Martin Luther (1483–1546)
Attempts to understand Luther have gone on continuously since the Reformation. Each age has attempted to understand and interpret his life and work and the picture that emerges is of an exceptionally complex man. He has been seen through the centuries as a heretic, a reformer, part of the history of salvation, a prophet, the apostle of freedom of the conscience, a nationalist, and as both the representative of the class revolution and its betrayer.
The Holy Roman empire in the early 16th century
The man who was to give rise to such diverse judgements was born in 1483 in Eisleben in Thuringia. His father, Hans Luther, was of peasant stock but became a copper miner and, in time, rose to be a member of the city council of Mansfeld and a lessee of mines and furnaces. Luther’s childhood was comfortable, he had a good education and studied law at the University of Erfurt.
His background was very much that of a peasant. The superstitions of the peasantry, its beliefs in demons and in the forces of good and evil actively intervening in human affairs did much to shape his beliefs. Luther was always to see life as part of the great struggle between God and the devil. He was a very human man, earthy, often coarse and frequently unscrupulous. He was capable of great love and great hatred and in return attracted both in equal measure.
In 1505, despite parental disapproval, Luther entered a priory of Augustinian friars, a reformed house, at Erfurt. He took this step in fulfilment of a vow made during a thunderstorm. In 1506 he was ordained and rapidly gained a reputation for piety. In 1508 he was sent to the Augustinian house at Wittenberg where he taught at the new university founded by Elector Frederick of Saxony. In 1512 he became a doctor of theology and professor of biblical theology.
Despite his reputation for piety and his rapid success at Wittenberg, Luther later claimed that during this period he found little satisfaction in his work. He was to sum up his purpose in becoming a monk as “I want to escape hell by being a monk”. 10 He was almost fanatically concerned about the salvation of his soul. Yet, despite a rigorous submission to the discipline of his order and to the observances of the church, he could not quieten his fears that he was damned. Ebeling believes that these fears rose out of the very progress he was making in the monastery.11 The holier his way of life, the more he despaired of finding salvation. His life was dominated by a fear of God’s judgement, and neither observances nor penance were able to assure him of forgiveness. As he later said, “The more I tried these remedies, the more troubled and uneasy my conscience grew”.12
He was also increasingly worried about the state of the church and of what he realized was the commercialization of the sacrament of penance through indulgences and the buying of Masses for the salvation of the soul. In 1510 he was sent by his order on a mission to Rome. His experience of the secularism and religious indifference of the Renaissance papacy increased his critical awareness of the abuses practised in the church.
Luther’s training at Erfurt had been dominated by the nominalist teachings of William of Ockham. The stress that the nominalists laid on the sovereignty of God and on his freedom to save or reject men as he wishes must have played a major role in Luther’s belief in man’s inability to earn salvation and must have contributed towards his feelings of personal despair.
In his attempts to settle his doubts and fears, Luther turned to the writings of the German mystics. Part of his education had been in a school run by the Brothers of the Common Life and his inner spirituality and piety had much in common with the devotio rnoderna. He was deeply impressed by the writings of a 14th century mystic, Johann Tauler, and particularly by his contention that “life does not consist in repose but in progress from good to better”. 13 This contention increased Luther’s doubts about the efficacy of doing penance in order to gain salvation. His dilemma was further increased by Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament, in which the Vulgate’s reading of Matthew 4:17 as “Do penance” was rendered as “Be penitent”.
To Luther, this indicated that the sacrament of penance, so central to the teaching of the church and so abused since the 13th century, was unscriptural. How then was man to find salvation? As an Augustinian friar, Luther had an intimate knowledge of the works of St Augustine. Like the later nominalists, Augustine had also stressed the sovereignty of God and man’s inability to find salvation without the grace of God. He saw man as being justified by his faith in God, and saw this justification as a slow process of renewal on the part of the individual until he was acceptable to God. Luther’s own personal feeling of unworthiness made it difficult for him to accept this belief, and, in order to ascertain whether Augustine’s viewpoint had validity, he turned to the source of the latter’s theology, the epistles of St Paul.
In 1515 Luther found his answer in Romans I:17 where Paul wrote: “He shall gain life who is justified by faith.” Luther believed that Augustine had misinterpreted Paul and that the latter saw justification as an act, not of man, but of God. He was convinced that Paul meant that it was only through faith that a man was justified, and he therefore evolved the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He argued that because of the sinful nature of man, man is incapable of saving himself, and that religious observances, penance and prayers are inadequate for salvation. Salvation can only come through faith in God and through the acceptance that, by his grace, God will save the sinner. Forgiveness is therefore a gift given by God to those who believe in him, and cannot be achieved by man’s individual effort.
There was nothing revolutionary in Luther’s interpretation. Despite the rise of scholasticism, Augustine’s writings had retained much support in the Late Middle Ages and Augustinian theologians such as the 14th century Thomas Bradwardine of Canterbury and Gregory of Rimini had stressed both justification by faith and the impossibility of gaining salvation by good works. The church, however, although it accepted justification, saw it as involving not only the faith of the individual but also participation in the sacraments and the performance of good works. Luther’s interpretation was different in that it negated human freedom. This had revolutionary implications, for it made the role of the priest as an intermediary between God and man redundant. If faith in God was sufficient to secure forgiveness, religious observances and participation in the sacraments lost their central role in salvation.
The doctrine of justification by faith alone also made Luther’s position radically different to that of both the mystics and the Christian humanists. Both groups believed in man’s inherent capability of saving himself through good works, particularly those which were involved in imitating the life of Christ. Luther’s obsession with man’s sinfulness and impotence in the face of God caused him to reject both mysticism and Christian humanism.
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