21st Century Reformation

He is still excommunicated and his beliefs are still anathema, don't see how it would be any different.

Well, after 500 years he might be a little more crankier I guess.

It is impossible for us to know the answer. The sale of indulgences does not exist now, so who knows?

Basil the Great said:

It is impossible for us to know the answer. The sale of indulgences does not exist now, so who knows?

Click to expand...

Yeah the church isn't nearly as corrupt as it once was, so the catalyst that got the whole thing started may be lacking.

I wonder if Luther would have supported the Reformation, if he could have looked into the future and seen how the Reformation would eventually lead to hundreds of different Protestant bodies?

Somewhere (I'd have to look it up) Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that if Luther were alive in the first half of the 20th century, he'd probably be zealously trying to re-catholicize the Protestant churches.

Dunstan said:

Somewhere (I'd have to look it up) Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that if Luther were alive in the first half of the 20th century, he'd probably be zealously trying to re-catholicize the Protestant churches.

Click to expand...

I belive that!

Basil the Great said:

It is impossible for us to know the answer. The sale of indulgences does not exist now, so who knows?

Click to expand...

Oh yes, they do.

This is not an easy question to answer. Would the RC church have made some of the changes they did if Luther had not called them on those things?

DaRev said:

Oh yes, they do.

Click to expand...

I know the indulgences themselves still exist. . . but do they really still sell them?

Okay, I found the quotation I was thinking of. Bonhoeffer does not explicitly state things the way I remembered them (oh memory!), but does lament the trajectory of much of Protestant history and along with his other letters and writings, seems to yearn for a kind of re-catholicization.

From a letter to his parents, dated 10-31-1943 (from Letters and Papers from Prison).

Today is Reformation Day, a feast that in our time can give on plenty to think about. One wonders why Luther's action had to be folloed by consequences that were the exact opposite of what he intended, and that darkened the last years of his life, so that he sometimes even doubted the value of his life's work. He wanted a real unity of the church and the West - that is, of the Christian peoples, and the consequence was the disintegration of the church and of Europe; he wanted the 'freedom of the Christian man', and the consequence was indifference and licentiousness; he wanted the establishment of a genuine secular order free from clerical privilege, and the result was insurrection, the Peasant's War, and soon afterwards the gradual dissolution of all real cohesion and order in society. . . As long as a hundred years ago Kierkegaard said that today Luther would say the opposite of what he said then. I think he was right - with some reservations.

Click to expand...

Luther073082 said:

I know the indulgences themselves still exist. . . but do they really still sell them?

Click to expand...

Yeah, they still sell them, I think. Let me see what I can find.

Indulgences Return, and Heaven Moves a Step Closer for Catholics - NYTimes.com

Edited to add:

They even have a manual on Indulgences:

Amazon.com: Manual of Indulgences (9781574554748): United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Apostolic Penitentiary of the Vatican

Yes, I know what you mean and I sometimes have told myself that the sale of indulgences still lives on when parishioners buy Mass cards for their dead relatives. To a certain extent this is true, but not in the same way that indugences were sold back in Luther's time.

Nostromo19 said:

That is a terrific point, who knows what the RC church would look like if Luther had not initiated the Reformation. I often wonder though, if Martin Luther would be pained by the enormous, contentious divisions that now exist in Christendom, largely initiated by him. Reformation became Separation. If Luther were alive today, he might not leave the Church at all.

Click to expand...

The divisions we see now are not Luther's fault and never where. It was a bunch of people who took advantage of the chaos result from his attempt at Evangelical Catholic reforms to make up their own doctrines and split away from the church.

Of all the reformers, it was only Luther and his followers that didn't desire a split in the church. The protestants on the other hand wanted this.

The shattering of the western church is the fault of Calvin, Zwiligi, the Anabaptists, and a few others, not Luther.

In terms of the reformation though, if it wouldn't have been Luther I'm sure it would have been someone. There where forces of culture and technology at work here. You mix a corrupt Roman Catholic Church who demands great control over the churchs, rivaling the power of the kings, emperors and electors, with the invention of the printing press and the ability to spread ideas over long distances to many different people, quickly and effectivly. Add that with a new focus on education...

I would say that even if Luther had not nailed the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, the Western Church would have split apart eventually. It might not have split as much and it might have taken another 100-300 years, but it would have happened sooner or later. It is hard to believe in these days of Modernism and emphasis upon democracy and individual rights that you could have maintained one monolithic Western Church in total control all the way up to the year 2000 and beyond.