I delivered my first school assembly address on Monday. The topic, of course, was Halloween. Okay, no it wasn't. It was the reformation, as October 31st commemorates the day on which Martin Luther, in 1517, nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door. But, as I argue, this was not the glorious beginning to the Reformation, this was a scholar's invitation to debate about the practices of indulgence-sellers. If you read the 95 theses, as I made my grade 9s do, you will see that he does not disagree with indulgences as such, nor the power of the pope, but with the practices that have surrounded these things. The real Reformation began, I would argue, during the Diet of Worms where Luther demanded to be proven wrong on the basis of scripture alone.
What follows is my assembly speech, which I did not deliver verbatim.
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When Martin Luther strode up to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, he did not intend to start a revolution. What he intended was to reform certain practices in the church of his time. In fact, the church door was the bulletin board of the city: if you had something you wanted people to know or to read, you didn’t e-mail them, you didn’t send it to the newspaper, you took a hammer and some nails, and you posted it on the church door. Martin Luther was simply inviting people to come and have a debate with him about these things called indulgences.
Here’s the deal. The Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had this great big church to build in Rome: St. Peter’s Basilica. But the problem was that he was broke—he had no money left. How was he to build a beautiful new church without a penny left in his bank account? He would raise the money by selling indulgences. These were pretty pieces of paper that let a person out of purgatory early. Purgatory is that place between earth and heaven where our souls go after we die to become clean. We are purged of our sins before we can enter heaven. Depending on how often you had sinned in your life, you might have to spend many years in purgatory before you could enter heaven. An indulgence releases the soul from purgatory, and sends them merrily on their way to heaven.
Of course, we don’t believe in purgatory. But in 1517, Martin Luther did. And so did most of the people around him. They believed in it so strongly that they would pay whatever they could to buy an indulgence. Luther, however, was not convinced. Purgatory, he might believe in; Indulgences, sure; But the fact that the people had to pay for them? That was a stretch. And the fact that the people selling indulgences, people like John Tetzel, took money from people too poor to even buy bread to eat? That was too far.
On October 31st, 1517, Luther wanted to put a stop not to indulgences, but to the corrupt practices of those selling indulgences. He did not want to start a revolution. The revolution came later, when the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church decided that Luther was a nuisance.
What happened on October 31st was Luther saying “Something has to change!” What happened two years later, in 1520, was Luther saying, “Everything has to change!” Nailing the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg was simply the act of a scholar wanting to argue and discuss with other scholars. But when the Roman Catholic Church decided it didn’t want to play nice, Luther set the world on fire with a speech, a speech with ended this way:
Since then Your Majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. [Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.] God help me. Amen.
Here is where Luther set the wheels of the Reformation in motion: don’t quote pope or council to me—they are human and can be wrong, in fact, they have been wrong!—instead show me from the true, infallible, trustworthy Word of God where I am wrong. Luther denied the authority of the Pope to determine the meaning of the bible. Luther denied the authority of the Roman Catholic Church officials to tell ordinary people—people like you and me—what the Bible says. In fact, Luther felt so strongly that every person should have the responsibility to read the Bible for themselves, that he spent the next year translating the New Testament from the Greek into his own language: German. And since Luther, every Reformation that happened did the same thing: translated the Bible and put it into the hands of ordinary believers.
This is the lasting and greatest legacy of the Reformation. When we celebrate Reformation day, we do not simply remember a monk who invited other scholars to debate about the way indulgences were being sold. No, we celebrate the fact that through this very humble beginning, the Lord raised up for his church a man who would eventually say ‘No!’ to manmade rules and regulations, say ‘No!’ to hiding the Bible behind human tradition, and said ‘Yes!’ to putting the gospel of Jesus Christ in the hands of every believer. And once that happened, everything did change. Men like Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer took this bible and continued Luther’s Reformation in their own countries to the end that all men, women, and children may glorify God—a God they have access to through his Word, a God they know from the Bible.
Here is the lasting legacy, the great treasure of the Reformation. Here is Christianity’s dangerous idea: we are all able and responsible to read God’s Word; to understand it; to submit to it; and to let it change our hearts and our lives.