To understand Luther, you have to understand this enormous burden of guilt that haunted him in the monastery. He would say, you ask me, do I love God? Love God?
Sometimes I hate God. I see Christ with a sword, with judgment, coming to condemn me. October 31st is a significant day in the history of the church. It's the day that Martin Luther, a towering figure in the 16th century Reformation, nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. As we approach that day, typically celebrated as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, we will focus our attention on the life of Luther, the Gospel that was rediscovered, and other important Reformation truths.
Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Whether we know it or not, Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation reshaped Europe, redirected Christian history, and recovered the truth of God's Word. We proclaim the good news of justification by faith alone, a glorious truth that Luther rediscovered in his study of Romans. This week, you'll be introduced to Luther, and R.C. Sproul will unpack that doctrine of justification by faith alone. You'll also have the opportunity this week to own the complete series, Justified by Faith Alone, its study guide, along with the hardcover edition of The Legacy of Luther, a book edited by R.C. Sproul and Stephen Nichols when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. So who was Martin Luther before he nailed his 95 theses?
Here's Dr. Sproul. I think one of the most interesting ways of studying church history is by focusing our attention on the people who made history. And when we think of the Protestant Reformation and the central importance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, we think immediately of the role that was played by this Augustinian monk from Wittenberg, Martin Luther.
And so what I want to do by way of introduction to our study of the doctrine itself is to look at the historical framework in which the controversy broke out and also look first of all at the person of Luther to see how he was involved the way that he was in the Reformation. Luther, according to most experts, was born in 1483. Nobody's absolutely certain for sure of the date of his birth.
Some said it at November the 20th, others at December the 7th. Maybe that's why that date is a date that lives in infamy, according to future generations. But Luther was born in a little town called Eisleben in eastern Germany. But one of the ironies of church history is that his family moved away from Eisleben very shortly after he was born. And so he spent the vast majority of his life outside of the town of Eisleben, but yet that's the town in which he died in 1546.
But when we look at Luther as a person and look at his history, one of the things that jumps out is that he tended to have crises every five years, at least for a while, beginning in the year 1505. Luther was the son of a man who owned several mines and foundries in the area, Hans Luther. And though he wasn't extraordinarily wealthy, he was certainly not a peasant and had the funds to send Luther to good schools. And his dream is that his son would become a lawyer. And so Luther enrolled as a young man in the University of Erfurt, and there he studied law. And even as a student of purest prudence, he was already gaining for himself a reputation for being a brilliant jurist, a brilliant student of law with a marvelous future ahead of him, which greatly excited his father. And then in 1505, after coming home to visit his parents on the way back to the University of Erfurt as he was nearing the city, there was a violent thunderstorm that took place, and the lightning bolt hit right next to where Luther was, and he was terrified, and he called out in horror, save me, Saint Anne, or help me, Saint Anne, I will become a monk.
Saint Anne, who of course was the mother of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was in the Roman Catholic panoply of saints, the special saint for miners and for those who were involved in dangerous enterprises such as mining. And so Luther, being terrified at that moment, said that he, if he survived this lightning bolt, would become a monk. And so he went to the university, got his personal belongings, had a goodbye session with his friends, and they walked with him to the Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt and bade him goodbye as he turned his back upon them and walked through the door into the monastery to present himself as a candidate for the priesthood.
You can't understand a Reformation. You can't understand Luther's role in it without understanding this crisis that took place in 1505 that drove him to become a monk, much to his father's consternation. Old Hans was fit to be tied that this son of his decided now to go into religious service as a clergyman, as a priest of all things, rather than to be a prominent attorney. Well, in any case, when Luther entered the monastery and went through the different stages to become ordained, which he was ordained in 1507, this was one of the most critical periods of his life without which would never understand the doctrine.
There's some great irony, however, involved in Luther's being ordained in Erfurt. A century earlier, a Czech preacher by the name of John Hus, or Hus as it were, was accused of heresy because he denied the infallibility of the church and put Scripture over the canons and decrees of the Roman Catholic Church. And he was interrogated at the Council of Constance, and there at the Council of Constance was condemned to death. And the bishop, who ordered his execution by being burned at the stake, had this response from John Hus. Hus said, you may cook this goose or you may burn me, if you will, but there will come after me a swan whom you will not be able to silence. Again, John Hus's name meant goose, and so he said, you can kill this goose, but there's going to come a swan that you're not going to be able to shut up.
I was in Prague on one occasion and couldn't believe the irony of two Catholic churches in the center square, and in the middle of the center square was this statue to John Hus, and our guide was telling us the story of his execution. And he said, this is where he pointed to a particular spot. He says, this is where John Hus was fired.
So we got a new perspective on what it means to be fired from this man who had a little trouble with the English language. But anyway, Hus was burned at the stake, and he made that comment. Now, the apocryphal part of the story is the story that I make up, which really isn't true. But what happened a century later is that when Luther was ordained there in the monastery at Erfurt, he was, of course, prostrated at the base of the altar and made his body in the shape of a cross, and there he was consecrated to the priesthood. And the man who was buried under the altar at Erfurt was the bishop who condemned John Hus to death by being burned at the stake. And so my apocryphal addition to that story is that when Hus said, you can kill this goose, but there will come after me a swan whom you will not be able to silence.
I have the bishop saying over my dead body, because he really was ordained over that bishop's dead body. In the 500th anniversary of Luther's birth, all of Germany was adorned with giant posters with a picture of Luther against the background of a swan, because he was considered to be that swan that was foretold by John Hus. But of course, the years in which Luther was in the monastery were years of great anxiety, great stress, great torment. The best history that we have of it indicates that he was a superb monk, that he was very well behaved and extremely productive in the monastery except for one problem. The monks were supposed to have daily confession with their father confessors. After they would go through the rigorous times of prayer each day, they would have a time set apart for entering the confession on rehearsing the sins of the past day, and most monks would come in and Father I have sinned and would say that they coveted Brother Jonathan's extra bread at dinner last night or something like that. And in five minutes, the priest would get the absolution and he'd be out and back to work. Luther would go in, and he would spend twenty minutes, a half an hour, an hour, sometimes two hours and more confessing the sins that he had committed in the last twenty-four hours.
I mean, you think about it. You're in a monastery. How much trouble can you get in in twenty-four hours? But Luther would think of all these things and ways in which he had disobeyed the law of God in the last twenty-four hours, and then would finally get his absolution, and then on his way back to his cell, he would think of a sin that he forgot to confess and would lose the peace that he had received from absolution. Now, some historians have looked at that procedure in Luther and considered it evidence that the man was insane, that he was crazy, to have that kind of a guilt complex that he would spend so much time confessing his sins every day. And we know that at that time Luther was a haunted man about his guilt. But at the same time, you have to understand that he had the mind of a lawyer, and he would study carefully with great scrutiny the law of God. And then he would measure himself against that law, and he would realize that he was sinning against the law of God every minute. Here's how Luther would think. He would say, the Bible says, the great commandment is thou should love the Lord thy God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength and all that, and your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Well, nobody does that.
And so who gets exercised about it? Well, Luther would think like this and say, well, if that's the great commandment, then the violation of that great commandment must be the great transgression. And so Luther would go to his cell, and he would beat himself up physically with self-flagellation, and he would enter into periods of fasting that were somewhat extreme, trying to get peace from the guilt that he was experiencing for breaking the law of God. I haven't kept the great commandment since I got out of my bed this morning. I haven't loved the Lord my God with all of my heart and all of my mind and all of my strength and all of my soul a single day of my whole life.
But nobody else does, and so I don't get so upset about it. But Luther did get upset about it, so much so that his confessor would get frustrated with him and say to him, Brother Martin, if you're going to come to the confessional, come with something serious. Here, come with some real crime against God instead of these peccadillos that you're always reciting there.
But again, to understand Luther, you have to understand this enormous burden of guilt that haunted him in the monastery. He would say, you ask me, do I love God? Love God?
Sometimes I hate God. I see Christ with a sword, with judgment coming to condemn me. Many people believed in the church that an extra bonus for getting into heaven was to go to a religious vocation and thinking that by being a monk and consecrated to this religious vocation, that would help him get into heaven, but he wasn't getting any peace from it. And then the next crisis came in 1510, five years later. To Luther's unadulterated joy, he was informed by the leader of the monastery that he, along with one of his fellow monks, had been selected on behalf of the monastery to make a visit to Rome to carry out some business for the monastery, and so that these two men were chosen to represent the monastery at Erfurt. And they basically walked the whole way from Germany to Rome, and Luther was so excited because one of the most significant things you could do to acquire salvation was to make a pilgrimage. And the two great sites of pilgrimages were Jerusalem and Rome. And so, Luther now was going to be able to go personally to the Holy City, and that was worth a huge number of indulgences, which concept we'll explore more later. And though he was still alive and not in purgatory, he couldn't apply the indulgences he would get from this pilgrimage to Rome to himself. He decided to devote this pilgrimage, this trip to Rome, to his grandparents.
And so finally, after months of travel, he and his partner arrived in Rome, and it was an experience of raw disillusionment. The first thing that upset him was the immoral lives of the priests in Rome, who openly were involved with prostitutes both male and female, and that the moral and sexual corruption of the Roman priesthood there in the city was not a secret behind closed doors, but it was openly. It was one big orgy from Luther's perspective. Secondly, the way in which the priests were selling their services for reciting the mass, they would be paid so much money for saying a mass.
And in order to enhance their profits on that, they would say the mass as fast as they possibly could, showing no reverence to the elements of the mass, but simply doing the mass for personal gain. And Luther saw that and was devastated because in his estimation before he got there, he said, this is Mecca from a Christian perspective. This is where the holiest of holy men are to be found. At the time, presumably Julius II was the pope, who even for a moment Catholic historians' evaluation was one of the most corrupt of all popes. He was a Borgia pope, and he had had the plan of building a new cathedral or basilica which would house the bones of St. Peter and St. Paul. And so he undertook this massive building project to build a new cathedral or basilica, but he ran out of money.
And so the foundation was built, and then it became overgrown with weeds and so on. And the building project was abandoned until later on until Julius' successor, Leah X, came into power, but we'll see that a little bit later. But the third event and the most decisive event that got to Luther when he went on his visit to Rome was his visit to the sacred stairs that were in the Lateran church, which was the previous basilica for the pope, the pope's headquarters. In the Lateran church was this set of stairs, I don't know, 29 or so many stairs long. And these stairs were a part of the judgment hall where Pontius Pilate sat to hear the case of Jesus and that Jesus presumably walked up and down these stairs during his trial. And so these sacred steps in Jerusalem were rebuilt in front of the Lateran church, and this became the central point of visit for those who were doing pilgrimages to Rome because the idea was that if you could go up these stairs on your knees and on each step recite an Our Father and a Hail Mary, go to the next step on your knees and recite the Hail Mary and the Our Father.
And you did that on every step till the top, you would get a certain amount of indulgences that you could use for your family to get them out of purgatory or to reduce their time in purgatory. So Luther, having made this journey to Rome, wanted to go up the stairs on his knees and perform this ritual for the sake of his departed grandparents. Now if you've ever been to Rome, you know that those sacred stairs are still there at the Lateran church. I don't know exactly how wide that staircase is.
I'm guessing eight to ten feet. It's not a narrow stairway. It's a wide stone stairway. And the first time I went to Rome and went to the Lateran churches, in fact, I have to back up and say our tour guide said, what do you want to see the most? And he expected me to say the Vatican or St. Peter's or this or that, the Colosseum. I said, I want to see the sacred stairs at the Lateran church. And he did a double take.
He said, no tourists ever asked him that. I said, well, that's what I want to see. So I was on my own pilgrimage, a Luther pilgrimage. But anyway, I got to the site and I wanted to go up the stairs.
And I looked. I couldn't get near the stairs. Every square inch of those stairs was occupied by somebody on their knees with their rosaries doing their ritual. And on the wall next to the stairs was this plaque that announced how many indulgences going up this staircase would be worth.
Now we're talking 20th century, 21st century. We're not talking 16th century. And those who think that all of that is gone, all they have to do is go to the sacred steps and you'll see that that practice is still alive and well. And so Luther, in any case, when he got there, he went up the stairs on his hands and knees. And when he got to the top, he stood up and he mumbled to himself these words, who knows if it is true. He had a crisis of whatever faith he had.
He had done all the things that the church required of monks and priests to do. And he still had no peace, no hope, no sense of redemption. Thankfully, Martin Luther's story doesn't end with no peace, no hope, and no sense of redemption. This is the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. As we begin a series of episodes to celebrate the work of God in the Protestant Reformation, today's message is from R.C. Sproul's 10-part series, Justified by Faith Alone.
This historical and theological look at Martin Luther and the doctrine at the heart of the Reformation is one we as Protestants should return to again and again so that we don't forget what it was that we were protesting, so that we can contend for the gospel and the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints in our generation. You can own it along with the study guide when you call us at 800-435-4343 with a donation of any amount. You can also give your gift at renewingyourmind.org. When you do, we'll also send you the hardcover edition of The Legacy of Luther edited by R.C. Sproul and Stephen Nichols with contributions from Dr. Sproul and Dr. Nichols as well as Sinclair Ferguson, W. Robert Godfrey, Derek Thomas and others. Give your donation today at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes and know that your support is helping spread the truths of the Reformation to the nations. Thank you. What happened during that monumental moment when Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses to the church door? That's tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.
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