MARTIN LUTHER.

Born: 1483, Eisleben, Saxony

Died: 1546, Eisleben, Saxony

Major, Works: Lectures on Romans (1515-16), The Ninety-five Theses (1517), An Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (1520), The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), On the Liberty of a Christian Man (1520), On Good Works (1520), On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

Major Ideas

Human nature is corrupt, weak, self-centered, and in a state of rebellion from God; the fruit of the fall from grace is death

God's laws show sinners their distance from God and arouse a desire for redemption.

Although God in his justice could condemn humanity, he chooses out of love to redeem sinners; this love is most fully manifest on the cross.

In the process of redemption one can do nothing but have faith, an absolute trust and response to God's words; human merit and good works are rejected.

The foremost vehicle of God's saving word is the Bible, which presents the whole of the good news for human salvation.

The Catholic priesthood, monasticism, and canon law are rejected as human institutions that make the false claim to control the spirit of God.

The sacraments are signs that communicate God's saving word.

Martin Luther was at the center of the storm that named the sixteenth century the period of Reformation. His views changed Western Christianity to such an extent that by the end of his life there existed competing conceptions as to how a person ought to respond to the divine. Scenes from his life such as the nailing of ninety-five theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenburg on the eve of All Saints; 1517, or his dramatic affirmation of Scripture and conscience before the emperor and the assembled nobility of Germany at the Diet of Worms, 1521, have become the stuff of Western historical memory. Very few in history have been the object of more intense condemnation and praise. To the Catholics of the day he was, in the words of the papal bull of excommunication, Domine Ex-surge (1520), the "wild boar" that had invaded the vineyards of the, Lord. By publicly burning that papal document at Wittenburg, Luther affirmed that he was, as one Protestant cartoon of the day portrayed him, "the German Hercules," the great leader of national and religious liberation. Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) in his funeral sermon preached on the death of Luther called him "the very instrument of God for the propaganda of the Gospel"; while Pope Gregory XV in 1622 wrote in a bull canonizing Ignatius Loyola (c. 1495-1556), the founder of the Jesuits, that Luther was "the foulest of monsters." Polemic works from both sides have appeared over the past 400 years as have recent psychoanalytic and Marxist interpretations of the reformer. However, in all of the discussions on Luther what remains basic is the way he conceptualized Christianity as the personal response of sinful humanity to a loving God known through the Bible by faith.

Sinful Humanity and Death

The Reformation has its origin in the question recorded in the New Testament, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25). Martin Luther's writings present us with the portrait of a person in a state of profound struggle with exactly that issue; a struggle between two worlds: goodness and evil, the divine and the demonic, light and darkness. At the core of Luther's passionate and melancholy personality was an intense anxiety about his own salvation. He grew up in the piety of the late Middle Ages, which often emphasized an image of God as an awesome judge whose all knowing frown struck awe and terror in the hearts of sinners.

In the midst of a violent thunderstorm in. 1505 when he thought he saw the very wrath of God in the bolts of lightning, Luther vowed that if spared he would enter the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt. Luther experienced the same terror in another context when he said his first Mass in 1507. At that even the was completely humbled at the thought that with his words the bread became the very body of Christ and the wine Christ's own blood. He said that he felt himself to be nothing but sinful dust and ashes daring to address the eternal God.

Luther would write of God's majesty in a later work, On the Bondage of the Will, as an all consuming devouring fire, a God who is beyond all control and manipulation by human will and reason. Nevertheless, humanity, in his view, is always trying by multiple pious, moral, and religious acts to earn its own salvation. These acts, often referred to as good works, were seen by many in his day as guaranteed to merit God's favor. For the reformer all this was nothing but the essence of sin, for its root was in the desire to make the self, not God, the center of the universe.

Adam's fall left humanity in a permanent rebellion from God, a state of enduring wickedness. Humanity, Luther writes in his Commentary on Genesis, is "utterly leprous and unclean." Original Sin is humankind's permanent state of weakness and self-absorption. The result of this sinful condition is death, as Paul teaches in his Epistle to the Romans (chapters 5-7).

The laws in the Bible reveal the Lawgiver's desire to be God alone and to have no strange gods before him (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5). This first and greatest of commandments not only makes a command but also condemns. It condemns the sinner by pointing out a person's self-absorption, and false gods. Thus, atheism is at the core an idolatry, a sinful egotism that refuses to love God alone.

Justification by Faith

As Luther studied Scripture in preparation for his lectures at the University of Wittenburg, his conception of God gradually changed. The more his thoughts turned to the life and sacrifice of Christ, especially as it was revealed on the cross, the more he saw not only the awesome God but also the all-merciful One who gave his son for human salvation. The inscrutable God who shows himself through the foolishness of the cross reveals that the measure of his mercy is that it is mercy without measure. This compassion for sinners can neither be captured by reason nor manipulated by human actions. This love brings humanity into a right relationship with God. This standing before God (Coram Deo) is known as justification. This Coram relationship implies that God turns his presence toward the sinner and thus the sinner has a place before God. All this was for Luther fully understood by Paul in his epistle to the Romans:

... God showed His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were sinners we were reconciled to God by the death of His son, much more, now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by His life. (Romans 5:8-10)

Toward the end of his life Luther would recall that as he struggled in the tower of the monastery at Wittenburg to grasp the meaning of the Bible, he came to understand the words of Paul, "the just live by faith" (Romans 1:17). This famous Tower Experience (Turmerlebnis) was a decisive moment in his life; human faith's response to God's grace is a faithfulness to God whereby one puts one's whole trust in God alone.

Faith is seen by Luther not as a human power or attribute but, rather, as that which is received from God. He took seriously the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John "... apart from me you can do nothing" (15:5). Contrary to the view of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Luther affirmed that the human will contributed nothing to the salvation dynamic Faith as a gift repudiates all forms of merit for humanity remains, although justified, in sin Faith as an obedient reception of God's word repudiates all forms of reason. With reason we place what is known under our own control. Again, the reformer was profoundly influenced by the words of Paul: "What have you that you did not receive? If then you receive it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The Christian remains simultaneously a sinner and a righteous person. Righteousness comes from God while human corruption remains. This idea is referred to as imputed righteousness," whereby God no longer looks upon the believer as deserving damnation but as one whose sins are cloaked over by the merits of Christ As Luther put it in his Commentary on the Letter to the Galatians: "It pleases one to call this righteousness (Justitiam) of faith or Christian righteousness passive righteousness.

In all this we see Luther's Augustinian reaction against Pelagius (d 418) William of Ockham (d.c. 1347), and Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), all of whom affirm various ways the nobility and capacity of the human will to do good. The last two mentioned authors are often linked with a philosophical tendency influential in Luther's education, nominalism. This tendency rejects attempts to ground faith on reason while, emphasizing the sovereignty of God's will to predestine whomever he chooses.

The Catholic view defended at the Council of Trent (1545-63) would understand grace to be that which heals and elevates human nature. In this tradition, the person is justified not by the extrinsic imputation of Christ's merits but through the actions of the Holy. Spirit within the human soul according to God's good pleasure and each person's free cooperation. This divine indwelling offers to the individual the three supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Here the soul has a supernatural gift, a habit (habitus), which is actualized by good works and, as such, God's free gifts become human merit.

Luther, on the other hand, saw divine grace as that which alters the person's situation in respect to his or her standing before God, not in his or her inner essence. He rejects the substance language of Aristotle and the ordered universe of the Neoplatonists. For Luther the only good work is faith, which is the work of God. Faith alone turns one's attention away from the idolatry of self-absorption and gives a person freedom to love. In this sense, faith is the source of love, the good tree that produces the good fruit, to use Luther's favorite image. Here is the meaning of the reformer's well-known line: "A Christian is free and independent in every respect, a bond servant to none. A Christian is a dutiful servant in every respect, owing a duty to everyone" (On the Liberty of a Christian Man).

The Word of God

For some thirty-five years, Martin Luther understood his vocation to be that of a professor of sacred Scripture. His greatest literary achievement was the translation of the Bible into German. This effort established the national language and would have the same prestige and effect in Germany as did the King James Bible in England (the "Authorized Version" of 1611). In his own lifetime it sold over 100,000 copies. His goal, to offer the living word of God to every person, would be the driving passion behind all his writings, lectures, sermons, and hymns. If the new Protestant movement could be summed up in an image, it would be that of Luther in the tower struggling with, and finding comfort in, the biblical text.

The Roman Church of Luther's day repudiated this claim of sola scriptura, for the complexity of Scripture demanded an infallible interpreter. Luther, however, argued that the text interpreted itself and that a humble Christian in contact with the word of God was closer to God than any pope without a Bible. The pope and the Councils could and did err, Luther believed, for the only norm for religion was the canonical Scriptures. The problems of interpretation do remain. It was the job of the exegete armed with a knowledge of the biblical languages and the whole of Scripture to dig out the kernel hidden in the shell, to find the baby in the straw of the manger. When a passage proved difficult it was to be interpreted in light of an easier one (Scriptura Scriptura Interpretatur). Also, Luther's own hermeneutics would be that of many before him, Christocentric, seeing the New Testament hidden in the Old. For him the psalms spoke of the gospel.

He also stood in the common piety of the age with his attention to the imaginative encounter with the text. The events of the Bible were experienced as if they were happening now. Luther encouraged in his preaching an emotional response of joy or sorrow as occasioned by the scene. By fully encountering the Word With intellect, will, and emotions, time and distance were eradicated. It is no wonder that Luther writes that Christ commanded the apostles to preach.

The Protestant Movement

The Protestant movement, which began as a protest against the selling of indulgences, was, in essence, a systematic reformulation of the ways in which a person can achieve and sustain a relationship with God. Luther's basic principles of sola fide, sola gratia, and sola scriptura would repudiate the medieval idea of the Church institution as the exclusive vehicle for the divine-human encounter. His attention to a personal decision and his religion of conscience would have far-reaching implications for the emerging modern world. For Luther, each person stands alone in the personal encounter with God.

Although he spent fifteen years as a priest and a monk, Luther rejected the ordained priesthood and the special status accorded to monastic life. Both institutions were seen as laying a claim to control the Holy Spirit of God. Even worse, he thought, they served to prevent the Spirit from acting. So to think that true poverty was the unique call of the monastic orders was to ignore the true poverty of spirit as a demand placed on everyone. Luther also noted that greatly lacking in all monastic education was the study of the biblical and classical languages essential for a proper exegesis of Scripture. He argued in his treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church that especially onerous was the oppression of the laity by the clergy, who substituted juridical authority for ministry to the people of God.

All baptized Christians are by virtue of their baptism priests, Luther maintained. This "priesthood of all believers" means that every Christian has the obligation not only to accept God's word in faith, but also to minister to the neighbor. The "keys to the kingdom" (Matthew 16:19) belong not to the Roman pontiff but to the whole community of believers. It is true that some, chosen by the whole community, would minister, that is, offer the word of God. This is the essential core of the church for, as Jesus put it, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). Thus the head of a family could maintain a church in the home by means of the Bible and baptism. After all, noted Luther, Jesus promised that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there He would be in their midst (Matthew 18:19--20).

The Roman Catholic church had built its legal and juridical structures on the commands of Jesus to Peter to bind and to loose on earth (Matthew 16:19). This gave rise to an extensive system of canon law and human traditions. To many in the sixteenth century, this establishment of ecclesiastical ordinance above the commands of God resulted in oppression and tyranny, which destroyed the liberty of the Christian believer. Luther constantly drew attention to this by making a sharp division between the command of God and the command invented by men. By doing so he undercut the Catholic idea of human tradition, which sought to probe and understand Scripture through centuries of councils, theologians, and saints. Divine law was not, however, to be repudiated, for it remained as a stimulus to penance, humility, and obedience, as well as providing an opportunity to deepen one's longing for the gospel. Human traditions also had a value in preserving human tranquillity and social order. However, for Luther, both had no place in the redemptive process if placed over and above the Bible, grace, and faith.

Sacraments were essential to medieval Catholicism as the vehicle by which God continued His work throughout all of history. In this view the actions of Christ as mediated through a hierarchical-sacramental impartation of grace would produce the power to do good works, acquire merit, and achieve sanctity. Luther, by denying the evolution of tradition as a legitimate expression of divine will, saw the sacramental system as a human invention created by the Roman Church to enhance clerical power. For him the only sacrament was the word of God. This word of command and promise is, however, communicated through three signs: baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, which call for a response of faith. Thus, the Lutheran focus is on the sermon, prayers, and hymns in public worship. Later Protestants would divide over the value of penance, the necessity of infant baptism, and the nature of Eucharistic bread. For Luther, all that mattered was that Jesus came preaching the gospel of God. In this way the true Christian congr egation would be the priesthood of all believers who profess the gospel with hands and mouth, by action, and by the proclamation of their faith.

Further Reading

Bainton, Roland. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950. The text, which is liberally illustrated with reproductions of woodcuts and illustrations of the age, traces the struggles and triumphs of the reformer. This is a 'very readable and dramatic biography.

Ebiling, Gerhard. Luther: An Introduction to His Thought. Translated by R. A. Wilson. Philadelphia: Fortrnss Press, 1970. An excellent summary of the fundamental tensions in the theology of Luther. The study goes to the heart of Luther's views on grace and nature by one of the greatest Lutheran scholars of the twentieth century.

Grimm, Harold J. The Reformation Era, 1500--1650. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1973. This is a standard summary of the major events and consequences of the whole Reformation movement with a comprehensive bibliography.

McDonough, Thomas M. The Law and the Gospel in Luther: A Study of Martin Luther's confessional Writings. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. By focusing on the large and small catechisms of Luther, this study delineates Luther's views of the force and function of law as well as the relationship of law and gospel.

Oberihan, Heiko A. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. Translated by E. Wallison Schwarzbart. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. The thesis of this work is that to get at the essence of Luther's own self-understanding, one must see him not only as a healer of the Church but also as one who believed he was engaged in a cosmic struggle against Satanic attacks on the kingdom of God.

Pelikan, Jaroslov. Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Reformer's Exegetical Writings. St. Louis: Concordia, 1959. This comprehensive discussion situates Luther's hermeneutics within the history of Christian attempts to understand Scripture. The work also examines select biblical passages with an eye to the practice and conclusions that emerge from Luther's exegesis.

____. Spirit vs. Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. A concise summary of the positions Luther took regarding the Catholic priesthood, monasticism, infant baptism, and the sacramental system. This short study examines the difficulties Luther had not only in articulating the conflict between spirit and structure but also his need to present an ecclesiology that saw spirit in and through structure.

von Loewenich, Walther. Luther's Theology of the Cross. Translated by H. Bouman. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976. The classic 1933 study of Luther's view of faith and the hidden God. The author's claim is that the theology of the cross touches the whole of Luther's theology of salvation.

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Author:	HUNDERSMARCK, LAWRENCE F.
Publication:	Great Thinkers of the Western World
Article Type:	Biography
Date:	Jan 1, 1999
Words:	3348
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