Wednesday, November 19, 2014

1527: The Ten Year Anniversary of the Reformation

The following is an article that I had almost completely forgotten about. It was originally published in The Outlook October, 2003, and I retrieved it from the archived page from Ntrmin.org.


On October 31, churches throughout the world celebrate the nailing of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg Chapel door. The event represents the outpouring of Christianity unshackled and blossoming. Like Hilkiah finding the Book of the Law, the thirty-four year old Luther began to re-proclaim the doctrinal “solas” to the world: scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and the recognition that all of life is lived to the glory of God alone. For over five hundred years, these biblical truths reclaimed by the Reformation have transformed individual lives and entire societies. Truly, churches do well to celebrate the victory of the Reformation.

But like all victories, we tend to overlook the struggles involved. We may even romanticize the Reformation. We see the triumphs, and think that God blesses particular individuals like Luther with great growth and success, while the rest of us struggle through our Christian lives with failures and hardship. Just ten years after the posting of the Ninety Five Theses, we find the forty-four year old Luther one of the most famous men in Europe. In 1527, he preached sixty sermons, lectured to students, wrote one hundred letters and fifteen tracts, and spent time working on his translation of the Old Testament. He did all this while having the responsibilities of a husband, father, minister, teacher, and political adviser. One can find this productivity throughout all of his life. We think God must have blessed Luther by making his life easier so he could concentrate on God’s work.

But a closer look at Luther in 1527 shows some surprising details. Scholars mark this as the year Luther’s health increasingly began to deteriorate. It is recorded that he had several fainting spells, even fainting during a sermon. Luther, a man who loved to preach, had to stop preaching for a while. He also complained of intense pain in his chest, accompanied by painful buzzing in the ears. It had become so severe that it was thought he was about to die. News of this spread quickly, and fear gripped the people of Wittenberg. An entire deathbed scene of “Luther’s last words” was recorded in which Luther, surrounded in bed by his closest companions, voiced a deep concern for his pregnant wife and infant son: “Lord God, I thank Thee for having allowed me to be a poor beggar on earth. I leave no house, property, or money. But you gave me a wife and children, I commend them unto Thee. Feed, instruct, and preserve them as Thou hast preserved me, O Thou Father of children and widows.”

Luther recovered, but his physical condition continued only to become worse from this point. This physical weakness brought on serious bouts of depression. This melancholy would accompany Luther throughout his life. As he struggled with failing health, he would at times wish for death to release him from the pain brought on by intense headaches, dizziness, arthritis, digestion problems, infections, and uric acid stones, to name only some of his maladies. In his pain, he questioned whether or not God had abandoned him. He wrote to Melanchthon, “I spent more than a week in death and hell. My entire body was in pain, and I still tremble. Completely abandoned by Christ, I labored under the vacillations and storms of desperation and blasphemy against God. But through the prayers of the saints [Luther’s friends] God began to have mercy on me and pulled my soul from the inferno below.”

Some may be surprised to read these words by Luther. How could a man who stood alone against the Catholic Church and Roman Empire show such a lack of faith? My belief is that Luther was like all of us. We at times stand strong, and at other times we cry out to God to increase our faith. Where Luther lacked faith in 1527, he also displayed it remarkably in other instances. The plague ravaged Wittenberg that same year. Many of Luther’s friends died, and his students and colleagues fled for their lives. Luther’s son even became ill for a time. Luther though felt “public servants, preachers, mayors, judges, doctors, policemen, and neighbors of the sick who have no one to take care of them are on duty and must remain.” He did not begrudge those who fled, “for to flee dying and death and to save one’s own life is a natural instinct implanted by God and is not forbidden.” But for Luther, fleeing the plague was not an option. He turned his house into a makeshift hospital, where he and his pregnant wife took care of the dying. The house was quarantined, remaining so even after the plague subsided.

This was the year 1527 for Luther, the ten-year anniversary of the Reformation. How many of us in Luther’s place would question whether or not God was chastising us for sin? How many of us would question whether or not we were missing God’s will for our lives? How many of us would wonder why we were not successful in our Christian ministry? Luther though, expressed profound understanding for all these trials: “The only comfort against raging Satan is that we have God’s Word to save the souls of believers.” In all these trials, Luther clung to that Word, and its promise that it would see believers through the difficulties of life, and that it alone showed us Christ and our salvation, the only really important thing. Luther best expressed this at the end of the troubled year 1527, by penning, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” Luther expresses that in our trials, God will be victorious, and so will we:

And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim? We tremble not for him. His rage we can endure, for lo! His doom is sure. One little word shall fell him.

Addendum 11/8/18
While documentation for this article was not required, I heavily utilized Christian History Magazine, Martin Luther, The Later Years and Legacy (Issue 39), particularly the article The "Weak" Man Behind "A Mighty Fortress" written by Mark Galli, also  Heiko Oberman's Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, and Roland Bainton's Here I Stand.

6 comments:

Rhology said...

Wow. Sobering!

Rhology said...

So you might've prayed for a guy who's in Hell.
Kind of like when you pray to dead saints, who might be in Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell, and you don't know.

said...

Thank you for this, James.
Greatly appreciated!

Anonymous said...

James,
That was encouraging. Somehow I missed it at the time you posted it.

These sentences stuck out to me:

My belief is that Luther was like all of us. We at times stand strong, and at other times we cry out to God to increase our faith.
. . .
But for Luther, fleeing the plague was not an option. He turned his house into a makeshift hospital, where he and his pregnant wife took care of the dying. The house was quarantined, remaining so even after the plague subsided.
. . .
This was the year 1527 for Luther, the ten-year anniversary of the Reformation. How many of us in Luther’s place would question whether or not God was chastising us for sin? How many of us would question whether or not we were missing God’s will for our lives? How many of us would wonder why we were not successful in our Christian ministry? Luther though, expressed profound understanding for all these trials: “The only comfort against raging Satan is that we have God’s Word to save the souls of believers.”

. . .

at the end of the troubled year 1527, by penning, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”


wow! He wrote that song that year, amidst all those trials.

Anonymous said...

Thinking about Luther's great hymn and the lines about Satan and his opposition to our souls, I am reminded of Ephesians 6:10-20 and 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 and spiritual warfare.

Satan and demons are real, and they hate the Lord and they hate His people, the saints, and they hate the work of the kingdom of God being spread.

I wonder if Reformed theologians don't write enough on the balance of spiritual warfare against Satan vs. the truth that God in His sovereignty allows those attacks. (Job 1-2; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10)

Here are a couple recently that I read that seemed good and I was glad that a ministry of Reformed theology wrote about this reality:

https://corechristianity.com/resource-library/articles/demonology-101

https://corechristianity.com/resource-library/articles/how-to-fight-off-the-devils-desperate-attacks

I have been trying to read through the Bible again, got bogged down in Numbers and had to go to NT and Psalms for a while; back to it.

Lord, give me the faith of Caleb and Joshua, in Numbers 13-14

"I do believe, help my unbelief" Mark 9:24

"Increase our faith" Luke 17:5

James Swan said...

Ken, thanks for your comment on this old entry. Hard to believe I wrote that back in 2003. My pastor was supposed to contribute an article for the publication it appeared in, but didn't have the time, so I was commandeered to write it.

I wonder if Reformed theologians don't write enough on the balance of spiritual warfare against Satan vs. the truth that God in His sovereignty allows those attacks.

That's a great point. In my own church, I don't recall a lot of emphasis on that. I'm not sure what the remedy is. I'll check out those links at some point...

I use those verses about faith you posted (well, the New Testament ones!) often, particularly in prayer when I'm leading something at church. I find that faith, like my basic energy, ebbs and flows. I've been doing a 5-6 mile run, and some days, I barely make it, and some days I have to walk part of the way. Other days though I do the full 6 miles and could keep going. No analogy is perfect, but that's sort of how faith is for me, and I assume for others as well. In those times of weakness, those verses serve as a helpful reminder to me that faith is a gift, and I pray that God takes the weakness of it at times and energizes it.