Historians today have a much more balanced and pluralistic view. It is impossible to read Luther, for all his coarse vitality, as an apostle of common sense. Nor is it clear that he, or the other reformers, wanted to end the traditions of argument in which they had themselves been schooled. The reformation was an argument within western Christianity, not a rejection of all that had gone before. No one involved could have imagined the consequences that would flow from the argument Luther started – consequences that ranged from mass literacy to the emergence of modern nation states, among them Germany; to the vast European empires of the 19th century; to the modern liberal idea that people exist as individuals before they are a part of society; the archbishop of Canterbury has even claimed that it led to the emergence of modern banking. It certainly gave us the principle of religious tolerance, after all possible alternatives had been tried and bloodily failed. [...]
The Reformation gave us the idea of progress: the hope that the future might be better than the past, and fundamentally different to it. This is implicit in Christianity itself, but it first took earthly shape when the Anabaptists – extreme reformers who rejected all external authority – took control of the town of Münster. They turned it into a kind of hell, before being bloodily suppressed, with Luther’s enthusiastic approval. But their idea that earthly history might improve towards a heavenly state has haunted us ever since.
The Reformation is in one sense over. Christianity has not entirely faded away even in Europe. But the theological arguments of the Reformation no longer seem central. Christians today can live with each other while disagreeing over transubstantiation: if they are going to excommunicate each other it will be over sexuality or even politics. “Theology” has become a term of abuse.
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