demands with the proper prayers, fasting, and almsgiving? Christian instruction had become the recipe for spiritual uncertainty. It is not much different in our day. When I first became a pastor, I had learned my Reformation history well enough. I knew all about Luther’s search for a gracious God, about the medieval church’s support for uncertainty. But I thought it was old hat. I had yet to realize that what the Reformation tried to confront in the sixteenth century was nothing less than the religion