“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
These words, both pastoral and prophetic, launched the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago, much to the surprise of the German Augustinian monk who penned them, Martin Luther. They constitute the first of his 95 Theses. When he nailed that document to the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, Luther thought he was simply launching a local debate about the sale of indulgences. Those were basically sinning licenses or “Get out of jail free” cards for sinners in Purgatory, or on the way there. To Luther, the indulgence racket was the most pressing example of corruption and exploitation in the church. His concern about this racket was as much pastoral as theological. Instead, that insight about true, lifelong repentance would be the first blow to split the Roman Church into many state and independent churches, like the Anabaptist ones. Mennonites have then a stake in the story of that monk and The 95 Theses. While they were, in some ways, sharp critics of Luther and what they believed was a truncated Reformation, reading Luther’s works on the sly helped Anabaptist reformers and leaders to break from both Roman and Reformation Churches. Our Anabaptist ancestors believed that they were continuing what Luther had only started.
Though there was so much wrong in the church that Luther could and did criticize and castigate, it’s worth noting that the Reformation, and all the churches that followed from it, began not with accusation but invitation. The first of The 95 Theses is an invitation, like that of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15), to repentance. But it was not to repentance as a “one-and-done” personal achievement, not even for the price of a piece of paper with the Papal seal. Nor was Luther only calling leaders and authorities to account for sinful structures and the abuse of power (though there was, and he did, plenty of that). The Reformation began with a call to repentance as a lifelong orientation of willingness rather than willfulness, to borrow Gerald May’s terminology, to a humble stance before God, Creation and others, of willingness to be corrected, to learn and to grow.
Surprisingly, The 95 Theses and this call to repentance came two years before Luther’s famous breakthrough insight about the gospel, faith, and God’s grace. About that he said, “I was born again of the Holy Ghost. And the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked through.” But one can see in The 95 Theses the first rays of light that would dawn in Luther’s own heart and mind when Romans 1: 17 came clear to him, and he realized that, “the righteousness of God revealed” in the gospel, “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last,” was not about the righteous demands and punishments of God upon sinners, as he so greatly feared. It was about the right-wising work of God on behalf of sinners, like himself. From then on, repentance was not the frightening, onerous duty it had so often been for Luther, in which his penitence might provoke the wrath of God for being incomplete, imperfect and impure of motive (as every human work always is). Repentance was the doorway to grace, refreshment and renewal. As the meaning of God’s grace grew on him, Luther came to understand that even his own righteousness required ongoing repentance. He saw that all his scrupulous, fear-driven, self-motivated and self-aggrandizing piety had been a blasphemous effort to bargain with God for all that God in love gives eagerly and extravagantly, and for his own glory, rather than God’s. He would later often say, “The most dangerous sin of all is the presumption of righteousness.”
Later, Anabaptist reformers would warn, correctly, that taking Luther’s words about faith, without genuine repentance and surrender to a Holy Spirit-driven transformation of life, could degenerate into mere mental assent to some doctrines. This happened, and it still happens. But it’s not anything Luther taught nor wanted. Nor is it unique to state churches. Luther himself would never disassociate a living, saving Christian faith from the genuine, ongoing repentance to which the first of The 95 Theses calls us.
Anabaptist reformers like Menno Simons and Michael Sattler also had legitimate and trenchant critiques of church business as usual, including Protestant church business. They were also correct in warning Luther about trading one state church for another, which resulted in Luther and his church rejecting, persecuting and even killing Anabaptists. But the Anabaptist Reformation did not begin nor end only with critique of others, either. Those leaders also testified to wrenching times of self-examination and struggle with conscience, conduct, repentance and the cost of following Jesus, until they surrendered and fell on the stone that is Christ, to accept being broken (Mt. 21:44). Repentance always comes prior to reformation.
Five hundred years later, we may again be on the brink of another Reformation, one which reunites some of what needed to be broken in Luther’s day. Ours is an “age of outrage,” and there is indeed much about which to be outraged. Technology and social media make analysis and critique all the more easy and less dangerous and costly for me than it was for that German Augustinian monk 500 years ago with only an inkwell, a quill, and some sheets of paper. Analysis and critique alone, however true, might accomplish some programmatic changes. But to do more than just tweak the edges of church practice and programs, and be reformed, transformed and conformed to the person and work of Jesus, requires starting and staying where Luther’s instinct first pointed him in his challenge to the indulgence racket: to repentance as an orientation, a stance toward God, repenting even of so common a temptation in wealthy, Western Christendom (or am I alone?): trying to do for God what God alone does for us.