While there are a myriad ways to approach so overwhelming a
topic, there is one moment which exemplifies so much of the era and all that
flowed from it. In April 1521 Martin Luther was called before the Diet of
Worms. There, he stood before the powerful man in the world and said, “No.” He
had already been condemned by Pope Leo X, the spiritual head of Western
Christianity. Now he told Charles V, king of Spain, Austria, the Low Countries,
vast swaths of the Americas, and Holy Roman Emperor that he was wrong and
Luther was right. In contrast to the inertia of human society which puts great
weight in the consensus of numbers, Luther declared that he was willing to die
for his beliefs unless he could be convinced by Scripture or simple reason.
Echoing the words attributed to Athanasius so many centuries before, Luther
stood against the world.
So very much of the Reformation and its legacies, both good
and bad, are encapsulated in this moment. This is the manifestation of the
previous few decades of protest against church corruption. This is the
culmination of humanist tradition challenging the weight of custom by looking
back before the prior few centuries. This is the declaration that the gradual
accretion of church traditions could not overrule the Word of God and that
there was a standard by which to judge all human institutions, whether church
or state. This is the archetype of the bold individual standing for truth against
all authorities, decades before Galileo was even born.
From this inspiration came the great explosion of protests
against political and religious powers and a constellation of sometimes allied,
sometimes warring Christian entities. Within the decade the German speaking
world had Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Reformed denominations. Within three
decades the French speaking world was fractured into Calvinist and Catholic
factions and the British Isles were seesawing between Rome and Geneva. By the
end of the century this second great schism of Christendom was recognized as
permanent.
European society was shattered, and the age of religious wars
that had begun in Luther’s day would not come to an end until 1648. Yet this
story of division was not the only one to come out of the Diet of Worms. There
was also the story of political liberty which, although it took quite some time
and many wars to become realized, had its antecedent that one moment of
defiance. In the following decades Puritans, Huguenots, Jansenists, and Dutch
rebels would lay the intellectual foundation for liberty of conscience a
century before Voltaire or Jefferson.
This focus on the Bible as the supreme authority had its
great social and even effect in the breaking of the dichotomy of life into
sacred and secular spheres. Suddenly butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers
were possessed of as much dignity as any prince or prelate. Extra-biblical
restraints on financial activities were removed and cash flowed and news means
of production were implemented. The elevation of commoners in art begun with
the Renaissance in Italy continued among the Dutch of the Reformation. The idea
that consensus of the majority was not coextensive with the truth greased the
wheels of the Scientific Revolution and set the stage for the technological
advancements of the Industrial Revolution.
The power of the individual to stand against authority had
its great and positive effects and also its great and negative effects. The
epistemological crisis sparked in part by the Reformation and the wars which
followed led to the skepticism and overconfidence of the Enlightenment. Rather
than standing against the world on the basis of Scripture and simple reason,
now people stood against others and the universe itself on the basis of their
flawed perceptions and limited perspectives. In our day this principle had
devolved into the Magisterium of the transient moment, where all values and
truth-claims shift as quickly the latest clothing fad, and the Protestant
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has mutated into the demand for all
individuals to create God, the universe, and their own selves in their own
image of themselves.
And yet, even with such dour results as some of these, the
overall legacy of the Reformation is positive, indeed. In the 1950s movie on the
life of Martin Luther, there was a scene where the then-monk Luther was speaking
to his fellow Augustinians about the glories of the grace of God even as he was
coming to an awareness himself. After he longs that the common people of the
world could see such divine grace, a superior chides Luther, asking what would
happen if all ordinary believers had the Bible in their own hands to interpret
for themselves. Luther then broke into a broad grin and enthusiastically
replied, “Why, then we might have more Christians, Father!” Through the efforts
of Luther, Calvin, and many others, the gospel of Jesus Christ was set free and
salvation came to many around the world who would otherwise have remained lost.
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