Happy Reformation Day!

For additional Reformation Day humor, check this out.

Reformation Day: Candy Story and Good Sermon

Happy Reformation Day! To celebrate with my family I picked up Butterfinger candy bars after work. It was the first time Moses (3 years old) and Kati (1 and-a-half years old) had had a Butterfinger, so it was a real celebration. They praised God for the Reformation with their chocolatey-grins while trying to gum-and-lick-loose the candy stuck to their teeth.

Also, this past Sunday was Reformation Sunday, and one of my pastors (Tim Bushong) preached a Grand Slam of a sermon -- "Was the Reformation Really Necessary?" -- go to our church's website to stream and/or download the sermon. I highly recommend it.

The Patristic Shape of the Reformers

“The Reformers learned from Athanasius about Christian psalmody, from Ambrose about catechetical instruction, from John Chrysostom about preaching, and from Augustine about the sacraments” (Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship:Reformed according to Scripture (Revised and Expanded Ed., WJK Press, 2002), 4).

Nevin: Reformation Thought, Again

Nevin, again. He briefly accounts the rapid flourishing of the Reformed Churches throughout France, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Holland, and even in the German Palatinate (a German dialect of the Rhine Valley), and carefully notes that, “These different sections of the Reformed Church were regarded, in the beginning, as one and the same Confession. They were not however, like the Lutheran Church, bound together by subscription to a common creed. With an independent organization, each national branch of the general body had its own ecclesiastical standards. Hence a variety of Confessions and Catechisms; which serve strikingly however, by their general agreement, to attest the substantial unity of the faith to which they owe their existence” (J. W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, 1847), 15).

True catholicity, that.

Nevin: Reformation Thought, Again

“It shows a most poor and superficial way of thinking, to look upon the sacramentarian controversy of the sixteenth century, as something only externally or accidentally related to the proper life of Protestantism – an arbitrary, isolated difficulty, created by the caprice of superstition simply, or mere blind self-will. To the religious consciousness of the time, the question stood intertwined with the entire scheme of the gospel, and was felt to reach out, in its bearings and consequences, to the farthest limits of theology” (J. W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, 1847), 11).

Nevin: Reformation Thought, Again

“They [Luther and the other Reformers] did not make the Reformation. The Reformation made them” (J. W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, 1847), 10).

Nevin: Reformation Thought

“The Reformation may be regarded, in one view, as an entirely new life in the history of Christianity. More deeply considered however, it will be found to stand in the closest living connection with this same history, as it had been regularly developed in the bosom of the Catholic Church for centuries before. It formed no absolute rupture with the old life of the body bearing this title; on the contrary, it was only its true and legitimate continuation, through the vast convulsive crisis which threatened at the same time its total dissolution. In no other light can it be vindicated as the work of God” (J. W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, 1847), 2).