through the ministry of the church. It is not quite how we do it, all right, but nonetheless, grace is still offered and the scriptures are read. The scriptures are read every Sunday in the churches. The scriptures are read and read abundantly. In fact, in many of those medieval liturgies, you will hear more scripture than you'll hear in PCA churches on a Sunday morning. You will. Okay, four readings. Psalm, Gospel, Old Testament, and Epistle. Or if not an epistle, the book of Revelation. Four readings were standard in in medieval liturgy and still are standard in Roman liturgy today. And so you hear the four readings all the time, all the time. A lot of scripture is heard. So Christ is not absent from this church. And we should not think that in the medieval world, the church had collapsed into nothing. And we should not think that Luther and Calvin and the other reformers started a new church What did they believe they were doing? They believed that they were continuing the ancient church which had indeed been founded by Jesus, and that only Jesus can found a church. And how many times can a church then be founded? Once! And it was already done. All right, so they were ousted from their from their positions, their lives, their towns, their cities, so many of them. Luther happened to have a rather friendly prince and so in Saxony, Prince Frederick the Wise sided with the Lutherans and Luther did not have to flee his city of Wittenberg and continued there his ministry for the rest of his life. Calvin ended up in a eventually friendly city called Geneva, and they'd driven the bishop out some years before Calvin ever got there, and the bishop never got back in. All right, so Calvin was able, well, after some struggle, to remain in Geneva. In other places, okay, you were driven out. In some places, you were burnt at the stake. In Scotland, There's some notorious cases where people were burnt for possessing New Testaments in English, because as everyone knew, the New Testament had only recently been penned by Martin Luther. Yeah, that is recorded in 16th century Scottish sources of history. Yeah, the news has been written by Martin Luther, so you have one, obviously you're heretical, and so, okay, off to the stake you go to be burnt. So we have a very, you know, difficult circumstance. In some situations in Europe, the local princes were at least neutral, so you did not have to flee. And so the congregation where you preached as a priest, maybe you've now become Protestant and you're still ministering in that church, and it's 30 years after Luther's death. And you're still in the same church, but you're not a priest anymore, at least not a Roman priest. You're a Protestant pastor and with the same congregation. Okay, that's a scenario that happens within the Reformation. So this is not the founding of a new church, it is the purifying of the ancient church and purifying from certain innovations that are mainly late and medieval in their history. So my theme today then, Martin Luther and the quest for a gracious God. Last time we saw that in late medieval piety in the West that Works of merit were prescribed by the priests upon penance. And if you're reading Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, you know that these are not really works that earn real merit. They were called works of congruent merit, that is, half merit, or as if merit. And insofar as your works were the fruit of the Holy Spirit, they had a genuine merit, which Thomas called condign, but only the Spirit gets that, the Spirit who bears the fruit, the Spirit who does the perfect deed within you. And insofar as the works are yours, you get only the congruent merit, that is, the as if merit. So in Thomas' teaching, okay, God rewarded our works as if they were meritorious. Isn't that what Protestants also teach? Right? That is, you have a life of piety, a life of service to God, You are on your deathbed, you pass away, you enter heaven, and there are rewards for the life of Christian service, right? And Christian virtue and justice. So we speak about rewards in heaven, we do. Are those rewards truly earned? Not in Protestant theology, and not in Thomas Aquinas either. But in the folk Catholicisms that dominated piety, Oh yeah, they were earned, and they're called satisfactions. Okay, so you say you're ten Our Fathers, or you're twenty Hail Marys, or you give so much in alms to the poor, or you keep your all-night vigil of prayer and fasting until sunrise, and you gain, and you have satisfied the wrath of God for your prior sins. All right, so in 1330 or so, a professor shows up from England at the University of Paris. His name is William of Ockham. Has anyone heard of Ockham's razor? Okay, a famous philosophical principle from this very fellow. So a British Isles philosopher-theologian becomes the most important theologian at the University of Paris. He has the chair that Thomas Aquinas had in the previous century at Paris. Okay, the most important theological professorship in all of Christendom. William of Ockham, this British Isles fellow, and William says, how can you be sure that you receive further grace? Okay, you've got the grace of baptism, right? Okay, you get that at baptism. The water, the spirit in the water grants you this gift. How can you be sure that you shall receive further grace? Here's what William says. By doing what lies within you. That's the phrase. Do what lies within you and you will receive further grace. Now, doing what lies within you in modern English would come out as this. Do your best. That is, you've received grace in baptism, you've received grace in penance, you've received grace in the various sacraments of the Roman Church, and in receiving grace, now you have new power to do more for God, to obey better, to be further in the path of discipleship. So fulfill that power to its furthest extent, and you will be granted further grace for yet more power. Alright, so grace is out of the grace is out of the grace, but by what means? By you doing what lies within you. Doing your best. Do you ever do your best? Do you always do your best? Okay, so think about a time when you did really, really well. Couldn't you have done just a little bit better? Okay, so that's the struggle. So Luther believes that unless he does what lies within him, he might be denied any further grace and be damned. So this reminds me of a story from Jimmy Carter, our one-time president, who is now in his 90s. And Jimmy Carter was in the Navy and applied for a post with the Nuclear Navy. Any Nuclear Navy veterans in the room here? OK. So Nuclear Navy, 1950s, I guess. And Admiral Hyman Rickover was the leader of the Nuclear Navy. Anyone remember that name, Hyman Rickover? OK. Very important fellow in American 20th century military history. Rickover ruled the nuclear Navy. And to get any post at all in the nuclear Navy, you had to go through Rickover's office and be interviewed. And legendarily, the chair you sat on had one of the legs sawed short. So it rocked and you were off balance, you know. And one of the questions, Carter says this, one of the questions he routinely asked was this, did you always do your best." Okay, so there's a young lieutenant named James Earl Carter sitting in that ragged-legged chair hearing this question. And honest Christian that he was, he says, no sir, I did not. Did Carter get into the nuclear navy? No, he did not. he hadn't always done his best. Which of us always does our best? But if that's the condition for receiving further grace and being sure it will happen, which of us will be saved? All right, so there's the late medieval theology on which Martin Luther cut his teeth. You like this theology? I don't think you should. So now let's, okay, so there is an eclipse of grace. It was joked by the students at the University of Paris back in the 14th century that William and his disciples, his leading colleagues who were his students who'd become professors alongside him under his tutelage, that these fellows really did believe in grace, but you could never get them to talk about it. In their faculty discussions among themselves, yeah, they might talk about grace, but get them in the pulpit somewhere, oh no. You could not get them to talk about grace in public. Why? Their fear was that if you made God too gracious, people would not obey and they would be damned. So a pastoral strategy that obscured and limited the declaration of grace. That was William of Ockham. So Luther's teachers are alchemists. Okay, so Martin Luther and the Quest for a Gracious God. There he is in his monastic robes. He's about 40 when this particular painting is made, and he's holding a leather-bound book. Can you guess what book this is? Okay, Luther is holding a Bible. He has already published a German translation of at least the New Testament when this painting is made. I don't know what the exact year is, so maybe Luther's entire Bible has come out, Old and New Testaments alike. I'm not sure where that stands in relation to the making of the painting, but Luther was already in 1522 a best-selling translator in a German New Testament. All right, so last night we saw a screen that looks like this. How does God grant grace? And we saw that there were two competing systems within the Christianity of the West, the Christianity of Europe. And we have on one side of the screen evangelicalism, that is, salvation is grace ministered by the power of faith in the gospel. And the word gospel is from Middle English, good spell. And maybe you've seen the musical Godspell, which is based upon that Middle English word, gospel. Okay, good news is a good spell in Middle English, but that translates an older Greek word, euangelion, or in Latin, evangelium, or in English, evangel, like an evangelist. Okay, so evangelicalism then, evangel is gospel. And Middle English also had the word evangel. It survives in the dictionaries today, but it's not used much. So faith in the gospel as the means by which God ministers grace. On the other column is what's called sacerdotalism, salvation, grace ministered by the power of the sacraments of the church. Now we saw that there was some mush and mud between these two views because those who are evangelical believe in sacraments. And those who are sacerdotal believe that faith is necessary. All right, so there's a middle ground of overlap. Presbyterians believe in sacraments, but are evangelicals. Roman Catholics believe in the necessity of faith, but are sacerdotalists. Okay, so there's overlap. Both systems, I'll say, are recognizably Christian. but only one of them is biblically warranted. Do I make sense? Only one of these is actually taught by the Bible. All those sacraments are in faith, are both taught by the Bible. So what will happen in our Reformation time is that late medieval sacerdotalism will be challenged. and a clarity of evangelical faith will rise to the top. And Luther is the first bold steps into the construction of what we would identify as evangelicalism. So there is Martin Luther in a woodcut from the 1520s. Notice how gaunt those cheekbones are. What's he been doing to get himself to look like that? Fasting. Okay, so the fastings and the vigils of monastic life. And did he go bald early? Is that why that top of the head is so resembling mine? That's called the tonsure, and so when you enter the monastery and take your vows as a monk, the top crest of your hair is shaved, and that is the mark of your monastic vocation, that is your calling. under the vows of poverty and chastity and obedience. So even if you cast off your monastic robes and go into town, you still have the tonsure. Kind of hard to escape those vows when you're still marked by the tonsure. So Martin Luther will become an Augustinian monk, and he in that role will get his doctorate and enter into a professorship. He and I teach the same field. If you had a doctorate, you were qualified to lecture on Bible. If you had only a master's degree in theology, you were qualified to lecture on the theological textbooks, especially the one called the Sentences, the most important theological textbook of the Middle Ages. Luther had that office as still having the master's of theology. but only one with a doctorate had the right to lecture on Bible, the holiest of all topics. So in 1512, Luther will finish his doctorate and enter into a professorship and is essentially a professor of Bible at this junior college for monks called Wittenberg. We do look to him as the founder of the Protestant Reformation, not that he meant to. It's all rather by accident. one of the analogies for Luther is that he there he was up in the bell tower and stumbled on the stairs and Grabbed the first thing he could to prevent himself from falling headlong to a broken neck and it was the rope of the bells And suddenly the bells are chiming and there he is dangling dangling and people would gather and oh, oh what's happened? Okay, what a Reformation he didn't mean it He didn't mean it. He had no intention of leaving the Roman Church that he thought When he posted the Ninety-Five Theses, our first document of the Reformation, he thought the Pope would join him in agreement of that document. So the Ninety-Five Theses, the first document of the Reformation, announces the authority of the Pope, and the perpetual virginity of Mary, and the power of priests to impose penance, to hear confessions, to grant absolution, and to impose penances. The 95 Theses asserts all of that. It's a very Roman Catholic document. But it nonetheless is a protest against a certain abuse. And we'll hear more of that tonight and also tomorrow morning in Sunday school. He was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1520. Five months later, declared outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Outlaw means that anyone can kill you and they will not be prosecuted by the law. How about that? You are outside the protection of the law. But nonetheless the hero of Germany Now, going back now earlier in Luther's life, that was the summary page, so we'll speak now about Luther's conversion. He, even in young manhood, clearly had a sensitive conscience. He was a very conscientious young man. He was a very diligent student. His father reveled in his academic achievement and so sent him on to further schooling. Pretty rare deed for the grandson of a potato farming peasant in Saxony in Eastern Germany. Luther's grandfather was a farmer, peasant farmer of no education. Luther's father began his working life working in the mines, copper mines. But eventually, by sheer ability, he was able to purchase a mine, and then another mine. and then another. So he's managing minds now, he's owning minds. So the son of a peasant, who had no education, enters into the middle class and has enough wealth to send his brilliant son to the best of schools. And the best school in the whole region was the university at Erfurt. And so Luther goes there for his bachelor's degree, finishes that in, I think, 1504. Luther is 21. He then is sent on instantly for his master's degree, which he achieves in record time. I think less than a year for his master's degree. Brilliant young man. And his father has had some disputes with the laborers, the miners in the family business, and he thinks it would be pretty handy to have a lawyer in the family. to enforce the rules more clearly upon the miners and make the contracts more favorable to the owners. So it's a labor management conflict that inspires Hans Luther to send his son to law school. So in 1505, the young Luther now is going for his third degree. In the medieval university, there are only three doctorates available. You can do medicine. Maybe that's the oldest doctorate. You can do law, or you can do theology. There are only three doctorates available in that university system. So Han says, Martin, go study for your doctor of jurisprudence, your JD. Any lawyers in the room? OK, so any lawyers, they have the JD degree still. It's the same degree. doctor of jurisprudence. A lawyer is actually a doctor. Rarely called that, but they hold a doctorate in law, the Doctor of Jurisprudence. So there is Luther then studying for the law, and his father has great hopes that this will solve the labor management disputes by having a lawyer in the family of the management and ownership of the mine. OK, he'll really make the courts do what they ought to do. So it's July. And do you have the handout there? OK. So it's July 2nd. And Luther is on his way home for a bit of a summer break from the university. He is still at Erfurt, where he had done his bachelors and his master's degree. He loved that town. And he's on his way home for a bit of summer break. And a storm suddenly comes over the mountain. And lightning strikes. It knocks him to the ground. We don't know whether it was just the fear of the lightning that knocked him down or whether he was actually charged a bit with electricity and that knocked him down. We don't know which. It doesn't really tell us. But he tells us that he was so terrified in that moment that he feared he would die right there on the spot. And so he cried out invoking a saint, in fact, the patron saint of his family, the patron saint of minors, and one who had been recently declared a saint by the Roman Church, namely Saint Anne. Saint Anne is the patron saint of minors. She is the alleged mother of Mary. So the grandmother of Jesus, and it is allegedly in her womb that the immaculate conception takes place. That's not something that Franco Harris did on a football field back about, you know, 40 years ago. No, that's the immaculate reception. Pardon me. Okay. You know, a certain catch in a Super Bowl game, right? No, it's the immaculate conception that is, that Mary is conceived without the corruptions of sin. All right, now Mary's not virgin birth. Okay, Jesus is that. But Mary is conceived by remarkable divine providence without passing on the original guilt of Adam. So Roman Church calls this the Immaculate Conception. And this woman now has recently been declared saint by the Roman Church and has become the patron saint of minors. And so Luther cries out, and here's the cry, Saint Anne, help me, I'll become a monk. Why would you say such a thing in such a moment? Well, to be a monk is to serve God better. That was the sense. It's like what some Protestant Christians think, okay, if only I could become a missionary, God will like me more. So I go to the mission field. Maybe I go to Africa or China, and God will like me more. Often that's an incentive in certain versions of American Christianity. Okay, God will like me more if I enter the ministry, if I go to the mission field, do something difficult for God. Satan, help me, I'll become a monk. and Luther survives the night, makes his way home the next day, tells his parents of his vow, tells his friends of the vow he has made, and his firm resolve to keep the vow. And instantly his parents and his friends counsel him that in the moral theology of the church, a rash vow need not be kept. All right, that's Catholic moral theology still. A vow made rashly, that is without clear, reflective intent, is not binding. So he's told by his priest, I think, and by his friends and family, you need not keep the vow, Martin. You can go on your life as we had planned before. But young Martin believes the vow is a vow. and that if he were not to fulfill the vow, he would offend God. And so two weeks later, he is back in Erfurt and he's knocking on the door of the Augustinian cloister near the university and asked to be taken in as a novice. Novice is the word for one who intends to become a monk. And so here is this very able law student who now abandons the law. The most brilliant student they've had, maybe, who abandons the law to enter the monastery. Hans, the father, there he is, some years later, his mother, Margarethe. Hans is furious, just absolutely furious. What a waste! My son, all this education, all this money, all this tuition! A great career in law is ahead of him! He could save the family business! What a waste of a brilliant mind to languish away in the cloister. Now, in monastic life, still in many places in the world, though not everywhere, in monastic life, when you entered the place, you did not expect to leave the building. It's called the cloister. And a cloister is a little bit bigger than an oyster, but likely closed. So you enter the cloister and maybe you might get the job of cellarer. The cellarer is the fellow who goes into the village to buy the provisions for the kitchen, for instance. Okay, so the cellarer is a monk that will go out into the world. The abbot or the prior, that is, the head of the monastery, well, he'll go out because he's got to hobnob with the bishops and the other abbots and do some politicking and this and that and some fundraising, perhaps. Okay, so the abbot might go out and the cellarer might go out, but very few others will leave the grounds of the monastery. It truly was a closed life, a cloister. And so Hans and Margarete do not expect to see their son. It was possible to visit a child in a monastery, but the room where you would do so had a screen, and your son or daughter would then be on one side of the screen within the cloistered area, and you would enter from a public door into a non-cloistered area, and you would not directly see the face of your child. You could converse through the screen for a set period of time. Sounds like visitation in prison, doesn't it? It's exactly like that. So Hans and Margaretha, okay, our brilliant son to waste his life in a monastery. Now, Luther says in a document he wrote near the very end of his life, a preface to all of his Latin works. It's 1545. He's got one more year to live. And he's published many, many, many, many things. And some of his friends say, Dr. Luther, why don't we collect all of your Latin writings into one grand multi-volume edition and publish that as a set? And you write a preface to it and explain these main issues, and Luther agrees, and we get a fine 10-page preface to his Latin writings published in 1545, and that preface is the most revealing piece of autobiography from the pen of Martin Luther. Now, Luther is not like Calvin. Calvin hated to reveal a whole lot about his personal life. The best biography we get from Calvin's own pen is a few pages in his preface to his Psalms commentary. And why there is because Calvin is an exile like David. Okay, David had 10 years of fugitive status. Calvin was pushed out of France and could never return. He was a man with a price on his head. If they'd caught him in France, that was the end for John Calvin. Calvin lost France forever. by becoming Protestant. And so Calvin identifies richly with David in David's ten years of exile, fleeing from Saul. But we only learned these things in one piece of Calvin's writing. One. With Luther, there's all kinds of autobiographical references. In fact, Almost everything the man said, eventually, got written down by students. Okay, so maybe you're a student under Luther as now a Protestant theologian, and it's maybe 1530-something, and you're living in the upstairs dormitory hall of Luther's house. And Mrs. Luther is the cook and the bedsheet cleaner and the laundress and all that. And you have a bunch of seminary students living in the upstairs. And you had dinner at the Luther table. That's how it was. Maybe 15 students having dinner with Luther every meal. And Mrs. Luther is the cook and the bottle washer, right? And they would appoint one of their number to transcribe the dinner conversations Have you read a bit of Table Talk? So there's a magazine called Table Talk, R.C. Sproul's devotional magazine. Why is it called Table Talk? Because Luther published two volumes of Table Talk. That is, the transcribed conversations at the dinner table. And some student is in the corner writing it all down. And the next night, a different student is appointed to write it all down. And so we have Luther's personal conversation of all kinds of spicy language. And advice about marriage. Go to it, young man. Things like this. Spicy stuff from Luther. We have all kinds of biographical stuff from Luther's mouth that is transcribed by his students. But in this 1545 preface, He tells us that if anyone was to be saved by his monkery, and here probably the man winked, okay, monkery, it's a joke in German, it's a joke in English. Okay, he was a monk. If anyone was to be saved by his monkery, it was I. So you saw the image of him with the gaunt cheekbones and the fastings and the vigils. And he says that he surpassed those in his order. his order of monks, in devotion, in prayers, in vigils, in penances, in satisfactions. He says that he confessed with his father confessor, Dr. Johann Staubitz, he would confess for hours at a time. A two-hour confessional. One day it was six hours in the confessional. And on that particular day, he got so angry with God for holding him guilty for his sins that he had to confess the anger that he felt within the confessional while doing confession. After one of these lengthy confessions, Dr. Staupitz says, young man, next time you come to confess, bring something to confess. Because most of the confessions were statements of turmoil. That is, they were not deeds in the outer world. They were turmoils of soul. And Luther says, I did not love this God. Indeed, I hated him. Why did Luther say that he hated God during his monastic time? Because God was never satisfied with my penance. Nothing I could do to render God satisfied. There was nothing that I could do. My deepest efforts still failed to render God satisfied and to grant peace to my conscience. And so he says, quote, with an exceedingly troubled conscience, I tried to serve God. In the year 1507, he is ordained as priest. So he's been in the monastery just two years, and his parents are invited to come to the mass, the first mass that Luther would celebrate as father Luther. His parents are proud. Okay, our son has made good. He's not just a monk, he's a priest. Okay, that's not terrible. Monk is terrible, priest is better. All right, things are improving a little bit. Maybe he can do some good. Yeah. But there, as Luther takes the bread, the sacred host, and is about to pronounce the words in which the sacred host is miraculously changed to be the literal body and blood of Jesus in his own hands, as Luther is about to say these words, trembling and terror come upon him. What are the words? Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. In Roman theology, when the priest intones those words, God does a miracle and the bread is no longer bread. What is it? It is the resurrected incarnate Jesus that you hold in your hand. And so, as I said last night, a sacristan, an altar boy, chimes a bell, and the congregation kneels, not to God in heaven, but to Jesus, who is the bread. And Luther is about to have this miracle happen within his own hands at that moment, and he can scarcely say the words. He stammers. At last he gets them out. But his terror is so intense that his father is disgusted. Can't even say Mass right! And so his father leaves the church, the monastery church, angry all over again at his failure of a son. Luther did have a man in the monastery, that became a father figure to him. I mentioned his name already, Dr. Johann Staupitz. Staupitz was the head, the leader of all the Augustinian monasteries in that European world. He was the prior general By prior, I mean the first, the highest of all the abbots. And general, I'm sorry, he was the vicar general, pardon me, vicar general of the Augustinian orders. By vicar, we mean that he stands in for the Pope. And by general, we mean that he's over all the Augustinians, the way a general is over all the privates in the army. And he becomes Luther's own father confessor. And it is Staubitz who says, Martin, I want you to study for your doctorate. Luther replies, Father Staubitz, that will kill me. Staubitz replies, that's all right. God needs many smart men in heaven too. So with this, Luther is put on the road to doctoral studies and finishes the work in record time, a little more than a year. And in 1512, Luther is Dr. Luther. And Johann Stoppage then steps aside from his professorship at Wittenberg, where he had been professor of Bible, and Martin Luther takes the place as professor of Bible. All right, so maybe the young man's going to do some good after all things, Hans. And so 1512 then, Dr. Luther. In the meantime, Luther has been sent to Rome on an errand for Dr. Stavitz. There'd been a controversy among the monasteries. And not all the Augustinian monasteries were willing to follow the authority of their vicar general. And so some of the abbots or priors were expressing independence and discontent with Staupitz's spiritual rule of the monasteries. And so Martin Luther is sent to Rome to adjudicate the case at the highest tribunal of the church in the dispute between Staupitz and other priors in the Augustinian monasteries. Luther will arrive in the city with great excitement in 1510. He's going to be visiting the holiest city in the world, aside from Jerusalem itself. the seat of the papacy, the Bishop of Rome. He expects to have an inspiring, grace-filled adventure in the holy city. And he says that when he first arrived, he believed all their lies. That is, okay, go visit the saints' bones and receive grace a thousand years less in purgatory. Say mass on this particular altar and get your parents out of purgatory. He says, I almost wish my parents had been dead. so that I could have released them from purgatory by my masses. However, Luther also sees priests visiting the brothels of Rome, and there are many brothels in Rome. He sees even high ecclesiastics, bishops, exiting the brothels of Rome, and they weren't there doing evangelism. And this preys upon Luther's mind. that the Holy City is actually a city that is corrupt. There's a medieval joke about Rome. Spell Rome in Latin. R-O-M-A. Roma. Radix Omnium. What's the next word? I forgot the Latin motto. I forgot my Latin. Oh. Okay. Radix Omnium. The root of all evil. I know it's either. Okay. Well, I'll give you the English. The root of all evil is the love of money. R-O-M-A. The root of all evil is the love of money. Oh, the last word is avaricia. Radix omnia malorum avaricia. There it is. Okay, I got it at last. Radix omnia malorum avaricia. The love of money, the root of all evil. That joke had been going around for 200 years before Luther ever got to Rome. And so Luther will experience the corruptions of greed and power in that city. It will take years for that to percolate into a thoroughgoing critique of Rome. His first published critique of Rome will be in 1520, a document called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. How about that for a title? The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. And what is Babylon? Rome. Rome has held the church captive by its corruptions, the Babylonian captivity, not of Judah, but of the church. All right, now, in the Reformation, Mark, how much time do I have? So in the Reformation we have to track two tracks in Luther. One of them is the public track, the public events that he participates in. One of them is the private inner track, the track of his spiritual turmoil and his spiritual resolution of that turmoil. So a psychological track on the inside and a public track on the outside, and the Reformation actually is a product of both of these. So let's track for a little bit the interior track, the psychological track. And what we find is that in Luther's lecturing on Bible at Wittenberg, which was, by the way, no great university. The school was founded in 1500 by the local prince. It was 12 years old when Luther begins his professorship there. and the students are monks. Basically it's a junior college for monks and it has no doctoral degree. So it's like, you know, what's the local community college here? What do you call it? Is there a community college nearby? Eastern Gateway Community College? Okay. Is it of sterling academic reputation? I have no idea. This man is shaking his head in the negative direction. Okay. All right. So Wittenberg University is a junior college for monks. in Eastern Europe in peasant country, all right? Is this going to be a great university for professorship? No, this is not Paris. This is not Boulogne. This is not Oxford. This is not even sweet-smelling Cologne, which all had great universities. This is a tiny, tiny Podunkville school, and Luther is lecturing there as professor of Bible, all right? He's lecturing on Psalms a lot, and he's also lecturing on the letters of Paul and on the letter to the Hebrews. That will be the dominant curriculum in his lectures from 1512 to about 1518. And the years 1517, 1518 are the first years of Protestant Reformation, when it was not yet Protestant. So Luther says that I was possessed of a great zeal to understand what St. Paul meant in Romans 1.17. And here, I'll quote from the screen here, for in the gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. As it is written, the righteous will live by faith. Now, in Luther's theological training, the righteousness of God was said to be the righteousness by which God himself is righteous and therefore judges the unrighteous. All right, that's a pretty good definition of righteousness in its basic form. Okay, a righteous God who hates sin. All right, clear enough. But that was also taught, Luther says, about the righteousness of God in this verse. He'd been taught by his teachers that here the righteousness of God is the righteousness by which God is wrathful against sin. And so in Romans 1 verse 18, we have exactly that that follows. How does St. Paul say it? Chapter 1, verse 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the unrighteousness and ungodliness of men who suppress the truth in their unrighteousness. All right, so there you have, right in that context, the very next sentence, a sentence about the wrath of God in God's righteousness against human unrighteousness. So Luther says that actually this is where I got maddest at God. St. Paul was talking about the gospel, but is the gospel simply a further revelation of divine wrath and righteousness? If so, who can stand? And so he says that I was knocking at this door of St. Paul, and he would, I guess, he was knocking at this door of St. Paul ardently trying to understand what St. Paul meant in this very passage. And now I'll paraphrase from Luther, at last, meditating day and night, it became clear to me that the righteousness of God, of which the apostle wrote, was not the active righteousness by which God himself is righteous and judges the unrighteous. but as rather the passive righteousness of God, namely the righteousness that he gives by gift to the one who believes in Christ. Does that sound more like what St. Paul had in mind? Next sentence. Here I felt as though I had been altogether born again and had entered paradise through open gates. what's happened here. Oops, try this again. I'm going the wrong way, aren't I? Pushed the wrong button. Okay, here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. And then it is to check whether this is a worthy insight within the traditions of interpretation. And he thinks about the phrase, the strength of God, that is, that which makes us strong. And the wisdom of God, that which makes us wise. And the justice of God. Okay, all these are the phrases he goes through in his mind and realizes that persistently the Bible uses these attributes of God as gifts to us. Okay, the wisdom of God by which we become wise. And he believes that he's right. And then he reads St. Augustine. Now Augustine was the most important theologian in all of the Western tradition after St. Paul. Okay, so put the apostles in heaven and go for the various centuries following. Who's the most important Christian thinker in history? Well, it's St. Augustine for Luther. And as you learned yesterday, it's also St. Augustine for some pipsqueak named Curtis. So, okay, so what does St. Augustine say? Augustine seems to say the same sometimes, though not with persistent clarity. He finds it in Augustine, but not as clearly as he would have liked. All right. So he feels confirmed enough. And in 1518, in November of that year, he preaches a sermon, which is then published. And the sermon is called On the Triple Righteousness. Published in late 1518, this is the first time in a Luther document that we get the phrase justification by faith alone. the end of 1518. Justification by faith alone. What's one of those Protestant mottos, the solas? What's one of them? Sola fide, which means faith alone. And in 1522, when Luther's New Testament is published, when he translates Romans 3, he says, translated the German here, so you see a man is justified by faith And the next word in German is alleine. Any German speakers in the room? Anybody married to a German lady who might know the word alleine? Any daughters of a German lady who might know the word alleine? What is alleine, Joanne? Alone. Okay. Now, St. Paul's Greek did not have the word alone. So is Luther distorting Paul? Well, here's Paul's next phrase, you see that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Now, the crisis in Luther's time is the idea that you can contribute to your salvation by your work, by doing what lies in you, by doing your best. Do that and God grants you more grace and you shall be saved. All right. Why does Luther put the word Allein there in his German? Because it is what Paul means. If it is apart from works of the law, then it is faith and faith alone. That will be where Luther is most ardently attacked by Roman Catholic theologians and still is to this day. I was on radio, on Word FM, the Pittsburgh Christian Station, on All Saints Day some years ago with my friend Scott Hahn, who is a Roman Catholic theologian. Do you know Scott? Maybe you do. Say again? Yeah, okay. So Scott had been Presbyterian and went back to Rome and has become one of the more important Roman Catholic biblical scholars today and is teaching at Franciscan University in Steubenville. So we're on radio together and this is where Scott was attacking me. because I was holding to faith alone. And I had to argue that Luther's word alone there was warranted by St. Paul. If it is apart from works of the law, it is faith and faith alone. I hammered back on that one. I think I won that part of the debate. Scott's a very good debater, and we are friends, but I think I won that part of the debate. So this is the righteousness by which God himself grants righteousness to the one who believes. And so this is the beginning of a doctrine that will later be rejected by Rome. The first official rejection of it will be in 1545. when Rome will write a decree at the Council of Trent excommunicating any who hold that justification is by faith alone. It takes Rome 25 years or so to get to it. In the meantime, you could be Roman Catholic and hold that view. And there were Roman Catholic theologians before the Reformation who held that view. Luther will hold it with greater clarity. All right, now the other side of the Reformation is the public side. And here we have to go to what's called the indulgences controversy, and I'll say rather more about this tomorrow morning in my Sunday school class, when I talk about the 95 theses. How many have heard of the document called the 95 theses? Okay, so it's the first public document that we identify as Reformation, posted on October 31st, 1517. So this is our Reformation 500. Well, in The area of Wittenberg, a certain Dominican priest, I'm sorry, a friar, comes selling something called indulgences. The sales begin in the summer of 1517. By early autumn, they're in the area of eastern Germany selling indulgences. And there is Tetzel, whose name rhymes with pretzel, which is deeply twisted. Okay, so as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul into heaven springs. And in German, it was a sales jingle, okay, so, ringen, springen. Okay, it rhymes in German, it rhymes in English, ringen, springen. As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs. What in the world is an indulgence? Well, let me give you some background here. And we have to go to the story of Albrecht of Brandenburg. He was 26 years old and wanted to become Archbishop of Menz. Menz is a German city, a very important city in those days especially, and one of the chief cities of the Holy Roman Empire. And this is the archbishopric essentially for all the German territories, all the German-speaking territories. Germany is not yet a nation. It's a loose alliance of various princedoms and archdukedoms and petty kingdoms and this and that. But Mence has the archbishopric for virtually all of them. Now, he's not the firstborn son from his family. His older brother is going to inherit the royal title. He's either son number two or number three, I forget which. So in those aristocratic families of Europe, son number two might become the next general in the army, and son number three will become the bishop. And so the same family will control church, army, and state. So imagine three brothers ruling that, and you have a strong alliance, right? Hard to break that alliance. That's what the noble families most wanted. Three brothers, one the prince, one the military general, one the bishop. Have that, okay, and you get your way in nearly everything. So Albrecht wants to become the archbishop. Trouble is he's only 26. And canon law says that archbishop status is only given to those who are 30 and older. But he makes a deal with Pope Leo X. Now, Leo is not a very pious fellow. Leo is from one of the richest families in Europe, one of the richest families in the richest region of Europe, namely Italy, and he's from the Medici family. How many have heard of the Medicis? Some people say Medici. Okay, the richest family in Italy. And Leo is one of those fellows. And when he becomes Pope, a few years before this, he says, quote, God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it. He had no idea that a certain monk up there in Wittenberg was going to make trouble very, very soon after his installation as the Pope. All right, so opera comes to Leo X. The main qualification for being Pope in those days was that you were a good administrator. And to be a good administrator, you had to have noble blood because you had to be able to negotiate with everyone else as either an equal or an inferior. There could be no one who was your social superior. So only the wealthiest, the most powerful families got to contribute sons to the papacy. All right, so Leo is that kind of fellow. And Operet comes to Leo and says, OK, I want to be archbishop because it suits the family politics. And Leo says, all right, fine. You can at the payment of 21,000 gold ducats. Now a ducat is 3.5 grams of gold, 21,000 ducats is 35 pounds of gold, and 21,000 ducats is $3,000,000 U.S. Okay, so get to be the archbishop by paying me $3,000,000. Okay, so pay me $3,000,000, I'll make you a professor at Geneva. I don't think it'll work that way. Okay. So Albrecht and the Pope agree, and the money is to be split two ways. For one, Albrecht does not have the money. He's got to borrow it from the richest bankers in Europe. Jacob Fugger, F-U-G-G-A-R, be sure to spell it correctly. And so half the money is going to go to Albrecht to repay his loan to the bankers. The other half is going to go to build the largest building in the world, which is not the Crystal Cathedral, but St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Now, the architects for this building are first a fellow named Raphael, who is not a turtle, and then another fellow named Michelangelo, who also is not a turtle. You have to shell out a lot to get this building built, but nobody is a turtle in the planning of this. And that's not a turtle shell for the top. It's an elongated dome on an oval pattern ingeniously devised by Michelangelo and the first such dome in massive construction. Michelangelo understood that a regular dome is just a half circle, and they've been building those things for a long time. How do you get a taller building? Make it more like an egg. And the egg-shaped dome will be higher. The dome is 450 feet above the street level. When I was a boy, the tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building, 1,002 feet, 102 stories, I still remember. And when I got to the top at age six, I wanted to climb the fence to get just a little bit higher. My mother didn't let that happen. Yeah, I always wanted to be a little higher. So I did climb up into the top of that one day when I was 21. There's a stairway. that you can enter between the double shell. And so you're inside the dome, and the higher you go, the more you have to bend. And by the time you're near the top, you're bending like this, and there's this little tiny window, about two by two, near the very crest of the dome, and you look almost straight down upon the great Bernini altar, and you are not quite 450 feet above the floor. This was astonishing for a 16th century building. Earlier they built such heights, but only as the spires of cathedrals. So Salisbury Cathedral's spire is about that high, but you can't get inside it. You know, it's stone that points higher and higher than the actual occupiable structure. Okay, so Michelangelo does something better than the English cathedrals. and designs what will be the largest building in the world. When you walk the main apse, the main nave in St. Peter's, they have marked on the floor the dimensions of far lesser church buildings like St. Paul's in London. So you're well down the aisle and suddenly there's a mark here. St. Paul's stops here. St. Paul's is not nearly as large as St. Peter's in Rome. Okay, the largest building in the world. How do you pay for it? Well, you get 21,000 gold nuggets from a certain fellow who wants to be archbishop. And how do you get all this money? You sell indulgences. What in the world is an indulgence? An indulgence is a piece of paper authorized by the Pope, which grants release from certain punishments of sin. And indulgence was invented back in the Crusades by Pope Urban II, the one who commanded the first crusade in 1095 AD. And the idea is this. Okay, you're supposed to confess your sins on your deathbed, right, and have one last absolution, one last sacrament before you go into the next life. What if you're on the battlefield serving Holy Mother Church, fighting for the Holy Land? What if you were killed on the battlefield? Knights of the Christian West were worried about death in battle. Would they, by serving God, have more time in purgatory? Because in the heat of battle, the wrath and the sin of war." All right. So the pope said, okay, I will grant you absolution from certain penalties of sin for the warriors who go on crusade. So an indulgence was invented to assure the consciences of Christian knights going off against the Muslims to get the sacred places back for Christendom. By the time we get to the 1500s, indulgences had been vastly expanded. And in 1517, a decree was secretly made in which the Pope claimed the power to release the penitent not only from the earthly penalties imposed by the priests, okay, the Ten Hall Marys or the Night of Vigil, but also from the pains of purgatory. The Pope claimed power over the exit of purgatory into heaven. Now, purgatory is not hell. There's no escape from hell. Purgatory is the antechamber to heaven for Christians who die with sin upon their soul. Purgatory purges the remaining sins of those Christians who are not yet fully sanctified. If you're a saint in this life, you shoot right on through, all right? But if you're not a saint in this life, you pause in purgatory until your repentance is perfected. And when that sin is at last gone from your soul by suffering and discipline and your own willful striving toward heaven's purity, then you enter the fullness of heaven. How many have read Dante's Divine Comedy in the section called Purgatorio? Okay, the penitent in Purgatory proceed by their own will painfully step by step toward heaven's door. All right. The Pope proclaims himself as having the power to release such souls into heaven. And officially these documents are not for sale. They are gifts of the church. But what's the usual condition by getting such a gift? And almost nobody got such a gift without the payment of a coin. So as soon as the coin in the coffer springs, the soul into heaven, I'm sorry, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul into heaven springs. And when Tetzel comes to the end of the bridge outside Wittenberg and sets up his sales booth, And Luther's own congregants in the church, where he himself sometimes preached, begin crossing the bridge to buy the indulgences. Luther goes into action and he writes a measured protest in 95 Latin propositions. Sounds a little weird, doesn't it? 95 Latin propositions. The theses are actually not meant to be a public document. They're meant to be a university document calling other scholars to debate the propositions regarding the proper function of the indulgence. So 95 sentences about the proper function of indulgence. Luther thinks that the Pope does not want this indulgence sale. And he did not authorize such things, and these are shenanigans going on by others who were underlings. He says that in the 95 Theses. But he also knows that in the gospel, Jesus calls us not to the sacrament of penance, but to the gospel action called repentance. Thesis number one. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, He called for the entire life of the Christian to be one of penitence. The rest of the 95 follows suit. The Church does not have power over purgatory. The Pope has power over the punishments imposed by priests within this life and not over the punishments imposed by God in the life of the world to come. And to buy repentance? That is damnable. And to offer repentance for sale? That is damnable. And Luther will denounce it in no uncertain terms. Unbeknownst to Luther, some person, we don't know who, takes down the document that he posted on that church door, the castle church door, That castle church door was the bulletin board for the university. The entrance to the dormitory and the entrance to the castle church were on the same foyer area. So you're coming out of your dorm and you see the post. It was the bulletin board for the university. Luther meant that as an invitation to other scholars to debate the propositions within the university. It was to be an academic disputation in good medieval style. But somebody took down the notice, copied it, printed it. We don't know who. But before long, thousands of copies of the 95 Theses are floating around Europe. It comes into Spain 10 days later, the second week of November. It's in Spain. Erasmus, Europe's greatest scholar, gets a hold of a copy and sends it to friends at Cambridge in England by March 1518. One day Luther's at lunch or something and it's December 1517 and somebody shows him a copy of it. He's astonished. It's in print! How did this happen? He had no idea. And he discovers that he is famous. The name Luther becomes a household name in Europe by the end of 1517. And he is astonished. He's like the fellow who fell from the bell tower and grabbed the rope, not knowing what else to do. And the bell is tolling and people gather. And so all of Europe is in distress over the sale of indulgences, the sale of forgiveness. How can this be? And Luther becomes the hero of the German public. Because that's where the indulgences were sold. They're not sold in France, not sold in Italy, not sold elsewhere, not in Spain. They're sold only among the Germans. And where is Europe most impoverished? Among the Germans. And where's the money going? To Albrecht, to repay the richest banker in the world, and to Rome to build the largest building in the world among the Italians who are the wealthiest people in the world. And so the German princes are furious at the Pope and furious at Albrecht, and Luther becomes their darling. And this is how a Protestant Reformation happens. There was an attempt at a Reformation 100 years before. The hero there was a Czech. preacher preaching at a place called Bethlehem Chapel inside Prague. And kings and princes and nobility and professors came to hear the wisdom of Jan Hus, in English, John Hus. And he preached the gospel. He preached the scriptures. They burned him at the stake. His king abandoned him. One major reason why we have a Protestant Reformation is because Luther's prince did not abandon him. So I think that I'm about 20 minutes after 8 now, and I probably should bring this to a halt. Do we have time for some questions, Mark? And what time do you want to end our session? 830? Okay, so I've got more stuff on my screens, but I will show you this one. Okay, so there's Luther before his emperor. Oh, there's Frederick. Frederick the Wise. Here's Charles V, the emperor. Here's Leo X, the pope. And there's Luther's best friend, Philip the Langton, who taught Greek. So the Greek professor of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon, he'll arrive in 1518 and befriend Luther very swiftly. He's the one who tells us that it's October 31st, 1517 when Luther posts the 95 Theses. Philip is the reporter of that. He was not present, but he's our source for that date. So some various persons then in the Luther story. And so we have a Protestant Reformation Did you ever think about the word Protestant as protest and Reformation as reform? Okay, so a movement of protest and church reform. Not a new church, but a reformed church in response to a protest against the abuse of church authority. So with that, I'll pause for any questions that you might have. And I have a gentleman back here with a question. Go ahead. Tell me your name, sir. My name is Matt. Matt, go ahead. I was just curious on what the cloister that Luther was in reminded fans of an Augustinian cloister. Yes. Was there any Augustinian theology influence from that? Or was it through other means that he came across Augustinian theology? Well, Augustine was revered. in the tradition of that monastic order. That monastic order was not actually founded by St. Augustine. Augustine did found a monastic community in North Africa in the 380s AD, but it did not survive into that period. And so in the late medieval time, a new order of monks was created, inspired by the vision of St. Augustine, who had wanted a order of intellectual contemplatives. So the Augustinian order is created, late medieval, on the model of what Augustine had done in Carthage or North Africa a thousand years before. But the leading theology, though, of the time is not really Augustine's anymore, and it's not even Thomas Aquinas. Thomas died in 1274 and his professorship eventually came to William of Ockham in the 1330s. And William's views became the dominant views even among the Augustinians. Now Luther reads Augustine and Luther reveres Augustine, but Augustine is not deeply understood. So what will happen with the Reformation is that people will go back to Augustine And there will be a far deeper understanding of Augustine. So the favorite theologian of both Martin Luther and John Calvin will be St. Augustine. And if you have a fine edition of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, you can trace who gets quoted where within that vast set of volumes. And of course the Bible is massively quoted. The Church Fathers are often quoted, but among all the Church Fathers, no one is quoted nearly as much as St. Augustine. by Calvin. Calvin understood Augustine very, very deeply. Luther in 1510 scarcely does. Luther in 1520, now he will. So we really see the first wonderfully vivid exposition of Augustine's theology in 1524 when Luther publishes a great book called The Bondage of the Will. 350 pages. It's Augustine through and through. That's a lovely book. Has anyone ever read in or read of Bondage of the Will? Yeah. Okay, so that's the book in which Luther really proves that he understands Augustine. But in 1510, 1512, this is not true. Does that answer your question? Another question? Over here to, is it David? Yes. You hit briefly on Erasmus. Yes. What do you see as the summary of the debate between Luther and Erasmus? And is there a similar debate in the modern church? Oh, I have a whole lecture just on that in PowerPoint. I could give it right now if you want. Let's go. OK, so in 1519 or 20, Erasmus published a book called The Sermon or Deitribe on the Freedom of the Will. And this is directed against Luther, because Luther had said in one of his monastic debates, let's see, I think I've got it somewhere here. Yeah, okay. Luther had said that, let me get the quote, the person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what lies within him adds sin to sin and becomes doubly guilty. It is certain that a man must utter the despair of his own ability before he's prepared to receive the grace of Christ. And basically he denounces free will as the path to hell. The Pope notices those, these are the Heidelberg Theses of 1518, and they get published, and the Pope hates them, and Erasmus hates them. And so Erasmus publishes a 100-page book swiftly written in defense of free will. And by free will, Erasmus means this, the power to choose by your own native ability. Now you press Erasmus on that, and he'll say, well, without God's grace you can't do it. So Erasmus is not a clear thinker on this question. And Erasmus says, you know, this Luther stuff is so bad, we really shouldn't discuss this stuff in public, you know, do this privately, not in public, Luther. But Luther says, in the freedom of the will, Erasmus, if we do not discuss this in public, the gospel will be hidden. And you, sir, prove yourself to be impious. by your desire to suppress the truth. And so the freedom of the will then is a 350-page rebuttal to Erasmus' 100-page sermon on the freedom of the will. And in that book, Luther says that the will is not a nothing. That's a quotation. The will is not a nothing. But the will is caught in its own self-love. It's very Augustinian. And unless grace breaks self-love, we cannot will rightly. You might say it this way. Luther didn't say it quite like this, but he might laugh at this one. Free will is free won't. That's a quotation from Johannes Vos, my first professor of Bible. Free will is free won't. Luther would like that. Luther would wish he'd said it that way. So yeah, we freely won't. And Erasmus does not understand the bondage that sin actually constructs in us. Another question on this side of the room. Well, another question on this side of the room. Going once. Oh, here's one. Yes, I have a question about his wife, Catherine. Yes, Catherine runs war. Now tell me your name. Amy. Amy. Oh, so it's not Catherine. Okay. I noticed a trend in Christian fiction. There are a couple books that have been published about. There are. I've not read them. Yeah. But can you recommend Oh, a hand goes up over here. That's right, Kitty My Rib. No, Edna's book is about Edelette Calvin. Calvin's wife. But there is a book called Kitty My Rib. And Luther nicknamed her My Rib, because Eve is from... Okay, so Catherine becomes Kate or Kitty, Kitty My Rib. It's a 1960s book, it may be out of print, not sure, but there's a far more recent book by a lady professor at Gettysburg Theological Seminary, and I think it's simply called Catherine von Bora. But the name of the author eludes me now. So I had a student write a paper on Catherine von Bohr a couple years ago. It was the prize-winning paper in my church history class that semester. So I suppose I could dig up the biblio. You could email me, yeah. One more question? Yes, back row. In your biographies, which biography of Luther would you recommend? There are so many of them. And so many of them are so well done. The most recent one I've read is by an atheist who hates the fellow. Oh well, I won't recommend that one. Eric Metaxas is a new one that I've not yet had my hands on. Has anyone seen the Metaxas biography of Luther? It's brand new. What's the actual title? Is it just Martin Luther? Yeah, so Metaxas wrote the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography about seven, eight years ago. So now he's done a Luther biography, but I've not read reviews of it and I've not read the book. My favorite biography is still the one from 1950 called Here I Stand, The Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton, B-A-I-N-T-O-N. That's a 500 page biographical novel. but by one of the premier church historians of North America in those days. So Roland Beaton, Here I Stand. That novel still gets, is it a novel or is it a biography? It's kind of on the borderline. It reads very novelistically, but it's brilliant. And the guy knew the sources very, very well. He was a Lutheran church historian, Roland Beaton, R-O-L-A-N-D, Beaton, B-A-I-N-T-O-N. That remains my favorite Lutheran biography. There's one by, oh, there are 40 of them, at least. So one's called Between God and the Devil. Yeah. OK, interesting title. So I like Bainton best. And? Say again? Yeah, Carl Truman has a theological study, kind of bio-theo, from Carl Truman. It came out about two years ago. Martin Luther and the Christian Life, or some such title. And that's a well done book. I like that book. I think we're pretty well done. Mark, would you pray for us all? Shall we stand for prayer? Gracious Father, we thank you. at the end of this night for the opportunity we've had to learn, even more to reflect upon your grace to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the fellowship, one with another. We pray for your blessing upon us as we come to worship tomorrow. We pray, O Lord, that you would give us rest this night, strength, clarity of thought. Pray, O Lord, that you would watch over us and keep us in all our ways. We thank you for your goodness to us, for your mercy, and for your grace in the Lord Jesus Christ. Bless us now and bless our time together. We call a ship one way or another in Christ's name. Amen. Amen.