Marius interprets Luther more as a schismatic than a reformer. Luther comes off as a character-disordered individual. While creative, brilliant and earnest, Luther nonetheless displayed a boorish and pugnacious attitude toward all who disagreed with him, a fawning dependency on political 'father-substitutes', and a life-long morbid fear of death and the devil.
After reading several other biographies and theological evaluations of Luther (Oberman, Bainton, Marty and Lohse), I am hesitant to adopt Marius' conclusions carte blanche. He had a personal vendetta against Luther as he did with most theological conservatives. He over emphasized Luther's disordered personality, and he didn't seem to practice historical empathy adequately. That said, Marius alerted me to the fact that Luther, especially the older Luther, was curmudgeonly, religiously racist and inflexible. Dr. Martinus Luther doesn't appear to be a likely candidate upon which to construct our spiritual theology. Or does he?
Martin Luther was a living manifestation of one of his famous sayings: simul iustus et peccator, the Christian is simultaneously made right with God and, in the meantime in history, lives a less than sanctified life as a sinner. Luther, while given to emphasize his Doctor of Theology credentials and as the quintessential Reformer, nonetheless, had moments of spiritual clarity when he would display true humility and insight:
How then should I-poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am-come
to call the Children of Christ by my wretched name? Not so my dear friends,
let us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christians, after
Christ whose teaching we hold.
This paradox of self-identity indicates there was something in Luther which recognized that he was more than his culture, history or personality; he was more than his faults and sins. Luther torn apart by an overactive conscience and a morbid imagination claimed that he was assured by God, by what he later called his Tower experience, that he was freed from absolute self-demolition by the justifying righteousness of Christ. Luther's spiritual theology stands or falls upon this claim.
While the doctrine of justification has been considered a schismatic principle that wrenched the Body of Christ in two, and then into hundreds of fragments, the apparently fractious doctrine paradoxically has the potential to heal the church and make her whole again. That is the hope of evangelical Catholics and ecumenical Lutherans, like Carl Braaten. His book Justification: The Article By Which the Church Stands or Falls contends that Luther's re-discovery of justification provides the church with a methodological and theological barometer to gauge its ultimate faithfulness to Christ.
Braaten uses an instructive metaphor to explain how Luther's doctrinal emphasis on justification could bring about the healing of the Christian community. He likens the Reformation traditions to governments in exile who carry on the business of legitimate government while the original homeland is being occupied by enemy forces. According to Braaten the enemy is not Roman Catholicism but the diminution of the doctrine of justification. There has been a revolt whereby the forces of self-righteousness, perfectionistic moralism, and works righteousness have dethroned this central organizing principle of belief. Limiting these features to one denomination would be extremely inaccurate.
What is the purpose of governments in exile? To hold things together until rapprochement can occur. Sadly this has not taken place for over five hundred years. Historically there are no governments in exile that have existed so long. They either blend into the cultural melting pot of the host country or they establish a new country altogether. They become permanently independent.
The only hope for this divided country called Christianity is the very principle that divided it, thinks Braaten.
I do not believe that we can renew the traditions of Christianity
without using the article of justification as a methodological norm....
the argument of Luther and the reformers was that in becoming more evangelical
(grounded in justification), they were all the more truly Catholic 7.
There have been attempts to agree on the principle of justification by faith. Braaten recounts these in one of his most tedious chapters, but the deep internalized meaning of justification hasn't anchored itself in the spirituality in Protestants, Catholics or Anabaptists. Braaten expresses the heart of this doctrine in this quote:
The gospel is the glad tidings of the Divine movement of paradoxical
love expressed as forgiveness of sinners, not motivated from the roadside,
not caused by any human action, and certainly not characterized as an
ad hoc response to God contingent on human believing and repenting.
The inward reconciliation of the heart of God with sinners occurs not
because of the connection we initiate with Christ, but because of the
connection Christ establishes with us. The free and full forgiveness
of sins is proclaimed as an objective gift of God, on account of Christ,
to sinners, not because they repent and believe but in order that they
may believe and repent (24).
This definition, while thick with meaning, couldn't get clearer. The basis of our unity and vitality is rooted in the acknowledgement that spirituality is an unmerited gift from God. It needs no other motivation than God's suffering love, and there is nothing we contribute that would improve or compel it. Absolutely and unambiguously - nothing.
Braaten explores the diverse and devious ways whereby the church, including Lutheran orthodoxy, attempts to detour around the spiritual centre of justification. Theologians fiddle with the order of salvation. Instead of placing justification at salvation's fountainhead they place call, regeneration, illumination or conversion before it, making the cause or our renewal syncretistic or joint venture. Evangelicals and other pietists have a penchant for placing faith, and by that they mean their subjective acquiescence to doctrinal belief in justification, before God's full acceptance. This makes faith/belief a work that saves. Faith becomes a doctrinal belief rather than a trust brought about by the Spirit alone. In order to maintain free will and with it credit for our coming alive in God some Calvinists and even Melanchton, Luther's right-hand theological crack shot, inserted God's foreknowledge of choices and deeds. God chose us because he knew we would choose him.
Devotionalists have put their subjectivity before God's acceptance. Calvinists and orthodox Lutherans have diverted our fixed gaze on the hope of grace by speculating about how election plays a role in our justification. It all comes back to a very simple human demand that we save ourselves or at least contribute to the merit of our salvation; we are hell bent in our determination that we will not let God accept us as we are.
It is not through the courageous idealized Martin Luther or any other faith hero, whether John Calvin, Menno Simons, the pope, saints, mystics, Desmond Tutu, J.I. Packer, or the Niebuhr brothers, that we rest our spirituality. These clouds of witnesses, like us, are infinitely incapable of attaining their own righteousness. Of all of these, Martin Luther knew, emphasized and was affected by the cardinal starting point of justification. If our communities could agree that justification by faith is the only place from which to begin and sustain a conversation, that we are saved by grace alone, then we could come to accept our paradoxical identity as sinners and saints and stop building our faith on egocentrism. We would have no need for a Richard Marius to demythologize Martin Luther - or for any of us to 'take our leaders down off their pedestal' since we will have learned not to place them there in the first place.