LUTHER AND THE MODERN WORLD

“LUTHER AND THE MODERN WORLD”

            One of my colleagues and friends from Ecuador, Laura Nieto,  commented on last week’s blog that only 25 years separated the landing of Columbus in the West in 1492 and the posting of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” in Germany in 1517, a posting which was the match that lit the Reformation.   I was invited to speak with some Lutherans in Atlanta a month ago to talk about multicultural ministries, and one of the speakers addressed the question of whether Martin Luther would approve of multicultural ministries.  While noting that Luther was a man of his times, he felt that Luther had sown the seeds of the dignity of the individual, and that this idea has led to the ability and validity of some of us seeing people of other cultures as sisters and brothers rather than just “other.”  History suggests otherwise, however.

            Some authors like Richard Marius have called Luther the first “modern man.”  While this does seem to be a stretch, Luther’s sense of the lonely individual dominated by anxiety and existential angst, unable to find home and meaning in a brave new world, seems to resonate strongly in our post-modern world.  I am intrigued with Laura’s connection of Columbus with Luther, and it is striking that one of the outcomes of the liberation of the individual from the confines of medieval Europe and the Roman Catholic Church was not greater dignity for all people but  rampant racism and exploitation of peoples around the world by the enlightened and beginning-to-be-liberated Europeans.  The idea of “race” developed post-Reformation in the Western consciousness as a way of acknowledging the dignity of individual European human beings while exploiting those who seemed human on one level but weren’t really human under the classification of race.  To paraphrase George Orwell’s phrase in his futuristic novel “1984:”  “All human beings are equal, but some human beings are more equal than others.”

            The forces unleashed in the Reformation are still rolling through us 500 years later, and the anxiety that drove Luther to his revolution still speaks loudly in our lives, only amplified to the nth degree.  All of our community attachments seem to be disappearing, and there is a strong connection to the fact that in the 20^th century when we had such technological advances and empowerment of the individual, we also had more people killed in wars, revolutions, and genocide than in all the other centuries of recorded history combined.   I am not laying this development at Luther’s feet, because he would have never placed the individual above the community.  I am noting that the anxiety that drove his great insight that our sense of meaning and salvation and home are gifts rather than being earned, that anxiety has grown exponentially in relation to the empowerment of the individual and the diminishing and importance of community.

            So, I’m wondering if this is a time of another Re-formation, if someone(s) out there are already feeling and formulating a new way of balancing the importance of the individual with the necessity of authentic community.   We individuals cannot bear the weight of creating our own meaning.  Sooner or later we will turn to community to provide the meaning for our lives.  If we are fortunate, we will be drawn to a community grounded in authenticity, where the values of both individuals and communities are affirmed and valued.  Most of us, however, will be drawn to inauthentic communities where individuals are crushed, where the community is valued over all other entities, and where strong boundaries must be drawn against the “outsider” in order to strengthen the community.   I call this inauthentic community “tribalism,” but I’m hesitant to use this word because it has such strong resonance in many cultures.  For awhile, I tried calling it “clans,” until one of the participants in a workshop I was leading indicated that when they heard the word “clan,” they thought of the KKK.   I’ve stayed with “tribalism,” but I’ll be glad to hear from those who have a better term. 

            By tribalism, I mean the movement to join others in closing ranks and having strong boundaries to keep the “other” out, no matter who the “other” is.   We are seeing that movement now in the Trump election and presidency, as the tribe of Trump seeks to consolidate power and to hold on to it by seeking to make America great again, i.e. to make America white again.  Tribalism means that we must see the other as enemy, or at least a threat.  The anxiety that drove Luther to a great Reformation is now driving us all, and the white supporters of Trump are seeking to return to boundary-fixing, wall-building, “enemy” speech which they believe will end their anxiety and bring meaning to their lives.

            There is another way, and we’ll look at it next week.  For this week, let us all seek to find where anxiety is leading us to move toward tribalism and away from our own humanity and the humanity of others.