Martin and Francis.
Lutherans are not given to noisy celebration, so you might have missed this. The Lutheran Reformation turned 500 years old on October 31. That was the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses questioning the pope’s authority to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
Those who assign a more hands-on role to the divine might say it started a dozen years earlier. In 1505 a bolt of lightning knocked the young wannabe lawyer off his horse, convincing him to switch his career aspirations from law to religion and forever blowing the idea of a monolithic church into pieces. The first shot of the revolution, fired by God.
That’s the way the history was taught me, a kid in Sunday school sitting on a metal folding chair in the church basement. Luther’s ideas changed history, but what I remember from Sunday school is the lightning strike. The bright revelatory flash winning out over more nuanced theological discussion.
I’ve been reading up on Luther during this 500th anniversary of his revolution. He was a popular teacher and wrote all the time, using Gutenberg’s newfangled printing press to spread his pamphlets around the countryside. This earned him a crowd of followers and made it difficult for the church to burn him at the stake, as was its usual remedy for his sort of troublemaker. Otherwise the whole thing might have been over in a hurry.
Lutheranism caught on across Germany and Europe, Protestants and Catholics spent the next century trying to murder one another until The Enlightenment arrived and religion was finally eased out of the governing equation. Now we all live together in a world Martin Luther would find astonishing.
He would be especially surprised to learn that right now the guy who’s talking a lot like he did is the current pope. The Antichrist himself, as Luther liked to describe his old adversary.
To further stand history on its head, the opposite role once occupied by the corrupt Catholic hierarchy currently goes to the leaders of Protestantism’s own evangelical movement.
A role reversal for the ages.
When Pope Francis looks at the culture war conundrums thrown his way and says, “Who am I to judge,” he’s echoing the central argument Luther made all those years ago. “My conscience is captive to the word of God,” Luther said before the tribunal, steadfastly refusing the right of anyone other than The Almighty to pass judgment on our sins.
This is confusing to some, who don’t like ambiguity when it comes to questions like sex and marriage. They prefer their orthodoxy handed down straight from the high places. Uncut. Unfiltered. Dot the i’s. Cross the t’s. Don’t leave room for waffling. New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat, who writes with a fine conservative voice, complains “the only Catholic certainty now is uncertainty.”
And so it is, but that’s not the pope’s doing. We live in uncertain times. 500 years ago it was a world swinging from Medieval to Modernity, pausing to admire some Renaissance art along the way. Today it’s a world running on warp speed every hour of the day. The spiritual remedy for this amount of disruption isn’t a judge. It’s a shepherd. Francis knows that. So did Martin Luther before him.
In Luther’s day the fight was over the sale of indulgences. You mortgaged the house to buy a slip of paper. When your time came it was supposed to give you a free pass out of Purgatory and straight on through the pearly gates. They went like hotcakes.
But dig a little deeper into the can of worms Luther opened up with his Ninety-Five Theses and it’s the same story we’re dealing with in the current political moment. You find churchmen hopelessly caught up in a lust for worldly power. The indulgence business was really a big confidence scheme cooked up between the pope and a German prince with his eye on high political office. This unholy alliance was supposed to fund construction of the pope’s grand new basilica in Rome and get the prince appointed Archbishop in Mainz, which sounds like an ecclesiastical job but was really the most powerful political position in the land.
You see how quickly things get complicated when the church worships the false idols of greed and power.
This is the hard truth evangelical voters face today. They’ve thrown in their lot with politicians who make a cruel joke out of everything their faith stands for, and they thought the result would be worth it. Heaven on earth, with the entire Republican Party singing like a choir of angels. Instead they get, what? Judicial appointments? The devil delights in such transactions.
And so the evangelical flock has been led astray and there’s no one to show them the way back. Only the wolves are happy. In Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler defends the schoolgirl-chasing ways of his party’s bible thumping Senate candidate Roy Moore by pointing out that Mary the Mother of Jesus was a teenager, and Joseph so much older. The entertainment business calls this jumping the shark. The moment it’s painfully obvious the show has gone on too long.
We are all human and flawed. Sooner or later the temptations of worldly power will get the better of those who anoint themselves as the upholders of all that is true and good. The moralizing judges end up on the wrong side of history. It’s the shepherds we remember.
