"This is the text that will break your neck!": the Reformation and its Biblical Legacy

I began the sermon with a joke [To hear the joke and listen to the full sermon go to  MCC's website at  http://www.mcchurch.org/sermons/?sermon_id=24. 

As a pastor AND historian of the Reformation, I’m like what my wife was to me – too knowledgeable to be duped by easy praise. I know the good as well as the bad, the truth as well as the fiction, the praiseworthy elements as well as the painful parts. So my hope is not so much to celebrate the Reformation with you today but to commemorate it – to remember it well; not so much to lavish praise but “speak the truth in love”; not so much to say “yeah us” but “praise him” and that him is not Martin Luther. It’s Jesus. Today I would like to focus on a Reformation understanding of Scripture – but not so much the idea of Scripture alone, which is easily understandable enough, but the Reformation legacy of “who” reads the Scripture, “how” one should read it, and the one legacy that we must unlearn. Well, let’s begin with Scripture!

Jesus says, “³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” ~ John 5:39-40

1.    Who reads the Bible? “Sinners read the Bible.” How do you hear that phrase? Do you place a comma – Sinners, read the Bible! - a sort of outward focused “get your life right,” sort of rant? Well, a strategy toward Bible reading anchored in the spirit of the Reformation is that there is no comma. It’s sinners NOT saints who read the Bible, Martin Luther insists.

“You study the scriptures,” Jesus says – but who is the “you”? Martin Luther would argue that the first point to proper Bible reading is to figure that out. Many of us, myself included, imagine ourselves standing with Jesus not the Pharisees. But if we think that we are always comfortably on the side of Jesus we’re probably missing the point. Martin Luther wants you to acknowledge your actual place – standing with sinners. That’s the only place to stand if you wish to read the Bible rightly. You see Pharisees are bad readers of Scripture BECAUSE they never imagine themselves as sinners. They are devoutly religious people who memorized scripture, prayed scripture, debated scripture, and just don’t get it – they still manage to miss God. 

Yet, according to Martin Luther, Christians alway do everything, including Bible reading – “simultaneously righteous and sinful.” He writes:

The saints are always aware of their sin and seek righteousness from God in accordance with God’s mercy. . . In reality they are sinners; but they are righteous by the declaration of a merciful God. They are unknowingly righteous, and knowingly sinners. They are sinners in fact, but righteous in hope.

Luther argued that reading the Bible correctly, getting the Christian life right, wasn’t about some new Biblical tools or study helps or even a high view of inspiration but happened when you acquired a proper orientation – “knowingly” a sinner, he says, “in fact,” a sinner. Luther’s reform set about demoting (not elevating) who a good Bible reader was – a sinner NOT a saint.

Maybe a more modern analogy might help us understand Luther’s point. This is not Martin Luther’s image but my own. In the mid-1800s, the entrepreneur John Tate began making compasses. After his first batch, Tate and his employees realized a terrible mistake that would end up causing the company to become bankrupt. You see, he had failed to mark which way was north making the compass useless. Luther’s vision of Bible reading argued that to understand the Bible rightly required that one understand it much like a compass. A compass, of course, always points in two directions North & South. If you don’t understand this you will read it wrongly no matter how well the compass works. In the same way, Luther argued that correct Bible reading demanded that you understood which way it pointed. He understood these two poles to be law and gospel. He writes, “The distinction between law and gospel is the highest art in Christendom . . . Virtually the whole of the Scriptures and the understanding of the whole of theology depends upon the true understanding of the law and the gospel.” Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (1535)

So, on the one hand, the compass always points south – the law, which aims to convict you of sin and to show you how much you need a savior. For Luther this is because the law tells us what we ought to do but can’t; while the gospel (north on the compass) tells us what God has done for us. The law shows us that we need to be forgiven; the gospel points to the fact that we have been forgiven. 

Friends, if your Bible reading doesn’t expose your lack, doesn’t reveal your brokenness, doesn’t uncover your sin, then you are not reading it as someone connected to the Reformation. You’re not understanding the purpose of the compass you hold in your hand.

So, who should read the Bible? Sinners. And good Bible reading always aims to help us remember that reality – “knowingly,” Luther says. 

But “how” should one read the Bible? Well, Luther says you need to know what the Bible is all about. Joke about the children sermon – “I know the answer is Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

2. It’s not about a squirrel! It’s about Jesus.

Jesus clearly states that the Scriptures are God’s story about himself and Luther whole-heartedly agrees. Jesus is the Word of the word. The Bible contains the Word of God – Jesus. In his preface to the Old Testament Luther wrote that the Bible was “the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies.” He argued, therefore, that readers of the Bible need to understand its “plain sense” which meant understanding the story the Bible wanted to tell – the gospel – the good news of Jesus Christ – which was not a command but a story.

For Luther it’s not trying to find Jesus under every rock of the Old Testament but getting our story straight, a story of what God has been wanting to do from the very beginning which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth – his life, death and resurrection. The Bible, in other words, is not so much a book about being good but God’s goodness.  

In the NT and throughout Christian history there are two themes that relate to Jesus: 1. One stream is that of imitation. It’s text focus on Jesus’ life as a model for the believer – “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5); “For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21). As a former monk whose sole purpose was to live a life of imitation Luther discovered only shame, fear and failure. He worried that a singular focus on it turned the gospel into a series of commands that people would inevitably use to justify themselves or to judge others. It promoted both self-righteousness and self-loathing. Imitation, in other words, became one more means of law - believing that it’s the scriptures themselves, rather than Jesus, that give life. 

2. The second stream, however, is participation. For Luther this was the vision of Paul. “³⁰ It is because of God that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. ³¹ Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.’” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31). It means that we believe whole heartedly in what Christ has done for us rather than what we do ourselves. Luther, like Paul, used marriage to illustrate this notion. That just like marriage, salvation came about not by first imitating but by saying “yes” as one does in a marriage ceremony. When we trust another and offer our “yes” we gain all that was there’s while our spouse takes on all that was ours. So Christ has fulfilled the law for us – we need not do it in order to be saved because he has already done so. We simply need to say, “yes” to him. 

Luther wrote, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and the it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”

And friends, in a day and age of constant surveillance, accusation and shame via Facebook or Twitter, where being right trumps being in relationship, I pray that we can hear this grace anew – that we are sinners saved apart from what we do but because God graciously loves us - and be thankful for Martin in helping us rediscover this great grace. But while grace is something that we should be thankful for learning from Martin. We must also unlearn a dangerous Reformation legacy that also connects to Luther - his struggle to extend grace to others, particularly when reading the Bible differently from himself. Luther got grace right, I believe, but he failed to understand it’s broader implication for Bible reading. 

The great Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr echoes this warning, “The Church can disturb the security of sinners only if it is not itself too secure in its belief that it has the word of God. The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches.” Luther would have done well if he could have remembered that.

I’d like to close with a story from the Reformation that illustrates what we should unlearn. In 1529, a German prince, Philip of Hesse wished to unify two branches of the Reformation: the Swiss Protestants led by Huldrych Zwingli and the North German Protestants led by Martin Luther. So he invited them to his castle in Marburg.

Their time together, however, did not start out well. Zwingli began by quoting from the book of John and then saying, “This text will break your neck.” Luther responded that he knew well how to give Zwingli “a blow to the face.” 

Not surprisingly, discussions broke down from there and the two sides, who eventually agreed on fourteen points of doctrine save one (concerning the Lord’s Supper), could not unite – Luther, in the end, even refused to call Zwingli and his entourage “brothers.” 

This is the one Protestant legacy that we must remember in order to change; to recall so that we can forget it. It’s the Evangelical idea exemplified by Luther, that reading the Bible correctly allows one to be ungracious, that right belief permits us to be unkind, that proper theology is good reason to use the Bible to “break” another’s neck or “punch” one in the face. We have to confess that many of us have followed in Luther’s footsteps – we’ve received a gospel of grace and then have been most unChristlike in our use of it. We have dismantled the manger of the word of God and bludgeoned others with the pieces. We’ve betrayed the Word – Jesus himself.

And this same Jesus forgave his betrayers, prayed for the unity of the church and, Paul tells us, broke down the wall of hostility between all people. If we submit to that, if we nail that to the doors of our churches, who knows, maybe we will experience another Reformation.