Rector’s Reflections
Friday 23rd May 2025
Why the Church of England needs Martin Luther
In yesterday’s reflections, we brought the story of Martin Luther up until the time when he was about 30 years old. To an outsider, Martin’s position looked both impressive and secure: he had become a professor at the University of Wittenberg, and he had joined the order of Augustinian Hermits, a religious order which was well thought of among contemporary Catholics. However, beneath the surface, all was not well. Martin had reached a point of spiritual crisis. He still believed in God but he found that he had no confidence in his relationship with God. He had performed the pious practices required and promoted by the Catholic Church, such as attending Mass and reciting the Divine Office, but these practices brought him no spiritual relief.
What was this young professor to do? It was a moment of crisis in Martin’s life – the first of many.
Out of the blue, Martin experienced a sudden revelation. It is referred to as his “Tower Experience” (in German, his “Turmerlebnis”) and it is usually dated to around 1512 to 1515. The content of this revelation was that the heart of the gospel is the belief that faith in Christ is enough, by itself, to mend our broken relationship with God. Nothing else is necessary. Faith is sufficient. In the technical language of theology, we are justified by faith, without the need for good works. This is sometimes referred to as “salvation by grace” rather than “salvation by works”: we are saved entirely by God’s grace, and not by anything we might do to try and earn God’s favour. Of course, if we have a living faith in Christ, we will perform good works, but the good works are secondary.
As Martin thought further about this doctrine of justification by faith rather than works, he came to the conclusion that this meant that there was no longer any need for the Church to stand as a spiritual gatekeeper between God and the individual Christian. Each and every Christian , by virtue of their faith in Jesus Christ, had direct access to God. So there was no need for priests and masses and all the other sacramental structures of the Church. It also meant that the Church had no need for monks and nuns, who spent all their time trying to earn loads of spiritual brownie points through their prayers and spiritual practices. In short, because we are saved through faith, we don’t need the Church – or at least the Church as it had become by the Late Middle Ages.
Luther was not alone in wanting to see reform of the Church. It was widely agreed that while there was much that was praiseworthy in the Church, it was also riddled with corruption and superstition, and it was often simply a pawn in games of secular politics. It was also generally agreed that the Papacy itself needed reform, and that there needed to be a re-think of the relationship between the power wielded by the Pope and the power wielded by the secular and religious leaders of each of the European nations. It was not right for a Pope to try and tell a King or a Bishop what they were to do, as if they were mere underlings. Of course, savvy Popes knew this, and would work in partnership with local leaders and other stake-holders, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties. But this did not always happen, and it was sometimes felt that the Pope was being given too much power; it would also be fair to say that some Popes felt that they were not being given the power they needed to carry out the duties of their office. And then there was the question of nationalism. It was an age of growing nationalism, and some felt that the Pope didn’t respect the national identities and aspirations of the French, English or the Germans. It was felt that the Pope and those who advised him remained focussed on Rome itself, and it could seem that the Roman Catholic Church was becoming a nice little business run by Italians for the benefit of Italians.
So the key question for many thoughtful Christians at the time was this: given the manifest failings in the Church, what was the way forward? To close the Roman Catholic Church down, and start again from scratch? To let the Roman Catholic Church go its own way, but to establish new churches, which people could join if they wished to? Or to keep faithful to the existing Roman Catholic Church, and try to reform it from within?
Martin decided to start with the last named option. He decided he would try to keep faithful to the Church, but try to reform it from within. He spent much of the years 1516 to 1520 pursuing this goal. What happened? Was he successful or not? We shall look at this in the following reflections.