Martin Luther was insane, crazy, stark raving
mad. Now as shocking as that may sound to you,
or particularly those of you who perhaps venerate the memory of the one who single-handedly
led the church into Reformation, let me assure you that there have been serious scholars
in the 20th century who have tried to reconstruct the life and the character of Martin Luther,
and submit his personality to psychological analysis from a distance. And just as it's been sort of camp in the
world of psychoanalysis in the 20th century, to analyze important people from the past,
people like Napoleon, people like Julius Caesar or the Emperor Nero and so on, so those who
have plumbed the depths of Luther's psyche from a distance have concluded, at least some
of them have concluded that, in fact, Martin Luther was clinically insane. Now we have to ask the question, what is it
about Luther that would lead modern analysts to come to such a radical and frightening
conclusion about him. I hate to think that the father of the Protestant
Reformation was a lunatic. Well, there was much about Luther's personality
in his life that is grist for the psychiatrist mill. We certainly know without question that Luther
was a bombastic personality given to strong emotional outbursts and frequently to intemperate
speech. If you've ever read, perhaps his most famous
work, The Bondage of the Will, in which Luther responds to the diatribe of Desiderius Erasmus
of Rotterdam. In that book, you see the graphic language
that Luther was accustomed to using. On one occasion, for example, in that work,
Luther complements Erasmus for the eloquence of his language and the beauty of his literary
prose. And, then of course, criticizes Erasmus for
the content of that language. And, he says, "Erasmus, reading your work
reminds me of someone who goes out and uses their finest silver dishes to transport dung
in the garden." Now, I'm not going to translate that expression
in modern vernacular, but Luther wouldn't say statements like that in an inhibited manner. He would frequently castigate his opponents
with most intemperate forms of speech, calling them dogs and worse. When his critics would respond to his teaching,
He would say, "Ah, the dogs are starting to bark." But, lots of people are guilty of intemperate
outbursts of speech, and one is not judged to be insane simply because their language
can become graphic from time to time. But, there were other quirks to his personality. For example, Luther seemed to be preoccupied
during his lifetime with a personal struggle with Satan. And if you read the memoirs of Luther, he
would say that there were times when Satan would come to him with an unbridled assault. Luther called it an Anfechtung, a kind of
siege of warfare, where the devil in his temptations and accusations what was relentless in his
attack on Luther. And on one occasion, Luther picked up an ink
well from the table in which he was writing, he sensed so vividly the tactile presence
of Satan that he hurled this inkwell at the devil. But again, Luther's self-expressed favorite
method of ridiculing Satan and resisting the temptation of Satan was by intentionally breaking
wind in the presence of Satan. In fact, Luther had such a problem with flatulence
that his problem with flatulence was notorious throughout Germany. He suffered from constant gastrointestinal
problems. Problems that bothered him so much that about
every six months he predicted his own death. And on one occasion, he said, "If I break
wind in Wittenberg, they will hear me in Leipzig." And, of course, this is not the way ministers
are supposed to speak, and we try to avoid such indelicacies in the 20th century, But again, simply because the man was earthy,
is no reason to assume that he was insane. But, if we look at the life of Luther, we
see that he had a tendency to have some kind of major personal crisis just about every
five years. For example, in the year 1505, Luther by then
had enrolled according to his father's wishes into law school, and as a student had distinguished
himself for his erudition and his brilliant grasp of jurisprudence. And, everyone on the faculty and indeed the
family of Luther had high expectations for this young man, a prodigy, who already was
earning a reputation even as a student throughout Europe for his brilliant penetration of difficult
juridical concepts. But we read of the crisis of 1505, when on
his way home one afternoon, suddenly, there was an outbreak of a violent thunderstorm,
an electrical storm, and a bolt of lightning came and crashed so close to Luther that it
knocked him to the ground and he was terrified, and in his fear he cried out, "Help me, St.
Anne. I will become a monk." And he was so afraid, he came home and he
told his father Hans, "Father, I'm leaving the University, and I'm entering the monastery." If ever Luther needed the help of St. Anne,
it wasn't to escape the threat of the lightning bolt, but rather the wrath of his father Hans. Hans was beside himself with rage saying,
"How can you throw away this career? How can you throw away this education to become
a monk?" Hans Luther had some kind of abiding contempt
for men who were religious in the sense of professional clerics. And he felt stabbed in the heart that his
son would give up a promising career in law to enter the monastery. What a strange way of reacting to a thunderstorm. That's not the way we do it in the 20th century. You remember a few years ago, at Medina Country
Club, during the Western Open, just outside of Chicago, lightning hit three golfers, didn't
kill any of them, but seriously injured them, at least for a season -- Bobby Nichols, Jerry
Heard, and of course, the most famous Lee Trevino. Do you remember that? And, after that episode, Lee Trevino was on
every talk show in America, and Johnny Carson had him on his program and he said to Lee,
he said, "That must've been a scary experience", and Trevino said, "Oh yes, it was." He said, "Well, what did you learn from that
experience? And, Trevino thought for a minute and then
quipped, he said, "I learned that when the Almighty wants to play through on a golf course,
you better get out of your, out of His way." And, he said, "Well, have you taken any precautions
to protect against another episode of lightning on a golf course?" "Oh yes," Trevino said, "Anytime now, I hear
thunder or see lightning in the distance when I'm playing golf," he said, "I march right
down the center of the fairway holding a one iron over my head." And Carson said, "Holding a one iron over
your head? Why would you that?" And, he said, "Because even God can't hit
a one iron." So, the Merry Mex laughs and jokes about his
close brush with lightning, whereas Luther changes his entire career. It's not because Luther's crazy, and Lee Trevino
is sane, but it's a totally different perspective and a totally different view of the relationship
between God and nature, between how it's viewed in the 20th century and how it was perceived
in the 16th century. So, indeed Luther did enter the monastery
in 1505 and he took his instruction for holy orders and then there came the moment that
he had prepared for during his training as a monk, and that was for the time of his ordination,
which was then celebrated by this newly ordained priest celebrating the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper for the first time. Now this was a monumental occasion in the,
in the church at this time. And even old, angry, disgruntled Hans Luther
finally reached the point where he was bursting in pride that his son, though he had given
up this career in law, at least had made good in the monastery and has, in fact, become
ordained and is now going to celebrate his first Mass. And so, Hans Luther went out and spent a fortune
to invite all of the townspeople and all the relatives to come and hear my son, the monk,
perform his first Mass. And so Luther, who obviously had great gifts
of public speaking, who had a natural presence of leadership before people, went through
each step of the performance of his first mass flawlessly. And then he came to that moment in the celebration
of the Mass that called for the priestly prayer of consecration. And one of the powers that is conferred upon
a priest in the sacrament of holy orders, according to the theology of the Roman Catholic
Church, is the power to say the prayer of consecration, which is the moment that the
miracle of the Mass takes place. The miracle of transubstantiation, whereby
supernatural power, the substance of the common ordinary elements of bread and wine are transformed
into the very substance of the body and blood of Christ, though their outward perceivable
qualities, their accidens, remain the same, it still looks like bread, it still looks
like wine, and so on. But the miracle, as an invisible miracle,
the real essence of the wine and the bread change to the body and blood of Christ. And for the first time in his life, Luther
was prepared to perform the miracle. And as the congregation waited for Luther
to utter the words of consecration, they watched him and as the moment came, he opened his
mouth, but no words came out. He stood, as it were, in a stupor, paralyzed
like a little child in a school play who forgets his lines and experiences stage fright, and
just stands as a statue. So, Luther stood there and his lip was trembling. His face was ashen. His hands began to shake, but nothing came
out, and you could sense Hans Luther back there in the congregation, urging his son,
"Say it, Martin. Say it. Don't mess this up, son. Come on!" And Luther froze. And after an interminable silence, finally
Luther mumbled something, quickly finished the Mass and walked off the altar in shame
and embarrassment. Later in his life, he reflected back on that
episode, and he said, "As I approached the table, and the thought struck me that my hands
were going to hold in them the very body and blood of Christ, my sense of unworthiness
left me paralyzed, and I couldn't speak." I once was close to a friend, who was, who
was a professional psychiatrist. And many years ago, in, I think, from my perspective,
in a less than sober moment in his life, he approached me and offered me a job in his
practice. If I would come to work with him, he offered
me a salary of $100,000 a year. This was back when $100,000 would buy more
than two or three loaves of bread. And, and he was serious. And I said, "Are you crazy? I don't have any training in psychiatry. I'm not qualified to, to work in an environment
like this." He said, "But you are a theologian." I said, "Yes." He said, "Do you realize that 90% of the people
who come to me in deep need of psychological and psychiatric help are suffering from some
kind of paralysis that is rooted in guilt?" He said, "R.C., these people don't need a
psychiatrist; they need a priest. They need forgiveness." And he went on to say what a powerful influence
unresolved guilt has upon the human mind and on the human psyche. Well, if ever a man demonstrated the paralysis
of guilt in his life, it was Martin Luther. Luther was being driven literally mad by his
guilt. He'd looked for peace in the monastery by
trying to become the best monk that ever lived, and he could find no peace there. But as he studied, he discovered that one
way that one could be certain of acquiring ultimate salvation would be to gain a special
indulgence from the church by performing a pilgrimage, by going to some sacred site where
there would be a collection of sacred relics. The cross upon which Peter was crucified upside
down, the Veil of Veronica, hair from the beard of John the Baptist, a piece of this,
a piece of that, and every church sought to find some precious relic that would sanctify
their altar. In fact, the church in Wittenberg had one
of the largest collections. Frederick, Prince Frederick's collection exceeded
like 30,000 authenticated relics, but these most sacred site of all, where the best relics
were to be found, and where the highest and most holy pilgrimage could be made was the
holy city itself, Rome. And so, five years after he cried to St. Anne,
Luther's second crisis came in the year 1510. The Vicar General of his Augustinian order
of monks, Staupitz, came to Luther and said, I said Luther, that's what his name was in
German. We call it Luther. He came to him and announced that two of the
monks of the order had been selected to make a journey as emissaries for ecclesiastical
business to the Vatican in Rome, and one of the two monks that had been selected was Martin
Luther. Luther was beside himself. He said, "I can't believe that a humble German
peasant like myself, an unworthy monk in this obscure monastery, is going to have the actual
opportunity to visit Rome itself. And Luther said he had only one regret when
he received that announcement, and that was because his mother and father were still alive,
because so powerful were the indulgences to be received from such a pilgrimage that Luther
could acquire enough merit to apply to his parents' lives that if they were still in
purgatory, he could get them both released from purgatory and in to heaven. But alas, they were still alive, so his pilgrimage
couldn't be applied to them. And so, he decided to dedicate this journey
to his grandfather. He and his comrade made the arduous trek to
Rome, and when in Rome, saw the city set on the seven hills by the river Tiber and looked
at it from a distance, his soul was flooded with joy. He saw that in this experience finally, after
all this time, he would receive some kind of release and peace from his haunted conscience. But when he came into the city and saw the
crass commercialism of the display of relics, and saw the blatant immorality of the Roman
priests, he was heartsick. But the high point of his visit, was his visit
to the Lateran church, to the stairs called Scala Sancta, the sacred stairs of the Lateran
church, because Roman tradition had that these 28 steps that adorned the church of the Lateran,
had been imported from Jerusalem itself. And that these were the actual stairs that
had been the stairs in Pontius Pilate's court. The very stairs that Jesus walked to His judgment,
and to His crucifixion. And so, Luther resolved to visit the Scala
Sancta, and to go up the stairs on his knees, saying an Our Father on each step. And so that's what he did. He went and knelt on the first stair and said
his prayer, knelt on the second and went all the way up this 28 stairs on his knees. And, when he reached the top of the stairs,
he stood up and he muttered to himself, "Who knows if it is true." So, even this trip to Rome left him unsatisfied,
guilty, depressed, his stomach continuously bothering him. When we look at Luther's life, some see in
later days, a manifestation of megalomania, not just monomania, like Captain Ahab in Moby
Dick, but megalomania, one who suffers from visions of grandeur and self-importance. People say, how else can you explain one monk
from Germany defying all of Christian tradition, all authorities in the world, both civil and
ecclesiastical to stand on his own, teaching this doctrine of justification by faith alone? We know that the climax of the debate over
justification that happened years later came at the Diet of Worms. Now, the Diet of Worms was not something like
the Scarsdale diet, or the Atkins diet that you can buy in the bookstore, a way to lose
weight. A Diet was an ecclesiastical and civil tribunal. By the time the Diet of Worms had come to
pass, Luther had already been declared a heretic. He had already had his monumental debates
with Cardinal Cajetan, and with Martin Eck, in which Luther had dared to question the
decisions of church councils and the decrees and encyclicals of popes themselves. And Luther at the time of this moment had
already been declared a heretic. He had been excommunicated with the papal
encyclical entitled Exsurge Dominae. Now, there's a little hint there to the personality
of Martin Luther. Every papal encyclical in Roman history receives
its name from the opening lines of the papal letter. And the papal bull that excommunicated Martin
Luther began with the words, Exsurge Dominae, which means, "Rise up, Oh Lord." Wel, why did the Pope in excommunicating Martin
Luther appeal to Christ to rise up? Well, the rest of the sentence goes like this,
"Rise up, Oh Lord, for there is a wild boar loose in your vineyard." You talk about a loose cannon. You talk about a bull in the china shop. Martin Luther was described by the Pope as
a wild boar ravishing the vineyards of Christ. Well, for him to be even able to appear in
the controversy at this imperial diet that was held in Worms in Germany, Luther had to
receive a safe conduct pass, because there was a price on his head. And even to come and defend his works against
the charge of heresy required that Luther risk his life. He had the papers that guaranteed safe conduct,
but there were a lot of people who didn't care about safe conduct papers; they wanted
his head anyway. But Luther came, and he stood alone in this
great hall where all the princes of the church sat assembled and all the representatives
of the Emperor were there. All of the authority structures in the world
had converged for this moment, and for this place in history. And Luther's books were stacked on the table
and his interrogator pointed to these books and said, "Brother Luther, are these your
writings?" And, Luther said, "They are." He said, "Will you recant of the writings
that are in this book?" Now, the Hollywood version goes like this,
that when Luther was called upon to recant that Luther stood with his chest out, defiant
and he said to the assembly there, "Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture, or by
evident reason, I will not recant, for my conscience is held captive by the Word of
God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, God help me, I can do no other." And then, he throws his fists in the air like
Rocky at the top of the stairs of the Philadelphia library, and then runs out the door, jumps
on a horse and rides into the sunset to start the Reformation. That's Hollywood. That's not how it happened. When the authority called upon Luther and
said, "Luther, will you recant of these writings?" Luther answered the question, but nobody could
hear him. He mumbled. And they said, "What did you say? Speak up." Luther raised his head and said, "May I have
24 hours to think it over?" And, they said, "Yes." And the Diet was recessed. And Luther returned to his chambers where
he was sequestered for the night. And there in the loneliness of his trial,
he wrote a prayer that survives to this day. And for you to get the flavor of Luther's
spirit during this struggle, I'd like to take a minute and read that prayer for you. This was Luther's Gethsemane. "O God, Almighty God everlasting! How dreadful is the world! Behold how its mouth opens to swallow me up,
and how small is my faith in Thee! Oh, the weakness of the flesh. Oh, the power of Satan! If I am to depend upon any strength of this
world, all is over. The knell is struck. Sentence is gone forth. O God! O God! O thou, my God! Help me against all the wisdom of this world. Do this, I beseech Thee; Thou shouldst do
this, by Thy own mighty power for the work is not mine, but Thine. I have no business here. I have nothing to contend for with these great
men of the world! I would gladly pass my days in happiness and
peace. But the cause is Thine. And it is righteous and everlasting! O Lord! Help me! O faithful and unchangeable God! I lean not upon man. It were vain! Whatever is of man is tottering, whatever
proceeds from him must fail. My God! My God! Dost Thou not hear? My God! Art Thou no longer living? Nay, Thou canst not die. Thou dost but hide Thyself. Thou hast chosen me for this work. I know it! Therefore, O God, accomplish Thine own will! Forsake me not, for the sake of Thy well-beloved
Son, Jesus Christ, my defense, my buckler, and my stronghold. Lord, where art Thou? My God, where art Thou? Come! I pray Thee, I am ready. Behold me prepared to lay down my life for
Thy truth, suffering like a lamb. For the cause is holy. It is Thine own! I will not let Thee go! No, nor yet for all eternity! And though the world should be thronged with
devils," Have you heard that in the mighty for though this world be filled with devils?
"and this body, which is the work of Thine hands, should be cast forth, trodden under
foot, cut in pieces, consumed to ashes, my soul is Thine. Yes, I have Thine own Word to assure me of
it. My soul belongs to Thee, and will abide with
Thee forever! Oh, Amen! Oh God, send help! Amen! Does that sound like a megalomaniac in a posture
of selfish defiance? Or does that sound like the voice of a soul
inflamed with passion for God. The testimony of history is on the next afternoon. The diet was reassembled and once again, the
interrogator called upon Luther and said these words. "I ask you Martin, answer candidly and without
horns. Do you or do you not repudiate your books
and the errors which they contain? And Luther said, "Since then, your Majesty
and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I'm convinced by sacred Scripture or
by evident reason, I cannot recant. Don't you see that my conscience is held captive
by the Word of God, and to act against conscience, is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can't do anything else. God help me." And
when the assembly exploded in fury and rage, and confusion descended upon the palace, a
group of unidentified men rushed into the room, physically grabbed Luther, took him
out and kidnapped him, riding away in the distance. Later it was discovered that these were his
own friends, who came to rescue him, even as he had asked his God, "Lord, send help." And Luther then went to the castle in Wartburg,
and there for about a year, lived incognito, disguised as a knight, Sir Jorg. And, while he was there in self-imposed exile,
he undertook the work of translating the Bible into German. And the Reformation was history. But, it wasn't even this kind of heroic extraordinary
strength of character and personality that has preoccupied the minds of analysts. Again, it's the question of Luther's guilt
complex. Probably, never a man in the history of the
church was more disturbed by guilt than Martin Luther. It was a matter of daily requirement in the
monastery. These men went to bed at about 5 o'clock in
the afternoon or 6 o'clock in the afternoon, and they arose from their sleep at one in
the morning, and they were gathered within five minutes in the chapel of the monastery
for 45 minutes of prayer and of the singing of Psalms and anthems. It was here that Luther developed his skills
and his love for music. Six or seven times during the day they would
assemble in this manner, and it was the duty of each monk at least once a day to go for
private confession to his father confessor. And as a matter of course, the brothers would
come and they would enter into the sanctity of the confessional, and they would say, "Father
I have sinned." And then they would rehearse the sins of the
last 24 hours. "Last night I stayed up five minutes after
lights out. Yesterday at dinner, I coveted Brother Andrew's
mashed potatoes," you know. I mean, how much trouble can you get into
in a monastery. And, they would go through their perfunctory
tasks of confessing the sins of the last 24 hours. The priest would utter his absolution, give
them a small penance to recite so many Hail Marys, so many Our Fathers, and that would
be it for the day. Then, Luther would come, and Luther would
come into the confessional, and he would begin to recite the sins from the last 24 hours
and he would take 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour. Johann Von Staupitz, the Vicar General of
the order, later testified that at least on one occasion, and this was not uncommon, Luther
rehearsed the sins of his previous day for six hours in the confessional. Six hours, to the point that it was driving
Staupitz himself crazy. Staupitz was Luther's father confessor. And one day in frustration, he said to Luther,
"Luther, you've taken this too seriously." He said, "If you're going to come in here
and take all of our time in the confessional," you know, they began to wonder if he was a
malingerer or a goldbrick, that he was trying to get out of his responsibilities for the
rest of the day by spending all his time in the confessional, or thought he was playing
games with him. He said, "Luther, for heaven's sakes, if you
are going to confess your sins, don't come in here you with this kind of stuff, confess
real sins, come in here and tells about adultery or murder. But don't drive us crazy with these peccadilloes." They said, "Only a crazy man would be like
that." Even Roland Bainton, the greatest biographer
of Luther says that he wonders whether Luther's preoccupation with his guilt was a result
of some kind of glandular or chemical imbalance in his life, that there is such a morbid preoccupation
of guilt with known psychoses in the world. How else can you explain this kind of behavior. Six hours to confess your sins for the last
day. And then Luther would walk out of the confessional,
he would return to his cell, after this experience of six hours and he would experience relief
from his guilt, only as he walked across the threshold to his cell, to remember one he
forgot to confess. And, the peace that he had enjoyed from that
priestly absolution only moments ago vanished. Luther was haunted by the holiness of God. He came to the place in his life where he
hated the concept of the justice of God. He said, "Christ seems to me as an angry Judge
with a sword in His hand. You asked me if I love God? This God who damns sinners, who imposes the
relentless decrees of His laws on their consciences. Love God?" said Luther, "Sometimes I hate
Him." But, he
understood the theology of the church. The church guaranteed forgiveness and peace
and assurance through the sacrament of penance, through the work of confession, if a person
truly confessed their sins. But, to receive forgiveness, you had to confess
your sins, and don't you see that to confess your sins, not only did you have to acknowledge
them, you had to recognize them, and and you had to remember them. And so, Luther was constantly in uncertainty
and turmoil because he wasn't sure he had covered all of his sins. Crazy? Maybe, but they tell us that there is a thin
line between insanity and genius, and some of the greatest geniuses of the world apparently
would take excursions back and forth across that line. Perhaps, Luther was such a man. Yes, I'm sure it's true that nobody in church
history was more preoccupied with his guilt and his sin than Martin Luther, but I think
it's also safe to say that from since the Apostle Paul that no Christian in church history
was a greater genius in understanding the law of God than Luther. Everybody else had peace because they didn't
know the law of God. But, Luther understood the law of God, and
Luther was an honest man, and he knew how much of the law of God he violated. You see, we have built-in psychological defense
mechanisms to deal with our guilt. Do you know why your sanctified so slowly
as Christians? I've been convinced that one of the reasons
that sanctification is a lifelong process is because of the tenderness of God. If God revealed all of my sins to me at one
time, I would be like Isaiah in the temple, I would be devastated. Nobody wants to know the full extent of their
sinfulness all at once. And, we have these psychological defense mechanisms
to excuse ourselves, to look at our own sin in the best of all possible lights, to be
quick with the judgment of charity for ourselves that we withhold it from others as a tendency. But, Luther laid his soul bear before the
mirror of God's perfection that is found in His law. You see, when we read the great commandment,
and we ask, "What is the great commandment?" We say, "Oh, we can recite it. The great command is, Thou shalt love the
Lord Thy God with all of Thy heart, with all Thy soul and all Thy strength and so on…and
thy neighbors as much myself. Oh, I can say it." You see, have you ever kept the great commandment? And, if you're honest about it, you realize
that you haven't kept great commandment for five minutes in your life, that you've been
breaking the great commandment steadily in the last five minutes. There's nobody in this room. There's nobody listening to my voice, who
has ever loved God with all of their mind. Maybe we love God with part of our soul, with
part of our strength. You know, but we say, "So what's the big deal? Nobody loves God with all their mind, heart,
soul and strength. Nobody loves everybody in the world as much
as they love themselves. I mean, surely God isn't going to take that
too seriously. Certainly, God must grade us on a curve. And relatively speaking, I'm doing all right. It's no big deal." Luther's mind would work differently. Luther would look at that and say, "Wait a
minute, if God calls this the great commandment, and if the Bible says that on this hangs all
of the Law and the Prophets, then to violate it must be a grievous matter before God. And so, Luther, for 10 years, sought his peace. He pummeled his body. He lacerated his flesh. He fasted, he abstained. He went through rigorous ascetic discipline
and even his enemies later admitted that no monk had ever outperformed Luther in his monkey. But then, in the year 1513, Luther was assigned
by the order to begin teaching lessons in theology and he lectured on the Psalms of
the Old Testament. And for two years, he poured through the Psalms
of the Bible, and he was beginning to get some little inkling of the grace of God, and
the sweetness of God's majesty, as he devoured the songs. But, then in 1515, you see the third crisis. 1505, Saint Anne of the thunderstorm, 1510,
the trip to Rome, 1515 was the so-called tower experience, where Luther was about to begin
his lectures on Paul's letter to the Romans. And he was pouring over the first chapter
of Romans, and he was scurrying to find what other scholars in the past had said, and he
read an obscure essay from the pen of Augustine that was written in the fourth century, where
Augustine commenting on Romans 1, where Romans 1 says, "Now the righteousness of God is revealed
from heaven, from faith to faith. The just shall live by faith." Augustine notes in this passage, almost as
a concluding unscientific postscript, quickly in passing, Augustine says, "Oh, by the way,
when here Paul speaks of the righteousness of God, he's not speaking of that righteousness
by which God Himself is righteous, not God's internal righteousness, but He's speaking
about a righteousness that is a iustitia aliena, a foreign righteousness, a righteousness He
provides for people who don't have any of their own. The righteousness that God provides for you
in Christ, the justice of God that covers your unjustness." Luther looked at that, and he said, "This
word 'justice,' the justice of God, this word that I hated in the depths of my soul, this
word that struck terror into my heart every time I saw it, the righteousness of God, that's
my problem. God is righteous and I am not righteous, but
now I see that the gospel says that there is a righteousness of God, not that righteousness
by which God Himself is righteous, but that righteousness that He gives to anyone who
asks it by faith, in Christ." He said, "The meaning of that text burst into
my brain, and into my soul." And there, in that moment Luther says, "I
was reborn. And as I understood this truth, the truth
of the gospel," he says, "It was as it were the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked
through. The just shall live by faith. Justification is by faith alone. That means justification is by the righteousness
of Christ and by His righteousness alone. It's not by my righteousness. I can never be righteous enough", Luther said,
"to satisfy the demands of God. The only way I can be redeemed is through
somebody else's righteousness, through the righteousness of Christ. That's the gospel. Justification is by faith alone," and Luther
said, "That's the article upon which the Church stands or falls. Look, I won't stand at any Diet of Worms,
I won't debate with any Cardinal Cajetan. I won't fuss with Martin Eck. I will never defy the pope over minor matters
of theology, but this is the article upon which the Church stands or falls. This is the gospel. Don't you take the gospel away from me." God put him through the torments of hell,
and dangled him over the pit of hell so that this man could understand grace. And once he understood it, he would not compromise
it. Crazy? Maybe, and if he was, I pray that in this
day, and in this hour, God will send us a maniac like Luther who will display the gospel
in power to a dying world.
