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

by Eric Metaxas

The first, in 1517, was his posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the great wooden doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church, criticizing the then wildly popular practice of indulgence.

The second was his unyielding courage at the imperial diet that was held in the city of Worms in 1521.

When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world. How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them? Since time immemorial, such men had spoken for God and for the state. But Luther defied them, humbly but boldly, in a watershed moment in world history. Those of us in the West have lived on the far side of it ever since.

Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

But not a single one of these seven things is true.

by simple faith one could accept God’s diagnosis and solution to the otherwise insoluble problem, and at the moment one did this, the problem was instantly solved.

He did it fearlessly, too, but not because he was traditionally brave; rather, because in this discovery, he had also come to see that death itself had been soundly and forever defeated and that this was in fact the central point of what he was saying.

Because November 11 was St. Martin’s Day—the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours—the child was given the saint’s name, a common enough practice at that time.

The fact is that Martin’s father—his name was Johannes, so he was called Hans—was indeed a man of great intelligence and fire.

Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

It is easy for the modern mind to forget that at all times in history before our own the imminence of sudden death loomed heavily, especially for anyone thoughtful or sensitive, and Luther was both.

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.

So Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil.

Either salvation was universally impossible or the whole current system—including the fearsome God behind it—was a diabolical hoax. It was that simple.

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

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.

And one of these things was the idea that human truth had limits and that by itself it could never reach heaven.

We could stretch and strain all we liked, but we would never touch the blueness of the sky itself. God must bring the sky to us, and therefore it must be divine revelation initiated by God to bridge this most unbridgeable of all gulfs.

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.

If feeding the Word of God to hungry flocks was the point of it all, and not mere shock-and-awe splendor, then these cavernous interiors would never do.

Luther saw that these priests hadn’t the slightest reverence for the holy act in which they were participating but wished only to tick off the appropriate box and gallop off to something less demanding.

that the only way to read the Word of God properly involved seeing beyond the mere words.

To read legalistically and simplistically was to miss God himself.

Therefore, one must not merely see what the devil could see, which is to say the words on a page, but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired i...

but to truly read the Word of God and not merely the words of God, one required revelation and the anointing of God himself, which itself previously required a prayerful and contrite attitude.

To read the Word of God in any other way was to miss the spiritual truth and therefore to miss the main point of reading it at all.

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

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.

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.

Erasmus said that simply going through the motions was not real worship. It was phony religiosity, which in its way was worse than nothing.

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.

This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be.

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 t...

In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in ...

We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filt...

If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our s...

So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest...

This world is the antechamber to hell and eternal death, and unless we allow the God of life to come here, we do not allow him to redeem us.

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.

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.

Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.

Because love grows by works of love, man thereby becomes better. Man does not, however, become better by means of indulgences but is merely freed from penalties.

Christians are to be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they must reserve enough for their family needs and by no means squander it on indulgences.

It is certainly the pope’s sentiment that if indulgences, which are a very insignificant thing, are celebrated with one bell, one procession, and one ceremony, then the gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.

And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace (Acts 14:22).

The Ninety-five Theses had never been intended for public consumption.

He wasn’t trying to stir up trouble, only to help the church see what was occurring so that it might be corrected, and who could doubt that it would thank him for his efforts in time and make the important corrections?

And yet in all of this, Luther’s greatest fears were realized. He saw that the cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them.