This group has been meeting at All Saints Anglican Church monthly.
Meeting of 28 March: ‘Martin Luther – Force for good or ill?’
We began by trying to remember our early experiences of the former Catholic—Protestant divide in Australia and our related knowledge and understanding of the Protestant Reformation – or lack of them. Most of us were quite ready to admit that we had simply imbibed the cultural prejudices of the day without question and without any knowledge of theology or history that lay behind them. Church Sunday school random encounters with literature and formal schooling even taken together provided us with no systematic framework for thinking rationally about the differences between the Micks and the Proddies; we just knew that the ‘Others’ were lazy and stupid held weird beliefs and took part in unnatural ritual practices in church. While most of the heat has now gone out of this religious division we had to admit that many Australians still have very limited understanding of its history.
Using the well-documented life of Martin Luther as a case study we pooled our knowledge of some of the main positive and negative events and effects of the Reformation. From a modern progressive or secular viewpoint the long-term benefits of the Reformation were seen to include: awareness and limitation of corruption; limitation of Catholic and Papal power; greater freedom of thought and conscience; acceptance of the vernacular in worship; increased power of written language; flourishing of education and science; growth of civic liberty; the Enlightenment; and the anti-authoritarian revolutions in England America and France. In the process there were of course many regressions from enlightened philosophy and frequent descent into violence and war. Compared with the catastrophic religious warfare suffered by the Germans for more than a hundred years in the 16th and 17th Centuries the English escaped fairly lightly. As an example of the intemperate language that led to even more intemperate action on all sides we looked briefly at Luther’s 60-page anti-Semitic diatribe ‘On the Jews and their Lies’. The debate on the relative importance of ‘faith’ and ‘good works’ in Christian theology an issue that was central to the Reformation and the ostensible justification for many deaths was not seen as having any great relevance in the rationalist 21st Century.