CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOW THE ERROR OCCURRED
You have probably noticed that I have been consistent in ascribing the error I am talking about to be a result of the teaching of "Protestant" theologians. To be more precise, it is the error of the Protestant Reformation.
Before the Reformation, our union with Christ was not a mystic union, a mystery. In fact, by the fourteenth century, our physical union with Christ, our union with Christ "in the body" was the very foundation upon which all Church authority and doctrine had been erected. When we understand what was required to destroy the idea of physical union with Christ as the foundation of authority among Christians, we will be prepared to understand what God wants us to know about our union with Christ today.
In order to understand the context within which Protestant doctrine is taught today, we must understand the historical context that gave birth to Protestant understanding of the message in the Bible. In other words, Protestants must understand what happened in the Protestant Reformation because we Protestants are literally the children of the Reformation.
We are the way we are because our parents were the way they were.
The Europe of the Middle Ages was a world both very similar and very unlike the world today. It was similar in that the people were people just like you and I; it was unlike our world in that the Church of Jesus Christ literally dominated every aspect of medieval life. Barbara Tuchmann, the author of A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century explains why it is difficult for people of this age to understand the Middle Ages: "Difficulty of empathy, of genuinely entering into the mental and emotional values of the Middle Ages is the final obstacle. The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages."
Later in the same book, Tuchmann details the "omnipresence" of the Church, "Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg 'during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.' It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter. Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy to dislodge....In daily life the Church was comforter, protector, physician. The Virgin and patron saints gave succor in trouble and protection against the evils and enemies that lurked along every man's path...The patron saint was an extra companion through life who healed hurts, soothed distress, and in extremity could make miracles...Above all, the Virgin was the ever-merciful, ever-dependable source of comfort, full of compassion for human frailty, caring nothing for laws and judges, ready to respond to anyone in trouble; amid all the inequities, injuries, and senseless harms, the one never-failing figure...No matter what crime a person has committed, though every man's hand be against him, he is still not cut off from the Virgin...The act of faith through prayer was what counted. It was not justice one received from the Church but forgiveness...More than comfort, the Church gave answers. For nearly a thousand years it had been the central institution that gave meaning and purpose to life in a capricious world...The Church gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create...The Church, not the government, sponsored the care of society's helpless--the indigent and sick, orphan and cripple, the leper, the blind, the idiot--by indoctrinating the laity in the belief that alms bought them merit and a foothold in Heaven. Based on this principle, the impulse of Christian charity was self-serving but effective."
Summarizing her point, Tuchmann concludes, "What the Church offered was salvation, which could be reached only through the rituals of the established Church and by the permission and aid of its ordained priests. No salvation outside the Church was the rule."
It is only when we see the awesome power exercised by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages that we can begin to grasp the true proportions and significance of the revolution historians call the Protestant Reformation. In a world utterly controlled and dominated by an institution that had ruled for nearly a thousand years, entered men and women who utterly destroyed the omnipresence of that institution. Where once the Roman Catholic Church was everywhere, it became here and there, maybe. Such a world-changing event begs to be explained.
The explanation of how the power of the Roman Catholic Church was destroyed is found by examining how the Roman Catholic Church maintained its control over people. Tuchmann defined the Church's controlling mechanism, "What the Church offered was salvation, which could be reached only through the rituals of the established Church and by permission and aid of its ordained priests. No salvation outside the Church was the rule." If the Roman Catholic Church's hold on the people came because people believed salvation could only be obtained through participating in the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, all the Protestant Reformers had to do to destroy the Church's power was convince people that salvation does not depend on partaking of the rituals, the sacraments, offered by the Roman Catholic Church. Which they did. And in so doing led us from error into error.
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Reformers looked at the Roman Catholic Church and realized its hold on the people was utterly dependent on one ritual: Holy communion or the Eucharist. People had been taught by the Catholic Church that, during the celebration of the Mass, people who received the Eucharist entered into union with Christ through eating the wafer. Salvation, which was only available to people in union with Christ, was a product of eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. Since the Eucharist was only available by permission of the priest, salvation depended totally on the relationship of the individual with the priest representing the Roman Catholic Church. Excommunication meant the priest denied the individual access to the wafer and blood. Absence of access to this mechanism of union with Christ meant loss of salvation to the medieval believer. All Protestant Reformers had to do to destroy the power of the Roman Catholic Church was destroy people's belief that access to the wafer and wine was a prerequisite for salvation. Protestant Reformers accomplished this goal be demolishing the doctrine of transubstantiation.
The Church's doctrine of transubstantiation explained exactly how the priest obtained the power to change the wafer and the wine into the body and blood of Jesus. According to Catholic teaching, each Mass is a true sacrifice, in which the risen Christ becomes bodily present in the wafer and wine on the altar as the Victim who is offered anew by the Church to God the Father as expiation for the sins of humanity. The priest who celebrates the Mass is endowed with the power to change the wafer and the wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus. The process through which that change occurs is called the miracle of transubstantiation.
According to Catholic teaching, the priest obtained the power to change the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Jesus from God Himself passed to the priest through a direct transfer of power from the Apostle Peter. In possession of this power, the priest performed the miracle of transubstantiation and those to whom he offered the wafer and wine entered into physical union with Jesus Christ. In this way, salvation was accomplished for those who were allowed admission to Holy Communion. The process through which the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation was passed from priest to priest across the centuries was called Apostolic Succession.
The structuring principle that undergirded every teaching of the Catholic Church and undergirded all the authority exercised by the Catholic Church was the idea of Apostolic Succession. According to Catholic teaching, the first Pope received the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation directly from Peter when Peter transferred that power to the Pope by laying his hands on the Pope. People were taught that the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation was the actual "keys to the kingdom" that Jesus had said he was giving to the Apostle Peter. Apostolic Succession occurred when the first Pope had transferred this power to each priest he ordained, and each priest transferred the power to each succeeding priest and so on across the centuries. By the fourteenth century virtually no one doubted that Apostolic Succession was a fact that explained where priests obtained the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation.
During the fourteenth century events did much to lay the foundation for the destruction of the idea of Apostolic Succession, and with its destruction the entire doctrine of transubstantiation. For the first time in recorded history, two Popes sat on the Judgment Seat of Christ, each Pope claiming the power to pass the keys to the kingdom, and each Pope excommunicating everyone who supported the other Pope. For nearly three generations, the Holy See was divided and as each decade passed it became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for the people of Europe to determine who actually possessed the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation upon which the salvation of the people rested.
In the midst of this historic crisis of authority, a crisis accentuated by the Hundred Years War and the Black Death, people began to search the Scripture to find a way of escape from a hopeless situation. From that search, men like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli emerged, each convinced that Scripture did not support either the idea of transubstantiation or the idea of Apostolic Succession. Instead of seeing salvation to be a product of participation in the sacraments of the Church, the Reformers became convinced that Scripture taught salvation was by faith. Alone. Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide--Scripture Alone and Faith alone--became the battle cry of the Reformation.
Sixteenth century Europe cried out for change. Huge proportions of the population were utterly disgusted with the abuses of the power of the Church and were totally dissuaded by the doctrines taught by the Church. Led by men who clearly understood that faith in our union with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection was all that God required for people to be saved, righteous, justified, forgiven--all that God gives in salvation--the Reformers mercilessly attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation. Since the Reformers could find nothing in Scripture supporting the idea that a priest was to be given the power to change the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the Reformers did everything in their power to exorcise that idea from the minds of the followers of Christ. Since the Reformers saw no alternative explanation in Scripture that explained how Jesus Christ could be physically present in this world, the Reformers obliterated the notion of the physical presence of Jesus in this world. Jesus' presence became a "spiritual" presence, an out of the body presence. The Eucharist became a symbol of the physical presence of Jesus Christ in the world rather than a part of the actual physical presence of Christ Himself.
Unless this brief summary of the context within which the Reformation occurred has led you to see that what we call the Protestant Reformation was a battle to the death between opposing models of salvation, between opposing explanations of how we are saved, nothing that I say can make sense to you. This book is a book about how we are saved. I am now discussing the Protestant Reformation because the Protestant Reformation was a Reformation in people's understanding of how we are saved. Unless I can get you to see the absolutely revolutionary change that occurred during the Protestant Reformation in Christians's understanding of how we are saved, an understanding that obliterated the model of salvation taught for centuries to be the "Biblical" model, you simply cannot see the significance of what I call "the error" I am presently attacking.
People could never have accepted a model of salvation that depended upon Scripture Alone and Faith Alone unless the doctrine of transubstantiation was utterly destroyed. Only through destroying people's faith in the power of the priest to change the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Jesus could the people be delivered from the controlling authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Unless people were led to understand that eating the wafer and drinking the wine had nothing to do with salvation, the Roman Catholic Church would remain omnipresent forever. It is only when this fact is in view that we can understand Protestant Systematic Theology as it has evolved to us today. Protestant Systematic Theology is a vehicle of thought whose shape was designed to accomplish one central goal: to teach people a message from the Bible that allows people to see how salvation can be available to people outside the Roman Catholic Church.
Accomplishing this goal was a matter of life and death for Protestant Reformers. Unless enough people could be convinced to support the Reformers, the Roman Catholic Church would inevitably execute the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. There was safety in numbers.
This was the context within which Protestant Orthodoxy was forged. To fail to see this context is to treat present Protestant Orthodoxy, our present understanding of Scripture, as if it arrived like a new born baby, unsullied by the fires of terror, and rage, and the necessities of survival.
Do I condemn the Reformers? Do I cast aspersion on the purity of their commitment to "rightly divide" the Word of God? Do I paint them as calculating survivors willing to do anything to stay alive? May God grant me the grace to utterly obliterate that thought from your mind! The Reformers wanted people to know Jesus, and the power of His Resurrection; they wanted people to see for themselves the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; they wanted people to be delivered from a mechanical model of salvation that made people keep their eyes locked on this world and its institutions instead of on Jesus where He is seated at the right hand of God in the Heavenlies. Do you think I don't know this! Do you think I don't feel it in the marrow of my bones! The Reformers are my fathers, my doctors, my guides on a long journey down a straight and narrow path toward an eternity in the presence of Almighty God! Before I would desecrate their memory I would never attach another word to paper as long as I live!
But there is no disloyalty, no disobedience, in pointing out the obvious: The Reformers were not perfect. They were men and women like myself, like yourself, people trying to serve God in a world in bondage to the law of sin and death. Prone to error, like myself, they were used by God to accomplish their goal: they delivered the Church from a mechanical model of salvation that prevented the individual from having a vital, personal relationship with the risen Jesus. They replaced the mechanical model of salvation that depended on the individual having access to the wafer and wine with a model of salvation that depended on our faith in the atoning sacrifice of the risen Jesus alone as the vehicle through which salvation was achieved. May God prevent me from ever saying anything that will ever interfere with the model of salvation taught by the Reformers. I believe their model of salvation is exactly what Scripture teaches. The only reason I am writing this book is to suggest that their model of salvation is not perfect. To say this is not to suggest their model of salvation is wrong! It is simply to say the model can be improved, be brought more in harmony with what the Holy Spirit of God would have us understand from Scripture. As God is my witness, I honestly believe that some day I will stand in the presence of the Reformers and they will smile on me. For they will know my heart and they will know it as their heart, the heart of the Reformer committed to seeing Jesus come alive in this world.
But until that day it is certainly possible that those today who cherish the Reformers will view me as their enemy. Why? Because I accuse the Reformers of grievous error. There is simply no more accurate way to say it, more diplomatic perhaps, but not more accurate. I have heard it said that a diplomat is someone who says, "Nice doggy, nice doggy" while at the same time looking around for a stick with which to hit the dog. I am not a diplomat looking to beat the Reformers; I am a man convinced that I see something the Reformers missed, something that God wants you to see.
In their single-minded concentration on breaking the hold the doctrine of transubstantiation had over the people, I think the Reformers simply missed what Paul had said about our "in the body" union with Christ. Since the Reformers viewed Catholic doctrine, not as a sincere attempt to explain the "secret things of God", but as a controlling device designed to perpetuate the power of the Roman Catholic Church in the world, and since the Reformers saw the doctrine of transubstantiation as the engine that drove the controlling device, they naturally assumed that there was nothing of God in the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Actually, the idea that the literal, physical body of Christ was present in this world even after Jesus ascended into heaven to sit down at the right hand of God has been around as long as the Church. Certain things Jesus had said during his earthly ministry resonated deeply within his believers. For example, in John 6: 47-69, we find a most curious teaching, "'I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If a man eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.'"
"Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves. 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'"
"Jesus said to them, 'I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Our forefathers ate manna, and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.' He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum."
"On hearing it, many of his disciples said, 'This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?'"
"Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, 'Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.' For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, 'This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.'"
"From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
"'You do not want to leave too, do you?' Jesus asked the twelve.
"Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.'"
Like the man said, This is a hard teaching. All this talk of eating flesh and drinking blood tends to stretch our pea brains. A little later in his ministry Jesus did something that will resonate forever. Mt. 26:26-29, "While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, 'Take and eat; this is my body.'"
"Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, 'Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom.'"
From the earliest days of the Church until today, many Christians have held onto the idea that the bread and wine were the body and blood of Jesus. This point needs to be emphasized to Protestants because we have lost touch, since the Reformation, with one of the oldest traditions of the Church.
I call the idea that the wine and wafer were the body and blood of Jesus a "tradition" because the explanation of how the wafer and wine become the body and blood has never been specifically explained. Jesus didn't explain the subject, and none of the Apostles attempted a specific explanation. Not that the Church hasn't tried. The Roman Catholic Church's doctrine of transubstantiation is probably only slightly, if at all, altered from the earliest explanations attempted by Church theologians. Throughout the history of the Church, the explanation of how the wafer and wine become the body and blood of Jesus have amounted to little more than explanations of what amounted to magic tricks performed by priests using the power of God.
I believe the wafer and the wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ in reality, not because God performed a magic trick but because the wafer and wine and everything in the universe was contained in the body of Jesus Christ when he was crucified, buried and resurrected. I believe this because I believe Jesus is God. And I know what God contains within Himself. Everything. Everything that ever was, is now, or ever will be is contained within God. All space and time is contained within God simultaneously. I believe Jesus of Nazareth is That God. I believe when mankind looked at Jesus, they were looking at the Father in the flesh. I believe that when the people stood on the hill mocking Jesus as He hung on the cross, they were mocking the Father in the flesh. Because Jesus and the Father are One it is error to separate the Father from what happened on the cross at Calvary, it is error to separate the Father from what happened when Jesus descended into hell. Those who have separated the Father from the Son have made it impossible to understand how the wafer and the wine are the body of Christ, not to mention made it impossible for anyone who believes as they do to understand how we got saved.
If I am correct, why didn't the Apostle's talk about it? Why didn't they explain this to us? I believe the Apostle Paul and the Apostle John did their flat-out level best to try. Reread the gospel of John, review all the passages from Paul I included in the previous chapter. Listen to them as they try to find words to talk about what it is like for God, the God revealed in the Old Testament, to take upon Himself flesh and walk on the face of the earth among men, to give Himself over to be crucified. See if you hear them trying to explain something exceedingly difficult to understand, something so difficult in fact that nobody can understand it unless they receive a gift from God Himself, a special dispensation that allows the eyes of our understanding to be opened to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. See if you can find places where the Apostles admitted that words were simply not available that could allow people to understand everything the Apostles perceived.
I refer you to the passage in 2 Corinthians I mentioned earlier. Paul tells us about the man who went to the third heaven, to Paradise, "He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say." When I read those words, this is what I hear Paul saying to the Church at Corinth: I saw things that I can't tell you about because you wouldn't understand them if I tried. If I tried, you would be so overwhelmed that I have experienced so much more than you that you would focus too much on me and not on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Notice please, that Paul is talking to the Church at Corinth, a Church notorious for not understanding much of anything Paul had tried to tell them. In other letters, though, like the letter to the Ephesians, Paul's words soar us to our union with Christ as He--and we in Him--are seated at the right hand of God in the Heavenlies. It is clear to me that the Apostles did everything in their power, used every word, employed every image available to allow us to understand that the universe of space and time is contained in the body of Jesus Christ. But we couldn't understand it until now.
Why now? Why did it take so long for us to grasp what the Apostles were trying to tell us? For the first time in history, many people--perhaps most people--understand what the Apostles understood about time. Before this century, before the twentieth century A.D., people perceived time to be an incremental linear continuum...Please allow me to pause here for a second and ponder that previous phrase. It is clearly the most highfalutin sounding phrase I have ever uttered and I'm not exactly sure what the words mean. I think those words describe a series of seconds stretching in a line from past through present into future. See what I mean? Man perceived himself to be standing on that line with the ability to look at past, present or future. This is the way time appeared from man's point of view and it was literally inconceivable that time could be anything other than what it appeared from our point of view. Even men of God who studied the Scripture and knew that Scripture seemed to tell us that, from God's point of view, time appears different than it does from our point of view could not actually conceive what God saw when He looked at time. "God knows the end from the beginning" is the best known Scriptural explanation of time as seen from God's point of view. When theologians in the past tried to explain what those words meant, they inevitably did not change our perspective on time. My point is, even though we had the Scripture, we could not conceive time to be anyway other than the way it looked from our point of view--an incremental linear continuum.
And then, in the twentieth century, all that began to change. Certain scientists, primarily Einstein, began describing space and time in ways that filtered into the consciousness of every person in the modern world. We began to see movies like Back To The Future and there was no sense of confusion in the audience.
There was no confusion because everybody knew that time was not an incremental linear continuum with man locked into one increment of the continuum. There was no confusion because everybody knew it was just a matter of time before time itself would be subject to the will of man. There was no confusion because everybody believed that man would be able to go back and forth in time stopping off here and there along the way. Wake up Christians! Modern man has accepted as a fact that time is not just an incremental linear continuum, but a unit! Modern man sees time from God's point of view!
If the world sees time from God's point of view, don't you think it's about time us Christians started viewing time from God's point of view? When we do so, much in Scripture that was hard to understand comes clear in sharp, crisp detail. For instance when we see time from God's point of view and reassess the story of Jesus's crucifixion, we realize exactly how our bodies could have been contained in the body of Jesus Christ. If time is contained in God as a unit, all that time contains is also contained in God. Time contains within itself everything in the universe, except God. God contains time. If Jesus is God, Jesus contained in Himself, when He was dying on the cross, everything in the universe. Including the wafer and wine we eat today. That's how the wafer and the wine become the body and blood of Christ. That's also how you and I become the body of Christ. If we believe. If we don't believe, we are unable to understand our union with Christ. We might believe everything we need to be saved for eternity with God, but we don't understand how we got saved. The Reformers didn't believe that time was contained in Jesus Christ's body as he hung on the cross; they couldn't conceive that reality. All they saw was the Catholic Church using the doctrine of transubstantiation to hold the world in bondage to a faith that was not centered on Jesus Christ.
It was this tradition that the Reformers were forced to throw out in their destruction of the doctrine of transubstantiation. They threw the doctrine out and in so doing threw the baby out with the bath water.
The bath water was the idea that priests through Apostolic Succession obtained a miraculous power to turn the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. This mechanical explanation of how the Holy Spirit accomplishes the work of salvation distorts so many of the messages in the Bible that all that was required to obliterate its authority over the consciences of people was a Bible to read, and the ability to read it. Increased literacy in the late Middle Ages and Guttenberg's printing press went a long way toward eliminating the idea that priests were some special category of Christian with miraculous power unavailable to the laity. The priesthood of all believers was the Protestant answer to Apostolic Succession, which answer got the bathwater out of the tub.
The baby was the awareness in the Church of the physical presence of the actual body of Christ in this world. The baby was thrown out when the key Protestant Reformers all agreed that the Father had turned His Face away from the Son when Jesus cried, "Eloi, Eloi, Lamasabachthani" from the cross of Calvary. By creating a model of Jesus that required us to believe the Father had turned His Face away at the precise moment in history when Jesus took our sins into His flesh, the Reformers made it impossible for us to conceive Jesus to contain at that moment, the moment when the Father turned His face away, all the attributes of the Father.
That which we cannot conceive, we cannot perceive. Unless we can see something subjectively, it is impossible to perceive it objectively. By defining Jesus as separated from the Father, we became as blind to the possibility of our physical union with the body of Jesus Christ as if the Reformers had poked out our mind's eye with a sharp stick.
Why did the Reformers not see this? If what I say is true, how can we explain the actions of the Reformers? Were they, after all, not mighty men of God committed to carrying out the will of God on earth? In order to answer those questions, we must look closely at what could have motivated the Reformers to exegete "Eloi, Eloi, Lamasabachthani" in a way that left the doctrine of the Holiness of God as, in the words of Billy Graham, the "regulatory principle" to which all Protestant doctrine was required to conform.
It is fairly easy to understand why the doctrine of the Holiness of God loomed so large in the minds of Protestant theologians. The Reformers lived in a world where all moral authority was held by the Roman Catholic Church. The law, both moral and political, was defined for the people by the Church. The Reformers proposed to replace this structure of authority with another structure, a structure in which the Holy Spirit used the message in Scripture to teach people about the law, right and wrong, political structures--all the myriad questions that have to be answered in any society. With the threat of anarchy, of antinomianism, looming ever before their eyes, the Reformers would have searched the Scripture to understand how moral authority could be exercised in the absence of the Roman Catholic Church, a Church that had dictated to people a code of ethics backed by the power of the sword. Such moral authority is found in the doctrine of the Holiness of God.
God's terrible wrath is revealed in the Bible because God is Holy. Holiness is a defining characteristic of God in the same way that love is a defining characteristic of God. The Biblical explanation of Holiness cannot be understood or adequately defined when we define Holiness as a revulsion to sin. When the Bible says God is Holy, the Bible is not just defining God's attitude toward sin, an attitude that predisposes God to turn away from sinners, the Bible is defining God Himself. God is Holy. Sin has no place in Holy God, sin has no relationship with Holy God, sin does not abide in Holy God. Sin makes God angry because sin is a direct attack on God Himself. Sin is a refusal to let God be Holy God, which He is. Sin is a presence in Holy God that attempts to destroy Holy God Himself. The Reformers knew this from Scripture, and they knew more.
They knew the entire Bible is a message designed to explain to us how Holy God has made a way for the problem of sin against Holy God to be overcome. They understood that the law, the Scripture, was given to mankind to convict us of our sin against Holy God. And they knew that the same Scripture contained a message that God intended to use to make Jesus come alive in this world. The Reformers knew that when people understood how to become righteous with Holy God through faith in the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ that people would be delivered from bondage to the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformers knew that people's consciences would no longer be bound by the definition of right and wrong promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, and would be free to serve God in a new way.
We must understand that the Reformers carried the weight of the world on their shoulders. As revolutionaries committed to destroying the old world order and instituting a new, they would have been irresponsible had they failed to look ahead and ask what would control the actions of people when the authority of the institution that had ruled the consciences of people for over a thousand years was destroyed. John Calvin, Martin Luther, Zwingli were not irresponsible men.
The fear of Holy God was ever before their eyes. This fear was their constant companion because the Reformers had rejected the physical presence of the risen Jesus in this world. They had actually thrown the baby out with the bath water. Rejecting the idea of the physical presence of Jesus, all they had to comfort them was the Holy Spirit of God who, using Scripture, struggled mightily to calm the fears that so easily beset them, that so easily controlled them, the fear that constantly tempted them to act like people who did not believe they were even now seated with Christ Jesus at the right hand of God in the Heavenlies.
Having abandoned the idea that Christ was physically present in this world, the Reformers found fear to be their constant companion. As they meditated on the words of Scripture, the fear could be kept at arms length, but it never disappeared. In a reality such as this, it was the most natural thing in the world to conclude that God intended the fear to be the Christian's constant companion. There were logical reasons why this should be so, and Scriptural grounds upon which the idea could be supported.
Fear of God was seen to be a necessary restraint on sin. In a world where even Christians are unable to do the things they want to do, but instead, the things they do not want to do, this they do, what mechanism existed to restrain evil? Had not God throughout the Old Testament used fear as a restraining device
around sin? Was it not reasonable to conclude that Scripture teaches fear is to be used by God to restrain sin, even within those who have found their righteousness before God through faith in Christ Jesus?
And how would God maintain the fear within Christians that would allow sin to be restrained? For the Reformers, the Holiness of God was the answer, but Holiness not defined as a word that describes the totality of God, but Holiness defined as God's attitude toward sin, Holiness centered around the idea that the Father did not allow sin into His presence. For the Reformers, a Holy God remained out there, distinct from Christ, a Holy God who did not hesitate to turn His face away from His only begotten Son when that Son took upon Himself the sins of the world. How much more readily might he turn away from us if we sin.
Perhaps there is place for this message in the lives of babes in Christ, those who have only a young and fragile and unformed faith in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, those who, like the Church at Corinth, tend to be, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "a messenger from Satan." But for those who are mature in Christ there is a better way that the Bible teaches.
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