Reformation Day: Match Making - Women Of The Reformation

While many today are celebrating the eeks and shrieks of Halloween, October 31 is also Reformation Day. Protestants commemorate Martin Luther’s act of posting ninety-five complaints against the church establishment of his time. You think that tweets can be controversial? Luther’s text, nailed on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, started a religious revolution that spread worldwide.

Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox—historians rattle off the names of Reformation leaders like kids thumbing through baseball cards. And the Reformers are all men. Where are the women of the Reformation?

At home, mostly. And in many cases, their supporting role was crucial to the cause.

Remember that the Catholic church required celibate priests. For a religious leader to be married was, in itself, a revolutionary act—so it was crucial for Reformers to marry women who would help rather than harry them. Like Katharina Luther, who brilliantly managed not only their home, but also Martin.

We see similar dynamics in the marriages of other Reformers. Before he married Idelette, John Calvin conducted a lengthy search for a wife who would share his reforming values. It’s likely that Idelette also softened the hard edges of this lawyerly theologian.

It wasn’t easy for these male Reformers to find wives who would mesh with their unique calling. Wibrandis Rosenblatt married four different Reformers, including Lutheran leader Martin Bucer. When each of her husbands died, there was another Reformer ready to marry her. Weird, yes, but it may testify to her own unique ability to support the Reformation cause.

Still, there was no particular model for these women to follow. In Strasbourg, Katharina Zell matched her husband’s pastoral ministry with her own work of radical hospitality and prolific letter writing. In Geneva, another pastor’s wife, Marie Dentière, wrote letters and spoke publicly in the Protestant cause. Each woman used her God-given abilities in teamwork with her husband to do God’s work.

One key teaching of the Reformation was “the priesthood of all believers”—that any Christian could connect with God without having to go through a priest. This was a bold new concept for men; perhaps even more so for women. These “women of the Reformation” understood that they, too, could honor God with their abilities.

There is one God and one Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity—the man Christ Jesus.

1 Timothy 2:5