Sunday School Notes: Why Study Luther?

As promised, here is the first installation of my Sunday School Notes. For my internship here at seminary I am working at a church, teaching an adult Sunday school class all year. It is a Lutheran church, and I am currently doing a series on Luther, even though I’m not a Lutheran. Should they trust me? Probably not.

Why study Luther? We might suppose that we have learned his lessons and that he is simply a relic of the past. His name is still on the billboard outside. Is not that enough? We still use his slogan, justified by faith alone. Or do we? Either way, we’ve got it. Why go all the back to the 16th century, wade through the laborious details, and once again deal with old Martin? Or perhaps some of us have never dealt with Luther and would prefer to keep it that way. After all, wasn’t Luther simply involved in a bunch of religious wars that we enlightened people in the 21st century should avoid? He was just a religious fanatic, right?

Maybe more to the point, why must we laypeople study Luther? Isn’t that what you do at seminary, not Sunday school? Sunday school is supposed to be relevant. It is supposed help me bring my faith to bear on concrete issues. How will knowing anything about Martin Luther help me live my faith at work? How will it help me raise my kids? How will it help me to be a more faithful Christian? I have two responses to these questions, one of them more general, the other more specific.

The first response has to do with how we view the past in general. We live in America, a country founded upon a revolution. We like to imagine that we escaped from the yoke of oppressive and senseless tradition and founded a new world, a free world, run by the people for the people. Americans look forward, never backward. Now, of course, we all have benefited from this forward looking American spirit, but it has made us somewhat allergic to tradition, and less prone to have deep respect for and interest in where we came from. Just watch Jay Leno’s bit (Jaywalking) where he walks the streets and asks people the most basic of historical questions. The ignorance is frightening. And I’m afraid that this lack of respect for where we have come from has seeped into the church. A lot of Christians seem to have the general impression that the history of the church runs from the apostles straight to the Reformation (where things either got fixed or messed up) and then straight into the present day.

Now I hope us studying Luther will not perpetuate such a silly myth. I hope studying Luther will open your eyes to much more than Luther. Luther himself cared profoundly about the history of church, and studying him can be a way to learn a lot about it. Contrary to much popular opinion, he was not bringing the American ideals of freedom and personal choice to bear upon the church. He was trying to steer the church back to the place from which it was born and from which it had lived for so long. So why is studying Luther important for us? Because where we have come from matters. We are indebted to our past in more ways than we can imagine, ignoring the past cuts us off from a full sense of who we are as persons. I think America’s generally resistance to historical consciousness is not a good thing. And in the church it is especially corrosive. The church is a peculiar community in that we believe in something called ‘the communion of the saints.’ What this means is that, in a very real sense, Augustine and Thomas and Luther and Calvin, and everyone before us in the church, are still with us today. We are accountable to them. Not chained to them, but accountable. And also, they are accountable to us. If we ignore them, we are not being the church in the full sense of the term.

My second response is more directly concerned with why we should study Luther, as opposed to some other historical figure. Here, things get a bit more urgent, at least for me. I am going to read you a quote by the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some of you may know who he is. He lived in the 20th century, acted courageously against Hitler, and was killed in a concentration camp for it. During his life, he took a couple trips to America and spent some time here observing and participating in our churches. He was deeply impressed by the African-American churches here. He observed that suffering people were the ones who really knew how to preach and sing about the Gospel. Also, they really understood that the Gospel ushers us into a life of profound care and advocacy for those who suffer injustice. These two strands of the African-American church deeply shaped Bonhoeffer. Later in his life when he was resisting Hitler and calling the church to do the same precisely because it was the church, he said, “He who does not cry out for the Jews cannot sing Gregorian chant.”

Bonhoeffer’s experience with the majority white churches in America was very different, though. He did not find there what he had found in the African-American churches. Here are his haunting words:

God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God. Anything of the churches of the Reformation which has come to America either stands in conscious seclusion and detachments from the general life of the church or has fallen victim to Protestantism without Reformation…American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of ‘criticism’ by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s ‘criticism’ touches even religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics. But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness. The decisive task for today is the dialogue between Protestantism without Reformation and the churches of the Reformation. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords

There are a couple of key phrases I want to draw out from this quote. The first is, “Protestantism without Reformation.” At first, this sounds like a contradiction. How do you have Protestantism without Reformation? Bonhoeffer’s point, though, is that what he has found in America are Protestant churches who do not seem to live by the truths of the Reformation. Sure, they may have all the right slogans down, they may have perfectly fine worship services, and they may live lives full of good works and many wonderful activities. But, says Bonhoeffer, this is not what is means to be the church, this is not what it means to be reformed by the Word of God. So what does it mean? He uses this phrase “‘criticism by the Word of God,” and he goes on to explain that this ‘criticism’ is directed toward Christianity and even toward the sanctification of Christians. What is the world is he talking about? I think what he is talking about is this: perhaps the central discovery of the reformers, Martin Luther in particular, was that the church does not possess the Word of God. We do not own it or control it and cannot put it to use however we want. The Word of God, for Luther, is the living Jesus Christ as he speaks his Gospel. This means that the Word of God has its own reality apart from the church. God does not speak only when the church speaks. Roman Catholicism in Luther’s day tended to think that it was in control of the Word of God, that God spoke only as the church spoke. What Luther discovered was that the Word of God, rather, is spoken to the church, not by the church. And with this, Luther also discovered that the Word of God spoken to the church is always a disruptive Word. The Gospel snatches us away from self-reliance and leads us to radical trust in the mercy of God. This means that the business of being a Christian, of listening to the Word of God, is one in which we are always led away from ourselves and our activity, even and especially religious activity, to what God has done for us and what God now says to us. Even our good works, then, are subject to criticism by the Word of God if they lead us to trust in ourselves and not in God.

This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that, “God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics.” Lots of people, go to church, Protestant churches nonetheless, thinking that what church is all about is simply doing whatever you do at church, singing, praying, talking with other Christians, and living a good life to accompany it. Bonhoeffer (echoing Luther) says No. He says that until you despair of yourself and cast yourself on the mercy of God you have not been to church. Church is about being confronted by God in the startling message of the Gospel, a message that says No to self-reliance. God makes the church apart from what we do, which is the same thing as saying that God saves us apart from what we do. The church is a gift from God, not a human achievement.

This is the message that Bonhoeffer thought the American churches did not hear. He saw in America, particularly in the white churches, that people went about Christianity as if it was all about what they did. To be sure, they said all the right Protestant lingo and did lots of good things. But they were not opening themselves to the Gospel, allowing it to call into question everything they did, even their Protestant religion. For in the end, it is not about being Protestant or Catholic. It is about hearing and believing the Gospel.

I think Bonhoeffer’s criticism of American churches still stands. For us, Christianity is largely about what we do. And this is why we need to study Luther, because he can teach us that Christianity is about what God has done in Christ. Luther can show us that to believe in the Gospel is to believe in a radical, disruptive message that kills us before it makes us alive. The Gospel, according to Luther, is not about noble self-improvement; it is about our death and resurrection, every day death and resurrection. We study Luther not so that we can be come better Lutherans or more adept at defining ourselves over against other groups of Christians, but so that we can become more faithful hearers of the Gospel, so that we can become suspicious of ourselves and our entrenched patterns of religion, and open to the surprising and revolutionary message of God’s grace.