BY COLLEEN TINKER
On October 17, 2017, the president of the Trans-European Division of the Seventh-day Adventist organization, Kamal Rafaal, joined other pastors and theologians in addressing the European Parliament’s celebration of the Reformation held in the Parliament building in Brussels, Belgium. The guests participated in exploring “lessons from the Reformation that can positively shape a future Europe.”
Bishop Simo Peura representing the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland said the Reformation concept of grace “opens the prophetical role of the community,” and he further observed that Luther’s “example in Wittenberg of a ‘common purse for the poor,’ and his strong work ethic” were examples for the good of the whole community.
The Hungarian theologian and historian Dezso Buzogany acknowledged that the Reformation legacy of Bible translations “into national languages” was a significant thing that “transformed Europe”. Other speakers said that “many Reformation issues were still highly significant today. ‘Tolerance is still a big issue,’ said MEP Arne Lietz. Orthodox priest Father Heikki Huttenen observed that different Christian traditions can come together on “the relevant, not the routine”, explaining that understanding people’s backgrounds can lead to improved justice, witness, and hospitality in many situations including the treatment of migrants.
Adventist Rafaal Kamal spoke near the end and said, “Jesus is the only answer for our Post-Truth time,” and he quoted John 15:6, “…I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He admitted:
“These rediscovered truths are salvific, yet other vital dimensions of the Reformation message should not be neglected. If our intention is to move our broken communities to a better and just place…human dignity, individual freedom of conscience, religious freedom, tolerance, generosity towards the other and duty of care for the poor and needy need to continue to be foundational blocks of our attitudes, laws, and partnerships between the EU, national governments and civil societies.
“These essential values are captured well in the book of Micah 6:8—‘He has shown you oh man what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.…’
“Here is a quick application for us today—a person’s conscience based on the Word of God should dictate his or her choice to worship and believe—or not.”
Kamal continued with a recitation of Adventism’s humanitarian good works and programs worldwide and made a plea for religious liberty. He appealed to those present to be sure their “laws and partnerships” respected “human dignity” and were “non-discriminatory…because everyone is created in God’s image and is born with and possesses the same dignity, regardless of where they live, their gender or race, or their religious, cultural or ethnic background.”
He concluded by characterizing his recommendations as flowing out of the “Reformation spirit and message [that] must be rediscovered and relived today if we are to make the most of its core principles.”
While he stated that “you and I are saved by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ,” he appealed to Parliament that they all would “have the same boldness and courage to acknowledge that we are our brother’s keeper—that we share common humanity and are responsible for one another.”
Implications
Significantly, Rafaal never actually mentioned the core of Luther’s theological contribution: that man is justified by faith apart from any good works he might do. Instead, he (and other speakers as well) claimed the Reformation as the ideological source of humanitarian good works and religious and political tolerance.
Our purpose is not to dismiss the significance of caring for the poor and acting justly. Those things are the normal fruit of the gospel. The concern here is that the political and ecumenical principles of equality and tolerance, of people’s being free “to worship and believe—or not” are not Reformation concerns. In fact, the Reformation was marked by a great deal of intolerance and even by an insistence on the church being united with state government.
It’s one thing for representatives of the Seventh-day Adventist organization to publicly lobby for the separation of church and state and for religious tolerance, but it’s quite another to invoke the Reformation as their ideological example for such things.
As believers we owe Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin a huge debt of gratitude for insisting that Scripture taught we are justified by faith, nothing more, and nothing less, and that God alone is sovereign. We can thank Luther for his commitment to translating the Bible into vernacular German and making it accessible to the common people. We can further thank God for Luther’s clarity that in Jesus the law was fulfilled, and when we are in Christ, the law has no more power over us. Also, we can praise the Lord that these reformers taught that we are by nature spiritually dead and cannot rise above the state of our natural death apart from the work of God bringing us to life.
This next Tuesday, October 31, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg. These academic statements which he never intended for the public to read were translated by an unknown person from Latin into German and printed. Within weeks they had circulated far and wide in Germany, and Luther was swept into a theological and spiritual crisis that led to his renouncing the Catholic views of justification and sanctification.
Many of us who have left Adventism for the sake of the Lord Jesus and His gospel can feel empathy with the losses and changes Luther experienced, and we thank God for the man’s integrity and conviction. Nevertheless, Luther was not always gracious or forgiving. His life was not a perfect example of how a Christian should live.
What we have in common with Luther, though, is the conviction that God’s word is sufficient and necessary, and the Lord Jesus’ work of justification of life for all men (Rom. 5:18) which He accomplished through His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension is our sole hope and source of eternal life. The law is fulfilled; we are complete in Christ.
As we celebrate the Reformation next Tuesday, we can praise the Lord that He sovereignly arranged for the doctrine of justification by faith to be spotlighted in 1517, eclipsing the layers of works and bargaining that had obscured the gospel’s good news for centuries. We can pray that we will remain planted in biblical truth and reality and that we will live our lives on the basis of Jesus’ finished work and with the assurance that in Him we have eternal life.
For a deeper look at the history of the Reformation, watch Gary Inrig’s series on the Reformation which he has been teaching at Word Search on Thursday evenings this fall. They are on the Former Adventist YouTube channel under the Word Search playlist. The Reformation series begins with Word Search video number 171. You may access them here.
Sources
https://news.adventist.org/en/all-news/news/go/2017-10-20/the-reformation-is-unending-adventist-leader-tells-european-parliament/
https://ted.adventist.org/images/news-2017/EU-Parliament-Presentation-Raafat-Kamal–Oct-2017.pdf
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