The Word Alone

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. ISAIAH 40:8

When Luther came back from the Wartburg to Wittenberg in March 1522, the town was in turmoil. In his absence, zealous reformers had smashed images, forced changes in worship and frightened the weak. Luther, still an outlaw, preached eight sermons on eight days, and calmed the city. In one of them he said something that goes to the root of his whole method. He had opposed indulgences and the papacy, he said, but never with force. He had simply taught, preached and written God’s Word, and otherwise done nothing. And while he slept, or sat drinking Wittenberg beer with his friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word had done it all.

The power is in the Word

That was not false modesty. Luther genuinely believed that the Word of God is alive and does its own work. The preacher’s task is not to manipulate, compel or impress, but to speak what God has spoken and let it go to work. In his Easter sermon on the resurrection he describes the Word’s power in the believing heart as strong enough to conquer death, the devil and sin, and then adds one of his most striking lines: “So mighty is the Word that God himself would sooner be vanquished than that his Word should be conquered.”

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. ISAIAH 55:11

This is why he gave his life to preaching, lecturing and translating. It is why he wanted every German to have the Bible in German. And it is why he could be so calm, in some moods, about the future of the Reformation. It was not his cause. It was the Word’s.

Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? JEREMIAH 23:29

Scripture alone

In the debates with Rome, this confidence took the form of a principle: Scripture alone is the final authority for faith. Popes, councils and church fathers were to be honoured, but they could err, and had erred; only Scripture could not. That was what Luther said at Worms. His conscience, he said, was captive to the Word of God, and unless he could be shown from Scripture and plain reason that he was wrong, he could not recant.

His Christmas sermon on the birth of Jesus has a beautiful picture of this. The angel told the shepherds that the sign would be a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. Luther reads the swaddling clothes as the Scriptures:

“The clothes are nothing else than the holy Scriptures, in which the Christian truth lies wrapped, in which the faith is described.”

And a little later, he draws the conclusion: “for there is no other testimony on earth concerning Christian truth than the holy Scriptures.” We find Christ where God has wrapped Him — in the Bible, and nowhere else so surely.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. LUKE 2:12

Christ the centre

For Luther, Scripture is not a collection of rules or proof texts. It is a book about Christ. The Old Testament, he said, is the cradle in which Christ lies; the New Testament opens it and shows Him to us. He found Christ in the promises to Abraham, in the sacrifices, in the Psalms, in the prophets. And he gave a famous test for judging the books of the Bible: whether they preach and promote Christ.

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. LUKE 24:27

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. JOHN 5:39

This Christ-centred reading kept Luther from dry literalism and from endless allegory. When he read the Bible, he was always asking where the gospel was, where the promise was, where Christ was.

The Word heard

Luther also insisted that the Word is first of all a spoken word, a word proclaimed and heard. Faith, Paul says, comes by hearing. The church, Luther said, is not a pen-house but a mouth-house: God’s Word is meant to be preached aloud, into ears, so that it can reach hearts. His sermon on the appearing of grace says that Christ is not placed in your hand or your bosom, but offered to your heart through your ears, in the Word.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. ROMANS 10:17

The same sermon adds that the Word has two uses, taken from the builders of Jerusalem in Nehemiah who worked with one hand and held a sword in the other. We are, Luther says, “to make a twofold use of the Word of God: as both bread and weapon; for feeding and for resisting; in peace and in war.” It feeds the soul, and it defends the soul against the devil and error.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword. HEBREWS 4:12

Honest cautions

Three cautions are needed. First, Scripture alone did not mean, for Luther, Scripture read alone. He read the Bible with Augustine and Bernard at his elbow, he kept the ancient creeds, and he fought hard against those who claimed private revelations of the Spirit apart from the written Word. The principle has sometimes been turned into an excuse for every individual to make his own Bible. Luther would have been horrified.

Second, Luther’s test of whether a book promotes Christ led him to rank some books of the New Testament below others. He placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation together at the end of his New Testament and wrote cautious prefaces to them. The church has not followed him in this, and rightly. The canon is God’s gift to us, not ours to rearrange by our own taste.

Third, his readings of the Old Testament were sometimes more ingenious than sound, as in the same Christmas sermon where the coarse outer swaddling cloth becomes the law and the linen inner cloth the prophets. The point he makes is true; the method is not one to copy.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Do you believe that God’s Word has power in itself? Choose one passage this week and simply read it aloud to someone, trusting it to do its work.

2. When you read the Bible, ask Luther’s question each time: where is Christ here, and where is the promise?

3. Take hearing seriously. Sit under the preaching of the Word this Sunday as if God were speaking to you, because He is.

4. Use the Word as a weapon: learn one verse by heart to answer a temptation you often face.

5. Read the Bible with the wider church — the creeds, a trustworthy commentary, older Christians — rather than alone.

A PRAYER

Lord God, Your word stands for ever, and it does not return to You empty.

Thank You for wrapping Christ in the Scriptures, and for giving them to us in our own tongue.

Make me a humble hearer of Your Word, and let it be bread to feed me and a sword to defend me.

Keep my conscience captive to what You have said, and show me Christ on every page. Amen.