(From the April 2001 NTJ)

The basic problem for any evangelical historian approaching Martin Luther is, of course, the centuries of mythology, literary, visual, anecdotal, that have come to surround the man and the Reformation in the evangelical tradition. How many third rate Protestant artists have painted their pictures of an angry Luther nailing the theses to the castle wall and thus symbolically putting a nail in the coffin of medieval catholicism? And how often have the sentiments of such artworks been echoed and reinforced in evangelical sermons and tracts over the years? Yet Luther himself in 1545 tells us that “when I took up this matter against indulgences, I was so full and drunken, yea, so besotted in papal doctrine that, out of my great zeal, I would have been ready to do murder — at least, I would have been glad to see and help that murder should be done — on all who would not be obedient and subject to the pope, even to his smallest word.” Clearly Luther’s own professed understanding of himself at this point in time has largely fallen on deaf ears in the tradition. Far from nailing up the coffin of the medieval church, he saw himself as operating within its framework for the furtherance of its mission.

A further complication in assessing the relationship between the Reformation period and that of the later revivals has been an argument from silence. In asking why the great Reformers and Puritans did not reflect upon mass movements of God’s Spirit in the manner in which Jonathan Edwards was later to do, the popular answer has often been that they were in fact living at times of awesome revival and were unaware of the extraordinary nature of the times in which they lived. This would appear, for example, to be the position of the influential evangelical leader, Martyn Lloyd-Jones who, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the popular understanding within English and Welsh Calvinistic circles of the nature and importance of revival in the twentieth century. Hence, as the goldfish cannot analyze the water in which it swims, the Reformers and Puritans could scarcely be expected to produce a treatise on revival akin to The Religious Affections.

There is a sense in which, of course, the scholar should not be influenced by such images and arguments. Few who have ever read Luther will fail to see the irony of a man who rejected Ulrich Zwingli as a Christian brother because of his eucharistic beliefs being used as an icon by the most hardline Protestant conspiracy theorists in their crusades against the influence of the Papacy. Yet it is also very difficult for the evangelical scholar, with the theological commitments that implies, to approach the Reformation without trying to read the Reformation in terms of how it anticipates or legitimates movements of the eighteenth century and beyond.

While there is at least one comment of Luther which might lead us to believe that the success of the Reformation depended on little more, humanly speaking, than his ability to drink beer (a point which, incidentally, certainly marks him off from much later revivalism), a more fruitful avenue for looking at Reformation priorities is almost certainly the literary output of the central year of 1520. It was at this point that Luther laid out in its fullest form his manifesto for Reformation in the three great treatises: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; The Freedom of the Christian; and An Address to the German Nobility. These three works, produced at the point in Luther’s career when it was becoming clear that the Church of Rome was not going to institute a theological reformation from within, laid out for all to see the implications of his understanding of justification by faith for the realms of the sacraments, the Christian life, and the secular authorities.

To place sacramental theology at the heart of Luther’s Reformation should require no justification: the fact that he was willing to anathematize Zwingli precisely on sacramental grounds should indicate to us the importance of this to Luther’s program; and the fact that one of the three major treatises of 1520 is devoted to this topic is scarcely coincidental to Luther’s overall vision of Reformation. Furthermore, this point should immediately alert us to the fact that Luther’s understanding of what the Reformation is all about has a sacramental dimension which is not something which stands out in the later evangelical tradition.

The sacramental revisions which Luther proposes in The Babylonian Captivity present in pointed form ideas that had been developing in his mind throughout the previous five years and which had become increasingly focused in late 1518 and 1519. In brief, he reduces the number of sacraments from seven to three (penance still being considered a sacrament at this stage) and redefines them in terms of his understanding of the centrality of promise and faith. Thus, the sacraments come to function as outward symbols whose inner reality (and usefulness) is only available to the eyes of faith.

Most striking for the evangelical approaching Luther on the sacraments is his view of baptism, for it is at this point that Luther’s theology sits most uncomfortably with any reading of his spiritual life in terms of later conversionism. At the start of the baptism section in The Babylonian Captivity, Luther makes the following point:

But Satan, though unable to do away with the virtue of baptizing little children, has shown his power by putting an end to it among adults. Today there is scarcely any one who calls to mind his own baptism, still less takes pride in it; because so many other ways have been found of getting sins forgiven and entering heaven.

What Luther is alluding to here is the medieval stress upon baptism as a “first plank” for salvation which, once the recipient has again fallen into sin, is more or less abandoned in favour of the “second plank” of the church’s penitential system. Such an approach effectively reduces the significance of baptism to a point in the past and focuses the mind far more upon the various means which the church provides in the present for dealing with sin. As a result, baptism becomes less important than the present penitential system with which believers have to do.

Martin Kenunu