Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Introduction
- Part I The Christian revolution: ascent to power
- Part II The modern revolution: compromises with power
- 4 The Reformation in context
- 5 Protestant pathways into the modern world
- 6 Catholic and Orthodox negotiations with modernity
- 7 Twentieth-century fortunes
- Conclusion
- Chronology
- Notes
- Index
- References
4 - The Reformation in context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Introduction
- Part I The Christian revolution: ascent to power
- Part II The modern revolution: compromises with power
- 4 The Reformation in context
- 5 Protestant pathways into the modern world
- 6 Catholic and Orthodox negotiations with modernity
- 7 Twentieth-century fortunes
- Conclusion
- Chronology
- Notes
- Index
- References
Summary
I shall set down the following two propositions concerning the freedom and the bondage of the spirit:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
The reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) promised freedom. He promised freedom from the burden of the moral law; freedom from fear of the devil and damnation; freedom from obedience to the pope and his church. Every infant, he proclaimed, ‘crawls out of the font [at baptism] a Christian, a priest, and a pope’. He himself had been set free by the belief that no-one and nothing stood between him and God. But Luther also embraced the role of a servant in relation to his God. He found freedom in complete, unswerving devotion to the God who had saved him by sending his Son Jesus Christ. As the servant of the most powerful master of all, a master who elevates those he loves, Luther could no longer be enslaved to any earthly power. As he put it in The Freedom of a Christian, he, like his fellow Christians, was not only ‘a perfectly dutiful servant’ but ‘a perfectly free lord, subject to none’.
What Luther had done, in effect, was to slice out the multiple mediating authorities that had stood between the individual and God in medieval Christianity. A Christian had to tread carefully, making sure that the higher powers that controlled his or her destiny were kept sweet.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Introduction to Christianity , pp. 159 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004