Thoughts on Luther's Reformation

Five centuries ago an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a defiant 95 theses to the door of a cathedral in Wittenburg, Germany. Thus, began the Protestant Reformation, a momentous cultural and religious movement that transformed Western civilization, decisively.

A century ago a German sociologist named Max Weber wrote one of the most read and quoted works about the influence of Protestantism. In his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,  Weber argued that a new ethic, a new work ethic had allowed Europeans to produce and to accumulate wealth.

Previously, Weber argued, Christians had seen life on earth as a preparation for eternal life. They saw work in terms of subsistence, not in terms of wealth. Living a pious life and receiving an eternal reward was more important than getting rich. After all, Christ has said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

The pre-Reformation Church had sound scriptural basis for its view.

Weber’s work is read and studied because it makes sense. Protestant cultures tend to be more work oriented while Roman Catholic cultures tend to give greater weight to art and love and even drama. If you compare the Protestant North American countries with the Catholic South American culture, you cannot miss the fact that the value system is different and that those in the North are more prosperous than those in the South. The same applies generally in Europe where the prosperous North is often asked to bail out the impecunious South.

Like all generalizations this one needs qualification. More so since some researchers have attempted to disprove Weber’s thesis. See this supposedly seminal study.

Detractors suggest that all Protestant cultures are the same, but that is not what Weber argued. He singled out Calvinist theories, the ones that declared people to have been predestined for Heaven or Hell—before their birth--regardless of what they did or did not do on this earth. This was a variant on the Lutheran theory, to the effect that God could not be bribed by piety. And he would not be manipulated by corrupt clerics selling indulgences. Luther's God would decide who to admit and who to consign to damnation for whatever reason He wished. Call it a divine version of free will.

Not all Protestants are Calvinists or even Lutheran. Lumping them together is not necessarily useful. Also, different political leaders produced different policies and different attitudes toward business. One might say that Protestant cultures were more likely to make it easier for individuals to do business while Catholic cultures put more trust in large institutions, like the Church or the government.

In theological terms Luther wanted to discredit the Roman Church and to tell people that it was a corrupt intermediary between them and their God. In simple terms, Protestants were encouraged to read the Bible on their own, in the vernacular, while Catholics had to rely on a priesthood that told them the correct way to interpret it.

From there people have concluded that Protestantism is more individualistic while Catholicism is more communal, with a more centralized authority.

We should be skeptical of these opinions. For example, there are different kinds of individualism. They are not all the same and are not all created equal. One form of individualism tells you that you can participate in the marketplace by following the rules and respecting the players. Another kind tells you that you can do as you please and break the rules if they do not please you. Free to play the game and free to break the rules are not the same kind of free and they do not show the same kind of individualism.

The free market is not a free-for-all. This means that America’s current obsession over individual rights, the rights of the transgendered and of cocker spaniels, is not necessarily conducive to the free market. To imagine that the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism is going to flounder because the nation does not practice liberal democracy simply shows a misunderstanding of freedom and individuality.

As for the cultural climate that gave rise to the Reformation, we cannot fail to notice that Europe at the time had seen a catastrophic plague destroy around half of its population. The plague arrived in the mid-fourteenth century and waxed and waned for over a century after it. The Church tried to fight it with prayer and this created conditions where people could question and doubt its authority. 

After all, Jesus Christ was a healer. He performed medical miracles. If the Church was really the proper and incorruptible intermediary through which Christians could appeal to their God… why was He not answering their prayers? Could it be because the intermediary had been corrupted.

In short, the Reformation found its cultural footing because Luther was judging the Church itself, was saying, in so many words, that it had failed a basic test… providing a healthy life for believers. If the Church was powerless, then, on pragmatic grounds, its claim to be the one true Church could be questioned.

Thus, pragmatic thinking, worldly thinking, was for the first time in the West applied to the Church.

After all, the theoretical basis for a market economy, as well as for science, is whether something works, whether empirical evidence can be allowed to prove or disprove it. When we are dealing with an ideology, especially a Platonist ideology, we are not supposed to allow evidence to refute any hypothesis, or, narrative. With the Reformation, mundane facts were first allowed to do so.

One must also note that the Reformation Europeans also ushered in an age of science and industry. The age of science was spawned by the Reformation. It allowed the radical thought that God could work his healing ways through antibiotics. Similarly, God could protect communities that armed themselves much better than communities that had disarmed and that were relying solely on prayer.

It becomes more complicated still. If the basis for capitalism and market economies lies in the concept of free will, we note that this concept enters the culture in the book of Genesis and that it became an important part of Christian theology through the work of Augustine. We recall that Luther was an Augustinian monk.

In the Bible and in Augustine free will is an ethical principle. It is about being free to take responsibility. It says that you are responsible for your actions, regardless of how tempted you were.

Surely, Luther knew about this. One might suggest that he was saving the theory at the expense of the ecclesiastical institution.

In addition, around two and a half centuries before Luther, Thomas Aquinas brought Aristotelian thinking into the Christian West. Following the Stagyrite, Aquinas saw human beings as rational beings. He provided the definitive rational basis for the Christian faith.

In addition, since Aristotle provided the basis for science, Aquinas also introduced a form of argument that sought to separate appearance from reality, to test hypotheses offered, most often, by the Church Fathers.

One cannot overestimate the importance of Aquinas in Western Civilization, but one must note that, at the least, his thinking was controversial, to the point where important church figures wanted him denounced as a heretic.

As you also know, when the Church embraced Thomas it tended to see his ideas as dogmas. When Galileo proved experimentally that Aristotle was wrong about the speed of falling bodies, among other things, Church leaders forced him to recant.

As long as the Church owned Aristotle, science could not advance. Once Luther loosened its grip, by offering a path that allowed people to seeing science as something that could be decided by experience and experiment, Western civilization metamorphosed into what it is today.