Five hundred years after Luther '˜we are in grip of our own reformation'

Harold Miller, bishop of Down and Dromore, said every 500 years or so Christianity undergoes a major shift and that one is under way at the moment – one which is seeing an increasingly non-denominational, egalitarian spirit on the rise.

He also said that the “centre of the Christian faith has moved south,” going from the developed world to the under-developed world.

Bishop Miller – whose church, the Church of Ireland, is the second biggest Protestant denomination in the Province – spoke to the News Letter ahead of today’s half-millennium anniversary of the date when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany (though whether he actually nailed them to the door is a matter of historical disagreement).

His theses directly challenged the practices of the Catholic Church, and are generally seen as the spark which led ultimately to the splitting of the church and the creation of Protestantism.

However, Bishop Miller said it is sometimes assumed Martin Luther is “the only character in the Reformation”.

“In actual fact for 150 years at least before the Reformation, the ideas of the Reformation were being discussed , and indeed sometimes people were dying for them,” he said.

He cited Czech theologian Jan Hus (executed in 1415), and English translator John Wycliffe (who died in 1384 and was later declared a heretic).

So whilst October 31, 1517, was the “tipping point” – and Luther was the Reformation’s prime “celebrity” – it was “not the beginning of it by any means”.

To the bishop the Reformation principally means two things – making the Bible the final authority on how to live as a Christian (which can “never be trumped by tradition and reason”), and stressing that what humans do cannot reconcile them to God; it depends only on God’s grace.

He said: “The church, every 500 years or so, goes through a kind of tectonic change.

“Five hundred years ago was the Reformation; 500 years before that was the east-west divide; 500 years before that was the fall of the Roman Empire and the clarifying of what Christians believed.

“Five hundred years before that was the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus.

“There’s a tag Luther himself had – semper reformanda: the church must always go on being reformed.”

He said that “in our generation the church will probably emerge very different,” adding that it will become “much less institutionalised, much more egalitarian, maybe even more questioning”.

Old denominational labels do not mean as much to people today, he said, especially to the young – but “it doesn’t mean faith doesn’t mean much to them or that Christ doesn’t mean much to them”.

In addition, he said: “The other thing about it is that the centre of Christianity has moved really to the southern hemisphere.

“The heart of the Christian faith has moved south, and that’s going to transform the church too.”

He said: “I would say we’re going through a reformation.

“And like the reformation of Luther, it can take 150 years to build up to it but there come tipping points.

“I think we’re in the midst of something more than incremental change – something more radical.”