Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Mensch Luther: Wittenberg 1517 to Grand View 2017


This lecture was delivered at the October 2017 faculty and staff colloquium at Grand View University, a monthly forum where colleagues present research for the wider community. 

One of the problems with understanding Martin Luther and the Reformation is how much of what we think we know has been handed on without really engaging the Reformer himself. This week’s issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article about Luther by Joan Acocella, a much-lauded dance critic and a regular book reviewer for the magazine. As happy as I am to see an article about my home boy, it was all I could do to get through it. Last summer our colleague Mark Mattes and I were privileged to join a few hundred others at the International Luther Congress in Wittenberg, Germany, where the world's best-known Luther and Reformation scholars presented consistently lively and reliable work that tended carefully to Luther's preaching and teaching, and especially to his context and nuanced theology. In contrast, Acocella's facile cherry-picking of secondary sources neglected the first task of the historian, which is to listen to the primary sources on their own terms. A Nick Little illustration accompanying the article showing a pixilated Luther, hammer and Ninety-Five Theses in hand, was an apt match for the article's content, which sent Luther through a twenty-first century lens that created a distorted picture of the man that looked little like the Luther found in his own words.
This, of course, is nothing new. Luther biographers tend to create Luther in their own image, producing work that reflects the author's own predilections and suspicions as much as or more than the Wittenberg friar's. As someone who dealt with the multiple theological and political issues descending on him and who never developed a systematic rendering of his ideas like Aquinas before him or Calvin after him, Luther didn't make it easy for biographers and historians. One can almost hear the reformer sigh when he said that, after his death, people would make of him what they will. And we certainly have.
It already happened during Luther’s lifetime with woodcuts like this one of Luther as the devil’s instrument. In more recent times Luther has been forced through the 19th and 20th century historical-critical meat grinder and critiqued for an approach to the Bible that doesn’t square with our own enlightened and less-superstitious views. Luther’s scurrilous writings against the Jews (something no serious scholar or theologian I know today will excuse him for) have been named a cause of the Holocaust and he himself has become the ur-racist. Tolerant liberals, among whom I usually claim a spot, have regarded him as an intolerant hot-head. And if criticism of Luther isn’t your bent, then you’ve probably been handed the great hero and prophet Luther who held high the standard of truth against the papal antichrist, the Luther of pre-Vatican II Lutheran tirades against Roman tyranny.
When you mention Luther, most people, if they know anything at all about him, will be able to link him to the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the All Saints Church, which served as the worship place for the Saxon prince’s castle and for the recently founded University of Wittenberg. Beyond that event 500 years ago next week, they might be able to tell you that the Theses exploded across Europe and led to an irreparable breach in western Christianity. Since this is the anniversary year, and since the Theses are the usual entry point into Luther’s life and thought, let’s use them as a way to understand him and, in the end, find something in Luther that bears consequences for our day-to-day lives at Grand View.
The first thing you need to know about Luther nailing the Theses on the door of the Castle Church is that it may not have happened. We do know with certainty that Luther had them printed in Latin and sent them with a cover letter to the Archbishop of Mainz who had authority over the nearby territory the indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel was working in. But we have no primary evidence that Luther grabbed a hammer and nails, left his desk at the Augustinian monastery, walked the quarter mile up Collegienstraße, and posted the Theses. Because neither Luther nor anyone else at the time recorded the event (sorry, no Facebook live streaming in early modern Europe), many scholars will tell you it’s all part of the mythology that arose around the hero Luther. But it’s an argument from silence. You can’t say something didn’t happen, because you don’t have a record of it.
In fact, we know that the church door did indeed serve as the 16th century version of myView for his university, the city, and the princely court. The Theses were the announcement of Luther’s intention to hold a scholarly disputation – a debate on the Ninety-Five statements – at the University. And we know that these sorts of debates were held on a regular basis (frequently at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning), and that they would have been announced in a place where all would be notified. There’s no reason to think that this particular disputation would have been treated any differently. What I would argue with in the story, though, is that he used hammer and nails. Scholars I’ve read lately argue convincingly that Luther would have used wax or paste to post his document. It’s so much better for doors not to be riddled with nail holes.
The usual way the story of the posting of the Theses proceeds is that Luther had a sudden revelation while sitting on the cloaca (that would be an inhouse version of an outhouse) and rushed to put quill to paper, because he wanted to wanted to slap the Roman church in the face. But Luther was a much more careful biblical scholar than that, not nearly the rash zealot he’s made out to be. Five years before the Theses, Luther was awarded his doctorate by being shown a Bible, being given a biretta (the doctoral cap), and a gold ring. He had to swear an oath to preach and teach the truth and, basically, to rat out anyone who didn’t. He took his oath seriously, and over the following years did his best to open his material for his students. He was, by all accounts, a hugely popular teacher, with students crowding his classroom (including, according to Shakespeare, a young melancholy prince from Denmark named Hamlet).
In his own university training Luther learned the humanist catch phrase “ad fontes” or “to the sources, and saw classical texts like the ancient church fathers and, especially his own sacred text in the Christian scriptures as more authoritative than Roman canon law. As he delved into the Bible to prepare his lectures, he came up against the church’s demand of facete quod in te est (do what is within you to do). It was part of the particulate that formed when the catalyst of Aristotle’s idea of ethical perfectibility mixed with medieval theology in the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas, for instance. Luther’s reading of St. Paul helped him see that the demand to perform sufficient good works was an impossible requirement.
So the first shift we see in his thinking is anthropological: Human beings cannot achieve what God demands by their own effort or understanding. By October 31, 1517, Luther had already written plenty against the prevailing approach. In May he wrote Johannes Lang, his friend from his days as a university student, that “Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne, and his final doom is only a matter of time.”[1] And in September he wrote the “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,”[2] which should have been explosive but ended up as a smoke bomb.
For Luther, the question of indulgences, though, was more than a mere academic theological question. It was a matter of pastoral care. He saw the sale of indulgences as a creating a massive religious front where people were coerced into an activity that did more damage than good. He was an ordained priest who knew his vocation included the care of his people. If Johann Tetzel were to bring to Saxony his fundraising campaign for rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and to repay the debts the Archbishop of Mainz owed to the Fugger banking family, then it was no different from one of the waves of the black plague that rolled across Europe to take everyone it could. For Luther, the Ninety-Five Theses were a prophylactic measure designed to prevent the sickness from entering into his own prince’s territory.
If you think the response from both Luther’s supporters and antagonists was a wild fire racing across the Holy Roman Empire, it, too is more nuanced. Printers, who in that day didn’t have to contend with copyright laws, were free to print whatever they thought would be profitable. Before Gutenberg and the printing press, the spread would have moved at the speed of one copyist writing a letter at a time. But movable type turned something like the Ninety-Five Theses into Flugschriften (flying writings). But the Theses were in Latin, so only the literate nobility or educated theologians would have had access or understood the technicalities of Luther’s argument. But a few months later, Luther prepared the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, where he made the same points, this time in German, and with a winsomeness and accessibility that the Theses lacked. Timothy Wengert, who’s become one of the best Reformation historians on this continent, says,
this tract more than any other catapulted Luther into the public eye and made him a best-selling author overnight. Here Luther’s clear explanations of complicated theological arguments and his edgy style, in which he repeatedly attacked scholastic theologians and their “opinions,” made a splash with the German reading public.[3]
Luther reshaped the Theses into this later sermon because, from the start, he saw this as a pastoral issue that created troubled consciences and stole money from the pockets of people who could ill afford an indulgence. In essence the church itself had broken the Seventh Commandment because it gave no just return on the payments of the pious. The church took their money, promising a Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free card but gave them a worthless fill-in-the-blanks form instead. Luther was certain that the church had more than empty promises to give and, in abiding by his doctoral oath, sought to deliver the truth.
The goal here was freedom for those troubled consciences, which Luther saw as a person’s estimation of their standing before other people and, mostly, before God. If Paul was right in Galatians 5:1 when he said, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” then a practice like indulgences forced people into captivity and worked counter to office of the keys Christ gave the church, that is, its vocation of freeing people and quelling those consciences.
By the time Luther would write On the Freedom of a Christian three years later, he’d long left the question of indulgences but had advanced to his second move: If human beings can’t improve themselves sufficiently, the righteousness God requires must come another way. For Luther it could only arrive through language that delivered what it said, in this case the gospel proclamation about Jesus Christ that, in its declaration, actually gave the benefits God’s word said Christ came to bestow: forgiveness, life, freedom, and salvation.
No matter the issue that cropped up, no matter his opponents on the left or on the right, in Rome or among the radical reformers, now it became a categorical issue. There’s Christ, on the one hand, who saves, and everything else, on the other hand, that does not. Both in Luther’s day and in ours, he would counter anything from that everything-else category that was presented itself as offering what it had no ability to deliver on. In October 1517 it was indulgences. Later it was whether becoming a professional religious person could advance your cause with God. Another time it was a question of whether Christians could be soldiers. Elsewhere it was what made for a blessed death. And everywhere it was what freedom such faith opened for people struggling daily to get things right, in the world, to be sure, but also in the quiddities of daily life and the web of relationships we operate in.
As a university of the Lutheran church, we can understand Grand View’s identity as grounded in these three very Luther-ly things: truth, freedom, and vocation. First, the Reformation and the role Luther played in it arose from scholarship. Lutherans have been well aware of our roots at the University of Wittenberg. If Luther and his fellow humanists sought out the most reliable sources – ad fontes – then our own careful scholarship is an extension of that rich tradition. Luther swore fealty to the truth, not simply to a set of facts, but really to a way of being, a stance vis a vis the world. To seek the truth is to be dissatisfied with the same-old same-old, to understand what makes each of us tick, to seek solutions for all the little people whose problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.[4]
So a Lutheran university goes after the truth: From the sub-atomic depths of quantum physics to gravity waves and dark matter. From the meaning of justice in “criminal justice” to seeking the connection between health and a nurse’s technique of applying care. From how a noble goal of standard American English can mitigate against inclusion to how John Donne’s poems speak to the core of human experience and how deeply racism has permeated American culture. And in my own discipline, from the ways religion, wittingly or not, can widen the divide between peoples and how faith frees people to cross those chasms.
Second, if Luther’s actions to counter the lucrative indulgence market arose from a desire to free people from binding restrictions, then there’s a direct line from Wittenberg in 1517 to Grand View in 2017 and our entire history as a “school for life” where we offer an education that frees and advances the lives of all – not just the privileged few who can purchase access to the levers of change. Our Danish Lutheran founders were not merely genteel adherents to N.F.S. Grundtvig’s educational philosophy, they also knew his theology. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses is a move was paralleled by Grundtvig’s approach 300 years later. The great founder of the modern Danish church and culture argued that we are humans first and Christians second.
What he meant was that human needs are always present, and Christian proclamation comes to address those needs. In our particular student population, those human needs and the binding burdens our students face are astounding. Our new GVCares grant is proof of that. But the freedom longed for goes beyond financial exigencies. It reaches out from our individual yearning to escape conflict, uncertainty, and violence and discover peace, joy, and even liberty from ourselves and our own history.
Finally, Luther’s moves 500 years ago stemmed from his own understanding of his vocation. His view was nothing like Frederic Buechner’s definition of vocation as the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. Luther wouldn’t tolerate the self-focused way of hearing Buechner that too often happens in our discussions of vocation. For Luther, vocation was always seen through the lens of Christ’s cross. There, he saw selflessness so radical that God’s kenosis, that is, God’s emptying of God’s very being, suffered utter devastation that matched what another Dane, Søren Kirkegaard called our “sickness unto death.” For Luther, vocation was never something that made a person feel fulfilled or affirmed their gifts and talents. Instead, for him giving was dying, pure and simple.
We have to wonder what could possibly lead a person to desire such a life of emptying oneself for others. For Luther it was the enormity of what Christ had done for him. It was a truth and a freedom that so gripped him that he risked the ire of the greatest religious power of his age and of the entire Holy Roman Empire. It was a promise that delivered the goods with such certainty that nothing could separate him from the love of God that allowed him, in some later accounts of the Diet of Worms, to say, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
This is what makes Grand View part of Lutheranism’s mission in the world. It’s the assertion that exploration of truth, freedom, and vocation – especially in a context where matters of faith are part of the mix – are an essential part both of being human and of being Christian. We ought to see that as something that doesn’t install a ceiling that limits thought, the sharing of ideas, or the exploration of any discipline, but is instead an open door that values these things. We’re not a Lutheran university because we demand that that everyone in this community of learning adhere to a religious party line, but because our own values find their genetic imprint already laid out from the Reformation’s initial spark five hundred years ago this month. Five hundred years of that business is worth celebrating.





[1] LW 48:42.
[2] LW 31: 3ff.
[3] Timothy J. Wengert, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 37ff.
[4] Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942.

No comments: