Long-Term Impacts

Although Luther lived nearly five hundred years ago, his influence can still be clearly felt in the twenty-first century. His actions and ideas changed Western civilization in profound ways, and the world in which we live is, in many ways, built upon the foundation that Luther laid. The historian A. G. Dickens summarized the enduring impact of Luther's reformation, despite the distance and foreignness of his context:

Dickens is quite correct; Luther's legacy looms large in the twenty-first century. And this legacy is felt not only through the churches that Luther and his followers founded. Indeed, many of the major aspects of Western civilization—the growth of individualism, the rise of the nation state, and the development of public education, among others—can be traced to key ideas developed by Luther.

The spread of Lutheranism

Some parts of Luther's legacy are quite easy to observe. The proliferation of churches that trace their heritage to Luther's reformation is an example. Today there are more than sixty million people in the world who affiliate with churches that bear the name Lutheran, all of which, to one degree or another, continue to affirm Luther's theology. And even though Lutheranism itself remained largely within its homeland of northern Europe, Luther's influence is also felt in the growth of various other forms of Protestantism worldwide. Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and other Protestant denominations each developed their own unique take on Luther's theological insights. This makes more than eight hundred million people in the world today whose religious heritage can be traced directly to Luther's actions and ideas.

Lutheranism itself rapidly grew in the sixteenth century. Saxony and many other north German states quickly adopted Lutheranism as their state religion during Luther's lifetime. From there, his ideas spread northward into Scandinavia. Many Swedish and Danish students studied under Luther and his associates at Wittenberg. In fact, literature's most famous Dane— Shakespeare's Hamlet—was a student at Wittenberg. When these students returned to their homelands, they brought Luther's ideas with them. Sweden is an instructive example.