This isn’t part of my three-week theme, but I thought it was too historically significant not to comment on:
Five hundred years ago today, in 1517, a young priest named Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, a document protesting the abuses of church leaders, to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenburg in Germany. Luther lived in a tumultuous era. Twenty-five years earlier, in October of 1492, Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World had launched an era of exploration and colonization and, not long before that, Galileo had “shaken up the universe” with his telescopes. It amazes the to think about how much change was packed into that short span of decades.
The early days of Martin Luther’s life (to Protestant readers, at least) are an inspiring tale of courage, of a man of conscience taking a stand against seemingly impossible odds and changing the current of history. I can picture him standing before the authorities, his voice shaking, as he declares, “Here I stand–I can do no other–so help me God.” Supporters hid him out for a while after that, and he spent those months of exile translating the Christian New Testament into German.
Luther’s later years, for me, are less of an inspiration and more of a cautionary tale. After casting off the oppression of the Catholic leaders of his day, Luther worked with the German government to establish his own form of Christianity as the dominant belief system in his region. The idea of allowing people the freedom to choose their own religious beliefs was unheard of in those days, and those who did not adhere to Luther’s teachings met with the same brutal treatment that Luther’s predecessors had suffered at the hands of the authorities he had broken away from. I am grateful for the role Luther played in “democratizing” religion by putting the Bible into the hands of laypeople, even if freedom of religion as we understand it was still centuries away.
With so much upheaval in the realm of religion these days, I realize that the freedom to choose your own religious beliefs does have it’s down sides. Common religious beliefs were a source of unity for many communities in the past, and friendly diversity can be hard to maintain. Choosing your own beliefs can also be a terrible responsibility, and we don’t always handle it well. There’s a tension between freedom and community, between unity and diversity, but it’s a necessary tension, I think. We need to preserve freedom without losing sight of the value of things like commitment and duty which sound like opposites to freedom and independence. Everybody is going to be bound by something (even if it’s the loneliness of being bound by nothing), but the ability to decide what you’re going to be committed to and bound by is huge.
Problems aside, I’m grateful for the opportunity, and I still appreciate the courage of that young priest.