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

by Eric Metaxas

Who knew what steep and half-infinite climb one might face? We know that Luther was too smart not to consider these things deeply and soberly and too sensitive not to have been bothered by them, often to the point of debilitating depression, which he called Anfechtungen. In fact, the word Anfechtung really has no English equivalent. It has as its root the verb fechten, which means “to fence with” or “to duel with.” Fecht is also obviously etymologically related to the word “fight.” So Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil. But for him this was something so horrible that it’s difficult for us to fully comprehend. Anyone who has experienced depression may have an idea. For Luther, it seems to have manifested itself as a widening hole of sheerest hopelessness, an increasing cacophony of devils’ voices accusing him of a thousand things, and all of them true or true enough—and no way out of it. This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton’s famous phrase, it is “darkness visible,”15 a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.16 We may also think of the words graven on the gate of Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”17 So for Luther, this Anfechtungen was a vivid picture of the nightmare of hell itself, a place in which one had indeed been utterly forsaken by God, with no end...

And if we wonder in the future chapters of his life and this book what it was that made Luther more than anyone else persist and persist where others had failed, it is this despair that must be our answer. He had no patience for theological bromides and had no fear of being burned at the stake. That would have been less painful than the deep soul agony of his Anfechtungen, and the inescapable tortures of hell itself, so he rode on and on and would get where he meant to go or would die riding.

somehow badly cut his leg, severing a main artery.

He clearly had much time to rest and think about twice leaning over the pit of death.*

April 1505 and then later in that year, two young Erfurt lawyers were swept from this life by the plague,

the last words of both of these lawyers had been “O, that I had become a monk!”18 The idea was that they knew that their eternal salvation was at stake, and in the nightmarish light of the eternity that yawned before them, they both piteously remonstrated against the worldly paths they had chosen. Luther surely participated in the requiem masses for both men.

Part of the difficulty that Luther would find as he trod this well-worn path was that God the Father and Jesus the Son were both principally thought of as fierce judges. So the role of comforter fell to Mary, the human one who understood us and our trials, the soft mother full of grace who could protect her beloved child from harsh and unyielding men. Although Christian doctrine had always clearly taught that Jesus himself had been fully human, and could therefore understand and sympathize with our trials and sufferings and temptations, the reality of church life at this point in history was that this part of Jesus had mostly been ignored, so that he was now thought of as every bit as distant and remote and terrible as God the Father ever had been. So only Mary, his entirely human mother, could comfort us. And not only that, but she could appeal to her harsh and perhaps indifferent son as only a dear mother could. Similarly, the faithful frequently appealed to the saints to understand human difficulties, again feeling that by dint of their humanity, they were closer to us than Jesus, who might technically have been human but who we knew was actually God. The saints would therefore be more patient with us and more desirous of helping us, and perhaps the implication was also that they had more time on their hands than God himself, who was far too busy running the vast universe to be bothered with our insignificant

concerns. This way of thinking was in fact as heretical as saying that God was the devil, but it was not seen as such at the time.

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.

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.

Staupitz saw Luther’s agonies and took a personal and fatherly interest in him. His importance in the life of Martin Luther cannot be exaggerated. He

obfuscation

So without entering into God’s presence and asking for God’s understanding of the words, one was doing no better than the

devil himself had done.

During this time, Luther also put forward the idea that to truly be a part of the church of Jesus Christ was inevitably...

but he believed that suffering and battling nonetheless continued throughout the ages, until the day of Christ’s return. And he believed that now this battle must be fought within the church against those who would pervert God’s doctrines and the deeper meaning of God’s Word. Such enemies had formerly been outside

the church, but now they were inside it and had gained leading positions in it. Luther later referred to them as “impious prelates.”5 So to battle against them, one would suffer too, and to suffer for this was a noble

h...

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.

Bernard had been canonized only twenty years after his 1153 death and while alive held that there were three ages of the church.

The first had been the epoch of martyrs, in which Christians were persecuted and killed for their faith; the second had been the era of heretics, in which Christians perverted church teaching; and the third and most terrible would be the third epoch, the Last Days, in which the church itself would be so corrupt that the Antichrist himself would arise from within it. Luther believed the church had entered this third and final stage. He had been sickened by the sales of indulgences and even spoke about it to his students. He was convinced that this abuse was a clear sign of having entered the end-time spoken of by Christ. “The way I see it,” he had said, “the Gospel of St. Matthew counts such perversions as the selling of indulgences among the signs of the Last Days.”6

to us

Luther saw in this the very essence of Christian theology. 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. So it fit well with Luther’s thinking that if God were to bestow upon

him—the unworthy sinner Luther—such a divine blessing, it must needs be done as he sat grunting in the “cloaca.” This was the ultimate antithesis to the gold and bejeweled splendor of papal Rome. 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 glitter...

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?” So “in this life” is clarified as “in this shithouse,” meaning in this execrable, this abominably

shitty, life.6

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.

So Leppin’s point, that Luther thought of this life in such terms, means that when he referred to the cloaca, he was speaking tongue in cheek and seriously at the same time, as he so often did. The cloaca was not only literally that place in the tower where he went to the bathroom but also the essence of this world, a world not merely begrimed with but filled with and consisting of sin and shit and misery and death. For God to come into this foulest world is for him already to come most of the way into hell. This world is the antechamber to hell and eternal death, and unles...

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.

if we appeal to Mary and the other saints before we appeal to Jesus himself, are we not effectively denying the Incarnation itself? Are we not saying that God incarnate never really came into this filthy world to be among us and to love us and suffer for us? For Luther, any appeal to Mary and the saints instead of to Jesus himself became a satanic twisting of the holiest and highest truth in the universe. It was therefore anti-Christ, and he knew that to expose it as such was the most important thing imaginable. In the end, he came to believe that the very devil had taken over the holy church and that somehow he, the lowly monk from Wittenberg, had been entrusted by God with the task of declaring this to the world.

blessed. Just as the pope justly

Cardinal Cajetan found himself buffaloed by Luther’s confidence. But Luther’s confidence was no act. He had little doubt there really was a God who should be feared and to whose authority he and everyone should submit. To that God—and to truth and plain reason—Luther would listen. But unless Cajetan and the rest of them pointed to that God through his Scriptures and plainly showed Luther his error, he was quite immovable. Along these lines between Luther’s position

He resolved that to get Frederick out of the line of fire, he would leave Wittenberg and Saxony. He knew he would be putting himself in tremendous danger, but out of respect for his sovereign, and with full faith in the God whose truth he desperately meant to uphold, he would go. 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. In a letter to Spalatin on November 25, he wrote,

The world hates the truth. By such hate Christ was crucified, and what there is in store for you today if not the cross I do not know. You have few friends, and would that they were not hidden for fear of the adversary. Leave Wittenberg and come to me that we may live and die together. The prince is in accord. Deserted, let us follow the deserted Christ.9 That this man who had so early seen the genius and promise of Luther would now encourage him in this fashion, by equating the papal power of Rome with the “world” that hated and killed the Savior—and with the Pharisees who had conspired to execute Jesus, and with the Roman mob that called for Barabbas—is simply astonishing. 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. But

holy golden rose was consecrated by us on the

In this final of these treatises, Luther spelled out the implications of sola fide (faith alone), which boldly declares that it is faith in Jesus that brings us salvation and not our own moral efforts. Jesus did all that was necessary to bring us to heaven by his death on the cross, and we need only trust in him. But to try to add to what Jesus did with any works of our own is absurd, not to say offensive to God and heretical. We cannot earn heaven by our acts, because Jesus has already done that for us. We need only accept his free gift. And if we see the magnitude of that gift, we are moved to do good things. But it is as gratitude for what God has already done in saving us, not as a way of earning our own salvation. Once we receive God’s free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back and to love our fellow man. When God in his sheer mercy and without any merit of mine has given me such unspeakable riches, shall I not then freely, joyously, wholeheartedly, unprompted do everything that I know will please him? I will give myself as a sort of Christ to my neighbor as Christ gave himself for me.38 Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor. That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and b...

Of course I would by all means come, if called, in so far as it would be up to me, even if I could not come by my own power and instead would have to be driven there as a sick man. For it would not be right to doubt that I am called by the Lord if the Emperor summons. Further, if they would employ force in this matter, which is most probable (for they do not want me called there because they want me to learn something), then this matter can only be commended to the Lord. For He who saved the three men in the furnace of the Babylonian king still lives and rules. If he does not want to preserve me, then my head is of slight importance compared with Christ, who was put to death in greatest ignominy—a stumbling block to all, and the ruin of many. We must rather take care that we do not expose the gospel (which we have finally begun to promote) to the derision of the godless and thus give our enemies a reason for boasting over us because we dare not confess what we have taught and are afraid to shed our blood for it. May the merciful Christ prevent such cowardice on our part and such boasting on their part. Amen.14

That Luther was in some ways the first celebrity of modern culture had everything to do with the extraordinary reach of his publications, as well as with the Cranach portraits. A month earlier in a letter to Spalatin, Luther had enclosed a handful of copies, which Cranach had suggested he autograph.1 The technology to print a near infinity of his many writings and to add to them the fanciful woodcut illustrations by Cranach made something possible that had never been possible before, to blast a persona—an image and a lively voice that knew how to communicate to the common man—into the wide world, where it would touch the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, none of whom spoke Latin or had previously ever been invited into these important discussions about the world in which they lived, about the institutions that affected them and shaped their lives. How it must have flattered them that this genius of great influence was speaking to them and representing their concerns before pope and emperor. It was simply unprecedented.

When they came to Gotha, Luther preached there too. But at the very time that he was in the pulpit preaching, some stones strangely came detached from the church tower and fell loudly to the ground. Once again, Luther was convinced it was the devil. Those great stones had been part of that venerable tower for two hundred years. Why must they come loose just as Luther was preaching the Word of God and making this historic confrontation? Luther knew that the spiritual import of his journey was greatly disturbing to Satan, who would have done anything to prevent it but who could do nothing now but stand impotently on the banks of this river in which the Holy Spirit coursed powerfully on its way.

Their journey next took them through Thuringia to Luther’s beloved Eisenach. But that evening, Luther suddenly became very ill, with a high fever. It seemed so serious that his friends were concerned for his life. A doctor was called and did what doctors often did in those days when they had no real idea of what malady they were treating: he bled Luther and then prescribed a hearty dose of schnapps. Evidently, however, these things did the trick, and eventually Luther felt at least well enough to continue the journey. But he was convinced that all of these things were the work of the enemy of mankind and truth who was raging against God’s purposes, and these disturbances only confirmed to him that nothing must prevent him from getting to Worms. Myconius, who wrote a chronicle of Luther’s journey in 1541, said that Luther roared defiantly that even if the fires against him should reach from Wittenberg and Rome up to heaven itself, he would still answer the summons and appear at Worms, and once there he would not fail to “kick the Behemoth in the mouth between his big teeth.”2 He was well aware that he was a man on a mission.

am coming, my Spalatin, although Satan has done everything to hinder me with more than one disease. All the way from Eisenach to here I have been sick; I am still sick in a way which previously has been unknown to me. Of course I realize that the mandate of Charles has also been published to frighten me. But Christ lives and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air. I enclose copies of the Emperor’s letters. It is not wise to write further letters until I first see in person what has to be done, so that we may not encourage Satan, whom I have made up my mind to frighten and despise. So prepare the lodging. Farewell.3

Spalatin later wrote, “He wants to come to Worms. Even if there be as many Devils there as tiles on the roof!”4 When Luther’s party reached Oppenheim,

The words he used, usually translated as “conscience,” cannot perfectly be translated as what we today mean by that word. The German word he used, Gewissen, really means “knowing.” And the Latin word, conscientia, means “with knowing.” But there is nothing about these words in Luther’s day that even implies what we today mean by the word “conscience.” The modern concept of conscience has come to mean something almost completely subjective, as though each of us has his own barometer and that barometer were sacrosanct, as though each person’s truth were comparable to truth itself. Indeed, the subjective idea of each person’s truth has fairly trumped the idea of an objective truth. It implies that each of us has his own truth, and that truth is one’s conscience. Many of the toughest critics of Luther rightly aver that the line between the one and the other concepts of truth and conscience was crossed when Luther took his stand at Worms. Once the interpretation of the Scriptures and the concept of truth was taken away from the church itself, it was given away to each individual, and real and objective truth itself was effectively abolished. Once the authority of the church was broken up and the opportunity to disagree with the church was possible, anyone might disagree with any authority, and a thousand churches might spring up, each with its own version of the truth. This is indeed precisely what happened.

But it is important to see that despite what both his critics and his defenders have often said, Luther was never coming near anything of the kind. His concept of the word “conscience” was not our modern view, in which conscience takes its cue from the autonomous self. On the contrary, his concept of truth did not vary one iota from the accepted Roman Catholic view. The only difference between his view and the church’s view was in the idea that one’s conscience must obey God himself. The Catholic church reserved the right to say that it and it alone spoke for God, whereas Luther, in pointing out that the pope had erred and church councils had erred, was saying that the church could not reserve the right to speak for God. Therefore, if the church—via pope and councils—was able to err and to sometimes not speak for God and God’s truth, Luther asserted the idea that only the Scriptures could be that inerrant standard to which everyone—including the church—must repair. Thus, if the Scriptures plainly said something different from what councils and popes said, it must be the councils and the popes who were in error and were obliged to change their views. There was no other recourse. And Luther, in saying that he could not go against conscience, was simply saying that if his own understanding, his own knowledge, as guided by plain logic and clear arguments, showed him that Scripture said one thing and anyone else—even the church—said another, he had no choice but to go with what...

God was all powerful and omniscient, and he alone defined truth and indeed was truth. But he did not assert that power in a way that ever smacked of power in the worldly sense. He had always and ever shown himself in weakness. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus died on the cross for those who had mocked and rejected him. God did not crush us but showed us mercy, and Luther could see that the church had not adopted this view, but had itself become wed to worldly power. It took money that was not its own and burned those who disagreed with what it taught. Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously. This was the good news of the Gospel that the church had so horribly obscured. And it was what had freed Luther from the horrors of his previous life. This was truth itself, and the church’s disturbing response to his attempts to get it to see these things only proved that God was not on its side in this. He would do all he could to get it to see this, including be willing to die for it, if it came to that. He feared that less than he feared God and denying God’s truth.

Many historians have put Luther forward as the first to put “individual conscience” before the authority of the church and empire. But ironically, he was not at all asserting the freedom of the individual to do as he pleased. He was asserting the freedom of the individual to do as God pleased—if

That it would be possible for someone to abuse these ideas to do what God did not want him to do was always the risk, so to the extent that Luther made that risk and error possible, he may be held responsible for that. But the alternative to opening things up to this risk is to accept the sheer authority of church or state, and that was far worse. So yes, to some extent, Luther’s stand at Worms created new problems that we did not have before, but to a larger extent it gave us genuine liberty in a way that would lead to a new freer and deeper understanding of what God wanted. Just as Jesus had called upon the Pharisees to stop their outward obedience to God and go far deeper, to inward obedience, so Luther called upon every Christian to cease the petty obedience to church that was nothing when compared to the freedom and joy of actually obeying God.