Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday
A
[1] Who is the best English hymnwriter? Surely everyone is going to shout, “Charles Wesley”. Who is the best liturgist? Anglicans and non-Anglicans agree it’s Thomas Cranmer. The most perceptive Bible translator? – William Tyndale. The most able catechists in English Christendom are the Westminster divines, while the finest preacher is deemed to be Hugh Latimer.
Imagine all these gifted people, gifted with diverse talents, gathered up and concentrated in one individual. What it took a dozen Englishmen two hundred years to accomplish, Martin Luther did in twenty. Luther is prodigious.
Did it all begin on Nov. 9, 1483 when Luther was born? Not exactly. It began thirty years later when Luther, tormented by uncertainty concerning his standing as unholy sinner before holy God, ransacked Scripture yet again but this time found lighting up for him the life-giving theme of the righteousness of God.
Up to this point Luther had always understood the righteousness of God as a quality in God that merely highlights the unrighteousness of the sinner. In other words, the righteousness of God, a righteousness that God possesses in himself, can only be bad news: God’s righteousness exposes and condemns the sinner’s unrighteousness.
Now, however, Luther saw with Spirit-given Kingdom-sightedness that the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people rightly related to him; that is, the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God turns capsized relationships right-side up. In the same way, the power of God isn’t a quality that God possesses so as to render human capacity insignificant. The power of God, rather, is that act of God whereby God empowers his people. The wisdom of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people wise.
Up to this point Luther had looked upon human righteousness as active; it was a righteousness we were supposed to achieve or acquire by extraordinary feats of so-called sanctity, religious observances, pilgrimages, fasts and flagellations; supposed to achieve or acquire, that is, but weren’t able to.
Now, however, Luther discerned and ever after spoke not of an active righteousness whereby we come to merit our standing with God; instead he now spoke characteristically of a passive righteousness that was passive only in the sense that our righted relationship with God is God’s gift, a gift that we can never fashion or forge or achieve, yet may and must receive. This gift has already been fashioned for us by the One whose cross has borne our sin and borne it away. The believer’s righteousness is passive in the sense (only in the sense) that the hymnwriter captured centuries later, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”
In his fresh appropriation of Scripture Luther grasped that what he could never achieve had been given him; the acquittal a guilty person could never earn, someone else had won for him; the pardon a condemned rebel would never deserve, the sin-bearing Lord had pronounced upon him. In short, a clemency that remained out of reach was his, thanks to crucified arms that embraced him so as never to let him go.
Luther gloried in the truth and reality of the greatest gift imaginable; namely a righted relationship with God. He gloried in it and glowed with it every time he spoke of it.
[2] Listen to Luther himself as he traces for us the path whereby he came to glow:
“Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction….Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul…most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it [i.e., the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live’. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith….There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me….And I extolled my sweetest word [‘the righteousness of God’] with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’ Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.”
[3] The “place in Paul” was Romans 1:17. For the rest of his life Luther would return to the epistles, chiefly Romans and Galatians, whenever he needed to revisit the gospel of right-relatedness with God by faith, the good news that God, thanks to his cross-wrought mercy, puts in the right with himself those who through their disobedience and defiance are currently in the wrong before him.
Specifically, Luther found Paul’s epistle to the Galatians the clearest, ‘impossible-to-miss’ declaration of the gospel. Luther wrote a commentary on Galatians in 1519, and another one, much expanded, in 1535. He used to refer to Galatians as his ‘Katie von Bora’. Katarina von Bora, everyone knows, was Luther’s wife (with whom he remained ardently in love); by naming Galatians as ‘my Katie’ he meant that whenever he needed invigoration, comfort, consolation, encouragement, not least correction, he knew where to go.
Luther relished Romans and Galatians inasmuch as there he found the epicentre of the gospel stated clearly and compellingly. For this reason, these two Pauline epistles would correct aberrant readings of Scripture elsewhere.
Luther couldn’t have known, of course, that the gospel of Romans would give rise to 80 commentaries on Romans alone, written by scores of thinkers, in the 16th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird the Evangelical Awakening in the 18th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird Karl Barth’s theological bombshell in the 20th century. But he wouldn’t have been surprised to see it happen. And he would have known why.
While Luther would extol the gospel of God’s grace for the rest of his life, a gospel unmistakeably delineated in Romans and Galatians, he didn’t come upon it there for the first time. He came upon it first in the Older Testament. To be sure, the Older testament doesn’t use the vocabulary of Romans/Galatians, but certainly the Older Testament speaks of the God whose mercy visits mercy upon those whose predicament before him is otherwise hopeless, and who thereby gives them a standing and a recognition – ‘you are my daughter, my son, with whom I am now pleased’ – they could never merit or achieve. Luther found the gospel throughout the Older Testament, but especially in Deuteronomy, the second half of Isaiah, and the Psalms.
[4] Plainly Luther exulted in the good news of God’s righting sinners with himself through faith in the crucified; plainly Luther exulted in this inasmuch as he was preoccupied with being in the right with God. Why was he preoccupied? Was he neurotically anxious over an insignificant matter? Was he obsessing over something inconsequential?
Luther was oceans deeper than this. He was aware that God is not to be trifled with. He knew that the sinner’s predicament before God is perilous. When I was on my way to my doctorate (University of Toronto) I had to appear before Prof. Jakob Jocz, Wycliffe College, for an oral examination. When the examination had concluded, Prof. Jocz, a Christian from eastern Europe who had witnessed unspeakable suffering and who was as deep as a well; Jocz said to me, “Mr. Shepherd, your grasp of the gospel is remarkable. Always remember that people never get the gospel; they never get the gospel until they understand that God is properly angry with the sinner.”
Luther knew as much. Luther knew that our defiant disobedience principally does three things to God: it breaks God’s heart, it provokes God’s anger, and it arouses God’s disgust.
Scripture, particularly the Older Testament, speaks again and again of God’s heartbreak at the recalcitrance of his people. (All we need do here is read the book of the prophet Hosea.) As for God’s anger, it too is found on every page of Scripture, not least in the gospel accounts of the public ministry of Jesus, where Jesus ‘boils over’ every day, it appears. As for God’s disgust, Scripture reminds us that we are repulsive to God; we are a stench in the nostrils of God. Over and over Scripture uses the language of ‘defile’ and ‘defilement’. Sinners are defiled people whose defilement God finds obnoxious.
How obnoxious? What’s the most repulsive thing you can imagine? (Don’t tell me!) Luther, whose imagination never lacked vividness, lived in an era that hadn’t yet seen a flush-toilet. Luther’s vocabulary with respect to repulsiveness – I think I should say no more lest I empty this room and spoil your lunch.)
[5] Let’s shift gears and think about Christmas. Every year in the Christmas season Luther capered and cavorted, laughed and leapt like children so very excited on Christmas Eve that they are beside themselves. Why was Luther near-delirious with joy over Christmas? He was ‘over the moon’ because he couldn’t thank God enough for the Christmas gift. The gift, of course, is Christ Jesus our Lord, given to us as the Saviour we need as we need nothing else.
Luther knew that when God looks out over the entire human creation, God can’t find one human being, not one, who renders him the glad and grateful, cheerful obedience God expects from the people he has created. Whereupon God says to himself, “If I’m going to find even one human being who renders me such cheerful obedience, I shall have to provide that human being myself in the person of my Son”. And so we have Christmas, where God in his mercy provides the human covenant-partner of God who remains rightly related to his Father in life and in death.
Luther knew that because Jesus of Nazareth is the one whose entire life and death are unbroken obedience, then insofar as we cling to the Nazarene in faith we are bound so closely to him that when the Father sees the Son with whom he is ever pleased he sees you and me included in the Son: we too, clinging to this one in faith, are declared – effectually declared – to be rightly related to the Father.
Luther knew, in the second place, that when sinners provoke God’s just judgement upon them, God’s judgement is just and there is nothing sinners can do to relieve themselves of it. Yet the breathtaking news of Christmas is that in the Son whom God has brought forth in our midst: in him, on Good Friday, the just judge visits his judgement on the Son who has identified himself with sinners, even as the just judge, the Father, one with his Son, absorbs his judgement in himself. If the just judge has exercised his judgement upon us only to absorb it in himself, what is left you and me? – mercy, pardon, acquittal, acceptance.
Luther knew, in the third place, that when sinners arouse God’s disgust (God finds sinners loathsome), the good news of Christmas is that the one crucified between two terrorists at the city garbage dump has soaked up the stench we are with the result that those who cling to him in faith are now rendered the fragrance, the perfume, of Christ (as the apostle Paul speaks of Christians in 2nd Corinthians).
Luther ‘lit up’ over Christmas just because he knew that in the Bethlehem gift the obedience we are expected to render but don’t; in this one such obedience has been rendered on our behalf. The anger we have provoked has been borne for us and borne away. The disgust we arouse has been soaked up by the one who leaves us smelling like roses. (Don’t we speak, at Christmas, of the ‘rose of Sharon’?)
All Luther wants to do is thank God for this gift and cling so very tightly to this gift in faith so as to be identified with him forever.
For Luther, then, the Christmas child is our salvation. In him we enjoy the same relationship with our Father that he, the Son, enjoys with his Father; namely, we, now rightly related to God, are that child of God with whom the Father is ever pleased.
At this point Luther knew himself a free man; a free man because freed by God’s gospel.
B
Yet Luther knew that those who have been freed for God have been freed not only for the praise of God but freed also for the service of the neighbour.
In 1520 Luther published a tract that has turned out to be the best-known of all his writings. The tract is labelled Christian Freedom.
Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are. Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”
Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture. In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives. A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio. Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.
Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him. (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.) The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only. In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.
Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks. The train is impeded from travelling along the rails. When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails. If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”
Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God. In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God. It is our nature as child of God to love God and love the neighbour in utter self-abandonment.
Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
Expanding on this statement Luther writes,
We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.
Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness. Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates. The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power. The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).
Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith. There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.
[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity. Luther admits this costs us little. If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me. Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).
[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering. Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us. Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).
[3] Finally, says Luther, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame. This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour. Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism. Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve? In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.
Conclusion
Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday: the man from Wittenberg launched a revolution that altered the course of history. Today we have probed only one area of his work, but it’s an area foundational for everything else.
Luther recovered the freedom of the gospel: the freedom that gives penitent sinners the gift of free right-relatedness to God thanks to the crucified Son; and the freedom whereby otherwise self-preoccupied people can forget themselves by abandoning themselves and their fussiness as they live henceforth to assist the neighbour whose need is undeniable and whose suffering is relentless.
Martin Luther happens to be a giant.
Victor Shepherd October 2017
“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”
In 1530, Martin Luther lived in Coburg Castle for five and half months under the protection of Elector John the Steadfast. It was during this time that Philip Melanchthon represented Luther at the Diet of Augsburg, which Luther could not attend as an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire.
“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”
[A] “And then all hell broke loose”, many people are fond of saying in everyday English. “And then all hell broke loose.” We can use the expression frivolously to speak of something ultimately insignificant, as some do when the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team is leading by three goals only to lose the game by giving up four goals in ten minutes.
Or we can use the expression profoundly, as war compels us to do when we describe the air-raids on London or Coventry in World War II, or when we speak of the ‘Final Solution’, the Shoah, that Nazi perpetrators unleashed on hapless victims.
When we use the expression profoundly we mean that horror has been unleashed. In the wake of unprecedented horror, our language fails, abysmally fails, to describe what is unfolding.
When Luther said, in so many words, “All hell has broken loose”, he was speaking most profoundly of all. For Luther was aware that cosmic assault was operative. The evil one himself, with all the powers the evil one can co-opt and concentrate; this one has turned upon Luther in person, as well as upon all that Luther upholds concerning Jesus Christ, his kingdom, his truth, and his people, not to mention Luther’s family and friends. In the aftermath of this assault Luther will speak for the rest of his life of Anfechtung as he is overtaken, time after time but never permanently, by an appalling sense of God’s absence together with an inability to find in his heart any awareness of God’s love and mercy, any evidence that God still loves him, holds him, and honours him.
I find today that Christians, especially younger Christians, have a shallow sense of evil. Not Luther: he found evil to be monstrous, hideous. He found evil to be subtle, sneaky, disguised, like a spy-informed commando raid. He also found evil to be a frontal assault without dissimulation, nothing less than death-dealing brutality.
Whether subtle or frontal, Luther insisted, “The ancient prince of hell hath risen with purpose fell…on earth is not his fellow.” Evil, finally, is a power greater than anything humankind can bring against it.
[B] Then who or what can defeat such a power, secure the victory achieved, and render God’s people beneficiaries of it? Only the “proper Man”, Christ Jesus, can.
Jesus Christ is the “proper” man in that this man isn’t man only; this man is God incarnate. Because this man is God incarnate, he can gain that victory which humankind otherwise has no hope of seeing. And because this man is God incarnate, this man is our elder brother who ensures our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father.
Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, is the “safe stronghold” or “mighty fortress” within which God’s people are protected from lethal assault and in which they are secure in the company and arms of their elder brother.
‘Stronghold’: the word occurs repeatedly in the Palms. “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble” (Ps. 9:9) “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Ps. 18:2)
Luther’s first published writings were his expositions of the Psalms (1513-1515). While many Christians today find the Psalms puzzling at best and off-putting at worst (except, of course, for a few favourites like Ps. 23), Luther found the gospel, no less, everywhere in the Psalms.
Let’s linger over Psalm 18:2. The Lord is my rock. Rock is solid ground. It suggests a refuge from floods that otherwise sweep away everything. (Flood or turbulent water, everywhere in Scripture, is a metaphor for the chaos that laps at us at all times and threatens to engulf us.) The Lord is my fortress. A fortress is that to which marauders cannot gain entry, that which whose walls render would-be invaders futile and frustrated. The Lord is my deliverer. It’s wonderful to be secure on solid rock; it’s wonderful to stand within the fort and see attackers repelled. But so far all we are doing is standing within the fort, passive. We need to be moved beyond passivity; we need to be delivered from our enemies so that we can join the God-man in his active campaign against all that mocks him and mobilizes against him.
And even if Christ our captain conscripts us into his army; even if we are equipped to fight alongside him in his campaign against all forms and forces of wickedness, we shall never last if we are panic-stricken. We must finally be delivered from the fear that otherwise drains us and dispirits us. For this reason the Psalmist once more cries, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1)
[C] Did Luther have anything to fear? Did Luther have anyone of whom he had reason to be afraid? We must remember that Luther wrote his best-known hymn between 1527 and 1529. He wrote it to reassure his people that they could rely on, trust in life and in death, the One who remains victorious in the face of evil’s most concentrated assault. What were the features (at least some of them) of the assault?
One was Luther’s medical problems, such as the onset of kidney stones, an agony no sixteenth-century treatment could relieve. Another was his heart problems. Another was his grief over the death of Elisabeth, his eight-month old daughter who succumbed to pneumonia. Another was the outbreak of the plague in August 1527. (One hundred and fifty years before Luther’s era, we should remember, the Black Death or Bubonic Plague had carried off 40% to 50% of Europe.) Luther’s political ruler, Elector John Frederick, evacuated Wittenberg University and reconvened it in Jena until spring 1528. Luther, however, refused to protect himself self-servingly but rather, like the diligent pastor he was, remained behind in Wittenberg to attend the sick and the dying. The Turks (the sixteenth-century’s version of Islamic threat) had been moving westward relentlessly, and by 1529 had laid siege to the city of Vienna. In addition, the Second Diet of Speyer (1529) had overturned the first (1527), with the result that Evangelicals were no longer tolerated (and, we should note, for the first time in history were known as ‘Protestants’). In 1529 Luther published his Large Catechism. In his exposition of the sixth petition of the Lord’s prayer he reflected on the danger surrounding his people: “This is what ‘lead us not into temptation’ means: ‘We cannot help but suffer attacks and even be mired in them, but we pray here that we may not fall into them and then drown.’”
And then there were the threats Luther had lived with for years. The pope had pronounced him a heretic in 1520, and then had excommunicated him. The emperor had condemned him an outlaw. Anyone assisting the outlaw would be deemed treasonous; anyone caught assisting Luther would be executed.
Luther had much to fear. Still, what rang in his heart was the Psalmist’s gospel-insistence, “The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Christ Jesus is his name, the Lord Sabaoth’s son; he, and no other one, shall conquer in the battle.”
[D] Jesus Christ has indeed conquered; he has gained a victory apart from us, extra nos. This victory, achieved without our help, extra nos, has been won on our behalf, for us, pro nobis. Essential as this is (it is, after all, the ground of our salvation), we shan’t benefit from it unless what has been achieved extra nos, pro nobis, is finally applied in us, in nobis. Luther, like all the Reformers, carefully balances pro nobis and in nobis, the work of God for us wrought in Christ and the work of God in us, owned in faith. Christology must always be balanced with pneumatology. All that Christ has gained for us benefits us only as we ‘put on’ Christ in faith. As much as Luther’s heart sings whenever he speaks of Christ, his heart sings no less whenever he upholds that faith which is God’s gift, to be sure, yet always a gift that we must own and exercise.
Like all the Reformers, Luther understood faith as notitia, assensus and fiducia; understanding, assent and trust. When we confess “I believe”, something must be understood or else faith is indistinguishable from idolatry. Something of the gospel must be understood or else faith is no different from superstition. Something of the gospel must be understood or else saying “I believe” is substantively no different from saying “I don’t believe”.
In the second place, what the mind understands of the gospel, however elementary, the will affirms; and what mind and will uphold the heart trusts (fiducia). To say that trust is the crucial element in faith is to say that we cannot save ourselves or inform ourselves or protect ourselves; we can only trust, entrust ourselves to, the “proper Man” who includes us in his victory.
While trust is the determining element in faith, Luther insists that the One whom we trust is also the One whom we are to love. It is unthinkable that we might trust someone we found repulsive. For this reason, Luther, in several places, discusses faith in terms of marriage, Scripture’s favourite metaphor for God’s covenant faithfulness with his people and theirs with him. In this regard Luther likens faith to that event wherein the bridegroom, Jesus Christ, embraces the bride and says, “I am yours”, while the bride, the believer, embraces the bridegroom, saying, “And I am yours”.
[E] With his close reading of Scripture, Luther is aware that Paul speaks in Ephesians 6 of the ‘armour’ that Christians are to put on as they contend with principalities and powers. One aspect of such armour is the ‘shield of faith’. Consider again the first two lines of Luther’s hymn: “A safe stronghold our God is still, a trusty shield and weapon”. While God is named the shield, everywhere in his writings the Reformer insists that faith renders the life-saving shield effective. In the same vein, Luther is aware that when the apostle Paul maintains we are justified by faith, ‘justified by faith’ is shorthand for ‘justified by God’s grace through our faith on account of Jesus Christ’. Looking at the matter from a different angle, Luther is aware that while we are justified by grace, we are never justified apart from faith, since grace forges within us that faith by which grace becomes effectual. To say, then, that God is our shield is to say that faith is our shield.
Luther, like all the Magisterial thinkers, came to the Reformation only after years of intense immersion in humanism. Having studied at Erfurt University, the major north-German centre of Renaissance humanism, Luther maintained that his humanist studies were a major ingredient in his theological development . “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies, untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”
For this reason, as soon as Luther read in Paul’s Ephesian letter that the shield of faith is able to nullify “all the flaming arrows of the evil one” he would have recalled a major incident in Roman military history.
In 53 B.C.E, the Parthians, under General Surenas (a military genius), fired flaming arrows in a high trajectory upon their Roman foes. The Roman soldiers held their shields above their heads while the projectiles rained down on them — at which point the Parthians fired a second salvo straight ahead, chest high. While Roman soldiers were still reacting to the second salvo, a third, in a high trajectory, fell down on them once again. Their shields couldn’t protect them against attack from two directions simultaneously. Moreover, because all these arrows had been dipped in pitch and then ignited, as soon as a flaming arrow stuck in a wooden shield it set the shield on fire. Attack from above, attack from in front, the soldiers’ protection aflame: they were helpless, and their situation hopeless. Demoralization soon effected one of the worst military defeats Rome would ever know. With this item of recent history in mind the apostle repeats yet again, “Faith in Jesus Christ is sufficient in the face of all life’s flaming arrows.”
When the apostle spoke of the shield of faith he was drawing on yet another aspect of military lore. As a Roman army advanced, each soldier’s shield, carried on the left arm, protected two-thirds of his own body and one-third of the body of the man on his left. Every soldier counted on the man on his right to protect the right-most one-third of his body that would otherwise be fatally exposed. The shield of faith protects the Christian as well as her fellow-Christian.
Luther’s Renaissance education integrated ancient military history concerning flaming arrows and the apostolic word concerning the efficacy of the shield of faith.
[F] “And though they take our life, goods, honour, children, wife.” We have already discussed the manner in which Luther’s life was threatened. His goods? Enemies accused him of profiting from the colossal sales of his books. In truth, Luther refused all royalties, and died dirt-poor, poorer than Erasmus. His children? Elisabeth’s death, we have noted, broke his heart. His heart was broken again when 13-year old Magdalena, afflicted with tuberculosis, died in his arms. His wife? Luther’s enemies smeared him with accusations of lust and lechery on account of his having married at all, and having married an ex-nun. No matter. He cherished Katharina as a singular gift of God.
At the end of it all he was found singing what he sang in the 1520s, “The city of God remaineth”. Luther knew that while creation begins in a garden, it ends in a city, the city of God – which city has to be “let down” since humans are incapable of building it. How was Luther to get to the eternal city? By faith, of course.
Let’s think once more, therefore, of the shield of faith. There is one additional matter we need to know about the shield of faith. When the mothers of Sparta sent their sons off to battle, their last word was, “Come home with your shield, or come home on it; but don’t come home without it.” If their soldier-son came home without his shield then plainly he had surrendered: disgrace! If, however, he came home with his shield, then he had triumphed gloriously. And if he came home on it, then he had fallen nobly in battle and was now borne home with honour. The same shield that equipped the soldier in life brought him home, with honour, in death.
Faith is the shield on which Christ’s soldier, Martin Luther, has been carried home, with honour, to that city of God which is nothing less than a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
2017 Sept. 16
Lyrics to A Safe Stronghold Our God is Still
1 A safe stronghold our God is still,
a trusty shield and weapon;
he’ll keep us clear from all the ill
that hath us now o’ertaken.
The ancient prince of hell
hath risen with purpose fell;
strong mail of craft and power
he weareth in this hour;
on earth is not his fellow.
2 With force of arms we nothing can,
full soon were we down-ridden;
but for us fights the proper Man
whom God himself hath bidden.
Ask ye who is this same?
Christ Jesus is his name,
the Lord Sabaoth’s Son;
he, and no other one,
shall conquer in the battle.
3 And were this world all devils o’er,
and watching to devour us,
we lay it not to heart so sore;
they cannot overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
look grim as e’er he will,
he harms us not a whit;
for why? his doom is writ;
a word shall quickly slay him.
4 God’s word, for all their craft and force,
one moment will not linger,
but, spite of hell, shall have its course;
’tis written by his finger.
And though they take our life,
goods, honour, children, wife,
yet is their profit small;
these things shall vanish all:
the city of God remaineth.
Source: Church Hymnary (4th ed.) #454
The Theology of Martin Luther
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The Spirituality of Luther
Order Audiotapes at
Regent Bookstore Online
and enter Shepherd, Victor in author name boxes
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Luther’s ‘Theologica Crucis’
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and enter Shepherd, Victor in author name boxes
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The Spirituality of Luther
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio
Product Number: RGCD3166S
A discussion of Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis’ (Theology of the Cross). In the image of the cross, the world perceives shame, weakness, folly, condemnation, sin and death. Victor Shepherd contrasts the world’s perceptions of the cross with the truth revealed as the consumate event of God’s glory, strength, wisdom, acquittal, righteousness and life. He distinguishes ‘theologia crucis’ from a ‘theologia gloriae’, and elaborates the implications of a theologia crucis.
Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis’
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio (2003)
Product Number: RGCD3335C
Always aware that Word and Spirit are conjoined, this man of the Word lived intensely in the Spirit. Few understood better than he that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.” Assailed from without and from within throughout his turbulent career as a Reformer, Luther was intimately with Anfechtung (assault, temptation, trial). While what he saw contradicted the gospel, his “theology of the cross” left him hearing his Lord’s “voice”. Therein he possessed the comfort of that “caretaker who lies in a cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, yet nevertheless sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty.”
The Theology of Martin Luther
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio (2001)
Product Number: RG3174S
A colossus who bestrides the early-to-mid Sixteenth Century, Luther is the single most formative thinker of the Magisterial Protestant Reformation. His output is prodigious, his Works filling more than fifty large volumes. Best known for his 1520 tract, The Freedom of the Christian, Luther wrote on virtually every topic that touch his understanding of the Christian faith, from how to correct recalcitrant children to the manner of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Unquestionably a major expositor of Scripture and a master of doctrinal articulation, he yet knew that amidst all our theological diligence we must ever hear the “voice” of that babe whom no one should confuse with the manger in which he lies (Scripture) yet who can never be found apart from it.