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a new reformation

"...we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified."  (Galatians 2:16 ESV)

Because of the fundamental nature of faith... it is natural to find that in the New Testament faith, as the reception of a free gift, is placed in sharpest contrast with any intrusion of human merit; it is natural to find that faith is sharply contrasted with works.  The contrast is really implied by the New Testament throughout, and in one book, the Epistle to the Galatians, it forms the express subject of the argument. 

That book from beginning to end is a mighty polemic in defense of the doctrine of justification by faith alone; and as such it has rightly been called the Magna Charta of Christian liberty.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the world was lying in darkness; but God then raised up a man who read this Epistle with his own eyes, and the Reformation was born.  So it may be in our own day.  Again the world is sinking into bondage; the liberty of the sons of God is again giving place to the bondage of a religion of merit: but God still lives, and His Spirit again may bring the charter of our liberty to light.

Meanwhile a strange darkness covers the eyes of men; the message of the great Epistle, so startlingly clear to the man whose eyes have been opened, is hidden by a mass of misinterpretation as absurd in its way as the medieval rubbish of the fourfold sense of Scripture which the Reformation brushed aside. Grammatico-historical interpretation is still being favored in theory, but despite is being done to it (by preachers if not scholars) in practice; and the Apostle is being made to say anything that men wish him to have said.

A new Reformation, we think, like the Reformation of the sixteenth century, would be marked, among other things, by a return to plain common sense; and the Apostle would be allowed, despite our likes and dislikes, to say what he really meant to say.

~ J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (1925; Banner of Truth edition, 1991) p. 183f.





Above, lithograph of Martin Luther from an 1882 painting by F. W. Wehle.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. 

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