Reformation Church History

Transcription

1 Reformation Church History CH502 LESSON 03 of 24 W. Robert Godfrey, PhD Experience: President, Westminster Seminary California This is lecture 3 in the series of Reformation Church History. In this lecture we begin our look at the life and career of the reformer Martin Luther. Martin Luther is truly the pioneer and in many ways the dominant hero of the Reformation. He is a man whose life was tremendously dramatic in and of itself, and who as a pioneer had to wrestle with the early questions of the Reformation, with the first discovery of the key doctrines of the Reformation, and to face the difficulty of defending those doctrines in early years and begin to attract followers to himself. I hope in the course of this lecture, we can see something of the drama and the heroism, as well as the deep spiritual insight of Martin Luther as that pioneer reformer. Luther was born on November 10, 1483 in Eiselben, a town in electoral Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. He was born to a family that was rather well-off, especially as Luther grew. His father had begun as a worker in mines and had gathered funds to go into a small smelting business. His mother seems to have been somewhat well connected in that part of the world, and as a result the family reached a level of above-average comfortable living. Therefore Hans Luther was able to contemplate sending his talented son, Martin, to good schools. He sent Martin off to a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life in Magdeburg in 1498, and Luther also studied for some three years in the two of Eisenach. In 1501 he was able to enter the University of Erfurt, an important and distinguished German university, and he studied and succeeded rapidly in his studies in 1502 receiving a bachelor of arts of degree and in 1505, the master of arts degree. After receiving that master of arts degree, Luther had to make a basic choice about how he ought to pursue his studies and career, and his father was adamant that he wanted Martin to enter law school. From Hans Luther s point of view, law school was an opportunity for his talented son to advance the family fortunes and to make 1 of 14

2 a success of himself. In that regard, at least, the outlook of the sixteenth century was not so very different from the outlook of many in the twentieth century, and so as a dutiful son, Luther entered law school in May 1505 at Erfurt. The trouble was already that Luther was having questions of conscience of what he ought to do with his life, and particularly, Luther was troubled religiously. Luther had come from a pious family; his mother and father were devout followers of the medieval church, but they saw with some distress the excessive concern of conscience in their son Martin. Martin was genuinely troubled about his relationship to God. He was genuinely troubled with the question of his sin, and Martin seems to have made clear to his parents that he thought that perhaps he should consider joining a monastery. Joining a monastery from the point of view of his parents would have meant an end to his career in the world, an end to his advancing the family fortunes, and an end to the possibility of him providing them with grandchildren, and they were not eager to see him do that. But from Martin s point of view, the idea of joining a monastery was taking the medieval church at its word. The advice of the medieval church had always been that if you were very serious about your soul, if you were greatly concerned about your salvation, the place to pursue those questions was in a monastery. The monastery was considered to be by the medieval church the apostolic lifestyle: the selfrenunciation of the things of this world, the taking on oneself of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were thought to be the ways in which the apostles had lived, and they were called the counsels of perfection. These requirements of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the monastery were not seen as an obligation placed upon all Christians, but they were the advice given by Jesus and the apostles to Christians who wanted to live the best kind of life and to pursue their salvation with utmost seriousness. And therefore Luther, as a young man troubled about the state of his soul and of his relationship to God, found himself thinking more and more about the advice of his own church and the desirability of entering a monastery to find salvation. But this is a point to underscore because sometimes Luther is regarded as a rebel, as one who found the old church an impossible place for him to stay, as one who was perhaps by nature an innovator, and in fact quite the opposite is true. Luther was very conservative by nature, and that conservative seriousness is revealed in his attraction to the monastery. It was the old church that had said that the monastery was the place to work out his salvation. 2 of 14

3 Not long after he had entered law school, he had visited home and was on his way back to Erfurt. This was on July 17, 1505, and there came the famous story of Luther being caught in a thunderstorm, of a lightning bolt hitting fairly close to him, Luther falling to the ground, and in a panic crying out, Saint Ann, I will become a monk. In technical theological terms, such a cry is known as a foxhole prayer; that is, Luther finding himself in great distress suddenly made a vow, offered a prayer in which he promised for deliverance in this present distress to do something for God and for Saint Ann in the future. And what he promised to do was to become a monk. This vow was genuine, no doubt, but also represented what Luther wanted to do in any case, and he proceeded on to the city of Erfurt and there joined the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits. The Augustinian Hermits were a strict order, and Luther showed his seriousness in the pursuit of religion by joining that strict order. In the city of Erfurt there would have been many monasteries from which to choose, and some of them were rather lax institutions, but Luther was serious in the pursuit of his soul, and so he joined this Augustinian monastery where with seriousness of purpose he could study and pursue salvation. Before he informed his parents, he had joined the monastery and then wrote to tell them of his action and of his decision. His father was, therefore, trapped on several scores. His father was not happy about this, but he knew his son had taken a vow, and not only had he taken a vow, but also he had taken a vow to Saint Ann, the patron saint of miners, and therefore he really had taken a vow to his father s own patron saint. And in any case Luther was now in the monastery, and there was little that this father could do. Luther began then the process of theological study in preparation for ordination, a study that acquainted him well with medieval theology, a study that was done in the tradition of William of Ockham and the nominalist philosophical and theological tradition of the late Middle Ages. He particularly studied the work of Gabriel Biel, a follower of William of Ockham, and therefore Luther was trained in the most recent and what was then considered up-to-date scholastic theology of the late medieval period. He was shown to be a very able student, and the order began to think that he had a good teaching career ahead of him. 3 of 14

4 In 1508 they sent him for a year to teach at the new University of Wittenberg. The University of Wittenberg was located in the capital city of electoral Saxony, Wittenberg. It had been founded in 1502 by the elector to bring some prestige and honor to electoral Saxony. The university, therefore, was quite new. It was not a prestigious place to be at that period, but after one year studying there, Luther was transferred back to the University of Erfurt and taught there from 1509 to In 1510, while at Erfurt, he began a course of study that included learning Greek and Hebrew so that he could read the Bible in the original languages. This indicates an influence of the Renaissance on Luther and a growing sense in Luther that he wanted to get back to the sources. He wanted to make use not only of the medieval theology he had learned, but also of the opportunities to look more deeply into the Scripture and into the church fathers for himself. During this period he memorized great sections of Scripture. He had a phenomenal memory, and some have felt he nearly memorized all of the New Testament and vast portions of the Old Testament as well. He did indeed have a most remarkable talent for study and learning and a great memory. He also began to take an active role in the affairs of his order, the Augustinian Hermits, and in relation to some concerns of that order in late 1510 and early 1511, he took a trip to Rome to be involved in some of the issues before the bureaucracy of the Roman church there. The trip to Rome has been a source of a lot of Protestant speculation, especially in earlier times, and it was thought that when Luther found himself in Rome he was so appalled by the corruption and the spiritual indifference that it paved the way for his later rejection of the papacy. In fact, there doesn t seem to be any contemporary evidence that that happened. A German monk traveling to Rome would probably have expected to find a great deal of corruption, and it s unlikely that Luther was particularly surprised by what he found in Rome. Germans had long talked about the moral failings of Italians, and his trip would have only have tended to underscore that sort of conviction. In 1512 Luther received his doctoral degree as a doctor of the Bible, and in his reception of that degree, he had to take an oath. The oath was to defend and to teach the purity of the Scriptures. Later in his life, Luther would regard that oath as very important, because it was one of the few medieval oaths that did not contain at the same time a promise of obedience to the pope. Later in his 4 of 14

5 life as many challenged him as a rebel against the papacy, Luther would respond by saying, The papacy itself administered an oath to me that I was to defend and to teach the Scriptures and that s all that I have ever done. So Luther again was not by nature a rebel but took with all seriousness what the church in his day was teaching him, and this oath that the church itself required of him continued to be an encouragement to him later in his life. In late October of 1512, he was made then a professor of the Bible and theology at the University of Wittenberg and began a series of lectures commenting on biblical books. And the particular books on which he commented are important in understanding the biblical issues that he was thinking about, and if a fellow had set out to be a reformer, he probably could not have chosen a more important set of books to comment on. His first set of lectures in 1513 to 1515 were on the book of Psalms. His second set of lectures in 1515 to 1516 were on the book of Romans. From the book of Romans he went on in 1516 to 1517 to the book of Galatians, and in 1517 to 1518 he lectured on Hebrews. The system of education in those days meant that a professor in lecturing on the Bible would lecture on the book that he was studying, and students were not intended to be given a comprehensive introduction to the Bible. Rather, they were supposed to observe their professor in the way in which he approached the text and by modeling themselves after the professor s approach to the text, it was thought that they learned to be able to interpret any text on their own or make progress toward that goal. And so Luther in these crucial years between 1513 and 1518 was looking at some central parts of the Scripture as they might relate to some of the issues dominant in the Protestant Reformation. As a professor, he also was giving himself to work as a pastor. He was appointed a district vicar over several of the monasteries of the Augustinian Hermits, which gave him some responsibility to visit and to find out what was going on in those monasteries. That appointment took place in 1514 or And he became involved as People s Priest in Wittenberg. That appointment came in 1516 or perhaps earlier, but it carried with it a responsibility to preach in the church in Wittenberg to the common people, to the lay people, and planted in Luther some sense of responsibility toward those people. And so he began to have both an intellectual investigation of the Scriptures, which led him to further reflection on the theological and philosophical methodology of the church in his period, and at the same time was brought in contact with some of the spiritual needs of the common people in his day. 5 of 14

6 This led to two important events in In 1517 Martin Luther was to write two important sets of theses. The second set of Ninety-Five Theses that are the most famous, but the first set of theses are also quite important. Those theses were theses against scholasticism, and in those theses, Luther revealed a growing criticism of Aristotle, a growing sense that a lot of the philosophical approaches of late medieval scholasticism were in fact unbiblical and undermined sound biblical theology and led him then to have an increasingly critical spirit about what had been accomplished in medieval theology. Those theses were primarily of concern to theologians and to scholars and were perhaps not very well known when he first published them, but they re an important insight into Luther s own thought. There are earlier indications when one looks carefully at Luther s earliest writings that there is a measure of distancing of himself from some of the traditional ways of speaking and looking at theology, and these theses against scholasticism are another stage in that development. The more famous theses that Luther produced in 1517 were his Ninety-Five Theses, which is commonly believed and I think still true that he nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, Again, that action of nailing the theses to the church door is sometimes looked at as a kind of rebellious action, but it ought to be borne in mind that the church door was used as a regular place for posting academic announcements, and the nailing of ninetyfive theses in Latin on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517 was probably not a lot more inflammatory than nailing ninetyfive theses on a church door in Latin today would be. That is to say, theses in Latin could be read only by the small academic and scholarly community there in Wittenberg. This was not an appeal to common people, but it was an effort to engage the theological community in debate over the points that Martin Luther wanted to make. It appears that at the same time that he nailed these theses to the church door, he also sent them off to his ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop, Albrecht of Mainz. The occasion for this second set of theses, these Ninety-Five Theses, was a pastoral concern for the life of the people there in Wittenberg, and these Ninety- Five Theses were occasioned by the selling of indulgences, by the selling of that general indulgence that was supposed to help pay for Saint Peter s in Rome. The elector of Saxoy, Frederick, who would show himself over and over again to be a good friend 6 of 14

7 to Luther, had forbidden the sale of this general indulgence in electoral Saxony itself, but John Tetzel, the man who had been appointed the salesman for this indulgence, had come very close to the border of Saxony and it was easy for people from Wittenberg to travel a short distance to be able to buy this indulgence. Luther had learned that in fact they were buying this indulgence, that they were being confused as they bought it, that they were thinking that they were buying the forgiveness of sins, and Luther, therefore, both as a pastor and as a scholar was very concerned about what people were thinking and how their spiritual state was being affected by these activities. As a result he took up the pen to present some issues for debate in the life of the church about the matter of indulgences. And I d like to read just a few of those theses so we can get some sense of what Luther was complaining about and what he was writing about. In the first thesis Luther writes, When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said repent, He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence. Then on to Thesis 2, The word cannot be properly understood as referring to the sacrament of penance; that is, confession and satisfaction as administered by the clergy. These first two theses make a kind of Renaissance point, a humanist point. The medieval church in defense of his sacraments of penance had often appealed to the words of Jesus in Matthew 4:17, Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. But in the Latin translation of those words, the translation had read paenitentiam agite, which means do penance for the kingdom of God is at hand, and so the medieval church, dependent only on the Latin translation, had said, You see, there are the words of our Lord. Do penance, and therefore those words serve as a defense of the sacrament of penance. Luther, having looked at the Greek, said, No, the words do not say do penance at all. What they say is repent, and therefore those words cannot be understood as referring immediately and directly to the sacrament of penance. Thesis 3 goes on to say, Yet the meaning of those words is not restricted to penitence in one s heart, for such penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh. Luther wanted to make clear then in a rather conservative way in Thesis 3 that he was not trying to argue that repentance was purely a matter of the heart but that repentance had to be manifested in external ways and in external actions. And in effect, Luther is going on to say, This verse, therefore, has some bearing on the sacrament of penance, and in fact as we read the Ninety- Five Theses, we find that Luther is not attacking the sacrament 7 of 14

8 of penance at all, and indeed we ll see he s not attacking the institution of indulgences even. What he is attacking is what he sees as gross abuse in the matter of indulgences. Thesis 6, for example, says, The pope himself cannot remit guilt, but only declare and confirm that it has been remitted by God. Or at most, he can remit it in cases reserved to his discretion, except for these cases, the guilt remains untouched. That is, Luther is arguing that we must recognize that the pope s power, even though significant, is limited and that the pope has no right to remove guilt. He can only administer God s removing of guilt, unless perhaps in the case where the pope has himself assigned a penalty. In Thesis 8 Luther writes, The penitential canons, that is, the canons of the sacrament of penance, apply only to men who are still alive and according to the canons themselves, none applies to the dead. Here Luther is attacking a papal policy and teaching, but a papal policy and teaching that as we ve seen before in an earlier lecture is only about fifty years old. Luther is therefore arguing that the papacy has extended its usage of the sacrament of penance and the application of the sacrament of penance in an area that is illegitimate, namely, in reference to the dead. And while Luther therefore is criticizing the papacy and its policies at that point, it should be borne in mind that he no doubt viewed that as a recent innovation and an issue still for debate in the life of the church. Thesis 27 shows that Luther was acquainted with the sale tactics of Tetzel. Tetzel it is reported had sort of a sales slogan or a sales jingle that he used when he was selling the indulgence after making an emotional appeal about the sufferings of one s loved ones in purgatory and the flames that were tormenting there. Then Tetzel would conclude with a sales slogan which something like, As soon as the coin in the coffer clings, another soul from purgatory springs, and so in Thesis 27 Luther wrote, There is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of purgatory immediately as the money clinks in the bottom of the chest. And by that Luther was saying in effect that neither the pope nor the living church had a right to guarantee that a soul could be immediately released from purgatory by a general indulgence. In Thesis 32, Luther goes on to say, All those who believe themselves certain of their own salvation by means of letters of indulgence will be eternally damned together with their teachers. This is a very strong statement. It s not a statement against the traditional teaching of the church. The church had 8 of 14

9 never said letters of indulgence guaranteed salvation, but Luther was concerned that that was an implication being drawn by common people, that it was a point of view that seemed to be taught in Luther s mind by people like Tetzel or at least was not made clear, and so he comes down very strongly saying that that point of view is damnable, and Luther wants to take the strongest possible stand against such teaching. Later in the theses, Thesis 71, Luther goes on to show his still quite conservative stance when he says, Let him be anathema and accursed who denies the apostolic character of the indulgences. That is to say, Luther is saying the indulgence idea, the idea that the satisfaction element of the sacrament of penance can be reduced by an action of the church. That idea Luther says is still a valid and correct idea, and so we see here that Luther is not attacking the sacrament of penance, and he s not attacking even the indulgence idea, he s attacking the abuse and misuse of the indulgence as he sees them in his own day. The seriousness of the issue for Luther from a pastoral point of view comes out in Theses 81 and 82. There Luther writes, This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for learned men to guard their respect due to the pope against false accusations, or at least from the keen criticisms of the papacy. That is to say, Luther is arguing the papacy is being brought into disrepute by the sale of these indulgences, and it s very difficult for us who as theologians want to defend the papacy to be able to do it effectively. And then in Thesis 82 he goes on to show some of the questions and accusations being raised by the laity. He says, They ask, for example, Why does not the pope liberate everyone from purgatory for the sake of love, a most holy thing, and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing with which to build Saint Peter s Church, a very minor purpose. Luther is putting in the mouths of the laymen, then, this complaint. If the pope has control over purgatory, why doesn t he as an act of love release everybody, instead as an act of making money, releasing only some? Surely it would be more admirable for him to release all for the sake of love than it is to release some for the rather insignificant purpose of building a church. And although Luther puts this complaint in the mouths of the people, it s rather clear it s also the complaint that Luther himself feels at this point, that the church is undermining its own moral authority. 9 of 14

10 The effect of these Ninety-Five Theses was dramatic, but the dramatic effect of the theses was a result not of Luther s action but of action of others. Others unbeknownst to Luther took those Ninety-Five Theses, translated them into German, published them, and then distributed them. That was not Luther s action. It was not even apparently Luther s desire, but it was an event that took place that suddenly made Luther a very well-known and very public figure. At this moment in late 1517 and on into 1518, when Luther is becoming a public figure, it is worth pausing to note that in the Ninety-Five Theses themselves, there is nothing of what we will later regard as distinctively Lutheran or Protestant doctrine. There is no discussion of the sole authority of Scripture. There is no discussion of justification by grace through faith. All of those themes are entirely absent from the Ninety-Five Theses. And part of the explanation for that is simply that that s not what those theses were about, and when one looks at the quite conservative nature of the theses, it raises at this point for discussion the question, When in fact did Luther come to his evangelical breakthrough? When in fact did Luther come to a point when he felt that for himself he understood the gospel? That has been an issue that has been debated at great length among Luther scholars, and it s not possible for us to reach a definitive answer to the date of that question here. What we do note is that Luther later in his life looked back on a time which he described as a time when he sat wrestling with spiritual questions in the tower, in the tower of the building in Wittenberg where he had his study, and he referred to that experience, that quite dramatic experience as his turmerlebnis, his tower experience, and that experience is regularly referred to as Luther s evangelical breakthrough. That evangelical breakthrough came about through the wrestling that Luther had gone through for years. For years in the monastery, and in the same time when he was going through all of this study and all of this lecturing and all of this pastoral work, Luther continued to be plagued by questions about his own soul. He continued to wrestle with those issues that had brought him into the monastery in the first place, those issues of how does his soul relate to God. And in the monastery, he gave himself with all seriousness then to the disciplines that the monks had always pursued to seek salvation. He spent not only a great time in study, but he spent long hours in prayer. He would spend all night awake 10 of 14

11 in prayer. He would fast to weaken the body and to subdue the body to discipline. He would even use at times some of the more extreme monastic disciplines, taking a rope and tying knots into it and beating his back until sometimes he would bleed, again to try to bring himself into submission, to conquer the sin he saw in himself. He also made use of the sacrament of penance himself. He went frequently to his father confessor to confess his sins and to seek forgiveness, and indeed Luther became, it appeared, a pest in the monastery for his father confessor. Luther was forever coming with sins to confess until at one point his father confessor said to him, Brother Martin, go away and don t come back again until you have something important to confess. But Luther, you see, was taking sin with an utmost kind of seriousness, and Luther felt that his sins would carry his soul down to hell, and so with a kind of almost fanatical energy, he pursued the church s own advice to make use of the sacrament of penance that his sins might be forgiven and overcome. And yet for all of this activity and for all of this use of the advice of the church, Luther found no peace for his conscience. He came to be close to his superior in the monastery and in the Augustinian Hermit order, a very wise and godly man by the name of Johann von Staupitz, and Staupitz tried to counsel Luther, and indeed he gave him some counsel that really had a very Protestant ring to it. Staupitz said, Don t look at yourself, Luther; look at the wounds of Christ and find comfort and hope in them. But even there, Luther could not follow that advice because hanging over him was the sense that God was a God of purity, of holiness, of righteousness, and of justice, and that He could not abide sin and that any sin left unconfessed and unatoned for could well carry his soul to hell. And so Luther as he continued to study the Scripture wrote that one phrase particularly stuck in his mind. It was the phrase the righteousness of God. And Luther came to say that righteousness of God became a source of the deepest kind of spiritual anguish for him. If God is righteous, then He will surely damn me as a sinner because try as I might, labor as I might, follow the advice of the church as I might, I cannot meet God s righteous standard. And Luther came to say, If God is alive, then I am dead. And even further he came to a point where he said, I came really to hate God. I came to hate the God who made requirements on me that I could not measure up to. And so Luther was a man who in spite of all the work he was able to do, in spite of all of the teaching and pastoral work he could do, nonetheless was a man who dealt with an inner kind of torment. 11 of 14

12 That torment was not entirely surprising or entirely unusual in the monastery; in fact, there was a medieval saying that doubt makes the monk. It was doubt that brought many people into the monastery, and yet there was a depth and a seriousness of wrestling with these spiritual questions that was tremendous in the heart of Luther. We can see in Luther s writings movement toward what will eventually become his full Protestant position, but although we can trace gradual steps of movement in his theology, for Luther himself, there was a decisive moment in which everything came together theologically or at least the heart of his evangelical insight came together, and that came together as we ve said in the tower for Luther when he was meditating on Romans 1: There he was reading about how in the gospel the righteousness of God was revealed. And there was that phrase, you see, the righteousness of God, and Luther kept looking at that phrase as the righteousness that God demanded, and Luther could find no gospel in it. He could find no good news in the notion that God was a God who demanded righteousness from us that we could never accomplish. And the tower experience, the evangelical breakthrough, Luther said was when suddenly he came to realize that the gospel was not the righteousness that God demanded, but the righteousness that God gave in Christ, and he said suddenly that verse took on a whole new meaning when he read it in that way, for in the gospel, in the good news, the righteousness of God is revealed, the just shall be live by faith. The justified ones, the ones declared righteous by God, are declared righteous not by their actions but by faith in Jesus Christ. And Luther said it was like the world being turned upside down. It was like the gates of paradise suddenly being opened for him. Suddenly everything that he hadn t understood and couldn t understand began to take place, and he said his mind raced through the Scriptures with which he was so familiar, and all of those Scriptures that had been so troublesome to him now suddenly took on this new meaning and this new dimension, and for Martin Luther this was an evangelical breakthrough indeed. Suddenly there was a gospel. Suddenly there was good news. For many in the Middle Ages the gospel had been defined as the new law, and indeed it was a law that came with more seriousness and more earnestness and more demands than the old law, but for Luther suddenly, there was the recognition that the gospel was not the new law, but the gospel was the good news about what God had done for sinners who could not help themselves. 12 of 14

13 And throughout the rest of his theological career, Luther was concerned to distinguish, to make the sharpest kind of distinction between the law and the gospel as two entirely different elements in God s work and God s way. So there can be no doubt that for Luther there was a dramatic moment when many pieces that he had perhaps been gradually gathering fell into place. But still the question remains, When did that happen? And there is quite a wide range of opinion among scholars on that point, some seeing it happened rather early, perhaps as early as 1514 or even earlier, others wanting to see it probably happening in 1515 or 1516; still others suggesting that it may not have happened until as late as And in fact when Luther discusses that evangelical breakthrough rather late in his life when he writes the preface to his Latin writings in the 1540s, it appears from what he writes there that the latter date is the more likely. Now to be sure, Luther is writing more than tenty years after the fact, and Luther may not be intending to give us an exact chronology, but it is at least possible and indeed from all of the evidence, it seems to me probably that Luther came to that evangelical breakthrough after the Ninety-Five Theses were posted on the church door. It may be that in the public arena that he now found himself and in the pressure to be a teacher of the church, in the kinds of questions that were now forced upon him, he came to a greater clarity and indeed to the breakthrough of insight that would be the basis of his theology. But whenever that breakthrough exactly occurred, it did occur,and it had the most important sorts of consequences in his life, and we begin to see him teaching rather clearly of the insights of that breakthrough in In 1518 he was invited in April to Heidelberg, to the city of Heidelberg, to present something of his ideas and his teachings, and in that presentation, in what is known as the Heidelberg disputation, he presents in much clearer gospel form than anything we see before in his writings, that there is a great distinction in theology between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory. The theology of glory is founded on man s wisdom and on man s works, whereas the theology of the cross is a theology of foolishness that denies man s wisdom and denies man s works and rests instead upon Christ s work, upon the folly of the cross. And so Luther said the great issue before the church in his day as he spoke there in Heidelberg in April 1518, Are we going to follow a theology of glory that seems so sensible, that seems to right by worldly standards, a theology that says we have to understand by the use of our minds and then we have to 13 of 14

14 do by our own moral energy to be right with God, or are we going to follow a theology of the cross which seems to so wrong by the world s standards, which seems, in fact, foolish according to the standards of the world, and are we going to say that we really find God on the cross, we find salvation on the cross, it s not in our wisdom or in our works, but it is in God s action that we are to find our salvation? The Heidelberg disputation created quite a stir and attracted even more attention to Luther and indeed led to a feeling on the part of authorities in the church that action needed to be taken. In July 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome for trial, and in August an order went out for his arrest. His elector, his prince, Frederick, came to his defense and insisted that any investigation and trial of Luther had to take place on German soil, an insistence that after all Luther was a German citizen, and he protected Luther. But the issues would not go away. The investigations would not go away, and in our next lecture we ll take up the continuing story of Luther as a public defender of his new Reformation insights. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 14 of 14