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In this last lecture to round off the Luther story. In many ways, Luther's finest hour, I think, was the years 1520 to 1522. His career after that, I wouldn't say it takes a nosedive, it doesn't, but it becomes more and more embroiled with the troublesome internal politics of Protestantism.
1525 is a particularly important year for Luther. Three significant events take place. The first event is what's known as the Peasants' War. From the late 15th century onwards, the peasants, the rural population of the empire, had come under increasing pressure for various reasons, partly due to the rise of cities.
As the cities were growing, people were moving to the cities, and the population of rural areas was declining. And, of course, that meant that landlords, I remember once saying to students, what happens when you have less people working your land, you're the lord, and you have less people working your land, what do you do?
And they said, well, you reduce the rent. And I said, no, that's not how landlords operate. You expect them to work a lot harder. That's essentially what happens. So there has been growing discontent among what we might call the lower classes for some decades.
And Luther's language, the language of the Lutheran Reformation, is also language that the peasants can identify with. When Luther talks about the freedom of the Christian man in 1520, freedom is powerful language.
Often, if you go into inner cities, I have a friend who is a minister. He's an African-American minister of a PCA, a Presbyterian Church in America, a church in Philadelphia, and the church is called Christ's Liberation Fellowship.
And we were speaking to him a bit at a conference we were both speaking at, and I asked him about the name of his church. And he said, well, for even a Presbyterian church, he said, to be successful in the African-American community, you have to have something about freedom in the title because that language speaks so powerfully to the African-American community because of the specific history of the African-American community.
Well, freedom was very powerful language for the peasants and the lower classes as well. So when Luther comes along and he's talking about freedom, this is grasped by the peasants. He's talking our language.
He has a vision for freedom as we do. Of course, we know that Luther's understanding of freedom is a profoundly theological cross-shaped one. But those sort of nuances were lost, and Luther's language becomes powerful, political, idiom for the peasants.
And in 1525, all over the lands of the northern Holy Roman Empire, there is unrest. There are explosive rebellions. It's also, of course, an era where there was great what theologians would call eschatological expectation.
There was this belief that we're living at the end of time, that things are about to change dramatically. And the peasants thought that the peasants' war, as they all rose up, this was the moment at which the kingdom would be established on earth.
The oppressive rulers would be overthrown, and a kind of paradise would kick in. Tragically, it was not to be. And the forces of the empire, Protestant and Catholic, unite to crush the peasants. A particularly brutal battle, the Battle of Frankenhausen.
It's a bit like the Battle of Culloden. The Battle of Culloden was the last battle fought on British soil. 1745, it was not really a battle so much as a bunch of people in a field pounded to pieces by cannons.
Battle of Frankenhausen, you had 4 ,000 poorly equipped peasants meeting the massed army of the empire. And it was simply a decisive victory for the empire. Luther's role in the peasants' war shift. Initially, he's sympathetic to the peasants' claims.
Luther did have a sympathy for poor people. He'd grown up, certainly in his early years, in comparative poverty himself. And the older he got, the more he would play on his peasant background. It allowed him to swear.
His language gets worse as he gets older, and he always plays this, oh, well, that's how we talk because we're peasants card. But when it becomes clear that the Reformation is being co-opted by social revolution, Luther swings dramatically in the opposite direction.
And one of the great strengths of Luther, of course, is his brilliant ability to wield rhetoric. And when that's going in the right direction, it's an incredibly powerful force for good. When he's on the wrong side, it's an incredibly powerful force for evil.
And Luther writes what is known as the harsh book against the peasants, against the robbing and murdering hordes of peasants, where he advocates, he basically says, if you're riding along and there's a peasant at the side of the road, get off your horse and kill him.
Put him to death. That's the best way of serving the kingdom in the present day. So Luther, 1525, writes this devastating book that is one of the two books he's most notorious for. The other book is a book about the Jews that I will talk about shortly.
Second great event of 1525 is his clash with Erasmus. Erasmus was the preeminent intellectual of his day. He was the man who produced a decent Greek text of the New Testament. He was the man who helped promote the learning of Greek and Hebrew in early 16th century Europe like nobody else.
He was the great man of letters. He was a humanist. Don't let the title disturb you. These days, humanists are people like Richard Dawkins. In the 16th century, humanists simply meant a man who was interested in humane letters.
We would say a man of letters, a public intellectual. A humanist does not tell you what theology they were committed to. They were committed to a program of cultural reform based upon recovering the classics, classical Latin, classical Greek.
Erasmus also saw clearly the corruption of the church and he wanted the church to clean up its act. But Erasmus was also a kind of skeptic. He didn't believe anything strongly enough to want to take a really strong stand on it, to put his life on the line over something.
Erasmus was asked in 1520 by Frederick the Wise what he thought of Luther and Erasmus had written some notes on Luther and he'd made the comment to Frederick the Wise that Luther has two faults. He's attacked the Pope's wealth and the monk's bellies.
Erasmus saw Luther essentially as attacking the moral corruption in the church. He didn't see him so theologically. These private notes passed to Frederick the Wise get published as a way of trying to say Erasmus is with Luther.
This means that Erasmus comes under great pressure in the early 1520s to declare himself relative to Luther. Where do you stand relative to Luther? In 1524, he wrote a book called Diatribe on the Free Will or on Free Judgment.
At the heart of this book are two propositions that Luther will take great exception to. One, Erasmus believes that the human will is free to choose or not to choose the gospel. And two, Erasmus believes that the Bible is just obscure and therefore you need the church to interpret it for you.
Luther responds with what is probably his greatest intellectual work in 1525 on the bondage of the will. It's actually better translated as on the bondage of judgment, but it's typically translated on the bondage of the will.
It is a great assertion of an Augustinian view of the human will, that the human will is bound and dead in sin, and an equally trenchant assertion of the fundamental clarity or perspicuity of scripture, that if you hear scripture read, if you hear it preached, you, whoever you are, can grasp enough of it to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's a great book. It had a profound impact upon the nature of British evangelicalism in the 20th century. British evangelicalism was typically not very theological and inclined towards sort of Arminianism.
Well, in the 1940s and 50s, particularly in the 1940s, I suppose, a number of significant figures emerged, most notably probably Douglas Johnson of the InterVarsity Fellowship and Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the minister at Westminster Chapel in London.
And Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, his daughter, was at Oxford and got to know a young man called James Packer when she was at Oxford. And James Packer became part of Dr. Lloyd-Jones' circle. And one of the earliest theological productions that James Packer did was he translated, with the help of an O .R. Johnstone, he translated Luther's Bondage of the Will into English and got it published.
And it had a profound impact on, well, even though Luther was not a Calvinist, one might say on the Calvinizing of British evangelicalism. Of course, James Packer went on to become a very great figure.
Many of us, I can date my own real grasp of the gospel to reading Dr. Packer's God's Words in my first week at university. So Dr. Packer went on to become a very influential figure in many ways, but one of his earliest contributions was a translation of this 1525 book by Luther.
And Luther himself, in this book, makes an interesting comment. He's pretty hard on Erasmus. He doesn't like Erasmus at all. He regards him as a vacillating compromiser. But he does pay him one compliment.
He says, everybody else, Erasmus, has tried to distract me by debating me about trivia, like the papacy and indulgences. He says, you and you alone have spotted the point, the hinge on which everything turns, the nature of the human will.
So 1525, the bondage of the will, one of the, I think that work and Luther's catechisms are the only two works that he considered to be worthy of outliving him. He makes some comments somewhere. The only two works that I really think are worth, might be worth preserving are bondage of the will and the catechisms.
The third great event of 1525 is his marriage to a lady called Catherine von Bora. As the Lutheran Reformation spreads in the early 1520s across certain territories in the Holy Roman Empire, monasteries start to close down.
And there's always been, monasteries and nunneries have always sort of grown and fallen in relation to each other. In the early church, female monasticism, nuns grow as a result of male monasticism. If you're in a patriarchal society where women fundamentally depend upon men for their economic well-being and security, what happens when the men run off and join monasteries?
Well, you've either got to develop some sort of polygamous sect or you have to develop some kind of female monasticism. So, male monasteries, female monasteries grow together in the early church and they get closed down together in the 16th century and you have the opposite problem.
Suddenly, you're getting all of these single guys and single girls being thrown onto the open market, as it were. And the obvious thing to do is to marry them all off to each other. Well, a group of nuns from Nimption escape to Wittenberg.
They hide in fish barrels. Now, I imagine that the level of personal hygiene was pretty low in the 16th century anyway. I mean, Queen Elizabeth I famously said that she had a bath once every three months whether she needed one or not.
So, I imagine that there was a fairly, you set the bar pretty high for objectionable body odor in the 16th century. But I would also imagine that traveling in fish barrels probably pushed you over the edge somewhat.
But anyway, this bunch of nuns turn up in Wittenberg and the obvious thing to do is to marry them off to all of the former monks who were being thrown onto the open market. So, one by one, these nuns get married off and there's one left that nobody wants, Catherine von Bora.
Apparently, she was pretty strong-willed and that may well have intimidated some of these men who up until then had lived a peaceful monastic existence. So, Luther actually gets involved in trying to fix her up and they try various avenues.
And finally, they try to fix her up with a sort of an elderly, miserable old skinflint Lutheran pastor, a thoroughly obnoxious individual. And she adamantly refuses to get married to this guy. So, Luther, more or less in despair, throws up his hands and marries this girl.
The movie romanticizes it a bit. In the movie, there is this kind of attraction between them. I don't actually think there was. I think they grew to love each other. I think it was a marriage in some ways of convenience.
They grew to love each other. They had many children together. She was certainly a transformative influence on him. You remember, this is 1525. He's already in his forties by this point. He's a middle-aged man.
He's a middle-aged man, certainly by 16th century standards. He's a very middle-aged man, a real confirmed bachelor. In his table talk, he's asked, you know, what's the thing you most noticed since you got married?
And he talks about, you know, it's odd waking up and finding pigtails on the pillow next to me. And he also says, you know, the other great thing is, before I got married, my sheets would have to be bored stiff with my sweats before I would have them cleaned.
He said, now my wife, you know, she keeps a careful eye on the bedroom linen hygiene situation and washes them fairly regularly. Remarkable lady. There are a number of little books written about her. She was a great home brewer.
I mentioned that. I will remember not to mention that while I'm in Brazil in January. But she was a great home brewer. Of course, it's the 16th century, so beer was the safest way of getting clean liquid.
I went to Heidelberg a few years ago to help in an ordination of a student and went on a tour of the castle. And one of the electors of Heidelberg died as an alcoholic at 21. And, you know, why was he an alcoholic at 21?
Well, he'd been given wine since he was age two or something. I mean, it's stunning to think that the standard drink would have been alcoholic from when you were knee high to a gross hopper. Well, Luther's wife was a great home brewer.
In Wittenberg, they delight to tell you that they would draw the water for brewing from the river, of course. So on the day when they drew the water for brewing, they would send out a warning that nobody was to relieve themselves upstream because it was a standard place for relieving yourself.
And you really didn't want that interfering with the home brew. She was a great home brewer, a great household manager as well. She was the one who they were... Frederick the Wise as a gift, as a wedding gift, this is an amazing wedding gift, gave them the Augustinian cloister, the little Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg was given to them as a wedding gift.
And if you go there today, it's still part of a seminary. Seminary students spend some amount of their time living in the Augustinian cloister. And it's a beautiful building. They had a lot of, not only did they have numerous children themselves, they also took in students.
The Luthers were continually suffering from financial difficulties. So they took in students and Luther, of course, this would have great fun holding court at meal time, as I told you earlier. If you go to the house, there is a beautiful stone doorway with two little stools, one on either side.
And that was a birthday gift from Katie to Martin because she became concerned that they didn't talk enough. So she bought this doorway for them so that when it was bright and sunny outside, and this is northern Europe, so that kind of restricts it to about three weeks a year or something, they could sit either side of the door on these little stools and talk to each other.
And if you go inside, there's another room inside where there's a window and there are two little chairs carved into the shelves by the window where they could sit. And she would insist that they spent time talking to each other.
She and Martin hired themselves out as gardeners. Luther was a great reformer, but being a great reformer doesn't pay a whole lot. He was a pastor and a university professor, but they were not particularly lucrative professions.
He got a household full of kids and a wife's support. So he and his wife would do gardening for people. Can you imagine that? It's pretty amazing that your gardener is Martin Luther, one of the most influential men in Europe, and he's coming and cutting your grass or digging your potatoes or something.
Luther also hired himself out as a carpenter at one point, but his carpentry skills were so bad that they got all kinds of complaints and he had to drop that lest he got sued or something. So Luther's wife and family makes a big difference to him.
As I said last night, I think when he writes his catechism, particularly the small catechism, there is a wonderfully childlike quality to the questions and a beautiful clarity and conciseness to the answers that belies their profundity.
And it can't prove this, of course, but I think a lot of it would have derived from Luther's experience as a father. He knew what it was like to try to teach his kids and to teach them everything, not just Christian truth.
A couple of his children died, one in infancy and one when she was a little bit older. And some of the most moving things that Luther writes are the table talks that refer to his deathbed conversations with his daughter about how he's trying to stop weeping and she's telling him it's okay because she's going to her heavenly father and as much as Martin loves her, her heavenly father will love and care for her so much more.
And he also talks about going into the carpenter's workshop and seeing the coffin that the carpenter has made for his daughter, not being able to believe that something so small and so beautiful has been taken away from him.
So there's some very, you know, Luther, unlike Calvin and John Owen, people like John Owen, who don't give us very much of themselves in their writings, which in many ways is very, you know, in the world of Facebook and everybody does everything publicly these days, it's very admirable, I think, that these men were very private.
From a historian's point of view, that can be a bit frustrating because you like to know about the man behind the books. Luther gives us plenty of information on his life and his marriage and it's very clear that he and Katie grew to love each other very much.
They said they had numerous children together and after he died she had to flee from Wittenberg because of the invasion of the empire, but they were very, very close together and had a very, very happy house.
1529 is another great watershed year for Luther. To go back to where we started a bit with Luther, that burning question, where can I find a God who is gracious to me? The answer for Luther was in the crucified flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And for Luther, that's found in two places today, in the word preached and in the bread and the wine administered when the word is preached. Luther, I've just received a text from somebody, I bet that's what it is, isn't it?
I'm going to put my, a friend of mine, one of my elders is at Presbytery and he's clearly texting me with outrageous things or something that have been said at Presbytery. I will switch this off. I wonder what that was.
Good job he didn't blow the speakers or something, that would have made me look like ACDC if the speakers had exploded. For Luther, the flesh of Christ is very important because there and only there do you find God is gracious.
It's why he doesn't like the book of James. We all know he rejects the book of James because it seems to contradict Paul, but if you read his preface to James, he also says it doesn't contain Christ. It doesn't contain flesh.
It doesn't contain Christ. Luther, by the way, has some wonderfully, he says things about the book of James that would certainly get me booted out of the ministry in the OPC. He makes a comment somewhere to the effect that if he had his way, he would whip little Jimmy from the Bible and throw him into the fire.
And that bit of James 3 .1, not many of you should aspire to be teachers. Luther puts in the margins, oh James, if only you had taken your own advice. So, those who try to rehabilitate Luther on the book of James, you've got a lot of hard work to get through, I'm afraid.
But for Luther, and remember, his first real crisis is precipitated by the mass. And Luther's criticism of transubstantiation in 1520, you know, if I would say to you, what's wrong with transubstantiation, you'd say, well, the bread and the wine turn into the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the body and blood aren't really there.
They're in heaven at the right hand of God the Father. For Luther, the problem with transubstantiation is they say the bread and the wine have gone. This bread is my body. They're both there, bread and body.
So Luther thinks transubstantiation is an error, but not a heresy, because it denies the presence of the bread. It affirms the presence of Christ, and that's important. Zwingli, of course, in Zurich, sees the Lord's Supper as being symbolic.
It's symbolism that the Lord is talking about when he says, this is my body. He's really saying, this symbolizes my body. That has a bad track record in Wittenberg, because the first guy talking that kind of language was Karlstadt, during these riots in 1521, 1522.
Karlstadt's the man who's talking about the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, being symbolic. That fixes in Luther's mind the idea that you say the Eucharist is symbolic, you're going to engage in iconoclasm and riots.
So he's always biased against that kind of view. 1529, Philip of Hesse. We met him before. Remember, he's the man who marries two women and gets Luther into a bit of trouble. Philip of Hesse wants to form a military alliance between the Lutheran princes in the north and the Swiss cities in the south.
Like I said earlier, it's got to be a theological alliance. And he gathers the greatest minds of both camps, the Lutheran camp and the Reformed camp, together in the castle in Marburg in Germany. And there in a room, they debate their theology.
And they come to agreement on 14 and a half out of 15 points. The half point they disagree on is whether Christ's humanity, whether his flesh, is really objectively present in the Lord's Supper. And Luther shipwrecks the whole deal on that point.
He will not agree on that point. Like I said last night, Machen says that's a tragedy. It would have been more of a tragedy if he hadn't thought that point was important. That's why to this day you have Lutheran churches and you have Reformed churches.
And the differences between them, certainly from the Lutheran perspective, are not seen to be insubstantial. They seem to be very, very significant. A couple of years ago, when I went to this ordination in Heidelberg, it was under the auspices of a group in the PCA called Reformation to Germany.
And somebody, Reformation to Germany, put a little thing up about how Reformation to Germany is bringing the Gospel to Germany. An American Lutheran pastor wrote an article on his website saying these people are not bringing the Gospel to Germany because they don't believe that the flesh and the blood are present in the Lord's Supper.
And I have Evangelical friends emailing me saying, isn't it outrageous what this person is saying? And I say, well, no. Praise God. He knows what he believes. He's a Lutheran. I expect Lutherans to behave like Lutherans.
People are always offended when the Pope says something that sounds Catholic. The Pope is a Catholic. He's not going to like Evangelicals very much and we shouldn't be offended by that. I mean, I'm not offended when the Pope says things Evangelicals are wrong.
I think he's wrong. But it's not offensive for the Pope to be a Catholic. It's not offensive for the Lutherans to be Lutheran. Luther busts Protestantism in two on that particular point. And that is why there is no agreement these days between Lutherans and Reformed.
Though many of us have Lutheran friends and it is no bar to sort of informal Christian fellowship. It's just that a Lutheran could never be ordained in my denomination and I could never be ordained in a Lutheran denomination.
1530 is an important year for Lutherans. That's the year that the Augsburg Confession is written and presented to the Emperor. Luther doesn't write it. It's his brilliant young number two, Melanchthon, who does that.
Luther is too controversial a character so he doesn't go to the Diet of Augsburg where this is discussed. He stays nearby the castle. The Augsburg Confession becomes the confession that the Lutheran princes in the Empire sign up to and form what's called the Schmalkaldic League, which is a military mutual defense league within the Empire, which means if the Emperor is going to take us on, he's really, really got to count the cost because we have a military alliance now.
You can't invade electoral Saxony and not expect the whole Empire to descend into complete chaos. The Augsburg Confession continues to be the standard, one of the standard Lutheran confessional documents today.
If you don't have a copy of the Book of Concord, you can download it free on the internet. It contains Luther's catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed.
It's a great example of confessional Christianity. Luther's own life, he will continue as leader of the Reformation until 1546 when he will, while doing a preaching tour, preach. He preaches in the town of Eisleben and is then taken ill and dies.
His body is taken back to Wittenberg for burial. His last sermon is interesting and brings me to a topic that I want to close with. His last sermon is interesting. We had R .C. Sproul as the speaker at Westminster's graduation this year.
In his address to the students, he referred to his high regard for Luther's last sermon. I lent over to Peter Lilbach, the president of Westminster. I was sitting next to him and said, I hope he doesn't mean the appendix.
Luther's last sermon, at the end of the sermon, Luther added an appendix. This was often the way in those days. Sermons were not just expositions of God's Word. They were also the way people got their whole view of what was going on.
So you'd often have a bit at the end of the sermon where you'd address a contemporary issue and almost give like a news broadcast or something. Luther adds, as an appendix to his sermon, a harangue against the Jews.
This is one of the things that Luther is most notorious for. If people know two bad things about Luther, they know that he advocated murder of peasants in 1525 and he hated the Jews. It's true. In 1543, Luther wrote a famous or infamous treatise on the Jews and their lives.
You can find it on the internet. I wrote a book a few years ago on how to do history. I did a chapter in that on Holocaust denial. I thought it was an interesting way of looking at what constitutes bad historical method and what's good historical method.
I spent an unhappy two or three weeks reading a lot of Holocaust denial stuff on the internet. So many of these Holocaust denial sites, white supremacist sites, have links to or contain the text of Luther's on the Jews and their lives.
It is an extreme piece of anti-Jewish polemic that he wrote in 1543. Well, to understand why he wrote this, and I'm not trying to excuse him here, I simply want to give you some idea of how his mind is working by 1543.
Luther, at the start of the Reformation, very quickly gets the idea that this is the end of time. By 1521, Luther is being identified with figures in the book of Revelation by friend and foe alike. He's living in apocalyptic times.
Luther, when he writes about the gospel in 1520, is very confident. I think a lot of his confidence comes down to the fact that he really believes that the word preached is very powerful, and when you preach the word, the kingdom of Satan will just collapse before you.
Remember in his great hymn, One little word shall fell him, Jesus, that's the only word you need, and all powers and principalities will fall to their knees. Luther is very confident that the end of the world is coming.
Christ is about to return. He also believes that the conversion of the Jews will be a precursor to the second advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. So in 1523, he writes a remarkable treatise called Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he advocates that Christians should be good and kind to their Jewish neighbors in order to build bridges to give them an opportunity to speak the gospel to them.
That is a remarkable treatise, and it's remarkable because it goes against the entire flow of late medieval writing against the Jews. If Luther writes a remarkable treatise on the Jews, it's not the treatise of 1543, it's the treatise of 1523.
The sad fact is that Jews were, by and large, hated by everybody in Europe at that time. The question is why. Well, it wasn't really so much a racial thing, I don't think. I don't think 16th century Europeans had much of a grasp of the idea of race.
It was very much a religious thing. Remember I mentioned earlier the close connection there is between religion and politics in the 16th century. Well, how do you become a member of society? You get baptized, and everybody's baptized as an infant.
It's why the Anabaptists are persecuted, because in being baptized as a believer, you're not simply making a point about believer's baptism. You're opting out of society as it is then known. To be an Anabaptist is to be the equivalent of in the 60s, you know, a member of the Manson family or be living in a commune somewhere.
You appear to be actually withdrawing yourself from society, and that's a very subversive thing. And many Anabaptists did that, of course. They felt when they were baptized, they ceased to be part of this world and became part of new communities.
The Jews, of course, you have a similar problem. How can Jews be member of society because they're not baptized? So there is this natural resentment and hatred that grows up because there's no way of accommodating or understanding them.
They're strange, they're other, they're outsiders. They don't do things as we do it. They're ripe for being picked on and scapegoated, one might say. And you have this horrible literature that pervades writing about Jews in the late 15th, early 16th century, which is really, really nasty.
That's what made Luther's 1523 treatise quite stunning, that here's a man saying you should be nice to Jews and reach out to them in love and care and make a bridge for the gospel. 1543, though, he's done a complete about-turn, and he's advocating, you know, lock them up in their synagogues and burn their synagogues down, which, of course, takes on a horribly at the time, it was just over-the-top rhetoric.
Relative to events in Germany between 1933 and 1945, it takes on a kind of horribly prophetic stroke policy kind of ring to it. What makes the difference? Why does Luther end up hating the Jews? Because Christ did not return.
I think by the time we get to 1543, Luther has gone the way that so many who, you know, believe that Christ would return in their day and generation and doesn't return. He's bitter. And, of course, it's 1543, there are no antibiotics.
Luther is an old man by the standards of the day, and he's an ill man. If you look at the medical, some people have written this little book called The Medical History of the Reformation. I'm not sure if it was ever published in the U .S.
It's, you know, it's the kind of book that makes your hair stand on end, if you've got any left. It's, the medical conditions of your average person in the 16th century are quite horrific, really. And the ways that they were dealt with were really, really awful.
I was reading a book on Mormonism this week, because, of course, Mormonism is very much in the air. And Joseph Smith, as a young boy, had some kind of infection in his bone that required them to open up the flesh on his leg and chip the bone off, the infected bone off.
And, you know, he held his dad's hand throughout this. And I was just thinking, what must have gone through his father's, you know, what screams must his father have endured? Well, that would have been standard in a world before analgesics and antibiotics, etc., etc.
So Luther is physically a wreck by 1543, and, of course, that has an impact on the way you think about the world. So by 1543, Luther is a bitter and angry old man, and he's looking for somebody to blame.
The Reformation has failed, and he identifies four groups as the reason for its failure. There are the Catholics, who've refused to accept the Gospel. There's the Turks, who refuse to accept the Gospel and are harrying the eastern boundaries of the Empire.
There are the Anabaptists, who are so wrapped up with the Holy Spirit they have no time for Christ. And there are the Jews, the very people of God, who, they've got the Scriptures. They should get it, but they don't convert.
So Luther's writing in the Jews. I end on that rather dark note, pretty horrific and unpleasant stuff. What one can say is that what he says is actually fairly cliched. Luther is not inventing a genre of literature here.
He uses a lot of the standard tropes, a lot of the standard accusations of the late Middle Ages. You know, Jews kidnap babies and crucify them and drink the blood, that kind of thing. You know, the blood libel, as it was called.
That's pretty typical of anti-Jewish polemic of the time. So Luther is the most famous anti-Jewish writer of his day, but actually, sadly, he was pretty typical in many ways of the anti-Jewish writing of his day.
Is there anything positive we can draw about his writings against the Jews and the peasants? I would say two things. One, it is a truth that one's character enables one to do certain things. To do what Luther did at the Reformation, to make the stand he took, meant that he'd got to be a pretty stubborn pig-headed man who was, at points, very, very confident in his own ability.
Melanchthon couldn't have done it. Melanchthon was too gentle. Erasmus couldn't have done it because he didn't want to stick his neck out for anybody. Only Luther could do it because he had that passionate and stubborn conviction.
The problem is, of course, that when passionate, stubborn conviction goes off in the wrong direction, there's virtually nobody to stop it going in the wrong direction. The second thing, I think, is it's a reminder that God's greatest servants are still vessels of great weakness.
The Reformation was brought about because of what the Lord did through Martin Luther, but in large part, despite what Martin Luther was. I'll just end with a personal anecdote. Last year, I stood in the church in Eisleben under the very pulpit where Martin Luther...I'm not into relics, but I did lean out.
At various points on my Reformation tour, I leaned out and touched various things. Not by means of the magic of touch, but I was cured from a couple of fairly serious illnesses, actually. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
I stood under the pulpit that Martin Luther preached his last sermon in. I remember actually praying, Lord, I will never do a 10 ,000th part for the kingdom that Martin Luther did, but I do pray that the last sermon I ever preach will be a better account of the gospel than the last sermon that he preached.
With that thought, I will close today. Would you like me to close in prayer, Mike? Would you want me to close in prayer? Oh, Lord God, we do thank you that you have indeed preserved your gospel throughout the ages, that you have done it using frail human vessels.
You have done it despite human weakness. We praise you, oh Lord, that that weakness in itself is a manifestation of your power and your glory, that it is not power and glory as the world thinks of it.
It is power and glory as the cross has defined it. Lord, as we part now, we ask that this afternoon might be a delightful time of relaxation, but we pray that even now that you would be preparing our hearts and minds for fellowshipping with your people tomorrow and hearing your word, the word that Martin Luther did so much to help recover, proclaimed.
And we ask, oh God, that this Lord's day might be one where we truly encounter God and are once more transformed by your presence. For we pray these things to you, confident not in our own ability, asking for your forgiveness of our sins, but fully trusting in the all-sufficient righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
For we pray these things to you, God our Father, in the name of your Son, by the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen.