Luther in 5 Sayings: Convicted Monk

Martin Luther’s journey from monk to Reformer was shaped by a spiritual transformation. Today, Stephen Nichols explores Luther’s early life, including a vow made during a storm and his realization that salvation comes through Christ alone.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are returning to our series of these great figures of church history in five sayings, and let's go back to our good friend Martin Luther. Well, the first saying for Luther is this, “Help me, St. Anne, and I will become a monk.” Luther uttered those words during a thunderstorm on July 2, 1505. He had been at Mansfield visiting with his family and he was on his way back Erfurt, where he was just wrapping up his studies in law and the thunder rolled. Luther was terrified by this storm, and he hid under a tree and he clutched a rock, and he uttered these words to the patron saint of miners, his father's position that if she were to deliver him, he would enter a monastery. Well, Luther survived the thunderstorm, gets back to Erfurt, puts his law studies and future career behind him, and goes straight into the monastery.

The second saying comes in 1510, while Luther was at Rome. He was on his knees going up and down the Sancta Scala, the very steps of Pontius Pilate that Christ was on. They had been removed by Constantine and brought to Rome, and there's Luther with all of his fellow pilgrims going up and down. And when Luther gets to the top of one of these trips, he says, “Who knows if this is true?” It shows us a monk who went into his church for salvation and found himself utterly disillusioned by his church and no real hope for his soul. The word that Luther uses to describe this stage in his life is a German word anfechtung. It means internal struggle. And actually, for Luther, it's the plural on anfechtungen. These were deep soul struggles that Luther, again, being terrified by God and not sure at all as to how he can be made right with God, and so he plunges himself into what his church of the day proposed for him, and that was a life of white-knuckling it by works.

Well, as Luther is reading Augustine, he’s sent back to scripture, and he's reading Paul in Romans, and God is using all of this to convict Luther and to bring him to himself. One of the many sayings that we could use of Luther to get at how he understood aright the doctrine of salvation is probably one of my favorite sentences that Luther ever wrote. It's from his Heidelberg Thesis. Now we all know the Ninety-Five Theses, October 31, 1517, nailed to the church door at Wittenberg, but this is a smaller, shorter set of theses. This has twenty-eight, it was presented at Heidelberg. Heidelberg for that year was the site of the chapter meeting of the Augustinian monks, the order to which Luther belonged.

And so of course the Ninety-Five Theses were the discussion of the day among these Augustinian monks. And Luther went there to defend them. And for the occasion he wrote a new separate set of theses and thesis number 28 of the Heidelberg Theses Luther writes, “The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it.” Luther had been taught that he had to cooperate with God's grace to be saved, that we must have something in us that somehow merits God's favor. Now of course, we have Christ, and we have his righteousness as the church taught, and salvation is by Christ, but it is Christ and what we do with all that ultimately merits God's favor for us. What Luther learned as he began his quest with the 95 Theses and then at Heidelberg, and as he continued in his studies of Romans, that we're all dead, we're all sinners and filthy rags, and there's nothing pleasing in us. There's nothing lovely in us to God, but God in Christ makes us pure and righteous and lovely and pleasing to Him. And word sola, not us and Christ, but Christ alone, not my works and Christ's righteousness, but Christ's righteousness alone. Well, that's Luther in three sayings. We have two more next time. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for joining us for 5 Minutes in Church History.