57 - Luther and the 95 Theses

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, enough of that. But we are talking about a German dude. Yes, Luther. And let's see.

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We were going to look at the 95 theses, which are available readily online.

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It really makes me wonder, to be honest with you. You know what I'm going to do here real quick?

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I'm going to fire something up. We are recording.

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Good. I really wonder how many people last year, with the 500th anniversary of the beginning of Reformation, the posting of the 95 theses,

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I wonder how many people actually read the 95 theses. I wonder how many of the people who went to Wittenberg and filled that poor little place up.

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I mean, there is this wonderful little restaurant right off the square in Wittenberg, right next to the parish church.

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Not the castle church, the parish church. I love going there. They have great spaghetti bolognese.

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And I've been there so often that the people have started to get to know me. And they know

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I'm the American that actually tips, because that's not nearly normal over there as it is here.

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But just looking at them, you could tell they just wanted all of us to go away.

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They were just so sick of all the tourists. And I was there in May.

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They're already sick of the tourists. They were much more sick of the tourists in September. I can't imagine what it was like by the end of October.

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They're probably happy now. But anyway, even of all the people who flooded the streets of Wittenberg, I wonder how many of them have ever read the 95

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Theses in context. And I would imagine the vast majority of people who even know what they were assume that they were protests against the teachings of Rome.

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But they were not. They were written by a man who viewed himself as a faithful son of the church, as a person speaking consistently with the teachings of medieval

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Roman Catholicism. And while Luther may well have an inkling at this time of some directions that he felt needed reformation, he certainly at this time had no concept of a reformation as we would understand that term.

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He would only have at this time had the idea of a reformation of the church within the church, not by a split, not by him being excommunicated, or anything like that.

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That would not have been in his thinking at all. And so what the 95

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Theses are, when you talk about a thesis, this was an invitation on the part of Luther to have issues for debate, academic debate, between universities.

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Wittenberg was still a relatively new and small university. So this was a

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AA school, seeing if you could get some 5A schools to have a basketball game.

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I mean, that would be one way of describing it. Because this was the nature of the interaction between universities at that time.

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You didn't get together and play football, which is actually played with the foot over there.

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We call it soccer, but it's football for 98 % of the world's population. And you didn't get together and have chess matches or anything like that.

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You got together and you had debate. And so Luther probably thought initially that in putting these out,

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Frederick would probably be happy that he was trying to sort of help promote Wittenberg and the

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University of Wittenberg. Had no idea the fiery results that were going to come.

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And so as I've pointed out, if it was October 31 when

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Luther walked up to the Castle Church door, which would have been covered with announcements, which would have been dusty and dirty because the road going by outside probably wasn't cobbled yet, and posted, whether he nailed them or not, posted those 95 theses on what was in essence the community bulletin board.

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Anyone walking by probably would not have even bothered to stop to look.

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There was probably a farmer going by with his cow or a donkey or something else.

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And morning, Father Martin. Good morning. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen.

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And that was about it. So all those wonderful paintings of Luther standing there with his hammer in his hand, pointing at the door, it's just pure fiction.

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When you take the tour at Luther's house, which is a museum now, it sort of takes you through his life.

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And then it also has an interesting section toward the end where it sort of goes through the mythification of Luther toward the end of his life.

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And then in the years after, showing you the escalation of the honoring of this man.

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I won't say deification, but he becomes bigger and bigger and bolder and bolder as time goes by.

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And we certainly can see that historically. This particular event was vitally important because the theses do contain within them not a mature doctrine of justification by any stretch of the imagination.

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Luther does not yet understand sola scriptura. He hasn't been forced to that. But there is a recognition, and he wasn't the first one to come up with this, but there is a recognition that, man, alive, this idea of selling the grace of God on a sliding pay scale, dependent upon where you are in the culture, is just disgusting.

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It does not, it was unknown in the early church, and it was. Ugly, I know.

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The theology upon which it was based had only developed over the past number of centuries.

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The concept of a treasury of merits and all those other things we've talked about before, the slow development of the doctrine of purgatory, and all that stuff.

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And now you just see this deformity in theology that is being used fundamentally to pay off Albrecht's big loan to buy the

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Archbishopric of Mainz and to help build St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

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And everybody knows it. So somehow God's grace has become a rather crass fundraising methodology, and everybody sees it.

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And he wasn't the first one to see it and to raise concerns about it. So why was this the explosion?

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Well, you can throw a match into a darkened room.

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If you throw it in there and there's no oxygen and no fuel, it's going to go out.

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So 150 years earlier, without the printing press, without the Renaissance, without the rise of nationalism, someone like Wycliffe can light a match, but it's not going to go off.

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What had happened was all those things were now present. And so you lit the match, throw it in the room, and it's now filled with gasoline and oxygen, and the result is a instant conflagration.

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Now, part of this was due to the fact that, of course, the 95 Theses were originally written in Latin.

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And it's hard for us to realize that it was not that long ago that every schoolchild learned

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Latin. And it was the language of learning. It was the language of communication.

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It was the language of international communication. The whole reason, for example, that we have a

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Greek text called the

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Textus Receptus is because Textus Receptus in Latin means the received text.

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And the advertisement to sell it in the 1630s in England, advertisements were done in Latin.

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And so that's why it's called the Textus Receptus. Well, the reality is that a enterprising

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German printer, at least one of the stories is, an enterprising German printer came along, was reading what was on the castle church door and starts reading through Luther's Theses and realizes, ooh, this is some hot stuff.

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And so without Luther's permission, he copies the theses down and translates them into German and runs a bunch of them in German, prints a bunch of them, the printing press now being available.

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And this is how what he is saying starts getting spread around.

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It's sort of the social media of the day. It took a little longer than Twitter and Facebook. And I don't know how many tweets it would take.

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You might be able to get each thesis into a single tweet. Some of them might be a little bit too long.

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So maybe it might be 95 tweets. Can you imagine if it was the 95 tweets? I mean, really, would the

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Reformation have begun if it had been the 95 tweets? Could it have lasted if it had been the 95 tweets?

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That is a question that honestly almost, well, no generation before us has ever pondered that particular question.

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It is certainly the first time I've mentioned it in a church history class, which means we are definitely going down very, very quickly.

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But anyway, it gets out. And once it's translated into German and gets out to the larger populace,

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Luther wrote them in the context of theological debate.

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He wrote them for scholars to debate in a university setting.

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Now, you take it out of that context and put it out in the midst of rising nationalism.

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This is only, what, eight years before the Peasants' Revolt of 1525.

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There are references in the 95 theses to the poor and to the abuse of the poor that taking money for the building of St.

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Peter's represents and stuff like that. And so all of a sudden, it's sort of given a different spin.

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And words that might actually be considered to be restrained or appropriate within an academic context can all of a sudden be given a much more strident reading in a general context.

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And so this is what you have in the 95 theses.

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And as a result, Luther only sent a few copies himself out.

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But as I said, very quickly, the

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German translation spread across Germany. Luther's name was on everyone's lips very, very quickly.

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And he had touched a nerve in the process. And so what happens is, if that's

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October of 1517, in April of 1518, there was a meeting of the

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Augustinian order. Remember, Luther is an Augustinian monk. And in April 26, 1518, there was a meeting of the

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Augustinian order in Heidelberg. Beautiful little city. You can still find the location of the meeting if someone does not park on top of the marker.

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And literally, there's just one marker. It's about that big around.

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And it's in a cobbled parking lot in an open square now.

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So in other words, the building is no longer there. And it has the date and talks about Luther and the

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Augustinian order and stuff like that. But you can only see it if you get there early enough.

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Because once the businesses nearby get full, that normally ends up as a parking spot. And so you sort of have to look under a car to find it.

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There was a car next to it when I was there. But I was able to get pictures with it. So obviously, by April of the next year, there was a great deal of discussion of what the ramifications of Luther's ideas would be.

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And so one of the people that is at this convocation, this meeting of the

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Augustinian order, well, two people, very important to know that were at that meeting.

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One was Martin Bucer. Now Martin Bucer is going to become the reformer of Strasbourg.

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And Bucer is going to sort of be known as a moderating voice.

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I'm not going to use the term ecumenical, because that's normally negative in our day. But Bucer would be one that would be trying to get everyone together in defense of the

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Reformation later on and trying to smooth out difficulties. Specifically, the difficulties are going to be seen 12 years late, well, 11 years later, between Luther and Zwingli.

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Bucer's trying to keep them from being at all -out war. Doesn't really succeed real well, but he tries anyways.

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And if you watch the movie The Radicals, which again, I highly recommend to you, you will see

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Bucer represented as meeting with Michael Sattler there in Strasbourg in that film as well.

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Not a real well -known name, but I think a very important name in Strasbourg.

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It is at the meeting of the Augustinian order in 1518 that Bucer hears

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Luther speaking and becomes a follower of Luther's ideas.

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This is the beginning of Martin Bucer's Reformation experience as well. But there's someone else, someone far more important.

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Important in regards to not important to the Reformation. Well, in some ways.

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Someone vitally important in forcing

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Luther's theology to develop. And that's going to be the man who is going to be his lifelong enemy.

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An enemy of tremendous intellect and debating capacity, and as such, one who shed a lot of light on Luther's theology.

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I've certainly learned that your best opponents very often help you to clarify your positions more than your best friends do.

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And Johann Eck, E -C -K, Johann Eck, functioned that way in Luther's life.

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Now, Eck is presented in both the Luther films, if you've seen either

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Martin Luther Heretic or the Martin Luther film from 2004. You can't do a

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Luther film without an Eck, because Eck was that important.

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And what's really ironic to me, in case I forget about it later on, I probably won't, but what's really ironic to me, which

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I did not know until last year, because it's almost never discussed, it's almost never discussed.

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Within a couple of years of each other, toward the ends of their lives, both

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Luther and Eck would write what we would simply describe as horrific books about the

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Jews. Eck's is much worse than Luther's. Eck's is the nadir, the low point, of this period's anti -Semitism on the part of, quote unquote,

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Christian writers. It accepts every horrific story about Jews drinking

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Christian children's blood, and the libel, the oaths, and all that kind of stuff.

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It takes all of that as a given. And so Eck's book against the

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Jews, which is going to be written, what was that? I've got the notes here, but just off the top of my head, it was somewhere in the late, late, late 1530s, early 1540s, somewhere around there.

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So it's down the road a little bit. The irony is, while he is the enemy of Luther, Luther and Eck are pretty much on the exact same page when it comes to the

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Jews. And when you ask why, the answer, again, is going to be found in sacralism, in the state church.

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Because fundamentally, when you get down to it, the idea was these people cannot be trusted, because they cannot really be a part of the state, which is a

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Christian state. So whenever we sing that one hymn in the

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Trinity hymn, we sang it, I think, last week, it's one of the two we sing by Luther.

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In the third stanza is a line that uses the term Christendom.

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You know which one I'm talking about? Remember last week we sang it? I just can't help but always hear that in the context of Luther, Christendom was the state church.

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We re -translate that in our own experience as your church spread abroad throughout a nation or throughout all nations, whatever.

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That's not what it meant for Luther. And so he and Eck can be mortal enemies.

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And yet, toward the end of their lives, sadly, Luther, because he is

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Luther, is more known for his anti -Jewish writings at the end of his life and is one of the last four sermons he preached.

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Ironically, in the same city where he was born but where he never really lived, it's a city called Eisleben, the third of the four of those last sermons he preached contains a very strongly anti -Jewish rhetoric and teaching.

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He's remembered more for that than Eck, even though Eck's writings were much worse than Luther's were.

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But it does, to me, just strike me. Well, Eck is in Heidelberg as well in 1518.

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And Eck, this guy is sharp. This guy is smart.

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And he immediately sees Luther's a problem.

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Luther's a problem. He, most of us just don't have that eagle eye to be able to see how something's going to develop.

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I mean, in our days, back in the 70s, there was a man by the name of Francis Schaeffer.

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And you can disagree with Schaeffer all you want, but the reality is you look back at what he was writing in the 70s, you look back at the movies that he was putting out in the 70s.

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And he was saying, this is what's coming. And a lot of people are like, oh, come on.

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Marriage between men? Confusion as to gender? No, no, no, no, no, no.

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Totalitarian state? And now we're living it. And frequently, people who have that eagle eye look a little bit weird to us because we don't have it and we're short -sighted.

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So yeah, maybe, I don't know. Well, Eck had a theological eagle's eye.

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And he was immediately, after this convocation, this meeting in Heidelberg in 1518,

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Luther is on his radar. And he's telling people, this isn't good.

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This is going to foment rebellion. If you really understand what he's saying, this is against the pope.

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Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So Eck begins working behind the scenes, shall we say, as Luther's opponent.

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Another of the gathering foes was Emperor Maximilian, who wrote to the pope about Luther.

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And because of that, Luther was summoned to Rome on August 7 of 1518.

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Luther appealed to Frederick, and an interview was arranged on German soil at Augsburg with Cardinal Cajetan.

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He's best known as Cardinal Cajetan. His name was Tom Savio, but cardinals are known by their names differently than their given names.

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And so October 12 of the 14th at Augsburg, Cardinal Cajetan interviews

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Luther. And he bombarded Luther with papal pronouncements about primarily purgatory and merit and indulgences and the church's right to control the treasury of merit and things like that.

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And Luther responded with scripture. So obviously, this is already beginning to develop into that battle, which always ends up being the battle.

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Some of you, I think, know that right now we're scheduled in, wow, barely a month and a half.

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It's coming at me like a freight train. I'm scheduled to be debating my own

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Eck, you might say, today. Very, very sharp Roman Catholic, very knowledgeable Roman Catholic.

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Eck read everything Luther wrote. It's not been my experience that my Roman Catholic opponents are overly concerned about what anybody else writes.

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But Peter D. Williams, who I'll be debating in Belfast, Northern Ireland on June 4 on indulgences, does read everything.

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And so that makes for a much more Eckian encounter, shall we say. But while we are debating indulgences, it will all come down to sola scriptura once again, just as it did back then, just as it did when

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Cayetan and Luther went at it in Augsburg. When it became clear that Cayetan was going to rule against Luther, Luther fled

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Augsburg, arriving back in Wittenberg on October 30. Luther's, quote, heresy, end quote, was clear even at this point.

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But the reaction of the Roman church was very slow. Now, why was that?

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Well, in God's providence, a number of things were taking place politically.

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And given that Rome was deeply entangled in politics, this limited the speed at which the church could move.

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Frederick was in no mood to banish Luther. Luther was good for the University of Wittenberg. He's one of his own.

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And so he's not in any mood to do anything. He was a powerful elector. In only a matter of months,

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January 12, 1519, Maximilian dies. The emperor dies. And so you don't even have a leader of the

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Holy Roman Empire for a while. And everybody knows that Frederick is a key vote in who is going to be elected as emperor.

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So you don't want to alienate Frederick. So there's sort of a big old barrier in the way of doing anything about Luther at this point.

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The mood in Germany was strongly nationalistic, anti -papal. So the pope took a conciliatory attitude.

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And instead of going after Luther, the papal representative disowned Tetzel. The Dominican preacher of indulgences gets thrown under the bus.

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And he himself soon died in chagrin. He was so devastated by being renounced by the papal see that he lived only a short period of time.

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Not that he committed suicide. He just, I guess, depression or whatever. There's lots of things that could kill you in those days that's not quite as many today.

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So on January 12, 1519, Emperor Maximilian dies. And the resultant process of electing a new emperor, which you can't get everybody on a

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Skype call and work this stuff out back then. It takes time. So this process gave

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Luther even more time to develop and to write. Frederick, his elector,

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Frederick the Wise, was even asked to be a candidate as emperor, but he politely refused. Finally, on June 28, so it took six months, 1519,

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Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor. And a few days later,

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July 4 and 14, Andreas Karlstadt, Luther's superior at Wittenberg, if you saw the movie, he was the one in when

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Luther first arrives in Wittenberg, they're looking at the relics. And he's the one that asks

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Karlstadt the question, well, do you believe? Do you believe that this really accomplishes anything?

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In the Martin Luther Heretic, he's a little bit weird. He's not quite as weird in the Luther film. Though he will become a radical, a radical reformer.

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He's the one who's going to, while Luther's at the Wartburg Castle, he's the one that's going to start smashing statues in Wittenberg and we'll talk about later, but announces that on New Year's he's going to give the

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Lord's Supper in both kinds, the bread and the wine, to everyone in the church.

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For hundreds of years, the wine had been withdrawn from the people. They were only given the bread. Because once you had transubstantiation being preached, it was too easy to spill

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God. And if you spill God, then the priest has to get down and lick

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God back up off the floor, which really wasn't a whole lot of fun. So you don't just wipe

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God up. It's a mess. So the cup had been withdrawn.

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So all you got was the bread. Well, reformers are like, nope.

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Bible says take, eat, drink, all of you, which is true.

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So he announces, Karlstadt announces, Luther's not there. He's in the castle church. He's up at the

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Wartburg. He's at the Wartburg. And he announces on New Year's Day that he's going to give the bread and the wine.

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And Frederick goes, no, you're not. So Karlstadt goes, yes, sir. So he does it on Christmas Eve instead.

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He didn't do it. The elector said, you don't do it on New Year's.

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So he did it on Christmas Eve instead. And I use that story in my sermon in the castle church.

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The people was filled. The place was filled. And there were so many just so rejoicing to have the opportunity of partaking of the bread and the wine.

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It was sort of a mess. I mean, it wasn't overly orderly. And so there were a lot of people that were very perturbed and offended by that.

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But I talked about the fact that in most churches, especially in America today, you have the

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Lord's Supper. And it's sort of like, oh, are we doing that? It's that quarter of the year?

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No preparation, no thought. That's going to make us late. We're not going to beat the Methodists to the restaurant and so on and so forth.

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And in those days, they're beating down the door, filled the place up. I thought it was an appropriate illustration to bring up in that room where it had actually taken place.

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So anyway, Karlstadt, interesting fellow. I keep bringing him up.

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We'll eventually get around it. So Karlstadt, Luther's superior,

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Wittberg and Luther together, the two of them, engaged Johann Eck in debate at Leipzig.

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So that's July 4th through the 14th,

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OK? When I do debates, they're three hours on one night.

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This was 10 days, OK? And this would be all you did during the day.

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I don't know how many hours of talking this would involve.

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But that's how things were done. The Church of Christ guys down south like debates like this.

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They literally could do a July 4th through 14th debate on Acts 238. They really could.

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And they'd go three hours a night because that's their one verse. Obviously, this was not just one person speaking.

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This was Luther and Karlstadt pretty much versus Johann Eck. I loved how they represented

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Eck in Martin Luther Heretic. He even looked like Eck.

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I mean, if you've seen any pictures, obviously not photographs, but woodcuts.

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And just the mannerisms that he had in the Martin Luther Heretic film just seemed to me anyways to pretty much match what

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I would expect Eck to be like. Luther hung back at first and let

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Karlstadt take the lead. But Eck's continuous barbs directed toward him dragged him into the debate.

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Because Eck wanted Luther to be speaking because Eck is mining for heresy.

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This is the whole reason that Eck has agreed to this debate.

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Because in essence, Leipzig, world famous as far as university goes.

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So taking on Wittenberg would normally not be what a 5A school is going to be doing, taking on the 2A school.

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But that's not why he's doing it. He has known for over a year that Luther is a problem.

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And so this is what he can do to try to get some ammo to prove this to the higher ups.

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So he drags Luther in. He does well.

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Luther is X equal intellectually and as a speaker.

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But the problem is that the debate was a bit on the rigged side.

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In the sense that, and Luther didn't know this yet, but in the sense that if you have the papacy as your ultimate authority, what ground really does

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Luther have to argue? And what it's going to come down to is the same argument that I end up having in every debate

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I have with Roman Catholics 500 years later. And that is, if you present, if you're debating justification and you quote

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Romans 5 .1, well, that's your interpretation of Romans 5 .1. But the scripture has been given to the church, and the church says it means this.

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And that's the end of the argument from a consistent Roman Catholic perspective.

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And so you know the story. I imagine you're going, just get to your point.

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But at one point in the debate, and you know that Eck had this plan for weeks ahead of time.

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Eck entered into the debate the statements of Jan Hus. And so what he does is he quotes

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Luther, and then he quotes Hus.

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And they're parallel to one another. They're saying the same thing. And so all he has to do, because Duke George is in attendance, all he has to do is quote

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Luther. Then he quotes this other person. You know who said that? That was Jan Hus.

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Now, he didn't even have to explain who that was. Everybody knew that Hus had been burned as a heretic at the

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Council of Constance just over 100 years earlier. So once you make that connection, let's light my opponent up.

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It's just basically what's being said, yeah. Probably, well, some might be from the theses.

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But Luther was writing, 1518, 1519 starts writing some pretty strong stuff, some pretty strong stuff.

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I mean, by the end of 1519, he's going to be identifying the papacy as the Antichrist and stuff like that.

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So he doesn't have to limit himself just to 95 theses.

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Luther has not been silent. Even though Frederick was encouraging him to be a little less vocal or a little less prolific in his writing, you couldn't shut him up.

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And so there was other things to be quoting from already at that point in time. So what happens is, during lunch,

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Luther's taken aback. Luther's like, and in the short debates we have today, that would've been it.

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But back then, it's going on and on and on. So during lunch break, he goes to the library and amazingly finds examples of Jan Hus' writings that weren't committed to the flames and starts reading

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Jan Hus and comes back for the afternoon session and is again pressed by Eck.

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And to the shock and awe, to the gasps of those gathered in the hall, openly admitted that many of the things

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Hus had taught were, quote, evangelical and Christian and later said that he and his followers were

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Hussites without even knowing it. So you can imagine the impact that it had in this debate when

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Luther publicly says that many of the things taught by a man who had been burned alive by the

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Council of Constance only 100 years earlier were evangelical and Christian.

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Eck, if it had been the appropriate behavior in those days,

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Eck went, got it. I win. And in essence, he did.

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I mean, you can say Luther vindicated himself all you want as far as what

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Eck wanted to accomplish in that debate. He accomplished it. Duke George, who was in attendance, would be a lifelong enemy of Luther.

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There would be never any opportunity after that day, after that debate, for Duke George to even think about Luther, Lutheranism, Reformation, anything like that.

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So those lands under George's control, don't even think about it. But post -debate, everybody on one side's going, we won.

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We won, we won. Well, as they're going back, the students whisper, hey, that was great.

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And Luther's like, no, he won. Because he was having to think through now, what is the basis of what

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I'm saying? If Huss could die for this, I probably will too.

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This changes everything. Changes everything. And the main thing it changes is this is where Luther has to think through epistemology.

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How do I know what I know? And this is where Luther is forced to start coming to understand the supremacy of divine revelation over human tradition.

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This is where solo scriptura comes into Luther's thought. Not where he invents it.

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We looked at, I gave you quotes long ago from early church writers teaching solo scriptura.

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But that was no longer the tradition of the church. Now you have the traditions of men.

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And Luther is forced to go, got to subject everything to solo scriptura.

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Scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith in the church. And Eck, smart, smart man, used by God to bring that clarification into Luther's thought.

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And we all, as a result, have been benefited thereby. All right?

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We are out of time. Let's ask the Lord's blessing. Father, once again, we do thank you for this opportunity to look back, make us to be wise, make us to learn.

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And Lord, we ask that you be with us now as we go into worship. May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place.