More than that, though, I wonder if the Reformation really did us any good. No one will argue the Roman Catholic Church was utterly corrupt in 1517 and needed some serious help. All of the things Martin Luther proposed to do were good (well, most of them, at least; confession: I haven't fully vetted all 95 theses) and even though the narrative goes that he didn't do what he set out to do (reform the Church), that may have been what we ended up with.
While many of my fellow Protestants will claim we liberated the faith from its bureaucratic, stale, and limiting tendencies, what we replaced it with was basically the same. The Church was still an institution.
I'm enough of a historian to know that, given the era, institutionalism was probably inevitable. However, the Church - no matter how corrupt and un-Christlike it became - always had radical factions, witnessing with their lives to the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Yes, they were often brutally hunted and killed off, but they were also always followed by another movement doing basically the same thing.
What I'm thinking is that the real reformation of the Church comes not with a changing of the gatekeepers, but with a changing of the life and practice of faith itself. I've been working a lot with Jesus' Kingdom motif lately - most of the parables begin as an explanation of the Kingdom - and I've found a recurring theme I hadn't noticed before. Most parables involve not the separating of saint from sinner, but the separating of the saints into faithful and otherwise. It's as if one message of the Kingdom, consistent throughout Jesus' ministry and thereafter, was that practicing the faith in the established institutional way is no guarantee of entry to the Kingdom of God.
We know that, of course; I can recount many a Sunday School lesson that stressed the very Lutheran notion of salvation by faith over works - that we can behave our way into the Kingdom - but I'm not sure we ever make the full connection to worship. We can't worship our way into the Kingdom either - at least in the way the institutional Church has come to define worship. Merely participating in the practices established by the community is not enough if there is no real transformation.
This is the message of Jesus' parables. The people of the Kingdom are noticeably different, not in habit or confession, but in being. The core of who we are is transformed by love and while may never act as perfectly in-line with "Christian" expectations as we'd like (or to the liking of some who share our pews), we may very well be experiencing and living into the Kingdom of God in ways those others don't yet understand.
When I think about the Reformation, I don't doubt the sincerity of its heroes or the core of its convictions, but I do wonder if the net result was just to change the expectation the institution places on its adherents, rather than a real testimony to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We have a long history of truly counter-cultural, prophetic movements - mostly small and unorganized - who witnessed to this great power.
Maybe we would've been better off with one monolithic Church that continually battled the prophets of its own conscience than to have 10,000 different perspectives on what the monolith should look like, each claiming to be radical and prophetic?
Now, perhaps, instead of one corrupt organization in need of salvation, we've got 10,000 and the work of the prophets is all the more difficult.
It is the converted who need to be converted, continually and for all time. Maybe, just maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the Reformation really didn't do much to further that cause?
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