The considerable differences in the religious, as well as the ecclesiastical outcome of the Danish and the Swedish Reformations were manifest when the two countries came to celebrate the centenary of the Reformation. The Lutheran Church of Denmark chose to acknowledge its Wittenberg roots and adhered to the suggestions laid down by the theologians of Wittenberg and Leipzig in the Epistola Invitatoria of September 1617. Under its leading Bishop, Hans Poulsen Resen, the Danish Church followed the Wittenberg pattern for the centenary celebrations - starting on 31 October at the University of Copenhagen with an oration by the leading professor of theology and continuing with a week of festivities in the country's churches and the university. Having got off to a good start, the Lutherans in Denmark seem to have developed a taste for Protestant celebrations, since they not only proceeded to commemorate Luther's day of death, but decided to have an annual celebration of the Reformation at the University of Copenhagen, something which at a much later date, in 1668, inspired the University of Wittenberg to follow suit. As in Wittenberg the centenary in Copenhagen was used to cement Lutheran orthodoxy, even if its Copenhagen version turned out to be considerably less rigid and antiMelanchthonian than in Wittenberg.

By contrast, the Swedish Church took no steps to commemorate the centenary of the Reformation in 1617. Instead, it waited until 1621, when, on the orders of King Gustavus Adolphus, it celebrated the centenary of what the House of Vasa considered the beginning of the Swedish Reformation.