Chapter 16: How the Theologians Entrenched Themselves. We must realize that Reformation theology didn't become the dominant theology of non-Catholics because it proved victorious in the free marketplace of ideas. No, it became dominant because it was backed by the strong arm of the state. The theologians of the Reformation and their state churches controlled the translating and printing of the Bible and other Christian works in Protestant countries.
Furthermore, in all these countries, no one was allowed to preach unless he had been licensed by the state. Those who defied the state church were banished, imprisoned, or put to death. Eventually, in Reformation states, nearly all who thought differently than the Reformers were silenced to death, torture, or imprisonment. As Luther declared, "What I say about public preaching by dissenters, I say even more emphatically about private preaching and secret ceremonies. These are not to be tolerated at all.
On peril of body and soul no one is to listen to such a man but report him to his pastor or his ruler." By silencing the kingdom people, the Reformers ensured that their own interpretation of Scripture would be the one that would prevail in the non-Catholic world. They then used three methods to thoroughly entrench their views so they would dominate the non-Catholic world, not only in their day but in all generations to follow. These three methods were: 1) Study Bibles, 2) Doctrinal Textbooks, and 3) Commentaries.
Study Bibles: The Catholic theologians had hindered the way into the kingdom by keeping the Bible in Latin, a language the common people could no longer understand by the Middle Ages. Luther gave the people the Bible in their own language, but he effectively blocked the entrance into the kingdom by trying to control how the people would understand the Scriptures. It would have been bad enough if Luther's only sin had been to deliberately add a word to Scripture to make it fit his theology, as I discussed earlier.
But he did far more. Luther had the audacity to add his own human commentary directly onto the pages of God's Word. Even the Jewish theologians had never been haughty enough to do that. As I've mentioned in these comments, Luther denigrated various books of the Bible that contradicted his new theology. He told the people in his preface to the New Testament what the real gospel was so as to slant their interpretation of the New Testament before they even read the first word of it.
He then disparaged the books of the Bible that revealed his theology to be obviously wrong, saying, "From all this you can now judge all the books and decide among them which are the best: John's Gospel and St. Paul's Epistles, especially; that to the Romans; and St. Peter's First Epistle are the true kernel and marrow of all the books. They ought rightly be the first books, and it would be advisable for every Christian to read them first and most.
John's Gospel is the one, understandable, true, chief gospel, far, far to be preferred to the other three, and placed high above them. So too, the epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter far surpass the other three gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In a word, St. John's Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul's Epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and St.
Peter's First Epistle, are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and good for you to know, even though you were never to see or hear any other book or doctrine. Therefore, St. James's Epistle is really an epistle of straw compared to them, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. Here, Luther surpassed in audacity every theologian who had preceded him.
He said a Christian can know all that is necessary and good about Christ without ever reading the three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Really? Why, these are the very gospels that contain the bulk of Christ's teachings. What an outrageous claim. According to Luther, if you want to learn about the gospel of Jesus, go to Paul. The second-century Christians would have been stunned to hear someone say that. Yet the incredible part of all of this is that Luther got away with it.
If today you asked a typical evangelical Christian what Christianity is all about, he or she will invariably take you to Romans, not to the Sermon on the Mount. In reality, Luther took institutional Christianity one step further from the kingdom of God than had any of the theologians who preceded him. None of them had made Paul the master teacher of Christianity. None of them had placed Paul above Jesus.
Furthermore, it wasn't just in his preface to the New Testament that Luther tried to skew his readers' viewpoints. No, he wrote individual prefaces for each of the Bible books, telling his readers what the writer of that book was really saying, and discrediting the Bible books that contradicted his teaching. Through his prefaces, Luther created a new thing: the Study Bible. It was a hybrid, an admixture of God's Word mingled with man's voice.
Regrettably, when men combined God's Word with human commentary, the human commentary normally influences people more than do the words of God. Unfortunately, most of the Bibles that came out of the Reformation and the century that followed it were Study Bibles: God's Word mixed with man's word. For instance, the Bible that came to dominate the English evangelical world until the King James Version was the Geneva Bible, first printed in 1560.
It was published in Geneva, Switzerland, under the influence of John Calvin by English Protestants. They had fled there to escape the persecution of Queen Mary. The Geneva Bible not only contained prefaces to each Bible book to make sure the reader would understand the Scriptures in the proper sense, but also contained numerous comments in the side margins to further influence and indoctrinate the reader.
From the very beginning, Study Bibles have always worked to obscure the kingdom of God and the teachings of Christ. Sometimes they're subtle, and other times they make a bold frontal attack on the kingdom. The Geneva Bible hid the kingdom of God by telling its readers that Jesus instituted nothing revolutionary with his teachings. According to the Geneva Bible, there is no difference between Christ's moral teachings and the law of Moses.
The Geneva Bible says that Christ's teachings merely clarified matters that the Pharisees had obscured. It also says that Christ is only making clear that obedience to the law of Moses has to begin inside our hearts and cannot be mere external obedience. Other than that, nothing has changed except the ceremonial part of the law. With such comments all throughout the Geneva Bible, the average person would read the New Testament and never even see the kingdom of God and the radical revolution it ignited.
The Geneva Bible continued to be used by evangelicals throughout the English-speaking world until it was finally surpassed in popularity by the King James Version. However, even after the publication of the King James Version, the Geneva Bible remained the Bible of the Puritans, Pilgrims, and English Separatists until the late 17th century. Once the Geneva Bible lost popularity, Study Bibles fell into disuse for a time.
However, they had a major rebirth in the 20th century, and now they have come to dominate the Bible publishing world. Nowadays, we have the Scofield Study Bible, the Ryrie Study Bible, Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible, the Open Bible, a MacArthur Study Bible, and the Zondervan NIV Study Bible, among dozens of others. There are special Study Bibles for women, for teens, for charismatics, and even for children. Today, Christians have come to accept it as a natural thing to add human commentary to the pages of God's Word.
Doctrinal Textbooks. The second method used by the theologians of the Reformation to make certain that their interpretation of Scripture would dominate was to publish books of systematic theology, setting forth what they claimed were the foundational doctrines of Christianity. The most successful of these by far was John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. It is a masterfully written work that ties all the books of Scripture together in a seemingly logical flowing stream.
Unfortunately, most of what Calvin wrote does not constitute the historic Institutes of Christianity any more than did the doctrinal books of Augustine. The Institutions in Calvin's work are simply his novel inventions, but because they are presented in such an understandable, coherent manner, they've had an enormous influence on the Protestant world. Through his Institutes, Calvin presented to the Protestant world a comprehensive theological, moral, ecclesiastical, and civic system.
Regrettably, Calvin's comprehensive system completely undermined Jesus' message of the kingdom. Under Calvin's system, Christians are not supposed to be the defenseless, gentle Christians of the first three centuries. They are not to be the meek children of the kingdom who turn the other cheek and won't even take others to court. No, Calvin taught that God was still dealing with mankind just as he had in Moses' day.
However, according to Calvin, instead of God's covenant being exclusively with one nation, Israel, it now can be with every nation on earth. Every country can be a potential Israel. The 16th-century canton of Geneva was the model for how this should work. According to Calvin, everyone in a nation needs to be brought into the covenant with God, whether they are the elect or not, by being baptized into the covenant as infants. Statewide, infant baptism should be mandatory.
Ideally, a nation should be governed by the elect, just as Israel had ideally been governed by faithful priests, prophets, judges, and kings. It's the responsibility of the government to protect the church, establish, and preserve the true Christian faith, and regulate the lives of its citizens according to God's moral law. As I've mentioned, according to Calvin, God's moral law is still the same law as that found in the Old Testament.
Even the unconverted should be forced to live by the same moral laws as do converted Christians. Essentially then, under Calvin's system, every nation can be in the same position as ancient Israel. If a nation obeys God's laws, properly worships him, and supports the teaching of true doctrine, God will prosper that nation economically and militarily. He will protect them from famines, droughts, and epidemics.
If a nation is experiencing economic decline, military defeats, pestilence, and national disasters, it means that God has a quarrel with that nation and is punishing it. To keep this from happening, according to Calvin, the state and church must work in close partnership. For example, the state must mandate weekly church attendance for everyone.
Furthermore, the local church elders, professors, must closely examine the lives of all who attend their church to make certain all are living closely within the bounds of God's law. Although the only discipline the church can administer is excommunication, God expects the state to punish sinners in order to keep the nation pure and thereby avoid his wrath. The system that Calvin set up was not historic Christianity. Rather, it was essentially Christo-Judaism.
It still had the Mosaic Law without the ceremonies, a church-state combination, and national wars. What could be further from the kingdom of God? How could anyone read the four gospels and so totally miss Jesus' teachings about the kingdom? We can't combine his kingdom with any earthly kingdom, and Jesus made clear, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight so that I should not be delivered to the Jews." John 18:36.
The ordinary uneducated Christians of the first two centuries clearly saw that Christ's teachings made a church-state combination impossible. They also saw that Christians couldn't possibly kill non-Christians any more, let alone kill their fellow citizens of the kingdom. But like the fourth-century theologians, neither Luther nor Calvin ever saw the obvious contradiction between their teachings and those of Jesus. It's just as Paul said it would be. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe?
Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 1 Corinthians 1:20. The most obvious things in the Scriptures are hidden from the wise. As a result, the followers of Calvin didn't hesitate to war against the Catholics. In fact, they didn't hesitate to kill each other when the goals of their respective countries differed. English Calvinists slaughtered both Scottish Calvinists and Dutch Calvinists. Some of them even killed one another in the English Civil War.
Calvin's teachings had completely hidden the kingdom of God from them. Because of the Institutes, Calvin ultimately surpassed Luther as the dominant theologian of the Reformation, at least in English-speaking lands. And his influence on the evangelical world remains colossal to this day. For one thing, Calvin's Institutes are still in print, and they are still read by theologians. More importantly, Calvin spawned numerous copycat works by later generations of theologians.
Although no single doctrinal work has had the same impact as Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, there have been literally thousands of doctrinal textbooks written ever since by each new generation of theologians. Yet few, if any, of these doctrinal textbooks and works of systematic theology teach the simple gospel of the kingdom. The theologians of today still imagine that theology is the essence of Christianity rather than relationship and the fruit it produces.