Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Sunday, July 06, 2008 11:38:57 PM
Without the rediscovery of the Gospel in the Reformation there would be no America with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.
For a thousand years the church had lost the message of the Gospel. Men looked inside themselves for the graces that merited salvation rather than a righteousness wholly outside of themselves. It is to Christ that one must look for salvation, said Dr. Luther, not inside oneself. Once the religious subjectivism of the medieval church was eliminated among the Reformation countries, the energy consumed by desperately seeking and ‘earning’ salvation was turned outward, and a thousand years of intellectual, political, social, economic, and religious stagnation ended.
The Reformation gave us the Scriptures in the common tongues. The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the membership. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.
The death and resurrection of Christ had guaranteed free access of all believers to God. Justification came only by grace through faith, not through baptism, nor through the mass, nor any other sacrament, and certainly not through good works. The Reformation rebirthed the idea of the priesthood of all believers, and it became the foundation for modern political democracy; that is, the equality of all men before God and the law.
The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers destroyed the ecclesiastical monarchy and aristocracy and with them went the theological basis for civil monarchy and aristocracy. We the people under Christ became the foundation of liberty.