The lecture hall at the university rang with new ideas as the thirty-three-year-old monk continued introductory remarks to his new commentary: “… all good works are but an outward indication of the faith from which they proceed; … Where faith is of the right type, all … qualities [such as] peace, happiness, love toward God and everybody … follow naturally on account of the immeasurable blessing which God has bestowed upon us in Christ.… Therefore we own that faith justifies without any work whatsoever” (quoted in Adolf G. H. Kreiss, D. Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, p. 29).
There was no uncertainty in his voice. Had he not struggled through the years just for this hour? Known for singular piety, devotion, and monastic zeal, his life nevertheless had been filled with unhappiness. He had had no peace in his heart.
But as he studied the Scriptures the light dawned upon his troubled soul. Now there was no longer any doubt in his mind about the meaning of the third chapter of Romans, that letter of Paul which has been called the “Acropolis of the Christian faith.” In his studies Doctor Martin had noted especially verse 25: “Mark this, this is the chief point and the very central place of the epistle and of the whole Bible.”
From that lecture hall at the University of Wittenberg the learned monk went out into the world with a newfound faith. He did not know then that he had left the Middle Ages behind him and stood on the threshold of a new era, that he had shaken the world intellectually, politically, and religiously.
But God’s hand had been placed upon his shoulder, and the fire which had smoldered for centuries suddenly burst into flame. “His doctrine of justification by faith was the decided step toward the emancipation of the individual from the absolute authority of the hierarchy” (Henry C. Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 5). Today at least one-third of the Christian world stands with Martin Luther on the doctrine he proclaimed, sola scriptura, the Scriptures as the only authority for sinful man in seeking salvation.
History has shown that it is difficult to keep a fire going. People get into the habit of things. The fire dies down, and formalism creeps in. Where is the flame, the inspiration, the life?
Not far away. God’s hand is stretched out. It touches another seeker after truth and holiness. He has wrangled with Hebrew and Greek syntax for many a year. He has met every week with other likeminded men. At least once every week he has “gone to Communion.” He has even served as a missionary to the American Indians. But to no avail. No peace, no happiness. Then one day, in the spring …
And again we see the hand of God moving among men. It makes little difference where in the world. He moves men in one country, and men become aware of his calling in other countries or upon other continents. Here, at a time when John Wesley is seeking after light and holiness, the heads of the Moravian Church in Germany are making arrangements to send a pious and gifted evangelist (who later became a bishop) to America, directing him to pass through London. Little do they realize what great consequences will come out of this journey!
The man chosen for this service was Peter Böhler, who after his arrival in London met John and Charles Wesley; to them he gave of his rich evangelical experience. Böhler believed in a complete self-surrendering faith, an immediate conversion, and a joy in believing. These things John Wesley did not have. He worked at them, but seemingly to no avail. Then one day he went to the extremes. During the day he attended a service in St. Paul’s Cathedral; in the evening he “went unwillingly” to a prayer meeting in a simple house on Aldersgate Street. And it was there he heard Luther speak. “Faith is a living and bold trust in God’s grace, so sure of itself that it would defy death a thousand times. Such trust and reliance upon God’s grace makes a man cheerful, courageous, and friendly toward God and all …” (quoted in Kreiss, op. cit., p. 19). Wesley’s spirit leaped for joy. He recognized that at long last he had found what he had sought. From that prayer meeting in Aldersgate Street, Wesley came out a changed man. From then until his death fifty-three years later, he could preach from his own experience a dynamic Christian faith. Aldersgate was to him a most wonderful experience which led to a most active life. In half a century Wesley with his followers broke up the cold formalism of English church life, made Christianity the transforming power for hundreds of thousands of working people, and set in motion philanthropic and reform impulses that led to John Howard’s crusade against prison horrors, William Wilberforce’s against slavery, and Robert Raikes’s Sunday schools.
In speaking of Wesley’s attendance at the prayer meeting in Aldersgate Street, we said that “it was there he heard Luther speak.” But was it really Luther who spoke? Was it not another, to whom also the words of life had come after a period of suffering in heart and soul—one who wrote, through the Holy Spirit, what John Knox called “unquestionably the most important theological book ever written”? From it we quote:
For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been made manifested apart from law … the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith (Rom. 3:20–25, RSV).
We believe God had put his hand upon Saul even when he “laid waste the church, and entering house after house … dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 7:54–8:3, RSV). And God’s hand was upon him from the moment he became Paul, when God showed him “how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16, RSV).
We have mentioned these three: Paul, Luther, and Wesley. There is an interesting chain reaction in the impact of the words of Paul in Luther’s life, and then of the words of Luther upon the life of John Wesley, who in return gave impetus to religious movements which have lasted for two centuries.
Did God then have nothing to say to other people through the intervening centuries? Of course he did! It was Paul’s Letter to the Romans which gave abiding importance to the life of Augustine, whose influence on the Church has been tremendous.
Centuries roll by. A man is on a journey when a vision of his departed saintly mother comes to him. It is the climax of that mysterious inner change in a person’s life which is called conversion. Before the altar of a nearby church this man gives himself, in a flood of tears, irrevocably to God. God honored his servant, and Bernard of Clairvaux became the greatest religious force of the twelfth century. His “love to Christ … in spite of extreme monastic self-mortification, found so evangelical expression as to win the hearty approval of Luther and Calvin.… Men admired in Bernard a moral force, a consistency of character … which added weight to all that he said and did …” (Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church, p. 246).
Then there was Francis of Assisi, of whom it is said that when he heard the Lord’s words recorded in Matthew 10 read in the church, he understood them as a personal call for him to give up all for his Master. So he did. He “entered into marriage with poverty” and gave the Gospel to the common people, the poor, the downtrodden, the forsaken. In so doing, in accord with the Word, he became the greatest of medieval saints.
“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of …” Yet we must not forget Peter Waldo and the “poor men of Lyons” who began the Waldensian movement and suffered much persecution for following Christ; finally they were nearly all destroyed except for a few in the northwest corner of Italy, where the group today is the oldest member of the Protestant family and more vigorous than ever.
Or how can we fully estimate the life of John Wycliffe, the “Morning Star of the Reformation”? In the Bible he found the one criterion for Christian faith and action, and therefore began to translate the Word into English so that it would be available to every man. His ideas were popularized by his Poor Preachers, and later by the Lollards, who spread his teachings especially to Bohemia and nearby countries in Central Europe. There they took root through the preaching and writing of John Huss, that great martyr who so influenced Luther that the latter admitted at the Leipzig debate that his positions were those of Huss and that the Council of Konstanz had erred in condemning the Bohemian reformer. Out of the Hussite movement grew (from the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks) the Unitas Fratrum, which absorbed most of what was vital in the Hussite movement and became the spiritual ancestor of the Moravians, who in turn greatly influenced John Wesley at his time of dire spiritual need. Thus we see how God through “spiritual chain reactions” leads in the movements of the centuries.
The “link” between Pietism in seventeenth-century Germany and the great Wesleyan revival movement in eighteenth-century England was formed by the work of two men who came out of the Pietistic movement: August Hermann Francke and Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf. The former experienced what he regarded as a divine new birth while writing a sermon on John 20:31. He later laid the foundation of his famous institutes, which were located in Halle and known as Franckesche Stiftungen. Under Francke this place became also a center for missionary zeal. From here Schwartz, Plütschau, and Ziegenbalg went to India. During the eighteenth century no fewer than sixty missionaries went forth from Halle to far-off peoples.
Zinzendorf was more interested in “heart-religion” in the Pietistic sense than in the barren Lutheran orthodoxy of his time. His was an intimate fellowship with Christ, who completely dominated his theology.
Zinzendorf opened his estate to the refugees from Bohemia and nearby Moravia, where the persecution which had begun with the Thirty Years’ War had lasted for a hundred years. He later became the leader of this group of sorely tried Christians.
During their journeys to and from the American continent, Moravian preachers came into contact with John Wesley and greatly influenced him, as has been related above. The Moravians carried on great missionary activity in many places—in Surinam, Guiana, Egypt, and South Africa, as well as among the American Indians in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Their missionary passion could only inspire others, who were given the holy flame and became zealous evangelicals both in England and on the Continent.
The fire spread to the New World, mainly through the efforts of George Whitefield, an associate of John Wesley. Whitefield emerged from a crisis in his religious experience in joyous consciousness of peace with God and began to preach the Gospel of God’s forgiving grace, peace through the acceptance of Christ by faith, and a consequent life of joyous service. “Dramatic, pathetic, appealing, with a voice of marvellous expressiveness, the audiences of two continents were as wax melted before him” (Walker, op. cit., p. 511).
While Whitefield went about preaching on this side of the Atlantic, he was witness of and a coworker in the Great Awakening, which was really the counterpart of Pietism in Germany and Methodism in Great Britain. It broke out in the church served by Jonathan Edwards and spread like wildfire, especially in New England. The movement did not last very long, however, mainly because of the political situation in the colonies.
While Methodism already had been introduced in the American colonies, it was Francis Asbury who carried the torch. This he did on horseback as he rode 270,000 miles over roadless swamps, pathless forests, untraveled wilderness. Having ordained more than 4,000 preachers, he could well be called “the maker of Methodism in America.” He did all this because from the time of his conversion at the age of thirteen he never forgot that it was “through faith in Christ” that he had accepted his Lord and Master.
Concerning all these men, the words of Scripture surely hold true: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord … that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them” (Rev. 14:13, RSV). Their deeds went with them into the nineteenth century. In this land the holy flame touched the life of a lawyer, who immediately experienced a wonderful conversion. From that time on Charles G. Finney gave up his practice and went out preaching the Word, always holding forth the importance of his listeners’ coming to immediate decision. It is estimated that those converted through his ministry exceeded half a million (Elgin S. Moyer, Who Was Who in Church History, p. 144).
The hand of God also touched the life of a Boston shoe clerk, and Dwight L. Moody left a good living to give himself in unstinted service to his God for a new life in the Spirit. Though not an ordained minister, he became a very effective preacher and evangelist who, together with the singer Ira D. Sankey, conducted many evangelistic campaigns both here and in Great Britain. It is said that Moody personally dealt with nearly 750,000 individuals in his eagerness to win them to Christ. He became a noted educator and left the Northfield schools in Massachusetts and the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago as a witness of enduring value. It would not be too much to say that through these institutions he, though gone from the scene of his labors, has influenced thousands of people.
A contemporary with Moody was Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who felt God’s call in a little chapel among the Primitive Methodists in England (although he soon joined the Baptists). Immediately he became famous as a “boy preacher,” and that fame followed him throughout his life. His ministry as an evangelist was different from others in that he stayed in one place, and people came to his great tabernacle. His writings had an enormous circulation.
In England a branch of the Wesleyan church touched the life of William Booth, who felt that he had to go outside of the church, out “into the highways and byways,” to seek the lost whom the Saviour loved. This compulsion to go anywhere in order to seek out men and women and give them the Gospel came to Booth and his wife after they both had been led into a deeper Christian experience through the influence of John Wesley’s teachings on sanctification. Booth’s Salvation Army came into being in London’s East End. He lived to see its work in fifty-five countries where the Army continued to be active in street preaching, personal evangelism, and practical philanthropy.
The working of God seems to have its heights and its valleys. We leave the centuries behind us. Men and women of God have come and gone. One can truly say with the Lord of the harvest: “One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor” (John 4:37, 38, RSV).
Where are we in this latter part of the twentieth century? There is much to make Christians pessimists, but there are also signs of encouragement. Such efforts as, for instance, those carried on by Billy Graham and his associates in evangelism, and the response given on every continent, could point to a world revival far superseding anything we have seen before.
So the influence spreads when man responds to God. It’s like a fire, spark to spark, from century to century, leaping across continents. There is persecution and suffering in response to the call, but there is also the endless march of splendor of Spirit-filled coworkers with God.
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