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Lecture 3

Martin Luther I:

Up to the Diet at Worms

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1. Background

· The new learning of the Renaissance, which challenged the old medieval philosophical propositions that were based on Aristotelian thinking (a division between real and ideal) had begun to inspire a climate of questioning throughout Europe.

· The Humanists were mainly clustered in Universities and urban centers, and their critiques were never really accessible to the illiterate public.

· They spoke in latin, and ridiculed the deficiencies in Catholicism in ways that pragmatists through the ages might always have done.

· For these new thoughts to shake the peasants into action, however, a peasant was needed to articulate them.

· Also, the printing press made wide distribution of thoughts more possible and at a lower cost.

· This was an age of propagandists in search of a propaganda!

· The free cities of the north, and the growing independence of princes and the nobility also set the stage for the coming collapse of medieval structure of life and society.

· Within the catholic church, discontent and decay had been persistent since the early 15th century, when the great councils of Constance and Basel sought to rescue the catholic faith from the degredations the papacy had brought to it;

· in other words, there were throughout the catholic church godly men who knew reform was needed, and who shared similar ideas about it.

· All of these circumstances were being drawn together when Luther added his comments to a local debate in a small principality in northern Germany- nailing his 95 theses to the Church door, much as today someone might post a comment on an internet blog.

· Luther became the lightening-rod for many of the needed reforms of his age, both secular and religious.

· His tempramental peasant mentality added fuel to the sparks he had first caused in Wittenberg.

· All around him, Europe heaved with revolution, and by the time he died, Europe had emerged from the middle ages and was entering the ‘modern age’.

· When we come to the Reformation, we are coming to something in Christian history as momentous as

· the decision to evangelize gentiles in Acts 15,

· the conversion of Constantine,

· the conversion of the Barbarians

· or the schism between east and west in 1054.

· These momentous events occurred once every half millennium and they transformed everything from politics to penance, from theology to culture.

2. Luther, early days

· Luther was born in 1483 at Eisleben to peasant parents.

· His father was a miner, who owned a few local mines, and his parents shared the piety and superstition of their class.

· Growing up in the small mining village of Mansfeld, Luther recalled later in life the in the local parish church of an angry Jesus seated on a rainbow, with a flaming sword drawn and ready to judge the wicked. Below was Mary, and under her skirts, she shielded the penitent who fled from Christ’s wrath.

· In those early days, he saw the processions of pilgrims or the cripples being carried to various shrines for healing.

· Hell and Purgatory held important places in his early imagination, and the woods were filled with witches and demons, much as under the earth, in the mines, pagan Saxons still practiced some of their black magic.

· When Luther left Eisenach, he went for a year to study at Brothers of the Common Life School in Magdeburg, before returning to enter the University at Erfurt in 1501.

· In 1502 Luther took his B.A. at a remarkable pace, and in 1505, he took his M.A.

· Much to his father’s pride, Luther was prepared to begin his studies in law, when, caught in a storm in the summer of 1505, Luther radically changed course, and vowed to commit his life to the priesthood.

· He entered an Autgustinian monastery in Erfurt that summer, and by 1507 had become a priest.

· This naturally came as quite a shock to his father, who had invested a lot of time, money and hopes in his eldest son becoming an Imperial lawyer, and very likely, a support for him in his old age.

· Exactly why Luther changed course is hard to say.

· It may have been because of the deaths of two of his close college friends, which exercised his thoughts about his own salvation and eventual fate before the judgement seat of Christ.

· Luther was a zealous monk, obsessed with personal holiness, diligent in trying to live a pious life.

· Among the surrounding monasteries and convents, he became a local legend for his strivings after true penitence and forgiveness.

· He had joined an order that was seeing a revival of Augustinian learning, and this only fed his concerns for the worthlessness of the body, and the need for spiritual liberation.

· Nevertheless, no matter how hard he tried to ease his conscience, he found no peace.

· He obsessively went to confession, fulfilled his penances meticulously, but ended up more conflicted and despairing than before.

· His superior banned him from reading the bible, and sent him off to the library to study more of the schoalistic writers of the past, such as Anselm, Bonaventura, and others.

· However, on a visit to Erfurt, the head of the order, von Staupitz revoked the ban, and encouraged the young monk to study the Bible.

· From his stifling religious scrupples, von Staupitz helped Luther see that it was only through faith in a merciful God that he could apprehend the true meaning behind all his religious acts.

· And later in life, it was back to von Staupitz interventions that Luther pointed to his final understanding of justification by faith.

· In 1511, he sent on a mission by his order to Rome, where he hoped to take advantage of the many sights there and where he might receive indulgences for his sins.

· But this experience disillusioned him even more- how could he really know if his grandfather’s soul was release from Purgatory as he said the pater noster kissing each of Pilates steps in Rome?

· In 1511, Luther was sent to Wittenberg where there was Augustinian cloister, and where von Staupitz became a mentor to him, pointing him to German mystical writings of the time.

· He was recommended by von Staupitz to succeed him as lecturer in Scripture at the new University founded by Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and in 1512, Luther took his D.D. and began teaching on the Psalms, Romans and Galatians.

· Luther became a popular lecturer, and it was during this time of teaching the Scriptures at the University, the Luther began to settle some of the questions he had wrestled with.

· Writing in 1545, Luther reflected back on the period from 1515-16 to be the time when he came to his famous affirmation of ‘justification by faith’

-Read Doc. 1

· Luther came to realize that the Righteousness of God was not his holiness condemning the world, but his love delivering it from bondage to sin.

· This led him to reject his own philosophical tradition of nominalism, which still vested a large amount of human action in the reception of divine grace,

· whereas according to his view of the Righteousness of God, Sin had been dealt with, and the many sins under our control could begin to be faced with grace.

· We saw this same issue in the early Church in the debates between Pelagius and Augustine.

· Between 1512-17 Luther became a well-known and loved lecturer and preacher in Wittenberg, emphasizing the centrality of grace which could only be received by the believer through faith.

· He continued his criticisms of the scholastics and began to attract students from all over Germany.

3. Reformation and Indulgences

· One of the struggles faced by the papacy in the 15th century was a constant need for more money to finance papal ambitions.

· One way these were met were through the selling of appointments to bishoprics, and the selling of indulgences- tapping into the vanity of nobles, and the superstition of peasants.

· The issue of Indulgences became a lightening rod of opposition around which many discontents gathered, and Luther’s 95 theses, nailed to the Wittenberg door on Oct. 31, 1517 unleashed a storm of interest and debate.

· Indulgences had their origin in the institution of penance demanded by the early church to assure themselves of the truthfulness of the repentance offered in public by a sinning member of the church.

· Tertullian, the famous lawyer and theologian set the parameters for a theology of penance that was further developed in the west by Cyprian, in ways that went well beyond what the church in the east was interested in.

· Over time, the Roman concept of penance was merged with the Germanic concept of ‘wehrgeld’, a monetary penalty exacted against the guilty party on behalf of the injured party.

· A complex system began to develop that attempted to offer purification for sins, and its chief mediators became the priests, who instead of public confessions before the whole church, now held private confessions, and dictated penalties.

· In order to avoid abuse, a system of punishments was catalogued, and soon, an economy of sin and penance began to be codified.

· In the thirteenth century, Alexander of Hales formulated the concept of the ‘thesaureus meritorum’, a treasury of good works, which consisted of all the works of the saints as well as Christ’s inexhaustible merits, all to be administered by his vicar, the pope.

· Initially, the institution of penance involved a movement from sorrow, through confession, to satisfaction before a pardon was given.

· But when the pope turned it into a sacrament, administered by priests under his authority it involved sorrow leading to confession, after which a pardon was given that had to be validated by satisfaction.

· This meant that although the sinner had been forgiven of the eternal dues of his sin, the earthly ramifications still required some work on his part, and included in the earthly ramifications was purgatory, which could last well into an imagined future.

· Indulgences had existed many years before Luther’s time.

· One of the first major indulgences was offered by pope Urban II who made the first Crusade an indulgence to all who participated, wiping away their mortal sins in one blow.

· Eventually, a system of vicarious penance emerged in which the penitent could pay for their sins to be forgiven through various acts of penance, such as a pilgrimage, crusade, or good work, such as alms, or building a church.

· This superstructure of medieval theology lay behind the events that transpired in 1517, when young prince Albert of Brandenburg, of the Hohenstauffen family, borrowed money from the Fuggers of Augsburg to purchase the archbishopric of Mainz alongside the two archbishoprics (Magdeburg and Halberstadt) he already possessed.

· This would have given the Hohenstauffen family two of the electoral seats for the Holy Roman Empire, and agitated the family line of the Wettin, to which Frederick the Wise belonged.

· Albert financed his purchase of the archbishopric by selling the pope’s indulgences in Germany through his official preacher, Tetzel.

· This was again resented by Frederick the Wise because it drew his own subjects away from his own stunning collection of relics across the border from Saxony into the regions where Tetzel was hawking his.

· It was in that year, that Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg Schlosskirche, complaining in subdued terms about the financial extortion these indulgences represented, and adding a nationalist tone to it by pointing out the pope’s projected builiding of St. Peter’s in Rome at the expense of German peasants’ incomes.

-Read Doc. 2.

· His theses were translated into German and a minor debate flared up between the Augustinian monks and the Dominicans (more conservative catholics).

· Luther’s ideas became known to Rome after they starting effecting the sale of indulgences, and he was called to account in 1518 before Cardinal Cajentan.

· Luther came expecting a debate, but was simply confronted with the option of recanting or being excommunicated.

· Luther’s refusal to retract his statements about indulgences led on to him questioning the pope’s infallibility, and though some conciliatory moves were made in 1519 (he sent a humble letter to Rome acknowledging the pope as head of the church) a debate later that year with Johaness Eck, known as the Leipzig disputation, led him to side with the ideals of Jan Huss of the past century, against papal and counciliar authority, thereby isolating himself from both anti-papal catholics, and loyalists to the pope alike.

· The breach had been made, and Luther quickly wrote three books to clarify his position:

· Address to the German Nobility- in which he called for the German princes to reform the church since it would not reform itself;

· On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church- in which he attacked the seven sacraments, reducing them to three (eucharist, penance, baptism);

· On the Freedom of a Christian Man- in which he explains the meaning of ‘justification by faith’ and argues for the priesthood of all believers.

· These became three pillars of the reformation.

· In 1520 a bull of excommunication was delivered to Luther in Wittenberg, which he, along with his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg, solemnly burned

· (he students were less solemn afterwards, parading through Wittenberg with a brass band!)

· In 1521, he was excommunicated and called to appear before Charles V, HRE at his Diet in Worms. There he was again called to account, and asked to recant his views, just as Jan Huss had been required to, at the cost of his life, 100 years before