500 Years of Martin Luther

Today many of my theologian and Christian friends are posting thoughts and quotes about Martin Luther since the Reformation officially began on this day, according to church historians, five hundred years ago when Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle.  Now I'm no Luther expert, but I have found some of his ideas really intriguing and I continue to wrestle with the implications of what he came to believe and teach.  

Two short quotes of Luther have proved to be a guiding light for me this year as I deal with the fallout from my divorce and the unending waves of grief I feel day after day:

1) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong ("sin boldly"), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world."  

When I hear these words I am only able to "hear" them as a child of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.  Wesley, when he encountered the work of Luther, found it to be deeply disturbing and too mystical.  In fact, he found the idea so completely confusing as to arouse anger.  In 1781 Wesley described Luther's work as "shallow … muddy and confused … deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often dangerously wrong."  How can a true Christian sin boldly, Wesley reasoned?  Doesn't such an idea lead into the darkness of anti-nomianism and anarchy?  I think Wesley never fully resolved some of these tensions in his own mind because, after all, his conversion experience took place while hearing Luther's reflections on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.  What can possibly be more Protestant than that kind of a conversion!?!

Yet the good news behind what Luther is writing beckons to me too.  It's like a faint glimmer of hope that God is so profoundly big and good and in utter control of history that our own human free will almost seems to fade in importance.  Sure, we do bad things and we do them all the time and these harmful choices we make hurt others around us and even hurt ourselves.  Yet what if the mystics are correct when they insist that God is love and that love wins and that in some very mysterious way that we don't yet fully understand we will -- all of us, according to some! -- come to rest within the arms of a loving God who is far bigger than we can even think or imagine?  Such is the logic of grace.  It is the logic behind old hymns that I grew up singing in camp-meeting tabernacles with words like "Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe / Sin had left a guilty stain / He washed it white as snow." In other words, salvation is a work of God and not something we ever earn.  As a dysfunctional Wesleyan, I find that very, very hard to believe for any serious length of time.  

The doubting Thomas in me cries out, "But how can God use addiction?" I've wrestled with this theologically for at least fifteen years:  can God really love an addict?  After all, I can hear Wesley saying, "a child of God does not sin."  And what is addiction if not utter slavery to sin and self? (Some would say it is a brain disorder, but I'm not completely sold on that idea yet).  So, anyway, that's why I am intrigued by Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, yet am not entirely sure if I can believe it.

2) The second quote from Luther that has been with me all year was posted by my friend Ken Brewer at Spring Arbor University:  “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”  

Of course, I find tremendous hope in this idea because it means that even a story as seemingly tragic as my own can be redeemed.  All of my life I have longed to be a theologian.  It has bordered at times on an obsessive-compulsive tendency, as the history of this blog demonstrates.  Try as I might, I have simply not been able to understand my recent divorce and my bouts with addiction.  In many moments my uncertainty has led me into profound despair of life itself and, as I have written elsewhere, throughout this year I have often asked myself the perennial human question: "To be or not to be?"  

Yet what an irony it would be if this path in life that I have taken (did I chose it or not?  I cannot decide) could be redeemed in such a way that through the suffering and damnation I am currently experiencing I might one day come to a better understanding of God.  God, after all, has always been my Ultimate Concern, even when I haven't always acted like it.  Indeed, I think this may have been the fundamental problem with my marriage:  I allowed Courtney to replace God in my life and, when she inevitably let me down as all humans must do, then I grew resentful and angry.  Even now I often feel the temptation to give in to bitterness, yet I know that to do so would be to walk a path toward destruction and death.  I hear St. Paul whispering in my ear, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  I'm not always sure what that means, but I want to do my best to follow in that Way.

Christian thinkers and mystics since Pseudo-Dionysius have pointed to a three-fold spiritual path for believers: a trail that leads from purgation through illumination to unification.  Luther's statement above echoes this ancient teaching about purgation.  We must be refined in a furnace of pain for, otherwise, some of us would simply never learn and we would be condemned to a hell of our own making for eternity.  This is a deep mystery:  even Jesus Christ had to enter into death and damnation.  Regardless of whether or not one takes it literally, the church has also always taught that Jesus Christ descended into hell itself prior to his resurrection by the Father.  

At this point in my life that idea brings me deep existential comfort.  It isn't just a "head knowledge," but a "heart reality."  When I can do nothing at all except to pray Psalm 6 or Psalm 77, even in the midst of the agony and tears I cling to this insane Christian idea that God herself/himself is present with us in the pain.  Thus we are called, as my uncle once told me, not to "go around" the pain, but to go "through" it.  I don't really pretend to understand what that means, but it seems wise.  

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God Almighty, thank you for the slightly insane, profane, racist bigot Martin Luther because if you can save a dude like that, you can probably save anyone.  That's the offensiveness of grace.  I believe, but help now my unbelief.  Amen.