This morning, while I was on the phone to a former student 2000 miles away, I saw an unfamiliar number pop up on my caller ID. I asked my friend to wait so that I could find out who was calling. Lo and behold, it was my son Jonathan, who with his wife Stephanie and our six-month-old granddaughter are vacationing in Germany. I switched back and told my friend and I had to take Jon’s call, then started to chat with Jon. He said, that just a couple of hours before he had been praying in the Worms Cathedral where Martin Luther had defended himself at the Diet of Worms, and then had journeyed the few miles to the Heidelberg Castle. He was overwhelmed with the Majesty and the beauty of the cathedral there and to be standing in a place that was so significant in the history of Christianity. He could hear the jealousy and my voice as I told him how great it was for him to be there to experience that. (Historical aside: Luther was at Heidelberg for the Heidelberg disputation. He had visited the castle, where he was shown around by the count to whom the castle belonged. In a letter to his friend, Spalitan, he praised the castle's beauty and its defenses. The Diet of Worms is of course better known. It was there that Luther uttered his justly famous “Here I stand!” in defiance of the Emperor and Church authorities.)

Heidelberg Castle

Jon had a sense of awe at being in the very place where something so important happened. I was overcome by that feeling of awe in October when Kay and I were in Istanbul visiting Hagia Sophia—the center of Eastern Christianity for over 1000 years. It is said that when Hagia Sophia was opened after five years of construction that the Emperor Theodosius exclaimed: “Solomon, I have outdone thee.” Two days later I had the feeling of awe in Athens, standing on the Areopagaus (Mars Hill) looking across to the Acropolis and down over the Agora imagining Paul preaching to the Athenian philosophers about the “unknown god.” For those who never had this sense or feeling of awe, the closest description that comes to mind would be a feeling transcendence. By transcendence I do not mean an otherworldly kind of transcendence, but being lifted out of ourselves and our own time and transported back through the centuries and realizing what a narrow perspective on reality we have. If we look at today and measure all reality by our experience, we are greatly impoverished. As C.S. Lewis wisely observed, “to study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own marketplace.” (Selected Literary Essays) We are participants in an ongoing drama that is greater than ourselves . . . a story that transcends the centuries and is ultimately a drama of eternal significance.”

But back to Luther. I must admit Luther is a particular hero of mine. Alas, I have never had the opportunity to go to Germany (the Frankfurt and Munich airports don’t count), but not for lack of trying. About four years ago I had planned to lead to a Reformation tour through the cities of the Reformation, both in Germany and Switzerland, but that tour never materialized. Perhaps Lord willing, sometime in the future I will have the opportunity to go there. I am still hopeful.

history. It occurred on April 26, 1519.

The spread of Luther's 95 theses that he posted on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church on October 31, 1517 is generally marked as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The act of posting the 95 theses has gone down in popular mythology as an act of defiance, where the angry young monk (he was actually about 35 years old at the time) nailed these theses to the door of the cathedral in defiance of the Catholic Church. I As dramatic as that sounds, that's not the way it happened. In fact the door of the church was the bulletin board for the academic community for the University of Wittenberg. If Luther had wanted to challenge Rome, he would have written his theses in German to get the populace behind him: the theses were written in Latin. Rather than being a challenge to the authority of the Church, they were in fact an invitation to fellow faculty members to come and debate these topics that he had set forth. A local printer, got wind of the theses and them translated into German and distributed widely. (I'm sure Luther never received any royalties on them.) As a result, Luther was thrust into the limelight, and his teachings quickly spread throughout the populace. The content of the 95 theses came to the attention of the Pope Leo X in Rome who wanted Luther silenced. To that end, Leo called upon the Augustinian order, of which Luther was a member, to brand him a heretic. The charge was given to Johann von Staupitz, Luther's mentor. Rather than take things into his own hands Staupitz asked Luther to present his new Wittenberg theology to a gathering of Augustinian monks in Heidelberg. He further asked Luther to present his views on sin, free will, faith and grace. These were all issues about which Luther head written in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. The result at Heidelberg was a sustained attack on a Scholastic method of doing theology. He set forth his “Theology of the Cross” and argued forcefully against Aquinas, and the theology which would at the Council of Trent become the enshrined as official Catholic dogma.

Worms Cathedral 

Rather than being condemned as a heretic, a significant number of the monks who had humanistic training were convinced of the rightness of Luther’s arguments and became close allies and supporters. (Humanism is not a dirty word—humanism was a literary movement that aimed at getting back to the sources, and also aimed at beauty of expression—Renaissance humanism in a real sense gave birth to the Reformation.) The Heidelberg Disputation, while perhaps not as visible as the more dramatic condemnation, which he received at the hands of the Emperor at the Diet of Worms two years later in 1521, was an event that garnered important theological allies in the growing movement, which would become known as Protestantism.