Lecture twenty-four—Europe on the Eve of the Protestant Reformation. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin. Let us pray. Eternal God, we ask that you would open up our minds and our hearts as we come to study together today. Guide us by your Spirit that all that we think and all that we say would be honoring to your great name. For it’s in that name that we pray. Amen.
We come today, of course, to the conclusion of our study of the Church to the Reformation, and I have greatly enjoyed sharing these hours with you. And I hope by God’s grace that they have been helpful to you and, in fact, strengthening to your faith. Over these past weeks, we’ve had opportunity to explore the beginnings of the church at Pentecost, its development and growth across the centuries, its outreach and missionary activity and compassionate service, its worship and music, its preaching and prayer, its understandings of discipleship, its times of faithfulness, and its painful seasons of failure. And I hope that through it all, we’ve come not only to understand the church better and to love our Christian heritage more deeply, but that in exploring our past, we ourselves have grown in our spiritual understandings and in our ability to minister within the world today.
The true purpose of education after all is to come to love God more completely, to rely on His Word more fully, to encourage each other to be faithful servants of our Lord, and to grow up into full maturity in Christ. And now as we conclude our exploration—particularly of this section on the Middle Ages—with all of that fascinating variety and richness which is there, we need to take a few moments to lay the foundation for the next era in the history of the church; namely, the great Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.
Professor E. Harris Harbison of Princeton University has suggested that if one were to place the point of a compass on the city of Basel
Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History
and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
in Switzerland and draw a circle 500 miles in radius around Basel, one would have enclosed most of the significant geography of the early Reformation. It would include most of France and Germany, the southeastern portion of England, the northeastern portion of Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. The largest concentration of population and wealth—buildings, people, ships, goods, and so on—during this period of time was in the northern section of Italy, in Eastern France, in the Rhine Valley in the Netherlands. Here then is the geographical heart of the first great wave of the Protestant Reformation, including the beginnings of the major branches of Protestantism, branches that will have occasion in the next segment of the course, the church from the Reformation to the modern period, the study in some depth—the Lutheran Tradition, the great Reformed family, Anglicanism, the various Anabaptist movements and the like.
At this time in history England had about four million people, total population. Spain had about eight million; France about sixteen. The various German-speaking states, fifteen to twenty million, and Italy about twelve million. The Mediterranean world was dominated in many ways by the Islamic Ottoman Turks. News in that day travelled extremely slowly. If Erasmus in Basel, for example, wrote to a friend in Madrid, his letter would take something like 1-3 months to arrive. It’s difficult to carry on a correspondence with that kind of time lapse. Europe, you see, was still overwhelming rural, and even though, as we discovered in our last lecture on the Renaissance, there was a growing development of urban culture. It’s still true that most people made their living directly from the soil in agriculture of some sort. There was a growing and increasingly important group, however, of artisans, merchants, lawyers, royal officials, and the like who were emerging as increasingly central to the life of Europe. Cities, of course, were still small by modern standards. Wittenberg where Luther posted his original thesis was only 2,000 at the time when he made that action on the castle church door. Geneva, when Calvin arrived in 1536, had a population of 16,000. In fact, the only cities in Europe which exceeded 100,000 in population were Venice, Paris, Florence, and London.
To the three traditional classes in Medieval society—the nobility, the clergy, and the peasants—was being added that fourth middle class or burgher group that we’ve talked about in our past lectures. There was enormous change and growth, however. The discoveries of Columbus opened up vast new possibilities, as did the use of printing. Johann Gutenberg had invented the printing
press and movable type, and the very first book to be printed in Europe was, of course, the great Gutenberg Bible, which appeared in 1456.
Europe was in this time composed largely of independent states. This is the situation then, when in the sixteenth century, the great Protestant Reformation burst upon Europe and then in ripple effect reached throughout the world. Protestantism, you see, is rooted in the sixteenth century, and though these folk broke with the Medieval Church in many ways, they did not think that they were starting a new church. They believed that they were calling the church back to biblical faith and practice. Their concern was to see the church recover its life and vitality, especially around the basics of the Gospel. This, in fact, is what the core of the Protestant Movement was all about.
The Reformation in Europe grew out of what’s often been called the disillusion of the Medieval synthesis. The Middle Ages, of course, were not uniform in life and thought. It was a creative period. I hope we’ve come to see that with all of its art and literature and its architecture, its religious and social life. It was a time of enormous vitality and great interest. But the Renaissance and Reformation Period did challenge some of the church’s hold on the life of the times which had emerged out of the Middle Ages. The major factors and the transformation from this Medieval to modern form of Christianity can be recounted in terms of the stress upon Mysticism and upon Nominalism and on Humanism and certain other forces. Let me comment on these just a bit, because these factors inadvertently in a way helped to break down this Medieval synthesis and helped to undermine the authority and particular place of the church during the sixteenth century.
The Mystic Tradition is one that we are all very familiar with now. God can be directly experienced by people. This had emerged from the work of Augustine and others, had come down through Bernard and Eckhart and Tauler and Kempis and others. The mystic’s time and energy had been spent in preparing through disciplined activity for this ecstatic experience, this face-to-face meeting with God. Bernard talked of this more in term so of a Christo-centric focus. Tauler and others talked about it in a more Trinitarian understanding of God. But, however, it emerged, it became a basic threat to the Medieval synthesis and to the church’s authority. And the basic threat was that it tended to undermine inadvertently the church’s stress upon its own power to mediate
the Gospel through its institutional structures and sacraments. Individual mystics were relatively few in practice during the Middle Ages, but later on groups began to spring up—groups like Brethren of the Common Life in Holland and the Friends of God in the Rhine Valley. These new mystic associations did, in fact, compete with the church, though they didn’t desire to do so. This, however, prepared the soil for the Reformers. Luther himself was heavily influenced by German Mysticism.
When one affirms that you can directly encounter God—when that experience can be something between an individual and the divine—it’s not a big step to circumvent the structures and institutions of the church in order to provide access to God. And, in fact, Mysticism without meaning to do so, actually helped to lay the foundation for what was to come in the Protestant Reformation.
In addition to Mysticism, was the impact of Nominalism. Medieval philosophy saw reality essentially in terms of structure and order, including rational thought—the structures of the mind, the logic that one uses. Language expresses reality. The nominalists, however, saw language as simply a useful tag to help us talk about things. Only individual items are real. The stress then is upon individuals in the church and in the society rather than on humankind. The emphasis is on God’s immediate acts rather than general revelation throughout the past.
Individualism tends to replace Universalism. Church and society are not seen so much as organisms, but as aggregates of individuals to be seen in terms of those individualized parts. This, in short, challenged the church by challenging the basic churchly notion of cohesion in church and society. The Medieval synthesis had been built upon the notion that society and church are essentially organisms in which all parts interact, the kind of body concept of the Apostle Paul. Nominalism raised serious questions about that and divided people up into atomic or isolated units, local atoms. The focus then is upon the particular rather than the universal.
In addition to Mysticism and Nominalism, Humanism helped to provide a foundation upon which the Reformation could build its structures. We’ve seen this, of course, in our discussion of humanistic Renaissance thought, a return to Greek and Roman literary styles. We also see this is in the new critical methods which emerge. The famous Donation of Constantine, the document in which the emperor reported passed on earthly powers to the popes
was not only tested but found wanting. It was determined to be a fraud and that grew out of some of this critical methodology that had emerged out of the Renaissance and its studies.
Questions were also raised about the accuracy of Jerome’s Vulgate translation. Many other areas came under the scrutiny; the bright lights of the new methodology of the Renaissance. The Renaissance also brought a new spirit, the stress upon the nobility of human person. When you put these factors—Mysticism, Nominalism, and Humanism—together with other forces—the rise of Nationalism, the breakdown of the Feudal system, the growth of the Middle Class, the emergence of trade and commerce, the rise of the city, all of those things that we’ve had occasion in our past lectures to look at—we can see the foundation for the shift to Medieval to modern. Other factors aided this. I suggested before the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the New World by Columbus. We could add also the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan or the Copernican Theory which emerged at this time.
What then was the situation in the church itself? Well, we see some problems emerging there as well. There’s a rise in church/state tensions and divisions. In the Middle Ages, church and state went hand-in-hand. That was the basic synthesis which allowed for the two, sometimes in uneasy tension. But the principle was always established that the two were to join hands and work together. The idea was of cooperation between church and state rather than separation of church and state as will later on emerge as a basic principle of the Baptists and others. But there’s a growing conflict which is emerging in the latter part of the Middle Ages between the pope and the various heads of state; this is exacerbated in some ways by the Avignon papacy. It’s also put under stress by abuses in the church, the problems of indulgences and the like.
In addition to the rise in church/state tensions and divisions, there’s also a growing criticism within the church of abuses. Remember our discussion of the forerunners of the Reformation, of Wycliffe in England, of John Hus in Bohemia. These parallel what Luther was doing in Wittenberg by raising serious questions about particular practices in the church. We’re going to see those very clearly spelled out when we look at the sixteenth century Reformation and see how important, how central, they were in the concerns which spawned the Reformation and which helped to give it early shape.
In addition to the rise of church/state tensions and the growing criticism of abuses in the church, there is also a reemergence of biblical theology. We’ve seen this very clearly in earlier lectures. The focus is on the rediscovery of biblical perspectives and this become enormously important, absolutely central for understanding Luther and Calvin. Here’s really, in a sense, the seminal focus of the Reformation. It’s a “back to the Bible” movement in very fundamental senses. We have a radical recasting of religious understanding, of the focus and perspectives on the church, which emerge now out of the study of the Bible. But more particularly, the center of biblical thought comes to be grace as the great doctrine of the sixteenth century Reformers.
Men and women are seen more clearly as sinners than they had been seen for quite a while. A part from God, people are lost, hopelessly lost. For Luther and Calvin, we are creatures separated from God. And because we’re separated from God, we are also separated from one another. We suffer from a malady called depravity, that inability of human beings to institute a relation with God, to do right. Human activity and human ability simply do not get us to faith and to salvation.
Think back if you would with me to our discussion of St. Augustine. Remember back awhile. His enormous struggle with sin, and the fact that he discovered in very practical terms that he could not refrain from sinning. He explained it for a time in terms of his Manichean philosophy, but ultimately found that that system was not strong enough to bear the weight of his own sinfulness. Men and women who had been created with the ability to sin or the ability to refrain from sin; that is, in genuine freedom, this notion of posse non peccare fell as Genesis describes it into a sinful depraved state in which they simply were unable either to turn toward God or to live in righteousness. They were no longer free; they were now in bondage to sin. And the great discovery of the Reformers, as we will come to see, was the discovery of grace that God breaks through to men and women. Unable to turn to God themselves frees them from sin through the power of the cross; this allows them to respond in repentance, genuine faith and obedience to Christ and the church.
This opens up the possibility of freedom for people once again. They are able to sin, able to refrain from sin. That is the new creation which we all become part of as God’s family. Realized in part now, but not yet fully realized. Only to come when in that great moment Christ gathers His church together and, after
the final judgment, establishes them in His new kingdom in the heavens. This grand vision—which has at its heart the problem of sin and its remedy in the grace of a sovereign God—is the central discovery of the Protestant Reformation that moves far beyond any concerns about local abuses or indulgences or difficulties in monasteries, or whatever it might be. It deals with the human condition of all people—men and women, children—all who are born into this world are born into sin. That sin is not seen so much in terms of specific acts, but in the tendency which we have to build our world around ourselves. It grows out of hubris. It’s separation from God in its most fundamental sense as Luther would have put it. The law serves a useful function in revealing the sinful situation of humankind. It’s a mirror for us, but salvation can come not through the law, but only through God’s initiative of grace.
Now one needs to hear that very clearly to understand just what a powerful challenge that was to the enormous superstructure of penance which the church had established as a means of dealing with sinfulness and, which Luther himself as we will discover, tested but found wanting. It’s only that immediacy of meeting God face-to-face in Jesus Christ, as God in grace comes to rescue us from our falleness that we understand the very heart, the very core of Reformation thought. It’s a wonderful, wonderful doctrine and one that we need to recover because it is at the very heart of our Scriptures as well.
For Luther and Calvin, faith then was both a gift and a decision. These both have to be held in tension with one of another as the two poles of faith, for if you stress only the gift, human beings become mere automatons. If you stress only the decision, you move into the peril of works righteousness. Gifts and decisions have to be seen part and parcel of faith. It must be a decision based, supported, and understood from the standpoint of Christ’s redeeming work. The Reformers, you see, went back to the Apostle Paul and to Augustine and to many others in the life of the church. Paul who wrote, “I, yet not I, but it is Christ who dwells in me,” that enables salvation to occur. Or Augustine, “I would not have found thee,” he says to the Lord, “hast though not first found me.” You see the emphasis.
The Medieval concept was upon repentance as decision which precedes faith. The Reformers turned that on its head, that faith is a gift from God by His grace and that repentance flows out of that gift of faith as a response. Faith is born, not made. The sinner
is unable to will himself or herself to faith. The decision of faith is rooted in the experience of the merciful presence of Christ. It has an objective reality, God’s laying hold of us, this is the giftedness that is part of it. It is subjective experience in that it involves a decision of faith, a trust in God’s trustworthiness anchored in prior experience of God’s mercy and goodness.
Luther, as we’ll come to see, rejected what we call double predestination. He felt that predestination makes sense only for the believers as a matter of trust. Calvin, on the other hand, both affirmed and taught double predestination. For him, predestination was not a matter of philosophical speculation, but the great final guarantee against any concept of meritorious obedience. It’s nothing we can do. Our destiny is wholly in the hands of God, Calvin would have said; a God who we can trust, who is good and has revealed Himself as a loving and merciful God.
What, then, for the Reformers came to be seen as the life of the Christian? Well, the experience of grace is the reality of the living Christ in the believer, the transforming presence of Christ. But experience for the Reformers never was an end in itself. One is driven from one’s self to one’s neighbor. Faith leads to good works. We are bound to serve others in Christ’s name. Justification then is “proven by obedience and good works.” These are the marks of justification. You see that in Calvin’s Institutes, for example, and the great edition of these is the Battle edition, Library of Christian Classics, two volumes. But you’ll find that discussion in book three, chapter twenty-seven, in section twelve. Luther and Calvin both saw works as insufficient to gain salvation, but works as absolutely essential for the living out of the life of faith.
For Luther and Calvin, God’s existence was assumed. In their day it was not seriously challenged. That was a struggle for a later day. But God is known for them in Christ supremely and, in fact, you could say, God is known adequately only in Christ. The Reformers accepted the classic understanding of the Trinity and of Christology which had grown out of the first four ecumenical councils, and you can remember our discussion of those. There was really no need for reformation in that theological position because that continued to be affirmed. But the central concern for the Reformers was on salvation or grace, what Luther called “justification”. The focus was on Christ’s work rather than on Christ’s person, as was the focus in those early councils. That is, concern was with the claim that God answered the sins of human
kind in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christ, for the Reformers, took the sins upon Himself. How did Christ take those sins? Well, Calvin stressed the prophet, priest, and kingly roles, stressing the suffering and then the glory of Christ. Luther tended to stress the incarnational lowliness of Christ, the apparent weakness which took on the very forces of evil.
For both Luther and Calvin, the Bible was the central focus of their life and work. The Bible is, in fact, the revelation of God. It’s the norm for church life. It’s the norm for the total life of the church. The Bible, in fact, creates the church. And what is the church? For the Reformers, it is the community of believers—those who are committed to God in Christ, who live by His mercy and power, those who worship a common Lord, who correctly preach God’s Word, who practice rightly the sacraments, who confess sins, who worship God together. There’s no essential difference between clergy and lay. There’s a difference in function and vocation, perhaps, but here we come to the heart of Luther’s idea of vocation, which we’ll discuss more fully in the second part of the course. It is an enormously important recasting of an early church commitment to an understanding that God calls all believers, whatever their work, and in the sixteenth century, we will see revived now the notion of Christian vocation not simply for pastors and missionaries, but for bricklayers and nurses, homemakers, and carpenters.
For Calvin, the church is the place where the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. And for Luther and Calvin, of course, there are only two sacraments, not seven—baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Scripture is superior to tradition, although the Reformers we often forget knew the church fathers and often quoted them. Augustine is quoted endlessly by Luther and Calvin.
What about the state? For Luther, the Christian finds life in two spheres—the spiritual and the temporal. For him the state is a remedy for sin, preventing disorder and anarchy. For Calvin, the stress is upon progress in Christian life. He argues that the state is needed to order life. It’s a remedy for sin. It should protect, but it also should promote true religion, and we’re going to see some divisions between Luther and Calvin on that point later on. Both considered the state ordained by God, a gift from God for life. Thus Christians should not despise the state, but accept it. Christians are to obey civil rulers. They were given their responsibility after all by God. Rulers ought to truly and justly govern. If not, God
is going to punish them. We don’t need to. Rulers can be called to account by good preaching, but Christians for Luther can’t resist the state. In the face of injustice, Christians can only suffer. Christians cannot rebel. And here’s going to be a problem for the Lutheran tradition, as we will see in the peasant’s uprising and in other ways later on.
Obedience to God, however, is for all of the Reformers more ultimate than obedience to the state; and there is a higher law and there are occasions on which it needs to be activated. Calvin also urged obedience as a duty to the constituted authority, but with two qualifications—to be obeyed the state must not demand what is contrary to the Word of God and our allegiance to God is always above every human sovereignty.
What about last things? Life, the Reformers saw, is only an interim. Christians are pilgrims in the world, and we must act as pilgrims doing God’s work, carrying out His mission in the world—but looking forward to that day when we will be reunited with our Lord in heaven.
Luther and Calvin formed the foundations for what we call the great Lutheran and the Reformed wings of the church. These we will have a chance to look at in more detail, but they aren’t the only wings of Protestantism. We have the Anabaptist wing, who felt that these Magisterial Reformers, so called, hadn’t gone far enough. And we have the Anglican wing that came out of the English Reformation that felt that the Reformers had gone too far. The Anabaptists, after all, had been tied together by a conviction that the presence of the Spirit of God in the lives of the believers calls for a drastic return to the church as it existed in the New Testament period. They were New Testament restorationists, as have been many other groups across history.
The point of conflict between the Anabaptists and the Reformers was in particular the practice of baptizing persons who had already been baptized as infants; therefore, they were nicknamed Anabaptists or Rebaptizers. There’s no valid baptism apart from faith in the believer, they felt. Few Anabaptist leaders, we will discover, died in bed; yet despite the intense persecution and the physical problems that they faced, many Anabaptist communities arose and flourished in Europe, in Bayern , in Basel, Strasburg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Munster, and the like.
Anabaptists represent a fundamentally different understanding of
the church in the Christian life, and I’ve just described for Luther and Calvin. The church is a voluntary association of Christians patterned after the New Testament. Of course, for Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, the Anabaptist, and others, they could all say the church is a community of those who have experienced the living Christ. But Anabaptists drew further inference from the New Testament forms for church life, including the ordering and the worship of the church and these must be followed in every respect.
The Magisterial Reformers, then, stressed justification by faith, the grace of God focused on the Word of God in the Bible. The Anabaptists stressed new life in Christ through the Spirit. The stress was upon the presence of the Spirit in the believer. Their concern was not the thought of the church so much as the life of the church.
In addition, Anabaptists, we will see, restricted church membership to the redeemed. They saw the fall of the church at the time of Constantine or maybe at the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 or when infant baptism was informed in the early fifth century. The common element of the movement was voluntary, disciplined community life of saints who had been drawn together. They felt that the Reformers, that is, the Magisterial Reformers, had themselves become a part of that larger fall; because they would not break with the linkage between church and state they insisted upon baptizing infants. So Anabaptists stressed voluntary church membership of redeemed only, discipline and order, which comes from the New Testament, the stressed the purity of the church, the lack of any distinction between clergy and lay, the separation of church and state. Some of them refused to participate in war or swear oaths, for example. They eliminated infant baptism, feeling it violated the New Testament pattern and the voluntary nature of faith. They also argued for a lack of any concrete presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements, which were more symbolic in form.
We see these contrasts in the great creeds and confessions of the sixteenth century Reformation. Those of you who would like to see the contrast that I’ve been trying to describe these last few moments may want to turn to the Augsburg Confession, which was written by Philip Melanchthon in 1530. It is included in a marvelous little collection by John H. Lieth, Creeds of the Churches, which was put out by John Knox Press in 1973.
If you look at the Augsburg Confession of 1530, you see the strong stress upon Magisterial Reformed themes. In its discussion of the church, it calls the church “the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.” What is the church? “Although the Christian church properly speaking is nothing else than the assembly of all believers and saints, yet because in this life many false Christians, hypocrites, and even open sinners remain among the godly, the sacraments are efficacious even if the priest who administer them are wicked men.” Then it talks about baptism and the Lord’s Supper and repentance. It goes on to talk about civil government and strongly criticizes the Anabaptists who take a very different position about the integration of church and state. That position can be seen quite clearly in the Schleitheim Confession, which was produced by the Swiss Brethren in 1527, written by Michael Sattler, who died very shortly after he wrote this. But it becomes one of the classic Anabaptist confessions. And that’s also found in this little collection by Lieth, Creeds of the Churches.
I would encourage you if you’re interested to go back and read through some of those; you’ll find some of the contrasts between the different wings of Protestantism. We’ll have occasion in the second half of the course to begin talking about some of those wings in very specific terms.
Despite all of these differences, however, in all of the groupings that I have pointed to, there are three great commonalities which hold all sixteenth century Reformers together—justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, and the authority of the Bible. No matter which group you look to, these three themes will emerge again and again as the very heart of Protestant Reformation thought. We’re going to talk about those in much greater detail.
But I’d like to point to what is at the very core of all three of those, and that is the centrality of Jesus Christ. I want to read for you a wonderful story by William Barton, who is no longer living but was a Congregational pastor in the Chicago area for a number of years; he wrote some marvelous little stories just after the turn of the century. This story is called “Things Not to Be Forgotten,” and I feel that it focuses for us some of that central Christological concern of the Reformation Period.
“I road upon a railway train,” he writes, “somewhere in Kansas and the train stopped 30 minutes for lunch and at one end of the station there was a little park with two great sundials; whereof, one showed central time and the other showed mountain time. And the park was attractive and it cost the railway some coin and the result was worth it.
“Now there stood in the little park by the train a small white post as it were two cubits in height. And there was framed on the top of the post an old time drawbar with a coupling pin and a link, and upon the post was painted in black letters this superscription, ‘Lest we forget.’ And I said unto myself, ‘It may be that this is the town where the man lived who first invented the safety coupler,’ and I entered the station and inquired of the young man who was clerk of the station hotel, and I asked him saying, ‘Wherefore is that post with the old drawbar erected in this town rather in another.’ And he said, ‘Where is it? I’ve never seen it.’ And I inquired of another and he said, ‘You can search me, I’ve never noticed it.’ And I inquired of the station agent and he said, ‘I once knew, but behold I have forgotten.’
“Then the conductor said, ‘All aboard,’ and I got onboard, and I considered the days of my boyhood when I played about the cars and I knew railway men and many of them had lost fingers that were crushed in coupling cars and many had lost hands and others lost their lives. And I said, ‘Behold, there was a man who considered all these things and sat up night and per adventure pawned his shirt that he might invent a method of avoiding all of this, and here is his memorial marked ‘Lest we forget,’ and some pass it every day and never see it, and others once knew it’s meaning, but they have forgotten.’ And I looked out of the car window and I beheld a church and upon the church was a spire and upon the spire was a cross. And I thought of the multitudes who continually pass it by and I was grieved in my heart, for I said among them are those who say, ‘I’ve never seen it,’ and others say, ‘I’ve seen it but what it meaneth, behold I know not.’ And others say, ‘Behold, I once knew, but I have forgotten.’”
I want to congratulate you on the hard work you have done to complete this course, work which I hope has been enriching to you personally and helpful to you in your various ministries. But I’d be remiss if I did not remind you by this little story of the central purpose for all of our studying, and that is to fulfill the Great Commission which Christ gave to us before He ascended into heaven, the commission which we read in Matthew 28:16-20.
Europe on the Eve of the Protestant ReformationLesson 24 of 24
The commission “to go into all the world and preach the Gospel, discipling all nations, teaching them the faith,” and then the great promise that God is with us always. This remains today the great privilege and obligation for all of us in the church. To point the way to Christ—that men and women, boys and girls might find Him as their Savior and, in finding Him, come to obedience through the Word to serve Him every day of their lives. May that be our purpose as well through the grace and power of our Lord. Amen.
