Yes. It may be easy to miss that truth when one considers all the seemingly random things that came together to bring the Reformation to pass. What if that thunderstorm had not re-routed Luther from law school to monkery? What if Tetzel’s sales territory had been further south? What if Gutenberg had been born twenty years later? These realities had a significant impact, along with sundry political intrigues and a dozen other less than theological forces.
And no. It wasn’t necessary if we mean by Reformation the split between the Roman and the Protestant churches. That didn’t have to happen. It could have been avoided had one thing happened, had Rome repented of her heresies and come back home. It is not pedantic but important to remember that Protestants did not split from the church, but rather Rome did. Just as the faith of Abraham is the faith we affirm, and Judaism has left it, so with Rome and biblical Christianity.
It is true that Luther himself was not shy about getting into theological battles. He did not have a strong reputation as a diplomat and a peacemaker. But such misses two critical realities. First, Luther’s battle at the beginning, from his own perspective wasn’t against Rome but for her. He genuinely, albeit naively, believed that when those in power in Rome learned of the heresy being wrought by those who were selling indulgences that the hammer would come down and the church would be made right. Luther and Tetzel were like two brothers fighting in the back yard, until Luther broke away saying, “Wait until Dad gets home. You’re going to be in big trouble.” Trouble is, when Papa came home, it was Luther who got the switch. Secondly, while Luther was fighting, he was fighting to protect the peace that we have with our heavenly Father. It was his love of the peace won by Christ that led him to fight.
The Reformation, the split, was not made formal when Luther was excommunicated. Rather this happened during the counter-Reformation, when the Council of Trent formally and unchangeably adopted its sixth session condemning as damnable heresy the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was her departure from the faith once delivered. The Protestant church was and is the church continuing, that against which the gates of hell will not prevail. The church did not end and then start anew with a different group. Rather Rome fell away as an institution.
It is not a bad thing at all to mourn the lack of institutional unity between Rome and the evangelical church. It is tragic indeed. It is a bad thing, however, to see the evangelical church as having been overly scrupulous or pedantic in its protestations, to lay the disunity at the feet of those who are in subjection to the Word of God alone. Those who deny the gospel, who not only deny being under the authority of Scripture alone but affirm themselves as above the very Word of God, they remain at fault. The Spirit, through the gospel however, even now has power to redeem everyone still caught up in Rome. Let’s pray that He does.