This year, Tuesday
31st of October, the evening before All Saints Day, (Halloween)
marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther and the day he
challenged the authority, teaching and practice of the church of his day with
his attack on the selling indulgences guaranteed to reduce the suffering of
your relatives in purgatory.
You may wonder how
the Scripture readings relate to this story? And perhaps also the hymns, so in
brief:
Romans and I Peter may be what we would expect on
Reformation Sunday
Luther’s breakthrough text – we are made right in the sight of God by trust /
faith. The ideas in I Peter that everyone, not just clergy, are part of the
religious leadership of the church, its priesthood and its mission.
Matthew is also relevant: the Reformation was about conflict where religion and
politics came together in an explosive mix. The greatest commandments Jesus
identified remind us:
1) - treating
others as we would be treated, applies to how we do history as well as how we
live in the present. Something we have been slow to learn.
2) – we worship
God with our whole selves, both heart and mind. Luther held those together, the
Calvinist tradition has been more comfortable with the philosophical, the legal
and the theological than it has been with the aesthetic, the artistic, and the
world of feelings. Individually this may be a matter of personality and gifts,
but as a church we need both. I think Opoho does this well, but it is something
to hang on to.
- · Now Israel may say, and that truly – survival after war and conflict
- · E te Atua - each in our own language, and learning from the language and faith of others: translation and interpretation continue
- · A mighty stronghold is our God – trusting God in the midst of conflict.
- · “By Gracious Powers” – trusting God when you may well not survive.
The Reformation Story
Luther was not the
first to question whether the church really had control over heaven. Socially,
economically and politically it was a time of change. Forces of nationalism,
the economic and political power of new cities and universities coupled with
threats of Islam at the gates and memories of the black death, undermined old
authorities. New ideas were in the air and the new technology of printing was
the media revolution of the day.
The fresh appeal
of learning called scholars back to the foundations of knowledge, including the
scriptures in Greek, the teachings of the early church.
Luther was a
superb publicist and printers made fortunes getting his writings and tracts and
the wonderful and often wonderfully rude woodcut illustrations into print. His ideas
spread to Northern Europe. His writings were smuggled into Scotland. Students
soaked up his vivid condemnations of the old order. Business men, traders, and
universities conspired. They were exciting and dangerous times.
In Switzerland in
1522, Ulrich Zwingli started the Reformation in Zurich by the simple act of
encouraging the eating of sausages in Lent. In Paris, a young French lawyer and
student of philosophy, John Calvin, was linked to anti-Catholic placards which
appeared overnight on 17 October 1534, including one on the King’s bedroom door.
in England Henry VIII had found it expedient to break with Rome for the messy
business of a royal divorce, and the financial benefits of closing down
monasteries and selling them off. However dodgy, the process encouraged forces
for reform.
If you were in the
wrong place at the wrong time in any of this your life was in danger. Calvin
fled Paris and was called to support the Reform in Geneva. People like George
Wishart in Scotland and Guido de Bres in Belgium (some of whose descendants still
live in Dunedin) were martyred. Wishart’s friend John Knox was captured in St
Andrews where he supported those who hung the Cardinal out his palace window in
revenge for the death of Wishart. Knox spent two years as galley-slave before
joining Calvin in Geneva and then taking the Reformation to Edinburgh in 1560. Before
Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1559 her half-sister Mary persecuted
Protestants and burnt Archbishop Cranmer and others at the stake. Many went
into exile in Frankfurt and Geneva until it was safe to return un Elizabeth,
though struggles continued about what sort of church England would have with
Elizabeth as head. Would it be like Calvin’s Geneva? Would it still look
Catholic? In Scotland could Presbyterianism have bishops or was that a door to
control by the King and a step back to Catholicism?
Good out of chaos
For many the
Reformation heralded the rediscovery of true Christianity after the dark ages
of medieval corruption. Others knew that the past was not all bad, and the story
is not so one-sided.
It is right that Protestants
celebrate Luther and the Reformers for giving power to laypeople, encouraging the
reading of the bible for ourselves, and articulating the faith that we are made
right in the sight of God just by trusting our lives to God’s mercy.
Having the bible
in their own language meant that Churches became places for sermons not just
sacraments. Psalms were to be sung. New music was composed. Theology was reinvented
and hotly contested. The discipline of new ways was imposed as the marks of the
true church took shape not around its history but around its faithfulness to
the bible read with fresh eyes.
The Reformation
changed how we think about God, about work and about God’s purpose in everyday
life; it changed ideas about sex and marriage as good gifts not a second best
for those who lacked self-control; about the church being a fellowship where we
engage with God’s word through Christ and the scriptures in our own language; a
community which is not afraid of science, business and education, and one where
it is possible to share in its responsible governance. All believers were
priests in the household of God, all were like the stones in a building, living
stones, like Christ, once rejected, but with Him, able to share in the purposes
of God’s kingdom in this life and in the life to come.
We can still celebrate
these things. They have not gone away in the different worlds we live in 500
years later. I am pleased to belong to a church where I can be married and be
authorized to teach and to share the sacraments. One where I am expected to be
responsible to my fellow elders and ministers, yet have freedom to think and to
read and to pray and to share God’s message as I understand it.
There is another side
But there are
other things which need to be said. Catholicism is still part of me, and it too
is a place where I belong.
For centuries,
Protestants identified the Church of Rome with the Anti-Christ in the Book of
Revelation. It was a reading of the bible which made sense at the time, yet it
does not stand in the longer run of history. God did not give up on that
church. In the Reformation there were many Catholic leaders who sought to
accommodate Luther’s teachings. Today, Pope Francis is recognized as a
religious leader by Christians generally, including those who do not see
themselves as Christians at all.
The Reformation
was messy. Once the authority of the church to decide was rejected, everything
had to be worked through afresh. And you cannot re-examine every teaching,
every practice, every ritual, in just a year or two. The role of the church in
society cannot be reinvented without reference to other sources of power. There
is not actually some blueprint in the bible you can just plonk down in another
time and space. In the conflicts of the day religious and political loyalties
easily aligned making the political, economic and theological strands of
conflicts impossible to disentangle. Protestants collected stories of Catholic
atrocities, but there were Protestant atrocities as well. The memories of these
were collected and cultivated well past their use-by date.
When Christianity
came to New Zealand it came with a legacy of these debates and how they
unfolded in European history.
Today
Yet today
relationships have become warm beyond recognition. This year Catholics and
Lutherans and other Protestants around the world have shared together in services
commemorating the Reformation era.
Generous and
creative things have been said. Many issues have been worked through. We all
recognize the priority of God’s grace over human effort; the temptations of
mixing money and religion are no longer seen as peculiar to one tradition, and
nor are the sins of the flesh. People want to face the future in a common
faith. Scripture is valued by Catholics. Protestants acknowledge that tradition
is part of helping us discern what God is saying to us. Although when Luther
appealed to conscience and scripture it counted for little in Rome, but today
an appeal conscience is today taken seriously in Catholic social and ethical
teaching.
It has helped that
people brought together by the Charismatic movement in the 1970s remained
connected through the frameworks for a sustained spirituality provided by
Ignatian Spirituality and the prayers of the Divine Office.
There is something
precious here out of the dust of battles of long ago that we need to keep alive
as we face new challenges about the environment, poverty, ethics, and the
sincere difficulty many have recognizing that God really does exist in love for
each and in all circumstances.
It can seem that
for all practical purposes the Reformation is over. I am not sure:
In 2002 Yvonne
Wilkie and I were in Rome as part of an archives conference. It was an
unbelievable setting on the Janiculum hill overlooking St Peter’s Square, the
ancient city down to the Tiber on our right. Below us the house of the
Augustinian order where Martyn Luther had stayed in 1510. Above to the left
above the façade of the basilica, enormous statues, including of St Peter with
a huge key; its message of religious authority apparent to all.
By the time Luther
left in 1511 his disillusionment with the church, its penitential practices for
was growing. For us we could acknowledge the temptations of power and ritual
and grandeur, but they were not our temptations, and there were other things
about people’s faith which seemed to rise above it all.
Yet it could be
confusing. Our archives conference coincided with the canonization of Josemaria
Escrivá the formidable founder of the Catholic order, Opus Dei. Not all our
Catholic colleagues were thrilled.
However
unreliable, you may have learnt of Opus Dei through the Dan Brown novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Walking across St
Peter’s square later when the crowds had gone, I picked up a service book
dropped in the plaza. The singing had been magnificent, and I was interested to
see what they had sung.
I was surprised to
see Martin Luther’s A mighty fortress is
our God. Like Luther, Escrivá emphasized how ordinary Christians should worship God
in their work and daily lives. Perhaps that was a point of commonality. What
astounded me was on the last page – it had a statement about the indulgence you
would receive from having been there at the service.
Just when you
might think the Reformation is over, it seems you come across something which
makes you wonder what has changed?
What might we say?
1)
Differences
between Christians are not all resolved and new ones will arise in every
generation. What we need to learn is how to handle them better.
2)
Also,
every generation sees the past differently. In 1917 for instance, Protestants
saw the Reformation as about religious freedom, democracy, rational education
and deliverance from superstition. Catholics then saw their response as about
restoring discipline and equipping them to resist the forces of materialism,
communism and modernity, as well as the injustices of the Protestant English
and Scots in Ireland
3)
Fortunately,
in most places today neither Protestants or Catholics have political power over
the other. Responsible scholarship is no longer partisan. There are differences
to be explored and arguments to be had, but not battles to be won at any cost.
4)
In
every generation we need markers of Christian identity that make sense to us
and to others. For both Catholic and Protestant then and now, Baptism and
Communion, have been places of encounter with Christ and the love of God. They
remain recognizable and important however they are explained. But there will
also be markers of difference to be respected not deplored.
Each of us will
have our own stories. Whatever they are, those stories matter; The symbols
stories and rituals of faith we grew up with, remain part of our formation as
people and as Christians.
John
Roxborogh
