Magyar Egyház, 2001 (80. évfolyam, 1-3. szám)
2001 / 2. szám
4. oldal MAGYAR EGYHÁZ LUTHER AND THE GOSPEL On October 31, 1517, Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Chapel to challenge some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. With that, the Protestant Reformation was born. That is, it became visible. The truth is, however, that its birth pangs had already been born, in relative silence and for some time in the soul of Martin Luther himself. The journey to the castle was marked by a series of spiritual struggles within the man. He wanted to please God whatever the cost and worked to be found worthy on the day of judgement. By acts of penitence, he tried to achieve reconciliation with God. Yet, he did not find peace of soul. Even his scholastic Bible study gave him no rest. In 1507, Luther was consecrated into the Roman Catholic priesthood. Nine years later, he became a doctor of theology and professor at Wittenberg and took the solemn vow: “I swear to defend the gospel truth with all my might.” He kept this vow till the end of his life. It was from the Bible that Luther sought and received light and insight, although the light came only gradually over the years in a series of discoveries. Called to teach theology, Luther began an exegetical study of some books in the Old Testament and then of the New Testament. His major concern was to find God’s will and feed His flock in Wittenberg. It soon became clear to him that salvation could not be earned by penitence or by doing good. He saw God as a stern judge who demanded impossibilities from him. In the works of Augustine, he read that God had preordained only a small number for eternal salvation. The rest, he learned, were doomed by God’s predestinating decree. Luther feared that he belonged to the doomed. As his search for a true knowledge of God progressed, he began to look more to Scripture and less to the church fathers. Luther realized that the theology of his church had in effect disrupted the principle of Sola Scriptura as it accepted the church and the Pope as the final interpreters of the Bible. He saw that if any extra-biblical authority has the final word about God’s Word, then the Bible can no longer be seen as self-explanatory. Luther also perceived that the spirit of the apostolic church and the simplicity of the gospel had been distorted through years of traditional teaching. The gospel had been lost in an increasingly complicated system of merits, good works, sacraments, and penances so that during the Middle Ages the church was teaching that outside it there could be no salvation. He saw that the priesthood itself could not bestow the sacramental grace of salvation, as if the ecclesiastical hierarchy had acquired a monopoly on divine grace. He saw that the personal certainty of salvation had been lost. Luther’s crisis of conscience Luther himself struggled to find personal assurance of salvation, even as he resisted the authoritarian claims of his ecclesiastical superiors. He saw a fundamental difference between the need for Christian freedom of conscience and the dictatorial behavior of the church hierarchy. When Luther started to study the Psalms in preparation for his lectures, his primary interest was not theoretical but practical. He was searching for an experiental theology, for a saving knowledge of God. His attitude was to seek God’s truth rather than to defend tradition. One of his main stumbling blocks was that he was not able to understand the meaning of the biblical term “the righteousness of God.” His Latin Bible had the phrase justitia Dei. The term “justitia” was the common word for retributive justice or punishment, as the scholastic theologians taught. In other words, in understanding the word that way, he ended up viewing God as a stern judge. Because Luther understood the “righteousness of God” as His punishing righteousness, he was unable to explain why David could pray in Psalm 31:1 “Deliver me in your righteousness,” and in 143:1, “0 Lord, listen to my cry in your righteousness.” The word “righteousness” thundered in Luther’s ears only as God’s wrath and everlasting punishment. Thus Luther wrestled with the wrath of God, and it burned as a consuming fire in his conscience. At last he turned to the New Testament for comfort. Romans 1:16 arrested him: “The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who
