REFORMATION DAY 2017
The 31 October this year, for the first time, is a public holiday in the whole of
Germany. Before this, it was always only a holiday remembered in
protestant areas. It also marks the end of a yearlong of celebrations of the
500th anniversary of Luther nailing his theses on the door of the Castle
Church in Wittenberg.
The festival was always controversial, since it also marked the division of the
Church. Luther never had thought of anything like it, he only wanted to draw
attention to misuse within the church and called for re-orientation onto the
roots of the faith.
Yet his ideas did not lead to a constructive discussion but to rejection and
polemics and eventually to war.
The remembrance day has been established since 1667, but was seen as a
sign of protestant rejection of the Catholic faith. But this year it wants to be
celebrated as an ecumenical feast, and the German Lutheran Church is
inviting all Catholic Christians to celebrate a Festival of Christ on that day, a
festival of reconciliation and ‘European Values of Freedom’.
But what are these values supposed to be, or
the ideas which we want to remember on that
day? Luther had indeed written a pamphlet
about ‘The freedom of a Christian’ which
again was so controversial, he had to modify
the content, because it led to revolution.
But he defended his ideas about the Bible
even before the Emperor, saying that the
Pope and church authorities could indeed be
wrong about their reading of the Bible,
because they are human institutions.
I grew up with the notion that Martin Luther gave a language to the Christian
Faith which could be understood by the common people, not only by
theologians. The success of his translation of the New Testament into
German succeeded all expectations.
The Wittenberg publishers Cranach and Döring issued 3000 copies at first,
an unusually high number for the time, and each for the price of one and a
half guilders, this was as much as a skilled tradesman could earn in a week.
Within three months the book was out of print, started a best seller career,
unheard of until then. Until Luther’s death in 1546, his translations of the
Bible in 430 partial or whole editions sold 500 000 times.
StOM Page 14