Who Was Martin Luther?

Question 13002.

Every 31 October, while most of the country is buying sweets, some of us remember that Martin Luther nailed a list of ninety-five propositions to a church door in Wittenberg and set fire to Europe. He did not intend to. He was asking for an academic debate about indulgences.

He was also, at that point, a desperate man. Understanding what Martin Luther was running from explains a good deal about what he ran towards, and it is the part of the story most often skipped.

The man before the Reformation

Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, the son of a copper miner who wanted him to be a lawyer. Caught in a thunderstorm as a young man and terrified by a lightning strike, he vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk, and to his father’s fury he kept the vow.

He was a conscientious monk and a miserable one. He fasted, kept vigils, confessed for hours at a stretch until his confessor lost patience, and found no peace at all. His problem was not that he took sin lightly. It was that he took it with total seriousness and could find no way to be sure God had forgiven him.

That is worth sitting with, because Martin Luther’s later theology was not an academic construction. It was the answer to a personal terror that had nearly destroyed him.

The verse that changed everything

Studying and lecturing on the Psalms and then on Romans, he came to Romans 1:17 and its statement that in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. He had always read the righteousness of God as the standard by which God condemns.

Then he saw it differently. The righteousness in view is a righteousness God gives rather than one he demands, received by faith and not achieved by effort. Luther wrote later that he felt himself to be born again and to have gone through open doors into paradise.

Everything else follows from that. If righteousness is received as a gift, then indulgences, pilgrimages, penances and the whole apparatus of earning are not simply unnecessary. They are a rival to the gospel.

The Ninety-Five Theses

On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther posted his theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, which functioned as the university noticeboard rather than as an act of vandalism. The immediate provocation was a Dominican friar named Tetzel selling indulgences to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome.

The theses are more moderate than their reputation. Luther was not yet calling for a break with Rome, and several of them assume papal good faith. What he attacked was the sale of forgiveness and the spiritual complacency it produced in people who thought they had bought security.

Printing did the rest. Within weeks the theses were circulating across Germany in translation, and a request for a university debate had become a public movement. Luther seems to have been genuinely surprised.

Worms, and the stand

Summoned before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and shown his own books, Luther was told to recant. He asked for a day to think, and then gave the answer that has been quoted ever since: that unless he was convinced by Scripture and plain reason, his conscience was captive to the word of God, and to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

The famous words here I stand, I can do no other may be a later addition, and historians differ. The substance is not in doubt. He was declared an outlaw, could have been killed by anyone lawfully, and was hidden by a sympathetic prince in the Wartburg castle.

There he translated the New Testament into German in eleven weeks. That translation shaped the German language as Tyndale’s would shape English, and it put the Scriptures into the hands of people who had never been allowed to read them.

What Luther recovered

The great themes are usually summarised as the five solas, and while Luther did not list them in that form they express what he fought for. Scripture alone as the final authority, faith alone as the instrument of justification, grace alone as its source, Jesus alone as its ground, and the glory of God alone as its end.

He also recovered the priesthood of all believers, insisting that a farmer doing his work faithfully serves God as truly as a monk, and that the Christian’s calling is not confined to religious professions. Congregational singing came back, and Luther wrote hymns himself, including A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

For a Baptist reading five centuries later, the debt is enormous. Martin Luther did not get us to where I now stand, but nobody in my tradition would be standing anywhere without him. I have written on the wider movement in what the Reformation was.

Where I part company with him

He remained a paedobaptist, and his treatment of the Anabaptists, who were pressing believer’s baptism, was not gracious. He held a doctrine of the Lord’s Supper close to what became known as consubstantiation, insisting on a real bodily presence in the elements, and he fell out with Zwingli over it in terms that were less than edifying.

He also handed the church to the princes. The German territorial church settlement, in which the ruler determined the religion of his subjects, has a good deal to answer for, and it is a long way from the free churches of the New Testament.

And his view of the will was more deterministic than I hold. His book against Erasmus argued a bondage of the will that later Calvinism developed further. I am not a Calvinist, and I would locate Luther’s own instincts closer to the text when he was preaching than when he was systematising.

The failures that must be named

Honesty requires more than a list of doctrinal disagreements. In 1543, late in life and in poor health, Martin Luther published a treatise against the Jews containing recommendations so vicious that they were quoted approvingly by the Nazi regime four centuries later. Nothing excuses it, and Lutheran bodies have repudiated it.

He also urged the crushing of the peasants in their revolt of 1525 in language of extraordinary savagery, having earlier encouraged their grievances. Tens of thousands died.

I set these out because a Christian account of church history that airbrushes its heroes is neither honest nor useful. God has always worked through flawed men, which is a doctrine Luther himself would have insisted upon, and it does no service to pretend otherwise.

Why he still matters

Strip away the controversies and one thing remains. Martin Luther recovered for the church the answer to the question that had tormented him, which is how a guilty man can stand before a holy God. The answer was not more effort. It was a righteousness given freely and received by faith.

That is not a sixteenth-century concern. Every generation invents its own indulgences, its own ways of buying security, its own systems of earning what cannot be earned. The answer has not changed.

He was rude, frequently wrong, sometimes appalling, and God used him to hand the Bible back to ordinary people in their own language. Those facts sit together uncomfortably, and I think we are meant to notice.

The world Martin Luther was born into

It helps to picture the setting. The Bible existed in Latin, which almost nobody outside the clergy could read. Salvation was widely understood as a lifelong process assisted by the church’s sacraments, with purgatory waiting at the end for those not yet fit for heaven, and indulgences available to shorten the stay.

Printing had arrived only decades earlier, and Europe was about to discover what happens when ideas can travel faster than the authorities can suppress them. Martin Luther was not the first to object to indulgences. Wycliffe and Hus had said comparable things and Hus had been burned for it. What was different was the press.

Erasmus had also published a Greek New Testament in 1516, and Romans 3 read in Greek rather than in the Latin Vulgate looked rather different at several points. The tools for a reformation were on the desk before anybody had picked them up.

What we should imitate, and what we should not

Imitate the seriousness. Martin Luther could not rest while the question of his standing before God was unsettled, and that urgency has largely drained out of Western Christianity. Most people are not troubled about their sin; they are troubled about their circumstances.

Imitate the appeal to Scripture. At Worms he did not appeal to tradition, to his own experience, or to what seemed reasonable. He asked to be shown from the Bible where he was wrong. That instinct is worth more than any of his conclusions. I have written on the movement’s outworking in what happened at the Reformation.

Ephesians 4:29 warns against corrupting talk and asks for words that build up, and Luther would have failed that test on most days of his life. Do not imitate the temper. Luther’s polemics were coarse even by the standards of his own century, and the habit of assuming that vigorous language proves conviction has done a good deal of harm in the churches ever since.

So, now what?

So what should you take from Martin Luther? Start with the question that drove him, because it is the one most people have stopped asking. How can I be right with God? If you have never faced it seriously, no amount of church attendance will substitute.

Then take the answer he found, which was not his own but Paul’s. Righteousness received rather than achieved. If you are still trying to be good enough, you are working a system Luther abandoned in 1517 and you will find no peace in it either.

And take the warning as well as the example. A man can be right about justification and badly wrong about his neighbour. That is worth remembering before we get too comfortable about our own doctrinal accuracy.

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, The righteous shall live by faith.

Romans 1:17 (ESV)