I have a real love-hate relationship with Reformation observances. From decade to decade I've been hotter or colder on whether to even include Reformation Sunday as a day in our liturgical calendar (it’s designated for the last Sunday in October each year).
Most of my discomfort with observing Reformation Sunday has had to do with all the amour-propre. How great we are as Lutherans! How bad is everyone else (especially the Roman Catholics)!
The most recent international 500th anniversary observances in 2017 at least dampened the self-adulatory aspects of the centennial and instead focused on spiritualities more integral to Reformation, spiritualities like repentance and reparations and care of creation.
Overall, Reformation Sunday has frequently served as an exercise in retrieval, trying to tell the world (and ourselves) how special Lutherans are.
This year, at least in part because my congregation is now made up of many members who have no roots in Lutheranism and were raised in other traditions, I’ve decided to go backwards from the present day toward the Reformation, and ask how we got here.
And perhaps this is a more fruitful line of inquiry. I pastor a progressive Christian Church in Northwest Arkansas that also happens to be Lutheran. I don’t always remember we’re Lutheran, to be honest. I just try to stay focused on Jesus in community and of course modern life isn’t hyper-interested in denominations.
But then periodically I receive reminders. Recently a book landed on my front porch (of unknown origin) and it was simultaneously the perfect book to discover on my porch and also made me wonder, “Is there a book about everything?”
So we might ask, what does it mean that there are now Lutheran in the Ozark… and how did we get here?
If we work backwards in this way, rather than starting with a supposed set of “marks” or list of the hallmarks of the Reformation, we can start from a more idiosyncratically complex and robust location.
Yes, we worship in English. But our music is a long ways from the Reformation, a mix of contemporary Americana and Lutheran choral and hymnody. The liturgy itself we host is entirely rational in approach, tending far more to the neighbor and their needs than to the mysterium tremendum and our trembling before it.
We pray and sing from a primarily social justice songbook that's been formed over the past few decades and continues to be formed especially by insights from the social gospel.
On the other hand our church is relatively middle class and walks with the cultural accoutrements of that class, all while espousing working class or liberationist theological views. In other words, if our theology is aspirational in any way, it's to live more deeply into theologies and Christianities that have originated in (economic/social) contexts not like ours.
I say all of this not to cast aspersions on our congregation or our current social location, but simply to indicate in brief some of the tugs and pulls on us as a congregation that likely form us in ways that are significantly different from the churches of the Reformation era.
A lot has changed. A whole lot.
Back in the late 20th century, at the turn of the millennium, I got a grant to spend some time in Germany studying the German language and interviewing leaders in the church. As I traveled around the country I asked a couple of programmatic questions. At that time (fresh out of seminary) I was tremendously interested in the question: what was the German understanding of the influence of the Reformation on the way they did church and taught theology today?
Of note, unlike North American Lutherans who, by and large, when they talk about Lutheran history jump straight from the present moment directly to the Reformation, the Germans were more likely to say something like: well, a lot has happened since then. Then they would talk about the influence of Schleiermacher, or Barth, or World War II, etc. all as other movements within German church life that were as influential on how they think about church today.
The Reformation was 505 years ago. A lot has happened since then…
This insight helps us keep in mind something maybe we forget about historical moments like the Reformation, that although it can be tempting to make lists of the point of those historical moments, such lists tend to reduce the complexity of history itself.
When you teach something you always need to be able to ask questions on the exam, like what was the Enlightenment? And you need your students to be able to answer that question with some degree of brevity and concision.
But if you're talking about the Reformation (or world-changing historical moment) it certainly wasn't just one thing. That's why we make lists. The Reformation was a historical pressure cooker with lots of inputs and lots of outputs.
And so, when you talk about the influence of the Reformation on the present day you can't always draw straight lines from significant markers of the Reformation to the present.
My favorite example: many Reformers were very committed to translating the Bible into the language of the people.
But the same forces of the Reformation that inspired Bible translation also contributed over time to massive secularization and a general “lowering” of Scripture into a realm of text among texts. We might even say it contributed to a movement in the present day of questioning the authority of ancient texts, period.
The result: most of us now have the Bible translated into our native language, and have copies of that Bible in our homes and on our phones via the Internet. But by and large we don't read them… and we may or may not consider them an authority in our lives.
Circling back, that whole question of authority and what counts as authority was itself called into question by the Reformation.
When people get around to making actual lists for the Reformation, and what it was about, there are top-of-line topics. Obviously, the Reformation ended up calling into question the power and primacy to the Pope. It did result in worship and Scripture translated into the language of the people (in place of Latin). It emphasized certain crucial, theological ways of thinking that were less present in Roman Catholicism of the time, like justification by faith, the freedom of the Christian and the priesthood of all believers.
But when those lists are made, it’s notable what doesn't get on the list that actually probably should be on the list. You could just as easily make a list about the impact of the Reformation that included socialism, democracy, public education, and hospitals. Or even liberation theology and the social gospel.
But if you invite a Reformation scholar (yes there are still some of those around) to come to your university and speak about Reformation, there's this pressure for them to speak from/to/about the widely received traditional emphases (in fact, I bet if you’re reading this and have been mostly unfamiliar with Lutheranism, you might wish I were writing a blog about justification by faith alone, the freedom of a Christian, etc).
But by doing so, they exclude a lot of other social imaginaries and commitments that arose out of that historical period and that perhaps in the end are even more influential, if also more sublimated.
All of this ends up moving us to ask a more fundamental hermeneutical question. How do we decide what gets retrieved, retained from the tradition and how do we decide what parts are rightly relegated to the dustbin of history?
For example, we widely recognized now that Martin Luthers later-in-life anti-semitism should be relegated and repudiated and repented of. Similarly, his complicity in the suppression of the peasant’s revolt is widely decried.
At the same time, we gladly retain and celebrate other parts of Luther’s legacy, including his catechisms and his teachings on the bondage of the will and the freedom of the Christian, to name just a few.
So how do we decide what to retain and what to reject? This ultimately I suppose is the center of the Reformation and perhaps the center of Lutheranism. You could say that all Lutheranism is is an interpretive move, a way of interpreting that challenges basic assumptions of almost everything, while also retaining a sense of truth.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the 19th century developed a profound hermeneutics of suspicion that has shaped our era. Many of these were themselves Lutherans.
Think of Feuerbach, who raised fundamental questions about what we thought we knew about religion, and who saw in Luther the origins of the atheist impulse itself. Or think of the development of the historical-critical method for biblical scholarship. Then more generally all the great thinkers who invited us to rethink economics, psychology, even truth itself.
The fear that has arisen among some Christian movements (especially fundamentalist Protestants who, in their own way, are also heirs of the Reformation) is that when you hack away at the foundations, if you move beyond or away from objective truth claims, you're left with no foundations at all, instead just sheer relativism, quick sand into which you quickly sink.
But the Reformation, if it was anything at all, was never that foundational. It was about, I guess you could say, the exercise of dialectical or paradoxical or ironic truth claims (the patron saint here is like Kierkegaard) that both said and unsaid so much.
The most interesting moments in Luther’s theology set up these kinds of dialectics. For example, in Freedom of a Christian Luther says that the Christian is perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none—yet at the same time, love binds the Christian as an utterly dutiful servant to the neighbor, subject to everyone.
Free because of the nature of God and what God has done, bound because of the responsibility that entails for our neighbors.
There is a similar dialectic in the Heidelberg disputation, distinguishing a theology of the cross from a theology of glory. A theology of the cross calls a thing what it is. A theology of glory calls the good bad and the bad good.
Perhaps here is where we can return to the modern observance of the Reformation and ask how and whether it can still be done. If we allow that the Reformation’s central insight really was “justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law,” we might still say that the Reformation interests and liberation theology interests are actually the same interests even though they sound very, very different.
Remember, liberation theology emphasizes the preferential option for the poor, which is stated in super stark terms, “You can’t say God loves everyone if you can’t say that God especially loves the poor.” That there's a special place in God's divine economy for the poor. That's kind of the point of some of liberation theology.
And the parallel for that from the “traditional” Reformation insight was this whole concept of justification by faith alone apart from the works to the law. That it's God alone who justifies.
And that nothing that humans do can accomplish that justification.
And these two things, though they sound unlike one another, if you bring the two together in all their brazen prophetic glory are stating the same thing but on opposite sides of a coin. If God has a preferential option for the poor then that God is also into justifying by faith alone because honestly if God justifies the ungodly with no riches presented on our part, that’s a radical kind of love of the poor.
The only thing liberation theology adds, as does all the movements of progressive theology today (and this “only thing added” is huge) is that whatever in God then also on earth. If God leaves no one behind in the divine economy then how all the more important that no one is left behind in this economy.
You don’t need to spend any of your money to get in right with God (thus the Lutheran allergy to indulgences). Therefore you are free to give all your money away to your neighbor in their need.
There are times I struggle with the celebratory nature of Reformation Day for the same reasons you listed. I wish it was a commemoration and not a celebration. Also, since the Church at large tends to go through a reformation, of sorts, every 500 years, you would think more people would be preparing for a 21st century reformation sooner than later.