Accepting despair is no way to live

There was a time when I embraced a comfortable resignation to the thought of the Church ever be officially one again. I believed that each denomination had some of the truth and not one had it all, so I was content to draw on all and commit to none. Then I watched "Luther", and I realized that this was no way to live. Oddly enough, what was a hopeful attempt to refocus myself on my Protestant roots turned out to be the beginning of a journey away. The movie helped me to begin to understand certain things about the Reformation as I never had before. That is not to attribute more influence to a movie than is actually possible - it was more a matter of the medium. I had read plenty but until I saw Joseph Fiennes as Luther, walking the roads Luther walked, in the very rooms he inhabited, making his journey to Rome, I never saw him as flesh and blood.

Luther was troubled but he was also a troublemaker. That is not to say that he was a fraud or that his earliest goals were ignoble, but the methods with which he went about things were inherently divisive. He did not set out for revolution of society, only the Church, as he wrote in to the Pope:

"It is a mystery to me how my theses... were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here. They were written in such a language that the common people could hardly understand them."

That admission may have been true at the time but it seems as though once the common people did lay hold of his theses, he did nothing to hold back the potential damage their proliferation might inflict. His greatest shortcoming, as is common to many a cultural revolutionary, may have been his lack of foresight. He should have sensed, given the economic and social conditions of the time, that there was great potential for rebellion and eventually bloodshed. And yet at the most crucial time, at the very genesis of the protest he inspired he hid away and busied himself with the translation of scripture into the mother tongue of the peasant masses. It is a credit to him that he was horrified at the actions of the most violent rebels, but it was a rebellion that he had handed to them. He was not the leader of his own movement.

As often as he is praised in Protestant churches as the hero of his time and the champion of "true Christianity", there is precious little said about the fact that he remained far more Catholic than almost any of the many Protestant denominations today. He still practiced infant baptism and services were based on liturgy. Those things don't seems to matter, and neither does that fact that Luther never wanted to stop being a Catholic, or that at first he wanted to reform only the hierarchy and not let loose the rebellion of the masses. He was the one that cracked the door open, the door that many millions after him came rushing through, trampling all that was good and bad in their path.

No sect is perfect, and neither is the Catholic Church. Christ's body is made up of fallible human beings and is therefore subject to all manner of sinful human corruption. But one side must own more truth than the other and I am inclined to believe that it is the side that has not changed its fundamental beliefs since the days when Christ established his Church on earth. I do not believe everything the Catholic Church teaches, but I find it easier to believe that their claims about being God's voice on earth are true because, while there are still dissenters, the Chuch speaks as one. I cannot trust a God who manifests himself in as many contradictory ways as the one I see in so many Protestant churches. That God is either false or he is schizophrenic, and I refuse to believe the God that came as Christ in the flesh and lives inside every believer is either of those things.

source material: 03/27/05