THE REFORMATION IN PERIL gorically, for it is chiefly responsible for the historical misrepresentation of Luther and has also created the heroic myth of the enlightened, educated
Protestant. Luther does not stand for the alternatives of "truth not unity,"
"conscience not institution," "individual not community." His declaration of loyalty to the Church as the communion of saints in the Grosser Katechismus of 1529 should have ruled out such false alternatives. For the Church is
"unified in love, beyond factions and divisions."' As long as the Protestant tendency to play off the invisible Church of the faithful against the visible institutional Church has not been overcome, this declaration will make no impression. These words are wrongly read as if Luther was thinking of the ideal Church, which can never and may never become real. Luther himself, however, had struggled from the very beginning to bring the Church of faith back into history, into the reality of his—even without him—unsettled time, back into the reality of his day. The visible, institutional Church must be measured according to the task set by the Lord.
Book of Psalms—Book of the Church Between 1513 and 1515 Luther held what was probably his first course of theological lectures in Wittenberg, on the book of the Psalms. This is where we shall be able to discover whether the young Luther had really been intent on the communion of the Church from the beginning.
If he was already following what was later to be his usual timetable, he could be heard from nine until ten on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
Following lectures of this kind presupposes more than a knowledge of Latin.
Apart from those of Luther's concepts that are taken for granted today, we also find ideas which, dating back to the Middle Ages, have become alien to us and may occasionally even seem daring. But once we have familiarized ourselves with his exegetical method, grasped the way he approaches a text, and developed a sense for the experiences the young professor wove into his biblical exegesis, we encounter that awareness of the Church which is incompatible with the prevalent view of the lonely Reformer without a Church.
The first lecture of the summer semester of 1513 was probably on August 15, after the dog-day holidays. Luther began it with a basic introduction about the proper "key" to understanding Scripture: it is the art of distinguishing between spirit and letter. That is what makes a true theologian. It is a gift bestowed on the Church by the Holy Spirit and does not spring from human cleverness. The Psalms are no more than the hollow letter if they are
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL regarded as a liturgical task and droned out daily as part of the Divine Office, without inner understanding; that merely renders one insensitive and locks the heart. Only by pressing forward to the spirit, the spirit of Christ, will the person at prayer be released and revived, for the Book of Psalms is the book which prophesies Christ.
Erudite scholastic commentaries on the "labyrinth of the Psalms" are often in greater need of explanation than the actual text, to which Christ himself provided the key when he said: "Search the scriptures; for . .
. they are that which testify of me" (John 5.39). This is the prophetic sense of the Psalms, testifying to the coming and the works of Christ. But this is by no means to exhaust the scope of the text; nor is it rendered obsolete by the coming of Christ. Its enduring spiritual value for today, after the arrival of Christ, is that its prophecy allegorically encompasses "all of Christ," the Lord and His Church. And the text goes still further, down to the life of the individual Christian, not as a creature in isolation but as a member of the Church Militant on earth: the tropological or moral meaning of the Psalms arms and strengthens man in his religious battle against sin and the Devil.
To demonstrate how this insight of the fourfold sense of Scripture is handled as an exegetical method, Luther falls back on traditional examples.
Again and again he uses the alternatives of Jerusalem and Babylon or the several messages contained in the term "Mount Zion":
(in the light of the Last Judgment) Jerusalem the city good people _virtues rewards of Judea Babylon the city in evil people vices punishment
Mount the land synagogue Zion of Canaan justice well-being Christian eternal life THE REFORMATION IN PERIL Luther employs this fourfold exegesis to expose the situation of the Church's struggle against the Jews and pagans, to arouse Christians from their lethargy, warn and fortify them, and to overcome their resistance to the "nuisance" and "folly" of the Christian faith.
Did students in August 1513 already realize the consequences of this design? Luther's text shows how goal-directed—directed at the Church—his exegesis of the prophecy of the Psalms is. Twice he plainly declares his intentions, and a third time he marks his position by conspicuous silence.
The introduction to his lectures on the Psalms, "the Preface of Jesus Christ," begins with a series of four scriptural passages, the last one indicating which Christ the Psalmist David—who was considered the author of the Psalms—foretold: "I know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified"
(I Cor. 2.2). This verse also furnishes the true interpretation of the Church: there is no Church save the Church Persecuted, which in its history participates in the sufferings of Christ. And: no one belongs to this Church save those who do not seek to escape tribulation and distress.
Luther became even more explicit in the second part of the introduction, in which he used carefully selected examples to demonstrate the Psalms' three levels of meaning—concerning Christ, His Church, and its members:
"As Christ was hounded by the Jews, so too the Church is plagued by tyrants, heretics, and godless Christians." '° The plague for the early Church is the era of martyrs. The recognition of Christianity by the emperor Constantine was followed by a period during which the Church needed councils and doctors of the Church to defend itself against dangerous heresies; finally, "in our time," the internal struggle has broken out against the godless in the Church, who have already advanced so far as to attain leading positions. "Contra tyrannos, hereticos, et impios principes ecclesiae":'! today we are battling against tyrants, heretics, and impious prelates.
What Luther so conspicuously neglected in his opening lectures is the fourth level of the traditional fourfold system of interpreting Scripture: the anagogic interpretation, in the light of the Last Judgment. In the next two years he would occasionally assess this dimension separately, but it was no accident that he omitted it from his introduction. The prophecy of Christ in the Psalms reveals that the Second Coming is fast approaching. The future has already commenced, the end has begun. A "last meaning" in the light of a distant Return is superfluous: this future is now!
Luther's exegesis of the Holy Scriptures was inseparably linked with a "doctrine of the Church" from the very beginning. A year after receiving his doctorate, the twenty-eight-year-old professor prepared his comprehensive
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL In the jaws of hell the pope is crowned amidst the servants of the devil, an allusion to 2 Thess. 2. 4a: "{The Devil] opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped" lectures on the Psalms in such a way as to enable him to assimilate the medieval tradition of scriptural exegesis while going on to develop it independently. The mark of Martin Luther is palpable from the very first sentence.
But the personal quality is not created by his orientation toward Christ and certainly not by his use of the fourfold method of exegesis. The striking feature is his emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between Christ, Church, and Christian, and on Christ crucified constituting His Church and determining the life of every Christian. That is why the Church is imperiled again and again, and why Christians are tested by the Devil's might "also today."
Luther wants to show that the time of Christ has not become distant past but that it is continuing in history. The Church is hotly contested by God and the Devil. The adversary may change his disguises, but he always remains recognizably faithful to himself, whether as a Pharisee, Roman emperor, heretic, or ecclesiastical leader. The original idea of the Church, and thus its guidepost and touchstone as the budding Reformer saw it, is that of THE REFORMATION IN PERIL the Church of Christ crucified, the Church of martyrs who spread the Gospel through belief and profession of faith and not by means of earthly power and armed force.
The martyrs' obedience by faith is still so central to the young Luther that he cannot yet fit justification by faith as found in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans into the fabric woven of Christ, Church, and the individual Christian.
This will be achieved only as a result of his Reformation approach to the central passage of the Epistle—"The just shall live by faith" (Rom. 1.17). In his search for clarity Luther makes his way from discovery to discovery, his path beginning with the Church and staying with it to the very end. Looking back on his Psalm lectures a quarter of a century later, he could say in retrospect, "Ah, I was often glad when I had found the true meaning of a word; it illuminated a whole sentence for me."
As the introduction proves, Luther's first lectures on the Psalms had been preceded by a number of discoveries. Fit together, they form the picture of a Church that already bears Reformation characteristics. Decisions made here prepared the way for the controversy over indulgences.
Church of Confessorr—Church of Martyrs The Church of Christ is not invisible. Though its power and treasures are concealed in God's hands and can only be viewed through faith, its testimony lays claim to space and a place in life and death, has a history, and also needs offices and office-holders. But when a reversal occurs in the Church, when its testimony is concealed and its possessions and wealth displayed, there is no alternative but to reform its very institutions.
In the autumn of 1515 Luther was still prepared to acknowledge the supremacy of the Church of Rome in the West as a later doctrinal and historical development," but his ideal of ecclesiastical government was a college of bishops. The Church of confessors has no room for wrangling over preeminence and privilege. It knows offices and requires the cooperation above all of bishops and doctors, but all of them are there to serve and not to rule.
They protect the preaching of the Gospel and supervise the administration of the sacraments. By virtue of his responsibility for preaching and teaching, the village priest is entrusted with the duties of both bishop and doctor in his parish. God's children are born through preaching; through the sacraments of baptism and communion Christ tears them out of the Devil's hands and fortifies them in distress and persecution.
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL The visible Church is never pure and immaculate; it will always be a "mixed body" (corpus mixtum) of saints and hypocrites. In periods of acute danger there will not be many who hold their ground and remain unflagging in their faith. Only a "handful" will stand fast to the end.
These are all basic ideas that can be found in Luther's first Psalm lectures.
They will survive to become the principle underlying both the indulgence theses of 1517 and the article on the Church in the Confession of Augsburg formulated by Melanchthon in 1530. In 1537 Luther again called the Church back to its true foundations in the Schmatkaldic Articles: "Thank
God, a child of seven knows what the Church is, namely the saintly believers and the sheep who hear the voice of their Shepherd." *
Luther offers a final account in his major treatise On the Councils and Churches (1539). There he names sermon, baptism, holy communion, absolution, ordination, and divine worship as six characteristics of the Church, and adds a crucial seventh one: God's people suffer persecution and are subject to hate, plagued by the Devil, world, and flesh. "As the seventh, one recognizes the holy Christian people outwardly by the relic of the Holy
Cross, that it must undergo all the misfortune and persecution, all sorts of tribulations and evil (as the 'Our Father' prays) from the Devil, world, and flesh; inwardly mourn, be stupid, be frightened; outwardly poor, scorned, ill, weak, suffer; so that it can be like Christ, its head. And the reason for this must alone be that it holds fast to Christ and the Word of God, and suffers for Christ's sake, Matt. 5: 'Blessed are they who suffer persecution for my sake' .
. Where you see or hear such, know that this is the holy Christian Church."'> The revolutionary character of this view of the Church is obvious. The Church of martyrs need only be compared with the outward magnificence and outward symbols of sovereignty of the medieval Church.
And that is exactly what many of Luther's contemporaries did.
Yet even as bold a program as Luther's has a darker aspect, which should not be suppressed. Exhorting the persecuted to defenseless acceptance of the cross and passive suffering can reinforce the status quo and have so conservative an effect as to obstruct change and reform. Christians "must be pious, silent, obedient, prepared to serve the authorities and everyone with body and all one possesses, and to do injury to no man."
"Pious, silent, and obedient"—is this not proof enough that Luther educated the Germans to subservience, to acquiesce to their superiors? That is no doubt how it looks when the "handful" becomes the established Church and the throne concludes a holy alliance with the altar. Pious silence becomes revolutionary, new and renewing again, only in times of war, when it ee
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL eee becomes daring "to do injury to no man," when it demands courage to counter violence with peace. This is the courageous Church Persecuted that Luther is talking about, a Church that continues to worship and to serve the common good though it be "hanged, drowned, murdered, martyred, chased, tormented." Once again: "Where you see or hear such, know that this is the holy Christian Church." "
By demanding that even in times of persecution a Christian must not isolate himself from society but must serve it, Luther indicates that he does not want to divide divine worship from the common good, Christian from citizen.
Oppressed and yet obliged to uphold the state—this is the historical basis of the distinction between Church and State, and the place to start if we are to find our way in the maze of debate over Luther's oft-misunderstood distinction between Christian and citizen, God's earthly realm and God's realm of faith. Instead of a modern concept like "upholding the state," Luther would have preferred "carrying a sword," thinking not only of Christian soldiers but also of judges, magistrates, and all office-holders committed to serving the people. Luther's own behavior contradicts the caricature of servility to princes. His own princes of Electoral Saxony, though they had all afforded the Reformation their protection, are not spared, and they are all criticized sharply, where necessary to the point of disobedience. Conversely, however, one should not refuse to serve a persecuting government—a view antithetical to that of the medieval papacy, which claimed the right to release the subjects of a refractory emperor from their oath of allegiance and exhorted the people to rise up in active battle against the authorities for the sake of the Church. The true, persecuted Church, on the other hand, has no political ambitions that it would risk peace in the world to achieve, for it is the same adversary who is persecuting the Church and trying to impose chaos on the world: the Devil. He does not have a third realm; he brings confusion into the two realms, enticing the Christian to retreat from the world and boast before God.
The persecuted handful is Luther's theme. Does that mean he has nothing to say about Christians and Church in a tolerant world, where they are safeguarded by constitutions and concordats? The origins of the great indulgence controversy lie precisely in this kind of ostensible freedom. In the autumn of 1514, when no one could possibly have anticipated the consequences, Luther took up this very topic of tolerant endurance: absolute tolerance is total persecution—"Nulla persecutio tota persecutio." "Today the Devil is endangering the Church with the greatest conceivable persecutions,
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL namely without persecution, with tolerance and security. Woe to us, who are so dazzled by satiety and well-being that we fall into the Devil's trap.""*
Luther's right to administer a warning cannot be denied, because a satiated, self-complacent Church will give offense to all but the satiated and selfsatisfied. Yet does this criticism justify the rift in and struggle over the Church that sowed despair and hatred and spilled blood in the sixteenth century and for a long time thereafter? Are we not dealing with a radical who attempted to force through his heady dreams for the true Church with no regard for losses? Had a passionate dream turned his normally cool head?
How can Luther have believed that the contemporary, historically rooted Church, which had no alternative but to assert itself in the hard business of politics, could survive in the defensiveless stance of a powerless communion of Christ? It would have been enough to remedy obvious flaws and bridle the abuse of power. But why attack the structure of the Church if, as experience had shown, it could prevail against kings and emperors, heretics and revolutionaries, only with the aid of a staunch, powerful papacy? What impelled this man to take a stand against authority and reality?
These questions do not arise from our modern viewpoint; they were already posed in Luther's time and were a source of anguish to him. That he pursued his convictions with utter self-confidence and steadfastness is a myth that has emerged with the passage of time. But his horror at the enormity of events did not render him speechless, for with the Scriptures at hand he was in possession of a "book that spoke" and helped him to find a twofold answer: for one thing, the Church of Christ crucified was neither a figment of the mind nor an idealist's dream. It was historical reality, the documented story of Christ and his witnesses. Moreover, no one would ever be capable of converting the triumphal, power-oriented Church. That was a task to be left for God on the Day of Judgment.
Let us begin with the historical reality of true Christendom: the apostles tell of the beginnings of the Church of confessors—how it was continually being pursued and oppressed. St. Paul presents the central message of the Gospel, explaining at the same time why the communion of believers is persecuted: "We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness" (1 Cor. 1.23). This passage was fundamental
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL Conradinus Conradi [111 Imeratoris filius,Siciliz & Neapofis Rex, a Clemente 1111 Papa capite truncatus.
Accipe nune Pape infidias, C7 crinine ab uno The diabolical pope (Clement IV) preparing to behead the pious emperor (Conradin) to Luther. Already a shaping factor in the exegetical work of his first Psalm lectures, it was frequently referred to later on, and, in the form of theses, presented with all its implications before his own order at the disputation in Heidelberg in 1518. Stumbling block, foolishness—these are the realities, because God conceals His majesty and, against all expectations, hopes, and convictions, transforms it into its opposite: weakness on the cross. The idea is intolerable to the world; it must be eliminated as blasphemy, even godlessness. It was consistent for the Church in imitation of Christ to have to attest to its faith with the blood of martyrs.
WHEN LUTHER spent four weeks in Rome for his order in 1511, it was not so much the classical monuments from the time of Rome's greatness that fascinated him as the sites recalling the shedding of Christian blood, the catacombs of St. Calixtus on the Via Appia, where so many thousands of martyrs
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL lie buried. The Church of martyrs was already a guiding light to him during his monastic years."
Other than this, the monk's knowledge of Church history was as incomplete as that of any other contemporary. When Luther was preparing himself for his doctoral degree in 1512, normal theological training did not include submerging oneself in the past and developing a historical approach. Nonetheless, the new spirit of the time did not pass him by. A sense of the past was stirred in him, and soon he grasped the necessity of subjecting legendary historical traditions to critical examination.
While he was studying at the philosophical faculty in Erfurt (1501-05), he moved in a circle close to the humanist Mutianus Rufus, although they were only to meet much later, in 1515. And it was from the Mutianus circle that his first student came, Johannes Lang, friar and friend. Lang introduced
Luther to Georg Spalatin, who had been the circumspect middleman between the reformers in Wittenberg and Elector Frederick since late 1516."
Luther owed his love for the classical writers, especially for Virgil and Cicero, to the Erfurt humanists; through his contact with them he acquired a feeling for rhetoric and rhetorical figures, which he later considered crucial prerequisites for a proper scriptural exegesis. It was also his years of familiarity with the Erfurt circle that generated his respect for the achievements of a Johannes Reuchlin or an Erasmus of Rotterdam in rendering Hebrew and Greek more accessible and later made it so natural to him to consult biblical texts in their original language. He quickly came to treat as second nature what "scholastic obscurantists" mistrusted and even branded heretical in their battle against Reuchlin and Erasmus.
At the monastery Luther buried himself in the new editions of the Church Fathers that had broken in on the scholarly world, enabling Augustine or Hieronymu®to be read completely and in their original form. This was by no means the norm, for the theology of the Middle Ages, still a time of manuscripts, was restricted to a small canon of patristic works, selections in socalled florilegia. During his Erfurt and early Wittenberg years Luther's interest in the Church Fathers was not, however, historical; he read them only in connection with scriptural exegesis. Moreover, crucial source material on the history of the papacy became available so late that Luther could only use it afterward. "At the beginning," he admits in 1536, "I was totally innocent of historical knowledge. I attacked the papacy a priori, as one says, meaning on the basis of the Holy Scriptures. Others now confirm my results a posteriori, on the basis of historical documents."
"Christo Salvatori Deo optimo maximo. Georgius Spalatinus. Peccator." (Georg Spalatin.
Sinner against Christ the Savior, the Lord God of the universe.) Luther' friend and disciple Georg Spalatin praying before the Crucifix.
Woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1515.
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL Not until early 1520 did he receive a copy of the newly published Hutten edition of Laurentius Valla's proof—demonstrated sixty years earlier—that the pope's claim to temporal dominion over the Western world rested on a forgery. The Donation of Constantine a fraud! This was more than the exposure of a brazen lie. It not only exacerbated the resentment the German nation already bore against Rome; it destroyed trust as well. By excluding emperors and kings, whole empires and countries from its communion through excommunication and interdict, the Church, hiding behind the cloak of law, had been leading man away from salvation in the name of God.
"Dear God, the vile cunning of the Romans," Luther wrote to Spalatin almost as soon as he had come into possession of Valla's disclosure. "You will
BBs Hort el6(t vom Bapftum elle Deiat dio (hrecklich Hild hie geftellt:
The lascivious monster the Whore of Babylon has taken possession of Rome THE REFORMATION IN PERIL be amazed at God's counsel for letting this lie survive for so long, even allowing it to make its way into canon law." Did this revaluation of all values, this perversion of Christendom, not provide incontrovertible evidence that the pope in Rome, acting under the guise of legality, against Christ in the name of Christ, was the expected Antichrist?"
THE QUESTION of historical truth was becoming ever more important to Luther. By early 1519 his historical documentation and interpretation of councils and Church decisions had taught him how unreliable canon law was. Preparing for the disputation in Leipzig, he studied Rufin's Latin translation of Eusebius' Greek history of the Church in the 1514 Strasbourg edition. In the course of his reading he discovered that the first genuinely ecumenical council, the Council of Nicea (325), had expressly granted Jerusalem, as mother of all churches, honorary primacy over Christendom. It was thanks to Eusebius that he became aware of the more remote churches in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa, which were independent of Rome. The thirteenth thesis that he wanted to debate in Leipzig in the summer of 1519 resulted from this discovery of a universal Church: "I deny that the pope is the supreme head of a// churches." In the West—the Donation of Constantine was not yet known to be a forgery in Germany—the Pope could be tolerated, though not with uncurbed power. Eusebius also furnished Luther with the historical evidence that proved the papal thesis of the fundamental priority of spiritual power over temporal power to be untenable. The Council of Nicea had been convoked by Emperor Constantine, not by a Roman bishop. The historical Constantine thus became a weapon against the legendary power of the pope and served as the model for the Christian sovereign in Luther's Address to the Christian Nobility (1520) by demanding the convocation of reform council, even, if need be, against Rome's will. Where all Christians are priests, bishops, and popes by virtue of having been baptized, no individual can arrogate the right to discipline the whole
Thus Luther could not speak of a Constantinian "fall" of the Church.
The roots of decline were not to be found in a political act of imperial tolerance and patronage, as the left wing of the Reformation has assumed to the present day. On the contrary, the historical change that had occurred at that time demonstrated the power of the testimony of the persecuted Church to Luther. Nonetheless, the Constantinian era remained ambiguous in his eyes—not because the emperor had interfered in "spiritual matters" but because even a time of tolerance had not crushed the Devil, nor would it ever.
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL Hardly had the Roman soldiers stopped raging than heretics came in to take over Satan's work through different means. In later years Luther gratefully remembered the master of novices who had given him a treatise by Athanasius to read during his first year at the monastery. Thus had Luther learned about Arius and how he had attacked that persecuted confessor of Christ,
Bishop Athanasius. Like the early martyrs, Athanasius had had to flee, but, despite all he was subjected to, he had never lost faith.
How was it then in one's own time, when the Church was not only tolerated but powerful, respected, even feared? Had the present power of the Church checked the power of the Devil? Certainly not, declared Luther in the autumn of 1514, when he was discussing the first verse of Psalm 69:
"Save me, O God; For the waters are come in unto my soul." St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians was once again the guiding principle of his exegesis: ". .
. God chose what is foolish in the world .
It was not as if the time of trouble had passed into history and the Church were now striding ahead unchallenged along the road to Paradise. The waters were up to their necks as much as they had been when Christ was crucified and His Church of apostles and martyrs was a frightened, despised handful. Now the situation was reversed, there was peace and security. The pressure of diabolical persecutions came not from outside but from inside.
All of us, Luther felt, even the leaders of the Church, are being lulled into a false sense of security and imperiled. Secular priests and monks alike are offering indulgences and peddling salvation from the treasure of Christ and the martyrs. As if we ourselves are not charged by God to contribute to the treasure of the Church and could afford to rest on the merits of the saints!
Like the prodigal son, we have run away from our parental home and are squandering our inheritance. This is the ultimate, but also the cruelest persecution. It will thin the ranks as never before. St. Paul had already predicted: "For when they shall say: 'There is peace, there is no danger,' then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape" (1 Thess. 5.3).
The warning of 1514 does not yet contain the sweeping attack on the sale of indulgences of three years later, when the treasure of the Church had been transformed into the treasure of the "most sacred Gospel of grace."
Nonetheless, some decisive ideas in the ninety-five theses of 1517 were taken over from the Psalm lectures. The ninety-second thesis, which none of Luther's opponents reacted to, takes up the warning of 1514: g2. Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ,
"Peace, peace," and there is no peace."
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL This is an appeal directed against a Church which teaches and lives as if Christendom had found the road to progress and was no longer being persecuted. The last three theses can thus be understood as a call to be vigilant and to fortify the persecuted Church under the sign of the cross:
93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Cross, cross," and there is no cross.
94. Christians should be exhorted to strive to follow Christ, their head, through punishment, death, and hell, g5. and thus be confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace."
The Future of the Church:
Reformation between Failure and Success After the Reformation breakthrough Luther would no longer make the hope for peace with God dependent on the individual's experience of the cross in the inner domain of repentance. The Christian's-confidence must rest on God's forgiveness of his sins."" But what remained, and would remain to the very end, was the new Reformation view of the Church. The fundamental decisions of the Reformation were not based solely on new theses concerning the doctrine of justification and the freedom of the Christian.
The various phases of exploration and discovery were preceded by Luther's general view that by means of His Word in the Old and New Testaments, God led His people in imitation of the suffering Christ. Though in their disobedience they develop into an exultant conquering power, they would have to be bidden back to the Church of martyrs in service of the world.
To recall to its Lord a Church clinging tenaciously to disobedience must evoke severe opposition and prove perilous to the point of martyrdom. In the spring of 1520, presumably before the bull threatening excommunication had reached him and a year before the imperial ban went into force, Luther could still muster a mixture of pointed irony and bitter earnest when he described the snares of the Inquisition to his students. They shielded the Church so thoroughly that "Christ, who went to his apostles through closed doors, would no longer be able to gain entry. He would not pass the test of faith, but be found guilty as a multiple heretic and disobedient son of the CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL
Three years later, on July 1, 1523, Luther's predictions came true. The first martyrs of the Reformation were burned before the town hall of Brussels. Johann von Essen and Heinrich Vos, Augustinian monks from the monastery at Eisleben, Luther's birthplace, had gone from there to Antwerp, where they had disseminated "heretical" doctrines. As they were not prepared to recant, only the stake could be their destiny—Margaretha, Emperor Charles V's aunt and regent, would tolerate no religious conflict in the already troubled Netherlands.
As we know that Luther was disappointed not to have been allowed to bear witness to the Gospel with his life in Worms, we are not surprised to read the account of a Swiss student in Wittenberg named Johannes Kessler:
"When he received the news of the two above-mentioned martyrs in written form, he began to weep inwardly and said: I thought that I should be the first to be martyred for the Holy Gospel; but I was not worthy of it." "°
Were we not aware of Luther's discovery of the Church of confessors, which is in the very greatest danger in times without persecution, this lament would have to be regarded as a pathological mania for martyrdom. Joyfully he wrote to his friend Spalatin in 1523: "Thanks be to Christ, who has finally begun to let my, or rather His, prophecy bear fruit."
"Finally bear fruit"—and that at the end of the years which all accounts of the history of the Reformation present as years of triumph and advance.
Martyrdom as success is certainly an unmistakable warning that Luther did not measure the Reformation's "progress" or "failure" by approval and growth in popularity. Profoundly affected by the two Augustinian monks in Brussels who had given their lives for their faith, Luther almost immediately
(August 1523) wrote the words to his first hymn, which was printed on placards and soon became widely known. The last lines of the final verse seem to forecast the victory of the Reformation:
Der Sommer ist hart vor der Tiir der Winter ist vergangen, die zarten Blumen gehn herfir.
Der das hat angefangen, der wird es wohl vollenden."'
[Summer is fast approaching, / winter is gone, / the delicate flowers are blooming. / He who began it, / is certain to consummate it.]
But Luther had long realized that this consummation would not signify the beginning of a new epoch in the history of man, with "Christendom
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL The "sixth seal" has been opened, and persecution is at its climax. "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth .
. and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men...
. hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains" under the cross" becoming the triumphal, ruling Church. Consummation did not belong to history; it was the Last Day, the glorious Second Coming of Christ, which would bring the eternal realm of peace and with it the final revaluation of all values. The road there was not one of continuous progress and guaranteed détente. Until then there could be no other peace and no greater success than the preservation of the Gospel. Whatever the price, whether property or life, the Gospel would be preached. Nothing could stop it.
Holding fast to the Gospel was indeed much, but it did not constitute a "success." For Luther reformation was the beginning not of modern times but of the Last Days.
Historians may conclude that depriving a secularized Church of its power is de facto one of the essential conditions for the dawn of the modern era and that all striving for a restoration of the power of the triumphal Church must mean a step backward into the Middle Ages. Their reasoning would have left Luther unmoved.
CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL Lucas Cranach the Younger, The True Church and the False Church The only progress he expected from the reformation was the Devil's rage, | provoked by the rediscovery of the Gospel. The adversary would hurl himself at the Church with increased force, attacking from all sides and by all possible means. Before there could be consummation there would be intensified persecution, for a general reformation, as Luther had known since
1520, could not be expected from the pope, a council, or any "reformer."
God Himself would bring about reformation through consummation; it would be preceded by the Devil's counterreformation."
This somber vision might be suspected to have arisen out of the deeprooted pessimism of the early years, when there was no way of knowing what would become of the Evangelical movement. Should not the genuine, surprising successes of the Reformation have been occasion for a new, "optimistic" interpretation of the visible renewal of the Church?
A glance at the final stage of Luther's life will shed light on the subject.
Once again it is the martyrdom of an Augustinian monk that gives Luther the opportunity to offer an interpretation of his time. Robert Barnes, a monk from the Cambridge monastery, was burned at Smithfield on July 30, 1540, by order of King Henry VIII. Five years earlier, the scholar and statesman
Hans Holbein, King Henry VIII of England (1509-47) CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL Thomas More, having refused to accept the king as head of the Church of England and to take the oath of royal supremacy demanded of him, had been executed for his belief in the supremacy of the Church of Rome. Though the English Augustinian may not be as well known (unlike More, Barnes was not canonized), he was nonetheless a witness for his beliefs. Barnes could accept neither king nor pope as head of the Church of Christ. He had been condemned as a heretic and imprisoned once before but had regained his freedom by recanting and had then fled to Wittenberg in 1530.
In the summer of 1531 the situation appeared to have undergone a fundamental change. Barnes was now in Wittenberg on a royal mission, to obtain
Luther's expert opinion on Henry's desire to gain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn.* In 1533 Barnes was officially matriculated at the University of Wittenberg as "Oxford Doctor of Theology." Ai that time King Henry was particularly interested in cultivating friendly relations with Protestant rulers so he could keep them from taking part in the council the pope was expected to convoke. But once the situation inside England had changed with the legalization of the king's marriage to Anne, and Barnes continued to insist that "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder" (Matt. 19.6), he was condemned and put to death at the stake.
In the very same year Luther published a German translation of Barnes' last confession of faith. In his foreword to the Confession of Faith which Robert
. Made in England, he took stock of the progress of the "last twenty years":
And it is a particular joy to me to hear that our good and pious companion at home and table [Barnes] has so graciously been called upon by God to shed his blood for the sake of His beloved Son and to become a holy martyr. Thanks, praise, and glory be to the Father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, who has once again, as at the beginning, let us see a time in which His Christians, who ate and drank (as the Apostles of Christ say) with us and were genuinely merry, are pushed to martyrdom (that means Heaven) and sainthood before our eyes and away from our eyes and our sides. Who would have thought twenty years ago that Christ the Lord was so close to us and was eating, drinking, talking, and living at our tables and in our homes through His dear martyrs?*
The last words of the foreword show with eminent clarity what progress and success consist of: "... It shall become even worse. Amen." The Church shares the fate of its Lord, Luther admonishes to the very last, in THE REFORMATION IN PERIL that the evil one will not be intimidated; he does not shrink from any attack nor does he fear violence, "for God sleeps and conceals Himself, yes, in His creatures He is weak." The Devil and his specters "are very bold, and pursue the suffering and dying God."*
' To sum up, it can be said that from his first lectures on the Bible to the end of his life, Luther's view of the Church remained unchanged and central to his convictions. The Church is visible, but as a suffering communion of Christians. It is endowed with great riches, which are accessible only through faith. It is unique and unified, but scattered all over the world. Bishops and doctors are its servants, allowing the Gospel to be preached in sermon, sacrament, absolution of sins, praise of God—and martyrdom: as in the days of the early Church so will it be till Judgment Day. Persecution and pressure will increase, and yet the adversary will not be able to vanquish the Church.
The Gospel, which Luther discovered in the course of the indulgence controversy, affords certainty that the individual Christian shares in all the riches Christ promised His Church in Word and Sacrament. It is, however, participation not in triumph and victory but in the history of the true Church, which, though apparently triumphant in the world, is still being pursued by the Devil and beaten by his forces. The Psalms had prophesied the history of the Church, and the apostle Paul had experienced it: "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed" (2 Cor. 4.8—9).
If we examine the conceptual framework underlying Luther's Reformation vision, it is hard to believe that he could have aroused and activated a whole era to the extent he did. The allegorical method of scriptural exegesis was already outmoded in the sixteenth century; Luther's division of Church history into epochs—the time of the persecutors, the time of the heretics, the time of the destroyers—is Augustinian and must have sounded rather odd to humanist ears. But thus it was that Luther uncovered a view of the Church that countless contemporaries felt to be genuine and realistic. The discovery that the wealthy, powerful Church was in fact a Church in captivity ignited the Reformation, a movement Luther himself interpreted only as a terrible prelude to a grand finale.
The idea that the battle for the Church was only a prologue to God's Reformation was ultimately not accepted by the Evangelical movement. Other forms of Church renewal, particularly in the cities of southern Germany and Switzerland and among the followers of John Calvin's Reformation, believed that the "ecclesia militans," the Church Militant, could already become vicCHRISTIANITY BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL torious here on earth. Consequently Calvinism developed greater momentum and seemed to be more successful, pointing the way and setting the goals for an incipient modern era. Where the Wittenberg Reformation had established itself, be it in Saxony, where it had begun, or in Scandinavia, the notion of a defenseless Church was able to prevail—under the protective mantle of the state.
Times have changed. The protection has become unreliable and the shield brittle. The expectation of imminent doom has freed itself from the embrace of the progress-oriented optimism of the Enlightenment and is as timely today as it was in the late Middle Ages and early sixteenth century.
Luther's vision of the Church of confessors once again captures the reality of our days. Viewed and assessed the right way, it can be of enormous benefit to the Church universal .
. and to all those who suffered so long under her raised fist.
Wedded Bliss and World Peace:
In Defiance of the Devil The Delights and Duties of Marriage or the person who believes in an eternal heavenly life, this life loses its value." Thus the former theologian Ludwig
Feuerbach repudiated Christianity. Faith and earthly love are mutually exclusive. The monastic way of life is in keeping with the nature of Christianity, but Christian marriage is a shallow lie because the true Christian is convinced that by believing in God, man becomes totally self-sufficient and thus needs no counterpart of the opposite sex.
Though Feuerbach liked to quote Luther, the two were divided not only by centuries but by epochs; they were as remote from one another as the Middle Ages and the Reformation. What Feuerbach the critical philosopher presented as "the nature of Christianity" was the medieval sexual ethic with which Luther so vehemently took issue. It was the Reformer who excoriated repression of the sexual drive in the service of a higher perfection, in complete contrast to the "critical philosopher," who presented—and thus caricatured—this modern "higher perfection" as true Christianity. But Luther wanted to liberate the Christian faith from this distortion: he could not accept the oppression of people down to their most intimate moments and warned of its devastating effects on society.
There are undoubtedly those who should stay unmarried for the sake of God. "But these are rare; not one in a thousand can do it: it is one of God's special miracles." God-given celibacy does not elevate to a higher, holier state, it is the result of a specific divine calling to undivided service to the This, however, is the exception, not the rule. Matrimony befits everyone.
It is a "divinely noble business."
Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being and being called human, tries to improve on what God has made. Adam's children
WEDDED BLISS AND WORLD PEACE are and will remain human; that is why they should and must beget more men. Dear God, we see daily the effort it costs to live in a marriage, and to keep the marital vows. And we try to promise chastity as if we were not human, had neither flesh nor blood.
But it is the God of the world, the Devil, who so slanders the marital state and has made it shameful—and yet allows adulterers, whores, and dissolute knaves to survive in high esteem all the same—that it would be fair to marry in order to spite him and his world and to accept his ignominy and bear it for God's sake.*
The above eulogy on marriage has nothing to do with an unrealistic, quaint concept of wedded life. On the contrary, from 1520 to 1525 Luther principally addressed the numerous nuns and monks who had entered monasteries or convents at a very early age and had renounced all claims to the family fortune. They were totally penniless; for them marriage was an economic gamble of the first order. Luther vividly depicted the risks run by members of orders who married without having learned a craft.
Marriage entailed obligations, but whoever was willing to take them on should make the leap in the name of God. For him there was truth in the familiar witticism that "marriage and tournaments demand considerable courage."
The Fall had debased the conjugal act as much as it had man's highest intellectual achievements. Yet through marriage the egocentric lust for possession could be turned toward a partner. The combination of sexuality and egotism was not novel; it could have been discovered in medieval morality texts. Astonishing, however, is the way Luther spurned everything the Middle Ages held sacred. How could one want to compare "high reason" to "Jow instincts"! Luther's association of "higher" and "lower" powers in man shows that something decisively new was underway. The surprising element—one still highly offensive in the sixteenth century—was the assertion that sexual drives were a divine force or even God's vital presence. Luther found the scriptural basis for his view in a verse from the Book of Genesis.
The passage became so important to him that he made repeated attempts to translate it into good German, ultimately deciding for the version: "Es ist nicht gut, dass der Mensch allein sei. Ich will ihm ein Gehiilfen, die um ihn sei, machen" (Gen. 2.18),° which corresponds precisely to the King James
. It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." Luther's exegesis of the text, informed by his thoughts on sexuality and marriage, is truly epoch-making. "This is the Word of God, by virtue of which .
. the passionate, natural inclination toward woman is THE REFORMATION IN PERIL created and maintained. It may not be prevented by vow and law. For it is
God's Word and work."® God's power is not confined to marriage; it is already present in the sexual instinct. Marriage is simply the right way to use it, the genuinely spiritual, divinely ordained status to live one's sexuality. Because the Devil hates God's life-giving power, he hates marriage with the same intensity and seeks to hinder the peace of God and to decrease the fruits of the earth.' At weddings
God was—and still is—referred to as the "third party" to the union. For Luther God is so vitally present in the power of attraction between man and woman that he inspires the conjugal union and Himself constitutes the sexual bond of marriage.
What made Luther's theology so vivid and intelligible was not the outer rhetoric, but the connection of the Word of God with corporeality. Unlike those who had gone before him and those who followed him, he understood
God's Word as truly creative: "God spoke and it was so." Thus the Word of God generates sensuous existence. The major schools of the Middle Ages, modern philosophical idealism, and contemporary, person-oriented theology all link the "Word" of God with the human "spirit," with conscience and always with man's conscious mind. The Middle Ages are faulted with the "sacramentalization" of grace and the Reformation invoked as a witness to the "spiritualization" of man.
Modern Christian thought describes the truly human being as responsible, as "responding" to the Word of God. If considered at all, his bones and ligaments, let alone his sexual drives, are no more than the requisite framework for his response. "The Word was made flesh" (John 1.14) is how
St. John the Evangelist announced the miracle of Christ's birth. But depending on the denomination, theology has transformed "flesh" into either
"Church" or "preaching." Feuerbach considered this "transformation" the essence of Christianity.
For Luther this spiritualization, this striving for the transcendental, was a perversion of Christianity. A just man does not become spiritual through faith, he lives out of faith; and this our life is created and intended by God.
The first line of the Creed can be fathomed only out of human experience:
"What do you mean," he asks in his Large Catechism," by the words 'I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, the Creator . . ."? Answer: What I mean and believe is that I am God's creature, that means that he has given me and continuously maintains body, soul and life, limbs small and large, all the senses, intellect and reason.'
WEDDED BLISS AND WORLD PEACE Even this unequivocal declaration did not escape misconstruction, restriction to intellect and reason. Sensuousness, and with it all the senses, was cast aside as irrelevant. The nobility of man is far above God's lowly creation—eating, drinking, clothes, food, wife and children. Both the new layman of the sixteenth century and the cultured citizen of the Enlightenment reveal themselves as the monks of times past. Luther saw the Devil at work in this monk. "Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being human": thus did Luther reject the vitiation of body, senses, and sensuality. It is the "god" of this world, the Devil, who has maligned marriage and made it "shameful"; one should marry "to spite and resist" him and his morals.'
No one in our century has dealt so thoroughly with Luther's sexuality as the Dominican Heinrich Seuse Denifle. His disgust for Luther demonstrates that hatred, too, can engender perception and the courage to say a great deal that has been politely pushed aside in our era of ecumenism.'®
Denifle sees Luther's "lust" as one of the main causes of the Reformation. Luther's experiences with his sexuality led him to believe that man's
"primeval sin" was insuperable. His carnal instinct drove him to reinterpret the Scriptures so as to legitimate marriage "completely overcome by lustfulness.""'
From sensuality to the Reformation! This image of Luther makes Luther's wife, Catherine of Bora, a whore as well as the core of Reformation theology.
Protestants immediately disclaimed the thesis as slander, and today it no longer. finds sympathy among the Catholic Luther scholars. Nonetheless, there is an undeniable consensus between Luther's slanderer and his defenders. Despite the Reformer, sexual drives are confused with man's "primeval sin." What nature wants is "unholy," something only for the dark hours of the night. One need only read Luther's Wider den falsch genannten geistlichen Stand (Against the so-called spiritual estate; 1522) to establish that he did not hesitate to speak plainly about the healthy elemental force of desire.
A young woman, if the high and rare grace of virginity has not been bestowed upon her, can do without a man as little as without food, drink, sleep, and other natural needs. And on the other hand: a man, too, cannot be without a woman. The reason is the following: begetting children is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking. That is why God provided the body with limbs, arteries, ejaculation, and everything that goes along with them. Now if someone wants to stop this and