Often when we consider the Protestant Reformation we think of it as largely a series of investigations, debates and discoveries relative to important theological and philosophical issues. Without a doubt this mighty movement of God was the climax of many years of intellectual and spiritual struggles over issues pertaining to the Bible and man's relationship with God. We owe much to the Reformers for their insistence on the authority of the Bible, the priesthood of the believer, the spiritual nature of the church, and justification by faith. These great and glorious truths have come down to us as recoveries of what we know the Scriptures to teach so clearly.

But what we sometimes forget is that the Reformation was not just born out of doctrinal and ideological struggles, but it was also the fruit of the very personal and subjective conflicts which some of its primary agents experienced. Issues such as whether an individual can come directly to God without the mediation of an earthly hierarchy, or wheth­er we are saved by grace or by works – these matters affect individual souls who long to enjoy peace with God and assurance of salvation. It is, after all, out of the throes of personal fears, doubts, longings and searches that great movements which shake the world develop.

No one in the period of the Reformation illustrates more vividly the importance of the personal struggle for hope and peace than the Ger­man monk, Martin Luther. Actually the mighty movement he initiated did not begin with any intellectual doubts about the authority and validity of the Roman Catholic Church which controlled the religious world of his day. Rather it came initially with his revolt against and disgust with the indulgence system which was carried on by the Vati­can. Those reactions emerged from his own inner struggle to come to a settled peace about his relationship with God. In this article I wish to focus on Luther's personal journey, which began with an intense devo­tion to Romanism, evolved into a period of fear, doubt and uncertainty, and climaxed in a glorious experience of joy in the marvellous grace of God.

The Struggle⤒🔗

It is doubtful that there ever existed in the long and tortured history of Roman Catholicism a more devoted, sincere and diligent follower than Martin Luther. He was brought up and trained, like most of the people of Europe in his day, to adore the vast machinery of the mediaeval church, beginning with the Pope and descending through its vast and ubiquitous tentacles which dominated practically every parish and town in his native land of Germany, and the rest of Europe. He took its claims seriously. He revered it, feared it, obeyed it, and in fact became for many years a slave to it. He once wrote to Duke George of Saxony, 'I was indeed a pious monk. If ever a monk could obtain heaven by his monkish works, I should certainly have been entitled to it.'¹

Luther, rejecting the earnest desires of his father that he should be a lawyer, entered the religious life of a monk, and his primary motive in doing this was to get a handle on the raging sins that tormented his soul, and to secure a settled comfort within. He felt (as a loyal Catholic) that through obedience to the church he could firmly obtain the favour of God. He took the vows, fasted, prayed, and mortified his flesh with all the power he could muster. He even took a pilgrimage to Rome and there, to demonstrate his total dedication to the church, climbed on his knees the mediaeval staircase known as Pilate's stairs, which were said to have been the stone steps leading up to Pilate's house at Jerusalem.

Martin Luther eventually emerged from his night of darkness and despair, but not in the way he had supposed. Peace did not come through obedience to the demanding laws of the Vatican, or even from devotion to the perfect commandments of God, but from a rediscovery of the message of the apostles of Christ: salvation through trust in the mercy of God through Christ.

The Jesus Christ Luther had come to believe in even from his youth was not the gracious Saviour who invites weary and heavy-laden sinners to flee to him for mercy, but a stern and angry Judge who looks over the parapets of heaven with an axe in his hand, ready to strike those who fail or falter on the spiritual journey. This fact is noted by Thomas Lindsay in his history of the Reformation in Germany:

A marked characteristic of this revival (in pre-Reformation pilgrimages) was the thought that Jesus was to be looked upon as the Judge who was to come to punish the wicked. His saving and intercessory work was thrust into the background.²

But the hope, peace and joy that he longed for eluded him. He found to his disappointment and consternation that all his external devotions were no match for the torrent of temptation that came from without and within. He said:

While I was yet a monk, I no sooner felt assailed by any temptation than I cried out – I am lost! Immediately I had recourse to a thou­sand methods to stifle the cries of my conscience, I went every day to confession, but that was of no use to me. Then, bowed down by sorrow, I tortured myself by the multitude of my thoughts. – Look, exclaimed I, thou art still envious, impatient, passionate! It profiteth thee nothing, O wretched man, to have entered this sacred order.³

And so Martin Luther learned what was taught so forcefully by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter seven, and what untold thousands who have experienced evangelical conversion through the ages have found, that while the law can give the knowledge of sin, it can do nothing to bring the hope of eternal justification or to quiet the guilty conscience. The law with its inflexible demands, demonstrating the holiness of the Creator, cracks, as it were, its whip over our souls and leaves us broken and hopeless. There is no misery so acute, no torment so deep, no anguish so intense as the despair of a soul seeking to obtain salvation by its own efforts. In a sermon on Matthew 13:1-9 entitled, 'Faith, Good Works and the Spiritual Interpretation of the Gospel', Luther says, 'It is a miserable, pitiable life that is under compulsion by fear of hell, of death and of shame. Hell, death and shame are his yoke and burden, heavy beyond measure, from which he has a burdened conscience and is secretly an enemy to law and to God.'⁴ As Luther himself put it, the Christ he knew early in his life was the 'stern judge from whom I would fain have fled and yet could not escape'.

The only way to appease this vengeful Jesus, as taught by the church, was to seek the kind and beneficent intercession of his mother. Lindsay says, 'Men forgot that He was the Saviour and Intercessor; and as the human heart craves for someone to intercede for it another intercessor had to be found. This gracious personality was discovered in the Virgin Mother, who was to be entreated to intercede with her Son on behalf of poor sinning human creatures.'⁵ And thus, like so many of his deluded countrymen, Luther went to the 'Mother of God', who, unlike her vindictive son, was full of tenderness and compassion. Mary, however fraudulently enthroned in heaven with god-like qualities, became the sole refuge for the terrified monk.

Hope and Peace←⤒🔗

It was while Luther was in the cloister at Erfurt that he began to study a book which had lain neglected by the professional clergy of the church for many ages, and which, in fact, was almost unknown. This book was the Bible. He mastered the original languages and here, in this fountain of life, the very revelation of God himself, he discovered the great truths which were to liberate his soul and eventually to transform the world. In this book he found nothing whatever about the fantasies in which he had lived so long: the danger of purgatory, the infallibility of the Roman pontiff, the adoration of Mary, the need for prayer to the saints, and, least of all, about salvation by human efforts. Instead, in the Bible, par­ticularly in the books of Galatians and Romans, he discovered that God freely offers redemption by his own sovereign grace, dispensed through the mediation of Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross.

It was actually a passage from the book of Habakkuk which finally set him free from the bondage of Roman Catholicism and broke the chains of sin away from his soul. D'Aubigne recounts what happened.

In the retirement of his quiet cell, he used to consecrate whole hours to the study of the divine Word, this epistle of the Apostle Paul (Romans) lying open before him. On one occasion, having reached the seven­teenth verse of the first chapter, he read this passage from the prophet Habakkuk, The just shall live by faith. This precept struck him, this life is the gift of faith. This promise, which he received into his heart as if God Himself had placed it there, unveiled to him the mystery of the Christian life and increased this life in him. Years after, in the midst of his numerous occupations, he imagined he still heard these words: The just shall live by faith.⁶

Now Martin knew that his standing with God rested not on any of his own strivings, however sincere and diligent, but on something entirely outside himself: the righteousness of God in Christ received by faith. The glorious truth of Christ's substitutionary work at once assured him of forgiveness and justification before God and also in­spired him to a life of even more zealous – though now truly enlightened – service to God. To a fellow friar he later wrote,

Oh, my dear brother, learn to know Christ and Him crucified. Learn to sing unto Him a new song, to despair of yourself, and to say to Him, Thou, Lord Jesus Christ, art my righteousness, and I am Thy sin. Thou hast taken what was mine, and hast given me what was Thine. What Thou wast not, Thou didst become, in order that I might become what I was not!⁷

Martin Luther was not the type of man to keep hidden in his own heart such a glorious truth as that of salvation by grace through faith. The message of the book of Romans which had transformed his own soul must now be shared with his fellow countrymen who were, for the most part, still as he had been for so long, struggling under the decep­tions of the medieval church. And so, from the pulpit at Wittenberg, Luther, risking the wrath of all the officials of the Roman Church, from the Pope down, risking his own reputation, career and indeed his own life itself, thundered forth the message to all and sundry: Forgiveness of sin and justification before God come through faith alone.

That faith, he insisted, is of course never alone, for good works fol­low it, but as the means of our saving relationship with God it is alone. Thus The Bible Alone, Grace Alone, and Faith Alone became the watch­words of the Protestant Reformation. When the bold and intrepid friar-nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, pro­testing at the shameful system of indulgences, it shook the walls of the Vatican. But when he began to preach the doctrines of grace and spread them throughout Europe by his books that poured forth from the press, the very foundations of the Vatican were broken as by a thunderous earthquake. The grip of fear, doubt and superstition by which the Pope and his emissaries had held them for so long was removed from the minds of thousands.

The debates Luther engaged in after his remarkable transformation were, as a rule, emotional and sometimes even violent. His language was often intemperate and even abusive. No one should justify the style he adopted at times in his warfare against what he perceived to be deadly errors. But, flaws and foibles aside, Luther stands today as a true Christian hero who was raised up by God to blaze a trail of truth in an age when lies and deception were the rule. Let us, no doubt in more patient and irenic ways, seek to take up the torch he passed to us, for the soul-damning notion of salvation by works is far from dead. 'The just shall live by faith' – is still a heart cry for us in the twenty-first century, and it will bring hope and peace to our generation just as it did in Luther's day.