The Reformation and the Modern World

Abstract

The leading figures of the Reformation — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the rest — are quite different from us. That is not a restatement of the rather trivial fact that people of the twentieth century are different from those of the sixteenth. The figures of the Reformation seem even more remote to us: they lived in direct contact with the reality of God, with the wrath of God which could kill, with the mercy of God which allowed men to live, and as often as not with the devil. For them, as for Luther, the crucial question was how to have a merciful God. It was a matter of life and death. Which of us could say that today? The men of the Reformation were concerned with salvation, we on the other hand are concerned with happiness. Ours is a secular, postreligious world. For this reason the Reformation strikes us as belonging to the past. It belongs in a museum. We can, of course, try to transfer the questions posed by the leading figures of the Reformation to our own time, for example: How can man so conduct his life and his life with others that he is able to live at peace with himself? Their answers, however, are different from our own. Ours bear the imprint of secularised religion, both individual and social, or at least of the dream or self-redemption. Here then, of course, lies the relevance of the distant world of the Reformation. It questions the self-assurance of our modern existence. For just because it is remote does not mean that it is necessarily totally outdated. That is, however, the purpose of our humane deliberations on the right way of life and the concern of Christian teaching today and our response to it, not the interest of scholarly reflection. My interest as an historian is more modest. I am concerned with the position of the Reformation in the course of world history and the role it plays in the origins of our modern world. Yet this is again, of course, closely related to the question of the existential modernity of the leading thinkers of the Reformation. For if they do indeed belong to the modern era, then they also belong to us.KeywordsEighteenth CenturySixteenth CenturyModern WorldWorld HistoryChristian ReligionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.