Remembering Martin Luther: Part II (Luther’s Conversion)

by Richard Barcellos | Oct 30, 2010 | Current Events, Historical Theology

Part I is here.

The exact date of Luther’s conversion is debated. We do know that some time between 1513 and 1518 Luther understood the doctrine of justification by faith. His study of Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians forced him to reckon with the concept of the righteousness of God. At this time, he was studying the writings of Augustine as well. His conversion came after much pain of body and soul. Luther describes his monastic life as follows:

I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that I could say that if ever a monk could get to heaven through monastic discipline, I should have entered it. All my companions in the monastery who knew me would bear me out in this. For if it had gone on much longer, I would have martyred myself to death, what with vigils, prayers, reading and other works.[1]

Some of his fellow monks tried to talk him out of such scrupulosity but to no avail. To him God was horrifyingly angry and there was no consolation, only accusation.

He experienced terror in his soul for many years. Some of these terrors lasted until death. His early anxieties centered on the confessional.

I tried to live according to the Rule with all diligence, and I used to be contrite, to confess and number my sins, and often repeated my confession, and sedulously performed my allotted penance. And yet my conscience could never give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.” The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak and afflicted conscience with the traditions of men, the more each day found it more uncertain, weaker, more troubled.”[2]

Bainton adds:

He confessed frequently, often daily, and for as long as six hours on a single occasion. …Luther would repeat a confession and, to be sure of including everything, would review his entire life until the confessor grew weary and exclaimed, “Man, God is not angry with you. You are angry with God. Don’t you know that God commands you to hope?”[3]

In his later years, he believed he had caused permanent damage to his intestines due to his overly scrupulous monastic disciplines.[4]

Luther did receive some worthy advice while in the monastery. Reformation scholar David Steinmetz comments:

[Of much] help to Luther was the advice of Dr. John Staupitz, Vicar-General of the Augustinian Observants and professor of Bible in the newly founded University of Wittenberg. “If I didn’t praise Staupitz,” Luther later told his students, “I should be a damned, ungrateful, papistical ass, for he was my very first father in this teaching, and he bore me in Christ.”[5]

Concerning Luther in the confessional with Staupitz, Bainton adds:

This assiduous confessing certainly succeeded in clearing up any major transgressions. The leftovers with which Luther kept trotting in appeared to Staupitz to be only the scruples of a sick soul. “Look here,” said he, “if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive – parricide [from pater, father, and coedo, to kill], blasphemy, adultery – instead of all these peccadilloes [from peccatum, a little sin].”[6]

In a letter written in 1518 to Staupitz, Luther testifies to the fact that it was Staupitz who pointed him to Christ and that sometime prior to the writing of the letter Luther had looked to the wounds of the sweetest Saviour and been gloriously saved from the wrath to come.[7]

Luther’s struggle with God ended when he understood Paul’s concept of the justice and righteousness of God. Bainton gives Luther’s own words:

  I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the justice of God,” because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.

  Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that “the just shall live by his 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 whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “justice of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.[8]

[2] Steinmetz, Luther, 2.

[3] Bainton, Here I Stand, 41.

[4] Ibid., 34.

[5] Steinmetz, Luther, 8.

[6] Bainton, Here I Stand, 41.

[7] Steinmitz, Luther, 9, 10.

[8] Bainton, Here I Stand, 49, 50.

Richard Barcellos

Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.

Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.

 

Remembering Martin Luther: Part I

by Richard Barcellos | Oct 28, 2010 | Current Events, Historical Theology

1.      Luther’s Impact

Martin Luther stands above all others in the German Reformation. He is one of the outstanding figures in all of history and second only to Calvin in the Reformation era as far as impacting Western culture is concerned. His ideas transformed Western culture from medieval to modern. His importance and unique place in history can be seen in Roland Bainton’s first two paragraphs of his celebrated biography of Luther, where he says:

  In  a  sultry day in July  of  the year 1505 a  lonely traveler  was trudging  over a parched road on the outskirts of  the Saxon village  of  Stotternheim. He was a young man, short but sturdy, and wore the dress of a university student. As he approached the village, the sky became overcast. Suddenly there was a shower, then a crashing storm. A bolt of lightning rived the gloom and knocked the man to the ground. Struggling to rise, he cried in terror, “St. Anne help me! I will become a monk.”

  The man who thus called upon a saint was later to repudiate the cult of the saints. He who vowed to become a monk was later to renounce monasticism. A loyal son of the Catholic Church, he was later to shatter the structure of medieval Catholicism. A devoted servant of the pope, he was later to identify the popes with Antichrist. For this young man was Martin Luther.[1]

Luther, better yet, the principles Luther stood for, shook Germany and Europe to the core and changed the face of history.

2.      Luther’s Early Life

Martin Luther was born into a peasant home on November 10, 1483. His father, Hans, was a common laborer who worked himself up to a well-to-do mining operator.[2] Domestic rules were strictly enforced which had a lasting impression on Luther.  In later life, Luther is reported to have said:

My mother cained me for stealing a nut, until blood came. Such strict discipline drove me to the monastery, although she meant it well. …My father once whipped me so that I ran away and felt ugly toward him until he was at pains to win me back. …[At school] I was cained in a single morning fifteen times for nothing at all.[3]

3.      Luther’s Education

Luther was well educated, preparing for a career in law. However, due to concerns about the state of his soul, Luther entered the Augustinian monastery in 1505. Hillerbrand rehearses Luther’s decision making process and his father’s reaction for us.

  On 16^th July, St. Alexis Day, Luther observed: ‘Today is the anniversary of my entrance into the monastery at Erfurt.’ Then he began to relate how he had made the vow. Two weeks earlier while traveling near Stotternheim, not far from Erfurt, he was so frightened by a flash of lightning that he exclaimed in terror: ‘Help me, St Anne, I will become a monk!’ He continued: ‘Afterwards I regretted this vow and many counseled me against it. None the less, I remained steadfast. … My father was also very angry about my vow, but I persisted in my decision.  …’

  He became a monk altogether against the will of his father. When Martin asked him, at the occasion of his first mass, why he was so angry about his decision, he received the answer: ‘Do you not know that it is commanded to honour father and mother?’ Martin reasoned that his terror in the thunderstorm had forced him to become a monk, but his father remarked: ‘I hope it was not the devil.’[4]

He was ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1507. In October of 1512 he received his doctorate in theology and in 1513 took a teaching post at Wittenberg.

4.      Luther’s Marriage and Home-Life

Several years into the Reformation movement, in June of 1525, Luther married Katherine von Bora, an apostate nun. Katherine had arrived in Wittenberg in 1523 seeking asylum. She had been smuggled from her convent by a man named Leonard Kopp. Bainton continues the story:

Some sisters in a neighboring village sought his [Luther’s] counsel as to what they should do in view of their evangelical persuasion. He took it upon himself to arrange their escape. This was hardy because the abduction of nuns was a capital offense, and Duke George exacted the penalty. …Luther clandestinely enlisted the aid of a respected burgher…a merchant who from time to time delivered barrels of herring to the convent. …he bundled twelve nuns into his covered wagon as if they were empty barrels. Three returned to their homes. The remaining nine arrived in Wittenberg.[5]

     Luther was to be married on Thursday, June 27, 1525. As was the custom, he sent out many invitations. “To Leonard Kopp, who organized the escape of the nuns” he said, “I am to be married on Thursday. My lord Katie and I invite you to send a barrel of the best Torgau beer, and if it is not good you will have to drink it all yourself.”[6]

     Marriage brought many challenges to Luther’s life. Luther testifies to this when he says, “Before I was married the bed was not made for a whole year and became foul with sweat. But I worked so hard and was weary I tumbled in without noticing it.”[7] Bainton adds bluntly, “Katie cleaned house.”[8] Katie was also like Luther’s physician at times. 

  Looking after him was the more of a task because he was so often sick. He suffered at one time or another from gout, insomnia, …hemorrhoids, constipation, stone, dizziness, and ringing in the ears… Katie was a master of herbs, poultices, and massage. Her son Paul, who became a doctor, said his mother was half one. She kept Luther from wine and gave him beer, which served as a sedative for insomnia and a solvent for the stone. And she brewed the beer herself.[9]

She gave him a stable home and children. They had six children of their own, four orphans and many university students. “The household would number as many as twenty-five.”[10] It was to this household that Luther gave his famous Table Talks. 

     Concerning marriage and family life, Luther was very frank and down to earth. He said, “The first love is drunken. When the intoxication wears off, then comes the real marriage love.”[11] He acknowledged that the mother bears the bulk of the domestic pressure yet counseled the father to hang out the diapers even though the neighbors laugh. “Let them laugh.” Luther said, ”God and the angels smile in heaven.”[12]

     There   was tenderness in his heart toward his wife and children. When his daughter Magdalena was about to die Luther could not find it in his heart to thank God. He prayed, “O God, I love her so, but thy will be done.” Holding his daughter in his arms as she passed on, Luther said, “…you will rise and shine like the stars and the sun. How strange it is to know that she is at peace and all is well, and yet to be so sorrowful!”[13] Luther himself died on February 18, 1546.

[2] Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 20.

[3] Bainton, Here I Stand, 17.

[4] Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 23-24.  See also Bainton, Here I Stand, 31-32, for a fuller account.

[5] Bainton, Here I Stand, 223.

[6] Bainton, Here I Stand, 226.  The authenticity of this invitation is questioned.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 228. Concerning Luther’s drinking Bainton comments: “A word may be said at this point also about Luther’s drinking. He imbibed and took some pride in his capacity. He had a mug around which were three rings. The first he said represented the Ten Commandments, the second the Apostles’ Creed, and the third the Lord’s Prayer. Luther was highly amused that he was able to drain the glass of wine through the Lord’s Prayer, whereas his friend Agricola could not get beyond the Ten Commandments. But Luther is not recorded ever to have exceeded a state of hilarity” (Here I Stand, 233).

[10] Ibid., 229.

[11] Bainton, Here I Stand, 235.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 237.

Richard Barcellos

Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.

Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.