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

by Eric Metaxas

Toward the end of his speech, he said, “Alas, obiit auriga et currus Israel!”—meaning “The charioteer of Israel has fallen!”

The coffin was carried into the Schlosskirche and placed in the aisle, perpendicular to the chancel. A grave had been dug, aptly almost underneath the pulpit from which Luther had so many times preached the Gospel.

Luther’s critics correctly saw that once the pope and the church’s authority was openly challenged, lies and confusion would be given a free hearing along with the truth. How then would the truth prevail and order be maintained? What guarantees would there be toward these ends? Once this extremely dangerous step was taken, couldn’t any fool establish his own interpretation of things and create his own religion and delude millions—leading them all to eternal perdition?

In the centuries since Luther, we have seen precisely that, and many times over.

He seemed to intuit that free competition and freedom itself were not only healthy but somehow a necessary part of the nature of God’s truth. But we should ask, on what basis might someone five hundred years ago think competition should tilt in a truthward direction?

If so, then we must allow argument and dissent and debate. Our modern era surely believes this, and less than a century after Luther’s death one of his spiritual descendants, John Milton, eloquently argued along these lines in his landmark essay Areopagitica. Today we take this for granted, as we take so much of what Luther dared; indeed, so for granted do we take them that we certainly don’t remember with whom they originated.

Whether Luther had thought about it much or hadn’t, once he broke away from the theological lockstep of Rome, he had broken away not only from what it believed but from the deeper and larger idea that one could force another’s beliefs.

This was an astounding development. He had opened the door to what we today call conscience and dissent.

Luther had dared to say that just because the Roman church had the power to crush dissent did not mean that it represented the truth and probably even indicated that it didn’t.

So the events that Luther forced into being by his unwillingness to recant implied that if one must burn heretics to kill heresy, perhaps this was a clue that one feared open debate.

is not enough simply to be right. That was the way of the Pharisee. The law of love and freedom was now in play too.

So just as today radical Islamists may believe there is no truth but the sword—that they can enforce their views through torture and death—the church once did this too.

When does liberty become license and oppression? When does freedom bleed across the invisible border into forced ideology? When does pluralism become its own oppressive monolithic ideology?