Paradoxes of the Reformation

Abstract

This article discusses the cultural-historical significance of the religious Reformation in Western Europe. The author sees its proclamation as early as the theological investigations of the Renaissance, and its prologue, its “source and secret,” in the theology of young Luther and his Wittenberg Theses, which he made public gon October 13, 1517 (the date is widely held as the birth of the Reformation). Particular attention is paid to a deeper meaning of the Theses, indicated by the phrase “the whole life of the Christian should be repentance.” The author stresses the philosophical significance of this formulation and traces its influence on the polemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The motivating force of individual and historical repentance is the intentional core of the Reformation as a reciprocating movement of creative pathos in whose crucible a new kind of industriousness was born, along with an entrepreneurial ethics, a principle and strategy of tolerance, and human rights grounded in morality.