There’s a common phrase among theologians that uses classical philosophical categories of causes to describe the Reformation: the authority of the Bible was its “formal cause” while the doctrine of justification was its “material cause.” I think we can get a fuller picture of the Reformation if we add sanctification as the “efficient cause.”

Between the recent Desiring God conference and Kevin DeYoung’s new book, the topic of sanctification has been getting a lot of attention lately. Praise God! If we want to build godly lives in the context of 21st-century civilization, we badly need to recover our Reformation heritage on this topic.

You don’t usually hear about the Reformation in connection with this topic. But the Reformation fought and won critical battles for a right understanding of sanctification. Renewing these triumphs over sin in our own time ought to be core to our identity as evangelicals and inheritors of the legacy from our Reformation forefathers.

These days, we usually identify only two causes with the Reformation: the final authority of the Bible and the doctrine of justification without the works of the law. In fact, when the Reformation first began, it had almost nothing to do with either of those causes. The Reformation began as an argument over sanctification.

Just read the 95 theses of Martin Luther that started it all. (No, seriously, if you’ve never read them, go do it.) It’s all right there in thesis one: The scriptural call to repentance is a call to live our whole lives as disciples of Christ, conforming everything we do to his holiness. Thesis two adds a sharp point by clarifying specifically that the scriptural call to repentance does not refer to the sacrament of penance.

Martin Luther did not write those theses to advance a position in a dry academic disputation. The local archbishop, Albert of Mainz, had taken out a huge loan to pay the Vatican to give him a cardinalship. To pay it off, Albert drove a vicious campaign of indulgence-selling. His agents barnstormed through the German countryside, telling people that the way to be godly is by doing religious works—especially donating to the church.

The people of Wittenberg were being crushed, spiritually and financially, by a legalistic understanding of sanctification. As a parish priest, Luther had to shepherd those people. His heart was breaking for them—just as his heart had been broken years earlier, in the monastery, groaning under the weight of the same spiritual oppression in another form.

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