Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

by Eric Metaxas

It was a plain fact that no one was really entrusted with reading the Bible by itself, so that monks and even priests and theologians were typically kept at one or more removes from it.

He wanted real answers, and he wanted to read the Bible in such a way that he could get those answers,

he now began to suspect that some of the official answers being peddled might be as much obfuscation as anything else.

Surely a sixteen-hundred-mile round-trip journey on foot to Rome and back would be helpful in distracting young Martin from his excruciating confessional navel-gazing.

The doctrine that the church possessed the authority to make these decisions about who suffered in purgatory and for precisely how long was believed to be absolutely clear.

“What if it’s not true?”

But lest we wonder if all of this was Luther’s perspective alone, we should remember that even the great Erasmus of Rotterdam had visited Rome five years earlier and experienced similar horrors.

To read legalistically and simplistically was to miss God himself.

Therefore, one must not merely see what the devil could see, which is to say the words on a page, but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired it, which was in the words and around them too.

to truly read the Word of God and not merely the words of God, one required revelation and the anointing of God himself, which itself previously required a prayerful and contrite attitude.

To read the Word of God in any other way was to miss the spiritual truth and therefore to miss the main point of reading it at all.

he and other monks had prayed the Psalms in their daily offices, sometimes reciting them with little more heartfelt understanding than a mynah bird or parrot might have done.

not only was wrong, but actually hardened the heart against the deeper meaning.

“impious prelates.”5 So to battle against them, one would suffer too, and to suffer for this was a noble honor.

many church officials in Rome were inclined to see Luther as yet one more troublemaking German with damnable Humanist sympathies.

I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology which deals chiefly with the divine mysteries unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.

Erasmus harshly criticized the trafficking in relics, many of which he averred were not the real thing.

it was not the indulgences that needed fixing but the deeper theological errors that had led to the practice of indulgences.

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience.

I did not love . . . yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.

And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.”

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “Righteousness of God.”

God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung.

We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filth and require total redemption.

So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition.

But the shit in its honesty as shit was very golden when compared to the pretense and artifice of Roman gold, which itself was indeed as shit when compared to the infinite worth of God’s grace.

True grace was concealed in the honesty—in the unadorned shit—of this broken world, and the devil’s own shit was concealed in the pope’s glittering gold.

So “in this life” is clarified as “in this shithouse,” meaning in this execrable, this abominably shitty, life.6

So the point is made. C. S. Lewis more elegantly said that life in this world was merely “the Shadowlands,” but Luther predictably phrases it much more bluntly and earthily.

Luther hadn’t the slightest inkling of these things when he wrote and posted his theses, nor when he wrote and sent his letter to Albrecht of Mainz.

Except for the actions of Archbishop Albrecht and Tetzel, the whole thing might have fizzled like an errant spark landing on damp ground.

It was as though a hastily written e-mail to a friend were inadvertently forwarded to a major news organization

this was a war, more than anything, about authority.

The conclusion to this peppery opus was a swift kick to the point: “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the matter of indulgences is a heretic.”

Prierias had simplistically declared things that the church had never before declared.

opened his own Bible and drank a goodly draught therefrom. Several times he was seen to do this, however, and was gravely scolded. After all, who did this saucy fellow think he was to read a Bible in church?

The elegant evil of the Medici popes sometimes makes Machiavelli himself come across like a gap-toothed rube.

during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), Cajetan played a leading role and was the one to bring about a decree claiming that the pope’s authority was indeed superior to that of church councils.

If the pope had declared indulgences to be doctrinally sound, they were then by definition doctrinally sound. So Luther must simply recant that he had not accepted the pope’s unquestioned authority.

This was the heresy, of course, and any fool could see that.

the pope and Rome indeed claimed that the pope had more authority than any council, so Luther’s calling for a church council would have been intentionally incendiary.

Luther had denied that the “treasury of the church” contained the “merits of Christ and the saints,” dealt with the idea that the good works of Christ and the saints not only had been sufficient to earn them their own salvation but had risen far beyond that, so that all of the “extra” merits their many good works had earned were put in the good keeping of the church’s “treasury.”

Thus the church—which had been given the keys to that treasury, per Matthew 16:19—could open the vault at any time and give portions of this treasure to whomever it pleased.

So when someone paid for an indulgence, the church was deputized by Christ to trade that payment for ...

...a bit of heavenly treasure.

But Luther said that this was not possible, because even if the priest were granting absolution, the person must in his heart have faith, else the priest’s absolution was an empty religious act.

It was the faith that mattered more than the priest’s actions.

Luther was implying that the priest was really only ratifying what had already taken place between the believer and God by faith.

It is another example of Luther’s faith that despite having no idea what lay ahead for him, he would do the noble thing and trust in God.

Deserted, let us follow the deserted Christ.9

He seems very clearly to have made the distinction in his mind between the true church of God and that vast bureaucratic political entity centered in Rome called the church.