Luther’s Biblical Revolution
Imagine reading St. Paul’s anguished letter to the Galatians and crying out, “This is my voice!” And then imagine hearing St. Paul speak of the Judaizers and concluding in dismay, “Paul’s arch enemy has almost won. The Apostle’s enemy is enthroned, and I must stop it!”. Such was the conviction, nay, worldview of Martin Luther. Luther might have begun with a humbler, simpler mission, but he could not but gradually identify his plight with the Apostle to the Gentiles. What is truly astounding is that half of Europe agreed with Luther’s assessment, telling us that they too looked upon the theological situation on the ground, searched deeply into the New Testament (especially St. Paul), immersed their medieval minds in it, and came to the substantially same interpretation as Luther. According to historian and linguist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “In the ‘Fatherland’ of the Reformation, Protestantism was victorious only so long as it insisted on remaining in the shade of Luther’s personal experience.”1 So, unless we can sketch the psychological frame of Luther’s world and life view, we will not be able to understand Luther or his reformation as he and his time understood and lived it.
“And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man.”2 Christ, you presume? No, this flame and beacon, says Thomas Carlyle, was Martin Luther.
Carlyle’s wonder and awe at Martin Luther is a testament to the hold Luther held not just over the German soul in the 16th century, but over the hearts of Protestant nations centuries after his death—how could a single man so reshape a nation, inspire a civilization, and upend the Roman church? Undoubtedly, there are many answers to this question: Luther’s Prince Elector. The Printing Press. The Holy Spirit. The Devil. The truth of the Gospel. The cleverness of his deception. Undoubtedly, there’s truth in some of those, but I believe the efficient cause for how Luther persuaded Germany and dislodged the Roman Church was his figural reading of Scripture.
Martin Luther was one who knew dedication and piety better than most, even in pious northern Germany. His utter faith in the working of God in creation (his oath to St. Anne at the Thunderstorm), and his deep scrupulosity over his sin, revealed not decrepit or cynical manipulation of religion but a profoundly literal faith in and loyalty to Scripture. Luther was the zenith of the medieval worldview. He so fully believed in symbolism that he became the symbol. He so fully believed in apostolic succession that he took on the apostle’s mind. His faith in the word as sign led him to distribute the sign and enfigurate the world. Lecturing on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews in consecutive years, Luther slowly habituated his mind to the mind of St. Paul, and imitated him as he imitated Christ.3
Before going further, an explanation should be given of what figural reading is. In Ephraim Radner’s usage, figural reading
Is but the practiced version of that conviction of Scripture’s power to provide and reveal the wholeness of God’s world and history, and to absorb and include all aspects of actual life within the formative power of God’s own life, most clearly given in Jesus Christ.4
It is the act of the experienced, prayerful, devout reader of Scripture overlaying the Bible onto his own mind so that his perception and the Bible’s perception become one, or as close to one, with the way that God himself reads creation. “Let the same mind be in you that was even in Christ Jesus.”5 Luther, when he took on the mind of St. Paul, was committing to that very same kind of figural reading.
After recounting the entire history of Israel and the nations in order to vindicate the name of God, St. Paul declares in praise, “For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counselor? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”6 Christ, a man, sits at the center of history as the exposition of the Divine Mind, the speech of the Father. The Son lived out human history in miniature as Israel, and now rules all the earth and conforms it to his will.7 When Christians “hear (Holy Scriptures), read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,” they are transformed by “the word of his power” into his image and likeness.8 What David Mason Barr says of Tyndale is even more true of his intellectual mentor, Martin Luther:
Tyndale’s interpretive habits thus did operate as a continuation of certain medieval interpretive postures, but he set into play new impulses that would prove to be durable and formative, notably the moral and social intentions of inundating the nation with Scripture.9
This should be amended only to note the preference Luther gave for the New Testament. Indeed, Luther was even less skeptical than Tyndale of the other quadrigal senses of Scripture, and he himself regularly used “medieval” allegory in his exegesis, even if he denounced excess.10
Men and institutions can and do take on the mind of Christ (unevenly and refracted), often through the example of some aspect or character of Scripture. The Episcopacy of Rome with St. Peter. The Holy Roman Emperor with St. Paul. The English Monarch with King David. Edward VI with King Josiah. Countless reformers with Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Maccabees. St. Paul himself suggested he did this with Phineas the Priest, and according to the scholarly consensus, later authors wrote epistles in the names of John, Peter, Paul, and Jude, all channeling their minds and work through the lens of a specific author and example of the faith. This practice has a long history within Christendom: Pseudo-Dionysius as a new Dionysius the Areopagite, John Donne as a new St. Augustine, Petrarch as a new Cicero, Napoleon as a new Alexander, and so forth. This application of figural reading by taking on resonances of a particular figure with little blood or geographic relation should be compared to the notion of mimesis. Philosopher René Girard argued that mimesis was the means by which mankind learned its appetites.
Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity…truly to desire, we must have recourse to people around us we have to borrow their desires. [But] It is not only desire one borrows from those whom one takes for models; it is a mass of behaviors, attitudes, things learned, prejudices, preferences, etc.11
Whether or not memesis is actually as inevitable as Girard claims, the pattern he recognizes is everywhere, and was a normative aspect of education within the early 16th century. Melancthon argues at length that a prerequisite to a learned culture is that its scholars, statesmen, pastors, and so forth must be rhetorically trained in the Scriptures, learning the ins and outs of its speech.12 In the words of classicist Alex Petkas,
[L]anguage facilitates mimesis. Indeed, it is the most powerful vector of mimesis, for language structures consciousness. A Renaissance man like Machiavelli wished to conform his entire person—his mind most of all—to the greatness he found trapped in the pages of ancient books.13
What separates mimesis from figural reading is that figural reading is only possible if Christ is the organizing principle of all things. Figural reading is only possible after someone has found themself in Christ, conferenced with his Scripture, and then expressed that Christlikeness through the example of characters found in Christ’s narrative of history, Holy Scripture.
So when we read history, we should expect to find echoes of our Scripture reading, both because they share the same Creator and Author, and because the actors of the former have taken an active role to conform themselves to the latter. Reading Scripture and interpreting history are thus inseparable subjects: “But to apprehend/The point of intersection of the timeless/With time, is an occupation for the saint.”14 The Christian, flipping between the timeless Christ and the time-bound world, thus finds in each means of reading and more fully understanding the other. The analogia entis thus allows the Christian to find in history an appropriate conversation partner to understand the Divine. In the words of Dr. Matthew Albanese,
The Bible views all things as no less than particulars, but most fundamentally, it speaks of creation as words and speech…In Psalm 19 the ‘all things’ that constitute creation are at base and most fundamentally speech and words: conversation from God and about God, story and poetry and song. The world is God’s speech act. Creation is God’s own speech, which also speaks about him. It is speech from God and speech through God and speech to God and speech in God. Creation is God’s speaking speech.15
It is because of God’s speech, “the fullness of God’s glory,” that we can rightly understand individuals such as Martin Luther as a fleeting fulfilment of Christ, as a fixed point within history who is in Carlyle’s words, a “Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world.”
So because Jesus Christ orders all of creation, we images of God can therefore reflect him, walk with him, imitate him, yea, be after his own heart.16 So the obvious discontinuities between a 16th-century Saxon professor and a first-century Benjaminite missionary ought not obscure the clear ways Luther intended to echo St. Paul and the ways he actually did imitate the man. Luther saw himself as St. Paul to the extent that Biblical theologian Richard Gaffin can lament, “In its basic dimensions, the Protestant Reformation may be seen as a rediscovery of Paul. Surely such a rediscovery was in large measure what Luther felt himself doing…It might be said that, if anything, Luther was too gripped by Paul.”17 As mentioned earlier, Luther did not merely rediscover Paul, though; he lived him out, becoming the evangel, vindicating St. Paul by his very existence.
Each of his occasional writings and sermons was modeled on the apostle to the Gentiles. For Luther, the enemy of St. Paul in each epistle was the Judaizers, the legalists, the Pharisees. And like his apostolic father, Martin Luther responded to these various threats in all corners of the church through occasional letters (to author a systematic text would be to reject the approach of his spiritual father).
The threat for St. Paul was never in an overly totalizing state or civil authority, but in false teachers who enslaved the soul.18 The emperor was to be feared and honored as the sword of God’s justice, someone to appeal to above and beyond religious courts (just as St. Paul did).19 The Temple system held nothing for the Christian.20 The Judaizers, those profiting from spiritual slavery and works-based salvation, were the ones who would rebel against the emperor and be sacked.21 The wall of separation had come down.22 The Gentiles–the Germans–were free.23 A propitiation had been made. St. Paul therefore became a Gentile to the Gentiles, forsaking his fellow Jews according to the flesh in order to save some. So too was Luther rejected by those who demanded greater adherence to “the law” of Rome.
The despair, the fear, the anguish, the crassness, the hyperbole, and the hatred of the circumcision party (the Roman Church and sometimes the Jewish religion)–all of Luther’s soul is laid bare in Galatians. And all of Luther’s hope is found in Romans. Faith alone, the soul standing before God alone, is the solvent to man’s sinful condition. “Fayth is a lyvely thinge / myghty in workinge / valiaunte and stronge / evyr doynge / evyr frutefull / so that it is vnpossible / that he which is endued there with / shulde not worke all ways good workes with oute ceasing.”24 This faith is self-propelling and evangelistic, and needs no contingency or threat of hellfire beyond itself. So, in the light of this free grace does Luther try to make sense of Romans 10 and 11 regarding the Jewish people. That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) is an outflow of his belief that the Jews would be reunited to the church in a short while, in a manner not unlike St. Paul, who also compelled the Christians to preach to the Jews and not to have pride over them.25
Unlike Rome yet like his St. Paul in I Corinthians, Luther is widely indifferent in his preface on the German Mass to how worship is conducted. He wishes not to bind the conscience, but to put forth things profitable. In all matters, good order is essential.26 Throughout the 1520s (and beyond, though the 1520s really is the most impactful decade of Luther’s life on Germany), Luther views himself as a Paul, on the run from his foes, protected by the emperor, writing polemics against his enemies, but primarily responding to and engaging in teaching and preaching, the apostolic functions.
Is there a more powerful character with more Spirit that can be imitated not just in action, but in psychology and conflict style than the Apostle Paul? And did anyone take so literally “imitate me as I imitate Christ” as Dr. Luther? Every generation of Christian sees themselves playing out some part of the Bible’s story. But almost never does someone find such a one-to-one connection with such might and force as St. Paul. He was stoned, shipwrecked, despised, yet ever pressing on because of his divine apostolic message, which could be denied by none. Luther turned his back on his own clerics and even his own empire, and embraced the Pauline mission, rejecting the works righteousness he saw in Rome, and becoming all things to all men, an apostle to the Gentiles.
