Luther: The Life and Legacy of the German Reformer (Full Documentary)

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

Came for the free documentary. Found the pastor of the first church I joined, Dr. Steve Lawson. I've never quite been able to divine his reputation and role in the larger Christian community. He is an incredibly talented speaker; rumored to be exceptionally fixated on the word and (per my only personal interaction with him) a bit defensive. It took me two decades to find a comparable sermon. Props supreme!

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/Tripppl 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2019 đź—«︎ replies

Always free for Amazon Prime members — along with most of Ligonier’s teaching series catalogue.

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/-DVTD- 📅︎︎ Oct 30 2019 đź—«︎ replies

These are not the comments I was expecting

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/jesh_wa415 📅︎︎ Oct 29 2019 đź—«︎ replies

Thanks for posting this

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Skipperfields 📅︎︎ Oct 30 2019 đź—«︎ replies
Captions
COOPER: Hi, I'm Barry Cooper, the host of the documentary, “Luther.” We’re coming up on another anniversary of that definitive moment when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg. Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, Luther was lighting the fuse that would lead to an explosive rediscovery of the Gospel, the good news that we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. More than 500 years later that rediscovery, that reformation, is still worth celebrating. For a limited time, the documentary, "Luther: The Life and Legacy of the German Reformer," can be streamed for free, in its entirety, right here on Ligonier Ministries’ YouTube channel. Please tell your friends and share the link to the film as widely as you can. Don’t forget to click the “subscribe” button, and the bell, so that we can let you know when new videos are released. And by the way, if you’d like to dig deeper into Luther’s story and significance, you can download Ligonier’s free study guide at LutherDocumentary.com/studyguide. I hope these resources will be of great benefit as we pray for a new Reformation in our day. LUTHER: God is our refuge in distress. Our shield of hope through every care. Our shepherd watching us to bless and therefore will we not despair? Although the mountains shake and hills their place forsake and billows o'er them break yet still will we not fear for thou o God art ever near. COOPER: Martin Luther. To most Protestants and Evangelicals, a legendary Reformer who rescued the gospel from the clutches of the papacy. To Catholics, a divisive heretic who denied the way of salvation. The reality, of course, is more complex. Martin Luther was a great man -- but he was a man, subject to all of the frailties and faults that you and I are subject to. He was also an emotional man, a passionate man. He experienced everything from the most luminous highs all the way through to the deepest and darkest sorrows. Verbally, he could be vicious toward his enemies and also his friends. For example, against colleagues who disagreed with him on the theological significance of the Lord's Supper, and that's before we even get to the alleged anti-Semitism in his later years. And yet, this was the man, this was the man that God used to recapture the gospel. He restored the Word of God, the Bible, to the center of Christian life and worship. He reestablished the importance of family, the value of music, the dignity of human labor, but most significantly of all, he recovered the truth that a person's justification in the eyes of God comes by grace alone through faith alone. Luther was, and still is, controversial, but the controversies hardly do the man justice. We need to get a sense of the world in which he lived. We need to grasp the cultural climate and the state of the church at that time in order to see Luther for who he really was and to understand what the legacy of the Reformation means for us. Once you begin to see what Luther did five hundred years ago, you begin to see his fingerprints all around you today. Martin Luther is popularly credited as the man who caused the Reformation of the church, but the real story is more nuanced. Luther was a huge driving force, of course, but the seeds of discontent had been sown long before he was born. By the time Luther came of age, organized Christianity bore little resemblance to its earliest days. The church had abandoned its prophetic voice and become a political force trusting not in God's wisdom, power and strength, but in its own. The finished work of Jesus Christ at Calvary had been replaced with the ritual of the Mass, sacrificing the Lord anew whenever the congregation gathered. The people's hope was not in the righteousness of Christ alone, but instead in their ability to meet the commands of God. Deceivers and swindlers wandered the streets peddling their false promise that "as soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs." The Bible written by and to the common man had been snatched from his grasp, its contents known only to an elite few. NICHOLS: This was a difficult age. In fact, the Reformation motto "post tenebras lux," "after darkness light," tells us that just before the Reformation, this was a time of darkness. One of the ways I think we can see this darkness depicted is in, of all things, a painting. This is The Haywain Triptych. It was painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch was a painter from the Netherlands. He died in 1516, and one of his last paintings was this painting. The Triptych has three panels, and on the one side Bosch depicts creation, and at the bottom of that panel, we have the fall and the expulsion from the garden. On the far panel, Bosch depicts judgment, and in that middle panel, the center panel, he depicts the moment. And at the center is this large oversized hay bale and right up against it are the nobility and the Pope and the bishops and they have access, as it were, to the hay bale. Then you sort of see the peasants and the masses of people and they're painted in dark tones and they're far off, it's as if they're unable to get access to the hay bale. In front of it there's a monk and he's sitting in a nicely appointed chair and he's being tended to by nuns and he has everything he needs. Then on top of the hay bale there's a solitary angel and that angel is looking up and that angel is looking to Christ, and there at the top of that center panel is Christ and He's looking down and it is Christ in all that He has to offer these folks and they can't see Him. They're not even looking up. It's not only that Christ was obscured at this moment in history, at this moment in the church's life. It's also that the people didn't even know what their true need was. Christ was so obscured they thought their need was material and material things would somehow satisfy that and they don't even see their need for Christ. LAWSON: The priesthood had become very corrupt, immorality flooded the church and they were literally the blind leaders of the blind, just as the Pharisees had been in the day of Christ, so the church of Rome was in the day of the Reformation. COOPER: The consolidation of power, haters of God pretending to shepherd His people. Was this what Christ intended for his church? And was it really true that Jesus' sacrificial death for sinners wasn't enough by itself to secure salvation? KOLB: But the world in which Martin Luther grew up was a world of a ritual religion in which going to Mass was really the heart of the way in which I found favor with God. It was a little scary for most medieval Christians to actually receive the body and blood of the Lord, but in this magic moment when the priest brought the presence of Christ right to our village, happened once in the week, just to be there was sufficient to earn God's grace. The longer Luther lived with that system, the more burdensome it became because it really put the burden on him. His instructors at the university had taught him that he had to do his best before God would give him the grace that would enable him to do the good works that really pleased God and made his way to heaven. And so it was as he turned ever more deeply into the Scriptures he found that the Christian religion is not a religion primarily of ritual, but it is primarily a religion in which we don't go to God first, but God comes to us first and He comes as a God who likes to talk and who spoke the world into existence in the beginning and who speaks a new person in Christ into existence through the forgiveness of sins. TRUEMAN: Well, the practice of selling indulgences emerges in the 15th century when the church ties together its understanding of purgatory, this place between heaven and hell where most people go after they die in order to be purged of their remaining sin and made fit for heaven. When that doctrine was tied together with that of the treasury of merits this, for one of the better terms, heavenly bank account where all of the extra good works of the saints have been deposited. What the church allowed for was the transfer of the good works from the treasury of merits, if you like, to the accounts of other people by payment of a certain amount of money and the provision of a certificate, a paper certificate by the church. So by the time we get to the beginning of the 16th century this is an established practice. It's a way of the church earning money and in terms of how it impacts popular piety clearly Luther perceived that this had led people to think they could more or less buy their way into heaven, that for a cash transaction you could have your sins dealt with in a way that bypassed the quality of the heart, bypassed the need for repentance. COOPER: Indulgences represented hope for those who died and for those left behind, but it was a false hope, it was a lie designed to improve the church's bank balance. It built up cathedrals, but it was tearing down the souls of men and women across Germany and Europe. But there was yet another sin, a greater sin that was staining the hands of the church. The Scriptures themselves had been all but lost to the average parishioner and this perhaps was the greatest tragedy of all. LAWSON: Well, every great movement in church history has been based upon the sole authority of Scripture. The Reformation was a back to the Bible movement in reality. But preceding the Reformation, there were two leading lights, in particular, whom God used, that would be John Wycliffe and John Huss. John Wycliffe was an Oxford professor, the leading scholar of his day in England, who lived in the 14th century, and he came back to the authority of Scripture and at the end of his life he actually translated the Bible into the English language from the Latin Vulgate. It was a step in the right direction. It would not be later until William Tyndale would do this work from the original Greek and Hebrew language, but John Wycliffe was known as "the morning star of the Reformation." He was the first to appear on the horizon and brought a portion of the church back to the authority, the infallibility of the written Word of God itself. John Huss was across the English channel in Prague and in the next century, in the 15th century, and he as a student at the University of Prague began handwriting copies of Wycliffe's works as a way of earning money. That was his initial exposure to the works of Wycliffe and then through an exchange program between Oxford and the University of Prague more of Wycliffe's writings came to that city in Europe and Huss actually devoured the teaching of Wycliffe, which was nothing more, nothing less, than the straightforward interpretation of the Word of God. And so Huss was raised up in the city of Prague as a powerful preacher of the Word of God and really was the leading pre-Reformer who would lead the way for a man named Martin Luther to come in the following century. TRUEMAN: There is a legend that John Huss when he was being burned declared, "Today you burn a goose, but a hundred years from now a swan will arise." Apparently, the word "Huss" in Czech means "goose." Luther knew of this legend and liked to think of himself as the fulfillment of Huss' prophecy arising almost exactly a hundred years after Huss. And that is why today in many Lutheran churches the lectern from which the Bible is read is in the shape of a swan. Luther was the swan who fulfilled the prophecy of John Huss, the goose. SPROUL: Luther's study in Scripture paved the way for a new understanding, or a fresh understanding, of how the Bible is to be interpreted. But one of the big issues was his view of private interpretation. Now let me just take a second to quote the fourth session again of the Council of Trent where we have a statement in there where it says, "To check unbridled spirits it," that is the council, "decrees that no one relying on his own judgment shall in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother church to whom it belongs to judge their true sense of interpretation has held and holds." Now what Luther advocated was called private interpretation, but he would agree with half of this statement. He didn't believe that any individual had the, ever had the, right to distort the Scriptures. With the privilege of interpreting the Bible for yourself, it also carried the responsibility of interpreting it accurately. But what he challenged was the unique sense in which the church claimed that it and it alone had the right to interpret the Scripture, and as this statement in Trent says, it condemns anybody who presumes to interpret the Scripture contrary to how it was done by Holy Mother Church. So those are just a few of the issues that have made a profound impact on the Christian church in history. COOPER: Long before Luther was born, the fires of Reformation were already burning, there were already men and women in the church who knew something was wrong, who just knew that a church built upon earthly power and ritual wasn't what the Apostles wanted, it wasn't what the church fathers wanted, and it wasn't what God wanted either. The church needed to be renewed, it needed to be reformed. The light of the gospel had almost been extinguished -- almost. When many of us think of Martin Luther we think of the Ninety-five Theses, the document that he nailed to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, his reaction to the corruption he saw in the church. Or, we think of that famous, if disputed phrase, "Here I stand; I can do no other. So help me God." Or perhaps, we think of the Luther insult generator online, personal favorite of mine, "You stink like devilish filth flung into Germany." It's pretty good. We know of him, but do we really know him? Do we really understand what made him tick? Well for that, we need to head to Eisleben in Germany to the home of his father Hans Luder. Born in Eisleben on November the 10th 1483, Martin Luther grew up in a devout Roman Catholic home where he was raised under the strict disciplines of his parents' faith. His father, a stern and hard-working miner called Hans, wanted for his son a life outside the mines. He wanted him to become a lawyer, so Martin pursued his education in Eisenach at the University of Erfurt, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees by 1505. Luther was an exceptional student with a formidable mind that thrived on study and analysis, but in July 1505, his studies were cut short when he was caught in a severe thunderstorm. Lightning struck nearby, throwing him to the ground. Fearing for his life and for his eternal salvation he cried out to Saint Anne, the patroness of miners, "Help me! And I will become a monk!" Luther was spared and so the trajectory of his life was altered. Within weeks and much to his father's dismay, Luther joined the strictest of monastic orders, the Augustinians. KOLB: The Augustinian hermits were one of the preaching orders that originated in the 13th century. They were gathered in cloisters and houses together, but they weren't supposed to stay there restricted or set off from the world, but they were to go out to preach, to teach, to hear confessions, to aid parish pastors. And so it was that world in which Luther came, he wanted simply to scrub the floors in the monastery so that the brothers could go out and preach. But his superiors recognized very quickly he had a very good gift for language. He could preach well, and he was very quickly the biblicus, we might say the living concordance. He mastered Scripture very early in his monastic career even before he studied at the university, and so he was the perfect preacher for a preaching order. TRUEMAN: By all accounts Luther's days as a monk prior to the Reformation were, we might say, angst ridden to a significant degree. When he officiated at his first Mass, when he was ordained as priest and officiated his first Mass he had some kind of break down at the altar. Possibly because his father was there and his father didn't really approve of his religion calling. Possibly because he was having to make God and he considered himself to be very unrighteous, how could he an unrighteous man stand before a righteous God? How could he make God with his hands and touch God? And this is a theme throughout Luther's life, really, but particularly prior to his Reformation breakthrough to justification by grace through faith. Luther's burning concern was, "How can I as an unrighteous man stand before a righteous God?" And there are tales of him being in the confessional for hours on end obsessing over every little sin, desperately seeking and desperately craving to find the assurance that God loved him and had forgiven him his sin. So Luther's early days as a monk were marked by great fear of God or great fear of what God might do to him because of his unrighteousness. COOPER: During his time as a monk Luther seemed unusually burdened by the demands of God's law far beyond the burden felt by his peers. He was desperate to know that his righteousness was firmly secured, that he was truly saved. LUTHER: When I was a monk, I wearied myself greatly for almost 15 years with the daily sacrifice. I earnestly thought to require righteousness by my works. I tortured myself with prayer, fasting, vigils and freezing. The frost alone might have killed me. COOPER: For more than a decade as Luther tortured himself, he sought out relief. He made his confessions, but they fell on deaf ears. He was even told not to bother doing it again until he'd done something worth confessing. Well, this blasé attitude toward personal holiness really troubled Luther, and his concern only deepened when he travelled to Rome as a representative of the Augustinian order. SPROUL: And in 1510, he was selected, along with one of his compatriots, to make a visit to the holy city of Rome which had enormous benefits from a pilgrimage and an indulgence viewpoint, so he was very excited to be selected for that trip. And when he went there he was extremely disillusioned by what he saw. He saw obvious evident corruption among the clergy, involving themselves with prostitutes and all kinds of immorality, saw them selling the use of the Mass and speaking at a rapid speed so that they could say as many Masses as possible to make money. But the big experience came when he visited the Lateran Church, which had the sacred steps where from the tradition was that when the crusaders went to Jerusalem they found the steps were still there from where Jesus had risen to talk to Pontius Pilate and there they dismantled those sacred steps and brought them back and then reconstructed them in the church, and the Lateran Church there in Rome. And so this was a huge site of pilgrimage value and relics where the view was that if you went up the stairs, I don't know how many stairs, forty some stairs, on your knees reciting the rosary while you were going that had an enormous value of indulgences and so Luther made that little journey on his knees up to the top of the stairs and it's said that when he got to the top of the stairs he stood up and said out loud, "Who knows if it is true?" COOPER: Returning from Rome, Luther poured himself into his studies, but has he grew in his understanding of the Scriptures, he found it increasingly difficult to reconcile them with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. He burned with desire to understand the Bible even as he was growing to hate the words contained within it. Throughout the early to mid-1510's Luther's conflict grew. He saw God as a tyrant demanding something which as unrighteous people simply could not give: righteousness, perfection. Luther did not love this God. He did not fear him; he hated him. LUTHER: But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather, I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, "Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the gospel and through the gospel threaten us with His justice and His wrath?" This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. COOPER: This inner turmoil went on for years until finally in an instant Luther was overcome. He began to see the words of Romans chapter 1, verse 17 clearly as Paul meant them to be understood. That we are justified by faith alone, not by our works, and the gospel hidden for so long began suddenly to burn within him. LUTHER: At last by the mercy of God meditating day and night I gave heed to the context of the words. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith and this is the meaning. The righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith. As it is written, "He who through faith is righteous shall live!" Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. COOPER: Was this a born-again experience as we might understand it? We don't know, nor do we know exactly when it occurred, although Luther has indicated it was after the event which we most closely associate with him, the nailing of the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church on October the 31st 1517. Little did Luther realize that this call to repentance would reverberate around the entire world. SPROUL: The Ninety-five Theses were written by Luther in Latin, and that's a key point because when he attached them to the church door at Wittenberg he wasn't doing violence to the church, that was the bulletin board where announcements were made and invitations were given to the faculty for academic discussions among themselves. And so what Luther was proposing was a serious scholarly discussion about the whole structure of the indulgence system. What happened without Luther's permission and without his knowledge, some students saw the Ninety-five Theses, translated them into German, took advantage of the printing press and within two weeks they were in every village and every hamlet throughout Germany and this huge uproar took place. Karl Barth makes the observation that Luther when he posted the Ninety-five Theses was like a blind man climbing a tower in the church in the bell tower and he began to lose his balance and he reached out to grab something to stabilize himself and what he grabbed in his blindness was the rope for the church bell and accidentally awakened the whole town by the ringing of the bells. LAWSON: The Ninety-five Theses was really a protest against the selling of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church to raise money to build larger buildings in Rome, and it was selling people a totally false hope that loved ones who have already died could be released from purgatory through the purchase of these indulgences. And when this message came to Martin Luther, that a man named Tetzel was going through Saxony and selling these indulgences, he was lit up with righteous indignation. And he could smell a rat from a long ways off and Tetzel was that rat. And so, Martin Luther wrote out ninety-five statements of affirmation and protest. He had no idea that he was striking the match that would light up Western civilization and unknown to Luther, a Reformation was being birthed. He simply wanted to have this discussion, but it found much attention throughout the general area and Martin Luther was now riding a tsunami. He was riding a wave of controversy that would propel him forward to be the chief spokesman of the initial phase of the Reformation. KOLB: There were four printers who recognized that these Ninety-five Theses were dynamite. They printed them and the world's not been the same since. NICHOLS: In many ways it was the beginnings of the modern world, the move from that medieval era into the modern age. We speak of the Renaissance and we credit the Renaissance with this, but there was something to that singular moment of the posting of the Ninety-five Theses that not only changed church history, this changed world history for the centuries to come. GODFREY: And what was particularly radical in the Ninety-five Theses was his criticism of the Pope, who had extended the indulgences to the dead as well as to the living, which was a practice less than fifty years old in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther, who had been really quite an unknown figure up until that point, suddenly became a famous figure and people began to talk about the possibility that the church might be wrong on certain issues and that the church might need to be reformed on certain issues. COOPER: Luther's fame spread at a remarkable rate. His courage in defying the men in power resonated particularly with those who had none. They took his works and reproduced them at such a rate that it was rare to meet a German who was unfamiliar with Luther's teaching. Before long, his works spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire and into the heart of the Vatican itself. NICHOLS: My favorite response from the Catholic Church to Luther's posting the Ninety-five Theses was Pope Leo the Tenth's first response. When a copy of the theses finally made its way to him down in the Vatican, Leo the Tenth quips, "Ah, the ramblings of a drunken German monk. He'll think differently when he sobers up." I think Leo the Tenth significantly underestimated what he was dealing with in this German monk, and on the one hand, Luther never sobered up. This was only the beginning of the challenge between Luther and his Church. And from the posting of the Ninety-five Theses until April of 1521 at Worms, there was one singular movement, and it ended with that decisive action of excommunicating Luther. And we need to remember what this means, this is a moment in time when to be outside of the church meant that you are outside of salvation. The church at this time believed that it held the keys to the kingdom. Literally, when Christ said to Peter, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." That was taken as Christ's giving of the keys of heaven to Peter. And then as Roman doctrine understands it through apostolic succession, Leo the Tenth was now the holder of the keys and that decision to excommunicate Luther meant nothing short of saying, "We are condemning you, we are saying that your soul is damned to hell." That was the result of the Ninety-five Theses. That's how the church fundamentally responded to Luther. How did Luther respond? "Well, you're not the true church. You've abandoned your calling as the church. The true church is the church that preaches the Word of God, that preaches the gospel, and the true church is the church that exercises the sacraments aright and according to the Word of God." COOPER: In November 1518, Luther was summoned to Augsburg to appear before an assembly and defend his theses. Three days of debate proved fruitless. Cardinal Thomas Cajetan continued to defend the practice of issuing and selling indulgences. Luther refused to recant and returned to Wittenberg. But the controversy didn't even there. Luther continued to write, publish and teach, formulating and clarifying the doctrines that would become the foundation for the Reformation. Papal commissions studied his works and declared them heretical. Pope Leo the Tenth declared him a heretic and excommunicated him in early 1521. And then, at the Diet of Worms, Luther was called to defend himself once again. GODFREY: The Diet of Worms is a very important event in the life of Luther in the progress of the Reformation. And the Diet, of course, was a regular meeting of princes, both ecclesiastical and secular. From the life of the Holy Roman Empire the Diet was roughly like the parliament in Britain. But at this particular Diet meeting in the city of Worms in April of 1521, another issue on the docket was the issue of Martin Luther the monk. KOLB: Rome had to have Luther recant because he actually had challenged the very basis of this medieval system. By 1521, when he was actually excommunicated, he had attacked this ritual system upon which medieval piety was based and said it is God's Word that comes to us and not our performance of the rituals of the church through the priest, through the hierarchy, that gives us access to God. So that was a major challenge to the entire edifice of medieval Christianity. And equally important, or perhaps more important, was his challenge to papal authority. He had said that the Pope rules Western Christendom not by divine right, but as a result of human agreement. GODFREY: So Luther arrives in the city and here are major players. There's the emperor himself of course, there are the great secular princes, there are all sorts of ecclesiastical princes, there's the representative of the Pope and the elector Frederick, of course, is there, and Luther arrives. What set the meeting off to a somewhat bad beginning in certain ways is that Luther had larger crowds and larger cheering when he entered the city than had greeted the emperor. This somewhat annoyed the emperor. But on the day of the first meeting they gathered in what we today would consider a relatively small room because after all it was a very limited number of people that were ever allowed in the presence of the emperor. And Luther was put on trial because the church had already declared him a heretic and insisted then that there should be civil penalties along with ecclesiastical penalties for that heresy. And Luther went into it with a measure of fear and trembling knowing how serious it was when he walked into the audience chamber before the emperor, the Spanish guards at the door muttered to him, "To the flames, to the flames." So everybody knew what was at stake here. He enters in and there are his books, a number of books by this time, piled on a table, and the representative of the emperor points to the books and says, "Are these your books?" And Luther says, "Yes, they are." And he says, "Will you now recant of the errors in them?" Well, Luther was distressed because he really was looking forward to the possibility of defending his views, so trying to buy time he says, "Well, will you give me a list of the errors in my books that I'm to recant of?" Well, they were ready for that, they knew he was clever and they weren't going to get into a debate with him what were and what weren't errors, so they said, "You're a professor of theology. You know what your errors are, and you must recant them." And Luther then made the less famous speech at Worms where he said, "Can I have 24 hours to think it over?" And they granted him time to do that. Now, why did he want that time? Well, I think it's a very important window into Luther's mind and heart and soul. He knew how serious this was and he knew as his critics had said to him that he before God would have to answer the question, "Are you alone wise?" And for medieval men this was a very troubling question. They were not rugged individualists. They really believed in community. And Luther wrestled in prayer with that question, "Am I the only one who's wise?" And what his conclusion was, "I am not doing this because I think I'm wise; I am doing this because I'm driven to it by the Word of God. I feel this is the only way I can read the Word of God or that anyone could read the Word of God." COOPER: He was put under enormous pressure, but Luther wouldn't be swayed. LUTHER: "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures, or by evident reason, for I can believe neither Pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves. I consider myself convicted by the testimony of holy Scripture, which is my basis. My conscience is captive to the Word of God. This I cannot and will not recant because acting against one's conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen." COOPER: Luther didn't begin his work with the intention of dividing the Catholic Church. He was simply calling it to repent, specifically to repent of the use of indulgences as a means of securing salvation. He was challenging the abusive authority within the church, not trying to create a new one. How would history look now if the Pope had listened to Luther's call to repent at this point? Would a Protestant movement still exist if it had nothing to protest? Declared a heretic by Leo the Tenth and vilified by Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, Luther went into hiding in Eisenach, and although he might not have said those famous Words, "Here I stand," this much is clear: in exile Luther never wavered. In fact, he became even more bold. He wrote and taught and reformulated his doctrines with indefatigable zeal. He began to translate the New Testament into German so that everyday folks could have the Bible in their own language for the very first time. Here in exile his desire for moral reformation morphed into the desire for a complete transformation, the establishment of a new church, one which was modelled after the church visible in the New Testament. TRUEMAN: Luther's understanding of the church does develop somewhat over time during the Reformation, but in terms of his mature understanding, essential to his thinking is the proclamation of the Word. The minister is the man, the priest is the man who proclaims the Word and the Word is not simply for Luther an explanation of the Bible. The Word is God speaking to the people. The Word comes in a powerful and transformative way. It either loosens people if they grasp it by faith, frees them, or it binds them if they meet it with unbelief. In terms of the congregation, I think Luther expected the congregation to receive the Word with faith. You would go to church to hear the Word read in your language, to hear the Word proclaimed in your language, and that was an active thing. Often we tend to think of congregants as sitting there passively while the person at the front preaches. For Luther, listening was active because listening had to be by faith. So when the Word was proclaimed, the congregation were to actively receive that Word. When his hairdresser, Peter the barber, is struggling with his prayer life, one of Luther's bits of advice is go to church. Hear the Word preached. Hear the psalms being sung. And for Luther that would help Peter with prayer because Peter's not just sitting there passively receiving this stuff; he's supposed to be grasping it by faith, and as he grasps it by faith so the Lord will transform him. GODFREY: I think Luther was committed theoretically to the notion that the Bible taught a rather congregationalist polity and that worship services would be quite simple and with a fair level of congregational involvement in those worship services. But Luther also recognized that the external form of the church was for him a relative matter of indifference and that in the world in which he lived those decisions would be made not by ministers or theologians but would be made by princes. So the princes ended up making the decisions about who would be ministers, where they would serve and how the liturgy at the church would remain fairly conservative. COOPER: Luther understood that all believers regardless of education, economic status or social standing, were invaluable members of the body of Christ. All believers are priests, for the kingdom of God is a kingdom of priests. And these priests were not under the authority of a Pope; they were under the authority of God. KOLB: The Word of God, especially as anchored in Scripture and in the authority of Scripture, was key to Luther's entire call for reform. And so the sermon, he says in 1526 in his work on the German liturgy, the sermon was now the center. The Lord's Supper, the celebration of the Lord's Supper was very important, and absolution was key to the Christian life as well, daily repentance. But the sermon, the delivery of the Word of God, the hearing of Scripture for a population that was 85-90 percent illiterate, that was the heart of the matter. NICHOLS: Why would a church want to keep Scripture from the people? Well of course the answer is obvious, because then you're dependent on the church. You need to rely on what the church says and it becomes a way for the church to keep the power over the people. The other reason that we see here is that some of the doctrines, really crucial doctrines of the Middle Ages were based on a bad translation. In fact, we see this in the very first of the Ninety-five Theses. After Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses, he wrote another text called "Explanations of the Ninety-five Theses," and those are paragraph expansions on each of the Ninety-five Theses, which are more or less single sentences. And in the first expansion of the first thesis, in that text, the explanation of the Ninety-five Theses, Luther references the Greek text and the Greek word for "repent." Of course, the Greek Word for "repent" is the word metanoia. We get from this the idea of a change of mind. So you do a 180 is the idea of repentance. This is how the Latin Vulgate translated that Greek Word, it translated it as Poenitentiam agite, and what that is best translated, or directly translated as, is "do penance." Well there's a world of difference between "do penance" and the intention behind the Greek Word metanoia, and Luther saw it. Remember it was just in 1516 that we have the publication of the Greek text through the scholar Erasmus' work at the town of Basel. An one of those copies made its way into Luther's hands and there's so accident here of history. Luther is reading the Greek text in 1516 and a year later he's posting the Ninety-five Theses. LAWSON: It was so scandalous because in the day of the Reformation, in the centuries preceding, the Church stood in a posture of authority over the Bible. The Pope became the chief interpreter of the Bible, and what was so scandalous about the Reformation is that the Reformers, chief of whom was Luther, asserted that the Bible is over the church, that the Bible commands and directs the church; not the other way around. So that's what really was the heart of the Reformation. It was a crisis of authority in the church. And no longer now would human tradition and ecclesiastical councils, and even the Pope himself, be the authority in the church. The highest arbitrator in the church would now be "Thus says the Lord" as it was recorded in the canon of written Scripture. TRUEMAN: The purpose of preaching was to convict people of their sin by proclaiming the law to them, pointing them to the righteous God and to their own unworthiness to meet the demands of the law, and then, to offer the people Christ. To command them to do something they can't do, and then to point them to Christ, the One who has done it for them. LAWSON: First are foremost, he had a fire in his bones, and it came out in the preaching and proclamation of the Word of God. The kind of preacher that he was, he was a straightforward Bible preacher. TRUEMAN: There's a famous painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder of Luther preaching. And there's his family on one side, and Luther's in the pulpit on the other side, and his hands on the Bible. And his arm is outstretched pointing to a crucifix, the crucified Christ, and that sums up beautifully Luther's approach to preaching. It was to be based on the Bible, and it was to culminate in pointing to Christ crucified. LAWSON: He was full of life and energy. He wasn't simply a lecturer who stood in a pulpit; he roared like a lion. He was bold, he was a son of thunder in the pulpit. It's been said that when you read the sermons of Martin Luther, you really need to read them out loud so that you can hear and feel the man because he was a powerful force as he stood to preach the Word of God. COOPER: Luther insisted that those who would preach the Word must first be changed by the Word, that they be people committed to prayer and careful study. Luther brought the Scriptures back to a place of preeminence in the church's worship and he also reinvigorated the practice of singing. After all, as Luther said, "God has created man for the express purpose of praising and extolling Him." SPROUL: Sacred music was an integral part of Luther's background as a monk. And once he came out of the monastery, he still had a profound appreciation for the importance of church music. In fact, he said, "Second only to the Bible, the Word of God, is the importance of music," because music had the singular ability to elevate the soul. LAWSON: Well, in Luther's day, the worship service had become dead because the spiritual leaders were spiritually dead, the people were spiritually dead and there was a dead profession of faith in the church. And when Luther burst onto the scene, he brought the life of the truth of the gospel with him and such theology revolutionized the doxology in the church. As people now are alive unto God, under the preaching of the Word of God, their hearts begin to overflow with anthems of praise for God. It is high doctrine that always promotes high devotion to God and Luther was responsible for this. Luther himself began to write hymns and they were expressions of his great love for Scripture and love for God. And so for example, when the black plague swept through Europe he chose to stay in Wittenberg and to minister to the people who were suffering, and in the midst of that crisis, he wrote that great hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. It was the direct result of meditating upon Psalm 46, and God had become a stronghold and a refuge for him in his hour of greatest need. SPROUL: When the things would be difficult at the university at Wittenberg, Melanchthon, Luther's closest lieutenant, trying to rally the discouraged professors would say, "Gentlemen, let's sing the 46th," meaning, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. And that song, of course, has come down to our day. GODFREY: One of the convictions of Luther is that singing would be a great way for people to know God's truth, and for that reason he wrote hymns and the Lutheran tradition encouraged the use of hymns, the development of hymns. NICHOLS: My favorite hymn of Luther's is a hymn called Christ Jesus Lay in Death's Strong Bands. In that hymn Luther actually plays off of a medieval saying. If they had bumper stickers in the Middle Ages, this would have been a bumper sticker, and the saying was this, "In the midst of life, media vita in morte sumus." "In the midst of life, we are in death." Isn't that a terrible worldview? You talk about the effect of the Middle Ages on the people, doesn't that show the hopelessness that was there on the eve of the Reformation? That they're saying is in the midst of life, we die. Here's what Luther does in that hymn, and it shows how clever he is, and it also shows what a great theologian he is. In that hymn Luther turns it around. Now, the truth is, in the midst of death we live. COOPER: Luther, an adept hymn writer, had a multifaceted view of music. It was a teaching tool, it was a key part of public worship, but it was also a glorious God given source of happiness. LUTHER: Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. I have no use for cranks who despise music because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology, I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God, only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues. COOPER: Luther was many things. He was a daring revolutionary, he was a passionate preacher, and a man of devout prayer. He cared deeply for the people of God and the worship of God. He wrote hymns of such beauty that they're still being sung 500 years later. But arguably the most impressive aspect of his ministry is one that he never anticipated and one that we often overlook: his ministry as a husband and a father. Martin Luther never expected to get married. His early writings suggested that he saw marriage as little more than a way of keeping men from sexual immorality. But after getting married himself Luther began to view marriage as a school for character. TRUEMAN: Luther gets married in 1525. It's quite a controversial move of course because he had originally been a monk and a priest. He had taken vows of celibacy. He was certainly not the first Reformer to get married. Clerical marriage had become quite common in Protestantism by the time Luther gets married in 1525. But, of course, he's well into middle age by the standards of the day at that point. He's a confirmed bachelor. He marries this lovely young lady, Katharina von Bora who was the one nun that they couldn't marry off. A group of them had fled from the town of Nimbschen, a group of nuns had fled from Nimbschen a couple of years earlier. She was the one nun that they couldn't marry off. She falls in love with a young man, his parents don't approve, so that doesn't work out. The Wittenberg establishment try to marry her off to a skin flint of a Lutheran pastor in the territory and she won't marry him, so Luther eventually marries her himself. They have what appears to be a marriage that certainly grows into one of great love. Luther makes a comment to the effect that he wouldn't have all the riches of Croesus in exchange for his wife. KOLB: Of course the house must have been just bedlam all the time because there were he and Katharina and six children. They took in nieces and nephews, they had students who lived with them, they had servants who took care of this kind of student dormitory. COOPER: Undoubtedly, it would take a woman of remarkable character to handle being married to a man like Martin Luther. Someone who could not only endure his good-natured ribbing, but be able to give as good as she got. TRUEMAN: Katie was a remarkable woman in her own right, a great homebrewer. She also did some gardening work in the town in order to generate some money for the Luther household and took in lodgers, and they seemed to have been a couple greatly in love with each other. One of the touching things about visiting Wittenberg is that outside the entrance into the house, the Augustinian cloister that elector John gave them as a wedding present, there's a doorframe, an arch with a little stool on either side. This was apparently a present, a birthday present that Katie bought her husband because she didn't think they spent enough time talking together. So she brought this doorframe so that at the end of the day they could sit on either side of the door and just talk to each other. So it's a delightful story and she was deeply devastated when he died. He died away from home, he died in the town of Eisleben, ironically where he was born. He was there doing some political business with the local counts who had fallen out with each other and he took ill and died, and she was devastated not to be with him in his dying moments. So it really is a very beautiful and touching marriage that they had. KOLB:[Luther] Had some very warm stories to tell about his children. He came in once and touched the lips of his daughter Margarete, and recoiled in horror because he had not thought to wash his hands. I didn't even think about whether people washed their hands in the 16th century. He knew that with dirty hands that he had from being out on the street he shouldn't touch the baby's mouth and he was just horrified that he might have tempted God by making her sick. I don't think she got sick but, so he had this devoted love. TRUEMAN: When the Luthers' daughter Magdalene was dying one of the striking things about the account that he gives is how much faith she had. She's looking at her father and saying things such as, "Why are you sad, father? I'm going to be with my heavenly father. I'm going to be in a better place," and he describes how he had to turn away because he didn't want her to see him weeping. And he's sort of beating himself up because he doesn't have the faith that his daughter has, that he wants her to stay with him but he knows that when she passes she'll be going to her heavenly father. And then he talks about the coffin and about how he can hardly believe that something so small and so beautiful has died and can be fitted into this small coffin. So it's a very, very moving scene. He and Katie were deeply devastated by the death of their daughter, as any parent would be. KOLB: And had a also wonderful spiritual relationship. The most dramatic story that I know is when Luther was in one of his periods of discouragement and depression and she came dressed in black, which was already then the color of mourning. He knew Wittenberg very well and he hadn't heard that anyone had died so he wondered why she had dressed in black. And she said that apparently God had died the way he was going around moping and that revived him. TRUEMAN: Katie seems to have ruled the roost somewhat within the house. There's an anecdote where he makes what she considers to be an inappropriate joke or harsh comment about an Anabaptist leader, one of the Schwermer, one of the crazy people out there. And she rebukes him and says, "You shouldn't speak like that about a minister of the gospel," and apparently he backs off straight away, he backs down. He refers to her as his chain, he plays on the Latin catēna, sounds a little bit like the Latin for Katherine, Katharina. He plays on that as a pun so he calls her his chain, he also refers to her as "my lord Katie," so I think within the home, Luther probably had to mind his p's and q's, as we would say back in England. He was very much the loving, doting husband and she was very much in charge, I think. COOPER: Luther the family man is perhaps where get to see the most endearing aspects of Luther's character: his love and his tenderness, his desire to cherish and to protect. He was the monk who changed the world, but there was one aspect of Martin Luther, for better or for worse, that never changed. LUTHER: You have fought against us as one would attack a cliff with a broken straw. You are undisciplined heads who out of utter perversity are able to do nothing in common or in agreement, but are different and self-centered in heart and life. You teach the disorderly masses to break into this field in disorder, like pigs. COOPER: Imagine being on the receiving end of that. Martin Luther was famous for his caustic barbs against his opponents and it's pretty shocking even by today's standards, especially when you consider that he was pastor. In fact, when you put together Luther's character and also the controversies that he increasingly became embroiled in in later life, it's hard to know what to do with him. How do we evaluate a man whose words make us wonder at the beauty of the gospel and yet a moment later make us wince? TRUEMAN: Anyone who reads Luther, or reads about the life of Luther knows that he's a man of extremes at points. For example, at the Diet of Worms where he really stands more or less alone against the mass ranks of empire and Church. Less than four years after he posts the Ninety-five Theses, he goes from being an obscure university professor and monk to standing in this room with the most powerful men in the Church and empire who could take him outside and burn him if they so choose. It took massive courage to do that. Yet if you read Luther's life, you also, for example, come across his attitude to the peasants in 1525 when the peasants rise up in rebellion against their masters. In 1525 Luther writes a book known as his harsh book against the peasants. And so, we admire the one Luther, the Luther at the Diet of Worms, and we're horrified by the Luther of 1525. I think what we need to understand, of course, is that the same character trait that allowed Luther to do the one great and admirable thing also drove the reprehensible thing. Luther was a bullheaded man who was capable of moments of supreme self-confidence when he knew it was right and he was going to move ahead like a bull in a china shop. And that allows him to stand at the Diet of Worms where, say, a Philip Melanchthon would have crumbled. Philip Melanchthon was a gentle soul, could not have achieved it. The problem with that kind of personality, though, is when they get hold of the wrong end of an argument, or when they go off in the wrong direction, the damage can be as spectacular as the greatness was spectacular. COOPER: The Martin Luther of the early days of the Reformation had, at times, a spirit of congeniality in debate, but he was rarely ever gracious to the defenders of Rome. GODFREY: One of the harder things for moderns to understand is that in the 16th century there was absolutely no notion of denominationalism. For centuries, probably almost from its beginning, the Church had fought about the Church as either the true Church or false churches. You know, today I'm a Presbyterian, you're a Baptist, somebody else is a Lutheran and we have differences, we may even see some of our differences as important, but we regard one another as Christians. That was not the case through most of the history of the church. You were either in the one true church or you were part of a false church. And Luther initially hoped very much to be a positive reforming influence in what he saw as the one true church. But when it became more and more obvious that the Roman Church would not listen to him, would not reform itself, Luther's conclusion was Rome is establishing itself as a false church. That's why fairly early on in the 1520's, Luther begins to talk about the Pope as the antichrist. And again, maybe when people in the 21st century read that they think he's being sort of rhetorical. He was not being rhetorical. He believed that the Pope was the eschatological revelation of the antichrist at the end of the age. And so Luther is very earnest in everything he says, both about the Pope, and about the Church of Rome. And what's interesting when you read most Protestant writers in the 16th century, they never refer to the Catholic Church; they refer to the Roman Church, and their argument is that we are the catholic church, we are the universal church, we stand in unity with the church of all ages. Now Luther and all the Reformers believed there were true Christians in the Roman Church that still held to the gospel. But they believed they could say that the Roman Church was a false church because it's official teachers had rejected the gospel. And I think it's worth saying, here as we're on the eve of the 500th celebration of the Reformation, that if Luther came back today he would not change his view of the Roman Church. The Roman Church in fundamental ways has not changed and it still does not teach the gospel clearly, and still elevates law to a place that undermines and contradicts the doctrine of justification by faith alone. COOPER: For Luther, everything was theocentric. He took deep personal offence when he felt that God was being dishonored in some way and so his most cutting rhetoric was reserved for anyone who seemed to be distorting or denying the truth about God, and this includes his writing in later life about the Jewish people. As a result, some have condemned Luther as anti-Semitic. Others have noted that Luther's words were taken and used by the Nazis in their attempt at extermination. However, for many years, Luther strongly advocated for a spirit of open-handed Christian love toward the Jewish people. LUTHER: If we really want to help them, we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law, but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially and permit them to trade and work with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either. COOPER: Luther strongly advocated for the Jewish people in a way that was unheard of in his day. Rather than treating them as second-class citizens or as subhuman in some way, Luther desired that they be treated with the same respect and offered the same opportunities as any German. TRUEMAN: Anti-Jewish sentiment was deeply embedded in western European society in the 16th century. Almost everybody would have hated, despised, distrusted, disliked the Jews. NICHOLS: Luther's first piece in which he addresses this issue was written in 1523, and in that piece, Luther actually says many favorable things towards the Jews. TRUEMAN: In which he emphasizes Jesus' Jewishness, and also advocates that Christians should be kind to their Jewish neighbors, they should reach out to them in order to be able to speak the gospel to them. NICHOLS: And really for the next decade Luther is saying favorable things, more favorable things than others were saying. TRUEMAN: Luther is very much the heir a late medieval eschatological expectation that Christ is going to return soon. And he understands himself as playing a role in what he sees as the great revival at the end of time, the Reformation. The breaking out of the gospel is an end time moment for Luther, that is an immediate precursor to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. And one of the precursors to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ is going to be the conversion of the Jews. So in 1523, Luther writes this, in many ways, very counter-cultural treatise on the Jews arguing that Christians should be kind and welcoming and good neighbors to them because that is the way to draw them into taking the gospel seriously, speaking the gospel to them so that they'll be converted to the Lord Jesus Christ and He will return. COOPER: Luther had been sure that overturning the corruption of the papacy was the key to winning the Jewish people to the faith. But he was mistaken, and he didn't take kindly to their continued rejection of Christ. He also became incensed when he learned that Christians were being encouraged to Judaize, to adhere to the Old Testament law. In his eyes, this was robbing the Christian of his or her freedom in Christ, and as a result, some of Luther's later work makes for disturbing reading. LUTHER: Set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed, all of their prayer books and Talmudic writings in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them, their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. COOPER: It's nearly impossible for us to hear those words and not hear them as anti-Semitic, but how should we understand them? Are we right to see them as a racist diatribe? Or was there another motivation at work? NICHOLS: And so here Luther writes this text and the text that everybody talks about is this text on the Jews and their despicable lies. And so in this text, Luther goes after them. He doesn't go after them on racial grounds; he goes after them on theological grounds. You know, at one point Luther says, "Melanchthon cuts with a knife; I swing with an axe." Right? So here's Melanchthon, his successor at Wittenberg. You can almost see him with the precision of a surgeon, you know, slicing in precise words, and words well said and well put. Well, that wasn't Luther. Luther has axe in hand, and he's flailing away, and whatever is in his way, look out. Right? Now, this is not an excuse, but it is a way to understand Luther, and we also have to understand Luther in his context. GODFREY: What Luther comes later in his life to believe is as he looks around, that the devil everywhere is active using the law to try to destroy the gospel. So everywhere he is seeing the devil promoting works righteousness against Christ righteousness in the gospel, and that's why he becomes so violent against the Pope and the Roman Church, that's why he can be very sharp against Anabaptists, that's why he criticizes lawyers; they're always all about the law. And that's why he criticizes Jews. What all these groups have in common is their misunderstanding of law in a way that corrupts the gospel and undermines the work of Christ. COOPER: The book of James says, "If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also, though they are so large and driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the wheel of the pilot directs. So also, the tongue is a small member yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire. And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing." This was certainly true of Luther's tongue. Here was a man who said, "I find nothing that promotes work better than angry fervor. For when I wish to compose, write, pray and preach well, I must be angry. It refreshes my entire system, my mind is sharpened and all unpleasant thoughts and depression fade away." Like fire, anger is a great servant, but a terrible master, and there were times when Luther's zeal for truth seemed to blind him to his own weaknesses and failures. His tongue set the world ablaze with bright gospel realities, but the fire could get out of hand. Speaking of Luther, John Calvin once said, "Consider how great a man Luther is and what excellent gifts he has. The strength of mind and resolute constancy, the skillfulness, efficiency and theological power he has used in devoting all his energies to overthrowing the reign of antichrist and to spread far and near the teaching of salvation. I've often said that even if he were to call me a devil I should still regard him as an outstanding servant of God. But with all his rare and excellent virtues, he has also serious faults. Would that he had studied to curb his restless uneasy temper which is so ready to boil over everywhere. Flatterers have done him much mischief since he is by nature too prone to be overindulgent to himself." Calvin recognized that even the greatest man or woman of God will continue to struggle with sin until the end. He saw that struggle in Abraham, in Moses, in David, and he saw it in Luther, too. And Luther himself knew how great a sinner he was. It was precisely that self-knowledge that made the gospel so personal and so precious to him. LUTHER: So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: "I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is, there I shall be also." COOPER: Though the fire of Luther's tongue could not be tamed, neither could the gospel which Luther had fanned into flame. In our day, perhaps more than any other since the days of Luther, Christians in the West are living with a real sense of unease. The Christian faith in previous generations almost universally recognized as being a great force for good in society is now often seen as precisely the opposite. The charge to Christians is this: conform or die. SPROUL: The world always tries to get the church to change because so often what the world wants, even when it seeks council, it doesn't seek council; it seeks permission. It wants the church to embrace wherever the culture is as we see it in our contemporary situation today. The whole question of marriage between men and men, and women and women, and they talk about marriage equality. That's where the culture is, and the culture is demanding in some cases that the church endorse, promote and embrace this kind of behavior. And it's the same with abortion. The church has been very much involved as being a prophetic criticism against the cultural acceptance of abortion on demand. And so we've heard from a recent presidential candidate that what happens is that the views of the church have to change in order to conform to where the culture is. COOPER: Luther and the Reformers left us with a similar charge to conform or die, but where the world calls on the church to conform to the wisdom of the world, the call of the Reformation is that the church be conformed to Scripture, and the call continues to this day. The generation following Luther summarized the charge in the Latin phrase semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, "always be reforming according to the Word of God." NICHOLS: One of the things that Luther actually feared most is that the church would forget the gospel. The very last sermon that Luther preached in Wittenberg was a call to the people at Wittenberg not to distort the gospel, not to turn their back on the gospel. He was seeing German peasants and the German people going back to the relics. In fact it's in that sermon that he talks about Joseph's pants at Aachen. And he also says, "Why would you settle for the Pope's second-hand junk?" That's what Luther says. His fear was that the gospel would be distorted or that the gospel would be neglected, and his hope for the church of every age was to recognize that in every age we need a Reformation. SPROUL: There are lots of historians who are saying that the Reformation is over. In many cases saying good riddance, as some have said that it was a tempest in a teapot in the first place. It was just simply a matter of doctrine, and doctrine divides. And there's this basic either indifference or even hostility to any doctrine at all. But Luther argued, of course, in the 16th century that the doctrine of justification, which is the doctrine of the gospel, is the doctrine, the article upon which the church stands or falls. The doctrines of the Council of Trent from the 16th century are still in place, a treasury of merits, the system of indulgences, all of that is still there, the anathema against the doctrine of justification by faith alone is still there. Now a lot of people ignore it, a lot of people are saying let's just all get along and that was an old time argument but it doesn't appeal or apply to today. I've had other scholars say what has changed from the 1st century until the 20th century? The gospel is still the gospel, and it has to be clarified and defended in every generation. And insofar as the gospel is always in danger of being distorted, it has to be maintained with clarity and urgency in every generation, including our own. KOLB: Luther had a very strong sense of history. God created in the beginning, and there was going to be a last day, and God participated in human history. Human history is also God's history for Luther. What that means is that we are faced with ever new situations. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not change. We are caught in our rebellion against God. Luther would say above all, our doubt of God's Word and God's Lordship, so that this rhythm of dying and rising in Christ is always there. But because God is a God of history, things are on the move and new situations developed and new ways of conveying this gospel of death and resurrection through Christ need to be developed. And so the church needs always, not only to be reformed, but more deeply the church needs always to be in a state of repentance. LAWSON: And so the church has always been confronted by the world wanting to tone down its message, but as long as we are rooted and grounded in the fertile soil of the Word of God, the truth will always be preached by the church, a message that is antithetical to the spirit of this age, that is totally in juxtaposition to what the world wants to hear. We must be different in order to make a difference in this world, and so that is why we are committed to preaching the Word of God. The grass withers, the flower fades away, but the Word of our God abides forever. COOPER: The Reformation isn't over. If we have ears to hear, God's Word creates in each one of us a mini-Reformation every time it's heard, but there is another kind of Reformation on the way. We who live in the West are experiencing it even now, in fact. The social privilege we once enjoyed has been ripped away, Christians increasingly stereotyped as intolerant bigots, socially regressive or just plain stupid by those who see themselves as progressive. It's challenging and increasingly costly for Christians to do what Luther did and stand firm. But even as the West declares Christianity dead and buried, there is still good news to tell. The gospel has not been extinguished here, and it burns brightly in Central and South America, Africa and many parts of Asia. Today, more than 2.2 billion people around the world, that's roughly one third of the earth's population, claim to be believers, and that number is rising. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to be home to as many as 1.1 billion Christians by 2050. Clearly God's gospel does not fail, and because of that we can have hope. LAWSON: The reason we have hope is ultimately because of the sovereignty of God. That God rules and reigns in the heavens and His supreme authority rules over all, and that what man means for evil, God intends for good. And even in the darkest hours of history, the light shines the brightest, the darkness cannot extinguish the light. The light will always extinguish the darkness. TRUEMAN: Christians should still have hope today because Christ is still on the throne. Christ is risen. It doesn't matter what worldly authorities do, it doesn't matter what the Supreme Court does, it doesn't matter who's elected president, it doesn't matter what your neighbor says about you, God is still sovereign and Christ is still savior. SPROUL: Well, we don't just hope that God's promises will come to pass in the sense of keeping our fingers crossed, but we have an assurance that God will do what He says that He will do, and that's the hope that we have as Christians, and going forward as the church. TRUEMAN: The gates of hell will not prevail against us so we know how the story ends. The story does end with God not only being sovereign, but being visibly sovereign in the new heavens and the new earth. So Christians should always have hope. Yes, our own bodies are going to grow old and die if the Lord doesn't return, but ultimately we will be resurrected and be with the Lord for all eternity. SPROUL: I am absolutely certain that no power on earth, no force in this world can ever extinguish the kingdom of God, that the church cannot and will not lose. The church of Christ will conquer all things. That's the hope that we have. COOPER: There's something else Luther's story proves. However dark the century becomes, however powerful the opposition, God will never allow the light of the gospel to be fully extinguished. And just when the fire appears to be fading forever, God will make it burn more brightly than ever before. LUTHER: God is our hope and strength in woe. Through earth he maketh wars to cease. His power breaketh spear and bow. His mercy sendeth endless peace. Then though the earth remove and storms rage high above and seas tempestuous prove, yet still will we not fear, the Lord of hosts is ever near. COOPER: That was Luther: The Life And Legacy of the German Reformer. Don’t forget that you can download the accompanying study guide for free at LutherDocumentary.com/studyguide. The study guide will help you dig more deeply into Luther’s life and the history of the Reformation. And by the way, if you want to make sure you don’t miss videos from Ligonier Ministries in future, subscribe to Ligonier’s YouTube channel and click the bell to enable notifications. Thank you for watching.
Info
Channel: Ligonier Ministries
Views: 1,068,680
Rating: 4.7377048 out of 5
Keywords: Martin Luther, R.C. Sproul, Steven Lawson, ligonier ministries, rc sproul, reformed theology, german reformer, reformation theology, documentary, church history, martin luther movie, martin luther reformation, martin luther reformation documentary, martin luther biography, protestant reformation, reformed, reformation, theology, christianity, full documentary, calvinism, protestant, 95 thesis, sproul, luther, bible, martin luther, christian video 2021, christian movies full movies, god
Id: 6VK0p-tuuao
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 92min 33sec (5553 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 29 2019
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.