I think that almost all of the Christian "reformers" of the 15th and 16th centuries were theologians - and pretty good ones, at that. Their differences with the Roman Church were relatively minor. For the most part, they just wanted the Church to clean up its act and move away from the power-hungry materialism that was the trademark of the papacy for centuries. For the most part, these reformers had no desire to separate from the Roman Church. It was those who followed after them, who simplified the teachings of the reformers into rigid doctrines that emphasized and delineated differences in thought, rather than seeing those differences as a healthy diversity.

I have to confess that one Christian creed I never could accept, was Calvinism. And then recently I read some of Calvin's writings, and they made sense. I then learned that it was those who came after Calvin who developed the simplistic and rather illogical teachings of so-called Calvinism - very few of the descendants of Calvin hold to those teachings any more.

Luther was an Augustinian, and the major influences on his theology were St. Paul and St. Augustine. Like Paul, Luther emphasized the importance of faith over good works, but he never denied the need to do good. Ideologues and politicians who came later took all the nuances out of Luther's teachings, and those nuances became differences that could not be reconciled.

Over the years, the Christian churches have forgotten most of what divided them. As I see it, there is one primary division in most religious groups - the division caused by fundamentalism. And that's a very significant difference.

When I was in a Catholic seminary in the 1960s, we used very few textbooks that were specifically Catholic. We used texts written by excellent theologians who came from a wide variety of denominations. So, I see this celebration of the Reformation as a celebration of unity - and I'm very glad to see it.

-Joe-