Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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Of few men can it be said with absolute certainty that they changed the course of history. Jesus was one; so was Karl Marx. Still another was Martin Luther, friar of the Augustinian Order of Eremites, who 450 years ago posted his 95 theses concerning indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. There was nothing defiant or earth-shaking about the act itself—all theologians of the day publicly announced their willingness to debate a timely religious issue. Not until later, in fact, did Luther come to realize that his action of Oct. 31, 1517, was the first shot in the war of words that was to create the Reformation.

To Yale’s Lutheran Historian Jaroslav Pelikan, the Reformation was a “tragic necessity”—tragic in that it shattered the unity of Christendom, necessary in that it cleansed the church and restored man’s faith in God to its Scriptural roots. It is equally true that the Reformation is an unrealized hope and unfinished ideal. Today, says Dr. Wilhelm Pauck of Union Theological Seminary, “one could characterize the spirit of our epoch as pre-Reformation. The old order is in a process of dissolution, but there is also a great positive religious expectancy.”

Rudderless Ship. Several theologians, in fact, have quite soberly wondered aloud whether the situation of the church demands the shock of another Luther. Even as it gropes toward ecumenical union, Protestantism stands threatened by secular inroads and spiritual indifference. Ranking church leaders openly question the relevance of Christianity, while old denominational quarrels have been upstaged by a new threat of schism: crisis-centered activists who see the church’s function as worldly service, against heaven-glancing traditionalists who argue that Christ’s message was to save souls not nations.

Given new impetus by a council that in many ways answered the Reformation demands upon it, Roman Catholicism frequently seems like a ship that has lost its rudder in high seas: almost every week a priest defects and marries, a theologian challenges defined dogma, new evidence appears that laymen are putting aside authority-given moral guidance to take a stand, Luther-like, as conscience dictates.

Christian thoughts about a second Luther coincide with a remarkable surge of new interest in the first. Within the past 50 years, points out Theologian Pauck, there have been more books written about Luther than about any other Christian figure, including Jesus. According to Dean John Dillenberger of Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, seminary students are showing a new interest in Luther’s own writings, finding in them an existential kinship to that favored secular rebel with a cause, Albert Camus. During this anniversary year of the Reformation, there will be Luther-honoring services and seminars in Protestant churches around the globe —including several in East Germany, where the atheist Ulbricht regime officially regards Luther as a spiritual precursor of Marxism for his fight against imperial and Papal oppression.

Scorn Gone. The most remarkable aspect of the Luther renaissance is that it is enthusiastically endorsed by Roman Catholics, whose postconciliar hymnbooks are patently incomplete if they do not include his martial hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Less than a generation ago, Luther was scorned—even by Catholic scholars who should have known better—as a sensuous, psychotic, fallen monk, the deliberate destroyer of Christendom. Luther, wrote Jesuit Hartmann Grisar in his 1926 biography, suffered from “an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion.”

Today, the vast majority of Catholic theologians concedes that Luther was a profound spiritual thinker who was driven into open revolt by the corruption of the Renaissance church and the intransigent stupidity of its Popes. Jesuit John Courtney Murray, for example, calls Luther “a religious genius—compassionate, rhetorical and full of insights.”

An American theologian teaching in Rome allows that “Luther was right on indulgences and on most theological points,” and that his teachings on justification “are more palatable to me than Thomas Aquinas.” After studying one of Luther’s major doctrinal tracts, reports Father John Healey of the Jesuits’ Woodstock seminary, “my students say that the only question we’re not talking about today is the problem with the Hussites”—the pre-Reformation Bohemian heretics of the 15th century.

Prophetic Figure. Appropriately enough, contemporary interest in Luther is proportionate to his direct impact on Protestant Christianity. Of the world’s 230 million Protestants, 74.5 million call themselves Lutherans. Although a truly universal church, Lutheranism is strongest in Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S., where it is the third largest Protestant segment (after the Baptists and the Methodists). Three branches of the faith account for most of the nation’s 10 million Lutherans: the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Far more than other reformers, Luther towers over his century by the sheer force of his personality, Churchillian in its scope and complexity. Yale’s Roland Bainton, whose Here I Stand is one of the best modern biographies of the reformer, says that “Luther is not an individual. He is a phenomenon.” Dr. Jerald Brauer, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, calls Luther “one of the three or four greatest figures in the history of Christianity, perhaps the greatest prophetic figure in post-Apostolic Western Christendom.”

So large is Luther that every age has been able to find in him a religious hero to its own liking. To the Enlightenment he was above all an individualist and rationalist who sneered at superstition and fought totalitarianism. The Romantic era saw Luther as a German nationalist, the rebel against Roman imperialism. Turn-of-the-century Christian liberals pictured him as a primitive reductionist who tried to return the church to its apostolic simplicity. Since Luther’s f ears,, foibles and physical ailments are amply documented—notably in his own writings, which fill some 100 volumes in the authoritative Weimar Edition—he has provided a wide target for psychoanalysts and playwrights. A successful case in point is John Osborne’s Luther, in which the reformer came across as a manic-depressive lout, whose rebellion against the church was motivated by a father fixation and a bad case of constipation.

Human Saint. Luther defies easy characterization, however, since his life and work add up to a complex of paradoxes. An authentic spiritual revolutionary, he was at the same time a social and political conservative, wedded to the ideals of feudal society. A limpid preacher of God’s majesty and transcendence, he was capable of a four-letter grossness of language. He was the archetype of individual Christian assertion; yet he could be brutally intolerant of dissent, and acquiesced in the suppression of those he considered heretics. Prayerful and beer-loving, sensual and austere, he was the least saintly, but most human, of saints.

Beyond personality, interest in Luther focuses on his efforts to solve the most fundamental of Christian problems: man’s relationship to God. The answer that he found—that man is saved by God’s grace through faith alone—is as old as Paul, but Luther’s particular framing of it came precisely at the right moment. A few decades earlier, suggests Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the Lutheran Church in America, Luther the rebel might have gone the way of Jan Hus or Savonarola, who were burned at the stake before their ideas could gain momentum. And by the end of the 16th century, spiritual renewal of the church might have been achieved from within, perhaps by that charismatic figure of Rome’s Counter Reformation, Ignatius Loyola.

No more than Loyola did Luther want to divide Christianity; for at least half of his life he was an unquestioningly loyal, devout Catholic, remarkable for his devotion in an age better known by its sinners than its saints. Born in 1483, the son of a Saxon miner, Luther had every intention of becoming a lawyer until, one day in 1505, he was caught in a sudden storm while walking toward the village of Stotternheim. A bolt of lightning knocked him to the ground, and Luther, terrified, called out to the church’s patroness of miners: “St. Anne, help me! I will become a monk.”

Sheer Monkery. Much to his parents’ dismay, Luther kept the vow, two weeks later entered the Augustinian priory at Erfurt. Luther was a pious cleric. “I kept the rule so strictly,” he recalled years later, “that I may say that if ever a monk got to Heaven by his sheer monkery it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work.”

What drove Luther to health-crack ing rigors of austerity—he sometimes fasted for three days, slept without a blanket in freezing winter—was a profound sense of his own sinfulness and of God’s unutterable majesty. In the midst of saying his first Mass, Luther wrote, “I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, ‘Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God.’ ” No amount of penance, no soothing advice from his superiors could still Luther’s conviction that he was a miserable, doomed sinner. Although his confessor counseled him to love God, Luther one day burst out, “I do not love God! I hate him!”

From Faith to Faith. Luther found that missing love in the study of Scripture. Assigned to the chair of Biblical studies at Wittenberg University, he became fascinated and puzzled by the emphasis on righteousness in the Psalms and in Paul’s epistles—notably Romans 1: 17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” As Luther later explained: “Night and day I pondered, until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”

The doctrine of justification—the cornerstone of the Reformation—was not in itself novel or un-Catholic. Yet from this central teaching, Luther was eventually to draw several conclusions that more bluntly challenged the spiritual structure of post-medieval Catholicism. If faith saves, man therefore has less need of clerical mediators between him and the Almighty. If man is to have faith, he will find it primarily through God’s word, both written and preached.

Treasury of Merits. Luther’s faith-centered theology ran strongly counter to the religious practice of 16th century Catholicism, which overemphasized the belief that man could earn his salva tion, and the remission of temporal punishment for sin, by good works. Central to this thinking was the church’s system of indulgences. In exchange for a meritorious work—frequently, contributing to a worthy cause or making a pilgrimage to a shrine—the church would dispense a sinner from his temporal punishment through its “treasury of merits.” This consisted of the grace accumulated by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the good deeds of the saints.

All too frequently in church preaching, the indulgence was made out to be some sort of magic: a good deed automatically got its reward, regardless of the disposition of the doer’s soul.

Armed with his new-found under standing of faith, Luther began to criticize the theology of indulgences in his sermons. His displeasure noticeably increased during 1517, when the Dominican John Tetzel was preaching throughout much of Germany on behalf of a papal fund-raising campaign to complete St. Peter’s Basilica. In exchange for a contribution, Tetzel boasted, he would provide donors with an indulgence that would even apply beyond the grave and free souls from purgatory. “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,” went his jingle, “the soul from purgatory springs.” To Luther, this was bad theology if not worse, and he promptly drew up his 95 theses.-Among other things, they argued that indulgences cannot remove guilt, do not apply to purgatory, and are harmful because they induce a false sense of security in the donor.

Boar v. Bull. Within a short time the German Dominicans denounced Luther to Rome as a man guilty of preaching “dangerous doctrines.” A Vatican theologian issued a series of counter-theses, arguing that anyone who criticized indulgences was guilty of heresy. Initially willing to accept a final verdict from Rome, Luther began to insist on Scriptural proof that he was wrong—and even questioned papal authority over purgatory. During an 18-day debate in 1519 with Theologian John Eck at Leipzig, Luther blurted out: “A council may sometimes err. Neither the church nor the Pope can establish articles of faith. These must come from Scripture.” Instead of offering him Biblical proof, Pope Leo X issued a bull demanding Luther’s recanting—on pain of excommunication—that began: “Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause. A wild boar has invaded thy vineyard.”

In reply, the boar burned the bull. Luther had attacked indulgences with more than theological argument. In a calculated appeal to the growing spirit of German nationalism, his treatises complained that a soft and corrupt Rome was robbing Germany of its wealth. Within weeks after he wrote them, Luther’s latest polemics were printed and circulated throughout the Holy Roman Empire. By 1521, when he was invited by Emperor Charles V to answer the charges against him at the Diet of Worms, the unknown friar had become a folk hero. There, Luther once more insisted that only Biblical authority would sway him. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” he told the court. “I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither honest nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

Revolt Against Rome. Excommunicated, Luther was saved from arrest and death by Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, whose domains included Wittenberg, and given sanctuary at the lonely Wartburg Castle. Luther stayed for nearly a year, during which he translated the New Testament into German. Meanwhile, the revolt against Rome spread; in town after town, priests and town councils removed statues from the churches and abandoned the Mass. New reformers, many of them far more radical than Luther, appeared on the scene—Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich, the ex-Dominican Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, Thomas Munzer in Zwickau. More important, princes, dukes and electors defied the condemnation of Luther by giving covert support to the new movement.

In 1522, Luther returned to Wittenberg to put into effect a spiritual reform that became the model for much of Germany. The episcopate was abolished, since Luther had found no Scriptural warrant for the office of bishop. Clerical celibacy was abandoned, even for monks and nuns—and in 1525, Luther married a former nun, Katherine von Bora. The sacraments were reduced from seven to two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Luther revised the Latin liturgy and translated it into German, allowing the laity to receive the consecrated wine as well as the Host, substituting a new popular hymnody for Gregorian chant. Emphasis in worship changed from the celebration of the sacrificial Mass to the preaching and teaching of God’s word.

Civilization Transformed. By 1530, when a summit conference of Reforma tion leaders convened in Augsburg to draw up a common statement of faith (the Augsburg Confession) leadership of the movement had begun to pass out of Luther’s hands. He continued to preach and teach the Bible in Wittenberg, but even sympathetic biographers have found it hard to justify some of the actions of his declining years. He endorsed the bigamous marriage of his supporter, Prince Philip of Hesse. He denounced reformers who disagreed with him in terms that he had once re served for the papacy. His statements about the Jews would sound excessive on the tongue of a Hitler. By the time of his death in 1546, admits Biographer Bainton, Luther was “an irascible old man, petulant, peevish, unrestrained, and at times positively coarse.”

The personal defects of an aging rebel do not in any way detract from the grandeur of his achievement, which ultimately transformed not only Christianity but all of Western civilization. Luther’s conviction that all men stand equally naked before God constitutes the theological substratum justifying liberal democracy. His teaching on “the two kingdoms”—that man with his soul belongs to the church, and with his body to the world—contributed to the rise of the modern secular state. Luther’s con ception of the “priesthood of all believers” implied that man served God best in his daily existence—the basis of the Protestant ethic of work and achievement. His insistence that men must read God’s word contributed to the spread of literacy. And in his own translation of the Bible—a rendering whose only peers are the King James version and the Latin Vulgate—Luther wrote a German of poetry and power that has been matched only by Goethe himself. In effect, he created a common language for Germany, the necessary prelude to nationhood.

Catholic Scope. Out of conviction, Luther stood for truth at the expense of unity—but the truths he stood for are essential to the Christian church: the primacy of faith and God’s word, the necessity of an ecclesia semper refor-manda (ever-reforming church), and the centrality of Jesus Christ. The Lutheran heritage, sums up Theologian Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago Divinity School, is “a tradition of profound, relentless, critical Biblical studies, a theological reflection of truly catholic scope, a type of piety nurtured by liturgical continuity with the old Catholic tradition.”

Even after the break with Rome, church historians agree, Luther wanted only to reform the one true church—and not to found a new Lutheran de nomination. With that in mind, many contemporary theologians agree that he could hardly fail to be displeased by much of the present condition of the churches.

One object of Luther’s wrath might well be the bureaucratization of the churches. Although one target of the Reformation was the overweening power of the Roman Curia, hardly a U.S. church exists without a frightening quota of red tape and organizational concern. “The Law of Moses may have been abrogated,” glooms Yale Historian Pelikan, “but not Parkinson’s.” Bureaucratic business goes hand in hand with clerical direction of the churches. “It is one of the great ironies of history,” says Dean F. Thomas Trotter of California’s Claremont School of Theology, “that whereas Protestantism began as an anticlerical movement, by and large today, at least in America, it is a movement of the clergy.”

Brownie Points. An even graver charge is that in much of Protestantism —including many of the churches that bear Luther’s name—his central insight into the primacy of faith has been lost in a bog of building campaigns, service agencies, relief programs and other church-instigated “good works.” American Christianity, charges Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, has fallen back on precisely the kind of spiritual error that the Reformation was designed to combat. The typical parishioner, adds Marty’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Theologian Brian Gerrish, feels that he has “done something that puts God in his debt if he puts down a nice thick carpet in the chancel hall—a sort of afterlife insurance policy.” Some laymen feel that all too many clerics are trying to earn what Marty calls “Brownie Points” by engaging in secular crusades—picketing against Viet Nam or for civil rights.

While the time may have arrived for another Luther, few Christian leaders expect one. For one thing, many Protestant thinkers are convinced that denominationalism is an obsolescent evil—the answer to Christian failings is not a revolt that creates still another new church. For another, a Christian distraught at the situation of the churches no longer needs to create a new spiritual community. Says Father Dino Bellucci of Rome’s Gregorian University: “Today, it is possible for a man to leave the organized church and try to remain a Christian outside organized Christianity”—the path chosen by English Theologian Charles Davis when he recently left Catholicism (TIME, Dec. 30).

A new Luther would almost certainly be as much of an unpredictable surprise to Christianity as the original was. There are Protestants as well as Catholics who believe that a modern reformer has already appeared, in the person of Pope John XXIII. “If we think functionally of someone who opened up the church to reform,” contends Claremont’s Dean Trotter, “the closest to Martin Luther has been Pope John.” Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford suggests that Luther’s spirit of reform is most likely to be embodied, if at all, by someone totally outside Christianity. “The Luthers today are not in the established church,” he argues. Novak suggests that the impulse for reformation today is in the New Left. Lutheran Liturgist Edgar S. Brown agrees that should a new Luther materialize, he would most likely turn up as “a novelist, poet or dramatist”—someone with the gift of words that Luther had “to get at men’s minds and hearts and grab them.”

Guilt & Fear. Whether or not a new reformer appears to shock Christianity out of its malaise, churchmen agree that the old Luther still speaks directly to many of their current concerns. Although theologians have trouble trying to translate justification by faith into contemporary terms—a discussion of the subject at a 1963 meeting of the Lutheran World Federation broke up in total bafflement—few Protestants are prepared to repudiate it. Yale’s Pelikan insists that “there is some relevance to a thought whose entire concern is how to cope with guilt, anxiety and fear.”

Anglican Bishop C. K. Sansbury, general secretary of the British Council of Churches, suggests that Luther’s basic insight into justification by faith “fits in very closely with the findings of many psychologists. When you think of all the nervous breakdowns, which are caused by the fact that people have built up some great image, this is still a liberating doctrine: that even when you slip up, you lay the whole lot at the feet of Christ, and you go on from there. All the striving and fear and anxiety goes. This seems to me a rediscovery of the sheer wonder of God’s grace.” Recent Luther research has emphasized the strong streak of secularity in his thought, which amounts to a virtual command for the Christian to live his faith in action. Traditionally, Luther’s doctrine of “the two kingdoms” has been taken to imply that Christians hould not interfere in the affairs of state. But Union Theological Seminary’s Pauck points out that Luther, in his tract On Civil Government, argued that a Christian must disobey a political ruler who expects him to disobey the will of God. It is no accident that the martyred anti-Nazi hero of the World War II German resistance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a Lutheran.

Christly Neighbors. Lutheran Leader Franklin Clark Fry suggests that a proper interpretation of the reformer’s teaching is that faith must find its existential expression in service. Luther advised his followers to be “a Christ to your neighbor”—which means, says Fry, “that one has to be the servant of everybody by love. Part of my service to my fellow man through love, in this age, is to make sure that he has his rights, to make sure that no man is robbed by society before he has a chance to live in society.” Luther’s conviction of man’s equality before God implies that “I have to rebel with all the heat that is in me against any man’s being submerged in this world.”

Both Catholic and Protestant theologians agree that the founder of the Reformation is an apt starting point in today’s quest for Christian unity. “Luther is an appropriate symbol of ecumenical encounter,” says Chicago’s Sittler. “His protest was a protest by a child of the church in the name of the church Catholic for the sake of the renewal of the church Catholic.” Roman scholars agree and—more than four centuries later—the Second Vatican Council adopted many of his ideas: the vernacular liturgy, the priority of Scripture, the church as the people of God who all share in the priesthood of Christ.

Temporary Movement. Protestant scholars, in turn, have been rediscovering how much of Luther was essentially Catholic—his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary, his belief in the efficacy of confession, his respect for a moderate amount of ceremony in worship, his spiritual debt to medieval mysticism. One leading Lutheran scholar, Dr. Carl Braaten of Chicago’s Lutheran School of Theology, insists that Protestant union with Rome is precisely in accord with the reformer’s wishes. “The Reformation was always meant to be a temporary movement,” he contends. “When the Roman Catholic Church is reformed, there will be no justification for a separate Protestant church.” He believes that any unified church structure would have to accept the papacy—not as an infallible magister but as “a symbol of the unity of the church.”

But Luther does not offer to the church any easy, adaptable solutions to Christian troubles. What he presents is something more: the exemplar of what a man of faith can and must be. In a dark age obsessed by pain and trouble, Luther was above all an “Easter Christian,” dominated by the memory and promise of Resurrection, the hope implicit in God’s word. He also possessed in full measure the quality that the late Paul Tillich, himself a Lutheran, summed up as “the courage to be.” For Luther, the life of faith was an existential risk; commitment to God was a summons to follow conscience and Christ—to sacrifice, dissent, even to death. Today, as in the 16th century, the believer will find few better guides than the words of God’s obedient rebel at Worms: “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.”

* In 1962 German Catholic Theologian Erwin Iserloh suggested that Luther simply mailed copies of his theses to two of his churchly superiors. Most historians believe that the traditional theses-posting story is probably accurate.