Interestingly, it was Calvinists, not Lutherans, who in 1617 first proposed a centennial marking Luther’s attack on indulgences. Alarmed by an increasingly assertive Tridentine Catholic Church and lacking legal status in the Holy Roman Empire, early in that year church and royal officials in the Reformed German Palatinate proclaimed that in October they would hold a centenary “jubilee,” to remember how “the eternal, all-powerful God has looked upon us graciously and delivered us from the horrible darkness of the papacy.” The ruler of the Palatinate, Friedrich V, urged all Protestants (by which he meant Lutherans and the Reformed) to put divisions aside and offer thanksgiving between October 31 and November 2 for the recovery of “the bright light of the Gospel.”

Lutheran theologians in Saxony and elsewhere largely demurred. Instead, they saw the occasion as a chance to show the Reformed upstarts who really owned the memory of the Reformation. On April 22, 1617, Wittenberg’s theological faculty wrote to the elector of Saxony, requesting that “the first Luther jubilee” be “celebrated with festive and heartfelt worship.” The elector, supported by the relevant church authorities, eagerly approved. Soon an edict went out, calling on Saxony and all “pure” (read: not Calvinist) Protestant lands to observe the upcoming milestone with festivities. Wittenberg’s theologians, it was made known, stood ready to supply appropriate scriptural texts and directives for homilies.

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Thomas Albert Howard and Mark A. Noll | “The Reformation at Five Hundred” | November 1, 2014

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