In 2017, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In preparation, the special October issue of The Lutheran Witness, which includes eight extra pages, focuses on why the Reformation still matters to Lutherans today.
Articles explain what it means to believe in faith alone, grace alone, Scripture alone and Christ alone. Others focus on the important documents, people and tenets that impacted the Reformation. A timeline of secular and ecclesiastical events outlines what else was going on in the world while Luther was busy writing. And a variety of ideas on how to celebrate the Reformation in churches, homes and schools also is included.
Many of the articles printed in this issue were originally posted at lutheranreformation.org/blog/, a website worth bookmarking. Interested readers may visit that site or witness.lcms.org for more.
Posted October 4, 2016
Print page
I understand the importance of the Reformation and Luther’s part, along with Tyndale and Wycliffe, in making the Bible available in the vernacular tongue of Christians everywhere. This was a shock to the Roman Church and the Papal system. However, we know the Reformation hardly “reformed” the Catholic Church to any great effect. If anyone who seriously studies the subject can please tell me which false doctrines were abandoned by the Roman Church, I would be pleased to know about it. And since the Roman Church started the “Counter Reformation” to discredit Luther and bring back to the Papal fold those who had gone after Luther, well, how successful was the Reformation? Half of Germany was Catholic, the other half Lutheran, and numerous religious wars and bloodshed spilled all over Europe for close to a century. Today, the Catholic Church no longer sends Jesuits and Dominican monks to arrest and burn heretics, and it no longer controls nations, but it is still the same as it was during Luther’s revolt, having added a few more Papal edicts and false doctrines since then. Luther’s greatness lied in his unswerving desire to free Christianity from the Papal nightmare and make the word of God available to each of us. And this alone was a seismic event.