Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Was Luther "Living His Truth"? Responding to The Rest is History || SLP511

Transcript

Was Luther "Living His Truth"? Responding to The Rest is History || SLP511 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really recognize the Luther that they were presenting.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: There are some elements of Luther's theology there.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: You have the idea that we are all sinful, and that because of that, we do have to depend on God's love.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We can't just work ourselves into salvation.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: But what was missing in that explanation, I felt was the cross.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including one of our favorite podcasts here.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: The rest is History, that's presented by Tom Holland and uh Dominic Sandbrook.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to be discussing their five-part series that was recently aired called Luther.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really uh an exploration of him as the first great reformer.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And as they were talking about Luther, I thought to myself, we really need to get some people on here who are great experts in the subject.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought of Amy Matravardi, and I thought of Mike Reeves, and they joined me on the line.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us, guys.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Great to be with you, Glenn.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, great to be with you.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And let me um let you guys introduce yourselves.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to know uh who you are, what you guys do, and uh can we have two positive notes from you to begin with?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what do you love about the rest is history podcast and what do you love about Luther?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Michael Reeves.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm a theologian.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that would not get a clap from Dom, I don't think.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I've uh appreciated Luther greatly for the um incisiveness of his theological insight.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: He seems to have sword thrusts of insight, like very few people, the clarity of his articulation of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I've I've admired appreciated Luther for many years, and I've also admired and appreciated both Donick Sandbrook and Tom Holland for many years.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've read, I think, all of their non-fiction history books for adults, um, and I've listened to almost every episode of The Rest is History, and love listening to their banter, uh, the the ambiance they create, and it is it's generally great history.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: It generally is not a I'm not being nitpicky, it's just that, of course, sometimes they're on surer ground, sometimes they're skating on slightly thinner ice.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: You've you've listened to almost all their episodes.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's very good going.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Amy, is is that similar for you?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Introduce yourself and and tell us what you love about the rest is history and about Luther.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I am a certified Wang, which is not a title that I chose, but one that Tom and Dow chose.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it means I'm a member of the Rest is History Club, all paid up.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been listening to The Rest is History pretty much since the first episode.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been following Tom Holland on Twitter for some time before that, but like Mike, I've listened to pretty much every episode.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh a little bit about me.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a writer living in Dayton, Ohio, here in the United States, and I do two kinds of writing.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The first is historical fiction novels.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a series about Empress Matilda of England that's out, and more importantly, I have a couple about the Reformation that are getting ready to come out in which Martin Luther is a character.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a big topic of interest to me.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I also contribute articles to an organization called 1517, where we're really all about just sharing the good news that uh your sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, that he died for you so you can live, and that's what we're all about.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So as far as what I love about the rest is history, I think Tom and Dom are such compelling storytellers, and they have such a good balance between the two of them.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times it's Dominic, who's a straight man, and Tom who's kind of the, I think, Tigger as they described him in the Times, always bouncing around.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: But really, they both uh can cover such a wide variety of subjects.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing I just love is all the people I've been able to meet through uh my connection with enjoying the rest is history and meeting other people who enjoy it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even the two of you, this has come about as a result of the rest is history.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's been a real blessing in my life that I sure didn't anticipate when I first started listening to this podcast, but it's been wonderful.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was reflecting on what I love about uh the podcast, and the the comparison I made in my mind was with David Attenborough as someone who does not so much impress you with their knowledge, even though their knowledge is far superior to yours, but what they do is they are fascinated by something and they sweep you up into their fascination with it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking just this morning about um some of what I do is kind of training other Christians perhaps in how to communicate and how to preach and that sort of thing.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me um like that is a very good model to follow, not to try to impress people with the great knowledge that you have, but to be fascinating because you're so fascinated with the subject.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think they managed they manage that on pretty much every topic that they speak about, including on Luther.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're going to talk really in this uh episode about the things we disagree with, actually, um, from those clips.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we've only managed to select just a few clips out of five nearly hour-long episodes uh about Luther.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But what are you gonna do?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Protestants are gonna protest, aren't they?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: So here we are.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna we're gonna protest.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I've got some clips lined up.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: They're probably more clips than we've got time for, but I thought I'd start with uh this one from the YouTube version of episode three, and they seem to be following an iron law of YouTube, which is you've got to grab people in the first 30 seconds.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to kind of explain the relevance of what they're about to watch.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so Dominic does a great job of trying to grip us with the contemporary relevance of the Luther story, but I thought it was just quite interesting the way he frames it.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look at clip number one.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever wondered why people love tearing down statues?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: Do you ever think that your individual conscience matters more than the views of the people around you?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_04: Do you sometimes feel that you're not really living your truth?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_04: If so, this podcast will explain why, because all of these things come from the German monk Martin Luther.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_04: And in this episode of our mighty series about the life and times of Martin Luther, we will be describing how he comes to the most radical and revolutionary conclusions in all European history and is set for a confrontation that will involve fire and fury that Europe has never seen before.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a lot of fire and fury that Europe has never seen before.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it seems to me in in the podcast um they're on most solid ground when they talk about the the history of the matter and the politics of the day and the geopolitical situation and the military threat and all those sorts of aspects they're on most solid ground.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Seems to me they're on least solid ground when they do the contemporizing and the psychologizing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then what we're going to talk about, I think most of all, is the theology that might have driven Luther.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um but let me begin with two diagnostic questions that are often asked when we talk about Luther.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um one is no Luther, no reformation question mark.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um Tom Holland says he's on the side of those who say no Luther, no reformation.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh another um statement that people often make is Luther the last of the medieval men or is he the first modern man?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Which is he?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it seems that Tom Holland and and probably Dominic as well tilt more towards that he's the first modern man kind of a thing.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so let me let me throw it open um to you.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's start with you, uh Mike.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um when Tom says the the no Luther, no reformation thing, what do you what do you make of that?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And is he the last medieval man, the first modern man, neither, both?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in one sense, we can see, okay, Luther, he's a man of his time, but he's a brilliant creative mind, and therefore uh you can see him in many ways as a forerunner of thoughts that others pick up later.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, to some extent, I feel the question is a bit like asking when did you stop beating your wife?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because whichever way you answer, it's buying into the particular paradigm that's shaped and driven where Tom and Dom go, um, which is this uh subjective personality-driven reading of Luther that I think is what's led them astray.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: So trying to listen to these episodes, it struck me that um Tom seems quite heavily dependent on three historians of the Reformation that he's mentioned Lindell Roper, uh Richard Rex, and Alec Ryrie.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: And Rex and Ryery particularly really characterize Luther and his discovery as uh he's painted as a a radical individualist, um this is a subjective version of the Christian faith.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Alec Ryrie talks about Protestantism being all about personal religious experience.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: To the extent that for Ryrie, um our definition of Protestantism is including non-Trinitarians, like um Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and while Luther's personal context most definitely does matter, and there are experiential features to Luther's thought, I feel that actually it's become a distorting lens here.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: That what they're setting up is the idea that Luther is entirely shaped in his theology by um personal subjective elements.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas Luther portrays his agenda as being the other way round, that he's seeking to be theologically driven.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I think the very question there is actually i is posing the problem that we're seeing in the reading of Luther here.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And on that question of of no Luther, no reformation, where where would you come on on that one?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: With that I I would agree more with Tom, that I I think all the the elements are certainly in place there, but I think you needed someone like Luther, if not Luther himself, with the theological acumen, with um the care for the issues and the ability to be able to communicate them really well.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: As well as some contingent historical uh happenings that that mean that he was protected by the the elector and you know the emperors and popes were were busy elsewhere, uh, whereas Jan Hus a hundred years earlier was not so fortunate.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's that yeah.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Amy, where do you where do you come down on those two questions?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: No Luther, no reformation, and is uh you know, can we buy into this this model of him either the the the last medieval man, the first modern man?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you come?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mentioned that I wrote those novels about Empress Matilda who lived back in the 12th century, and I researched the Christianity of that time quite a bit, and I can tell you that many of the factors that led to the Reformation were already in place at that time, such as having more powerful centralized governments that could stand up to the power of the Pope and give people another source of identity besides the church, or the rise in education with the founding of universities and more people who are able to read, because of course being able to read the Bible is so key to the Protestant Reformation.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you also have maybe uh theological influences that are there in people like John Wycliffe or Jan Huss, who Mike mentioned.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So all the factors are in place that you're going to have a reformation.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the key question is, what kind of reformation are you going to have?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: At the time when Luther is posting his 95 theses, there is another potential model for reform out there in the person of Desiderius Erasmus, who has just put out this Greek New Testament with a new Latin translation that has just lit a fire in the field of biblical studies.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he is pushing for a reformation that is mainly about getting rid of some of the superstitions that have cropped up in medieval Christianity, reforming the behavior of the clergy, and really trying to make your life more Christ-like.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he would like to see that kind of a reformation take place in the church.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: When Luther comes along, he's going to focus on a different issue.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not that those issues are unimportant to him, but he's going to zero in on this question of how do I know that I have the grace of God?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do I know that I am justified before God?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Or to put it another way, that God approves of me, that I have met the standard that he has set.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that question is what is going to drive Luther's reformation.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that Luther is the one who, like you mentioned, has the protection of a political authority who keeps him from being burned at the stake, means that it's Luther's reformation that is really going to take hold.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I guess I would say definitely there would have been a reformation, but it wouldn't have necessarily been the one we know, and it wouldn't have necessarily split the church.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on the question of whether Luther is a modern or medieval man, I think the answer is definitely both.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, on the podcast, they looked at a lot of ways that he's very modern.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's using these new tools of biblical scholarship, he's using new technologies, uh, being able to use the printing press to get his message out.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is that Luther, unlike many of the other Protestant reformers, had a very traditional medieval education at the University of Erfurt.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that experience of being trained in that late medieval method is actually what he's going to be uh reacting against a lot when he posts his 95 theses, because he was exposed to this theology of the time that said if a person does whatever is in them, God is going to give them the grace they need to be able to be righteous.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Luther as a monk realized that even if he was doing everything people told him to do, he still didn't feel like he had the grace of God because he was still full of sin.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the church was telling him, anytime you commit a mortal sin, you lose the grace of God.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So he was on this continual uh trying almost like trying to do the feat of Sisyphus, where he no matter how much he tried, it just got worse.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what led him to this particular breakthrough when he was able to read Erasmus' Greek New Testament and studying in the Psalms and Galatians, he had that theological breakthrough.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: But even as he does that, he still maintains a love of medieval theology around the time that he posts the 95 Theses.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: He translates a work known as the Theologia Deutsch, which is a medieval mystical work into German, and he's gonna love that book for his whole life.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you see, he has definitely both these medieval and modern influences, and he's kind of a great hinge point or hinge person in history in that regard.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: So interesting that you mention Erasmus, because it occurs to me as as you're saying that, that Erasmus is very much a modern man.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that if if he is buying into a medieval theology that that says grace will not be denied to those who do whatever is in them, and if he's talking about the freedom of the will, which was his great pamphlet against which Luther wrote the bondage of the will, it seems to me you could call Erasmus the modern man in terms of somebody who believes in freedom and believes in doing what is within you, whereas Luther is saying, oh no, because of the bondage of the will, our salvation must come from entirely outside of ourselves.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you start to cast modern struggles from the 1960s onwards differently if you pay attention to whether you're looking outside the way that Luther does, or whether you're looking inside the way that Erasmus does.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: But that we I'm sure we'll get into those those kinds of issues.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I thought we could go to uh episode three of The Rest is History, and uh they start talking about the Heidelberg disputation.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they talk about Luther going up in April of 1518 to defend the 95 theses, and uh a number of comparisons are made between Luther and modern issues today.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's treated as an absolute celebrity everywhere he goes.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: He's kind of cheered and uh uh he gets to Heidelberg and the the local prince shows off um, you know, his chapel and his castle and invites Luther to dine with him.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: So it's all tremendous.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: So Tom, is there a sorry, is there a slight Jordan Peterson side to it?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, a little bit, I think.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_04: A celebrity professor who has said the unsayable and who has gotten it suddenly, you know, do you remember how people first reported when Jordan Peterson was doing rallies and stuff?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: People would say it's amazing that somebody who's basically talking about what is it, something to do with lobsters.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: Jungian philosophy.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Jungian philosophy is is inspiring young people.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, what a remarkable thing.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the same Exactly.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you think of the kind of that he is saying things that have in universities for a long time have been unsayable, Luther is doing something similar at Heidelberg.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: So he is now directly attacking the foundations of the theology that has prevailed in the Latin West for centuries and centuries.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: So as opposed to the idea that reason, as mediated through Aristotle, enables you to understand God, Luther says that reason is actually a whore.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: He says that philosophy is a delusion, that the only true Christian is a fool.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um he says out front, I believe it is impossible for the church to be reformed unless church law, so that's canon law, with its rules and decrees, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic, as they are now taught, are eradicated and replaced by other studies.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: Daily I ask the Lord that the pure study of the Bible and the church fathers might be summoned back as soon as possible.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: So that is a bit like Jordan Peterson saying gender studies, it's all woo-woo, you know, post-colonial studies, all nonsense.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Let's get rid of it all.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go back to to studying Shakespeare or whatever.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_04: Or it's like people on the other side of that particular debate attacking their own disciplines, isn't it?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's very popular and that's sort of on the left as it were of the political spectrum, is saying our whole discipline has is is colonial.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_04: It is tainted by prejudice.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_04: Let's get rid of it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_04: Decolonize Anglo-Saxon studies or whatever.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's and people find that intoxicating.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: And Luther is Luther is the wellspring of both those traditions.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's it's uh and that's what makes him so fascinating.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_04: And he's genuine sorry Tom.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: He's genuine.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_04: Luther is genuinely the place from which both those impulses come.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well he would say I mean he of course he is in turn drawing on on the on uh Augustine and uh ultimately on the Bible.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: So but but the the the the framing of it is uh is new.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's coming this is this is what is so thrilling and intoxicating.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to be a number of things going on here.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: One is sort of Luther the Revolutionary, and then there's also the the the contemporary uh kind of comparisons that are going on.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um Amy, in you you've written about this on your Substack, a couple of different um really interesting articles that are um going over the these episodes from the rest of history.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you didn't seem to mind so much the contemporary comparisons that that they were making, or or did you?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: What what did you think about the contemporary comparisons?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I didn't mind them as much as some people did because I think actually a lot of people listening to this podcast who have little knowledge about the Reformation at all, they're wanting to know how are these theological issues that see really like Ivory Tower kind of stuff, how does this impact me?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And being able to sort of draw these connections, I think it helps people to realize that actually our own cultural moment is very similar to Luther's cultural moment.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're having a lot of people losing faith in historic institutions, we're having vast and sudden changes in the way we understand sexuality and gender.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: The last time that it happened to the degree we're seeing now was at this time in the Reformation.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that is helpful.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think what you get from the Jordan Peterson comparison is the fact that although Luther was very driven by theology and was putting together these very uh articulate theological arguments, he inevitably did get a lot of people who were attracted to his message who really just did want to, you know, tear down statues and, you know, make a mess of things and, you know, wanted to basically be free from the the 1%, the ruling class.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna see coming up that in events like the Peasants' War that happened, they really went far from Luther's original intent.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you got people who really just did.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of want to tear the whole thing down.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Luther is actually always a very conservative figure.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know that may seem counterintuitive, and on the podcast, he was sort of presented as a very progressive figure who all of a sudden got conservative halfway through his life.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, I think he was always very conservative.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: They mentioned the 1518 Heidelberg disputation.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: What Luther was saying there at that meeting of Augustinian monks was coming straight from St.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine of Hippo.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't proposing anything that was at odds with church doctrine.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, this wasn't one of the things that the Pope took issue for him for, what he said there as much as some of the things he was saying later on in 1519, 1520.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Glenn, you and I even had this slight discussion on Twitter about when does Luther actually have his evangelical breakthrough.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Tom suggested it was at this point by 1518 he had already had it.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue he probably didn't have it until the following year when he said that he had it.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: But um I agree with that.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think these kinds of examples, they they give you some of the truth of what's going on, but they always have limitations because even what a university professor is in our society is very different than what a university professor was in Luther society.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: At that time, they were viewed almost as members of the clergy, even if they weren't teaching theology.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: They had that kind of role in society.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And now I think we we've had such a separation of church and state.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: We've become such a secular society that we just would never think of a university professor the same way.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of catching that sort of the interest, particularly of a lot of young men who initially flocked to uh Wittenberg to hear Luther teach, I mean that is sort of similar to the Peterson phenomenon.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And like Peterson, Luther was a very divisive figure.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say there are some similarities and some differences.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, Mike, you um you you seem um to be with Amy that the conversion sort of happened in 1519, which is a year after um the the Heidelberg Disputation.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um why do you think that's important or or how how would you think about the Heidelberg Disputation and and those 28 theses that he he wants to forward at the Heidelberg Discussion?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think this is something that that really divides um Lutheran Reformation scholarship as to uh is there a point at which he has his discovery or is this a gradual um journey for him?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and as I read the Heidelberg disputation in 1518, there are elements in there that seem to show he's not got a completely mature understanding of justification by faith alone.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um he asks at one point, what should we do when we realise the depth of our sinfulness?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: He says, fall down and pray for grace.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, in 1518, he's saying the solution is we should do something rather than God has done something to which we respond.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I think what what Luther's really getting at um in uh the Heidelberg disputation is contrasting, not only showing uh our uh radical sinfulness, but contrasting how people love and how God loves.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a key insight that we'll carry on for him.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: That he wants to show that when people love, they love what is already lovable to them, what is lovely to them.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas when God loves, it's a very different type of love.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: God loves the unlovely.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Shall I read out the actual words and and and you can you can reflect it, you can preach them if you like.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thesis 28, the final the final of these theses.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: He says, the love of God does not find but creates that which is lovable.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: The love of man, on the other hand, is made up of those things which it loves.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then he says, Rather than seeking its own goodness, the love of God pours out and bestows goodness.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, sinners are lovable because they are loved, they are not loved because they are actually lovable by nature.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that important?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's hugely important in understanding the very nature of the gospel, first of all, in that God is not responding to how good we are and therefore approving us.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Before we are lovely, God loves us.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: While we're still sinners, Christ died for us.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so it means that his love, his grace comes first before we've done anything to earn it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the other reason it's important for how we read Luther is that it means because the love of God is so different to how we love, therefore we need to be theologically driven.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why these um personality, subjective readings of Luther can become distorting lenses.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think of one, for instance, that that comes out in these episodes.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Tom talks about um Luther's daddy issues, which is something picked up from Lyndall Roper's um excellent work um on Luther.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but at one point Roper had said that Luther was, because of his own experience really, unable to transmit a sense of God's fatherly care for the believer.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so she says, God for Luther is really characterized by distance, not closeness, in Luther's thinking.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, when you look at um Luther's large catechism, he answers the question, what kind of God do we have?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: With saying, God has revealed and disclosed the deepest profundity of his fatherly heart, that is, his sheer inexpressible love seen in the Lord Christ, who is the mirroring image of the Father's heart.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: And what that I think has shown you is that whatever Luther's own issues with his earthly father, however broken they might have been, the gospel has actually reconstructed his understanding of the word father.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: So rather than Luther projecting his human experience onto God, he's seen in God the Father a different love to what he maybe he saw in his own father.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, to read psychologizing into his theology is misunderstanding the direction of travel of his thought.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think we'll get onto these issues quite a bit when we um see how Tom, in the same episode, episode three, characterizes uh the Tower experience and characterizes how Luther uh describes his Reformation insights as a love affair.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um this will be probably the longest uh clip that we'll share, but I think it's uh it it's quite at the heart of how Tom is reading Luther.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: So Alec Ryrie, who's brilliant on this, on what it is that makes this Reformation moment so important, he says that that Luther's theology was not a doctrine, it was a love affair.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not about drawing abstract theological principles, it's it's about articulating a feeling, a kind of an an intensity of love.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: So all the time that Luther had had kind of been dreading that he was unworthy of God's love, that that he would be condemned by God's justice, that God hates him, this realization suddenly that God loves him, and and and that God loves him in a way that that transcends you know uh rubrics of you've done this and therefore you have to do pay this penalty and you'll be in purgatory this long, that's not what it's about at all.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's total, it's kind of intoxicating, it's beyond reason, and it comes to to Luther, I think, partly through kind of psychological impulses, a kind of yearning for this love in the face of all the unhappiness that he's been feeling in trying to kind of justify himself to God.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: But as I say, it also comes from reading Paul and particularly one line.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a letter, so there's a line in in the letter that Paul writes to the Christians in the church, the letter to the Romans.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: The righteous shall live through faith.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: And Luther understands this to mean the faith that specifically that God loves you, and that it doesn't matter if you're lost to sin, everyone is lost to sin.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there is no people humanity is so sinful that they can't, through their own agency, obtain the forgiveness of God.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: But it doesn't matter because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace, and that the state of grace is the feeling that you have the that Christ is present in you, in your your secretmost heart, and the certainty of that grace in turn gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience, that all your anxiety about whether you're going to be redeemed or not is is gone.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so you can have a kind of deep, profound spiritual joy and sense of certitude that essentially cuts the Gordian knot of all the purgatory stuff, all the confession stuff, all the am I going to go to heaven or not?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_03: And and it's an incredibly I mean, it's a really, really kind of profound moment because it it provides both a theological but more importantly, I think an emotional justification for getting rid of all the purgatory and clergy and pilgrimage and all that kind of stuff.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not just that that stuff is is is wrong, it's positively sinful because it's blocking off a proper understanding to the Christian people of God's love.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: All and so this is why Luther emphasizes the kind of the loneliness of the individual Christian before God.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: It is you alone with scripture, with faith, you don't need anything else.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_04: So two things, Tom.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_04: Number one, if this is the case, why isn't this just a massive get out for you know you don't have to feel bad about your sins and stuff because God loves you, everyone's sinful, everyone you know what, everybody is sinful, the world is sinful, and the thing is all that matters is that God loves you, so crack on, you know, fill your boots.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this is this is the great debate.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and this is the the great criticism of that kind of Protestant sense of election.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you you put your finger on it.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_04: Secondly, what I would say, thinking about the 2020s, um, a criticism that some people would have of the capital E enthusiasm of some activists, no matter what side they're on, is the tremendous sense of being puffed up with their own righteousness.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the certainty that some of us, more sceptical, find so obnoxious.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um is Luther not conscious that other people will find his moral certainty, his sense of being saved.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, look at me, you know, I I'm I'm God loves me, isn't that brilliant?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_04: He doesn't think other people will find it.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: He's in a love affair.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah he's in a love affair.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: And when you're in a love affair, you don't care what other people think, you only care about the person you're in love with.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, because of course the Catholic the institutional criticism would be it's all about you, isn't it?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: This is very narcissistic.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: It well it is, but I think this is why it matters because it does feed into all kinds of intellectual trends that will emerge over the course of the centuries that follow.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: So again, to quote Ryrie, the idea's initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: It was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before, but that seemed to many people, once they had grasped it, to be self-evidently true.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not just Luther, I mean it's other people as well.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: Once they have this, then they can share in the love.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: But of course, it is it it kind of turns on its head the notion that everyone in Christendom is a Christian.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_03: Because what Luther is saying basically is that you have to have this feeling of that God loves you, that you've been born again, that you've entered the gates of paradise, or you're not really a Christian.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: So the implication in turn of that is that only a tiny elect really are going to be saved.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: And and although Luther does believe that the knowledge of God is is imprinted on the soul of every human being, I mean what he would call belief is is the the idea that you have an absolute conviction that that your salvation has been granted to you.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: And this, of course, is a much you know it's a much rarer bloom.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so he basically Luther ends up saying that maybe only one in a thousand people rank as a Christian.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know what he would say?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_04: He should say that the other people are Tom.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm very pleased with this.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's very uh Liz Trust like behaviour.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_04: He should call them uh chinos, Christians in name only.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: Very good.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: Very good.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: I do like that, yeah.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, the implication in turn for that of that is that say you live in a Protestant country, a country, you know, you're in a Protestant community, you can't just coast.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you have to you have to work out what you believe.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: The job of believing becomes something that is personal to you.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: You can't just leave it to the professional Christians, as you know, and it looks like it's about your truth, right?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's about living your truth.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, living your truth.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: So the idea of this is where the idea of living your truth comes from.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, the the reason why this breeds uh in the long run, atheism and unbelief, as well as belief in God, is that you may just feel the strain is too great.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you you're trying to believe and you don't.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: So again, I think this is why Luther stands at the the kind of he's he's stands at the head of the atheism that is uh emerges in in in in the West.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_04: Partly because the atheism is all about you again.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's like what do you think?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's not what it's ignoring tradition and all that stuff.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's why it's you know humanists are are patently the descendants of Luther.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean they their truth is that they don't believe, but they don't believe in a very Lutheran way.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So there was lots in there, so much we could do the entire episode uh just about those seven minutes.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so let's let's spend some time uh teasing some of these things out.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: The source material that um Tom is referring to is really um Luther's account of his tower experience.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh at the end of his life, he does he does put this event um uh in 1519.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but he he talks about how he had been uh captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the epistle to the Romans.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he talks about in chapter one of Romans um the phrase the righteousness of God, and he says, I hated that word righteousness of God.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he thought that it meant that God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner, and then he talks about how he tried to live up to that kind of uh righteousness and could never do it.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then he says, Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, Romans chapter one, most ardently desiring to know what St.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: Paul wanted.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith, and this is the meaning.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, um, friend of the show, Tim Vasby Burney, um, who is also uh a friend of uh the rest is history, Top Vicker.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was actually my my best man.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: My best man was Top Vicker.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: How about that?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I was his.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um he uh has written in a question, I was asking for questions on Twitter.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um he says, What matters is the love of God in my heart?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this is is this actually true of Luther's theology?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: And since it isn't, where did this tendency come from and how has it affected the West?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So Tim is uh putting a big question mark over whether uh Luther's theology is uh whether you can feel the love of God in your heart or not.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Why why is that a misreading, Mike Reeves?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that a misreading of what Luther is saying here?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, do you know I I perhaps the most glaring omission in all five episodes, to my mind, seemed to be the absence of mention of justification by faith alone.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I think Tom would feel he's covered it here.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: But the problem is that when we talk about justification by faith alone, how Tom has defined faith.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: That faith here is a feeling.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: And now, to be sure there was subjective feeling for Luther, but that's not the same thing as faith.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because Luther's problem, whilst he had this anfachtung, this angst, this anxiety about his status before God at this time, that wasn't the problem.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: That was a consequence.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: The problem he saw is that he would stand before the judgment of God, and that's why he felt the angst and anxiety.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: So his problem was an objective problem, not a subjective problem.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, subjectively feared, but it was an objective problem, and the solution needed to be equally objective.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look, for example, at his um famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, you get to see where is Luther's hope outside of himself, not in how he's feeling, but in Jesus Christ himself.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think what is going wrong here is mistaking later evangelical conversionism uh with a theology of regeneration.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: And what happens here in this reading is that faith has actually become a work.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: Live your truth.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to have this feeling of um God loving you.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, given that reading, Dom's making two really good objections.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that first, if you can feel God loves you while you're a sinner, why not crack on keep sinning?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, Tom agrees that's a problem.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not a problem for Luther.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's not what faith is.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is his trust in the objective righteousness of Christ, which is given to the believer.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't just crack on in sin when we have that, because Luther said, through faith in Christ, Christ's righteousness becomes our righteousness, and all he has becomes ours, rather, he himself becomes ours.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the image Luther uses is of a marriage in which uh the the bride takes her husband's status.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so a poor girl becomes a queen when she marries the king.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: So she takes his status, but she's not doing it just for the status.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's doing it because she loves him.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we trust in Christ, we are given the righteous status of Christ, not because of how we feel, but because of his promise.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason we're turning to him is because we trust him and we want to live with him.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: And this is why I think this comes up again in a later episode where Tom says that Luther became fat because he thought he can live as he wants, which isn't really fair, I don't think.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: It was simply that he was rejecting his previous understanding that asceticism was a good path to righteousness.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and in fact, it was he went onto a normal diet and had a very stressful lifestyle.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: And Dom's second objection, that his s that Luther's certainty of salvation is arrogant and narcissistic.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Tom's reply is really revealing.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: Tom says, no, it's not arrogant because he's in a love affair.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not Luther's reply at all.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: Luther would say, no, he's not arrogant, not narcissistic, because his certainty of his righteous standing before God is not based on his feeling, but on God's objective promise.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's not arrogant because he's simply believing what God has promised.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: When Tim, though, so Tim Vasiburney's question he says, since um this definition of faith as just a feeling within your own heart, um, since that's not true of Luther's theology, Tim's asking where did this tendency come from and how has it affected the West?
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I think you would agree, Mike, that within Protestant.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is a problem, and all those objections that Dominic raises are objections to certain strands of Protestantism.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: So where where have they come from?
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I think there have been a couple of strands.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't want to get into the danger of a very simple history story where one state of affairs has one common origin.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: But I think there are a couple of things that feed into it, and that is with this clear need pointed out by Lutheran other reformers for us to turn in personal faith to trust Christ, that spins out of control in the thinking of some to an emphasis on the need to see evidence of conversion.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so the emphasis goes on the experience of conversion that follows from the uh the regeneration of the heart, the the fact that the believer is born again.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so the emphasis has moved away from this objective reality of a heart being turned from love of sin to love of God to the experiential consequences.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's another um little element that's fed into that, which is um think of Friedrich Schleimacher at the beginning of the 19th century, who really started putting the foundations of theology on personal experience.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, for Schleimacher, who was a Protestant, um, but he's known as the father of liberal theology, it would be what matters for Schleimacher is my own religious feelings.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: But that's really it's a Copernican revolution in theology.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: For Luther, it's the other way round.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: For Luther, what matters is not so much this experience, this feeling that God loves me.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: What matters is the objective truth.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: I can then enjoy the truth of God's promises, but the foundation of my theology is not my feelings.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Amy, how how are you responding to those seven minutes from Tom?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, there's a lot happening there.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um I will say, when I was listening to this portion of the podcast, I felt like I didn't really recognize the Luther that they were presenting.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: There are some elements of Luther's theology there.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: You have the the idea that we are all sinful, and that because of that we do have to depend on God's love.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: We we can't just work ourselves into salvation.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what was missing in that explanation, I felt, was the cross.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: So Martin Luther would say the cross alone is our theology.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: And why do you need the cross?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: This leads to another question, which is can God just write off our sins?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think this was actually the idea that I had when I was a younger person.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: I would hear a lot about how God forgave our sins, about how God loved us.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that leads to a question: if God can just forgive our sins, why do we need Jesus to die on the cross for us?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: What is the point of that?
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, what Luther is actually going to be teaching is that Christ had to live a perfect life and go to the cross and die so that he could transfer his righteousness to us.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: When Luther is reading that part in Romans where it says the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous person will live by faith.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: What his breakthrough is there is he realizes that yes, the standard that we have to meet is the righteousness of God.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: But God is actually going to give his righteousness to us.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the mystery of our union with Christ.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this ties in so much with Luther's view of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which I guess predictably they didn't talk a lot about in the episodes, but you cannot understand Luther's theology without understanding the emphasis he places on baptism.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because when one of Luther's congregates would come to him and say, I'm not really feeling like I'm having faith right now, I'm having doubts, I'm not sure I'm saved.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't tell them, Well, have you had a conversion experience?
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or are you doing all the right works that will let us know you're a Christian?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: He would actually point back to baptism and say, Are you a baptized person?
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because he believed that when you're baptized, it's not so much about you demonstrating your faithfulness and either putting yourself forward for baptism or bringing a child forward for baptism.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: God is making a promise to you in baptism.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's promising that even as you're symbolically dying and being raised in this rite of water, that God is going to unite you with this death and resurrection of Christ.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: We die with him to our sins and we're raised to a new life.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we have the fulfillment of that promise immediately in that we are spiritually resurrected, but there's also a future promise that he is going to raise us again to eternal life at the end of time.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that can only happen with the cross and with us receiving the righteousness of God.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we can be just before God.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that if you take away that sense that God is giving this to you, that it is entirely a gracious gift, that it's not anything you feel or anything you do, then you haven't understood Luther's mature theology.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because for him, whether it's baptism or the Lord's Supper, or even when the word is preached in a church service, God is giving himself to you.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why Luther ended up uh splitting with uh Zwingli and some of the other reformers over the issue of the Lord's Supper.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was so important to him that Christ really be present in the Lord's Supper because he believed that was Christ being given to you.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he felt on some level that if you just see the Lord's Supper as something you're doing to kind of remember what Christ did, and it's not really about anything God's doing for you, then Christ isn't giving himself to you.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that concept of Christ being for you, of it coming from outside yourself, it's so key to Luther's theology.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just say one more thing because when they said that maybe only 1% of people are really Christians, that is so contrary to what Luther believed.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: He even would have thought that a lot of people who were still part of what became the Catholic Church were legitimate Christians because they were baptized and you know God had made this promise to them that they put their faith in.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't believe that it was the perfection of all your doctrinal beliefs or the perfection of your feelings that gave you any kind of assurance before God because he knew our feelings are going to change, that we're always we're never gonna have assurance of salvation if it's based on anything we have to do.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: But he absolutely believed that you know that anyone who has that promise from God and place their faith in that objective thing that God is offering can be assured of salvation.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a where he differed from Rome.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: Rome didn't think you should ever, it would be dangerous to give someone assurance of salvation.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's key.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think you have to if you take the cross away, if you take uh baptism and the right, the righteousness of God given for you, I think you've wandered very far from what Luther's theology actually was.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: I actually looked up um because as soon as Tom Holland said, you know, he he thinks that only one in a thousand are a true Christian, I kind of looked up.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where does Luther say that?
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because that that doesn't sound like the the sort of Luther that I I know.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's from a 19 it's from a um 1523 pamphlet where he's worried about peasants' revolts and that sort of thing, which which will sort of emerge, you know, in the fullness of time.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: But he's worried about people taking the Reformation forwards and radical reformers that say, because we've got the law of Christ, we don't need the magistrate to bear the sword.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's sort of a defund the police kind of a move for people to say, okay, we don't need soldiers and we don't need magistrates and we don't need the state, because we are such true Christians, uh, we we don't need that sort of law above us.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the law of Christ.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Luther, in articulating, no, no, there are three senses to the law of God, and the first use of the law of God is in this civic realm, and magistrates are given the sword because, and then he the the quote is um only one in a thousand is a true Christian in that sense, in that radical reformer sense, where I don't need the police anymore or I don't need the state and and that kind of apparatus.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: Everywhere else, Luther is um far more expansive in his view of who is saved, and I can think of three areas where he's more expansive than Rome.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's more expansive on the on the question of the Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox can be saved.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Rome says no.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh limbo is a place where Rome has said um the unbaptized children who die are forever, and Luther rejects that.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, I'd I'd say um he thinks that there are true Christians on the other side of the Tiber, and it's not so much the case for the official position of Rome looking at the the far side of the Tiber.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so everything about Luther, it seems to me, is is more expansive on that question of salvation than um than the Roman side of things is.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I also love what you said, Amy, about um what would Luther say pastorally to somebody who says, I don't feel like, you know, I I don't feel like I have this feeling of the love of God.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he would say, Well, are you baptized?
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: He would he would point that person outside of themselves.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed a number of times that Tom talks about election in a way that I think is true of of other strands of the Reformation and late later reformers, but is not so authentically Lutheran.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he he says uh in Table Talk in 1532, he said, a dispute about predestination should be avoided entirely.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: I forget everything about Christ and God when I come upon these thoughts and actually get to the point of imagining that God is a rogue.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: We must stay in the word in which God is revealed to us and salvation is offered if we believe him.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: But in thinking about predestination, we forget God.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: However, in Christ are hid all the treasures, Colossians 2, verse 3.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: Outside him are all locked up.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, we should simply refuse to argue about election.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Such a disputation is so very displeasing to God that he has instituted baptism, the spoken word, and the Lord's Supper to counteract the temptation to engage in it.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: In these let us persist and constantly say, I am baptized, I believe in Jesus, I care nothing about the disputation concerning predestination.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that y you're getting a flavour there of the the extranos, the outside ourselves nature of of theology.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Mike, I can see you nodding as well.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I thought that was so helpful of um what Amy said as well about um the dispute over the um the nature of the Lord's Supper, that essentially it's uh uh the reason why Luther will break with Zwingli is over the question is um if the Lord's Supper is a chance for us to do something, then we've turned what should be a means of grace into an opportunity for a work uh which is constantly what we're trying to do.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: And this is exactly Luther Luther's genius in wanting to show throughout Christianity we see God loving first.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: We we see his grace to us, and we're not thrown onto ourselves dependence on ourselves, our feelings, our works, our performance.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let's seems to me to be at the heart of his dispute with Karlstadt as well, which was in the podcast sort of framed in terms of a clash of personalities, and no doubt there was a clash of personalities, but but deeper still, um there was that that theology of salvation from outside ourselves.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's crack on because I'd I'd love to talk about the the issue of solar scriptura as well.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um people often talk about the the two sort of principles of the Reformation, the the formal uh the formal principle and the material principle.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the the matter of things is that we are saved by faith alone, solar fidee.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've spoken about how um faith is not a thing that I drum up from within myself.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: I see Christ alone given to me in the gospel, and that calls forth faith in me.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we've we've thought about solar fidae's faith alone.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Let's think about um the formal principle of the Reformation, um, an issue that is referred to with the Latin phrase solar scriptura, and we'll have a look at how Tom and Dom frame the issue of solar scriptura, and then we'll think about what did sol sola scriptura mean for Luther.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: And just to give the context of this clip, we're in October 1518, and Luther has to answer for his uh 95 Theses.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Cardinal Cayetan is uh asking the questions at the Diet of Augsburg, and Cayetan is starting to realize the sort of figure he's dealing with as he deals with Luther.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: He realizes very, very quickly that what's at stake is not the details of the 95 Theses.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's about essentially who has authority in the Christian world.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_03: And to Caetan it seems self-evident who does.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's the you know, it's the it's the church, it's the Catholic Church, it always has done, it always will.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, to question that is just unspeakable.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: But uh Luther is questioning that.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_03: He's questioning the papacy, he's questioning canon law, he's questioning um, you know, all the philosophy derived from Aristotle, all of it.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_03: And Luther is arguing that all that really matters is the Bible, sola scriptura, scripture alone, and that he says to to Cayetan, the Pope is not above, but under the word of God.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Caetan can't believe it.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_03: He can't believe that he is arguing with this obscure monk who is making this case and refusing to accept the majesty of the teachings of the church.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_04: So to use an analogy that you've used previously in the in the podcast, in the series, um, it is the equivalent of a an incredibly distinguished scientist, you know, one of the world's great scientists, suddenly finding that he's got to have a debate with somebody who not merely doesn't come anywhere near him in eminence, but says, I don't really believe in your science, and is kind of ripping it down to the to the foundations and saying he doesn't accept everything that that the scientist and his colleagues take for granted.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_03: But I suppose that the difference would be that this would be you know, this person who's opposing the professor would have a a a basic grounding that would enable him to argue his case because Luther is saying you know, disprove me.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_03: Go to the Bible and and prove to me that the Pope should have this and that Aristotle is right on that or whatever.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that's Caetan, you know he can't.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_03: That is a problem.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and Luther is saying you know, and Cayetan comes back and says, Yes, but this is you know, this is the majesty of the church, this is tradition, I I embody it.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: And Luther says, Yeah, but I you know, my conscience is more important to me than what you're saying.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_03: And and here he is making the plea for conscience, which again is so important to the way that I think people in the modern West uh understand the basis for what they do, the more you know, their moral underpinnings.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: But it it it again, it is Luther who is taking this step and foregrounding conscience as something that is more important than than anything else, really.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got uh three questions from an actual Lutheran on Twitter, Tapani Simeoki, uh, who's been on the channel at least once, if not more than once, um, and he asks some great questions that uh are all surrounding this particular clip.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: He says, What does solar scriptura actually mean for Luther?
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: What was Luther's relationship to tradition?
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: And what did Luther mean by conscience?
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: And what was its relationship to objective norms of truth?
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those those are the big questions uh for this one.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: But what what about that first question, solar scriptura?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, can we get a definition?
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: Amy, what what what would you say was at the heart of this um prizing of scripture alone?
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it certainly doesn't mean that you don't do anything that isn't in the Bible or that the Bible contains all the knowledge you would ever need for anything.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think that it's best to maybe approach this by explaining uh something of how Christians view revelation, the God revealing himself to us.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the historic view of the church is that the Bible is a divinely inspired book, and thus it is a completely accurate description of God and uh of what is necessary for salvation.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what you're gonna see in the Reformation is you get two different views of revelation.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: You have the traditional view of the Roman Catholic Church, was is that you have this revelation in Scripture, and Scripture may be closed, but then you can get some ongoing revelation as the Holy Spirit guides the bishops of the church into correct doctrine and to make correct decisions on theological issues.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that then, if you have the a church council called and they make a decision, that that can be treated with the same weight of authority as the scriptures can.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Luther is going to come to see as he goes along that actually the church councils have sometimes contradicted each other, that you've had papal decisions that are clearly not in line with scripture.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what he's going to mention actually at the Diet of Verms when he makes this great statement about his conscience being captive to the word of God.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason for that is he's going to tell them, I'm not going to trust in councils that have disagreed with each other and have erred.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: This was not his initial view in 1517 when he posted the 95 Theses.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, he still had a lot of hope in the Pope to do the right thing.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was not even trying to disagree with uh what he felt were the historic Catholic doctrines.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as he went on and saw that people like Cardinal Cayetan were not willing to engage with the scriptures, and what seemed to be very clear to him from Scripture, that was when he started to doubt, and he looked further and further into the history of church councils and historic theology and saw there are some real problems here.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this is part of what pushed him to this realization that actually scripture is a form of authority that no other thing actually is, no other theological decision.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, he certainly saw a great value in historic theology and church councils.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: He will really love the Apostles' Creed for his whole life and put it up almost right beside Scripture and his catechism and other places, he'll maintain as much of the church tradition as he can, but he's going to say that scripture is the ultimate authority.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if something disagrees with scripture, then we can't take that as authoritative because we have to go with what is actually the inspired word of God.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're seeing that these theologians are disagreeing with each other, how do we know which one is right?
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: We have to look back to the final authority, which is scripture.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you do get over time this way of interpreting soul as scriptura that some people will call solo scriptura.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's sort of, it's not real Latin, but what they're basically saying there is people who think you can't have anything extra-biblical in your theology.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, they might object to the notion of the Trinity because the word trinity never appears in the Bible.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many different things like that where they'll just say we don't need any of the historic work uh church theologians.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, we just need to take what was the case in 100 AD, and anything after that was a mistake.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that was not Luther's view at all.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was very in touch with the historic theology of the church.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: He'd been, that's something he had to teach at the university.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: And his view was pretty conservative.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's as long as something isn't compromising uh salvation and the eternal welfare of people's souls, as long as it's not uh taking us away from the gospel, uh, we can keep it.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that means in terms of vestiments that we're gonna wear during church, whether it means in terms of the structure of our church service, well, that wasn't ordained in scripture, but it's tradition, and we can keep it because it's not harming anything.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, the the idea that you just sit as one person with your Bible uh coming up with theology, Luther never would have approved of that.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: He thought, of course, you're going to reference the work that hundreds of years of theologians have produced, of course you're going to.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Be hearing this word explained in the church service by your pastor who's in this uh you know authoritative role given by God in this preaching role.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea that it's and actually sorry, just thinking on that point, um it Luther's printing and writing makes no sense if he believes that all you need is scripture.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: Why why is he writing so much?
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, why would he write catechisms for people to memorize?
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are some people now who say, well, catechisms, those aren't scripture, so should we be bothering with them?
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: But that just shows that he really thought that you when you are a Christian who has been um saved by God and you've been you're you've been renewed through your union with Christ, you actually can use your reason.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can use these tools that the church has created over the centuries to help you understand scripture.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you just try to sit down and read scripture without any knowledge of the circumstances in which it was written, without any knowledge of what the church has taught about it over time, you probably will come to some pretty crazy conclusions.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that just was never what Luther would have favored.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's more uh typical of sort of modern people in our day who think, I don't need to go to church.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: I can just sit home with my Bible or watch something on YouTube, no offense to YouTube, of course.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this is Luther thought you, of course, you have to go to church because that's where God's gonna talk to you.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's where he's gonna give himself to you in the Lord's Supper and where you're going to be receiving his word that is proclaimed.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very different notion than what some people mean when they say sola scriptura today, which is really just solo scriptura.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and Mike, we've had a question, we've had questions from uh an Anglican, a Lutheran, and now from a Catholic, Timothy Ezat, uh, has asked about solar scriptura.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: He says, given the long and complex history of scripture formation and and interpretation, does scripture alone make sense?
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't it be true to say that all scripture readings are inevitably an interpretation?
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_01: That is, scripture is never alone.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: Looking back, should Protestants admit that Luther's solar scriptura did not free scripture from the traditions within which it was interpreted, but it simply replaced it with different traditions.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say to that?
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I think this is quite similar actually to um and Tom's reading that Luther is the foundation of my truth.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because the emphasis is on my conscience.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I I think how Luther is different to that is he's not talking about my truth, I've got to be loyal to my conscience.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's saying I need to be loyal to Scripture's objective truth, and my conscience is, this is what he says before the Emperor, captive to the Word of God.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's so it's not that I'm simply following what I feel, but my truth must follow that objective truth.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so we need to draw this distinction between my feelings, my conscious and my interpretation and God's objective truth.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: They're not the same thing.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, my interpretation is not infallible.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the same thing as God's word.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_02: But does that mean, Timothy's question, does that mean then that we're back to um if if if scripture alone means you can have all these different interpretations and we can never decide which one is which, that reading it it falters on something else that Luther's saying about scripture that that goes together with his understanding of solar scripture, that scripture is a supreme authority over all um the all other authorities.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's this that scripture is not only supreme in its authority, but scripture is clear.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Now that doesn't mean that every part of it is completely easy to understand, but it is clear.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and now this actually comes up.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_02: He says it's obvious Tosh.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now we love it when Dom talks about Tosh.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_02: But um I I just if I wanted to put that back to Tom, I'd want to say, um sorry, to Dom, I'd say, look, do you think the meaning of your books being plain is obvious Tosh?
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because sure there are um some parts of your books that people could misuse or misinterpret, but Dom expects his books to be comprehensible.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Why not Scripture?
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that Tosh?
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the Bible is actually clear um in many things.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are harder parts to understand, but because it's clear, it means we're able to um not only make a distinction between my interpretation and what scripture says, but we're able to say, okay, we've got two interpretations here.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Scripture is clear, and we're able to turn to scripture.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it'll be easier, sometimes it will be harder.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're able to turn to scripture as the supreme authority to rule over which of these interpretations is correct.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: So let's actually go to that clip because I I think that's sort of the centerpiece, it's it's sort of the seminal moments of Luther himself when he is before uh Charles V, the Emperor at the Diet of Worms.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I think it brings together so many of uh the interpretations that Tom and Dom have of Luther.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_04: Luther says, you know, basically to make Mimra Kant, you'd have to prove in the Bible.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's just the Bible or nothing for me.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_04: But even at this point, the Inquisitor, who's a guy, slightly confusingly, he's called Johann Eck, so he has the same name as a previous Johann Eck.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_04: We had Waves of X.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_04: But he's a different man.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_04: And Johann Eck says, Do you know what all heretics go on about the Bible?
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he makes this point.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_04: He says, You're talking about scripture, but that's what all heretics do.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_04: That's why you need the church as the institution to explain what the Bible means because otherwise it's too ambiguous and it's too unclear.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_04: And that issue, that conflict between the two, I mean, that runs through hundreds of years of not just Protestant versus Catholic, but kind of Western civilization, the individual conscience versus the institution.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because Luther is taking for granted that the Spirit is speaking through him, that his understanding of the word is self-evidently the truth, and that if everyone shares in his experience, they will understand the word of God exactly as he does.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that is his position.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_03: And this is what gives him the strength to face down the Inquisitor.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_03: And when the Inquisitor accuses him of kind of basically playing scholastic games, playing the kind of the university lecturer, trying to wriggle out of situations with fine-sounding sophistry, Luther makes this ringing statement.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: He fixes his Inquisitor with his gaze, he looks around him, he says that he scorns all the pretensions of popes and councils and inquisitors because he is bound only by the understanding of scripture that has been revealed to him by the Spirit, and he says, My conscience is captive to the word of God.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_03: So that word conscience again, which he keeps emphasizing, I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_03: And according to the transcript of the interrogation, this is where he he stops, this is his final statement, but according to the transcript that in due course will be released by his supporters in Wittenberg, he then goes on to utter a ringing phrase that will probably be the most famous thing he ever says.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_03: I cannot do otherwise.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_03: Here I stand, here stay.
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_03: And this phrase will ring across the empire, and indeed, Dominic, down the centuries.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, brilliant.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so basically, his enemies have handed Luther exactly what they didn't want to do, which is a chance to make his case in front of the emperor himself, the simple monk opposed by all the panoply and power of the emperor, of the church, and you know it's an amazing moment.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_04: Tom, that moment, by the way, that phrase, here I stand, I can do no other, or however you translate it, Deadman McCulloch in his book on the Reformation says that's the motto not just of the Reformation, but of all modern Western civilization.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, living my truth.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's what it is, right?
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that's why it reverberates, that's why it has the influence it does.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: But really, the question is, how does Luther know that that what he's saying is right?
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_03: Because what Charles V says in his response is that you know he doesn't pretend to deep theological knowledge.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_03: He's not a professor of theology and um the Bible as as Luther is.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_03: But he doesn't understand how a single monk could be correct in an opinion which, as Charles puts it, according to which all of Christianity will be and will always have been in error, both in the past thousand years and even more in the present.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_04: I mean that's such a fair point, right?
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_04: Because Charles V could reasonably say, listen, fellow, Christianity is what the Christian church says it is.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_04: End of story.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_04: So if the whole Christian church says this is Christianity and you say no it isn't, it's something else, you're by definition wrong because the church decides.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_03: And Dominic, what's interesting is that there is a a humanist scholar called Johann Cochleas, who is in Worms and he's come sympathetic to Luther.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_03: And he's he's worrying about this.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_03: He wants to know kind of what Luther thinks.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_03: So on the 24th of April, while Luther is still in Worms, he gets himself invited to dinner in Luther's rooms, and he finds himself sitting between Luther and Frederick the Wise, the elector, who's there as well.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_03: And he presses Luther on this point, and Luther doesn't really give him convincing answers.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so Luther, after dinner, goes back to his quarters and Cochleas follows him.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_03: So it's exactly the kind of behaviour that you really don't want.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_04: It's exactly how I expect theologians to behave to be fair.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_03: But Luther Luther allows Cochleus in, Cochleus pulls back his cloak and shows that he doesn't have a sword or anything.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_03: And Cochleus keeps pressing him and saying, You know, how do you know that your interpretation of scripture is right?
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Surely everyone will have different interpretations.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_03: And Luther's answer is that the meaning of God's word is plain.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_03: If the spirit illumines you, then you will you will know.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_03: You'll get it right.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_03: Tom, I'm sorry.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_03: This is such obvious.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_03: Tosh.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, well, Cacleus is with you.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_03: He agrees, and the argument between them becomes so intense that the two of them fall out irrevocably.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_03: And Cacleus, from being an admirer of Luther, becomes one of his most inveterate enemies.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_03: And the accounts that he will write of Luther are so abusive and so popular with Luther's enemies that they will influence how Catholics see Luther for centuries and centuries to come.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_03: But I agree, he has kind of zoomed in on what, as events will show, is the big issue for Luther and indeed for the entire Reformation.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: So isn't that fascinating?
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, the church by definition decides on what Christianity is, which is pretty much at the heart of the formal principle of the Reformation.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um is Christianity simply what Christians say it is, or is there is there an authority, is there a source of revelation, is there a gift to the church that is above the church that constitutes the church?
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and Luther is really standing and saying, sola scriptura is guarding that.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_01: There is a free Bible above the church that is able to give life to the church and beget the church by the word.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that it without that, then Christianity is simply what Christians say it is.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_01: And at that stage, you you don't really have any means for reformation.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: All you have is mutation, don't you?
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: All you have is accretion.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: All you have is Christians just adding this and adding that and distorting this and distorting that.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And who can ever stand above what the church says and and bring it into line with God's intentions and purposes?
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Luther is really that that's where solar scripture comes, wouldn't you say, Mike?
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that that story we're hearing from Tom and Dom, where it's basically the church has spoken like this, but you as an individual are choosing to speak differently, and there's the problem.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's why Luther is obviously wrong, as Dom says.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Now Luther's definition of the church I think helps us to understand how differently he's reading things.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_02: So about twenty years later, after this uh actually it's probably about fifteen years after this, um Luther says, Thank God, a seven-year-old child knows what the church is, namely holy believers and sheep who hear their shepherd's voice.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, the church is the flock of Jesus Christ hearing his voice.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, it is God's word comes first.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is not that the church is over God's word and can decide um what truth is.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_02: God's word must be over the church.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise the church can't be reformed.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_02: The church is a creature of God's word.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderfully put.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Amy, what what your what are your responses to uh Tom and Dom's account of Vorms?
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's very interesting because the running joke has always given that Tom is the Catholic and Dom is the Protestant, even though I neither really would divide themselves that way.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Dom seemed very Catholic in some of his assumptions in these podcasts.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, I would just say this reminds me of nothing so much as our debate here in the United States about whether our Constitution is sort of something set in a time capsule and preserved for all time, the way that the people who wrote it meant it, or is it a living document which changes uh according to what the Americans of the time uh believe it means or want it to mean?
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very similar to this question of is the church basically what is the truth what God said it was at one point in time in giving us the scriptures, or is it what any generation of Christians might feel kind of inspired to think that Christianity is?
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly we see that a lot now with uh people coming to theological ideas that, you know, don't seem to really have any root in scripture, and they'll say, well, you know, that was true for that time, but now we know better.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why Luther just will keep going back to this idea that it's scripture that is the thing that binds us, that takes our consciences captive.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because even in his time, the Roman Magisterium was not the only place you could look to for a definition of what Christianity was or what the church was.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_00: You had the whole Eastern Orthodox Church long before that, you'd had uh the uh Oriental Orthodox churches like the Coptic Church in Egypt that had broken off.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, there already were multiple models of what Christianity could be.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what Luther is arguing is how do you make sense of who is really presenting Christianity?
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have to take it back to something that is set in time, that's unchanging, and that we know is the perfect revelation of God.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because otherwise, you have the bishops of the East saying, no, we know how to interpret things correctly, and the bishops of the West saying, no, we know how to interpret things correctly.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, within Protestantism today, you obviously see a lot of disagreement over doctrine, a lot of differing interpretations of what scripture says that lead us to think, well, maybe it's not so clear what scripture means.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_00: But Protestants are in agreement that you ultimately have to prove your case from Scripture.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is, is one split in the church more an indictment of the fact that Scripture is unclear or a thousand?
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, either way, you obviously have some differences of interpretation.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what Luther would say about the clarity of Scripture is it doesn't mean that every obscure passage is going to be clear to you.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_00: There are going to be secondary things that people disagree on, but that the basic thrust of Scripture's message, this story of the fall into sin and of people trying and failing to uh live up to God's standard of righteousness, and then of God Himself coming down in the person of Jesus Christ and uh living and dying on our behalf and being raised again.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: That basic message of the gospel, Luther would argue, is clear.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason that people go to scripture and don't quote unquote see it is that actually, as scripture tells us, people's hearts are often set against the gospel and the cross becomes a stumbling block for them, is something they can't accept.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess I would say some of our interpretive differences are due to general, genuine confusion, but there are others that could be due to the fact that actually things are clear and we're not wanting to accept them for one reason or another.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned a very interesting parallel with uh whether the US Constitution is a living document or not, because those who tend to think it's a living document tend to line up on the more progressive side of politics, and then conservatives sort of say, well, let's just get back to the text.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now, r now, if we are going to make contemporary comparisons and read back, that very much casts Luther as a conservative, doesn't it?
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like, because he he's basically saying you you can't just have a a church that continually travels on in certain directions without it being anchored to its founding text, can you?
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_01: At that stage, Luther is an arch conservative, and and Rome uh are the progressives in that sense.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_01: And if Tom does see this, and I'll I'll set certainly send this to Tom, uh I know that Tom is working on a kind of a project, a writing project, in which um he'll see the 1960s as um equivalently revolutionary to the 1520s, and and I think that's right.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the ways in which you read Luther might actually affect the ways in which you read the 1960s and everything that's been happening since then, because what if Luther is actually the conservative?
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_01: What if what if Luther is actually bringing uh an ever-evolving situation back to a center and and back to, you know, a God who breathes life and and begets but begets its church at that at that stage?
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's conserving, so he's conserving the Jesus Revolution, and I think Tom Holland is right to sort of name Christianity as the Jesus Revolution, but he's conserving that revolution, Mike.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_02: On that, I think it's worth saying that Luther would not have seen himself as the schismatic breaking off.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_02: He's seeing himself, and the other reformers would agree with him, that rather than being the ones to split off, they're the ones who are seeking to conserve and reform the ancient purity of the church.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_02: Rather than breaking off and doing something new, it it's returning to faithfulness to God's word.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we're Protestants, and that's kind of that's kind of what we would say, but um we offer that as uh as an interpretation of things.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we don't have time uh to go into, we were gonna um talk about uh Luther's execrable um uh pamphlet called On the Jews and Their Lies.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we are all agreed with Tom that this is appalling.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're also agreed with Tom that um he was not speaking racially, um, he was speaking theologically, but as Tom says, that uh is probably no uh consolation to any Jews reading that, and uh and we repudiate that um entirely.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_01: But um Luther as a character is fascinating, and uh you can like him or not like him, but what we hope we've done is show you some of the theological drives that were motivating him, and I think if you want to get to the heart of those, one thing you can do is check out on uh YouTube.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Greaves has done a sensational talk if you just search for Mike Greaves and Here I Stand, a wonderful 40 minutes where Mike kind of goes through some of the theological underpinnings of uh Luther and his thoughts.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And um, Amy, how can people uh be catching up with you online?
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they can make their way over to Twitter and or X, where just look for the gifts.
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Look for all the gifts, and you'll know that you found me.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I am on you know several different social medias, and I'm the only Amy Monterati in the world.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look for my name, it probably is me.
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_00: I also do have that page on Substack, which is called Sub Creations.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's a play on a concept from Tolkien, who I'm a big fan of.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I do some writing there and I do the writing for 1517, and I do have coming up late this year the first of my two novels that take place uh during the Reformation, and they're focused on how Martin Luther came to write the book The Bondage of the Well, which you mentioned earlier in this showdown he had with Erasmus.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_00: So yep, lots of gifts, just lots of gifts.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Check it out.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there's definitely more than one Michael Reeves because I remember finding gifts of uh a karate black belts master, I think, is is one of the many Mike Reeves that are out there.
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_01: But um it's all they're all you.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're all you so how how can people catch up with the real Mike Reeves?
• 1:28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, I've got uh uh a little book um called Write With God that will show people what Luther's trying to say with on justification, so you could just get on Amazon wherever you get your books.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've got a new little book coming out as well um on preaching, which is trying to show what Luther and the Reformers were trying to do in sharing the word of God.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_02: And again, you'd be able to find that on Amazon wherever.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Preaching a God Centered Vision.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll put those in the show notes.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Reeves and Amy Mantravati, thank you so much for joining me.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_02: Lovely to be with you both.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, it's been a pleasure.