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

by Eric Metaxas

Melanchthon would never be the kind of leader Luther was. Luther had far more confidence in him than Melanchthon had in himself.

Things weren’t yet at a point where this caused problems, but when Luther read the theses that Karlstadt had written on the subject of the vows of monks and priests, he quickly discovered a fly in the ointment. Luther said in an August 3 letter to Melanchthon that he was bothered by some sloppy biblical exegesis that Karlstadt had used to make his argument against monkish vows: I highly approve of his effort

But the initial event was capped with the consummation of the marriage, so the marriage—actually called the Kopulation, which is etymologically related to the more anodyne word “couple”—was in fact consummated before the wedding. If the marriage was not consummated, the wedding would not happen.

So after the small ceremony, the couple were escorted to their bedroom in the cloister, where Jonas did the curious honors, watching the two become one flesh literally and figuratively. He wept to see it, knowing the huge significance of it all on every level. There was often an observation deck above the bed, though this detail seems not to have been observed in this case. It seems more likely that Jonas simply stood someplace in the room, silently beseeching the Lord of hosts not to abandon him to a coughing fit or sneeze.

Even the eely Erasmus had spread the false rumor that Luther had taken advantage of the young nun and was only marrying to cover his beastly tracks.

For I feel neither passionate love nor burning for my spouse, but I cherish her.

In effect, he was telling Erasmus to stay out of the way and he wouldn’t get hurt. In his tremendously direct and undiplomatic German fashion, he might as well have called Erasmus an incontinent old man. In any event, Erasmus took it as though he had.

Besides, there was enough in the Old Testament to make the case for free will, and the church fathers—whose points of view were further recommended by their lives of great holiness (he said pointedly)—had also believed free will existed.

On this and some other issues, the only honest way out was to let them stand as mysteries about which we could only say so much.

Dionysus with his thyrsus into St. Peter’s to lead maenads in bacchanalian revelry.

For one thing, Luther had not composed it de novo but decided to rebut Erasmus point by point and to follow the general form of Erasmus’s own essay, so it was not a stand-alone explication of Luther’s views but more a refutation of Erasmus’s. Still, it is widely regarded as Luther’s magnum opus, and Luther too came to see it that way.

that we cannot choose our way out of hell, nor do anything of our own accord to be freed from sin and eternal damnation,

Luther hoped to convert Erasmus, not simply to win an argument.

Luther also almost violently takes issue with Erasmus’s contention that one’s stance on free will is not important. For Luther, there is no doctrine more important, because for him this was the doctrine that determined how one read all the rest of the Bible.

The contrasting stances of Luther and Erasmus are fascinating. That their simmering feud finally boiled over in Luther’s greatest work ended their communication, but not their private feuding.

And in 1559, when Pope Paul IV published the Vatican’s first Index of Prohibited Books, one certainly expected to find Martin Luther’s books there, and did, but if one looked closely, one would have seen Desiderius Erasmus’s were there too.

This whole controversy—over which much genuine blood was eventually spilled and many bodies broken—all depended on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Luther disagreed with this doctrine, holding that the plain meaning of Scripture must be grasped, and no more or less. Jesus said that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood (“This is my body,” and “This is my blood”).

Jesus really was genuinely present in the elements. He did not become present when a priest prayed, but he was present when we believed in the words he spoke.

So it was the faith of the believer in the Word of God—and not the transforming words of any priest—that effected the change.

Why was this so important to Luther? There were two principal reasons. First, Luther said that we must believe precisely what the Scriptures said and that when Jesus said “is” there was no way to read it other than “is.”

The second reason this was important to Luther had to do with the very important idea that God did not wish us to have disdain for the physical or the corporeal.

According to Luther, the Catholic church of his time and the Gnostics had taught that to be more like God meant to become less physical and more spiritual, to be somehow at war with this world.

According to him, Christ could really be actually present in the bread and the wine without their becoming other than what they were.

But Luther maintained and taught that Christ was present in the bread and the wine but did not replace them. Both were still there.

For him, Christ was actually present in the bread and the wine, without the bread and the wine being somehow “transformed” in the way that Aristotle or rather Aquinas explained via his unconscionably smuggled-in Aristotelian thinking.

Being theologically consistent, Luther felt similarly about infant baptism. It was by simple faith that the water of baptism transformed the infant baptized. The water was not “magical water” and did not become other than water, but by faith all things were transformed.

Luther believed in what we may think of as the “magic” of faith to very genuinely change things. It was not merely a spiritual transformation but the spiritual sacramentally united with the physical, forever and genuinely changing it, redeeming it from merely physical into something more, but not forgoing the physical.

Luther saw that to allegorize or turn into metaphors or symbols what was plainly stated was no different than saying that Jesus rose “in the hearts of his disciples.” It would be like saying the check is in the mail—“metaphorically.”

the spiritual reality produced by faith in God makes everything even more real than physical reality, but it does not push physical reality into nonexistence or unimportance.

the church had over the centuries created such a rigid ecclesiastical structure that it had effectively walled God off from the faithful.

All that was good was of God, and to create walls where God has built none was far worse than a mere tragic mistake. So Luther, in creating the worship services for the new Reformation church, sought to bring every kind of good music into God’s service and sought to bring the “priesthood of all believers” into God’s choir in church.

before Luther introduced it, there was no congregational singing in churches.

Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart.

Luther also declared that Henry’s ranting and raving made him come across like “a livid whore on the street.”2 It was this work that prompted Erasmus to publicly take issue with Luther’s tone.

we are here together in this vale of tears and we should earnestly wish to join our martyred brother in the place where there are no tears and where sorrows and dying have passed away:

But here is the more dramatic point: that even when we don’t have faith, the faith of our friends and family can be enough. So he is saying that his friends’ prayers sustained him when he could not sustain himself. This is consonant with his doctrine that our prayers for an infant are enough to recommend him to God, that our faith for that speechless babe will suffice to open the child to the great channel of God’s mercy.

It is believed that the twin agonies of Kaiser’s martyrdom and the death at the Black Cloister of Bugenhagen’s sister Hanna, along with her child, were what led Luther to compose the hymn for which he is most famous, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”).

Important hymn Amighty fortress is our God

even where the Reformation had succeeded in abolishing the old traditions of the Catholic church, it seemed to have freed the people only from behaving with some semblance of morality and toward the barest modicum of religious activity.

Dear God, what misery I beheld! The ordinary person, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about the Christian faith, and unfortunately many pastors are completely unskilled and incompetent teachers. Yet supposedly they all bear the name Christian, are baptized, and receive the holy sacrament, even though they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments!

It is hardly a surprise that after decades and even centuries of being taught nothing and living in their syncretistic world of medieval superstition and the barest bones of Catholic faith, many of the villagers knew nothing of the true Christian faith.

What they did at Speyer was to lodge a formal protest, and it was because of this protest that the name “Protestant” first came into the world.

They were debating whether Jesus’s use of the word “is” was literal or merely metaphorical.

If the believer complied with the rules and laws of the empire and lesser governmental authorities—if he rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s—then “Caesar” or “Tsar” or “Kaiser”* must allow him to “render unto God the things that are God’s.” So Luther was from the Gospels themselves establishing what would become the future idea of religious liberty that the American founders would enshrine in the U.S. Constitution.

Melanchthon had written what has come to be known as the Augsburg Confession, which was to be and indeed has been the official summation of what all Lutherans believe.

but of course it did not agree that what the Lutherans termed “abuses”—such as required celibacy for clergy and Communion taken only in one kind for laity—were

Dietrich Bonhoeffer would four centuries later bump up against this again and would do his best to resolve the dilemma and formulate a solution, but by then he was so far ahead of the Lutheran ministers in Germany that they could not follow him, and the National Socialists had no resistance from the churches and were able to do as they liked.

There are many of you in this congregation who think to yourselves: “If only I had been there! How quick I would have been to help the baby! I would have washed his linen! How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!” Yes you would! You say that because you know how great Christ is, but if you had been there at that time you would have done no better than the people of Bethlehem. Childish and silly thoughts are these! Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor. You ought to serve him, for what you do to your neighbor in need you do to the Lord Christ himself.13

Christmas quote on Bethlehem

From the ground we were made and back to the ground we would go, but God had seen fit in filling us creatures of earth with the very breath of heaven, with the wind of eternity.

“I have this day received a sad letter which troubles me so much that I doubt whether I shall be able in the future to discharge my duties in the University. What this is I will now relate to you so that you may not believe other persons who may circulate false reports in regard to the matter.”