55 - Martin Luther up to 1511

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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We are only a few months behind where we should have been had we been actually planning things, but we weren't planning things, so we're,

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I guess, right where we should be. But we have been covering church history now for at least over a year's worth of sessions.

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We're heading towards 60 -some -odd in this particular run through, up through Reformation church history from the beginning, and we have finally arrived at the spot where everybody thinks they've already got it all figured out anyways, especially if you did as I suggested.

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And you still have time to do this, but I suggested last week that you write down and avail yourself of the free resources on YouTube, and that you watch two films, one the

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BBC production Martin Luther Heretic, Jonathan Pierce, is that,

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Price, Jonathan Price played Luther in that one, there is another one, is it on YouTube as well,

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I'm not sure, the 2004 Luther movie, I'm sorry, it is on YouTube as well, okay,

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Joseph Fiennes, yeah, it's a longer one, and the Fiennes one was actually shot on location, so when we were over there, for example, there's a scene in the

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Fiennes movie where Luther and Staupitz are on their knees,

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Luther's cleaning a floor in a hallway, and that hallway, the door behind them leads right into the chapel of the church where Luther was ordained, and then they show him, when you were ordained in those days, the night before your ordination, you would spend the night alone in the cathedral, face, in cruciform form, with face down on, well, it would actually be a sepulcher in front of the altar, basically, and that's still there in Erfurt, Germany, and they actually show him laying out on that there in front of the altar, and you would spend the night in the dark there, thinking about what you were going to do, and so anyways, the

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Fiennes film is available as well, they'll both give you a lot of good background, and then the other film, which we would have more time for you to get to if you wanted to, is titled

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The Radicals, it's actually titled The Radicals, it's not entitled anything, but it's titled The Radicals, and it is the story of Michael Sattler, and it sort of generally covers the

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Anabaptists as a whole, if you need more and further reason to watch it,

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Spock's dad is in that film as well, so not playing

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Spock's dad, and he doesn't have funny -looking ears, but he is in that film as well, and it does a really, really good job, and it will bother you to watch the two of them together, and it's meant to, and when you watch them, you will see why it is, and of course, when we finally get around to, and finish up with the

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Anabaptists, and that movement in Reformation church history, you'll see why

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I had you watch those videos, so if you have a chance, I would highly recommend those to you, but we are in Germany, and last time together, we had begun to speak a little bit about the situation there, as far as the

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Holy Roman Empire, the rise of nationalism, nationalism was especially strong in Saxony, in Luther's area, and we had talked about the founding of the

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University of Wittenberg by Charles, I'm sorry, by Frederick the Wise, Charles is going to be the

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Holy Roman Empire Emperor in a few years, but Frederick the

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Wise, we had talked a little bit about him, the fact that he would end his life as a

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Lutheran, but that during his, most of his life, he had remained technically in fellowship with Rome, everybody sort of knew where his real sympathies were, again, very, very important, we've already talked about this many times, but just to remind you, the issue of sacralism, the state church, by this point in time, it's pretty much been established for over a thousand years, and as a result, it is very difficult for us to climb back into the minds of the reformers and those who lived that time period, so as to understand how even the reformers themselves could so deeply committed to a sacral understanding of the church and state.

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They did not have in mind a free church, and if you don't realize that, you're gonna really struggle when we start looking at the

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Anabaptist and looking at how, well, we'll talk a little bit about Luther, not sure if we'll get to it this week, probably will, we'll see,

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Luther and his fight for religious freedom to a point, religious freedom to establish another sacral church, in which there would be no religious freedom for anybody who doesn't agree with that perspective, and it causes us to struggle a little bit, and it does damage our superhero images that, unfortunately, we have, but we want to know what really happened.

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Mentioned a while back the whole constellation of amazing intellects that lived in the year 1500,

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Luther was born November 10th, 1483, so in 1500, he would be 16, 17 years of age.

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His parents were Hans and Margaretha. Hans Luther was involved in mining.

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Luther liked to talk about his peasant stock, but the reality is his parents would be considered upper -middle class,

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I would say, not royalty or anything like that, but they weren't super poor.

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They had money, and in fact, one of the issues that could come up later on is

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Hans Luther made a fairly substantial contribution to the monastery at Erfurt.

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That's why there was a problem when Luther struggled to perform the Mass, as all the videos will show you.

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Hans was embarrassed and the embarrassment was increased by the fact that he had had funding to contribute toward the monastery, so Luther wouldn't have lived in the lap of luxury, but he also wasn't scraping at the to try to find things to eat either, so keep that in mind.

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Like most rural Germans, his was what we would call a somewhat superstitious family.

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When you tell the story here in a moment of the lightning strike, there are people today who go, ah, that probably didn't happen.

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There's a lot of revisionism going on, especially in Germany right now, in regards to Luther and just all sorts of silly theories are being propounded about himself,

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Melanchthon, all sorts of people. You've always got to try to change history to make it fit the modern narrative, but modern man sort of struggles a little bit to understand how

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Luther could be, in some instances, so far -seeing and then in other instances so very short -sighted, and that it would be so challenging to the modern mind to recognize that for Luther this was a very supernatural world.

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You know, I mentioned with Erasmus, the fleas biting at him were demons. Well, that would be something that Luther would understand and probably wouldn't take umbrage at.

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His was a fairly superstitious family, very disciplined, Hans Luther, L -U -D -E -R, in the earlier documents, and remember, as I pointed out, spelling was rather fluid in those days, as it seems to be now, thanks to the internet again as well, but for different reasons.

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Hans Luther, a strong disciplinarian, and of course that has also been a part of, if you go to the library, you look up Luther, you will find there's this whole field of modern psychoanalysis of Luther.

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I mean, wow, it is bad, because, you know, a lot of people today would look at Luther and they would say, bipolar.

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They want to try to do some, you know, psychoanalysis in the past, which is always great for getting an article published, but I'm not sure how useful it is in actually casting light on past events, but especially when about the only information you have about them is from, you know, the individual himself or people second, third hand, whatever it might be.

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There is no question that Luther had deep periods of depression.

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It is told, we'll meet Katie later on, but Catherine Von Bora, his wife, the story is told of during one of these dark, dark times,

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Luther was alone down in the darkness of the basement, and something we here in Arizona don't know anything about, but in other places you actually have these holes in the ground you can go down into under your house.

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It's great, and this is actually in places where you can dig in the ground and not immediately run into a rock, but he was down in the basement and Katie comes down and she just sits down next to him and says says nothing and just has this horribly depressed look as well, and so he, you know how it is when you're depressed that someone comes along and you're like, hey, you can't be more depressed than me.

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Stop ruining my depression, you know, and so she, she looks at, he looks at her and says, what's wrong with you?

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Haven't you heard? Oh, what? God is dead. God is dead.

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Woman, what are you babbling about? God can't die, and she says, well, it certainly is the only thing

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I can explain why you've been down here for so long, and you know, you just hate it when people ruin your, your, your good pout that way, you know, but he, he had this, these kinds of, of deep, dark fits, and one of the things, when we were preparing to go over to Germany last year,

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I read all of Luther's correspondence.

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Well, okay, I'm not all of it. I read a bunch of Luther's correspondence that he wrote, especially while he was at the

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Wartburg Castle after his encounter with Charles in 1520, and interesting fellow.

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I'm not, I'm not sure I really would have wanted to have been one of his friends, because yeah, well, he, he was yeah, he was quite, quite intriguing, and he also in later life would have some physical issues.

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Being a monk really isn't good for your body. He's always shown as a rather portly fellow, but he, he wasn't a portly fellow initially.

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The earlier portraits show him to be more, almost thin and gaunt.

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Evidently, marriage had something to do. That's not the first time that's happened, huh?

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Guys get, get married skinny, and by the time they're 40, well, anyway. So, that, that sort of happened with, with Luther as well, but he had lifelong, shall we say, digestive issues, which he, which he would share with his friends in his letters from the

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Wartburg Castle. And it was like, okay, you know, in the same letter where you've got this stuff about everything that's going on in the

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Reformation, and you have a few paragraphs about how rough things are going for, for Luther in that area, and so you had to be a, you really had to be a friend to, anyway,

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Luther studied in a Latin school close to home.

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He entered the University of Erfurt in May of 1501.

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Erfurt is a very interesting city. A lot of the city of that day still exists.

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The cathedral up on the, up on the hillside, really impressive, very, very impressive.

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You go up to it over these, these very large number of steps, and it just dominated the skyline.

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And the, the city itself, we, we, when you go over to the university, you have to cross the, the river, and it's interesting, they would, they would build these bridges, and they would build all sorts of structures on these, these bridges.

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So you don't, you hardly even know that you're crossing a bridge, because it's just, there's just houses and everything on, on each side of you.

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The problem was, they, they built primarily out of wood back then, and every few decades, somebody'd tip over something, and the whole place would, would go up.

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But the, much of the, much of the University of Erfurt is still there.

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What's interesting is, when I spoke there, we spoke in a very modern building.

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The reason being, that building had been built since World War II, and that would, it was on the site where Luther would have done most of his studying.

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But that building was wiped out by one of the very last bombing raids by the

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Allies in, in World War II. Took a direct hit, you know, right down the, the proverbial smokestack, and just, just blew it away.

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Just missing, obviously, the, the church next door, that was, is so central in so much of Luther's experience, that I was just describing, that they shot in the, in the finds version of the, the

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Luther story. So, the building right next door, and you'll see a lot of that in Europe. You'll, you'll be walking along in, amongst buildings that are many hundreds of years old, and all of a sudden, there's something that ain't hundreds of years old, and it was, it was due to the damage during, during the war, of course.

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So, 1501, he's in, in Erfurt. He receives his

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BA a year and a half later, 1502. And on January 7th, 1505, so in three years, he receives his

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Master of Arts degree, and he began to study law.

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However, shortly after this, he had his famous thunderstorm experience, and again, there's all sorts of revisionists, they're trying to undo these things, but while walking near Stotterheim on July 2nd, which is not very far from Erfurt, a lightning bolt struck close to him during a summer thunderstorm.

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And in terror, he cried out, St. Anne, help me, and I will become a monk. Now, St.

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Anne was the patron saint of miners, and of course, his father was a miner, so it would have been natural for him to seek

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St. Anne's intercession. But it is interesting to us today, his father strongly opposed this.

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Monks begged for food, while under the strictures of the order, they could only walk, they could not ride a horse or a donkey, they could not own land or property.

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And obviously, Hans had been hoping that Martin would take care of him in his older age, and it's always good to have a lawyer in the family.

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And so he had had plans, and so despite that,

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Luther had made an oath. And years later, he would write on the validity of oaths, especially in regards to monks leaving orders and abandoning their oath of celibacy and things like that, and would argue that he probably had actually made a mistake in dishonoring his father.

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For the sake of an oath, years and years earlier. But he had made the oath, and felt that it was absolutely necessary, that that was his highest duty.

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He had sworn to St. Anne that if he lived, he'd become a monk, he had lived, therefore he didn't have any choice.

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Despite the fact that I'm sure the look that Hans gave

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Martin was probably significantly worse than any look I've ever given Josh. So I'm not even sure

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I could do a Hans Luther type German miner look, I'm not sure

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I could pull that one off. So two weeks later, he walked down this narrow street, there is a wall all around the monastery, there is a gate which is still there today, which we went through, and there's a bell.

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And you ring the bell, and a monk comes to the gate, looks through the gate at you, and what do you wish?

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I wish to become a monk. And if you are allowed through that gate, you leave all of your earthly possessions behind.

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We went into the building where the monks would live. These were, well you've heard the monks sell, and there's a reason they're called sells.

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I suppose I should, again, I could have set up, we could have, I was thinking about it last year going, wow this is going to be really great,

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I'm going to show lots of pictures. And it's like, it's a lot of effort to set up that projection system and hope that it's going to work.

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But these are about less than a quarter the size of a motel six room.

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There's nothing in there. You might have a desk if you had work to be, if what you were doing required you to be doing work.

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But you might have a straw mat. Luther was well known in later life for saying that he, as part of his discipline, would sleep on the stone floor, even in the winters, without a blanket.

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And it can get quite cold in Germany. And that he would frequently fast and things like that.

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Very, very small place. Really no privacy or anything like that.

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And this would be your life. So this would be significantly more strict than what

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Luther would have experienced at the university or things like that.

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He had, the data indicates that while he was at the university in the years prior to that, that he had lived a comfortable life.

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A comfortable life of a student. He wasn't one of the poor people in the class. He was doing okay.

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So this would be a difficult time, a time of transition. In 1507,

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Luther took holy orders. So this would have been that time where prior to receiving that ordination, he would have spent the night laying with his arms out, face down, on the sepulcher that is in front of the high altar of the church.

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And the church would be locked and closed and it would be dark. And you would stay there all night contemplating what you were going to be doing.

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I would just be having back spasms, personally, in that situation. But they must have been tougher than us back then.

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I don't think I could sleep in that way, but that's what he would have done.

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So 1507. And on May 2nd of 1507, he attempted to celebrate his first mass.

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Now, again, there are differing stories.

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The generally understood version is that when

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Luther got to the words of consecration, he had a really sharp mind.

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So there wouldn't have been any issue in his having memorized all the proper canons and things that you needed to do and the way that you needed to do them and the things you needed to say in Latin and everything else.

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But when he got to the words of consecration and some of you older folks who were

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Roman Catholic many, many, many, many moons ago will remember Latin masses.

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Vatican II allowed for the mass to be said in the vernacular.

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And there are a lot of people today that trace the corruption of the modern Roman church back to those days, actually.

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But in the mass at a certain point, the priest elevates the host and in Latin would say,

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Hoc es corpus meum. This is my body. And due to the ordination, when a

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Roman Catholic priest is ordained according to Roman Catholic belief, that person's very soul is marked with a sacramental authority to perform the mass and the miracle of transubstantiation.

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And even being excommunicated, kicked out, run out of the church cannot change that.

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So from at least historic Roman Catholic perspective, you can become a complete apostate, you can become an atheist and be excommunicated.

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But if you've ever been ordained, even as an atheist, you still have the capacity to change the elements in the body, soul, blood and divinity of Jesus.

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And so at that point, the elevation of the host and the saying of those words, this is my body, this seems to be where Luther stumbled.

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And to understand his stumbling is to understand a little bit about what drove

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Martin Luther. And that's why, again, the videos are helpful here because they both do a good job, and especially

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Martin Luther Heretic. They both do a good job in briefly but forcefully helping you to understand that the concept of God's holiness and justice was deeply ingrained in Luther's mind.

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And this is what is going to be so central in his coming to understand what justice, justification, righteousness means in the

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New Testament and in Paul's language. Which, of course, in the modern day, the new perspective on Paul and all the rest of that stuff is, ah, see,

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Luther just had his personal issues, we've gotten beyond Luther's personal issues. Well, we can talk about that a little bit more.

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But the idea of him as a sinful individual, now here is a newly minted priest, but he was well known in the years after this for spending an inordinate amount of time in the confessional.

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His father confessor was named Staupitz, and he was prior of the monastery, and Staupitz always represented in the videos as a kind, insightful, wonderful elderly man.

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And everything I've ever read of him would indicate that that's what he was.

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Staupitz recognizes in Luther this kind of contemplative, self -critical individual.

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I don't know how he couldn't when he had to spend, I can imagine every time he looked through the latticework of that confessional box and saw

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Luther coming, it was just like, oh, no. Well, so much for lunch today, you know, that's the way that is.

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And yet, he didn't allow that to turn into a kind of dislike for the man.

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Staupitz is one of those characters that, again, makes you struggle with the ease with which many of us will just simply dismiss everybody in that time period before Luther as a lost pagan.

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We should struggle because Jesus said he'd build his church. They were still believers, just where were they?

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Well, they were hiding in the woods in France. Some people go that far. It's the only ones there were.

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Staupitz's responses to Luther as to what Luther should do were pretty good.

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They were pretty good. And it is interesting, if you ever have the chance, you ought to look through the hymnal sometime and see how many of our most favorite hymns were written by people in the preceding hundred years, right before the

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Reformation. They seem to sometimes have some pretty good insights and some pretty bad ones, too.

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You have to look at each person individually. Anyway, Luther sees himself as unworthy of holding the body of God.

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God is holy. He is not. And at least give him credit for actually believing that what he was doing actually meant something.

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So many of the priesthood in Luther's day, very formal, external, you observed the rites, but not with your heart.

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At least give to Luther credit. He was really thinking about what he was saying and what he was doing and what it allegedly meant.

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And he believed it. That's why he couldn't say it. Because he could not see himself as worthy of engaging in this activity and holding the very body of God.

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And so there's always, well not always, but there's very normally in a large situation another priest standing by to assist you.

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And that priest stepped in and finished these things. And as far as we can tell, Hans Luther, who has come to observe this, still not happy that his son has gone the direction he has.

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But, like I said, has made a donation to the monastery. He comes and he leaves furious that his son has embarrassed him in not being able to finish that mass.

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And so Staupitz, recognizing the introspective character of Luther, knowing that Luther fasted beyond what the rules of the order called for, was frequently ill because of the way he was mistreating his body.

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As Luther himself would say in later years, if anyone could have been saved by monkery, it would have been me.

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Now, again, people question that, but there doesn't seem to be any real reason to do so.

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And so much, yes sir. The Augustinians weren't the largest.

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You have other larger orders, especially the

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Dominicans. It could simply have been that the

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Augustinians were the... Well, there were other places he could have gone there in Erfurt.

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Erfurt was a fairly major city. The fact that it's an Augustinian order is extremely important and will be important,

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I think, to the shape of the German Reformation in particular.

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Not quite as important to Luther, I'm sorry, to Zwingli, as it is to Luther.

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But yeah, you can definitely see a very important influence of Augustine's theology.

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Even though the Augustinianism of 1510 is not quite faithful to Augustine.

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Augustine's monergism, which we've talked about before, remember the three pits that I drew up here on the board?

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Augustine's monergism and strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God and things like that had to be adjusted in light of the development of the sacramental system within Roman Catholicism in the years after.

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So it wasn't a pure Augustinianism, but you read Augustine enough that you would be influenced by his perspectives.

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And so it really is important.

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Luther struggled, you know, he saw the New Testament's teachings on grace.

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He heard Augustine talking about grace, but until that fateful breakthrough, and there's disagreement amongst people as to when it was.

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But until that point in time where he came to understand that he did not have to fear the holiness of God because that righteousness was not a standard to which he could never ever attain.

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It was the gift of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Only by faith and not by works.

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Until that breakthrough, those promises of grace just seemed to be for somebody other than him.

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He couldn't understand how they could be for him. So they were there, the relationship between them had been so muddled by the insertion of man's activities and the sacraments and things like that, that it was difficult for him to see what the connection was until God's grace allowed him to do that.

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And what put him on the track to doing that was, again, Staupitz. In one of the films,

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I think it's Martin Luther Heretic, when Luther is basically weeping at his feet, what shall

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I do, Father, what shall I do? And he says, eat more food, get more sleep, and learn more about God.

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And so he puts him on an academic track rather than a pastoral perspective or just being that.

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He pushes him toward going on for his doctorate and for teaching.

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And so that is a very, very important aspect of things.

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I was about to say before I question, Staupitz found Luther unconscious from lack of food, sleeping without a blanket in his cell more than once.

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And Luther very often pointed out that he felt this was where he developed his gastrointestinal difficulties for the rest of his life, was in that time period.

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So that does come up in both films, because you can't read Luther without encountering that particular issue.

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Now, very briefly, we only have a few minutes left. Very, very, very important episode in Luther's life took place between November of 1510 and April of 1511.

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Luther was sent to Rome on business for the Augustinian order.

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And you might say that's a long time period, but that's because he had to walk. It takes a while to walk from Wittenberg to Rome, I assure you.

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And so he had to walk back and forth. That's why the younger

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Luther is thinner than the older Luther is, who doesn't do nearly as much walking.

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What he saw in Rome deeply disturbed him, deeply disturbed him.

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This was the first time he had been there, of course. When you hear stories about a place that is supposed to be a special place of holiness and grace and God's presence and things like this, the reality is always going to be somewhat disappointing.

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I think of, for example, talking to former Mormons about their experiences.

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And one that's been a normal experience amongst them has been anticipation of going to the temple.

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And you've been told about the temple as this very special place where you're going to have special spiritual experiences.

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And almost invariably, almost invariably, the honest

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Mormon will admit that after going through the endowment ceremony for the first time in the

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Mormon temple, they're just left going, really? That was that was what

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I've been anticipating all the way up to this time period in my life.

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Signs, tokens, penalties, wearing weird clothes and sign of the nail, the compass and memorizing a secret name and watching movies.

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Because that's unless you go to the Salt Lake Temple where they still use actors at all the other temples in the world.

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They have these videos that do it now. And they're extremely disappointed.

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It you know, they were told it was going to be one thing. And the reality wasn't that. And yet they're put under a lot of pressure to say it was something it wasn't.

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And and so it it really impacts them in a in a way that may not be visible initially because they may just try to go along with the flow.

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And maybe we'll get better over time or whatever. Same thing here for Luther.

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He he comes to Rome and this is the the seat of Christ Church and. And the things that he sees and experiences.

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Lay the foundation for what's going to happen seven to seven to nine years later, because I would say by 1519,

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Luther is completely broken from the church. I mean, it's a process, but it's pretty much irreparable by 1519.

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I mean, you look at the books he writes in 1519. That's, you know, the pope is the antichrist and so on and so forth. That's fairly, fairly certain.

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So it starts the process via disillusionment, a recognition that Rome.

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You know, once he'd start hearing people saying things about Rome, now he'd go. Yeah, that's pretty much the way it was.

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Yeah. It's pretty bad. So we'll pick up with some of the things that he saw and experienced there in Rome.

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The next time we're together and then start looking at some of the studying and the teaching he was doing.

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And then the next subject is indulgences and Tetzel and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

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So we will we will press on in our in our study of church history. We're out of time.

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Let's close the word of prayer. Father, once again, we look back upon your working with your people.

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We ask that you would help us to have eyes to see and ears to hear, to learn both from the good as well as the mistakes.

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Lord, that we might be thankful that you have been working with your people. All of these generations, as we pray that you're working with us, us even now.