Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know (part 1) - The Life Of Martin Luther

I want to spend some time today looking at the life of Martin Luther. Martin Luther is a very important figure, particularly for Protestants, even those who aren't Lutherans, because so many of the issues that are dear to us as Protestant evangelicals, their agenda was set by Martin Luther.

Martin Luther was the man who really latched on to justification by grace through faith as a key doctrine for Christians. And to that extent, therefore, we're all indebted to Luther. We may not be able to trace our immediate denominational history back to Luther, but many of the ideas that are dear to us go directly back to him.

Luther’s Early Life, Family Background, and the World He Inherited

But in order to understand Luther, I want to spend just a few moments at the start talking about the world in which Luther lived. One of the things that we have to do when we think about history, when we look at history, is to understand that often the worlds that we're looking at are very different to the ones that we know today, the world in which we live today.

And Luther lived at a very interesting point in time. He was born in 1483 in a town called Eisleben. Providentially, he was actually to die in Eisleben in 1546. He just happened to be there preaching, was taken ill, and died.

Eisleben was in the old, what was known as the Holy Roman Empire. It was kind of the German-speaking lands of Europe at the time. And he was the son of a man called Hans Luther. Hans Luther was himself the oldest son of his family, and therefore, according to inheritance law at the time, didn't inherit his farm, but went and became a miner.

Miners, of course, then as now, very tough people. But Hans had an interesting career in that he started his time, his career as a miner, but rose to become a mine manager. And that symbolized what was going on in Europe at the time.

Europe was changing. There were possibilities for social nobility that had never been experienced before. Had you been born in Europe in the 15th century, you'd probably have been born to a farming family, and you'd have grown up knowing that you were going to be a farmer, and your father would have been a farmer, and your grandfather would have been a farmer, and your great-grandfather would have been a farmer.

That no longer applies by the end of the 15th century, beginning of the 16th century. The possibilities have arisen that you can go on, and as my own parents would have said, you can go on to better yourself.

You can go on to be something greater than your parents were. And Luther's father has that ambition for him. Luther's father may have had to work hard with his hands all his life, but his ambition is that Martin, his son, will become a lawyer, and will go to university, study for law, and become a lawyer.

And so, in 1501, the young Martin leaves home and matriculates at the University of Erfurt in Germany in order to start preparing for a career in law. Everything goes fairly straightforwardly for the first three or four years, and then in 1505, something rather dramatic happens that changes Luther's life forever.

He's on his way from home back to the university one day, and he's caught in the middle of a thunderstorm. And a bolt of lightning comes crashing down at his side and throws him flat on his face. I don't know how many have ever been near a lightning strike.

I've been nearly hit by lightning twice in my life. If it keeps carrying on, sooner or later, I'm going to be taken out by a bolt of lightning. It's pretty terrifying, because by the time you realize what's happened, it's already over.

But what happened was of just such immense power that you don't know what's happening. It's like a big blue column suddenly appears in front of you and disappears, and the whole ground shakes. The first time I was standing in my back room on the phone to a friend, and a bolt of lightning came down in my back garden, and it was like an earthquake.

Things fell off shelves. The whole house shook. And I just went silent on the phone, and my friend said, Are you okay? What's happened? I said, Well, I think I was almost struck by lightning. Well, Luther, of course, almost struck by lightning.

But when lightning misses me, what do I think? I think, Well, wow, I was glad I was where I was. All those ice crystals crashing about in the upper atmosphere, creating this ionic disparity that generates this immense bolt of lightning.

Luther, of course, doesn't have access to my profound knowledge of electronic science. For Luther, lightning is a direct act of God. One of the big differences between now and then is these things were direct acts of God.

Illness was a direct act of God. Bolt of lightning, direct act of God. When Luther is thrown flat on his face by this bolt of lightning, he thinks he's had a narrow scrape. He thinks he's narrowly missed God's judgment.

And as he falls flat on his face, he cries out, St. Anne, help me, and I will become a monk. For many years, I wondered, Why did he call out St. Anne? It would have been fairly typical in the Middle Ages to call out to a saint.

But why particularly St. Anne? And then one day I discovered St. Anne was the patron saint of minors. And it all makes perfect sense, of course, at that point. He calls out to the saint who would have been pervasive of the household piety that he grew up with.

He's reflecting the piety, the godliness of the household that he grew up with. Within days, Luther presents himself. Here I'm going for my, as I told you last night, my unconscious nervous tick. I take my watch off, place it on the left, and start fiddling with it.

Within days, Luther presents himself at the Augustinian monastery in the city of Erfurt. And his father is furious. His father is furious on two counts. One, Luther has given up his potentially lucrative career as a lawyer.

His father wanted his son to do better than he had done. He wanted his son to be a lawyer. And secondly, Luther has not even signed up for a particularly prestigious religious order. If you think, it helps, I think, to think of religious orders in the Middle Ages a little bit like one might think of universities or colleges today.

There is a hierarchy. Boston, of course, it's Harvard, I think, that's based in Boston. Harvard is right at the top of the hierarchy. If you get a scholarship or you go to Harvard, you're up there in the Ivy League.

If you were to go to, I don't know, is there a Northampton Community College? If you go to Northampton Community College, that may be a very good place to study, but in the general culture, it doesn't have the same cachet and prestige as a Harvard.

Well, it's a bit like that for Luther. If he joined a group like the Dominicans or the Franciscans, these are prestigious religious orders. Luther joins the Augustinians. They're really a bit of a two-bit amateur outfit as far as his father is concerned.

So it's as if Luther, you know, okay, if you've got to go to college, at least go to Harvard. Don't go to the community college. Luther has to go to the order equivalent of a community college. Not only did because he become a monk, but in 1507, he's ordained as a priest, and this is often not commented on, but I think it's vitally important to understanding Luther.

Luther's not just a monk, he's also a minister. He doesn't just have monastic duties within the cloister, he's also a pastor. He has regular preaching duties, and he cares for people's souls. And Luther becomes not only a monk, he also becomes a minister.

And that will mean that he has certain pastoral duties, and that's important for the Luther story because the Reformation, the initial explosion of the Reformation, takes place not really because of a direct theological crisis, though it is theological, but because of the pastoral implications of a theological crisis.

Wittenberg, Rome, and Luther’s Growing Inner Crisis

1508, Luther is transferred from Erfurt to the new University of Wittenberg. University of Wittenberg, I think founded in 1501 by the man known as the Elector of Wittenberg. The Holy Roman Empire is ruled by an emperor, but unlike, say, the Queen of England.

When the Queen of England dies, we all know who succeeds her. It will be the heir apparent, and the heir apparent at the moment is Prince Charles. So when the Queen dies, if Prince Charles is still alive, he becomes king.

It passes on father to son or parent to child. Holy Roman Empire isn't like that. When the emperor dies, the new emperor is elected. But not everybody in Europe has a vote. In fact, only seven men have a vote in Europe on who becomes the emperor, and they're called the electors of the empire.

And the electors are the princes of seven particular territories. And one of those territories is Electoral Saxony. It's called Electoral Saxony because the prince is an elector of the empire. Frederick of the Wise is the elector of Saxony, and he founded this university in 1501.

And he's trying to recruit talent for this university. And Luther gets recruited in 1508. 1510, Luther goes on a journey to Rome. He's on the business of the Augustinian Order. He travels to Rome, and Rome has this incredible impact upon him.

I don't know, have any of you here been to Rome? A few of you have been to Rome. It's one of the most amazing cities in the world, particularly as you walk into St. Peter's Square. You don't, I think, grasp the significance of the architecture until you're on the ground in St. Peter's.

You've seen the pictures from above, and you have sort of the great circle going out like that. As you walk into St. Peter's Square in Rome, this is like two great big arms. And you walk into Rome, and it's a bit like, welcome home.

There is this powerful theological message being sent by the architecture of St. Peter's. It is a powerful, emotionally powerful city to visit. I often use the analogy, it's a bit like, I don't know how many of you have been to Niagara Falls.

I went to Niagara Falls, and maybe I'm just weird, but if you stand at the edge of Niagara Falls, and you see this water, this powerful water, sweeping over the edge, there's that little part of you that wants to jump in.

It's weird. And you know it will be, well not quite instant, but it will be fairly instant death if you jump in. But there's this, I just want to jump in and feel what it's like to be swept along by that kind of power.

I found it was the same when I went to Rome. I don't want to be a Roman Catholic, but you walk into St. Peter's Square, and there's this powerful impulse to, welcome home. You really want to jump in, you really want to belong here.

And then you walk into St. Peter's, the church, and one of the first things that greets you is the Pieta, which is a Michelangelo statue of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ who's been brought down from the cross.

And you go up and you look at the information on this statue, and you realize that Michelangelo was 25 when he carved this. And you think, wow, what were you doing when you were 25? You know, for me, forgive me, I'm a Presbyterian, not a Baptist, so I can get away with saying this and not get in trouble.

For me, at 25, the ideal afternoon was sitting watching rugby on the television, drinking a glass of beer. That was what I was doing when I was 25. Michelangelo was carving the Pieta, and I think he lived for another 60 years.

He did not die a young man. He did this at the start of his career. So Rome is an overwhelming place to go, and Luther was overwhelmed when he went there, and he was overwhelmed both positively and negatively.

Negatively, he was horrified by what he saw as the corruption of the papal court, the amount of sleaziness that existed there. On the positive side at that point, he was overwhelmed by the number of relics that there were, the pieces of the true cross, the steps that went to the upper room.

It just blew his mind to be surrounded by all of these precious relics that were supposed to have come from Bible times. And Luther, he only visits Rome the once, but the impressions that are made in 1510 will stay with him for a lifetime.

It had a profound impact upon him. At the same time as Luther is becoming a professor at the university, he's a monk and he's also a pastor, he's also engaging in his own struggles, his own theological, psychological struggles.

Some of them probably come from the fact that he's fallen out with his father. Psychologists have looked at Luther and said, you know, a lot of his problems with God are really problems with his dad, that he fell out so badly with his dad.

We contend often as evangelical Christians to dismiss that and say, well, that's psychologizing the Reformation. Well, I wouldn't want to reduce the Reformation to that, but I'd also want to say most of us have relationships with our fathers and with our parents that are quite important.

And if they're disrupted, they do affect the way we think and behave. And I'm pretty sure that Luther falling out with his father did have an effect on him. And when he celebrates Mass for the first time after his ordination, his father's in attendance.

And that must have put great strain on Luther. But in some ways, more than his father's presence when he celebrates Mass is what he's doing in the Mass. And for Luther, as a good medieval Catholic, he thinks that when he pronounces the words of blessing over the bread and the wine, the bread and the wine become the Lord Jesus Christ, that he makes God, that he handles God with his hands, that he touches God with his lips.

And this generates in Luther a profound moral and existential crisis because Luther knows that he's not worthy to do this. He knows what dwells in his heart. And the question for Luther becomes, how can I, as an individual who knows I know what I think, I know how I behave, I know the color and complexion of my own heart, how can I make and touch God?

How can I stand before a God who is a consuming fire and is utterly righteous? And his medieval advisers tell him, well, it's okay. We know that you're not righteous, but God is all-powerful. And what God has done is that he's decided that if you do your best, then God will count that as righteousness.

Now, it takes a little bit to explain this. I'll use an analogy. I wonder if there's a young person in the audience who'd like to earn some money. Put your hand up if you're under the age of, let's say, 14 and want to earn $5.

No, you don't get that easily. Anybody? Do you want to come on up? I've got a piece of paper here. How much is that piece of paper worth? Five dollars. It's just a piece of paper, isn't it? I've got another piece of paper here I've just picked up off the front.

I'll buy it. This piece of paper, I'll tell you it's worth $10. I'll buy that off you for this piece of paper. Are you willing to do that? You are? Only if it was really... So, you don't want to swap.

You don't want to swap this. But they're just two pieces of paper. What's the difference? You can actually use that one. Yeah, well, you've earned your $5. You can go and sit down. No, you've earned it.

It's an interesting experiment, isn't it? It's just two pieces of paper. It's just two pieces of paper. What makes the difference? How much does it cost to produce that piece of paper over against this piece of paper?

There's probably no difference at all. There certainly isn't $5 worth of difference. It's marginal and negligible. The difference, of course, is that the governments have decided that they will back up that piece of paper.

Once upon a time, countries were on the gold standard. And it meant that for every piece of paper in circulation as money, there was a little bit of gold somewhere in the Central Reserve or something that backed it up.

Essentially, that piece of paper that I've just given away, it's worth $5 because somebody's decided to extrinsically denominate it as $5. It means that if you go into a shop and you hand that over, you can get $5 worth of candy.

Or you can buy $5 worth of magazines or a book for $5. If you go in and try to hand over this, you're not going to be able to buy anything with it. But they're still just pieces of paper. If you stick them in water and dissolve and boil them down, you just end up with two little lumps of paper.

They're worth exactly the same, virtually nothing. Well, Luther's being told that him doing his best is a bit like that. Yeah, on its own, doing your best, he's told, is worthless. But God, in his grace, has decided that if you do your best, he'll actually credit that to you as righteousness.

He'll treat that as if you've really been righteous. It's a great solution to Luther's problem at first glance anyway because it seems to be wonderfully tailor-made to the individual. Your best might be different to my best.

You might be godlier than me. You might be able to do works of good moral quality much more powerfully than I can. So it's only fair that you're held to a higher standard than I am. So initially, this seems to be a great solution to Luther's problem.

He seems to have been told that it doesn't matter who you are or how you're made up. God has tailor-made for you a plan that allows you to stand righteous before him. But Luther, as a professor in Wittenberg, is required to lecture through the letters of Paul.

And this creates a disturbance for him. Because as he reads Paul, he comes to the conclusion that human beings are not simply injured or morally wounded such that they're not able to do very good works.

He comes to the conclusion that they're dead. And if you're a dead person, there's nothing you can do. So the system that's put in place to try to help Luther, just do your best and the Lord will count you as righteous, comes back to haunt him because he knows however much he does, however much he does that he thinks he's the best, he could have done more.

And it becomes a burden that starts to break his back. He realizes that he's dead. And then at some point, probably around about 1515 to 1516, Luther comes to realize that, well actually, I may be dead in my sins, but united to Christ, Christ has died and risen again.

In and through Christ, I can be made alive. All this is really going on, of course, in the privacy of the classroom and Luther's day-to-day preaching. Why does this throw Luther onto the world stage, as it were?

Indulgences, Purgatory, and the 95 Theses

Well, events are taking place way back in Rome that will come to have a European significance. The Pope is a man called Leo X. Leo X is quite a corrupt individual but certainly a very astute businessman.

However, through years of war and through the building of St. Peter's, he slowly but surely bankrupted the papacy. What he's done is he's hired some of the greatest artists of their generation to build and to decorate St. Peter's and he's running out of money.

Then happens a happy confluence between his interests and the interests of a bishop in Germany, Albrecht of Mainz. Albrecht of Mainz is a bishop and Albrecht of Mainz is a bishop of two places. Now, if you're a bishop in the late Middle Ages, it's a good deal because when you're a bishop, you have tax-raising powers.

So the more places you're a bishop of, the wealthier you become. But church law actually restricts you to only two bishoprics unless you buy a special license from the papacy that grants you permission to add a third bishopric.

And Albrecht decides he'd like to add a third bishopric. And so he goes to the papacy and asks if he can buy permission to do this. The pope grants such permission by selling him a license. And the pope also grants Albrecht permission to borrow money from the German bankers to pay for this special license.

And then, as a third part of the deal, he allows Albrecht to raise what is called an indulgence within the empire. Half of the money from this indulgence will go towards paying the papacy for permission to raise the indulgence.

And half of it will go towards paying off the interest and capital on the loan for the extra bishopric. All of that financial background is significant because it means that Albrecht has a vested interest in the vigorous sale of indulgences in the empire.

What is an indulgence? An indulgence quite simply is this. It's a piece of paper. It's a certificate that you buy from the church that grants you or a loved one time off in purgatory. If you're a medieval Catholic, you believe there are three places you can go after you die.

There's heaven, there's hell, and there's a third place, purgatory. Purgatory is sort of between heaven and hell. It's as nasty as hell in many ways. There's a lot of terrible punishment and torment going on there.

But it's temporary. When I say temporary, we're talking tens of thousands of years typically. But it does come to an end. And the church has created a system whereby you can buy righteousness from the church, the surplus righteousness created by really godly people, and have it transferred to your account or the account of your relatives who are suffering in purgatory.

And the proof of this transaction is an indulgence, a piece of paper. And a man called Tetzel makes his way up through the empire selling indulgences. If you've seen the Luther movie, it was inevitable they would get the sort of slimiest English-accented actor they could possibly find to play Tetzel.

And this man makes his way up through the empire, Tetzel. Selling this indulgence. Here's some great sales pictures. One of them, every time a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs. On a more profane and offensive level, he says, even if you had raped the Virgin Mary, one of my indulgences would be enough to square that sin away.

He's preying, of course, on the most vulnerable in society. It's not really wealthy people buying indulgences. More than likely, it's poor people. If you've seen the Luther movie, it's really pretty good.

It was made maybe five or six years ago. Tetzel is portrayed brilliantly in that. And you have that scene where Luther's walking down the high street in Wittenberg. And he meets a young lady with a baby strapped to her.

And I think he asks her whether she's used the money as she should to buy shoes or clothing for the baby or food or something. And she says, oh no, no, I've done something much better. And she waves this piece of paper and says, I bought an indulgence.

The indulgence salesman, they preyed really on the most vulnerable people in society. Often, Protestants are quick to criticize Catholics today because they say they still have indulgences. I actually think Protestants, by and large, are better indulgence salesmen today than the Catholics are.

Every time you switch on the Christian channel and watch somebody who tells you that they'll pray for your complete healing, but you've got to send money in for them to do it, that's an indulgence salesman.

And ask yourself again, who is it sending in the money for these people? It's not multimillionaires who've got money to spare for not-for-profit organizations. It's the most vulnerable members of society.

It's the little old lady dying of cancer and living in a trailer in Texas who's sending in $10 that she should really be spending on medication or on food, helping to support the lavish lifestyle of people who are essentially the spiritual heirs of Tetzel and the 16th century indulgence salesman.

The indulgence doesn't come to Wittenberg. It doesn't come to Wittenberg for the simple reason that Frederick the Wise, the Prince of Wittenberg, has his own collection of relics going. He has one of the finest collections of relics in Europe.

And he doesn't want Tetzel's indulgence cutting into his own particular trade. Frederick the Wise becomes a very great and magnificent figure in the Reformation story, so we perhaps shouldn't be too hard on him.

But he bans Tetzel from coming to Wittenberg not for any godly reason, but because he's in the same sort of game himself. But it still becomes a pastoral problem for Luther because Luther's people cross the river to the neighboring parish in Ducal Saxony where Tetzel is allowed to ply his trade and buy the indulgences from Tetzel there.

So Luther has to speak on this. And he does so in a fairly standard fashion. He posts on October 31, 1517, 95 theses against indulgences. Essentially what he's doing there is putting up a series of propositions for debate.

Part of the problem is Luther doesn't know what the church's exact teaching on indulgences is. In fact, it will emerge that not even the church knows what its exact teaching on indulgences is. The pope has to ask for expert opinions on indulgences.

So all of this idea of Luther at this point, those 19th century paintings of Luther driving a nail into the castle door in Wittenberg and symbolically driving a stake through the heart of the church, it's all actual nonsense.

That's not what Luther's intending at all. Luther simply wants to set up an academic debate within the university at this point in order to establish whether what's going on is legitimate Catholic practice or not.

His major concern is that what seems to him is happening is that God's grace is being traded for money. And he's come to the conclusion if we're dead in our sins, then only the death and the resurrection of Christ can get us off the hook, if you like.

And one cannot make that into a cash transaction. That involves dying to self. How do you come into union with Christ? How do you get united to Christ? Well, in 1517, 1518, Luther thinks it's by acknowledging your status as dead, by despairing of yourself.

Very shortly, he will move to seeing faith as being the means by which one is united to Christ. But at this point, I think he simply thinks it is despair in self. So Luther nails these 95 theses, and then one of the weirdest things happens.

What is really a very boring treatise, and if you read it, you'll find it very boring indeed, becomes a bestseller. It is translated into German, it is printed as a pamphlet, and it starts to spread across electoral Saxony and into the lands of the empire.

The time is just perfect for a protest against the church. There is increasing concern among the German nobility and among the German peasants at this point that Germany is being bled dry financially by the church and by the Italians.

Luther himself will later use language when he writes. He'll say, you know, I see the scene in Rome now. I see all these well-fed Italian cardinals sitting around drinking their fine wines and laughing about the stupid beer-drinking Germans who paid for the whole thing.

It's fascinating to me recently listening to British radio how somebody made the connection, one of the journalists made the connection between today and the 16th century, and we're looking at the rhetoric that was emerging in the German press about Germany essentially being bled dry to fund the south of Europe, which is essentially what's going on at the moment, and drawing the connection with the 16th century.

So Luther then finds himself suddenly at the storm of a controversy, got it in again in a legitimate way, at the center of the storm of a controversy that he never expected. And the church makes a fatal mistake at this point.

The church decides not to act immediately against Luther. What the church should have done in retrospect was had him immediately summoned to Rome where he would have just vanished. If you've ever been to Rome, you know, if you go down from St. Peter's Square just across the river there is that circular castle.

That was where people dispatched to Rome as heretics ended up when they went to Rome. They simply then were either executed or they were thrown into a cell and left to rot essentially. So they leave Luther alone, and Luther makes his way in April 1518 to the city of Heidelberg where the Augustinian order is having one of its routine meetings.

And in Heidelberg, Luther presents, drafts and has presented a set of theses that are far more radical than the 95 theses. I think it's Heidelberg 1518 where the Reformation really begins. And it's here that Luther draws this great contrast between what he calls a theologian of glory and a theologian of the cross.

I won't quote you his exact words because it sounds kind of obscure when you first read them. But essentially he draws a distinction between two kinds of theologian. The whole world, everybody he says is a theologian.

You're either a theologian of glory or a theologian of the cross. A theologian of glory essentially assumes that God is simply like a very large version of themselves. That God's logic, God's way of acting is like our logic and our way of acting.

We assume, if you like, that God is made in our image. This, of course, plays straight into his understanding of justification. If I want Mike to like me, what am I going to do? I'm going to do nice things for Mike so that he will respond by liking me.

And therefore, as a theologian of glory, I extrapolate and I think, well, okay, how am I going to get myself right with God? I know. I'll do nice things for God. And then he won't think so badly of me.

Anytime you've chatted to a non-Christian friend and they've said something like, well, you know, if there is a God, I'm not a bad person. I'm sure that he'll look with kindness on me when it comes down to it.

That's a theologian of glory. That person is assuming that God is really rather like them. A theologian of glory will also use worldly criteria of success, for example. Mike told me just before we came in this morning about some advert for some evangelistic rally or church, or something that says, you know, when God shows up, you have to put out more chairs.

That's a theologian of glory attitude. How do you judge whether somebody has been faithful? You've got to put out more chairs. That wasn't Noah's experience. That was not Jeremiah's experience. It was not Amos' experience.

It's a theologian of glory idea. How do we judge our success? By essentially whether we're mimicking the same patterns, criteria of success of the world around us. In contrast to that, Luther sets up what he calls the theologian of the cross.

And the theologian of the cross, he says, is the person who judges things through God's revelation of himself. And where has God revealed himself? He's primarily revealed himself on the cross in Christ's crucifixion.

Luther's really developing Paul's thought in 1 Corinthians here. When Paul writes 1 Corinthians chapter 1, chapter 2, what is Paul essentially saying? Do not use worldly criteria to judge your leaders or to judge success.

And Paul has that lovely twist, doesn't he? He said, because actually, if God was like that, most of you wouldn't be in church. Because God would not be interested in you. If God actually looked like you want him to look, it would be real bad news for you ultimately.

Because not many of you were great. Not many of you were powerful as the world considers it. Luther says we have to think of God as crucified. And for Luther, Christ crucified is absolutely constitutive of his understanding of who God is towards human beings.

The cross, we often think today, we'll defend the cross as penal substitution. And that is good and appropriate and proper. But for Luther, the cross was not just an action whereby God dealt with sin, it was also a revelation of God's attitude towards sinners.

So Luther lays out his theology, theologian of the glory and theologian of the cross idea. And he culminates in this, in Heidelberg, with this final thesis that says, the love of God does not find but creates that which is lovely to it.

And it's a beautiful theological summary of the way that Luther's theology is heading at this point. Think about it. The love of God does not find but creates that which is lovely to it. If you're married, presumably you love your spouse.

Why do you love your spouse? Because at some point in the past, you noticed something in them that was intrinsically lovely, and you reacted to it. Your love was ultimately, in origin, a reactive love.

Luther draws this contrast between human love and divine love. He says that divine love is creative. Divine love does not find something that's lovely and react by loving it. Divine love finds that which is unlovely and delights in making it lovely.

And there, in a nutshell, you've got the whole of Luther's theology, in some sense. That's the theology of the cross. What is the theology of the cross? That God came down and died for the righteous, for the lovely, for the beautiful people?

No. For the unrighteous and the unlovely. So, Luther in 1518, now that he's starting to gain some fame, but his own theology is still developing very, very rapidly. What time do I run to in the first lecture, Mike?

10 .05. Okay, we'll go for another 10 minutes. By the summer of 1518, the Luther problem is becoming very problematic. The people are starting to really like Luther as a popular figure. And as Luther is gaining confidence and becoming more and more convinced that the theology that the church is teaching is defective, he's becoming more and more outspoken.

He's invited to a monastery, the Augustinian Monastery in Dresden, one of my favorite incidents in the Reformation. It's the equivalent of the Watergate tapes, but in the Reformation. You'll know, of course, that in the 16th century they didn't have voice-activated recording machines.

What they do is Luther is invited to a party at the Dresden Augustinian Monastery. And, of course, if you know anything about medieval monasticism, they were great brewers of beer and producers of alcohol.

So they knew how to throw a party. Luther's invited to dinner and this party there by a man called Emser. And what they do is they ply Luther with alcohol. And the more he drinks, of course, the more eloquent he becomes.

It's a real kind of In Vino Veritas moment. Once he's been plied with beer and wine, I say to him, you know, what do you really think about the Pope? And behind a curtain in this room they have a Dominican monk, great rivals of the Augustinians.

The Dominicans were always looking for a way to take the Augustinians down. They have a Dominican taking dictation. So as Luther is sort of waxing eloquent, it's all being written down. And this, of course, is then sent to Rome.

And it doesn't go down well in Rome. And in August 1518, Luther is summonsed to Rome. And this is where Frederick the Wise becomes significant. Frederick the Wise doesn't send Luther to Rome. Frederick the Wise is an interesting figure.

One of my criticisms of the film is the film blows it in order to get a Hollywood moment at the end. If you've ever been to Wittenberg, it's a real one-horse town. It's just like a one street, maybe a mile long, something like that.

It would have been a very small town in the 16th century. It's a pretty small town in the 21st century. Frederick the Wise never meets Martin Luther. They never have a first-hand contact. They must have seen each other, but they never speak directly.