Reconsidering the Reformation: Returning to the Faith of Jesus and the Apostles
For centuries, Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers have been celebrated as heroes of faith—bold liberators who broke the chains of ecclesiastical oppression and restored the purity of biblical Christianity. Their courage and conviction undeniably reshaped the Western world. Yet, when the movement they began is examined with theological honesty and historical awareness, an uncomfortable truth emerges: the Reformation reformed Rome, but it did not return to Jerusalem. It loosened the Church’s hierarchy but failed to recover the Jewish-apostolic roots that defined the original faith of Jesus and His followers.
To understand this, one must look beyond the narrative of progress that often defines Western church history and instead ask: what did the Reformation actually accomplish, and what did it leave untouched?
The Reformation and the Illusion of “Recovering the Authority of Scripture”
A common narrative in Protestant tradition claims that the Reformers “recovered the authority of Scripture” from a corrupt and oppressive Catholic Church. The problem with this phrase is not its intent—it is its assumption. Scripture has never lost authority. God’s Word does not become more or less authoritative depending on who recognizes it. What the Reformers truly did was reclaim interpretive control from the institutional Church and place it in the hands of the individual believer. That shift, while revolutionary, did not inherently bring the church closer to the biblical worldview—it simply redistributed power within a framework that was already far removed from the world of Jesus and the apostles.
The early church had long since ceased to read the Bible through Jewish eyes. By the time of the Reformation, Western theology had been shaped for over a thousand years by Greco-Roman philosophy, imperial politics, and the intellectual traditions of the medieval Church. Luther and Calvin inherited this worldview. Their quarrel was not with the Gentileization of Christianity but with the abuses and excesses of Rome. In this sense, the Reformation was a renovation within the same house, not a return to the foundation laid by the apostles.
Salvation by Grace Through Faith: A Narrowed Truth
One of the Reformers’ central tenets—salvation by grace through faith—is often portrayed as their great rediscovery of Paul’s gospel. But Paul never lost it. Nor did he define it as they did. Paul’s message of grace and faith was not a theological abstraction; it was a proclamation of God’s covenantal faithfulness to Israel and the nations. His language of “grace” and “faith” belonged to the story of Israel’s redemption, not to a system of individual justification detached from covenant.
In Second Temple Judaism, faith (pistis, or emunah) was not mental assent but faithful allegiance—trust manifested through loyalty. Grace was not an escape from law but the sustaining mercy of a covenant-keeping God. The Reformers, following Augustine’s ideas, pictured salvation like a courtroom—God as the judge, people as the guilty ones, and faith as the way to be declared innocent. But Paul’s message was bigger than that. It was about God keeping His promises and rescuing His people. The Reformation recovered part of that truth but still missed the larger story of covenant and redemption.
Martin Luther and the Problem of Character
Even setting theology aside, the Reformers’ moral legacy demands examination. Martin Luther’s antisemitism—evident in his later writings such as On the Jews and Their Lies—betrays a spirit fundamentally at odds with the Messiah he claimed to serve. His words, urging the burning of synagogues and persecution of Jews, remain among the most shameful pages in Christian history:
“First: their synagogues or schools must be set on fire, and whatever in them that cannot endure fire must be covered or buried, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. Second: I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. Third: I advise that all their writings—whatever does not heave toward blasphemy, lies, cursing, and the such—be taken from them …” (Luther, Martin. 1543. On the Jews and Their Lies. Translated by Martin H. Bertram. Section XI, “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?”)
“We are at fault in not slaying them.” (Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies [German: Von den Juden und ihren Lügen]. Wittenberg, 1543.)
“They are a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.” (Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies. Wittenberg, 1543. Translated by Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works, vol. 47.)
To say this is not to dismiss all of Luther’s contributions, nor to deny that people can change or be used by God despite their flaws. Rather, it is to recognize that spiritual insight and moral integrity are meant to walk hand in hand. When a movement exalts Scripture’s authority yet harbors hostility toward the very people through whom that Scripture came, it exposes how far it has wandered from its roots. Luther’s failure in this area was not unique—it reflected a deeper blindness within Christianity itself, which had long forgotten that it was grafted into the story of Israel.
Constantine and the Gentile Takeover
The deeper issue, however, long predates the Reformation. The fracture between the Jewish apostles and the emerging Gentile church began in the first century and was later cemented in the fourth, when Constantine institutionalized Christianity as the religion of the empire. What began as a Jewish sect proclaiming the kingdom of God became an imperial faith serving the kingdom of man.
Under Constantine and his successors, the Church underwent a transformation that redefined its relationship to the faith of Israel. By the fourth century, Christianity had not only grown in size and influence but had also begun to formalize its separation from Jewish observance—a division that had been developing for centuries. The Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 explicitly severed the connection between Easter and Passover, declaring it “unbecoming” for Christians to follow the customs of the Jews. Subsequent councils reinforced this divide, forbidding participation in Jewish festivals and Sabbath observances. What had once been a faith rooted in the rhythms, feasts, and Torah of Israel became increasingly detached from those covenantal patterns, reflecting a broader rejection of Jewish life and practice.
At the same time, people’s understanding of faith began to change. The early followers of Jesus looked forward to a real, physical resurrection and a future kingdom that God would bring to earth. Over time, though, many teachers started to explain these hopes as symbols or spiritual ideas instead of real events that would one day happen. Influenced by thinkers such as Origen and later Augustine, the Church began to read the promises of Scripture as spiritual symbols rather than concrete realities. The physical resurrection of the dead and the coming reign of the Messiah—central expectations in apostolic preaching—were reinterpreted as inward spiritual truths or as realities already fulfilled in the life of the Church. Though belief in the resurrection was never formally denied, its character and focus were transformed. The eschatological tension of the early faith was replaced by a theology of present fulfillment.
This reorientation also reshaped the Church’s understanding of the Kingdom of God. Augustine’s City of God articulated the notion that the Church itself was the visible expression of God’s kingdom on earth—a theological synthesis that served both ecclesial and imperial purposes. The kingdom was no longer viewed as a future reign to be inaugurated by the Messiah but as a present institution under divine sanction, intertwined with the structures of empire. This fusion of theology and power became one of the defining features of post-Constantinian Christianity.
This imperial vision of a triumphant Church echoes an older error — one that long predated Constantine. Within first-century Judaism, the zealot movement sought to bring about the kingdom of God by human strength, attempting to overthrow Rome and establish divine rule through force. Yet Jesus decisively rejected this vision. He taught that the kingdom would not come through political upheaval or human ambition but through repentance, faith, and divine intervention at the appointed time. In Luke 17:20–21, Jesus is responding to the Pharisees’ question about when the kingdom of God would come. They expected observable, political, messianic signs — an earthly restoration of Israel’s rule and defeat of Rome. Jesus’ response challenges the timing and the manner of that expectation, not the reality of a future kingdom itself: “The kingdom of God does not come with observation,” He said, “nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20–21). This means the kingdom would not arrive in the way the Pharisees anticipated — through visible political upheaval or military conquest. It’s a rebuke of the zealot-like, human-driven efforts to force the kingdom into being.
In the centuries that followed, however, the Church fell into a similar trap — not by rebellion against Rome but by alliance with it. The zealots had tried to force the kingdom; Constantine and his successors tried to build it. Both sought to manifest divine rule through human power. The result was a theology that confused the hope of God’s future reign with the authority of earthly empire. In doing so, Christianity mirrored the very distortion that Jesus had opposed: the attempt to achieve God’s purposes by political means.
The union of church and state that emerged from this vision produced a “church triumphant” that sought to rule the nations but often did so through coercion, conquest, and bloodshed. Ironically, the effort to advance Christ’s kingdom by worldly power led to some of the most anti-Christian outcomes in history — crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and forced conversions — all in the name of the Prince of Peace. The same Jesus who refused the zealots’ sword now found His name invoked to bless the empire’s. Thus, what began as a movement proclaiming the coming kingdom of God became an institution that sought to create it by its own hand.
Tragically, this same period also witnessed the entrenchment of supersessionism—commonly known as replacement theology. By the late fourth century, influential Church Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine proclaimed that the Jewish people had been rejected by God and replaced by the Church as His chosen nation. This doctrine did not remain an abstract idea; it shaped Christian identity for more than a millennium, fueling anti-Jewish sentiment and justifying persecution. Theology, once meant to display the steadfast faithfulness of God to His covenant, became instead a weapon that severed Christianity from its Jewish roots and distorted the character of God Himself. It raises the haunting question: How can God be faithful to the Church if He has proven unfaithful to the Jews?
The consequences of this theological rupture have echoed through history. The anti-Jewish attitudes of the Church Fathers eventually hardened into social and political systems that excluded, humiliated, and often brutalized the Jewish people. From medieval expulsions and forced conversions to mob attacks and ghettos, the belief that the Church had replaced Israel became the unspoken foundation for centuries of Christian contempt. Though the forms of hostility changed, the spirit behind them remained—culminating in the Holocaust, where the logic of replacement reached its most horrifying expression. While the Nazi regime was not a Christian movement, it drew upon a long tradition of Christian anti-Judaism that had prepared Europe to see the destruction of the Jewish people as the removal of a rejected race rather than the attempted annihilation of God’s covenant people. Yet history itself testifies to a different story. The survival of the Jewish people—against every attempt to erase them—is nothing short of miraculous. The restoration of the nation of Israel in the twentieth century stands as a profound confirmation that God continues to work through His people and has not abandoned His covenant. No other nation has been scattered for centuries, persecuted without respite, and yet restored to its ancestral land with its language, identity, and faith still intact.
Today, the Jewish people make up less than two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population—around fifteen million souls—and yet they remain at the center of global attention and hostility. Such disproportionate hatred defies mere politics or sociology; it reveals something spiritual at work. The enduring animosity toward Israel is not simply a human prejudice—it is a reflection of the world’s rebellion against the purposes of God. For if Israel’s continued existence bears witness to His covenant faithfulness, then hatred toward Israel becomes, at its root, hatred toward the God who keeps His promises.
Even today, echoes of this theology persist—sometimes overtly in anti-Semitic rhetoric, other times subtly in theologies that continue to spiritualize Israel’s promises or dismiss her ongoing role in God’s redemptive plan. Supersessionism, whether ancient or modern, is not merely a theological error but a moral tragedy. It obscures the faithfulness of God, distorts the identity of those who follow Jesus, and blinds believers to the redemptive story that still binds Israel and the nations together in God’s unfolding purpose.
By the time the Reformers appeared, these assumptions were so embedded that they were no longer questioned. Luther’s protest was against indulgences and clerical corruption—not against the theological framework that had supplanted the Jewish worldview of Jesus and the apostles. Thus, the Reformation, for all its courage, rearranged the furniture of Christendom but never left the house of Constantine.
Why So Few See the Problem
It is reasonable to wonder why, if this departure from the apostolic faith is so significant, it remains largely unrecognized. The reasons are complex. Tradition offers identity and safety; challenging it feels like cutting off one’s spiritual ancestry. Seminaries teach within inherited systems—Augustinian, Thomistic, Calvinist—rarely engaging the world of Second Temple Judaism. Many Christians have been taught to view “Jewish” as the opposite of “Christian,” unconsciously perpetuating the very anti-Judaism that blinded the Reformers.
Moreover, the church’s self-understanding has long been shaped by a myth of progress: the idea that history naturally moves toward greater truth. Within that narrative, the Reformation must be seen as an ascent toward enlightenment. To question that story feels like regression. Yet truth demands honesty: the Reformers did not rediscover the ancient faith; they merely reconfigured a Western one.
Returning to the Source: The Jewish-Apostolic Faith
If Christianity began as a Jewish movement, then any expression of faith that looks unrecognizable to that origin must face scrutiny. The earliest believers saw themselves not as founders of a new religion but as participants in the fulfillment of Israel’s promises—a people awaiting the Messiah’s return and the restoration of all things. Their Scriptures, prayers, and hope were saturated with the language of covenant and kingdom, not the categories of philosophy and abstraction.
To read the New Testament in its proper context is not a modern academic exercise—it is an act of faithfulness. It allows the words of Jesus, the letters of Paul, and the Gospel itself to be heard once more in their native Jewish context. It allows the words of Jesus, the letters of Paul, and the Gospel itself to be heard again within their Jewish context, restoring theology to the story it was always meant to tell. Most importantly, it restores the story of the Gospel as the story of a faithful God fulfilling His covenant through Israel for the sake of all nations.
A church that reclaims this foundation will resemble not Constantine’s Rome or Luther’s Wittenberg, but Jerusalem—a community rooted in Scripture, shaped by covenant, and living in anticipation of the age to come.
Conclusion: Beyond Reformation Toward Restoration
The Reformation was necessary in its time, but it was not sufficient. It challenged corruption but left untouched a deeper exile—the estrangement of the followers of Jesus from their own story. To honor the true authority of Scripture is not to idolize Luther or Calvin, nor to cling to denominational identity, but to return to the worldview of Jesus and the apostles—to the soil of Israel where the faith first took root.
The goal is not another reformation of Christendom but a restoration of biblical faithfulness—a recovery not of independence from Rome, but of dependence upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The New Testament reveals a divine partnership between Jews and Gentiles—God working through Israel and extending His promises to the faithful among the nations. Only by returning to that foundation can Christianity cease to be a Gentile reinterpretation of a Jewish Messiah and once again become what it was at the beginning: the continuation of Israel’s story, fulfilled in the Messiah and destined for His coming Kingdom.