Luther's Protest: A Call for Unity

Today marks 492 years since the Augustinian monk and Doctor of Theology Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, so I'm re-reading Luther's work recently republished by P&R and edited by Stephen J. Nichols entitled Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.

In Luther's day the church door was similar to contemporary academic journals or blogs. Churchmen would post their doctrinal concerns on the church door calling for debate among their colleagues.

Roman Catholic apologists contend that Luther's protest was a subversion of papal authority, seeing it as the beginning of the end of church unity. But that is simply bad history and bad theology.

So, what was Luther's protest? Was it that the Roman church was corrupt because its practices contradicted Scripture? Not exactly. Eventually he and others would come to that conclusion but not quite yet. Luther's protest was that a church practice (i.e. indulgence selling) had become corrupt because it contradicted the church's and the Scripture's teaching. In other words, church authorities were not only contradicting Scripture but themselves. Rather than injecting disunity into the unified, Luther was trying to recover unity within the disunified.

Ironically, while Roman Catholic apologists accuse Luther of being the catalyst that led to the radical disunity of the church, the truth is that Luther simply recognized the church was already disunified and sought to regain her unity, a unity based on doctrinal purity.