500 years of Luther’s Reformation (1517-2017)
In 1517, a young German Augustinian friar and biblical theologian, Martin Luther (1483-1546), marshalled out a forceful protest against abuses of the practise of indulgences in the Church. The protest moved into the condemnation of the worldliness and moral decline of the popes and clergy, and challenged the sacramental and penitential systems of the medieval Church. This protest eventually issued into a radical schism in the body of Roman Christianity. This year 2017, the world will mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation; an event that tradition tells us began on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
At the centre of this movement stands Luther’s rediscovery of the Gospel message: human beings do not earn their salvation by doing good works, but rather God freely offers salvation to all who believe. For Luther, this message liberated humanity to engage in all kinds of new undertakings and activities, chief among them lives of service to others. Meanwhile, across Europe the impulses coming out of Wittenberg inspired others to interpret the Bible in new ways (facilitated by the invention of the printing press), thereby calling into being many of the Protestant denominations that exist to this day. The Catholic Church responded too, introducing its own reforms that would change the face of the Church. The Catholic reform crystallized at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and led to the promulgation of The Catechism of the Council of Trent.
Luther was a well-educated priest and monk. He enjoyed the privileges of classical learning from his youth. But a series of frightening spiritual experiences, which greatly troubled him, led him to the doorsteps of monastic life. With the encouragement of his spiritual counsellor, he took to the study of Scripture and earned his doctorate in 1512, at the age of 29, from the University of Wittenberg. For the following four years, he lectured on Psalms, Genesis, and the Pauline epistles in the same university. Later in life, Luther had other spiritual experiences, which altered his thinking and provided a centring point for his personal and theological reflections. Luther felt the awesome powerful presence of God in the monastery and this experience liberated him from what he felt was the righteous God’s harsh condemnation of sinful, unrighteous man. He began to have a different understanding of God, which significantly impacted his view of the gamut of the Christian life.
Luther’s understanding of Romans 1:17 “The just shall live by faith” helped to resolve the tension he experienced within the Church and within himself. It is alleged that Luther was so moved by this verse that he inserted sola (alone) after the word “faith” in his Latin Vulgate. This was Luther’s conversion, his enlightenment, the answer for which he had long struggled. Now he knew that salvation depended not on what he could offer God, but on what God had offered him in Jesus Christ. This new insight was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Luther wanted to debate the issues of indulgences, how we are saved, and what this meant for papal authority. That was the origin of his ninety-five theses. The ensuing debates caused great turmoil in the Church and Luther was finally asked to recant his position at the Diet of Worms in 1521 before the emperor and Church representatives. He refused to do so with his famous reply: “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen.”
The content of Luther’s revelation according to James W. Thomasson, “was to provide the foundation for a movement that would strike at the base of the entire medieval ecclesiastical and sacramental/ penitential system: no human acts can merit forgiveness of sins, nor is grace a supernatural quality infused into the soul. Forgiveness lies in the faithful, trustful acceptance of the gracious God, who was actively present in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, reconciling the world to himself.
Nowhere was the need of reform more obvious than in the exaggerated practice of indulgences, which originally had been instituted as a practical concession for satisfaction of penalties imposed by the Church for the temporal punishment of sins. By the late middle ages, so many abuses had crept into the theological and sacramental system of penance. It is clear at first that Luther opposed the excesses, not the practice as intended, of indulgences. By challenging accepted, even endorsed, practices of the institution, he questioned its authority. Initially, the papacy reacted only mildly. At the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther outlined his ‘theology of the Cross.’ By the Leipzig debate of 1519, Luther had moved toward a total rejection of the medieval view of Church and sacraments: monasticism, the sacrificial Mass, penance, works of merit, indulgences, and the pope. For Luther, these were perversions of the grace of God freely given in Christ.
On October 6, 1520, all this was rolled together in Luther’s writing, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. On October 10, Luther received the papal bull, Exsurge Domini, condemning his views and giving him sixty days to submit to the Church’s teaching authority. Instead, on December 10, 1520, Luther and his supporters staged a bonfire outside the gates of Wittenberg, burning the bull, along with a copy of canon law. Finally, at the Imperial Diet of Worms he defended his writings and declared his total reliance on apostolic witness and the ‘voice’ of conscience: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” With that declaration made, reconciliation with the Church was no longer desirable nor possible. In its draft version of Decretum Romanum Pontificem, of January 3, 1521, Luther was excommunicated. The division of Christendom was realized.
What Luther said and did back then in the 1500s quite literally changed the history of the church and the world. But the Reformation didn’t start with Martin Luther, nor did it end with him. From the beginning, the Church faced a host of challenges which threatened to destroy the teaching it had received from the Lord. To these challenges, which more and more became crises, the Church responded. Even before Luther’s time, the Church’s response to the challenges it faced had become so insistent that response had turned into reformation. With Luther this response reached its high point, and since Luther, the Church has continued to face even more challenges to which it must respond. Response, then, still leads to reformation, to re-forming in line with God’s truth. Ecclesia semper reformanda - the Church is always in the process of being reformed.
Up till today, the word Reformation still conjures up images and excitement whenever we hear it. The motto of the Reformation was “Verbum Domini manet in aeternum” (The Word of the Lord Endures Forever). This motto was a confident expression of the enduring power and authority of God’s Word. The Reformation was, first and foremost, all about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was then, and it still is now. The task of reformation never ends, for every person, in every generation, needs to hear the good news of their Saviour from sin and eternal death, in its essence and unchanging purity. There is so much to say about the progress made since the Protestant Reformation to realign both the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church to the Gospel of Christ. Many ecumenical initiatives have taken place, and even in the area of theology so much progress has been made in clarifying many issues, prominently the issue of faith and justification.
To mark the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation, the Lutheran World Federation has outlined a series of events, with the main theme, “Liberated by God’s Grace.” These words go to the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the soul of the Lutheran Reformation. They are linked to Luther’s key insight that helped trigger the Reformation. For Lutherans, all celebrations, worship, study and engagement over the next three years will focus on how the gracious love of God, through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, opens up opportunities for us as faithful Christians to reach out as healers and reconcilers to a world torn apart by strife and inequality.