Saints & Reformation

Today is All Saints Day and yesterday was Reformation Day, a time for honoring departed servants of God and, in the latter, specifically recalling among them the Protestant Reformers.

Many, likely most, Evangelical churches will not acknowledge either. The first is typically noted in liturgical churches, and the second in Mainline Protestant denominations. Most Evangelical congregations don’t really relate to either tradition, which is sad, because this disconnect partly separates Evangelicalism from the historic universal church. Evangelicalism often tends to be very in the moment, in ways both good and bad.

Recognizing All Saints Day reminds all Christians of the great Cloud of Witnesses across time and culture of which we are apart. This Cloud reassuringly means we are never alone, but it also offers ballast against the fads of any particular time and culture. The Church need not bend to any contemporary or localized fashion because it is rooted eternally in the glorious Body of Christ. What a relief!

Similarly, Reformation Day should remind all Protestants and Evangelicals of the glories of their 500 year old tradition and the great price that was paid in blood and anguish by our spiritual forbearers. Indeed, both days should remind us all of the terrible price that millions of Christians of all traditions continue to pay for their faith in countless places today.  And they should remind us that Christian faith requires that each of us, even if not called to martyrdom, must carry our Cross in some sense if we are faithful to Him who died on that Cross.

Neither day should signify importance only to Christians or Protestants. The saints across millennia are millions of persons who have, in service to their Lord, redeemed the world in some at least small way. Some have rendered tremendous service to humanity. Absent these saints, our world today and its nearly 8 billion souls would be poorer, sicker, crueler, sadder, and less beautiful.

The Protestant Reformers, for all their sins, helped unleash an unfolding new age of enriched personal faith, of mass literacy, of enlivened economic growth through markets, of accelerating science and technology, and of rule by consent, undergird by an evolved understanding of intrinsic human rights for all. Christians of all traditions, and all humanity, are beneficiaries.

Reformation Day and All Saints Day are ultimately summons to gratitude and humility. Where and who would any of us be without the faithful who have gone before? In the Providence of God we are networked together with so many others, past, present and future. We reap the fruits of past sacrifice, hopefully share in current sufferings, and bequeath to our descendants ideally an enlarged spiritual capital, through ongoing divine grace.

Neither All Saints Day nor Reformation Day are mainly about great or famous heroes who merit by earthly standards biographies and statues. They are both mostly about very ordinary people, male and female, of all races and ages, some rich, most of them poor, who lived by faith. They are nearly all forgotten to the world, their deeds of faith and sacrifices mostly unrecorded in formal history. 

But God remembers and honors each one and continues to bless us through their witness.