The Reformation at 500

Luther was angered by the crass advertising campaign launched by the papacy to raise money for the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica, but he was not alone in that. What troubled him was the concept of “indulgence” itself. The very idea, he felt, was at odds with the Christian gospel. And so although he meant to start a discussion among academic theologians—his theses were written in Latin—he provoked a Europe-wide dispute over the essential features of Christianity. In 1521 Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. The pope thought he had taken care of the problem, but in fact the next 150 years would be marked by the argument Luther started—the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—and modern life and culture unalterably transformed as a consequence.

All week, Protestant churches around the world—Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican congregations in Europe, the Americas, Africa, southeast Asia, and elsewhere—are holding conferences and musical and artistic events to celebrate the life and work of Luther and other reformers. At issue is this question: Is the Reformation still relevant?

Leaving aside the elevated do-goodism that still uses the trappings of Christianity in some versions of Protestantism and Catholicism, these two manifestations of Christianity have much in common: Both hold the same doctrine of the triune nature of God, both hold that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man, both believe that He died and rose from the dead to save men from their sins, and both believe—allowing for major differences—that Christ’s followers receive the sign of His favor in baptism and commune with Him at the table. Much attention is given to the variations within Christianity, but this level of continuity is astounding in a 2,000-year-old religion with adherents on six continents.

What most fundamentally separates Protestants from Catholics is more than a specific set of doctrines; it’s an understanding of the individual’s relationship with God. And it’s the Protestant understanding, not the Catholic one, that has left the deeper impress on the American psyche and culture and economy.

In the Catholic view (to oversimplify), the Christian follows God by seeking to conform his life and character to a standard that is above and before him. Salvation is by grace, and this grace is an unmerited gift. By grace the sinner is called to turn away from sin and repent. But his reconciliation with God requires the sacramental intervention of a confessor-priest, who after forgiving the sins imposes a penance or punishment. Indulgences make sense in that conception of belief; they are a sort of suspended sentence.

In the Protestant view, the believer follows God by responding to an event behind him—in the past—namely the finished work of Christ. Salvation is by grace in the Protestant view too, but this grace has already been imputed to the believer; he responds to it by a life of love and righteousness. In that understanding, as Luther sensed even before he understood the full extent of the problem, the power to grant or assign indulgences must be the work of corrupt money-grubbing ecclesiastics.

The Catholic understanding stems from a view of the church as a global institution given by God to govern fallen man and place a check on his appetites. The Protestant understanding stems from the conviction that the most important thing in the world is for the individual believer to know God as He is and to enjoy His friendship. Both understandings are defensible given different premises; both are reasonable interpretations of the very large and complex book called the Bible; and both lead to their own excesses and idiocies when “secularized” or emptied of content. And of course they overlap: Catholics respond to Christ’s work in the past and Protestants strive to meet ultimately unattainable moral standards. But these are the two contrasting manifestations of the Christian gospel that have grown up side by side in the last five centuries.

This week in America will feature retrospective essays and television shows on Luther and the schisms he inspired, and many of these interpretations will treat the Protestant Reformation as though it were merely a thing of the distant past—an important series of events, to be sure, with here and there vestiges of continued significance (within, say, the disparate collection of denominations known as “evangelical”), but essentially an unrepeatable phenomenon of a pre-scientific age when people still cared about heaven and hell. The Reformation may be an unrepeatable event, and the secularists may be right that the world has moved on (or at least that Europe and much of North America have moved on), but this complaisant view misses something important. Americans are so profoundly influenced by the Protestant worldview that it’s hard for us even to talk about it without employing assumptions unique to a Protestant worldview.

The economic dynamism of America and northern Europe is an upshot of Protestant soteriology. Max Weber’s famous argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)—to oversimplify, that Protestants created wealth to prove their own salvation—gets it exactly wrong. Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries could form creative new business ventures because their salvation had already been accomplished, not because they needed to prove it or live up to it. This is not merely to praise the Reformation and the Protestant work ethic: Divorced from their spiritual and theological moorings, the Protestant cultures would over time transform themselves into societies characterized largely by amoral avariciousness.

The point here is simply to note the degree to which Americans think and assess in terms set by the Reformation. The idea that all forms of work are morally valuable, not just spiritual or ecclesiastical ones, is an American assumption and an outgrowth of the Protestant understanding of salvation as something one responds to rather than strives toward. So too is the belief that it’s always, or almost always, morally right to question and resist authority: If God has already declared me righteous, who are you to tell me I’m wrong? George III, remember, is reputed to have called the American Revolution a “Presbyterian rebellion,” and precisely for this reason: Americans are Protestants, and Protestants rebel; that is what they do. These ideas sound noble and right to Americans, but they are not always right: As cultural traits (as distinct from religious ones) they can become as twisted and dangerous as their opposites.

Is the Reformation still relevant? Americans can hardly answer that question, because the Reformation is us.

Barton Swaim is the opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.