As Reformed Christians, we celebrate October 31 as “Reformation Day” because on that day in 1517, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the castle-church in Wittenberg, Germany. The door functioned as a bulletin board for various announcements related to academic and church affairs. Luther’s hope was to invite public discussion on the theology of indulgences. 

What’s an indulgence? An indulgence is a grant from the Pope for the remission of punishment for sin in purgatory. You could get an indulgence in exchange for doing a specific good work, by venerating religious relics, or by making a generous financial contribution to the Church in Rome. Just as in all times and places, the questions people were concerned about were, “How can I be right with God” and “How do we deal with the problem of sin?” But in seeking to answer those questions the church had nearly lost sight of the gospel of grace. 

Luther soon discovered that indulgence sales were a part of a larger problem related to the doctrine of justification. He was studying the book of Romans and made his famous “Reformation discovery.”  It involved a new understanding of Romans 1:17.  His eyes were drawn not to the word “faith,” but to the word “righteous.” The text was clear on the matter: “the righteous shall live by faith.” The problem was, Luther could not live by faith because he was not righteous—and he knew it. 

But Luther came to see that the righteousness of God is not God’s justice that punishes. Rather, God’s righteousness is actually a gift given to undeserving sinners. God “justifies the ungodly,” by giving them a righteousness from God. And that’s how I can be right with God and deal with my sin. Not by making satisfaction for my own sin, but by the grace of Jesus’s righteousness given to me that makes me righteous.

Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses failed to spark a public debate, because on October 31st no one showed up! But Luther’s Theses were copied and sent around and word began to spread. People began to realize that the church had lost its way and a reformation was born!

And so the Reformation stands in the midst of the history of the church as a retrieval of the gospel. In this way, the Reformation was actually a catholic movement inside the catholic church. That is to say, it wasn’t a revolution trying to start a new thing initially, but emerged out of a frustration that the Roman Catholic church of the medieval period wasn’t being faithful to its own catholic identity as the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” and to the gospel of grace that is the foundation of its life and existence. In their disputations with the Roman Catholic church, Luther and Calvin looked back to God’s Word and the early church Fathers, especially Augustine, to recover the doctrines of grace. According to church historian Philip Schaff, what they were trying to do was “bind man to the grace of God, and to lead his conscience captive to God’s word.”

Today we’re standing in that tradition. We are part of this Reformed heritage. So we talk about grace through faith and the sufficiency of Jesus’s work. And when the church begins to lose its way, we seek to be true to the authority of the Bible and to what the church has always believed.