Reformation 2006
October 29th, 2006I recently came across a very interesting insight into an aspect of the Lutheran Reformation that I had never understood before. We may wonder how such obscure and innocent things turn into movements and reformations. When Luther posted his 95 Thesis on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, he was only doing what had been done hundreds of times before – proposing a discussion and debate of certain propositions among fellow theologians. How did it happen that this particular episode created such a stir and led to such a movement?
One of the subtle dynamics at work here had to do with the rivalry between the various monastic orders of the day. There were the Franciscans who followed the ideas of St. Francis. The Society of Jesus, later known as the Jesuits followed in the footsteps of their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola. There were the Benedictines who carried out the faith according to St. Benedict. And there were the Dominicans founded by St. Dominic. When Luther decided to become a monk, he chose to enter a monastery of the Augustinian order which held to the teachings and interpretations of the Scriptures according to Augustine. No one is sure why he chose the Augustinians. One guess is that they claimed a particular devotion to St. Anne. St. Anne was the saint to whom Luther prayed when he was in the thunder and lightning storm and to whom he vowed that he would become a monk if he were spared death.
Over time, these various monastic orders developed certain rivalries between each other. One of the most bitter rivalries was between the Dominicans and the Augustinians. When Luther, the Augustinian took aim at the practice of selling indulgences, he got pretty personal in his attacks. And the target of his personal attack was most notably a man named John Tetzel, the great seller of indulgences. John Tetzel was a monk in the Dominican order.
When Luther attacked Tetzel, the entire Dominican Order rallied to support their brother for reasons that had nothing to do with the question of whether or not the selling of indulgences was right or wrong. And when the Dominicans began to attack Luther the Augustinian, the entire Augustinian order came to Luther’s support, and not necessarily because they were so sold on the merits of Luther’s propositions as outlined in the 95 Thesis. It is only as the Dominicans agitate the Vatican to respond to Luther that the Pope is drawn into this conflict. When Pope Leo is first presented with a copy of Luther’s 95 Thesis, he is said to have made two comments. First, he said, “Luther is a drunken German. He will feel different when he is sober.” And second, “Friar Martin is a brilliant chap. The whole row is due to the envy of the monks.” (“Here I Stand.” Bainton. P.65). Whether he really said such things or not is questionable but at least the second statement captures the situation just right.
So, what brought Luther to the 95 Thesis? These were certainly not a set of random ideas that just popped into his head that he decided to post like we post a comment to a blog site on the internet. Although we mark the posting of the 95 Thesis as the beginning of the Reformation, they are not at all the beginning of Luther’s spiritual formation. By October 31st, 1517 Luther has already come a long way on a hard journey in his search for the truth about God.
Luther certainly does not arrive at these conclusions on his own or in a vacuum. He is highly influenced by others along the way, most especially, the man who was in charge of the monastery where Luther was a monk – John Staupitz. As Staupitz heard Luther’s daily confessions and his desperate search for acceptance by God, he would speak to Luther about a gracious God who, in love for His people sent His Son, Jesus to atone for all of our sin. In every trial and trouble, especially the trials and troubles of the conscience with guilt and shame before God, one must simply rely on God as He has made Himself known to us through His Word, and let all our questions find their final answer in the cross.
Unlike so many others, Luther would not simply accept the advice and counsel of others at their word. For Luther, everything had to be tested and proved. And for Luther the standard against which everything must be proved as either true or false was the Scriptures. Not the decrees of the Church or the teaching of the great philosophers or the feelings and emotions of the human heart. Sola scriptura was the Luther’s first principle. Only later did he conclude that the Scriptures reveal a God who saves sinners by sola gratia through sola fide.
It is Luther’s insistence upon testing everything by the Scriptures alone that brings Luther to the 95 Thesis. The great breakthrough for Luther was when he was finally able to bring the whole Bible to bear upon the meaning of Romans 1:17 which says, “For in it, that is, the scriptures, the righteousness of God is revealed.” The way that the “righteousness of God” was understood and taught in Luther’s day was that the scriptures reveal to us the high standard of God’s righteousness against which all men will be judged. All judgment and punishment will be meted out to each one as he deserves according to this high standard of God’s righteousness.
It is here that we come to the thing about Luther that we have learned to appreciate the most. For most, this impassable chasm that separates us from being able to stand in the presence God and feel secure about having a place in His heaven is simply an intellectual problem. We hear it and we even believe it but it hardly effects us because we have somehow rationalized it away or we have come up with our own little system to ease our conscience before God, and the systems we devise to do so range all the way from the simple reliance on an inner goodness, (“he was a really good person”) to the complex systems of penance and indulgences.
But for Luther, none of this washed because he could find nothing to support any of this in the Scriptures. And Luther was one of those people who could not simply intellectualize the problem and rationalize it away and get a good night’s sleep. It tormented him. To this day, those who are unsympathetic to the Lutheran Reformation teach that Luther was an eccentric crazy man. But to us who see where this leads Luther, we say, ‘thanks be to God’ for this man who, like Jacob had to wrestle with God until he could find his rest in God.
Luther concludes that sinful man must stand before the holy God as entirely dependant upon God for mercy if he is to be spared the wrath of judgment. And it is there that the great breakthrough happens. Testing that theory against the Scriptures alone, Luther discovers that the entire revelation of the Bible speaks to a merciful God whose righteousness consists in making sinners righteous for the sake of Christ alone – sola Christos. The righteousness of God was not so much the measure that we must impossibly attain to escape the judgment of God, but it was the status that God conferred upon sinners as a free gift. Luther says, “at this the gates of paradise were opened to me. When St. Paul quotes the prophet Habakkuk saying, ‘the just shall live by faith’ he means to say, ‘I am not good and righteous, but Christ is and He credits His righteousness to me.’”
From that point on, Luther sees that the purchase of indulgences, which are said to put man in a better position before God is not only false, but much worse. They are the idolatrous attempt of sinful man to be reconciled to a holy God apart from the blood of Christ.
So the 1st of the 95 Thesis that is really the summary of the 94 that follow is this, “When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said "Repent", He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” This is the dramatic confrontation to the message of the Church of the day and of John Tetzel in particular. The Church had been teaching that when Jesus said that we must “repent,” He meant that we must “do penance.” Luther points out the error in translation and maintains that the correct understanding is that we must “be repentant.”
What Luther would discover is that he had opened not just a theological can of worms but that he had stepped on an economic hornets nest. And as we Americans ought to surely understand, it really does all come down to the economy.
In the centuries that have passed since Luther posted his 95 Thesis the theology of his propositions has been thoroughly debated by both sides. The central issue is over the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Those who maintain that Luther was wrong, say that it is necessary for sinful man to do penance and that the penance we are to do flows from the grace of God in Jesus Christ and is therefore by grace. The distinction that Luther brought to the table is not about the necessity of the grace of God to be saved. Both sides agree that grace is necessary for salvation. The distinction that Luther raises is the all-sufficiency of God’s grace in Jesus Christ that leaves sinful men and woman with nothing whatsoever that they must do or are able to do but receive the righteousness of God by faith alone. As with Luther, so with us. As we cling to the all-sufficient grace of God in Jesus Christ who declares us righteous in His sight for Christ’s sake alone, “the gates of paradise are opened to us.”
Related Entries:
» Sermon Index – Lutheran – LCMS» Man of Constant Sorrows – Reformed Version
» Holy Week – 2006
» Suggested Movie List
» Sermon – Labor Day 2006 – "The Holiness of Vocation"
» Sermon – 3rd Sunday in Lent – "The 10 Commandments Are Good" – Exodus 20:1-17 – 3/19/06
