Plan Well to Commemorate 500th Anniversary of Protestant Reformation

[Valin]

Discovery Institute

6/23/13

 

Christians are beginning to realize that a potentially embarrassing anniversary is coming up in 2017, only four years from this October: the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It could serve to underscore the continuing division of the Church, "the Body of Christ." It could highlight the diminished authority that Christianity receives in the West, even as Africans and Asians converts seek the faith. Worst of all, reliving the tumultuous history of the 16th and 17th centuries could rekindle the flames of mutual animosity.

 

Or, more likely, Christians of all sorts, under assault by a culture increasingly indifferent to faith where it is not hostile, may rally to common convictions. Perhaps, they can hope for substantially more unity coming out of the anniversary commemorations than they have going in. Planning for a substantive anniversary, therefore, would seem to commend itself to leaders in all denominations.

 

In some ways the most remarkable advance in Christianity over the past century has not come directly from the "ecumenism", though that movement did result in a number of instances of coordination on liturgy, for example, in Catholic and Protestant/evangelical circles. The most significant improvement, however, may be in the awareness among orthodox Catholics, Protestants and, yes, Jews that they are natural allies on one worldview issue after another. God, they may have concluded, tests them all with moral choices that also are posed to societies as a whole. One of those choices is whether to work together or to quarrel.

 

A proper 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, therefore, might attempt to reveal the growing possibility of unity, while respecting inevitable differences. Some five centuries ago Catholics and Protestants fought each other on fields of battle. Sometimes it got so complicated that armies could not tell co-religionists from foes; hence the famous saying of one general upon attacking a city where friend and foe might both be located, "Kill them all, and let God sort it out."

 

(Snip)