Luther’s Centrifugal Reformation

Abstract

Luther’s secular spirit is paradoxical, because it is clothed in religion and visible more in its consequences than in its original thrust. The Reformation was the work of a Saxon monk, who traveled 1,500 miles from Erfurt to Rome and back in 1510 to plead a case for his Augustinian order before the Curia. It was not yet the Rome of St. Peter’s basilica; nor did it repulse him. Rather he was troubled inwardly by the great problem of the approaching age: “How can I be saved?” Indubitably, this was a quintessentially religious problem. The solutions Luther reached, however, had prominent secular dimensions when they led him to reject, step by step, Catholic tradition and authority.