The article that I have been dealing with (the June 07 Banner of Truth magazine) is saying that Calvinists are guilty of pride if they think of other theologies as inferior and perhaps non-Christian. However, I have been saying that the Reformers themselves saw Arminianism as a false Gospel, though indeed they referred to it as Semi-Pelagianism. In the Historical Introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will the writers say this: “These things need to be pondered by Protestants to-day. With what right may we call ourselves children of the Reformation? Much modern Protestantism would be neither owned nor even recognized by the pioneer Reformers. The Bondage of the Will fairly sets before us what they believed about the salvation of lost mankind. In the light of it, we are forced to ask whether Protestant Christendom has not tragically sold its birthright between Luther’s day and our own. Has not Protestantism to-day become more Erasmian than Lutheran? Do we not too often try to minimize and gloss over doctrinal differences for the sake of inter-party peace? Are we innocent of the doctrinal indifferentism with which Luther charged Erasmus? Do we still believe that doctrine matters? Or do we now, with Erasmus, prefer a deceptive appearance of unity as of more importance than truth?”
The chilling quote from above was published in 1957. It is now fifty years later and we have to ask if the writers were correct at that point or not. We then have to ask if things are better or worse if they were correct. Without questioning things are worse and perhaps even much worse. What would the Reformers think of modern Protestantism? While we have no way of knowing these things exactly, we can have a good idea from what they wrote and the positions they wrote against. It is my belief that Packer and Johnson were right in 1957 when they say that “modern Protestantism would be neither owned nor even recognized by the pioneer Reformers.”
Why wouldn’t modern Protestantism be recognized by the Reformers? What the authors of that statement were saying, I think, is that the pioneer Reformers would not have recognized modern Protestantism as anything like what they fought for and were willing to die for. I know this is going to sound rude and harsh, but at some point the Emperor needs to be told that he has no clothes on. Modern Protestantism does not have any clothes on that would identify it as the Protestantism that God sent forth during the time of the Reformation. Even more, it appears that what is known as Reformed theology in our day is not what the pioneer Reformers taught. In the modern day Reformed people also have followed the path down and out of the sight of the pioneer Reformers. Some of them hold to the five points of Calvinism, but a type the Reformers might not have recognized. Some of them hold to justification by faith alone, but again a type that the Reformers would not have recognized as what they taught.
What we must say, and perhaps at the top of our literal and literary lungs, is that all presentations of justification by faith alone are not even close to being the same thing. Again, to quote from the Historical Introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the will, “Justification by faith only is a truth that needs interpretation. The principle of sola fide is not rightly understood till it is seen as anchored in the broader principle of sola gratia. What is the source and status of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received, or is it man’s own contribution to salvation? Is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves?” (p. 59). This is a vital point. The quote then goes on to show that if God is not the source of faith and it does not depend totally on God, then that is a return to Reformed Catholicism’s way of salvation in principle.
We have got to get our heads and souls clear of the modern muddled way of looking at this. We are so afraid of offending people that we will not take the time and effort in prayer and the study of Scripture in prayer to notice that the Gospel has virtually been lost in our generation. Let us ask another question that gets to the point of the issue. If true grace is not understood apart from the teaching of the bondage of the will, then what does that say about today’s versions of the doctrine of justification? Again, the pioneer Reformers taught that we cannot understand the teaching of justification alone apart from the biblical understanding of grace alone. Luther was so emphatic in writing that one cannot understand grace apart from understanding man’s bondage of the will in sin. What Luther taught and what modern Arminianism teaches, even if it is under the guise of Reformed theology, are biblically and logically contradictory. Surely it is evident that our nice little teachings on justification by faith alone would have been condemned by the Reformers. After all, they were fighting Rome over the Gospel and the glory of God in the Gospel. It is not just some little difference between two differing camps. These are issues that are utterly vital concerning the Gospel and today some think others are proud for pointing out the differences.
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