What was the Protestant Reformation and why do churches celebrate it?

Reformation is celebrated each year in October, and this year will be recognized on our program on Oct. 27. According to The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Reformation is described as:

“On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses—the ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’—to the church door in a small city called Wittenberg, Germany. This event ignited the Protestant Reformation, and thus the Lutheran church officially commemorates this important anniversary on Oct. 31.”

The dispute Martin Luther had with the Church was that it had added doctrine invented by man to essentially buy trust in salvation and was deemphasizing the Gospel in doing so.

Many churches will celebrate the Reformation on the last Sunday in October with hymns and a message that focuses on God’s free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Why was Martin Luther such a pivotal figure in the Protestant Reformation?

The event that sparked the Protestant Reformation was Martin Luther posting the 95 Theses in 1517 (read more above). His proposed reforms of the Church were not intended to split the Church, but were meant to bring the Church and its leaders to reflection and repentance for straying from biblical teaching by adding man-made rules to find the hope of salvation. When Luther posted his theses, he was a professor of biblical studies in the Church he sought to change.

Luther was previously on his way to becoming a lawyer, honoring the wishes of his father, when he committed his life to becoming a monk after being caught in a thunderstorm. His intelligence and commitment to continued learning and teaching and his struggle to understand and teach the Bible set him up to become a figure who could not only debate the learned Church leaders of his time, but also inspire others to reform the Church and to write in a way that could be shared with common German churchgoers. Martin Luther would go on to translate the whole Bible into German (it took him less than 100 days to translate the whole New Testament—quite a feat!).

Were there German translations of the Bible before Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible? If so, what was special about his translation?

There were other Bibles translated into German before 1534 (when Martin Luther had translated all of the Bible into German). There are a few things that set Martin Luther’s Bible apart, however. Other German translations relied heavily or solely on Latin translations of the Bible. Martin Luther first translated the New Testament in 1522 and used a Greek translation of the Bible to inform his translation. He also made it his goal to have his German version be readable by Germans from different regions and with varied reading abilities. Luther’s translation was also printed so that it could be reproduced faster and with less cost. Luther’s New Testament translation is also known as the Septembertestament because it was released widely in September at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

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