latin.

The laity could bring their bodies to
the services, but their minds,
understanding, reason and spirit could
take no part at all.
For this reason, the 24th Article of the
Church of England declared:
“It is a thing totally repugnant
to the Word of God and the
custom of the primitive church to
have public prayer in the church
or to minister the sacraments in
a tongue not understood
of the people.”

The Reformation gave a Biblical
understanding of the office of a minister

Before the Reformation, the concept of the Christian ministry was
sacerdotal. That is – it was understood that every clergyman was a
sacrificing priest. The clergy were understood to hold the keys of
Heaven and to be practically the mediators between God and man.

The Reformers
brought the office of
the clergy down to
its Scriptural level.
They stripped it
entirely of any
sacerdotal character.

They cast out the words “sacrifice” and “altar”.
They taught that the clergy were pastors, ambassadors,
messengers, witnesses, evangelists, teachers and ministers of
the Word and sacraments.

The Reformers taught
that the chief business
of every Christian
minister is to
preach the Word
and to be diligent
in prayer
and the reading
of the Scriptures.

The Reformers taught the immense superiority of the pulpit to the
confessional. For this reason, where the altar used to be, the Lord’s
table was placed with an open Bible, or a pulpit, showing the centrality
of God’s Word in the worship of Protestant churches.

The
Reformation
restored a
Biblical
understanding
of holiness.

The Reformation is the
source of many blessings.
We need to ask:
are we on
the side of the
Reformers ?

or of those
who burned
them and
the Bible?

Before the Reformation,
it was believed that a
monastic life and vows of
celibacy were the only ways
to escape sin and to attain
sanctification.
Multitudes of men and
women poured into the
monasteries and convents
under the vain idea that this
would please God
and ensure their eternal
salvation.

The Reformers struck at the root of this fallacy by establishing the great
Scriptural principle that true religion was not to be found in retiring into
convents and monastries and fleeing from the difficulties of daily life,
but in manfully facing up to our difficulties and doing our duty diligently
- in every position to which God calls us.

It is not by running away from the world, that we fulfil God’s
call, but by courageously resisting the devil, the flesh and the
world and overcoming them in daily life. That is how true
holiness is to be exhibited.

For this reason,
the Reformers
dissolved the
monasteries and
convents in their
areas and freed the
inmates to be
reintegrated into
normal life.

The Reformers also ordered that the Ten Commandments be
set up in every parish church and taught to every child, and
that our duty towards God and our neighbour be set forth in
the Catechism. They insisted that you cannot become saints by
shirking your duties in society.

A Heritage of Faith and Freedom

We must continually thank God for the Reformation.
It lit the flames of knowledge and freedom which we
must ensure are never allowed to be extinguished or to
grow dim.

We need to continually remember that the
Reformation was won for us by the blood of many
tens of thousands of martyrs.

It was not only
by their
preaching
and praying,
and writing
and legislation,
but by their
sacrifices that
our religious
liberty, freedom
of conscience
and Christian
heritage was
won.

The Reformation
found church
members steeped in
ignorance and left
them in possession of
knowledge.
It found them without
Bibles and left them
with the Bible in
every parish.

It found them in darkness and left them in light.
It found them bound in fear and left them enjoying the liberty
and peace which only Christ can give.

It found them
strangers to the
Blood of Christ’s
Atonement, to
faith, grace and
holiness and left
them with the key
of all those
blessings in their
hands.

It found them blind and left them with spiritual eyes to see.
It found them slaves to superstition and set them free to serve
Christ.

As Bishop
Ryle declared:
“Are we to
return to a
church which
boasts that
she is
infallible and
never changes

– to a church which has never repented her pre-Reformation
superstitions and abominations – to a church which has never confessed
and abjured her countless corruptions?

Are we to go back to gross
ignorance of true religion?
Shame on us,
I say, if we entertain the
idea for a moment!
Let the Israelite return to
Egypt, if he will.
Let the prodigal go back to
his husks among the swine.
Let the dog return to his
vomit.

But let no Englishman with brains in his head,
ever listen to the idea of exchanging Protestantism
for Popery,
or returning to the bondage of the church of Rome.

No, indeed! … God forbid! The man who counsels such base
apostasy and suicidal folly, must be judicially blind.
The iron collar has been broken; let us not put it on again.

The prison has been thrown open;
let us not resume the yoke and return to our chains …
Let us not go back to ignorance, superstition,
priestcraft and immorality.”

If you have a Bible in your own language, and enjoy to read
and study God’s Word, never forget that you owe that Bible to
the Reformation. Brave men and women died that you could
have the freedom to delight in God’s Word.

If you know the joy of sins forgiven and new life in Christ, if
you are walking by faith and enjoying peace with God, never
forget that you owe this priceless privilege to the Reformation.

If you enjoy Church services, Scripture in song,
Hymns, prayers and sermons in your own language,
remember that for this you are also indebted to the
Reformation.

If you appreciate the Biblical and practical
sermons of your pastor, and his counsel,
never forget that for this you are indebted to the
Reformation.

The Reformation is
the source of many
blessings.

We need to ask
if we are on
the side of the
Reformers, or
of those who
burned them
and the Bible.

“… Contend earnestly for the Faith which
was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Jude 3

Dr Peter Hammond
Reformation Society
P.O. Box 74
Newlands, 7725
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel: (021) 689 4480
Fax: (021) 685 5884
Email: info@ReformationSA.org
Website: www.ReformationSA.org

How the Reformation Changed the Church

How the Reformation Changed the Church

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to How the Reformation Changed the Church

Similar to How the Reformation Changed the Church (13)

More from Peter Hammond

More from Peter Hammond (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

How the Reformation Changed the Church