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

by Eric Metaxas

Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

In Luther’s day, far more emphasis was put on God as an eternal judge, one whose holiness was almost always offended by us, so that if we were especially lucky, we might find ourselves in purgatory instead of hell. But even if we found ourselves in purgatory, we might face a steep and painful climb of literally thousands or perhaps even millions of years until we were properly purged of our deep-rooted sinfulness.

When would it end? But Luther didn’t care. He was simply determined to keep digging until he got to the bottom of it all. But he never did. He did not yet understand that there really was no bottom, that we were sinful all the way down.

Staupitz, on more than one occasion, tried to shock Luther out of his downward spiral of navel-gazing. “God is not angry with you!” he once said. “You are angry with God! Don’t you know that God commands you to hope?” Another time he said, “Look here. If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes.”

His struggles instead usually had to do with his own doubts that he could ever be good, no matter how he tried, that he could ever be worthy of God’s mercy, grace, and salvation.

But for Luther, the more he tried to be holy, the more he saw that he couldn’t be. The more he cleaned, the more furniture he moved, the more dirt he saw.

Here was the central difficulty of late medieval Catholic theology: that one was brought to the place of understanding one’s sinfulness and one’s unworthiness before God but was not told what to do at that moment of understanding except to lie paralyzed with hopelessness, to confess and try harder. At some point, the sinner—and Luther chief among them—came to feel that he wholly deserved God’s fierce anger.

Staupitz saw that for Luther the Bible was not a book like Aristotle’s Ethics or like a volume of Livy or Cicero. It was something entirely apart from every book in the world. It was the living Word of God and therefore could not be read like any other book. It was inspired by God, and when one read it, one must do so in such a way—with such closeness and intimacy—that one fully intended to feel and smell the breezes of heaven. If one missed this aspect, one missed the whole point.

Luther was hunting for the truth itself about who we are and who God is and what he really expects of us and how we can reconcile the infinite breach between heaven and earth, between God and man, between peace and agony.

God reached down not halfway to meet us in our vileness but all the way down, to the foul dregs of our broken humanity. And this holy and loving God dared to touch our lifeless and rotting essence and in doing so underscored that this is the truth about us. In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting. 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. If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our sins and are eternally dead. So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition.

There all was gilt, but here in Wittenberg it was all Scheisse. 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. That was cheap grace, which was to say it was a truly satanic counterfeit. 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.

he explained to his flock that the paper they purchased meant nothing if they were not genuinely contrite for any sins they had committed. And if they were genuinely contrite, the paper still meant nothing, because God forgave their sins anyway.

If ever there was a moment where it can be said the modern world was born, and where the future itself was born, surely it was in that room on April 18 at Worms. There can be no question that what happened that day unequivocally led to all manner of things in the future, among them the events 254 years and one day later, on April 19, 1775, when the troops at Lexington and Concord took a stand for liberty against tyranny.

He was asserting the freedom of the individual to do as God pleased—if and when the church or the state attempted to abrogate that freedom. Luther was asserting the modern idea of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience for the first time in history.

The idea that the emperor had issued this edict against Luther helps us see how the medieval world, where church and state essentially formed a theocracy of sorts, was very much like a Muslim caliphate. We see that where the church and the state are essentially one, there can be no genuine—or “free”—church, and although Luther did not have what we think of as the separation of church and state on his mind, nor religious liberty, what he was doing nonetheless amounted to the same thing. To free the Gospel—to free freedom—meant tearing it out of the world and letting it stand alone.