MAIN REFORMATION MOVEMENT SOLA SCRIPTURE The reformation, pushing aside the traditions and ultimate authority over scripture which the Roman Church insisted upon, held up the Bible as the only foundation for religious faith. If they had adhered to this principle, the papacy would have been completely overthrown. But they stumbled on this issue in a great and suicidal way and as we will see, it gave the papacy the footholds to make a grand, and in the end times, almost complete comeback. The first mistake was in being selective in scriptural interpretation. Luther chose to be selective in his Biblical beliefs. His bold depreciation of James is one example. He also declared that "Moses is no concern of ours." And in the preference to his first edition of the New Testament he wrote of Revelation, "There is too much lacking in this book to call it apostolic or prophetic." This position showed up in the complete confusion on end time events among Protestants and opened them up to the deceptions of the Jesuit counter reformation. LAW AND GRACE The selective interpretation of scripture also led to Luther's tendency to separate justification from sanctification. Luther tended to see the law as merely a tool by which people see their inability to do the will of God and therefore, the sinner throws himself on the mercy of God after which the law, not even the ten commandments, is no longer needed. The Christian does good works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God. Luther's gospel focused primarily on justification. THE EUCHARIST Catholics believe the bread and wine in the Eucharistic service actually turn into the body and blood of Christ and the priest created and reenacted the sacrifice of Christ. The emblems then became filled with mystical power to infuse grace for meritorious works into the receiver. At first Luther spoke quite strongly against this unbiblical doctrine. Yet he continued the service of mass, simply modifying it somewhat. Then, in his zeal to stop the mob action of the fanatics, he swung right back into Catholism by turning back the reform in this area; restoring the Latin mass with its elevation of the host, condemned giving the emblems into the hands of the participants, and reinforced the rules of fasting before Communion! BAPTISM The spiritual significance of baptism seems to have totally escaped many of the reformers. The concept of the carnal nature dying with Christ and the person being raised to newness of life in Christ was not seen. Luther continued to baptize babies on the basis of their "sleeping faith". This is one of the reformers blackest marks! On April 23, 1529 the Catholic and Protestant Princes gathered at the second Diet of Speyer and one of their decrees was: "every Anabaptist and rebapitized man and woman of the age of reason shall be condemned and brought from natural life into death by fire, sword, and the like, according to the person, without proceeding by the inquisition of the spiritual judges." Speaking for Luther and himself, Melanchthon, making no distinction between the quiet reformers who believed in baptism and the radicals who had used mob action (peasant's revolt)to war against papal oppression, wrote (February, 1530) "The government is under obligation to kill them:" A year later, Luther himself wrote: "I approve, ...although it is terrible to view." Here we have a classic example where the lawless deeds of some is used to persecute the true, honest believers in Biblical truth. And the mainline Reformers sided with the Papal position. Proper procedure would have been to punish those individuals who instigated the violence, but instead they condemned truth and persecuted those who followed it. Luckily not all Protestant princes followed the decree. Prince Philip of Hesse, when urged to do so, said, "We cannot find it in our conscience to judge someone with the sword for his faith, where we have no other adequate evidence of an uprising." STATE OF THE DEAD The Catholic Church teaches the immortality of the soul, complete with the soul going to hell, purgatory and heaven. In his early years Luther frequently referred to the "sleep" of the dead. He asserted that the immortality of the soul was only a papal doctrine to "make it possible for them to hold fast to human dreams and doctrines of devils." However, as the doctrine of the sleep of the dead was accepted by the " whole Bible only" reformers, who also believed in baptism, etc., Luther began to say less and less about it. It was never included in his catechism or in his confession of faith. After Luther's death the truth on the state of the dead continued to be suppressed and the papal traditions upheld. THE SABBATH Luther opposed the Sabbath, calling it legalistic. He failed to see the spiritual value of the full truth in the Biblical Sabbath. He was however perceptive enough to point out that Sunday was not the Biblical Sabbath, Saturday was. A Protestant leader named Schwenckfeld, was quite impressed with Gait's thorough Biblical research on the Sabbath, but countered it by spiritualizing away Sabbath. He wrote the Biblical admonitions should not be taken literal but all one does is "resting from sin is the true spiritual Sabbath." To which the Sabbath believers responded that he had an "extreme mystic holy day theory." Luther, on hearing of the Sabbath keeping churches springing up, declared. "A foolish group of people who call themselves Sabbatarians." By 1529 reports of people being martyred in reference to Sabbath keeping begin to show up. In France, Barabara of Thiers was executed because "God commanded us to rest on the seventh day." So once again, Biblical truth was uncovered but suppressed while the Papal tradition was maintained in it's place.		THE FAITHFUL REFORMATION SOLA SCRIPTURE The Bible, not tradition, was the watchword. The whole Bible was regarded as God's holy Word. Andreas Karlstadt, contemporary and co-reformer with Luther declared: "God's Word is a fountain out of which the Divine Spirit flows into the believers...we believe the Biblical books because the Holy Spirit spoke them to the church." Karlstadt wrote: "I am grieve by the bold depreciation of James." As to the Revelation, it was the Anabaptists who, with diligent and prayerful study discovered many truths of the Advent hope, long suppressed by all churches. It was the firm adherence to the Bible in opposition to the traditions of the papacy which caused these faithful believers to suffer, not only the wrath of the papacy, but also the wrath of the Protestants. Yet if their stand on the Bible had been followed the Papacy would never have gained the victories over Protestantism which have been gained. LAW AND GRACE Karlstadt also emphasized the importance of justification by faith and pointed out that good works are never to be seen as "merits". But he pointed out to Luther that throwing out the moral law was contrary to scriptural teaching. He strongly asserted that the moral law was still the divine standard by which the obedience of grace is demonstrated in the life. Do we then abolish the law? No! We become "lovers and doers of the law." Karlstadt stressed that "the full gospel of Christ" must include not only justification by faith but also sanctification, or a "new supernatural life," lived in harmony with the commandments of God, as the forgiven sinner gives himself to Christ in complete self-surrender and total commitment. THE LORD'S SUPPER Karlstadt replaced the mass with the communion service. He again offered the cup with the bread and emphasized that this was a memorial service of Christ's death. He officiated without the Eucharistic vestments, wearing a plain gown. He did not elevate the host and made no reference to this being a reenacted sacrifice. It was Karlstadt who reintroduced the Lord's Supper as Jesus gave it to His disciples. (Note: Karlstadt and his followers were totally against violent measures to implement changes. They refused to participate in the peasant's revolt, etc. Yet, as we will see, they were constantly lumped with, and condemned, with the people who sought reform by violence, rather than the Spirit of God. This was just another of the enemies tactics to cause the reformation to flounder and maintain as much of the false doctrines as possible) BAPTISM Karlstadt saw baptism, not as a ticket to heaven, but as a public confession of commitment to Christ, and an acknowledgment that the old way of life was forsaken and a new way entered upon. "He who wants to receive baptism properly...must repent, forsake the old life, and take up a new life," he wrote. This is sola scripture! Infant baptism came from Catholic tradition not Biblical authority. "Repent, and be baptized." (Acts 2:38) the Bible says. "Know you not, that as you are baptized into Jesus Christ you are baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we also should walk in newness of life!" (Romans 6:3-6) Jesus set the example by being baptized by John in the river Jordan. These reformers instituted the dedication of children after the example of Jesus. This service was begun by Hubmaier in Switzerland. The ordinance of foot washing was also rediscovered by several of them. Interestingly, the mainline reformers renounced their belief on baptism, not with the Bible, for they had no basis for that, but because of "disruption to the state." For the honest Christian, to be baptized into Christ was a solemn decision indeed, not to be taken lightly, for many were forced to seal their decision with their lives. STATE OF THE DEAD The doctrine of the "sleep" of the dead was taken up strongly by these reformers who based their belief on a thorough knowledge of the subject from the scriptures. THE SABBATH Karlstadt saw the moral law as the continuing standard of the Christian life, but at first he excluded the Sabbath command. As he continued to study, he realized that God did not place the command in the middle of the Decalogue by mistake. So he began to advocate Sabbath keeping. But he did not associate it with the 7th day. Luther condemned the whole idea as legalism but pointed out that to be consistent, Karlstadt would have to keep Saturday. Some of Karlstadt's followers took Luther's words seriously and searched the scriptures to see if these things were so. Oswald Glait, about 1529, became the first to point out that the true Sabbath was the "seventh" day. Glait pointed out that the moral law of the Decalogue was as binding on Christians under the new covenant as it had been in the Old. "Either the Sabbath must be kept," he argued, "or all the other nine commandments must also be rejected." He maintained that the ceremonial law was the shadow that passed away, but God's moral law stands firm. "Sunday," he said, "is the pope's invention," and the abrogation of the Sabbath is none other than "the devil's work." Oswald Glait can be classified as the first Seventh-day Adventist, for his arguments on the Sabbath sound surprisingly like those of any Seventh-day Adventist. And he also believed in the coming of Christ before the 1000 year millennium. Others took up the message and Sabbath keeping churches sprung up in Moravia, Bohemia and spread to other European countries. The Seventh-day Baptists are direct descendants of this movement.