God by his Spirit continues to work in the same way today. The Lord blesses the same gospel, and the same ordinary preachers who trust the authority of his Word and the necessity of the Holy Spirit to bring conviction and illumination.

One danger of being familiar with history is just that. It becomes familiar to us. Or so we think. Our familiarity with the facts, the cause-effect relationships, and the narrative may keep us from actually seeing what happened, or why what took place matters for us. The narrative of the Protestant Reformation serves as a case in point. Martin Luther (1483–1546) simply read the Bible, rediscovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide), and preached the gospel. And in the process, he and later Reformers like John Calvin (1509–64) turned the world upside down. [1] Right?

Not so fast, argues Brad Gregory. Gregory, a highly trained Reformation historian, argues that the Reformation unbound the tightly-knit-together world of the Thomistic synthesis between faith and reason and the Catholic conception of Christendom in which secular and religious cohered closely together. Unknowingly, Luther unleashed a torrent that swelled into the modern world with all its post-Enlightenment problems.

In other words, the Protestant reformers unwittingly caused modernity. How? Most fundamentally by turning away from the Catholic church’s definition of dogma to the view that the Bible, not the church, determined the truth. Sola scriptura caused the problems the West has faced in modernity. [2]

Luther on Preaching and Prayer

When Luther and Calvin, though, described what led to the earth-shattering transformations of their days, with one voice they declared the recovery of the gospel and the clear preaching of that gospel which caused people to come out of spiritual darkness into light. Sola fide flowed from sola scriptura.

Luther struggled for months (or longer!) to understand how “the righteousness of God” (which he thought must refer to God’s retributive justice) could be “good news” in Romans 1:16–17. After finally seeing that God graciously imputed Christ’s righteousness to his people, [3] Luther described the doctrine of justification by faith alone as “the summary of all Christian doctrine” and “the article by which the church stands or falls.” [4] In another place he observed, “Nothing in this article [of justification] can be given up or compromised, even if heaven and earth and things temporal should be destroyed … On this article rests all that we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world.” [5]

Luther argued that the tide of the Reformation swept forward on the preaching of the Word of God alone: “I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer . . . the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.” [6]

There you have it. The Word did it all.

In order for the church to gather as the people of God, there must be both the preaching of the Word of God and prayer, Luther exhorted. “At each service a passage of Scripture is to be read and then interpreted. This is to be followed by the praying of the Psalms and other prayers.” [7] Luther stressed that the Word was the very Word of Christ. And Christ brought the Word to bear with power by means of his Spirit. Although “God uses the ordinary means of the reading and preaching of the Word by ministers of the gospel,” nonetheless the Word “becomes inward when inwardly it is received and believed. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is through the Word that the Holy Spirit works.” [8]

Calvin on Preaching and Prayer

Calvin agreed with Luther the pioneer. He described justification by faith alone as “the main hinge on which religion turns.” [9] And the means of proclaiming this exquisite gospel is the ordinary preaching of the Word of God. Calvin counted it “a singular privilege” that God had consecrated “to himself the mouths and tongues of men in order that his voice may resound in them.” [10] Preaching is essential. In fact, nothing is “more notable or glorious in the church than the ministry of the gospel, since it is the administration of the Spirit and of righteousness and of eternal life.” [11]

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