How the Reformation Changed the World

If you take some time to trace the story of human history, you’ll find something interesting. Development on the world’s scale doesn’t move along at a consistent rate. It comes in bursts and thrusts of explosive energy that reform the world, which then germinate, at times for centuries, until the next dramatic step forwards. Like a growing child, the world develops through “growth spurts.”

We refer to these explosive episodes with names that point to their creative energy. Take for example the “Industrial Revolution”—termed because its societal impact was truly revolutionary. By the end of the Industrial Revolution, most facets of life had been affected by the change that culture was working through. To be clear, I’m not saying nothing changes outside these windows, but rather, that within these windows it seems like almost everything does change. These times are not only the development of a concept or the evolution of an idea; they are the remaking of the world. They truly are hinge points in history.

One of the most dramatic hinge points in history happened about 500 years ago. Coming out of the Middle Ages, Western civilization had lived in a rather stable cultural state for almost a thousand years. That is until around 1500—because in a matter of a few dozen years, the world flipped upside down. Christopher Columbus had just sailed off the edge of the map and discovered the New World, beginning a global race for economic and political power, the likes of which the world had never seen. Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo were reinventing arts in the Renaissance, and Martin Luther had tipped the religious scales with the beginning of the Reformation. In time, the winds of change would invent the modern concepts of nation-states, democracy, and capitalism. A new era was beginning. 

In this particular hinge point in history, much of society was changing simultaneously. As we will see later, there are particular reasons this happened the way it did, but for now, let’s ask this question: What role did the Reformation play in the midst of this whirlwind of change?

Reinventing Faith

Any student of church history will tell you the Reformation was a critical time for the church. What it meant to be a Christian and how one participated in church radically changed.

Before Luther’s time, the experience of faith and church was so different; it’s almost hard to imagine. The church was often the center of the community, both literally and socially, but it was also more distant from the believer’s personal life. For starters, the services were all in Latin, a language incomprehensible to all except priests and scholars. The services were not meant to be accessible; they were meant to be a religious experience that culminated with mass, the priest serving the body and blood of Christ in communion. The mass would provide the grace to remain in fellowship with God and His church for another week. This, along with regular practices like confession to the priest, performing the required penance along with, perhaps, the purchase of indulgences, formed a system whereby the church regulated the individual’s relationship with God. As long as the church helped you stay in good standing before God, you could expect to go to pearly gates when you died. If not, expect eternal torment.

Into this context, Martin Luther began to ask some critical questions. He was an Augustinian monk who had a passion for the Scriptures. Unlike most priests of the day, he had learned Greek and Latin and had been studying the Bible extensively. As he did, a new picture began to emerge—one in which Jesus allowed believers access to God directly, through faith. Rather than your own activity being guided by the church, which kept you in good standing before God, you simply needed to look to Christ and receive His activity on your behalf. It was not by our own works, but by faith in what Jesus had done that we were saved and sustained as believers.

These radical ideas began to permeate the church throughout Europe, and as that happened, a new form of church emerged. Once the core picture of Christianity shifted, the purpose of the church in one’s life shifted as well. Rather than existing to mediate people’s relationship with God for them, the church was recast as a vehicle to help people on their own journey of faith and connection with God. Church services, along with the Bible, were translated into the languages of the day. The sermon became the high point of church because in it the people of God’s faith were bolstered, and they were taught how to live the Christian life for themselves. Luther introduced congregational singing as a means of passing along theology to the common man (what we now call hymns).

The Grounding Principles of the Developing West

As these radical ideas spread throughout Europe and birthed the Protestant church, they became an anchoring point for societal development beyond the church. Once the thought that God valued each of us individually leaked its way into culture, then a number of questions arose; should that not affect politics, government, and economics? What if we could construct our cultural systems around that principle?

It is this line of thinking that introduces concepts like government by representation and democracy. It also leads to the idea of individual stewardship of wealth and capitalism. Luther’s ideas reinvented the church, but it didn’t stop there; the reinvented church provided the core principles for reinventing Western society. It was these ideas that provided the anchor point for the world that was birthing in the 1500s. The whole world was changing, and the Reformation provided the needed ideological tether to keep it moving forwards, not backwards. In other words, the Reformation wasn’t critical only for the church; it was also just as critical for the world.

In the intervening centuries, systems like capitalism and democracy would continue to wrap their way around the globe. While not ubiquitous, these Western systems continued to increase their scale and influence on the direction of humanity. The ideas that Luther hatched into culture didn’t just rebuild the church; they rebuilt nearly all of the West. Much of the modern world is laid upon the foundation once nailed to that church door in Wittenberg.

Luther’s story is fascinating because his impact so dramatically transcended his life. He didn’t lead the Reformation; he just tipped over the first domino in a chain far longer than anyone imagined. It was the power of the ideas that rippled straight through culture, reinventing the world in their wake. There truly is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The Press that drove the Reformation

Odd as it may seem, what drove the Reformation was not simply superior theology. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the theological development Martin Luther stood for was suggested by John Hus a century prior. The theological ideas in and of themselves were not what tipped the scale; it was the combination of theological ideas communicated as a result of technological development.

The Reformation sits in the shadow of the printing press. First produced in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg, the printing press had a revolutionary effect; it democratized access to information. Prior to this, writing had to be hand-copied and was extraordinarily time consuming and hence, expensive. After the printing press, written material could be reproduced at a fraction of the time it previously took.

It is the combination of these two, Martin Luther’s theological anchoring and the ability to transmit these ideas all over the known world, that stoked the flame of the Reformation. Luther himself was shocked; he had no intention of all of this happening. In fact, he was looking for a friendly academic debate when he first posted his ninety-five theses in 1517. Some colleagues then took his writings and spread them (without his intent) all over the German countryside, and his ideas began to spread and take root in ways he never would have predicted.

This theme of technology driving the communication of ideas sustained the Reformation. Luther was not only a theological innovator; he was the first to use the printing press to its full potential and give his ideas a wide audience. In fact, Luther may have been the first person to become a celebrity through mass media. Many of his writings included illustrations and at times came attached with a portrait of the author—a right reserved up until this point for nobility. As a result, when Luther would travel throughout the German countryside, he was recognized and applauded widely.

The printing press had been in play for nearly eighty years before Luther came along and capitalized on it. This is part of why the church was falling out of touch with the world; the transmission of new ideas was creating a new world, but the church hadn’t stepped into it yet. That gap meant the church was losing relevance. On the other hand, Luther’s ideas provided the anchor points for the new world the printing press had the potential to birth. The message without the technology didn’t have the power to spread, and technology without the message couldn’t give new life; they were a pair that fulfilled each other. It was the medium and the message in tandem that spread ideas that rebuilt the world.

Our World in Flux

When I look at our world, I can’t help but see parallel conditions to the world that existed prior to the Reformation. Like the world in the early 1500s, change is accelerating and permeating almost every layer of society. Much of this is facilitated by the latest disruptive technology—the Digital Revolution and the new levels of connectedness it is facilitating.

The governmental systems of our day are wrestling with how to navigate this sweeping change. Where it was once possible to draw a line around our borders and control what goes in and out, that capability is breaking down. This is what empowered Russia to interfere with American elections recently. On the other side, we have China, which is using new digitally-empowered capabilities to create a digitally-enforced communism with its social credit system.

A glance at the most valuable companies in the world shows that economics is increasingly driven by the leaders of the digital age. Industry after industry is being reinvented around digital capabilities. Blockbuster was succeeded by Redbox, which was ousted by Netflix. Amazon has squeezed countless retail stores out of business. Uber is replacing taxi services and Airbnb, hotels. The arts are beginning to change as well. Pixar, specifically, has ushered in an almost entirely new type of film previously unimaginable.

In the midst of all of this, there is increasing tension between the greater culture and the church. The church in the West is fading into irrelevance as it seemingly communicates in a different language than culture is speaking—not literally, but an apt expression that captures how it feels to experience a church designed for a world we are rapidly leaving behind. I’m sure the tension our culture at large feels with the church isn’t entirely rooted in this issue, but neither is this issue a small part of the problem.

Luther brought the church through a “phase transition”: no longer ice, it was now water, made of the same molecular ingredients, but arranged in a fashion that results in completely different behavior. This wasn’t just an adjustment of the church; it was a wholesale reinvention that fit the world of the day. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what the world in our day needs. Society is marching into a new world based on a new paradigm, and unless the church crosses the Rubicon as well, we are doomed to be a relic of a bygone age.