26 The Rise of Martin Luther
The Rise of Martin Luther The career of Martin Luther began very well. Sylvester Hassell could not seem to find words sufficient to describe him. He describes Luther as, “the greatest of all Germans, and one of the grandest characters of all time, the founder of the German language and of modern public schools, the typical hero of the German race, the author of the best German hymns, and the translator of the best German Bible.” (Hassell pg 474,475)
Luther the Augustinian: “Vividly realizing the vanity of the world, he resolved to forsake it, and at that time knowing no better way of doing so,he entered the Augustinian convent at Erfurt, July 17th, 1505. This was the best Roman Catholic Order, and traced its origin to Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, in the fifth century. Here Luther subjected himself to the severest monastic discipline, and the humble services of sweeper, porter and beggar. His deep mental conflicts, penances and mortifications of the flesh seriously undermined his health and brought him to the brink of despair. He found a whole Bible and read it diligently, but it did not bring him peace. Deeply burdened with sin, and not satisfied with his infantbaptismor any other Roman Catholic form, he invented continually new forms of penance; but ‘all the while head and heart told him that outward acts could never banish sin’”
“‘I tormented myself to death,’ he said, ‘to make my peace with God, but I was in darkness and found it not.’ He became a full monk in 1506; and his prayers, and vigils, and fasts, and castigations were so excessive that he says that all his fellow-monks will bear him witness that, if ever a monk entered Heaven through monkery, he also could thus have entered. He revered the Fathers, and adored the pope, and sought zealously and heartily to obey their teachings; but no comfort came to his sin-sick soul” (Hassell pg 475)
“In 1507 he was ordained a priest; and in 1508 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in Wittenberg University. In 1509 he was made a Bachelor of Theology, and in 1512 a Doctor of Theology. In 1510 he visited Rome on business for the Augustinian Order; and there he saw something of the depth of the mystery of Roman Catholic iniquity, so that he afterwards said he would not take a hundred thousand florins instead of having seen Rome.”
“While devoutly, on his knees, creeping up theScala Sancta, or holy stairway, he seemed to hear an inward voice crying to him,‘The just shall live by faith’ (Romans 1:17).... Here I felt at once,’ he says, ‘that I was wholly born again, and that I had entered through open doors into paradise itself. That passage of Paul was truly to me the gate of paradise’” (Hassell pg 476).
Tetzel’s sale of Indulgences-licenses to sin:“And when the monster Tetzel - fit tool for such a Satanic business - came in four miles of Wittenberg, and, to make money for himself and the pope, hawked, with brazen impudence, the papal indulgences for sin, and when Luther learned in the confessional at Wittenberg that many of his townspeople had bought these indulgences, andconsidered them a sufficient covering and atonement for the grossest sins, the spirit of the God-taught professor, like Paul’s at Athens, was deeply stirred within him, and he resolved to denounce the horrible abomination. Without consulting any man, and without considering the tremendous consequences, he prepared, and at noonday, Oct. 31st, 1517, he nailed to the door of theCastle Churchin Wittenberg, ninety-five Theses or Propositions denouncing indulgences.”
“The next day was theFestival of All-Saintsat Wittenberg. Large numbers of people flocked to the city from all quarters, and were intensely excited by Luther’s Theses, and many rejoiced, some from political and some from religious motives, that some one had been found bold enough at last to bell the great papal cat. Instead of taking back home with them indulgences for sin, they carried Luther’s Theses; the newly invented printing presses rapidly reproduced them; and in two weeks Germany, and in four weeks Christendom, was ablaze. The Protestant Reformation was begun” (Hassell ppg 476,477).
Luther declares war against the Pope: “Luther for several years discovered and denounced more and more of the imposture, corruption and unscripturalness of Roman Catholicism. The pope at first affected to treat him with contempt; but, finding that the truth was everywhere gaining ground, and his dominion threatened....Leo X., feeling that he could endure this dangerous opposition no longer, in 1520 excommunicated Luther; and the latter, a few months afterwards, boldly burned the papal bull, together with the Catholic Canon Law and False Decretals, and thus declared open war with the Roman Antichrist.”
“Summoned by Charles V., the Catholic King of Spain and Emperor of Germany, the most powerful monarch of his time, to appear before him at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther, to his friends who warned him that he would be burned there as Hus had been burned at Constance, replied: ‘Though they should kindle a fire as high as Heaven between Wittenberg and Worms, yet I will go and appear in the name of the Lord; yea, I will confess Christ in the very mouth of Behemoth.’”
“And, as he was nearing Worms, he said to a friend who warned him of his danger: ‘To Worms was I called, and to Worms must I go; and, were there as many devils there as tiles upon the roofs, yet would I enter into that city.’ Before the splendid and imposing assembly, composed of the emperor and more than two hundred princes and nobles, Bishops and archbishops, and five thousand people, April 18th, 1521, Luther calmly and boldly declared that unless his views were proved erroneous by some other authority than by pope or by Council, even by clear testimonies of Scripture or plain arguments, he could not and would not retract anything that he had written; that his conscience would not permit him to recant; and he concluded his remarks with these undaunted words:‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me. Amen’”(Hassell ppg 477,478)
“He was allowed by the emperor to leave Worms on a safe-conduct that gave him twenty-one days in which to return to Wittenberg; and May 8th, the emperor issued an edict placing him under the ban of the empire, declaring him an outlaw, and forbidding all people to give him food or fire or shelter” (Hassell pg 478).
Luther protected by Frederick: “Luther was protected by the national feeling of Germany from attack; but Frederic, the Elector of Saxony, fearing that the most able and famous of the professors in his new University of Wittenberg might fall a victim to the emperor’s ban, had him stopped, on his return from Worms, at Eisenach, by a band of armed masqued knights, and carried to the fortified castle of the Wartburg. Here he remained incognito ten months, and devoted his time to the best German translation of the New Testament that has ever been made - by far the most important work that he was ever enabled to perform for the German people, and the instrument which, under Provi-dence, contributed most to the permanence of the Refor-mation. His translation of the New Testament, almost entirely his own unaided work, was published in 1522; and his translation of the Old Testament, in which he was assisted by Melanchthon, Bugenhagen and Cruciger, was published in 1534” (Hassell pg 479)
Luther at the very doorway of the church: “During the first and most glorious period of Luther’s Christian life, ending about 1522, when, as Prof. T.M. Lindsay remarks in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was ‘raised above himself,’ he came to be virtually almost a Bible Baptist. In his tract on the Sacrament of Baptism, published in 1519,he distinguishes carefully between the sign and the thing signified- the ordinance of baptism being the mere outward sign of the far more important spiritual reality within, the death to sin, the new birth, and a new life in Christ. He considered that there was no eternally saving virtue either in the literal water of baptism or in the literal bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper; but that the true virtue lay in the living, spiritual, justifying faith within.”
Luther’s first departure: “From this simple scriptural view of the ordinances he made the first departure in his ‘Babylonian Captivity of the Church’ published in 1520, wherein he adopted a view similar to Calvin’s -that the ordinances are seals or pledges of the inward grace.” His second departure: “But, after he came in contact with the Anabaptists, he made a still further departure from the symbolical view of the ordinances,because he thought that neither his first nor his second views would justify infant baptism.” His third departure: “And, in his Sermon on Baptism, in 1535, his natural conservatism went far backwards towards his old Roman Catholic standpoint, medieval sacramental-ism, substituting the outward ordinances for the efficacious atonement of Christ and the inward grace of justifying faith.”
“From his favorite Apostle, in his favorite epistle, which has been called ‘the Magna Charta of Evangelical Protestan-tism,’ Luther ought to have learned not to imitate the foolish judaizing Galatians, who, ‘having begun in the Spirit,’ thought to be ‘made perfect by the flesh’ (Galatians 3:3)” (Hassell pg 479) The peasants’ war: “The Peasants’ War in Germany, in 1524 and 1525, has been well described as the ‘terrible scream of oppressed humanity.’ Their oppressions had gradually increased in severity as the nobles became more extravagant, and the clergy more sensual. The example of free Switzerland encouraged the hope of success, and from 1476 to 1517 there were risings here and there among the peasants of the south of Germany.”
“The Reformation, by diffusing sentiments favorable to liberty, was not indeed the cause, but the occasion of the great insurrection of 1525; although Luther, Melanchthon, and the other leading reformers, while urging the nobles to justice and humanity, strongly reprobated the ultimate violent proceedings of the peasants.” The peasants’ simple requests: “The Twelve Articles expressing the demands of the peasants are now almost universally commended for their moderation. They asked the right to choose their own pastors; agreed to pay, not small tithes, but tithes of corn for the support of the pastors and the poor; they asked for freedom from serfdom; that wild game and fish should be free to all; that woods and forests, not yet purchased by the nobles, should be free to all for fuel; that the peasants should not render more services than had been required of their forefathers; that for additional services wages should be paid; that rent, when above the value of the land, should be properly valued and lowered; that definite punishments for crimes should be fixed; that common unpurchased land should be given up to common use; that death-gifts (that is, the right of the lord to take the best chattel of the deceased tenant) should be done away with; and the peasants, in conclusion, declared that any of these articles proved to be contrary to the Scriptures should be null and void.”
“Warned by the terrible French Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, Germany granted the most of these rights to her peasants early in the nineteenth century. But the German Princes of the sixteenth century were in no mood to grant them. Luther’s exhortations to them had no effect in abating what he called their tyranny and insanity; nor did he succeed in inducing the peasants to cease their mad rebellion.”
Luther’s lack of courage: “‘Had he thrown the weight of his influence into the peasants’ scales,’ says Prof. Lindsay, ‘and brought the middle classes, who would certainly have followed him, to the side of the peasants, a peaceful solution would in all probability have been arrived at, and the horrors of massacre averted. But Luther, bold enough against the pope or the emperor, never had courage to withstand that authority to which he was constantly accustomed, the German Princes.”
“He trusted too much in fine language. His advice for the choice of arbiters came ten months too late. The bloody struggle came; the stream of rebellion and destruction rolled on to Thuringia and Saxony, and Luther apparently lost his head, andactually encouraged the nobles in their sanguinary suppression of the revolt, in his pamphlet entitled ‘Against the Murdering, Robbing, Rats of Peasants,’ wherehe hounds on the authorities to ‘stab, kill and strangle!’ The Princes leagued together, and routed the peasants everywhere, and butchered 50,000 of them; 100,000 perished during the war; and the survivors were subjected to greater oppression than ever” (Hassell pg 480,481)
Luther’s hatred for the Baptists, and his final apostasy: “While Martin Luther had great spiritual light on the doctrine of grace, the crime of religious persecution, and other matters, he was in great spiritual darkness on many other subjects. Among the latter, I will name the most important, as follows: His urging the Princes to war on the Peasants;his increasing hatred, during the last twenty years of his life, of theAnabaptistsand of all others who differed from him; his traditionalism; his sacramentalism;his assumption of infallibility, making himself a pope, considering himself the authoritative judge both of the meaning and the authenticity of Scripture; his thus rejecting the books of Esther, Jonah, James and Revelation, and his criticism of the books of Chronicles, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Hebrews and Jude; andhis advising Henry VIII. of England to marry a second wife without getting a divorce from his first,and his authorizing, or granting adispensationto Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, the princely champion of the Reformation, to do the same thing, which, to the great scandal of morals and of the cause he espoused, the latter did, thus having two wives at once, and a large family by each. This pope-imitating dispensation was drawn up and signed by Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg, December 19th, 1539, and afterwards signed by seven other Protestant ministers; the prudent attempt to keep it secret failed” (Hassell pg 486).