Martin Luther: The Monk Who Did Not Want a Party

Martin Luther is the most famous name of the Reformation, and he did not want it to be a name at all. He was a monk who loved the church enough to argue with it in public, and when the argument became a movement he begged the people in it to call themselves Christians and nothing else. This page lets him speak for himself, from his own sermons on the Gospels and Epistles and from his lectures on Galatians, all of which this site holds and has checked word for word. He is quoted where he agrees with this site and where he does not. He would have asked for nothing less, since he said more than once that he was only a witness to the Scriptures and never their master.

Who he was

Luther was an Augustinian monk, a priest and a teacher of Scripture at the university in the small German town of Wittenberg. On 31 October 1517 he posted ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences. A thesis, in the universities of that day, was a point put up for debate, and that is what he intended: a disputation among scholars, not a new church. He wanted the church he belonged to corrected, and he expected, at least at first, that it would listen. It did not, and the quarrel grew. In 1521, before the emperor and the princes of Germany at the Diet of Worms, he was asked to take back what he had written, and he would not. He lived under the imperial ban for the rest of his life and died in 1546.

Behind the public man there was a frightened one. He spent years as a monk trying to be sure that God was not angry with him, and he never found that assurance in anything he could do. He said so often, and without excusing himself:

What changed him was not a new idea but an old verse read as if it were addressed to him. "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). The peace he had tried to earn in the monastery was a gift, and the giver was Christ. Everything else he did came out of that discovery, and everything on this page comes back to it.

Not Lutherans, but Christians

Within a few years of the theses there were people calling themselves by his name, and some of them had begun to look down on ordinary believers who had not joined them. In 1522 Luther wrote a public letter to his own followers warning them against revolt and against pride, and in it he asked them to drop his name altogether. The words below are an English rendering of 1846, from Michelet's Life of Luther, a book made almost entirely of Luther's own writings. The site's Road Home page gives the same passage in another translation; the sense is the same in both.

“In the first place, I pray you to leave my name alone, and not to call yourselves Lutherans, but Christians. Who is Luther? My doctrine is not mine! I have not been crucified for any one. St. Paul (1 Corinthians iii.) would not that any one should call themselves of Paul, nor of Peter, but of Christ. How then does it befit me, a miserable bag of dust and ashes, to give my name to the children of Christ? Cease, my dear friends, to cling to these party names and distinctions; away with them all; and let us call ourselves only Christians, after him from whom our doctrine comes.”

“For me, I neither am nor wish to be master of any one. I and mine will contend for the sole and whole doctrine of Christ, who is our sole Master.”

Luther, A Faithful Admonition to All Christians, 1522, as given in J. Michelet, The Life of Luther, English translation by G. H. Smith (New York, 1846). This passage is not in the site's library of Luther's sermons; it is quoted from Michelet.

He was reading the chapter he named. "For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?" (1 Corinthians 3:4-5). Two chapters earlier Paul had put it as a question that answers itself: "Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?" (1 Corinthians 1:13). Luther preached on that chapter too, and he saw the danger in his own day as plainly as in Corinth:

This site takes the request seriously, and the letter The Label and the Man is built on it. A reader who calls himself by a Reformer's name is doing the one thing that Reformer asked him not to do. The name that was crucified for us is the only one worth wearing.

What he kept

It is easy to imagine that Luther threw out everything between the apostles and himself. He did not. The Lutheran churches gathered their confessions into the Book of Concord in 1580, and that book opens with the three creeds of the early church, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed, before a single Lutheran document is printed. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, written by Melanchthon and approved by Luther, defends its teaching on faith by calling the Fathers as witnesses: Article XX says that Augustine, in many volumes, defends grace and the righteousness of faith against the merits of works. The whole Confession is on this site in the library, and the creeds are set out in What the Early Church Confessed.

Luther read the Fathers and named Augustine often in his sermons. But he read them as teachers, not as masters, and he said so in the middle of a Christmas sermon when Augustine's reading of a verse did not fit the text:

And in the Galatians lectures he put himself on the same bench as the Fathers he was weighing:

That is the rule this site tries to keep as well: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Fathers are heard, and heard with respect, because they stood closer to the apostles than we do. They are not obeyed for their own sake, because the Lord left only one Master. "But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren" (Matthew 23:8). Luther kept the creeds because the creeds kept Christ.

Faith alone, and the works that follow

The sentence Luther is remembered for is that a person is justified by faith alone. He took it from Paul: "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law" (Romans 3:28). He meant exactly what it says. Nothing a sinner does, before or after believing, earns God's verdict of righteous. That verdict is given to the one who trusts Christ, and it is given whole.

What is less remembered is how hard he pressed the other half. He knew there were people who heard "faith alone" and took it as permission to do nothing, and he had no patience with them. Preaching on the First Epistle of John, he said that this was the very error the apostle wrote to correct:

The order mattered to him, and he kept it the way Paul keeps it in one breath: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:8-10). Faith first, and then the works, not as the price of the gift but as its fruit. He said the same thing in his own words:

In his preaching James and Paul are not enemies. "Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2:17) and "faith which worketh by love" (Galatians 5:6) describe one faith, the kind that holds on to Christ and then goes to work because it has Him. The letter Righteousness works this out at length. The root is Christ, received by faith. The fruit is a life that looks like Him.

Baptism and the Supper, in his words

Here many modern Protestants will find Luther closer to the early church than to themselves. He held that baptism is not only a picture of a new birth that has already happened but the place where God gives it. He read Paul's "washing of regeneration" as a washing: "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost" (Titus 3:5), and the Lord's words to Nicodemus as a promise tied to water: "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John 3:5).

He did not make the sacraments work without faith. Faith receives what God gives in them, and doubt refuses it. But doubt, for him, was not humility. It was an insult to the giver:

On the Supper he was plainer still. When Jesus said, "Take, eat; this is my body" (Matthew 26:26), Luther held that the bread is what Christ said it is, and that Christ is truly present in the meal. He knew that others in the Reformation read the word is as signifies, and he answered them from the pulpit:

This is the point on which the Reformation could not agree with itself. At Marburg, in October 1529, Luther and Ulrich Zwingli met to settle their differences and agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen. The fifteenth was the presence of Christ in the Supper, and on it they parted. This site stands with Luther and with the early church on the reality of what is given at the table; the letter The Lord's Table sets out why. The meal is not a lecture about a Christ who is elsewhere. It is Christ, giving Himself to His people.

The will

Luther's longest and hardest book was written against Erasmus, the most learned man in Europe, who had defended the freedom of the human will to cooperate with grace. Luther's answer is called The Bondage of the Will. This site holds it but does not quote it here, because the copy in the library is a twentieth-century translation that this site does not reproduce. Described fairly, it argues that the fallen will is not free toward God at all; that a sinner cannot choose Christ until God changes him; that God's will stands behind everything that happens; and that to give the will any power of its own in salvation is to take glory from Christ. It is the strongest form of the case this site argues against in Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail and Predestination and Free Will, and a reader who wants that case at full strength should hear it from Luther himself.

His sermons say the same thing with less heat, and they say it from Scripture. "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him" (John 6:44). "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not" (Romans 7:18).

Concede what is right in this, because much of it is. No one on this site believes that a sinner climbs to God by his own strength. "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). Where this site parts from Luther is on whether the grace that makes a heart willing can still be refused, and whether God's call to turn is a real call to a person who could answer either way. "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" (Ezekiel 33:11). What Luther got right is the thing he most wanted to protect: whoever comes, comes because Christ drew him, and the thanks belong to Christ.

Kept, and able to fall

It surprises many readers that the man who wrote The Bondage of the Will did not teach that a believer cannot be lost. He did not. Luther held, and the Lutheran confessions after him hold, that grace is truly given and can be truly thrown away through unbelief. He preached it as a warning to his own people, not as a theory about other people.

He was reading the warnings as warnings. "Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4). "Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God" (Hebrews 3:12). And the Lord's own word about the vine: "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered" (John 15:6).

This is where the site stands with Luther and against the later Calvinist teaching that a true believer cannot finally fall. The letters The Security of Salvation and The Warning and the Way Home gather the texts and the Fathers on both sides, and they come out where Luther came out. The warning is real because the gift is real. But notice how he preached it. The danger is unbelief, ingratitude and contempt of the Word, not the ordinary weakness of a Christian who stumbles and comes back. His counsel to a frightened conscience was to look away from itself to Christ, who does not let go of anyone who holds on to Him, and who is the one the branch is told to abide in.

Where he was a man

The Reformers were men, and Luther was one of the most human of them. The same stubbornness that stood at Worms stood at Marburg, where the fifteenth article could not be agreed and the Reformation divided over the very meal that was meant to make it one. And late in his life, in 1543, he wrote a long and bitter treatise against the Jews, On the Jews and Their Lies, which later centuries used for evil. Saying so does not cancel what he did well, and hiding it would make this page the kind of party literature he asked his followers not to write. It is the same rule the Reformers themselves applied to the Fathers: good men, under Scripture, and never above it. Luther knew the rule, and he knew it applied to himself:

Paul's instruction for a brother who has fallen is the one to apply to a teacher who has fallen too: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). Considering thyself. The failures of a great man are not an argument against what he taught when he taught the truth; they are an argument against trusting any man in place of Christ. That was Luther's own point from the beginning. He was a bag of dust and ashes, in his words, and the doctrine was not his. It was Christ's, and Christ is the one who does not fail.

Where this lands

Strip away the party that formed around him, and Luther is a monk who found out that God was not angry with him, and spent the rest of his life telling everyone why. The why was never Luther. It was the Son of God, given for sinners and received by faith, present in the water and at the table, holding His people and warning them not to let go.

This site does not follow him everywhere. It does follow him here, to the one place he wanted every reader to end up. "For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11). A man who will not have a party named after him has left you nowhere else to stand. "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). Not Lutherans. Christians, after Him from whom the doctrine comes.

Related: The Road Home, The Label and the Man, What the Early Church Confessed, The Augsburg Confession, Justification, Righteousness, The Lord's Table, Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail, The Security of Salvation, The Warning and the Way Home, and Augustine; the wider story in The Church, One Story. Luther's sermons are quoted from the Church Postil in J. N. Lenker's English edition (Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther, Minneapolis, 1904–1909; public domain), and his Galatians lectures from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library text of A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians; every quotation is checked word for word against this site's library. The 1522 admonition is quoted from J. Michelet, The Life of Luther, Gathered from His Own Writings, translated by G. H. Smith (New York: D. Appleton, 1846; public domain). The Bondage of the Will is described, not quoted. Dates for the theses, Worms, Marburg and Augsburg are those given on this site's own history pages. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple and the words of God in gold.