Greg Daly
If ever there was a precise date we can point to and say that it changed the world, October 31, 2017 would surely be a contender. Then it was that the young German professor, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther, gave notice of an academic debate around 95 ‘theses’, signalling the beginning of what we now know as the Protestant Reformation.
This would within decades be immortalised as his launching of the Reformation by nailing his theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle’s church, but whether or not that happened, what is indisputable is Luther’s questioning of the teaching and practices around indulgences was made public and widely shared, generating huge public interest and enthusiasm.
The new technology of printing gave Luther’s theses a reach that obvious forerunners such as the Englishman John Wycliffe and the Czech John Hus had never had, transforming what could have been a mere academic debate into a popular movement with dynamics neither Luther nor anyone else could ever realistically hope to control.
Theses
Excommunicated in 1520 and with Pope Leo X having issued a formal rebuttal of the theses, Luther was called to recant his views the following year at the Diet – imperial assembly – at Wurms. There he said that some of his writings might indeed have been inappropriately harsh coming from a monk, but that the consciences of the laity had been so tortured by the laws of the Pope and Church teaching that to recant his claims would have bolstered “tyranny”.
Further, he said, his opponents had taken to attacking his belief that the Pope’s power should be limited purely because they knew they could not refute his arguments against indulgences.
Condemned as an outlaw, Luther was protected for some months by his patron, Frederick III of Saxony, before returning to Wittenberg where he restrained and challenged some of his more radical fellow-reformers, over this period translating the New Testament into German and becoming an even more influential figure across Germany and Europe as his ideas about justification by faith alone and about the interpretation of Scripture catching the imaginations of many.
The peasants’ revolt that convulsed Germany between 1524 and 1526 saw many Germans looking to Luther for leadership, but despite widespread support for the peasants among Protestant clergy, Luther opposed the revolt.
In 1525 he married Katharina von Bora, with whom he would go on to have six children. Although his work continued as he wrote numerous important hymns, forging a tradition that would reach its pinnacle with the 18th-Century composer Johann Sebastian Bach [pictured], and devoted himself to organising a new church, with its own order of worship and catechisms, he disagreed with other reformers on the key issue of the nature of the Eucharist, preventing the Protestant Reformation from coalescing into a single coherent movement.
From 1531 on Luther’s health declined, while conflicts both with the Catholic Church and across the Protestant reform movement took its toll, and as his writings grew more polemical so did his health worsen until his death in 1546, by which time the second-generation Reformer John Calvin was perhaps an even more influential figure, transforming Geneva into a ‘Protestant Rome’, and building a systematic theology that would underpin reformation movements in the Netherlands, England, Scotland and further afield.
Long viewed in Catholic circles as an ‘arch-heretic’, Luther has seen something of a rehabilitation in the Church over recent decades, with Cardinal Jan Willebrands referring to him in 1970 as our “common teacher”.
As Pope Francis remarked last year, before visiting Sweden to begin a year marking the fifth centenary of Luther’s 95 Theses, “I think that Martin Luther’s intentions were not mistaken; he was a reformer. Perhaps some of his methods were not right, although at that time … the Church was not exactly a model to emulate.”