Reformation Sunday.

Reformation Day is October 31, commemorating the date in 1517 when Martin Luther hammered his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, sparking the Reformation.  This year it falls on this coming Sunday.

Early in my career I thought this a cool time to remember our Protestant history.  Invariably we would sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and stress the doctrines and approaches that became characteristic of Protestantism.

But eventually I got frustrated with that approach.  If we sink too much energy into looking back, we don’t have much left for what is going on now.  We can’t imagine that the Church was reformed back then and that everything has been fine ever since.  If we pay too much attention to the 16th century, we lose sight of both the original revelation and Christ’s continued Presence.  

I remember my grandfather telling me how, in that hymn, “the Prince of Darkness grim” was supposed to refer to the Pope, who, at the time, was waging war against Luther’s followers.  Later I learned that the hymn was used by the Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s, and they understood the Prince of Darkness to be Hitler.  When I began my ministry in 1981, I went to a clergy retreat led by Christian ethicist, Paul Lehmann.  He suggested that that title might be applied as well to the new President at the time, who was embarking on a program of injustice and predatory economics from which we have yet to recover, 40 years later.  Still more recently, we have had a leader whose cynical greed and lying knew no bounds, who instigated a murderous insurrection, undermined a legitimate election, botched our response to a deadly pandemic, and continues to retain millions of devotees.

My point is that we can’t reduce Reformation Day to a historical artifact.  Some of the dynamics that pertained back then persist in every generation and even today.  Tyranny, greed, ignorance, lies, and violence assault the Church all the time; the Holy Spirit is always reforming the people of God according to God’s Word, Jesus Christ.

Neither can we continue to harp on the theological issues that were at stake in the 16th century.  They became less relevant with each passing decade, until now, it is hard to generate any energy over things like “sola scriptura,” “salvation by grace through faith,” or “the priesthood of all believers.”  Not that these didn’t have elements of truth which needed lifting up and defending at that time.  But not only can undue attention to these questions unnecessarily divide Christians today, but it can be a distraction from the issues that the Spirit is calling us to address now.

For instance, Luther’s action has fed into the Modern mythology about the courageous outlaw individual who bucks the system to become successful doing his own thing.  His interpretation of the conflict between law and grace has been used to justify virulent pathologies from anti-semitism to the “cheap grace” that (Lutheran) Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw was neutralizing the gospel and killing the Church.

In other words, many Protestant ideas and approaches have been twisted into service of the domination system of Modernity, and used to justify racism, slavery, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and war.  These have become some of the most pressing things we need to deal with in our time.

Maybe “reformation” itself is a dated concept that is now an obsolete relic of the Modern Age.  Maybe the Church today needs to understand change in a different way.  Not as reformation, but the word I use to describe what needs to happen now is “emergence.”  In other words, we are not called to reform the Church.  I am not even sure the Church itself is always “being reformed” by the Spirit, if by that we imply a kind of “get with the times” mentality placing the Church in a perpetual mode of response and reaction.  Reform too often means that the changing culture sets the agenda, as if we need a retooling or an upgrade.  A Christianity 4.0 or something.

Reform, to use the language of Ronald Heifetz, is a technical fix.  Emergence is a more comprehensive adaptive change… but does not adapt to external environmental shifts, as profound as they may be.  Rather, emergence realizes and participates in our original Source which is always present deep within us and everything.  Reform is a kind of revolution; emergence is a revelation.  Reform has to do with agendas, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, initiatives, programs, and narratives.  Emergence lets go and lets God.  Reform manages and mixes memory and desire, past and future.  Emergence is Presence.

Five-hundred years ago, the Reformation did get at least one thing right: the Reformers understood at some level that we had to turn our attention first and only to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is our Source and who is God’s Wisdom and Presence.  

Maybe that’s what we have to do now as well.

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