THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION declare Luther as the forerunner of the Enlightenment, the statement "Here I stand, I can do no other" was reinterpreted as the principle of freedom of conscience.
But that is missing the whole point. Appealing to conscience was common medieval practice; appealing to a "free" conscience that had liberated itself from all bonds would never have occurred to Luther. Nor did he regard
"conscience" as identical with the inescapable voice of God in man. Conscience is neither neutral nor autonomous: hotly contested by God and the Devil, it is not the autonomous center of man's personality, it is always guided and is free only once God has freed and "captured" it. What is new in Luther is the notion of absolute obedience to the Scriptures against any authorities; be they popes or councils. The way Luther dislodges the Christian conscience from its individual, immediate proximity to God and integrates it into the obligation to heed reasonable woridly and historical experience is innovative. Faith is not founded on reason: God's omnipotence transcends reason and the cross of Christ contradicts it. Actions, on the other hand, must be able to stand the test of reason and experience because their sole objective is service to one's neighbor; there is no room here for selfjustification or self-sanctification.
Luther liberated the Christian conscience, liberated it from papal decree and canon law. But he also took it captive through the Word of God and imposed on it the responsibility to render service to the world. That is why in all realms of life, be they marriage and sexuality, civic duties or obedience to the temporal authorities, the Word of God must be heard anew; it must be applied with the standard of practical reason and directed at how life is to be lived. Satan availed himself of ecclesiastical law to enslave man in all spheres of life, in faith, morals, and politics. The "grievances of the German Nation," the complaints about the exploitation and tyranny of the Church of Rome, are the evidence that the lives of both individual and community are threatened and in urgent need of external reform.
Looking back on Worms, one can understand the wish, somewhere between dream and dismay, so well expressed by Leopold von Ranke:
One could almost be tempted to wish that Luther had for the moment stopped there [the attack on papal abuses]. It would have strengthened the whole nation in its sense of unity, and it would have furthered national cohesion, if under Luther's leadership it had risen up against the worldly rule of Rome. The answer, however, must be: the power of this spirit would have been broken had he been fettered by considerations
THE REFORMER ATTACKED not wholly religious in content. He had gone out not from the needs of the nation but from religious conviction, without which he would never have achieved anything and which certainly got him further than would have been either necessary or useful for that political struggle. The eternally free spirit moves along its own path."
If Luther had been "moderate" and castigated only curial infringements, the German nation might have awakened and achieved unity by doing battle under his leadership against the temporal rule of Rome—long before It is a dream, and such an understandable one that it affected even a man of Ranke's stature. But he then succeeded in shaking it off'on the grounds that Luther's horizon did not encompass politics. If "politics" is equated with "strategy," and if its goal is to establish the City of God on earth, then
Ranke is right. But politics as a means of preserving the world until doomsday is something Luther propagated to the very end of his life and even became actively involved in where he could; the last days of his life were spent at the negotiating table.
Though no professional politician, Luther was an eminent political mind.
He had an enduring influence on the politics of his time. The grievances of the German nation, which had been occupying princes, bishops, and imperial diets for almost eighty years, had resulted in a White Book against Rome in 1521." Independent of their attitude toward the Evangelical movement, the imperial estates emphatically demanded that the emperor put a halt to the damage being done by Rome. Luther provided legal foundations for these grievances by disqualifying canon law as foreign, papal law, and providing a scriptural basis for the temporal authorities' right to self-determination.
There were, however, considerable gaps in the new legal foundations, which various groups, not all of them marginal, tried to turn to their own advantage: under Sickingen, knights revolted against clerical rule on the Rhine (1522); rebellious peasants destroyed monasteries and robbed monastery property (1524-25); and princes pursued a course of "secularization," which was nothing but a redirection of Church property and funds into their own coffers (1526-27). Grievances were once again in order, this time to prevent the aristocracy from establishing its rights at the expense of the public welfare. In the struggle against all these efforts to promote personal interests in God's name, Luther became more than a political issue, he became a politican.
The example of the Papal States and episcopal principalities revealed the THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION Devil's basic strategy to him: the power of faith is to be undermined and the world to be ruled by means of ecclesiastical might. Luther's fierce resistance to this perversion emerges from his epoch-making discovery that only when the crippling fear of not being saved and the anxious egotism of achieving one's own salvation have been overcome by faith does the welfare of the world come into view. The gift of justification releases man from his greed for rewards and enables the believer to be truly pious "for nothing"—not from fear of punishment and Hell but to the greater glory of God and "to the benefit of one's neighbor." " t
The Reformation in Peril Life between God and the Devil Driven and Drawn ineteenthand early twentieth-century accounts of Luther portray him as a simple workman's son from Mansfeld who, by studying hard in Erfurt and Wittenberg, succeeded in cutting through the tangle of medieval Church doctrine and finding his way back to the Holy Scriptures. Defying persecution and threats, he defended his discovery undaunted, resolutely following the path he knew to be his, and mesmerized the masses with the power of his preaching. That is how he made history.
Much of this heroic interpretation of Luther's bursting genius is beyond dispute. A chain of major decisions in Luther's life, from becoming a monk to the rapid succession of events in the complex controversy over the Church, must be deemed momentous also by posterity. In the interest of faithful
Christians all over the world, he had to decide again and again—sometimes on the spur of the moment—in how far he could with good conscience make allowances for pressure from Rome, from the princely court, and, until about 1519, from his fellow monks in the German Augustinian congregation.
Luther saw his life and work from a different perspective, one uncommon, even alien, to the modern historian and enlightened cosmopolitan: he was led, indeed driven. From the first disputes over his indulgences theses to his final retrospective view of the road to the Reformation, Luther consistently maintained that his "career" was neither the product of a natural predisposition nor a plan engendered by personal ambition.
That he considered himself absolutely unequal to the task of a reformer was not simply pious modesty. The monk and university professor had to overcome two major handicaps in order to achieve mass appeal. At the beginning of the sixteenth century monks competed with university professors for the lowest rankings in public esteem; viewed as sanctimonious and pseudo-erudite, they were roasted with equal glee in the local pub as at the patrician's table. Both had long since become figures of public ridicule.
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL Luther thus had what seemed to be the worst possible qualifications for a popular reformer—an opinion shared by Hieronymus Aleander, the special papal legate dispatched to the Diet of Worms in 1521 specifically to deal with the Luther problem. Aleander thought Luther incapable of electrifying the masses and far too stupid to have authored such erudite writings. The monk was nothing but a straw man for the person really pulling the strings.
And there was only one person ingenious enough to initiate such an effective, dangerous campaign against Rome: Erasmus of Rotterdam, a biblical scholar as perfidious as he was learned.'
Luther, too, saw himself as an instrument, but of a totally different type. It was not intelligence or determination that was shaping the course of his career; God was driving him on and sweeping him along. He had no illusions about his abilities. Others had superior talents and education, and Erasmus, the great humanist so feared by Aleander, far surpassed Luther in the art of oratory and knowledge of languages. Luther lacked an air of cool superiority when dealing with people who did not share his views; he flared up and lost his temper. Even his writings were undisciplined; it was not only his early works which he would have preferred disappear from circulation. He recommended that the Holy Scriptures, not his works, should be read; and if anything else was'to be consulted, then rather the Loci communes, Melanchthon's concise work on Evangelical doctrine first published in 1521.
Luther's self-assessment might be taken for the last vestiges of monastic humility, but it was a humility with a hard core: service to the Word—Luther had not sought it; the post of a professor—he had not desired it; the mission of an evangelist—he would have liked to avoid it. As he saw it, he entered the monastery under compulsion, blinded by fear; his doctoral studies had been imposed on him against his will by his Augustinian superiors. Instead of fighting and becoming entangled in feuds, he would have liked to devote himself to study and meditation. Time and again Luther offered to cease his activities if only the Gospel became public property. But again and again he was overwhelmed, led where he did not wish to go, by a God who, irrespective of obedience or disobedience, steers the course of history.
Hardly had his indulgence theses become public knowledge than his opponents in Germany and Rome condemned him as a heretic, and his inquiry into the danger of being misled by purchasable indulgences as heresy. Their arguments so obviously contradicted the Scriptures and faith in Jesus Christ that only onc interpretation was possible: the heresy-hunters were blind and obstinately refused to hear the Word of God. They, too, were evidently being driven .
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL This public outcry was the overture to the Reformation. What we encounter in Luther is not the medieval battle cry "God wishes it"— deus vult, but "God does it"'—deus facit. Luther's exposure of curial abuses of power and the Scriptures was as impossible to suppress or retract as the discoveries of a Columbus before or a Copernicus after him. Remaining silent would have constituted, as he understood it, the spiritual murder of the faithful, who for centuries had been deluded into trusting in the authority of the Church.
The indulgence controversy was only the beginning. Again and again, after every new incident, every new turn of events that linked Luther's life with the history of the Reformation, he declared in his table talk and letters:
"Here I was driven by God, here I was hurled from the beginning to the outcome."
LATER GENERATIONS liked to speak of "divine guidance" and "providence." Luther, on the other hand, preferred a phrase drawn from the mystical tradition: "I was swept along," an expression less of a destiny guided by a remote Almighty than of the intervention of a present, all-powerful God.
Man does not appear in the light of his self-determination, but in the light of his need for guidance from God's overwhelming power. Modern man shrinks from the thought of such direct divine intervention. With the coming of the Enlightenment God retreated into the distance, at best comprehensible now as the primal architect of the cosmic world machine. Perhaps modern man understands "divine providence" as the harmonious world he longs for, or it may simply be a symbol of a still-to-be-discovered natural law.
Above all, he suspects "guidance" of being a projection of one's own wishes or at most a defense ex post facto of unpopular decisions: Luther must have confused his own mind with God's counsel!
Luther and Enlightened Humanism Not at all! Luther could never regard Providence as a private court of appeal or as justification for his own actions. Augustine affirms that the God who is closer to me than I am to myself creates, guides, and drives the life of the individual exactly as He does the world history of all.
IN De servo arbitrio (Bondage of the Will; December 1525), his polemical tract against Erasmus—and "modern" men of all eras—Luther took up and emphasized the subject of the distant and the present God. Contemplating the THE REFORMATION IN PERIL real tension between God's sovereignty and human responsibility, he unlocked the doors to his own life history, incorporating his own experiences as a "reformer in spite of himself" and scrutinizing them in the light of central scriptural passages.
But the suspicion that personal experience dictates scriptural interpretation may be a modern prejudice. Luther may well have started from the opposite end: from listening first to Scripture and then applying it in the light of daily life. Faith in God and experience in life were so intimately linked for Luther that the beginning cannot be distinguished from the end. That is also why Luther's "life between God and the Devil" must deal with his view of his own life as well as with his interpretation of how things stand in the lives of all. Luther's reply to Erasmus is considered too complicated and strangely abstract. Scholars have rejected the tract as unsuccessful or exaggerated, the "liberal" view has rendered it innocuous, and the "pastoral" one has tried to put it right. Luther was unquestionably being provocative: "Free will in man is the realm of Satan"; "God Himself does evil through those who are evil."
His response to Erasmus seems to have deteriorated into contempt for man and a profanation of God. And yet, as ill structured as it is, it is not in the least a failure; it is ruthlessly direct and clear. Were these the only pages of his writings to have survived, we could deduce from them the total scope of The tract was entitled The Bondage of the Will in direct response to Erasmus's preceding treatise De libero arbitrio (The Free Will), but it could much better have been called "The Majesty of God." That would immediately have revealed what was at stake, while rendering it less shocking.
Luther's dispute with Erasmus had already begun several years earlier, _ though neither publicly nor directly. Luther saw no advantage in confrontation; the preaching of the Gospel would suffer as much harm as scholarship and the arts. And yet he was divided against himself. While desiring the compromise of silence, he wanted to debate the issue. It was the otherwise reticent Erasmus who allowed himself to be thrust into open confrontation, not only by critics, who unjustly distrusted him, but also by his patrons among the nobility, who rightly admired him: King Henry VIII of England and Duke George of Saxony.
In early September 1524 the time had come: Johannes Froben in Basel published De libero arbitrio Diatribe sive collatio. In it Erasmus took up the thesis of the unfree will, which Luther had long formulated openly. The question, as the humanist emphasized, was one which scholastic theology had already found extremely perplexing. The Holy Scriptures were evidently
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL not unequivocal, and even if Luther were right, it would be inadmissible for an assertion of this kind to be made in public, from the pulpit. Where would the normal Christian be if, at the mercy of "fate," he were relieved of all responsibility for his own moral improvement! The thesis of the unfree will would lead the ordinary believer to moral abuse without helping the theologian to attain the certainty of knowledge.
It was of the utmost importance to Luther to keep discussion of this fundamental issue from being the reserve of theologians. What he wanted was to present his basic ideas plainly in preaching and teaching, so as to make them intelligible to his less educated contemporaries, and even to do it in German. He had always rejected the idea of an educated elite. The problem was one that has stirred reflective people of all eras and educational levels: if ' God is the supreme ruler—and there was no quarrel between Luther and Erasmus on that point—the question of how to reconcile the cruel, ruthless, and apparently blind course of history with God's mercy will inevitably arise.
It is only a short step from this challenge to a nightmarish conclusion: God is merely the past hope of generations that wanted to believe, He is the projection of a society in search of-an ultimate design and purpose. Heaven is empty; we stand alone.
Luther's reply to Erasmus is modern in that it already reflected these consequences in the form of questions. As he battled with the problem, he did not take Erasmus the man and programmatic reformer into account; he suspected the Dutchman of being the first Christian atheist. All the characteristic aspects of Luther's thinking and beliefs can be found here: God's grace and human works, the dark power of the Devil and the viability of human beliefs.
Erasmus had made a pertinent observation and drawn a reasonable conclusion from it: the best minds of scholasticism had spent centuries comparing biblical passages and had nevertheless been unable to agree on how much freedom man could have in a world ruled supremely by God. It was therefore his advice to draw the appropriate consequences from the situation and to counter any claim to absolute, ultimate solutions with scholarly skepticism. God is so far above us that we can never grasp more than a part of His truth; for the truly pious, that is enough.
This must have sounded like sweet music to the ears of many; it was the unmasking of a blind, academic theology alienated from its historical sources.
Modern Bible scholarship in the sixteenth century, with its rediscovery of Hebrew and Greek, the languages of the Old and New Testaments, called into question the authority of the Latin text of the Bible, on which the whole
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL of scholasticism had been based. But conservative theologians in Cologne, Louvain, Rome, and Paris stubbornly adhered to the Vulgate, the Latin translation sanctioned by the Church. These "obscurantists" and "sophists," who prided themselves on their pseudo-education, had succeeded in having the great German Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin condemned in Rome less than four years earlier (1520); now they were endeavoring to silence Erasmus, whom they had long considered suspect, as well. He was impugned as Luther's guide and mentor, though from Erasmus' standpoint Luther was anything but a disciple. With his trust in the potential of theology Luther seemed to be quite the child of scholasticism, incapable of bearing the insecurity of scholarly research. For the scholastic from Wittenberg the adventure of open inquiry could be nothing but a bold attempt to undermine the This would, however, be a misrepresentation of Luther, as he was unquestionably one of the theologians who could appreciate what humanist scholarship had achieved: without knowledge of ancient languages there could be no reliable exegesis of the Scriptures! When Erasmus published his edition of the Greek New Testament in December 1516, Wittenberg hailed the work as revolutionary. The first copy available there was received with great ceremony. In contrast to Erasmus, Luther even numbered among the first—of the humanists of his time, among the few—who used Reuchlin's works to study Hebrew. Thus Luther recognized that the mastery of ancient languages was a necessary tool in accomplishing a clear textual interpretation of the Bible.
SCHOLARSHIP LEADS TO various results and divergent points of view.
Using his own exegetical work as an example, Luther demonstrated to his students again and again that a text or part of a text or just a single word could be translated in very different ways; he showed that decisions must be left open not only where he was uncertain but also where he himself thought matters were clear.
This relativist attitude of groping and searching can be described as scholarly detachment and skepticism; such skepticism is an integral part of modern scholarship. But when doing research, it is equally important to approach and grasp straightforward matters with an open mind, not governed by given authorities, not deferring to sanctioned traditions. The Scriptures do not contain only obscure texts, where "skepticism" would be apt; there are also clear, self-evident passages that can be translated unambiguously and must therefore be interpreted accordingly. Clear scriptural passages seem
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL obscure only when earlier, established interpretations are not taken as preliminary versions but become pre-judgments that judge—without allowing themselves to be judged—because the reader or listener has a closed mind.
The most stubborn and effective of these preconceptions are based on a "clear" and "general" consensus of what is "self-evident." "Common sense" knows precisely what deserves to be termed moral, how true piety manifests itself, and how a righteous God must behave. But there are straightforward passages in the Bible that are in such marked contrast to our sense of what is morally self-evident and to our natural image of God that only God's spirit can bring clarity and awaken in us the readiness to listen to the text with an open mind and then to accept it.
THOUGH THE questions Erasmus and Luther labored and clashed over seem to be lofty ones, they were to become basic issues throughout the course of the Reformation and modern intellectual history as a whole. Erasmian "skepticism," as liberal and liberating as it appeared to be, would, as Luther anticipated, lead believers astray in one of two ways. On the one hand the Scriptures would be elevated to "Holy Scriptures" and locked away with seven papal seals that could be broken only by the "Holy Church."
With that the book on which the Church was founded would become a Church Book, shrouded in mystery, deriving its authority and power from the pope, as the Roman theologian Silvester Prierias summarized the claims of the curia as early as 1518—seven years before Luther's dispute with Erasmus. The Bible could no longer be read with a critical eye on pope or Church, since its message would then be limited to proofs for the authority of the papacy, to passages which, according to the claims of the curia, might properly be interpreted only by and from the vantage point of the pope.
The other consequence, too, would result in a sealed book, but this time final judgment would be left not to the pope but to biblical scholars. Today that would mean the systematic theologians above all—who, like the "sophists," the scholastic theologians, so complicate the Scriptures that the "uninitiated" Christian can no longer find any solid ground in which to root his faith.
"The Holy Ghost is not a skeptic," says Luther; He does not lead us into the semi-obscurity of conflicting views on basic questions that, true to the spirit of scholarly detachment, should be left unanswered. There is, after all, one fundamental truth in the Bible about which there can be no arguing, for it has been revealed: God Himself became a man, suffered, and will rule for all eternity. The message is unequivocal; it is the reader who equivocates,
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL who cannot approach the text objectively and without preconceived ideas.
He is man in conflict, who does not want to accept God's judgment over him.
"Remove Christ from the Scriptures and there is nothing left." Through Christ, God and His design were rendered accessible to everyone, even though there may be passages, statements, and concepts that are obscure to us and for which we need scholars. But that does not apply to more than isolated problems. The Gospel is plain and must therefore be taught and preached simply and without skepticism.
It would be totally wrong to declare Erasmus defeated by this argument.
He has certainly never been driven from the field—up to the present day.
He was, after all, not interested in skepticism as such, but in an attitude that, with its academic reticence and struggle for objectivity, would serve peace in the Church and the world. It is unquestionably easier to live with Erasmus than with Luther, not so much with Erasmus the man—who was vain and over-sensitive to criticism and contradiction—but with his ideas, which have appealed to the cultural elite throughout the centuries.
That is one side of Erasmus, the side that corresponds to our present-day temper. But the modern aspect does not constitute the whole: as a rule, the Renaissance is associated with rebirth and energetic new departures; but in his conflict with Luther, Erasmus presented a totally different picture, one of weariness, disappointment, and disillusionment at the end of a long era of seemingly secure values and firm convictions. It was in his confrontation with Luther, his diatribe on the free will, which generations have interpreted as humanism's programmatic repudiation of the Reformation, that the outstanding Bible scholar was more scholastic and medieval than ever before.
His treatise was oriented toward the past; it was extremely conservative in its rejection of public discussion of unauthorized, untried, and hence unacceptable solutions and biblical interpretations.
Unlike Luther, Erasmus was, however, modern in that he placed his hopes in a long future. He believed there was enough time for a re-education of the elite to produce a gradual ethical change; the medieval "mirrors for princes" —the political "textbooks" of that time—would have to be rewritten to suit governmental and cultural leaders of a bourgeois society. Erasmus pinned his hopes on the progress of time and the educated man, the best defender of the loftiest interests, whose innate, ineradicable striving for selfactualization is purified by God and then finds consummation in true piety.
From Erasmus' perspective Luther was impatience personified, a monk who would listen to no one, who had not learned from history and threatened the cause of piety and education by casting doubt on man's moral disa eee eee
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam position and perfectability. A thing done well cannot be done quickly, as the saying goes.
But Luther had no time to wait. There could be no thought of either a long-term educational. policy or a step-by-step subjugation of peaceimperiling barbarism. Of course he regarded the founding of schools and universities as "a thing done well"; that was one of the absolute obligations of a Christian regime in Church, state, or city, so that people could learn to THE REFORMATION IN PERIL use reason in adapting themselves to their world and would not become the pawns of the powerful. But there would never be an educational program with the means of transforming a society so as to give political shape to the longed-for kingdom of peace and justice.
What Luther saw on the horizon were the dark clouds of divine judgment gathering over a world nearing its end, a world fettered and enslaved in a thousand ways, that insisted on self-determination before God, that dared to speculate about the "meaning of history" and to speak of freedom of the will without being able to free itself from the paralyzing primeval fear of being trapped helplessly in the cage of an impenetrable world history.
Luther and Erasmus—two realities: not the Middle Ages versus the modern era, but two interpretations of man and history drawn from divergent perspectives and experiences, neither of them indisputably "obsolete" or Luther's break with Erasmus was bitterly divisive to the Evangelical camp.
If the Peasants' War was the external crisis of the Reformation, Luther's falling-out with Erasmus was its internal one. Sympathizers were faced with a choice they had never dreamt of. The preceding years had seen a wave of popular pamphlets proclaiming the rediscovery of the Holy Scriptures as the Reformation cause. Now the time had come for a liberation from the unholy
"appendices," from the "wisdom" of ecclesiastical law, which had numerous provisions to regiment Christian life and threatened to stifle it completely.
At that time Erasmus and Luther were still considered allies, champions in the common struggle against the repression of conscience, the halfknowledge of impudent monks, and the Roman exploitation of Germany through direct and indirect taxes, through crusade funds and indulgence peddling. Neither excommunication by the pope nor the emperor's ban could extinguish this sweeping protest movement. Luther's excommunication had only limited effect because the moral authority of Rome had reached its nadir all over Europe, and curial theologians were evidently not in a position to respond to the religious issues of the Reformation in their fight against Luther. The effect of the imperial ban imposed in the 1521
Edict of Worms was contrary to expectations. Instead of protecting the traditional order, it made Luther's program for the reform of Church and empire even more of a national issue and prevented the Reformation from sinking
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL into the oblivion of a local theological dispute, as had so many other late medieval renewal movements. Nor was the peasants' revolt that had struck terror in the hearts of the Germans since spring 1525 able to inhibit the Reformation, although in all centers of European power Luther was now being decried, feared, and fought as a violent revolutionary and public danger.
Erasmus provoked the great spiritual crisis, the lasting and powerful historical challenge to the Reformation when, finding the central point of Reformation theology, he exposed the appealing alliancé of Renaissance and Reformation as only a temporary coalition. He succeeded in pinning Luther down to a statement that coming centuries would read as a symbol and summary of the whole of the Reformer's theology and that was often taken as sufficient grounds for neglecting the reasons that had induced the Reformer to raise his voice. The horrible diagnosis: man is the battlefield between God and the Devil.
When God had long paled into an uncertain hypothesis and the Devil was no more than a medieval vestige and a childish memory of times past,
Luther's slap in the face of humanist progress was still remembered: for Luther, man is not the mule that, stupefied by ignorance, cannot decide between two haystacks—education could help that mule. No, the condition of man does not depend on the breadth of his education but on his existential condition as a "mule," ridden either by God or the Devil, but with no choice in the matter, no freedom of decision, no opportunity for self-determination.
This proclamation of man's total impotence on the eve of man's greatest scientific discoveries and enduring cultural achievements could only eliminate Luther as a point of spiritual orientation in the tumult of modern times.
It is true that the linguistic accessibility of his German writings gave rise to so broad and deep-rooted a Luther tradition in Germany that the Reformer could not simply be discounted in favor of the Erasmian vision of erudition.
But Luther's principal effect was as a beacon of freedom in the confessional struggle from the age of the Counter-Reformation to the late nineteenthcentury Kulturkampf; his continuing popularity did not imply agreement with the contents of his works. The experiences of the Third Reich ultimately robbed this Luther of his credibility, too. "Anti-Semitism" and "submission to the authorities'—these became the catchwords of a "new"
Luther interpretation.
The loss of heroic status led to a perceptible cooling of admiration for Luther in Germany and promoted a more critical evaluation, which discounted as medieval the view of man as a "mule." This is where the dialogue, having reached an impasse, will have to be taken up again, for it is
THE REFORMATION IN PERIL through this needle's eye that all the threads of the Reformation discovery run: justification by faith alone (sola fide), the preaching of God's Word alone
(sola scriptura), and trust in God's grace alone (sola gratia).
Luther and Fundamentalism We can encounter Luther only where he was convinced he stood and not where he approximates the temper of our time. And that, as he plainly says in the concluding remarks of his treatise against Erasmus, is in the recognition of man's powerlessness before God. Luther concedes that Erasmus more than any other opponent had realized that this, and not the indulgence controversy or purgatory, was the central question of the Christian faith. Yet to call it a central question" is already misleading; this is not a problem to be solved, since this issue in the Scriptures is crystal-clear.
In 1521 Luther had not been willing to recant before the emperor in Worms without factual refutation, but now his tone was even more strident, leaving no opportunity for a counterargument: "This is what the Scriptures teach ..
. and so do I. Here I can yield to no one." He goes on even more pointedly: "Whoever teaches otherwise denies Christ and faith." So whoever contradicts the Reformer here rejects him totally. How inconceivably bold it was of Luther to venture such an assured, conclusive judgment on a problem the Greek philosophers and scholastic theologians before him—and many others after him—had tried in vain to solve. Who has ever succeeded in overcoming the basic conflict between God's omnipotence and man's freedom without opening an even greater abyss? Luther's answer is short but not immediately clear: the testimony of the Holy Scriptures is his legitimation.
For us in the twentieth century, his answer cannot be convincing, because application of the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, the Scriptures alone, has not brought the certainty he anticipated. It has in fact been responsible for a multiplicity of explanations and interpretations that seem to render absurd any dependence on the clarity of the Scriptures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries post-Reformation Protestantism tried out many variants of "fundamentalism" to counter the trend, often declaring the letter of the Scriptures sacrosanct. But even desperate rescue missions cannot breathe new life into a motto that was once so persuasive: as God truly became incarnate in Jesus, so His spirit became inerrant truth in the Holy
LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL That this motto had fallen into disuse would be no loss from Luther's point of view. He started from a different and, in fact, contradictory principle, which was to be ignored in the Protestant longing for a "paper pope":
"God and the Scriptures are two different things, as different as Creator and creature."' This historically innovative principle forms the surprising basis of his response to Erasmus, in which we can also find a new and crucial point of departure for present-day theology. It is this principle that distinguishes
Luther from the biblicism of both his own and later eras.
IN THE early days of the Reformation the principle of the Scriptures alone (sola scriptura) was such a convincing battle cry that it must be numbered among the factors that enable us to understand how a scholastically trained monk from a university at the edge of civilization could, despite these obstacles, find such enthusiastic acceptance. 'The thesis of the sufficiency of Scripture alone had the immediate ring of truth, quite different from the two more complicated, equally explosive concepts: by grace alone—by faith alone (sola gratia—sola fide). Even untrained readers of Reformation pamphlets in areas where Evangelical preaching was not yet permitted could immediately grasp that God's Scriptures were the decisive authority, which could liberate one from the shackles of tradition.
In villages and cities, inns and market squares, peasant leaders had long been speaking of a return to the "old law." Since Luther had appeared on the scene, there was an additional demand: the old law was to be interpreted and framed according to the Word of God. And it was not only in the country that the call for the law of God found a receptive ear. In the cities, too, people were demanding a reintroduction of the old laws; freed from clerical tutelage, citizens wanted to mold their lives according to Scripture. To the leaders of the urban Reformation, who had attended the only recently founded Latin schools and had been appointed to their newly established preaching posts by a city council—not a bishop!—the discovery of the Holy
Scriptures as the sole Christian rule signified the great Evangelical turning point.
Many of the urban Reformers, from Luther's older Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt to John Calvin, a member of the second generation of the Evangelical movement, had legal training. They applied the new methods that accompanied the renaissance of jurisprudence to theology: the standard for every just judgment was the literal sense of the law; not traditions and learned interpretations, but the text alone was the final
The Geneva reformer, John Calvin. By René Boyvin LIFE BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL arbiter. Analogously, the Scriptures, not the Church Fathers or scholastic doctors, constituted the norm in matters of Christian faith. The Bible, not the pope's canon law, should judge and regulate Christian life. For these legally trained reformers the heart of the discovery of the Gospel consisted in the principle that the teachings and preaching of the Church must prove themselves by Scripture and Scripture alone.
This does not, however, apply to Martin Luther, at least not in this form.
The exclusive authority of the Holy Scriptures was not part of his Reformation discovery—a fact that gave rise to tensions in the sixteenth century and has caused misunderstanding to the present day. In his early works, which according to Luther himself belonged to his "papist" phase, he already presupposed the Scriptures to be the obvious sole source of faith. Later he explained this early insight: in 1518 he had successfully participated in the great academic disputation of his order, the Augustinian Hermits, in Heidelberg; there he had been allowed to introduce his new theology to members of the order and guests in a learned debate of thesis and criticism, question and answer.
On his way back from Heidelberg he stopped in Erfurt, where he had spent his first university and monastery years. He wanted to visit his revered teacher Jodokus Trutfetter and explain in person the program for theological and Church reform that actuated him. But in vain. He was denied access to the house; Trutfetter's servant dismissed Luther with the excuse that the professor was indisposed.
As soon as Luther reached the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, where he was staying the night, he wrote his former teacher a moving letter, pleading for understanding and reminding him that Trutfetter himself had been the one to teach his students to have faith only in the Holy Scriptures and to judge all other authors critically, as not only Augustine but even St. Paul and St. John had demanded.'
To name Trutfetter was not a tactical apology. As a student Luther had indeed been helped by Trutfetter to find this crucial key and made his professor's scriptural principle his own. In Luther's earliest known works the normative authority of the Bible is never called into question; it is put to use against speculative scholastic teachings not determined by the Scriptures and where necessary even against the Church Father and founder of his own order, Augustine. His quest did not concern the authority of the Bible, which was self-evident to him; he wanted to know how this authority could be properly expressed, how the Word of God could be ascertained among the wealth of scriptural testimony.