5 Theses On Reformation Day
How October 31 of 499 years ago changed your world
Do you enjoy Halloween? I do, because it’s my birthday. I also enjoy a scary movie, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and a party full of clever costumes.
But October 31 is more than just ghouls, ghosts, and goblins.
For many Protestant Christians, it’s Reformation Day, and for all of us, it’s a day that changed the world. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, he wasn’t planing on altering the course of history, but that’s exactly what happened. Here are five things we may not have without that fateful day.
1) Separation of Church and State
In the West before the Protestant Reformation, society was viewed as a whole, and that whole was often called “Christendom.” Princes and Popes vied for power and control, but people didn’t assume that religion and politics were two separate things. Martin Luther didn’t end this state of affairs; in fact, the Wars of Religion of the 16th-17th centuries represented some of the worst mixing of church and rulers in Western history. However, these wars and the split between Catholic and Protestant rulers and their territories did eventually help lead to the more modern systems of government and religion we enjoy today, especially through the agreements made in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (see #4, below). Eventually, this led to religious minorities protesting official government-backed religions, hiding from their own governments, or even leaving their homelands to establish new, freer societies across the Atlantic.
2) A Cultural Focus on Helping Poor People
One of the major factors leading Martin Luther to publish his 95 Theses was the fact that the Church was allowing leaders to promise salvation and an escape from post-death punishment for people’s loved ones in return for money for church building programs (called “indulgences”). Luther was incensed that money that could have gone to help poor was being given to build lavish buildings. This focus on helping the poor not only caught on and thrived in many Protestant traditions, but was revitalized in major streams of Catholic thought through the Catholic counter-reformation, among other factors. From the 95 Theses:
It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased; but when the church intercedes, the result is in the hands of God alone.
Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend that the buying of indulgences should in any way be compared with works of mercy.
Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.
Christians are to be taught that he who sees a needy man and passes him by, yet gives his money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God’s wrath.
Christians are to be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they must reserve enough for their family needs and by no means squander it on indulgences.
Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting indulgences, needs and thus desires their devout prayer more than their money.
Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather that the basilica of St. Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.
St. Lawrence said that the poor of the church were the treasures of the church, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time.
Again, “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?’’
3) Widespread Literacy (and other foundations of democracy)
One of the most scrutinized and yet enduring sociological discoveries in recent Western history is Robert Woodbury’s explosive finding that:
Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.
In other words, “Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple — if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary.”
4) The Modern State
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ushered in the era of modern politics and diplomacy that we take for granted today. Rather than continuing or reestablishing some kind of European imperial arrangement, “the weakening of the papacy under the impact of the Reformation thwarted the prospect of a hegemonic European empire…. in the sixteenth century, the emperor came to be perceived in Protestant lands less as an agent of God than as a Viennese warlord tied to a decadent pope. … The balance of power replaced the nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in pursuing it’s own selfish interests, would somehow contribute to the safety and progress of all the others.”
5) The United States of America
Related to #1–4, this is not an argument that America is a Christian nation, but that the spirit of Protestantism, of religious revivals like the Great Awakening, and the suspicion of powerful rulers inherent in the thought of a movement that rejected the idea of a Pope led (along with Enlightenment rational and empiricist philosophy) directly to the foundational colonies, thinkers, and ideas that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The United States is far from perfect, as we have all been reminded this election cycle, and so is Protestant Christianity, but many of the freedoms and rights we enjoy today have at least part of their genesis in that late October day, 499 years ago. Happy Reformation Day.
