Martin Luther presents an interpretative challenge to anyone who studies him. His written output is immense. An edition of his collected writings is thousands of pages of books, short pamphlets, letters, sermons, lectures, and other jottings. Not only is there a mountain of text to analyze, but there is little organization to it, and individual texts are often quite different from one another — even contradictory, as Luther worked his way through developmental stages in his thought.
Beyond that, Luther wrote in different styles. In some passages, he writes with the nuance of a philologist. Sometimes he writes as a caring and kind-hearted pastor. In other passages, he uses the invective and hyperbole of a polemicist. He sometimes writes passionately about his own personal spiritual struggles, and sometimes academically about theology.
Beyond his written output, there are his actions and interactions, his relationships with different thinkers of his era.
To do a close reading of a Luther text can be energizing and fascinating. To attempt to draw large conclusions about his career, to summarize it, to draw a bottom line and boil it down to clearly stated principles, can be frustrating.
Perhaps that is why James Payton wrote a book titled Getting the Reformation Wrong: it is easier to identify erroneous perceptions of Luther than to articulate a correct perception. One can more confidently say what Luther was not, than say what he was.
Some have attempted to see Luther and his Reformation through the lenses of sociology, economics, or political science. While there were ripple effects from Luther’s work in those fields, he was quite clearly not primarily oriented around any of them. Luther was not a political revolutionary, he was not working to restructure society, and he showed little interest in economics. To be sure, there are isolated passages in which he alludes to those disciplines, but always and only in the service of a larger spiritual topic.
Indeed, there are mentions of nearly any conceivable topic in Luther’s writings, which is inevitable, given the sheer volume of his texts. There is an apocryphal story about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who is supposed to have once pointed to the many volumes of Luther’s works, and said “you can find anything in there!” The story continues by alleging that Barth then threw a rug over the massive bookshelf, and promised to ignore it for an extended period of time. It will be left as an exercise to the reader to see if this story has ever been documented.
James Payton poses the question: What did Luther expect to come of his work? Would Luther have considered his Reformation successful?
This question is posed about Luther’s Reformation, as distinguished from the Anglican Reformation, the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation, or the Radical Reformation of Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, and others. Luther’s Reformation has the distinction of being chronologically the first of these.
Patton’s question might be phrased this way: What was Luther trying to do?
Again, it is easier to state the negative: what Luther was not trying to do. He was not trying to create an established religion, in the sense that it would be an institution promoted and supported by the state. He was not interested in a theocracy. He was not interested in a detailed programmatic morality to be imposed upon society.
Luther was interested in promoting an understanding of God’s grace — God’s propensity to freely give unearned gifts to undeserving people. Human beings are declared righteous — “justified” — not because of their actions, but because of God’s generosity. People respond to God’s grace by placing their faith in Him. Luther’s central goal was to explain this view of God. From it, he believed that many benefits would flow: primarily, the peace which he himself experienced when he first conceptualized this understanding of God.
The biography of Luther reveals that in his early years, he was an anguished and even neurotic young monk, tortured by the knowledge of his imperfection and sinfulness in the face of a righteous and omnipotent God. How could he ever make peace — make amends — with God? The turning point in Luther’s life was when he discovered that he couldn’t. It would be God who made peace. The relationship between God and humans is restored by God’s action, not by a human’s action. Humans then respond to God’s forgiveness with thankfulness and joy. Luther’s demeanor was less anxious and more bold from that point forward.
James Payton writes that even thinkers who were not part of Luther’s Reformation adopted bits of Luther’s theology:
The Wittenberg Reformer wanted to proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith alone which had brought him such comfort after the years spent desperately but fruitlessly searching for peace with God. Luther was unquestionably successful in that endeavor: the whole of his teaching, as we have seen, grew out of and was integrated by his insights on justification sola fide. Moreover, since the other Protestant Reformers joined with him in proclaiming this foundational doctrinal principle, Luther could look with some satisfaction on the success of this teaching.
Even before he famously posted his 95 debate topics in Wittenberg in 1517, Luther had wrestled with, and identified as central, the notion that people cannot reconcile themselves with God. Rather it is God who reaches out to people, who are powerless because they are trapped in their own sinful human nature.
This notion would remain central for Luther for the rest of his life.
Luther was not a programmatic thinker. He did not have a plan or a system which he wanted to institute. Rather, he began by identifying errors or malfunctions in the church as it existed in his time and place, and in people’s perception of God. He wanted to correct those mistakes.
For Luther, then, if someone had asked him if he’d been successful, he might have answered that the extent to which people internalized the concept of being reconciled to God by grace through faith was the extent to which he’d been successful.
In James Payton’s interpretation, Luther was also deeply eschatological. A “reformation” would only happen at the end of time, when all things would be made new. Until that Judgment Day, a true and thorough reformation would not be possible. Rather, Luther thought in practical terms of repairing the church until it was serviceable, fixing it up until it was good enough to get the job done — the job of proclaiming God’s love for people. The ideal church, the product of a true reformation, would not and could not exist in this world, but it would in the next world.
According to Payton, Luther did not see himself as building a new institution — that was never his goal — nor did he flatter himself that his impact would result in the ultimate church, free from every flaw. Luther knew that people and churches will never be perfect in this life, but rather in the next one:
But would he have thought of this large movement he launched, the Protestant Reformation, as a success? It may be startling to many readers to discover that Luther had no intention of starting any “reformation.” It is striking that he never uses the term itself, and he certainly did not think he was involved in any renewal of the church. In his own understanding, Luther was calling it back to its founding truths, but not as a way of “setting things right again”; rather, he believed that he (and others as associates) had been commissioned to prepare the church for the cataclysm of Christ’s impending return. To be sure, Luther was no apocalyptic seer, prognosticating dates for divine interventions to bring history to its end. Even so, he viewed the church and European culture around him as irremediably corrupt, a stench in the divine nostrils that must surely result in the irruption of the end times. A reformation would be a work of the future, to be achieved not through human endeavors but by divine power and intervention at the end of history. In the time that still lay at hand, he believed that he and others should proclaim anew what God had revealed through the apostles and so prepare humankind to meet its Maker. For Luther, if this movement in which he was involved took root, that would not be what he expected.
Luther was often frustrated. Unlike the pre-reformation church, he was not asking people to donate huge sums of money, to make long and arduous pilgrimages, to fast, to self-flagellate, or perform other heroic works. Rather, he was asking people to trust Jesus and to rely on Jesus and to rest in the peace of mind which comes from such faith. But often Luther’s simple message got lost, and people were inclined to return to pre-reformation habits.
It was not merely the habits of the pre-reformation church which led people astray. It was and is human nature itself. Even a person who had not been shaped by the superstitions of the pre-reformation era would be naturally inclined to find something which she or he must “do” in order to merit salvation. The belief that salvation is an unearned gift is a belief which conflicts with human nature’s tendency to believe that it can achieve or earn salvation.
As James Payton explains, Luther was dismayed how the New Testament’s message of “salvation by grace through faith” kept getting lost in old superstitions or in new socio-political concerns:
In the meantime, in the brief span before the cataclysm that would bring history to its culmination, Luther hoped to see the proclamation of justification by faith alone which he and others proclaimed bearing fruit. That fruit would include: many embracing God by faith and, like Luther, finding peace with God; lives transformed by the love received from God, a love freely shown by the recipients to others; and the church edified in and committed to the faith so gloriously reclaimed and proclaimed. However, in the last few years of his life, Luther traveled throughout the regions of Germany into which he could safely venture, conducting church visitations. This experience profoundly dispirited Luther: what he found was so little transformed from what had been common before his labors that he became morose and discouraged. Even the little change he expected to see, a change not leading to a whole-scale reformation of the church, but resulting in small advances in faithfulness before God, he did not readily find. Furthermore, that his own prince and other German rulers used the movement begun under Luther’s efforts to seek their own political ends provoked the Wittenberg Reformer, who viewed this as a perverse misappropriation of his teaching.
So, what would Luther have said, if someone had asked him if his reformation had been a success? Luther probably wouldn’t have understood the question. He didn’t see himself as trying to start or implement a reformation. He saw himself as someone who was trying to proclaim God’s message of salvation, a message which Luther had found in the Scriptures and had experienced in his own life.
