Remembering Martin Luther

Martin Luther, like all individuals, struggled with the great questions of life.  His experience as a German youth, student, monk, scholar and, finally, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, shaped him into the man who has fascinated historians for hundreds of years.  He has been vilified and sainted; however, at the center of this Saxon rested the heart of a pastor who faced the darkness of his own spiritual struggle.  He found the only remedy for God's righteous judgment in the very promises of that righteous God.  These promises were unified in the Christ of the Gospel made available via faith alone.  From that fount of grace, Luther drank deeply, which gave him the only lasting hope he ever found.  This hope, realized through faith alone in the active obedience of Christ, became the central message he proclaimed to his beloved German people. 

The time period in which Luther lived was one of difficult circumstances in which death was a constant.  Whether it was the plague, old age, or infant mortality, death was all around Luther.  As a youth whose parents faithfully brought him to church, Luther learned of the righteousness of God.  This holy being required much from humanity, and the Mosaic Law loomed large before all flesh, including young Luther.  He struggled along with his family until his father, a miner, sent him to school.  Luther's greatest struggles came in the form of Christian piety.  With the Church's constant reminders of man's sinfulness and the Law's impossible demands, Luther found himself in a battle for acceptable piety.  This conflict only increased once he was terrified into becoming a monk.  On the road to Erfurt that fateful day, lightening nearly struck Luther, and he declared that he would become a monk if he did not die.

Rather than finding spiritual relief in the monastery, Luther was faced with an every increasing inability to perform satisfactorily the requirements of the Christian life.  He found himself inadequate as a monk and unacceptable before God.  Luther later maintained that he was seeking to stand before God on the basis of "active" righteousness, not the "passive" righteousness of faith in Christ alone.  Luther explained that apart from Christ, the world espouses "righteousness...of many kinds.  There is political righteousness, which the emperor, the princes of the world, philosophers, and lawyers consider.  There is also a ceremonial righteousness, which human traditions teach, as, for example, the traditions of the pope and other traditions".  None of these types of righteousness were able to give humanity the justification needed to come into God's holy presence.

Luther sought to keep God's Law in order to stand before the Holy One in righteousness; however, the more he sought to follow the rules, the more hopeless he became.  He commented regarding the Law's effect upon the conscience, "For although the Law is the best of all things in the world, it still cannot bring peace to a terrified conscience but makes it even sadder and drives it to despair.  For by the Law sin becomes exceedingly sinful".  Luther found himself suffering from the weakness of the human nature, and instead of finding hope in the obedience and piety for which he strove as a monk, he found misery and despair.  He explained "that in the terrors of conscience and in the danger of death we look at nothing except our own works, our worthiness, and the Law".  This weakness and misery, along with the taunts of the devil, were Luther's companions throughout much of his time in the monastery.

Luther saw the Church as not helping the monk or the common man in his quest for righteousness.  In his polemical work, Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther charged that the priests used the sacraments as a tool to manipulate the laity.  The priests demanded that the common people perform in certain ways in order to gain salvation and proclaimed that salvation was attainable only as passed on from God through the priests to the people.  Luther believed that "all the sacraments were instituted to feed our faith," and he maintained that one of the most heinous abuses of the Church was the withholding of the cup of Christ from the laity.  By exercising this power, the priests created a glaring division within the Church between those who played as if they were able to keep the Law through monastic rituals and those who were unable to keep the Law because of their common state in life.  Since the priests alone held the power to turn the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, they became the conduits for salvation.  No longer was God's gift of salvation free but ex opere operato (by the working of the works) with a man-centered work necessary for its efficacy.

Luther found himself hating God and living in a world of despair as a result of his sin.  It was only when he began to read and study the Old and New Testaments that he discovered the way to God as taught by the Scriptures.  While reading Paul's epistle to the Romans, Luther came across the seventeenth verse of chapter one, which reads, "For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, "BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH."  It was in the reading of this verse, where the Apostle Paul quotes Habakkuk chapter two verse four, that Luther had a revelation as to the nature of the righteousness necessary for a right standing before God.  The only way any person could be acceptable before God rested on an "alien" righteousness, a righteousness that was foreign to the sinner and received on the basis of faith alone.  Luther concluded, "For the righteousness, by which a person is worth of such salvation, of God, by which alone there are righteous people before God, is revealed in it, because formerly it was considered hidden and to consist in a person's own works.  But now it is ‘revealed,' because no one is righteous unless he believes, as it is written in the last chapter of Mark (16:16):  ‘He who believes,' from faith to faith, as it is written, Hab. 2:4: ‘The righteous, namely, in the eyes of God, shall live by faith, that is, only through complete belief in God will he be saved'".  Luther's grand realization freed him from the foolish presumption that justification comes by the works of fallen humanity.

This epiphany changed everything for Luther.  It was through this doctrinal filter, the filter of faith alone in Christ, that Luther began to view the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper as the signs of God's promise fulfilled in Christ.  Luther wrote of this new found confidence, "God is faithful in his promises, and I received his sign when I was baptized.  If God is for me, who can be against me?".  A God who demanded perfection to His standard and then provided every aspect of that standard through His perfectly righteous Son conquered Luther's doubts and fears.  Luther realized that "the afflicted conscience has no remedy against despair and eternal death except to take hold of the promise of grace offered in Christ, that is, this righteousness of faith, this passive or Christian righteousness, which says with confidence:  ‘I do not seek active righteousness.  I ought to have and perform it; but I declare that even if I did have it and perform it, I cannot trust in it or stand up before the judgment of God on the basis of it.  Thus I put myself beyond all active righteousness, all righteousness of my own or of the divine Law, and I embrace only that passive righteousness which is the righteousness of grace, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins."  In other words, this is the righteousness of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, which we do not perform but receive, which we do not have but accept, when God the Father grants it to us through Jesus Christ'".

            This new-found freedom, based solely upon the work of Christ alone, brought a liberty that Luther would proclaim for the rest of his life.  It was in this liberty that the fullness of the Christian life could be lived out upon this earth.  In Concerning Christian Liberty, Luther reflects on the implication of Christian liberty:  "And, to cast everything aside, even speculation, meditations, and whatever things can be performed by the exertions of the soul itself, are of no profit.  One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification, and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ."  Ironically, this liberty came not through the labors of monastic life or law keeping but in the promises of God freely applied through faith.  At the heart of this freedom and liberty rested the Father's ability to unite the sinner to Christ.  Luther taught that this freedom rested upon the Christian's passive acceptance of Christ's active obedience.  Furthermore, "where Christ is truly seen there must be full and perfect joy in the Lord and peace of heart, where the heart declares:  ‘Although I am a sinner according to the Law, judged by the righteousness of the Law, nevertheless I do not despair.  I do not die, because Christ lives who is my righteousness and my eternal and heavenly life'".  If justification and freedom could come by any other means, Luther would not have held Christ and His Word as the sine qua non of salvation.

Luther maintained that the Christian must never trust in his or her own ability to keep God's Law but must always trust in the perfect and complete work of Christ.  He emphasized that "if the doctrine of justification is lost, the whole of Christian doctrine is lost".  The Law fulfilled by Christ and received through faith by the sinner was the remedy for Luther's doubt-weary soul.  He saw the Medieval Church as leading people away from the only source of joy and freedom available to them.  As a man who had been manipulated by the Church's teachings founded upon fallen human wisdom instead of the Word and profoundly impacted by a difficult life laboring for justification before a Holy God, the pastor, theologian, and leader would not allow those under his care to continue in such error.  Luther saw this foundational error in the Church's teaching on salvation as not simply of a temporal nature but one in which eternity lay in the balance. 

                                            Rev. Timothy Gwin, Associate Pastor