Luther the Reformer

The Story of the Man and His Career

James M. Kittelson, Hans H. Wiersma

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781451488883
• eBook ISBN: 9781506416861
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For nearly thirty years, James M. Kittelson's Luther the Reformer has been the standard biography of Martin Luther. Like Roland Bainton's biography of the generation before, Kittelson's volume is the one known by thousands of students, pastors, and interested readers as the biography that gave them the details of this dramatic man and his history.

The accolades were well deserved. Fair, insightful, and detailed without being overwhelming, Kittelson was able to negotiate a "middle way" between the many directions of historical research and present a more complete chronological picture of Luther than many had yet portrayed.

For this revised edition, Hans H. Wiersma has made an outstanding text even better. The research is updated, and the text is revised throughout, with an emphasis on retaining the tone and pace of the original. Additionally, the volume has an entirely new map and image program, updated bibliographies, improved timelines, and other features to enhance the reading experience.

It's a great volume, greatly improved.

2

The Genesis of the Reformer

4

The Maturing Professor

“But it will be the death of me!” This is how Luther responded when his superior, Staupitz (who was by then also his closest confidant), told him that it was time he became a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg and preacher at the Castle Church. The conversation took place as the two men were sitting under the pear tree in the monastery’s courtyard. Staupitz replied, “Are you not aware that our Lord God has much important business to conduct? For these things he needs wise and learned counselors up there too.”^[1] Luther was to stop taking himself so seriously.

Nonetheless, Staupitz did not easily have his way. The second time he proposed that Luther take his doctorate and the professorship, the twenty-nine-year-old monk replied with more than a dozen reasons why such a thing was beyond possibility. Sometime in late September 1511, or about a month after Luther’s arrival in Wittenberg, Staupitz became adamant. “My dear fellow,” he sputtered, “surely you do not wish to set yourself up as wiser than the whole congregation [of Augustinians] and the Fathers!” Staupitz was exercising his authority and very nearly ordering him to take up this new calling. Luther’s own testimony was, “I, Dr. Martin, have been called to this work, and I was compelled to become a doctor without any initiative of my own but out of pure obedience.”^[2]

An Unrelenting Conscience

Staupitz succeeded in the end. He not only had the right to give Luther orders but Luther also was indebted to him. Repeatedly, Luther had come to Staupitz to confess his sins and heal his troubled soul: “For I hoped I might find peace of conscience with fasts, prayer, and the vigils with which I miserably afflicted my body, but the more I sweated it out like this, the less peace and tranquility I knew.”^[3] In this turmoil, Luther came to his confessor so frequently to confess his doubts, misgivings, sins, and despair, that Staupitz once commanded him to go and commit a real sin.

“Pay attention,” Staupitz said. “You want to be without sin, but you don’t have any real sins anyway. Christ is the forgiveness of awful sins, like the murder of one’s parents, public vices, blasphemy, adultery, and the like. These are real sins. . . . You must not inflate your halting, artificial sins out of proportion!” But Luther’s conscience was an unrelenting monster. “I tried to live according to the rule and I used to be contrite, to confess and enumerate my sins; I often repeated my confession and zealously performed my required penance. And yet my conscience would never give me assurance, but I was always doubting and said, ‘You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’” The wise counselor probably knew how much his words meant to the troubled young monk. “If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz,” Luther once commented, “I would have sunk into hell.”^[4]

Now it was Luther’s turn to be useful to Staupitz, who was himself strained almost to the breaking point. Far too many demands were being placed on his time and he had no hope of fulfilling them all. As vicar-general of the Augustinians he was constantly negotiating with Rome and traveling from monastery to monastery throughout his territory. He was also much in demand as a preacher and teacher, so much so that he was rarely in Wittenberg.

This situation was embarrassing because Staupitz, or someone under his supervision in the Augustinian order, was obligated to give the lectures on the Bible in the theological faculty of the elector’s brand-new university. With the professorship went also the duty of teaching in the monastery and preaching at the Castle Church. It was all too much for Staupitz. For some time he had failed to complete the required lectures at the university and frequently he was unable even to be present. But here was Luther, both bright and loyal; moreover, he had completed all of the academic requirements that prepared him to receive the doctorate and become a professor. So Staupitz persisted and Luther finally agreed—even if he thought it would kill him.

The sixteenth century was an age that loved ceremony, and Staupitz had already spent an immense sum to celebrate the conferral of four other doctorates on members of the order. As a result, he had few funds left to pay for Luther’s promotion. Staupitz therefore approached Frederick the Wise, the elector-prince of Saxony, to provide the necessary funds. Frederick had funded the establishment of the University at Wittenberg in 1502. Another year passed, however, before the reluctant prince agreed to fund Luther’s doctorate. When he finally did, he made clear that Luther’s promotion to doctor of theology represented a lifelong appointment. Frederick expected his investment to last.

The Doctor’s Cap

Luther received the special license that made him a candidate for the doctorate on October 4, 1512. Five days later he traveled to Leipzig to collect the fee for his promotion. The ceremonies began on the evening of October 18 and continued the next morning at 7:00 a.m. Luther took an oath (sworn on the Bible, of course) to teach only true doctrine and to report all who promoted falsehood. Then the woolen doctor’s cap (in which he was most often pictured) was placed on his head and the silver doctor’s ring on his finger. Three days later he was formally received into the Senate of the Faculty of Theology. He began his lectures, perhaps on Genesis, the following Monday, October 25, at 7:00 a.m.

“I could use two secretaries,” Luther wrote to his friend, Lang, the prior at Erfurt. “I do almost nothing during the day but write letters. . . . I am a preacher at the monastery, a reader at meals . . . a parish preacher, director of studies, supervisor of eleven monasteries, superintendent of the fish pond at Litzkau, referee of a squabble at Torgau, lecturer on Paul, a collector of materials for a commentary on the Psalms, and then, as I said, I am overwhelmed with letters. I rarely have time for the required daily prayers and for saying mass, not to mention my own temptations with the world, the flesh, and the devil. You see how lazy I am.”^[5] Later he commented that he was often so tired at the end of a day that he would simply fall into bed and wrap himself in sheets that had not been washed for months.

Yet in the midst of these exhausting responsibilities, Luther worked a revolution in everything he had been taught. “I did not learn my theology all at once,” Luther later recalled, “but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me.”^[6] His life between 1512 and 1517 was full of distractions. Through it all he continued to read and search the Bible, the “church fathers,” and later commentaries. He prepared his lectures and went where his temptations took him. When Luther later looked back on this time in his life he explained, “I was all alone and one of those who has become proficient by writing and teaching (as Augustine wrote about himself). I was not one of those who out of nothing suddenly becomes the topmost. Such people are nothing; they have neither labored nor been tempted nor become experienced. Instead, they take one look at the Scriptures and their entire spirit is exhausted.”^[7]

In fact, Luther referred to Augustine frequently during these years. As an Augustinian and a scholar, Luther became increasingly steeped in the writings of his order’s namesake: St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, the great fourth-century church father and (with Sts. Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory) one of the four “great doctors” of the Western church. Late in life, Augustine wrote his Confessions, in which he described, among other things, his gradual intellectual development. Like Augustine, and like the mature pear tree in the monastery courtyard, Luther the professor also grew slowly to maturity.

As a professor, Luther was assigned a small room above the connecting arch in the monastery where he could prepare for his obligations to his students. His specific task was to lecture on the Bible, particularly on the Old Testament, but in consultation with his colleagues he could choose the book he would treat during any particular term. Once a professor had made this decision, he would usually request that the university printer prepare a special edition of the proposed text. These contained extra-wide margins so that he could conveniently jot down whatever it was he intended to say about each passage. Likewise, his students could make notes on what they heard in the wide margins of their copies.

These notations of both professor and students are the tracks Luther left as he painstakingly resolved his religious questions. Nothing remains of his presumed lectures on Genesis during his first year as a professor. But then the track becomes clear. There are highly revealing notes for the lectures that followed on the Psalms (1513–1515), Romans (1515–1516), Galatians (1516–1517), Hebrews (1517–1518), and once again on the Psalms (1518–1521). It is possible to see his mind at work throughout. The theology he had been taught was his starting point.

The Righteousness of God

Both the lectures and Luther’s own reminiscences reveal that he was preoccupied first and foremost with the problem of the righteousness of God. About a year before his death he wrote, “I hated that word [in Romans 1:17], ‘the righteousness of God,’ which, according to the custom and the use of all teachers, I had been taught to understand in the philosophical sense with respect to the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.”

This understanding of the righteousness of God lay at the root of his own search for holiness.

“Though I lived as a monk without reproach,” he continued, “I felt, with the most disturbed conscience imaginable, that I was a sinner before God. I did not love, indeed I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners and secretly (if not blasphemously and certainly with great grumbling).

“I was angry with God, and said, ‘As if indeed it is not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through eternal sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Ten Commandments, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel’s threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!’ Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.”^[8]

When Luther read Paul’s statement that the righteous live by faith, he concluded that he had to be righteous in order to be given faith. Luther was not agonizing and puzzling over the righteousness of God from a detached, speculative, or philosophical point of view, and he was not primarily concerned with how an unbeliever comes to a righteous God. Luther was compelled to discover how a Christian could live with a righteous God whom he could never possibly satisfy. Consequently his eyes were drawn in these early years to the word righteous and not to the word faith. He knew that God was righteous and that he, Martin, was not. How, then, could he possibly “live by faith”?

Luther began his lectures on the Psalms sometime in late 1513 with the same awe and humility that had overcome him at the thought of becoming a professor. “I sense with certainty,” he told his students, “the weight of this task upon my neck, which for a long time, all in vain, I was reluctant to undertake and to which I agreed only when compelled to do so on orders. And I simply confess that to this day I cannot understand some of the Psalms, and unless, as I hope, the Lord will enlighten me through your talents, I cannot interpret them.”^[9]

Such a heightened sense of responsibility reduces many beginning professors to mere repetition of what they have been taught. But Luther responded with great care, reading the most recent commentaries by the best scholars and taking up the study of Greek and Hebrew. Such effort would culminate in an utterly new understanding of the righteousness of God and of the Scriptures themselves. Luther’s progress, however, came one scripture passage at a time.

When Luther arrived at Psalm 72, he explained to his students, “[T]his is what is called the judgment of God: like the righteousness or strength or wisdom of God, it is that with which we are wise, just, and humble, or by which we are judged.”^[10]

Something revolutionary was happening. He had told them that the righteousness of God had two different meanings, but he had only been taught the second one: God’s righteousness was God’s possession and the quality by which he found sinners wanting. But Luther’s first and longer explanation contradicted this traditional teaching. There he spoke of righteous judgment as something that God used to bestow qualities (such as wisdom, justice, and humility) upon individuals. This insight ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to Second Edition
• Chronological Table
• The Formation of the Young Man
• The Genesis of the Reformer
• An Outlaw’s Work
• No Other Gospel
• The Later Years
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Image Gallery