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When the German monk Martin Luther (1483-
1546) on 31 October 1517 nailed his 95 theses
against the Catholic Church’s practice of selling
indulgences to the Wittenberg church door, he
initiated – perhaps unwittingly – a cultural
revolution that once and for all ended the
Catholic Church’s monopoly in Europe and left
deep impressions in Western civilisation. Luther
maintained that no human body stands between
God and the individual, which means that all
have equal access to interpreting the Bible. Saying
so, he challenged the papal church’s monopoly on
opinion and faith and opened up for individual
religious views and interpretations of the Bible.
Luther was in no way a liberal or a democrat in
the modern sense of the word, and the Protestant
reformation did not lead to freedom of religion in
the short term. Nevertheless, he paved the way for
the humanist basic view of respect for the
individual’s right to a development in freedom
and accountability, which later became a hallmark
of Western democracy.
Denmark officially joined the Evangelical-
Lutheran Church in connection with the coup staged by Christian III in 1536, which put a
sudden end to the influence of the Catholic
Church. The responsibility for church matters was
instead taken over by secular authorities headed
by the king. Similarly, the Crown seized the
Catholic Church’s huge estates. The previously so
powerful clergy changed into an estate of servants
of the state. It had two far-reaching consequences.
First, the Government was provided with the
entire administrative capacity of the church, and
thus a power potential which laid the foundations
for today’s public sector. Second, the state
assumed responsibility for the tasks that had rested on the church up till then, such as the
education of young people and poor relief. Both
matters were ultimately administered by the
clergy. Consequently, we may here be looking at
some of the most significant historical conditions
for our modern welfare system, the actual
precondition of which is a strong and stable
Government with the capacity to ensure a fair
distribution of goods and to ensure that help for
those in need is provided as close to the citizen as
possible.
“Now I would advise you, if you have any wish to
pray, to fast, or to make foundations in churches (…)
to take care not to do so with the object of gaining
any advantage (…). What you give, give freely and
without price, that others may prosper and have
increase from you and from your goodness. Thus you
will be a truly good man and a Christian.”
MARTIN LUTHER’S WORK VON DER FREIHEIT, 1520.
Reason
The religious reformations with their
background in the biblical criticism of
humanism represent one of the great changes
in modern European history, namely the
initial transition from a state characterised by
cultural and religious authority to a state
where ideas of cultural and religious diversity
and the opportunity of the individual to
change his own situation became dominant.
These values remain the pillars of today’s
Western and Danish democratic thinking.
What happened during the Reformation
with its liberating and sometimes
revolutionary thinking would be an obvious
point of departure for considering and
discussing the historical preconditions for
modern democratic values, such as the
freedom of the individual, the right to make
individual choices while being accountable to
the community, and freedom to choose a
faith in God or choose not to believe in God.
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Martin Luther (1483-1546).
Reformer Hans Tausen (1494-1561) protecting
Bishop Rønnow from angry citizens in
Copenhagen.
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This page is part of the electronic publication "The Danish Democracy Canon"