I am taking a Lutheran Foundations class at United Lutheran Seminary. Because I went to a Methodist seminary, my Candidacy Committee required that I take this class on my route to ordination. I thought it was a course in Lutheran theology, but it's much more than that. It's a class that addresses the question: what does it mean to be a Lutheran?
In yesterday's class, we went over the history of the Reformation, which was more than just Luther nailing his theses to the Wittenberg door. Much of it was familiar to me from Church History class, but we spent a lot more time focused on the German part of the Reformation.
My professor stressed how the people of Luther's time must have seen these developments as God/Holy Spirit involvement. Here's Luther, in a distant outpost of the Holy Roman empire, in a small university, causing all this disruption, and living to tell the tale. I tend to think of Luther, and it was good to remember that he was about as marginal as it was possible to be, without being a peasant.
My professor pointed out that if you're the pope, and you excommunicate someone, you no longer have power over them. Similarly, if you're the Emperor, and you put a price on someone's head outlawing them, you've played your highest card. If that person persists in their actions, you've got no leverage left.
We talked a bit about Calvin too, less about Henry VIII. At the end of class, our professor showed us a map of Europe showing which parts were Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist. It's amazing to think about how these developments happened in a century, and people were very aware that they were living in a time of great change (unlike, say, people living in the 14-16th century, who were probably not thinking of themselves as living in "The Renaissance").
It's no wonder that Luther's contemporaries thought of him as having supernatural powers. I'm trying to decide whether to use these ideas in Sunday's sermon or in a Transfiguration Sunday sermon.
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