490 Years Ago Today...

490 years ago today, a Catholic monk published a list of 95 propositions, discussion of which was intended to reform church teaching around the principle of salvation by grace alone: a principle taught throughout Scripture—as a quiet subtheme in the Old Testament, rising to a trumpeting crescendo in Christ's work on the Cross, and taught explicitly and at length in the writings of Paul. In the years to come, that monk's action would shake the Christian world. Little could he have realized what he was about to unleash.

Let us thank God for those down through the ages who—like that monk—have been called to steadfastly teach the greatest and most surprising truth of all: that salvation is by grace alone, a gift of God's mercy whose splendour, beauty, and matchless value lies precisely in the fact that it is a work untouched by human hands.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (Romans 3:22b-25a)

(This article is part of the Reformation Day Symposium.)