Most of the monks at the Black Cloister in Erfurt were disappointed in Egidius’s decision to merge all the monasteries in Saxony, and wanted to again appeal the issue to Rome. Luther did not join in the clamor, believing it better to put the matter to rest. His recalcitrance led his fellow monks to believe that he had abandoned them and was personally aligned with Staupitz, and Luther saw no point in arguing. Perhaps there was some truth to it. In the spring of 1512 Staupitz had Luther transferred back to the Augustinian house in Wittenberg, this time permanently.
Located in north-central Germany on the banks of the River Elbe, Wittenberg—sometimes sarcastically called the Gem of Thuringia—was a small, bland city of about 2000 people. Just nine-tenths of a mile in length, it was built on a sand dune called the White Hillock, Witten-Berg. City streets were narrow and unpaved, rutted and often muddy. Many peasants lived in tiny one-room houses, built with wooden sides and thatched roofs, which stood close together. Some wealthier merchants owned more elaborate homes of brick and mortar. They were most often heated by coal, which was cheaper than wood but fouled the air. Most of the daily activity centered around the market and the guild hall, from which the local government operated haphazardly. In true German tradition, Wittenberg’s residents enjoyed their beer: when Luther arrived, 172 of 400 households had brewing licenses, and taverns were located on most street corners. A small shop boasted a newly-invented printing press. Game was plentiful in the nearby woods, although most peasants dared not often venture into the foreboding darkness. The region’s soil was just rich enough so that farmers could produce fruit, vegetables, and grain in sufficient quantities to feed their families and, it was hoped, pay their landlords the monthly rent. In time Luther grew to love Wittenberg and even wrote a little poem, poking fun at its unremarkable trappings:
Ländle, ländle.
Sie sind nur ein Haufen Sand.
Wenn ich Sie graben, ist der Boden Licht.
Wenn ich Sie ernten, ist der Ertrag gering.
Little land, little land,
You are but a heap of sand.
If I dig you, the soil is light.
If I reap you, the yield is slight.1
The city’s most prestigious resident was the Elector Frederick the Wise, who lived in a reconstructed castle, bustling with servants and decorated with fine tapestries, on the western edge of the city. Frederick’s ambition was to transform Wittenberg into “the Rome of Germany.” The Schlosskirche, or Castle Church, was Wittenberg’s greatest treasure, and Frederick had stocked the church with relics that he had procured from years of barter, exchange, and negotiation with princes throughout Europe. He envisioned that visitors would flock to Wittenberg and pay for the privilege of viewing holy articles and thereby receive years off from their time in purgatory. In 1509, three years before Luther’s arrival, Frederick’s collection numbered an impressive 5,005 relics, including the thumb of St. Anne, hay stalks from the manger of Jesus, milk from the Virgin Mary, a tooth of St. Jerome, one piece of gold brought to Bethlehem by Wise Men, a piece of bread eaten at the Last Supper, and a stone upon which Jesus had stood before he ascended into heaven. It was calculated that if a sinner paid the required fees and viewed each and every relic on display, his purgatorial punishment would decrease by 1,443 years. Within ten years Frederick counted 19,013 relics in his collection, and the potential decrease in purgatory time totaled exactly 127,799 years and 116 days. Frederick’s entire collection was put on public display each year on November first, All Saints Day.2
Wittenberg’s second attraction—and Frederick’s other treasure—was the University itself, comprised of a few small buildings in the center of town. It was founded by Imperial Charter in July 1502—Frederick’s support of the institution was a challenge to his cousin Duke George’s university at Leipzig—and was approved by papal decree. Frederick worked strenuously to bring the most distinguished faculty to Wittenberg and it included, at the time of Luther’s arrival, the theologians Andreas Karlstadt, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, and Jodocus Trutfetter, in addition to Staupitz. Luther was particularly pleased to see Trutfetter, who had been one of Luther’s instructors at Erfurt, where he also served as rector.
Luther moved into the cloister, settling in a small room above a connecting arch, at the opposite end of town from the Castle Church. In May he accompanied Staupitz to Cologne, where both men participated in an assembly of Augustinians. Upon their return, on a warm June day, Staupitz took Luther outside the monastery and the two men sat down under a pear tree. By now Staupitz had seen and heard enough of Luther to give him some career advice. Luther should study for his doctorate degree, counseled Staupitz. He should become a professor of theology there, at the University of Wittenberg, and should become the preacher at the adjoining Castle Church, as well. Predictably, Luther balked, and he stammered out a dozen reasons why he was not up to the task. He was too young, too inexperienced. He doubted that he would last three months on the job. But Staupitz persisted. He needed Luther’s help, for he was falling behind in his own duties. He was constantly travelling from monastery to monastery throughout the region. He was expected to lecture on the Bible to the university’s theology faculty and preach several times each week. In effect he now proposed to groom Luther to be his successor. When Luther argued that all the work might kill him, Staupitz laughed at Luther’s habit of looking at things too seriously. If Luther did die, Staupitz joked, “there was plenty of work for doctors to do in heaven.”3
Luther’s deep sense of indebtedness to Staupitz, and his irrepressible belief in duty and commitment, finally led him to agree. “With a joke Staupitz refuted me,” he said. “I have been called to this work, and I was compelled to become a doctor without any initiative of my own but out of pure obedience.”4 Luther worked quickly to meet his remaining academic requirements, and then had only to apply for his doctorate licensure, an expensive undertaking at the cost of fifty gulden. With some effort Staupitz persuaded Frederick the Wise that Luther was a remarkably gifted theologian and would make an excellent addition to the faculty, and therefore deserving of financial backing. Frederick had heard Luther preach a time or two, and had been impressed with his oratorical skills. He mulled over Staupitz’s request for nearly a year, and then agreed; he would pay the licensure fee on condition that Luther remain at Wittenberg for the rest of his life, where he would be responsible for “lectureship on the Bible in the theological faculty.”5
Elector Frederick the Wise, flanked by Luther and Melanchthon. Painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1530 (The Granger Collection, New York).
In early October 1512 Luther travelled to Leipzig and collected the monies from Frederick’s representatives. On October 18 he appeared before the Wittenberg faculty for the presentation ceremony. He promised to “teach only true doctrine” of the Catholic Church, and to report all who “promoted falsehood.”6 (Curiously, no specific oath to Rome or to the Pope was required, perhaps a foreshadowing of Germany’s eventual move to religious independence.) A brown woolen doctor’s cap was placed on Luther’s head, and the silver doctor’s ring was placed on his hand. Luther took careful note of the doctorate’s insignia, which included an open and closed book. The open book was of course the Bible, and represented the ways in which God revealed himself to man. The closed book represented the secrets that God kept from man. A few days later, as the Castle Church bells chimed, Dr. Martin Luther was received by the full Senate of the theology faculty at the University of Wittenberg. He would hold this position until his death in 1546.
For the next five years of his life Luther immersed himself in the study of theology. In the Middle Ages theology was known as “the Queen of all disciplines” because its primary purpose was to support the church and its teachings. All other subjects, including philosophy, language, rhetoric, logic, and even mathematics, existed only to assist the understanding of prevailing Christian doctrine. The orthodox theologian did not rely primarily on the Bible. Rather, he utilized the medieval strategy of exegesis, relying upon biblical commentaries such as Lombard’s Sentences, which interpreted the literal meaning of the sacred text in a sea of allegory. These commentaries were by nature burdensome, systematic, and inflexible. There was little room for original thought or debate in this framework. Intellectual or humanistic initiative, to the extent that it questioned or contradicted tradition and structure, was neither accepted nor encouraged. University courses taught in this matter were painstakingly tedious; some instructors took a year or more to cover one book of the Bible.
The rigidity of the system offered Luther the intellectual challenge he expected, but not the spiritual enlightenment he craved. Commentaries did not adequately address the great mystery, the central question that plagued and terrorized him: How could a sinful man, much less a conscientious Christian, stand before a judgmental God with any assurance of gaining eternal salvation? Luther wanted desperately to find solace in a loving, merciful God, but God’s unfathomable omnipotence frightened him. “It is God’s eternity,” he wrote, his “holiness and power which thus continuously threaten man throughout the whole of his life…. God’s ever-present judgment clutches man in the loneliness of his conscience, and with his every breath conveys him to the Almighty and Holy One to prosper or destroy.”7 Luther’s turmoil began to manifest itself by taking a toll on his health. He slept poorly, often waking up in cold sweats, and suffered from headaches and constipation. The only hope for a remedy, he believed, was to work harder.
Not content to constrict himself to the traditional framework but still, at this early stage of his academic career, unwilling to stray too far from it, Luther looked for ways to expand. Determined to better understand the true meaning of the Bible, he came to reject the prevailing method of exegesis. Instead, he was certain that Holy Scripture, standing alone, was solely authoritative. Armed with this conviction he spent many months studying Greek and Hebrew, thus gaining a full understanding of original languages in which the Bible was written. He insisted on a literal translation of the Bible, the sensus literalis, grammaticus, historicus, for in this way, he reasoned, the literal, and not allegorical, truth could be gained.
He also familiarized himself with the writings of St. Augustine, whose ideas about the nature of faith, God’s grace, and the sinful nature of man, among others, formed the backbone of early Christian thought. Luther felt that the teachings of Augustine, however, had diminished in importance through the centuries and been forced to give way to the theories of the philosophers Averroes, Aquinas, and Aristotle, whom he despised. He then turned to the book of Genesis, ruminating on the Almighty, the world’s creator and, for Luther, the source of all his pain and pleasure he had come to know in life. In 1513 he began an analysis and then a series of lectures on the Psalms, his first detailed study of the book since he had memorized them in the early days of monastic life. He truly loved the Psalms, looking to them for inspiration and guidance. Indeed, all one needed to know about living a Christian life, Luther thought, might be found in the Psalms. “Would you see the Holy Christian Church portrayed with living color and form, fastened together in one place?” he wrote. “Take your Psalter, and you have a fine, crystal-clear mirror which will show you what Christianity is.”8 Confident in his methodology of literal interpretation of Scripture, aided by the guiding words of St. Augustine, and inspired by Genesis and the Psalms, Luther was slowly but steadily developing his own personal, spiritual inquiry: he sought “that theology which extracts the nut from the shell, the grain from the husk, the marrow from the bone.”9
*
In the fall of 1515 Luther began a series of lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, for Luther (and most Christians then and now), the greatest of all theologians and the man most responsible for delivering and explaining God’s Word. In November Luther turned to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, lectures that would conclude nearly a year later in September 1516. He then analyzed Galatians and Hebrews. In his work Luther utilized a brand new edition of the New Testament, printed in Greek, which had been prepared by the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus. As he read, he recorded his notes in the oversized margins of the text; many of those notes survive and provide fascinating insight into his thought process and the revolutionary doctrines that he was formulating. Steadily, he began to work through what was to be a new understanding of man’s relationship with God.
Meanwhile, Luther’s obligations at the University increased. He was given new responsibilities, new tasks, and new duties. When the town priest of Wittenberg became ill, Luther served as substitute preacher. This meant that on some Sundays he preached three times in one day. He was appointed the Provincial Vicar for Meissen and Thuringia. He took over administrative superintendent duties of eleven convents, which he personally visited once each year. He was also charged with the spiritual welfare of all monks and nuns in the region, correcting their missteps, comforting their malcontent, advising their temptations, and even tending to the legal affairs of the different locales. “I could use two secretaries,” he wrote to a friend. “I do almost nothing during the day but write letters…. I am a preacher at the monastery, a reader at meals…, a parish preacher, director of studies, supervisor of eleven monasteries, superintendent of the fish pond at Litzkau, referee of a squabble at Torgau, lecturer on Paul, a collector of materials for a commentary on the Psalms, and then, as I said, I am overwhelmed with letters. I rarely have time for the required daily prayers and for saying Mass, not to mention my own temptations with the world, the flesh, and the devil.” He could not resist poking a little fun at himself. “You see how lazy I am!” he wrote. Luther later remembered that at the end of the day that it was all he could do to fall into bed, exhausted, upon sheets that he did not have time to wash.10
His dynamic lectures at the University quickly became popular. Luther was regimented in his work, addressing his students at six o’clock each morning and often again in the afternoons. “I sense with certainty the weight upon my neck of this task,” Luther wrote, “which for a long time, all in vain, I was reluctant to undertake and to which I agreed only when compelled to do so on orders.”11 He had a memorable presence in the classroom, towering over his students from a perch at the front of the lecture hall, bundled up in bulky layers against chilly German mornings, a wool cap on his head. His unusual appearance aside, he impressed his students with his clarity and earnestness, and he drew the constant admiration of his peers, as well. One friar from Cologne, a fellow Augustinian named Augustine Himmel, attended some of Luther’s early lectures. “He was a man of middling height, with a voice both sharp and gentle,” recalled Himmel. “It was soft in tone, sharp in the enunciation of syllables, words and sentences. He spoke neither too rapidly nor too slowly, but evenly and without hesitation, as well as very clearly and so logically that each part flowed naturally out of what went before. He did not get lost in a maze of language, but first expounded the individual words, then the sentences, so that one could see how the content of the exposition arose and flowed out of the text itself. For it all hung together in order, word, matter, natural and moral philosophy … there was never anything in his lectures that was not relevant and full of meaning.”12
Luther’s ideas and biblical interpretations evolved slowly during these early years of his academic career. “I did not learn my theology all at once,” he recalled, “but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me. Keep in mind that…. I was all alone and one of those who, as St. Augustine says of himself, have become proficient by writing and teaching. I was not one of those who from nothing suddenly becomes the topmost, though they are nothing and have neither labored nor been tempted nor become experienced, but have with one look at the Scriptures exhausted their entire spirit.”13 He was feeling his way, trusting his instincts, and formulating a new, personal theology.
Luther examined the problem that had plagued him for so many years. How could man, a pathetic sinner, satisfy an angry God who demanded perfection? Luther’s image of God was the image all Christians had, the image that the Church itself had for centuries perpetuated. God was a terrible, frightening, all-powerful being whose purpose, whose very existence, was to sit in terrible judgment of the world he had created. God was the Divine Majesty who expected the impossible of his children, and who then sentenced them to eternal damnation for failure to measure up to the unreachable standards he had established. Death and damnation seemed a certainty, and under this fear Luther lived his life.
Yet there was the promise of salvation. The hope for eternal life in God’s heaven was the centerpiece, the distinguishing mark of Christian belief. And the key to salvation centered on the concept of justification, or God’s act of declaring a sinner righteous. Gaining an understanding of the righteousness of God lay at the root of Luther’s quest, his obsession, for personal holiness. It is also what tormented him. He wrote, “I hated those words, ‘the righteousness of God,’ which, according to the custom and the use of all teachers, I had been taught to understand in the philosophical sense with respect to the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.” The idea of a punishing God tore at Luther’s soul and rendered worthless all his earthly efforts at piety and goodness. “I did not love, indeed I hated that God who punished sinners,” said Luther. “Though I lived as a monk without reproach I felt, with the most disturbed conscience imaginable, that I was a sinner before God…. Secretly I was angry with God.” He described his anger as “monstrous, silent, if not blasphemous” and a “murmuring” of his heart. He obsessed over the “fierce battle” that raged in “his troubled conscience.” Luther fumed, “As if indeed it is not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through eternal sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Ten Commandments,” now God added “pain to the gospel … by threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!”14 He recognized the horrible irony of his life: he hated the same God he was devoted to serving.
But then a light illuminated the darkness that enveloped him. As Luther “meditated night and day” on St. Paul’s writings, he focused on Romans 1:16–17: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” The true meaning of these words struck Luther like a lightning bolt. “God had mercy on me,” he later wrote. “I realized the significance of the context, namely: In it the justice of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous (just) shall live.”15 Here, in that phrase, was the very meaning of the gospel, the explanation for Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. Here the intention of the Lord was revealed. And here, for Luther, at last came relief from the torment, from his hell on earth, and from his paralyzing fear of death. Luther now understood that the justice of God meant justice through God’s gift of faith. God’s justice did not depend on human action. It was not the mighty and punishing justice that, the Church taught, was to be feared. Rather, God’s justice is passively received. It could not be earned because it had already been given; it could not be attained because it was already present. Believers—Christians—were justified by faith alone. Their salvation, their standing before God, was in no way related to personal merit. They were received by God, justified by Christ for them. Luther now believed, absolutely, that the righteousness of God was not to be feared, but embraced. “He who through faith is just shall live.”
It was for Luther a most joyous revelation. “Now I exalted in that sweetest phrase,” he said, “with as much love as I had previously hated the words ‘justice of God.’” Through this new interpretation of St. Paul’s declaration, Luther felt that he “was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” He excitedly examined biblical passages in light of his discovery, working day and night, verifying what he already knew. He found, in Romans, Corinthians, Philippians, and Colossians, “analogies in other terms, such as ‘the work of God,’ by which he works in us; ‘the power of God,’ by which he makes us strong; ‘the wisdom of God,’ by which he makes us wise; ‘the strength of God,’ ‘the salvation of God,’ ‘the glory of God.’”16
Luther pressed on. “Afterwards I read Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter, and contrary to expectation I found that he also interprets the justice of God in a similar manner: the justice in which God clothes us when he justifies us. And even though this was still expressed imperfectly, and concerning imputation Augustine did not explain everything clearly, yet it was a delight to find a justice of God by which we are justified being taught.”17 In the transforming words of St. Paul, Luther was finding answers to his spiritual cravings. From Augustine came intellectual vindication, as well.
Now Luther’s real work began. Emboldened by his new interpretation of God’s righteousness, he examined salvation. For this he looked to the cross. God had sent his son, the Christ, to save the very world he condemned. Thus God the Terrible was at the same time God the Merciful. Why, after all, would God desire that sinners should die? Why had he sent his son if he did not desire that sinners should live? Luther concluded that just as there must be a connection between these dual natures of God, there must be a connection between poor sinners (God’s children) and Jesus the Savior (God’s only begotten son). Jesus, of course, had been rejected by his Father. Alone on the cross of Calvary, suffering the agony of persecution and mercilessly tortured in front of his family and followers, Jesus believed he had been abandoned. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he cried out from the cross, just moments before he died and descended into hell. God’s own son had felt humiliation, anger, desolation, betrayal, and rejection—and God was the source of all of it. Jesus had known, a thousand times more, infinitely more, the very pain Luther had known. Jesus Christ had his own Anfechtungen.
This same Christ, while the Son of Man, was also the Son of God, and therefore perfect and without sin. Thus, in his duality he was of mankind and yet the opposite of mankind. He could only have felt the incalculable weakness and desperation of the cross because he had shouldered the burden of mankind’s sins as he suffered his horrible death. He had not just taken on sin, surmised Luther, he had become sin, the sin of all God’s children. In his agony, and through it, Christ became the Redeemer. The great and mysterious God had sent his son to die, not for himself, but for mankind. There on the cross was the message. God in his weakness—manifested in the suffering and death of his son—was also God in his almighty strength, dying so that the world might live. Luther loved the concept of God’s dual nature. The Savior of the world had been born, after all, in a filthy stable, attended not by royalty and magnificence but shepherds and lowly animals. He had expressed the power of God not with displays of thunder and might but messages of love and peace. The duality of God was made apparent everywhere. God’s power, understood Luther, was in fact hidden in his weakness, and it went further: “God’s wisdom (was hidden) in folly, his goodness in severity, his justice in sins, and his mercy in anger.” Luther’s ruminations would ultimately become known as his Theology of the Cross, the bedrock of his Christian belief.18
For Luther, God’s righteousness was more than the quality and manner by which he judged mankind. God’s righteousness was also something that God gave to believers. It was a gift, given in mercy to the undeserving. God’s justice was his grace. And it made sinners acceptable in his presence. God judged, to be sure, but he did so solely for the purpose of giving sinners his justice in Christ, his son, the Savior. This was, to Luther, “passive righteousness,” for to receive it a sinner only had to believe.
And if righteousness was truly a gift, it simply could not be earned. Sinners, then, need not strive to attain what was unattainable. Luther, by his own words a pious monk, knew that he had fallen woefully short in this endeavor, even after years of struggle. The Church, thought Luther, was wrong to teach that salvation had to be earned, that it could only be earned. In fact it could not be earned at all, any more than it could be bought or sold. Righteousness was a gift from a merciful and loving God, not a threat from an angry and damning God. Man could not, on his own or through his own efforts, earn that which could never be earned. No matter how well- intentioned, monastic life—a life that included sacrifice, self-denial, vows of poverty and chastity, the numbing routine of prayer and service, strict adherence to Catholic doctrine, all of which Luther referred to as the attempt to become humble before God—was of no avail. And if one believed that he had achieved the impossible, that he had, on his own, reached some acceptable level of goodness and purity, he was deluding himself dangerously. For then, warned Luther, “very soon smugness takes hold of us, and as soon as this happens God’s imputation of sin returns.”19
The Church taught that there had to exist in man a spark of goodness. This tiny spark, if fanned properly (by strict obedience to the decrees and mandates of the Church), could ignite into a genuine love for God and for neighbor, and could nurture the ultimate Christian goal of salvation. By his own powers, the Church decreed, “a person can love God above all things and can perform the works of the law according to the substance of the act, but not according to the intentions of him who gave the command, because he is not in a state of grace.”20 This was, to Luther, insanity. Man had no such ability, with or without the Church’s instruction or assistance. For human beings were surely, absolutely, mired in sin. They were by nature, from birth, so sunk in sin that they could not even begin to recognize their own dreary condition without God’s grace. There was no room in a sinful countenance for a “spark of goodness.” The idea was a fiction, a creation of the Church.
Luther portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1526 (Library of Congress).
For Luther, it all came back to St. Paul. The lectures on Romans focused on the will of God, and the idea that man was deceiving himself if he believed he could win God’s favor, for he was but a poor sinner. “The sum and substance” of Romans, Luther taught, “is to disperse and eliminate all the righteousness and wisdom of the flesh and on the other hand to confirm, increase, and magnify sin and nothingness, so that finally Christ and his righteousness may enter into us in place of those things which are wiped out. For in God’s presence man does not become just by doing just works, but by being just, he does just deeds.”
The Church had it exactly wrong, Luther thought, when it taught that good works, in addition to faith, were required in order to achieve salvation. Rather, the very faith that brought about salvation would generate good works. “Why does man take pride in his merit and his works,” wondered Luther, “which in no way please because they have merit or are good, but because they have been chosen by God from eternity that they should please Him?” The constant endeavor to live a godly life was misguided; perhaps the Church’s interpretation of what constituted that life was mere folly. “Therefore we have no good works except the search for grace,” wrote Luther, “because our works do not make us good, but our goodness, or rather the goodness of God, makes us and our works good.” Sinful man could never earn salvation through his own behavior. He had already been given it, as a gift from a loving God. “God wills to save us,” repeated Luther in a theme he returned to again and again, “not by a righteousness and wisdom from within but from without. Not that which comes and is born from ourselves. But that which comes from without into us. Not that which rises from the earth, but that which comes down from heaven.” And now Luther could recognize the duality of mankind, sinful but saved, undeserving recipient but, through grace, a recipient nonetheless. “Just is a man reckoned so to be by God, but because he is reckoned to be just by God, therefore he is just,” he wrote. “Always a sinner, always a penitent, always right with God. In our ignorance [man is] justified, in our knowledge unjustified; sinners in fact, but righteous in hope.”
Luther never lost his belief, impressed upon his psyche since childhood, that the world was an evil place, and that Satan remained the dark, tempting force behind all earthly desires. What he began to realize, however, was that God alone provided the means to conquer evil. He now understood that his time spent as a monk, in endless hours of self-sacrifice and penance, had been all but wasted. He wrote, “It is a mistake to believe that this evil is remedied by works, since experience proves that in spite of all our good works the desire for evil persists and that no one is free from it, not even a day-old child. But God’s mercy is such that, although this evil endures, it is not reckoned as sin for those who call upon Him and with signs beseech Him to deliver them…. Thus we are sinners and yet we are accounted righteous by God through faith.”21
Luther now came to another revelation. He had always contemplated God’s law and God’s gospel as the same thing. He had understood that the horrors of righteousness and the elusive promise of salvation were intertwined. Now his thinking changed. He wrote, “When I discovered the proper distinction—namely, that the law is one thing and the gospel is another—I made myself free.”22 The proper use of the law—God’s law—was that of a hammer or anvil. It smashed human pride, crushed human vanity, and cleared the way for God’s love and mercy. God’s law was also a Spiegel, or mirror, that revealed to humans their sin indicating their desperate need for God’s loving grace. God’s law was both hammer and mirror—terrible, judgmental, and harsh but also preparing one for the Gospel, which was merciful, righteous, and gracious. All man had to do was believe. All man needed was faith.
And what of faith? That too, for Luther, was a mystery that could not be credited to man. Faith was another gift from God. Faith trusted God’s promise. It was, in and of itself, “knowledge of things invisible and trustworthy. It is a hidden understanding, for it is one of those things that a man cannot know by his own powers.” Faith alone was Christ alone. St. Paul made this clear. Paul had scoffed at “those presumptuous persons who think they can come to God apart from Christ, as though it were sufficient for them to have believed and … then having once accepted the grace of justification, not needing him.” Faith, like righteousness, came from God alone. In fact, sinners could only know of their sin through faith. Without faith, theorized Luther, “we are not conscious of the fact. Thus we must stand under the judgment of God and believe his words with which he has declared us unjust, for he himself cannot lie.”23
No one knew better than Luther that the gift of faith could be wasted, hopelessly lost in a sea of doubt and despair. But God’s love was limitless, and never-ending. That fact, too, had been proved on the cross. Luther wrote, “The cross of Christ is distributed through the whole world; each person is always allotted his portion. Do not therefore cast it aside but rather take it up as a holy relic to be kept not in a golden or a silver case but in a golden, that is, a gentle and loving, heart.” Luther offered this advice to those who despaired, who felt the same anguish he had felt for so long: “Learn Christ and him crucified; despairing of yourself, learn to pray to him, saying, you, Lord Jesus, are my righteousness, but I am your sin; you have taken on yourself what you were not and have given me what I was not. Beware of aspiring to such purity that you no longer wish to appear to yourself, or to be, a sinner.”24
This most basic understanding of man’s sin would cause him to repent of them. “For because he repents,” said Luther, “he becomes just from being unjust. Therefore repentance is a medium between unrighteousness and righteousness. And thus he is in sin as a beginning point and in righteousness as an end point. If therefore we are always repenting, we are always sinners, and yet at the same time we are just and we are justified, partly sinners, partly just, that is, nothing more than penitent.” For Luther, one basic truth had to be acknowledged and had to be understood: “in the Scriptures righteousness depends more on the imputation of God than on the essence of the thing itself. It is not he who possesses a certain quality who possesses righteousness; rather, this one is altogether a sinner and unrighteousness; but he has righteousness to whom God mercifully imputes it and wills to regard as righteous before him on account of his confessing his unrighteousness and his imploring God’s righteousness. Thus we are all born and die in iniquity, that is, unrighteousness. We are just solely by what the merciful God imputes to us through faith in his Word.”25
Luther’s theology, still developing, still in need of much polish and definition, started with this: Man’s salvation began by knowing his own sin. For the moment when man was at his most sinful, his most unworthy, his most guilty and fragile, was precisely the moment when God was his most gracious. The goodness that could then characterize the human condition did not reside in humans, but outside of them, in Christ alone, and “yet through faith also in them.” Mankind was justified, sanctified, saved—and the work had already been done. It was the message of St. Paul: “He who through faith is just shall live.” Luther’s groundbreaking new understanding of God’s righteousness, this revolutionary new way of contemplating the road to salvation, this radical interpretation and explanation for man’s relationship to his Creator—all were concepts that had never before been explored. Luther’s theology—now little more than intellectual exercises in personal spirituality, meant to spark a dialogue with divinity students—was bound to shake the very foundations of the dominant Christian Church that ruled all of Western Europe. It was to become, very quickly, the genesis of the Protestant Reformation. It would ignite a massive reform movement, first in Germany and then across Europe. It would consume the Church, disrupt and divide it, inflicting wounds that would never be healed.
But in 1517 Luther was still just a poor monk, a little-known professor of theology, all but unknown outside his tiny university in the outback of Saxony, a thousand miles from the power and glory of Rome. It would take more than just fresh interpretations of ancient biblical verses to bring the Holy Church to its knees. It would also take the reckless and scandalous actions of another monk, this one a cheap showman who would stumble unwittingly into Saxony and deliver a misguided message of greed and false promise to gullible believers. For without the papal-blessed actions of this charlatan there would likely have been no Reformation. He was a Dominican Friar named John Tetzel, and he would soon feel Martin Luther’s wrath.