Why the Reformation Matters

Posted On October 24, 2025

This blog post is an adapted transcript of the first message from Dr. Stephen Nichols’ video teaching series Reformation Profiles. Dr. Nichols is president and professor of apologetics at RBC.

We’re going to talk about the Reformation. As we start talking about the Reformation, I want you to come along with me on a little trip. Let’s go across the sea to Germany, and let’s go to the city of Wittenberg. Let’s make it about the 1530s, and let’s try to show up on a Sunday—any Sunday will do. We’ll walk into the Castle Church, and there, high and mounted on the wall, is the pulpit, and there will be Martin Luther. Let’s try to listen in to a sermon by Martin Luther. He’ll be talking about Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac.

Luther’s preaching is a very vivid, picturesque preaching. For one thing, they didn’t have chairs and people had to stand. These were German farmers, and they’re up early milking the cows, which means he’s got an audience he has to connect with. So, Luther is telling this story very vividly, very powerfully—you know the story. Abraham takes Isaac up and he puts him on the altar, and he’s about ready to make the sacrifice. Here’s how Luther ends the sermon.

Then Abraham bound him and laid him upon the wood. The father raised his knife; the boy bared his throat. If God had slept an instant, the lad would have been dead. I could not have watched. I’m not able even in my thoughts to follow. The lad was a sheep for the slaughter. Never in history was there such obedience, save only in Christ. But God was watching. God was watching and all the angels were watching. The angels cried, “Abraham, Abraham, see how Divine Majesty is at hand in the hour of death.” We say, “In the midst of life, we die,” God answers, “No, in the midst of death, we live.”

Now, what Luther was doing there at the end of that sermon was actually quoting a medieval saying, and the medieval saying was Media vita in mortem sumus, or “In the middle of life, we are in death.”

We sometimes call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, and that’s a bit of a misnomer. It wasn’t entirely the dark ages—there were a lot of bright spots—but it was also a pretty dark time. It was a time of death, a time of physical death—this was before they had the germ theory of disease, right? These are the centuries of the plague, and death really did surround them in the midst of life—so you can understand why they had this saying. I guess they didn’t have bumper stickers back in the Middle Ages, but if they had bumper stickers, it would say “In the middle of life, we die.” And see what Luther does? He flips that around. We move from death to life.

Well, Wittenberg was our first stop. Let me take you to another city in our little Reformation tour. We have to go a little bit south of Wittenberg, and a little bit over to the west. Right at the foothills of the Alps, you can picture Mount Blanc off in the distance. There’s a nice little lake, and nestled right up against that lake is the city of Geneva—the old city of Geneva. As you walk around the city of Geneva, you begin to see this Latin phrase all over the city. If you’ve hung around Ligonier for any amount of time you’ve seen this Latin phrase too, and that Latin phrase is Post tenebras lux, or “After darkness, light.”

So, we go from death to life, and we go from darkness to light. That’s essentially what the Reformation was about. The Reformation came at a time of intense darkness, of death. It came at a time when there was spiritual darkness, spiritual death. It wasn’t the abnormal, that was the normal. That was the standard situation, and into that time of darkness and death comes life and light. And it comes as the Reformers focused on one thing.

Why We Study the Reformation

We go from death to life, darkness to light, because we recovered the Word of God. And when we go to the Word, we are very quickly drawn to Christ. There we have the major themes of the Reformation. We start off with our plight, and our plight is death and darkness.

Now that just wasn’t true in the 1500s; that’s true for us today too, isn’t it? But we’ve sort of numbed ourselves to that, haven’t we? We’ve sort of anesthetized ourselves to that fact—that we live in darkness and that death is all around us. But in the Middle Ages, it was hard to numb yourselves to that. It confronted you head on. And so, the Reformers take us to this idea of life and light, and they do it by leading us right to the Word and leading us right to Christ. And that’s why the Reformation is such a fascinating time in church history. That’s why we’re doing this series, and that’s why it’s worth camping out for a while in the sixteenth century.

This was an era of death and darkness, and into this era came the life and light of the gospel. In fact, I mentioned the phrase “In the midst of life, there is death.” Luther actually not only preached that at the end of the sermon, but after he preached that sermon, he was inspired to write a hymn about it. He wrote this beautiful hymn. It’s sometimes called “In the Very Midst of Life.” Let me just read you a few of the stanzas from it.

In the very midst of life, snares of death surround us.
Who shall help us in this strife, lest the foe confound us?
Thou only, Lord, Thou only.
In the midst of death’s dark veil, powers of hell overtake us.
Who will help when they assail? Who secure will make us?
Thou only, Lord, Thou only.
In the midst of utter woe, when our sins oppress us, where shall we for refuge go?
Where for grace to bless us? To Thee, Lord Jesus, only.
Thy precious blood was shed to win, full atonement for our sin.

Well as we spend this time together looking at the Reformation, what we’re going to do is flesh out these themes. These theological themes of sin and the consequences of sin, of death and darkness as the theological predicament—the theological plight. We’re also going to look at the theological solution, and the way we get at this is what we call the solas.

Now, I’m not even sure solas is actually a term. The Latin word *sola *in the plural I guess is solae, which means “alones,” but I don’t think that’s a word either. So, we’ll just fudge and call it the solas. You’ve all heard of the five solas, and we’ll walk through the five solas. What we’re actually going to do is try to illustrate through a biography each of the five solas of the Reformation. That’s where we’re headed with all of this. Before we go any further, it might help to just back up and take one more look at why we’re doing this, and why we study church history and the Reformation.

1. History Matters

I’ll give you three reasons, three quick reasons. One is, very simply, history matters. History matters. If you stop and think about it, we as Christians are a people with a past. We are very much a people with a past. Our faith, and make no mistake about it, our faith is a historic faith. If it were not for a historic event—the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ as a historical faith—well then, we might as well pack everything up and just go home. We have no church without it.

Beyond that, at the center of our faith, we repeatedly see this in the Old Testament, we see that refrain “Remember the exodus.” You know the saying “Remember the Alamo,” right? Well, the Old Testament saying is “Remember the exodus.” And why were they supposed to remember the exodus? Because it was a time where they could look back and say, “This is what God did in redeeming us as His people, and that matters to us.” Israel was also building monuments. You know every time something happened, they were supposed to gather stones and build a monument. What were those monuments for? They were markers to remind them that they were a people with a past.

Well, we have our biblical past, but we also have our church history past. We can quote Charles Spurgeon, and everybody likes Spurgeon, right? The Baptists like Spurgeon cause he’s a Baptist. We Presbyterians like Spurgeon because he’s so Reformed and he even smokes cigars from time to time, so how could you not like Spurgeon?  But Spurgeon once said, “I find it odd that someone who thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit teaches them, thinks so little of what the Holy Spirit teaches others also.”

You see what he was saying? The Holy Spirit is not a unique gift to us as individuals. The Holy Spirit is not even a unique gift to the church in the twenty-first century. As sophisticated as we are with all our technologies and all our advances, we’re not the only century that has had the benefit of the Spirit at work. What we need to do is recognize that for the last two thousand years the Spirit has been at work in building the church. We don’t want to just turn our back on that. So, history matters to us. Biblical history matters to us, but also church history matters to us. It can be very humbling to realize that we’re not coming at this for the first time. But not only can church history be humbling, it can also be inspiring to us. So, the first reason is history matters.

2. The Reformation Addressed Central Issues

The second reason is that the Reformation really gets at the center of what the church is all about. You know, everybody recognized that the wheels were falling off the wagon in the 1400s. I mean, the church was in bad shape. We refer to this period as the Late Medieval Ages or the High Middle Ages, and later medieval Catholicism—from the 1200s to the 1500s—was a time of significant deterioration. Even Catholic historians need to admit that these were bad times, and there were various attempts at reform.

There was a reform attempt called the Conciliar Movement. This comes from the word council, and the idea was that this system with a pope had led to a corrupt church. And what the church needed to do was an organizational shift, an administrative change. They wanted to go back to the early centuries of the church, where things were decided in the councils of bishops. So, they were proposing a change, a shift from the papal line to church councils. Jan Hus, the famous Czech martyr, was a member of the Conciliar Movement. The Conciliar Movement made an attempt at reform but wasn’t successful.

There was an attempt at reform called the Devotio or Devotio Moderna, and that just means “new devotion.” And the idea here is that the church needs more spirituality. A famous text from this movement, perhaps the representative text, would be The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. That text was part of a movement, and Kempis himself was part of a movement to reform the church by addressing its lackluster spirituality. So, we’ve got an attempt to address the administrative change, we’ve got an attempt to address the spirituality. But you know those attempts, while they did make some headway, they weren’t successful at reforming the church.

I think they weren’t successful because while they were beginning to rightly diagnose the problem, they weren’t at all close to the solution. The problem with the medieval church was not administrative. The problem was not even their spirituality. The problem was a hollow, or maybe we could say rotten, theological core. That was the problem. When the Reformation came along, the Reformation analyzed the problem with an acuteness that got right to the center of it, and then it prescribed a solution that got right to the heart of the matter.

The problem was theological; the solution needed to be theological. That’s true of the church in the High Middle Ages; it’s true of the church in any age. You know the temptation is to say, “Well, how do we bring revival, or how do we bring reform?” And what do we do? Programs. That’s what we do. We turn to gimmicks; we turn to programs. But it’s about theology. We need to be led back to theology. When the theology is right—this is the beauty of the Reformation—when the theology is right, all of the pistons are firing. Here’s what’s happening in the Reformation—preaching is happening. Preaching is returned to the center of church life. Through the Middle Ages, it was the mass and an occasional homily. Maybe for Advent or Lent you’d hear a homily. But ordinarily, it was just the mass. There was no preaching. The Reformation returned preaching to the center of church life.

How about church music? Imagine if you showed up in the Middle Ages and you just felt compelled to want to sing praises to God. You couldn’t do it. Only the choir could sing; there was no congregational singing. You know what the Reformers brought back to the church? Music. If Luther wasn’t a theologian, he’d have been a musician. His instrument of choice was the lute, which is sort of a precursor to the guitar. Luther loved music, and we should be very grateful for that. Every time we stand up in a congregation and sing a hymn of praise to our God, we need to think of the Reformers.

Christian education. The Reformers were all about it. Luther said, “Listen, if we don’t train this next generation, all of our efforts are for naught.” He poured all this energy, all this effort, into training the next generation. Christian education.

Then there’s missions. We’re going to talk about this later in the life of John Calvin. This is one of the least-talked-about elements of the Reformation. These guys—Luther, Calvin—they were all about missions. So, here we go, back to it. You get theology at the center, then all those pistons are firing. Preaching, missions, Christian education, even the social engagement—and we’ll look at that too as we get to Geneva. As we move further along and talk about Calvin, we’re going to look at how the city of Geneva reached out to refugees.

We see all this happening, and that’s why I think we want to study the Reformation. Not that they had it all perfect, not that they got it all right, not that the Reformers were without flaws. If we had Luther here, he would tell us, “I’ve got my flaws, to be sure.” They didn’t get it all right. But—and maybe we need to hear this from time to time—they certainly get it more right, I think, than we sometimes do. Again, the temptation is to latch onto this program, or latch onto this gimmick, or try this, when we have to return to God’s Word. We have to return to those doctrines that are at the center of what it means to be Christian, and that’s what the Reformation was about.

3. We Can Learn from the Reformers

Well, there’s a third reason and it sort of dovetails with what I was just saying, and it’s that we are facing similar battles in our own day. We can actually learn from these Reformers—not just be humbled by them or just be inspired by them—but actually learn particular things. That’s what we’re going to do as this series continues. We’re going to plunge below the surface to learn what these solas are all about—how they connect to Scripture and how they connect to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

4. The Reformers Are Interesting People

Well, I said three reasons, but I’ll throw in a bonus reason. The bonus reason as to why we study the Reformation is because these are really interesting people. These are fascinating people. Sometimes we think of figures in church history as sort of flat—like in an encyclopedia entry. We think they only have that one dimension to them. They had a birth date, and maybe they were married and had a few kids, and they had a death date. But these were flesh-and-blood, full-dimensional people with a sense of humor.

They not only had a sense of humor and laughed, but they also wept. They stood by the graveside of their children. They stood by the graveside of their spouses. It’s like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, right? Pulling back the curtain, and there’s a funny-looking old man back there. Sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on our church history heroes and see them as husbands, see them as fathers, and see them as friends who enjoy life—but also recognize that there are times when they mourn, and cry, and weep. So, we look at these Reformers because they were real people. They give us some insight into what it means to be a Christian.

The Five Solas

Well, let’s get back to the five solas and let’s set the stage for what’s coming in our next time together. We’ll start off with sola Scriptura, and again, the Latin world just means “alone.” Sola Scriptura is the idea of “Scripture alone.” The issue here is the issue of authority. Obviously, there are other things. We talked about Spurgeon’s quote, you know there is tradition. Every time I hear the word tradition, I always think of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—you know, “Tradition!” There is value to tradition. But the difference between the Reformers and Roman Catholicism is tradition for the Reformers is not authoritative. Tradition is always a second-order issue. The first order exclusively belongs to Scripture. We’re going to see the sola Scriptura principle played out for us in the life of Martin Luther.

The next two go together: sola gratia, which means “grace alone,” and sola fide, which means “faith alone.” Those two go together to get at the heart of what the gospel is about. The gospel is about grace alone through faith alone. We’re going to split them up though, and for grace alone we’re going to go to another city in Switzerland, this time Zurich, and look at the life of Ulrich Zwingli. Then for sola fide, we’re going to cross the channel and go over to England where we’re going to look at a young, sixteen-year-old queen—she was only queen for nine days. We’re going to look at Lady Jane Grey and the principle of sola fide.

Well, after Scripture, and the gospel, we come to solus Christus—Christ alone. For Christ alone, we’re going to go back to Switzerland and we’re going to go to the life of John Calvin. Then our last one is soli Deo gloria, which means “for the glory of God alone.” For this we’ll go back again to England, and we’re going to look at the Puritans and see this principle worked out in the Puritans.

On Luther’s deathbed, he had one last sermon in him, and his last sermon quoted two texts. He quoted Psalm 68:19–20. In Psalm 68:19–20 we’re right back to that sermon from Abraham. “Though death surrounds us,” Psalm 68:19 tells us, “our God is a God of salvation.” Even in the midst of death, our God is a God of salvation. After he quoted Psalm 68:19–20, he quoted—and I kid you not—John 3:16. Our God is a God of salvation in Jesus Christ, and we learn that as we return to the Word, to sola Scriptura.