A letter dated July 1534 is the best place to test the idea that the Reformation was a white European story. In it, Martin Luther and his colleagues commend an Ethiopian deacon named Michael as a brother who shares their faith. Together with Luther’s repeated use of Ethiopia as a picture of the true church, the letter shows that African Christianity was part of how the Reformation’s leading figure understood the church. The Reformation’s leaders were mostly European. Its story was not only European.
Church historian Dr. David D. Daniels III assembled this evidence, and its two parts carry different weight. Luther’s use of Ethiopia is an argument about how Luther thought, and scholars are still testing it. The letter is a document.
The familiar account runs through European names: a German monk and his Ninety-Five Theses, then Zwingli in Switzerland, Calvin in Geneva, and the English reformers. None of that is wrong. The real question is whether the account is complete, and whether what it leaves out changes the meaning of the movement.
A movement looking for the apostolic church
The Protestant Reformation was a sixteenth-century schism. Churches in Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, France, England, Hungary and Romania stopped living under the authority of Rome. Daniels adds that Luther, Calvin and Zwingli first set out to reform the church rather than leave it, and that a parallel reform movement inside Catholicism means the century really saw several reformations.
The reformers wanted to recover the gospel of the apostles. They put justification by faith at the center, and held that Scripture alone, grace alone and faith alone, for the glory of God alone, defined the faith. That goal raises a historical question the reformers had to answer: where had the apostolic church survived intact? If Luther’s only answer had been Europe’s own past, the white European picture would hold. His writings give a different answer.
The test has three parts. A purely European Reformation would draw its picture of faithful Christianity only from European sources. It would have no real contact with African Christians. And it would take place in a Europe with few Africans to encounter. Daniels’s work speaks to all three, though not with equal force.
Luther’s Ethiopia
Medieval Europe was already fascinated by Ethiopia, a Christian empire on the far side of the Muslim world. Legends attached to it: a pious emperor called Prester John, a great army, a great deal of gold. Daniels traces that interest from the thirteenth or fourteenth century into the early sixteenth, and he names Erasmus, Thomas More and a pope named Clement among those drawn to Ethiopian Christianity. His question was whether Luther shared that interest. Luther did.
Daniels counts about 85 mentions of Ethiopia in Luther’s writings that have been translated into English, and he expects more in material that has not been translated. Other scholars have not yet checked that count. Still, a number on that scale shows a sustained pattern rather than a stray reference.
What Luther wrote matters more than how often. In one passage that Daniels reads, Luther lists what the Ethiopians signify. They are singled out among the nations to be converted to Christ, they stand for people of ardent faith, and they represent the church of the Gentiles. The list ends: “But the church is symbolized and called by the name Ethiopia.” Luther wrote this before the Reformation began, and according to Daniels he wrote it again in the 1530s, when he was leading the new movement.
Luther’s reason lay in what he believed about where the Ethiopian church came from. He connected it to the official Philip baptized in Acts 8, whom the KJV describes as “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). Luther thought this man went home and converted his kingdom in the apostles’ own time. That would make Ethiopia the first Christian kingdom in the world, older in the faith than Britain, Germany or Sweden, and faithful where Rome had drifted. Daniels concludes that Ethiopia served Luther as both a forerunner and an example of what the church should be.
The text of Acts supports less than Luther’s story. Acts 8 records one man’s baptism and his departure as “he went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39). It says nothing about a national church. The founding story is later tradition, which Luther accepted.
Where Luther’s picture was wrong
Daniels supplies the strongest counterevidence himself: “Historians say that the church in Ethiopia arrives around the fourth century.” Luther’s apostolic-era Ethiopian kingdom did not exist as he imagined it. He also believed the Ethiopian church used the Bible in the everyday language of its people. On that point Daniels is equally direct: “we now know it really wasn’t in the vernacular, but Luther thought it was in a vernacular.”
The Ethiopia in Luther’s mind, then, did not match the actual Ethiopian church. That changes the kind of claim the evidence supports. It shows that an African church shaped how Luther imagined faithful Christianity. It does not show that real Ethiopian teaching shaped Protestant doctrine. Daniels describes the exchange as largely an intellectual one happening in Luther’s mind.
Daniels is also open about the status of his larger case. He calls it “my argument, which is just beginning to enter into a scholarly debate,” and adds, “This is my hunch. This is what I’m arguing for.” He expects to win some of his main points and lose others. The claim that Ethiopia worked as a theological model for Luther is a church historian’s proposal, and readers should hold it that way.
The letter of July 1534
The letter stands on firmer ground. It records that Michael, a deacon of the Ethiopian church, had been in Germany and had spoken privately with Luther’s circle about Christian doctrine. They found that he held the creed of the Western church and did not think differently about the Trinity. The letter grants that his church kept different ceremonies, and it sides with Michael’s view that “he judges that the dissimilarity does not nullify the unity of the church.” It reports agreement on the Lord’s Supper and asks good people to show the visitor Christian love.
Daniels adds a detail beyond the letter’s text. Luther had about sixteen articles of faith, and Michael agreed with all of them, including the article on communion that divided Luther from Zwingli’s followers. From there, a Hungarian scholar Daniels cites argued that Luther was ready for full communion with the Ethiopian church while refusing it to Zwingli’s party and to the Bohemian Brethren. Daniels states the conclusion plainly: “But he was willing to be in full communion with this Ethiopian church. And he clearly realizes it’s a Church of black people.”
The meeting and the letter are facts. Daniels calls the meeting something “which I don’t think can be contested,” and he points to the third volume of Martin Brecht’s biography of Luther, which briefly discusses an unnamed Ethiopian cleric. The full-communion reading is an interpretation. The letter clearly treats Michael as a fellow believer. Whether that amounts to a formal offer of communion is a judgment about its meaning.
Daniels makes a further claim. Lutheran contact with Orthodox churches is usually dated around 1560, he says, so the 1534 meeting would move that contact back by 26 years and make an African, rather than a Greek or a Russian, the first Orthodox Christian Luther engaged. “That shifts everything around,” Daniels says.
Whether it does depends on what counts as contact between churches. Michael was a deacon, the first order of ordination, and not a fully ordained priest. Daniels is unsure whether he came to see Luther on purpose or passed through while touring Europe. The letter is addressed to good people at large, which makes it read like a letter of introduction for a traveler rather than a statement between two church bodies. If Michael carried authority from his church, the meeting would rank as early ecclesial contact. If he did not, it was a private theological exchange that his own church may never have known about. The evidence in hand supports the second reading with certainty and leaves the first open. Even the modest version still matters. A leading reformer tested his beliefs against an African clergyman and found them shared.
A Europe with Africans in it
The third test is about Europe itself. Daniels cites scholarly estimates of 100,000 to 200,000 Africans in sixteenth-century Europe, most of them in Portugal and others in Spain, Italy and England, with Ethiopian communities in Rome and Venice. The common image is of a closed, all-white world. Daniels rejects it: “And it is not, it is a community with Africans floating around.”
Some of these Africans were enslaved, especially in Portugal, but “all the Africans there are not slaves.” Daniels names Vicente Lusitano, an Afro-Portuguese priest who dealt with people in the Vatican and later became a Protestant. He also mentions Congolese Christians traveling in Europe whose families had been Christian for a generation by 1517. He does not overstate the German case. In Germany or Sweden, he says, you might find only one or two Africans in the whole country. Meeting an African in 1534 was ordinary in Lisbon, Rome or London. It was rarer in Luther’s part of the continent.
The population numbers are estimates Daniels reports from other scholars, so they are a range to verify rather than a settled count. Even a cautious reading of them is enough to discredit the picture of an all-white continent.
What the evidence settles
Lisa Fields names the reason this history matters: “one of the pushbacks we get, especially from black millennials, is Christianity being the white man’s religion.” If the only Reformation story told is a list of European reformers, the church’s own account of itself seems to confirm the objection.
The evidence answers that objection at a specific point, and it is important to see how far the answer reaches. It does not show that Africa caused the Reformation, and Daniels does not claim that it did. It shows that the leading reformer used an African church as his symbol of the true church, met an African clergyman, and put their shared faith in writing. Daniels names what this overturns: “the Reformation is often only seen as an all white, all European affair that’s produced by Western civilization.”
His method is also worth noticing. Daniels does not ask anyone to reread the familiar facts in a new way. “We have to reframe the narrative, not by new interpretation, but by including more of the facts,” he says. The 1534 letter shows why that is hard. Daniels points out that the English translations of Luther’s letters skip it: “They haven’t translated that letter yet. They have letters before that date, and they have letters after that date.” A reader who knows Luther only in English cannot find the document at all.
That gap explains how a Reformation that included Ethiopia came to look entirely European. No one had to deny the evidence. It only had to stay in a language most readers could not read. Anyone who wants to know whether a familiar story is complete has to ask which sources it was built on, and which ones never made it into translation.
