Thesis on ’95 Theses for the new generation’, by Lucas Magnin

Lucas, with a language full of metaphors, paradigms, quotes, born from reflection, invites us to join the guerrilla revolutionaries of spirituality. A peaceful guerrilla that is adding men and women with restless minds every day, who are not satisfied with repeating ideas without first going through the sieve of Scripture: authentic Bereans of the 21st century, who investigate “to see if these things were so.” ”. He already called the revolutionaries in his first book “The Rebellion of the Saints” a couple of years ago; he now he invites them to the outpost.

The book constitutes a dialogue between Martin and Magnin (or between Luther and Lucas): choose the initial you choose, they will match. And they will also agree on certain intentions regarding the need to review what we have been accumulating for years, but they will also disagree on other issues. And you and I will do the same. We will read the author and think that he is too revolutionary in some ideas; Or maybe inside us there is a feeling that tells us that I wish I had said it before. But what Lucas does is provoke. He provokes thought, invokes the Bible, summons people from history (tradition)… to affirm that the Reformation needs a reform.

introduces us to a Luther dynamizer of the stale, stagnant and obsolete faith that had been installed in his time. That was a crossroads of paths that coincided and that were the breeding ground for what came later. Except for the “five alone”, one might think that certain of Luther’s theses have suffered a kind of obsolescence, and that, therefore, new ones must be enunciated and nailed down. However, Magnin does not demolish “the faith given once and for all to the saints”, but rather invites us to reflect on the essence (what is always valid as knowledge) of it and on the additions that have been added over the centuries. These attachments are anachronistic; the essence remains intact. What he calls the “theological building” is not going to collapse because we carry out an exercise in revisionism (thesis 3), purifying customs (thesis 5). It is not a reform for reform’s sake, but a serious, consistent, sensible and lucid process of revision, deconstruction, meditation and filtering of our ideas about God and about the world around us in order to reform our spirituality. And said reform must be carried out inexorably in Christ (thesis 9), not being a face wash or another layer of makeup that covers imperfections and wrinkles (thesis 11). It is, in short, a synchronization of those theses with our current history.

Each thesis will speak to you in your particular or ecclesial circumstance. Some have been useful to me for my current spiritual state, and I am sure that others will be useful for the future in the same way that others would have been useful to read in the past so as not to make certain mistakes. A prophetic voice that will often resound in our memory and perhaps in our conscience. He will talk about God, the Church, the Bible, eschatology, being a Christian, the priesthood of every believer, and about Christ, that Christ who makes us more human and dignifies us. None of his theses is wasted, so I invite you to spend time enjoying this book.

The question we should ponder is this: Should the church always be reforming? Should it be a ecclesia semper reformanda? or on the contrary, should it always be a vigilant church (ecclesia semper watchman)? Because every blessing for the Church is found in Christ, in Him all kinds of blessings unfold, is it not that what we need is continuous care that we do not take these blessings as something already aseptic, as a kind of placebo for our spirituality? Vigilance is imperative.

Lucas presents us with the most human Luther, the one who fights with himself because of his theology; that he disagrees with himself, with his demons, with his and I of him so that the supreme Other may win. And of each episode of Luther’s life he writes to us, as if it were a metaphor, a reflection that provokes us.

Serve this book to wake us up from lethargy; fan the smoking embers. It will be a breath of air that fuels the fervor for the faith and its praxis; orthodoxy and orthopraxy. A prophetic voice for the postmodern Church.

CLIE has been the door of Wittenberg where Magnin has nailed his 95 theses so that we can read them privately and in public, challenging a Christianity that is falling asleep to be revolutionaries in the 21st century.