The Influence of the Reformation on World History

For four and a half centuries world history has felt the influence of the Reformation. Today that influence is more potent than ever, and it is growing. This seemingly preposterous statement can be amply justified if seen in historical perspective.

We need to remember that for at least its first century and a half, the heart of the Reformation experience—what from the standpoint of the Gospel was its essence—was shared by only a small minority in a mere fragment of the inhabited earth and was almost eliminated by persecution and by compromise with factors that denied or distorted the Gospel.

The heart of the Reformation experience as expressed by Luther was salvation by faith, as he had discovered it through the Scriptures after prolonged inner struggle. In other words, it was the new birth into an eternal life of fellowship with God wrought by the Holy Spirit in response to faith in what God had done through his Son. The history of God’s preparation for the decisive act through his Son and the record of that act and of the effects of that act in the first century after Christ are in the Scriptures.

In the sixteenth century, partly through contagion from Luther and his written report of his experience and its implications, several thousands entered into the new birth through faith and by the study of the Scriptures. However, they were mostly in Northwestern Europe. Northwestern Europe is only a part of the western peninsula of the continent of Eurasia, and these thousands were at best a minority of the inhabitants of that small segment of the globe. Many of the thousands were members of the Anabaptist movements, whose designation arose from their insistence that the new birth was wrought in response to the faith of the individual, not by the baptism of infants. All the Anabaptists except the Mennonites were stamped out by persecution. Moreover, although Protestantism, which began with Luther, became the professed faith of the peoples of Northwestern Europe, it was mainly espoused by kings and princes, who used it to enhance their power. Only a few of them and a minority of their subjects really appreciated what had come to Luther. Compromised by the selfish ambitions of kings and princes, Protestantism contributed to wars that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laid waste much of Western Europe.

But the vital experience Luther had shared did not entirely disappear. Again and again it broke out in individuals and groups, most of them humble, and gave rise to movements, also of minorities. Among them were the Puritans, Quakers, Independents, and Baptists in the British Isles, and many varieties of pietism on the continent of Europe.

Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there began the geographic expansion of peoples who were Protestant in name and by heredity. At first the major settlements were in the thirteen colonies from which the United States developed. Some of them—those in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—were made by refugees who held to the new birth, but these believers mere small minorities. Although the colonists were quickened by the Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century, when the United States became independent only about five out of a hundred of the population were church members, and not all of these had really been born anew.

The nineteenth century witnessed the further migrations of people, a majority of whom were Protestant by ancestry. They settled in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Evangelicals—if we may so designate those who had experienced the new birth—sought to witness to the new birth to these migrants and their descendants. Among other means used were the British and Foreign Bible Society (organized in 1804) and several Bible societies in the United States, of which the largest was and is the American Bible Society (begun in 1816). These societies sought to distribute the Scriptures “without note or comment,” thus bringing to the reader the full impact of the inspired message free from distortion by other readers.

During the nineteenth century, European peoples and peoples of European ancestry penetrated all the globe and brought much of it under their control. Evangelicals sought to use this penetration as an opportunity to spread the Good News and to be the channel for bringing into existence communities of those who had experienced the new birth and would witness to it.

Following the two world wars of the twentieth century, most of the non-European peoples freed themselves from the political control of European peoples. For a time it looked as if the churches founded by evangelicals in Asia and Africa would disappear because of their association with Western colonialism and imperialism. In some countries, notably mainland China and North Korea, they have dwindled. However, in most of the non-European world the opposite has happened. The so-called “younger churches” have grown in numbers in Asia and Africa and in nominally Roman Catholic Latin America. More significantly, they are developing their own leaders and are spreading the Good News among their neighbors. Thanks largely to evangelicals in the British Isles, Western Europe, and the United States, the Scriptures in whole or in part have been put into more than a thousand tongues. Hundreds of languages have been given a written form to make that possible. Although those who have had the experience of the new birth through faith are still a small minority of mankind, an increasing proportion of the total population have in their own languages at least the heart of the Scriptures in one or more of the Gospels.

We need also to remind ourselves that the effect of the Reformation has extended far beyond the minorities who have been introduced to the new life through faith and reading the Scriptures, significant though these have been. The Reformation has contributed, often as the chief creative cause, to movement after movement whose influence has permeated all mankind.

One of these movements has been democracy. Democracy has many roots, not all of them from the Reformation or even Christian. Yet the Reformation has been a major source of democracy. The democratic idea was implicit in Luther’s emphasis on the right and duty of individual judgment arising from the new birth. At the Diet of Worms before the magnates of church and state, when summoned to recant what he had written, Luther declared that unless he was persuaded by reason and the Scriptures he could not disavow anything that had come from his pen. By reason he did not mean private judgment. He was familiar with much that Christians had written through the ages. However, he was convinced that he must use his individual judgment, enlightened by the Scriptures, to ascertain basic truth. Luther was not consistent in applying this principle. He sought to enlist the help of the state in eradicating what he thought was contrary to the principles he believed he had discovered.

From the radical wing of the English Reformation came major contributions to modern democracy. These were from the Puritans and especially from the Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and others akin to them but even more extreme. John Locke, a moderate whose writings did much to shape English and American democracy, was in many ways the spiritual heir of these groups. In Great Britain, including Scotland, and on the continent of Europe, the Reformed wing of Protestantism was a major source of democracy. From these streams came much of the “American dream” and the democratic ideals of the United States. British and American democracy has had repercussions throughout much of the world.

The Red Cross clearly sprang from the Reformation. Its founder was Henri Dunant, a businessman who religiously was a product of an evangelical revival in his native Geneva. Dunant was present at a battle in Italy in 1859 and was horrified by the lack of care of the sick and the wounded. He depicted what he had seen in a best-seller. To give continuing effort to preventing such tragedies, he organized the International Red Cross.

The United Nations is an outgrowth of the Reformation. In the nineteenth century, Protestants, chiefly evangelicals, formulated plans for easing international tensions through a world court and international law. The League of Nations sought to give concrete expression to these plans. On the insistence of Woodrow Wilson, the Covenant of the League of Nations was appended to the treaties of Versailles. Wilson’s ancestry and parentage were evangelical. In his teens he made a Christian commitment that he never forsook. From it he drew the inspiration and stamina that forced the league on skeptical and nationalistically self-seeking European statesmen. When the League of Nations disintegrated, it was succeeded by the United Nations. No one person was as influential in the creation of the United Nations as Wilson was in the League of Nations. But those who brought it into being were chiefly men of Protestant—and therefore Reformation—origin. Moreover, the Declaration of Human Rights, one of the major achievements of the United Nations, was formulated and adopted on the initiative of a representative of the Churches’ Commission on International Affairs—clearly of Reformation background.

Besides influencing the movements we have named—and the list might be extended—the Reformation also had an effect on Gandhi. Gandhi was a Hindu, not a Christian. But he frankly acknowledged that he had been influenced by Christ. That influence was first channeled through evangelicals in his South African days, when his ideals and program were being shaped. Therefore Gandhi’s prodigious effect, not only on India but on all mankind, was in part a fruit of the Reformation.

We must quickly note that democracy, the Red Cross, and the United Nations have been largely secularized and the emphasis of the Reformation through them largely obscured. The same was true of Gandhi. Again and again in history this has been true of movements, institutions, and individuals indebted to the Reformation. That need not surprise or discourage us. We recall that Paul spoke about the seeming weakness and folly of the Cross and then, in a contrast fully borne out in history, declared the Cross to be the power and the wisdom of God.

If we are ever dismayed by the forces that threaten the Good News, we will do well to remind ourselves of the source of the phrase “salvation by faith,” which brought peace and triumphant joy to Luther. He found it in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul found it in the Book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk was wrestling with the problem of the seeming triumph of evil, of the apparent helplessness of the righteous before the callous cruelty of powerful conquering kingdoms. As, tortured, he struggled with the question why God seemed to tolerate evil, God revealed to him that the righteous shall live by faith.

We of a later age must remember that we are told that our Lord said the gates of hell—on the defensive—should not prevail against his Church. We must also remember that on the eve of the crucifixion, when to human eyes he seemed to have failed, he declared: “Now shall the Prince of this world be cast out.”

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