16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith. (Romans 1: 16-17)
This coming Tuesday, October 31, is the date when someone in a dark costume came to pound on someone’s door with a very scary message. Oh, did you think I was talking about trick-or-treaters on Halloween? No, I’m thinking about a black-robed German priest and monk of the Order of St. Augustine, Martin Luther. Exactly 500 years ago this Tuesday, he hammered his 95 Theses onto the door of the Wittenberg church. His message was not, “Trick or Treat,” but “Repent,” as in, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent,’ he meant for the entire life of a Christian to be ones of repentance.” That was the first of The 95 Theses.
I’ve been so excited and inspired about this this coming Tuesday’s 500th anniversary, maybe that’s what we’ll give the children who come to our door that very evening, instead of candy (which I only end up eating most of): their very own copies of Luther’s 95 Theses, in Luther’s original Latin nonetheless. Or in the German translation that quickly followed.
Luther did not come to the door of the Wittenberg Church on October 31, 1517, looking to launch a worldwide Reformation. But that’s what happened, once the printing presses started churning out copies of those 95 Theses. Luther was only looking for a debate. A debate about indulgences. Indulgences were basically sinning licenses on paper with the Pope’s seal, with which you bought forgiveness for any sins you had committed, or that you intended to commit, or that loved ones had committed who were now suffering for them in Purgatory, supposedly. The Pope in Rome was selling these indulgences to raise money for a bigger cathedral.
Once a copy of Luther’s 95 Theses reached the Pope in Rome, Luther was a wanted, hunted man. But that rejection and reaction freed Luther to question even more things. Like all the other hoops and fires he was supposed to jump through in order to justify himself before God and earn God’s grace. As a scholar and expert in church law and liturgy, he knew what practices, prayers and penances you were to say and do for what sins, and how many, from all the rules, rituals, and reforms that had built up over a thousand years of Western church tradition. All those rules and regulations and rituals had nearly buried the simple gospel of God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. The church was teaching people how to earn their own merits, rather than to receive God’s grace.
It wasn’t working for Luther, and not for any lack of trying. He was so brutally honest with himself about the mixed motives and self-interest that infected his every good work that he had become honestly brutal with himself. He was so obsessively and painstakingly scrupulous about his every fault, failure and temptation, that at one point his spiritual director told him, “Martin, Martin, next week please come to confession with some interesting sins to confess.” But the harder he tried to be a good Christian, the worse a sinner he knew himself to be, and the angrier he got at God. “Why would God demand of him such an impossibly high standard of holiness, sanctity and purity, in thought as well as deed, when this same God declared him to be a sinner born to slavery and incapable of saving himself, he wondered, and then condemn him for that same powerlessness to be anything but a sinner, born to slavery to sin and unable to justify himself?
So whenever Luther read Romans 1:16: “…in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed…” he misunderstood that to mean that the gospel of Jesus Christ reveals to us the inconceivably righteous character of God, the impossibly righteous demands of God, and the indisputably righteous punishments of God, like those that he knew backward and forward from ten centuries of church law and tradition. But selling indulgences from sin to pay for a new cathedral? That was a bridge too far for Luther to cross. That he protested, by means of The 95 Theses. And so he launched, in spite of himself, the Protestant Reformation.
It’s hard to believe, but it was actually two years after he posted the 95 Theses that the full meaning of those 95 Theses for himself would finally dawn upon Luther. It happened when he looked anew and again at these words in Romans 1: 16-17: “In the gospel is revealed the righteousness of God by faith from first to last; as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.” Then light dawned on him and his hatred of God gave way to hope in God. In his own words, he said: “At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it 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. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word 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.”
In other words, Martin finally understood that the “the righteousness of God” revealed in the gospel is not the righteousness that God demands of us, nor the righteousness by which God judges or condemns us, but the righteousness which God has accomplished for us, and which God offers to us, and works in us, through Jesus Christ. It is the nature and the work of God by which God sets fallen people and a fallen world right with himself through Jesus Christ, by forgiveness, and then by transformation, and not the righteousness of people who thereby justify themselves to God. This righteousness flows from God’s mercy and toward our trust every step of the way. “by faith, from beginning to end, for the one who is righteous through faith shall live,” in every sense of the word. God gives this gift of right standing with himself freely, for the asking; any effort on our part to earn it, however righteous our works, is a form of blasphemy and idolatry, because it puts us in God’s place. And because it treats every good and devotional work as though it were a bargain with God for something that God is already eagerly desiring to give, and freely. It is but another way to fall for the serpent’s lie to Adam and Eve: “You shall be like God.” It would be worse than offering to pay your neighbor for the meal to which he invited you. By trying to trust in his own righteousness and religiosity, rather than in God’s faithfulness and mercy, Luther realized that he had been committing idolatry, leading to another grave sins in his Roman Catholic catechism: “despairing of the grace or mercy of God.”
When Luther started teaching, preaching and writing his liberating insight about Romans 1: 16-17, the Reformation got supercharged and took on a bold new life. What had started slowly with a critique of church corruption exploded and became the liberation of the Christian man and woman from the complicated, irrelevant and oppressive claptrap and clutter of so much church hierarchy, church traditions and church practice and politics, so that every believer could personally enjoy the same relationship of trust, release and renewal with God that Martin Luther was experiencing and expounding. Luther’s flash of insight into these two verses, Romans 1: 16-17, was the spark that started that fires of Reformation: the reformation of persons, and not just of church practice. It reformed and restored the Christian life from a personal project of earning merit through the church’s rules and rituals, to a life of receiving grace personally through Jesus Christ, living it, enjoying it, and sharing it.
Now I should stop and give a word of a warning here: do not take Luther’s experience, nor his criticism of his 16th Century church as a blanket condemnation of Roman Catholicism and all Roman Catholic Christians today. They have gone through several Reformations, and most Roman Catholic Christians and clerics whom I have known are sympathetic to Luther’s criticism and discovery. That we might bury the simple gospel under an accumulating clutter of tradition, structure, rules and rituals, sometimes for the best of intentions at first, that’s not unique to any one denomination. For all our efforts to be First Century, red letter Christians, we Mennonites may sometimes find ourselves needing to do some housecleaning, too.
Now, why should Mennonites care about Luther, the 95 Theses, and his rediscovery of God’s grace? Especially since Luther and other Protestants sometimes persecuted Menno Simons, for whom we are named, and the other free church Anabaptists? Especially since Luther continued the state church system that made believers’ baptism—or “Anabaptism” as they called it—illegal, even a crime punishable by death?
Despite Luther’s faults and blind spots, our free church Anabaptist ancestors like Menno Simons and Michael Sattler could do what they did because Luther did what he did. Luther effectively paved the way for them, and for us. In some ways, the founders of our movement were sons and daughters of Martin Luther, even though Father Martin later rejected and disowned them, I’m sad to say.
But we still have more in common than not. Both Menno Simons, for whom we are named, and Martin Luther, were Catholic clergy, living at roughly the same time, just a few hours’ drive from each other. And both of them were seized and transformed by a fresh, personal rediscovery of God’s grace. But while Luther had been guilty of “despairing of the grace of God,” Menno had been committing its opposite sin, “presuming upon the grace of God.” Whereas Luther was so scrupulous that he was driving himself crazy with self-doubt and despair, Menno came to realize that he had never been scrupulous enough. As he later testified, while in the priesthood he was engaged in “playing, drinking and other diversions, in all vanity,” neglecting God, his own sanctity, and perhaps the congregation he was to pastor as well. But as zealots and true believers fought and died all around him, for or against the Reformation, Menno grew increasingly disturbed and distraught over his comfortable and complacent life, sitting on the fence, living high off the hog in a corrupted state-church system.
Menno was also reading Luther’s works, on the sly. Slowly, painfully, Menno came to two conclusions: 1) that Luther was right in his discovery about God’s grace and in his criticism of church corruption; and 2) Luther was not right enough. Luther’s reformation of the church stopped a few steps short of the real deal. He had only switched one medieval state church system for another, with princes and city councils still calling the shots. People were still added to the fold, involuntarily, through infant baptism, so that everybody and their dog was Christian, supposedly. And Christians of these state churches took up the sword against other Christians, or against Muslims and unbelievers, so that the church looked really no different from the world in either conduct or character. Luther could preach all he like about grace, and God bless him for it. But for Menno, grace does not want to stop with just a change of heart or mind or doctrine. God’s grace wants to claim and transform the total person and his or her relationships and community.
To borrow the words of one old hymn, both Martin and Menno could testify to God’s “grace that will pardon and cleanse within.” We typically identify Martin and his heirs with the grace that pardons, while Menno’s heirs major in the “grace that will…cleanse within.” Or in the words of another hymn, Amazing Grace, Menno could sing, “twas grace that taught my heart to fear,” and Martin would chime in, “and grace my fears relieved.” These somewhat different perspectives on God’s same seamless grace explain, in part, the different routes their heirs have taken over the last five centuries. When Mennonites and Anabaptists talk about grace, it is usually the loving initiative of God that leads us to amendment of life, nonconformity to the world and following Jesus in peaceful, practical ways, and voluntarily, to which we testify by believer’s baptism. Menno Simons and the first Anabaptists were thereby following the road of Reformation all the way back to a New Testament believers’ church of voluntary membership through believer’s baptism, and to lives and churches that differ from the world because they look and act like Jesus, even to the point of loving our enemies and persecutors.
But just as I think that Menno had valid words of warning for Martin, I think we could stand to hear a word of warning yet from Martin Luther. He said, in effect, if you Anabaptist are not careful, your emphasis on good works as the fruit of God’s grace can very well lead to another version of self-justification by works-righteousness. How long before your good works become a parade of the proof of God’s favor, rather than simply the humble fruit of it? Like when an Amish family left church one day and the father told his wife and children, “You know, I think we were the plainest people there today.”
And about the sacraments like baptism and communion, Luther would say, “You guys risk changing them from channels of grace received into personal trophies of grace achieved.” Some of us grew up in Mennonite Churches where we heard, “Get your conduct, your character and your relationships all in order before you come take communion; otherwise, you’re partaking of it unworthily.” Luther would ask, “So who thinks they’re worthy? Sure, work at getting your relationships in order, but still come to the communion table, knowing that we need it precisely because we are sinners, and that Christ alone is worthy, and not ourselves, knowing that we need his grace to get our conduct, character and relationships in any semblance of order.”
Looking over nearly 500 years of Anabaptist/Mennonite schisms and controversies over things like hair length, clothing and language, it’s hard not to admit that Luther had a point. The devilish temptation of self-justification constantly nips at our heels like an unruly little dog. We can fall for both liberal and conservative, traditional and progressive versions of self-justification. This may be why some chaplains in Mennonite nursing homes have told me that their Mennonite members sometimes exhibit more anxiety about facing God after death than they do desire or delight, even though theirs have often been the most exemplary lives.
But they didn’t get that anxiety nor uncertainty from Menno Simons. Menno wrote to one critic who accused him of works-righteousness, “…we plainly teach that we cannot be saved by outward works, however great and glorious they may appear or that we can thus entirely please God; for they are ever mixed with imperfection and weakness and, therefore, through the corruption of the flesh we cannot acquire the righteousness required in the commandments; therefore we point, alone, to Christ Jesus who is our only and eternal Righteousness, Reconciliation and Propitiator with the Father, and do not at all trust in our works.”
The Bible does not divide nor distinguish the grace that gives us peace with God, and the grace that transforms us into peacemakers. Consider Paul’s description of grace in Titus 2: 11: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people,12 instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age, 13 looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, 14 who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
I can hear both Menno and Martin saying “Amen” to that.
If we would keep warming our spirits at the 500 year-old fire of Reformation, then let’s keep those two facets of God’s grace together: the grace that pardons and the grace that cleanses within, the grace that teaches our hearts to fear, like it did for Menno, and the grace that our fears relieved, as it did for Martin. For the righteousness revealed in the gospel is more God’s gift to us, than it is our gift to God.