To describe the Reformation as a Twitter spat that got out of hand would obviously be anachronistic. Nevertheless, it is not entirely so: for it hints at a quality of Luther’s genius that we, in the age of social media, are perhaps peculiarly qualified to appreciate.

When, in 1517, the previously obscure professor of theology at Wittenberg published 95 theses challenging Church doctrine on salvation, they promptly went viral. “A mere squabble of envious monks.” So the Pope, with the lordly tone of a politician in 2010 turning his nose up at Twitter, is said to have dismissed the imbroglio.

Pretty soon, however, the flame war had got out of hand. Luther turned out to have a genius for publicity beyond anything that Europe had witnessed before. A mere four years after he had posted his 95 theses, his name had come to sound across Germany, and far beyond. Even the emperor, Charles V, had found himself perturbed by it. When, 500 years ago this month, a great assembly of the empire’s power-brokers, a “diet”, was convened in the city of Worms, Luther was on its agenda.

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On 26 March, a summons duly arrived in Wittenberg. Luther was instructed “to answer with regard to your books and teachings”. He was given three weeks to comply. He also received a personal assurance from the emperor of safe conduct to the diet. This, however, was not entirely reassuring, for history suggested that the word of an emperor could not always be trusted. Nevertheless, Luther answered the summons. He set off from Saxony for Worms. The journey proved a triumph. Welcoming committees toasted him at the gates of city after city; crowds crammed into churches to hear him preach. As he entered Worms, thousands thronged the streets to catch a glimpse of him. Luther was the man of the hour.

How had he done it? “Luther spoke,” as Diarmaid MacCulloch has put it, “at many levels: he debated with scholars, shouted from the pulpit, wrote vigorous German and sang his message in German hymns and songs.” He was — to coin a metaphor — a digital theologian faced by ponderously analogue foes. The technology he exploited was, of course, the printing press. No one had recognised its potential as readily as Luther, nor leveraged it to such seismic effect. The impact of his 95 theses had been crucially dependent on his determination to have them broadcast as widely as possible. He carried on as he had begun.

Staggeringly, over the course of the decade that followed the Diet of Worms, more than a fifth of the pamphlets printed by German presses came from Luther’s pen. These treatises and broadsides were then further amplified by memes. Luther himself was portrayed as a prophet, a hero, a saint. His enemies were shown as animals, or demons, or excrement. Nothing on the scale of this trolling had ever been witnessed before. Luther’s admirers were putting images to use in a way that was destined to have a long and enduring history. They had, in the words of Carlos Eire, “invented the satirical cartoon”.

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Luther, by coming to the Diet of Worms, by sticking his head in the lion’s jaws, by daring the emperor to do his worst, had demonstrated in the most dramatic manner possible everything that had made him so effective a rebel against the established order: his daring, his popularity, his refusal to bow and cringe before his foes. Yet all these qualities would have been for nothing had they been in the service merely of his own ego. Certainly, Luther believed himself to be loved by God — but not because he merited such love. As a monk, he had lived in dread of divine judgement, starving himself and praying every night, confessing his sins for long hours at a time, wearying his superiors, all in a despairing attempt to render himself deserving of heaven.

Yet the more he had studied the Bible, and reflected on its mysteries, the more he had come to see this as wasted effort. God did not treat sinners according to their just deserts — for, were He to do so, none would ever be saved. Only by means of His grace might salvation be obtained. This was the conviction that Luther brought with him to Worms. Unworthy though he was, helpless and fit to be condemned, yet God still loved him.

Luther, afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, loved God in turn. There was no other source of peace, no other source of comfort, to be had. This was the conviction that Luther, a heretic excommunicated by the pope, a rebel summoned by the emperor, was prepared to die for rather than retract. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

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Twice Luther appeared before Charles V; and twice, challenged to renounce his writings, he declared that he would not. To the emperor such defiance appeared bewildering. “A lone friar whose opinions contradict the past thousand years of the Christian religion must surely be wrong.” Two days after listening to Luther’s second bravura display in the crowded hall at Worms, Charles V wrote his reply. Obedient to the example of his forebears, he vowed, he would always be a defender of the Catholic faith: “the sacred rituals, decrees, ordinances, and holy customs.”

He therefore had no hesitation in confirming Luther’s excommunication. Nevertheless, he proved himself a man of his word. He permitted the “lone friar” to depart. Luther, leaving Worms, did so as both a hero and an outlaw. A survivor too. Abducted by his patron, the ruler of Saxony, and granted sanctuary in a castle, he devoted himself to moaning about his bowels, growing a beard, and translating the New Testament into German. By the time he finally felt safe enough to return Wittenberg, a year after the Diet of Worms, he had abandoned for ever the disciplines of his life as a monk. “Here I stand,” as he was reported to have told Charles V at Worms. “I can do no other.”

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Was this arrogance, as the emperor had claimed, or was it the certitude of a sinner resolved, no matter what, to share the good news of God’s grace? Doubtless, it was both. The “restless, uneasy temperament” that so perturbed Calvin was the same temperament that enabled Luther, over the course of his eventful and fractious life, to upend Christendom.

500 years on from his defiance of emperor and pope at the Council of Worms, the episode has resonances for us that it would not have possessed even 20 years ago. Luther, over the course of his career, displayed a breathtaking command of all the qualities required to flourish on social media: a genius for aphorism, for invective, for denouncing fake news, for spreading fake news, even for publicly doting on pets. (“Oh, that I could only pray,” he once exclaimed, “in the way that my puppy stares at meat!”)

Yet few of us today in the West, when we use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, are called to draw upon the most stirring of all Luther’s qualities: his readiness to risk death in the cause of holding true to his conscience. The anniversary of the great drama at Worms should serve to remind us of our own good fortune — and of those many today who, not sharing in it, have no choice, when making a stand, but to emulate Luther’s courage.

From an early age, I had struggled to fathom how a loving God could possibly have passed a death sentence on creatures as magnificent as dinosaurs. At an age when I only had to look at a cow to wish it were a Triceratops, it filled me with a sombre sense of the sheer immensity of time, and the impermanence of living things on the face of the planet, to know that the placid fields which stretched behind my house had once been a Jurassic swamp.

How was my understanding of this to be combined with what I was simultaneously being taught in Sunday School: that God had created the heavens and earth in six days, that he had fashioned every living creature, “every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air”, only a short time before fashioning humans; and that all of them had co-existed? How did dinosaurs fit into this narrative?

At Sunday School, our illustrated children’s Bible showed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden alongside a Brachiosaurus. That no human being had ever seen a sauropod – a source of the intensest grief to me – seemed not to worry my teacher one little bit. When I asked her how Adam could possibly have lived alongside dinosaurs, bearing in mind that they had all died out 65 million years ago, she shrugged the question aside. The older I got, the more the question niggled. God, speaking to Job from the whirlwind, had told him of drawing Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord pressing down his tongue.

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But I found this hard to square with what I knew of ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. The reaches of time seemed too icily immense for the life and death of a single human being two thousand years ago possibly to have had the cosmic significance claimed for it by Christianity. Why should Homo sapiens be granted a status denied ammonites? Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas boil, and darkness cover the face of the earth? Increasingly, the hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and a purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that was slipping my grasp.

I was hardly the first to tread this path, of course.

Dinosaurs had played a notable and glamorous role in the Victorian crisis of faith. To Edward Drinker Cope, a Quaker from Philadelphia whose genius as a palaeontologist served to revolutionise the understanding of prehistory, they were literally the stuff of nightmares. In 1876, fossil-prospecting in the badlands of Montana, where the bones of dinosaurs stretched for miles in an immense and uncharted graveyard, the monsters he had been excavating by day would come to visit him in his sleep, “tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling him down”.

Every evening, before retiring for the night, he would hold prayer meetings and readings from the Bible – but still the dinosaurs kept haunting his dreams. The immensity of geological time; the cycles of evolution; the brutal finality of extinction: all, when he contemplated them, served to corrode his faith. Bones entombed in rock seemed to mock the reassurance provided by the Christian message of the Resurrection. In 1877, a year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, Cope resigned from the Society of Friends.

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Yet without Christianity, it is unlikely that dinosaurs would ever have been identified as prehistoric creatures many millions of years old, that Cope would ever gone prospecting for their fossils, and that I, as a child, would ever have known the first thing about sauropods. In truth, fathoming the deep past of the earth was an ambition that had always come naturally to Christians. “Of old,” the Psalmist had written in praise of the Creator, “You founded the earth, and the heavens – Your handiwork. They will perish and You will yet stand. They will all wear away like a garment.”

Here, in this vision of a world that had both a beginning and a history, linear and irreversible, lay an understanding of time in decisive contrast to that of most peoples in antiquity. To read Genesis was to know that it did not go round in endless cycles.

Unsurprisingly, then, scholars of the Bible had repeatedly sought to map out a chronology that might reach back before humans. “We must not suppose,” Luther had declared, “that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.” Increasingly, though, enthusiasts for what by the late 18th century had come to be termed ‘geology’ were founding their investigations, not on Genesis, but directly on their study of God’s creation: rocks, and fossils, and the very contours of the earth.

It was among the clergy that this had grown to become a particular obsession. In 1650, when James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and one of the most brilliant scholars of his day, sought to establish a global chronology, his exclusive reliance on written records – and in particular on the Bible – led him to identify the date of the Creation as 4004 BC.

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In 1822, when William Buckland, another clergyman, published a paper demonstrating that life on earth, let alone the deposition of rocks, was infinitely older than Noah’s Flood, it was his dating of the fossils he had found in a Yorkshire cave that enabled him to demonstrate his point. Two years later, he wrote the first full account of a dinosaur. In 1840, he argued that great gouges across the landscape of Scotland bore witness to an ancient – and decidedly unbiblical – Ice Age. Buckland, a noted eccentric with a taste for eating his way through every kind of animal, from bluebottles to porpoises, saw not the slightest contradiction between serving as Dean of Westminster and lecturing on geology at Oxford.

Nor did most Christians. Although some, clinging to a literal interpretation of Genesis, refused to accept that the earth’s history might stretch back immeasurable distances before man, the vast majority felt only awe before a Creator capable of working on such a prodigious scale.

Palaeontology, then, bred as it was of the biblical understanding of time, served to buttress as well as shake the foundations of Christian belief. If Cope ended up losing his faith, then many palaeontologists did not. Today, Bob Bakker – perhaps the most celebrated of all living palaeontologists, whose theories have proven as influential as anyone’s on the way that dinosaurs have come to be understood – sees no contradiction between his work as a scientist and his preaching as a Pentecostal minister. When he declares the discovery of the Mesozoic to have been “the proud legacy of evangelicals who searched for the truth in the pages of Scripture and the chapters written in stone,” he is not wrong.

Does Jesus love dinosaurs? It remains a question I am unqualified to answer – but certainly, without Christianity, we would have lacked the understanding of time that enables us today to know that such wondrous and extraordinary creatures as dinosaurs ever existed.

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Indulgences turned salvation into a business model, whereby ordinary people could amortise their spiritual debt to the almighty. “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs”, was a quote that Martin Luther attributed to Johann Tetzel, one of the Pope’s most successful indulgences salesman. For Luther, one had to take personal responsibility for one’s relationship with God and not subcontract it to another, and especially not for money.

The comparison with this and Elton John paying to offset the carbon footprint of Harry and Meghan’s use of his private jet to fly to their summer holiday is compelling. The sins that Harry and Meghan have made against the environment can be paid for by someone else. Green is the colour of money. With wealthy friends, your sins can be forgiven. Those who are poorer, those who take cheap package holidays to Tenerife, they will have to account for their sins alone.

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That said, in the overall scheme of things, the Protestors of the 16th century could be said to bear the greater responsibility for the current environmental crisis. For, as Max Weber famously explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the idea that one has to manage one’s relationship with the Almighty alone created a kind of anxiety about one’s final destination that was only mitigated by the reassuring idea that earthy success somehow prefigured heavenly access. In this way, the burgeoning bourgeoise explained their accumulation of wealth as a sign of God’s favour, and thus provided moral cover to the capitalist equation of continual economic growth with progress and success.

And the reason this is such a theological mistake, not to say environmental one, is that it flies directly in the face of a key Biblical teaching that would support the idea of sustainability: the idea of having enough.

Remember the story in the Bible of the manna that falls from heaven? The people of Israel have escaped from their slavery in Egypt, and are on their way, through the desert, to the land God has promised them. In this wilderness, God teaches a lesson about sustainable economics. There is enough bread to go around, but not enough to be stockpiled against future want.

Give us our “daily bread” goes the Lord’s Prayer. Note daily. Not enough for the next several weeks. The Egyptians gathered their accumulated grain into barns, thus to hedge against the insecurity of their dependence upon the environment. But the manna that falls from heaven goes off if stored up and is useless. The moral of this story is that there is no way of outsmarting one’s radical dependency upon God.

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The sort of Protestantism Weber described was a travesty of its original intention. The misleadingly named “justification by faith” was not intended to be a justification by having the right beliefs, but rather that one’s ultimate justification is in God’s hands not our own. It is an expression of radical dependence on that which is beyond our power to manipulate – by our ‘works’ or even by our ‘faith’.

For those who get a little itchy about religion, this can also be roughly translated into a sense that there is no way of outsmarting our radical dependency upon the environment. In order to live in harmony with creation, one has to live with a sense of limit, of there being such a thing as having enough.

The relationship between religion and the environment is set at the very heart of the Biblical narrative. Though the word that religious people use is not the environment but creation. This is a word that secularists have besmirched, linking it to debates about Darwinism and a small group of religious conservatives who describe themselves as creationists. But for those of us who have long ago conceded that Darwin was correct – albeit often worryingly appropriated by those who would justify an economics of agonistic competition and continual growth – the Biblical picture of creation has much to offer of contemporary relevance.

The Bible understands the environment as offering a moral lesson about how we are to live. It provides a kind of map by which we can orient ourselves towards an appreciation of human flourishing. This map remains the way most of us pattern time, for instance. There are seven days of the week because there were seven days of creation. Our diaries are mini-expressions of creation theology.

The purpose of the sabbath – where work and economic growth are not the order of the day – is to orientate one towards an appreciation of the fecundity of nature as a gift to be treasured. The theologian Ched Myers describes what he calls Sabbath economics as a teaching about “gift and limits: the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession”. Sabbath economics is an alternative to the capitalist paradise of abundance for the few, not the many.

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Sabbath, of course, is the original holiday, holy-day. Not that this connection features much on the travel plans of those who would spend a couple of weeks in the sun thus to ‘re-charge their batteries’ so as to be more effective workers on their return – a point well made by the historian and columnist Tim Stanley on his Thought for the Day this week. The idea of holidays as an expression of excessive consumption again misses their original purpose – to be a reminder of our ultimate dependency upon something that is properly beyond the laws of human ownership.

There are those who would castigate the young protester Greta Thunberg as she makes her way to a climate conference on an expensive zero-emissions yacht as offering a moral example that only the fabulously rich can follow. It’s a fair point. But I imagine that bobbing about mid-ocean, and as a Tropic storm is developing in her path, there is no better way of recognising the fragility of human life and its vulnerability to forces beyond our control.

As the Amazon burns on the altar of continual economic growth, there is an ancient wisdom to the idea that we need to respect the limit of human expansion. In the end, the question at the heart of the environmental crisis is whether we can be content to live within certain limits. Can we ignore those forces in our society that prompt us always to want more and more? Can we learn to live with manna? Can we develop a positive appreciation of having enough? Here is the recipe for a proper holiday.