Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he Frederick had founded at Wittenberg.
He vowed to protect this troublemaker. Things came to a head in Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:.
Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.
I cannot and will not retract anything. The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off.
During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing.
Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time.
Under his influence, it did gel. The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in , followed by the Old Testament, in , translated from the Hebrew. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible.
Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS.
There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them. These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer.
More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap it cost about as much as a calf , sold out immediately.
As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so. In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts.
Michael Knoche. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry.
He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them.
At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. She was the one who proposed. One crucial factor was her skill in household management. One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on. It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.
Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man.
More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children.
He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.
Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children.
In , when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her.
One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. That had happened two years earlier, in July , at Leipzig.
In German, Eck means corner, and he boxed Luther into one. He forced Luther to admit that popes and church councils could err, and that the Bible alone could be trusted as an infallible source of Christian faith and teaching.
Under duress, Luther articulated what would come to be the formal principle of the Reformation: all church teaching must be normed by the Bible. Luther emphasized instead the primacy of Scripture. However, Luther did not reject tradition outright. He respected the writings of the early church Fathers, especially those of Augustine, and he considered the universal statements of faith, such as the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, binding on the church in his day.
For Luther, the church does not take priority over the Bible; instead, the church is the creation of the Bible. It is born in the womb of Scripture. If I had been there, I would have messed in my breeches for fright! In it, a living God confronts his people. Martin Luther developed his understanding of justification amid the moralism and mysticism of late medieval religion.
He made strenuous efforts to find a gracious God, doing penance according to the dictates of scholastic theology. Ultimately he became frustrated to the point of despair. The pivotal text was Romans From that moment, I saw the whole face of Scripture in a new light. Though God does not actually remove our sins—we are at the same time righteous and sinful simul justus et peccator —he no longer counts them against us. Thou hast taken on thyself what thou wast not, and hast given to me what I am not.
Medieval theologians considered faith one of the three theological virtues, along with hope and love. But to Luther, such faith is not sufficient for salvation. Even demons have it, Paul wrote. Truly justifying faith— fiducia, Luther called it—is something more. United to Christ, the great king and priest, the believer too is both a king and a priest. But these offices are not excuses for lording it over others.
The believer is king of everything by being a servant of everyone; the believer is completely free by being subject to all.
As Christ demonstrated his kingship and power by death on the cross, so the believer does so by giving himself or herself unconditionally to the aid of others. We are to be, as Luther puts it, little Christs to our neighbors, for in so doing we find our true identity as children of God.
This argument is explosive, giving a whole new understanding of Christian authority. Elders, for example, are not to be those renowned for throwing their weight around, for badgering others, and for using their position or wealth or credentials to enforce their own opinions.
No, the truly Christian elder is the one who devotes his whole life to the painful, inconvenient, and humiliating service of others, for in so doing he demonstrates Christlike authority, the kind of authority that Christ himself demonstrated throughout his incarnate life and supremely on the cross at Calvary. The implications of the theology of the cross for the believer do not stop there.
The cross is paradigmatic for how God will deal with believers who are united to Christ by faith. In short, great blessing will come through great suffering.
This point is hard for those of us in the affluent West to swallow. For example, some years ago I lectured at a church gathering on this topic and pointed out that the cross was not simply an atonement, but a revelation of how God deals with those whom he loves. I was challenged afterwards by an individual who said that Luther's theology of the cross did not give enough weight to the fact that the cross and resurrection marked the start of the reversal of the curse, and that great blessings should thus be expected; to focus on suffering and weakness was therefore to miss the eschatological significance of Christ's ministry.
Of course, this individual had failed to apply Luther's theology of the cross as thoroughly as he should have done. All that he said was true, but he failed to understand what he was saying in light of the cross.
Yes, Luther would agree, the curse is being rolled back, but that rollback is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to the cross, evil is now utterly subverted in the cause of good. If the cross of Christ, the most evil act in human history, can be in line with God's will and be the source of the decisive defeat of the very evil that caused it, then any other evil can also be subverted to the cause of good. More than that, if the death of Christ is mysteriously a blessing, then any evil that the believer experiences can be a blessing too.
Yes, the curse is reversed; yes, blessings will flow; but who declared that these blessings have to be in accordance with the aspirations and expectations of affluent America?
The lesson of the cross for Luther is that the most blessed person upon earth, Jesus Christ himself, was revealed as blessed precisely in his suffering and death.
And if that is the way that God deals with his beloved son, have those who are united to him by faith any right to expect anything different? They happen, Luther would say, because that is how God blesses them. God accomplishes his work in the believer by doing his alien work the opposite of what we expect ; he really blesses by apparently cursing. Indeed, when it is grasped that the death of Christ, the greatest crime in history, was itself willed in a deep and mysterious way by the triune God, yet without involving God in any kind of moral guilt, we see the solution to the age-old problem of absolving an all-powerful God of responsibility for evil.
The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.
Romans is true because of the cross of Christ: if God can take the greatest of evils and turn it to the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.
Luther's theology of the cross is too rich to be covered adequately in a single article, but I hope that my brief sketch above will indicate the rich vein of theological reflection which can be mined by those who reflect upon 1 Corinthians 1 and upon the dramatic antitheses between appearance and reality that are scattered throughout Scripture and marshaled with such force by Martin Luther.
An antidote to sentimentality, prosperity doctrine, and an excessively worldly eschatology, this is theological gold dust.
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