Series on the Modern Lukewarm Evangelical Church – No. 9
In Part IV we shall look at the fifth (Sardisean) period of the seven periods of history in the Church Age. The Reformation era (1517-1720) is described as similar to the church at Sardis (the dead church) in the first century. In this period the Bible’s doctrines, leadership gifts, and the gifts of the Spirit continued to be substantially ignored, compromised, corrupted, or abandoned altogether.
• Sardis – The dead church (AD 1517-1720). It was representative of the church that is dead or at the point of death even though it still had a minority of godly men and women. The great charge against this church was hypocrisy. It was not what it appeared to be. The ministry was languishing. There was a form of godliness but not the power. This description of the dead church fits both the Roman Catholic Church and the warring factions of Lutheranism and Calvinism in the Protestant Reformation period between 1517 and the late 1600s.
It is interesting if not confusing to most Protestants that the Reformation period is called the dead church by Jesus. We may think this description best fits the Roman Catholic Church after a thousand years of corruption within, and it does fit. However, a close examination of the first two hundred years of Protestantism reveals that it also was not a holy, vibrant church. Although it moved away from many aspects of the corruption in the church, in many ways it was not much different from the Roman church from which it had broken away. Yes, the supreme authority of the Bible was reaffirmed and many man-made traditions of the church were cast off. However, the continued presence of many false doctrines and practices and the reliance on the sword of state to impose Christianity on whole regions and countries were major obstacles. These obstacles prevented an infusion of spiritual life into the partially reformed but dead churches and the cleansing of the cadaverous odor emanating from their forms of godliness.
Martin Luther and John Calvin were the two men most responsible for planting Protestantism in the West and from which its two great branches grew. The writings of these Protestant Reformers and others addressed many of the failings of the Roman church up to that point in history. Luther may have struck the match, but it was Calvin and many other reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli who provided much of the kindling that aided in spreading the flames of Protestantism.
The Reformers readily affirmed their allegiance to “the scriptures alone” as the authority of the church and guide for living the Christian life. However, it was a far more difficult matter to shed centuries of corrupt church doctrines and practices that conflicted with or undermined faithful adherence to the Scriptures. Therefore, the implementation of the reforms in the new Protestant churches often carried with it many of the old Roman Catholic ways of doing the business of church.
Even though there was a general consensus among Protestants that the church’s authority came under the authority of the Bible alone, the various reformers had different ideas on charting the way forward with regard to the finer points of interpreting scriptures as they related to doctrinal matters and the organization and operation of the church. It must be remembered that the Reformers had been deeply immersed in Catholicism, and those doctrines and practices were not quickly, easily, or entirely cast off. It must also be remembered that most priests and the people were exceptionally ignorant of the Bible. The Reform leaders faced the daunting task of both organizing the church and educating the Protestant faithful in their respective countries.
By 1550, the church in the west had divided into three distinct branches: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism (Christianity allied with the state), and Calvinism (theocracy). The branches were similar in that each was a compulsory religion, had strong ties with the state in one way or another, and attempted to use the state to impose a religious monopoly in those states where each had prevailed.[1]
The most distinguishing feature of the Lutheran church was the power given to the state. Luther supported the principle that the state should be above the church. However, Calvinists took the opposite view and denied that the state had any power over the church. To the contrary, Calvin believed the church had power over the state. Both responses were nonbiblical as to God’s design of the roles of church and state in society and the relationship between church and state. The church must let the state bear the sword of state but at the same time admonish the state when it overreaches its proper biblical mandate and role in society.[2]
Luther and Calvin’s continuing affinity for many aspects of Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines and practices is evident in their admiration of Augustine (354-430), considered by many as the greatest teacher in Roman Catholic Church history. One of the Roman church’s false teachings, strongly promoted by Augustine, was the persecution of both the heathen and heretics. The doctrine of persecution was an important practice the Roman Catholic Church used a thousand years after Augustine to severely persecute Protestants during the time of the Reformation.[3] On the one hand, it seems ironic that Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two most important figures of the Reformation era, continued to revere Augustine and his teachings. On the other hand, Augustine’s appeal to both Luther and Calvin may not be surprising given their own extreme persecutions of other Christians and non-Christians.
The years between 1520 and 1562 were a time of bloody martyrdom for the Protestants. But the worst was to come between 1562 and 1648 when Protestants fought for their very survival. In a belated and half-hearted effort to reunite the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestants, Pope Paul III called for a council to meet in the little town of Trent in the mountains of northern Italy to consider reforms within the Catholic Church. The efforts of the Catholics at Trent were an attempt to revitalize the church following the shock of the Reformation and spurred the Roman church’s efforts to stamp out Protestantism. Between 1562 and 1618, the Calvinistic Protestants suffered the greatest martyrdom. In 1618, the Lutherans were also dragged into the conflict with the Catholics. The Catholic-Protestant wars eventually ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia which fixed many of the boundaries of Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism in Europe to the present day.[4]
By the end of the 1600s, the church, beginning at its birth on the day of Pentecost, had traveled on a seemingly incomprehensible and tortuous path through persecution, compromise, corruption, triumphs, defeats, and tragedies. Along the way the Roman Catholic Church had accumulated an enormous amount of wealth, excess doctrinal baggage and false teachings, and a large measure of worldliness. But in spite of the faults and corruption within the corrupt church, the true church’s sustaining life preserver to which it clung, however tenuously, for a millennium and a half was (1) the power of the inerrant truth of the divinely inspired New Testament and its doctrines, (2) the Holy Spirit dwelling within each believer, and (3) the gifts of the Spirit made available to all true believers.
The Church of England did not consider itself Protestant but not fully Catholic because Henry VIII placed himself at the head of the Church of England, not the pope. Therefore, the changes in the church were more political and organizational than religious and doctrinal. As a result, the dissenters’ unrest and desire for freedom from the attacks of the Church of England continued for a long time after the Reformation had run its course and had become settled in other countries. This unrest manifested itself in two ways: complete separation from the Church of England and reform of the Church of England from within.
• Separatists, including the Pilgrims, were those who believed the process of reforming the hopelessly Church of England was not possible. They chose to separate from the church altogether. The Separatists were called Congregationalists or Independents.
• Those members of the Church of England who pushed for a more thoroughly purified church were called Puritans. They objected to the rites, ceremonies, and episcopal form of government of the Church of England; however, they wanted to remain in the church and work for reform from within. Eventually, the Puritan segment of the Church of England believed that it was not possible to reform the mother church in their homeland. Nine years after the Separatist Pilgrims had sailed for America, the Puritans followed and establish a reform-minded outpost of the Church of England at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[5]
In 1620, one hundred and three years after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, (midway through the Sardisean period of church history 1517-1720), a singular event produced a document that was perhaps as important in the revival of New Testament Christianity as Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
It all began as a tiny ship approached the shores of a primitive continent called America. Historian Paul Johnson in his massive A History of the American People called the arrival on December 11, 1620 of an old wine ship at New Plymouth as “…the single most important formative event in early American history.” The Mayflower contained a mixture of thirty-five English Calvinist Christians including some who had lived in exile in Holland to escape religious persecution in England. All were going to America for religious freedom. They were Separatist Puritans who had despaired of reforming the Church of England and its episcopal form of government and heavy influence of Catholic teaching. They were accompanied by sixty-six non-Puritans. The two groups contained forty-one families. Having endured two months of a winter voyage in the turbulent North Atlantic amid the discomforts of a tiny and crowded ship, forty-one heads of households gathered in the main cabin of the ship and signed the Mayflower Compact which pledged them to unity and the provision of a future government.[6]
In the Name of God, Amen…Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country…Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politic, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid….[7] [emphasis added]
This event was not the beginning of the Philadelphian period of church history. However, the monumental influence of the Pilgrims in shaping future generations of Americans made possible the faithful church that ushered in the Philadelphian revival of New Testament Christianity one hundred years later.
The Reformation era was a time of casting off much of the church’s excesses, failures, and worldliness, but it would be a painful and imperfect parting for both Catholic and Protestant churches. Satan used the church’s distractions and disruptions to further his efforts to destroy the church of Jesus Christ during their contentious and painful separation. Satan thrust into the church’s fractures the humanistic dregs of the waning Renaissance of the sixteenth century and the ascending humanism of the era of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the late 1600s and all of the 1700s).[8] Those poisons would loom large in the church’s descent from the Philadelphian period to the Laodicean period beginning in the 1870s.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 288. (paragraph from Evangelical Winter – Restoring New Testament Christianity, p. 45.)
[2] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), pp. 184, 200.
[3] Ibid., pp. 45-46.
[4] Ibid., pp. 244-245.
[5] Ibid., pp. 240-252.
[6] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 28-29.
[7] Henry Steele Commager, ed., “Mayflower Compact,” Documents of American History, Vol. 1 to 1865, (New York, F.S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 15-16.
[8] Larry G. Johnson, Evangelical Winter – Restoring New Testament Christianity, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2016), pp. 43-44.
