According to tradition, it was on October 31st, 1517, that a priest named Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and began the Protestant Reformation. The movement gave Europe Christian sects outside the supervision of the Pope, a doctrine of salvation by faith alone, and Bibles in common languages. In short, the idea of religious freedom was born out of the Reformation. But as the 500th anniversary of his protest approaches, you might be surprised to learn that there is no evidence that Luther ever nailed his theses to the church door. He merely sent them to the archbishop.
If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “Protestants” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.
The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.
In honor of the anniversary, the New Yorker has a relatively short biography of Martin Luther, warts and all, and a simple explanation of the beliefs that led him to revolt against the Catholic Church. -via Digg