“Brothers of Different Periods”: Martin Luther and John Wesley’s Influence on the Twenty-First Century Church

Martin Luther and John Wesley stand as towering reformers and transformers whose influence still defines ecclesiastical theology in the twenty-first century. Luther and Wesley survived 200 years apart in two different countries, and circumstances, and yet their responses to the challenges of their milieus present the lived legacies of Lutheranism and Methodism respectively. Factors contributing to the shaping of their backgrounds and theology force one to argue that: “without Luther’s theology, the development of Methodism was a chance”. The purpose of this paper was to reread the convergencies in the backgrounds and theology of Luther and Wesley and analyse how their life settings and writings influenced the twenty-first-century church. The paper reminds the twenty-first-century church that much as Luther and Wesley’s biographies were influenced by the role of their parents, their conversion through nature, the impact of university life, unplanned marriages, and the fight against orthodoxy. Unfortunately, similar converging life experiences have not been taken seriously to “saltify” the rotting world as individualism and self-gain characterise the modern church. The paper also argues that Apostle Paul’s theology of justification by faith, sola fide, sola scriptura, and sola gratia is central to both Luther and Wesley, and they are the anchors of the twenty-first-century church. This paper does not aim to bring superiority and inferiority intricacies between Luther and Wesley but to use Luther as the role model of Wesley with the two being the beacons of the twenty-first-century ecclesia and ecclesiology.