Reformation 2017: Relevant or Redundant? – Paul Yeulett

During the course of this year, to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Affinity is commissioning six articles from church leaders across the UK to explain what the Reformation means to them. In this first one, Paul Yeulett, pastor of Grove Chapel, Camberwell, London, describes the effect upon him as a young man of a book that changed his view of this historic event.

 

Reformation 2017: Relevant or Redundant? – Paul Yeulett

Back in school days the “Reformation” was that grey and tedious topic which was laboriously studied in dusty history classrooms, with musty textbooks and fusty (and fussy) teachers. Henry VIII chopping off his wives’ heads was satisfyingly gory, but the initial chuckle at the “Diet of Worms” evaporated quickly and I could never begin to spell “transubstantiation”, much less understand what it meant.

That all changed in the summer of 1995.

Picture: Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms

I was still in the classroom but by now I had swapped the desk and the inkwell for the whiteboard and the register; and mathematics, rather than history, was my teaching subject. On the last day of term a senior colleague, on the eve of his retirement, handed me a pair of hardback books with imposing artwork emblazoned on the front and back covers, and said to me in avuncular tones, “You should read these over the summer holidays. Every young Christian man should read Merle d’Aubigné on the Reformation.” The books were a gift, not a loan. So I began to read.

The title of the first chapter of the first book – Christ Mightier than Druid Altars and Roman Swords – was stirring enough to double my pulse-rate, but the words of the first paragraph still produce a unique kind of frisson within me:

Those heavenly powers which had lain dormant in the church since the first ages of Christianity, awoke from their slumber in the sixteenth century, and this awakening called the modern times into existence. The church was created anew, and from that regeneration flowed great developments of literature and science, of morality, liberty, and industry. None of these things would have existed without the Reformation. Whenever society enters upon a new era, it requires the baptism of faith. In the sixteenth century God gave to man this consecration from on high by leading him back from mere outward profession and the mechanism of works to an inward and lively faith.[1]

The pages that followed were full of history, but history written with passion and raciness, the political exploits of princes and prelates running side-by-side with the heroics of early English Reformers and Protestant martyrs. It was not a local, poky little history either; as the title of the first chapter implies, it began in the distant mists of pagan Britain and then spanned sixteen centuries. It was architectonic, panoramic and altogether glorious, like a view of the earth across many thousands of miles of outer space.

Picture: J. H. Merle d’Aubigné

It was around that time that my hitherto rather stagnant spiritual life received a new impulse; as well as discovering Merle d’Aubigné I was also reading J. I. Packer, Iain Murray and Martyn Lloyd-Jones for the first time. I began to see that being a Christian meant a great deal more than “me and my walk with Jesus” and that God, the Sovereign Ruler of history, causes his people to join “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), not only the heroes of Scripture but the vast company of men and women who have lived and died since, animated as they were by “an inward and lively faith”.

The Protestant Reformation was brought about not by the lusts of a lecherous monarch, nor by the stirrings of nationalism, nor even by the disputations of a German monk, but by the clear purpose and plan of Almighty God, who determined to visit his people and to return to them the greatest gift of all – the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ. Without the Reformation I would have no gospel to believe, no English Bible from which to preach, and no understanding of the historical narrative which I had inherited. I realised that I stood in the line of the Reformers and their successors: the great English Puritans, the leaders of the Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century, as well as men like C. H. Spurgeon and J. C. Ryle in the nineteenth century. I wanted to stand in that line, and I still do.

Why do I treasure the Reformation as a pastor? The reader might be excused for thinking that my interest is merely antiquarian, aesthetic or cultural. But that is far removed from the truth. The Protestant Reformation was nothing other than the rediscovery of the “faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), the clear message that no one can be saved by his own efforts or any outward ceremony, but only by faith in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. I love the Reformation because at its heart is the gospel that Jesus himself entrusted to the apostles, the gospel that must be believed if anyone is to know God, and live.

But speaking as citizen of the United Kingdom, let me add that we are living in days of great opportunity. Our nation is presently poised to leave the European Union and, in some sense, to forge anew its independence and identity. The fact that it is five hundred years since the Reformation may not be uppermost in the minds of most of our politicians. For some in public life, the Reformation is a great blot upon European history. But I can feel another quote from Merle d’Aubigné coming along:

This island was to add its banner to the trophy of Protestantism, but that banner preserved its distinctive colours. When England became reformed, a puissant individualism joined its might to the great unity.[2]

My prayer is for no recovery of English or British nationalism. The greatest narrator of the Reformation, Merle d’Aubigné, was a Frenchman, as was its greatest theologian, John Calvin. But may the nations of Europe, and indeed the whole world, be blessed and transformed once more by the same God who so graciously visited them with the gospel five hundred years ago.

Paul Yeulett, January 2017

Picture: Paul Yeulett (second right) on the day of his induction as pastor at Grove Chapel.

 

[1] J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, The Reformation in England, Volume 1, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994) 23.

[2] idem.