October 31, Reformation Day

Rome (NEV), November 2, 2019 – On October 31, 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church of the Wittenberg Castle, an event that is conventionally considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
Throughout the world, on October 31, initiatives and cults are held to celebrate the Reformation Day. Reformed churches, also in Italy, organize a worship service for the “Reformation Sunday”. Depending on the needs of each community, the day is celebrated either on the previous Sunday or on the one following October 31st. The offers collected during the services of the “Reformation Sunday” of the Waldensian, Methodist and Baptist churches, this year will be donated to the Biblical Society in Italy (SBI). The invitation to support the SBI has also been extended to the Federation of Pentecostal Churches (FCP).

Eric Noffke, professor of the New Testament at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Rome and president of the SBI, spoke in the weekly Riforma of the need for biblical reading in the life of believers and churches, emphasizing how the great reformers of the sixteenth century “warn us against the theology of works”’ and recalled how “being motivated by the best intentions is not enough, on the contrary it can sometimes be counterproductive”. The Bible in this sense represents a “moral compass for action”, because “as the action is ineffective without the guidance of the Scriptures, so there can be no faith in the love of God that remains passive and inert before the challenges of this world”.

The SBI is the Italian emanation of the British and foreign Bible Society (SBBF), which was born in 1804 in London with the aim of spreading the Bible and that in a few years it expanded to involve hundreds of traders, officers, administrative officials, parliamentarians and diplomats from different churches also in Germany, Russia, Holland, Sweden, United States, France, Greece …