Reformation Day

Do you know what happened on Halloween back in 1517?

It was on that day nearly 500 years ago in Germany that an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther gave a corrupt and apostate church its worst nightmare.

In the German town of Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, Luther went to the front doors of the Castle Church in the center of town and nailed onto it what we know today as "The 95 Theses". Luther was at the time a professor at the University of Wittenberg, and he wrote down 95 points of contention and rebuke with the Roman Catholic church over issues such as purgatory, works righteousness, and the selling of indulgences. It was written in Latin, the language of the intellectuals and scholars, and he wanted to enter into a debate with his colleagues on the theses.

The church was in the center of towns and of life at that time, and the church front doors served as a community bulletin board, where townspeople could nail on it news and announcements of all kinds, much like a newspaper or internet message board today. The theses caught the attention of some of his students, and thanks to new inventions like the Gutenberg printing press the document was mass-produced and read all over Germany, prompting like-minded individuals to also question the church's corruption and decadence. It ultimately led to a series of events that shook the church to its very core and restored the biblical understanding of salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. Those events are known as the Protestant Reformation, and are dramatized in the 2003 motion picture "Luther". While the secular world celebrates witches and goblins on this day as Halloween, the Lutheran church and many other denominations celebrate October 31 as Reformation Day.

In other Protestant churches, particularly evangelical ones, I have perceived a love-hate relationship with Martin Luther. I hear pastors on the radio complain that while Luther went far in reclaiming the truth of the gospel and reforming the church, in their eyes he didn't go far enough. The one thing they get tripped on the most is that Luther supported infant baptism. While Mark 16:15-16 was among Luther's Bible verses to support the practice, pastors like Chuck Smith and Pat Robertson consider that a flimsy excuse for an unbiblical ordinance. Luther wanted to reform the Roman Catholic church and bring it back to a biblical understanding of salvation by grace; why didn't he simply break away to begin with if the Vatican was already so entrenched in and defensive of its heretical practices? Temperance-minded Christians like myself may also be disturbed that Luther loved his beer, and wrote proudly about it being part of good fellowship and fun with his fellow students and scholars. And then there was Luther's sometimes coarse sense of humor, like joking about flatulence in his "Table Talk" series of books and bluntly referring to one of his critics in the Vatican as a donkey's rear end.

In living a life led by the Spirit as it is understood today, Luther fails on all counts, so how and why could the Lord use such a worldly man to bring about the reformation of Christianity? And why, pray tell, do we celebrate this beer drinker who has a denomination named after him?

We celebrate Martin Luther because despite his flaws, this was a man the Lord chose to shake up a church that had been corrupted with money and power, which had cast aside salvation by grace for good deeds and indulgences, which jilted its followers with the man-made concept of purgatory and asked for money to spring their souls out of it, which rarely taught from a Bible many of its own priests could not even read, which replaced God's Word with relics and venerated objects. And at just the right time in history, Luther was so outraged that he stood up against such formidable opposition with the very Bible the church claimed to believe in but had long ago betrayed.

It led to other men joining Luther against the corruption, men such as John Calvin, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli and Prince Frederick the Wise of Saxony. And it ultimately led to a breakaway from Rome in the declaration of the Augsburg Confession in 1530. Luther translated the Bible into his native German so the masses could read and understand God's Word in their own heart language instead of in Latin. The flames of reformation spread across Europe, later giving rise to the Church of England, the Puritans, John and Charles Wesley, and so forth. Despite our differences in secondary doctrinal issues such as modes of baptism, eschatology (the end times) and styles of worship, the various churches and denominations we are all a part of today ultimately had their start with the Protestant Reformation.

I personally find a lot of comfort in hope in the example of Luther. Here was a man with many flaws and shortcomings like all of us. He didn't clean up his act or try to be as righteous as possible in the sight of God before he nailed those 95 theses; he tried doing that for several years and went insane because he realized he could never be justified on his own power. But he discovered from the Bible that righteousness is not by good deeds or works, but solely by faith, and that is faith in Jesus Christ and what He did for us on the cross. While that today does not absolve us as believers from living a life that is guided by God's Word and his Spirit, Luther's life is a prime example of how liberating the Good News really is. We cannot earn our salvation, nor can we keep it, by going good deeds, for "No one is good--not even one" (Romans 3:10). But the good news is that "God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty. He has done this through Christ Jesus, who has freed us by taking away our sins... We are made right with God when we believe that Jesus Christ shed his blood, sacrificing his life for us" (Romans 3:23-25).

That is the gospel in a nutshell, and the driving force of the Reformation. And that is why what happened in Germany on Halloween 1517 was so important.