Rector’s Reflections
Wednesday 4th June 2025
Why the Church of England Needs Martin Luther
In the last instalment of the current series, I wrote about the subject of leadership in the Church of England. As we saw, Luther had some interesting and challenging things to say on what is needed for effective leadership within the Church. In essence, Luther felt that the leadership in the Church is too important a matter to be left solely in the hands of the clergy - it should be shared with senior secular leaders, for example with the Monarch. Luther also felt that it was important that church leaders should have a real understanding of the reality of church life in local communities. Many of the senior church leaders of Luther’s day were out of touch with the reality on the ground, and the same is probably true of the majority of senior church leaders in the Church of England today.
Luther also felt that it was important for senior leaders to understand what makes people tick- not just as Christians, but as ordinary human beings. For Luther, church leaders need to understand all the different elements which come together to make us who we are – for example, our personalities and our family circumstances, our jobs and our roles, our status in society, our gender, and our nationality. These are just a few of the different elements which are knitted together to make us who we are; there are many others, as well, for example our age, our race, and our physical health. God calls as real human beings, and real beings are a combination of all these different elements. The Church needs to engage with us as human beings, in all our complexity, rather than as cardboard cut outs.
So Luther might well ask the following question : does the Church of England engage with the reality of what it means to be a human being? Or does it ignore large elements of what it means to be human? And if so, is it failing to connect with the average man or woman in the street or on the pew?
I think Luther has a real point. The official Christian theology and spirituality of Late Mediaeval Catholicism had largely lost touch with the life and experience of the ordinary person. It was fine for academic theologians in the Universities; it was fine for the fulltime ecclesiastical professional, such a monk or a priest. But it had very little to say to the ordinary Christian, who was trying to live out their faith amid the joys and challenges of family life, and who had to go to work to earn a living. In short, the Church’s teaching had become irrelevant to most people. Luther wanted to change this, so this is what he did : he wrote and preached about the topics which ordinary people were talking about. He left the academic theology to the professors. Luther wanted to make the gospel relevant.
Luther also had the courage to recognise what people valued. For example, in Luther’s day, there was a growing sense of national identity, especially in Germany. Many Germans felt that it was a good thing being German, and they wanted their German identity to be valued and appreciated. One reason why the Papacy was disliked was that it was felt that it did not do enough to recognise the German Nation. Luther himself valued being German, and he promoted his German credentials. Indeed, he made a point of translating the Bible into German, and Luther’s Bible by itself played an important role in the development of the German language.
Of course, Luther’s recognition of the importance of nationality had its draw backs. At its worst, it could lead to discrimination against men and women of other nationalities and other backgrounds. It also meant that it was hard for the Lutheran Reformation to spread into non-German cultures. But it had it’s advantages, too. It meant that people felt that the Church was at last recognising ordinary Germans as real human beings – not the two-dimensional abstractions dreamt up by University professors, but men and women for whom national identity was important.
So Luther might well ask the current day Church of England: you call yourself the “Church of England”, but do you actually engage with what it might mean be to “English”? Do you celebrate the good things about “being English”, or are you too embarrassed or frightened to recognise the reality of national identity? Is the Church of England abandoning Nationalism to those who seek to use it to promote hatred and division? Does the contemporary Church of England have anything to say to the man or woman who is “proud to be English” or “proud to be British”? Indeed, has the Church of England ceased to be the “Church of England” in any meaningful sense? What do you think?