Reading Luther

Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

We haven’t finished with Luther. “We” Christians, “we” Europeans, “we” westerners, in any event “we” Protestants.  Around 1517, the theologian Martin Luther constructed a new language, a new way of being Christian, a new “being in the world”: “novelties” which caused his excommunication, which made Latin Christianity explode, burst and reconfigure the Church, and of which we are still the heirs. This new language, these new meanings given to old words – faith, law, works, justification, conscience, freedom, Church, lay –, have in their turn become old, worn-out, strange. Like a true pedagogue, Professeur Pierre-Olivier Léchot suggests revisiting them to make them resonate even today. To the extracts from Luther’s writings that he has carefully selected in order to arouse the desire to read more, I shall add my own favourite, drawn from a sermon preached in Wittenberg, on 10^th August 1522:

“Beware of false prophets!” (Mt 7,15) : Christ is not speaking only to the pope, but to everyone[…]. If then I must beware and discern false teaching, it’s my responsibility to judge and to say: Pope, you or the councils, you have decided this, but it remains for me to judge if I can accept it or not.  Indeed, you will not fight for me and you will not reply for me when I die.  The onus will fall on me to know where I stand. You need [the word of God tells us] to be sure that it’s about the word of God, just as sure as of the fact that you are still alive, and still more sure, in order to settle your conscience. Even if every human being, not to mention the angels, got on with deciding, if you can’t decide yourself and judge, you are lost. For you must not base your judgement on the pope or on others; you must be capable of saying on your own: this is right, this is wrong.  Otherwise you will not be able to survive. For if you wanted to say on your deathbed: The pope said this, the councils decided that, the holy fathers Augustine and Jerome defined this or that, the devil will instantly make a hole and barge in: And if it was wrong?  Couldn’t they be mistaken? And there you are on the floor. That’s why you must be certain of being able to say: This is the word of God, that’s what I rely on. […] Very well! Let them decide and say what they will. You cannot place your confidence there, nor give peace to your conscience by that.  It’s about your head, your life, that’s why God must speak to you in your heart and say to you: There is the word of God; otherwise it’s unsure. You have to be sure of it yourself, cutting out [the opinion of] everybody else.”

Sermon for the 8^th Sunday after Trinity (10^th August 1522), on Mt 7, 15f., (WA 10, III, p. 258, 18- 260, 10,)

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