Martin Luther: (His Teaching)

Martin Luther, a Protestant reformer, played a significant role in challenging the corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century. He emphasized the need for salvation through faith in Christ alone and sparked the Protestant Reformation by challenging the sale of indulgences. However, Luther's views on the role of the civil magistrate led to a separation of civil law from biblical principles, resulting in legal positivism and the emergence of socialism in certain regions influenced by Lutheranism. The Reformation also restored the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer and elevated the dignity of common labor. While Luther's teachings had positive impacts, his passive approach towards the civil ruler and reliance on the state for education inadvertently weakened the church's teaching mission. Welcome, everybody, to TheGreatBibleReset.com, which refers to the necessity of a forthright national recommitment to the law of God, summarized in Exodus 20-24, as the only escape from the looming great economic reset of Klaus Schwab. Today, we are looking at the teaching message of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. And Martin Luther is kind of a mixed bag, because in spite of his positive contributions, very positive contributions, the natural law prescription offered by Luther for the civil magistrate of the ruler has unfortunately led us ultimately into our current cultural disaster. Now, the reformer spoke of three lawful uses of the law of God. So this has reference to the political use, has nothing to do with salvation, and this is opposed to the pedagogical use of the law of God to expose our sin prior to our conversion to Christ, and the normative use as a guide for life after our conversion. Now, Luther was, of course, right on the money in demanding a spiritual solution to the problems created by a corrupt church. Luther could find no relief for his guilty conscience in the papacy's perverted system of works righteousness. He finally found peace when he received by faith the free gift of righteousness that God offers us in Christ. And Luther sparked the Reformation by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg door. These challenged specific beliefs of the papacy, especially the sale of indulgences for salvation. So in summary, Martin Luther was born to a poor peasant family in 1483. The Reformation came in 1517. His father managed to provide for his training as an Augustinian monk, and he became an instructor at the University of Wittenberg, and on that door he posted his Ninety-Five Theses in protest of papal indulgences, and that was 1517. This triggered the Protestant Reformation. After many debates with church officials, the Pope kicked Luther out of the church. All Christians were forbidden even to look at him, let alone listen to him. After learning that his books had been burned in Rome, Luther decided to fight fire with fire. That night, students at Wittenberg emptied the library shelves of all the Romish books, and they lit a great bonfire, singing as the books went up in smoke. And finally, at the end, Luther cast the excommunication and the canon law into the fire, and he issued a curse. Because you have corrupted God's truth, he said, may God destroy you in this fire. He declared that any would-be denied salvation who failed to renounce the Pope. So the monk had excommunicated the Pope. Prevailing temporarily against Rome in his trial before Emperor Charles V, Luther went on to clarify many biblical doctrines, including the sovereignty of God and the priesthood of the believer. Unfortunately, he adopted this hands-off policy toward the civil magistrate, resulting in a theory of legal positivism, wherein civil law was divorced from the Bible and employed for utopian social engineering rather than just administration of the law of God. So the Roman Catholic Church was deeply stained by the Renaissance, lapsed into a gross system of works righteousness, tickets to heaven or indulgences were actually being marketed in Germany and elsewhere. And these were funding the Pope's building projects and art projects in Vatican City, many of these by Michelangelo, Raphael, and others. And this was similar to Acts 8.18, where, and this is a quote, when Simon the magician saw that the spirit was bestowed through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, give this authority to me as well. But Peter said to him, may your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money, end of quote. So that's where our word simony comes from. Now by way of review, this started several centuries earlier, actually 500 years earlier, with the papal revolution of 1075 to 1122, and that was about 50 years, almost 50 years of warfare between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, civil magistrate. And when St. Anselm at that time was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, following the Battle of Hastings, in spite of his dictum, I believe in order that I may understand, you know famous dictum associated with St. Anselm, in response to a challenge from his students, Anselm elevated reason above the word of God by using logic to allegedly prove the existence of God and the incarnation. And this started a chain reaction among his successors. For example, Anselm paved the way for the speculations of Abelard in Paris, somewhat later, shortly thereafter, to resolve alleged contradictions in the scripture by logic. And so Abelard is sometimes called the Descartes of the 12th century, and a forerunner of Rousseau, Kant, Spinoza, and the like. Now his student, Abelard's student, John of Salisbury, carried this natural law philosophy into the political realm, giving us the secular civil magistrate. And this was reinforced by a book by a man named Glanville, called the Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England. And this was the first systematic summary of the common law of Henry II, with very little reference to Bible law. In like manner, the canon law of the church was summarized in a book by a guy named Gratian. His concordance of discordant canons was based on natural law, again with very little Bible law. And according to legal historian Harold Berman, the canon law of the papal revolution and Gratian's commentary gave us an external forum for the trial of crimes based on retribution or tribute that was owed to the state primarily, instead of restitution owed to the victim or to God, as under Alfred the Great. So the Battle of Hastings was really a turning point in legal theory. And then there was an internal forum, which was the system of church confession to the priest and the penance, the system of penance in the canon law. And that's why Luther burned a copy of the canon law symbolically, along with his bull of excommunication, the night of the bonfire. So we've inherited all these competing law codes in modern pluralistic America. Pluralism is political polytheism, and Christians have to make a choice, because we cannot have the first amendment and the first commandment. The two are in direct opposition. The first commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me. The first amendment makes America a pluralistic nation with multiple competing law codes. Pluralism is political polytheism. Israel, Iran, China, all have a single law code based on a single religion. But we in America are so steeped in polytheism, political polytheism, that we recoil from an exclusively Christian government with an exclusively Christian law code. Now God had graciously revealed to Luther the way of salvation by faith in Christ alone. And this came in a flash of insight from the book of Galatians, chapter 3, verse 11, the just shall live by faith, or solo fide, faith alone. So in Luther, in his book, bondage of the will made a strong case for the sovereignty of God. He exposed the Arminian view of man's alleged free will in salvation. It's a question of whose will is first and final. Is it the will of God, or is it the will of man? Luther was summoned before Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. His views were condemned on May 25, 1521, and Luther himself was granted short-term freedom under a safe conduct, but on the way out, he almost at once was spirited away by his protector, Frederick the Wise. Now Luther's works restored the basis for redemption and liberty in Christ. As Jesus had declared in the gospel, ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, John 8, 32. Spiritual liberty before God extended into all areas of life. For instance, the Reformation restored the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. It also raised the dignity of common labor in every realm. And this led to what is what we call the Protestant work ethic, and unleashed a flurry of creativity in all areas of life. Sadly, Luther failed to apply the liberty of the gospel into the civil arena. This was apparently because of the debt he owed for his very life to the German electors. So he tended to adopt kind of a passive, hands-off policy toward the civil ruler. He did groundbreaking work in soteriology, the study of salvation. But the Lutheran doctrine of the state aided the alleged independence of the ruler from the Bible. Biblical historian Harold Berman reports that, quote, the Lutheran reformers explicitly denied that it was the task of the church to develop human law. This Lutheran skepticism made possible the emergence of a theory of law called legal positivism, which treats the law of the state as morally neutral, a means, not an end, a device for manifesting the policy of the sovereign and for securing obedience to it, end of quote. So this is opposed to the biblical doctrine of law as a negative restraining force to hold back the sin of man. So it's positive law versus negative law. Luther may have been influenced by the nominalism of William of Ockham, who died a century or so earlier in 1347 in the realm of civil government. And this nominalism denies the existence of absolutes outside the names or categories or names assigned by fallen human reason. And so it remained for other streams of the Reformation to fully develop this biblical doctrine of civil rule. And sadly, in areas heavily influenced by Lutheranism, various forms of socialism or heavy-handed statism have emerged. And this includes Germany, Scandinavia, Minnesota, the Northwest United States and elsewhere. And the trend was made worse because Luther had asked the state to provide a system of tax-funded education. And this unwittingly turned the church's teaching mission over to the civil leader. Now, Rome soon launched a counter-reformation. It was led by Jesuit Ignatius Loyola against Luther's challenge. There was some reform of morals, but a brutal inquisition was set up to force confession of heretics by torture. The Vatican also fomented wars. It was Spain against Holland and the Thirty Years' War in Europe. So thank you for being here today. You can learn more about this in Keys to the Classics, the History of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization at the kingswayclassicalacademy.com bookstore, where 15% of our purchases fund scholarships for low-income students, also the 60-Day Longevity store and boomers-alive.com. So tomorrow we'll be analyzing Martin Luther's teaching in more detail in light of the Bible.