MARTIN LUTHER PART 1 BY PROF ALEC RYRIE

[Music] so with martin luther we're dealing with one of the most unlikely of the the great christian theologians and he doesn't fit the stereotype he's not a a great office holder the only job he ever holds is as a professor of theology at an obscure eastern german university he's he's frankly fat he's much more of a sensualist than great christian theologians are supposed to be um he can be positively foul-mouthed at times his use of language is really shocking to modernize he's open in his celebration of his enjoyment of of his sensuality he's a great beer drinker he openly celebrates the fact of his being married he's not the first great great christian theologian to be married but maybe the first one to really make a point of it and to celebrate it in that sort of public event and he and his wife together become icons of the perfect protestant family you'll find their portraits side by side in in good lutheran homes so what i want to do is lay out a little bit of how this unusual and unlikely man came to stumble into the position that that he did and to become convinced himself and to convince many others that he had been sent by god to to reform and to renew the church and to see it through what he thought were going to be its last days it's a very medieval story he's he's very much a man of the middle ages born in a moderately prosperous um saxon family in the in the 1480s his father is a minor and is choosing to set up his son in life with the fortune that he himself has made by sending him to university and he's going to become a lawyer this is the kind of thing that that ambitious parents do for their children down the ages and so he sends young martin off to university and he prospers and then disaster strikes when he's 18 years old and something again tremendously medieval happens to him he's caught in a thunderstorm uh at night he's terrified this is all from his his later autobiographical reminiscences some of which are you know we have to ask questions about but it's the story we've got and the fact that this is a story he chooses to tell us is interesting anyway the story is he's caught in this thunderstorm and he's terrified it's at night he thinks he's going to die and so he makes a vow he makes a vow to sundan to the mother of the virgin mary promising that if he survives he'll become a monk and he does and he keeps his vow to his father's horror you know all that expensive legal education up in smoke he goes off and joins the augustinian order fashionable scholarly um monastic order and apparently hates it he finds that the struggle of monastic life to begin with tremendously difficult not so much the discipline but the confrontation with his own sinfulness that this life involves this is a a rigorous existence of prayer of penitence of study but he finds that instead of coming to terms with and overcoming his own sins the more he confronts them the more he's sunk underneath them he later says that if a monk could ever have saved himself by monkery it would have been him very luther kind of thing to say but instead all he's able to do is convince himself of his own sinfulness and the utter distance between that and god's righteousness um his superiors recognizing that the drama that this novice is making about about himself pack him off to university to to study theology um and he goes to wittenberg university eventually where he he takes up a teaching job in 1511. uh and that's where he remains for the rest of his life that's as i said is the only job he ever holds pat collinson one of the great historians of the period says that you know for luther the reformation happens between lectures um other than a few brief periods away he continues to to lecture in biblical studies further for the remainder of his life and during the course of the following decade we don't know precisely when this happens if there was a single event between 15 11 and 15 20 at the very latest he has a breakthrough he comes out of this spiritual despair this sense of being unable to free himself from his own sins and breaks through to a completely different way of believing it's something which he in those later reminiscences describes as his tower experience and sometimes that's taken to refer to a literal moment that happened in in a room in the tower of the the augustinian church in wittenberg sometimes it's seen as as something much more metaphorical that he's fond of using a tower as a metaphor for god one of his most famous best-loved hymns um begins our god is a strong tower so whether this was a real event or something that he's constructed metaphorically we don't know what we know is that he tells us that he's reading paul's letter to the romans chapter one and comes across a verse which he'd read many times before and which might seem very innocuous the just shall live by faith verse 17. and he says that at that i felt the gates were opened and that i'd straightway being admitted to paradise itself which may seem slightly odd reaction to this this straightforward verse but what he finds is that this opens up to him a completely different way of understanding what it is that god's love and god's justice means god's justice here up until then always seen as something which could only condemn him he knows that he is a miserable sinner the more he confronts his sins the the deeper they seem to be um and he the the circle he's caught in is the conviction that god will punish him for these sins and god should punish him he cannot deny the justice of god's punishment what he recognizes through his his reading of of scripture above all through his reading of saint paul crystallized for him by his encounter with that verse is that god's justice is something which can also rescue him that god's justice can be given to him as a sinner so that he can be rescued from his sins despite his despite almost because of his utter unworthiness for it and of course when a scholar and theologian has an intellectual breakthrough what he does is put in his lectures and this is what luther does he spends much of the the middle part of that decade thrashing out these issues and we can see them we have these lectures we can see him beginning to tease out these ideas and what they might actually mean for christian living and for much of that time it looks as if this is simply going to become one professor's private theological breakthrough many of the ideas that he's having around this are not particularly outlandish they're picking up on on ideas which are which are there in the in the atmosphere but then in 1517 a set of different events come together which turn this private spiritual breakthrough into a public crisis and then we need to back up and and explain a little bit about what's what's going on in the in the wider world the wider church at this point so the church in late medieval europe which is sometimes caricatured as being dreadfully corrupt uh and overcome with difficulties and of course it was corrupt and it was overcome with difficulty the church always is but in many ways it wasn't in such bad shape there is there are problems there are difficulties in particular the papacy in the late 15th century has been going through a fairly rough patch but there's an enormous amount of energy and renewal within the church as well enthusiasm for for new movements newly invigorated piety that the church is doing what it's done so many times in the medieval period before which is to generate renewal from within itself and one of the the liveliest of these movements at the time is that the set of of broad disparate movements which we clumped together under the misleading term humanism misleading because nowadays humanism is taken to mean secular atheism which is is very different from what it what it meant in in that period humanism in the 16th century context means something more like the study of the humanities as we would say today it's a movement which does begin as a secular one coming out of of italian politics and scholarship looking at the rediscovery of ancient languages latin then then greek and hebrew but the rediscovery of greek and hebrew in particular has obvious importance for christians uh as they're beginning to access the biblical texts in the original language and the broader ethos of humanism which is to return to original sources to simplify to move to a a clear ethical christianity rather than complex ceremonial which is of course entirely in keeping with significant strands of catholic piety uh something which fits very nicely with that that wider humanist movement so the great intellectual battle within the churches in that the early 16th century is between this movement for humanist scholarship which is pressing for a simple piety emphasizing good scholarship good learning ethics rather than ceremonial and wealth the the contrast between wealth as corrupting and poverty as as as meaning simple ethical living is important in this so those that's one of the great battles

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2013