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Luther's Reformation 1 Luther’s Reformation: From Humble Beginnings to Widespread Restoration Dr. Paul Kreiss, Professor Emeritus, Concordia University Chicago1 Martin Luther (1483-1546) is best known as the face of the Reformation, a movement that found its origins in the scholarship of the Renaissance and the growing malpractices of the Catholic Church. Through his act of posting the 95 Theses on October 31, 1517, Luther called for a reform in Church policies and a return to the true teachings of God’s Word that had been buried and lost under centuries of Church traditions. His disaffected writings set the European continent ablaze, turning one monk’s call for debate into centuries of church separations, violence, and rebellions. If Luther alone stood for what he believed in against the Catholic Church, the Reformation would have surely failed. The Reformation was not the result of one brave man’s radical writings, but the culmination of decades of biblical scholarship across France and Germany. Johann Von Staupitz’s Influence in Luther’s Meteoric Ascent Before Luther ever thought of posting the 95 Theses, his life was remarkably influenced by his spiritual father, Johann Von Staupitz, a vicar of the regional Augustinian Order, prior of the Wittenberg convent, and superior of Augustinian monasteries in a large area of southern Germany. A great spiritual leader, Von Staupitz guided Luther through his anxious guilt and depression. Luther believed he was unable to satisfy the demands of a righteous and sovereign God to whom he had dedicated his whole life. Despite his unrelenting zeal in carrying out his duties as a monk and giving God his total devotion, he could not find peace in his efforts to 1 Emeritus Professor Dr. Paul Kreiss, inspired by the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, labored on this essay while in his 90s. He and his family are particularly grateful for CUC graduate Jason Kohm’s extensive editing which enabled it to come to fruition. 2 please such a perfect God due to his extreme sensitivity and consciousness of his own sin. He felt continually rejected by the Creator despite his prayers and confessions. However, Von Staupitz exercised endless patience and empathy for this gifted young man who nearly tortured himself to death in his devoted service—he was barely skin and bones due to fasting. The prior tried to assure Luther that Christ went to the cross and laid down His life not only for him, but for the whole world, yet Luther could only see himself as the victim of an unloving God. As with Saul of Tarsus who later became the Apostle Paul, God had mercy on this tormented soul. Von Staupitz recognized the endless energy and gifts in this driven young man and decided to take a tremendous risk: he called Luther to take over his post as professor of theology at Wittenberg University. He wanted to take Luther’s boundless efforts spent on self- deprecation and channel it into teaching and lecturing students in the study of the Bible. Luther initially resisted the offer because he felt unqualified and feared losing his close relationship with his best friend and mentor. Von Staupitz hoped, however, that Luther would find a deeper insight into God’s mysteries and proclamations by teaching the Bible to students instead of merely studying it for his own edification and wisdom. Although this gesture seemed magnanimous and risky, it was quite logical for Von Staupitz, who had become vicar for an even larger portion of the Augustinian Order and needed relief from some of his other responsibilities. It was customary for institutions like Wittenberg University to begin the school year with the study of the book of Psalms, since it was so widely used in the daily meditations of a monastery’s liturgy of house prayers. After the Psalms followed the study of St. Paul’s epistles like Romans, Galatians, Ephesians Hebrews, etc. Von Staupitz most likely speculated that in this new teaching position, the gifted and restless professor would be exposed to God’s grace in 3 Christ, giving the Holy Spirit the opportunity to open Luther’s heart and mind to the good news so frequently presented in the Psalms and New Testament epistles. Luther, alongside his positions as professor at Wittenberg and prior of his own monastery, was asked to oversee the priories of 11 additional Augustinian monasteries in order to visit their operations, evaluate their function, and foster their betterment. In an excerpt from a letter to his friend John Lang, a prior of the Augustinians in Erfurt, he indicated the extent of his status as a leader in and around the territory of Lower Saxony almost one year before the posting of the 95 Theses. He humorously writes in 1516: Greetings! I nearly need two copyists or secretaries. All day long I do almost nothing else than write letter; therefore I am sometimes not aware of, whether or not, I constantly repeat myself, but you will see. I am a preacher at the monastery, I am a reader during mealtimes, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to supervise the study [of novices and friars], I am a vicar (and that means I am eleven times prior), I am caretaker of the fish [pond] at Leitzkau, I represent the people of Herzberg at the court in Torgau, I lectured on Paul, and I am assembling [material for] a commentary on the Psalms. As I have mentioned, the greater part of my time is filled with the job of letter writing. I hardly have any uninterrupted time to say the Hourly Prayers and celebrate [mass]. Besides all this there are my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the devil. See what a lazy man I am!2 What a tremendous amount of work and success for this thirty-three-year-old monk from a quite ordinary and rather poor family! Luther’s many accomplishments, initiated by Von Staupitz, 2 Martin Luther, “To John Lang,” Oct. 26, 1516, Luther’s Works, Vol. 48, Letters 1, (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1963), 27-28. 4 began to restore his family’s good name and earn the respect of his father, who originally was incredibly disappointed in Luther’s abandonment of law school for a clerical career. With this new professorship, Luther was expected to uphold the truth of Holy Scripture in his lecturing on doctrine and faith. He took this obligation very seriously as he began to teach the book of Psalms in his first year at Wittenberg University. Unfortunately, he initially interpreted the Law in the Psalms too literally with very little Gospel to accompany the passages. It was not until his second time teaching Psalms (after having been through Paul’s epistles) that he discovered how much of the New Testament Gospel was already hidden within them. This revelation uncovered a new enlightened and balanced spiritual connection across both Testaments for the professor. Luther soon found his own road to Damascus in Wittenberg and experienced his own conversion from Saul to Paul by leading students into God’s powerful Word. Von Staupitz had successfully led and equipped his protégé to carry out the plan for which God had destined him. Lefevre d’Etables’ Writings Instruct and Inspire Luther Luther’s perspective on Scripture began to change as he read the writings of Lefevre d’Etaples (1460-1536), the earliest and most prominent reformer in early 16th century French literature. D’Etaples graduated from the University of Paris, published a textbook about Aristotle’s metaphysics, and taught philosophy and liberal arts at the College of Cardinal Lemoine. As all humanists did, he rediscovered great works of antiquity, but as a devout Christian he took special interest in biblical exegesis. A few years later, like Luther, he became a very popular teacher and lecturer who influenced many students until his retirement in 1508. They later embraced his Quincuplex Psalterium (1509), which rejected the medieval exegesis— literal, allegorical, topological, and analogical interpretations of the Psalms—in favor of the 5 literal supplanted with spiritual meaning grounded in the direct prophetic mystery of Christ. I am inclined to James Samuel Preus’ study in his book From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther, which explains how d’Etables, in his preface to the Quincuplex Psalterium, entertained a different view of “literal” in the Psalms than what had been previously accepted. Preus states, “the proper literal sense of Scripture is that which corresponds to the intention of the prophet (of the Old Testament) and the sense of the Holy Spirit speaking in him…there is no treatment of the grammatical issue, no direct dealing with the four senses—except the assertion that his own ‘literal sense’ is not what others called allegory or tropology or analogy.”3 In other words, a “literal sense” has no sole grammatical foundation of interpretation, but goes beyond to a “spiritual” one inspired by the Holy Spirit. As the Apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians: “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”4 D’Etables concluded that the true meaning of the Psalms cannot be understood correctly or adequately without the promise of the New Testament. If the Law, the “literal sense,” had been sufficient for salvation, Christ’s death would have been unnecessary. Thus in Psalms, David is more of a prophet in the Christological sense than a mere product of literal history. Jesus Himself states that the Old Testament prophesied about Him: “It is [the Scriptures] that bear witness about me.”5 If the Old Testament is read in light of the New, the Psalms become messianic chants with a new spiritual meaning lodged in the direct prophetic mystery of Christ.
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