Protestantism Isn’t Individualism: The Solas, Catechesis, and Authority (Greg Quiggle)

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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Thanking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, and I'm glad you're here. In this special series, we're stepping back into one of the most pivotal times in Christian history, the German Reformation. This was a time when the Gospel was being rediscovered, the Church was being challenged, and the course of Western civilization was being reshaped with ripples that still reach into our lives today. And to guide us through this journey, I'm joined by a true expert, someone who doesn't just know the Reformation from books, but from the cobblestone streets and cathedral halls where it actually happened, Doctor Greg Quiggle. Greg is a Reformation historian and the owner and operator of Kotelis Travel, a company that runs what they call tours for ten, intimate travel experiences designed for people who want something deeper than a typical tour. They offer a three to one guest to guide ratio, and these trips give you consistent access to guides who've been on location multiple times, who know not only the history, but also where to find the best able strudal and other German delicacies along the way. You can learn more about Greg and Kotellus at kotellistravelservice dot com. And if this series piques your interest, Greg actually has a German Reformation trip coming up this May, and last I heard, there are still a few seats available. In this series, Greg is going to help us explore the people, places, and theological stakes of the Reformation as well as helping us understand why it still matters for Christians today. So let's get started. Hey, everyone, welcome back to this episode of Thinking Christian On Doctor James Spencer and I am joined again by doctor Greg Quiggle, and we're going to continue our series on the German Reformation, and today we're really going to pivot to something that's a little bit more about the tradition of Protestantism, and that is the Reformation Souls as sometimes they're referred to, and so we're going to talk about how these help us to frame out what it means to be Protestant, regardless really of what the nomination you're in, and why these are so central and crucial to the Reformation, particularly as we looked at the instability that was created by the Reformation and the break from the Catholic Church in the last episode. So Greg come back, talk to us a little bit about what the souls are. Man.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's I believe five of them. I I prefer to frame it a slightly different way, if that's okay, Yeah, please. I think there are three basic questions that are at the core of what happens in the sixteenth century.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

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Speaker 2: Most Protestants think that the Reformation was about corruption, and that's marginally true because the fact of the matter is the Roman Church admits they were corrupted and fixed it themselves. There is such a thing as a Catholic Reformation. The Council of Trent deals with a lot of this stuff. Okay, but I think what's really going on is there's three basic theological questions that really the soul has come out of. So let's let's frame it that way.

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Speaker 1: Great.

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Speaker 2: The first question is what's church? And the sixty four thousand dollars word for that is ecclesiology. You know, you pay all this money so you can learn a vocabulary. That's about all that is. So what is the church? What is the church? And in sixteenth century Roman Catholic thought and I'm using sixteenth century because they've changed some and sixteenth century Protestants aren't the same either. In sixteenth century Roman Catholic thought, the church is a pyramid. Okay, it's it's it's the old model that you always saw at a business, you know, it's the here's the CEO, and then it goes down. And so what is the church. The church is this structure and at the top is the pope, and then you got the cardinal, and then you've got the archbishop and the bishop, and and down at the bottom you got the low priest. So it is basically the clergy that are in a hierarchy. And so this is religion as spectator sport. That's the way I like to think about it. You and I've been to lots of medieval cathedrals, and we've all seen how they have tried to modernize them. But when you walk in, the first thing you see is way, way, way way up front, and at a higher level is the altar because that's where the juice is. Okay, And in the sixteenth century there would have even have been a screen to screen this thing off. So way up here is the altar. People can't even see what's going on up there, and it's all in Latin. They have no idea what's going on. It's physically above them and they can't understand what's happening. So the church is these guys with the pope at the top. It's an organism or an organization. Okay, church is organization. Sixteenth century Protestants are going to say, no, it's not. The church is an organism, not an organization. And the doctrine here is called the priesthood of all believers. So what they're going to say is everybody is part of the church, and there's only one distinction between clergy and lay people, and that is what they called the office of the Word. So the only difference between clergy and lay people is clergy have the right to teach and by extension, to do sacraments, because that was seen as an extension of the teaching office. So priesthood of all believers means two things. Number One, you have all the rights of the clergy save one, the preaching office, which means who's between you and God nobody, So it's a flattening okay. Second part, and this is the part that we don't like. You have all the responsibilities of the clergy save one, meaning who's responsible to do the ministry, answer everybody. The clergy's job is to teach the word, to equip the saints to do the work. So I've made the argument that many large Protestant churches are functionally Roman Catholic. They pay clergy to do the ministry. They think their job is to show up, watch and pay the professionals. That's Roman Catholic. Who's responsible to raise children in the faith? Well, the youth pastor, of course, no, parents are Am I opposed to youth pastors? Of course not. Who's responsible to do evangelism? Well, the pastor of evangelism? Am I opposed to ask? No? But you see how this is working. What Luther is going to do and other Protestants are going to do is say Christianity is not a spectator support. Every Christian has a gift. Every Christian is a meaningful part of the church church. Every Christian is a priest. Every Christian is a necessary part of the church. So what is the church? Is it? Is it an organization or is it an organism? That's a fundamental difference. Number one? Number two? How do I stand before God? How am I saved? Sixty four thousand dollars? Word soteriology Okay, in sixteenth century Roman Catholicism, you're saved in buy and through the hierarchy of the church, you are made righteous with God. Through the sacramental system, the Church dispenses grace that you must get only through the sacraments. No sacrament, no grace, no grace, no salvation. There's the authority.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, So let me just ask a quick question there before you go on to the third question. So you have this flattening in the ecclesiological section that's obviously interrelated to the soteriology and the way you achieve salvation within the Roman Catholic system, and you can see that mediatorial role of the church. The people have to come to the church to get the grace, to spense sufficient to actually earn their righteousness, and those things come not necessarily through Although I think sometimes my impression was Catholics teach that you need to be a good person in order to go to heaven. That's probably a little bit too simplified an understanding of what's going on, because what's really happening is you have to participate within the ructures and practices of the church, the sacraments of the Church, in order to be saved coct Okay.

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Speaker 2: Correct, You are never saved by works alone. You are saved by works plus grace and faith.

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Speaker 1: And that grace plus faith is mediated by the Church through.

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Speaker 2: The sevenfold Sacramental system, which we can talk about some more at another time.

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Speaker 1: Great, Okay, that clarifies. Okay, So we have what is the church? How? How do I stand before a righteous God? How do I stand before God? How am I saved? Okay?

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Speaker 2: So what do Protestant sixteenth century Protestants say? It's not church centered, it's God centered. Yeah. This is justification by faith alone in Christ alone, as he's found in the Bible alone. Justification by faith alone in Christ alone, as he's found in the Bible alone, solo fida, sola christ solo scriptura. Okay, So it's God centered. Salvation is something God does, and the peace underneath this is things like predestination, election, because faith is a gift from God and faith is something that is personal. Yeah. So here's another difference in the In the Catholic system, there is what's called or I will. The term that I use is implicit faith. You don't even need to understand. They can believe for you. M Okay, I need to do is show up. Okay, you don't need to understand this stuff. It's okay that it's Latin. Just do what you're doing. Okay. They have explicit faith, You can have implicit faith. That's what I mean religion as spectator sport. Look, you can feel it when you walk in the building and you know, James, and when when people come with us on the tourist they will see. How has the Catholic Church tried to fix this after Vatican too, they shoved the table down. Nobody does the mass up the big altars anymore. They shove the table down. It's simple. It's on the same level as the people. They serve it from the same level as the people. They tried to shove it down into the people so that there isn't that great golf anymore. But that was a deliberate golf. They were built that way. It was to remind you they're the guys. You're just the schmos that show up. So faith is something that God does. Yep. Faith is the object or the virtue by which you are made right with God. The object of that faith is Jesus, and Jesus, the Jesus who saves is found solely in the scriptures. This is a point that both Luther and Calvin make. The Jesus who saves is the Jesus of the Bible, not the one you make up in your own head. So it's the Bible alone in that sense, which gets us to the third question. And this is the question that really is the ultimate question. It's the question of authority. And the sixty four thousand dollars word for authority is authority. Yeah, who or what has the right to define what I must believe and what I must do? Who or what has the right to define what I must believe and what I must do? Sixteenth century Roman Catholicism. It's the hierarchy, yeh, Cardinal Archbishop ding Ding Ding ding Ding down to the local priest. Yeah, Protestants, it's the Bible alone. This is the one that is the the that there is no way to make this one work. You will find that Catholics and Protestants can find places of agreement on the first two questions.

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Speaker 1: I can believe that, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: You can. You can find strands. I mean I I have a master's from a Roman Catholic Jesuit university. I had a class in soteriology from a Jesuit father. And he said, I remember scaring my mentor because I said, I always thought Luther and Augustine made more sense on justification than a Quinas did. And you know, and he was very Augustinian Lutheran on soltariology. Yeah, but he accepted the authority of the Pope. Yeah. You can't fudge on that. Either either you accept people and fallibility or you don't. There's no no way around that. Either either it's the Bible alone or the Pope. But you can't. There's no middle one on that one. Yeah. And that's the one that even when you look at the sixteenth century, every time they tried to find ways to rebridge this, anytime a doctrine came up that Protestants would say, make it clear from the Bible, and the Catholic Church would say, well, the fourth lateran council or the Pope has declared, end of conversation. There's nowhere to go on that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because I even remember, you know, there was and I don't recall exactly when they did it, but there was a joint declaration on justification I believe between the Lutherans and the Catholics if I'm remembering that correctly, Yes, and you can sort of understand between Lutherans and Catholics. I will say there is probably even more commonality between Lutheran doctrine and Catholic doctrine than there would be let's say, to Southern Baptist or you know, those kind of things. So, just to give an illustration of what I have in my head, the way that baptism produces faith within the Lutheran doctrine resonates with the sort of sacramentalism you still see in the Roman Catholic Church. Something like that. Yes, but still I take your point like there is a way to bridge it. The issue is always going to be do we surrender ourselves too? And in the Lutheran case, it would probably be do we surrender the entire Lutheran denomination to the Roman Catholic Church, because that denomination is a bit more hierarchically structured, And even though they might sit under the Bible alone, the church sits under the Bible alone a little more than like individual Christians sit under the Bible alone. Again, as you might see in like a more autonomous doctrinal or independent church. Let's say, yeah, I mean you know. I mean there's shades of it, right, a simple illustration.

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Speaker 2: I mean I used to say this all the time to kids on study abroad at Moody. I'd say, look, we may be visiting the Catholic Church. Don't take the mass, well, and Catholics will say, please, do not take the mask. Take the mass, right, because part of taking the mass is accepting papal authority.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a solidarity there, and that's right. It is interesting, go ahead, good well.

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Speaker 2: I mean it's simply a maunt of respecting them. Yeah, you know, and there's no way around that.

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Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's it's so it's been interesting to me if we just go back to the justification by faith for a minute. So in New Testament scholarship, there's been a movement by some to go back and rethink the meaning of faith. So biblical work on pistas and pistis related terms. In the New Testament, pistics is the Greek work for faith. There has been this movement toward faith as fidelity or faith as loyalty that seems to me to actually have some you know, as an Old Testament guy, and you're looking at the love of God in Deuteronomy and you realize that to love God is to be loyal to him.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: Devotion is not a warm, fuzzy feeling, It's a giving oneself over to it in you know, in full measure. Right, So there's an intuitive sense where I'm like, yes, of course faith involves loyalty. Do you have a sense greg of how that sense of faith would have factored into justification by faith in Luther's day? Or was this just strict I believe it, you know, sort of. I assent to it, intellectually commit to live by it. You know, what's the range on that within Luther? Do you have any idea?

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Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I think I think Luther gets a bum wrap on this because he is constantly accused of being an Antinomian. That means lawlessness, is it right? Obedience doesn't matter, And I'd take us back to the ninety five thesis. When our Lord and Savior said repent, he didn't mean dependent. He meant the entire life of the believers to be one of repentence.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, which suggests obedience, which is obedience?

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Speaker 2: I mean? Right, now, here's where I think Luther complicates it. Okay, because Luther does not diminish the law. So here's the law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And second is under the first, love your neighbor as yourself. When when do you do that? When does anybody do that? When is anybody ever obedient? Yeah? Answer never?

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Speaker 1: Never?

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Speaker 2: So what should what should your life look like? Of course it should look like repentance. Repentance is a way of life. Guess what else is the way of life? Faith? The just shall what by faith live? Faith is not something you did. Faith is something you do. Luther doesn't care what you believed. On December the seventh, two thousand and three. Yeah, so you know I quoted I think I'm quoting him. Right. There's a guy named Malcolm Muggridge who was kind of like C. S. Lewis Part two, but never as famous. And somebody asked Muggridge, and I've never looked this up, but I think this is right. When did you decide for Christ? And his answer was a classic Lutheran when he said, I hope I decide for him every day. Yeah, Luther isn't interested in what you did, He's interested in what you do. Faith isn't something you did. Faith is something you do. Belief is something you do. Faith is a way of life, as is repentance. So Christian and that he consists of two things, faith and repentance. That's why gospel and law can never be separated. You must always preach law and gospel. You have to kill your people every week and then raise them from the dead. So if you preach just law, you destroy people. If you preach just gospel, you make them lawless. That's why he says nutty things like if you think you're good, you need to go commit a little sin. You need to go drink too much, you need to go sleep too much, you need to be lazy, because there's no word of comfort in scripture for people that don't think they're sinners. Yeah, so so how do you That doesn't really fit either category? So you know, so for him, yeah, holiness means faithfulness, but faithfulness means believing, and the sure sign of believing is repentance. So you know, how does this? It doesn't really work in those categories. Yeah, you see, you see what I mean?

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Speaker 1: I do I don't I don't know. I don't know Luther's work well enough. But it strikes me that, like first John would resonate with the way Luther's with the way you're describing what Luther's saying. If you even if you just go to First John one, and you know, the initial one is God is light, and if we walk in the light, if we have, we have fellowship with Him. If we walk in the light, if we walk in darkness, we don't. And then you know, if we deny our sin, right, we deceive ourselves. But if we confess our sin, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins in cleensic all and righteousness. You have these sort of markers. Whereas, yes, you're walking in the light. Part of walking in the light is agreeing with God that you are doing things that are anesthetical to what you would have you do. That is confession. And so you have later on in First John, you know, the combination of love and obedience, love and obeying the commandments of God. And so it just it strikes me that Luther's onto something there and that these are important aspects of you know, when we talk faith alone, we're not just talking about an intellectual assent or even a moment of commitment. Faith is a life of commitment, and I think maybe because we're running a little low on time. I want to if faith is a life of commitment, it seems to me that the teaching office that is part of the structure of the way that they framed out what is church that you described earlier becomes way more crucial. We make it today, way more.

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Speaker 2: Yes, and that's why that's why I think he would be very frustrated at the whimsical nature that we the way we treat the teaching office. If a I don't need it or be anybody in their brother can do it. Yeah, you know it does say not many of you should be teachers number one and number two. We tend to assume that the key to spiritual growth is my own personal Bible study, as if Christianity is personal growth, and you know, christian growth is accomplished independent of the teaching office. I don't Why did God establish it then? Right? And you know, to me this is these things are like self evident. How how did Christians function for so many for thousands of years without personal devotions?

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Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I'm not saying I'm a post That's not my point. My point is not saying you shouldn't that personal. But for some some way people were able to function effectively without having personal devotions and doing daily Bible readings, right, and.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: Well, this gets us back to things like you know, and we don't need to go into all this, but I think, you know, when I think the teaching office and some of the let's say, just the church calendar, the electionaries that are followed the Catechism, obviously that Luther was big on, and I was. I grew up Lutheran, so I went through the luther Small Catechism before I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church, and so I remember a lot of those things, and it actually was a helpful way of understanding and putting barrier boundaries around faith. But I think a lot of this goes to when we strip out too much of the structure, we run the risk of losing something that we really don't want to lose, yep. And that's you know, I understand that tension within the Reformation. What do we keep what do we get rid of? We have these solos, but I would even argue that as we're looking at those three questions that you gave us and then the five solos that extend from them, Man, there's a lot of nuance we need to put around each one of these. Yeah, it's like we have to understand them in context in order for them to really function. We just can't slap oh, it's sola scripture around and assume So whatever I interpret the Bible to be, that's.

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Speaker 2: What it is.

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Speaker 1: And that's you know, all this is, or you know, priesthood of all believers. Nobody can tell me what to do, you know, those kind of things. It's like, ex no, No, that's not what this was. This was a much more structured, much more nuanced system of five convictions, right, that were intended to function in a particular way.

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Speaker 2: And that's why I framed this as sixteenth century Protestantism. Yeah, and you know, I you know, we're gonna we're doing other podcasts and one of them is on American Revivalism, and and that's where American Protestantism is not sixteenth century European Protestantism, Right, that's a whole different ball of wax. Now we're cousins, but there's a lot of water that went under the bridge. And you know, so for our listeners, please tune in so Paul Harvey can get the rest of the story because because a lot of things that we assume about Protestantism are American not Protestant, and that's important distinction to make. Yeah. Yeah, individualism, the right to individual interpretation, all those kinds of things are quite different than what the Protestants had in mind, and they may not even be what the New Testament had in mind.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's interesting when you rip it out, pull it into a different context and you see even how just a sort of gesture to some of what will go through and the Great Awakening and those kind of things, the break from the Church of England and the reactions that are occurring based on that on the Church of England have to condition some of what's going on in American Protestantism as well as just sort of the colonial instincts that are going on within the founding of America. There is a particular sort of individual who's going to go to a land that has not been conquered. I mean, I don't even like to go camping, greg Like, I don't know, I don't want to. I don't want to have to find the porta potty, right, Like I am not going to be a great colonist that is not going to be my thing, right, Hey, yeah, let me go and figure things out.

00:31:11
Speaker 2: Nope.

00:31:12
Speaker 1: If there's not a Hampton, I'm really good. I'll just I'll wait for you guys to build one, and then I'll come over and see it. I think there's a certain mentality of these guys that when they came over, it's like, no, it's game time and we're going to do this. And that mentality gets baked in in a lot of different ways into an early American Christianity. Absolutely, absolutely, well, this is very good. We've got probably one or two more that we're going to do on the Reformation, the German Reformation, some of these. We'll probably talk one more on the Sola's. I'd like to get into the idea of justification by faith and maybe do a little bit of work on the new perspective Luther's conception of justification by faith and the particularly I would say the background the Protestant scholarship is used to understand the Jews of Jesus's day has been subject to a lot of debate over the last let's call it decade and a half, and so I think there's there. It's worth kind of closing this up, maybe with that and then otherwise, I just encourage everybody. We're going to do some of these on Swiss Reformation, We're going to do some of these on some of the other historical aspects of our faith, and just encourage you to tune back in check out our Great Awakening stuff when it comes out. We're planning for that to release in October, and we're actually doing it as a well produced series. So these are just, you know, a minimal edit sort of podcast that one's going to be. Think of it like your favorite true crime podcast, really well done, scored, edited, all that kind of fun stuff. So keep an eye out for that one. And Greg, it's always a pleasure to have you. Well, we'll be back in the next episode. And for everybody who's listening, thanks for being here and have a great day. We'll see you on the next episode of Thinking. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.