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I'm Philip Cary. I teach philosophy at
Eastern University just outside
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
So here's Augustine, who is Luther's
favorite theologian, and Augustine is
putting us on a journey to God. It's a
journey of love, loving God with your
whole heart, mind and strength, and your
neighbor as yourself. But as long as
you're on the journey, you're not
home yet; you haven't arrived, you're
imperfect for as long as the journey is
not completed - which means the journey
always is the journey of a sinner. And
the question is, how serious is this sin
as a way of holding you back on the
journey? How seriously will this sin
prevent you from reaching the end of the
journey, which is eternal life with God?
If the journey is a journey of love, if
it's all about heading toward God,
there's the little sins - they call them
venial sins - which slow you down on the
journey, but then there's the big sins,
the mortal sins which turn you around
and you go in the opposite direction, and
you end up the very opposite place from
Heaven with God: you end up in eternal
torment, and that's a really serious
problem, which is why you need penance.
Penance is what restores the state of
love or charity as they called it:
This state of loving God with something
close to your whole heart, mind and
strength. And if you don't have penance,
then you're stuck with these mortal sins
which are called mortal because they're
eternal death. And the deep problem is
that by the time you get to Luther in
the 16th century, nobody's sure whether
they're in a state of mortal sin or not.
It's actually, it's official Catholic
teaching that you can't be sure whether
you're in a state of grace or in a state
of mortal sin; and if you're in a state
of mortal sin, and you die, then that is
the beginning of eternal punishment in
Hell. And in the 16th century, that had a
lot of people very, very frightened.
How do you know what your fate is going to
be when you die? Well, in the
16th century the teaching of the church
was, you can't know. And that
created what Luther called the terrified
conscience. When Luther was aware of his
own sins, when ordinary people in the
16th century were aware of their
own sins, they didn't feel what we call
guilt, at least when they described it.
It doesn't sound like what we call guilt
feelings; it was terror, and that
terrified conscience was the state of
people that Luther was preaching to when
he was preaching the new Protestant Gospel
that he'd worked out in 1517, 1518, 1519.
Purgatory is what happens if you find
all those mortal sins by confessing them
in the Sacrament of Penance, and all the
really mortal sins in your heart...you
found; for instance, there's this really
interesting and difficult problem: Jesus
says if you hate your neighbor in your
heart, it's as if you committed murder.
Well, murder is a mortal sin; the hatred
in your heart is mortal sin even if you
haven't committed murder; it's
murderousness of the heart and you need to
find that and confess it. And then, here
you are, this ordinary 16th century
Christian, and what happens when you die
and there's still a lot of that remnant
of this mortal murderousness in your
heart? Well, you don't go to hell because
you've confessed your sins. But you
really need to make up for that
murderousness in your heart; something
has to fix it, to cleanse it, to purge it -
purgatory means cleansing. So you spend
years and years cleansing the remnants
of mortal sin out of your heart. What's
fascinating is, purgatory had become
something different by Luther's time,
because if you read Dante's purgatory, in
Dante there's literally angels around
every corner in purgatory; there's music!
People help each other. Purgatory is a
good place in Dante. But by Luther's time,
300 years later, purgatory was
essentially temporary Hell. When people
imagined it or preached about it, it was
not a place of angels, it was a place of
devils. It was demons
tormenting you just like
Hell, and the only difference is that
it's temporary. That is, it might last a
few thousand years or so. And so, people,
ordinary Christians, hoping not to go to
Hell, expected that
they would end up in
purgatory for several thousand years of
being tortured by demons, which means
that they really did have an incentive
to try to shorten their stay in purgatory.
So, here you are: you're worried about
your long stay in purgatory being
tortured, or maybe you're worried about
your mother or your father who might be
in purgatory right now being tortured,
and wouldn't it be nice if you could get
them out of purgatory free as it were,
you know, kind of a get out of purgatory
free card? Well you can buy a get out of
purgatory free card: it's called an
indulgence. And when you buy that
indulgence, at least as it was being
preached in the 16th century by a man
named Tetzel, who was preaching in the
area around Wittenberg where Luther was
a pastor, what you can do is you put
the money in the box, and Tetzel promised
that as soon as the money goes into the
box, a soul goes out of purgatory, and
into Heaven. So you can literally buy
your mother or father an
entry ticket into Heaven.
Wouldn't you be willing to spend that
kind of money? You can imagine the sales
pitch, right? Like, what kind of son or
daughter are you, if you're not willing
to pay a little bit of silver to free
your mother, your father, from thousands
of years of torture? Come on! You can do
this! It's not that much: pay up! And so
they were paying, and the money went:
it was split halfsies; the money went
half to the Pope in Rome and help build
St. Peter's; the other half went to
Albert of Mainz, the most important
archbishop in Germany. And the funny
thing is, this is the guy that Luther was
writing to: he sent the 95 Theses to
Albert of Mainz saying, look at this
terrible corruption, this abuse of the
Church's teaching! You've got to fix this,
because people are being misled by this,
and the Pope doesn't like it either I'm
sure! So we gotta fix this, right? And he's
writing to the guy who's making half of
the money from the indulgences; the other
half is going to Rome with the Pope. He
had no idea that in fact the people he
was appealing to, to take care of this
Christian flock, were actually the ones
who are making money from the
indulgences.
So here's Luther, and his concern
is that these people are thinking they
can buy their way into Heaven, and that's
just not true: it's gonna lead them to
spiritual complacency, it's gonna be bad
for their spiritual lives. It's
a pastoral concern for Luther that
they're gonna be misled by this, and this
is gonna be spiritually bad for them. So
in order to fix this, he's thinking about
what are indulgences, what do
they do, what is the proper theology of
indulgences? They can't save you
from purgatory, they can't get you into
Heaven, and the indulgences can't do what
Tetzel was saying they could do. So what
Luther did - he was a Bible professor at
the University of Wittenberg, so he
decided, let's have an academic dispute
about this, so we can clarify our minds
about what indulgences actually do.
Because the theology of indulgences
at the time was in fact rather unclear;
it really needed further development,
further thought, and that's exactly what
a university theology professor is
supposed to do. So Luther wrote up these
95 Theses which were meant to
be a topic of disputation, which is a
standard academic exercise in a medieval
university. You get a bunch of theology
professors together, you have a
discussion of these theses: are they true,
etc., etc. The theses are in fact
rather rambling; they're not really a
literary document, they are just a whole
set of thoughts that Luther writes
down and says essentially to his
colleagues, help me figure out if this
stuff is true, and how to do this. The
funny thing is, in fact, that when he sent
his letter to Albert of Mainz, he sent
these 95 Theses dated October 31st,
1517, which is why we have that date,
and then he also sent a little treatise
on indulgences which was much better
argued, much more reasonable, and that's
actually his considered opinion. What
ended up happening is that the 95 Theses
are the ones that got attention. Luther's
treatise on indulgences, which is about
five pages, a very nicely reasoned little
theological argument, was pretty much
forgotten for about 500 years. The 95
Theses, on the other hand: what happened
is that somebody that Luther was
circulating these theses to, probably
some academic friend, gave them to the
printer - gave them to the printer in
Wittenberg, the university town where
Luther was a teacher, and the printer
printed up numerous copies, and then it
got to the next town over, and another
printer picked it up and printed it, and
then it got to the next town over, and
another printer printed it. And there
were a couple of dozen editions within
the next few months. It was astonishing:
this is the very first document in the
history of the world that goes viral.
No one expected this to happen; no one had
really thought about the possibility of
one printer and another printer and
another printer, and pretty soon there
are copies of this thing translated
into German so everyone can
read it, circulating all over Germany, and
causing a real ruckus.
So here we have this document which is
originally an academic document, and it's
circulating throughout Germany, and it's
circulating among people who are not
academics. These are not professors, these
are just ordinary Germans reading this
and they're thinking, oh my goodness,
good grief, these indulgences, they're a
sham! These indulgences
which I paid good
money for are not going to save my
mother or father from purgatory; they're
not going to accomplish anything.
This doctor, this teacher - doctor means,
you know, somebody with a doctor's
degree from the University of
Wittenberg, one of these great scholars
named Martin Luther - never heard of him
before, but my goodness, he seems to be
showing that this is a fraud! And I
happen to know now that all the money is
going from Germany down to Rome, so the
the Pope is just milking us Germans for
all this money, and it doesn't do
anything, and this is outrageous! The
German princes need to get together and
do something about this, so that
we stop getting cheated by this jerk
down in Rome who's a charlatan! And
that's enough to get the Reformation
started. Luther is a funny guy: he wants
to just have this academic dispute, but
Luther has a tongue on him. Luther has a
sharp tongue. He's a man of vehement
opinions. I had the sense
Luther is somebody who, he
blurts: he's holding stuff in and trying
to behave himself, and then all of a
sudden, he lets it out, and it is just
verbally powerful. This man has a tongue
on him; he speaks in a German that
ordinary people can understand. When he
starts writing his own stuff in German,
it reaches people and it touches them
and it gets them angry and upset and it
makes them mobilized. And one of the
things that the Pope didn't understand,
as the Pope is trying to suppress this
drunken German as he is reputed to have
said, is that this guy can write, and he
can write in German, and it reaches
people and he keeps writing and he
literally just out-writes the Pope. And
the printing press, which is a new
invention only about 50 years old, is
disseminating this stuff everywhere, and
you can't put a lid on it!
Earlier heretics,
before the age of the printing press, you
couldn't do it. I mean, you could
get rid of these people, right? You could get
rid of them very easily. But Luther, you
can't get rid of, for two reasons: one is,
he's writing all this stuff that's being
printed and it's much more powerful
and moving than the stuff that the
Pope's people are writing; and two is, the
German princes are on his side because
they don't like all that money being
shipped down to Rome either. So they're
protecting him. So we've got a different
situation than previous heretics who
were burned at the stake; this guy
Luther cannot be gotten rid of.
The first of the 95 Theses says that all
of our life is a life of penance. So
Luther as a monk - and we happen to know
this because we have his lectures
as a university professor lecturing to
other monks - he was teaching people that
their whole life is a life of penance,
repentance, and indeed self-hatred: that's
thesis number four, I believe, where your
whole life really ought to be a life of
self-hatred because that's what sinners
ought to do - they should hate themselves.
And he was very serious about this; in
his early writings he said, look, you
should hate yourself like someone who
sincerely hates his enemy and wants him
to be damned, and you should resign
yourself to damnation for God's glory,
and that way you'll be justified in
God's sight. It was really kind of
spiritual masochism. And he was trying to
practice this self-hatred as a monk, and
it wasn't working for him. And what
ended up happening is, in order to
think about penance and indulgences, he
had to think about the Sacrament of
Penance for the first time in his career.
He hadn't been writing about this ever
before. So what he did is, he had to think
about this moment in the Sacrament of
Penance when the priest says, I absolve
you of your sins in the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And that's based on Christ's promise
that what you absolve on earth will be
absolved in Heaven. And that means, Luther
concluded in 1518 less than a year after
the 95 Theses, that this is God
Himself forgiving your sins. And so
instead of hating yourself and trying to
punish yourself because you're such a
sinner, and this inward penance of
self-hatred, you're supposed to believe
that your sins are forgiven, because
Jesus Christ Himself has promised that
when you hear that word you're forgiven -
and who are you to call Christ a liar? So
you're gonna have to believe that you
are forgiven, and not someone that
God hates, and therefore not someone who
should hate himself. And that is what
Luther later calls the gospel: the gospel
of Jesus Christ. Good news. So instead of
hating yourself in a life of penance,
it's a life of receiving the good news
because this is the promise of God, and
it's a gracious and kind word,
and that's what you ought to
believe. Luther thought there should be
both law and gospel, and that the Bible
contains both kinds of discourse: both
law and gospel. There two kinds of
discourse, two ways that God talks to us.
The law is the commandments, like the Ten
Commandments; the gospel is the promises.
So, think of two different ways of
someone talking to you: one is someone who
can give you rules and say this is what
you have to do, and if you don't
do this, you're in trouble!
That's law. And God gets us in trouble
for doing all this stuff that we
shouldn't do; that's sin. But then the
gospel is this promise that says things
like, I absolve you of your sins, or most
powerfully of all, this is my body, it's
given for you. And you're supposed to
believe that, because it's God's own
promise, it's God's own word. So imagine
especially the kind of promise by which
one person gives themself to another,
such as a wedding vow where the
bridegroom says to his bride, I am yours
and you are mine, and the bride
herself responds, I am my beloved's, and
he is mine, because he's promised; because
that's his word. I can count on that word.
So what Luther's thinking is, the law
reminds us that we're sinners and drives
us to the gospel so that we hang on for
dear life to this gracious and kind
promise of God who gives Himself and
gives His own son to us. Luther was
really worried about that terrified
conscience, because he knew what
it was like to be terrified.
So, to understand Luther I think you have
to start with that situation of terror
and helplessness, of abject helplessness
and terror, in the face of the judgment
of God. What can you do in the face of
God's judgment which makes you helpless?
What you do is you hang on to the
promise of God. Well then: what happens
next? Here you have this promise of God
where God graciously gives you his own
Son. This is wonderful, is great news; but
now you have a life to live, and Luther
says, look, you receive the Gospel by
faith alone, but then there's the
Christian life, and the Christian life is
a life of love. So in faith, we live
in Christ. In love, we live for our
neighbor.
So our works of love, which we are
supposed to do, don't save us, they don't
justify us, they don't make us Christians.
But our neighbor needs them, right?
I don't need my good works to save
myself, Luther's thinking, but my neighbor
needs my good works - and that's why God
gave me to my neighbor. That's why God
saves me through Christ, so that I can
give myself to my neighbor. And anyone
who's not doing that is probably someone
who doesn't have real faith in Christ to
begin with.
If Luther were here today, I'm hoping
he'd be worried about the same things
that worry me, because I find that
there's a certain kind of Lutheran
preaching of the gospel that really
reaches people - even people who don't
have the terrified conscience of the
16th century. Many people in our day are
not exactly afraid of going to hell if
they die tonight. But, many Christians
today are deeply shaped by a kind of
performance anxiety, I'll call it: they're
worried about whether they're
really good Christians, and
they keep on trying to convince
themselves that their Christian life is
going well, that they're living the abundant
life and all that sort of thing. And then,
when they mess up, instead of doing
something ordinary and, you know, sort of
doing something sensible like confessing
their sins, they're feeling all
like there's something wrong with their
Christian life - maybe they're not really
Christian and so on. Luther's preaching
of the Gospel is a wonderful remedy for
performance anxiety. It's a way of saying,
look, yes, you're a sinner; yes,
your Christian life is never going to be
perfect; but you know what? The perfection
belongs to Christ Jesus, who's given to
you by faith alone. Meanwhile your works
of love which are not perfect, they're
good enough for your neighbor. That's why
you do it. So instead of
worrying whether you're
really truly a good Christian in your
heart, let Jesus Christ worry about that.
Meanwhile, you worry about your neighbor.
And instead of asking the question
"is my Christian life good enough?" - ask
the question, "is what I'm doing for my
neighbor actually good for my neighbor?"
That's the question that love asks; love
does not ask the question "am I a loving
enough Christian?" - that's kind of
narcissistic, isn't it? And what I love
about Luther's notion of the Gospel is
that it frees love to actually be love,
instead of people trying to prove to
themselves that they're good Christians.
Now, one of the things that does happen
in Luther's thinking is he insists
that in order to understand the Gospel,
you have to understand
that the Gospel is for me.
That the good news of the Gospel is not
just for the whole world - it is
for everybody, but it's also in
particular for me. So the words
of absolution say, I forgive you of
your sins, I absolve you of your sins, in
the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: I
absolve you! This is my body given for
you - and you need to
realize, this is for you.
But the wonderful thing is, I think that
it's an external word, and Luther insists
on this. It's not all about my experience
of myself; it's not all about how I
experience myself as a Christian; it is
about the word of the beloved who says,
"This is my body given for you" - so that I
really can say I am my beloved's, and he
is mine. There's a kind of individual
experience of grace, but it's not based
on an inward turn where it's all about
me and my experience of my feelings.
Because, you know, you can go to church
sometimes, and so many poor pastors are
trying to be relevant all the time, and
they're trying to make it all about me!
And my experience of the Christian life
is, enough churches, good grief, I don't
come to church for it to be all about me!
And wouldn't it be nice if instead of
talking about me and my experience and
my heart and my life, I get to talk about
my beloved, about Christ, about my
neighbor, about something other than me,
me, me all the time! And I think Luther's
actually very good about that, because
what the Christian life is about is my
neighbor, not myself.
One of the nice things about Luther's
thought, I think, is that he distinguishes
between what he calls two kingdoms:
there's the kingdom of God, and then
there's the earthly kingdom, the kingdom
of ordinary politics - and he doesn't
expect a lot of ordinary politics. That
is, he doesn't expect a lot can come of
it. The Christian life is a life of love.
You're supposed to be doing a whole lot
to help your neighbor, but you can't
really expect to change the world and
transform the world because that's the
job of God. It's God who transforms the
world ultimately, and it's not our job to
be the ones to make all the difference
in the world; it's our job to love our
neighbor. And I think that's good sense.
There's no one I'm more suspicious of
than someone who wants to change the
world. Hitler did that, he changed
the world; so did Stalin, so did Mao.
I don't want to be one of those people who
change the world, and if you want to
transform me and my world, I say, you know,
get away - watch out, you're
dangerous. What I need,
what all of us need, is
people to be good neighbors, not people
who are going to be change agents
transforming the world. The Reformation
is a movement that changed the world,
despite Luther's intentions. He was not
trying to change the world, he was just
trying to get straight on the theology
of indulgences, and then on the theology
of the Gospel, and then he wanted to help
people who had these terrified
consciences, and give them Christ through
the preaching of the Gospel. It turns out
that if you care about the individuals
around you - if you care about giving a
good word, especially the good word of
the Gospel to the people you know -
I think that makes a much bigger and
better difference in the long run, than
attempts to change the world. Love
doesn't change the world by a program of
transformation that you impose on other
people; love changes the world by being
kind and generous and occasionally
self-sacrificing, and thinking about what
other people need and doing what's
needed for them.
We all know that music has this way of
moving our hearts; it has some deep sort
of immediate tentacle that reaches out
and touches our emotions. And so what we
do with music is terribly important: it
shapes us in all sorts of ways. And there
were some Christians going back to the
ancient church who were suspicious of it,
because of how it moved us. Luther, on the
other hand, loved it because it cheers us
up. He has this wonderful little essay
where he says, music drives away the
devil because it cheers you up and
drives away fear. But of course, the kind
of music that he wanted is a music that
is tied to the word of God. And this is a
wonderful thing: there is so much western
music that is tied to the word of God,
that puts the Bible into music, puts the
Gospel into music - and you can sing this
stuff, and it becomes a favorite song.
Luther loved how our hearts could be
shaped by the word of God, by the Lord's
Prayer - the Lord's Prayer being like a
favorite song that we can learn by heart -
but then think of all the other music we
can learn by heart. I remember one of the
best things that ever happened to me
was joining a choir where we sang
Bach and Palestrina and all this
wonderful music that set the Bible and
the Christian tradition to music. And it
became part of my heart, part of my
experience, part of the way I felt the
world. And that's one of the great gifts
of the Holy Spirit to the Christian
tradition, is that we have musicians like
especially, most wonderfully of all,
Johann Sebastian Bach. If you're a
Lutheran, my goodness, this is probably
the greatest Lutheran theologian of the
18th century, is Johann Sebastian Bach.
And he puts Luther's theology and the
Bible to music in ways that get deep into
our hearts, and I think in the
end make us different people
which is an absolutely wonderful,
wonderful thing.
One of the most important features of
the history of the church is how the
church has related to new developments
in media. So the church has often been an
early adopter of new developments in
media. In the early times of the ancient
church, the church was one of the first
institutions to adopt the book: not the
scroll, which is the way that Jewish and
Roman writers would write, but the book
where you flipped pages, because that
allowed you to look stuff up, and flip
from,say, the the first part of the
Gospel of John, to the last part of the
Gospel of John, and compare passages. So
the church loved that new technological
innovation of the book with pages, rather
than the scroll. Then along comes a
thousand years later the Gutenberg Press,
and Luther adopts the press and uses it
to essentially drive the Papacy out
of Germany. But both of those inventions
were ways of deepening your contact with
the written word of God, so that the word
of God could come out of the page
and into your mouth, into your ears, into
your heart. Part of our problem today is
we've got a new media that more or less
distances ourselves from a really deep
interaction with words - you know, we have
140 characters in Twitter, we have
Facebook posts that, well, no one's going
to read more than a couple paragraphs.
We've lost a lot of our ability to pay
careful attention to a text. So now our
attention spans are shorter, our ability
to grasp text is less, and as a result,
that favorite song, that text that ought
to be writing itself into our hearts, is
less deeply part of our hearts because
we're distracted by trivialities: lots
and lots of texts, but none of it that
gets deeply into us. One way of thinking
about this, I've thought about: imagine
Googling the name Jesus Christ, and
you would get of course a bunch of
of hits; and then try Googling the
same name a year later: there'll be
an entirely different set of hits. You won't
be looking at the same text, which is
very different from opening a Bible and
looking at the same text that you've
looked at in love and faith and hope for
years and years and years. So our
relationship to the Word of God is
different because of our distraction,
because the texts that we work with are
evanescent, trivial, transient; and we
don't really learn the word of God the
way we used to.
So Luther was an insomniac. He would wake
up in the middle of the night and
thoughts would be running in his head,
and they would accuse him and terrify
him - that terrified conscience business
again - and he would say that these are
the thoughts that come from the devil:
which say things like, "Martin Luther, how
could you be the only one who's right?
You are upsetting a thousand years of
Christian history, you're defying the
Pope. Maybe what you're doing is driving
a lot of people who follow you into Hell
because of your false teaching!" And you
can imagine that kind of thought eating
at him all night, and he's wrestling with
these thoughts, and he's thinking
that he's wrestling with the devil,
because these are thoughts that won't
let him go. He calls these thoughts
Anfechtung, which is this wonderful German
word that means assault, attack - the
devils are attacking him and trying to
make him despair and give up the Gospel.
And he says this is how you become a
theologian, is you get attacked by the
devil. You have these wrestles with the
devil in the middle of the night, because
you have to hang on to the Gospel even
though the devil is trying to make you
give up and despair and give up the
Reformation and give up what you've been
preaching and teaching. And what
Anfechtung, this temptation by the devil,
teaches you is that everything depends
on hanging onto the Gospel of Jesus
Christ for dear life. So you can't be a
theologian unless the devil's attacking
you now and then, says Luther. We all have
our Anfechtungen, we all have the things
that tempt us, to despair, tempt us to
give up hope that Christ is Lord, to give
up hope that the Gospel is true - we all
have those temptations, and we all
wrestle with them. And when I wake up in
the middle of the night with those kind
of dark thoughts, I don't
identify them with the
voice of the devil, but I am tempted to
give up hope; I am tempted to think the
church is such a mess, there's no hope
for us, Christianity must fail
because of what a wreck
it's made of itself in the
past, oh, couple of decades - and at that
moment, you have to hang on to the Gospel
when you don't really feel like you have
a reason to, other than: this is what
you've been hanging on to your whole
life, and this is the promise of God. You
hang onto it even if all the evidence
seems to go against it. And that's
the hard, hard work of Christian faith.
Luther and the Jews is such a difficult
subject, because - I'm someone who loves
Luther. He's my favorite theologian in
the Christian tradition, outside the
Bible, and I think he's the only great
Christian theologian I know of who's
written stuff that I think is just
positively wicked. The stuff he wrote
about the Jews is just wrong. There's no
excuse for it. He had written one
beautiful little treatise called "That
Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew" which
basically said, now that we're no longer
under the Pope, we can stop persecuting
the Jews and just preach the gospel to
them - and, you know, if they don't
believe, well, look, we're not such great
Christians ourselves! And if that was the
attitude he stayed with, then we would
have had a much different Luther and a
much different relationship to Judaism.
Instead, what he does is he suggests:
here's a couple of passages you can use
from the Bible that explain how only
Jesus of Nazareth could possibly be the
fulfillment of the messianic promises to
the Jews. So you use these passages from
the Bible to show the Jews that Jesus
has to be the Messiah. And if they don't
believe, well, we're not such great
Christians. That's his view in 1526. In
the 1530s he hears about Jews who are
proselytizing and converting Christians,
and he gets very upset. And I think
Luther has a kind of trigger, and the
trigger is: somebody's trying to take the
Word of God away from him. When he fights
against the Pope starting in 1520 or so,
it's because the Pope wants to take the
gospel away from us. When he fights
against other Protestants, it's because
they're taking the Gospel away. When he
fights against the Jews, it's because
they're taking away the Gospel. But the
Pope is not someone that Luther can harm
or threaten; Jews are people that Luther
can do harm to. And he actually
recommends that, you know, if these Jews
keep on insisting that their view of the
Bible is right instead of ours, we have
to do something about this!
And he makes all sorts of horrible
recommendations: burn their books, burn
their synagogues, kick them out of the
country; his worst recommendation, which
you don't often hear about - it's
really pretty terrifying - is that if they
pray or praise God or worship as Jews in
our country, that should be a capital
crime; that is, we should kill them for
worshiping as Jews. This is just
horrifying, and it's so bad that when
Luther wrote these books and they were
circulating down towards Strasbourg on
the border of Germany and France, the
government there said, we're not gonna
let this be printed in our city because
it'll cause social unrest and it's just
not allowable. So they censored
Luther's books; and I'm
someone who doesn't like censorship, but
I think that that's a good move: don't
print this book, it's really awful. Let
the scholar study it and say why Luther
is wrong, but don't let this stuff
circulate - it's really vile poison.
Yeah, well, you know, you read the news and
it's enough to make you depressed or
confused or despairing. The question is,
what gives us hope for the future? And
the thing about Luther that I love is
that he keeps directing our attention to
the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to the fact
that Jesus is Lord, and that God wants to
give us his own son. And every time I
hear that, especially if you put it to
music, it cheers me up, and it gives me
hope. And that's why I live as a
Christian, because I need that hope.
I think our self-centeredness, our focus
on "who I am and why I matter and why I'm
at the center of the world" is a problem
that we've had - that we have had, not just
I - we have had this problem ever since
Adam, for heaven's sakes. Sin is an old,
old problem, and it's not going to be
solved tomorrow, and the only reason to
hope that it's going to be solved in the
end is that Jesus is Lord. So you have to
keep looking away from yourself, says
Luther, but don't expect that the world
is going to turn into a nice place
overnight, because the world is still
full of a great many horrible things, and
you open up the newspaper or your
favorite website, and you'll still find
horrible things that will make you
depressed. That's the way life is going
to be until Kingdom come. There's much
about Luther, when I read him, I think, you
know, I would like to spend time with a
calmer person like Philip Melanchthon
his best friend - he's much more like I am.
Luther is a difficult person. But I think
we needed him, and there are moments when
he's just wonderful. He takes the Gospel
very, very seriously; he does not take
himself seriously. And he makes wonderful
jokes at his own expense. One of Luther's
jokes about himself: he says, "The world is
like a gigantic asshole, and I am like a
ripe piece of shit. We shall soon be
parted." That's Luther's view of himself.
He does not take himself very seriously.
Luther expected that the world was
going to end soon, that the Antichrist
was the Pope - and that the end of the
world was coming soon. He, I think, was
exhausted at the end of his life, because
he'd been fighting these demons in his
night watches, with this Anfechtungen,
these thoughts in his head.
I don't think he got a lot of sleep for
the last twenty years of his life. So he
was ready to call it quits, he was ready
to go. But as a result, in the end he was
happy to go, and he has these haunting
words - the very last words he's ever
recorded to have said - he says, "We're
beggars, that's the truth." I think those
were in fact cheerful words: we are
beggars at the throne of grace, and we're
beggars for mercy at the throne of a God
who is deeply gracious. And he's ready to
throw in the towel, call it quits, and beg
for grace. And that's the truth.