Luther’s defiance of papal authority shaped Europe and the world in ways he could never have foreseenLuther’s 95 Theses were supposedly nailed to a church door in Wittenberg 500 years ago on Tuesday. In the mythological way in which this act was remembered for centuries,he was not nailing anything up so much as hammering down the lid of the coffin of the middle ages, and burying a grand rotting mass of superstition and obscurity. In its place would approach truth, or justice and (in England at least) the triumph of common sense.
Historians today have a much more balanced and pluralistic view. It is impossible to read Luther,for all his coarse vitality, as an apostle of common sense. Nor is it clear that he, and the other reformers,wanted to end the traditions of argument in which they had themselves been schooled. The reformation was an argument within western Christianity, not a rejection of all that had gone before. No one involved could have imagined the consequences that would flow from the argument Luther started – consequences that ranged from mass literacy to the emergence of contemporary nation states, and among them Germany; to the huge European empires of the 19th century; to the contemporary liberal idea that people exist as individuals before they are a fragment of society; the archbishop of Canterbury has even claimed that it led to the emergence of contemporary banking. It certainly gave us the principle of devout tolerance,after all possible alternatives had been tried and bloodily failed.
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Source: theguardian.com