Transcript

We're at almost the 500th anniversary since the Reformation.

So, you know, it's 2017 and it was 1517, on October 31st of 1517, that Luther nailed his 95 Theses to Wittenberg Cathedral doors, castle doors, and And so that's a big thing, and I think we're going to find, we're already starting to hear echoes of this in the media, and the media is going to be talking a lot more about the Reformation.

And one of the things we want to do is look back at that period, because part of the role and mission of the Augustine Institute is to be, really, our mission is to help Catholics understand and to live and to share their faith.

That's our tagline, right?

That's our mission statement, is helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith, But you're going to hear a lot from the media about, well, it's been 500 years since Martin Luther did his revolt and his protest, and the church is still in need of reform.

So religion is not improving.

And that's going to be, I think, a lot of the message that we're going to hear.

And therefore, we don't need religion.

And what we want to do at the Augustine Institute is really create an intellectual resource for the church to reflect on the scriptures and on the tradition.

and to understand our faith and the signs of the times, to engage the world and what's going on in the world with our faith and from a deep Catholic perspective that understands scripture and tradition.

So part of that mission is, all right, we're going to engage.

It's 500 years since the Reformation.

What does that mean?

And it's been a powerful experience.

One of the things we did is we published a book called True Reformers, looking at 10 saints of what is known as the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but it's really the Catholic Reformation.

at that time of the 16th century, that time where Luther is, you know, creating the Protestant Reformation, but there's a renewal in the church.

And then that is one of the things we did, is that book we did with our dean, Dr. Chris Bloom, who spoke last week so eloquently, who I hate to follow.

Bloom did a beautiful video series called True Reformers, going through the life of six of these key saints.

And then as that reflection, as we've been doing that, one of the things that struck me Going back and reflecting on this time of the early 16th century is that you see the church suffering in a great time.

There's no doubt that Luther had a lot of reasons to call for a reform and to call for a renewal in the church.

Because at the end of the 15th century, the church was a victim of its own success.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the church had become central in the life and the culture of the people of medieval Europe.

And it had done so by taking care of their spiritual needs and by teaching and educating and shaping and forming the culture.

And the church did that so successfully and so profoundly that the church was at the center of medieval culture.

And being at the center of medieval culture and really helping people come to know and love Christ and be so meaningful to them, people started to leave More and more money for the church.

And so the church was so central, the church was starting to amass a great amount of wealth.

And over time, compounding interest, over generations, what you ended up with is monasteries and convents owning tens of thousands of acres and having enormous wealth, so much so that people started to look at the church as a lucrative place for their career.

And so people were looking to get into the church not for mission reasons, But for selfish reasons.

And we see that there would be people who would be made archbishop or appointed bishop who would be eight years old or ten years old to make sure that that lucrative seat that would make a lot of money would stay in the family.

And there's a key turning point that happens when someone's proposed a nephew of an important king who is six years old and he proposes him to be the new Archbishop of Toledo.

And his wife, thanks be to God, Knock some sense into him and said, no, we're not going to have your six-year-old nephew get this C. Now, just to give you a sense, that appointment would give the Archbishop of Toledo discretion with 10 to 20 million dollars of revenue a year or more.

So it was significant.

This C was second only in revenue to the king and queen in Spain.

And, of course, the Queen, Isabella, said, no way.

And she appointed a very holy Franciscan preacher who started to lead a reform.

And this is in the 1490s.

So Cardinal Jimenez Cisneros ends up becoming the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, and he starts a reform.

And that reform does amazing things.

And I touch on this because we'll see this is happening even before Luther.

And I think a lot of people have the perception, and I know I did before I really studied this, that nobody was thinking about reform except this Augustinian monk named Luther.

And that's not the case.

And so just to set the stage for what's happening in the time of the Reformation, Cisneros starts this reform in the 1490s.

And he does many things of reforming the clergy and doing audits in the parishes for where the money's going and all the benefices and the endowments.

But one of the important things he does is he founds a university, Alcalá. to create good education.

Because a lot of the clergy and the leaders in the church were uneducated.

And so, for example, there is no such thing as seminaries at this time.

If you were going to be a priest, if you were going to join a religious order, you join the religious order, you join the priesthood, but you would be apprenticed to a priest, but you may not spend a lot of time getting an education.

You may not take many courses at all.

You could be sent, you know, helping in the garden, cleaning out the church, running errands for that pastor.

And so a lot of clergy didn't know Scripture.

So Cardinal Cisneros saw that one of the first and formidable tasks of the renewal of the church is a return to Scripture.

And so one of the things he did is he started the Polyglot Bible that he published.

He got some of the best scholars together, tried to get the best manuscripts, and he published a Bible called the Polyglot Bible that had the Latin, but it also had the Greek and the Hebrew.

And then he created dictionaries and grammar books to study Hebrew and Greek.

And so he did this amazing thing and he said that the dormant studies in his prologue, the dormant study of Scripture should be revived by a deeper study and return to the original languages.

So that was his project.

Now that comes out before 1517. He's doing this project He starts the university right around the year 1500 to 1502. And then the second thing he does is he purchases a printing press.

Radical new technology for communication.

So he gets a printing press at the University of Alcalá and he starts publishing books.

This is going to start a revolution, a good revolution, a good reform of the church that's happening well before 1517. In fact, one of those books that he publishes will be picked up by a Spaniard who's convalescing in his home castle after wounds from battle.

And he asked for books to be read because, you know, there's no TV, there's no Netflix, and so he's got to read some books.

And so he asked for some books on chivalry.

There's no books on chivalry.

There's just two books, a book by Ludolf the Saxon called The Life of Christ and another book on the life of the saints.

Both those books were published by Cardinal Jimenez Cisneros in his printing press.

And of course, this is now fast forward to 1521, and the man who reads that goes through a great conversion, and his name is Ignatius of Loyola.

You've probably heard of him.

Founder of the Jesuits, right?

But it's because of that book.

And then the second book that creates another conversion story is St. Teresa of Avila.

She reads a translation from a Latin book of Augustine's Confessions to Spanish, and she goes through what she calls her second conversion, which leads her to found 17 And that, again, you see the dispersion and the distribution of great books to the laity rekindles in the laity and the university.

And so two things that happen, and I say this because I was just in Spain in the footsteps of the 16th century reformers, and I realized a printing press and a university.

What are we doing here at the Augustine Institute?

We have a graduate school, a university, to train people deeply with a focus on Scripture and renewal and evangelization of Scripture.

And the second thing is, we don't have a printing press, but we do publish.

And we have a digital media, which is what Cardinal Cisneros would have done back then.

Because the new revolution is not a printing press, the new revolution is the digital.

So all that to preface, to say I want to dive into Martin Luther, but I want us to realize the larger context.

Luther is not operating in a vacuum.

The word reform is being bandied about in the Catholic Church by many people.

In fact, in the year 1512, the call for reform to the Pope and the cardinals and the bishops happens, where an Augustinian monk who has a doctorate in Scripture asks and requests the Holy Father and the bishops of Rome and the bishops who are gathered in Rome for a reform of the Church.

And of course, that Augustinian monk is none other than Martin Luther?

No. Giles of Viterbo.

Giles of Viterbo calls for reform.

And he calls for, by the way, a new springtime.

And he quotes from the Song of Songs, chapter 2, verse 14 and following, saying that the winter is now past and the spring is coming.

Arise, my beloved.

And he uses that imagery of the springtime coming in 1512. Now, there's already the first fruits of the springtime because it's happened in Spain and it's starting to spread.

And he's also bringing this in amongst the Augustinian monks.

Now, that is an important backdrop because later on, I think 500 years later, there's a Pope who calls for a new evangelization and a new springtime, St. John Paul II. Where did he get the idea of a new springtime?

Was it from the Song of Songs?

Was it from Giles of Viterbo?

I asked George Weigel, who's John Paul's biographer, and he said, I've never thought about that.

I didn't know that connection.

So he's going back.

He's trying to find the answer.

I think, whether John Paul was conscious of this or not, the Holy Spirit certainly was and is.

And we are at the cusp of a time where the church is in a winter and in a spiritual doldrum, a kind of spiritual malaise lays over the church, but there's also the beginning stirrings of a new springtime, a great renewal.

And just as there was a call for reform, now Pope John Paul II is calling for a new evangelization.

And the Church is calling for a new evangelization.

And there's calls from the Church for reform and renewal.

And I think we can learn a lot looking back 500 years.

And I think that's important.

That's what we're trying to do in this lecture series.

So now to the key person here, and that is Luther.

So in 1517, he nails his 95 Theses.

Now, this was not Luther's intention at this point to break from the church.

It was a protest.

It was a protest because we had a bishopric in Germany where somebody was holding one see and he was trying to get another bishop see to get the revenue for that and he was paying a donation to get that.

And he was sending out those selling indulgences to help pay for this see.

Certainly, that would be corruption.

Certainly, a need for reform.

And so there was every reason for Martin Luther as an Augustinian monk and priest to protest this to a degree.

But what happens in the debates over the next couple of years is the debate intensifies and Luther reaches too far.

He reacts too far.

And I want to take us to one year in particular as we look at Luther's approach to scripture.

And I'm going to look at one year in particular, three documents that Luther does, and I'm going to focus in on one of them in particular.

That gets to the heart of Luther's misreading of Scripture, in my mind.

The year is 1520. So there's been debates.

And there's been a lot of dialogue that's been rather heated between Rome and Martin Luther.

And now things are getting to a particular point where it looks like there could be a break.

And Luther writes several letters.

One in August of 1520. He writes a letter, an open letter, That he publishes and it becomes a bestseller in Germany.

He writes an open letter to the Christian nobility of the German nation.

So he writes to the Christian nobility of the German nation.

And that's very intentional audience.

He's writing to the elites, to the powers that be in Germany.

And he's calling on them to break with the Romanists.

And he calls the Pope and the key theologians in Rome, he calls them Romanists.

So as Luther is tweeting out, he uses a tagline.

We've seen this strategy, right?

Where you have a label for your opponents.

And Luther was a master of rhetoric, and he was a master communicator, and he could get the crowds whipped up.

We know people like that.

And as Luther was doing that, he labeled his opponents the Romanists.

And by doing that, he's trying to reduce the church from being Catholic, which means universal, to being parochial and local, the Romanists.

Those Romans, those Italians.

And so he's playing a national card, a nationalistic card, to make Rome look like it's the Italians and the Romanists versus us Germans who need to get free from these Italians who would oppress us.

Luther is intentionally using that language.

to create and play on the ethnicity of the Germans versus the Italians.

He's intentionally doing that in that address.

One of the big missteps, and it's a tragic one, he will go to Romans chapter 13, and he will talk about how the state has the authority to discipline.

Now, Paul talks about how the state has the authority to wield discipline for justice.

If someone's a criminal, they can be punished by the state.

And so Paul uses this line that God has given the state the authority of the avenging sword for those who commit high crimes.

And so he's telling the Christians to submit to good civic order of the state.

Luther uses that to say, which Paul never, never would have dreamt of, Luther uses that text to say that the state should oversee the church.

and that the princes should oversee and regulate the life of the Church, so that the Church should submit to the state.

This is something that is a new and a radical departure in the interpretation in the tradition, something that was hard fought, by the way, if you understand the early Middle Ages, of what was fought to create the independence and the right of the Pope and the Church to name bishops in different countries, with input from local civic leaders, The kings and queens of different nations did not have the right to appoint bishops.

That was the right of the church.

They could nominate, they could have a say, but they could not appoint solely.

And that was a right given to the Holy Father and to the church alone.

And many other elements of this.

Luther does this, and now the state will rule over the church in terms of Lutherans and in other countries where the Protestant Reformation will go.

And of course this will tempt people like Henry VIII to get on board with this reform movement because now Henry VIII will be able to, later on, arrogate to himself all rights over the church, which means property rights.

And one of the things that Henry VIII and many of the princes in Germany will do is they'll disband the monasteries and the convents and all of a sudden they end up with tens and hundreds of thousands of acres at their disposal that they own.

So you can see how that incentivizes the civic rulers to get behind this reform movement, right?

Now, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that, because that's not so important for our day today, that misreading of Romans 13. But I want to look at another document that he does in October 1520. So a couple months later, he launches another major address that he popularizes, and it's called On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

And so he's talking about how what's going on in Rome is the Babylonian captivity, so the true church is in exile.

And again, one of the things that Luther does here, a movie makes, which is going to be problematic, and we're going to see it in his next document in spades, is that Luther operates with a kind of dualism, a dialectic that tends towards dualism, that there's a visible church that's false, but there's an interior church, a secret church, an invisible church that's true.

And so he splits the visible from the invisible, in terms of the church.

Now, this is a move, again, that, as an Augustinian, you should know better.

Augustine dealt with this problem, and so did the church in many ways, where you have people who are heretics or schismatics in the church, and what Augustine deals with this is with the Donatists, and he will talk about how they want to have a pure church, a perfectly pure church.

what Augustine will argue is he goes back to the parable of Christ of the wheat and the weeds intermixed.

That the kingdom of God, which is the church, is like a field sown with wheat and inter-sown with weeds, the tares.

And they're interspersed so that you can't pull out one without the other and you have to wait for the final judgment day to end up with a pure field where the wheat and the weeds are separated.

So the idea of the sheep and the goats, the weeds and the wheat, over and over again our Lord uses parables to talk about how the church is not going to be pure and perfect.

It's going to be a mixture of the righteous and the wicked.

We see this with Judas amongst the twelve, right?

Immediately, right?

And so Augustine will use this teaching to show that the church will have sinners.

The church will have those who are unfaithful amidst the faithful.

and that the idea that you can just have a pure church is something that is an impulse, but it's going to be a wrong one.

And our Lord even taught that that can't be.

But here, Luther starts to go against that idea.

So the idea that the visible church under Rome is the false church.

We're going to create a pure church.

And that impulse in Luther will be taken with the Puritans, with Zwingli and then Calvin.

and the idea of creating a pure church, and you're going to have the Puritan movement, and this idea that we're going to have a perfect community.

And that doesn't follow from the Scriptures, doesn't follow from the New Testament, doesn't follow from our Lord.

That will be, again, a significant misreading of Scripture in the way he lays this out.

But the significant thing that he does here, the really radical move that's going to be, and what, by the way, Luther does here in 1520, will lead to the break.

There's no longer a dialogue it's going to be a radical break with the church because he's going to throw out four of the sacraments.

He's going to say there's three sacraments, which I think, as he says, he kind of puts a caveat, there's three sacraments that are real sacraments, four we have to throw out.

And the three sacraments he wants to keep is confession, the Eucharist, and baptism.

A couple of years later, A little afterwards, he'll change his mind about confession.

He'll throw that one out too.

And he'll end up with just two sacraments.

And even then, he's going to change the efficacy and the significance of those sacraments.

But Luther really breaks with the sacraments.

And I think that reflecting on this, one of the great mistakes Luther makes is that at this time, and I think of, and I was always struck by this when I was reading Cardinal Cisneros' introduction to the polyglot Bible.

The now heretofore dormant study of the Scriptures shall be revived.

And of course, Luther studies and he gets his doctorate in Scripture.

But at that time, a biblical doctorate in Scripture is a very new study.

And the study of Scripture is really in its infancy.

And the Church has assumed that so much of its practices In so many of its theological treatises, it's assumed Scripture.

And so when Luther challenges and says these sacraments aren't biblical, they don't go back to Scripture, they aren't really rooted in Scripture, it's something that hasn't been deeply thought out.

It was assumed more than stated and taught.

And I think that it's an unfortunate moment where all of a sudden Luther creates this strong hermeneutic suspicion about how every practice of the church needs to be rethought in light of Scripture.

And for a church that's gone through so many years throughout the Middle Ages of growing slowly with tradition based on Scripture, but kind of reflectively and slowly, and all of a sudden there's this major rethinking and questioning.

You can trust nothing.

We can't trust the church.

We only can trust Scripture.

And the church hadn't found itself where it had to articulate the biblical basis for all of its thought.

It was assumed.

I'm not saying the church didn't do that.

I'm just saying that it wasn't self-consciously thought out.

And so Luther caught everybody by surprise by holding to a standard that the church never had, and that was sola scriptura.

And that's what he's going to argue in this document in a significant way, that the new criteria for theology is sola scriptura, And so sacraments that seem to come from tradition and from liturgy are to be held with great suspicion and ultimately to be rejected.

And so now notice what's happening.

Luther is adjudicating what's biblical and what's not biblical.

This is a subtle move that hasn't been caught yet by those following Luther because they're in the heat of the battle and they're like, well, he's a biblical scholar and he's saying that this isn't biblical.

And so people are kind of like, oh, it's not biblical.

But they're realizing that it's a judgment what's biblical or not biblical.

And Luther is rejecting the Magisterium and Rome as, you know, an interpreter of Scripture.

But now Luther is putting himself as the new pope, in a sense.

It's a slight of hand, but it's an important move.

He is now interpreting Scripture.

And it seems easy at first, but during Luther's own lifetime, Zwingli will interpret Scriptures differently.

And Luther will get really mad at Zwingli.

and not want to talk to him after a short while.

They're going to have arguments about the Eucharist and about the Mass.

But now the problem is there's no controlling legal authority, as someone once said.

There's no way to adjudicate who's interpreting Scripture correctly, right?

And this is part of the vacuum that's now coming into play by Luther's break with the Church.

But I want to move to the main document that I want to focus on, and this is at the heart of Luther's theology.

and of his novel and his new theology, and that comes in November of 1520. And that's going to be his great Magna Carta to make the real break fully, and it's on Christian liberty.

And of course the liberty, he wants the Christians to be liberated from the church and from Rome.

And this, by the way, this very spirit that Luther will tap into, is exactly what I fear is going to be tapped into, and I'm already seeing and hearing echoes of this, and it's going to grow over this next month of October, where people say, look, Luther tried to reform the church 500 years ago, the church is still corrupt, we still have problems, look at the recent scandals in the priesthood, and so you can't, the church hasn't been fixed over 500 years, religion can never be reformed, forget religion.

That will be the battle cry, I'm afraid.

But what the church understood in the time of Luther, Giles of Viterbo, and others, is that the church is always in need of reform.

Because the church will always have the wheat and the weeds.

The church will always need reform because the church is made up of the fallen children of Adam and Eve.

And as long as we have the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we're always going to need reform.

Right?

And this ideal of a pure ideal is a false ideal.

that the reality is there's going to be sinners, but the reality is we need to work to reform in every age.

And that's what's beautiful about the Catholic reformers of St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, is that we see that real reform happens through holiness.

Real reform happens by saints.

Falling in love with God, following him radically.

Now, Luther thought that the path to reform was going to be by faith alone.

And this is what I want to talk about.

The keynote theme of On Christian Liberty is this idea of faith alone.

And what is faith-freeness of?

First and foremost, more than a pope, more than bishops, more than ecclesiology and the church, what we really had to be liberated of is the idea that we have to do good works.

That, for Luther, was the ultimate enemy.

is the idea that we have to do good works to be saved.

Now, of course, it's well known that Luther struggled with scrupulosity as a monk.

That's why his superiors told him to go get a doctorate in Scripture.

They thought that would be a good distraction so that he wouldn't have time for self-reflection.

And that's a good idea.

Getting a doctorate in Scripture can take, can preoccupy one, I know.

I think of St. Jerome.

We said learning Hebrew was atoning for all the sins of his youth.

But Luther was a man of great power and intellect, and that didn't solve his problems of scrupulosity.

And so as Luther was struggling with scrupulosity, the first thing after he did his doctorate, he lectured on the Psalms.

And the Psalm that jumped out at him the most was Psalm 22, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Because Luther lived with anxious fear that God was going to condemn him as a sinner, and that he was going to go to hell.

And he suffered with deep anxiety and deep despair from that thought.

And his spiritual directors tried to help him with that.

Then, after that first year of lecturing through the Psalms, he lectures through Galatians.

And he comes across Paul's idea that we're saved by faith apart from works of the law.

And all of a sudden, this leads to a revolution for Luther, that good works doesn't matter.

What matters is that I simply believe and have faith, and I can be saved by faith alone.

And so this is going to become the resounding note of all this theology.

I'm going to give you a few quotes from Luther on this, from his On Christian Liberty.

And then I want to show how he bases it in a certain anthropology in the way he's going to read Scripture that I think is fundamental to understanding Luther.

So a couple of quotes about faith.

He says this in Christian Liberty from paragraph 369 and following, Line 369, the following, he says, That's a quote from 1st Epistle of Timothy, in chapter 1, verse 9. is that Christian liberty, our faith, the effect of which is not that we should be careless or lead a bad life, but that no one should need the law or works for justification and salvation.

So, works and salvation, works, good deeds, has nothing to do with your salvation.

It's faith alone.

Again, I'll say this over and over again.

It is not by working, but by believing that we glorify God and confess Him to be true.

It will say in the same document, line 453, so much so that works actually are evil.

Good works are actually evil in Luther's perspective.

This is a quote he gives a little bit later.

The Christian who is consecrated by his faith does good works, but the works do not make him holier or more Christian.

For that is the work of faith alone.

If a man were not first a believer and a Christian, all his works would amount to nothing and would be truly wicked.

Now I want to highlight this idea because it's not accidental to Luther.

He says it repeatedly.

Good works lead you to be wicked.

Why?

One of the great debates as Giles of Iturbo is renewing the Augustinian order, there's a sense of the orders need to go back to a stricter rule and that they have to go back from Sometimes they were living too comfortably, eating too well, not working, not praying, not doing discipline.

And so there's this call for religious orders to go back to the original fervor of the order.

This is happening amongst the Franciscans, happening so slowly that the Capuchins order is founded to renew the Franciscans.

This is happening with the Carmelites, like I mentioned, with what Teresa of Avila is going to be doing and others.

But Giles of Viterbo is the first to lead this In a significant way amongst one of the conventional orders, and he's doing it with the Augustinians, a debate breaks out amongst different monasteries about how good that monastery is at living and going back to the original rule.

Luther's monastery is critiqued by other monasteries for being too lax.

Luther is delegated to represent his monastery to argue to the order that they're not being too strict.

And what does Luther do?

And this is before 1517. Luther argues that the other monks are being Pharisees.

You ever hear that term?

Yeah.

That they're being Pharisees and self-righteous, and that they're concerned with outward works, but all that matters is inward and the heart.

This dialectic of the inward heart and the outward works is something that shapes Luther in the debate that's happening in the reform question of the Augustinians before the split, before even 1517. And I want to show you Luther doesn't publish anything at this time, before the break, except for his lecture notes, which are put later on the Psalms.

There might be his lecture notes on Galatians, which is questionable how that gets redacted, but I'm not enough of a Lutheran scholar to tell you if that's legit.

But I will tell you this.

Here's his commentary regarding Paul's understanding of anthropology that I think affects him deeply on this.

In other words, I want to show you that for Luther, he's formed by the sense that the inward man comes to faith, that the soul and the spirit have faith, but the outward body is about outward works.

And he's going to separate the soul from the body, and therefore faith from good works.

And this is going to be not just a dialectic, but it's going to be a dualism that controls Luther's anthropology.

And that's important because if you really want to...

when someone constructs a theological worldview, look at their anthropology.

And what do I mean by anthropology?

The understanding of the human person is fundamental to how you see how the world works and how God works.

And so this is what Luther does in his anthropology that will control his understanding of faith alone.

So he says this, Man is composed of a two-fold nature, a spiritual and a bodily nature.

As regards to the spiritual nature, which they named the soul, he is called the spiritual, inward, new man.

Called that by Paul.

He doesn't say that, but that's what he means.

Called that by Paul and the tradition.

As regards to the bodily nature, which they named the flesh, he is called the fleshy, the outward, the old man.

The apostle, That's from 2 Corinthians 4, verse 16 and following.

The result of this diversity is, this is Luther, that in the Scriptures opposing statements are made concerning the same man.

The fact being that in the same man, these two men are opposed to one another.

The flesh...

lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.

So for Luther, his idea that good works happens in the body, which is the flesh, but there's no good in the flesh for Luther.

And therefore, the more works you build up, even good works, end up in wickedness because the body and the outward man don't matter at all.

All that matters is the inward man and the spirit and the soul.

And so what he's going to do by saying that you have the soul versus the body, he's going to say that faith operates in the realm of the soul and works operates in the flesh and in that body, the old man.

Now the problem with this is that he's created this great dichotomy in the human person, but he's misreading St. Paul's anthropology.

And I want to take us to, in a short way, So a couple passages in Paul that bear this out.

So the key passage is going to be in Romans 6 and 7 and 8. And this is dangerous because this alone is at least an hour lecture.

So I'm trying to compress this in short order.

But let me give you a brief outline of the key argument in Romans.

In Romans chapter 5, there's two halves to Romans 5. In the first half is Adam.

Therefore sin came into the world through one man.

Verse 12 of Romans 5. That's the problem.

And then through sin, death.

But there's a solution.

Verse 15 of chapter 5. But the free gift is not like the trespass.

And he's going to talk about the free gift is the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, has abounded for many.

So Christ brings a free gift, which is grace, and the one man, Adam, brings sin.

So you've got Adam versus the new Adam, Old Adam, New Adam, Jesus versus Adam.

Then in chapter 6, he talks about baptism.

That in baptism, we die to the old man, Adam, and we are born anew to the new man, Jesus, in baptism.

So baptism is the fork in the road.

That's where you leave the old Adam and you take on the new Adam.

Now that's important in Romans 6, but then when you read Romans chapter 7, he is going to, in Romans chapter 7 and 8, In Romans 7, he's going back to if you are in sin and if you're in the old Adam, you're in captivity and slavery.

And then in Romans 8, if, however, you've been baptized and you're following Christ and you're led by the Spirit of God, you're in freedom.

So the metaphor Paul plays on here is slavery and freedom.

Think of Luther's document here on Christian liberty.

He's taking the Pauline idea of freedom.

But for Paul, The metaphor of slavery is sin creates slavery.

And Paul, of course, is building on a biblical metaphor.

Egyptian slavery.

Israel and Egypt bondage to the Egyptians.

And then they cross through the Red Sea and they get liberated from Egyptian bondage.

And crossing the Red Sea is what Paul says in Romans, in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, is baptism, which frees us from bondage.

So Paul who talks about that in 1 Corinthians 10 is thinking about that here in Romans 6, 7, and 8. So in Romans 6, we get out of bondage to sin by baptism because we die to the old man.

In Romans 7, he says, well, what does slavery to sin look like?

And so he goes into Romans 7 describing what bondage to sin looks like.

And then in Romans 8, he contrasts what bondage to sin and being in nature without baptism and without grace in the Adam And so Romans 8 is how we're liberated by the Spirit and by baptism.

So Romans 7 is old man, Romans 8 is new man.

Notice that there's a dialectic in Paul.

Not a dualism, but a dialectic.

Romans 5, Adam versus Jesus.

Romans 6, baptism.

You die to the old Adam, and if you sin again, you're going to be a slave to sin, and you're going to be in the Adam again.

But in Romans 6, if you follow the law, And you're led by the Spirit, you could be a slave of righteousness and do what's righteous and good.

So Paul's talking about baptism frees us.

So again, there's this dualism.

Old Adam you die to, new Adam you rise to in baptism, but if you go back to sin and obey sin, you're going to be back in Adam.

So for Paul, the metaphor is you're under Adam or you're under Christ, depending on who you're obeying.

And baptism gets you out of Adam into Christ.

But sin can take you back to Adam.

Now, in Romans 7, it's life in Adam.

Romans 8 is life in Christ.

Now, that's important because he ends Romans 7 by saying, look, I can know what's right, but I end up doing what's wrong.

But I see, as he says in Romans 7, verse 23, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.

Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, So then I by myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

And the flesh for Paul is sarx, oftentimes means the flesh, unredeemed by Christ, living under the realm of sin.

But the flesh can be redeemed.

And that's why he moves into chapter 8 by saying, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free "...from the law of sin and death.

For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do, sinning His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.

He condemned sin of the flesh in order that the just requirements of the law might be fulfilled..."

In who?

Not in Christ.

That's what you would expect.

In us, is what Paul says.

"...in order that the just requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us, And then he goes on, Now, in chapter 7, sin indwells, But in chapter 8, the Spirit indwells.

And that word for indwelling is the idea of the Holy Spirit in the tabernacle, in the tent of meeting, in the temple.

And so what his contrast is, is that when we were dominated by sin, sin indwelled in our bodies, and we were powerless to do what was right.

But with the Holy Spirit given to us by Christ, now with the Holy Spirit indwelling in our bodies as temples, we are given the power and the grace to do the law.

Now this is embodied in a very simple move that Luther makes, and I want to go back to the macro picture.

This is like, all right, Tim, I didn't follow that.

All right, go back and read Romans 5 through 8, and maybe you'll get it.

Paul's not easy.

Even Peter says that in Scripture.

Here's what Luther does with the Catechism.

That's a simple move.

There's four pillars to the Catechism, right?

And the first pillar of our Catechism, even in the New Catechism of the Catholic Church, published by St. John Paul II, what's the first pillar?

The Creed.

The second pillar?

Sacraments and Liturgy.

The third pillar?

The Moral Life.

The fourth pillar?

Prayer.

Alright.

Luther keeps all four, but he changes their order, which changes everything.

What does Luther put first?

What pillar does Luther put in the first place?

The moral?

Any other guesses?

Prayer?

Prayer sounds good.

If you're a reformer, that sounds good, like a good answer.

Like, we should pray.

We should be more spiritual.

He puts the moral life first.

He puts the Ten Commandments first.

And you're thinking, wait a minute, Tim, you read all these, Luther hates the law, right?

He does.

But he puts it first so that you experience the law and you despair that you could ever do it.

And then you cry out in faith, which is the second pillar he puts, the creed.

You cry out in faith, and then you're saved, and then you have some sacraments and a little bit of liturgy, and then you pray.

But he never thought that the redeemed man could live the law.

And see, that's the problem.

Now, Catholics aren't Pelagian.

We don't believe that we can do good works and earn our salvation.

We believe that only by the grace of God can we do good works.

But we believe that God's grace is effective to empower and enable us to love and to do good works.

As Paul just said in Romans 8, that the just requirements of the law, so why does Jesus die?

Why does he give us his spirit?

That the just requirements of the law might be accomplished in us.

So that's crucial.

So the point is this.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first pillar is the Creed.

We hear what God does in salvation history and in Scripture, and then we come to believe.

And then that leads us to the sacraments and liturgy, where we take God's saving deeds of the past, are made present through the sacraments and the liturgy, so that we're given grace.

And once we're given grace in the second pillar, now we go to the third pillar, which is the moral life.

And now, by living faith in the Creed and grace in the sacraments and liturgy, I can now live the moral life.

And by living the moral life and following God in the moral life, that leads me to greater intimacy with God and empowers me to have prayer, which is intimacy with God.

So there's a great ordo to the Catechism.

it's brilliant theology.

It's not just a collection.

The order of the Catechism is crucial.

Change the order and you change the faith.

And that's what Luther did.

But notice there's no place for works.

Now what are works?

Luther is famous for using works.

And you've heard probably Protestants say, you Catholics believe in works righteousness, right?

Well, let me give you a couple passages on works in the New Testament and contrast that to Luther's perspective quickly.

Jesus, Matthew 5.16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Notice that good works give glory to God.

I read you a line where Luther said the only way we give glory to God is by faith.

Clearly against Scripture.

Matthew 7.21, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.

And then he tells you A very important conclusion to a very important homily.

Now, the next passage is from Matthew 16, verse 27. For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man according to what he has done.

That's Jesus.

Another one, Revelation 2.23 from Jesus.

I am He who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you as your works deserve.

Later in Revelation 22, verse 12, the final judgment is laid out.

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense to repay everyone according to what he has done.

We're not judged by faith alone, right?

that's going to be important and that will be a crucial thing.

Paul, Romans 2 verse 6, for he will render to every man according to his works.

So the New Testament did a really bad job of saying we were saved by faith alone.

I just want to highlight that.

2 Corinthians 5.10, Paul says, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive good or evil according to what he has done in the body.

Oh, the body does matter.

Now, Paul uses sarx, which is the Greek word for flesh.

He also uses the word soma, which is the Greek word for body.

Soma is oftentimes neutral to positive, whereas sarx oftentimes, but not always, is the idea of human, fallen human nature, under what Augustine will name concupiscence.

Fallen human nature is what Paul means by sarx.

But see, Luther read that we're not redeemed and changed and transformed by the Spirit.

He thought that Romans 7, that Adam in Romans 5 is the condition of every Christian.

But for Paul, there's a transformation that happens by baptism.

We're no longer in Adam.

We're in Christ.

And by the grace of Christ, we could be transformed, and we can do the law.

Luther thought we could never really do the law.

He thought that, because he had this dualism, that we were saved by faith alone, but the body, which he saw was the fallen human flesh, alone, could never be redeemed and animated by God's grace and by God's Spirit, so we can never be led by the Spirit.

But for Paul, that's a total misreading.

Paul's talking about Romans 7 and Romans 5 as life in Adam versus life in Christ.

He's not collapsing these two together, that we're always under Adam, we're under the dominion of Adam and the dominion of Christ together.

No. We're freed from dominion to sin by the Spirit.

And that's part of the joy of the good news.

What's better news?

That we're freed by sin to be able to live the law, or that we can never do the law?

What's better good news?

What's a better gospel?

Right?

Now, the ultimate problem for Luther is he doesn't want humanity to be in the equation of salvation and justification.

For Luther, it's not just that it's faith alone, apart from works.

Ultimately, the other Great cry that Luther has is that we're saved by grace alone.

Sola gratia.

Grace alone.

Grace alone versus what?

What's grace pitted against?

What do you think?

You could say nature.

It's not sin.

It's not just works.

For Luther, faith is against works.

So why dig down even deeper?

Grace.

What's grace?

So you have faith versus works.

You have sola scriptura, scripture against what?

Tradition, the church.

So again, Luther sets up these opposing dichotomies, this dialectic.

And so to understand them, what's grace against?

Well, what is grace?

Let me put it this way.

Who is grace?

God, the Holy Spirit, right.

Caris, grace, is the gift of God.

So grace, and so what's opposed to grace then?

If it's God, what's the opposite of sola gratia?

Sola grace means what?

It's only about God versus who?

Not the devil.

Against us.

Humanity.

In other words, it's about what God does 100%. It's not about us.

And Calvin will get this with great clarity, and that's why he's going to teach with predestination.

the idea that we're saved and justified, and God, it's all God, and it has nothing to do with what we do.

What you do has nothing to do with salvation or justification.

It's all God.

So the motive is, in a sense, give God all the glory, right?

But this goes against the economy of salvation, how God works in history and in salvation.

The Scripture is divine authorship and human authorship.

The Incarnation.

Jesus is 100% divine.

And what percentage human?

100%. Not 50-50. That was thrown out.

That was bad.

Right?

And then some people say, well, if he's 100% divine, he's 0% human.

And then some people say, well, if he's 100% human, he's got to be 0% divine.

The mystery of the hypostatic union is that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.

That's the mystery of Scripture.

That's the mystery That's the mystery of Christianity and the sacramental economy, but it's also the mystery of justification.

It's 100% God and it's 100% free will.

God gives us free will.

And what sola gratia, what grace alone denies, is human free will.

But God doesn't save us without us, as Augustine once observed.

God will not save us without us.

He freely gives us the choice to love him or not.

That's scary.

It's a huge weight of responsibility that he gives each one of us, and we can blow it.

But if we call out to him, we don't have to live in anxiety and the borderline despair and depression.

We can walk in trust that God intends our good, and if we cry out to him, he will save us.

Not with assurance of salvation, that we're 100% assured, but with hope.

And so that's going to be very important.

And so part of what Paul will say, and there's so many passages here I wanted to give.

Part of what Paul will say at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15, verse 1 through 2, he says, Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, provided you hold it fast.

Unless you believed in vain.

So Paul believes that you can have a faith that ends up being in vain if you don't hold it fast, if you're not faithful to that which you believe and to whom you believe.

He says this earlier in 1 Corinthians 13. What does he mean by this?

He says, If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and have all faith, So as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Paul did not believe we are saved by faith alone.

Now, Luther will add the word alone in that famous passage in Romans chapter 3, and then when Luther was challenged immediately by the Catholics, Paul didn't say alone, and Luther said that's what he meant.

But there's some countervailing quotations in many other books.

But just within, we don't have to go to James.

Of course, James is obviously explicit that we're not saved by works alone, but by faith.

And the importance of faith and works.

But the significant thing, this runs throughout Paul, but I could read, oh gosh, so many more passages.

You know, in Philippians 2.12, Therefore, my beloved, so now not only in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation.

See, we're not Pelagian that we think we can pour ourselves up our own moral bootstraps, but we believe that God's grace is effective in the human heart and transformative.

And that by grace, we can do, we can love, and we can be faithful to the law and good works.

And that's so crucial to understand.

Now, what happens After Luther is going to argue faith alone, is there going to be a Catholic reaction to it?

And I want to just pull out two slight themes.

One is from Charles Borromeo.

He is going to take on this idea of faith alone.

And what happens, and I first encountered this just as an example, and Charles Borromeo was the Cardinal of Milan.

And he had an important role in the renewal of Rome and in the Later papacy.

But I want to highlight this.

He has a titular church in Rome that was his church that he was in charge of.

His cardinals all are assigned a church in Rome.

And his was Santa Preseda, which is one of my favorite churches in Rome.

It's a treasure.

It's a great, great church.

It was renewed by Pope Paschal I in 822. And it's just a phenomenal church.

But he had that church.

And in his chapel, he put In one of the side chapels, the four cardinal virtues on all corners.

And this became something of counter-reformation chapels and churches, where they would put the four cardinal virtues on the four corners of a chapel to remind everyone what Peter says in 2 Peter 1, verse 5, where Peter says that we are called, in verse 4, he says, we are called to be partakers of the divine nature.

This is what grace does.

It divinizes us.

we are sharing in God's grace in life.

And then, given that we're called to partake of the divine nature by the gift of Christ, he says in 2 Peter 1.5, therefore make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue.

So there's Peter saying make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue.

And then by the time he gets to verse 8, he says this will keep you from being ineffectual and unfruitful in your service of Jesus Christ our Lord.

So to be fruitful and effectual, we have to supplement our faith with virtue, with good deeds, with good works.

Well, Charles Borromeo really starts to put these cardinal virtues up in his side chapel.

Then other chapels do this in these kind of Reformation churches.

Many of them have that to remind the faithful of the importance of good works, to give honor and love to Christ.

Now, one of the things that Luther ends up doing that will be Significant in the development of the West and amongst Protestant nations is that he wants to drain the swamp of the idea of you have to do good works.

And so one of the first things he does, he says we should take a tax, the government should tax, to instead of having people give alms to take care of the poor, the government should do a tax to take care of the poor.

And they do that.

And they start to, so all these governments start to add taxes to take care of hospitals and the poor.

Calvin will do this in Geneva.

This will be done everywhere else.

And so it starts to catch.

And so even a Spanish Catholic king tries to do this, Philip II. So he offers up, he proposes that they do it at a tax in Spain so that rather than having, and before that, by the way, all the hospitals and all the works of charity had confraternities.

So you have several hundred people who belong to this hospital and all those people would do prayers and they would give their alms and give financial support to support that hospital or to support whatever good work, support that homeless shelter.

So that's what they would do.

They would have all these, there was thousands of confraternities with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of members who supported all these good works.

So when Philip II proposed this, there was riots.

And the people rose up and said, how dare you take away our good works and our free merit by imposing a tax on us to take care of the poor and almsgiving, and we lose the freedom of doing this of our own free will and accruing good works and good merit.

And by the way, the beautiful thing about the confraternities is it wasn't public care of the poor.

It was people like St. Catherine of Genoa who started a confraternity to take care of people in hospitals, or people like St. Philip Neri, the people who supported the hospital actually volunteered and got to know and care for them.

And so the idea was, you know, these ideas, I guess what I want to say, about good works has huge implications.

They start to trickle down into how society and the government is structured.

And I'll leave it to you how that gets applied.

In many other ways, but it's a fascinating, this consequence with good works and the idea that you don't need a good works gets this idea that there's a social welfare system, that you don't have to do anything to ultimately, where it gets pushed by liberal Christianity, is you don't have to do anything to get into heaven.

Everybody's saved at the end of the day if you don't have to do good works.

And of course that's stretching what Luther thought and taught, but it's certainly the outcome You take that down and you can see how if you throw out the equation of good works, then there's no judgment.

There's no accountability.

And there's no motivation to do good.

And that's a great loss for the Christian faithful.

And there's many scriptural passages that give motivation and the idea of reward for taking care of the poor.

And that's what's lost by Luther.

And if you look at The Catholic nations, the charitable works for the poor, hospitals, homeless shelters, they're legion.

They're all over because people are motivated by the Scriptures.

And of course, I'd end with one passage of Jesus, then we can take questions and wine, which is always a good thing.

That is the wine, I'm sure.

In chapter 25, verse 31, When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, Notice that salvation is always inheritance.

You have to be a child of God in good standing, which is what good works and loves names, to get the inheritance.

But you don't earn an inheritance.

You're given an inheritance.

But if you're not a child of good standing, you don't get the inheritance.

Think of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son.

This my son was dead, but now he's alive because he's reconciled.

But he was out of the family.

He was out of the inheritance.

Then Jesus goes on, For I was hungry, and you gave me food.

I was thirsty, and you gave me drink.

I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.

I was naked, and you clothed me.

I was sick, and you visited me.

I was a prisoner, and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?

And I wouldn't do that.

I'd be like, yes, I'm in.

But the righteous are radically honest.

I've got a long way to go.

And then, of course, Jesus says, whenever you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it unto me.

Now, notice, this is Jesus telling us what's on the final exam.

And it's about the difference between the sheep and the goats is by what they did and did not do.

It's not by what they believed and didn't believe.

I wish it was that easy.

if it was just about what you understand and what you believe, great!

Salvation is by getting a doctorate or a master's in theology and just believing.

But that's not enough.

That's not sufficient.

So here we see that love embraced.

And here's where I want to get to the point.

What is works?

It's not works righteousness.

What does Jesus mean by good works?

He means love.

He means love.

And at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, He said, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works.

And that metaphor of light comes back at the end of the Gospel, right before this passage in Matthew 25, where he says there's five foolish versions and five wise.

And the five wise have their lamps, what?

Lit.

And what does it mean for the lamps to be lit?

That means that the oil is good works and there's a fire, but it's a metaphor for love.

Let them see your good works that they may shine before all and give glory.

So what happens is the brides who have love, their lamps lit, get the bridegroom, Christ.

The five foolish virgins are closed out because their lamps have burned out.

In other words, they don't have love.

And you only get the bridegroom if you have love.

If your lamp is lit.

To receive the bridegroom and to be welcomed into the eternal wedding feast, you have to have love.

And works is a term, but works is not this extrinsic thing.

Works names charity and love.

The good deeds were called to do out of love.

Love of neighbor, love of God.

And that's vitally important.

And if we want to be invited into the wedding, the heavenly wedding banquet, we have to love.

And so that's vital.

So I'll conclude there with a glory be, and then I think we'll have a little bit of time for question and answer.

All right, let's just pray.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end.

Amen.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.