Bishop Barron on Martin Luther

[Music] well with the great profit and pleasure I've been reading recently Alec Y Rees new book called Protestants the faith that made the modern world a lot of books are coming out now because it's the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation and I've been reading a number of them and I think his book stands out for its lucidity and its Verve and its energy in some ways it reminded me of Brad Gregory's book the unintended Reformation and Gregory looking at it more from the Catholic side Reilly from the Protestant side what I most appreciated though it's toward the beginning of his book is his portrait of the undisputed founder of the Protestant movement namely Martin Luther now I'll confess to a certain fascination with Luther over many years I started reading and probably when I was in college I've read a lot of his books and articles and sermons etc and then for about ten years when I was a teacher Mundelein seminary I taught a course kind of graduate level course in the theology of the sixteenth century which involved reading an awful lot of Luther say what you want about Martin Luther he's one of the most beguiling figures of the time I mean he was cantankerous he was pious he was brilliant he was deeply anti-semitic he was wonderful and he was exasperating I mean all at the same time and I think it's why people keep coming back to Luther with a certain fascination giving to his writings even though I disagree with massive amounts of what Luther says it's hard not to like his literary style he's one of the rare people from the time of Augustan on who's able to write in latin with an awful lot of Verve and energy his works kind of crackle when you read them so anyway Luther I've been fascinated by it for a long time well Ryrie it sort of prompted me to squint at Luther in a somewhat new way looking at Luther with fresh eyes he uses the categories of fighter and lover you know Luther quite obviously was a fighter look he took on the roman curia took on the Pope he took on the Emperor took on the electors of the Holy Roman Empire he took on the inquisitors etc etc Luther was a very pugnacious figure and there's no doubt that he bequeathed to Protestantism this fighting spirit I mean from Zwingli and Calvin all the way through Karl Barth you can see the sort of you know protesting side of Protestantism so that's true but Ryan says I think he's right about this that that's only to see a comparable part of the picture because Luther was also and primarily a lover and what he themes here is he's somebody who fell in love radically with God so we know the story well that Luther the pious Augustinian monk after you know many many years of striving and striving striving through all sorts of spiritual exercise and moral excellence to be pleasing to it to adjust and demanding God in the famous Tula madness the Germans call it at our experience Luther felt this breakthrough of grace that he's justified not by his own heroic effort but by the sheer grace of God accepted as a gift in faith and this was mediated to him by by the Bible the great text especially of st. Paul so Luther fell radically in love with the God who would radically expressed his love for him and there's the heart if you want even the mystical heart of Protestantism now trace that as well from everyone from John Wesley through slyer mocker all the way up to contemporary times you can see this mystical affective dimension of Protestantism now here's why I say this caused me to squint at Luther in a new way because I'll use another standard set of categories often religious experience is analyzed according to either the mystical or the prophetic right so mystical is experiential it's often T the kind of you know priestly sacramental side of things then there's the prophetic which is very word oriented it's challenging and cetera cetera well in almost all the characterizations Luther falls on the on the prophetic side of that divide and indeed you can find a lot of things in Luther to justify just that move but Ryrie prompted me to think I don't know maybe that's not really adequate to it that if anything Luther falls on this more mystical the the lover side of the equation you know now why do I say that help me to see it differently well think about someone now who's in love who's fallen in love what do they do and what do they sound like well consult the high Romantic poets or consult even a teenager talking about his first crush they tend to use words like forever and only and always something that's over-the-top that's exaggerated in the speech of people who have fallen in love and if I might bring this up to date look at my great hero the Nobel laureate Bob Dylan who's a distant spiritual descendant if you want to Martin Luther because in the late 70s Bob Dylan becomes an evangelical Christian he writes a song not long after his conversion called saving grace to lovely song and includes the line I look around this whole world and all that I'm finding is the saving grace that's over me now mind you this is the same Bob Dylan who a handful of years before had talked about desolation row who had talked about unmasking the executioner's who had talked about pellets of poison poison flooding our waters and so on so forth this is a sharply prophetically critical Bob Dylan who in the wake of his own experience of grace can say all that I'm finding all that I see is the saving grace that's over me that's the way people in love sound now listen to Martin Luther the great SOLAS the three solos of the Reformation right so Lafitte a my faith alone gratia Sola by grace alone scriptura Sola by the Bible alone what what is that but the sort of excessive extravagant over-the-top expression of a powerful mystical experience now does that hold up to strict scrutiny no I would say is it in line is it is an expressive of an experience yeah powerfully so correct in the strict sense no of course not I would say now here's my plan can we look at Luther's great statement the solos of the Reformation and say yeah good right in the measure that it expresses this experience of grace and at the same time can we look at the Council of Trent which offers a sharp theological correction I would say of Luther's language Trent that looks now at the relationship between faith and works between Grace and and our effort etc etc in a much more careful manner and can we say yeah that's right and I just wonder I miss kind of speculating here is whether saying yes to both those things might actually represent a step forward in the ecumenical conversation you [Music]

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Keywords: Catholic vs Protestant, reformation, martin luther, Bishop Barron, Alec Ryrie

Id: EXQDqjR8HGw

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2017