| Summary: | The year of 2017 will go down in the history of Latvia as a year of various commemorative moments of the Reformation announced by Martin Luther in 1517. It is a good chance to revalue not only the effects of Luther's Reformation on the history and culture of Latvia, but also to project Luther's reforms on the axis of his whole reforms movement in the church history. Reforms in the Carolingian empire were already called for in the 9th century. The monastic tradition of Benedictines in the 10th and the 11th centuries are often called reform monasticism, and the fight against simony, clerogamy and laymen investiture in the 11th century also are called Gregorian Reformation. So the demand for reforms are present in whole history of Christianity and in every denomination. In the 13th−14th centuries there were theologians (like Pietro Valdes, John Wycliffe or Jan Huss) who did not ask only for the reform of moral standards and observation of canonical law but also for the structural and doctrinal changes in church. But these so called pre-reformers did not win in the centuries they lived and the doctrines survive through very small groups of adepts. The victory of Reformation initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Henry VIII in some European countries was determined by the epochal changes in the paradigm of ages, Christendom was replaced by a new model - the model of state religion, without distinct borderlines between situation of Catholics, Protestants or Ortodox, but controlled by state.
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