I’ve been trying to find a good historical example of a person who stood up to the most powerful people of the day and ended up changing the entire world, and blimey if I haven’t found him in the person of Martin Luther.
“Here I stand. I can do no other!” That’s a sentence that has reverberated over the last five hundred years. In 1517, Pope Leo X had demanded that Martin Luther recant his criticisms of Catholic doctrine.
Luther’s attack is not a rejection of Christian doctrine. He shared with all other believers prioritizing individual salvation. What is different is that Luther challenged the Pope’s authority over salvation, and he gave a convincing theological argument. Luther appealed to scripture’s authority over all humans, since all Christians believed at the time that the Holy Scriptures were infallible. He ends his defence by stating: “ “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
The Pope’s position was that giving financial support for the church earned you merits that drew on Jesus’s sacrificial power that had been invested in the institution of the church through the church’s monopoly on the sacraments. Against this, Luther appealed to Augustine’s foundational concept of original sin, which implicated all humans, and, it meant, paradoxically, that without God’s grace, nothing one could do would contribute in any way towards their own salvation. It is only by subjectively trusting in God in this moment that a person is saved, he insisted. On this basis Luther condemned the practice of "indulgences”, ie. gaining merits towards salvation by giving money to fund the church’s projects.
The key to Martin Luther’s impact, is that he successfully broke the Catholic hierarchy’s medieval monopoly on theology and the sacraments by appealing to scripture and individual conscience. Luther’s defiance created the spark that led to the modern age: the age of the individual, the age of mass literacy and education, and the secular age.
It’s been five hundred years since Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral, and the idea that we ought to obey our own conscience is still in currency; most of us are comfortable in this modern secular world, where people from multiple faiths live together in peace; in Western European inspired societies it is less and less the case that churches or mosques have any jurisdiction over our secular activities; Even the division between secular and religious can be traced back to Luther, through his two kingdom doctrine.
Luther had effectively destroyed the very idea that any person or institution could be considered infallible, and his words had the effect, not of cementing Biblical infallibility, but of opening up Christian writings to new critique and interpretation. Now we look down on countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, that impose a single religious doctrine on the entire population, countries that, not coincidentally, have no respect for individual conscience. I may not believe the same things that Luther believed, but I do recognize the importance of what he did for making the modern world that we live in possible. I think we can see by Luther’s example the world changing potential that can come from standing up to a corrupt authority.
