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.”
And in September he wrote the “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,”
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.
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.
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.
