program thus far and the food, the fellowship, the the the uh what’s been
shared from the front has been truly a blessing. And uh when I was asked to speak here, I said, “Well, what do you
want me to speak about?” And they said, “We want you to speak about as it’s October 31st when you’re preaching, we
want you to speak about the reformation and science.” And so I said, “Okay.” So those are my marching orders. Uh so it’s
it’s my privilege to share with you today uh the first time this afternoon is called Luther and today and uh then
this afternoon we’re going to have a continuation of this uh just before our evening meal. And so um I I love the
story of Martin Luther uh because of the change that he brought in our world today. I think that we sometimes forget
how significant a figure Martin Luther was for the world in which we live. So
this is going to be our journey uh this afternoon. Um we’re going to start out by looking at the diet of voms and of
course we just had our lunch. So um that refers to our meal. We then have the
look at the petristic era and then the era of authoritative interpretation. We then look briefly at the renaissance
between Luther the diet of vms once more and then we come to the copenician revolution and then we come to our
conclusions. And so that’s the journey we’re going to make this afternoon as we uh look at the significance of
Reformation Day, October 31st, um back there in 1517. So we’re going to start
out our journey uh by just reminding ourselves what happened at the Diet of Vums. And so it was in January the 28th
1521 that the imperial diet or you might say the the congress or the assembly of the
Holy Roman Empire was uh called together to meet in the city of Vorums in Germany. The diet was called by the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V. He was the master of most of Europe and it was to
discuss the problems of a devout Catholic priest called Martin Luther. Now, Martin Luther was an Augustinian
monk and he’d been summon summoned to answer for the 95 thesis that he pounded
on the castle um church door on um October 31st just four years previous to
that uh to the diet of verms and those writings had caused an earthquake across
Europe and um so they they were published they were printed after the Goodenbo press was published and you
might say that Martin Luther’s 95 thesis came just in the nick of time. Had they
come 20 years earlier, people may have heard rumors of them, but they came after the invention of the printing
press. And so his ideas were disseminated all across Europe. Uh we we we sometimes forget how significant the
printing press was. It used to be before the time of Martin Luther that if you wanted to study or learn, you had to
travel long distances to university. But with the advent invention of printing
now knowledge could be brought into your home through the through the media of a book. And so and printing meant that pe
knowledge could be disseminated widely across Europe. And so when Luther published his 95 thesis there was
delight across much of Europe because people were sick of the papal corruption, the greed and the cruelty of
the Roman Catholic couer, the administrative class. And so gathered at the diet of worms were the German
electors. These were the aristocrats. These were the nobles. Uh these were the bishops. These were the archbishops.
These were the decision makers of the Holy Roman Empire. And together with Martin Luther were some cardinals from
Rome. So Luther arrived in Vorms on the afternoon of April the 16th. And he was
ordered by the administrators to appear before the diet of Vms at 4:00 the next
day on the 17th of April. This he did and he was instructed only to answer
direct questions from the presiding officer of the diet of worms, an officer called Johan von Ek. Now Luther was
presented with a collection of his books and he was asked if he was ready to recant. Scenes like this do repeat
themselves in human history. He was asked if he would recant um for the books that he published in the years up
until 1521. Luther asked for time for prayer and so he said yes. now is 4:00 today. You must
reappear tomorrow at 4:00 and then you must give your answer. So Luther went back to his accommodation and he spent
mo much of that night in prayer. The following day on the 18th of April um
1521, Luther appeared again. You see an artist rendition of it up on the screen there. And he was asked again, “Will you
recant of these writings that you’ve published?” And Luther’s response was three-fold. It was a very clever answer.
The first answer was this. He said, “Some of my works are contain um standard um theology and they’ve been
wellreceived by the Catholic authorities. So why would I recant from things that the church already
believes?” That’s the first answer. The second answer Luther gave was this. He said, “Some of those of my writings
attacks the lies. They attack the abuse of power and the the the moral corruption within the church.” She said,
“And if I retract those writings, that will only encourage those abuses of power to continue. So it would not be a
good thing for me to recount and retract those writings.” And the third thing that Luther said was that some of his
words indeed had attacked individuals such as calling the pope the antichrist, which was rather strong for those days.
He apologized if his tone had been rather harsh, but he stood by the substance of the issues that were being
addressed. If Luther said he could be shown from the scripture that his writings were in error, then Luther was
ready to retract his writings. He then concludes with those very famous words that you see on the screen. He said,
“Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the
authority of popes and councils because they’ve contradicted each other. I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted
and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant
anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I
can do no other. So help me God or may God help me. Amen. Very famous words.
Luther was dismissed from the diet that afternoon and he left the city of Vms with a promise of safe conduct from the
Holy Roman Emperor. Uh much to the shagrin and anger of the papists and the priests who wanted to see Luther
executed as a heretic. But in that afternoon, the world changed forever.
And the modern era that we live in today was made possible because of what Luther said that afternoon on October 31st um
all those years ago. So why did the world change so rapidly um on that afternoon? Well, let’s go back and look
at a bit of church history, shall we? If you go back to the era of the the the era of the church fathers or the
petristic here in the second to fourth or fifth centuries AD, the church was growing rapidly in the Roman Empire. The
church at first faced persecution. Satan brought that upon the church and then when that didn’t work, Satan brought
compromise into the church and so the Christianity became a form of baptized paganism rather than being comprised of
converted pagans who are now disciples of Jesus Christ. And in the second and fifth centuries, the church was consumed
by debates about the the nature of Christ. And these days, we live in a world where people accept the humanity
of Jesus. Um many scholars accept that Jesus literally existed. But our modern
day scholars, they deny the divinity of Christ. But the situation was reversed
in the second to the fourth centuries. In the second to the fourth centuries, people accepted the divinity of Christ,
but they rejected the humanity of Christ. And this was partly because there were some false teachings um based
on mystery religions which basically said that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad. And therefore, when
when Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, um he didn’t leave any footprints in the sand. He appears to be real, but he
really wasn’t real. And so um therefore they said so Jesus was divine but
whether he was human or not is altogether another question. And so they debated the divinity of Christ. And
there were many debates about this uh about the they call them Aryanism, modalism, adoptionism, apollinarianism,
uh neestorans. I thought that the Neestorans were a dead um sect of Christianity until it was my privilege
to meet them in northern Iraq in 2014 and they had been persecuted by ISIS and
I met Neestorians, Netorian priests and I wondered how did they survive the last
1100 years but they were these fierce debates within the church and uh people were excommunicated people were thrown
out of the church at the time and uh so the the Christian church was divided
about about the humanity of Christ. And there were all kinds of ideas that Jesus had a divine nature and a human nature.
That the divine nature and the human nature was somehow fused. That there was the human divine divine nature up here
and a human nature down here. And when Jesus died on Calvary, was it the divine side that died or the human side that
died or was it a blending of the two that died? So there were these kind of debates going on within the early
church. And because of this chaos, a certain monk called Vincent developed
what he called the notion of authoritative interpretation. And I hope you can see that up on the screen now.
Vincent was a monk in the fifth century AD. And he wrote the following lines. He said this quote, “The line of
interpretation of the prophets and apostles must be directed according to the norm of the ecclesiastical and
Catholic sense.” End quote. So what do he mean by this? What he meant by this was quite simple. He was saying that all
biblical interpretation, however you choose to interpret the Bible, must be
under the authority and the authoritative interpretation of the Catholic Church. That the church no
longer sits under the scriptures, but now the church sits above the scriptures. And the church tells you
what you believe from what to believe from the scriptures. Um, but it’s not up to you to figure out what God wants to
say to you. um the church will tell you what you need to know sufficient for salvation. And so with from serial
onwards in near the end of the fifth century, we have the idea that uh the
supreme authority in interpreting the scripture is not the Holy Spirit upon your conscience. It is not you um
listening to a sermon and praying about it. It’s not even you reading the word of God for yourself. The supreme
authority in interpreting the word of God comes from the ecclesiastical councils or from the pope himself, the
bishop of Rome. And this uh this transitioned us to the era of authoritative interpretation or as some
people call it the dark ages. And I see we have dark ages on the screen here as well. So during the era of the the dark
ages, in the era of the dark ages, that was the era of papal supremacy within
Europe. It was the era of the Crusades. And during the dark ages, the Roman Catholic Church claimed supreme and
exclusive authority in the interpretation of the word of God. You didn’t need to read it for yourself. You
simply believed what you were told to believe and you accepted that as if it were the gospel. All interpretation was
in the within the Catholic Church’s authority um to determine. And even today if you go into a Catholic
bookstore or you buy a book on Amazon let’s say you buy the catechism um or you buy a book by say the previous pope
Benedict and if you open the front of that book in the preface they will have two little words and those words are
nhil obstat and the words nhil obstat means uh nothing obstructs this or
nothing stands in the way of this book. That means that this book um uh is consistent with Catholic dogma. And so
if you buy if you buy a Catholic book, you know that it is a genuine article, look for the words nhil obstat and you
know that this book is consistent with dogma and the encyclicals and the council decisions over the last 1500
years. So um in the era of authoritative interpretation you have this guy here very famous um or saint. Augustine he
came from North Africa. He lived at the time that the the barbarian tribes were conquering North Africa and driving the
Romans out. And St. Augustine was a key figure in Catholic theology and he
looked for multiple senses of scripture which made the scripture quite hard to understand. Now Augustine argued that um
when the king sent out the messengers to invite guests to the wedding feast um that most English translations say there
in the gospel it says that you are to invite the guests to come to the wedding feast. But that verb anco that you
intermittently see on the screen there, that verb Ancazo also means to compel.
And most English translations don’t capture that sense. So um you see it upon the screen and now you don’t. Um
but the the verb means to compel. And so um in the English world, we say that the
king sent out his servants to invite the guests to come to the feast. But Augustine took upon a rather obscure
interpretation of that verb and said no you with the king send out his servants to compel them to come to the feast.
That is to compel them to come to the church. And that was the basis for the persecution of the church of dissenters.
Because if if if Jesus said that we can compel people to enter the church and
you add that to the doctrine that extra ecclesian non-salucess which means outside the church there is no
salvation. So if you believe that salvation is only possible within the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church
and Jesus said we are to compel people to enter the church that means we’re going to do that and we’re going to
compel them either through the Spanish Inquisition as a great example and if we kill you in the process it’s for your
own good because when we kill you by bringing you into the church your eternal salvation is hereby guaranteed.
What a great evangelistic strategy. Can you imagine if you put your evangelism budget based on that kind of
premise together? Yeah. We’d like um we’d like some Glocks and AR-15s for next year, please. We want to make sure
we can compel people to come into the church. And if we kill them in the process, they’re going to be saved. So, we’re doing them a favor.
And so, the era of authoritative interpretation lasted all the way through the dark ages. And key to this
was the Latin Vulgate. Now, the Vulgate was a Latin translation of the Bible.
And that became the core text for the Roman Catholic Church. It was incomprehensible to most people in
Western Europe. Most people couldn’t speak Latin. They couldn’t read Latin. And when the word of God was held in a
language that people had no access to, it meant that people had no possibility of knowing what the word of God said or
what God wanted to say to them as individuals. And if you uh growing up in England in the middle ages for instance,
they would have um in each um church they would have a Bible and it was in Latin which people didn’t speak and the
Bible would be chained shut during the week. So the common folks could not get access to the word of God. This was a
real problem. So um uh after the patristic era, the era of chaos over
discussions about the nature of Christ, we enter the era of authoritative interpretation which says that the
church determines everything and you simply cannot question it. And then that brings us to the Renaissance. And so the
Renaissance um starts in the 1400s in the north of Italy in a city called
Florence. And the Renaissance means um this is this is the uh a new birth
that’s coming along here. And so with the Renaissance starting in the early 1400s um this was a desire um to get
back to our classical roots. And so with the Renaissance there was the belief that Europe had stagnated which was
correct. And there was a belief that um we can’t escape this monolithic system called the papacy which was also correct
at the time. And so these scholars were saying, well, let’s go back beyond the papacy, beyond Christianity to our Greek
or Romano roots, and we’re going to look at Greek philosophy and and Greek logic and and Roman uh the Roman legal system.
And so the the Renaissance took off in the 14th century, and the major figures there were Michelangelo and Leonardo da
Vinci. And uh there was a flourishing of art and there was also many writings in
the area of politics and social affairs. But the Renaissance was a humanistic
movement. It was not a spiritual reformation in any sense of the word. But what really moved the Renaissance
forward and the reformation was this event here. You know, we look at um uh these these turning points in human
history, but the fall of Constantinople, it was a turning point not just in um
Turkish history, not just in Christian history, but this was an event that tragic though it may have been, it
actually was the catalyst for the Reformation. And the reason it was a catalyst for the reformation uh there in
1453 was that um when Constantinople when the Muslims were coming and they
they controlled most of Turkey the Ottomans and Constantinople alone was left um for many years and when
Constantinople was going to fall um in the in the collapse of Constantinople there were thousands of Greek
manuscripts were smuggled out and they were brought to the west. This was the single largest transfer of knowledge in
European history up until that moment in time. And when Constantinople fell, there was a flood of Greekeaking
Christian refugees from um Turkey of today, Constantinople in Stanbul, the name of the city today, to um Western
Europe. They brought with them artworks. They brought with them Greek manuscripts of the scriptures and other documents.
And they brought with them Greek philosophy and learning. And the arrival of those Greek manuscripts had a massive
impact on the Renaissance and also affected Arasmus who translated the Bible into Greek in Rotterdam. And so uh
the fall of can constant we view it as as a as a tragedy in Christian history.
It was the end of the Byzantine Empire. Um it was the first time the city walls were taken out using cannon. The cannon
themselves were manufactured on the site and the cannon was so large they
couldn’t haul them with with um with oxen. So they actually had to melt the cannon outside the city walls. They
brought in ingots of brass and they melted it down. They made the cannons and all the work all the artillery was
done by Bulgarian Christians. They were mercenaries and they knocked down the walls of Constantinople. And from that
moment on um siege warfare was fundamentally changed with the advent of artillery. And so after the fall of
Constantinople, we see rapid change coming all across Western Europe. You
have the you have princing was developed. You have um the the plague or some people call it the black death. And
the black death killed some estimates say up to 50% of the population of Europe.
It was huge. and whole cities would just be laid waste when when the plague arrived. And
so this caused massive social changes. If half of our nation’s population were to die out in the next 3 months, it
would cause huge social changes. And the most obvious social change it caused was
that until the plague arrived, Europe had a feudal system where the surfs were
tied to the land and they were allowed to farm the land as long as they gave taxes to the knight who controlled that
fftom and they had to give military service for a few weeks every year and give taxes in exchange they were allowed
to live on the land. And that system of mutual protection went all the way up to the kings of each respective nation. But
after the plague arrived, most of the peasants were wiped out. And now all of a sudden, peasants had an economic
value. Every every farmer, every juke, every aristocrat needed peasants to work
his land. And so the peasants started moving across Europe. They had freedom of movement because everybody wanted to
get their hand on a peasant because they the ones who knew how to work the land. And so um not only did we see the death
of the aristocracy, but we saw the rise of the merchant class. And in Europe, we had merchant cities um such as Venice
and London and Amsterdam and Rotterdam. These were very powerful cities that were self-governing and they were ruled
by the merchant classes. You read this in Shakespeare where you get the the the um um Romeo and Juliet. Yes, they’re
from two competing um merchant families within that particular city there. And
so um with the re with the renaissance there a new kind of humanism arose. It
was not anti-religious but it was an attitude of skepticism towards institutional authority
and the vulgate began to be challenged but in this in the early 1500s because scholars started to focus on the Greek
and the Hebrew texts rather than the Vulgate itself. And with the advent of printing and the printing press, now
these new translations of the gospels could be disseminated all across Europe in the original Greek language. And
that’s what happened. And this was uh this was the catalyst for this was a guy called Arasmus. Now he lived in
Rotterdam in the late 1400s, early 1500s. Holland Holland was a tolerant um
society. It was good for those who who didn’t who were Protestant without realizing they were Protestants just
yet. and um he he decided to devote his life to the translation of the New
Testament into Greek. Now he had the Latin Vulgate but he didn’t want to use
that. So he started looking for the Greek manuscripts that were flooding into Western Europe particularly after
the fall of Constantinople. And as he got more and more Greek manuscripts so every couple of years he
would bring out an updated version of the Greek New Testament. And so the first Greek New Testament he produced,
he used as many manuscripts as he could get. And then for the bits that way didn’t have Greek manu manuscripts, he
just translated from the vulgate back into the Greek, which wasn’t a great thing to do. But as his manuscripts
developed and more his translation developed and more and more manuscripts became available, so the Greek New
Testament became more and more consistent and reliable. Now, Arasmus,
you might say, was a good Methodist or a good Baptist or a good Adventist in the sense that he insisted that that you
need to have a personal connection with Jesus Christ to be saved. He also believed that in order to maintain that
faith, you need a daily devotional life and you need group meetings. And this
idea came through into John Wesley and the Methodists where they would have methodical meetings once every week on a
Wednesday or a Tuesday where they would gather for confession of sin um mutual encouragement, rebuking for sin and and
reading and growing in faith together. And that’s what came into Adventism as our Wednesday night prayer meetings. Now
these things have certain roots in in Reformation history here. Um but Arasmus
um argued essentially that the heart of your faith is not what the church tells
you to believe, it’s what you read in the word of God. Now that’s a pretty profound shift in
the time in which he lives, which brings us to um reformation day in Martin
Luther um from 1483 to 1546. Now, Luther began to separate
theologically from the Catholic Church when he was lecturing on the book of Romans and and Genesis and the Psalms in
1515-1518. Not so much because he was differentiating himself from them
theologically, but because he chose to use Arasmus’ Greek New Testament and not
the Vulgate. And in choosing the Greek New Testament rather than the official Bible of the church, the Latin Vulgate,
Luther was different was separating himself from the church and from their translation from which all kinds of
erroneous doctrines and practices were coming. So is the Vulgate would say do penance and the gospel saying Greek be
be penitent. There’s a big difference between doing penance and and being penitent. And so um so as he started to
use the Greek New Testaments instead of the Latin New Testament of the Catholic Church um Luther started to move away
from the idea that the church has the authoritative teaching role in society and he started to deny the pope’s claim
to be the final arbiter in matters of doctrinal truth. Well, as we’ve already seen, there was the diet of verms. The
pope threatened excommunication upon Martin Luther, but Martin Luther appealed to the diet of of Vms. Now,
this was a huge victory for Martin Luther because Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk and technically he was
under the jurisdiction of the Augustinian order and he should have been um tried and then convicts or
acquitted in the courts of the Augustinian monks. That was where he should have been tried and the pope had
already said this guy is worthy of excommunication. So when Luther appealed and he went to the diet of verms, he was
taking his case out of the the ecclesiastical courts and he was taking it into the civil courts. The very fact
that the the diet of worms was held to discuss Martin Luther’s writing was a huge defeat for the papacy because for
the first time in over a thousand years, a civil court was about to make a decision on what the papacy had already
decided. The pope says this man is worthy of excommunication. And the the Holy Roman Empire said, “Wait a minute.
We’re the ones that make the final say on this. You can bring your recommendation to us. We can ratify it
or we can reject it.” So the very fact that Luther was speaking at the Diet of Wombs in the first place was a huge
victory. And so when he gave those famous words that you see on the screen, we’ve already read them out together. Um
what was Luther essentially saying here? Luther was saying this that there is God
up there and there is man down here. And when God wants to reveal himself to you
or to myself, he doesn’t need to go through an ecclesiastical hierarchy.
That if God wants to speak to you, he speaks directly to you through your conscience through the read reading of
the word of God. God does not need to go through take a detour through an
ecclesiastical hierarchy um in order for what he wants revealed to you to be acceptable. Luther was saying that God
can speak directly to us today in 2025 the United States of America and we can
come directly into the presence of God without a human mediator. Jesus Christ is our only mediator. We
can come into the presence of God without the needs go through a priest, a pastor, a church elder or a Sabbath
school teacher. Each one of us has that privilege, that responsibility and that right. Luther was insisting in these
words on the screen on the primacy of reason over dogma, on the need to focus
on the inspired text rather than church tradition. He was insisting on the right of individuals to seek understanding for
themselves rather than just to accept the official interpretations of the church. And he was insisting that it’s
the role of the Holy Spirit and not that of the pope to bring conviction and understanding. And his ideas in these
few words here led to a reformation. But not just a reformation, they led to a revolution in almost every aspect of
life in the Middle Ages and all the nation states of Europe. One of the ideas of Martin Luther was what we now
call exegetical optimism. The idea that every man, woman, or child can read, has the responsibility and the right to read
the Bible for themselves in their own language. And God will reveal sufficient to you for your salvation. God’s not
going to reveal all mysteries to you before this side of heaven. But God will reveal himself to you in a way that is
sufficient for your salvation. That is why we have Sabbath school as Adventists. We believe that every
Adventist should be reading the Bible and studying it for themselves every single day of the week to grow in grace
and to grow in truth. I want to encourage you to be reading your Sabbath school classes and to be growing in that process uh because that is the
exegetical optimism that Martin Luther was promoting. Now, how does this affect science and and space? Well, um at the
same time of as Martin Luther, you have um the Copenician Revolution that
started in modern day Poland. And we start with this guy here um uh
Capernacus. He lived in modern day Poland about the same time as Martin Luther and he was a classical
Renaissance man. He was an accomplished scholar. He had a doctorate in Kent church or canon law. He was an
astronomer. He was also a mathematician. He was a physi physician. He was a classic scholar. He was a governor and
he was a diplomat. He wrote extensively on economics and on what inflation is
and his writings on how um debased money that is where you say this is a this
this this little silver coin is an ounce of silver but it’s really half tin and half silver this is debased currency he
argued that debased currency drives out good money and that’s the basis behind Gresham’s law a fundamental principle of
economic theory today now when kern capernicus was alive and Martin Luther
the dominant theory of the world and how the universe worked was based on the works of a guy called Tommy who wrote in
about 150 BC. Now according to Tommy the earth was the stationary center of the
universe and the sun and the stars were all rotating around planet earth. They
were they had their own smaller spheres but they were essentially rotating around planet earth. And capernicus
proposed just before his death a radical new understanding of how the heavenly uh
bodies work. He published this book here called a revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. It was published months
before he died. And he knew this long before he died, but he didn’t want to
publish it before he died because he was afraid of the reaction from the Catholic Church. And so he knew in his own
mathematical and astronomical research that the earth is not the center of the universe, that we actually revolve
around the sun. But this was too big an issue to raise. this was too dangerous an idea to spread abroad in the 1500s.
So he decided not to publish it. Meanathan and Luther were both aware of Capernacus’s work and Meangan sent a
Protestant astronomer to study with Capernacus and also to try and convert him to the Protestant faith. So
Capernacus he published this book just before he died. And the Capernac revolution took off from there. And we
come to this guy here called Galileo Galileam. Now Galileo um he lived he
lived after the death of Capernacus and um he was an interesting character and
he championed Capernacus’s ideas and that brought him into a direct confrontation with the with the papacy
whereas Capernicus had not want to publish his works because he was afraid of the reaction from the papacy and he
also saw what was happening to Martin Luther. So when Galileo came along, he decided to publish his works and that
brought him into a direct confrontation with the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church. He he was uh he was uh brought
before the Jesuits in the Inquisition um there in 15 1616 and they asked him to
answer his ideas. Now Galileo was a brilliant astronomer like Capernacus. He
was a mathematician, a physicist and a mathematician and an engineer. He studied speed and velocity. He
understood gravity and freefall. He understood the principles of relativity, inertia, and projectile motion. He is
viewed as the father of modern-day observational astronomy, the scientific method, and modern physics. And what
happened to Capernacus? Well, he was forced to recount his writings.
Martin Luther didn’t recount, but Martin Luther had freed men’s minds for
open-minded research. and uh Capern even though Galileo was
forced to recant by the Inquisition. They banned his books and his other major writings. He was confined in
Northern Italy to house arrest until he died. But the cat was out of the bag, you might say. Because of Martin Luther,
the principles of free research and thinking for yourself and coming to your own conclusions and logic and reason,
they were taking root in the scientific world in Europe. The third phase of the Capernac revolution is with this guy
here, Isaac Newton. He lived in Britain from 1643
1727. And the difference between Isaac Newton and Capernicus and Galileo was
that Isaac Newton lived in a Protestant nation. And the Protestant nation was open to
freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of speech. Writing at the
time, Newton was an astronomer. He was a mathematician. He was a physicist. He was an inventor and he was also an
accomplished theologian. He published a book called um the philosophy of natural
um mathematical principles. You see it on the screen there in 1687. In his writings, he covered classical
mathematics. Um achieved the first unification theory of physics. He formulated the laws of motion and
universal gravitation which dominated science until the arrival of Einstein. His studies covered the laws of
planetary motion, a theory of color, the uh the trajectories of comets, the progress, the procession of the
equinoxes. He demonstrated Capernacus’s theory that we rotate around the sun and not vice versa. He was also a devout
Anglican who believed that rather than science and theology being in opposition to one another, theology is actually the
queen of the sciences. And in in the universities of England in the time of Isaac Newton, theology was
not a separate department maybe under the arts or the humanities. Theology was in the sciences.
And so Isaac Newton was that that rarity today. He was one of the greatest minds
of his era who was a devout Anglican. He refused ordination as an elder because he disagreed with how they formulated
the doctrine of the theor of the the trinity. So the trinitarian debates aren’t anything new. But um he was he he
was a devout theologian at the time. And whereas Capernacus was wary and almost
afraid of disseminating his ideas for fear of the reaction from the papacy. And whereas Galileo was um was rejected
by the Inquisition and placed in house arrest and forced to recant his writings. It was in Protestant England
that the Capernac revolution took off and found its fullest flowerings in the work of Sir Isaac Newton. In
Protestantism, there was no tradition to uphold, no dogma to defend, no encyclicals to promulgate, no
excommunications to be enforced, and there was no papal fried pride to be modified. It was the cradle, it was in
the cradle of Protestantism that the scientific revolution flourished leading to the industrial revolution and the
modern world today. So, what do we say in conclusion? They’ve just given me five more minutes. So, in 1521 at the
diet of verms, the world changed forever. irrevocably. Once Martin Luther stood at
the diet of voms, there was no going back. From that moment on, there has been the understanding of the need for
the primacy of reason over dogma, free inquiry over blind submission, text over
tradition, and an evidence-based understanding of faith, science, and life. and the explosion of knowledge
that began in Western Europe uh as a result of the Protestant Reformation. It led to the enlightenment to the age of
reason, the industrial revolution and the modern world. And it can all be traced back to Martin Luther on in the
diet of voms and his stand for reason, liberty of conscience, freedom of inquiry and honesty of thought. Those
enlightenment writers, they advocated for constitutional government rather than the divine right of kings. They
argued for religious tolerance rather than the Inquisition. They argued for the separation of church and state
rather than the persecuting union of church and state that papy had become during the dark ages.
Martin Luther didn’t just say a few words in a council in Germany 500 plus years ago. He changed the world and we
today are the beneficiaries of that. But I want my children to be
beneficiaries of that as well. And we are living today in an era of misinformation, disinformation, cancel
culture, coercion of conscience, and intolerance for those who deviate from the established orthodoxy of the day.
And if we don’t stand up for the same principles as did Martin Luther, we may enter a new dark ages. If not in
society, then in our own wider denomination. So I want to paraphrase Martin Luther as my concluding thought
here. Unless we today are convicted by scripture and plain reason. We today do
not accept the authority of popes and councils because they have contradicted each other. We today are bound by the
scriptures. We have quoted and our consciences are captive to the word of God. We today cannot and will not
recount anything. For to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here we stand today. We can do no other.
May God help us. Amen. So pass on the Protestant Reformation to
your children and your grandchildren that the light of the truth will always shine in the midst of the darkness
around us. Amen.