While Reformation Day is not commemorated in Anglican calendars (save the commemoration of Martin Luther on October 31 in the Church of England’s Church Year), given the ecumenical relations of the Anglican Church in North America with several Lutheran (or Evangelical) bodies, including the North American Lutheran Church, the Evangelical Lutheran church of Latvia, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, it is appropriate to mark the day with an entry in this sanctoral weblog. To that end, I have reproduced in full the entry written by the late Revd. Dr. Philip Pfatteicher (a Lutheran pastor) for his book, the New Book of Festivals and Commemorations: A Proposed Common Calendar of Saints (2008), which is ecumenical in its stated purpose and in its inclusion of saints from the wider Christian tradition.
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Each of the liturgical churches has a day celebrating its central and formative event or experience. Eastern Orthodoxy has a celebration of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday in Lent, commemorating the settling in 843 of the controversy over the legitimacy of icons in the Church. The Roman Catholic Church has the feast of the Chair of Peter (February 22), emphasizing the founding of the Church upon Peter the prince of the apostles. The Anglican Church commemorates the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 as the principal liturgical and theological source for the Anglican Communion; a rubric in [the 1979 Prayer Book of The Episcopal Church] reads, “The First Book of Common Prayer, 1549, is appropriately observed on a weekday following the Day of Pentecost.” Reformation Day is the distinctive festival of the Lutheran Church.
The Festival of the Reformation is to be understood and observed not as a triumphalist celebration as though all error was purged from the church forever in 1517 [the year understood as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Germany]. It is a day that reminds God’s people of the provisional nature of all that is less than God, and of the sovereignty of God alone, who is always free to tear up and destroy and in order to build and plant anew. Reform and renewal is not a once-for-all event, nor even an occasional eruption, but rather a continuing condition of the church.
[This has been so from the Church’s beginning, as we see in the epistles of St. Paul the Apostle, in the ecumenical councils and in the various regional synods of the patristic Church, throughout the Middle Ages, right up to the present day. Furthermore, it is true across the whole breadth of the Church, West and East. It is fittingly summarized in the Latin phrase, Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, “The Church reformed, always reforming,” a motto associated with the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition.]
Only six of the several hundred church orders of the sixteenth century made provision for the celebration of the Reformation. The date of the celebration varied: in Pomerania it was celebrated on Luther’s birthday, November 10; sometimes it was Trinity Sunday (as Pentecost commemorated the birthday of the church so the following Sunday commemorated the rebirth of the church); sometimes is was the Sunday following the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, June 25. The observances soon died out.
A new anti-Roman spirit was created by the Thirty Years’ War in which Roman Catholic princes attempted to eradicate northern European Protestantism. In 1667, John George II, the Elector of Saxony, ordered a Reformation festival to be celebrated on October 31, the anniversary of Luther’s posting of his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg [in 1517], questioning abuses in the sale of indulgences. The observance of the festival spread and was often moved to the nearest Sunday, whether before or after the date. In the latter twentieth century, as the old anti-Catholic fervor was cooling and a new appreciation of the necessity of the unity of the church was arising, the day became known and was observed in many places as Reformation/Reconciliation Day or Sunday.
A more irenic date for the commemoration of the Reformation is June 25, the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, which makes clearer the Lutheran understanding of itself not as a separate denomination but as a reforming movement within the Catholic Church of the West.
The Collect
Almighty God, gracious Lord, pour out your Holy Spirit upon your faithful people. Keep them steadfast in your Word, protect and comfort them in all temptations, defend them against all their enemies, and bestow on your Church your saving peace; through you Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.