The 500th Anniversary of the Reformation: From Nominalism to the Holocaust to Secular Socialism

October 31st, 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It was on this date in 1515 that the Reverend Father Martin Luther hung, or nailed, on the church door at Wittenburg, Germany his “95 Theses,” which propounded two central beliefs:

1. That the Bible is the central religious authority and
2. That humans may reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds.

Martin Luther’s theses sparked the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s 95 Theses was intended to be points to be debated within the Catholic Church. What was a challenge by Father Luther to his Church superiors and the Pope about God turned into a political movement. The History Channel notes, “The Catholic Church was ever after divided, and the Protestantism that soon emerged was shaped by Luther’s ideas. His writings changed the course of religious and cultural history in the West.”

QUESTION: What has the Reformation given Western culture and Christians?

Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option quotes Charles Taylor’s three bulwarks upholding the medieval Christian “imaginary”–that is, the vision of reality accepted by all orthodox Christians from the early church through the High Middle Ages:

• The world and everything in it is part of a harmonious whole ordered by God and filled with meaning–and all things are signs pointing to God.
• Society is grounded in that higher reality.
• The world is charged with spiritual force.

According to Taylor, “These three pillars had to crumble before the modern world could arise from the rubble.” Dreher wrote:

The theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model–that is, Christian metaphysical realism–was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham (1285-1347). The ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to be called nominalism.

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Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not.

Dreher noted that nominalism, “[S]et the stage for man enthroning himself in the place of God…a new emphasis on naturalism and individualism emerged. The old world, with its metaphysical certainties, its formal hierarchies, and its spiritual focus gradually ceased to hold the imagination of Western man…What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance.”

In a column titled “Lamenting Luther’s Reformation” Charlotte Allen writes:

[O]n Oct. 19 of this year [2017], Italian Bishop Nunzio Galantino, secretary-general of the Italian bishops’ conference, took it another step and declared that Luther wasn’t even a heretic and that the Reformation was the “work of the Holy Spirit.” Now, I wouldn’t go that far – but I feel some sort of ecumenical obligation to say something nice about Martin Luther.

The trouble is: it’s hard to think of anything. You don’t have to subscribe to Young Man Luther-style armchair Freudianism to conclude that Luther was a mess. He was arrogant, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing – and thought the world revolved around him personally because he was smarter than and spiritually superior to everyone else.

Allen notes in her article, “Luther preached sola scriptura, but he freely messed around with the Bible when it didn’t suit his theology. He inserted the word ‘alone’ after the word ‘faith’ into his German translation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans and tried to relegate the Letter of James to second-class status because it mentioned good works. When it came to getting married, he couldn’t just settle for a nice German burgher’s daughter. He had to marry an ex-nun, Katharina von Bora, whom he had personally lured out of her convent.”

So what was the lasting influence of Martin Luther’s religious and cultural history?

Perhaps it is appropriate to note that Adolf Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 8 wrote, “To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.” Why did Hitler list Martin Luther as a “great reformer”? Perhaps it was due to a treatise by Martin Luther, the pioneer of Protestantism, titled “The Jews and their Lies.” Luther begins his treatise with these words:

I had decided not to write anymore, neither of the Jews, nor against the Jews. Because I have learned, however that those miserable, wicked people do not cease trying to win over to themselves us, that is, the Christians also, I have permitted this booklet to go forth that I might be found among those who have resisted such poisonous undertaking of the Jews, and have warned the Christians to be on their guard against them.

I would not have thought that a Christian would permit himself to be fooled by the Jews to share their exile and misery. But the Devil is the God of the world, and where God’s word is not, he has easy sailing, not only among the weak, but also among the strong. God help us. Amen.

Hitler was also a supporter of the German Christian Social Party founded by Adolf Stoecker, which promoted political anti-Semitism in Germany. Hitler wrote in Mein Kaupf, “It [the Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.”

The Reformation lead to the Renaissance (rebirth) of Western culture. Dreher wrote in The Benedict Option:

It [the Renaissance] contains within it the secular progressive belief that the religiously focused medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic sterility–a ludicrous judgement but an influential one.

[T]he Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the glory of God to the glory of man. “We can become what we will, said Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), the archetypal Renaissance philosopher.

Dreher quotes Brad Gregory who wrote, “Because Christians disagreed about what they were to believe and do, they disagreed about what the fruits of a Christian life were. As so it is today.”

And so it is today.

RELATED ARTICLE: Raymond Ibrahim: The 500th Birthday of the Pro-Islamic West

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