A Brief History of Martin Luther, Part 6

Luther Angered By The Indulgences:

Luther was provoked to speak out against this profane practice when Tetzel, the famous hawker of indulgences came to Jüterbog, a few hours from Wittenberg. Tetzel was born somewhere between 1450 and 1460. He began his career as a preacher of indulgences. Protestant writers depict him as an ignorant, noisy, impudent, and immoral charlatan, who was not ashamed to boast that he saved more souls from purgatory by his letters of indulgence than St. Peter did by his preaching. Roman Catholic historians defend him as a learned and zealous servant of the church. His private character was certainly tainted, if we are to credit the papal nuncio, Karl von Miltitz, who had the best resources of information, and charged him with avarice, dishonesty, and sexual immorality.

Tetzel traveled with great pomp through Germany, proclaiming everywhere the indulgences of the Pope. He was received like an angel from heaven. Priests, monk, magistrates, men, women and children marched in great processions with songs and candles to meet him and his fellow monks. Tetzel displayed the papal Bull on a velvet cushion. This was placed on a high altar where a red cross draped in a silk banner bearing the papal arms was set up in front of it. Beneath the cross was placed a large iron chest for the indulgence money. Tetzel here spoke those notorious words: “A soul flies from Purgatory as soon as the penny tinkles in the box."

The common people made no distinction between the guilt of sin and its punishment, so they eagerly embraced this rare offer of salvation from punishment. The Elector of Saxony would not allow Tetzel to set up his trade in his territory for fear that he might take too much money from his subjects. So this is why Tetzel set up his trade on the border of Saxony, at Jüterbog.

Luther had experienced remission of sins as a gift of free grace. This was diametrically opposed to the system of forgiveness by payment of money. It was a conflict of principles.

Thus, he could not be silent when the traffic of indulgences came so near to the borders of his sphere of ministry. As a preacher, a pastor, and a professor, he felt it to be his duty to protest against such measures: to be silent was to betray his theology and his conscience. 

A Brief History of Martin Luther, Part 5

Luther Becomes a Professor at Wittenberg:

Luther was called by Staupitz to Wittenberg and arrived there in October, 1508. He was called back to Erfurt in autumn of 1509. He was sent to Rome in 1510. He returned to Wittenberg in 1511 and stayed there till a few days before his death in1546. He first lectured on scholastic philosophy. But he soon devoted himself exclusively to theology, which was much more congenial to his taste. By contemporary standards, he was well equipped for his position. By modern standards he was quite ill-equipped. Although he was a Doctor of Divinity, for several years he relied almost exclusively on the Latin version of the Scriptures. Very few professors knew Greek, and still less knew Hebrew. Luther had acquired a superficial idea of Hebrew at Erfurt. The Greek he learned at Wittenberg, we do not know exactly when. His labor in translating the Bible forced him into a closer familiarity with the original languages, though he never attained to mastery.

Luther began his theological teaching with David and Paul. These became the pillars of his theology. His first original work in German was an exposition of the seven Penitential Psalms. This was in 1517. It was a suiting introduction to his Theses, for in these he set forth true evangelical repentance. In this exposition he set forth the doctrines of sin and grace and the comfort of the gospel for the understanding of the common people.

Luther did not have any idea yet of reforming the Catholic Church – and still less did he plan to separate from it. He considered himself a good Catholic even in 1517. He still prayed devoutly to the Virgin Mary from the pulpit, and he believed in the intercession of the saints. He celebrated mass fully believing in the repetition of the sacrifice of the cross and the miracle of transubstantiation.

Christ began his public ministry with an ejection of the traffickers of the temple court. Likewise, the Reformation began with a protest against the traffic in indulgences that profaned and degraded the Christianity.

According to the Roman legal code indulgence was a term of amnesty from punishment. In ecclesiastical Latin it meant the temporal (not eternal) remission from the punishment of sin on the condition that money was given to the Church or to some charity. The practice of indulgences grew out of a custom of the Northern and Western barbarians to substitute pecuniary compensation for punishment or an offense. The church favored this custom in order to avoid bloodshed, but did wrong in applying it to religious offenses. After the Crusades, the granting of indulgences degenerated into a regular traffic, and became a source of ecclesiastical and monastic wealth. Most of the profits went into the papal treasury. The idea of buying and selling the remission of punishment and release from purgatory had roused protest from earnest minds long before Luther, but without much effect. 

A Brief History of Martin Luther, Part 4

Luther’s Conversion:

With help from the old monk and Staupitz, but especially from the study of Paul’s Epistles, Luther gradually was brought to the conviction that the sinner is justified by faith alone, without works of law. By the end of his convent life he came to the conclusion that “the righteousness of God” (Rom. 1:17) is the righteousness which God freely gives in Christ to those who believe in him. Righteousness is not to be attained through man’s own exertions and merits. Rather, it is complete and perfect in Christ, and all the sinner has to do is to accept it from Him as a free gift. Justification is that judicial act of God whereby he acquits the sinner of guilt and clothes him with the righteousness of Christ on the sole condition of personal faith which apprehends and appropriates Christ and shows its life and power by good works, as a good tree bringing forth good fruits. This experience acted like a new revelation on Luther. It shed light upon the whole Bible and made it a book of life and comfort. He felt relieved of the terrible load of guilt by an act of free grace. From then on the doctrine of justification by faith alone was the very substance of the Gospel and the heart of theology. He measured every other doctrine and the value of every book of the Bible by this standard. That is the reason for his great enthusiasm for Paul, and his dislike of James, whom he could not reconcile with his favorite apostle.

In this way Luther’s monastic and ascetic life was a preparation for his evangelical faith. It was the tutor that lead him to Christ (Rom. 3:20; Gal. 3:24). He was ordained to the priesthood, and on May 2, 1507, he said his first mass. This was a great event in the life of a priest. He was so overwhelmed by the gravity of offering the tremendous sacrifice for the living and the dead that he nearly fainted at the altar.

An interesting event in his training for the Reformation was his visit to Rome. In the fall of 1510 he was sent to Rome at the suggestion of Staupitz, who wished to bring about a disciplinary reform of the Augustinian convents in Germany. Rome was filled with enthusiasm for the renaissance of classical literature and art, but was unconcerned with religion. Julius II, pope from 1503 to 1513, bent all his energies on the enhancement of the secular dominion of the papacy by means of an immoral diplomacy and bloody wars. When Luther came in sight of the city, he exclaimed, “Hail to thee, holy, Rome! Thrice holy for the blood of martyrs shed here.” In his own words, he ran around like a “crazy saint” going to all the churches, crypts and catacombs with an unquestioning faith in the legendary traditions about the relics and miracles of martyrs. He even climbed the 28 steps of the Scala Santa (said to have been transported from the Judgment Hall of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem), on his knees. But at every step he seemed to hear the word of the Scripture as a protest in his ear: "The just shall live by faith" (Rom. 1:17). So here, even at the height of his ascetic career he doubted its efficacy in giving peace to the troubled conscience. This doubt was strengthened by everything he saw around him. He was shocked by the unbelief, levity and immorality of the clergy.

Money and luxurious living seemed to have replaced apostolic poverty and self-denial.

In the year 1502 Frederick III, surnamed the Wise, Elector of Saxony, founded a new University at Wittenberg. Wittenberg was a poor and badly built town of about three thousand inhabitants in a dull, sandy, sterile plain on the banks of the Elbe, and owes its fame entirely to the fact that it became the nursery of the Reformation theology. Luther says that it lay a few steps from barbarism, and speaks of its citizens as wanting in culture, courtesy and kindness. He felt at times strongly tempted to leave it. Melanchthon complained that he could not get a decent meal at Wittenberg. The university was opened October 18, 1502. The organization was entrusted to Dr. Pollich and to Staupitz, the first Dean of the theological faculty, who fixed his eye on his friend

Wittenberg soon overshadowed its powerful rivals in Erfurt and Leipzig by the new theology. The number of students was four hundred and sixteen in the first semester, then declined to fifty-five in 1505, partly in consequence of the pestilence, began to rise again in 1507, and when Luther and Melanchthon stood on the summit of their fame, they attracted thousands of pupils from all countries of Europe. At times Melanchthon heard eleven languages spoken at his table.

A Brief History of Martin Luther, Part 3

Luther Becomes a Monk:

In the summer of 1505 Luther entered the Augustinian convent at Erfurt and became a monk. His father nearly went crazy when he heard the news. Later in life, Luther declared that his monastic vow was forced from him by terror and the fear of death and the judgment to come, yet he never doubted that God’s hand was in it.

The Augustinian convent at Erfurt became the cradle of the Lutheran Reformation. Luther was a sincere, conscientious monk. It was significant that the order Luther joined bore the name of the greatest Latin father who, next to St. Paul, was to be Luther’s chief teacher of theology and religion. But it is an error to suppose that this order represented the anti-Pelagian or evangelical views of the North African father. In fact, it was intensely catholic in doctrine, and given to excessive worship of the Virgin Mary, and obedience to the papal see which conferred upon it many special privileges.

At the end of 1505 Luther promised to live until death in poverty and chastity, to render obedience to Almighty God, to the Virgin Mary, and to the prior of the monastery. For the next two years he diligently read the Scriptures and the latter Scholastic theologians. He observed the tiniest details of discipline. No one surpassed him in prayer, fasting, night watches, and self-mortification. He was already held up as a model of sanctity. "If ever," he said afterward, "a monk got to heaven by monkery, I would have gotten there."

He was disappointed in his hopes to escape sin and temptation behind the cloister walls. He found no peace in all his pious exercises. The more he advanced externally, the more he felt the burden of sin within. He had to contend with temptations of anger, envy, hatred and pride. He saw sin everywhere, even in the smallest trifles. The Scriptures impressed upon him the terrors of divine justice. He could not trust in God as a reconciled Father, as a God of love and mercy but trembled before him, as a God of wrath, as a consuming fire. He could not get over the words: "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God." His confessor once told him: "You are a fool, God is not angry with you, but you are angry with God." He remembered this afterward as "a great and glorious word," but at that time it made no impression on him. He could not point to any particular transgression; it was sin as an all-pervading power and vitiating principle, sin as a corruption of nature, sin as a state of alienation from God and hostility to God that weighed on his mind and brought him often to the brink of despair. In this state of mental and moral agony, Luther was comforted by an old monk of the convent who reminded him of the article on the forgiveness of sins in the Apostles’ Creed, of Paul’s word that the sinner is justified by grace through faith, and of an incidental remark of St. Bernard (in a Sermon on the Canticles) to the same effect.

His best friend and wisest counselor was Johann von Staupitz, Doctor of Divinity and Vicar-General of the Augustinian convents in Germany. Staupitz was Luther’s spiritual father. He encouraged Luther to enter the priesthood (1507), and brought him to Wittenberg. He convinced him to take the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and to preach. 

A Brief History of Martin Luther, Part 2

Luther Enters The University:

When he was 18, in 1501, he entered the University of Erfurt which had been founded in 1392 and was one of the best in Germany. By this time his father was able to assist him so that he was free of care and could acquire a little library. His main studies were scholastic philosophy, namely: logic, rhetoric, physics and metaphysics. He also studied the ancient classics. In this way he was able to acquire sufficient mastery of Latin to write it with clearness and vigor, although not with elegance and refinement.

He had an unblemished moral character and his reputation was not sullied for sharp and scathing language until after his theological passions were roused by the Reformation. He went to mass regularly and observed the daily devotions of a sincere Catholic. His motto was: to pray well is half the study. He was a devout worshipper of the Virgin Mary.

He was 20 when he first saw a complete Bible in the University library. He was surprised to find that it contained far more than he heard explained in the churches. He began a systematic study of the Bible once he entered the convent. He was very concerned about his personal salvation and given to gloomy reflections over his sinful condition. Once he fell dangerously ill, and was seized with a fit of despair, but an old priest comforted him, saying: "My dear Baccalaureus, be of good cheer; you will not die in this sickness: God will yet make a great man out of you for the comfort of many."

He graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1502 and Master of Arts in 1505. This degree was bestowed with great solemnity. Speaking of the ceremony, Luther said, “What a moment of majesty and splendor was that when one took the degree of Master, and torches were carried before him. I consider that no temporal or worldly joy can equal it." His talents and attainments were the wonder of the University.

Luther now began to prepare himself for the profession of lawyer, after his father’s wishes. But certain circumstances opened a new path for his life. The events that led to this sudden step we gather from his fragmentary utterances which have been embellished by legendary tradition. He was shocked by the sudden death of a friend. Shortly afterward, on July 2, 1505 he was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm near Erfurt on his return from a visit to his parents, and was so frightened that he fell to the earth and tremblingly exclaimed: "Help, beloved Saint Anna! I will become a monk."