Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World," by Eric Metaxas:
When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world. How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them? Since time immemorial, such men had spoken for God and for the state. But Luther defied them, humbly but boldly, in a watershed moment in world history. Those of us in the West have lived on the far side of it ever since.
What followed ended up scrambling the landscape of Western culture so dramatically that it’s hardly recognizable from what it was before. Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Luther’s story is that it need never have happened. Martin Luther was not a man born—or later inclined—to tilt at papal windmills. In fact, until about 1520 he was as vigorous a champion of the church as anyone who had ever lived. He desired desperately to help Rome elude the fate it ended up experiencing. In fact, in a case of extreme irony—so much so that one might think of Oedipus—he became the very man who brought about everything he had hoped to avoid. As his story illustrates, it was a sublime and ridiculous decoction of forces that created the perfect storm that burst over the European continent, creating what we now call the Reformation and the future. We can only wonder what might have been avoided had the distracted Pope Leo been sensitive to his role in history and taken the German monk’s earnest suggestions to heart. It was Rome’s mystifying inflexibility that drove Luther to bolder and bolder public positions, eventually putting him beyond rapprochement and setting him along a path that will forever be debated either as heretical and ignominious or as orthodox and glorious. But for good and for ill, Martin Luther was the midwife of the irrevocably divided world in which we now live.
I was recently lamenting with a friend how easily I fall apart when things don't go my way. He gently and graciously reminded me that "the universe doesn't care about fairness." Because that's how the meltdown goes, you know? Of course it is the day that the kids are sick and the big meeting got moved up at the last minute that SEPTA is running late. Why, universe...why me and why now?
