on martin luther
As is so often the case with this blog, I'm probably still working through these thoughts as I write them, so this might be a little circuitous again, bear with me. I went to town today and got a book from the minster library (the minster, in case i haven't mentioned it before, is a massive cathedral in town that took about 250 years to build. it's huge and beautiful and, in my opinion, a huge waste of money that probably could have been spent feeding people, but nonetheless it's nice to look at and quite the testament to man's engineering ability) for a paper I'm working on. The paper is about Martin Luther's interpretation of the letter to the Romans and how it affected his political views. So I found this book that is essentially a dumbed down version of Luther's lectures on the book of Romans (the actual lectures have been reprinted, but it's really hard to read and very slow going, so I opted for this one because it's been cleaned up a bit). The actual title of the book is, "The Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans." It's published by Zondervan (or was publised, anyway) and translated by J. Theodore Mueller. I tell you all that because I think that pretty much everybody should get ahold of this thing (you could probably check it out from the library, I think most of them might have it, but I could be wrong) and at least read the intro. Marty was a pretty smart guy, whether or not you agree with everything he said, he was flat out brilliant. I mean, he had a fair amount of the Bible memorized for most of his adult life, and that takes some brain power. I took the book to Borders and got a cup of coffee and started reading the introduction that Luther wrote to it, which in fact is probably what he started the whole lecture series with (the way university lectures commonly worked was that the professor would write everything out beforehand and then essentially just read it word for word to the students, with maybe the occasional tangent, but those were rare). I have been thinking a lot lately about my faith and just what it is to be saved and stuff and things havent' been that easy. In the past few days I've really been struggling with the whole issue of faith and what it is and what it should feel like and stuff like that. A lot of the time I feel like I'm just forcing the beliefs I know I should have upon myself without actually feeling them. It's a pretty uncomfortable feeling. So in the intro, Luther essentially just runs through the whole book of Romans and kind of summarizes each chapter. According to Luther, actually, the book of Romans is the entire Christian message rolled into one book, and through this one letter we can better understand the rest of the Bible. It's as though, he says, Paul wanted to write out a summary of what it is to be Christian, so that the rest of what is written makes sense and we can better understand it all. It's pretty interesting. At some point in the reading, I think it was about half way through, he's talking about the fact that most people who are trying to do good things in the name of Christ are actually just doing them to try to earn salvation when in fact we know that the only salvation comes from faith. So then he goes into this big long thing about how faith is something we can't get for ourselves, it has to come from God, and the reason for that is so that we can be sure that our salvation has nothing to do with ourselves, but only to do with the grace of God. So God gives us faith in Christ so that even though we are still sinning, and will be until we die, through the sacrifice of Christ he looks past that sin and accepts us as sinless. It was, for some reason, a huge revelation for me that it's not that I will actually be able to cease to sin because of faith in Christ, not entirely anyway, but rather that just the fact that I have faith in Christ that allows for God to view me (again, despite my continued sinning) as though I were sinless and righteous. The righteousness with which he views me, then, cannot be my own as I know for sure that I keep sinning, but it is through that gift of faith that the gift of righteousness is given. All of a sudden, sitting in Borders at 4:30 in the afternoon I was aware that my own continual sinning does not keep God from seeing me as sinless in Christ. It was huge. And just like Luther, I now want to immerse myself in Paul's letter to the Romans to get a better understanding of all this. I know it seems like pretty patent Christian theology, and I know I've heard it and said it a thousand times before, but for some reason something about it escaped me. I'm not even sure just yet what it is about it that hit me today, but it was pretty exciting. I just thought I'd throw that up here for ya'll to see, cause I'm pretty happy right now. And it seems like along with that, I am more able to be at peace with where I am right now. Rather than wishing for the future, when everything will be better for whatever reason, I am much more able to just chill here in the present. It's been a big day. I have a feeling that I didn't do a very good job of laying that all down clearly, but that's mostly because exactly what happened is still not terribly clear in my own head, so it's hard to describe. Hopefully you get the idea. Hooray for the fact that I have a class where I get to read theology for my papers, huh? Sweet. Ok, I'm done now. Peace.
posted by Joe at 11:06 AM
2 Comments:
Yeah, the whole peasants war thing I'm not totally sold on. He definitely was on the side of the nobility in that, but his writings on the issue tend to line up with the reality that he honestly felt that his previous teachings had been misrepresented (he seems to have thought purposefully) to allow for an armed revolt, which he never condoned. His response to the nobility was that it was their responsibility to maintain order, and if you look at his early stuff on secular authority it makes quite a bit more sense. I think Luther would have looked to people like Muentser to be responsible for the deaths of the peasants, as such leaders were the ones misinterpreting his writings. Although you can't ignore the fact that his political views seem to have changed as he got older (whose don't?) and he is even quoted toward the end as having said it would have been better if all his writings had been burned - or never written. I think that's mostly because once something is written and published (especially with the new advent of the printing press, with which came a much faster disemination of information than ever before - perhaps to the surprise of the early printers) it is much harder to ensure that it is read with the same meaning as it was written. All of that is not to say that it's not important to try and figure out how the facts of his anti-semitism and other political/social views should or should not influence our acceptance/understanding of his other writings. In any case, it's impossible to overlook his contribution to the way we understand and read the Bible and formulate our doctrines today. Nor can we look past his sheer brilliance just because we disagree with the way he thought about certain things. It may also be worth questioning (i'm almost done here, i promise) just how much one man can deviate from the social standards of his time. I mean, here you have a guy who's conclusions were so deviant that they led to his excommunication from the Church and an Imperial Ban on the secular side. He pretty much pissed off all the highest-ups with what he thought, so for him to maintain one outrageously commonly held prejudice may just be forgiveable. Even Calvin actually ordered a man to be burned at the stake, which seems at least as personal a connection to death as does writing in opposition to an uprising with which you disagree and for which you have been made an unwitting poster-boy against your will. Ok, I'm done. I do appreciate the comments, they're fun. (there's another three lettered word for ya bradley.)
probably the most interesting thing about bradley's post was that he actually dropped the a in another and just said "nother three letter word." you just don't get class like that every day.
But seriously, i would have to agree. If we start looking at people involved with the history of the Church and demanding of them perfection before we will accept what they say we will eventually have to rule out the Bible as a source, because they guys who put it together were probably pretty jacked up, so their judgements can't be trusted. I would tend to believe that despite our prejudices and such God can and does still use messed up people. I mean he spoke through an ass once, and we're not too much less reliable than them, so maybe he'll use us once in a while too.
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