Luther's Reformation Breakthrough

in this lecture we're going to be looking at Luther's Reformation breakthrough what conclusions that he come to what do we know about this change and then how did this flow into the 95 theses and we can begin by talking about where this lecture fits into all the previous lectures because all of the sort of spadework we've done so far all comes to a head during this break through the Luther has where he changes his theological convictions on the nature of penance and sacrifice in salvation itself and so just to recap briefly we've looked at some of the crises in the church in the latter middle ages we looked at some of the corruptions we looked at some of the problems both in terms of the Magisterium with the Renaissance papacy and all the problems there and we talked about some of the abuses on the ground in both churches and in diocese throughout much of continental Europe again not all of it but much of it next we did a real sort of long arc looking at Luther's early life why he joined the monastery what was his experience in the monastery what was expected of him we've also looked at Luther's education first and foremost the process of how he went from simply an arts student at the MA and BA level up until the point when he got his doctorate we look to the influential person of stout pets as well as the previous teachers who influenced his life and we made a couple of passing comments about Luther's general anxiety as a monk and then lastly in our last lecture on scholasticism we looked at the context of the pessimism in the latter Middle Ages with the via Madonna as it looks back on previous theological conversations of Aquinas and SCOTUS and others and it says essentially the rationalistic realistic epistemology of that group is leading them into error and what's worse it convinces them that what they've come up with in their minds is there by necessity in the world and so the view moderna focused mostly on the issue at least in terms of theology with simply focusing on Scripture if our minds are darkened and prone to wander something from the outside has to speak into our minds to give us the truth well all these pieces all of these subsets within the story of early Luther comes to a head in Luther's crisis and his breakthrough now what are these things well the short answer is no and any historian who tells you the fact oh that they know exactly what happens or exactly when it happens is lying to you okay not really maybe they're just convinced of their conclusions but still what we don't have here is a smoking gun we don't have a calendar of when these things were happening we don't even know the nature of the breakthrough itself and more importantly in terms of historical research Luther really only gives us the narrative as to what happened after the fact well that's a bit like trying to describe your girlfriend after she's dumped you you know what's you're excommunicated to say well yes I've always had problems you know there was always issues I didn't like them at all well Lizzie does a bit of that and it's not that we doubt Luther's intentions or his convictions it's just that like any of us whenever there's a rupture whenever there's a relational break or whenever there is simply years have gone by you know describing something of your youth there is a bit of a sort of compression of the events into one single narrative and so I've tried to say along the way that you really don't get a lot of anxiety or provocation out of Luther that he's ready to make a break throughout most of the early 15 10s all the way up into the middle point and we'll confront this when we look at the life of Calvin as well both of these figures since they play such a heavy role in the development of Protestantism over the centuries it always tends to be the case that we believed that they were exactly who they became in later life whenever they were you know just out of the womb and so we usually gin up the evidence and add all these complexities and believe that Luther is some sort of rebellious doubter or some sort of anxiety prone person along the way and as you've probably noticed by now in the previous lectures I'm trying to blow up a few of those if not quite a few of those along the way what ever it was that drove Luther to have his break it was not any single event it was not any single doctrine necessarily it was not any single moment per se and as I'll say in a minute even his somewhat conversion to the Protestant view of justification by faith was not a Eureka moment now he came to a conclusion sure and he tells us later that he experienced something like a conversion but as we'll see in this lecture and in the next one he really kind of fumbles and bumbles and stumbles his way into being forced frankly by the Catholic Church to reckon with the difference as theological II that he has over against what the church was saying he ought to believe well let's start slowly let's not get to the conclusion yet Luther's breakthrough is obviously shaped by the context of its anxiety so let's focus first on that Luther's anxiety is sort of pressed through a grid that really sort of proclaimed two main points when it comes to the late medieval understanding of salvation and we've noted a few of these things along the way but let's crystallize them very specifically first and foremost is the concept of penance itself as the means to restore one soul to the state of grace now Catholics will always contend that this is a gray space system that you're not saving oneself through works by doing this that this is simply just part of the quote working out your salvation with fear and trembling but in the context of the latter middle ages and in the context of Luther as a monk what Luther began to experience is not so much a concept that he was simply cleansing his soul from the inward sin that was plaguing him but rather there was the sort of practical experience that he was in fact having to do these things or else he would not be saved so that's the structure the big piece though that Luther can't get his mind off of is a concept in the latter Middle Ages about how one's will or how one's sort of personal desire ought to play into this process because here's the thing in the Catholic system in the latter Middle Ages and frankly even until today you can't simply go by rote or buy a wooden mechanical process of confession and penance in this system in the idea of penance it has to begin with conviction there has to be a sense in which the spirit and the inward will has said I wish I had not done this I have sinned and it was said widely and frequently people who do not have a full conviction of sin and a sorrow for it if they go and confess even if they say with their lips I did this I did this I did this if there's not an actual inward compunction then everything that flows out of that is irrelevant and does not apply to the believer and we saw this previously in the Holy steps that Luther ascended in prayer and he gets to the top and he tells us later in life that he wondered if it made any difference well I said then and I'm saying now in general about Luther's anxiety is that the real linchpin of his problem is he's never convinced that his will has the proper emotional and psychological response that he needs for penance and the cycle to achieve its desired effect so when you hear a quote like this which Luther gave he says the more I sweated it out like this the less peace and tranquility I knew what is speaking to there is that in his heart he kept having this radical doubt that it wasn't that he wasn't doing enough he even admits that he was going above and beyond the sort of requirements when it came to penance and the structures of life now the thing Luther brings up the most is that he is never convinced in that piece that his will has the proper emotional state but at the core of his problem is he cannot convince himself that he's done anything efficacious through his process of confession and penance and his desire to seek the Lord and he does begin to despair well this was a problem in the latter Middle Ages in general Luther is not the only one who experienced this and we know that because there were a number of theological sort of slogans out there one in particular that tried to give Lady and the clergy a sense of peace about this process so that their minds wouldn't run amok and it's just sort of axiomatic historically that if you see a slogan or something that is cutting against the grain of something you have to assume that the opposite was the case and that they're trying to correct something so I always point out that when the church puts out a rule the Catholics need to attend confession at least once a year typically around Easter well it is almost certainly the case that people were not doing this they were somehow avoiding the confessional and their Christian duties well in this case the slogan that was being said in the latter middle ages is often described by scholars in its Latin form so I'm going to give you that and then I'm going to tell you the English translation of this and what this means but it was frequently said in the context of Luther's theological education and in the circles that he was raised in in terms of the church the following phrase Vicari quote incest now the literal translation of this is to do or to be doing that which is in you which I think needs a bit of a 21st century application for you to kind of get it if we were to say it in the 21st century the phrase would simply mean something like and just do the best you can well why would the phrase do that which is within you somewhat translate in the 21st century lingo to mean do the best you can well it all comes out of the central conviction of the Middle Ages as a whole no matter what philosophy in general which is that at baptism it was believed that the infant is infused with grace that is vitally important to understand the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism at baptism the little infant is infused that is to say there's a transference into their soul of the grace of God that washes them clean and gives them strength to perform moral things like penance and confession etc and so it is believed that when you feel compunction for your sin and then you an honest remorse do your penance that in a manner of speaking what you're doing is you're exercising that infused grace within you so that it grows and grows and you become for lack of a better word stronger in your faith in fact that's probably the best way to put it it's almost literally a strengthening of the thing that is within you well others seem to have had a problem with the subject of their will and their desire to confess and to do penance I think that's just frankly biblical you put structures on people you put commands you put duties on people and if you turn those screws too much and in some churches and diocese in areas and in not a few monasteries the screws were turned on them if you try to kick them to do things in guilt or on the other hand if you describe God as a wrathful judge who will purge you in purgatory before you enter into heaven what you have a scent of a ripe recipe for a disaster in some personalities if not a lot of personalities and so there was this counterbalancing idea that so long as you were just simply exercising some of what is within you some of that grace if you were just simply trying your best to do that which was within you to take that infuse grace you received at your baptism and exercise it a little bit it was said by the higher-ups by the theologians in particular but as long as you're doing your level best God is not going to toss you away he's not going to send you to hell he's not going to consider you to be beyond the reaches because your heart wasn't purely in it well this is why I would say that the phrase to do that which is within you really kind of translates in the 21st century to mean do the best you can at your baptism you had grace infused in you just do what you can to take an analogy from exercise just get off the couch once a week or two or three times a week you don't have to do p90x and go crazy just do the best you can do what's in you you have this grace that's infused into your soul at baptism simply exercise it well in the end even that concession for Luther to do what is within him would not give him peace and assurance that he was still even doing what was in him and so Luther describes later in life a pinching process in his psyche or in his soul and the word he uses is actually quite important the word in German is unfit cumin in German has a sort of amazing way of taking multiple words or prepositions or parts of words squashing them together and coming up with the sort of compound word which they find very intuitive and very natural but people who are English speakers do not at least not to the extent that you do in German well the word infect ogen for this reason is somewhat difficult to translate we don't simply want to psychologize this the on fact omen is not simply depression in that sense though it does include some element of depression on fact to infer Luther this this pinching process had experienced from say 15 15 to 15 16 or 17 brings together a couple of different concepts of depression doubt anger frustration a sense of being lost that when Luther sort of gives us the ethos of what he experienced when he was going through his own FAC Toulon is that he experienced this kind of profound misery in which he didn't feel he was able to do that which was in him very well because the slippery slope he would later say is they never knew if he had done it and no priest was going to say that you had or had not it was simply the charge that Christians needed to seek out their calling and seek out their inward self and ask themselves the hard questions did you actually feel compunction about this Luther could never say that he felt perfect compunction he would always say that his sorrow for his sin was mixed with some sort of degree of self-preservation or just simply that he was fear-based not true sorrow but some sort of mixture of a bunch of different emotions that caused him to have doubt as to whether or not he was doing the good works that he wanted to and so Luther goes through this unfit TuneIn and again we don't know what happened he tells us of the long hours that he spent in the confessional at one point with stout pits he spent six hours in the confessional and shallots must have the patience of an elephant but of course any confessor is not going to ask anyone to leave if you want to sit there for six hours a good confessor will sit there with you the entire time but we don't know when this is specifically happening in the context of Luther in the monastery we also don't have a lot of specifics other than some of the comments he mentions about confession as to sort of his anxiety stout bits is certainly aware of it but one of the more curious things I've noticed over the years is you don't have a lot of people around him sort of distancing themselves from Luther because he's such a maniac rather the impression you get both from Luther's account of it and just simply from the evidence that's out there is that this was some sort of inner dialogue some sort of inner turmoil that he simply can't shake now he probably had good days and bad days but he tells us later that his experience as a monk never wavered from an overall tone of a lack of assurance that his heart was in it that his will was untainted in its desire to confess sin okay so what happens to Luther if this is the context of his doubt and his frustration what exactly is the thing that gives him his breakthrough as it's called how does he come out of the unfit to lean into a place where you can begin to describe himself as justified by faith well again dating this is next to impossible estimations by historians and scholars of Luther range from everywhere from 1508 which is frankly extraordinarily early to as late as fifteen eighteen or nineteen which would be somewhat strange obviously because it would happen after the 95 theses now the issue here is not so much that we are uncertain that it happened the issue is that the evidence that we have to base our understanding of this period of time and Luther's life comes from Luther himself and it comes from his offhand conversations around the dinner table at his house with students who are writing it down and of course these conversations where Luther is being very extemporaneous and free-flowing and probably had imbibed a few pints here and there or eventually bound together in the table talk as it's called well the first mention we have of Luther's crisis of him sort of recalling these years is actually in 1532 in other words loser doesn't express any of these concerns in the midst of the controversy surrounding the 95 theses and he only comes to describe these things 15 years later even though we don't have a specific date we do have clues from Luther as to what was going on in his life during this time and two things really begin to sort of focus our attention as to the things that give rise to his Reformation breakthrough the first is something that's often under explored and under utilized in an effort to understand Luther's theology now scholars focus on this but usually at the popular level it's not mentioned as often and that is what Luther called the theology of the cross now part of the problem here is that Luther doesn't really refer to the theology of the cross very explicitly very often that being said though Luther does apply the concepts of the theology of the Cross repeatedly especially in the earliest years of the Reformation now we're going to hold off on a detailed description and unpacking of the theology of the cross until we get to the later lecture on the Heidelberg disputation where Luther very boldly applies these concepts but we need to mention it now because it's very clear that the hermeneutic that Luther is using which he calls the theology of the Cross is the thing that frankly drives him to a certain reorientation to Paul in Romans and to other places on the issue of justification you recall again that the nominalism of the Via moderna stressed a certain pessimism about natural theology and unaided reason and of the will and the soul to sort of do things by their own power you might say it the other way around they had too low of a view of the effect of sin on us on our minds and on our hearts and in particular on our will but Luther begins to do hermeneutical II we might say in terms of his overall approach to theology really is something of an extension of this acha missed or via moderna perspective on things now the language he uses is the theology of the Cross any juxtaposes that over against what it calls the theology of glory no what does he mean by this well for Luther the theology of glory is this optimistic belief both in the capacity of your mind to think through things theologically on their own and beyond Scripture along with this optimistic perspective that the soul and the will domestically is believed to have some strength within it particularly after the infusion of grace to be able to exercise its own penance and merit and its own moral sanctification and there's a lot of stuff behind this which we're not gonna be able to get into but put simply medievals classicism overall tended to believe that if works were somehow sprung up within our hearts by the activity of the spirit and that sanctification was somehow passive that we are sanctified and therefore good works that we perform are being urged through us or being inspired through us by the Spirit we ever can't claim them as an example of our own moral strength what medieval scholars tended to think that if you go with that approach the passive approach to sanctification then works aren't your works and therefore they can't be part of the Christian life then Luther has inherited this and so they came up with these ideas again optimistically that the will isn't dead in its sin but rather that it is simply weakened in a particular once infused with grace it is able to achieve some level of moral sanctification on its own it's able to exercise on its own well all of those ideas of the optimism of both our intellectual properties natural theology apart from Scripture or above and beyond Scripture as well as the optimism of our moral progress and sanctification Luther describes in one fell swoop as the theology of glory and he contrast that with what he calls the theology of the cross and Luther has a lot of sort of shadings to what he means by this the out of the cross means that the only primary way to understand God's saving work is on the cross itself through that great mystery of the apparent defeat of our Lord who is then resurrected in glory but not without the anguish first so a theology the cross for Luther means we are dead and sin it took the death of our Lord to come and rescue us therefore all these appeals of the theology of glory to this optimistic spirit just easy get thrown out the window we are dead in our sin we have no capacity within our own souls based on grace to approach anything that looks like sanctification but the theology of the cross is not just a hermeneutic it's not just a figure of speech you might say it is for Luther a driving force to his understanding of the law and the role of the Christian will the law he'll say in the theology of the Cross is nothing but condemnation and death in us it's not something we can approach ever with optimism as we are confronted by the law of God we feel condemnation and burden and despair and doubt and it's that use of the law that drives us then to the cross so that's a real quick sort of summary of the theology of the Cross versus the theology of glory and again we're going to pick this back up with the Heidelberg disputation because Luther's theology this comes through loud and clear at that moment but this is something of the hermeneutic that Luther is developing from say 1516 on until right about the time of the 95 theses the actual conversion though that Luther experiences the breaking of the unfit to lean that was plaguing him is some particular moment that Luther describes but he doesn't date for us and the word he gives us is tumour lateness which many have translated directly in English as the tower experience and Luther describes the scene this moment where he is wrestling deeply with Scripture and in particular Romans and he has this sort of clouds partying shaft of light into his heart that he'd later in life will say made him feel as if he were now altogether born-again so he is using conversion language long after this event is over long after the implications of his tour malignus are over he says that was the moment of the Reformation for him not the 95 theses but whatever this Torme or lateness was but what do we know about the tumor lateness well we know what he was reading and studying and that is Romans 1:17 and Romans 1:17 says for in it in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith or as it is written the just shall live by faith now anyone who was raised Protestant knows that they sort of core conviction in many ways is this idea of justification by faith alone well this is why Protestantism focuses so exclusively on this one doctrine even though obviously it cares about an enormous variety of all the other doctrines we're not a one doctrine faith but the reason why this is sort of given the pride of place is because what it does and Luther is what sparked the Reformation you see because when Luther reads Romans 1:17 he does not see this as a good comforting passage for his soul he tells us later in life that the theology he was trained in and the perspective that he knew made this verse something of a nightmare because what he says is when he reads that a righteousness from God is revealed and the just shall live by faith what he reads in this is that God has revealed an external righteousness that is sort of the bar that Christians ought to jump over in other words the righteousness that is revealed is this sort of objective righteousness it's the target it's the goal for Christians it's not God's righteousness or some righteousness that's in Christ rather it's something like an Olympic event God's righteousness is revealed and it's sort of like the high jump get over this bar and you are admitted into heaven at least this is how Luther was trained to read these texts and even the word justification was not something that was received or that was counted as your righteousness but instead was the opposite it was seen as the justifying of the Christian along the path of their life as they enact their penance as they seek after confession in these kinds of things so in a manner of speaking there is no moment of justification but an ongoing life where you are being justified by seeking and striving after the objective righteousness that God has revealed that we ought to live up to and hopefully now you can see where this was terrifying to Luther God has given us a righteousness that we have to meet or else and to be justified is to be striving for that goal and he tells us later he says this first terrified him and more importantly he says it provoked in him not love for God but hatred he says bluntly I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners now what happens when Luther has a breakthrough is in some way he has the theology of the Cross or this sort of deep-seated sense of pessimism about the ability of a soul to really have any strength in it to perform works of sanctification at some point he has again this tour mare lateness which many take to be that he was studying in a warm room in the tower there in fittin Borg and you can actually still go and see it today this tower it's or the rounded thing on the side of the building there that goes up over the roof but Luther uses the phrase tower experience in kind of a double meaning in the sense that he was in the tower but also somehow there is a we might say today a mountaintop experience there is some sort of euphoric release in his heart and in his soul when he realizes something about Romans 1:17 that seems to spin all of his other readings of Scripture on their head well what is that change well essentially what Luther comes to the conclusion on when he's reading this text and when he's studying the scriptures deeply in wrestling with a day and a day out reading commentaries etc is he comes to the conclusion that what Paul is talking about here is again not this objective righteousness that God has revealed that Christians ought to achieve but rather God's own righteousness his own covenant righteousness we might say today in the person of Christ that has come down to do the work of salvation on our behalf and therefore justification is not something that is being enacted within me but it is something external to me in the person of Christ that is counted as mine that is the pivotal change because I said at the beginning this lecture that at the moment of baptism in the medieval Catholic system it was believed that the infant was infused with righteousness but there is now something within them that they can exercise well at the root of the tower experience is Luther simply saying that does not happen you are not infused at the moment of justification instead he will begin later to describe what he calls the imputed righteousness of Christ now imputed is a bit of a jargony word all it means here is that it is counted as ours it's not ours Christ's righteousness is not ours it's not within us it's not infused into us but rather it below was the Christ and therefore our faith trusts him and trusts in him as Lord and rests on his works and that our faith our grasping of Christ are holding on to Christ means that we are counted as if we had done all of the perfection of Christ's work so imputed is just the counter of infused nothing goes into us we are not given some sort of strength within us that we have to exercise we remain weak we remain enfeebled and we remain incapable of exercising our own sanctification Luther will now say at least once it comes to the full conclusion of what this tower experience has given them but what he says instead is that we are now imputed or counted as righteous and if we're justification is an act you might say of the gabble banging saying not guilty the work of Christ covers your sins perhaps a mental way to look at it is this in the medieval system with penance and justification and all these things sort of being tied up with moral sanctification and seeking after restitution for our sins really effectively made the doctrines of justification and sanctification in Catholicism entangled so that in a manner of speaking it was perfectly appropriate to say how do I know I'm saved well I began to see these things happening and I'm exercising this within my soul I'm confessing I'm having sorrow my will is activated I didn't perform the penance and I am restored to the state of grace so in that system in what drives with her crazy is this entanglement of the moment we are justified and counted as righteousness based on the work of Christ and the ongoing Christian life which has now lived in the desire to keep in step with the spirit but Luther's tower experience or his breakthrough brings is essentially a detaching of justification from anything to do with sanctification he pulls them apart in fact in some ways eventually he'll set them as far as East is from West and what it will say is you are justified with no reference to your merits or the infusion of anything into your soul or your capacity at all to achieve anything on your own so justification Luther will say is Christ's work is done already and this righteousness that is revealed at Romans 1:17 is his righteousness in what Paul is saying Luther says is that his righteousness is counted as mine not infused and not acted upon and not required but at the mount of justification at the moment when we are now redeemed and called children of God it is at the moment when we are counted as righteous even though there has been technically no change whatsoever in us at all now one last thing before we finish what is striking about Luther's tour my lateness or his tower experience is probably like so many of us you have a dramatically emotional experience in your life whether it was your own conversion whether it was something else and just like Luther sometimes it takes us some time to sort of detangle in our mind exactly what the implications of this are you know so days weeks months years down the line we reflect back on this really intense emotional moment it would begin to realize but that has changed me dramatically and I'm a different person now in the moment you couldn't describe this but later you could well that really is my position on Luther's breakthrough in torment lateness and why it will seem like he's so halting along the way and it seems sometimes as if he's not really actually made any difference at all in his theology in fact as we'll see in the next lecture the 95 theses are anything but a dramatic call to a Reformation Lutheran fact doesn't do much of anything other than call for the end of the abuse of adult insis but here's the thing Luther's had the tumor lateness and that sparks in him some desire to attack the abuse of indulgences and the response he gets is the thing that galvanizes Luther's mind to understand more deeply what it is he believes in over the course of about 6 to 12 months after the posting the 95 theses as the controversies are swirling Luther becomes more and more convinced of what he believes and frankly better and better at articulating it so frankly we really don't get the full throated Luther the full-blown Luther until no earlier than 1518 and frankly it's 15 19 or 15 20 2 or 3 years after the 95 theses it's you start to see Luther the bold reformer ready to take on the Catholic Church but that being said his Reformation breakthrough is from his time as a monk prior to the 95 theses and it was essentially a radical reorientation to how we are counted righteous by the work of Christ okay that's it next we're looking at the 95 theses and just what sparked this thing called the Reformation we're going to dovetail this lecture that we just finished while Luther's breakthrough and why that drove him to post these theses on the wall of the VIN burg Church you