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Rector’s Reflections
Wednesday 28th May 2025
Why the Church of England needs Martin Luther
In Friday’s reflections, we left the young Martin Luther facing a moment of crisis. He had come to believe that faith In Christ is enough, by itself, to mend our broken relationship with God. In other words, we are “justified” in God’s eyes by our faith alone, without any need for good works. (This is often called the doctrine of Justification by Faith). Because every Christian has direct access to God, there is no need for the Church to act as a spiritual gatekeeper between human beings and God. This new understanding of the Christian faith placed Martin in a dilemma. Should he give up on the Catholic church, and start up his own Church? Or should he remain within the Catholic church and try to reform it from within? And if he tried the latter approach, would the leaders of the Church be open to change?
Martin decided to get the ball rolling with a challenge to system of Indulgences. An Indulgence was one of the ways in which the contemporary Church claimed to have the power to control and manage a Christian’s relationship with God. An Indulgence was a bit like a cheque written by the Church, which guaranteed that God would grant the payee a set amount of salvation, provided that certain conditions were met. Many faithful Christians found the idea of an Indulgence rather attractive, as it was seen by most non-theologians as a way of guaranteeing salvation, either for oneself or for another. All you had to do was to buy the Indulgence, and then you could relax - your spiritual worries were over.
At this time Pope Leo X was re-building St.Peter’s in Rome. Funds were short, and so in 1516 the Pope issued an Indulgence, in the hope that this would prove popular with the faithful, and the money flood in to swell the papal coffers. A popular preacher called Johann Tetzel went around several areas of Germany commending the Indulgence to the faithful. Tetzel was a controversial preacher, and he was not allowed to preach in Wittenberg, where Luther was living at the time. Luther could have ignored Tetzel’s activities, but he felt that several fundamental principles were at stake. So Luther decided to provoke an academic debate. He did so by posting a list of 95 theses for debate on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg. Within a fortnight, the 95 Theses had spread throughout Germany: in modern parlance, they had gone viral. The year was 1517, and subsequent generations have seen Martins’ action as the marking the start of the Reformation.
Over the next few years, it became clear that Luther was launching a full scale attack on many of the traditional practices and beliefs of the Catholic Church. By 1519, Luther was denying the primacy of the Pope and the infallibility of the General Councils. In 1520, Luther published three classic works (Address to The Christian Nobility of the German Nation; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; The Freedom of a Christian Man ) in which he set out his proposals for reform in detail, and he issued an invitation to the German princes to take reform of the Church into their own hands. Luther’s proposed reforms included the abolition of religious orders and masses for the dead, and the requirement for clerical celibacy. Luther saw nothing wrong in the idea of married clergy, and indeed in 1525, he married a former Cistercian nun, Catherine von Bora. Luther also proposed a radical change to Holy Communion: he disagreed with the doctrine of Transubstantiation and saw no reason why the laity should not receive communion in both kinds, ie both the bread and the wine.
When Luther had started the debate going, back in 1517, it was perfectly possible to imagine that the Church would have been open to reform. But by the summer of 1520, the Papacy had decided that Luther’s proposed reforms were too radical. Luther refused to compromise, and he was officially excommunicated on 3rd January 1521.
Luther ignored this excommunication, and he remained active in ministry until his death in 1546. He continued writing on numerous topics, but his greatest literary contribution was a translation of the Bible into German. This brought the Bible to life for many German speaking Christians, and to this day Luther’s translation remains one of the most influential books ever published. By the date of Luther’s death, the Reformation had become an accepted reality in many parts of Europe, and Luther’s theology had entered the mainstream of Western Christianity. His theology remains both a challenge and an inspiration to this day, and in the days ahead we shall see what it might have to say to the contemporary Church of England.