Reformation Day

Congratulations, Steve on a great fundraiser last night and thanks for Refro and Evans and all who hosted the event!

When I was a kid I loved Halloween as much as any of them. But I wish we'd remember the significance of the day. That is, Halloween, "Hallowed Eve" is the night before All Saints Day in which ghosts, goblins and demonic creatures were said to rise as a show of force before the blessed day. And it was on that evening in 1517 that Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg as opinion points--which lit a fire of nationalistic protest and ecclesiastical protest, but also asked people to look personally at what they held dear in their lives of faith. And for that reason it is called Reformation Day.

The Reformation was sort of a perfect storm. Had it not been for a troubled monk who finally realized that his salvation came only by God's grace, had he not been a prolific writer (30 books published in 36 months), a German nobility that wanted to throw off the Italian papal dominance of the Holy Roman Empire, and a population that wrestled with life's meaning amid bubonic plague and newfound prosperity, the entire event would have taken a much different shape. When I look around at the melange of churches today, at how they cross-fertilize in ideas, Reformation Day makes me smile. My own church has significantly improved its mission because of this diversity of faith. And yet there is a tremendous unity in what is called orthodox Christianity that makes it easy for us to worship together. Luther's "Grace alone,Faith alone, Scripture alone" motto has in a rough way been affirmed by all of Christianity. His notion that there is a Natural Law of how God created men to be equal and free, yet hungering for a relationship with the Almighty and a responsible life, spawned Locke and Jefferson to re-write governance in what we now call 'republican democracy.' Luther's common sense writing begat a host of others to examine how faith could be reconciled with reasoning, science, art, business, and all the rest of life without capitulating to humanism, the creed that elevates egotism into making each person a little god with little regard for others. His vernacular church and Two Kingdoms humbled Europe's monarchs and set about forces that redrew the map of Europe into nations of common people. A few years ago, a very politically liberal group of historians voted on the Man of the Millenium. Jefferson narrowly defeated Luther but British Catholic historian Paul Johnson laughed and pointed out that outside the West, little European history is studied and only America is noted.

In some ways Reformation Day itself is a misnomer. Luther and Pope Leo exchanged letters and made amends from 1517 to 1518. It was only after the Dominicans skewered Reform ideas in 1519 that the real controversy began. After Luther's death in 1546 and that of Henry VIII of England, Charles V pounced on the Northern German principalities and defeated them. Then in a queer twist, having completely defeated Protestantism at a great cost of war, he inexplicably decided to grant universal freedom of faith. For 400 years historians could not understand what had happened--the reason for war had been overturned in the conquest. Then a few years ago, a lost series of letters was found. Charles' sister, married to a German prince at the time, was writing him almost daily, telling him the joys of her Christian faith. She was the biggest Protestant of them all. It seems that Charles reconsidered his victory on the battlefield and and laid down his arms in the battlefield of faith. Reformation Day still makes me smile.