Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
So if this is your first theological talk back, let me just kind of explain to you our purpose in this is we we typically will bring in somebody to come and talk about a certain subject, often a theological topic, for about an hour or so, 50 minutes to an hour. Usually, this is something that, you would wanna address from the pulpit or you need a little bit more time than you could have on a Sunday. And then we'll take a break and let you ask questions, for another 50 minutes or an hour. And this format has worked really well. And I'm extremely excited about tonight because we have a former professor of mine.
Joel Brooks:We have doctor Timothy George, who is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School. So Beeson is the divinity school it is because of Doctor. George. And I think the school is a stellar school. Pretty much the staff at Redeemer has all come up through Beason.
Joel Brooks:Its impact is not just here in this city, but, really, Beeson has had a worldwide impact. And, I and I am forever indebted to doctor George. And I remember I I took his class, theology of the reformers, as one of the first classes I took at Beeson. And after I heard him speak, I instantly got my wife and said, you need to audit this class. And so she came and she audited this class as well.
Joel Brooks:One of the things I appreciate about doctor George is how accessible he is. And he is a brilliant man who, went to Harvard, but he also used to pastor a small church in North Georgia, grew up in Chattanooga. And he has a way of talking to people like me who are not the sharpest tool in the shed. And I understand it, and I think that is a sign of somebody who really has a great grasp of what they're talking about is when they can communicate that. I do have just one thing I need to forgive Doctor.
Joel Brooks:George of, that he did something pretty mean to me about 20 years ago. When I took his class, Theology of the Reformers, I had to turn in a 110 page paper for his class. A 110 page paper for just a 2 hour class. Now to put that in perspective, all throughout Beeson, I never had to turn in another paper over 20 pages. But doctor George assigned a a homework assignment, and he said, I want you to read through Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and, just summarize every page.
Joel Brooks:And I remember asking, when you say summarize every page, what what do you mean by that? And he goes, I mean, write a summary of every page. So a 110 pages is what it takes to summarize every page of Calvin's Institutes, but I forgive you. I forgive you of that. It's it has taken a long time to get past that.
Joel Brooks:But if you would welcome doctor George here. We're so honored to have him.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you very much, Joel. I remember most of that 110 pages was pretty good. And you have a very learned pastor because I made that assignment. They don't let me teach anymore, but if they did, I'd still require students to do that. Well, it's the reformation, and this is a pretty good crowd to come out on a Wednesday that's filled with rain to hear about something that happened 500 years ago, the reformation.
Speaker 2:Why are you interested in the reformation? What was the reformation? Does it even matter anymore? Those are some questions that might come out of our discussion tonight. Now before I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to give you a little map of my talk.
Speaker 2:I wanna begin by reading 2 of my favorite quotations from Martin Luther. This is one of them. Luther said, I simply taught, preached, wrote God's word. Otherwise, I did nothing. And then while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Gamsdorf which proves Luther was not a Southern Baptist.
Speaker 2:The word, capital w, so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The word did it all. Now, keep that in your mind for a few minutes, we might come back to it. Now, the second quotation, my second favorite quotation, famous statement from Martin Luther is when he was reflecting back on the what it took to become a theologian.
Speaker 2:And this is what he said, I did not learn my theology all at once, but I had to search deeper for it. I had to go where my temptations took me. Now, the German word for temptations is Anfectungen. I want to come back to that word too. It's a big word for Luther.
Speaker 2:It's an important word for Luther. He had to follow where his temptations led him. A better translation might be, assaults, his dreaded bouts of fear, and angst, and conflict, combat. I had to follow where my assaults, and temptations, and testings took me. Not understanding, reading, or speculation, but living nay rather dying and being damned is what makes one a theologian.
Speaker 2:If you understand those two quotations, I think you've got a good grasp of certainly Luther and maybe of a big chunk of the protestant reformation. Now here's my road map. The first thing I wanna do is to do a little bit of sanctified debunking. I want to correct 4 common myths about the reformation. You may believe some of these myths.
Speaker 2:They're widely held by lots of people. I think they're just bunk, they're wrong. And you can argue with me, we have a whole hour for that I think coming up. So don't hesitate to challenge me, I'm used to it. But I wanna debunk 4 commonly held misunderstandings.
Speaker 2:I'm calling them myths about the reformation. And then I wanna talk, this will have to be ever so briefly, but I think it's important. I wanna talk about the reformation before the reformation. The reformers before the reformers. What was going on before Luther and Calvin?
Speaker 2:And then, thirdly, I want to bore into Martin Luther a little bit more in terms of his own trajectory toward reformation. Pre 15/17, which is the day we all remember the reformation started, right? October 31st, 15 17, Reformation Day, Protestants still call it today. Because on that day, Martin Luther nailed to the northern door of the castle church in Wittenberg 95 theses, really proposals for an academic debate about the sale of indulgences that was rampant in the church and in his part of Germany. And so we date the reformation from that one punctiliar event.
Speaker 2:But what was happening before 15/17 in Luther's own mind and heart? How did he come to the place where he felt called upon to stand and make that important stand against indulgences. I wanna say a little bit about that. And then I want to close out a little bit by referring to some of the changes that happened in the reformation that are still with us today in many respects that you may or may not have even thought about. So that's what I want to do.
Speaker 2:It's not everything. It's just a little slice of everything. But, I hope you'll be able to follow this trajectory of my talk tonight, and then we'll open it up for discussion. So first of all, the myths, the debunking. Won't take me long to do this.
Speaker 2:Not that they're in not big controversial issues. I just don't wanna give a lot of time to it, but I do wanna mention 4 of them. The first one is the reformation divided the church. I bet some of you thought that. Some of you may still think that.
Speaker 2:That the reformation was the cause of the division of the church. This is how it's often presented. Not only by Roman Catholics but by other historians as well. That the church prior to Luther and the reformation was kind of this seamless robe of Christ, unified, intact, monolithic, whole, entire. And the reformation came along and broke that all apart and we're left with the shards now of division because of the reformation.
Speaker 2:I want to say that's a myth. Why is it a myth? Because division was a part of the Christian story long before the reformation. We won't go back way into the early church where you already have schisms here and there and east and west, but go to 10:50. That's when a big schism took place.
Speaker 2:We call it the great schism between the church in the west, that is what we call the Roman Catholic church, it wasn't called Roman then, And the churches of the East centered in Constantinople. That was a very decisive split. It still is a split today, a 1000 years later. That didn't start with the reformation. And on top of that, there were all of these various dissenting groups.
Speaker 2:The Kathari or the Albigensians, they were called in southern France. This was a radical dualistic sect. We don't know a whole lot about them because they were persecuted and the estimate is between 200,000 a1000000 of them were killed. It's hard to get good figures for the 11th 12th century. But that was an enormous gaping wound within the bosom of the church, long before the Reformation.
Speaker 2:Then there were the spiritual Franciscans, there were the other dissenting groups, the Waldensians, the Lollards, the Hussites. And then something happened in the 14th century. We call it the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. When the papacy was actually removed from Rome and for a period of about 70 years, that was the length of time of the Babylonian captivity in ancient Babylon, the papacy was centered not in Italy, not at Rome, but in France, in Avignon, where you can still visit today and see this beautiful Palais des Popes, this Palace of the Popes where a number of different Popes lived during that period of time. And that was followed in turn by another split in the church because a number of people, including the great Catherine of Siena, petitioned the pope to go back to Rome.
Speaker 2:And she was successful. But then, there was also another pope elsewhere. So you had 2 popes, each claiming to be the one and only and sole and authentic vicar of Christ on earth. You had a divided allegiance. It's division.
Speaker 2:And then after that was more or less kind of papered over, for a period of time you had not 2 but 3 popes. A triple papal allegiance. Well, you get the drift I'm trying to say that there was division around long before Martin Luther was even born in 14/83. So the reformation did not divide the church. Division was not the result of the reformation, it was its point of departure.
Speaker 2:And in some ways, and this may be more a topic for discussion than I can comment on now, but in some ways, the reformation can be read and interpreted as a call to Christian unity, which it is undoubtedly, and I think incontrovertibly true to say, ended up with a deepening of the division that was there from the beginning. The call to unity was not successful in the 16th century. It remains today to be continued and extended, but that doesn't say anything about the intentionality behind this effort to heal the rift in the church. Okay. Point number 2.
Speaker 2:Luther did it alone. In the beginning of the reformation, darkness covered the face of the deep and God said, let Luther be and there was light. There's a little bit of a caricature but it's not too much of one because there is a way in which Luther is such a volcano of a personality. He just dominates his century. Nobody like him.
Speaker 2:Maybe the millennium of which he was a part. And so you can see how you're sort of drawn into this vortex of Lutheriana. Martin Luther was all about Martin Luther. However, that's really not true. It's a myth.
Speaker 2:Luther did not do it alone. It wasn't all about Martin Luther. In fact, if you go to Zurich today where I was a few weeks ago leading a reformation heritage tour, you go to the to the the door of the great church in the heart of Zurich called the Grossmunster, And there you will find the words, here in this church on January 1, 15 19, the reformation began. That's just as defensible a date for the beginning of the reformation as October the 31st, 15 17. Because on that date in that church a man named Horikswingli entered the pulpit and began to preach and teach the bible starting with the gospel of Matthew, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.
Speaker 2:Here on that day, the Reformation began. Luther did not do it all alone. Now, the 3rd myth I want to briefly debunk or at least say it's debunkable, is to say that it all started in 15/17. Well I've already kind of alluded to that and I'm going to come in a minute and talk about the reformation before the reformation. There was already a burgeoning call for reformation.
Speaker 2:Reformation was not a new word in the 16th century. It was in fact a very old word and a word that meant a lot of different things to different people and used in different ways politically, culturally, ecclesially, yes, spiritually. And so, it didn't all begin in 15/17. And then the 4th thing that needs to be said is the belief that the reformation was a German event. Well, yes, of course it was a German event.
Speaker 2:Martin Luther was a German. But one way of reading the reformation is to see it as a kind of historical unfolding of German destiny. And that everything that really mattered in the reformation took place between the Elba river in the east and the Rhine river in the west. It was a German event. And in some ways, you see this being unfolded in subsequent German history right down to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 20th century, claiming Luther, claiming the reformation as a German event.
Speaker 2:I don't have time to debunk that but it's very debunkable. Now the next myth that these four myths have to be, put in context and, I wanna move on to talk a little bit about the reformation before the reformation. I've already said it didn't all start in 15/17. And here I wanna say a little bit about the context of the reformation in terms of what we used to call back in the days when words meant something, western civilization. That's a term that's fallen on bad repute of lay of late, but there's certain great events that mark I think decisive moments in the history of the unfolding of the civilization, let us just say of the Latin Christian west.
Speaker 2:One of them in fact I think you can mark the history of western civilization, by 3 walls. The fall of 3 walls. The first wall, the wall of Rome. Rome fell. And the debate is fall in 410 when Alaric and his barbarian invaders came into Italy and conquered Rome and burned it to the ground and sent refugees scurrying everywhere.
Speaker 2:Saint Augustine wrote his city of God as a result of that event because these people fled from Rome to North Africa and began to talk about what was the meaning of this horrible cataclysmic event, the fall of Rome. In faraway Bethlehem, Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate Bible. And when he got word that Rome had fallen, he sat stupefied. He was working on his commentary on Ezekiel. He sat stupefied for 3 days.
Speaker 2:He couldn't say a thing. Rome had fallen. It was a big event. Some people say it fell a little bit later, 476. Whenever you mark it, that was a huge transitional moment from what we call antiquity, the classical past to what will be called later on the middle ages, medieval times.
Speaker 2:Now the most recent wall that fell happened in our own time more or less, about 30 years ago. It's the fall of the Berlin wall. That too marked a kind of cataclysmic shift in the consciousness, historical consciousness of the west, but there was a wall that fell during the time of the reformation. And we don't often hear a whole lot about it, but it's really important and it happened in 14/53 and the wall that fell that year was the wall around the city of Constantinople. For a 1000 years, the city of Constantinople, which we now call Istanbul, had stood as a bulwark against the armies of the Ottoman Turks and those who preceded them.
Speaker 2:But now after all of these assaults, Constantinople fell. And that introduces is something into the era of the Reformation that is with us still. And it is a kind of, let me call it civilizational conflict between Islam and Christianity. We still struggle with that today in all kinds of different ways. And the reformation lived with the threat of being invaded from the east by the forces of the Ottoman Turks.
Speaker 2:They advanced as far as the gates of Vienna in the 15 twenties. One of the very few things the Protestants and Catholics could agree on in the 16th century was that they both needed to be against the invading armies of the Ottoman Turks, and contributed monies and soldiers to that common front. We're still trying to unravel what all of that means for us, but the reformation took place just at the moment when that was becoming a pressing reality. So the reformation before the reformation happened at a moment, I would call it a moment of transition in the history of the Christian west. A time of transition when a great many of the universalizing forces that kind of held the west together for a 1000 years more or less, were beginning to feel stress and even crumble under the weight of these events.
Speaker 2:What were these 4 universalizing forces that were beginning to feel weight and stress? Well, one was monasticism. Don't forget Martin Luther was a monk. And you cannot understand the reformation without understanding monasticism as a very important pre history of that movement. But monasticism itself was confronted with all kinds of new forms, challenges from within and from without the papacy.
Speaker 2:It's true that there were great and grand claims made for papal autocracy in the late middle ages, culminating perhaps with Boniface the 8th in 1302, who claimed to be the sole absolute ruler of the world. And everyone must bow and kiss the foot of the pope it said, 1302. But the papacy itself was being challenged in all kinds of different ways. The papal States over which the Pope presided were themselves the subject of war and violence. So that one of the popes in Luther's life, Julius the second, was actually seen by Desiderius Erasmus as leading his troops in battle to defend the papal states.
Speaker 2:Erasmus and his party were brushed off the road by this army that came by and he looked up and he looked up, there's the pope, Julius the second. And when she said I wonder if he's not more the successor of Julius Caesar than he is Jesus Christ. And then the empire. There was such a thing as the holy Roman empire and the holy Roman empire was itself beginning to crumble and fall apart. It actually kind of hobbled along on one leg until the early 19th century, the time of Napoleon when it was finally buried and put to rest.
Speaker 2:But, already in the time of the reformation, the Holy Roman Empire, was confronted with something new in Western history, and that was the emergence of strong, contentious, competitive nation states, states like France, like Spain, like England with a king who said, this England is an empire. You remember him? Henry, the 8th. And then the 4th universalizing force that was under assault was the university. Yes, the university is.
Speaker 2:There's a reason why a reason why universities are called universities. There's supposed to be something universal about them. And, increasingly, the universities themselves were fragmented both in terms of the curriculum, what was taught, how they were financed, who went there. There are all kinds of pressures. And so in the midst of this, the reformation emerges.
Speaker 2:But I want to talk about the reformation before the reformation and mention at least just to mention some of these impulses toward reform. One of them was called curialism. Curialism, is a word the curia referring to the papal court, which was opposed by another counterbalancing force conciliarism. That's referring to church councils. There were a number of these church councils that took place in the late middle ages, And, the most important, perhaps is the one that ended the great schism I was talking about a while ago, When you have 2 and then 3 popes, that was the council of Constance in the early 15th century, but there were others and they were claiming to have a kind of role in authority over against the pope, over against, various forces within the church.
Speaker 2:And there were calls for reform that emerged from these councils. There was a phrase, the church needs reformation in head and in members, in capite et in membes. In head and in members, the head is the pope, the members is everybody else. And we need a thoroughgoing reformation, it was said. And many of these claims are going to be coming back again in the 16th century.
Speaker 2:There was a general council held on the very eve of the reformation, Started in 15 12 and ended in 15 17, the year of the 95 theses. And this was called the 5th Lateran Council. It was intended to be a reform council. And some people have speculated, you know, historians don't like to speculate. We just tell the facts.
Speaker 2:But, some people have speculated. What if the 5th letter on council on the eve of the reformation had really dealt with some of these issues, these abuses that were in the church. Maybe the reformation wouldn't have been necessary. I'm not gonna accept that thesis myself but it's it's widely held by some people. There were councils.
Speaker 2:Then of course, eventually there was a council, a reform council that took place within the Catholic, the Roman Catholic church that had a definitive kind of settlement in some ways for Roman Catholics, even to this day almost and that's the Council of Trent. But you have to understand these councils in the light of a preceding history. Let me mention, I've already referred to the Waldensians. These were a group of people from the valleys of the Alps in northern Italy and Switzerland, who were organized way back in the 12th century, 11 70 by a man named Peter Waldo or Valdez as they say in French or Italian. The poor men of Lyon, because they, like Saint Francis of Assisi, said we're gonna disband our property.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna own anything. We're gonna travel about and live the Vita Apostolica, the apostolic life, following Jesus Christ as closely as we can. We want to be like the apostles as they put it, nakedly following the naked Christ. Nakedly following the naked Christ. What do they mean by that?
Speaker 2:They meant not the Christ of glory and pop and circumstance. The Christ sitting on his throne, but the Christ who was a humble servant, who walked along the shores of Galilee with the poor and the needy, and who died on a cross penniless. They wanted to follow that Christ and there were a lot of people who joined up with the Waldensians all over Europe. They didn't stay in France and Italy. They spread, you find them in Hungary.
Speaker 2:You find them in Poland. You find them up in the Netherlands. Became a peripatetic movement of reform on the eve of the reformation. There were the Lollards in England, followers of John Wycliffe, so concerned that the Bible be translated into the English tongue. This was the age of Chaucer when this is happening.
Speaker 2:Form of middle English we call it. And these these for the most part were not learned scholars. They were some of them had a basic education but they began to translate sometimes in the holes of ships, sometimes in a grove of trees out in the countryside where they wouldn't be, over taken by the authorities because what they were doing was illegal. That had a great impact among the people over the years, these Wycliffeites. And the Hussites in Bohemia, a similar and dependent in some ways on on Wycliffe, a reform movement.
Speaker 2:Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. Hus picked up that theme and also taught a doctrine of grace and justification that wasn't exactly the same as Luther, but got much closer to a reformational way of thinking about it than you might have found elsewhere. And eventually, he ended up burned alive at the stake at the Council of Constance in 14/15. So there was a reformation before the reformation. And when Luther comes on the scene, he's able in some ways to re articulate with a different kind of accent, different kind of nuance.
Speaker 2:Many of these calls for reformation, they were already there. But having said all that, I'm not taking it back. Nonetheless, there was something different about Martin Luther. He isn't just repeating over and over again the same thing that had been said for 100 or a 1000 years in the church. Scholars debate this question and they debate it in terms, is the reformation a movement of innovation or is it a movement of continuity?
Speaker 2:And of course, the answer I think in some ways has to be yes. It's both and. Innovation, there are things that are different, that are new. And continuity, they didn't come out of the blue. They're building on things that were there before.
Speaker 2:Now, let me tell you the story of Martin Luther in about 5 minutes, or less or more. Who knows? He was born in 1483. He was the son of a miner, actually a businessman in the mines. He had become somewhat prosperous, his father, Hans Luther.
Speaker 2:His mother's name Margareta. She was from the city of Isenat, more wealthy than her husband by background. So he married up when he married Marguerite Luther and they had a number of children, 6 in all. One of whom was Martin Luther, very precocious. His father wanted him to go to, the University of Erfurt and to study law, at which he did in obedience to his father.
Speaker 2:He went to Erfurt and began to study law. He didn't study very long. We know he was a had a law book when he entered the monastery, which he gave away. And so that he had gotten that far to get his textbooks, but that was about it. About 6 months we think he studied law before he entered the monastery.
Speaker 2:Why did he enter the monastery? His father was against it. We don't know what his mother thought, but she was probably against it too. I mean, who would be for entering a monastery if you had a career in the law looking, down the road? Well, Luther was prompted to do so by what he considered to be a direct intervention by God himself.
Speaker 2:He was coming back to Erfurt from spring vacation at home and he was struck down in a thunderstorm at a little tiny tiny place in the road called Stauternheim. There's a little, stone there that marks the place where we think this happened. Anyway, he thought he was gonna be killed. He cries out, Saint Anna help me, I'll become a monk. Why did he call on Saint Anna?
Speaker 2:Who was she? Anybody know? Saint Anna was two things. She was the patron saint of the miners. And there's no doubt probably, Luther saw little statues of her in his home from the time he was a boy because his father was a miner.
Speaker 2:But she was something else too. She was the mother of the blessed virgin Mary which means she was Jesus' grandmother. And there was a very important cult, devotion to saint Anne in that part of Germany. So Luther cries saint Anna help me, I'll become a monk. Well, she did help him or somebody helped him.
Speaker 2:He survived. And everybody said, you don't have to fulfill this stupid vow you made in the thunderstorm. God will understand. You made it under duress. You don't have to do this.
Speaker 2:But Luther said, no, I must. I want to go through it. I've got to go through it because I made this promise to God, to saint Anna that I will do this. And he was concerned about something else too. The question swept over him.
Speaker 2:What if I died in that thunderstorm? What if my life had been snuffed out? How could I have been ready to stand before God? What would have happened to my soul? He was concerned about that.
Speaker 2:And so he enters the gates of the Augustinian Monastery. There were many monasteries around, but the one he chose was the strictest monastery in the Augustinian tradition, the order of the Augustinian Hermits. You can still go today. I was there a few weeks ago in Erfurt and see that building. It was not completely destroyed in World War 2, so you can actually go and see what they think was the cell assigned to Martin Luther when he was there.
Speaker 2:And he entered that monastery seeking to find a God who could forgive his sins. A God who would be gracious to him in the midst of his sin and waywardness. You know the story of Martin Luther in the monastery, how he tried this, that, and the other. He would fast. He would go without food days on in.
Speaker 2:He would lacerate his back with a whip and he was always trying to himself. Am I hungry enough? Am I cold enough? Have I suffered enough? How can God be pleased with me?
Speaker 2:Well, he had a very patient confessor. His name was Johann von Staupitz, a great Augustinian theologian, by the way. And he went to Staupitz with these doubts and questions and Staupitz said to him, man you're making this too hard. All you've got to do is just love God. Love God, said Luther.
Speaker 2:I can't stand him. I hate him. Well, that's blasphemy. So you hate God? And Staupus didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2:I don't understand this fellow, he says. Ishpuschaim nicht. I can't understand him. And Luther wondered, am I the only one in the world who's suffered like this? Not even Staupitz can understand me.
Speaker 2:Nobody understands me. What can I do? He was cast into the very abyss of desperation and despair. And then Staupitz said to him one day, they were sitting under a pear tree in the garden of the monastery, and Staupitz puts his arm around Luther and said, listen here, Brother Martin. I've been thinking about you.
Speaker 2:I think you ought to go over there to the university and get a PhD in biblical studies and become a professor in the seminary. Now here's a guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his mentor says, you need to become a theological professor. Oh no, said Stompitz. I can never do that. That would kill me.
Speaker 2:Well, said Staupitz, if it kills you that's okay. God has lots of things for clever people like you to do in heaven. You just go ahead and do it. You see, Luther was a monk and a monk takes 3 vows, a vow of obedience, a vow of chastity and a vow of poverty. That vow of obedience meant he had to do what he was told.
Speaker 2:And so under the command of his father, confessor, Johann von Staupitz, he begins to study the bible and actually enrolls in a program that eventually leads in 15/12 to his receiving a doctorate in the bible. That's a really important thing because it meant that Luther is now pouring over the text of scripture. He becomes what we might call today a scripture scholar. He studies the bible day and night. These texts that had puzzled and troubled him.
Speaker 2:For example, Psalm 22. Now you understand that's all monks do. So they just chant the Psalms over and over. We had chanted that psalm probably thousands of times. He knew it by heart.
Speaker 2:He'd say it backwards. But now, when he read that Psalm 22, he read it with a new intensity for the first time. It hit him what it really meant. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, so far from the words of my roaring.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, I cry to you by day and am not silent by night. I stretch out my hands. I am a worm and not a man. And Luther realized, you know, those were the very words Jesus had quoted on the cross. My God, my God, why?
Speaker 2:Why have you forsaken me? I thought I was the only one that moment of his sacrifice of himself on the cross so that he felt himself on my side, estranged from God, crying out in the darkness of the cross. The very question I have asked a 1,000 times, my God, my God, why? And then he came to this text in Romans chapter 1 and verse 17 where Paul is actually quoting an Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk. And the verse that is so famous that Luther quotes and refers to again and again was as about righteousness of God.
Speaker 2:The righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as is written, the righteous, the just one shall live by faith. A phrase that bothered him, he tells us about this in the autobiographical fragment he wrote in 1545 in the preface to the collection of his Latin works. That's the year before he died. And in that year, Martin Luther refers back, thinks back, reflects back on this early experience. And he says, the the phrase that bothered me in Romans 1 was that phrase, justitia Dei in Latin.
Speaker 2:The righteousness of God. We can easily translate that the justice of God, be an equally good translation of Justitia or Dioksune in Greek. Well that righteousness of God bothered Luther because he understood it to mean the righteousness by which God punishes the unrighteous, the sinner, me. It was this God that Luther could not love but rather hated, murmured against in his heart. He kept he uses an interesting phrase.
Speaker 2:Says he keep beating beating, pummeling, pummeling, hitting, hitting that verse. Do you ever read the bible that way? You don't just just reading it to be reading it, but you pummel it. You hit it. Well, Luther did that with this text.
Speaker 2:And finally, it came to him. He said in the midst of all of that struggle that the justitia day, the righteousness of God that Paul is talking about in Romans 117 is the righteousness by which God without compromising his holiness. It's important to say it that way. By which God without compromising his holiness declares the sinful one to be righteous because of Jesus Christ. Well, Luther said, once I got this, once this had dawned on me that that's what Paul is talking about, I felt as if the gates of paradise had opened and I had entered in.
Speaker 2:He said, I felt as if I'd gone from the darkest midnight into the brilliance of the noonday sun. He said, he used this term long before it became a kind of shibboleth for modern evangelicalism. I felt as if I were born again. Now all of this happened at a time, we don't know exactly when and there's huge, huge debates. Did this happen right Lots and lots of debates.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe we should not try to pin down one particular moment, but maybe we should distinguish a couple of experiences that loser had. 1, probably quite early in his time in the monastery as a student of Scripture, long before the indulgence controversy as he was studying the Bible and actually lecturing on the book of Romans. We have Luther's lecture notes that he gave to his classes. They met at 6 o'clock in the morning in Wittenberg on the book of Romans. And it was in the context of struggling and beating and pummeling on these texts that the gospel of justification by faith alone became clear to Martin Luther.
Speaker 2:So I think we should distinguish 2 separate experiences. 1, an initial, let us call it evangelical awakening, a born again moment. And another one, a little bit later after he had turned this over in his mind and he had thought about it and he digested it, And it's when he gave a, let's say, more mature, considered doctrine of justification by faith alone. Well, what was he what was he struggling with? What were the issues that he was finding in that book of Romans as he read it and studied it?
Speaker 2:Well, if you ever read Romans, I mean there's a lot of deep water in there, right? Luther was waiting right up to his neck in it. There's a lot in Romans. I want to mention just three things real quickly. 1 is sin, and another one is faith, and finally, humility.
Speaker 2:He grapple with these three concepts in his lectures on Romans. First of all, sin. Luther devotes many pages of his commentary on Romans, his lectures on Romans to the doctrine, the teaching, the theology, the experience of sin. What's unusual about that? That's what preachers have always talked about, right?
Speaker 2:Well, there was something new with Luther. The way in which sin had been portrayed in medieval scholastic theology coming from Saint Anselm, who was a great theologian of the Middle Ages, sometimes called the father of scholasticism. Saint Anselm had presented sin, original sin as the absence of original righteousness. Something's missing. Something's lacking.
Speaker 2:Something's not there. Sin is privation. It's not having something that you ought to have. And this is the theology Luther grew up in, but as he pummeled that text about Paul and sin, he came to see that sin is not merely the privation of the quality and the will. It's not merely the loss of the light.
Speaker 2:But it is in fact a raging torrent that misdirects my life and he uses a very graphic term. I'll give it to you in Latin, but you can understand it if you listen. Incervatus in say, curved in upon oneself. Luther invented that phrase, I think. Saint Augustine said something very similar when he describes sin as a curvature, a curvatus, but he was talking about being bent down to the earth.
Speaker 2:You sort of see Augustine's neoplatonism showing through there a little bit. With sin, it makes us look on the creaturely things. On the earth, we're bending down to the earth. Luther intensifies it. So it becomes a kind of incurvature not just to the earth, not just to the to the creaturely realm, but to my own heart.
Speaker 2:So for Martin Luther, this is really important because the number one big question for every human being in the world is this, to whom do you belong? What do you want? Who is your Lord? What do you trust? What are you willing to stake your life on?
Speaker 2:That was the question for Martin Luther And the fact that there is this kind of curvature into the self means that we need more than simply somebody to help us do better, make a new resolution, live a better life, moral rearmament, whatever. No, we need we need radical spiritual surgery. We need to be born again. Now, I don't want to belabor this point, but I will belabor it anyway for just a little bit, because it's so important to get this. If you if you if you get this, you get Luther, more or less.
Speaker 2:If you miss it, you'll never get Luther, or the reformation. Luther's deepened doctrine of the radicality of sin anticipated by more than 3 centuries, the deepest insights of modernity's 2 great prophets of atheism, Ludwig Freyrbach and Sigmund Freud. Luther anticipated Freyrbach's critique of religion when he observed that the root of all idolatry is human worship of God not as he is, but as we imagine and think him to be. That was Freibach's critique of religion. It is projection that we project onto God our own feelings of a human father of this that or the other, but it's a projection.
Speaker 2:And Luther understood this was the result of this curvature into the self. We think of God as we wish him to be. A God there was a book a few years ago titled a God who looks like me. Well, that's exactly what Freibach is saying and Luther realized this is where our temptations on vectungen take us. So that's where but let me mention Freud.
Speaker 2:Because Luther's insight derives not only from his critique of external religious practice but from his own tortured quest to find a gracious God. He was bothered by this verse in the Psalm, Psalm 1912. I don't know if you've ever read this or thought about it or not. Clear thou me from hidden faults. That's how it's sometimes translated into English.
Speaker 2:Psalm 1912. Hidden faults. Sometimes, surrendered in English, secret sins, secret faults. See part of Luther's problem in the back in the monastery of all of his confessing of his sins was his problem is not whether they're big sins or little ones. His problem was how I confessed to everyone.
Speaker 2:Is the slate completely clean? How can God be pleased with me? And so the fact that the our secret hidden things that are not even known to us, to ourselves, that lie deep be beef the level of consciousness, that have a way of twisting and distorting and perverting our life. It's one of the things Sigmund Freud recognized and Martin Luther recognized it long before Sigmund Freud. There is something about the human being that a bent toward destruction, a bent towards self absorption, the hidden secret sins that are not even made known to our conscious mind.
Speaker 2:What about the sins you commit in your sleep? Luther was worried about that. And because he had a radical doctrine of sin, he knew in the gospel, he discovered and found, and he knew there had to be a radical doctrine of divine grace. If you have a shallow view of sin, you don't need much grace, a little bit will do you. But if you have a really radical view of the human self as Luther did, as Freud did, as Wehrbach did, then you need a radical doctrine of grace to deal with it.
Speaker 2:And that was the genesis of justification by faith alone. That's really what it was about. I wanna say just word about faith because and about alone because faith for Luther is not just saying, yes, I agree with that. That's true. Belief.
Speaker 2:I mean, that there is belief. Okay? There's not denying. There are some things we have to believe if we're Christians. But the kind of faith Luther says we're justified by is not shaking your head.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right. I sent. I agree. No, it's back to that question. What are you trusting?
Speaker 2:To whom do you give your life in time and eternity? And that's the kind of the Latin word is fiducia. You trust it. You give your life to it. You rely upon it.
Speaker 2:Reliance, trust. You stake your eternity on it. Now, Luther added a word when he talked about justification by faith that is not in the Greek New Testament. I'm sorry, it's just not. He knew it wasn't, but he said we have to add this word in order to make clear that what we are teaching is the same thing Saint Paul taught in Romans and that word is alone.
Speaker 2:Justified by faith alone. Says, alone is necessary works of the law, but out of the sheer mercy and grace of God alone. Okay. Humility, and then we'll take a little break. Humility is in some ways in the theology out of which Luther is now swim in which he's now swimming, the predisposition required for the verdict of justification.
Speaker 2:I mean without humility, we think we still go on thinking we can justify ourselves by this that or the other. But when we recognize who we really are vis a vis God, we recognize our own waywardness and sinfulness and curvature into ourself, then we recognize in that way that all we can do is let loose of ourselves. That's the posture of humility. It was a it was a theme deeply woven into the mystical literature of the late middle ages, the German mysticism. Luther's first book, 15 16, the first book he ever published was an edition of what was called a theologier Deutsch.
Speaker 2:The German theology was German mystical theology. And one of the great themes in that theology is self abandonment. It's German word, Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit, hard to translate. Letting loose of yourself, letting go of yourself, and standing before God without anything to your credit, without a leg to stand on, as we say.
Speaker 2:In that moment of delicious despair, then you're ready and able, maybe for the first time in your life, to hear the message that, as Saint Paul put it, you're accepted in the beloved. And you no longer have to justify yourself because God has once and for all justified you to the merits of His son, Jesus Christ. Well, that's a little take at Luther. I didn't go much beyond him, did I? And remember I said, it's not all about Luther.
Speaker 2:So you need to ask me, what about the others? How did you mention them if it's not all about him? That's a fair question. So let's take a little little break. And, Joel, are you coming back or somebody coming back?
Speaker 2:Yeah.