Only the cause of bringing them to God, he argued, could possibly justify Spain’s rule of the New World; and only by means of persuasion might they legitimately be brought to God. ‘For they are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for them Cajetan, stupefied that an obscure monk should think to place his personal interpretation of the Bible on such a pedestal, dismissed the argument as ‘mere words’; but Luther, quoting verses with a facility that came naturally to a professor of scripture, appealed for the first time to a concept that he had discovered in Paul: ‘I must believe according to the testimony of my conscience.’
After having an argument about this with his superiors in the Catholic Church that resulted in deadlock, Luther refused to recant, and thus, taking the cardinal for his word, did not return. Luther was alone and afraid. But he was not merely afraid; he felt exhilaration and sense of exultation. He was free from the bonds of the Catholic religion and could now forge something new. And the time was urgent.
Two months after leaving Augsburg, Luther confessed in private to a dark and growing suspicion: ‘that the true Antichrist mentioned by Paul reigns in the court of Rome’.
Luther believed that the salvation of the Christian people required a new reformation to save them from their darkening shadow. The papacy gave Luther sixty days to recant, or else be damned as a heretic. On December 10, the time was up. Luther appeared that morning near one of his colleagues from the university, a theologian named Agricola, who lit a fire.
It was the spot where clothes of the diseased of a nearby hospital were burned. Agricola used books, not rags, as fuel. He and Luther had been looking for collections of canon law in libraries.
The fire began to catch. Agricola continued to feed books into the flames. Then Luther stepped out from the crowd. Trembling, he held up the papal decree that had condemned his teachings. ‘Because you have confounded the truth of God,’ he said in a ringing voice, ‘today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you.’ He dropped the decree into the flames. The parchment blackened, and curled, and turned to smoke.
Luther went a step further; it was not only the canon that needed to be abolished but the entire structure.
That Cajetan, a man of transparent holiness, had placed obedience to the pope above the witness of scripture precisely illustrated the problem. Even at its very best, the Roman Church was a perversion of what Christianity should properly be. Far from bringing the Christian people closer to God, it had seduced them into paganism and idolatry.
Luther warned that the world of a church which for four hundred years had been motivated by nothing except a ravening appetite for power was a literally hellish abomination.Luther’s summons was to all the Christian people. For centuries, priests had been deceiving them.
The founding claim of the order promoted by Gregory VII, that the clergy were an order of men radically distinct from the laity, was a swindle and a blasphemy. ‘A Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, and subject to none.’ So, Luther had declared a month before his excommunication, in a pamphlet that he had pointedly sent to the pope. ‘A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’ The ceremonies of the Church could not redeem men and women from hell, for it was only God who possessed that power.
A priest who laid claim to it by virtue of his celibacy was playing a confidence trick on both his congregation and himself. So lost were mortals to sin that nothing they did, no displays of charity, no mortifications of the flesh, no pilgrimages to gawp at relics, could possibly save them. Only divine love could do that. Salvation was not a reward. Salvation was a gift.
When Luther was a monk, he had lived in dread of judgement, starving himself and praying every night, confessing his sins for long hours, in a despairing attempt to be deserving of heaven. But the more he studied the Bible an reflected on its mysteries, the more he realized that this was wasted effort.
The Best Books on the Reformation
- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World
- Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe–and Started the Protestant Reformation
- Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World
- Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
God did not treat sinners according to their just deserts – for, were he to do so, then none would ever be saved. If this was the somber lesson that had been taught by Augustine, then even more so was it evident in scripture. Paul, a Pharisee upright in every way, had not been redeemed by his zealousness for the law. Only after he had been directly confronted by the risen Christ, dazzled by him, and set on a spectacularly different path, had God marked him out as one of the elect. Luther, reading Paul, had been overwhelmed by a similar consciousness of divine grace. ‘I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’
Unworthy though he was, helpless and fit to be condemned, yet God still loved him. Luther, afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, loved God in turn. There was no other source of peace, no other source of comfort, to be had.
It was in this certitude that Luther had returned to bishop’s palace. He was asked again if he would renounce his writings. He refused, ‘My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.’
Luther was excommunicated. He left Worms both a hero and an outlaw. The drama of it all, reported in pamphlets, flooded the empire, and compounded his celebrity. And then he was ambushed. No one knew where he had disappeared. For months, the mystery persisted. The whole time, Luther was in the Wartburg, a castle that belonged to Friedrich, whose men had brought him there for safe-keeping. He spent a miserable time there, with no one to talk to or argue with.
At Worms, the emperor had charged him with arrogance, and demanded to know how it was that a single monk could possibly be right in an opinion ‘according to which all of Christianity will be and will always have been in error both in the past thousand years and even more in the present’. It was to answer that question, to share his good news of God’s grace, that Luther kept to his writing desk.
Finally, he settled on a project that was sufficient to ease his anguish. He read Scripture and opened his heart to the Spirit.
What better could he do, then, than break down the barrier that had for so long existed between the learned and the unlearned, and give to Christians unfamiliar with Latin the chance to experience a similar joy? Already, back in 1466, the Bible had been printed in German; but in a shoddy translation. Luther’s ambition was not merely to translate directly from the original Greek, but also to pay tribute to the beauties of everyday speech.
He completed his rendering of the New Testament in eleven weeks.
‘If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.’ Now, with his translation, Luther had given Germans everywhere the chance to do the same. All the structures and the traditions of the Roman Church, its hierarchies, and its canons, and its philosophy, had served merely to render scripture an entrapped and feeble thing, much as lime might prevent a bird from taking wing.
By liberating it, Luther had set Christians everywhere free to experience it as he had experienced it: as the means to hear God’s living voice. Opening their hearts to the Spirit, they would understand the true meaning of Christianity, just as he had come to understand it. There would be no need for discipline, no need for authority. Antichrist would be routed. All the Christian people at long last would be as one.
Source: Dominion