Phone-y scandals & 500th anniversary

Turns out that all you Republicans who were dissing Obama for his “phony scandals” statements were wrong.  He was telling the truth.  A Fox news reporter reported yesterday that she was doing investigative work at a Food Stamps outlet and zealous government workers gave her not one but 3 Obamaphones despite her saying she probably didn’t qualify.  There you go.  Obama may have been talking about this scandal of phones being handed out to people who aren’t poor and don’t qualify.  Phone-y scandal. (Ahem!)

 

I have been discussing the life of Luther with some historians.  We are coming up on the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, Oct. 31, 1517.  But this is a rather artificial date based on Luther’s posting of 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door.  In Jan. 1518 those Theses were translated into German and circulated  making Luther a hero among the Germans.  Thoughtful historians have suggested that the Luther-Eck debates of 1519 are a better event to signify the beginning of the Reformation.  That was the watershed happening that laid the groundwork for excommunication of Luther and brought out his anti-papal stands. 

But those are political dates.  What I want to ask is when did the Reformation begin in Luther’s brain? That is, at what point might we choose to note that Luther had split with the establishment in spiritual terms? The Spiritual Reformation. The answer has to be about 500 years ago today.  Here’s a small time line of his thinking on faith. 

1501 Luther entered college to study Law and become the lawyer for his father’s business.

1502 Bachelor’s degree.  1 year.  Smart guy!

1505 Master’s degree. While traveling from school to home, he was caught in a thunderstorm and was nearly struck by lightning.  In fear of his life, he vowed to St. Anne that he would become a monk. Entered Augustinian cloister at Erfurt.  He was a smart guy, worked very hard, but was troubled by sin and God.

1507 ordained a priest.

1508 The ‘troubled friar’ was sent to the Augustinian monastery at Wittenberg University to teach logic, physics and theology and work on his doctor’s degree. Luther saw God as an impossibly harsh taskmaster and man trying to work out his salvation in terror.  Also about this time, he read the writings of Jan Huss and, by secretly agreeing with Huss, grew even more tormented because Huss was burned at the stake as a heretic. 

1509 Luther wrote about how he struggled with Romans 1:17 “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The just shall live by faith”.  So if you think God’s righteousness is impossible, it is to be feared as your condemnation.  Luther struggled with this passage for several years. 

1510 Sent to Rome.  What shall we do with this messed-up genius monk?  His superiors thought he might develop a love of the church if they sent him to see the finery of Rome.  They sent him on an errand to deliver papers to the pope.  The whole thing backfired.  Luther was sickened by the decadence and immorality of the holy city.  In 1511 he returned disillusioned.

1512 Became Doctor of Theology and succeeded Johan Staupitz.  Staupitz was vicar-general of the order and he began a new strategy to help Luther—work him to death, and thereby get him to stop navel-gazing and worrying about his salvation.  It worked because Luther began to scour the scriptures until he made sense of taking them literally and found the light of his life. 

1513 Luther began to lecture on Psalms in the fall of 1513.  He read “the Lord is my Rock and my Salvation” and explained it by grace.  He taught that over and over again. scriptures should be understood literally as God’s very word and that they pointed to God’s tremendous mercy embodied in the sacrifice of His only Son (grace).  So here we have two of the three principles of Luther’s beliefs, “Sola Gracias, Sola Fides, Sola Scriptura” (Grace alone, Faith alone, Scripture alone).  As soon as you believe in grace alone, the notion of indulgences grows jaundiced.  As soon as you believe in literal scripture which attests to its own uniqueness of God’s expression, you grow chagrinned by decisions of Church Councils and pronouncements by a pope. I submit that sometime from August and December 1513, Luther’s beliefs came together.  Perhaps this is the spiritual Reformation and it was only a matter of time before the world would hear it. So the 500^th anniversary is right now.

1515 Staupitz made Luther pastor of Wittenberg church.  Luther protested that he would die from too many things to do.  But now, as he prepared his daily lectures at the U. he had to also sermonize his ideas into the vernacular of the peasants in the pews.  His theologic discourses went through Romans, Galations, and Ephesians.  Gone are doubts about Rom. 1:17.  Rom. 5:8, “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us,” has become a new theology of Simultaneously we are Saints and Sinners.  His teachings on Romans were compiled and published by the Vatican. They show a stunningly incisive mind and a discerning Greek translator who links the entire book into one coherent teaching of the soul’s struggle with God’s demands of the Law and His grace for the sinner to a sanctification (progress) of faith. [Compendium on Romans, was thought to be a lost book until recently when the Vatican “found” it during discussions with the German Evangelical Lutheran Church.  Those discussions in the early 90’s concluded that Rome had been sadly mistaken in Luther’s excommunication and that Catholics and Lutherans believe in the same Grace. The Cardinal who led those discussions became Pope Benedict]

1516 Bubonic Plague hit Wittenberg but Luther valiantly remained at his post, a man who courageously knew his life was in God’s hands, doing his duty to the job.  And Wittenberg began to grow by leaps with is leadership.

1517 In protest to sale of indulgences he posted 95 statements or theses against the practice.  Noteworthy is that the local bishop read them and found no problem with Luther’s arguments except that they were pretty inflammatory and advised him to keep his mouth shut for awhile.

1518 Theses were translated into German and printed widely.  All of Germany seemed to leap to it’s feet in acclaim.  Luther spoke not only to faith, but also fairness and German nationalism.  Luther was not a separation of church and state guy. Yet he strove to patch things up with Pope Leo.  Leo agreed that Tetzel had gone rogue with claims and relieved him of duties selling indulgences.  Humanistic Leo and faith-filled Luther exchanged 3 letters of reconciliation and things for a while looked to be on the mend.

1519 The Dominicans weren’t happy.  They were the leading proponents of Scholasticism and divine Papal authority.  They induced Luther into a trap, a debate with Johan Eck, a leading scholar.  Luther was exposed to be at odds with official church teaching but became a superstar in the minds of many Germans who read or learned of the debate.  His simple ways of making a point became famous.  For example, when the sacrament of communion came up and Catholic teaching contended that the bread had transformed into Christ’s body, Luther asked, “If a mouse is eating crumbs beneath the communion rail, is he eating bread or is he eating God?” (That is to assert, the host is both bread and, only by the faith of the one eating, can also be Christ’s body.) From this debate forward, the Reformation was on—in spiritual argument, political and warfare struggles, nationalism and reform.

 

So then, what should we celebrate as the 500^th anniversary of the “Spiritual” Reformation? Perhaps one would say fall of 2013 or sometime in 2015.