Chapter 10 of a festschrift for Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, president of Westminster Seminary California, contains a commencement address delivered to WSC graduates by R.C. Sproul. In it, Sproul tells a story about the end of Martin Luther's life. The gospel had been preached throughout the region twice on Sundays. People had come from far off to hear it. But, Luther noted, everything had since changed. No longer were people excited to hear the gospel of God. They preferred to travel to far off lands to see indulgences as they had been doing prior to the Reformation. Sproul writes:
[Luther] wondered, why is it that people are still spending their money on indulgences and on what Luther called the Pope's second-hand junk? He said, the Pope is like a decoy duck, sitting on a pond with a great bag of tricks, seducing people with this nonsense. He wondered why it is that people ignore the Word of God and exchange it for Joseph's pants...What relevance does that have for us today? We don't see the evangelical church of our day rushing to depositories of sacred relics. Nobody's looking for Joseph's pants. Rather we have invested our time, our energy, and our money in more contemporary ways to improve the gospel. We look to programs, to Madison Avenue methodologies, to entertainment, to pop psychology, even to the establishment of Starbucks in the church to improve the gospel. Why do we do this? I think people in the church today are looking for exactly what they were looking for in sixteenth-century Germany. They went to Trier, they went to Aachen, they went to these relics because they believed that the relics had power. Every pastor wants to have a powerful ministry. And so we look to the latest program, to the latest method to give us a powerful ministry, forgetting where the Lord God omnipotent has put the power in the first place. [Always Reformed, 190]
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