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

by Eric Metaxas

You know that I am descended from the most Christian emperors of the noble German nation, the Catholic kings of Spain, the archdukes of Austria, and the dukes of Burgundy, who all were, until death, faithful sons of the Holy Roman Church, and they have always defended the Catholic faith, the sacred ceremonies, decretals, ordinances, and laudable customs, for the honor of God, the propagation of the faith, and the salvation of souls. After their deaths they left, by natural law and heritage, these holy Catholic rites, for us to live and to die following their example. . . . What is true and a great shame and offense to us is that a single monk, going against God, [is] mistaken in his opinion, which is against what all of Christendom has held for over a thousand years to the present. I am therefore determined to use all my kingdoms and possessions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life, and my soul. For it would be a great disgrace for you and me, the noble and greatly renowned German nation, appointed by privilege and singular eminence to be the defenders and protectors of the Catholic faith . . . I declare that I now regret having played so long the proceedings against him and his false doctrines. I am resolved that I will never again hear him talk . . . and to act and proceed against him as against a notorious heretic.2

“let the future decide” whether Luther and what he preached was of God or not. Luther was referring to that passage in which the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem had become furious that Peter and the apostles refused to stop preaching about Jesus and wanted to put them to death. But Gamaliel, who was one of the most respected of them, counseled that they be left alone. “Let them go!” he said. “For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”

So Luther was comparing himself to the early apostles, who were also persecuted, and asking that he be allowed to continue doing what he was doing. In addition, he asked that the archbishop simply allow him to depart Worms gracefully.

Von der Ecken said that because of his unrepentant attitude the emperor would indeed be taking action against him. Therefore Luther must be back at Wittenberg within twenty-one days. More important, during that time, he was forbidden to preach and even to write. They especially didn’t want Luther to write an account of what he had experienced at Worms, which would likely stir up further dissent. The emperor granted Luther safe-conduct during this time. That was all. Luther’s response was cheerful: “As it pleases the Lord; blessed be the name of the Lord!”6 He knew that he was free, that he had done what he needed to do, and that God would do the rest. What that was, was God’s business. He agreed to obey all that had been asked of him and even shook von der Ecken’s hand in

parting.

But to force things by dragging one’s own dead flesh into what ought to be done only by the living Spirit of God was to play into Satan’s hands and to do Satan’s work. Luther

“The summons of death comes to us all,” he said, “and no one can die for another.” Who could fail to be drawn in by that, whatever the speaker’s “cephalic structure”? How these first startling words from the man thought dead himself must have echoed in the ears of the congregation. “Everyone,” he went on, “must fight his own battle with death by himself alone. We can shout into another’s ears, but everyone must himself be prepared for the time of death, for I will not be with you then, nor you with me.”4

that we may not rely upon nor blame others for our relationship with God—and

took three years of constant study, reflection, and discussion to arrive where I now am, and can the common man, untutored in such matters, be expected to move the same distance in three months? Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit wine and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and stars have been worshiped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky? Such haste and violence betray a lack of confidence in God. See how much he has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The Word did it all. Had I wished I might have started a conflagration at Worms. But while I sat still and drank beer with Philip [Melanchthon] and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.9

Luther was saying that freedom and love must be at the center of Christian faith.

It was as though in rebelling against a forced uniform of suit and tie, a group would cast a suspicious eye on anyone not wearing the new anti-uniform of denim and tattoos. Both attitudes represent a kind of bondage, and both are against the greatest laws of all, the Gospel laws of love and freedom. “Formerly the devil made us too papistic,” Luther said, “and now he wants to make us too evangelical.”11

have taught in such a way that my teaching would lead first and foremost to a knowledge of Christ, that is, to pure and proper faith and genuine love, and thereby to freedom in all matters of external conduct, such as eating, drinking, clothes, praying, fasting, monasteries, sacrament, and whatever it may be. Such freedom is to be used in a salutary way only by those who have faith and love, that is, those who are real Christians. On such people we can and should impose no human law—nor permit anyone else to do so—which would bind their conscience.12

Satan is feeling his wound; this is why he is raging this way, and throwing everything into confusion. But Christ, who has begun this work, will tread him under foot, and all the gates of hell

will strive against Christ in vain.

Just as no one can die for us, no one can have a relationship with God for us, and therefore no one can take full responsibility for how we read the Scriptures. At some point we have the personal responsibility to be involved.

all of Luther’s commentaries were meant to be helpful, but none of them were meant to be exhaustive or definitive. Of all of Luther’s prefaces, the one he wrote to the book of Romans is almost universally regarded as the masterpiece:

Faith is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God. . . . Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times. This knowledge of and confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all creatures. And this is the work which the Holy Spirit performed in faith. Because of it, without compulsion, a person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything out of love and praise to God who has shown him this g...

so purely communicated what it meant to be “born anew” that more than two centuries hence, in May 1738, John Wesley heard them read aloud and instantl...

This led to Wesley’s preaching this same Gospel message on a grand scale, which had tremendous historical ramifications, including the Methodist revival of the eighteenth century, which in turn led to the conversion of William Wilberforce, who led the battle to end the slave trade in the British Empire. It also led to the ministry and preaching of George Whitefield in the American colonies, which over several decades led to the unification of the colonies under the same egalitarian ideas as those that Germans were encountering in the early...

Be a man, let your heart be strong, wait for the Lord.7

Luther’s insistence at times that one be clearly on board with him in all matters, or else anathema, ironically betrayed the same inflexibility that he had experienced with the papists and the Schwärmer both.

“For in no place,” he wrote, “do they teach how we are to become free from our sin, obtain a good conscience, and win a peaceful and joyful heart. That is what really counts.”19

His message was scriptural: if we do not take these things into our own hands, but cry out to the Savior, we will see how he fights on our behalf. But it is clear from history that people rarely have the kind of faith that believes this sufficiently to resist taking action. To

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” Then he wrote, Indeed, our leader, Jesus Christ, says in Matthew 7 [5:44] that we should bless those who insult us, pray for our persecutors, love our enemies, and do good to those who do evil to us. These, dear friends, are our Christian laws.

Everywhere Luther now traveled after Eisleben, he saw groups of peasants on the march, and he sensed the demonic spirit of murder that was in the

air.

Luther finally saw that they were not to be spoken to. They had become rabid and bloodthirsty, so now there was but one thing to be done: he must rally the nobles to crush them.

Müntzer had again fled, this time to Nuremberg, and then he fled Nuremberg to return to Mühlhausen. But his lifetime of serial fleeing would soon be at an end, for here and now his great hour of action had come, and Müntzer could at last mount the world stage to play the part of his waking dreams. In Mühlhausen, he amassed and led an armed militia that he humbly dubbed the “Eternal League of God.” It rallied under a rainbow banner daubed with the painfully ironic maxim “The Word of God Endures Forever.”

Frederick had been as moderate and kind as ever, even trying hard to understand the peasants’ bitterness toward the nobles. To his brother John, who now succeeded him as elector, he had written,

Perhaps the peasants have been given just occasion for their uprising through the impeding of the Word of God. In many ways the poor folk have been wronged by the rulers, and now God is visiting his wrath upon us. If it be his will, the common man will come to rule; and if it be not his will, the end will soon be otherwise. Let us then pray to God to forgive our sins, and commit the case to him. He will work it out according to his good pleasure and glory.2

the act of marrying a nun was as though he had delivered a whirling roundhouse kick to the devil’s own snout. He knew that this act would have meaning and very real power in the spiritual realm. It was an act of worship to God as much as anything anyone could ever do, and its spiritual significance was tremendous. Luther was in his person and with his own body countering the falsely pious antipathy to the physical, and specifically to the erotic. God had created the physical and the sexual as good, and he had redeemed them from their broken fallenness via marriage. Thus not only was there nothing dirty about this, but the opposite was true. Luther thought unnatural celibacy to be of the devil and natural and healthy marital sex to be something that glorified God.

Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being and being called human, tries to improve on what God has made. Adam’s children are and remain human; that is why they should and must beget more men. Dear God, we see daily the effort it costs to live in a marriage, and to keep the marital vows. And we try to promise chastity as if we were not human, had neither flesh nor blood. But it is the God of the world, the Devil, who so slanders the marital state and has made it shameful—and yet allows adulterers, whores, and dissolute knaves to survive in high esteem all the same—that it would be fair to marry in order to spite him and his world and to accept his ignominy and bear it for God’s sake.8

A young woman, if the high and rare grace of virginity has not been bestowed upon her, can do without a man as little as without food, drink, sleep, and other natural needs. And on the other hand: a man, too, cannot be without a woman. The reason is the following: begetting children is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking. That is why God provided the body with limbs, arteries, ejaculation, and everything that goes along with them. Now if someone wants to stop this and not permit what nature wants and must do, what is he doing but preventing nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from being wet, and man from either drinking, eating, or sleeping?9

What Luther had done was something else entirely. Far from saying there is only this material world, he said God originally created this material world as good and had suffused it with his presence, but in Eden we fell away from that union with God. Thus the split between the “material” and the “spiritual” is the wound at the heart of the universe, and only Jesus can heal it. Therefore let us now allow him to do so by inviting him into this world. He came to Bethlehem and died on Calvary, but we must invite him into our hearts and must accept him so that he can do in our lives what he came to do. When we do this, everything is restored. So whatever we do in our humble, daily lives—whether having sex with our spouses, or raising our children, or working at our jobs—we may now do unto God’s glory and may therefore redeem in him.

Luther was saying that for people who live like this, there is no longer a world in which officially religious and spiritual people only do religious and spiritual things. There is now a new world in which everyone can partake of God’s goodness, in which every person is a “priest,” in which every person can live fully loved and approved of by God, in which everyone can take the

bread and the wine both at...

is not something strange and dirty from which our minds must recoil, because it does not believe that inviting the ultimate spiritual being who is God into our physicality and sexuality is to bring the spiritual where it has no business. On the contrary, it belongs there. It is also not something beautiful because there is no such thing as sin and broken sexuality. It is not an orgy or a group grope that says all sex with anyone is beautiful and a healthy option. It is that distant third thing of which the world knows so little. It is an invitation into the supreme health of a life fully redeemed in Jesus Christ, one that says yes, we can be born again; we can reenter God’s good graces and again be as little children; we can take what the world and the devil would call dirty and make it as clean as soap.

Luther had of course early in his life lived the hell of trying to do what he could to get to heaven. In those efforts, he had only gone backward, all the way to the antechambers of hell itself. This was where one’s efforts would lead and could not help but lead, and Luther would by no means coat this everlastingly fatal poison with honey:

for me, I firmly confess that if it were possible, I would not wish to be given free will or to have anything left in my power by which I could endeavor to be saved, not only because, in the midst of so many adversities and dangers and also so many assaults by devils, I would not be able to stand firm and keep hold of it (since one devil is stronger than all men put together and no person would be saved), but also because even if there were no dangers, no adversities, no devil, I would still be forced to struggle continually towards an uncertainty and beat the air with my fists; for no matter how long I should live, and do works, my conscience would never be certain and sure how much it had to do to satisfy God. For no matter how many works I did, there would always remain a scruple about whether it pleased God or whether he required something more, as is proved by the experience of all self-justifiers and as I learned over so many years, much to my own grief.9

without Jesus to save us utterly, we are utterly lost. With Jesus, we are saved.

Luther called this doctrine the Real Presence. 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. The Word of God was true, and believing that—faith in the Word—was all that mattered. So it was the faith of the believer in the Word of God—and not the transforming words of any priest—that

that effected the change.

Believing what God has said is all that is necessary for God to come all the way from heaven to earth and to transform not just the bread and the wine but us too, and eternally. This was at the heart of it all. This was the redemption that Christ brought to us and to all creation via faith in his Word.

For Luther, this was a large part of what the Reformation was all about, to take holiness out of the church and into the wider world. To take it from the priest and give it to every father and mother. To take it from the praying monks and nuns and give it to every laborer and every housewife. It was never meant to be hidden in religious vocations. The wall between them must be broken down forever. Just as the curtain in the temple had been torn to allow us into the holy of holies, and to allow God out of the holy of holies, so now all that was once confined to the religious and ecclesiastical spheres must fly out and into the wide world. Thus was everything that God had made redeemed by faith in Christ. On the one hand, this had happened fifteen centuries earlier, but it was as if the money had been put in the bank then and no one knew it was there, or soon forgot it was there. So no one had made a withdrawal and spent it, which was the point of the money. Luther was declaring that it was there and that it was available to all and now we must take it out and use it in our own lives for God’s purposes. In this way, the Gospel would and should touch everything. Thus it was with sex and with every physical thing in this world, and so it must be with music too.

Because it is so ubiquitous today, including even in Catholic churches, it is hard to believe that before Luther introduced it, there was no congregational singing in churches. He knew the power of music and wanted to use it for God’s purposes:

Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. St. Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. 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. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues.18

“There is not one square inch in all of creation over which Jesus Christ does not say ‘mine!’”19 So everything would be redeemed,

The spiritual darkness sometimes felt so strong that he said he was sure they were dealing not with mere demons but with the prince of demons himself. At one point, he told Bugenhagen that he didn’t have enough faith and needed Bugenhagen to speak some of the promises from God’s Word to him, to declare them over him in faith, because his own faith was weakened. At one point, Bugenhagen said, “This is what God thinks: What am I going to do with this man? I gave him so many outstanding gifts, and he doubts my grace.”8

the Reformation leaders now do? 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. But

We cannot in conscience approve such a league inasmuch as bloodshed or other disaster may be the outcome, and we may find ourselves so involved that we cannot withdraw even though we would. Better be ten times dead than that our consciences should be burdened with the insufferable weight of such disaster and that our gospel should be the cause of bloodshed, when we ought rather to be as sheep for the slaughter and not avenge or defend ourselves.2