Augustinian monk son of the Renaissance,
Martin Luther (1483-1546), was born in times of fear. Men feared an angry God, witches
and spirits as well as Turks. In his monastic life Luther turned to the study
of Greek and Hebrew languages, which monasteries had kept for centuries, and by
the age of twenty five he was a professor of theology in Wittenberg, although
his doctorate was completed until 1512 at age 29. In this process Luther learned
to doubt all thinkers (Jodocus Trutfetter) and came to the conclusion that
faith and not reason was the only path to know God (W. of Okham).
The terror of God Luther resolved
it through a very long and existential process, by stressing the love of God
which he called grace using pauline language. A loving God had declared the
believer righteous so there was no reason to fear him anymore. This turned an
angry deity into a gracious God who accepts man on the basis of the death of
Christ by declaring man justified.
Luther also reflected that the
Church could not have created a path to know God. Tradition was after all not a
divine gift but a human development which yesterday was as human as the day before yesterday, so if one goes back to its earliest origin one does not find but the
face of man himself rather than God’s.
So to know God he, graciously, has to make himself known through his
Word in the Scriptures. There is not other source of divine revelation but
Scriptures.
So Luther denied that the
scholastic bridge between heaven and earth was a God given tool. Analogy as the
connection between what is human and that what is divine is an arrogant move on
the part of theologians. It is a product of the “whore reason” and comes short
to putting God in ones pocket. It can be predicated only on the basis of destroying
Gods glory, his majesty and divine order. Gott
ist der ganz Andere! In Old
Testament tradition God was totally other and Luther believed that to be the
core of who God is. The world of witches and spirits was nothing and certainly
not a source of fear.
In his search for that which is truly biblical
Luther discarded five of the sacraments and reinterpreted the other two. He denounced
the purgatory as unbiblical and used against the Pope a very effective ad-hominem.
First there are not biblical basis for substituting repentance and penance as
the only way to appease God, so taking money instead of contrition was another
deformation without biblical support. If the pope claims to have power over the
purgatory why does he have to ask for money in order to use it. Why does he
not, as an act of compassion, empty the purgatory once and for all?
Luther by recovering the Bible and its themes
as creation, the fall, the incarnation, and so forth, had helped to bring back
history into theology. The scholastic approach had exhausted itself and delivered all that it had. Reason had devised formulas to explain things, usually going
around, behind and above history to satisfy human reason but without meeting
history itself in a personal way. The incomprehensive encounter between eternity
and time, spirit and matter, infinite and finitude postulated by some
scholastic rationalists had finally met in the person of Jesus Christ, the
point in which God meets man. This was made possible in new way when Martin
Luther rejected the abstract notions and categories of scholastics.
Nature and supernatural are connected but not by
reason for that leads only to the vanity of man search for himself. They are
connected by God, in the person of Christ who reveals God through the veil of
his flesh, Deus absconditus, who in Christ
becomes Deus revelatus, God revealed in
mystery, is through Christ the way par excellence
to know something true about God, his glory and his majesty.
