Transcript

Now, I must confess that I have been wrestling with Dr. Martin Luther for many years, since long before I became a Catholic about 13 years ago, back in the days when I was reading his works in graduate school.

Nevertheless, Luther remains for me, as for all those I think who study him carefully, a figure of great complexity and contradiction.

You might say of Luther what Winston Churchill once said of Russia, famously, that he is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

This morning, then, I think it's best to spend the brief time we have in an examination of one important aspect of that complexity, what I would call the irony of Luther.

The irony of Luther.

Now, what do we mean by irony?

Well, of course, that depends on the context.

As a figure of speech, irony refers to the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of their literal meaning.

For example, when my wife tells me that her cousins are coming to stay for a week, and I reply, wow, I hope they can stay longer.

Well, we won't go there.

Story irony, on the other hand, uses devices, such as character development or situation or plot, to stress the paradoxical nature of reality, or the contrast between the ideal and the actual.

In drama, this irony, which is expressed in the dialogue of the situation, is appreciated by the audience, but not by the characters on stage.

They are blind to it.

Now, the irony I'm referring to here is yet a different kind, though it's related to the others.

It's called historical irony.

When historians speak of irony, they refer to an outcome of historical events that is contrary to what was expected or to what might have been expected by the historical figures who were involved in those events.

Now, this irony is all the more sharp, more poignant, more tragic, when a figure acts with certain intentions, often good intentions, only to find that his very actions serve to bring about the opposite results of what he had intended.

Now, our everyday lives provide abundant examples of what I'm talking about.

How many of us, for example, know a family where the parents acted in overbearing ways, intended to keep the children in line and out of trouble, only to provoke those children to rebel and to misbehave and defiance?

Or the opposite, perhaps more commonly today, may be true.

How many parents indulge their children's misbehavior in order to allow them ample freedom, only to find that their indulgence has cultivated in their children a bondage to their passions?

The opposite of their very intentions is brought about by their actions.

But how is it that a person's actions can sometimes cause the very opposite of his intended results?

What is it about human beings that allows them, even disposes them, to produce ironic outcomes?

Well, the answer should be obvious to any of us who have found ourselves in that situation, because all of us do from time to time, I think.

We are finite creatures, and we are fallen creatures.

Our creaturely limitations, our finiteness, assures that we cannot determine most of the circumstances surrounding and shaping our actions, nor can we foresee the seemingly random events that will influence its outcome, nor can we control the reaction of other human beings whose free will acts like a wild card in the process.

At the same time, and to make matters worse, however, we are fallen.

Because of the fall, despite the graces that may come to us through the sacraments and other channels, we struggle still with concupiscence, that weakness, that inclination to sin that is left by the wound of original sin, even after baptism.

Often then, the fruit of our actions defies our expectations, not because of our limited knowledge or power, but because of our sin.

As St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us, sin darkens the intellect, the understanding.

Or as my friend, the inimitable Mark Shea, some of you may have heard him speak, as Mark Shea so bluntly puts it, sin makes you stupid.

You see, the infamous seven deadly sins, although they're more accurately called the seven capital vices, pride, lust, wrath, envy, the rest, get us into a whole world of trouble by blinding us to reality.

And to them, the fog that's created by the emotions of doubt, fear, sorrow, they can lead us to misjudge situations, to underestimate other people, and to overestimate ourselves, to misunderstand the truth about who God is and who we are.

Historical irony then shows its closeness to dramatic irony, for drama does imitate history, and that its characters are in certain ways blind to the contrast between the ideal, or perhaps only imaginary, and the actual.

Like the audience before the stage, we ourselves look back on the lives of earlier generations, and we can see the paradoxical outcomes of their actions that were hidden to them.

And like the audience of a good drama, we can learn valuable lessons from what we see.

An ancient Greek philosopher once said that history is philosophy teaching by example.

History is philosophy teaching by example.

In a similar way, I like to say that church history is theology teaching by example.

The most intriguing of theological speculations, the most sincere of biblical interpretations, may manifest serious flaws when they're tested in the laboratory of concrete human experience over the course of a generation or two.

I think that's precisely part, at least, of what Scott was talking about and showing us last night.

So now within that context, let's move on to our main concern here, to see how the life and thought and work of Martin Luther offer us a classic example of historical irony and to glean whatever lessons we can from his mistakes.

First, for the sake of those not familiar with the basics about Luther's life or as a refresher, we'll have a biographical sketch.

Keep in mind that some of the details of his life are debated by historians because the evidence is sometimes inconsistent.

Luther was known for, shall we say, embroidering the truth.

He had a gift for overstating the case.

And so some of his later reminiscences about his earlier years are in debate.

But Martin was born in 1483 in Eisleben, Saxony, Germany.

It's now Germany.

His father was a poor copper miner, but later a mine owner.

He spoke earlier about overbearing parents.

Well, according to Martin's repeated testimony, his parents' discipline was quite severe, even for that time and culture.

He recalled, for example, one day when as a child he stole a little nut from the kitchen and his mother beat him bloody for the crime.

His father was apparently even more harsh.

In 1501, Martin entered the University of Erfurt.

His father was determined that Martin would become a lawyer.

How is it, Calvin's saying, how is it that these lawyers end up becoming theologians?

Somehow we're always the worst for it.

If you're a lawyer, I apologize.

The young man was reputed to be a good, hardworking student, rather moody and something of a musician.

In January 1505, Martin entered law school.

But on July 2nd, 1505, while riding from his home now in Magdeburg, back to Erfurt, he had a life-changing experience, though scholars still debate the details of what actually happened.

According to one report, anyway, Luther was caught in a sudden violent thunderstorm.

According to his later testimony, a lightning bolt struck in a nearby field very close and threw him to the ground.

In his terror, Martin vowed to St. Anne, who was the patron saint of miners, so would have been familiar to his family, that if he lived, he would become a monk.

Fifteen days later, he kept his vow by applying for acceptance as a novice in the Erfurt house of the Augustinian friars.

The Augustinians dominated the university at that time, and they accepted him.

As far as we can tell, there was no hint of any inclination in Luther prior to this event, either toward the religious life or toward the priesthood.

Luther was really not made for the monastic life.

He was highly gifted and he was tirelessly energetic.

He was generous and impulsive, but he was also high-strung and moody, with a lifelong disposition to melancholy, what we might now call clinical depression.

He once said, sadness of heart is not pleasing to God, but although I know that, I fall into that feeling a hundred times a day.

Martin was perpetually agitated, burdened with fears and anxieties, constantly haunted by a sense of guilt.

His moodiness took him in violent swings between hope and despair, joy and sadness, and his interior life was preoccupied with anxieties about himself and about his spiritual condition.

He suffered from occasional panic attacks, such as he did on the occasion of celebrating his first mass as a priest.

Martin recalled later that he wanted to bolt from the altar in terror, but his superior prevented him.

All in all, the young man longed for an assurance that he would not lose his soul.

A year after his reception as a novice, Martin took the solemn vows that should have bound him for life.

Nine months later, in 1507, he was ordained a priest, at which point he began his theological training.

Martin said later of this period in his life, from misplaced reliance on my righteousness, my heart became full of distrust, doubt, fear, hatred, and blasphemy of God.

I was such an enemy of Christ that whenever I saw an image or a picture of him hanging on his cross, I loathed the sight and I shut my eyes and felt that I would rather have seen the devil.

My spirit was completely broken and I was always in a state of melancholy.

For whatever I might do, my righteousness and my good works brought me no help and no consolation.

The accounts given by his fellow monks show that they feared at times that he was on the verge of insanity because he wrestled so much.

His confessor, Johannes Staupitz, tried valiantly to help him.

The older man once advised Martin, and I can just hear him, Martin, Martin, my brother, Martin, don't act like a child any longer.

God is not angry with you, Martin, but you are angry with God.

Very good advice, but apparently of little avail in his life.

In 1508, Martin was sent to Wittenberg, where a university had been established six years before.

He taught first philosophy, then theology, both there and in Erfurt.

The winter of 1510-11, he made a visit to Rome, which he later claimed scandalized him deeply.

Those writings from that period hardly mention it.

1512, the age of 29, he received his doctorate and was put in charge of the Wittenberg School of Divinity.

Luther's so-called tower experience, which is well known to Lutherans for sure and to many others as well, took place in a room at the castle of Wittenberg.

We don't know for sure the date or even the exact year, probably 1515. Luther later spoke of having a divine illumination about the true meaning of the words, the righteousness of God, an experience about which he said years later, this immediately made me feel as if I had been born again and as if I had entered through open gates into paradise itself.

In any case, during this time, Luther began his series of lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which show that his teaching was beginning to diverge from that of the church and the Catholic tradition.

The next year, 1516, he gave his lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.

In 1517, Luther nailed the infamous 95 theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, or perhaps he simply published them in a pamphlet.

Historians have debated that matter too.

In this document, he invited a debate over the practice of indulgences and implicitly at least questioned the authority of the pope.

His theology had already been developing in directions, as I said, contrary to church teaching, but the publication of his theses against indulgences brought him notoriety.

So the Christians across Europe, especially the universities, began to discuss and debate it.

The theses were forwarded to Rome and some Catholic writers began writing critiques of it.

Others, though, began getting involved on Luther's side as well.

And the German Andreas von Kolstadt, for example, issued his own theses that even went further than Luther at that point, saying that the private judgments of an individual Christian in matters of faith, when based on scripture, should take precedence over all other forms of authority.

Declarations and counter-declarations were issued, though at this point not yet any official pronouncements of the church's magisterium.

In 1518, Pope Leo X summoned Luther to Rome for theological investigation.

Luther asked to have his case heard in Germany and after some confusion and stalling, eventually the pope suspended efforts to enforce the summons against him.

In 1519, Luther engaged in a public debate with Johann Eck, after Eck challenged him to do so in a disputation at Leipzig, Germany.

In that debate, Luther finally publicly declared that the ecumenical councils of the church were not infallible, that they could err, and that he thought the Council of Constance had in fact done so in its condemnation of Wycliffe and Huss.

I don't think we heard about them last night, but two kind of forerunners of the Reformation.

Well, Eck declared Luther a heretic and once the results of the debate were published, not surprisingly, other Catholic theologians followed suit, including the theological faculties of the universities of Cologne and Levant and eventually the University of Paris.

Luther continued to preach and publish sermons that showed he was moving farther and farther away from the church's teaching.

In 1520, his case was reopened at Rome.

Commissions were established to investigate him and prepare the case against him.

Meanwhile, Luther began to write in German as well as Latin so that he could appeal to the common people, reach a lay audience.

At this point, he concluded, I am so tormented, I can hardly doubt that the pope is properly that antichrist, which by common consent the world anticipates.

On June 15th of that year, the papal bull against Luther, Exsurgiae Domine, was promulgated.

He was threatened with excommunication if he did not recant and seek pardon within 60 days of its publication in Saxony.

Three of his most famous works soon followed, one called Address to the Christian Nobility, another, The Freedom of a Christian, and a third, Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

By this time, Luther was adamant that he wanted nothing more to do with the Catholic Church.

As for me, he declared, to die is cast.

I despise alike the favor and the fury of Rome.

I do not wish to be reconciled with her or ever to hold any communion with her.

Let her condemn and burn my books.

I, in turn, unless I can find no fire, will condemn and publicly burn the whole pontifical law, that swamp of heresies.

Immediately, Luther issued his own response to the bull, entitled Against the Exsurgiae Bull of Antichrist.

He wrote in it, I maintain that the author of this bull is Antichrist.

I curse it as a blasphemy against the Son of God.

Every Christian who accepts this bull will suffer the torments of hell.

Where are you, emperors, kings, and princes of the earth, that you tolerate the hellish voice of Antichrist?

Leo X and you, the Roman cardinals, I tell you to your faces, renounce your satanic blasphemies against Jesus Christ.

In December of that year, Luther publicly burned the papal bull, along with the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians whom he deeply despised.

Local university students gathered to jeer and to chant a requiem, and they sang lewd drinking songs.

The next day, he preached to the people, if you do not separate from Rome, there is no salvation for your souls.

A few weeks later, in 1521, Luther was formally excommunicated by the Pope, more than three years after he had first expressed his defiance of the church.

He was then summoned to appear for examination at the Imperial Diet of Worms, called by the Emperor Charles V. Luther did appear at the Diet, he spoke, he entered into some negotiations, then left.

On the road home, however, he was kidnapped by the agents of his friend and ally, the German Elector Friedrich the Wise, and taken to Wartburg Castle near Eisenach.

He remained there for a year, almost a year, hidden and under their protection.

Soon, the Emperor placed Luther under the ban of the Empire and published the Edict of Worms against him.

But Luther was safe because of his friends in high places.

That same year, back in Wittenberg, Luther's new followers at the Cathedral discontinued the Mass and began their own, what they called, evangelical celebrations instead.

In 1522, at the Augustinian Monastery in Wittenberg, the reforms led to rioting and vandalism of religious images.

Luther returned there and confronted the so-called Zwickau Prophets.

They were early Anabaptists who were already beginning to take some of Luther's ideas to their logical, extreme conclusions.

But Luther dismissed their prophetic powers as the work of the devil and drove him out of town.

Later that year, Luther completed his German translation of the New Testament.

He also began organizing local churches according to his new teachings.

In 1524 and 1525 came the Peasants' War or the Peasants' Revolt, it's been called.

This was a very complex political and cultural phenomenon in which Luther's religious teaching played an important role.

Many of the rebel leaders were evangelical preachers, evangelical meaning Luther, taking their cue from Luther's teachings about the freedom of the Christian, as he called it.

So they were fearful, he became fearful, that their apparent ties to his teachings would jeopardize his political goals.

He had the support of some of the nobles and now the nobles saw that their peasants were rebelling against them in Luther's name or the name of his theology.

So Luther then issued just a rabid repudiation of the peasants and their agenda, which he entitled, Against the Murderous and Robbing Rabble of Peasants.

In this tract he called upon the nobles, the princes, to slaughter the offending peasants like mad dogs, to slab and strangle and slay as best they could, and he held out as a reward for them the promise of heaven.

Well his advice was literally followed, the process of repression was frightful, with the military encounters resulting more like massacres than battles.

The undisciplined peasants who mostly had rude farming implements as their weapons were slaughtered like sheep, more than a thousand monasteries and castles were leveled to the ground, hundreds of villages were laid in ashes, the harvests of the nation were destroyed, an estimated 100,000 people were killed.

One commander alone boasted that he had hanged 40 evangelical preachers and executed 11,000 revolutionaries and heretics.

Toward the end of the war in 1525, Luther in his 42nd year married Katrina von Bora, who was then 26. Katrina was a Bernadine nun who had abandoned her convent, as had many other nuns and monks that Luther was urging.

By this time it was already becoming clear to Luther that his reformation was splintering.

In a letter written the same year he married, you observe that there are nearly as many sects and creeds now as there are heads.

In 1527 a major division erupted between Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, who was a Swiss reformer, challenging Luther's teaching as not radical enough, especially with regard to the nature of the Eucharist.

Luther's published attacks on Zwingli and his followers were just as vehement and crude as the ones on the Papist.

He called them dogs, swine, jackasses.

He told them, go to your pigsty and roll in your filth.

In 1539 there took place the infamous double marriage of the nobleman Philip of Hesse, the prince there, who had the reputation of being, according to his court theologians, the most immoral of princelings.

I like that word, princelings.

And who ruined himself by unrestrained, they said, and promiscuous debauchery.

He himself, Philip, admitted that he could not remain faithful to his wife for three consecutive weeks.

But Philip's affections were directed to Margaret von der Saal, a 17-year-old lady in waiting.

Luther gave his consent to Philip for him to marry her without divorcing his wife.

In other words, to commit bigamy, as long as Philip deceived the people by keeping it secret.

A little bit more about that in a minute.

Once married to Catherine, Luther was given by the elector the old Augustinian monastery to be his homestead.

That's ironic.

Six children were born to them there.

In later years, as Luther's movement gained supporters, his rugged health began to fail at last.

He suffered prolonged attacks of dyspepsia, nervous headaches, chronic granular kidney disease, gout, sciatic rheumatism, middle ear abscesses, vertigo, gallstones.

He was subject to increasing irritation, to passionate outbreaks and relentless suspicions, which in his last days alienated from his allies and even his friends.

His reformation had disturbing consequences, even in his lifetime.

They filled him, as he said, with unspeakable grief.

He glumly pondered the divisions of the new church, the endless quarrels of the preachers, the tyranny of the secular rulers, the increasing contempt for clergymen.

Above all, he lamented the disintegration of moral and social life, the vice and immoral conduct that had become epidemic.

We live in Sodom and Babylon, he wrote toward the end of his life.

Affairs are growing daily worse.

In addition, Luther reported during this time agonizing assaults by the devil, which left, as he noted, no rest for even a single day.

His nightly diabolical encounters exhausted and martyred him to such an intensity that, as he put it, he was barely able to gasp or take breath.

Of all the assaults, he said, admitted to a friend, none were more severe or greater than those about my preaching, with the thought coming to me, all this confusion caused by you.

It was while in this torment of body and mind that his lifelong inevitable coarseness reached its peak in his anti-Semitic and anti-Papal pamphlets.

One was called Against the Jews and Their Lies, another was called Against the Papacy Established by the Devil.

We should note here in passing that Luther's speech and writings were shot through, even his theological writings, with vulgarity and even obscenity, far beyond the admitted crassness of many others in his day.

Why this was the case or how it might have been related to his theology, I'll leave that to others to debate.

In any case, Luther seems to have had a startling, even a pathological, fixation on the bodily excretory system.

He also spoke openly and crudely about sex in general and about his sexual relations with his wife in particular, in public, to her great embarrassment.

His tract Against the Papacy, this time, was illustrated with nine obscene caricatures of the Pope by the artist Lunas Konak.

You have seen his work, most of the pictures you see of Luther are Lucas's paintings.

These were accompanied by expository verses that had been composed by Luther.

They showed such scenes as the Pope being born from the devil's rectum, a man defecating into the Pope's tiara as if it were a toilet, several men mooning the Pope and emitting gas from their posteriors, the Pope and the cardinals hanging by the neck with their tongues pulled out by the roots and nailed to the gallows.

Luther's text was just as crude and obscene.

Somehow it seems fitting, then, that the famous tower experience we noted actually took place as Father Ryland reminded me before the conference, and according to Luther's report, while the monk was sitting on the john.

In fact, a museum in Wittenberg today claims to have that very toilet on display.

It's a telling historical detail, I think, that encapsulates the odd and recurrent juxtaposition of vulgarity and piety in Luther's thought.

Another paradox.

One day while visiting his hometown of Eisleben, Luther came to an end rather quickly through a rapidly progressing illness.

He died about 3 o'clock in the morning, February 18, 1546, in the presence of a number of friends.

Now what exactly were the developments in Luther's theology that had finally led him to revolt against the church?

Here are a few of his most critical departures from Catholic teaching.

There are, of course, others.

First, original sin, he insisted, is a radical destruction of human nature.

It corrupts us wholly and permanently in our essence.

The human being, because of his corrupt nature, is utterly powerless to do good, and concupiscence cannot be conquered.

He wrote, I say that whether it be in man or devil, the spiritual powers have not only been corrupted by sin, but absolutely destroyed, so that there is now nothing in them but a depraved reason and a will that is the enemy and the opponent of God, whose only thought is war against God.

Consequently, second, and Luther taught that there is essentially, in spiritual matters at least, no human free will.

The will is enslaved.

Quote, he who wished to uphold free will in man, and to maintain, however, restrictedly, that in the spiritual order it is capable of anything and can give it support, that man denies Christ.

I hold to that, and I know that it is the very truth.

Luther also taught that salvation comes through sola fide, faith alone, not faith in works.

When he said that works are no essential part of the process of salvation, he was not simply excluding the works of the old Jewish law, as Galatians talks about, or works done before faith is received, or works done apart from the agency of grace through faith.

He went much further.

He went on to say that all possible and imaginable works are sinful and harmful, that faith doesn't have to produce them to result in salvation.

There are some places that faith cannot and should not do so.

Sinless works, he wrote, even though they always seem beautiful and probably good, are mortal sins.

If you would not sin against the gospel, then be on your guard against good works.

Avoid them as one avoids a pest.

Even the interior love of God, Luther taught, is a work that does not figure into our justification.

Next, grace alone, sola gratia, saves us, Luther said, which of course is a basic Catholic teaching.

But then he went on to say that grace changes nothing in us in the process of saving us.

The sinner, after receiving grace and being saved, is no less a sinner than before we are left just as we were.

Luther thus believed that justification, that process of being made righteous and just, is a thing that is external to the soul and to its action.

He rejected the Catholic teaching that justification actually infuses grace into us, that it infuses into us new life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, that it transforms us and gives us a share in the divine nature so that ultimately it perfects us.

Instead, he said, no, justification simply covers us with Christ's righteousness like a cloak.

It's exterior to us.

Or it's like snow on a dumb hill that nevertheless remains dumb.

In the Lutheran theological scheme then, once a human being is justified through faith, that is accepted as just or righteous by God, even though he isn't really just, then his sinfulness can have no effect on his eternal destiny.

It is enough, he wrote, that we confess through the riches of God's glory the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.

From him sin will not tear us away, even if thousands and thousands of times a day we fornicate or murder.

Since assurance that this justification has taken place cannot come from observing that our life has in fact changed, that we've become a more holy person or closer to God, then assurance has to come from a different source.

It has to come from our possession of faith.

Christianity is nothing, he wrote, but a perpetual exercise in feeling that you have no sin, although you committed sin, but that your sins are attached to Christ.

Finally Luther asserted the supreme authority of Scripture, not just as an essential or even a primary part of the deposit of faith, but in opposition to the authority of tradition and the magisterium.

More about that in a minute.

So what were the logical and practical implications of Luther's teaching?

First, Luther's notion of faith ultimately denies any objective value to the sacraments and all the other means of grace, such as the Scripture or even the Church herself.

These things for Luther become merely psychological stimulants to faith.

Second, the practice of good works becomes unnecessary for salvation.

All works are useless.

The papist, he wrote, put in heaven people who could only string works together.

There's not one among so many legends of saints which shows us a true saint, a man possessing the true Christian sanctity, sanctity by faith.

All their sanctity consists of having prayed much, fasted much, worked much, and their having mortified themselves, had a bad bed and rough clothing.

Dogs and pigs, too, can practice this kind of sanctity almost every day.

Consequently, for Luther, the entire penitential system is a blasphemous sham.

In addition, there's no need for the mass, which to Luther's thinking was not a sacrifice.

There's no need for an ordained priesthood or for a magisterium, nor is there any need for religious orders or vows.

There's plenty more to follow from that, but we'll stop with that.

The irony.

Okay, now given these elements of Luther's life and thought, it's time to focus on the historical ironies that they produced.

The first irony.

Luther sought moral reform, but his reformation produced moral chaos.

Luther sought moral reform, but his reformation produced moral chaos.

When we read the early Luther, we find him indignant at the moral laxity of his day, from the leaders of the hierarchy on down to everyday Catholics.

More than that, as we have seen, he personally struggled mightily with his own moral failures, seeking some way to overcome the temptations that plagued him because he wanted to become acceptable to God.

Sadly, however, his solution to the problem was to declare that works are useless and sin doesn't really matter as long as we have faith.

In doing so, he divorced morality from piety, and he detached conduct in this life from eternal destiny in the next.

Now I could be overstating, not overstating, but perhaps simplifying some of Luther.

He's very nuanced, but part of what we have to remember is that what you're hearing today is what his listeners heard.

So even if he meant things to be a little more nuanced in his own mind, the consequences of what he said to the people around him were such that they took it the same way you're hearing it today, with the result of chaos.

This is where it led him then, eventually to say, a pure heart enlightened by God must not dirty, must not soil itself with the law.

Thus let the Christian understand that it matters not whether he keeps the law or not.

Yes, he may do what is forbidden, and he may leave undone what is commanded, for neither is a sin.

These are all from different texts.

If we allow the Ten Commandments any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies, and blasphemies.

What was the result then?

Luther himself will tell us in his later life.

These are observations he made, not all on the same day, but on a number of occasions.

With regard to how he might personally, or others around him, how they should struggle with temptation, this is the conclusion he came to.

To a young man plagued by the accusations of conscience, Luther wrote, seek out the society of your boon companions.

Drink, play, talk bawdy, and amuse yourself.

One must sometimes even commit a sin out of hate and contempt for the devil, so as not to give him a chance to make one scrupulous over mere nothings.

If one is too frightened of sinning, one is lost.

Another occasion, oh, if only I could find a good sin to make a fool of the devil, to make him understand fully that I do not recognize any sin, and that my conscience does not reproach me with any.

We who are thus attacked and tormented by the devil must put away from our eyes and from our spirit the entire Ten Commandments.

And then at a larger scale, with regard to the moral anarchy that spread in the wake of the Reformation, he observed bitterly, the people behave so scandalously towards the gospel that the more one preaches, the worse they become.

With this doctrine, another time he said, the more we go forward, the worse the world becomes.

It is the doing and the work of that accursed devil.

It is clear enough how much more greedy, cruel, immodest, shameless, wicked the people are now than they were under Popery.

Townsfolk and peasants, men and women, children and servants, princes, magistrates, subjects, all are going to the devil.

Avarice, usury, debauchery, drunkenness, blasphemy, lying and cheating are far more prevalent now than they were under Popery, he said.

This state of morals brings general discredit on the gospel and its preachers.

And finally, many other examples, but he said the German people are seven times worse since they embraced the Reformation.

This is Luther speaking.

To use the language of the biblical prophet Hosea, when he cleaved asunder faith and works, Luther sowed the wind and he reaped the whirlwind.

In irony, Luther intended to proclaim and promote, as his treatise called it, the freedom of the Christian.

But the result was bondage to the passions and political oppression.

Like the indulgent parents we talked about earlier, Luther sought to provide Christians with a new freedom, which he preached about, wrote about frequently.

He wanted to liberate Christians from a sense of guilt, to overthrow what he saw as the tyranny of the Pope, the church councils, the ordained priesthood, the penitential system.

Here's how he described it in his prelude on the Babylonian captivity of the church, which he ended with this defiant ultimatum, because few know of this glory of baptism and joy of Christian liberty, nor can they know it owing to the tyranny of the Pope.

I here and now liberate myself and redeem my conscience, and I charge the Pope and all the Papists that unless they lift their own laws and traditions and restore to the churches of Christ the liberty which is theirs and see that this liberty is taught, they are guilty of all the souls that perish in this miserable captivity, and the papacy is indeed nothing but the kingdom of Babylon and the true Antichrist.

In order to bring about this liberation, however, Luther cast off all the restraints as we have seen, and in his own despondent words, among the people who were affected by the Reformation, these were the results.

The people feel, he said, they are free from the bonds and fetters of the Pope, but now they want to get rid of the gospel, too, and all the laws of God.

Everybody thinks that Christian liberty and licentiousness of the flesh are one and the same thing, as if now everybody were allowed to do what he wants.

You say, Luther, duh.

Listen to yourself.

As we have seen in our biographical sketch, such casting off of restraints also spilled over into the political arena with the Peasants' Revolt.

Since many of the preachers, as we noted, claimed this freedom of a Christian as justification for the revolution, then Luther was getting in trouble with the nobles.

So when he condemned the peasants in the strongest terms as a result, they were massacred and subjected after that to even more oppressive measures.

The authorities, he told the nobles, must resolve to chastise and slay as long as they can lift a finger.

The present time is so strange that a prince can gain heaven by spilling blood easier than another person can by praying.

How this would result in heaven, I don't know, according to his system.

But anyway, even in less turbulent times, Luther's view of total human depravity provoked him to make a declaration like this.

Like the mules who will not move unless you perpetually whip them with rods.

So the civil powers must drive the common people, whip, choke, hang, burn, behead, and torture them, that they may learn to fear the powers that be.

Another part of the irony is that Luther also championed freedom of conscience.

When asked before the Diet of Worms whether he would recant, he had that famous declaration, you've probably all heard, I cannot and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.

Yet he eventually became so confident of his teaching and so hostile toward his opponents, not just the Catholics but the radical reformers as well, that he ended up insisting that everyone, in fact, had better agree with him or be damned, literally damned.

I do not admit that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels, he once boasted.

He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved.

My word, he once claimed, is the word of Christ.

My mouth is the mouth of Christ.

And sure, though he condemned the popes for asserting their authority, Luther claimed for himself more authority than any pope ever did.

He said of the Catholics, those who taught traditional Catholic doctrine were knaves, dolts, asses, infernal blasphemers, knowing very little about the gospel, easily deceived by the devil and deserving to be in hell rather than in heaven.

Rascals, beasts, antichrists, theological abortions, fountains of error.

Then he turned to the more radical reformers, mainly the others, who criticized him and called them dogs, swines, jackasses.

They served the devil under the appearance of the gospel.

At a more profound level, we should note that Luther's attempt to bring people freedom finally pressed him, ironically, to deny the existence of human free will, at least with regard to spiritual matters.

Whoever sets up free will, he declared, cheats Jesus Christ of all his merit.

Whoever advocates free will brings death and Satan into his soul.

For a man who had sought freedom, what could be more ironic than denying free will?

The third irony, Luther sought fidelity and obedience to the scripture, but he ended up dismissing and mutilating the scripture whenever it contradicted his teaching, making himself its master.

And later German Protestant biblical scholars, God can tell us all about this, followed his example.

This is probably one area in which modern day Lutherans, at least the more conservative ones, would just be scandalized to read what Luther had to say about scripture.

They know the sola scriptura part, that scripture alone is the source of authority for our faith.

But they don't know so much.

Luther, as his banner, took sola scriptura, scripture alone, rejected the authority of sacred tradition and sacred magisterium.

But even an inspired book must be interpreted.

And in the vacuum of authority that Luther did, well, Luther ended up positioning himself as God's chosen replacement for the fathers of the church, for the doctors of the church, for the councils and for the popes.

The greatest defender, supposedly, of scripture soon found himself tearing apart the scripture because it did not reflect what he, time and time again, called my gospel.

Luther was known to twist the meaning of the text blatantly to suit his purposes.

He once said, this shall serve you as a true rule.

Wherever the scriptures ordain and command to do good works, you must understand it, that the scriptures forbid good works.

He also revised the biblical text to suit himself and dared anyone to challenge him.

For example, when a scholar criticized him for changing the word faith, wording faith, to faith alone, in his text to the German translation of Romans 328, he replied, if your papist annoys you with the word alone, tell him straight away, Dr. Martin Luther will have it so.

Papist and ass are one and the same thing.

Whoever will not have my translation, let him give it to go by the devil's thanks to him who censors it without my will and knowledge.

Luther will have it so.

And he is a doctor above all the doctors in Popedom.

When he had to interpret biblical passages that talked plainly about the freedom of the human will or the importance of good works, he would distort the meaning, claiming, for example, that God was speaking sarcastically or even that God was lying playfully.

When he couldn't so easily do that, he simply tossed out the biblical passages altogether.

Because Moses gave God's people the law, Luther declared, we have no wish either to see or to hear Moses.

He and his books should be looked upon with suspicion as the worst heretic, as a damned and excommunicated person.

Yes, worse than the Pope and the devil.

To the gallows, he said, with Moses.

Luther deleted the Deuterocanonical books from his Bible, we know about that, because they spoke, for example, of praying for the dead, making sacrifices for the dead.

And these were practices he rejected.

So he didn't change his thought, he threw out the books.

Even other books that are still in the Protestant canon, he dismissed or denigrated.

The Book of Esther, he announced, I toss into the Elba River.

I am such an enemy to the Book of Esther that I wish it did not exist.

Jonah, Ecclesiastes, Job, all those books warranted his disdain.

Even in the New Testament, Luther rejected the full authority of the books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation.

He took them out of their regular order, put them at the end of his Bible, after the others.

And he said, well, just the ones in the first group are the true and certain capital books of the New Testament.

He labeled John, quote, the only true gospel, saying it should be preferred to the others.

And he wrote that the epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter were superior to the first three gospels.

In the Book of Hebrews, he said, he found, quote, bits of wood, hay, and straw.

And he denounced the epistle of James altogether, of course, it talks about faith and worth, as an epistle of straw.

I do not hold it to be his writing, he said, and I cannot place it among the capital books.

Of the Book of Revelation, he said, there are many things objectionable in this book.

To my mind, it bears upon it no marks of an apostolic or prophetic character.

Everyone may form his own judgment of it.

As for myself, I feel an aversion to it, and to me, this is sufficient reason for rejecting it.

I reject the book because I feel an aversion to it.

Sola Scriptura, indeed.

The fourth irony, Luther intended to spread the truth.

I think that really was his intention.

But his actions ended up promoting deception and, even worse, confusion about the truth.

The dishonest insertion of a word to the biblical text to justify himself that we mentioned a minute ago, that's only one example of Luther's ultimate failure to serve the truth.

Another instance was the bigamy affair of Philip of Hesse, which we mentioned before.

In justifying this latter act, Luther said to the Hessian counselors that were assembled at Eisenach in 1540, we are convinced, he said, that the papacy is the seat of the real and actual Antichrist, and believe that against its deceit and iniquity, everything is permitted for the salvation of souls, including this lie, this deception.

Another time, a necessary lie, speaking of this, a useful lie, a helpful lie.

None of these lies goes against God.

What harm would there be in telling a good big lie for a greater good and for the sake of the Christian church?

Yet another example.

For a while, Luther retained the mass in Saxony because he knew the people there were so attached to it that he thought they would revolt against his reforms if he took it away openly.

So instead, he advised Lutheran pastors there to engage in deceit.

Quote, the priest can very well manage so that the common man is still unaware of the change that has taken place and can assist at mass without finding anything to scandalize him.

Luther's efforts to introduce others to spiritual truth led not only to deception, but also to utter confusion.

His championing of private interpretation without the guidance of the church's tradition and magisterium led others to claim the same authority for scripture interpretation that he claimed for himself.

It shouldn't have surprised him, but somehow it did.

But he was disgusted with the result.

How many doctors of theology, he said, have I made by preaching and writing?

Now they say, be off with you, go off with you, go to the devil.

Thus it must be.

When we preach, they laugh.

When we get angry and threaten them, they mock us, they snap their fingers at us and laugh in their sleeves.

Laugh in their, I think he means.

After the Reformation movement splintered theologically, Luther observed, there is no smearer, but when he has heard a sermon or read a biblical chapter in German, his translation, makes a doctor of himself and crowns his ass and convinces himself that he knows everything better than all who teach him.

Noblemen, townsmen, peasants, all classes understand the gospel better than I, Saint Paul, Neon.

They think they are wise and think themselves more learned than all the ministers.

Another occasion, when we have heard or learned a few things about Holy Scripture, we think we are already doctors and have swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all.

The great irony, of course, is that all these criticisms describe Luther himself perfectly.

This one he complained will not hear of baptism.

That one denies the sacrament.

Another puts a world between this and the last day.

Some teach that Christ is not God.

Some say this, some say that.

However rude a yokel may be, when he has dreams and fancies, he thinks himself inspired by the Holy Ghost, that he must be a prophet.

Completely depressed by what he saw, he said to his associate, Philip Melanchthon, that in the light of these developments, there will be the greatest confusion.

Nobody will allow himself to be led by another man's doctrine or authority.

Everybody will be his own rabbi, hence the greatest scandals.

Such paralyzing subjectivism came about in part because in his quest for truth, Luther ironically rejected one of the great gifts God has given us for that very quest, the power of reason itself.

Luther insisted that God has given us human reason only for use in earthly affairs, not in spiritual matters.

In spiritual matters, he said, reason is not only blind and dark, it is truly, pardon the language, the whore of the devil.

She can only blaspheme and dishonor everything God has done.

Reason is a prostitute who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.

Throw dung in her face.

Luther, it's always dung.

Throw dung in her face to make her ugly.

She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism.

Reason, he wrote, is contrary to faith.

Reason is directly opposed to faith and one ought to let it be.

And believers, it should be killed and buried.

In light of what Scott Marcus was saying last night, you can understand why he burned the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Luther's rejection of reason led him not only to inconsistencies of thought, but also to utter subjectivity, to arrogant anti-intellectualism, to a personal subjugation of himself to feelings and appetite rather than to reason.

A life and a theology in which sheer will became lord over the intellect.

The outcome may have been ironic, but from the perspective of Catholic wisdom, which we talked about last night, welcomes both faith and reason as God's gift.

The outcome was inevitable.

Fifth, we're almost to the end.

Luther sought the glory of God, but his religion became human-centered instead.

Luther once depicted the servant as incurvatus in se, curved in on self.

Our nature, he wrote, by the corruption of the first sin is so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them, or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it is so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeking all things, even God, for its own sake.

Nevertheless, if we look closely at the results of Luther's teaching about the extrinsic, exterior nature of justification, that it doesn't change us inside, it simply wraps us around from the outside, then we can see here yet another deep irony.

By declaring salvation something that comes to us from outside and remains outside rather than transforming us within, Luther actually ends up closing the soul in on itself, the very thing that he had feared.

The soul becomes focused not on God, but on its own heroic act of faith.

His central dogma is notwithstanding faith as he understands it becomes the one great exhausting human work, human work that is necessary for salvation.

Luther's most pressing personal need seems to have been a need for assurance and consolation felt deeply in the heart, a relief from the fears and anxieties that imprisoned and paralyzed him.

Ultimately, he came to presume that all people have this pressing need to the same degree that he did, and so he also came to identify his own personal resolution of the problem with a universal plan of salvation.

Everybody else has to do it this way.

In the end, then, Luther's desperate search to feel himself in the state of grace became human-centered rather than God-centered.

Personal salvation became the central preoccupation.

Theology revolved around human corruption and the problem of trying to feel free of sin.

Meanwhile, in making this frantic search for salvation, the center of religion, ultimately, Luther replaced the God who is a loving father, as Scott was talking about so beautifully last night, the father who makes his home in us according to Jesus in the Gospel of John, who recreates us in his own beautiful image.

Luther replaces that father with a judge who declares as a legal fiction that we have been justified, someone with whom we have to do only because he can rescue us from damnation.

The attitude and the blindness that Luther despised is thus precisely the attitude and blindness that he finally embraces.

Luther seeks God for Luther's sake, not for God's sake.

And yet another way, the notion of extrinsic justification leads to ironic results.

Luther sought to exalt God's grace, sola gratia, grace alone, the third of the sola doctrines.

But if God's grace can only work a legal fiction, if that's all it can do instead of, if it lacks the power to transform the person and truly justify, make just the human person, then God's grace is limited and his glory is diminished.

The final irony, Luther sought to offer Christians hope, but his actions and teaching led many instead to despair.

The kind of scrupulosity with which Luther struggled in his youth typically leads either to despair or to presumption, I think.

He first despaired, but in his efforts to overcome despair, he overreached and fell headlong into presumption.

Luther dealt with the despair of his moral and spiritual helplessness by attempting to baptize it and normalize it.

He didn't win the fight, he simply gave up the fight, declaring that God expected and accepted naked faith and nothing else.

Is it any surprise then that we find multiple laments from Lutheran preachers of that day who report that there was widespread despair among Luther's followers and an increase in suicide among their parishioners.

In short, Luther attempted reformation but ended in defamation.

As the celebrated French philosopher and Catholic convert, Jacques Maritain, once put it, Luther's teaching sets a universal war within us.

It has inflamed everything and healed nothing.

It leaves us hopeless in the face of the great problems.

In all these ways, then, we see the stunning, terrible irony of Luther in his life, thought, and work.

When we ask, among the common causes of such failure that we noted in the beginning, which is the cause that predominates in his case?

When we ask that, I think we must answer, it is clearly pride.

Throughout the words and actions of Luther, I have cited this morning, there runs a thread.

No, it's more like a brazen cable of arrogance.

Luther's voice is the voice of Christ.

Luther is the master of scripture.

Luther's predecessors and opponents are all ignoramuses and worse.

No one, even the angels, may judge Luther.

No wonder, then, that Luther could not foresee the consequences of his doctrine and actions, could not see what we see all too clearly in the abundant ironies of the man, his pride blinded him to the truth.

At one final irony, we should note that Luther, nevertheless, considered himself a prophet.

He once made a prediction that I think perfectly reflects both his arrogance and his blindness.

If my gospel, he said, is preached for but two years, he boasted, then Pope, bishops, cardinals, priests, monks, nuns, bells, bell towers, masses, rules, statues, and all the vermin and riffraff of the papal government will have vanished like smoke.

Nearly 500 years have passed since those words were so confidently spoken.

And you know what, Dr. Luther?

The church, the Catholic church, is still here, and the gates of hell have not prevailed.