“Primitive Christianity and the Reformation are the two greatest revolutions in history.” This sentence, written in 1835 by the Swiss historian, J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, reflects the sentiment of the earliest Protestants that the Reformation was an act of God comparable only to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. In 1528, just eleven years after Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, the Lutherans of Brunswick started to remember the Reformation. A “Reformation Festival” joined Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Whitsunday on the church calendar. The reformers of Brunswick believed they were witnessing God at work in a way that had not been seen since the age of the apostles. Fellow evangelicals shared this opinion, and the practice of observing a Reformation Day spread.
Some Lutherans placed their Reformation observance on St. Martin’s Day in November, in memory of Luther’s birth, for they considered Luther the most powerful preacher of the Gospel since Paul. Others selected the Sunday before June 24, the nativity of John the Baptist, because they were convinced that Luther, like John, was a prophet preparing a path for the Saviour. Still others set it on Trinity Sunday, thus following observance of the birth of the Church on Pentecost with observance of its rebirth in the Reformation.
A uniform date began to be established after 1667, when Elector John George II of Saxony placed Reformation Day on October 31, the day on which Luther posted his theses. By then Lutheran Protestants were unanimous in their understanding of what Reformation Day signified. As Jesus had cleansed the temple in Jerusalem, so Luther had purged the church of Rome. October 31, therefore, was a “day to remember” because it was a “day of the Lord,” a day commemorating the renewal of biblical Christianity. It recalled, in the words of the Formula of Concord, that “by the special grace and mercy of the Almighty, the teaching … of our Christian faith … was once more clearly set forth on the basis of the Word of God and was purified by Dr. Luther, of blessed and holy memory.…” During the nineteenth century Protestants of many denominations adopted the custom of commemorating the Reformation on October 31.
Four hundred and fifty years have now passed since that eventful eve of All Saints, 1517, when young Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation. In the intervening centuries the whole face of the earth has been transformed and the entire fabric of society altered. Protestantism, which started with one Augustinian monk, has grown into a world-wide religion numbering nearly 228,000,000 members. Roman Catholicism, inspired by saintly leaders from Ignatius Loyola to Pope John XXIII, has sought internal reforms in the Council of Trent and in the Second Vatican Council. The West, economically, has experienced commercial and industrial revolutions, and factories have replaced manors and farms as the major means of production. Previously untapped sources of energy have been utilized, and horse power has been superseded by steam power and, in the last twenty years, atomic power. Political attention has shifted from Rome, Madrid, and Vienna to Washington, Moscow, and Peiping. A New World, largely unexplored in 1517, has emerged to occupy Europe’s position as the nucleus of Western civilization. Militarily, according to historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr., man has fought nine world wars; now he teeters on the brink of a tenth one, to be waged with atomic weapons. In international diplomacy, leadership has passed from Spain to Holland, from Holland to France, from France to Britain, and, since 1945, from Britain to the United States, a nation that did not even exist in the sixteenth century. In the years since the Protestant Reformation ushered in the modern age, there have been five decisive political revolutions—the British of 1688, the American of 1776, the French of 1789, the Russian of 1917, and the Chinese of 1949—involving the new ideologies of democracy, nationalism, and Communism. Between 1650 and 1950 the population of this planet increased more than fourfold, and it continues to soar. The geographical horizons of Western man have widened immensely. In 1517 Spanish and Portuguese navigators were venturing into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in tiny barks in the maiden voyages of discovery. In 1967 Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts investigate outer space in sophisticated space vehicles.
Because we live in a time profoundly different from the sixteenth century, some have wondered whether it is worth our while to remember the Reformation. They concede that scholars may satiate their curiosity by studying the personalities, accomplishments, principles, and perspectives of the period, but they doubt whether Reformation ideas and insights are applicable to the problems of the twentieth-century Church. To them, the Reformation record is a report of the religious tribulations of early modern Europe. We, however, must move forward to a “New Reformation.”
If, on the other hand, as d’Aubigné suggested, the Reformation brought a return to the power of the primitive Church, then we would do well to recall its men and recapture its message. Toward the end of the first century the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews invited a new generation of Christians to reflect on the leaders and legacy of apostolic Christianity. Similarly, we may with profit bring to mind again the reappearance of that faith nearly five hundred years ago. The Epistle to the Hebrews was addressed to Christians in crisis, faced with the dangers of apostasy and doctrinal drifting, and it encouraged them to stand firm in the faith through a revived appreciation and renewed application of their heritage: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God; consider the outcome of their life, and imitate their faith” (13:7, RSV).
The leaders were, of course, the great heroes of the faith. The greatness of the Protestant Reformation lay in its determination to recover apostolic perspectives. We shall do well, in the closing third of the twentieth century, to follow the admonition of the Reformers. They would point us to the Bible for light on the crucial problems that trouble and confuse Christians today—the unity crisis among the churches, the community crisis in American society, the authority crisis in recent theology, and the identity crisis of the individual. Observance of Reformation Day will be ecumenically meaningful, socially significant, theologically relevant, and personally satisfying if we do not disregard their call.
A Call To Southern Presbyterians
Southern Presbyterians are worried. They number 955,000, including 3,700 active ministers. But in 1966 there were only 4,000 additions by profession of faith. It took nearly 240 Southern Presbyterian ministers and members to make one convert last year, and the large majority of those added were children of church families. Moreover, the Southeast is second only to the Pacific Coast in population growth rate. In one year 3,700 ministers, 34,500 elders, 38,000 deacons, and 880,000 communicants ought to reach more people with the Gospel.
The 1967 General Assembly had something concrete to say about the problem of evangelism. It was not satisfied to rest with an increase in giving of $5,000,000 that lifted the per-capita rate to $122.59, and not willing to be deflected into a disguised universalism that places nearly total emphasis upon social and political action as the Church’s primary business. By overwhelming vote the General Assembly resolved “that, since the primary objective of our Church is the salvation of lost souls, the General Assembly challenge each officer of our Church actively to offer the message of salvation to at least one of God’s children during the coming year; that a copy of this motion be sent to each officer; that the Moderator offer at this time a prayer for those who are not of the household of God.”
By a special mailing from the office of the Stated Clerk, each ordained man in the denomination is receiving a copy of this statement. He now knows where the highest authority in the structure of his church says the emphasis should be placed. Will he take it seriously?
The Teacher Strikes
Everybody talks about problems of the inner-city school, but few have done much about them. Until this fall, that is, when thousands of the nation’s teachers cut classes, sometimes in defiance of law, demanding more money (requested base salary generally about $7,000), more control over educational policy and discipline (teachers want authority to bar unruly students from their classes), and relief from multiple nonprofessional duties. Unfortunately, the interests of the students were sometimes overlooked as the strikes hit numerous communities in Michigan, Florida, Illinois, and New York City. In all, about 600,000 students were affected. Observers in Harlem reported that parents have strongly opposed the teacher strike, claiming that it is depriving children of desperately needed education. No doubt many of the teachers’ demands are legitimate. But it is a sad commentary on the capacities for constructive change within the nation that strikes, demonstrations, and violence increasingly replace law, dialogue, and education as agents of reform.
Unrest In Milwaukee
The Rev. James Groppi of Milwaukee has joined the ranks of militant, violence-oriented black-revolution advocates such as H. “Rap” Brown and Stokely Carmichael. The white Roman Catholic priest led violence-pocked demonstrations aimed at wresting an open-housing ordinance from the local government.
What began as a “mothers’ march” to the mayor’s office ended in a violent scene in which 100 militants, reportedly directed by Groppi, smashed windows, ransacked files, slashed upholstery, and reduced the lobby to a shambles. Father Groppi, who earlier had urged marchers at a church rally to protest in “suffering love,” encouraged the destruction and announced that “cool it” was no longer part of his vocabulary. Unfortunately, anti-Groppi members of Milwaukee’s Polish Catholic community behaved no better.
When civil-rights demonstrations turn from peaceful protests to angry clashes marked by bottle-and rock-throwing, mass arrests, and the wanton destruction of public property, the cause of racial justice suffers serious setbacks. All Christians should work to end the oppressive discrimination that so long has crushed the Negro. But when demonstrations are led by clergymen who advocate violence and force, the Christian principle of love is mocked and participation by churchmen becomes hypocrisy.
During a run-in with people whom J. Edgar Hoover might call disciples of the “gospel of nihilism” we took a Christian stance, insisting that God is man’s last hope. We were interrupted by a bearded churl who said with a sneer, “It’s like you’re sick, man!”
He wasn’t far off. We are sick! For one thing, we are sick of unwashed, unruly potheads who shoot from the lip at our generation.
We are sick of living with unflagging tensions that are due to the condition of our cities. We are appalled at watching metropolitan areas roar into ruin while human pack rats carry off people’s hard-earned property, joking with each other as they do it—and police stand by under orders to hold their fire.
We are sick of hearing people say it had to be this way in order for the Negro to get his rights. Deeply as we deplore the injustices done to Negroes, we cannot believe that turning our great American cities into torches will right our wrongs.
We are sick from the feeling, which refuses to go away, that someone is out to make this not a better world but a far worse one. Whether there is a “conspiracy” afoot we will leave to those in the know; or whether the Communists have a big hand in this business we can’t be sure—even if we have the thought that the Communists might not want to let this opportunity pass without setting a few fires. But we are certain that anarchy threatens to overwhelm order in this country if our present madness is not stopped.
We are sick, too, of the way our government seems to approach this problem. It appears to think that if we pour enough money over the conflagration it will go out. This seems a sort of insanity. We favor every community’s getting rid of slums and we cry loud for civil rights for all people, colored, colorless, or multicolored. But, in heaven’s name, what has civil rights got to do with Negroes’ making Negroes homeless through the use of Molotov cocktails?
All authentic civil-rights leaders denounce these slaughterous rampages in our streets. Only the out-and-out revolutionaries—those fireheads who cry for black men to take up arms against “whitey”—shout in favor of this horror. If these men are civil rights workers, Charlie McCarthy was a Marxist!
We are sick, we repeat, at our government’s idea that money can end anarchy in our streets. Do you stop hoodlums by paying them to stop? The government’s very thought of trying to stem criminality with a dollar sign appears to imply that the vast majority of Negroes are rebels against the democratic order and can be pacified with sufficient funds. Any intelligent person, black or white, is aware that the great body of Negroes in America are simply people trying to live normal lives, asking only that they be treated as human beings equal to all other human beings. They do not follow the black-power revolutionaries. And the Negro leader who said that all Negroes have to be either radicals or Uncle Toms spoke out of either demagoguery or stupidity. The people who burned millions of dollars’ worth of property in Detroit were not representative of the majority of Negroes in that city; in fact, the Negroes were the ones who lost the most.
We are sick of hearing that civil-rights injustices triggered all this insane violence. Some cities that have tried hard to obtain justice for the Negro, that even felt they were approaching the day of justice, were hard hit by the murderous goings-on. One governor maintains that less than 5 per cent of the Negro population in a riot-rent city in his state brought off the violence there—and most of them had criminal records! Almost to a man the mayors of these tortured cities agree that the destroyers in the streets were scarcely interested in civil rights as such.
We are sick of observing civil officials who think they can control an inferno with a water gun. The law must operate, right in those mad streets. It must be unflinching, impartial, and authoritative. No man, black or white or in-between, is safe when the law is violated with impunity.
We are also sick of clergymen who manage somehow to exonerate the hoodlum rioters and put the blame for the calamity on countless innocent people who have always stood ready to assist the downtrodden. Even when we manage to love everybody, a burning city is still a fearful sight. God’s love never lessens his demand for order. That committed Christian, Paul, insisted that God had sanctified the sword of Caesar’s law and made its bearer His minister (Romans 13).
We are sick of those pulpits and religious publications that in seeking a solution to our problems advocate a compromise with evil rather than pronouncing judgment upon all wrong and presenting the Gospel of grace, which can give men a motivation for ethical living in the human situation.
We are sick of experts who offer nothing but pacification and prosperity to guerrilla terrorists as they cry louder and louder to our world, “Burn, baby, bum!”
In brief, we are sick of being so long sick while everybody keeps locking the door against the one Physician who can save us.
