This episode of CS is titled, Martin’s List.
In the summer of 1520 a document bearing an impressive seal circulated throughout Germany in search of a remote figure. It began, “Arise, O Lord, and judge Your cause.
This episode of CS is titled, Martin’s List.
In the summer of 1520 a document bearing an impressive seal circulated throughout Germany in search of a remote figure. It began, “Arise, O Lord, and judge Your cause. A wild boar has invaded Your vineyard.”
The document was what’s called a papal bull—named after that impressive seal, or bulla bearing the Pope’s insignia. It took 3 months to reach the wild boar it referred to, a German monk named Martin Luther who’d created quite a stir in Germany. But well before it arrived in Wittenberg where Luther taught, he knew its contents. 41 of the things he’d been announcing were condemned as à “heretical, scandalous, false, and offensive to pious ears; seducing simple minds & repugnant to Catholic truth.” The papal bull called on Luther to repent and publicly repudiate his errors or face dreadful consequences.
Luther received his copy on the 10th of October. At the end of his 60-day grace period, he led a crowd of eager students outside Wittenberg and burned copies of the Canon Law and works of several medieval theologians. Included in the paper that fed the flames was a copy of the bull condemning him. That was his answer. He said, “They’ve burned my books. So I burn theirs.” That fire outside Wittenberg in December of 1520 was a fitting symbol of the defiance toward the Roman Church raging throughout Germany.
Born in 1483 at Eisleben in Saxony to a miner, Luther attended school at Magdeburg under the Brethren of the Common Life. He then went to university at Erfurt where he learned Greek, graduating w/an MA in 1505. His plan was to become a lawyer, but the story goes that one day he was caught in a thunderstorm; a bolt of lightning knocking him to the ground. Terrified he cried out to the patron saint of miners: “St. Anne, save me! And I’ll become a monk.” To his parents’ dismay, Luther kept the vow. 2 weeks later he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt where he became a dedicated brother. Some years later he said about his being a monk, “I kept the rule so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.” Luther pushed his body to health–cracking rigors of austerity. He sometimes engaged in a total fast, meaning no food OR water, for 3 days and slept without a blanket in winter.
In the Erfurt monastery he did further theological study & was made a priest in 1507. When he transferred to Wittenberg in 1508 he began teaching moral theology, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and the Scriptures. A visit to Rome on Augustinian business in 1510 opened Luther’s eyes to the corruption so prevalent among the higher clergy there. When he returned to Wittenberg in 1512 he earned his Doctorate in Theology & was appointed to the Chair of Biblical studies which he occupied for the rest of his life.
But all throughout this time, Luther was consumed by guilt & the sense his sinfulness. While the majesty & glory of God was inspiring to most, it tormented Luther because he saw himself as alienated from a holy God.
While performing his first Mass, Luther later reported, “I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, ‘Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin, à and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God?’” No amount of penance, nor counsel from his peers could still Luther’s conviction he was a miserable, doomed sinner. Although his confessor counseled him to love God, Luther one day burst out, “Love God? I do not love Him – I hate him!”
Luther found the love he sought in studying the Word of God. Assigned to the chair of biblical studies at the recently established Wittenberg University, he became fascinated with the words of Christ from the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Luther found an odd solace in the idea that that Christ was forsaken. Luther was a sinner. Christ wasn’t. The answer had to lie in Christ’s identification with sinful humans. Luther began to ponder the possibility that Jesus endured estrangement from God for us.
A new and revolutionary picture of God began to develop in Luther’s restless soul. Finally, in 1515 while pondering Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Luther came upon the words of 1:17 “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.”
This was the key that turned the lock & opened the door to everything else that would follow. He said, “Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which 