How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism

[Buster's Uncle]

How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism
Time
Billy Perrigo  October 27, 2017



Many will mark the 500th anniversary of Oct. 31, 1517, when Martin Luther started a revolution by posting his complaints about the Church



Five hundred years ago, an unknown monk named Martin Luther marched up to the church in Wittenberg, a small town in what is now Germany, and nailed a list of criticisms of the Catholic church to its door.

The date was Oct. 31, 1517, and Luther had just lit the fuse of what would become the Protestant Reformation. His list of criticisms, known as the 95 theses, would reverberate across world history. The Church would split, wars would be fought and people would be burned at the stake. It was the birth of Protestant Christianity.

Religiously speaking, the Reformation led to the translation of the Bible into languages other than Latin, allowing many people to engage with scripture for the first time. It also brought an end to the controversial sale of indulgences payments the Church said reduced punishment for sins after death, which Luther regarded as corrupt.

More generally, the Reformation contributed to the expansion of literacy, with people no longer needing to rely on priests to read and interpret the Bible. Luther promoted universal education for girls and boys at a time when education was reserved for the wealthy, and believed in the connection between literacy and empowerment, both spiritually and socially.

Luther's act is taught as one of the cornerstones of world history, even though most historians now agree that it was a relatively unremarkable event which was canonized at a later date for political ends. Nevertheless, it remains a lasting symbol of resistance 500 years later.

So how is an anniversary of that magnitude being celebrated?

The hub of anniversary celebrations will be Luther's homeland, Germany, where "Reformation Day" has long been celebrated as a holiday in certain states. This year, it's set to be a full-blown national holiday. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, has encouraged German churches to promote a narrative of unity over division in their celebrations.

That's a line that the Catholic Church and some of the biggest protestant denominations are also keen to stress. On last year's 499th anniversary, Pope Francis joined leaders of the Lutheran World Federation in Sweden (where Lutheranism is the dominant religion) to hold a joint commemorative service. In his address, Francis said: "We have the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another."

Not long after Francis' address, the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury in England expressed remorse for the violence committed there in the name of the Reformation. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were demolished in the 1500s, and many people gruesomely killed, during England's pained transition from Catholicism to Protestantism.

After 500 years of division, there seems to be a consensus from the top that this anniversary will be one of reconciliation.

But official church celebrations aren't the only ways in which the milestone is being marked.

In popular celebrations Germany also leads the way, and for proof you need look only as far as its toy economy. In 2015, a commemorative Martin Luther figurine from Playmobil became the German company's fastest-selling product ever. It took just 72 hours for the initial run of 34,000 to sell out, leading the company to rush another batch into production. A spokesperson labeled the demand a "big mystery."

Americans are also doing their bit. A musical entitled Luther: The Rock Opera premiered in Wittenberg earlier this year. The North Dakota pastor responsible for the two-and-a-half hour production describes it as "Hamilton meets Jesus Christ Superstar meets Monty Python." Performances in Berlin and Wittenberg will mark the anniversary.

And, as the anniversary falls each year on the same day as Halloween, around the world people are taking inspiration from Luther for their costumes. On Reddit's Christianity subreddit, a post asked whether it would be sinful to dress up as Martin Luther for Halloween. On Twitter, others had no qualms about their plans to do the same, whilst on Amazon, a search for "Martin Luther Costume" turns out enough results to dress a small congregation.


Back in Germany, the broadcaster ZDF is airing a two-part serial entitled "Reformation" commissioned especially for the anniversary, starring Maximilian Brackner as Martin Luther. It is also airing in the U.K. on the BBC, and both channels have also commissioned special documentaries to mark the occasion.

The town of Wittenberg itself is understandably excited; in fact it's already in the tenth year of a "Luther decade" it proclaimed in 2008. On the anniversary, a "Reformation festival" will see "jugglers, musicians, hosts, craftsmen and people from the Middle Ages"gather in the town center, before the church opens for a commemorative concert in the evening.

For some people, this anniversary may be the first they've heard of Luther and the Reformation. But the wide range of celebrations, exhibits, documentaries and even commemorative toys mean that it'll be hard to escape its legacy, 500 years on.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/world-marking-500th-birthday-protestantism-130053118.html


For Elok... 

[Elok]

Hey, Protestantism is a Western problem.  We had an entirely different group of heretics, TYVM.

[Buster's Uncle]

"Problem".  Right; sure.

[Elok]

(the reciprocal  was implicit there)

[Elok]

Srsly: the good and bad effects of the Reformation are obviously going to be inextricable at this point, but even leaving aside the century of war which followed, from the Orthodox POV Luther threw the baby out with the (very dirty) bathwater.  His anticlericalism has since metamorphosed into an increasingly common enmity towards religion in general, at least if religion is to be understood as anything other than a private idiosyncratic opinion of no relevance to daily life.  Of course I cannot deny that his intentions were good, or that his battle did not need to be fought.  I only wish he'd chosen different tactics.

[Buster's Uncle]

Seriously; you don't get Luther.  Short of somehow becoming pope, there was no way he was going to reform the church from within.

[Elok]

From within?  Probably not, though it should be noted that the church was far more corrupt in the tenth century, and successfully reformed prior to the Crusades by a charismatic monastic movement.  Of course Europe was a different place five centuries later.  But I'm not speaking merely of schism, but of his teaching sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, etc.  It's not hard to see how this led to the progressive marginalization of religion in public life; if everyone is an authority, authority becomes meaningless.  There's a lot of middle ground between "listen to a lot of Latin you don't understand and shut up" and "eviscerate the whole patristic tradition."

EDIT: sorry if this is offensive; I'm phrasing this as neutrally as I can.

[Buster's Uncle]

That line of argument nearly boils down to "better the church on top than right with Jesus".

[Elok]

Not at all.  The churches in the East have gone through cycles of corruption and purification numerous times, without ever abandoning the idea of dogmatic authority.  The problem is not the idea of centralized doctrine, but of theocracy.  Once the church has political power, faith takes on a political dimension; our schisms began in earnest after the Second Ecumenical Council, when Constantinople claimed temporal supremacy and thereby offended the other, older churches.  By contrast, Judaism has never had worldly power, but did have a firmly established tradition of authority, and remained largely intact until the nineteenth century in spite of severe hardship and geographic barriers.  Whereas some modern Protestant denominations are non-clerical, but nonetheless crooked as a Borgia.  Witness Joel Osteen ...

EDIT: By contrast, Islam disintegrated into rival camps within the first generation after Muhammad.  Whereas early Christians appear to have been hierarchical and authoritative, but overcame Gnosticism by conversion alone, and of course could not hope to be corrupt or abusive with the power they did not have.

[Elok]

Again, I'm not trying to be offensive here.  I'm just saying, Luther has a mixed legacy, and part of that legacy is a world where religion has become irrelevant.  The Europe celebrating the Reformation is covered with empty or nearly-empty churches, and in most of it even mentioning God in public is grossly distasteful.  America's headed the same direction, though we're weird enough that we might not follow the same trajectory exactly.  Now, most people, in most time periods, aren't really all that into religion in the first place; you could argue they've only stopped pretending.  But the post-Luther conception of religion has drifted to the point where even those who want religion can't always find it, because it's been reduced from a cohesive worldview to a personal idiosyncrasy.  It didn't have to go this way.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't put any of that down to not having a universal church, though.  It's more prevalent, in fact, in Europe, where the Catholic church is still a far greater presence...

-Geo, do chip in...

[Elok]

I'm not talking about just "not having a universal church."  I mean the general Protestant worldview of religiosity as primarily an individual, rather than collective, phenomenon.  It wasn't that way from the beginning; where religion thrives, it does so as a social glue, a set of rituals which bind the community together as well as providing a shared worldview.  Along comes Luther, who chucks out not only the idea of authority and tradition, but even the direct relevance of good works.  Faith is king--and faith can exist between your two ears.  This has an atomizing effect which has only increased over time.

Now, America is a Protestant country, through and through--but it is also a very conservative country.  Its history has been far more stable than Europe's, and its society has changed more slowly.  We've never had our government violently overthrown, for example, and our last domestic war was a hundred and fifty years ago.  The absence of true theocracy also slowed the rot.  Even so, we're really not that far behind Europe.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, church is community; that's no different for protestants.  You're blaming something doctrinal for an effect I'd tend to put more to the TV being more entertaining than the local preacher/priest.  Seriously.

I wish I was in more of a chatty mood, because there's an interesting conversation to be had here, if only, like everything in my world right now, it didn't feel like too much work.  Such are the tides of my own soul...

[Elok]

Understood.  I can accept this argument being somewhat one-sided, if you're just feeling meh; I was just worried, from your silence, that you were terribly offended.  I hope you get over your blahs soon.

A personal anecdote: a coworker of mine converted her husband from nominal Catholicism to [some sort of Evangelical, nature unspecified].  Neither she nor my Baptist boss could fathom why coworker's MIL was so upset by the baptism.  As Baptist boss put it: "you'd think a person would be pleased by her child choosing to take their relationship with Jesus more seriously."  I had to explain the completely alien view of Catholics that church membership is a form of communal identity, and that by abandoning Catholicism hubby was effectively repudiating his heritage.  The man's family didn't take their Catholicism at all seriously, so you could argue that this is an improvement; on the other hand, if such a radical shift of beliefs is seen as no big deal in itself, that's another way of not taking it seriously.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh no; I desperately want to set you straight about protestants and Protestantism, but I'm not easily offended talking religion.  It is what it is, and a lot of spiritual belief sets -a majority, probably- hold it pretty implicit that everyone else is wrong -- and you just CAN'T have these conversations without a thick skin...

Now me, I'm pretty resolutely agnostic and the Southern Baptist Convention is pretty much a wing of the Republican party for the last 30 years, but that doesn't mean it doesn't bother me when somebody thinks MY people suck in ways they don't.  [shrugs]  But it's nothing to get all het up about; you put it tactfully, at least.

---

So since you think Authority, in the form of a priesthood and patriarchy, are a good thing, tell me: how is that consistent with Paul's teachings on the Priesthood of the Believer, on the level of Melchizedek?  I cannot say that I know a great deal about Orthodox theology, beyond the differences with Rome on hierarchy; educate me please, sir.