1517 by Marshall Peter;

1517 by Marshall Peter;

Author:Marshall, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00


In the current age, Quitman was pleased to reflect, ‘the influence of the pope has been declining, and the thunderbolt of the Vatican has lost its terrors’.18

In reflecting on the blessings of the Reformation, American Lutherans generally did consider its precise date of inception to be a significant matter. ‘Would it not be shameful indifference in us’, Quitman asked on 31 October 1817, ‘to let this memorable day pass, without taking honourable notice of that great man, to whom we are so much indebted’? In 1815, the New York Ministerium urged Synods from Pennsylvania and North Carolina to prepare for a joint commemoration on the Sunday ‘nearest to October 31st, 1817’, though it was only in September of the anniversary year that the New York Ministerium determined to have its own celebration on 31 October. This followed a resolution from the Pennsylvania Ministerium to the effect that they were happy to unite with their New York brethren ‘in so far that we would hold the said celebration on the 31st day of October, it being the exact anniversary of the Reformation…and they must be requested to keep with us the very anniversary itself, and not the Sunday following’. The president of the Pennsylvania Synod, George Lochmann, later declared 31 October 1517 to be a day which must be held in grateful remembrance ‘as long as the world exists’. He added that ‘what the 4th day of July, 1776, is and must be to our precious political liberty, that the 31st of October of the year 1517, should be, in respect to our religious liberty’. It is a revealing pairing of dates, suggesting the emergence of multiple ‘sites of memory’ (see pp. 14–15) in the construction of a national narrative, as well as the capacity of public commemorations to reinforce a collective view of history.19

Concern with the ‘exact day’ was not universal—the Special Conference of Evangelical Lutheran preachers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania resolved to hold their commemoration of ‘the Reformation by the blessed Luther’ in 1817 over the first three days of October. But it testifies nonetheless to the perception that one specific action of Luther’s was the original wellspring from which a veritable river of blessings flowed. Among the works published by American Lutherans at the time of the anniversary was a translation of a popular biography of Luther by Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Tischer, superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Saxony. Tischer made much out of Luther’s ‘bold step’ in posting the Theses. Everyone, he claimed, was simply ‘astonished at the intrepid undertaking’. Reports of it spread through every country ‘with incredible rapidity’. The crucial role played by printing in this process went silently unacknowledged: ‘the greatness of the undertaking itself, and the general complaint against indulgences, but which none had dared to attack, were the cause of the rapid circulation of this news’. Yet at the same time, Tischer’s account betrayed some uncertainty about the meaning of the Thesenanschlag in Luther’s own day. He recognized that Luther’s intention



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