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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 17

An Indulgence from Johan Tetzel

by Rev. Donavon Riley

Despite Martin Luther’s provocative teachings at Wittenberg University—and their influence on students, faculty, local monks and priests, and earthly rulers—the theology and practices of late Medieval Roman Catholicism continued relatively undisturbed.

One such practice was the sale of indulgences. Indulgence sales were the medieval equivalent of a modern “big tent revival meeting.” An indulgence salesman would roll into town with a theater troupe, clowns, public orators, musicians, and the like. It was quite the scene when everything was set up and the show began, like a circus and stage play and concert combined!

And even though indulgence sales were a spectacle to see, their purpose was very serious. Theologians of the church had concluded that although baptism washed away the stain and penalty of original sin, Christians still had to “do what was in them” in order to be saved at the Last Judgment. However, if a Christian lived a life that was neither too wicked or too holy, they died they were sent to purgatory when they died. As a consequence, any sin that remained on their record had to be worked off (or paid off, thus the sale of indulgences) before they could be set free to enter into heavenly peace (after presenting themselves to St. Peter and Jesus at the gates of heaven). So an “indulgence” was simply how the church “indulged” a sin by absolving it of all penalty. All that was necessary to procure an indulgence was proof that the Christian was sincerely repentant over his sin. Or, if he was dead, his family or friends had to provide proof in his place.

In purgatory, the dead could not do anything to work off their sin. On the other hand, since they were in purgatory they could not commit any more sin. So, if someone could purchase an indulgence in their name, for them specifically, showing that the dead truly was repentant over the sin committed after baptism, the dead could escape purgatory. If no one came forward on their behalf, they were essentially doomed to remain in purgatory, because they could not square accounts with God.

When one did buy an indulgence, the money that exchanged hands was proof of penitence, because this was another example of self-sacrifice on the part of the one seeking an indulgence, whether while they were still alive or on behalf of the dead. And, as always, it was said by every indulgence salesman that the money which purchased an indulgence was for “the work of the church.”

In the end, indulgence sales were held in the same esteem by the church as confession, penance, and other spiritual exercises that demonstrated a Christian was truly committed to “doing what was in him” to faithfully guarantee God was pleased with him.

Next week, we will turn our attention to John Tetzel, who became the target of Luther’s anger when the young professor finally broke from his support of the Church’s practice of selling indulgences.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 16

Boy at baptismal font

by Rev. Donavon Riley

When Luther moved to correct the long-held teaching that a Christian was partly sinner and partly righteous (and this in varying degrees depending on his humility, penance, charity, and so on) he attacked head-on the medieval teaching about holiness.

Luther taught that a Christian is totally sinful in himself, but totally righteous in Christ through faith, and this was constant throughout life. That meant holiness was not something to be sought after on a progressive scale of works, but something to be enjoyed through faith in Christ. In fact, for Luther, especially based on his reading of the Old Testament, wherever God is He makes sinners holy by His presence among them. God is holy and those whom He calls into relationship with Him are thereby holy, by virtue of His coming near to them. Personal experience, spirituality, success or failure at living a god-pleasing life were irrelevant regarding holiness. One was either “in Christ” or not. And, in Christ, a Christian is totally holy, because God declares him righteous for Christ’s sake.

Luther knew that his teaching was theological dynamite. But he pushed on preaching and teaching that only someone who’d given up trying to achieve holiness for himself was prepared to receive God’s grace, which came from being in Christ Jesus.

As Luther wrote, “it cannot be that a soul filled with its own righteousness can be replenished with the righteousness of God, who fills up only those who hunger and are thirsty. Therefore, whoever is full of his own truth and wisdom is not capable of the truth and wisdom of God, which cannot be received save by those who are empty and destitute.”

Luther denied that a Christian can become better in the presence of God. All his works and doings are exposed as sinful and damned in relation to a holy God. Only the righteousness of God in Christ makes a Christian “holy.” Therefore, faith empties a person of his own desire to become holy and instead focuses him more and more on Christ Jesus. This is a Christian’s one sure and certain hope in life.

“The wounds of Jesus,” Luther wrote, “are safe enough for us…This, if anyone is too much afraid that he is not one of the elect…let him give thanks for such fear, and rejoice to be afraid, knowing with confidence that the God who says, ‘the sacrifice of God is a broken, that is a desperate, heart’ cannot lie.”

Not a single work we call “holy” impresses God in the least. Only Christ makes Christians holy. Likewise, then, only Christ can make a person “whole in hope,” as Luther noted.

Luther followed Scripture where it led him, where his questions were answered by God’s solid words about Jesus. But Luther’s whole world was populated by people who’d been taught that faith and good works led to salvation, not faith alone in Christ alone. The push back against Luther’s teaching, especially as he wrapped up his Romans lectures, was about to escalate. When Luther had taken his vows as a professor he’d sworn to uphold the truth and condemn false teaching.

By 1518, there were many who’d become convinced by what they heard coming out of Wittenberg that Martin Luther may have become confused about true and false teaching. They felt that young Luther was in need of severe correction before he misled too many priests, professors, students, and laity into damnable unbelief.

Next time we will examine the explosion that occurred when Luther publicly opposed the sale of indulgences.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 12

Wood carving of Luther rose
Saved by Christ alone

Rev. Donavon Riley

During his lectures on the Psalms and Romans, the Righteousness of God had finally gotten hold of Luther—and it wouldn’t let him loose. Like two sheepdogs, God’s righteousness in Christ, freely given in the preaching of the Gospel, pursued and herded Martin Luther day and night. It was all he could focus on. The old wineskins of Medieval theology, which taught righteousness is what we achieve in ourselves in pursuit of godly obedience burst at the seams from the new wine of Christ’s righteousness, for that righteousness is completely outside sinners, bestowed only by God’s declaration of the sinner as righteous for Christ’s sake.

Even though Luther didn’t know it at the time, he had become God’s instrument—bulldozing anything that obstructed God’s Jesus-way of salvation. No more would Christian hope and love be considered the primary signs of Christian life. Instead, grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone distinguished true Christians from the pretenders.

Now, when Luther said “grace alone” and “faith alone” he meant “Christ alone.” For him, there could be no talk of grace or faith apart from talk about Jesus crucified for sinners. To talk about grace and faith apart from Jesus, to locate grace and faith inside the individual Christian, was simply old Adam’s attempt to get to God (to be God in God’s place) and become righteous in himself. Old Adam wants to save himself, believing in the power of his own belief, and he imagines he can become his own savior with just enough effort, enough knowledge, enough obedience to the God’s commands.

Luther finally saw how faith in one’s ability to believe and obey was nothing more than a denial of Jesus’ suffering and death for the sin of the world, and a sure path to torment for troubled souls. His focus was now wholly on Christ crucified for sinners. Christ sacrificed on Calvary was God’s gift of salvation and Christ’s faithfulness to His Father’s will and to each individual sinner for whom he suffered and died, was the comfort and certainty he’d always yearned for. And, as it turned out, so had many people who heard his lectures and sermons, or read his early theses. That is, many people except Roman Catholic bishops, like Albrecht of Mainz, and others in positions of authority in Saxony and at Rome.

But, despite some grumbling and attempts to tame him early on, Luther pushed his students and others to focus on Christ instead of themselves. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1516, “Therefore, my sweet brother, learn Christ and Him crucified’ despairing of yourself, learn to pray to him, saying, ‘You, Lord Jesus, are my righteousness, but I am your sin; you have taken on yourself what you were not and have given me what I was not.’ Beware of aspiring to such purity that you no longer wish to appear to yourself, or to be, a sinner.”

Luther’s dogged attention to the Gospel, of Jesus alone being the sinner’s righteousness, won him many supporters and allies, but also began to attract critics and opponents.

Next time, we will look at what happened when Luther’s teaching collided with Johann Tetzel, and the explosion that resulted in Luther’s eventual excommunication.

If you’d like to learn more about Martin Luther, check out: The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge Companions to Religion).

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 13

Martin Luther

Rev. Donavon Riley

Martin Luther received his license to enter doctoral studies in 1512. He swore on oath on the Bible to teach true doctrine and stand strong against false teaching. Then a wool cap was set on his head and a silver ring was slid onto his finger. Luther began lectures on Genesis three days later.

Outside his responsibilities as a teacher (which began at 7:00 a.m.), Luther was also busy writing letters to friends and colleagues, preaching at the monastery, reading Bible devotions at meals, preaching in parishes around Wittenberg, serving as a student advisor, supervising eleven monasteries, lecturing on St. Paul’s letters, and preparing a commentary on the Psalms. At that time, Luther said to a friend that he was so tired by the end of the day he would collapse on his bed and immediately go to sleep.

But, for all that, Martin was still focused on reviewing and revising everything he had been taught about the righteousness of God. He said, “I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me.” Everything Luther did was in service to eliminating anything and everyone who stood between him and Jesus crucified for sinners.

Luther’s turn away from the theology he had learned while a boy, that was instilled in him at university and as a young monk, did not happen all at once. Instead, he grew slowly and through much temptation and struggle. Then, finally, it was during Martin’s biblical lectures that things began to lock into place for him. It was in the classroom, as a lecturer, that Luther worked out his questions. Though nothing remains of his first Genesis lectures, one can read his evolution as a theologian from the first Psalms lectures, through Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, then through another go ’round in the Psalms.

Through his lectures on the Psalms, Luther came to a startling conclusion almost unheard of in former commentaries and lecture halls. From Psalm 72, he taught the students that God did not have one, but two kinds of righteousness. Martin had only been taught the second one. God’s righteousness on the one hand was a righteousness by which He found sinners guilty of disobeying the commandments. Then, and here is where Luther began to break free of Late Medieval theology, God’s other kind of righteousness—God’s primary righteousness—was a righteousness by which He declared believers righteousness for Christ’s sake, that made them acceptable in His presence. This was a new teaching, unheard of by anyone at that time. Luther was beginning to tear down—one theological brick at a time—the wall that separated sinners from God’s grace and mercy in Christ Jesus.

Next time, we will look again at Luther’s time as a lecturer and the personal and professional consequences of his teaching.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 15

Rev. Donavon Riley

By 1517, Luther was turning late medieval theology on its head. As students and guests at his dinner table trickled out from Wittenberg and took home with them what they’d learned, Luther’s teaching also began to change the day-to-day religious practices of ordinary Christians.

Luther wasn’t just attempting to tweak the system he had grown up with, he was putting an axe to the roots of late medieval Roman Catholic theology. Monasticism, a life of self-denial, spiritual exercises intended to earn God’s favor, and the life gained a Christian nothing, Luther taught. Only the Gospel, the teachings and life of Jesus Christ, could save sinners from judgment and eternal death.

As Luther said during the Romans lectures: “We must know we are sinners by faith alone, for it is not manifest to us; rather we are more often not conscious of the fact. Thus, we must stand under the judgment of God and believe his words with which he has declared us unjust, for he himself cannot lie.”

Before this, Luther had been shown by his teachers to find the law in the Gospel. Now, as one Luther scholar wrote, Martin was shown by the teaching of St. Paul that “the purpose of the law was to drive Christians to Christ alone.”

The point Luther drew out from this was that since we are shown to always be sinners, we are always called to repent of our sin. Therefore, since we are always repenting, since we are always sinners, we are always justified by faith in Christ to whom we look for forgiveness of sin. Thus, a Christian is always a sinner, always repentant, and therefore always declared righteous on account of Christ.

This paradox confused many. Where others had tried to smooth over and systematize such (seeming) contradictions, Luther plunged into the tension. He stood as sinner and righteous at the same time, and he rejoiced because he was shown that there is where a Christian hears Law and Gospel, is put to death and raised to new life, is condemned to hell and yet is lifted up into heaven with Christ.

As Luther said in the Romans lectures: “It is not he who possesses a certain quality who possesses righteousness; rather, this one is altogether a sinner and unrighteous; but he has righteousness to whom God mercifully imputes it and wills to regard as righteous before him on account of his confessing his unrighteousness and his imploring of God’s righteousness. This we are all born and die in iniquity, that is, unrighteousness. We are just solely by what the merciful God imputes to us through faith in his Word.”

Next time we will examine how Luther’s pastoral concerns drove his teaching and preaching in the face of growing opposition.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 14

Rev. Donavon Riley

One topic Luther engaged as a lecturer was the place of humility in a Christian’s life. In the Late Middle Ages humility was central to a person’s faith and life. It was taught that if a Christian wasn’t devastated by his sin, then he wasn’t ready to receive God’s grace. To help a person arrive at this state, the church came up with various spiritual exercises for him. Confession, penance, and other spiritual exercises were taught as necessary to achieve the proper mental and physical condition to receive God’s grace.

For Luther the monk, judging oneself in order to be in harmony with God, was necessary to salvation. Only the meekest would be blessed. Only a person in a state of true penance, who has made a genuine confession of his sin, can be raised up by God. However, for Luther the lecturer who taught the Psalms day after day, this belief began to lose traction. Martin concluded that either humility was a human work, which then led to self-righteousness, or a work of God, which led to pride. By the end of his first psalms lectures, Luther concluded that either way there was no comfort for a Christian who worked to become truly humble.

Of course, critics point out that Luther was always troubled by his inability to stand before God in true, genuine humility. His sin and lack of righteousness weighed heavy on him. His inability to work with God’s grace to achieve a state of genuine humility that led to salvation gnawed at him. Luther was always crying out to God for mercy, but didn’t believe himself worthy to of being heard by the Lord.

This all changed as Martin worked his way through the psalms and St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. By the end of his Romans lectures, Luther was convinced that human beings were only capable of living themselves. Even their profession of love for God was a confession of self-love, of loving a god formed in the image of man. Self-love was “the sum of all vices” for Luther.

Therefore, the underlying motive for striving after humility wasn’t a desire to enter into God’s grace, but the urgency of a sinner to put himself first, last, and always. Luther said it was “plainly insane” what he’d been taught: that a man had the ability to love God above all things and with the help of grace, obey the commands. He referred to his teachers and those who believed such things as “fools” and “pig theologians.”

What Luther taught shocked his students, that, “The term ‘old Adam’ describes what sort of person is born of Adam…the term ‘old Adam’ is used not only because he performs the works of the flesh but more especially when he acts righteously and practices wisdom and exercises himself in all spiritual works, even to the point of loving and worshipping God himself.” Because the old Adam always hangs round our necks, Luther taught, human beings not only “enjoy the gifts of God,” but also, “seek to use God.”

Just at that point when he believes he is most humble, most spiritual, most in harmony with God’s grace, human beings because they are “in the flesh” seek to use God to their advantage.

Next time we will look some more at how Luther changed what the Church taught about humility, but how this led him to proclaim Christ alone and cleared the way to a proper understanding of the Gospel.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

Woodcut (“Sauritt des Papsts”) after Lucas Cranach the Elder, used by Christian Roedinger the Elder of Magdeburg. According to I. Gobry, it is a reproduction of a Cranach woodcut (no. 6) in Martin Luther’s 1545 polemic Abbildung des Bapstum (cf. Image de la papaute (Grenoble: Millon, 1997), p. 118).

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 11

Wood carving of Luther rose
Saved by Christ alone

Rev. Donavon Riley

Throughout the course of his early lectures, Martin Luther found that even though he had been taught as a young monk that there was a vast, uncrossable chasm between sinners and a righteous God, that is not what he discovered in Scripture. Instead, especially in the pages of the Old Testament, Luther discovered sinful men and women pursued and saved by a God of faithful, lovingkindness; a God slow to judge and quick to forgive sinners; and a Savior God who led sinners down into darkest hell so He could carry them up into heavenly glory.

Martin was delighted to learn (and teach his students) that one does not become a theologian by knowing God’s mind and will, or by reading many theology books, but by “living, no, rather dying and being damned.” That, he discovered, is what makes a theologian.

This revelation was, as one Luther scholar writes, “like a pinch of yeast that gradually worked its way into his thoughts, his being, and his entire life.”

It is impossible to get to know Martin Luther unless one accepts that he embraced, in totality, what Scripture teaches about God’s righteousness: that God is righteous when He gives sinners His righteousness through Jesus Christ. God crosses the divide between Himself and sinners (a divide that sinners, not God, establish), and through Jesus’ bloody suffering and death, takes our sin on Himself and gives us His righteousness instead.

The reason this was so important for Luther, is that he also discovered in the Bible this truth: people cannot do anything other than love themselves. The first, middle, and last thing sinners only ever care about is themselves. Even when we are focused on being righteous our focus is on ourselves. We only worry about becoming righteous because we fear death and hell. Left to ourselves, without the threat of judgment and hell, we sinners will run amok through creation.

That is why, for Luther, he taught his students that people who imagine they can love God above all things and do what the Law commands as God Himself intends, are “plainly insane” “fools” and “pig theologians.”

There is no movement from sin to righteousness for Luther, not from us to God anyway. The whole movement of righteousness is from God to sinners through Christ Jesus. All a sinner, the Old Adam, contributes to his salvation, Luther said, is “sin and resistance.”

Everything human beings do is selfish, and everything God does in Christ Jesus is selfless. The scales of justice are then completely unbalanced because God has His thumb on the scale. Righteousness is always a one-sided action, from God to us.

This was a revolution for Luther that captured his entire imagination for the rest of his life, and it eventually resulted in his excommunication and a death sentence hung on him.

Next time, we will look more at this teaching about sin and righteousness that led to Martin Luther’s excommunication.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 10

Luther reads about righteousness

Rev. Donavon Riley

For Luther, while he lectured on the books of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg, one question captivated his imagination: “Where can I find a merciful God?” And the one text that drove Martin forward was St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans [1:17] “For therein [in the Gospel] is the righteousness of God revealed.”

In the Late Middle Ages, it was popularly taught that the righteousness of God was the eternal law by which God is holy (and for us, unapproachable) and by which He will judge all people on doomsday. At that time God will hand out His just judgments on all people, and punishments or rewards will be handed out.

But, what about the righteousness of grace that comes through faith in Christ? Didn’t theologians before Martin Luther embrace that part of St. Paul’s teaching? The simple answer is, no, not really. Medieval theologians taught that what St. Paul meant by righteousness was this: The Church hands out righteousness in the place of and by the command of Christ.

At that time, righteousness was understood to be like money that is paid out because someone works hard for it or because someone makes a good investment of his time and talent. Christ’s righteousness doesn’t make someone righteous before God though. It puts one in a position to become righteous through faith and hard work. Then, at the Last Judgment, and only then, will each person learn whether righteous God has decided they are worthy of entering Paradise or whether they will be thrown into hellfire.

What was “new” about Luther’s discovery of the true, biblical meaning righteousness is that God’s righteousness cannot be torn away from Christ’s righteousness by which He makes righteous people for free as underserved gift. And that, Luther said, is “the reason all the faithful will be able to stand the test: ‘That is the long and short of it: He who believes in the man called Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, has eternal life – as He himself says (John 3:16): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.'”

But why did Luther grasp this when so many other theologians, priests, and religious leaders did not? Because he tested what he read in St. Paul against the rest of the Scriptures. He did not go to church traditions, or theology books, or canon law, or the word of the Pope. The Bible, and nothing else, was his anchor at this time of gospel discovery. Only then, as he later said, were the “Gates of Paradise” opened and a flood of knowledge overwhelmed him now that he had finally broken through and grasped the text (Romans 1:17) in which St. Paul quotes the prophet Habakkuk: “The just will live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). Therefore, as Luther said, “I am not good and righteous, but Christ is.”

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 9

Martin Luther Wittenbrerg doors

Rev. Donavon Riley

Martin Luther’s move to Wittenberg did not lighten his workload at all. In fact, if anything, after he received his special license that made him a candidate for the doctorate in 1512, Luther’s life became so busy he barely had time to sleep.

“I could use two secretaries,” Luther wrote, “I do almost nothing during the day but write letters… I am a preacher at the monetary, a reader at meals, a parish preacher, director of studies, supervisor of eleven monasteries, superintendent of the fish pond at Litzkau, referee of a squabble at Torgau, lecturer on Paul, a collector of materials for a commentary on the Psalms, and then, as I said, I am overwhelmed with letters. I rarely have time for the required daily prayers and saying mass, not to mention my own temptations with the world, the flesh, and the devil. You see how lazy I am.”

Still, the old nagging questions hung onto him. Martin was still in search of a merciful God. As “lazy” as he imagined himself to be, or not, Luther’s studies and teaching led him deeper into Scripture. He searched, and wrote, and lectured, and preached like a man on his hands and knees crawling through the valley of the shadow of death. He hunted God through the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, which was where his particular theological expertise lay.

This is why, as Luther later said, “I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me.”

During his early years as a lecturer Luther taught the book of Genesis (1512), the Psalms (1513-15151), Romans (1515-1516), Galatians (1516-1517), Hebrews (1517-1518), and again the Psalms (1518-1521).

And through them all, Luther was hunting for God’s mercy. He chased after “the righteousness of God,” to understand what “righteousness” meant. As Luther said years later, “I hated that word [at Romans 1:17], ‘the righteousness of God,’ which, according to the custom and the use of teachers, I had been taught to understand in the philosophical sense with respect to the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.”

“Though I lived as a monk without reproach,” he said, “I felt, with the most disturbed conscience imaginable, that I was a sinner before God. I did not love, indeed I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners and secretly (if not blasphemously and certainly with great grumbling) I was angry with God, and said, “As if indeed it is not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through eternal sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Ten Commandments, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel’s threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!”

This is why he had been taught, and continued to teach in his early lectures, that when St. Paul wrote that “the righteous live by faith,” Luther had to be righteous to be given and keep faith. Martin did not care how sinners come to God. He was only interested in how a Christian can live with a God whose demand for righteousness can never be satisfied.

God was righteous and holy. Martin Luther was not. And the Gospel, no matter how many times he heard it, taught it, or preached it, gave his heart no rest. Luther heard the Gospel, but the question stuck in his mind: “How can I ‘live by faith?'”

Next time, we will look at Luther’s biblical lectures and how these lectures led him to the discovery that changed not just the Christian Church, but the world.

Rev. Donavon Riley serves as pastor at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.

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Higher History

Who Was Martin Luther? Part 8

Luther in Rome

By Rev. Donavon Riley

Martin Luther’s time in the monastery, all his study and work, all his searching for a merciful God, kept leading him back to the same point: If he wanted to enter into eternal life he needed to make sure he was always leaning toward heaven.

It didn’t matter if he was praying, or scrubbing floors, or just out for a walk, Luther was taught by every authority in the church, that if he just did his best, God would show him grace. But, only if the young monk did his best.

As Luther later said, when he thought back about this time in the monastery, “I Iost hold of Christ the Savior and comforter and made him a stick-master and hangman over my poor soul.”

There was not anything during those early years that shows us Luther was going to bust loose from what the church of his day believed and confessed as the truth about God, salvation, and so on. In fact, young Martin pretty much went along with what he was taught, even after he began to teach at university. He lived the way he was expected to live. He taught what he was expected to teach. He was, by most everybody’s opinion, a good and faithful monk.

Even his trip to Rome in 1510 did not change his attitude toward the faith of the Church. Near his 27th birthday, Luther was sent by his order to Rome in the hope that someone higher up, with more authority in the Church, could settle some political infighting that was happening amongst the monastic orders.

Luther and one other monk walked to Rome in the winter of that year—yes, they walked to Rome, over the Alps, in the winter!—as representatives of their order. Even though Luther expected to find a Rome (and a pope) that represented an example of faith, hope, and charity for the whole Church, what he found was something different.

First, the pope was not even in the city when Luther was there. Second, Rome was not a clean city. Garbage and sewage were dumped into the gutters. Wealthy people, especially women, avoided walking on the streets, mostly because they were under constant threat of being mugged. Third, Luther wanted to say a Mass at one of the little chapels that were everywhere in Rome at the time, but they were so jammed with priests wanting to do the same, that when he got his turn at an altar another priest behind him kept saying, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” the whole time. All in all, his experience in Rome was so bad that Luther, when he returned to Wittenberg, said that Romans were no better than dogs.

Still, he was able to overlook the poor conditions of the city and the overall miserable piety of the clergy he saw there, that as he later said, Luther “was so drunk… submerged in the Pope’s dogmas that I would have been ready to murder all… who take but a syllable from the obedience to the pope.” Life in Rome may not have been what Luther expected, but his hope in the Church and God’s grace were there for him, even if they were hidden and had to be hunted up.

When the young monk got back to Erfurt, and it was determined that what Rome had decided about their infighting was unacceptable, monks took sides. That is why, in the end, Luther and his friend Johannes Lang, were more or less pushed out of the monastery and sent into exile, to live at the monastery in Wittenberg, the “Black Cloister,” with their superior and friend in the Augustinian order, Johann von Staupitz.

Next time, we will look at what kind of city Wittenberg was in 1511, and what happened to Luther when he arrived.

Rev. Donavon Riley is the pastor of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Webster, Minnesota.