What is your opinion on the Protestant Reformation?
The Protestant Reformation was absolutely imperative in order for our faith to be where it is today. Prior to the Reformation, the Bible was largely inaccessible to the common person, as the Roman Catholic Church held the only copies of the Scriptures. As corruption in the Roman Catholic Church reached deplorable levels by the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, and different figures were raised up to protest and see necessary changes enacted—it is clear enough how God started moving on men and women to return to the Scriptures. In the Protestant Reformation, a great many Roman Catholic traditions began being questioned and eliminated from the faith. Many of the Protestant Reformers were hunted down and martyred for their beliefs, because they dared to challenge the papal authorities, who not only held great sway over European religion, but also politics.
It is easy for some Messianic people today, to look back on the past, and say that if they had been there during the Reformation that they would have seen to it that practices like Sunday church, and replacement holidays like Christmas and Easter, would have been totally eliminated from the Protestant scene. Even more so, they would have seen that replacement theology or supersessionism should have been jettisioned earlier, with a more favorable orientation toward matters of Israel and Judaism. Unfortunately, none of us can go back into the past and change it, to the way we think things should have occurred.
We have to be thankful for what occurred in the past—even if various positive changes have been incremental—because our faith is in a continual state of reform. The Reformers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries were used by the Lord to perform a mighty work, and we have the responsibility to our ancestors in the faith to continue what they began. In today’s generation, many throughout the Messianic community are of the conviction of returning to the First Century faith of Yeshua and His Disciples. We have to have much, much more information than the Reformers of the past did about the Jewish background of the Apostolic Scriptures (NT), and we benefit from a more open society where there has been Jewish-Christian religious dialogue, as well as easier access to the lands of the Bible and antiquity.
When we look back on the legacy of the Protestant Reformation, today’s Messianic people should be considering the future legacy they will leave behind to their successors.
