The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture

Iain Provan

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481307499
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's castle church. Luther's seemingly inconsequential act ultimately launched the Reformation, a movement that forevertransformed both the Church and Western culture. The repositioning of the Bible as beginning, middle, and end of Christian faith was crucial to the Reformation. Two words alone captured this emphasis on the Bible's divine inspiration, its abiding authority, and its clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency: sola scriptura. In the five centuries since the Reformation, the confidence Luther and the Reformers placed in the Bible has slowly eroded. Enlightened modernity came to treat the Bible like any other text, subjecting it to a near endless array of historical-critical methods derived from the sciences and philosophy. The result is that in many quarters of Protestantism today the Bible as word has ceased to be the Word. In The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, Iain Provan aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible by recovering a Reformation-like reading strategy. To accomplish these aims Provan first acknowledges the value in the Church's precritical appropriation of the Bible and, then, in a chastened use of modern and postmodern critical methods. But Provan resolutely returns to the Reformers' affirmation of the centrality of the literal sense of the text, in the Bible's original languages, for a right-minded biblical interpretation. In the end the volume shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century that does not simply replicate the Protestant hermeneutics of the sixteenth, but stands in fundamental continuity with them. Such lavish attention to, and importance placed upon, a seriously literal interpretation of Scripture is appropriate to the Christian confession of the word as Word—the one God's Word for the one world.

1

Introduction

O Little Town of . . . Wittenberg

. . . this stinking hole, this barbaric underworld, this heretical new Rome.

—Johannes Cochlaeus1

Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg. . . .

—Martin Luther2

This is a book about biblical interpretation, or “hermeneutics”—but we cannot begin there. If we are to understand the questions that lie at its heart, we must necessarily begin with some European history.

The town of Wittenberg in what is now northeastern Germany has an interesting past, both real and imagined.3 Founded in the twelfth century AD, it soon became the residence of the Ascanian dynasty under Albrecht II (1250–1298), the founder of the duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg. By the time that this dynasty had run its course in the early fifteenth century, the town had become a strong fortress, owning almost all of the surrounding land and most of the electoral privileges (e.g., the right to mint coins). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, now the capital of the Wettin King Frederick III “the Wise” (1463–1525), Wittenberg gained a new castle complete with a castle church, a university, and (consequently) more and more housing for the accommodation of faculty and students. The university, founded at Frederick’s request in 1502 by Johann von Staupitz, who became the first dean of the theological faculty and also assumed a professorship in Bible there (1502/3–1512), was principally maintained from income deriving from the castle church, with which it was closely associated. This church still stands in Wittenberg, in some respects not looking very different in its exterior now than it did in the sixteenth century, albeit that its wooden door, destroyed by fire in 1760, was replaced in 1858 with a bronze one, and its current roof and spire are differently (and controversially) constructed.4 At the time of writing, it is being thoroughly renovated, together with the castle itself, in preparation for the five-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the events that I shall shortly describe. Much of the town of Wittenberg has changed to a greater extent, as a result of developments both internal and external. During the Seven Years’ War in the eighteenth century, Wittenberg was bombarded by the Austrian army, and during Napoleon’s campaigns in the nineteenth, it was occupied by the French. In the twentieth, mercifully, it escaped destruction during the Second World War, unlike many other historic German cities, although it was again occupied in the aftermath of war—this time by the Russians. It became part of East Germany in 1949, and of a reunited Germany in 1990.5

Wittenberg remains an interesting town. Yet not even nowadays does it strike the visitor as a likely venue for the beginning of a revolution. Back in the sixteenth century AD, when the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther launched his own kind of revolution there, the absurdity of the idea was already apparent to some. One of Luther’s opponents, Duke George of Saxony (1471–1531), once proclaimed that it was intolerable that “a single monk, out of such a hole, should undertake a reformation.”6 Luther himself was not much more complimentary about the “hole,” at least on his bad days. He could refer to it as “a butcher’s yard” (i.e., where the animal parts not for sale were located), found “on the far border of civilization.”7 It is this reference that Heinrich Böhmer picks up in the title of the sixth chapter of his book Road to Reformation (1946) as he begins to describe Wittenberg—this town “on the outskirts of civilization”8—using the words of Luther’s arch-enemy Johannes Cochlaeus (writing in 1524):

It is a poor, wretched, filthy town, hardly worth a red cent in comparison with Prague. Indeed, it is not worthy of being called a town in Germany. It is a town with an unhealthy and disagreeable climate, without vineyards, orchards, or fruit-bearing trees, with an atmosphere like that of a beer-cellar, altogether uncouth and made unpleasant by smoke and frost. What would Wittenberg be if it were not for the castle, the chapter house, and the university? Without these one would see nothing but Lutheran—that is to say, filthy—houses, dirty streets, and all the roads, paths, and alleys filled with slop. One would find a barbarous people which trades only in beer and catchpenny merchandise. Its market is not peopled. Its town has no citizenry. The people wear small-town clothing, and there is great want and poverty among the inhabitants.9

Cochlaeus was keen, Böhmer tells us, “to have this ‘stinking hole, this barbaric underworld, this heretical new Rome’ wiped from the face of the earth” (see the first epigraph to the present chapter). It was the Nazareth of medieval Germany, out of which no good thing could come (John 1:46).

Martin Luther in Wittenberg

Yet it was from Erfurt to Wittenberg that the troubled young Augustinian monk and priest Martin Luther was transferred late in 1511 by his longtime superior and confessor von Staupitz, succeeding him in 1512 as a professor in Bible in the university.10 And it was this same Martin Luther who did, in fact, launch a revolution only a few years later that shook the very foundations of medieval Europe, turning Nazareth (in the eyes of many) into more of a Bethlehem. It began on October 31, 1517, but the immediate events that provoked it have deeper roots going back to March 31, 1515, when Pope Leo X granted a “plenary [complete] indulgence . . . which was intended to finance the building of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.”11 Indulgences in this period were designed to distribute to those who received them the excess “merit” accumulated by Christ and the saints, such that they received forgiveness for their sins. By Luther’s time, they had become a major instrument for financing the Church, and at the same time a problem for rulers who saw money flowing out of their territories that they would have preferred to retain. In 1514 the pope had nevertheless cleverly negotiated the right to sell his plenary indulgence in the Church provinces of Mainz and Madgeburg, whose (joint) archbishop was Albrecht of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern—a man financially beholden to Rome because of the way in which he had risen to power. So it was that, at the beginning of 1517, the selling of plenary indulgence letters finally took off in these provinces, under the supervision, in Magdeburg, of a Dominican monk from Leipzig, Johann Tetzel. Soon the people of Wittenberg began to travel to the province of Magdeburg in order to gain access to this important commodity, and this had an immediate impact on pastoral care in Wittenberg—since when they returned, they naturally expected absolution from their priests without repentance or the amending of their lives. It was Luther’s reflections on these events during the spring and summer of 1517 that ultimately spurred him into fateful action.

On October 31, Luther sent a letter to Archbishop Albrecht expressing concern about the papal indulgence and the manner in which it was being administered; he also wrote to at least one other bishop, and possibly to more. Along with the letter to Albrecht he enclosed his famous ninety-five theses. Either on the same day, or more likely a few weeks later,12 he left his residence in the Augustinian Monastery (also called the Black Monastery) at the east end of Wittenberg, walked up to the door of the castle church, and nailed his theses to it. In the popular imagination, this action has taken on overtones of a defiant and loud “statement,” the hammer-wielding Luther pounding into the sturdy door nails that would ultimately pierce the heart of the bishop of Rome himself. More likely we should think of it as akin to posting an advertisement for an upcoming seminar in the town square: “The door of the Schlosskirche . . . , which lay conveniently between the university library and the law lecture rooms, was the logical site for the university bulletin board.”13 The ninety-five theses are in reality as much an invitation as they are a statement, as their introduction makes clear. Their public discussion will take place

under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Lutther [sic], Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter.14

At the heart of the ninety-five theses, of course, lies concern about “papal indulgences” (thesis 27), by means of which “inestimable gift” (some claimed) “man is reconciled to [God]” (thesis 33). Luther’s proposal, to the contrary, is that “those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers” (thesis 32); that “they who teach that contrition is not necessary on the part of those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessional privileges preach unchristian doctrine” (thesis 35); and that “any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters” (thesis 36). Criticism of the pope himself is never far below the surface, even if it is typically represented as deriving not from Luther, but from others. In thesis 81, for example, we read: “This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult even for learned men to rescue the reverence which is due the pope from slander or from the shrewd questions of the laity.” The “laity’s” criticism is then described in thesis 82: “Such as: Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and the dire need of the souls that are there if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial.” At the same time, Luther is careful to distinguish the pope’s real intentions from the practices actually occurring in Germany; “if, therefore, indulgences were preached according to the spirit and intention of the pope,” he writes in thesis 91, “all these doubts [the ones Luther has identified in the document] would be readily resolved. Indeed, they would not exist.” This careful avoidance of attacks on the pope characterizes Luther’s writings in the immediately succeeding period as well, even as he begins to question in a more serious manner notions such as papal infallibility.

The ninety-five theses quickly became known throughout Europe. Translated from Latin into German by the end of 1517, and then printed and distributed widely, almost immediately they were being read throughout Germany, and within a few months they had reached the rest of Europe; they were sent by Erasmus of Rotterdam to Thomas More in England, for example, on March 5, 1518.15 By the summer of that same year, Luther’s thinking about the forgiveness of sin had further developed—forgiveness is promised to the one who believes in God’s Word—and radical implications had begun to emerge for the Church’s entire penitential system (and not only with respect to indulgences).16 By this point Luther was in serious trouble with Rome, and in October he arrived in Augsburg in southern Germany to meet with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan. The two main points at issue in their various encounters were “the certainty of salvation as the heart of Luther’s doctrine of justification and the teaching of the treasure of the church as the foundation for the papal power of indulgences.”17 Cajetan informed Luther that he “should return to the heart of the church, retract his errors, and in the future refrain from them and from everything else which could disturb the church.”18 Luther refused to do so, eventually fleeing in the night under threat of arrest and deportation to Rome. For the next twenty-eight years until his death in Eisleben on February 18, 1546, he continued to debate with opponents, to teach, and to write tracts in pursuit of his vision of a reformed Church. By the time of his death, not only had Luther been excommunicated by Pope Leo X for refusing to recant his mistaken views,19 but also Western Christendom was divided between Protestant and Roman Catholic camps.20

The Reformation, Authority, and Biblical Interpretation

At the heart of this important story lie questions of authority and—intrinsically connected to these—biblical interpretation. These questions are nicely brought out in Luther’s response to enquiries about his writings at the Diet of Worms in 1521.21 Asked whether he stood by everything he had written, he responded (while apologizing for his harsh tone in dealing with some individual opponents):

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.22

Luther takes his stand on “the testimony of the Scriptures” as he understands them, and it matters not that the bishop of Rome or any other bishop considers his position untenable, for they themselves are only fallible readers. This same theme comes out clearly in Luther’s earlier encounter in a public forum with the theologian John Eck (Leipzig, 1519), in the course of which Luther explicitly asserts that Matthew 16:18 (which begins “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”)23 does not give the pope the exclusive right to interpret Scripture and then simply tell other Christians what it says. The issues at stake are clarified in the response of the presiding officer at Worms to Luther’s refusal to recant:

Martin, in the last resort you retreat and take refuge to the place where all heretics are wont to resort and have recourse. Of course, you say that you are prepared . . . to accept instruction from the Holy Scriptures from anyone at all. . . . Is it not the case that all the heretics have always behaved in the same manner? Is it not the case that you, just as they did, want Holy Scripture to be understood by your whim and your own ideas? . . . Many of the ideas you introduce are heresies of the Beghards, the Waldenses, the Poor Men of Lyons, of Wycliffe and Huss, and of others long since...