The World Martin Luther Made

When in life have you wanted a do-over? 

In the year 1517, a German monk and professor named Martin Luther changed the course of world history.  Luther was an unlikely person to take such a role.  He was not set up to participate in the power politics of his day.  Neither was he an especially skilled manager, a brilliant inventor, or a courageous warrior.  But Luther did have one great tool that set him apart from his contemporaries: his gift with words.  Luther was unique in his ability to speak and write powerfully and convincingly.  He would realize that gift’s full potential while undermining the basis by which his contemporaries understood the basic building blocks of human life. 

Luther’s life and career unfolded in a world we today find difficult to understand.  With education mostly the purview of the elite, and with the technology for disseminating new ideas still in its infancy, the medieval Church had been able to ride its tenuous alliance with powerful lords and monarchs to absolute supremacy over the European intellectual universe with little difficulty.  As an institution, the Church of Luther’s day wielded influence that stretched beyond concerns of eternity and ethics, and into the way people understood most aspects of their everyday lives, including social obligations, medicine, and the natural world.  In these matters, the Church was not to be questioned.  If you are wondering why it is so hard for us to imagine such a world, a good place to start would be with a certain monk and professor…

The year 1517 is famous in Luther’s story because it is commonly used as the start date of the Reformation, in which Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, protesting what he saw as the flaws of western Christianity, the sale of indulgences most notoriously.  This moment is often considered the point of origin for what we know today as ‘protestantism,’ and thus, of the Christian landscape we know today.  But the forces Luther unleashed with this action were much more consequential.  Some scholars believe that Luther introduced the concept of individual conscience into the European religious landscape.  Central to Luther’s movement was his doctrine of ‘Sola Scriptura,’ (scripture alone) the position that the Bible exclusively represented the fountainhead from which claims about God and matters of faith could be made.  By using new technology to popularize his ideas, and by introducing ‘vernacular’ copies of the Bible so more people could read its words, Luther gave everyday people a vehicle for making their own claims about the nature of God, and the meaning of faithfulness.  For the first time in European history, accepting the authority of a priest, pastor, theologian, bishop, or Christian institution had become a matter of individual choice. 

Do you think Luther would want a do-over, if he could see what his work has produced?  Luther liberated personal piety from its rigid captivity to institutions and gave it a place in the heart, mind, and soul of individual people.  Luther also made it difficult for Christians to challenge those who would use the Bible for their own ends on the basis of ‘correctness,’ and to use Christian tools to resist the harm these people often cause.  Luther may have even paved the way for the rise of agnosticism, atheism, and spiritualism, and other non-Christian traditions in the West.  He opened a floodgate.  We are still making sense of that flood today. 

The Saints of Washington Street

In 2016, back when I was a fresh-faced seminary student, I interned at Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Atlanta.  Trinity was, by most conventional standards of assessing church health, on the decline.  Once, Trinity’s Sunday morning worship had filled up a sanctuary that could seat several hundred people.  When I worked there, we worshiped in the Fellowship Hall.  But though this congregation lacked in numbers, it punched well above its weight in faith.  As part of my internship, I attended a meeting with an official from the city of Atlanta and representatives from other churches in our neighborhood to discuss economic development projects.  As we settled into the meeting, though, our Trinity contingent began to get frustrated.  It was clear that, among the church people present, we were not united in our priorities.  I listened as people from these other churches spoke about businesses that they would like to see come into the neighborhood and begin to generate wealth.  This continued on for several minutes until a Trinity member chimed in.  In an exasperated voice, he demanded the city official answer what was, to us, the most important question of this meeting: what was the city going to do to help the homeless people who lived all around us?

It made sense that someone from Trinity would demand that we confront this question.  Atlanta struggled with the issue of homelessness the whole time I lived there.  At Trinity, people experiencing homelessness often slept on our porches and under the awnings of our sanctuary doors.  During my internship, I even heard a story about a woman who had snuck into the church to sleep one night, and had interrupted Sunday worship by waking up with a loud yawn the next morning.  I don’t know how she was treated afterwards, but I imagine it was with a welcoming spirit.  For that congregation, treating people experiencing homelessness with dignity was a genuine commitment.  Homeless men and women joined us for worship regularly, and I got to know a few of them during my internship.  When, during a Sunday worship service, a pair of police officers interrupted a hymn to arrest one of these men, the hearts of the congregation went with him.  Whatever he had done, he was part of our family, and blood runs thicker than water.    

Trinity’s attitudes towards the problem of homelessness and the human beings experiencing it were a product of their faith.  They respected the fullness of the Christian tradition, including the wisdom of such luminaries as Martin Luther King and John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement.  They trusted their experiences, which told them that it was possible to stand in God’s presence through counter-cultural relationships with hard-pressed and long suffering people.  They believed that Jesus spoke with the authority of heaven when he said “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.”^[1]  And they reasoned that being a Christian, being part of a church, being a follower of Jesus Christ, demanded that they treat the most vulnerable people in our neighborhood with respect and dignity.  Five hundred years after Luther had upended Truth itself, the people of this congregation had arrived at a shared consensus about what it means to be human, what we owe each other, and who God is.

Believing Well

The word ‘theology’ refers to claims we make about God.  Christian theology is theology based on the narrative of Christian scripture, the Bible, with a focus on the person of Jesus Christ, whose story begins in Genesis, and continues on into the present, through the work of the Holy Spirit and the Church.  Knowing how to make sense of Christian theology, how to judge between these claims, is essential.  As Luther’s career reminds us, matters of faith are deeply personal, and any attempt to create a common understanding of Christian faith should have limits.  But the people of Trinity United Methodist Church also remind us of the genuine good we can accomplish when a common understanding is allowed to emerge.  We cannot treat theology as subjective.  Neither can we treat it as objective.  We have to find a middle way between these two poles, for the claims we make about God, and the congregations and communities that unite around them, to have meaning, and to make the world a better place.   

Finding this middle way is, really, a matter of terminology.  For a long time, Christians have relied on words like “Good and evil,” or “Right and wrong,” or “Correct and incorrect” to label each other’s beliefs.  Once, while waiting to pick up a pizza, I got in a conversation with a local funeral home director in which he forcefully insisted, over my objections, that there was, clearly and obviously, only one way to understand a common Christian issue.  In his mind, he was correct, and any other view was incorrect.  I would guess that, in his mind, if another person acted upon another view, they would probably pass from simply being ‘incorrect’ in their understanding, to being morally ‘wrong,’ and perhaps even taking the side of ‘evil’ by going against God.  It was not a great conversation.  I just wanted pizza. 

Words like correct and incorrect, right and wrong, good and evil, leave minimal room for subjectivity.  We are different people, with different experiences, worldviews, and needs.  Equally though, we need to be able to talk about God in a way that allows us to come together, help people, and be helped by people.  Otherwise, why go to church, read the Bible, or try to be Christian, at all?  We need new terms, new words to describe what we are trying to do when we speak about God and create theological claims.

What if, instead of believing ‘correctly,’ we tried to believe ‘well?’ 

What if, instead of calling ourselves ‘righteous’ and ‘good,’ and others ‘evil,’ we sought to be ‘responsible’ as we spoke about God?  To understand the means by which we construct our beliefs, and to do the work of using those means prudently and wisely, in our quest to comprehend God?  What if, like art, music, food, and so much else, we agreed to accept that there is more than one way to think about God, but that there is a difference between Beethoven and a six year old with a recorder?

In the United Methodist Church, we believe that there are four sources from which we make our statements about theology.  The Christian tradition refers to the wisdom and example of the Church, in all its history, diversity, and wisdom.  Experience refers to our personal spiritual experiences, as well as our encounters with people, and with the world God created, which all shape our perception of who God is.  Reason refers to the faculty by which we make sense of information.  And when we speak of Scripture, we are speaking of the Bible.  These four things are obviously interrelated.  For example, how we understand the Bible will depend on our experiences, which might include time spent in a church, and our own innate sense of logic.  While it might not be possible to ‘correctly’ synthesize these things into a set of theological statements which can be proven true, I would argue that, if we work to understand each of these four sources of belief for what they are, it is possible to use them well.  In doing so, we can make theological claims that lead us towards the kindly conviction of the people of Trinity United Methodist Church, and away from the intellectual tyranny of medieval Christianity, or of it’s modern day fundamentalist heirs which can be found all across the Christian landscape, in every denomination, tradition, and congregation. 

Martin Luther was a complex man.  Most of us, especially those of us living in the West, are his intellectual descendants, if not always his spiritual ones.  He had a strange fixation with..ahem..the human gastrointestinal tract.  More seriously, his deep anti-Semitic views gave the Nazis religious cover amongst the German people from which they defended their genocide.  In many ways, Luther was much more a villain than a hero.  But, perhaps by accident, he gave us an opportunity to believe well.  To think deeply about what it means to be Christian, and to cling to our convictions, including the conviction that none of us are not always right.  By embracing this opportunity, we can give modern Christianity a better, kinder, more faithful future, in which we live our lives compassionately, and worship the God of the universe. 

May we believe well, and create a Reformation of Responsibility together.

A Note On Sources: Most of the section on Luther is sourced from a podcast series called “The Rest is History” which is hosted by Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. Both are imminently accomplished historians and their credentials as scholars are both extensive and widely available for review.  

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^[1] Matthew 25:40 (NIV)