Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 159

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World," by Eric Metaxas:




When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world. How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them? Since time immemorial, such men had spoken for God and for the state. But Luther defied them, humbly but boldly, in a watershed moment in world history. Those of us in the West have lived on the far side of it ever since. 

What followed ended up scrambling the landscape of Western culture so dramatically that it’s hardly recognizable from what it was before. Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Luther’s story is that it need never have happened. Martin Luther was not a man born—or later inclined—to tilt at papal windmills. In fact, until about 1520 he was as vigorous a champion of the church as anyone who had ever lived. He desired desperately to help Rome elude the fate it ended up experiencing. In fact, in a case of extreme irony—so much so that one might think of Oedipus—he became the very man who brought about everything he had hoped to avoid. As his story illustrates, it was a sublime and ridiculous decoction of forces that created the perfect storm that burst over the European continent, creating what we now call the Reformation and the future. We can only wonder what might have been avoided had the distracted Pope Leo been sensitive to his role in history and taken the German monk’s earnest suggestions to heart. It was Rome’s mystifying inflexibility that drove Luther to bolder and bolder public positions, eventually putting him beyond rapprochement and setting him along a path that will forever be debated either as heretical and ignominious or as orthodox and glorious. But for good and for ill, Martin Luther was the midwife of the irrevocably divided world in which we now live.

Part of that process began with understanding his role as a seeker of truth and how that role could conceivably lead him to question what was thought of as received and therefore unquestionable truth. At what point did loving the church mean questioning the church? At what point did one have an obligation to boldly and forthrightly—albeit lovingly—help it see its errors? And at what point could one move from being shown one’s own errors by the church to oneself showing the church its errors? If the church was the repository of all truth, what should one do if one found a splinter of truth outside the church? Or if one found a splinter of untruth inside the church? At what point could one even admit that these two things were possibilities, and on what basis? These were the questions.

The specific point here is that the infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be.

Because this sermon was out of the blocks and picking up speed far beyond Wittenberg, Tetzel predictably decided to pounce with his own publication. This was probably toward the end of April 1518. In his own writing, he slapped away the niceties of theological debate and leaped forward to pure ad hominem frontal assault, quickly placing Luther in the incendiary heretical category of Jan Hus and John Wycliffe. Here for the first time we see what will be the tragic way forward in the larger debate. In lieu of trying to actually wrestle with what Luther is humbly and genuinely saying, Tetzel—in his zeal to protect the honor of Mother Church—had chosen to stoke the fires of heresy, to dishonestly pit Luther against pope and church, when it was a plain fact that at this point Luther himself genuinely wished only to help the pope and the church. The gravamen of Tetzel’s argument in this document is a bitterly sad one, one that again prefigures all that lay ahead. It is “Be silent and revoke all you have said. Unless you do so, the Church will crush you. Amen.” Tetzel is selfishly and cynically trying to head off any actual consideration of Luther’s arguments, and of course we know that in the end he mostly succeeded. By framing the debate as Luther standing against the pope himself, Tetzel had bet everything on the vanity and distracted narcissism of Leo X and those around him. If he was right that they wouldn’t bother to consider this more carefully—perhaps even prayerfully—but would instead lazily decide to swat the renegade German monk into silence, all would be well as far as he was concerned.

Luther’s prophetic boldness in speaking to pope and emperor—and to Frederick and Albrecht of Mainz and to so many others in power—is one more example of what might well be considered the shining center of his larger rediscovery and rescue of the true Gospel from under its crushing welter of ecclesiastical and political medieval structures. He had seen that he was not under these leaders as much as they were all under God together. All authority came from God, and as in Christ all were one and all were judged equally, it was Luther’s right and indeed his duty as a Christian to speak the truth to these powers, to point out to them where they were wrong and where they might go wrong, for the sake of their souls and for the sake of all those whom they ruled over. Luther’s fear of God trumped his fear of these rulers, so he was free to speak with perfect candor, knowing that his authority to speak came not from selfish desires but from a desire to bring God and his Gospel to bear on the situation. So it was not just his right to speak to them as he did but his solemn duty. This is what started him along this course, when he posted his theses in 1517, but we see as time passed that whatever timidity and fear he once had of offending those in power had diminished, to the point that it ceased to exist altogether. He began to reckon being careful to speak as mere worldly wisdom and “fear of man” than as born out of genuine faith in the God he served.

Luther descended from his island in the sky on March 1, 1522. About two days into the trip, he came to the town of Jena, where he stayed at the Black Bear Inn. Johannes Kessler, a nineteen-year-old student from St. Gall, Switzerland, was also staying there. Kessler was headed to Wittenberg too, traveling with a fellow student, Wolfgang Spengler. Kessler wrote a firsthand account of his time at the inn, saying that he and Spengler observed a knight at a table, dressed in a scarlet-red doublet with woolen breeches and wearing a red hat. One hand touched the pommel of his sword, the other held a book, which they observed to be a Hebrew Psalter. How curious for a knight to be reading such a book! But the mysterious knight bade them join him and asked whether they knew anything about the nascent Reformation. They certainly did. As it happened, they were themselves headed to Wittenberg. At some point in their conversation, they inquired after the famous Martin Luther, asking whether he was then at Wittenberg. The knight volunteered that he could with certainty say that Luther was not at Wittenberg but would soon be. And he told them that when they reached that fair city, they must send greetings to Schurff from “the one who is to come.”1 At some point, the innkeeper took the young men aside and told them the man with whom they were eating was none other than Luther himself, but they mustn’t let on that they knew, because he was traveling incognito, no thanks to this blabbering innkeeper. But the students didn’t believe this preposterous claim, assuming the ill-informed innkeeper had mistaken the name of Ulrich von Hutten—who they knew was a real knight and a friend of the Reformation—for Luther’s and that this knight, conversant in the things of the budding Reformation, therefore must be he. But when they arrived at Wittenberg on March 8, they gave their letters of introduction to Hieronymus Schurff and soon afterward were introduced to Melanchthon, Nicholas von Amsdorf, and Justus Jonas. And then they met Luther too. Here he was in his natural habitat—sans beard and doublet. They were taken aback to understand that this smooth-shaven monk was indeed the same figure with whom they had spoken at the Black Bear Inn. Eventually, Kessler would return home to become a noted reformer in his native Switzerland.