We always think that things happening in our time are new. Truth is that we have always faced hard times. And in the midst of those hard times people have risen up to speak truth to a troubled world.
On Oct. 31, it will be the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Of course it had great significance for the Christian Church, but it also had a great impact on Western civilization.
It was one of the things that brought the world out of the middle ages and into the modern world. New technologies made it possible for people to travel and communicate like never before. The most important of these was the printing press. Before its invention it would take a monk one year to copy the Bible. Books were for the wealthy only. The ideas that were brought forth in the Reformation were made possible by this new technology. Pamphlets with ideas that changed society could be mass produced and read by more people. It made it possible for people to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
The Reformation also changed politics by giving princes and nobility more power and lessening the influence of the church. One could make the argument that the rise of the merchant class came about as a result of the Reformation.
Today we are in a similar revolution. As religion looses influence over people’s lives, as more and more people find spirituality in other ways, as advancement in technology makes it possible to know more and more, we see that people are able to think for themselves. Less and less are institutions ruling our lives. More and more we are moving to an economy of individual choices, and ideas.
These changes seem scary to many people. They yearn for the day when religious life was the center of our lives, when stores were closed on Sunday, when people didn’t play on their devices all the time. However, I see them merely as the cyclical nature of history. Just as it was 500 years ago, there are exciting new ways of being, opportunities to explore what it means to be a human being. There are new exciting things we know about each other because we have access to more information than ever.
What has not changed in those 500 years is human beings.
We still have the capacity to hate and kill each other. We still have the capacity to be small-minded even with more information. As we explore our spiritual selves outside the confines of organized religion, I hope that it will lead us to a more humane and nonviolent society. I also hope that Christians will see our own need for reform. That Christians will see the errors of the past, and learn to follow Jesus’s teaching of nonviolence and love. I hope that we can use our knowledge as a way to understand each other better, deepen our relationships across the world and maybe to care more about our global neighbors.
Only history will tell us what others will see 500 years from now as they look back at our times. Let us hope that we are the ones speaking out for truth in a troubled world. Let us hope we are encouraging each other to love more and hate less, to see in each other our common humanity.
Let us make the Reformation not just a moment 500 years ago, but something that we continually do.
(The Rev. Jonathan Hopkins of Concordia Lutheran Church lives in Concord.)