Born in 1483, Martin Luther was around 34 years old when the Reformation began. As a multi-year event which changed society, civilization, and culture, the Reformation can be understood on various levels: spiritual, intellectual, political, ecclesiastical, and even economic.
The precipitating cause for all of those changes was, however, personal: The Reformation finds its roots in the conscience of Luther. His self-analysis and his questions about his own status — specifically, his status vis-a-vis God — were the causes of theological questions which lie at the core of the Reformation.
As Jonathan Kay writes:
Luther’s struggle against the Vatican began as a struggle against himself. He started his career as a tortured German academic whose spiritual neuroses were tangled up with biblical exegesis — a state of constant agitation that members of the religious classes then referred to as the “bath of hell” — according to Craig Harline’s outstanding new history, A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation.
The problem for Luther was this: Like any human being, he knew that he was imperfect and flawed. In spiritual terms, this meant that he was sinful; everyone occasionally does the wrong thing, and Luther was no exception. What, then, is to be done about the resulting guilt?
The guilt which concerned Luther was not the feeling of guilt, but rather the objective fact of it. No matter how people feel about their failings, the failings themselves are events which cannot be wished away.
At first, Luther attempted to embrace the common teachings of the times: One could pay for one’s sins, and work off the guilt. A person could identify failures, confess them to a priest, and perform specific tasks assigned as penances.
Luther eventually identified several problems with this system: First, one had to identify the sins. What if a sin was forgotten and unconfessed? Second, given the perpetually imperfect nature of human beings, the next wrongdoing would soon be committed, and so the individual is in a never-ending cycle of confessing sins and working them off. Other problems permeated the system: How does one know if the prescribed penitential actions are sufficient? etc.
Luther’s search for inner peace — his search for a confident hope that he would not face painful eternal punishment for his sins — took place in the context of late medieval monasticism. Imposing hardships on one’s own self was a type of continual penance. Luther became a monk and lived, at first, in the monastery in Erfurt, starting in 1505. He had arrived in Erfurt in 1501 to study at the university there.
Luther was both a monk and a scholar, i.e., a highly-educated person. Some men were monks but not scholars; others were scholars but not monks. Luther was both.
Kay writes about Harline’s book:
Harline lingers on details of archeology, food and hygiene that allow the reader to imagine cloistered life in the 16th century. Even in a relatively well-funded monastery, such an existence was hard, filthy and, in the winters, freezing. As a scholar, Luther found a measure of comfort and privacy in his friary’s unglamorous nooks — including a third-floor tower room that once had been part of Wittenberg’s outer battlements, the visitors’ chambers and even the cloaca (cesspit).
The self-imposed hardships were a type of comfort to Luther: They made him feel that he was in some way addressing his own imperfections. Yet he still suffered from anxieties, wondering if he had done enough to earn forgiveness. In the word ‘earn’ lay the cause of most of Luther’s troubles.
The church of Luther’s era presented a muddle of ideas concerning salvation. It taught, on the one hand, that entry into the afterlife was a free gift. But on the other hand, it taught that each individual had to prove herself or himself worthy of that gift. Luther’s ideas amounted to a challenge to this usage of the words ‘free’ and ‘gift.’
Luther reasoned that, if one had to prove one’s self worthy of a gift — by feeling contrite, by performing acts of penance, by adhering to the traditions of the church — then it wasn’t really free. Luther focused on the word ‘grace’ and used it to refer to a unilateral gift, given by God to human beings, bestowing upon them a salvation and a justification in which they were passive: a “justification” which declared that compensation had been made for their sins and which thereby purchased the “salvation” which gained them entry into the afterlife — entry into heaven.
Compensation had been made for people’s sins, but people didn’t make that compensation. The compensation was made by God, as a gift to people.
As Luther’s career progressed, he became a priest and a professor. As a priest, he carried out certain tasks within the church and on behalf of the church. As a professor, he taught, researched, wrote, and published. His work as a professor initiated, or at least accelerated, certain skepticisms which Luther began to have regarding some of the church’s teachings and some of its practices.
In this context, the word ‘church’ refers to the organization which oversaw the spiritual life of nearly all of western Europe. This would later be called the ‘Roman Catholic’ church.
Luther’s research led him to the conclusion that the church had departed from its foundation: It was created to carry out the teaching and work of Jesus, but in fact had become something different. The church was failing to put into practice the ideas of Jesus, even though it had been founded to do that very thing. In short, the church was no longer Christian.
It is from this idea that the word ‘reformation’ arises: Luther wanted to reshape the church, to form it again, so that it would return to its original mission and purpose.
But Luther’s ideas remained, for a long period of time, in Luther’s head. He was not famous and hadn’t published much. His lecturing at the university and his preaching in church didn’t directly touch on the issues which were most troubling him — although, in hindsight, it can be seen that these issues were indirectly and obliquely simmering under the surface of his public speaking and writing, a sort of latent reformation in the making.
When Luther’s concerns about the church became public, they were mature, having benefited from a long period of reflection. Luther’s thought appeared in a mature form, as Jonathan Kay explains:
Luther’s first set of theses — not the famous 95 titled Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, but a more plodding 99 denouncing Aristotle’s influence on Christian theology — was almost completely ignored. Luther waited, pathetically, for many weeks, expecting some form of appreciation or critique from fellow scholars. Even when he produced his more provocative set of theses in October 1517, it took more than a month for any feedback to roll in — despite Luther’s efforts to move things along by sending personal copies to local bishops.
Although Luther was perhaps frustrated by a lack of speedy response and attention, it was, Jonathan Kay hypothesizes, this slow pace which allowed Luther’s thought to continue to develop and mature, and finally emerge as a considered viewpoint with substantial supporting argumentation. The years leading up to these two sets of theses, as well as the weeks and months afterwards, constituted a time of refining.
Kay suggests that, had Luther’s ideas gain fame sooner, they might have been weaker, and readily dismissed.
