Luther's Reformation (an overview)

in this lecture we're going to pick up where we left off in our last lecture where we noticed Luther's Reformation breakthrough in his new understanding of the gospel and in this lecture going to carry it forward into the Reformation itself how did the Gospel message launch Luther and propel him into a controversy with the Catholic Church that eventually led to the rise of the Protestant Reformation and as with Luther's Reformation when we talk about his breakthrough so also when we talk about his Reformation in his fight with the Catholic Church there was a great deal of familiarity here just about everybody knows that Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church at Vinton Berg and that with a hammer stroke into the door there sounded a gong as we say that launched the Protestant Reformation unfortunately there's a lot of myth making here there's a lot of sort of embellishing of the story there's so much that is in play here that too often it becomes a bit of a cartoonish caricature of the reality of what happened in Luther's day as we'll see in this lecture Luther actually in a way stumbled and bumbled his way towards the Reformation he didn't set out to start a controversy that would lead to 500 years of Protestantism though of course once it got under way he was certainly in favor of leaving the Catholic Church well what happened well in a manner of speaking st. Peter's Basilica happened if you were to go to Rome today down to the heart of the old world and you were then to cross over the river you would be very close to the Vatican and if you approach it on foot you will always be struck by just how impressive it is and it's not just the history and the art and all the heritage that is within it but it's also too simply the size of it the tome designed by Michelangelo is one of the most impressive domes still standing today you go inside it is just simply a marble if you take the tour you get to see things like Michelangelo's works and frescoes there on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you get to see the art of Raphael and just a number of others again in terms of scope and importance of all of these pieces both in the architecture of the building and in the art and the legacy that is curated within it within its museums and within its archives is second to none really well it would surprise most people to know that this isn't the original st. Peter's most people can notice that when you do the dating of the Roman numerals on the outside of it the Pope who was able to put his name on it was the Pope who finished the cathedral just goes to show that those who finish things will often get to put their name on it despite all those who went before them but the Roman numerals just on the facade tell us that st. Peters is from a later date even the fact that I just told you that Michelangelo was the designer of the dome itself should tell you that it comes from after the Renaissance well there was before a basilica there a much smaller basilica by the name of old st. Peter's an old Saint Peter's had been established and founded in built like none other than Constantine himself back in the 4th century Constantine had laid over with dirt a 1st century Christian graveyard and had built a hallowed basilica there and it had been called st. Peter's well during the Renaissance papacy as it's called a number of the folks became unhappy with the dilapidation and the squalor that a number of the churches there in Rome lived in and in particular the old st. Peter's was beginning to fall apart it had a wooden base structure and though obviously would all be pictures of it we are told that it was leaning at one point the walls were no longer true and plumb and so there was the call for a new st. Peter's to be built one that would rival any Church in Christendom and the Pope at the time was Clement the seventh well the problem though is that Clement did not have the funds within his own resources to design and build a basilica that would meet the standard that he wanted well over the Alps in the city of Mainz there was another Archbishop now the Archbishop of Mainz is a vitally important Bishop and a seat of power in the 16th century and long after the Archbishop of Mainz was one of the seven electors of the whole Roman Empire which means that whenever there was a vacancy in the Holy Roman Empire whenever the previous Emperor had died these seven electors came together and elected the new Emperor so the archbishopric of mites was a very very important office well the man who held the office at this point to the current archbishop had actually gotten a hold of this office through the practice of Simon II through the practice of buying and selling of church offices he was from a very important family the Holton's Oh learned family which has a long legacy that runs all the way down until they are of Napoleon and beyond well this man had bought the office and so he too was in very much debt and needed a revenue stream in order to make up the amount of money that he had borrowed to secure this archbishopric well the two of these men conspire climb at the seventh the Pope and the Archbishop of Mainz to offer an indulgence sale throughout the area of Germany this has led principally by the archbishop who says to the Pope let's have it indulgence sale in my kingdom in my area of the world the Holy Roman Empire and if you bless it will do it and the two men agree to split the profits climate then having a revenue stream to go ahead with the refounding of st. Peter's and the Archbishop of Mainz than having a revenue stream to be able to pay for his loan for the securing of his office now by large no one knew of this deal into a great time after this is something we know about in terms of behind site being 2020 this is not something that was broadcast now an indulgent sale is a very an important thing and we have to understand what is going on here too often it's said that selling of indulgences is the selling of salvation itself that's a real big misstep indulgences are still offered today they're not sold today that issue is rectified shortly after the Reformation but indulgences are part and parcel to the Catholic system in our last lecture we looked at how the cycle of the Christian life works in the medieval Catholic Way where you are born you then enter into the state of grace then after sin you have to confess it here the absolution from the priest and then perform a certain amount of penance well an indulgence doesn't negate the reality that one has to confess sins or feel sorry for sins or seek their emendation in one's life rather an indulgence has a very specific in a very particular purpose an indulgence lifts the demand for penance to be performed in order for someone to be restored to the state of grace now the logic here is not that you're buying it per se these are considered to be alms now again an all MS anything above and beyond a tithe and the giving of alms is a good work and so what would happen in the Middle Ages is a number of people would come and confess and they would be told well you need to do X amount of penance and the person would say I simply don't have the time or the capacity to do all of these things and there's lots of reasons why they might say this well what the church with an offer is an indulgence essentially what you're doing is you're funding the church's good work you're paying for others to live the life of prayer and confession and penance namely the clergy it's still considered a good work it's still considered to be a good act it's not buying and selling of things in terms of the way we might buy and sell lunch or dinner at a restaurant still though the system is ripe for abuse the boundary lines the brake pedals that would stop people from abusing the system and essentially making it as if you were buying a way out of penance we're not as present as they ought to have been similarly it was often not very clear that leads to the laity where the buying of indulgences is to get out of purgatory began and we're buying one Salvation ended no again the theology of it is is that one is already a Christian one is already on the journey of the Christian life from a product of you might say the issue here is you're not buying your way into heaven rather you're purchasing indulgences as a way of securing the fact that you are already in the church but you don't fall away fully etc but again this is ripe for abuse and well with the conspiring of Clement in the Archbishop of Mainz they find their man who was going to become one of the most hated and reviled indulgence hawkers in all of church history Johann Tetzel now again Tetzel always plays the scapegoat here he's always considered the evil man but we need a stress here there were a lot of indulgent sales that went on throughout the Middle Ages there were abuses and other parts of the Empire and in other parts of Europe and there were indulgent sales and abuses in general that went on in other parts of Europe in Luther's day as well the fact is because Tetzel is the man that Luther goes after in particular he often goes down as the one who abused and broke the system but he's not he is very effective as we'll see here in a second though and Tetzel is one of these guys who takes the brake pedals off you might say and just simply goes for it in terms of abusing the purchasing of adult ensues and what Tesla would do is he would travel with an entourage and as they were coming to a village or to a city a front man a sort of carnival barker would go out before them into the city and he would call throughout the city and he would post placards and all these kinds of things declaring that an indulgence sale was coming to their midst and calling for them to be ready when the man came Tesla would then enter into the city of the village with the crucifix held high sort of a beacon for people to come and to hear his sermon or his message if a church would not let him preach in their pulpits he would preach sometimes in the open air and Tessa was really good at two things he was good at scaring people really ginning up the rhetoric to get people to be fearful and frightened of the fear of purgatory he was also by the way good at slogan izing this and so Tessa would preach the sermon these sort of fire and brimstone messages where you would hear the screams of your dead relatives in purgatory and then he would offer the sale of the indulgences itself and the slogans he would use are somewhat numerous but the famous one that quote as soon as a coin in the coffer Springs a soul from purgatory Springs and we know of this in particular because Luther asked you to cite this in his 95 theses this is one of the things that Luther considers to be so condemned natori of this particular sale of indulgences well there's one last wrinkle to this that we have to note and that is towards the end of the Middle Ages what began to happen is there arose this doctrine that when you purchase an indulgence we didn't simply purchase it for yourself but rather you could also purchase an indulgence for your dead relatives in a still relatively feudal era where familial ties are really the core of one's identity to hear a sermon that described the anguish of your dead relatives and then all it took was a coin scale to whatever your personal net worth was to get them out of this well as you can imagine it was pretty lucrative so people would buy indulgences for themselves or for their relatives who had passed on we still by the way in museums and in archives and things have the indulgences chests where this money would be placed and this is put a great big box that would be weighed down with all this filthy lucre all the money that had been extorted you might say from the populace now before we get to Luther it needs to be noted a lot of people found this to be quite unseemly if not downright dastardly this was considered to be extortionate abusive behavior by those in the Catholic Church on the laity the problem though is is that many people blame Tetzel they didn't really know what was going on maybe they knew that the archbishopric of mites had offered the adult and sale but a lot of people Luther himself as we'll see in the 95 theses believes that it's Tetzel who's kind of gone off the reservation it's going his own way and trying to be a successful salesman he has broken all the cardinal rules so for example actually in Luther's home area in the area of it and board Frederick the wise Frederick of Saxony another one of these electors and other one of these high-powered people in the Holy Roman Empire had actually barred Tetzel from coming to any of his regions Luther in other words is not the only person the lone wolf voice standing up decrying these as abuses well what happens to Luther in many ways is that he stumbles into a controversy that he never intended and that the church seeks to make an example of somebody who's relatively unimportant theologically or in terms of the church they want to shut people up well they're not going to shut up Frederick the wise or some of these more powerful people from criticizing the sale of indulgences these were lucrative monies that were coming into the church both for mites and for the Pope and so Luther in a manner of speaking stumbles and bumbles his way into the cause of the Reformation and we know this from Luther's own mouth he describes his Reformation as he stumbling around blind reaches out to study himself and grabs a gong and pulls the rope sending out the call for Reformation throughout Europe in other words this is not a manifesto document these 95 theses if we're going to talk about for Reformation but they soon become that in the history that follows well what happens is on Halloween night as we like to say today October 31st 1517 it is alleged that Luther approached the church door there at the castle Church in Wittenberg and nailed 95 theses now I say alleged because we actually don't have a smoking gun here we'll have the first document of this we don't actually have Luther describing the night he nailed these to the door it's actually just conjectured that he put them up the night before they're noticed at the next day but in fact we don't actually have a scene of Luther walking up to the door in broad daylight banging these theses up on the door now this is important because in all the art and all of the Hollywood representations of the 95 theses I mean this is just a moment of the Reformation for most people here's this man walking up pounding the 95 theses into the door and letting everyone know that he's not going to put up with this anymore I do always get a chuckle in the art depictions of this there's usually people all around him in the or representations of this just are losing their mind pointing at the door looking at gassed shocked that he would say these kinds of things etc my other favorite that I always point out is that the size of the hammer always seems to grow over the decades I mean he's nailing up a small document here he's not nailing up you know of steel bracket but the way the story tends to grow with the telling by now all these artistic impressions in these representations of the 95 theses Luther's up there apparently with a sledgehammer banging this document up with a few small thumbtacks but the character is always there in earnest because of the way the 95 pcs are read in the light of later events in their actual historic moment there actually isn't a great deal of aggression by Luther historians always point out and we're going to point out now the nailing of theses on the door or nailing of theses anywhere is not a call for a revolution or Reformation it's an academic bulletin board you might say just go to anyone's faculty office and usually on the outside of the door they'll be these bulletin boards they might nail up things that they want people to notice and read whether it's humorous or not and they end up notifying people as they pass by that this is their position this is all Luther is really doing and we know that because just a month before in September Luther actually posted 97 theses and no one lost their mind and excommunicated him and no one started Protestantism over that the 97 theses by the way or often described today or titled today the disputation against classicism in some ways they're a bit more rancorous really than the 95 theses it just goes to show again Luther is not trying to start a fight here he's trying to start a debate in the actual University of Wittenberg well the 95 theses attack the abuse of the sale of indulgences it's very clear here it's not about justification by faith it's not about the Pope it's really not about any of these Cardinal issues of the Reformation itself it's specifically about the sale of indulgences one can find if you read the 95 theses some are quite punchy they talk about all the abuse of indulgences has taken people off of the focus of Christ however there are other theses where Luther plays the defender of the Pope's honor he actually says that Tetzel others are bringing the Pope's honor low and that he is writing these theses because he hopes that people will get rid of Tetzel so that the Pope is no longer slandered there are even by the way some theses that talk about the merits and the role of good works in the Christian life so this is hardly sort of manifest destiny here I stand a kind of great big Luther starting a Reformation rather the way to probably see the 95 theses is that Luther has had a gospel conversion the problem though is he's not quite sure how this all works out in his mind you or I probably can talk about all kinds of times in our lives but this has happened you have a real breakthrough in your personal life in your professional life whatever and it doesn't really dawn on you into a good time after just how important that change in your life is the leaven of that idea or that breakthrough has to work its way out in all kinds of ways within your psyche and within your own frame of reference that's really what's going on here with Luther he's had a breakthrough he's at a gospel conversion you might say and that has led him to the 95 theses but he's not coming at this fully formed as a Protestant well if that's the case why did the 95 theses caused such a stir well the answer is is as I've said in part the church wanted to make an example of him what happened is the 95 theses were taken down at some point shortly after their posting and no one by the way took Luther on for the debate which is either a sign that no one wanted to touch the issue of indulgences which is unlikely everyone like the poke fun at Tetzel or more likely everyone already agreed with Luther on these points so there was no real need for a debate well the problem is again within a matter of weeks the 95 theses are taken down and they're translated from Latin into German and then they are printed and sent around as a broad sheet throughout all parts of Germany in a manner of speaking is that action that provokes the response in the Catholic Church to the 95 theses it's not the posting of themselves it's the printing of them in the German language which makes it obviously more accessible to those who do not read Adhan namely those who are outside of the church but sending it around does suddenly make it seem like it's a manifesto for a challenge now the problem is we don't know if Luther approved this it doesn't seem that he did still it gets him into trouble and Luther realizes that he is getting into trouble and he actually writes a letter of apology not a full apology but he writes an explanation in that sense of an apology about what he means in the 95 theses and he forwards the theses and his apology to none other than the Archbishop of Mainz and if you were ever to read the apology you would find it actually quite uncompelled that Luther is a reformer at this point at least not the man that we come to know much later he's essentially saying yeah okay I overstated it here a little bit I understand why someone's mad about this and back and forth and back and forth well the Archbishop of Mainz Ford's the document without really looking at it to the Pope and as a result Luther has stepped on a trap the response for the 95 theses at this point is really pretty shrill and pretty authoritarian the Catholic Church really goes after Luther they try to exert indirect pressure through his monastic order they tried to exert somewhat direct pressure at times doing private interviews between Luther and a Cardinal etc well at this point Luther does begin to dig in his heels he's a bit shocked in fact at how much the Catholic Church is resisting his call to end the abuse of indulgences in his mind he has a really cold for all that much than to stop screwing up the system and so he begins to really iron out and become better you might say at the expression of his new understanding of the gospel and why that he believes being biblical is a grounds for not doing indulgences maybe not even at all well this all comes to a head in the Leipzig disputation where Luther squares off against his great nemesis Johann Eck it's at Leipzig frankly where Luther finally makes his verbal break with the Catholic Church while they're debating Eck on the issue of the 95 theses and indulgences egg performs a countermove against Luther that is really masterful in terms of strategy he takes on Luther not on the issue of indulgences not on the issue of salvation itself but on whether or not Luther believes the Pope can err can be wrong he says if you're saying that this is what the Bible says and this is what the Church teaches well Luther it sounds like what you're saying is that the Pope can be wrong when he tells you to do something well it's at this disputation the Leipzig disputation where Luther very famously out loud says yes that's what I'm saying I'm saying that if it's between the Bible and the Pope I'm going to take the Bible and Luther says this in a very famous phrase when X is pushing Luther to realize it's something that he is saying is somewhat analogous or synonymous even with the teachings of yawn hosts and yawn host was a man from the latter Middle Ages who had been burned at the stake we're saying the Pope can be wrong and for really a lot of the same views that Luther had and eventually Luther pushed and controlled says out loud at the disputation yeah Hickman who site which means yes I am a ha site which is a bit like going before Senator McCarthy and saying yeah I'm a communist to stand in front of the theologian Eck a man who is sort of the heresy hunter and to say you're a huh site is to cast your lot with a renegade group that says the Pope is wrong and we don't care we're gonna follow the Bible that really is the final nail in the coffin for Luther in celle in 1519 in October there arrived a bull and Vinton burg that is titled in the translation in English rise up o Lord and there's a bit of a confusion here at least amongst the way the stories usually told it's often said that this is the bull of excommunication the official document that declared Luther to be a heretic actually it's not this October 1519 document is a document that tells Luther answer these questions finally or else you are officially condemned and it gave him a number of days to do so and Luther has to respond or else so it is in some ways the bull of excommunication but it's a bull of warning that the trigger is about to be pulled if he doesn't respond and recant well Luther famously walks to the city square and burns the bull again he's not burning the bull officially excommunicating him but you might say he's burning the very questions that he's being asked to answer or to recant and so in January of 1520 the following year the official bull of excommunication arrives and Luther is now a heretic now what follows after is Luther is put on trial now he's not put on trial by the church the excommunication of Luther is the final verdict by the church the way these things usually happen in the Middle Ages is whenever someone was excommunicated for heresy they would be first excommunicated and then in a matter of speaking the Catholic Church would hand that person over to the state and then it would be the state that would put them on trial and if they agreed with the Church's verdict the person would then be executed the medieval church will often believe it it has executed no one directly in this sense that it's the state that has said all the executing but it's a bit of a both sides of the same coin so when Luther is now caught before the emperor in 1520 he's been put on civil trial and his neck is on the line now being excommunicated in January of 1520 he's called to the next what we call Imperial diet now a diet in a German political system just the same today by the way in many ways is a sort of congressional meeting of all the constituencies of the princes and with the Holy Roman Emperor himself so this is a pretty big deal going on right now these are all the major major people that run frankly most of Europe with the exception of France in England and a 1520 Luther was brought before the diet of forms forms of the city where the diet happened to be meeting at this time which is why Luther is summoned there it so Luther comes and a very famous scene standing before the Emperor Charles v a man who controlled more than half of Europe politically in in terms of muscle and might Luther is asked to recant he's demanded to her Kant and famously Luther says he resting and I can do no other and he is eventually condemned now Luther had been given a free conduct pass that is he had been given the right to return to a fittin burg that he would be chased down frankly after but that he wouldn't be hauled to the gallows immediately and executed so Luther is free to leave and once he realizes that the edict condemning him was going to come down he flees and surprisingly he's kidnapped as he's on the road heading back to bitten Bourg Frederick the wise the man who was in charge of Saxony that very important Prince sent Knights sent armed men to capture Lutheran to send him someplace safe were even Frederick the wise did not know where he had gone to this is actually a bit of a comical moment for a period of time for a period of weeks and months Charles and his entourage keep asking where Duluth Ergo and Frederick keep saying I don't know where he went and he means it he doesn't really know where Luther is going off to because he instructed his men not to tell him well his men had taken Luther to the vort burg Castle very famous Castle he can still go and see you today and there Luther really began to shed so much of what was Catholic about him he grew a beard which might not seem to be a big day in hipster land but in terms of this day and age if you're a monk you're supposed to be clean-shaven which by the way so very often when you see pictures of the Reformers there's a reason why they always look look ZZ Top it's a bit like hippies growing out their hair it's thumbing your nose at the man but Luther grows a beard and he begins to write some of his most important treatises on the gospel and on the Reformation from the context of the Vaart burg now with that but he begins to translate into German the Greek New Testament now for those of you who had Greek you might marvel at this where do you have time to learn all this well important he had a study aid Erasmus had published the Greek New Testament not long before and it's often believed that this was just a pure Greek New Testament it wasn't it was really more of an interlinear in the modern sense Erasmus had the Greek text on one page and on the facing page he had supplied a new more literal updated Latin translation so those focusing on the Greek could look over to the Latin which they spoke fluently and notice where the connections were and so Luther translates the majority of his German New Testament there in the varberg beginning the process where Luther will eventually translate the entirety of the Bible to Luther Bible which will have a dramatic shape on not only the German Church the Lutheran Church but on the very German language itself from the fart burg Luther eventually returns to the city of Edinburgh where he will then begin a real substantive deep Reformation of the church that will eventually become known as Lutheran well in the end Luther did stumble and Bumble his way into the Reformation it was not something he intended but the intentions of the 95 theses were driven by his gospel breakthrough and therefore when challenged when pushed the man who had had his breakthrough about the gospel had an opportunity finally to see where his understanding of the gospel began and where that of the medieval Catholic Church ended and he could finally see that he and the church differed on the fundamentals of the very essence of salvation itself and so while the 95 theses were not a manifesto for Reformation in the history that followed as Luther's Reformation kicked off and after it got underway after his excommunication and after his trial at the diet of forms Luther becomes not just a reformer from within but a reformer from without

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 135,305

Keywords: Martin Luther, Lutheranism, Protestant Reformation, Protestantism, Ryan M. Reeves, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Seminary, Theology, Evangelicalism, 95 Theses, Roman Catholic Church, Papacy, Justification by Faith

Id: pX0oqGbSiG0

Length: 31min 32sec (1892 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2016