Justified True Belief

(●) A monk who went looking for a merciful God, and split the Western church in the course of finding one. + Martin Luther did not set out to start anything. He was a professor of Bible in a small Saxon university town and an Augustinian friar, which is to say a member of a religious order, living under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in a house with other men who had taken the same vows. He kept them carefully and confessed his sins at exhausting length. The question that drove him was not political at all. It was personal, and it was this: how does a person who knows himself to be a sinner ever come to stand before a holy God without terror? The answer he found in Paul’s letter to the Romans is the reason his name is known. Righteousness before God, he concluded, is not a standard a person climbs up to but a gift God hands over, received by faith in Christ and by nothing else. Once he believed that, a great deal else had to go, beginning with the traffic in indulgences: the trade in certificates that were supposed to cancel punishment a forgiven sinner still owed, which is what brought him to write out ninety-five debating points in the autumn of 1517. Within four years a pope had excommunicated him, cutting him off from the church’s sacraments, its appointed signs of grace such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and from the fellowship of every Christian who held to Rome; an emperor had declared him an outlaw whom the law would not protect; and Western Christendom, which had been one visible communion for a thousand years, had begun to come apart along a seam that has never closed. Here is the fact about him that a reader will not forget. He is very probably the best-selling author of the sixteenth century, and the German Bible he began in the Wartburg castle and revised for the rest of his life did for German roughly what the King James Version would later do for English: it gave a divided people one book they all read in the same words. The critical edition of everything he wrote, begun in Weimar in 1883, was not finished until 2009, and it runs past a hundred and twenty volumes.

(●) 1483 AD: Born in Eisleben to a copper miner who meant him for the law. + He was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, and baptized the next morning on the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, which is where the name came from. His father Hans was a peasant’s son who had gone into the copper trade, leased smelting works, and clawed his way into the town council of Mansfeld; his mother Margarethe kept the house and, by his own telling years later at the supper table, beat him until the blood came for stealing a nut. He remembered the schoolroom the same way. None of this was unusual, and he did not tell the stories to complain. He told them because they were what he had instead of a childhood picture of a kind father, and he knew later that they had colored what he expected from God. Hans had plans. A boy this quick was going to be a lawyer, which in the sixteenth century meant a family that never went hungry again. So it was school in Mansfeld, then Magdeburg at thirteen, where he lodged near a house of the Brethren of the Common Life and, he said, begged for bread in the streets with the other schoolboys, then Eisenach, then in 1501 the University of Erfurt, one of the best in Germany. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1502 and his master’s in 1505, ranked second in a class of seventeen, and in May of that year he enrolled in the law faculty. His father bought him the standard edition of the Roman law, an expensive present, and settled back to watch the family rise.

(●) 1505 AD: A thunderstorm on the road to Erfurt sent him into a monastery instead. + On 2 July 1505, walking back to Erfurt from a visit home, he was caught in a violent storm near the village of Stotternheim and a lightning strike threw him to the ground. What he called out was a vow: "Help me, Saint Anne, I will become a monk." Anne was the traditional grandmother of Jesus and the patron saint of miners, so she was the natural name in a miner’s son’s mouth. Fifteen days later, after a farewell supper with friends who tried to talk him out of it, he knocked at the door of the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt. His father was not merely disappointed but publicly furious, and the two of them were still arguing about it years afterward. The cloister was one of the strictest houses in Germany, which was rather the point. Luther fasted and confessed for hours at a stretch, hunting his memory for sins he might have forgotten, and he kept the night offices, the rounds of prayer that get a monastery out of bed in the small hours and again before daylight. He was ordained a priest in 1507, and at his first mass, at the words that address God directly, he froze, by his own account, so badly that he nearly ran from the altar. He had a word for what he suffered in those years, Anfechtung, which is German for an assault or an onslaught: not ordinary guilt but the sense of being hunted by the God he was trying to please. His superior in the order, Johann von Staupitz, told him to stop torturing himself and look at the wounds of Christ instead, and kept a hand on his shoulder for the next decade. In 1510 the order sent him to Rome on business, and he did what any pilgrim did, climbing the holy stairs on his knees with a prayer on every step to release a soul from purgatory. Purgatory, on the teaching he had grown up with, was where the souls of the saved worked off the punishment still owed for their sins before they were fit for heaven, and a living Christian could shorten the stay of someone he loved. So a man on his knees on a staircase was doing something useful for his own dead. The table talk his students wrote down years later has him reaching the top and thinking: who knows whether it is true? At the time it was a passing doubt, and he went home and kept on being a good friar.

(●) 1512 AD: Made a doctor of the Bible at Wittenberg, he found in Paul a righteousness God gives rather than demands. + Staupitz moved him to the new university at Wittenberg, a place of a couple of thousand people on a sandy river plain, and then pushed him toward a doctorate he did not want. Luther protested that the work would kill him. One of the stories told at his table has Staupitz replying that God had plenty of work for clever men in heaven too. On 18 and 19 October 1512 he took the degree, swore the customary oath to teach Scripture faithfully, and stepped into the chair of biblical studies that he held for the rest of his life. He returned to that oath whenever anyone asked what authorized a friar to argue with Rome: he was a doctor of the Bible, sworn to say what the text said. Then came the lectures, and they are where everything happened: the Psalms from 1513 to 1515, Romans from 1515 to 1516, Galatians, and Hebrews. Preparing them, he kept running into one phrase in Romans that he later said he hated. "The righteousness of God" (Romans 1:17) had been taught to him as the standard by which God judges and punishes sinners, and a man already convinced he could never do enough heard it as a death sentence. He hammered at the sentence until, as he told it, the meaning turned over: the righteousness of God in that verse is not the yardstick God measures with but the standing God hands out, credited to the sinner who trusts Christ. Writing in old age, in the preface to his collected Latin writings, he described the moment: "I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise" (Roland Bainton’s translation). He placed that moment, in one of the table talks, in a tower room of the Wittenberg cloister, which is why it is usually called the tower experience, and the account he wrote in 1545 puts it late, in 1519, while he was lecturing on the Psalms a second time. The trouble is that the two ends of the evidence will not meet. A man who first saw this in 1519 ought not to sound, in lecture notes he was dictating from 1515 onward, like someone who has already seen it, and that is how he sounds. Historians have argued about the date for a century without settling it, and it is safer to speak of years of grinding at Paul than of one thunderclap, which is roughly what his manuscripts show.

(●) 1517 AD: Ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences turned a quarrel about money into a quarrel about the gospel. + An indulgence was a remission of the temporal punishment owed for sins already forgiven. The guilt was not the issue, since that had been dealt with in confession; what remained was the penalty a forgiven sinner still had to work off, in this life or in purgatory, and an indulgence cancelled some or all of it, granted by the church out of what was called the treasury of merit, the accumulated surplus goodness of Christ and the saints. In principle it presupposed real repentance. In practice, by 1517, it was a printed certificate with a price. The Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel was working the roads near Saxony selling one authorized for the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in Rome, half the takings of which quietly went to pay off the debt Albrecht of Brandenburg had run up buying the archbishopric of Mainz. Luther’s own parishioners were walking across the border to buy the certificates and coming back convinced that they need not bother repenting. On 31 October 1517 he wrote to Archbishop Albrecht, respectfully and at length, enclosing ninety-five theses for academic debate. That letter is beyond dispute; it survives. Whether he also nailed the theses to the door of the Castle Church, which served the university as a notice board, is less certain: the story comes from his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, writing in 1546 after Luther’s death, and historians have gone back and forth over it since 1961, with a marginal note in the hand of his secretary Georg Rörer counting in its favour. What is certain is what happened next. Someone put the theses into German and into print, and within a couple of months they were being read all over Germany, which is not what happens to a set of debating points. The first thesis had already moved the ground: if the whole life of a believer is repentance, then repentance is not a transaction to be settled by paying at a table. Rome answered slowly and then hard, and from the spring of 1518 to the summer of 1519 Luther was summoned from one hall to the next. At Heidelberg in April 1518, at the general assembly of his own Augustinian order’s German congregation, he set out what he called a theology of the cross, arguing that God is not found where human reason looks for him, in power and glory and visible success, but hidden in suffering and in a crucified man; the young hearers who carried that home included Martin Bucer, later the reformer of Strasbourg, and Johannes Brenz, later the reformer of Württemberg. At Augsburg that October, Cardinal Cajetan wanted a single Latin word, revoco, I recant, and did not get it. At Leipzig in the summer of 1519 the theologian Johann Eck maneuvered him into admitting that some of the articles for which Jan Hus had been burned in 1415 were plainly Christian, and that a general council of the church had therefore erred. A general council was the highest court medieval Christendom had, the bishops of the whole church gathered to settle a question for everyone, and it was a general council, meeting at Constance, that had condemned Hus and sent him to the fire. To say that such a council could be wrong was to stand exactly where Hus had stood. There was no honest way back from that sentence.

(●) 1521 AD: He refused to recant before the emperor at Worms, was outlawed, and translated the New Testament while in hiding. + The year 1520 had made the break irreparable. In August he published an appeal to the German princes to reform a church whose own hierarchy would not; in October a treatise arguing that Rome held the sacraments captive; in November a short warm book on Christian freedom, sent to Pope Leo X with a courteous covering letter. Leo had already signed the bull Exsurge Domine. A bull is a papal decree, named after the bulla, the lead seal that hung from the bottom of the document, and this one gave Luther sixty days to submit. On 10 December 1520, outside the Elster Gate at Wittenberg, he threw it on a bonfire in front of the students, and the volumes of canon law, the church’s own body of law governing everything from marriage to the powers of a bishop, went into the flames with it. He was excommunicated on 3 January 1521. That April the new emperor, Charles V, twenty-one years old and ruler of half of Europe, summoned him to the imperial diet at Worms under a safe conduct. A diet was the assembly where the princes, bishops and free cities of the empire came together to do business with their emperor, and a safe conduct was a written guarantee of passage there and home again. Friends reminded him that Hus had been given a safe conduct too, and burned. He went. In the hall his books were stacked on a table and an official asked two questions: are these yours, and will you take back what is in them? Luther asked for a day to think. When he came back on 18 April he said he would gladly take back anything Scripture showed to be wrong, and then gave the answer that made him famous. The words "Here I stand, I can do no other" appear in the first printed version of the speech but not in the notaries’ record of the day, so they may be a printer’s memory rather than his; the sentences that are certainly his are quoted in (T2). The Edict of Worms, signed the following month, made him an outlaw whom anyone might kill without penalty. His prince, Frederick the Wise, had him seized on the road by masked horsemen and hidden in the Wartburg castle above Eisenach, where he grew a beard, called himself Junker Jörg, suffered from constipation and depression, and threw himself at a piece of work. In roughly eleven weeks, using the Greek New Testament Erasmus had edited, he translated the whole New Testament into a German that a farmer could hear. It went on sale in September 1522 and sold out at once. He had meanwhile come out of hiding against his prince’s advice, because in Wittenberg the reform was turning into a riot: images smashed, priests jostled, a colleague hurrying the changes along. Luther preached for eight straight days that March, telling the town that faith cannot be forced and that love waits for the weak, and the town listened.

(●) 1525 AD: He called for the killing of the rebel peasants, married a runaway nun, and told Erasmus the will is not free. + In the spring of 1525 the peasants of southern and central Germany rose against their lords, and their manifesto, the Twelve Articles, quoted Scripture on every page and appealed to Luther by name. He answered first with an Admonition to Peace that blamed the princes before it blamed anyone else and told them their own tyranny had earned this. Then the revolt turned murderous, a garrison at Weinsberg was massacred, and Luther wrote a second tract, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, in a fury: "Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel." It reached the printers after the peasant army had already been cut to pieces at Frankenhausen on 15 May, so it read as gloating over corpses. Estimates of the dead run to the tens of thousands. Asked to withdraw it, he refused, and defended it in print. It is the hardest thing in his record (†3). That June, in the middle of the wreckage, he married. Katharina von Bora was a nobleman’s daughter who had been placed in a Cistercian convent as a child, had read his writings, and on the eve of Easter in 1523 had escaped with eleven other nuns in a Torgau merchant’s wagon, with a later story adding that they travelled among his herring barrels. Luther found husbands for the others; Katharina held out for him. They were married on 13 June 1525 and moved into the emptied Black Cloister, which she turned into a farm, a brewery, and a boarding house for students, running the accounts he was hopeless at. They had six children. When their daughter Magdalena died at thirteen in 1542 he stood at the grave and said that he was joyful in spirit and sorrowful in the flesh, and that the parting hurt beyond measure. He closed the year by answering Erasmus, the greatest scholar in Europe, who had written a careful little book defending free will. Luther’s reply, On the Bondage of the Will, is the one book he later said deserved to survive, along with the catechism he had not yet sat down to write. It is quoted in (T4), and the two men never spoke again.

(●) 1529 – 1546 AD: He gave the German parish a catechism, a Bible and a hymnbook, broke with Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper, and died in the town where he was born. + Visiting the Saxon parishes in 1528 he found ordinary people who could not say the Lord’s Prayer and priests who could not explain it, and the shock produced the two books that shaped Lutheran homes for four centuries. The Large Catechism is for pastors; the Small Catechism is for a father to teach his household at the table, question and answer, a paragraph at a time. He also wrote hymns for people who had never been expected to sing in church, about three dozen of them, including Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." And he kept at the Bible: the complete German Scriptures came off Hans Lufft’s press in Wittenberg in 1534, and he was still revising the text in the year he died. Not everything held together. At Marburg in October 1529, Philip of Hesse brought Luther and the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli to the same table to unite the Protestant cause, and they agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen. On the fifteenth, whether Christ’s body is truly present in the bread, they deadlocked. Luther chalked four Latin words on the table, hoc est corpus meum, "this is my body," and would not move off them. Zwingli read the same words as a picture, the bread standing for the body the way a photograph stands for a person; Luther read them as a promise meaning what they say. He refused Zwingli the hand of brotherhood, and Protestantism has had two eucharistic families ever since, two settled answers to the question of what a Christian actually receives at the Lord’s Supper. His last fifteen years were productive and increasingly bitter. He lectured on Genesis for a decade, wrote the Smalcald Articles in 1537 as his theological last will, and turned out polemics against the papacy, the Turks, the radicals and the Jews in language that shocked even his friends. He was often ill, with kidney stones, crushing headaches and heart trouble, and he expected to die for years before he did. In February 1546 he travelled in bad weather to Eisleben, the town where he was born, to arbitrate a family quarrel between the counts of Mansfeld. He settled it, and died there early on 18 February, aged sixty-two. Among his papers was a scrap on which he had written two days before, half in German and half in Latin: we are beggars, this is true. He was buried in the Castle Church at Wittenberg, under the floor beside the pulpit, in the building on whose door the theses may or may not have hung.

What He Taught

(T1) A sinner is counted righteous before God by faith in Christ, as a gift and not as wages. + Think about the difference between a wage and a wedding. A wage is what an employer owes you at the end of the week, and if the work was poor the pay is docked; you can always tell yourself you earned it, and you can always fear you did not earn enough. A marriage works the other way. Two people put everything they have into one pot, and from that day the debts of one are the debts of the other and the property of one is the property of the other, not because either has been assessed but because they belong to each other. That second picture is Luther’s. He called justification the way a person comes to stand acquitted before God, and he insisted it happens by faith alone: not faith plus pilgrimages, not faith plus paid masses, not faith plus a lifetime of trying harder. Christ takes the sinner’s sin and death as his own and hands over his own righteousness in exchange, and faith is simply the empty hand that receives it. Luther is reading Paul, and he thought Paul could not be read any other way: "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law" (Romans 3:28), and "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). You might reasonably ask what happens to good works, and Luther is often accused of leaving no room for them. His answer is that he has changed where they go, not whether they happen. Good works do not make a person good; a person made good by faith does good works the way a good tree bears fruit, freely and without keeping score. That is why the same short book that says faith alone justifies spends its whole second half on service to the neighbour, and why Luther could call one and the same Christian the freest lord of all and the most dutiful servant of all without feeling that he had said two things.

(Q) "Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation; the soul is full of sin, death, and condemnation. Let faith step in, and then sin, death, and hell will belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation to the soul." + Source: Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), on the third grace of faith (R. S. Grignon translation, Harvard Classics vol. 36, 1910). Luther has just compared faith to a marriage between Christ and the soul, in which everything each owns passes to the other. Later theologians named this the joyful exchange. The same treatise puts the principle flatly: "as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works" (T1).

(T2) Scripture stands above popes and councils, and a conscience bound to it may not be moved. + A courtroom has to have a final witness. If two experts contradict each other and a third overrules them both, someone has to be able to say which testimony settles the matter, or the trial never ends. Medieval theology gave that place to Scripture in theory but let popes and general councils say authoritatively what Scripture meant, so that in practice the last word belonged to the interpreter. Luther’s claim, worked out under pressure between Leipzig in 1519 and Worms in 1521, is that the last word belongs to the text: popes and councils are worth listening to, they have often been right, and they can be checked, because they have demonstrably contradicted each other. This is what later Protestants would call sola scriptura, Scripture alone, and the phrase has since been made to carry a good deal more than he ever put into it. He did not mean that a Christian should read the Bible with no help. He wrote catechisms, prized the ancient creeds, quoted Augustine constantly, and thought a man who despised the church’s teachers was a fool. He meant that every one of those helps is answerable to the text, and none of them outranks it. He also thought Scripture was clear enough in its main matter to be checked by ordinary people, which is why he spent his life putting it into German. The objection came at once and it is a serious one: if the text is judge, who decides what the text says, and does that not simply move the last word to whoever is reading? Luther’s reply was that the central message of Scripture, what it says about sin and Christ, is plain on the surface, and that where a reader is genuinely stuck the answer is more Scripture and better teachers rather than a ruling. Christians have argued about whether that reply is sufficient ever since, and the Berean Jews who "received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11) are the picture he kept coming back to.

(Q) "Unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason (for I trust neither in popes nor in councils, since they have often erred and contradicted themselves), unless I am thus convinced, I am bound by the texts of the Bible, my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I neither can nor will recant anything, since it is neither right nor safe to act against conscience. God help me. Amen." + Source: Luther’s reply at the Diet of Worms, 18 April 1521, as translated in Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 118. Philip Schaff’s more literal rendering of the same answer is at History of the Christian Church, vol. VII, § 55. The questioner was Johann von der Ecken, official of the Archbishop of Trier and a different man from the Johann Eck who had debated him at Leipzig. He had just demanded a plain answer with neither horns nor teeth. Luther gave one in German and was then made to repeat the whole of it in Latin. The earliest records add only "God help me, Amen"; the more famous sentence "Here I stand, I can do no other" is not in the notaries’ record of the session, appears first in the printed version, and may well be a later addition.

(T3) The whole life of a Christian is repentance, and forgiveness was never the church’s to sell. + Everyone understands the difference between paying a fine and being sorry. You can settle a parking ticket in ninety seconds on a phone and feel nothing at all about it, and that is exactly the right way to handle a parking ticket. What Luther saw in the indulgence trade was that trade of that kind had been quietly extended to the soul: a printed certificate, a fixed price, a receipt, and a peasant walking home believing his account was square. His first thesis cuts underneath the whole arrangement. Jesus began his preaching with a single word, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17), and Luther argued that the word describes the shape of a Christian’s entire life rather than an act performed once and ticked off. If that is right, then a certificate that ends the matter is not a lesser version of repentance but the opposite of it. He was not attacking absolution, the priest’s declaration to a penitent that his sins are forgiven, and he was not attacking the ministry of the church. He was attacking the idea that God’s forgiveness is a commodity the church holds in stock. Thesis 62 says where the real treasure is, and it is not in a strongbox: the true treasure of the church is the gospel. Notice how limited the attack was in 1517 and how far it reached anyway. Luther still assumed purgatory, still assumed papal authority, still wrote as a loyal friar asking for a debate. But a man who says that forgiveness cannot be bought has already said that the machinery for selling it is worthless, and everyone on both sides worked that out faster than he did.

(Q) "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance." + Source: The Ninety-five Theses (1517), thesis 1 (Works of Martin Luther, Philadelphia edition, vol. 1, 1915). Poenitentiam agite is the Latin Bible’s rendering of Jesus’ opening word in Matthew 4:17. It had come to be heard as "do penance," meaning perform the acts the priest assigns; Luther, reading the Greek behind it, took it as "repent," a change of the whole person. A great deal turns on those two syllables. Thesis 27 says what he thought of the alternative on offer: "They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory]."

(T4) The human will is not free before God, and salvation is his work from first to last. + Erasmus, the finest Greek scholar in Europe and no friend of the indulgence sellers, finally wrote against Luther in 1524, and he chose his ground carefully: not the pope, not indulgences, but free will. Surely, Erasmus said, a person retains some small power to turn toward God or away from him, or all the commands and warnings in Scripture are addressed to a stone. Luther’s answer thanked him for going for the throat instead of nibbling at side issues, and then denied the premise. He was not denying that people choose freely in ordinary matters: what to plant, whom to marry, whether to build a barn. He drew a line between what he called the things below us, the whole ordinary business of living, where the will is genuinely free, and the one thing above us, salvation, where it is not. In that direction, he argued, the will is not neutral machinery waiting to be pointed. It is already going somewhere, driven by what it loves, and what fallen human beings love is not God. So the will must be captured before it can be freed, and the capturing is God’s work: "no one will be justified" by works of the law, as Paul puts it (Galatians 2:16), because there is no one in a position to start. Two honest notes about this teaching. First, it is the point at which Luther is closest to John Calvin and furthest from the late medieval teachers he was trained on, and it is one of the places where Christians who agree about justification still divide; the debate between them is old, serious, and internal to the faith. Second, Luther pressed the argument into predestination, the teaching that God has settled beforehand whom he will save, and he did it in language he himself called hard. He told readers that the right response to what God has not revealed about his choosing is to stop asking and go look at Christ, who is God revealed. Whether that is an answer or a refusal to answer is a fair question, and he would rather a reader asked it than pretended the difficulty away.

(Q) "Thus the human will is, as it were, a beast between the two. If God sit thereon, it wills and goes where God will. If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan will. Nor is it in the power of its own will to choose, to which rider it will run, nor which it will seek; but the riders themselves contend, which shall have and hold it." + Source: The Bondage of the Will (1525), section XXV (Henry Cole translation, 1823). Luther has just drawn the distinction his whole argument rests on, between a necessity of compulsion and what he calls a necessity of immutability. The image of the ridden beast is not meant to say that a person is dragged unwillingly, and he is careful about that in the same section: whichever rider has the reins, we go not by force but with a desirous willingness, because a will that was forced would no longer be a will (T4).

(T5) Every baptized Christian is a priest, and ordinary work is holy work. + Medieval Europe divided Christians into two ranks. The spiritual estate was clergy, monks and nuns, people who had taken vows and whose lives were counted as offerings to God. The temporal estate was everyone else: princes, bakers, farmers, mothers, who were permitted to be Christians but were understood to be doing something second-best. Luther took an axe to the distinction in 1520, and his argument is short. Baptism is the only consecration that matters, everyone has the same one, and the difference between a priest and a cobbler is a difference of job, not of standing before God. Peter had said as much to ordinary congregations: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9). He drove the point home with an analogy anyone could follow. Suppose ten brothers, all sons of a king and all equal heirs, choose one of themselves to administer the inheritance for the family. The chosen brother has an office the others do not have. He is not thereby more royal than they are. That is what ordination is: the congregation setting one man to do publicly, on behalf of all, what belongs to all of them. The consequence Luther drew from it changed how Protestants think about ordinary life. If the milkmaid and the magistrate are as fully consecrated as the monk, then their work is not a distraction from serving God but the place where they serve him, and a mother washing nappies is doing something God calls good. He used exactly that example, and he meant it against a whole culture that thought otherwise. What he does not mean, and what he spent later years fighting when the radicals claimed it, is that anyone may therefore preach or administer sacraments at will; the office is real and is to be entered by a call, not seized.

(Q) "All Christians are truly of the 'spiritual estate,' and there is among them no difference at all but that of office... Through baptism all of us are consecrated to the priesthood." + Source: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), on the first wall (C. M. Jacobs translation, Works of Martin Luther, Philadelphia edition, vol. 2, 1915). Luther pictures Rome as defended by three walls: that the clergy outrank the laity, that only the pope may interpret Scripture, and that only the pope may summon a council. This sentence is the first wall coming down. He grounds it on baptism, the gospel and faith, and on Peter’s "royal priesthood" (T5).

(Q) "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one." + Source: Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), opening propositions (R. S. Grignon translation, Harvard Classics vol. 36, 1910). The two halves of Luther’s Christianity in one breath, and he knew they looked like a contradiction. Faith makes a person free of every human authority in the matter of his salvation; love binds him to every neighbour who needs him. Take either half away and what is left is not what he taught.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His books made a church: a Bible in the mother tongue, a catechism for parents, and a congregation that sings. + The movement that grew from Wittenberg was organized largely by other hands. Philipp Melanchthon, the young Greek professor who became Luther’s closest colleague, drafted the Augsburg Confession presented to the emperor in 1530, which remains the basic Lutheran statement of faith; Luther, still an outlaw, followed the proceedings from a castle at Coburg and complained that Melanchthon had been too gentle. Half a century later the Book of Concord of 1580 gathered the confessional documents, including both of Luther’s catechisms, into the standard by which Lutheran churches still measure their teaching. What spread furthest, though, was not the machinery but the habits. A Bible in the language people actually spoke; a catechism short enough for a father to teach at the table; hymns written so that a congregation, and not only a choir, could sing the faith back. Habits like those travel further than confessions do, because they do not need a synod to adopt them, only a printer and a household. William Tyndale, translating into English, worked with Luther’s prefaces open beside him. John Calvin, a generation younger, built on the same doctrine of justification while parting from Luther on the Supper. Two centuries later, on 24 May 1738 in a room on Aldersgate Street in London, John Wesley heard someone reading aloud Luther’s preface to Romans, felt his heart "strangely warmed," and went out to preach a revival that reshaped the English-speaking world. The reach outran the church as well. Historians of the German language give his Bible a large share in the settling of modern standard German, and historians of the printing trade reckon him the best-selling author of his century, a man whose short, cheap, furious pamphlets showed Europe what a new technology could do.

(†) Rome answered at Trent, and four centuries later the two sides found they could say something together. + The Council of Trent, meeting from 1545, gave the Catholic answer in its decree on justification of January 1547. It agreed with Luther that a sinner cannot earn the beginning of salvation and that grace comes first. It denied that faith alone is the whole story, teaching that the grace received in baptism genuinely makes a person righteous rather than only counting him so, and that this righteousness grows through love and can be lost by grave sin and restored. Its canons, the numbered decrees in which a council states what it rejects, condemned the Lutheran formulas as the council understood them. Trent also reformed the abuses that had lit the fire, abolishing the office of the indulgence preachers in its final session in 1563, and four years later Pius V cancelled every indulgence that carried a fee. For four hundred years the two sides mostly talked past each other, and the caricatures hardened on both sides: Catholics were told Luther had licensed sin, Lutherans were told Rome taught salvation by shopping. The thaw was slow and came from scholarship. The Catholic historian Joseph Lortz argued in 1939 that Luther had been wrestling with a genuinely deformed late medieval theology and that the church of his day had failed him, and after the Second Vatican Council Catholic study of him became serious and often sympathetic. The result is one of the more remarkable documents in church history. On 31 October 1999, in Augsburg, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification stating a shared understanding: that sinners are justified by grace alone, through faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit of their own. It does not pretend the remaining differences are gone, and both sides said so in the text. It does mean the sentence that split the West in 1517 is no longer, by itself, the thing that keeps it split. The World Methodist Council associated itself with the declaration in 2006 and the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017.

(†) Where he fell short: the peasants, the Jews, and a secret dispensation for a bigamous prince. + Luther’s own record contains things a Christian has no business defending, and stating them at full strength is simply honesty. - The peasants, 1525. Having first told the princes that their tyranny caused the revolt, he told them in print to "smite, slay and stab" the rebels wherever found, and afterward refused to withdraw a word of it. Whatever can be said about the duty of magistrates to keep order, this was a theologian urging slaughter without limit on men he had helped to stir, and it does not survive contact with "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them" (Romans 12:14). - The Jews, 1543. In 1523 Luther had written That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, blaming Christian cruelty for Jewish unbelief and urging that Jews be received kindly. Twenty years on, angry that they had not converted, he published On the Jews and Their Lies, which urges rulers to burn synagogues and Jewish schools, raze houses, confiscate the rabbis’ books, forbid them to teach, deny Jews safe conduct on the roads, seize their money, and put the young to forced labour. He repeated the attack in a sermon days before his death. There is no reading of this that is not a straightforward contradiction of "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), of Paul’s grief and hope for his own people in Romans 9 to 11, and of the gospel Luther himself preached. Lutheran churches have since repudiated these writings, and the honest thing is to name them as his and as wicked. - Philip of Hesse, 1539–1540. Philip held the title of landgrave, which made him one of the ruling princes of the empire, and the reform in Germany leaned on his protection. When he asked, Luther, with Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, signed a confidential written permission in December 1539 for a second marriage while the first wife lived. The wedding followed in March 1540, and when the secret leaked he advised that a good strong lie would serve. He had bent his own doctrine of marriage for a useful prince, and he knew it. Two things are worth holding together. Luther was capable of a violence of speech that his friends winced at and that no cause excuses, and the man who wrote those pages is the same man who wrote that a Christian is the free lord of all and the servant of all. He would have been the last person to be surprised. Simultaneously righteous and a sinner, simul iustus et peccator, was his own phrase for what a Christian is, and he meant it about himself.