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

by Eric Metaxas

The church believed that Jesus had given “the keys of the kingdom” to Peter, whom it believed to be the first pope, and that those keys had been transferred from pope to pope, down through the ages, so that the church and the pope had these keys, which gave them access and authority to dip into that treasury of merits and make a withdrawal whenever they deemed it necessary. Which of course brings us to the thorny subject of indulgences.

But at some point, the church came up with the idea of indulgences, and if someone bought an indulgence from the church, it was just like doing a good work and could be counted toward one’s penance.

This tremendous problem and temptation got much worse in 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV realized that the market for indulgences needn’t be confined to those millions who were alive and sinning but could extend to those multiplied millions who had already left the land of the living and were languishing in purgatory.

It was as if Sixtus had discovered a gleaming vein of gold as long and wide as the Tiber. He had discovered a monstrously large untapped market—the suffering dead.

The medieval church’s penal system led people to believe that they could earn their way to heaven, and that they therefore must try as hard as possible to do so.

So why did he feel he was making no progress? He confessed and confessed, and yet he knew that if he was honest, there were always some bad thoughts that he had forgotten to confess.

The bottom line was that he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere and it was all torturing him.

Luther was obsessive about confession. In fact, it eventually got to the point that his confessor—who ended up being Staupitz—began to get fed up with his maddeningly overscrupulous confessee.

“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.”

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.

So here we have manuscript proof that it was the great Augustine—who was as foundational and revered a church thinker as any who ever lived—who first helped Luther begin to see things that would lead him to challenge the church of his own day. And one of these things was the idea that human truth had limits and that by itself it could never reach heaven.

So Luther was puzzled. Why had the church swallowed Aristotle’s thinking along these lines for so many centuries and baptized human philosophy as though it could do what it plainly could not? Answering this very important question would occupy Luther for some time to come.

the study of the Bible per se was simply unheard of in his early years as a monk.

This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself. What propelled him in this intensive reading, we cannot know for sure, but it seems undeniable that his personal struggles—his Anfechtungen—formed the lion’s share of his obsession. In a word—and of course in the Word—Luther was desperately searching for the answer to his bitter difficulties,

Strangely enough, once a novice actually became a monk, he was no longer allowed to keep his Bible. At that point, he must limit himself to only reading scholarly books, and those while in his cell.

According to this entrenched academic approach, the four ways of seeing the text were: first in its literal sense; second in its topological; third in its allegorical; and fourth in its anagogic.

For example, during his time in the Erfurt monastery, Luther once happened upon the sermons of Jan Hus. It is curious to think the sermons of this infamous heretic were available for monks to read, but apparently they were and Luther read them.

Luther was mystified and disturbed as to why Hus had been denounced as a heretic and burned.

The Erfurt monastery was among the Observant group. As vicar-general of the entire order, Staupitz insisted that the Erfurt monastery—and the eighteen other Observant monasteries—should come under his authority and lose its relative independence.

One of Luther’s first stops on the long journey was the city of Nuremberg, 140 miles south of Erfurt. There Luther beheld the recently completed Männleinlaufen, an impressive mechanical clock at the top of the fourteenth-century Frauenkirche. Luther must have been stunned to look at this darling and marvel of the clockmaker’s art.

Luther felt that the impressiveness of the structure sacrificed the spiritual lives of the people who would come there.

It has been said that Luther went right through Italy in the middle of the Renaissance but somehow missed it.

Anfechtungen

Forsaken of God

Everywhere Luther looked, he was horrified. Later he referred to “the chaos, the filth, and the practice of locals who urinated in public and openly patronized prostitutes.”

“With my own ears,” Erasmus said, “I heard the most loathsome blasphemies against Christ and His apostles. Many acquaintances of mine have heard priests of the curia uttering disgusting words so loudly, even during mass, that all around them could hear it.”

But today we know how she was able to say this, because the woman who styled herself Anna Laminit, the dedicated ascetic, was a thoroughgoing fraud. The details of her life are worth dilating upon briefly, because they illustrate the absurd end of the very kind of otherworldly asceticism that Luther sought but that he would in the end reject with everything in him.

In any case, compared with Erfurt, Wittenberg was a pathetic, hickish backwater. If Luther and Lang loved Staupitz that much, they could now be near him full-time.

Now, nearly twenty-nine, he was a far cry from the stout figure we see in Cranach’s later paintings. Though it may be hard for us to imagine Martin Luther as bony and frail, at this time in his life he was indisputably more ibex than ox. In fact, fully seven years after this conversation—at the 1519 Leipzig disputation—he was described by an observer as being so thin one could almost see his bones through his skin.

For the first two years at Wittenberg, Luther would teach on the Psalms. Two years later, he would teach on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and two years after that he would teach on the book of Galatians.

Greek-language savant called Philip Schwartzerdt, later to be known as Melanchthon, because the Humanistic tradition of Latinizing or Grecizing one’s name would turn the German words Schwarz (black) and Erde (earth) into the Greek Melanchthon.

At some point on the trip, his ship dropped anchor off the Greek island of Rhodes, and it was on his visit to its shores that Frederick discovered and obtained an extremely important relic. It was the thumb of Jesus’s reputed grandmother, Saint Anne, which had some years before hitched a ride from Jerusalem to this Greek island and which would now hitch a second ride to its final destination at Frederick’s Schlosskirche in Wittenberg.

but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired it, which was in the words and around them too. This super-rational element gave the words their vital context and deeper meaning.

So the idea that one could advance as a Christian merely by amassing a head full of intellectual knowledge was not only wrong but evil and perverse; it was the very reason for which Christ had railed against the Pharisees, who clearly knew the Torah backward and forward but whose lives were often at odds with what it taught.

The Christian faith was an affair of the heart and of the whole person. To relegate it to the attic of mere learning was to miss the point. Luther understood this and stressed it in teaching his students.

So Spalatin became the single and vital point at which Luther and Frederick communicated, and without Frederick, Luther’s story would be very different. It is a truly strange fact that Frederick and Luther never met but only and always communicated through Spalatin.

In 1504, Erasmus published a severe criticism of the religious piety of that time. It was titled Enchiridion; or, Manual of the Christian Soldier and became a great bestseller. Many of his criticisms also centered on the preposterous religious formalism of that time. Erasmus said that simply going through the motions was not real worship. It was phony religiosity, which in its way was worse than nothing.

“If all of the fragments were joined together,” he quipped, “they’d seem a full load for a freighter.”

Luther, as an exegete savant, was always trying to dig into the kernels of the text, knowing that if the church’s understanding of things was made plumb at its foundation, the rickety structure above it would inevitably be able to correct itself.

“the process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue—or moral purpose—lost.”

Important on gaining power

Nonetheless, the moment in which the Middle Ages buckled under their own weight and thus gave way to the Reformation and the future seems to have occurred when a single tremendous insight came to Luther, who was at that moment in the so-called Cloaca Tower at the Black Cloister in Wittenberg. In 1532 and then again in 1545, Luther mentioned what happened at that point, sometime in early 1517.

This is because Luther—who couldn’t resist making a joke and who often made terribly serious points while joking—was implying that God had given him this insight while he was sitting on the toilet. Cloaca was the ancient Latin term for “sewer” and at the time of Luther had come to mean “outhouse.”

But we now know that the heated room that was Luther’s study for decades—and where he therefore did his biblical exegesis—was in that part of the monastery located in the tower. It so happened, however, that in the base of this tower there was an outhouse. Thus this tower was always referred to as the Cloaca Tower, probably by the many monks who went there only when that particular duty summoned them.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. 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.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Thus a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Hereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

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.

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

“If our Lord God in this life—in this shit house—has given us such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life, where everything will be perfect and delightful?”

This life is “a shit house” compared to the glories of heaven, and Luther was marveling at God’s extravagant generosity in bestowing upon us such glorious and heavenly things as music here, where we shouldn’t expect them, where they were but foretastes of what was to come.

According to this Reformation breakthrough, all the marmoreal and golden splendor of the Vatican was nothing more or less than a monument to mankind’s efforts to be as God—indeed was a monument to the very devil of hell. It was our attempt to be good without God, to impress God and be like him without his help. It was all far worse than excrement could ever be, for it pretended to be good and beautiful and true and holy, and in reality it was not just not these things but the very bitterest enemy of them.