From Reformation to Transformation: The "Age of Global Dialogue"*

Five hundred years ago, on October 31, 1517, the Western world in the person of Martin Luther started on the road of Christendom's Reformation, which has led to today's unforeseen and amazing global transformation: the "Age of Global Dialogue."¹ I want to look briefly at what happened back then, where we are today, and how we got from there to here. Then, we can ask ourselves what lessons might lie in this history for us today—and tomorrow.

Many critical events took place around the portentous year 1517. Just twenty-five years before Luther supposedly banged his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, Western Europe in 1492 in the person of Christopher Columbus discovered a whole hemisphere, and just five years after Luther's reformatory action, Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the world in 1522, definitively proving it not flat, but a globe.

The year 1517 marked both the end of the Catholic Church "reform efforts" by the pope and the beginning of the "Reformation." Just five years earlier, in 1512, Pope Julius II called the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) in Rome to undertake a badly needed reform of the Catholic Church. Toward its end, two Augustinian monks submitted, and struggled mightily for, a comprehensive reform program for the Church. Tragically, in the end, it was not adopted.

Later in 1517, another Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, launched what has become known as the "Protestant Reformation." Among other immediate results, it splintered the Catholic Church of central and eastern Europe into multiple sects and spilled open massive sluices of blood and gore for the next nearly century and a half, finally just beginning to slow and coagulate only with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

Of course, Luther had no such intention in mind. He was a very serious, relatively moderate product of the fourteenth–fifteenth-century religious Renaissance, which, among other things, had produced the recovery of the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, leading to a much deeper understanding of the Bible (both testaments of which Luther eventually masterfully translated into German). That scholarly advance, plus the increasing availability of inexpensive Bibles—thanks to the new printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg (1554)—made the Bible of greater importance than ever before. Luther focused on this advance by beginning to answer the constant question: How do we as Christians know what to believe? His response was not by the customary Traditio, tradition, or by the Magisterium, the teaching authority, the pope, but by sola scriptura, "by scripture alone."

For Luther, and his many colleagues, sola scriptura was not the only "sola." He also asked the question: How am I saved? Such a question might sound a little strange in our twenty-first-century secular age, but it was an overpowering question for Luther and many others. In fact, he was quite overwhelmed by it, thinking that even the good deeds he performed, such as prayer, almsgiving, etc., were ultimately sinful, for he feared that he might ultimately be doing them to "avoid hell and gain heaven"—rather than purely because they were good.

As an Augustinian monk, he agonized endlessly over this—doubtless drawn into this spiritual abyss by the writings of his order's namesake, St. Augustine, who had a titanic spiritual battle with the Irish monk Pelagius over whether humans freely chose to do good or evil or were predetermined by God. Pelagius argued that, of course, we humans freely choose good or evil and appropriately earn favor or punishment, heaven or hell. Augustine, on the other hand, argued—and drew the great swath of subsequent Western Christians along with him in this teaching—that humans ultimately did not have free will; rather, God determined from all eternity that certain persons would perform morally good acts, and others would perform evil actions. The former, God determined, would thereby go to heaven, and the latter, the great mass of humans—"massa damnata" was the term he used—were predestined by God for eternal agony in hell.

It was with this towering doctrine of inherited fear that...