Correctly and Profitably Read Scripture: Luther the Biblical Scholar

PART THREE

LUTHER’S LEGACY

CORRECTLY AND PROFITABLY

READ SCRIPTURE:

LUTHER THE BIBLICAL SCHOLAR

Martin Luther’s credentials as a Reformer would hardly seem to require verification. He is, indeed, likely to be seen by many as the Reformer of his day—the man who triggered the Reformation as such with his protest against the sale of indulgences; the man who put his finger on fundamental flaws in the medieval church’s views on authority and salvation; and the man who subsequently articulated the principles of sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria that came to define Protestantism.

Yet Reformer is not a label Luther would have readily applied to himself. He simply did not view himself as the proper agent of the changes that were taking place around—and ultimately through—him. In his estimation, the Word of God was the proper agent of those changes. God accomplishes His purposes, Luther understood, by means of His Word (cf. Isa. 55:11), and God’s purpose in Luther’s day, it seemed obvious, was to rouse the church from its theological and moral stupor. Luther’s own part in that process, to his thinking, was merely to facilitate the reach of God’s Word.

Luther expressed this conviction rather colorfully in a sermon preached in Wittenberg on March 10, 1522. Reflecting on the relative roles that he and God’s Word had played in the surprising events of recent years, he observed: “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.” Lest his listeners miss the point, Luther repeated: “I did nothing; the Word did everything.”

Luther’s convictions regarding Scripture’s authority and his role as a preacher of God’s Word are considered elsewhere in this book. It is the particular task of this chapter to examine Luther’s identity as a biblical scholar, especially as that identity found expression in his efforts to translate and interpret Scripture. Translating and interpreting the Bible were, after all, two important aspects—even more so than sleeping and drinking Wittenberg beer—of the “nothing” Luther did behind the scenes of the “everything” ultimately accomplished by God’s Word in his day.

Luther as Translator of the Bible

When Luther preached that sermon in Wittenberg on March 10, 1522, he had, in fact, very recently completed his translation of the New Testament into ² In one of the more famous episodes of his life, Luther had been German. “kidnapped” en route from Worms to Wittenberg in May 1521 by order of his prince, Elector Frederick the Wise, and tucked away—for his own protection—in Wartburg Castle in Eisenach. During the early months of his time there, he took advantage of the forced break from his normal duties to advance the Reformation with his pen, writing works that criticized monasticism and the Roman Catholic Mass. He also began to think seriously about translating portions, at least, of the New Testament into German. In early December, he paid a short, secret visit to Wittenberg, where Philip Melanchthon—his close friend and disciple, and professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg—encouraged him to tackle translation of the New Testament in its entirety, thus honoring the essential unity of that testament. Luther heeded Melanchthon’s advice and, upon returning to Eisenach, threw himself wholly into the task, completing the project in the remarkably short span of eleven weeks, just before leaving the Wartburg for good. Published the following September (and so dubbed the September Testament), Luther’s German New Testament was an immediate best seller.

Back in Wittenberg, Luther lost no time in launching efforts to translate the Old Testament into German. This task ended up taking considerably longer than had his translation of the New Testament. Though Luther now enjoyed direct assistance from both Melanchthon and Matthew Aurogallus, professor of Hebrew at the University of Wittenberg, he and his colleagues were hindered in their efforts by their busy schedules (including, as of 1525, the demands of married life for Luther), bouts of illness for Luther (kidney stones and gallstones), and political events in Germany that required one or more of them to spend time away from Wittenberg. There was also, of course, the inherent difficulty of the task. Luther had translated, on average, eleven pages per day of the New Testament into German while in the Wartburg. By way of comparison, he and his colleagues took four days to translate three particularly difficult lines from the book of Job in 1524.

Their work progressed in stages. By 1523, they had completed the Pentateuch. The next year saw the finished translation of the historical books (Joshua to Esther) and poetical books (Job to Song of Solomon), leaving only the prophetic books—which proved particularly reluctant to “speak German,” as Luther put it—to be completed. No matter their resistance, Luther had completed translation of the Minor Prophets by 1526 in conjunction with his university lectures on those books. Translation of Isaiah, a labor Luther compared to that of childbirth, was completed by 1528. The Reformer knew something about childbirth by then—his son Hans and daughter Elizabeth were born in 1526 and 1527, respectively. Whether Katie, his wife, would have conceded that her husband’s efforts to render biblical Hebrew into German were comparable to hers in childbearing remains uncertain. By 1530, translation of the book of Daniel was complete. Though the end of their project was clearly in view, Luther guessed that the events prophesied in Daniel that culminated in the end of the world would probably beat them to the finish line. As it happened, the world continued, and the Prophets in their entirety were completed by 1532.

The first entire Luther Bible, comprising both Old and New Testaments, proceeded from the press of the Wittenberg printer Hans Lufft in September

1534. When Luther died twelve years later, half a million copies of this and subsequent editions of his German Bible were in circulation. While German printers profited greatly from producing these editions, Luther, interestingly, never earned a dime—or rather, a guilder—from the Bibles sold. He never requested royalties. His aim, of course, was not to turn a profit, but to put God’s Word into the hands of the people in language they could understand, to have them hear it read and preached, and so ultimately to see sinners reconciled to God through faith in the person and work of the One whom it proclaims. Luther’s success in this regard defies statistical analysis.

Before considering Luther’s translation of the Bible in more detail, it is important to acknowledge—as has not always been done—that Luther was not the first person to translate the Bible into German. Portions of Scripture—namely, certain psalms and extracts from the gospels—existed in German translation as early as the ninth century, having been commissioned by the Emperor Charlemagne to assist in the conversion of Germanic peoples to Christianity within his realm. By the fourteenth century, a complete German Bible was in circulation in the Holy Roman Empire. This late-medieval translation was revised and reproduced, following the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, more than a dozen times before Luther ever began his own translation work. The Roman Catholic Church held no official position on the legitimacy of these German vernacular Bibles, but one can discern a certain discomfort on her part with such works and the access they granted the laity to the sacred text. In 1486, the archbishop of Mainz issued a provincial prohibition of unauthorized printings of German Bibles, arguing that the German language was inherently ill-suited to communicate the sacred matter of Scripture, and that, regardless, the German people weren’t capable of grasping that matter, whatever language they encountered it in.

What, then, set Luther’s translation of the Bible apart from these previous efforts? The first thing that made Luther’s work unique was the sources he used for translation. Much like the fourteenth-century English version of Scripture produced by John Wycliffe and his followers, the German translations of Scripture produced before Luther were based upon the Latin Vulgate, which had served as the medieval church’s standard version of the Bible. Although Luther consulted the Vulgate—as well as existing German versions of the Bible—his translation was ultimately based on the best available Greek and Hebrew texts of Scripture. Luther, in other words, translated from the languages in which Scripture was originally penned.

The failure of previous translators to consult the original Greek and Hebrew texts of Scripture was no real fault of their own. Knowledge of Greek and Hebrew had all but vanished in Western Europe in the centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the influx of Germanic tribes into European lands. The Vulgate had become the church’s de facto official version of Scripture partially, to be sure, because of its merits as a translation, but even more so because of the inability of anyone to read Scripture in its original languages. In the years immediately preceding the Reformation, however, a circle of scholars known as humanists had labored to revive interest in the languages of antiquity and to recover classical texts—Scripture included—in their original languages. Toward those ends, the prince of humanist scholars, Desiderius Erasmus, had produced in 1516 a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, having compared all the Greek manuscripts available to him in order to arbitrate textual variants and capture, as much as possible, the exact, original words of the various writings contained in the New Testament.

Luther worked from the second, revised edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, published in Basel in 1519, when he translated the New Testament into German. For translation of the Old Testament, he and his colleagues relied on a copy of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures produced in 1494 by the Italian Jewish printer Gerson ben Moses Soncino.

Of course, translation of the Bible into German from Greek and Hebrew required a significant degree of aptitude in those languages. Luther had begun studying the biblical languages while still a monk in Erfurt. He had utilized the Hebrew Scriptures in his university lectures on the Psalms in 1513–15 and the Greek New Testament in his lectures on Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews in 1515–19. As of 1518, he had availed himself of Melanchthon’s presence at Wittenberg to improve his knowledge of biblical Greek. Even so, Luther’s abilities in the biblical languages remained modest. Fortunately, his translation team included experts in Greek and Hebrew like Melanchthon and Aurogallus. Melanchthon’s linguistic abilities can be measured by the fact that he had published commentaries on classical authors, had translated Greek poets into Latin, and had written a Greek grammar before graduating from his teens.

A further distinguishing feature of Luther’s Bible was its accuracy, readability, and—indeed—beauty in the German language. Luther shed some light upon his own philosophy of translation into German in a 1530 open letter ⁴ In that letter, he observed that he and his colleagues had sought on the subject. to translate Scripture into the kind of German that was spoken by “the mother in the home, the children on the street, [and] the common man in the marketplace.” “We must,” he noted, “be guided by their language, the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly. That way they will understand it.”

By Luther’s own admission, producing a German text that was faithful to the original sources but nevertheless readable—and so, ultimately, understandable—was no easy task. He reckoned that few folk would realize, upon reading the finished product, how much he and his colleagues had struggled over certain biblical passages. “One now runs his eyes over three or four pages and does not stumble once—without realizing what boulders and clods had once lain there where he now goes along as over a smooth-planed board. We had to sweat and toil there before we got those boulders and clods out of the way, so that one could go along so nicely.”

Nevertheless, Luther felt some frustration as of 1530 with the success of his German Bible as it then stood. He commented that he and his colleagues had aimed for “good German” in their work, but “unfortunately” had “not always ⁷ A desire to improve the existing translation of reached or hit upon” the same. the New Testament and, by 1530, most of the Old Testament resulted in the establishment in 1531 of the Collegium Biblicum(Bible guild), a circle of six or so Wittenberg scholars who met weekly in Luther’s home to revisit and revise the standing German translation of Scripture. The men who made up this group were selected not just because they were knowledgeable in one or more of the ancient languages—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic—but also because they represented discrete regions of Germany, and so could collectively ensure that the translation of a given passage decided upon would be understood by as broad a range of German speakers as possible.

Luther’s Bible guild outlived the initial publication of the entire German Bible in 1534. Once the whole of Scripture had been translated, Luther and his colleagues began revising the entire text. In fact, Luther spent the rest of his life improving his translation of both testaments, thus justifying the opinion of one ⁸ With scholar that he was “obsessed with the right way to translate the Bible.” the help of his colleagues, he ultimately produced no less than five unique editions of the entire German Bible, the last completed in 1545, one year before ⁹ His goal with every change made to the text was greater faithfulness his death. to the meaning of the biblical Author/authors and better German—that is, German that would be more easily comprehended by the people.

Unsurprisingly, Roman Catholic polemicists raised questions early on about the accuracy of Luther’s German Bible. They specifically accused him of importing his own “heretical” ideas about salvation into Paul’s discussion of justification in the book of Romans. Luther’s translation of Roman 3:28 had Paul stating that “man is justified by faith alone[German allein] apart from works of the law,” while the Greek text merely stated that “man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” Luther freely admitted that the word “alone” was absent from the Greek original, but argued that good German required the word “alone” to capture the “sense” of Paul in translating this passage. He explained that Germans—when affirming one thing and denying another—regularly modify the thing affirmed with the word “alone.” So, for example, a German speaker would say, “I have allein eaten and nicht[not] yet drunk,” even if the essentially equivalent phrase “I have eaten and nicht yet drunk” would suffice.

Luther provided further examples of this grammatical phenomenon in German, all toward the vindication of his translation of Paul. In sum, he displayed complete confidence that his translation of Romans 3:28 had captured “the sense of the text” and had communicated the same in words that were “clear and vigorous” and, ultimately, true to “the way [Germans] speak.” His Roman detractors, needless to say, were no more impressed by his apology for his rendering of Romans 3:28 than they were by his description of them as “blockheads” who sat staring at the word allein in his translation “like cows at a new gate,” uncertain what to make of it because, in the end, they understood neither the science of translation nor the German language as it was spoken by the people.

Ironically, the very same Roman Catholic figures who criticized the accuracy of Luther’s translation of the Bible into German ultimately provided testimony to the merits of Luther’s work. Shortly after the release of Luther’s German New Testament in 1522, Duke George of Saxony, a strong opponent of Luther’s reform, banned Luther’s translation from his territories and ordered the confiscation of existing copies—measures that only increased sales of the work. George subsequently commissioned the Roman Catholic scholar Jerome Emser, a man who claimed to have discovered no fewer than 1,400 errors in Luther’s translation, to produce an alternative, orthodox German translation of the New Testament to counter the spread and influence of Luther’s work. Emser’s translation appeared in 1527 and subsequently saw numerous editions under the guidance of Johann Eck between 1534 and 1558. But a comparison of Emser’s translation to Luther’s reveals that Emser largely copied Luther’s work, editing the text when appropriate to make certain passages sound less supportive of Luther’s reforming ideas. “The Papists steal my German,” Luther complained, ¹² Of course, such “and they do not thank me for it, but rather use it against me.” plagiarism of Luther’s translation served as a kind of backhanded compliment to the quality of the Reformer’s work.

Whatever judgments have been made over the centuries regarding the accuracy of Luther’s Bible translation, nearly all have conceded the literary and aesthetic merits of the German text he produced. His translation made significant use of techniques such as rhyme and alliteration, devices that were principally intended to make Scripture as memorable as possible to those reading or hearing it—perhaps for the very first time—in their native tongue. An example of rhyme can be found in Luther’s translation of Proverbs 8:14. Where our English versions read “I have counsel and sound wisdom” (ESV), Luther’s German reads “Mein ist beides, Rat und Tat” (literally, “mine is both advice and help”). An example of alliteration can be found in Luther’s rendering of Mark 14:33. Where our English versions describe the Savior in Gethsemane as “greatly distressed and troubled” (ESV), Luther’s German describes Christ as “zittern und zagen” (literally, “trembling and wavering”).

Scholars agree that Luther produced a work of remarkable literary quality, even if this was not his foremost goal. Luther possessed “an extraordinary ear for ¹⁴ Needless to language and a literary talent unparalleled in his place and time.” say, nonnative German speakers will find it difficult to fully appreciate the literary merits and aesthetic appeal of Luther’s translation. Perhaps the best witness to Luther’s accomplishment for those who do not speak German is the eighteenth-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who set Luther’s German translation of Scripture to music in numerous pieces. So, for instance, Bach’s StMatthew Passion comprises the exact text of Luther’s translation of chapters 26 and 27 of Matthew’s gospel. It is no accident that Luther’s words sit so comfortably against the backdrop of Bach’s music. The congruity between Luther’s text and Bach’s music stems from the inherent beauty of each.

One could gauge the ultimate success of Luther’s translation of the German Bible—beyond questions of accuracy, readability, and aesthetic appeal—by its sheer staying power. Luther’s Bible remains the most widely read and preached translation of Scripture among German speakers today. More telling testimony to the success of Luther’s translation of the German Bible—at least by the standards of Luther’s ultimate goal as noted above— came from another of Luther’s Roman antagonists, Johann Cochlaeus. Three years after Luther’s death, Cochlaeus was still complaining, in his biography of the Reformer, about the impact that Luther’s translation of Scripture had made in Germany: “Even shoemakers and women and every kind of unlearned person, whoever of them… had somehow learned German letters, read it most eagerly as the font of all truth. And by reading and rereading it they committed it to memory and so carried the book around with them in their bosoms. Because of this, in a few months they… did not blush to dispute about the faith and the Gospel, not only with laypeople ¹⁵ Had Luther been alive of the Catholic party, but also with priests and monks.” to read this, he would, one suspects, have discovered in it the greatest endorsement that his efforts at translation could have received.

Luther as Interpreter of the Bible

The first printing of Luther’s German New Testament in 1522 came to be known as the September Testament not simply, or even primarily, because it was published in September, but because it was succeeded by a revised edition—the December Testament—within only three months’ time. Luther made no significant changes to the biblical translation itself in the December Testament. He merely added marginal notes and prefaces to each book of the New Testament, thereby producing something akin to what today might be called a study Bible. In this, we see Luther’s concern, from the very first, not just to grant the people access to Scripture in language they could understand, but also to guide them in their reading and understanding of Scripture.

Indeed, guiding others in their reading and understanding of Scripture was Luther’s principal vocation, at least to his thinking. From 1512, when Luther was appointed chair of biblical studies at Wittenberg, until his death in 1546, Luther lectured two to three times per week during term time, always expositing discrete books of the Bible. His exegetical and interpretive efforts reached an audience beyond Wittenberg’s student population in the form of biblical commentaries based upon his lectures. Luther ultimately produced commentaries on the Old Testament books of Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and all the Minor Prophets, as well as the New Testament books of Romans, Galatians, ¹ Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, 1 and ² Peter, Jude, and ¹ John. His level of engagement with the biblical text seems to have deepened as he aged—his exegetical labors in the book of Genesis occupied him from 1535 to 1545 and ultimately filled eight volumes of the English edition of his works. Of course, Luther’s biblical interpretation also found expression in his many sermons and—for that matter—in his polemical and theological treatises. Indeed, exegesis and interpretation of the Bible lay at the root of everything Luther ever wrote or said in service to the church. A proper appreciation for Luther, then, requires paying some attention not just to what he believed, but also—and, in some sense, more fundamentally—to how he read the Bible and thus arrived at what he believed.

Luther’s starting point in biblical interpretation was his conviction that “the Holy Scriptures did not grow on earth,” but are “the Word of God,” having been ¹⁷ Given its identity as “the Word of God,” “spoken by the Holy Ghost.”

Scripture ultimately validates and interprets itself. To seek confidence that Scripture is God’s Word, or to seek Scripture’s meaning from some other source than Scripture itself, would be to acknowledge some word above God’s Word. But Scripture knows no “masters, judges, or arbiters” in Luther’s view. It knows ¹⁸ Thus, he rejected Rome’s claim “only witnesses, disciples, and confessors.” that Scripture requires validation from the institutional church to be recognized ¹⁹ He likewise rejected Rome’s claim to possess—whether as the Word of God. in church councils or in the person of the pope—the exclusive right and requisite spiritual gift to interpret Scripture. In claiming some unique prerogative and ability to interpret Scripture, “the Pope,” Luther quipped, “pretends to drink malmsey out of the same cask from which others … get water.”

Against such Roman presumption, Luther insisted that Scripture “belongs ²¹ His conviction that “everybody” could, at least in equally to everybody.” theory, read and understand Scripture’s message was rooted in his assumption that Scripture is fundamentally clear in its teaching (and so ultimately accessible to every Christian). “There is not on earth,” he wrote, “a book more lucidly ²² Luther’s insistence on Scripture’s clarity written than the Holy Scripture.” found expression, among other places, in his mid-1520s conflict with Erasmus—the very man whose Greek New Testament served Luther’s translation needs—concerning the effects of sin upon human choices. Erasmus prefaced his defense of “free will” with the claim that scriptural teaching on many matters is rather un clear, including—somewhat ironically—that matter regarding which he intended to expound Scripture’s meaning. “The deeper we go” into “some secret places of Scripture,” Erasmus wrote, “the darker and darker it becomes.” Luther replied by acknowledging that God keeps some (indeed most) things to Himself (see Deut. 29:29), but he insisted that when God speaks—as He has done in every word of Scripture—He intends to be understood.

Of course, Luther, like every student of Scripture, knew the experience of reading the Bible and struggling at times to make sense of it. His defense of Scripture’s clarity, then, requires some nuancing. He drew an important distinction between the “subject matter” of Scripture and the various “texts”—some more grammatically challenging than others—that constitute Scripture and so advance the “matter” in question. It is, he insisted, the “subject matter” that is always clear—“the subject matter of the Scriptures… is all quite accessible”—even though specific “texts” might prove “obscure and abstruse… because of ²⁴ A further obstacle to our our ignorance of their vocabulary and grammar.” understanding of Scripture, no matter the clarity of Scripture’s “matter,” is discovered in our sinful resistance to Scripture’s teaching and/or insistence that Scripture conform to our demands for what God ought to reveal to us. “Scripture simply confesses the trinity of God and the humanity of Christ,” Luther observed in illustration of his point. “There is nothing here of obscurity or ambiguity. But how these things can be, Scripture does not say…, nor is it necessary to know.”

An important principle for reading and understanding the Bible is implied by Luther’s nuanced understanding of Scripture’s clarity. That principle, alluded to previously, is that Scripture itself must interpret Scripture. When confronted with a puzzling passage, the Bible reader should let clearer biblical texts shed light upon more difficult texts. “If the words are obscure in one place, yet they ²⁶ One should also be careful to interpret individual texts of are plain in another.”

Scripture in a way that conforms to the overall teaching of the Bible. Luther criticized contemporaries who, in defense of one error or another, failed to “quote Scripture in its entirety.” To properly interpret discrete passages in Scripture, one must “have regard to the whole of Scripture.”

But what does “the whole of Scripture” teach? What, ultimately, is the “subject matter” of Scripture, which Luther deemed perfectly clear? “Take Christ out of the Scriptures,” Luther wrote to Erasmus, “and what will you find ²⁸ Or, to put the matter positively: “All of Scripture remaining in them?” ²⁹ Luther made this assertion with regard to everywhere deals only with Christ.” both testaments of Scripture. The New Testament reveals Christ in a rather straightforward way, while the Old Testament constitutes “the swaddling clothes ³⁰ Luther took his cue in this regard from and the manger in which Christ lies.”

Christ’s own testimony concerning the Old Testament Scriptures: “It is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). The surest method, then, of interpreting any given passage of the Bible is to look for the One whom Scripture in its entirety reveals. “If… you would interpret well and truly, set Christ before you, for He is the man to Whom it all applies.”

Luther’s assertion that “Scripture everywhere deals only with Christ” requires several qualifications. First, it should be noted that while Luther commonly identified Christ as the single subject of Scripture (as in the quotes above), he regularly observed elsewhere that Scripture comprises two distinct “words” of God: law and gospel. So, for instance, he wrote in his On theFreedom of a Christian that “the entire Scripture of God is divided into two ³² God’s commandments (law) “show us parts: commandments and promises.” what we ought to do but do not give us the power to do it.” God’s promises (gospel), on the other hand, reveal Jesus Christ to us—the One who has fulfilled God’s law on our behalf and suffered the penalty for our sins, thereby securing for us forgiveness of sins and eternal fellowship with God. Luther’s distinction between “commandments and promises” is not a distinction between Old and New Testaments: law and gospel are interwoven throughout Scripture from beginning to end.

Luther’s acknowledgment of “two parts” to Scripture could, upon the surface, seem to contradict his assertion that Christ—who is uniquely revealed in the gospel “part” of Scripture—constitutes the whole of Scripture’s subject matter. But closer attention to Luther’s teaching on law and gospel resolves any apparent contradiction in his doctrine. God’s commandments are, Luther explained, ultimately “intended to teach man to know himself, that through them ³³ Human despair, he may recognize his inability to do good and may despair.” however, is never God’s final goal. God leads sinners “to despair” so that they might “seek… help… from someone else”—namely, Jesus Christ, who has lived and died in the stead of sinners. God’s commandments, in other words, ultimately serve the interest of God’s promises. Luther’s recognition of commandments and promises in Scripture—“words” of God that must not be confused—does not, then, ultimately oppose his assertion that “Scripture everywhere deals only with Christ.” It reminds us, rather, that the identification of Christ as the exclusive content of Scripture was not intended to provide license to discover Christ in passages in forced or awkward ways— some passages, the Reformer realized, lead to Christ by another route than direct proclamation of Him.

Second, it should be noted that “Christ” entailed, for Luther, both the person and the work of the Savior. In other words, the content of Scripture was ultimately, in Luther’s perspective, “Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Luther’s medieval predecessors had developed their own method for discovering Christ in places of Scripture that did not obviously speak of Him. They had insisted that Scripture has both a literal and one or more nonliteral meanings: an allegorical meaning that might reveal Christ or some aspect of Christian doctrine; a tropological meaning that served to reinforce Christian morals; and/or an anagogical meaning that pointed to future (eschatological) events in the life of the church and the world. Medieval interpreters, then, had not been entirely remiss in finding Christ in the whole of the Bible. They had, in fact, discovered Him in some of the most unlikely places. But the “Christ” yielded by their allegorical readings of Scripture was typically one who merely intended—perhaps in explicit correspondence to the tropological meaning of a text—to reinforce God’s law, either by promulgating or modeling the same.

Luther had little patience for those who buried, with their allegorical 34 “When I was a monk,” he “monkey-tricks,” the plain meaning of Scripture. admitted, “I allegorized everything. But after lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans, I came to have some knowledge of Christ. For therein I saw that Christ ³⁵ He had even less patience for those who, by virtue perhaps of is no allegory.” their allegorical exegesis, turned Christ into a mere expounder of divine law, whether by His teachings or His perfect example. He denounced those who preached the “works, life, and words” of Christ with no greater goal than ³⁶ In Luther’s view, the “Christ” improving their listeners’ “conduct of life.” whom “Scripture everywhere” reveals is a “Christ” disclosed in plain words and, even more significantly, a “Christ for you and me”—a “Christ,” in other words, who is God’s gift to us.

Luther made this point most clearly in his 1521 work A Brief Instruction onWhat to Look for and Expect in the Gospels. “Be sure,” he lectured his readers, “that you do not make Christ into a Moses, as if Christ did nothing more than teach and provide examples as the other saints do, as if the gospel were simply a textbook of teachings or laws.” A “Christ” who is only a positive role model “is no more help to you than some other saint”; the “gospel” of “Christ” our perfect example “cannot… be called gospel” at all.

Proper reading and understanding of Scripture, then, entails discovering and accepting Christ “as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own.” Luther explained: “This means that when you see or hear of Christ doing or suffering something, you do not doubt that Christ himself, with his deeds and suffering, belongs to you. On this you may depend as surely as if you had done it yourself; indeed as if you were Christ himself.” Only when Christ has been thoroughly digested as gift can “you take him as your example, giving yourself in service to your neighbor just as you see that Christ has given himself for you.”

The “Christ” whom “Scripture everywhere” reveals, then, is a Christ, finally, who demands the human response of faith. One must believe that God offers him this extraordinary gift and accept it for what it truly is, a priceless treasure freely given. “When you lay hold of Christ as a gift which is given you for your very own and have no doubt about it, you are a Christian. [Your] faith redeems you ³⁹ With a view toward faith as the proper response to from sin, death, and hell.”

Christ as properly revealed—i.e., Christ as God’s gift to sinners—in Scripture, Luther could ultimately claim that Scripture contains “nothing but Christ and the Christian faith.”

In bringing this brief consideration of Luther’s approach to biblical interpretation to a close, it may perhaps be useful to observe Luther in the act of interpreting Scripture—that is, to see how Luther applied these principles to a specific text. While any number of passages might serve our purpose in this regard, I have chosen to review Luther’s treatment of Genesis 3:14–15: “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel’” (ESV). Luther’s comments on these words well illustrate a number of his basic principles of biblical interpretation as outlined above, and illumine, moreover, critical differences between his approach to Scripture and that of his medieval predecessors.

Genesis 3:14–15 records God’s words of judgment upon the serpent that persuaded Adam and Eve to break God’s law by eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:16–17; 3:1–7). Numerous biblical exegetes in pre-Reformation times had deemed the biblical account of Adam and Eve’s fall—especially with regard to the role played therein by the talking serpent—unfruitful for doctrinal or practical purposes if received purely as a historical episode. Thus, they had resorted to allegorical interpretation of the text, making the serpent and his offspring (or “seed”)—and, for that matter, Adam, Eve, and every other entity referenced in the passage—symbols of realities encountered in the everyday ⁴² In Luther’s comments on this text, he experience of average Christians. intentionally distanced himself from such “allegorists” and promised a “historical and literal” analysis of the passage in which “Adam remains Adam,” “the woman remains a woman,” and “the serpent remains a serpent,” albeit “one dominated by Satan.”

God’s words of judgment, directed in the first instance to “a real serpent,” must, therefore, be accepted at face value. “Before sin,” Luther judged, the serpent “walked upright” and was “most pleasing to man, as… puppies are today.” By virtue of God’s judgment, the serpent now “creeps on the ground” and has become “more frightful and more hated than all the other animals.” Moreover, the serpent has been banished from the “dinner party” that other beasts perpetually attend and consigned to a permanent diet of “raw earth.”

Luther acknowledged, however, that God’s words were equally—indeed, ultimately—directed at Satan, who was “hidden within the serpent.” Indeed, the serpent, “being an irrational animal, did not understand” God’s words of judgment, “but Satan did, and he was the one whom God had especially in mind.” Luther’s assumption that Satan lay “hidden within the serpent” was informed by biblical texts that identify Satan as “the father of lies” who “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (John 8:44; ¹ Peter ⁴³ His reasoning on this point well illustrates his principle of letting clear 5:8). biblical texts interpret less clear biblical texts. Who but the “father of lies,” after all, could tell that very first lie, “You shall not surely die” (Gen. 3:4)? “When we must make statements about Satan,” Luther advised his readers, “let us fall back on other Scripture proofs that are pertinent, sure, and strong.”

Luther resisted the temptation—freely indulged by his allegorizing predecessors—to discover some aspect of Satan’s condemnation in every word of judgment addressed to the serpent. One need not, for example, discover a reference to Satan’s loss of his angelic “form and stature” in the words “on your belly you shall go,” even if we can be sure that Satan’s fall did result in his deformity. In any case, Satan’s share in the judgment pronounced by God finds expression primarily in the subsequent words of Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Luther discovered in these words prophetic testimony to “the ultimate destruction of Satan’s tyranny”: “it is not the tail and not the belly of the serpent but the head itself, that is to be crushed and trodden underfoot by the Seed of the woman.” “Satan,” Luther judged, “understood this threat well.” Thus “he has continued to rage against human nature with such great hatred.” But while God’s words of judgment in this text are directed at Satan, they are not, in the final analysis, “spoken by God for the devil’s sake.” Indeed, “God does not regard [Satan] worthy of His condemnation.” God speaks these words of judgment, rather, “for the sake of Adam and Eve”—that is, so “they may hear this judgment and be comforted by the realization that God is the enemy of that being which inflicted so severe a wound on man.” While “the allegorists” had seen Adam and Eve as literary symbols of faculties that exist in every human being (reason, the affections, etc.), Luther viewed Adam and Eve as historical individuals who had sinned and stood in need of pardon (which, remarkably, God was willing to extend).

God’s words of judgment to Satan, then, are words of promise—that is, gospel—to Adam and Eve. “Here grace and mercy begin to shine forth from the midst of the wrath which sin and disobedience aroused. Here in the midst of most serious threats the Father reveals His heart; this is not a father who is so angry that he would turn out his son because of his sin, but one who points to a deliverance, indeed one who promises victory against the enemy that deceived and conquered human nature.”

The divine mercy extended to Adam and Eve finds its basis, according to Luther, in the promised triumph over Satan by “the Seed of the woman,” who is none other than “the Son of God.” It is here, in discerning the identity of that “Seed” that will crush the serpent’s head, that Luther’s Christ-centered reading of Scripture shines and the contrast between Luther’s interpretative approach to Scripture and that of his medieval predecessors is most pronounced. Pre Reformation interpreters of Scripture had identified the “Seed of the woman” not as Jesus Christ, but as Mary, the mother of Christ, largely because medieval versions of the Latin Vulgate had rendered the pronoun in the biblical phrase “he will crush your head” as feminine. In other words, Genesis 3:15 in the Vulgate read “she will crush your head” (ipsa conteret caput tuum), despite the lack of any basis for such a reading in the Hebrew text.

Luther was appalled by this medieval mistake and the honor it ultimately stole from Christ. “How damnable,” he wrote, “that through the agency of foolish exegetes Satan has managed to apply this passage, which in fullest measure abounds in the comfort of the Son of God, to the Virgin Mary!” He rejoiced that, with access to Scripture in its original languages, the proper reference and meaning of Genesis 3:15 could now be “restored.” It should be noted that the specific crime committed, in Luther’s judgment, by earlier “foolish exegetes” of the Latin Bible was less one of over-venerating Mary than it was one of undervaluing Jesus Christ. “Let the Blessed Virgin keep her place of honor. Among all the women of the world she has this privilege from God, that as a virgin she gave birth to the Son of God. But this must not be permitted to deprive her Son of the glory of our redemption and deliverance.”

The scope of the promised victory over Satan promised in Genesis 3:15 should not be underestimated. “This statement,” Luther wrote, “includes the redemption from the Law, from sin, and from death; and it points out the clear hope of a certain resurrection and of renewal in the other life after this life.” He explained: “If the serpent’s head is to be crushed, death certainly must be done away with. If death is done away with, that, too, which deserved death is done away with, that is, sin. If sin is abolished, then also the Law. And not only this, but at the same time the obedience which was lost is renewed.” In short, man’s redemption, justification, sanctification, resurrection, and glorification are implied by the promised work of the “Seed.”

The victory that Genesis 3:15 ultimately promises Christ in his conflict with Satan, then, is equally a victory for all who place their hope and confidence in Christ. “This victory will also be given to us as a gift, as Christ clearly states (Luke 11:22): ‘The spoils are divided after the defeat of the mighty one.’” Thus, Luther ultimately sees “the Seed of the woman” as a reference both to Christ and to those who by faith are joined to Christ and share in his blessings. “By faith the Christian is made victor over sin, over the Law, and over death, so that not even the gates of hell can prevail against him.” Indeed, God’s promise of One who would ultimately crush Satan’s head was proclaimed for the very purpose of engendering that faith which makes one, with Christ, a “victor over sin, over the Law, and over death.”

The faith engendered by this “fountainhead of all promises” was first discernable in Adam and Eve. “This, therefore, is the text that made Adam and Eve alive and brought them back from death into the life which they had lost through sin.” All who respond to the promise of Genesis 3:15 (and subsequent passages) in faith ultimately share in Adam and Eve’s hope of eternal life, even in the midst of suffering and death. “Thus we also live in the same hope. And, because of Christ, when we die, we keep this hope, which the Word sets before us by directing us to put our trust in the merits of Christ.”

Luther’s examination of Genesis 3:14–15, and the promise of Christ and Christ’s saving work he discerned therein, led him ultimately to doxology. He concluded his comments on the text by exhorting his readers to acknowledge God—on the basis of His promise and its fulfillment—as the “God of salvation,” to cite the psalmist (cf. Ps. 68:20). “Let us,” he wrote, “give this title to God, not only because He grants aid in this temporal life… but because… He frees those who are overwhelmed by death, and transports them into eternal life. This He does, as Moses teaches here, by crushing the head of the serpent.”

Conclusion

“For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year.” So remarked Luther to friends and students gathered around his dinner table in

1532. “If you picture,” he continued, “the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted ⁴⁴ The picture Luther thus painted of his to know what it was and what it meant.” own efforts to understand Scripture is appropriate, because it positions him under God’s Word. Luther exercised the greatest care throughout his entire life not to impose his own understanding of God and God’s ways onto Scripture—not, that is, to stand above Scripture—but to submit to God’s Word, and to let his understanding of God and God’s ways be determined by the same.

And Luther was, by any fair reckoning, successful in his efforts to discover the Bible’s meaning. Protestant believers today owe Luther an immeasurable debt in precisely this regard. Luther recovered biblical truths—not least the truth that salvation is God’s pure gift to sinners on the basis of Christ’s atoning work appropriated by faith alone—that were largely obscured in the centuries before the Reformation. But it was never Luther’s intention to stand alone beneath the “mighty tree” of Scripture. His translation of the Bible into the language of the people was an invitation to others to join him in the shade of those branches. His lectures and commentaries on the Bible provided instructions on how to grasp those branches and shake them effectively—that is, in such a way that they might yield their fruits. The greatest honor, therefore, that we can pay Luther in our day is not to rest content in knowing what he believed “every word” of Scripture meant, but to accept his invitation and follow his lead in grasping ourselves, again and again, “every one of [Scripture’s] branches” and shaking them, confident that God will repeatedly bless our efforts and reveal to us “wonderful things from [his] Law” (Ps. 119:18).

Notes

Notes

1. LW, 51:77. Editorial comments from original text omitted.

2. For a fuller treatment of Luther’s efforts at Bible translation, see especially Eric W. Gritsch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” in Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62–72.

3. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 7:344.

4. LW, 35:175–202.

5. Ibid., 35:189.

6. Ibid., 35:188.

7. Ibid., 35:190–91.

8. Orrin Robinson, “Luther’s Bible and the Emergence of Standard German,” in David E. Wellberry et al., eds., A New History of German Literature(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 233.

9. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 7:348.

10. LW, 35:188–89.

11. Ibid.

12. Quoted in Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 7:351.

13. Ruth H. Sanders, German: Biography of a Language(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010), 147.

14. Robinson, “Luther’s Bible,” 233.

15. Elizabeth Vandiver et al., eds., Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther(Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002), 106.

16. For a fuller treatment of Luther’s approach to biblical interpretation, see especially Arthur Skevington Wood, Luther’s Principles of Biblical Interpretation(London: Tyndale, 1960).

17. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 12.

18. LW, 26:58.

19. On Luther’s notion of Scripture’s self-authentication, see Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 75– 76.

20. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 6.

21. Ibid. Luther did, however, privilege a corporate, churchly interpretation of Scripture over any private individual’s judgment of Scripture’s meaning. This is evidenced in his ongoing call for a “truly free council” to meet and adjudicate the theological controversies of his day on the basis of Scripture’s teaching.

22. Ibid., 17.

23. Luther and Erasmus, 38.

24. Ibid., 110.

25. Ibid., 112.

26. Ibid., 111.

27. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 22.

28. Luther and Erasmus, 110.

29. Quoted in Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 74.

30. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 33.

31. Ibid., 34.

32. LW, 31:348.

33. Ibid.

34. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 24.

35. Ibid., 25. Luther’s instructions to look for Scripture’s “literal” meaning should not be confused with advice to read Scripture in a literalistic fashion. So, for instance, Luther’s interpretive approach left ample room for discerning Christ in OT types. Scholars agree that many of the “spiritual” meanings that OT interpreters discovered in the biblical text were simply rechristened the “literal” or “plain” meaning by Luther.

36. LW, 31:357.

37. Ibid. Emphasis mine.

38. LW, 35:120.

39. Ibid.

40. Quoted in Wood, Luther’s Principles, 33. Emphasis mine.

41. Luther’s commentary on Gen. 3:14–15 is found in LW, 1:182–98. All following quotes are taken from these pages unless otherwise referenced.

42. For a brief but informative discussion of literal and allegorical exegesis in the patristic and medieval periods, see Heiko A. Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of LateMedieval Thought(repr., Cambridge, England: James Clarke, 2002), 281–94.

43. See also Rom. 16:20.

44. LW, 54:165.