Introduction

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. ROMANS 1:17

Few people have changed the world as much as Martin Luther, and few have been so often claimed, so often blamed, and so seldom read. He was a German friar and professor of the Bible who set out, in the autumn of 1517, to start an academic argument about indulgences, and ended by dividing the Western church. Statues of him stand in German squares. Churches around the world bear his name. Historians argue over what he caused and what he did not. And yet the heart of what he taught is not complicated at all. It is the discovery of a frightened man that God is not against him but for him, and that the righteousness he could never manufacture had been given to him as a gift.

He was born in 1483 at Eisleben in Saxony, the son of a miner who had worked his way up into the copper trade and wanted his clever boy to be a lawyer. He became instead an Augustinian friar, a priest, a doctor of theology and a lecturer on the Psalms and the letters of Paul at the small new university of Wittenberg. From that lecture-room came the Reformation. He died in 1546, in the town where he was born, having translated the Bible into German, written hymns that are still sung, taught a nation to pray its catechism, married a runaway nun, raised a family and preached some thousands of sermons.

Why he still matters

Luther matters because he asked the question every awakened conscience asks — how can I stand before a holy God? — and he refused every answer but the one Scripture gives. He had tried the other answers. He had fasted, confessed, watched and prayed as few monks did, and they had left him more afraid than before. When at last he saw in Paul that the righteousness of God is not only the justice by which God judges but the gift by which He justifies, he said that it was as if the gates of heaven had opened. Every Protestant church, and a great deal of modern Catholic teaching too, has had to reckon with that moment.

He matters also because he gave the gospel back to ordinary people. He believed the ploughboy and the housewife should hear God speak in their own tongue, pray in their own words, sing in their own church, and serve God in their own kitchen and field without apology. The German Bible, the congregational hymn, the household catechism and the dignity of daily work are all, in part, his gifts.

The one thread

If there is one thread that runs through everything Luther taught, it is two small words: for you. The gospel is not simply the story of what Christ did; it is the announcement that He did it for me. Luther makes the point again and again in his sermons. Preaching on the angel’s message to the shepherds, he asks:

“Of what benefit would it be to me if Christ had been born a thousand times … if I were never to hear that he was born for me and was to be my very own?”

That is the whole of Luther in a sentence. Faith is not agreeing that the history is true, for the devils do that. Faith is laying hold of Christ as mine: His righteousness mine, His death mine, His life mine. Out of that grows everything else — the joy, the freedom, the love of neighbour, the courage in death.

Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. ISAIAH 9:6

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life. The twenty chapters that follow each take one of his key teachings, beginning where he began, with the righteousness of God in Romans, and ending where every life ends, with his comfort for the dying. Between them come faith alone, the theology of the cross, law and gospel, the freedom of a Christian, the bondage of the will, the Word, the priesthood of all believers, vocation, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, prayer, the catechism, spiritual struggle, music, marriage, the two kingdoms, the devil, and the believer who is righteous and a sinner at once.

Ochorus hosts six of Luther’s sermons, in an older English translation: on the birth of Jesus, on the appearing of the grace of God, on Christ’s sufferings, on His resurrection, on the office of the Holy Spirit, and on Paul’s praise of love. Wherever Luther is quoted in these pages, it is from those sermons. His great treatises — The Freedom of a Christian, The Bondage of the Will, the catechisms, the lectures on Galatians and the rest — are described in the present author’s own words, and a guide to them is given at the end.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Luther would have approved. He thought theology that did not end in prayer and comfort was not worth the ink, and he wrote his little book on prayer for his barber.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and Luther would have mocked one. He knew himself to be a sinner, and he said so loudly. But his readers must go further than he did, because some of his sins were public, written and deadly.

Three things must be named plainly at the outset. First, and gravest, in his last years he wrote against the Jews with a hatred that cannot be excused. In On the Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543, he urged that synagogues be burned, Jewish homes destroyed and Jewish teachers silenced. Twenty years earlier he had written kindly of them, hoping they would come to Christ; when they did not, he turned savage. Those pages were revived and used by the Nazis in the twentieth century, and many Lutheran churches have since formally repudiated them. No appreciation of Luther is honest that passes over this. Second, in the Peasants’ War of 1525 he urged the princes to strike down the rebels without mercy, in language that still shocks. Third, his polemic against opponents — popes, fellow Reformers, Anabaptists — was often coarse, abusive and unjust, and it helped to harden divisions that have lasted five centuries.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

None of this cancels what he saw in Romans. But it is a warning, and Luther’s own teaching explains it: a man can be justified by faith and still be a sinner, and a great teacher of grace can be terribly wrong. We read him, then, as he told us to read everyone — under the Word of God, holding fast what agrees with it and letting go what does not. What agrees with it, on grace, faith, the cross and the comfort of the gospel, is some of the richest treasure the church possesses.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly: do I believe that Christ did what He did for me, by name? Write the words “for me” beside a verse such as Galatians 2:20 and pray over it.

2. Name the answers you have tried, other than Christ, to the question of how you can stand before God. Bring them to Him and lay them down.

3. If you know Luther only as a statue or a slogan, resolve to read one of his sermons in the Ochorus library this week.

4. Consider how you speak of those you disagree with. Luther’s worst sins began with his tongue and his pen. Ask God to guard yours.

5. Set aside a regular time to read one chapter of this book slowly, and to pray at the end of it.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You have not waited for me to become righteous before You would love me; You have given me the righteousness of Your Son as a gift.

Teach me to hear the gospel as good news for me, and not only as a story about others.

Keep me honest about the sins of those I admire, and more honest still about my own.

And as I read of Your servant Martin, let me find not him but You, the God who justifies the ungodly, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.