A century ago, most Protestants viewed Martin Luther as the faithful David who felled the papal Goliath with the single stones of sacred Scripture. Most Catholics viewed Luther as the seven-headed demon who destroyed Western Christendom with his heretical ranting. For most Protestants, Luther was the great prophet of modern liberty who freed Western law and culture from the oppressive rule of the Catholic Church. For most Catholics, Luther was the grim priest of secularism, who cut off Western law and culture from their essential religious roots.

Today, such confessional caricatures of Luther and the Reformation are happily fading. Most Protestants have now begun to recognize that the Lutheran Reformation was part and product of a whole series of late medieval reform movements, and that the new Evangelical churches depended upon Catholic theology and canon law for many of their cardinal ideas and institutions. Most Catholics have now begun to recognize Luther as a loud but inspired prophet for an alternative Christian worldview, a shrill but shrewd architect of a new biblical theology of human nature, social pluralism, and religious liberty, much of which the modern Catholic Church now embraces.

The sixteenth-century Lutheran Reformation did bring fundamental changes to German spiritual life. The Lutheran Reformation radically resystematized dogma. It truncated the sacraments. It revamped spiritual symbolism. It vernacularized the Bible and the worship service. It transformed corporate worship and congregational music. It gave new emphasis to the pulpit and the sermon. It expanded catechesis and religious instruction.