“Martin Luther” by Eric Metaxas

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran. That meant that, when I was 12 and 13, I spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 4 to 5 p.m. during the school year in Pastor Nelson’s office with 10 to 15 other students my age, being taught from the Small Catechism of Martin Luther. The point of all of those classes was our confirmation, which happened during Sunday worship services in late May of our second year in catechism.

Part of confirmation was being quizzed by the pastor – in front of the entire church. It was always helpful to have a large confirmation class, because then you would get only one question at most. Mine was the smallest they’d ever had, before or since – four of us, and I was the only boy. That was a great relief to the three girls because they knew Pastor Nelson would ask me the hard questions, including the one every person in every class dreaded because the answer was so long – explaining the “Jesus section” of the Apostles Creed. They were right to be relieved. That was one of my questions. Somehow, I was confirmed in spite of my answers.

What I didn’t know then was that what I learned those two years in catechism became my theological framework. While I might change somewhat or adapt or add or subtract over the years, what I learned from Luther’s Small Catechism is still inside my head more than half a century later.

So it was with some curiosity and then considerable delight that I began to read Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas. I knew some of the basics about Luther (circa 1483-1546), and had even visited Erfurt in Germany, where he attended seminary. But the Luther I found on the pages of Metaxas’s book was not the myth but the living, breathing reality. In fact, I knew I was in good hands when the first thing Metaxas did was to enumerate and sweep away the myths that have grown up about Luther over the centuries.

No, he didn’t come from a family of peasants. No, he didn’t have a hardscrabble upbringing. No, there was no literal bolt of lightning that led him to become a monk (although there was a thunderstorm involved). No, his trip to Rome did not convince him of the need for a reformation. No, he didn’t literally hurl a pot of ink at the devil. No, the nun who eventually became his wife didn’t escape the convent hidden in an empty herring barrel. And no, he most likely did not nail his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517. That probably happened two weeks later. What he did do on Oct. 31 was to send a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, and it was that letter that officially began the process we came to know as the Reformation.

Perhaps the most critical thing Metaxas tells us about Luther is that he was a passionate reader of the Bible – and he was in a tiny minority, because most people, nobles, priests, archbishops, cardinals, and popes did not read the Bible. And it was his understanding of Scripture that framed the Reformation. The church’s practice of selling indulgences (allowing people to pay for time off in purgatory, for themselves and departed family members) was the flashpoint, but it was Luther’s knowledge of Scripture that propelled what could only be called the most significant revolution in human understanding and development of the last 500 years. And perhaps longer.

The church had become comfortable with the teachings of Aristotle. Luther, who also knew his Augustine, saw the inherent contradictions the church had either missed or glossed over.

The church taught that only the priests could drink the wine in communion. Luther made the startling claim, based on the Bible, that all people were equal in God’s eyes, and all people should partake of both the bread and the wine. That shocking idea of the equality of all people would find political expression more than 250 years later in a document called the Declaration of Independence.

Luther articulated the ideas of each person being free, subject to none, and each person being a servant, subject to all. He understood that anyone could understand Scripture – it wasn’t only church officials who could read and interpret. And to that point, as he stayed hidden in the castle of Wartburg while church and state looked high and low for him, he translated the New Testament into German. He did it in 11 weeks, and it was such a good translation, Metaxas says, that it is still used as the basis for new German translations today.

Eric Metaxas

Metaxas tells this story of Luther extraordinarily well; the man has a gift for storytelling. Never would I have imagined that I would become fascinated with the account of the theological debate between Luther and Johannes Eck at Leipzig in 1519, but I was – and that’s due entirely to how well the author tells the story.

Metaxas is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and the host of the Eric Metaxas radio show, broadcast daily to more than 120 cities. A Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Large for the King’s College in New York City, he is the author of numerous books, including Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (2007); Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2011); Miracles: What They Are, How They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (2015); 7 Men and Their Secrets of Greatness (2016); 7 Women and Their Secret of Greatness (2016); and If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty (2016).

Martin Luther is not only an outstanding biography. It is an incredible reminder of what one man accomplished, often in the face of great personal and professional peril. And it is a reminder that the Reformation was only something that happened 500 years ago, but something that is still happening, and needs to continue to happen, especially in our own hearts.

Related:

My review of If You Can Keep It by Eric Metaxas.

I Feel Like I Lost a Friend – Mark Sutherland on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas.

Top photograph: Memorial statue Martin Luther, Marktplatz, Lutherstadt Wittenberg in Germany, via Wikimedia Commons.

“October 31, 1517” by Martin Marty

This year is a big year for Martin Luther and the Reformation. On Oct. 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk and professor of theology in Wittenberg, Saxony (eastern Germany) nailed 95 doctrinal theses to the door of the castle church. He couldn’t have picked a more conspicuous place.

As Lutheran theologian Martin Marty says in the subtitle to his October 31, 1517, it was indeed a day that changed the world.

Numerous books have been written that detail the beginnings and history of the Protestant Reformation (and quite a few in the last year alone). But it’s not Marty’s intent to tell or retell that history. Instead, his essays briefly summarize that history, look at how the Reformation continues to affect us today, and consider the issues that remain in any significant move toward ecumenism.  

It’s familiar ground, but Marty brings a keen eye to it. He’s lived many of these issues in countless meetings that seek to heal the rift between Protestant and Catholic (and especially Lutheran and Catholic). He knows where strides have been made, and he knows how wide the remaining gaps are.

He writes much about penance and repentance. He meditates on justification and penance. He summarizes half a millennium of conflict. He looks at the sacraments. And he finally asks the question implied by the subtitle: did that one day change the world?

His answer: “That this monk, Martin Luther, acted in the context of long-term debates about whether God is gracious, and whether God’s grace changes the world, our world, leads to October 31, 1517, to be regarded as a day of decision.” (The book’s appendix contains all 95 of the theses for reading and reference.)

Martin Marty

Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He is the author and co-author of numerous works on religion, faith, and ecumenism, including Martin Luther; The Christian World: A Global History; Lutheran Questions Lutheran Answers; The Mystery of the Child; WhenFaiths Collide; and many others written over a 50+-year career.

Luther wasn’t the first, Marty says, to question how the church controlled the individual’s theological practices or beliefs; nor was he the last. But his was the one that struck the imagination and hearts of his time, and still strikes the imagination and hearts of our own.

Painting: Martin Luther in 1525 at age 42, by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Martin Luther Did What?

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran. Some of my earliest memories involve a Sunday School class at church, a small room (it was a small, new church) with jalousied windows. Our teacher was Miss Gail. Whether accurate or not, the memory that stands out is coloring scenes from Bible stories.

In seventh and eighth grades, it was catechism class, every Tuesday and Thursday after school. We were taught from Martin Luther’s small catechism. The worship service included communion, a reading from a Gospel and an epistle, hymns and a sermon. To this day there are certain hymns that I always think of as “Lutheran hymns,” because I sang them many, many times over the years at our church. Luther wrote a lot of them.

One might say that by the time I enrolled in college, I had been thoroughly “Lutheranized.” But it was during my freshman year that I discovered another Luther, one I had never heard about.

I should say up front that this was not the typical “Christian goes to college and falls under the influence of evil, pagan professors” story. I was in a small colloquium, mostly about history, literature and culture, and the professor assigned us a paper on the Reformation – specific topic of our choice. I decided to do some reading about Luther, and tripped over the Peasants Revolt of the 1524-1525. Peasants all over the German states and beyond, influenced by the overthrow of the Catholic Church in their areas, decided to attack another source of tyranny – the landowners and the nobles. At first, the revolt has been relatively mild, and Martin Luther openly supported it. Then it spread and turned more violent.

And Martin Luther, the Martin Luther who wrote the hymns I sang and the catechism I had studied, turned against the revolt and began preaching sermons with themes like “destroy the peasant vermin.” (The nobles obliged.) I also discovered he could use rather earthy language, something else we never heard in catechism class. I wrote a paper filled with youthful indignation. My professor told me I was being too hard on Luther.

One thing I didn’t understand was what Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses on the Wittenburg church door had triggered. It wasn’t only what would be decades of religious wars and turmoil. Whether cause or catalyst, Luther helped blow up how people understood the world. And it didn’t take long for Luther himself to challenged and “broken away from.” Groups and sects appeared all over Europe. Some of them, as Judith Shulevitz points out in The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, had very different notions about what constituted the Sabbath, what day it should be observed, and how it should be observed. (Luther got involved in this, too. Luther seems to have gotten himself involved in everything.)

In two chapters, “People of the Book” and “Scenes of Instruction,” Shulevitz recounts how the understanding of the Sabbath began to change and reshape itself in the 16^th century, the Puritans in the 17^th century (and it’s not what you might expect it to be), Rousseau and the Romantic poets in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the contribution made by Charles Dickens (who urged everyone to get physical exercise on Sundays), and on to writers like George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. The 19^th century saw something of a counter-reaction to the Rousseaus and the poets, largely under the influence of the evangelical movement, and the explosion of Sunday Schools (and how some of those evolved to non-religious activities).

It’s a fascinating account, but its importance is more than just satisfying intellectual curiosity. How we understand the Sabbath also relates to how we understand God. Seeing how the Sabbath has been influenced by culture also points to understanding our beliefs about faith and god have been influenced by culture.

I’m a Presbyterian today, and no longer casting aspersions on Luther’s character for urging the extermination of rebellious peasants. I believe I understand what was actually happening, and have set my youthful outrage to the side.

But then Shulevitz says John Calvin, the patron saint of Presbyterianism, had people burned at the stake in Geneva. Wait! Stop! Only the Catholics did that, and in Spain. You know, Cervantes and Don Quixote and the Inquisition and auto da fe and all that. Certainly the Presbyterians didn’t do that. Not John Calvin! Arrgghhhh!

We’re reading The Sabbath World over at The High Calling. To see the discussion about this week’s chapters, please visit the site (and don’t tell them about Calvin).