Forming the Lutheran Church

in this lecture would pick up from where we left off in our last lecture with Luther having gone to the diet of forms having been condemned as an outlaw now by the civil government after the excommunication earlier that year in 1521 and now Luther is kidnapped and taken by the men of Frederick the wise to the Vaart burg Castle and we said at the end of our last lecture that Luther was not expecting probably to make it out of the diet of forms or to have made it back home and so with the relief of having been kidnapped and taken to the Vaart burg Luther now had essentially a year of quiet contemplation study and writing Luther grew his hair out he grew a beard who ever the name Younker George which is something like a low rank noble knight but Luther wasn't done with his Reformation the first thing that Luther sets about to do when he gets to the vard burg is he sets about to translate the Bible into German now Luther will eventually translate the entirety of the Bible and actually the Epoque for as well though he himself will doubt the Apocrypha has any place in the scriptures and the entirety of the Luther Bible will be published in 1534 well after the Reformation is underway at the heart book though Luther within the space of the year translates the Bible into German now this translation of the Bible is profoundly important not only for the Reformation but even for the formation of the German language itself German at this time was transitioning out of the Middle Ages and it was beginning to take shape into something that we would call modern German or modern high German well Luther's Bible believe it or not is one of the formative things at shapes the transition into high German what's interesting about Luther's translation is he knew German but he didn't know it necessarily very well that is to say he wasn't a man of the people by and large Luther had spent most of his life conversing and speaking in Latin now don't go too far with this point it wasn't as if Latin was his first language but since you don't spend most of it versing back and forth and german-built spent a lot of time with the average lay speaker of German Lutheran finds that he can be I guess Edward is creative in his development of the German language still the impulse is there and Luther to make sure that his German translation is a sound one now what did he use well there are usually pretty overplayed stories about Luther going line by line and rendering it straight over in perfect German well I've said before and I'm stressing again here honestly the average seminarian who's gone through Greek probably knows a good bit more Greek than even Lew through it at this point Luther like anybody used help it is translation the text Luther used was actually a rasmus's Greek New Testament now if you understand this book who understand what Luther is doing when he's using it Erasmus when he published the Greek New Testament in 1516 actually didn't do so in an effort to really sort of spur on or inspire necessarily the study of corny Greek Erasmus actually got into this project first and foremost because he wanted to correct and improve the Vulgate now the Vulgate is the translation of Jerome in the 5th century into Latin where Jerome had used the Greek and Hebrew text and translated it over well Erasmus in reading the Vulgate found it actually not the best Latin Erasmus was simply that good at Ciceronian Latin Erasmus actually has a relatively bad joke in which he says the point of his intention was to make sure that the Apostle Paul addresses the Romans in better Latin than Jerome had made him address the Romans so Erasmus is Impulse here again is not to spawn a wave of Greek New Testament studies but rather to fix the Latin Vulgate well the way that it gets to this in part is through the Greek text he's an omnivore when it comes to languages prickly ancient languages and so what Erasmus does in 1516 is he compiles roughly loosely and frankly quickly as many of the Greek texts that he can find now the only text he can find or 12th century Byzantine text these were not the ancient texts or the oldest texts that we have not only that but the first edition of Erasmus Greek New Testament contain a number of typographical errors Erasmus himself admits that he compiled the book in a rather slapdash manner then textual critics of the New Testament will tell us that Erasmus is text is really not necessarily the best now this is somewhat ironic because these texts that are Asmus uses come to be known later as the Textus Receptus or the received text and it's these texts that of course become the basis of the King James Version because it does take some time for us to develop an awareness of so many of the variety of manuscripts and of course the Textus Receptus in the KJV become the bedrock of the idea of the KJV only folks well the manuscripts that Erasmus uses or 12th century Byzantine texts in fact initially enough it doesn't even have the first six verses of the book of Revelation in the Texas Receptus in the document that Erasmus uses he actually has to take the Latin Vulgate and translate the first six verses of Revelation from the Latin into the Greek because he doesn't simply have them in the manuscripts that he had acquired he also corrects a number of things along the way to better suit his liking the important thing though is his Erasmus is Greek New Testament as it's called wasn't actually a Greek New Testament now it certainly had the Greek New Testament in it but when I actually go and look at the book it's actually something like an interlinear if you open to any page on the left-hand side is the Greek of whatever chapter a verse you're looking at and on the right-hand side of the page is a new better Latin translation that Erasmus has written both in part to correct the Vulgate as well as to base that Latin translation more closely or more faithfully on the Greek so in other words Luther at the varberg using the irathient New Testament is essentially given a real strong leg up in terms of being able to understand where the Greek to Latin translation points are in other words Luther knew his Vulgate he had used the Jerome Bible as every man had done in the Middle Ages only Erasmus now gave them a way of triangulating you might say between the Greek which Luther knew a little bit of and Erasmus is new translation and the Volk in itself you notice a discrepancy you can look up the Greek words and figure out what the issue is this in other words is enormous ly helpful and something like training wheels you might say for Luther as he translates into German he's not sitting there as I've said just with the Greek with the power of his brain simply translating it all in full on his own Luther isn't only worried about the translation of the Bible while at the varberg Luther also sends out a number of texts that sort of become programmatic or sloganeering documents you might say of where Luther intends the Reformation to take the church one of the more famous ones is called on confession and in this one Luther is actually taking on the idea that you have to confess to a priest which was of course part of the penitential sacramental order of the Catholic Church the Middle Ages in that document Luther says actually that every Christian is a confessor which is frankly as close as Luther is ever going to get to saying anything like the priesthood of all believers no one in the 16th century ever said the phrase priesthood of all believers by the way but the doctrine behind this thing called the priesthood of all believers is what Luther has set here in this book on confession you see the priesthood of all believers has actually nothing per se to do with ordination the prison of all believers is not a claim that priesthood or pastoring or ordination is now irrelevant or that we're all somehow our own little Pope's that interpret the Scriptures or come up with our own meaning all these kinds of things rather when Luther says here is that this idea of being a confessor to one another again we would call the priesthood of all believers is that we don't have to go to a priest or pastor to confess that as first Peter says we are a holy priesthood a chosen nation we the church and so therefore if my brother or my sister comes to me and they confess their sins or if I go to them as the body of Christ we can lift one another up we can in a medieval way of talking about it here one of those confessions because that confession is no longer tied to penance and works in merit but rather repentance in the life of the Christian in the context of the church Luther also sends a letter an open letter that was published that went around to monasteries and nunneries letting them know that now that the Pope has been exposed and now that the Catholic Church has sort of shown its stripes that those who were unwilling participants in the monastic order those who had qualms about this could now be freed can be considered freed of their monastic valves now it doesn't tell all of them they have to come out but rather he says if you desire to come out you don't have to keep this vow anymore this is no longer the best life for the Christian all life is sacred all callings are sacred you do not have to stay in the monastery working out your salvation now by and large a significant number of monastics came out of the monasteries in Germany it would seem in fact that Luther after the diet of forms has simply become a lightning rod for all discontented Catholics who desire for a different expression of their Christian faith now not everyone saw Luther as the apostle of the Reformation even in Germany and what it rose while Luther was in the Varg were a couple of impulses in Germany that really convulsed the Reformation and put it on a rocky soil from really the very beginning and that is there were a number of folks who felt that Luther wasn't radical enough or at least over time they come to the conclusion that Luthor isn't radical enough there are also a number of people who are not content mailer to reform the church and reform ministry in reformed Christian life but they also want to inject a great deal of apocalypticism into their understanding of Protestantism now historians have spent a lot of time trying to piece these folks together to understand their teachings the problem with really understanding all these groups is twofold one in the past historians tended to kind of paint everyone as the same brush either Anabaptists in general or as part of the radical Reformation overall and what that tends to do is it gives us tunnel vision and we think that everyone kind of fits into this one category even though a variety of people might be quite different the other thing is is at times we don't necessarily always know what they were teaching saying or doing or even what their impulse might have been whenever they went into rebellion well in the case of Luther in Vinton Bourg of course there was Luther's good friend Andres Karl Stott well at some point during the course of the Reformation some sort of screw went loose in Karl Scott's brain at least according to Luther you see cross shot really became disenfranchised with the order of the church as a result of the Reformation that is to say in 21st century language he got burnt out on organized religion and Karl Stott actually meets up with a man who comes to Benton Borg by the name of Gabrielle's villain in Zwilling is one of these apocalyptic type folks he wants to radicalize the Reformation and Carl stop buys into this and what they began to preach and teach in the city of Vinton Borg now with Luther go on is that there needs to be more radical measures taken to cast down the old structures of Catholicism and one of the big ones that they undertook was something called iconoclasm which is you go into the churches and you break statues you destroy art you destroy anything that would be considered idolatrous now this is important because this happens in January of 1520 - and when Luther hears about this he goes crazy he loses his mind out of frustration and anger he actually writes a letter in which he says that Satan has entered my sheepfold and it's this problem of the apocalypticism of Zwilling and ondrea's Carlstadt that brings Luther once and for all out of the four burgers Whittenburg and in March of that year Luther returned to the city Luther preaches a series of sermons in which he affirms his relative doctrinal affiliation and similarity with Karl Stott he affirms him somewhat but then he says that the Reformation in his City won't go like they're doing it but they will not be radical here now Andres Kraus Cotton's willing repent a little bit Snelling in particular repents entirely and kind of caves under knuckles under to the Lutheran Reformation Karl Stott repents a little bit but he still seems to be a bit bent out of shape by this reports about Karl Stott or that he walked around of peasants clothes they like people to call him brother andreas didn't want to go by dr. cross Dodd or anything else he's with an accident kooky and eventually he gets a call to a pastor it in or Lumumba and it's very compelling and very interesting because he goes to this city it becomes a pastor and it begins to an active number of what we'd call radical reforms in the city the congregation that he sets at the church that he governs might very well be called congregational or in modern lingo non-denominational he also begins to challenge the idea of infant baptism more radically he says that the church should have no music and no art because those things are obviously of the devil and again he begins to radicalize after a couple years in 1524 Luther actually begins to attack crawl stop his old buddy his old partner and colleague and the argues that Karl Stott should not be allowed to publish or preach without Luther's express consent a comment by Luther which actually requires eventually that crawl stop resigned his post well that's not enough for Luther and Vinton Bourg there's one more really serious uprising in Germany that puts the Reformation on the horns of a dilemma and that is the actions of thomas müntzer in the german peasant revolt Muenster was another one of these apocalyptic guys in fact who his familiar were some of the other folks that had come to vit and bird before well through his teachings and through a number of others there arose in 1525 a massive uprising of peasants all throughout the country and down into the swiss regions these are peasants they were the low classes they had no military prowess or any arms that they could marshal or equip themselves with to really do any serious battle but even if they did have these things they didn't really know how to use them very well they weren't trained well these peasants went to war in part because they believed that there needed to be a radical revolution in society not just in the church they wanted the overthrow of the entire order of what was left over from the feudal era and they believed they wanted everything held in common meaning a certain form of socialism Luther over the course of these uprisings wrote a number of tracks but by far the most inflammatory was one that Luther entitled against the murdering thieving hordes of peasants and this is really wasted Luther not at his best in fact it's really quite heinous what he says here he actually argued that anyone who finds these peasants who are uprising should just sort of feel free to kill him and he argues that nothing could be more poisonous hurtful or satanic than a rebel now in later lectures we're gonna have a lot to say about Luther and politics in the two kingdoms but here is an application of Luther's early view which is that Protestants don't rebel that being violent means that you should be killed as quickly as possible and that very likely you're going straight to hell for having rebelled okay moving on and setting aside the issue of Luther in rebellion in his comments about the peasants war we can save two more things about the shaping of Luther's Reformation here in the middle point of the 1520's that are vital to understand in terms of Luther's impact culturally and theologically the first is Luther's marriage as we said in previous lectures about the medieval background it was scandalous to believe that a pastor or priest could be a married man they were to be holy and in this day and age prior to Luther holiness was in part due to the person's willingness to cut themselves off from the things of this world and one of the big ones that you would cut yourself off from was the right to marry well it goes without saying that Luther now the reformer for years on from the diet of forms for him to marry is one of the most dramatic cultural and sociological and frankly even theological changes that Luther can bring to the post Reformation world most Protestant evangelicals today actually have a bit of the opposite of what it was experienced in the Middle Ages most of us are unable to think of pastors who are not married well it would be only slightly hyperbolic to say that Luther symbolically broke through this wall and married and that everything that flows after that all of the Protestant discussion of married pastors in the family life is based at least in part if not significantly while Luther's willingness to take this step Luther even in his own self-identification as the man who began the Reformation knew that marriage was something that he should do in order to symbolize his break with the past well the woman he married was Katie van Bora or Katerina van Bora or Katherine van Bora depends on how modern English speakers render the name Luther referred to her personally as my Katie so I've chosen to call her Kate even Bora well on June 13 1525 Luther married her and Katie was actually a former nun she had been a nun in a German monastery and she had been stuck out through these fish barrels as a result of Luther's proclamation in evisceration of the order of the monasteries and having nowhere else to go Katie and a number of other nuns who left the monastery arrived in vit Borg now katie has gone down in history as one of the great women of the Reformation if not of church history she was plucky she was spunky she was smart she had all of these amazing qualities and attributes to her in fact one of the great chagrin zuv most historians is that we don't really know a great deal about her from either her own words or really more than what Luther tells us about her but it is telling I think of Luther's personality that so highly did he speak of his wife and just about any context private letters offhand comments and even formal things that he said about her in his writings Luther always spoke enormous ly highly ever in fact to this day in the typical Lutheran calendar there was a feast celebrating Katy Bambara on December 20th every year well by large Luther and Katy had an extraordinarily complex and interesting and I hasten used the word wonderful marriage they had six children together and they adopted four orphans they are often scenes depicting in art Luther playing music and his children and his wife sitting around them one of the more poignant moments for Luther actually was that he actually lost one of his children at a very young age young Elizabeth by some sort of disease or something that she had acquired very common for this day for people to die young and the scene and the description Luther gives of having his heart torn out because his daughter has passed away is one of the more poignant and humanizing ways that we can gain a little bit of access into the real man who Martin Luther was and even just the fact that they had children was again enormous Lee controversial for the day as heiko Berman has pointed out actually it was a common urban legend that the Antichrist would be born by a former monk and a former nun two renegades conceiving a child and giving birth but that was going to be the Antichrist and Oberman tells this wonderful story about how when their first child was born even committed Protestants were is the baby looking good okay is the baby healthy did it come out with horns on its head these kinds of things but Luther had six children of his own and four adopted another thing that was dramatically important in shaping Luther's voice in his theological vision for the Protestant church also occurred in 1525 in December and that was Luther's debate with her Asmus in writing on the subject of free will now I want to bring this up because it's actually quite striking because in terms of modern popular misconceptions of the doctrine of predestination or freewill you still find a number of people who believe that this doctrine is somehow the intellectual property of Calvinists or reformed people you can actually find all kinds of places where people refer to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination now that's telling that we have a massive miscommunication on our hands because in fact here we have Lutheran 1525 writing on this subject years before Calvin even converts to the faith now as we'll say when we get later in the course to the comparing contrasting phase we'll actually look at Calvin and Luther on the doctrine of predestination and we will say there and I'm going to go ahead give you the punchline they do have a different perspective on this in a different application of the doctrine of predestination but it mostly has to do with when we discuss it and how it is preached and at what point the doctrine of predestination is raised in the Christian life Luther over time is actually quite demure at when we should talk about it because he will say the main issue is preach the gospel and whenever someone says oh I believe the gospel you say well congratulations God has seen fit to illuminate your mind and save your soul Luther will not in other words talk about predestination in a more systematic theology sense or in a more abstract sense not that Calvin or anyone else would really talk about it abstractly but for Luther predestination is a after the fact discussion whenever someone has come to believe the gospel and it is not something that is to be incorporated heavily into the Christian life well here in 1525 Luther gets into a battle of wills a theological sparring match with one of the great eminent lights of the Reformation period Rasmus well a number of people knew Thursday blamed in at least a simple way Erasmus for what happened in the Reformation it was believed that Erasmus had been too snarky or that some of the texts that he'd put out for example the Greek New Testament and the read translation of the Bible into a better Latin had eroded the confidence of reformers for the Catholic Church and for most of the Reformation or aspis stays quiet he actually doesn't get involved openly with anything that is of course until 1524 when Erasmus writes a book called on free will and in it Erasmus in his own style in his own way essentially toes the medieval line in terms of his understanding of how our will is involved in the process of the Christian life now hopefully you come to call our discussion on the will when we looked at Luther in the monastery and Luther in his engagement with scholasticism Erasmus essentially takes the argument of the latter middle ages which says we have free will God has for known what we will do but in terms of grace grace comes to give us strength but it doesn't create in us out of nothing faith itself and then therefore our works or Erasmus will say again very typically for this day and age in the Catholic Church our works are something that we ought to perform we can perform them we have the ability so that's a rasmus's argument essentially in 1524 well in December of 1525 Luther comes out swinging on this issue in fact anyone who reads the bondage of the will is usually struck by the forcefulness that Luther argues his case well what is Luther's argument well again we've already seen that Luther is negative he's pessimistic he's very very unwilling to discuss the ability of our will to perform good works in keeping with our salvation but let's do just a quick synopsis of this in terms of systematic theology in the Reformation the discussion of the freedom of the will in this case and the subject of predestination as it's called is not first and foremost a discussion of whether or not God has allowed something like let's say 9/11 to occur in traditional categories in traditional discussions the subject of whether or not God causes all things to come to pass things that are tragedies for example it is not discussed under the heading of predestination rather that subject is handled under a different name theodicy which in more popular language we say is the problem of evil how can a good God allow all things that come to pass in this case in the Reformation the discussion of the freedom or the bondage of the will and by extension predestination is a discussion on our ability prior to conversion and our wills ability to perform good works on their own power and strength in other words I always tell students it's a question of who moves first God or us and again that's overly simplistic but it puts the situation in more stark contrast which is where Erasmus and Luther take it Erasmus essentially says we move first we are able to act and God cooperates with us or more back really we cooperate with God in terms of the grace that he allows us to have well not surprisingly given all the backstory we've told thus for Luther finds a support he does not believe at this point and all the way back to his Reformation breakthrough that our wills have the ability to do anything apart from grace our wills in other words or dead in their trespasses and to put it bluntly dead men don't make choices for Luther the dead will must be resurrected and that it must be carried along by God and therefore he'll say since our will was dead it was in bondage it was unable to choose God ultimately or in any real capacity then all that comes after salvation can be said to be given a gift of the Holy Spirit now he doesn't mean that we're robots rather I tell people it's a bit like the way we understand that we have the gift of life in fact that's probably the best analogy entirely just as we were given the gift of life just as God gave us our lives he gave us our souls he gave us our bodies he gave us life and yet we speaks of effortlessly that it's our life we don't feel that somehow simply because life was a gift to us that we are simply robots and that if life is given to me well then it's not my life I have to somehow own it myself this is really more ruthless coming from he's saying our wills were regenerated now that word actually in the original etymology of it means that it was resurrected there was a Genesis moment where our dead wills were given life and the Spirit is there for equipping and nurturing and sanctifying us all along the way and Luther will say prior to that our wills are in bondage they are unable on their own to free themselves they always choose narcissistically sinful behaviors now not utterly so Luther's not saying we're all little baby Hitler's running around but what he's saying is is that when it comes to choosing God left to our own devices our wills are dead and unable to choose him now one thing to say before we conclude this some allege particularly those who are in later Lutheran circles that Luther really didn't mean this book that it wasn't his best work he wrote it out early and it was entirely in response to Erasmus and therefore he can kind of be forgiven for this a lot of the impulse for this is that later as Lutheran and Calvinists circles begin to fight with one another one of the touchstones of where they fight is on the subject of the ongoing evolution of some of the language in the reformed world about predestination and a relative pullback in the Lutheran circles in their willingness to discuss this doctrine in full the least outside of the context of post regeneration post justification and so over time people began to allege that Luther didn't really mean what he said here actually all the way to the day he died he actually refers to this as his most important and his best book in 1537 not long before his death when he looks back on all of his writings he actually at that time refers to this book as his best book but he after I said why Luther would say that and what he means for Luther the freedom of the will is synonymous with medieval monastic virtues and sanctification and penance so of course he's going to say that a book that challenges that and he thinks destroys the doctrine of the freedom of the will is his best book because it clarifies that his Reformation breakthrough means that God saves us and that we contributed nothing to our salvation okay that's it next we're gonna look at some of the political problems of Lutheranism in the 1520's how it very nearly crashed and burn and then we're gonna look at Luther and Zwingli and their good fight at the colloquy of Marburg

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 63,357

Rating: 4.8835387 out of 5

Keywords: Lutheranism (Religion), Religion (TV Genre), Martin Luther (Founding Figure), Protestantism (Religion), Protestant Reformation (Event), Katherina von Bora, Desiderius Erasmus (Author), Bondage of the Will, Predestination (Literature Subject), German New Testament, Andreas Karlstadt, Thomas Muntzer, Peasants Revolt

Id: ahfRUjSoPIA

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 24 2015