History is written by the victors. That truism is being put to the test this year as we celebrate the Reformation’s five-hundredth anniversary. Churches across the world—however tenuous their connection to the Reformation—are joining in its victory parade, eager to share some of the glory of Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers. What exactly are […]
Why was there a Reformation? What was the church like just before the Reformation took place? Why did the Reformation have to happen? By looking at these questions we can begin to gain some understanding of our own situation today. One of the reasons why the Reformation happened is that there was a rediscovery of […]
Max Weber, a nineteenth-century German sociologist of genius, put forward a theory that still remains influential, particularly among those who are not historians. In a classic work first published in 1904, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,1 he suggested that there was a causal link between these two phenomena, more particularly between Calvinist Protestantism […]
“He’s merely a monk who wants a wife.” So the pope dismissed Martin Luther when first he heard of the Saxon monk’s decrying of the papacy. But then in 1521, during his compelled sequester in the Wartburg Castle, Luther began hearing of many former priests taking wives. “Good heavens!” he retorted. “They won’t give me […]
Much of the hoopla surrounding the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation has been blather. On October 31, 2016, at a joint service in Lund, Sweden, Pope Francis and the president of the World Lutheran Federation exchanged warm feelings. Rev. Martin Junge, general secretary of the mainline Lutheran body, said in a press release […]
“They fill the world with their chattering and scribbling—as if the Spirit could not come through the Scriptures or the spoken word of the apostles, but the Spirit must come through their own writings and words.” — Martin Luther In 1537, at the behest of Elector Johann Friedrich the Elder, Martin Luther composed (with the […]
Some of you may have been to parts of the United States (such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania) where you have seen a bearded man in plain clothes driving a horse-drawn carriage down paved roads—perhaps with a number of cars behind him moving slowly. He may be moving toward a farm where plows are still pulled by […]
In 2008, Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom published the controversial book Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism (Baker Academic). The year before, in 2007, the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, converted to Roman Catholicism, and the evangelical world continued to debate “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” initiatives […]
Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther By Roland H. Bainton Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950 Luther: Man between God and the Devil By Heiko Oberman Yale University Press, 1989 One of the first books I remember reading as a young Christian was Roland H. Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950). It […]
Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer By Scott H. Hendrix Yale University Press, 2017 368 pages (paperback), $22.00 Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet By Lyndal Roper Random House, 2017 576 pages (hardback), $40.00 October 31, 1517: Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World By Martin Marty Paraclete Press, 2016 128 pages (hardback), $19.99 When Martin […]
In AD 336, a report was circulated that the Egyptian bishop Arsenius had been killed and Athanasius was to blame. The schismatic Meletian party could even produce the corpse’s severed hand as proof. The evidence was persuasive enough that Emperor Constantine was prevailed upon to press a murder charge against the theologian. Fortunately, it turned […]
During a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I noticed the small number of travelers in the airport. When I asked about this, I received quite different accounts about why: from moving major airline hubs to other airports to post-9/11 woes. Doing a little research, I discovered that all of these versions were crucial parts of the […]
