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The Reformers of the sixteenth century were a galaxy of brilliant men of high learning and deep spiritual conviction who flooded the desen wastes of the church with the precious life-giving water of the rivers of God. The greatest of them ail-probably the greatest life-bringer to (he church since the time of the apostles - was Manin Lulher (1483-1546).

Never was there a lime when the church needed a Martin Luther as it did then. Never, in all its long history, had the church sunk 10 such depths of moral obloquy and ( corruption, or worldliness and unbelief, as il had when Lulher was born. To read the diaries kepi by the secretary of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI (1493-1503), is to be introduced to a Vatican which was then a world of incest, adultery, prostitution and i drunkenness, of gambling and vice, of / cynicism and scheming, where bishoprics and cardinalships were sold to the highest bidder, even to boys of eight years old. It was a world as vulgar and vile as the basest of thieves' kitchens, alien to any kind of spirituality, to any kind of theology.

It was Lulher who, by preaching and teaching faith based on the Bible and (he gospel, gave people a vision of what the Founder Jesus Christ had intended for his : church. This clear vision captured the minds of European men and women; it awoke their consciences to how wrong filings were. Luther gave people a taste of ilieold wine of the New Testament, and none who had tasted il ever returned to the new wine of late medieval Catholicism.

History books make a great deal of his work in clearing out wickedness and corruption, yet Luther's concern was not with scandals, but with God. He gave himself to telling a lost world and a straying church what God had done for us in Jesus Christ. He was a man with the gospel. When hearts were convicted and warmed, the scandals fell aside. Lulher offered lo re-form what mankind had deformed by giving again to the world the trulh in Christ, All his re-forming work was simply to let this same Christ into the church to reform il. In this way Luther is the supreme 'life-giver' of all time. He warms (he heart of every man, woman and child who reads him.

Of course, as the previous article has established, there were life-bringers before Luther. God never leaves himself without witness. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a strong anti-papalism and anti-clericalism was simmering in Europe, which the worldliness and increasing financial exactions of the papacy brought to the boil. The German theologian, John of Wesel (1400-81), the Dutch theologian Wessel (c 1420-89) -such men, and others like them, have been called, 'Reformers before the Reformation'. The Italian Savanorola (1452-98) was gravely concerned about the moral scandals of the church, less about its theology. But .supremely it was England's John Wyclif, whom history has described as 'the morning star of the Reformation', and John Huss of Bohemia who began the work of bringing new life to a despiritualized church.

So Luther stood on prepared ground. Yet still Luther was the Reformation and the Reformation was Luther. He converted all the classical Reformers who followed him, and all Reformers, even the Radicals, look their stance in relation to his pioneer work. Europe was ready for a Luther.

How did il all happen? And what was new about Luther's protest? Why did the whole of Europe, in its political and spiritual dimensions, respond so dramatically loan unknown professor from a new and obscure university?

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