The Reformation Explosion

The Reformation still matters because the church is still cosplaying as the bomb squad.

Anonymous, “Martin Luther in the Circle of Reformers”

A version of this article originally appeared on 1517.

The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s has been likened to many things, perhaps my favorite being Robert F. Capon’s witty explanation that the movement only emerged after some theologians got staggeringly drunk after discovering “a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, 200-proof grace.”¹ I like that metaphor because I’m a Baptist and I don’t drink alcohol. The analogy is striking, though, especially once you imagine Luther and Calvin and all the rest getting drunk on the Word and the Spirit (Eph. 5:18), whose ministry to the saints is preoccupied with proclaiming the work of Christ for them. It tracks, then, that the reformers would be known for their enthusiastic confession of and fixation on solus Christus.

Another portrait of those five-hundred-year-old events that no theologian I know has been able to wring dry is offered by the late American Lutheran theologian Gerhard O. Forde, who compares it to a nuclear explosion. I’m not sure if he’s the first to draw such a parallel, but the proverbial bomb going off in the narthex of Rome as the reformers challenge the curia and champion the sufficiency of grace and faith alone is an analogy that almost writes itself. There’s no un-detonating the incendiary device that is the rediscovered gospel of unadulterated grace, a fact that is evident by the veritable firestorm that followed Luther as his disputations effectively went viral across the European continent. Even if Luther had been silenced early on, I am of the opinion that there was no re-corking that “bottle of pure distillate of Scripture” that he cracked open, to return to Capon for a second.²

But here’s the point: that’s what the church has been trying to do ever since. If you’re among the gallery of those who wonder why I and several others whom I consider real friends are so absorbed by the events of the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, it’s because what demanded reform then still does today. Both institutionally and personally, grace that’s free is all too often dubiously received. The concept of unmerited and unlimited favor through the Lord’s Christ is just too good to be true, and the church hasn’t always diminished that thought either. In fact, as Forde points out, the church is constantly squabbling with the allure of bringing grace under its control, which, as he says, does nothing but “dampen the explosion.” Here’s how Forde put it:

The constant temptation of the church seems to be to dampen the explosion, attempt to bring it under control, make it ‘safe’ according to our timorous and cautious estimate of things. To use an image from atomic physics, we are always putting the rods into the reactor to bring it under control and render it useful for our own particular ends. When the explosion that gave us the Reformation has been so dampened and brought under control, it is not strange to find ourselves hundred of years later wondering if perhaps it wasn’t just a minor affair after all, localized in time and space, parochial in its application, or perhaps even something of a ‘dud.’³

If you’re left questioning the ongoing relevance of the Reformation, it might just be that you’ve been given a gospel that’s been tempered by the law. The rods of moralism, performancism, ritualism, and the like have been put into the reactor of grace, foiling the explosion of regeneration with which the word of the gospel is charged. “Faith itself has been taken captive by legalism,” Forde continues. “The price is so inflated that no one can afford it anymore. In the face of the qualifications of such faith, the onslaughts of legalism and moralism, the explosion is dampened, tamed, and lost.”⁴ Churches are enamored with the notion that they can play the role of evangelical bomb squad because, at least, they can then monitor the behavior and progress of their members.

This, in my mind, is the severest pitfall into which the church’s pastors and leaders can stumble — namely, the eagerness with which they insert themselves into the equation of salvation by grace through faith. We are all too quick to assume the mantle of our peers’ sin-managers and sanctification supervisors, forgetting the fact that God has already appointed an infinitely more qualified person for that function, the Holy Spirit. But, like the Galatians, the church is still duped into believing the foolish proposition that even though one’s life of faith was “begun by the Spirit,” it is up to them and their flesh to perfect it (Gal. 3:3). The fact of the matter is, we just don’t trust the Spirit of God to make sure the Word of God never returns void. Somewhere along the way, we consider it necessary to step in and help God along. Forde says it this way:

The mistake is to think that we can remedy the charge of ‘cheap grace’ by making it expensive, by inflating the rhetoric, piling up the adverbs, reimposing the law, until the enterprise takes on the aspect of a great balloon which rises on the strength of its own hot air! Death and resurrection as a real event, however, proposes quite a different way.⁵

This, in my mind, is why the Reformation remains so trenchant for the church, even five centuries later. The Protestant milieu was pervaded with the announcement that God and God alone is the active agent in the salvation of sinners. “The emphasis of the Reformers,” Carl R. Trueman once said, “was always much more upon the identity and action of God than upon human experience of him.”⁶ Indeed, it was, is, and always has been the activity of God through his Word and Spirit that has defined and sustained the church through the ages. Therefore, as long as the church keeps its hands on the control rods, the need for Reformation endures. As Forde reminds us, “The explosive character of the Reformation’s confessional message can come to light once again if the death-life language is recovered and restored to its proper place.”⁷ Indeed, the good news is that God’s word of grace will continue to erupt into new life because God himself is continually striking the match, and no amount of ecclesiastical hedging can snuff that fire out.

Happy Reformation Day, my friends!

1. Robert F. Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 109.

2. Capon, 109.

3. Gerhard O. Forde, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1991), 2.

4. Forde, 10.

5. Forde, 17.

6. Carl R. Trueman, Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2000), 22.

7. Forde, 3.