Well, welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. We are again on

location and we are in Vittenberg. And we are going to talk about something that's very

crucial for the Reformation, central to the reformation in Luther, and that is

Luther on scripture. Now there are a number of things that we could be saying,

let's just say a few things in the time that we have together. The first, and this is

where we start with, the authority of scripture. We see this in

Luther in the Leipzig debate in 1519. One of the monuments to Luther at Ice Lab and I believe

it is, there is an etching on the side of the monument of a very angry looking Roman Catholic official and that angry looking official is Johann Ek. And on the other side of Ek is Luther and Ek is holding in his hands all of these sort of bound up, rolled up documents as it were and Luther is holding a book, the Bible.

And that tells it all. Ek is appealing at Leipzig in this debate to the teachings of the councils, the teachings of the church,

and those rolled up documents are to represent that.

He's coming at Luther and coming at the Wittenburg Reformers and all that is emanating from the city from the context of the church and

the church's authority and Luther says to act well I have an authority that is

older than yours and of course this astounds act and he says we'll name them and Luther says

Paul and Peter and John he appeals directly to the authority of scripture at Leipzig

and of course he'll do the same thing at Verms so at Verms he comes to say my conscience is captive to the word of God

When he says here I stand he is standing on scripture and standing firm on the foundation of scripture.

And because scripture is authoritative, we should read it and we should study it.

And Luther offers us a lot of counsel here among the many things that he has to say about the Bible.

He wants to tell us how to read and study it. One text in particular it helps us is one of his prefaces to an addition of a collection of his writings.

There was a Latin collection of Luther's works and Luther wrote the preface to that and in that preface he recalls his conversion.

But there was also a German collection of his works and again Luther writes the

preface for that and there he tells us how to read and study the Bible. He gives us three steps.

...