Martin Luther: is he still relevant?

Currents in Theology and Mission, April, 2005 by Kjell Ove Nilsson

Luther was a servant of Princes, a man who hated Jews and oppressed women. He has given people guilt complexes with his constant talk about sin; he made our lives boring; he made us into workaholics. He made it a virtue to have a bad conscience, and we are not supposed to have fun. We have to shun good food and a glass of wine. This is all Luther's fault!

It sounds like a joke, but such comments are rather common in the Lutheran country of Sweden, sometimes in newspaper and magazine articles but more often in advertisements or letters to the editor in daily papers. "Fight Luther within You" is perhaps the message, so that you may enjoy a nice flight with this or that airline without working yourself to death or relax with a good meal in some restaurant. Luther sits on your shoulder and whispers negative and bad things in your ear. And the common message is: Put him down! Get rid of him!

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This attitude is, of course, very superficial and ignorant. It is simply not true--most of it. But it needs at least to be looked at from several perspectives.

The controversial Luther

Many examples of the controversial Luther were found in papers and books in 1983 when the 500th birthday of Luther was celebrated all over the world. Of course, such an anniversary was also the occasion for many serious and well-grounded writings among scholars and historians, as well as theologians. A big Congress for Luther Research was held in Erfurt in the German Democratic Republic (at the time), the place of his birth, where it all began. This anniversary was celebrated on five continents, particularly in minority locations, as well as in the big Lutheran majority churches like those in the Nordic countries and in Europe. It was celebrated in Santiago, Kuala Lumpur, Bukoba, and Madras as well as in Wittenberg, Lund, Helsinki, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Already that is interesting.

Celebrations are not altogether reliable sources for anyone who wants the truth. Many themes circled exactly around the question of the relevance of Luther. Is he forgotten, abused, debated, up to date, or what? It is a simple matter of fact that the real Luther is to some extent forgotten, and often misused, misinterpreted, or locked up in a kind of Lutheran prison of a traditional and rather narrow understanding. The picture of Luther today is quite a long way from that vivid, dynamic, unpredictable man from the early sixteenth century. I sometimes think of him as being like the good Samaritan who fell into the hands of robbers and was stripped and beaten (Luke 10:30). Today in the hands of the media Luther is maltreated and misrepresented--indeed, he has fallen in the hands of robbers. But at least this shows that Luther is still interesting to many and that he is actually relevant and important to discuss, though very controversial!

To some extent this is true also among those with a more serious approach, among Luther's most eager and devoted followers, particularly those who want to maintain a clear Lutheran label over and against all kinds of non-Lutherans or worse (whatever that could be). Some of his admirers have turned out to be robbers as well. Thus has Luther become the champion of a rather conservative, more or less apolitical, understanding of the world and human society due to a basically misinterpreted doctrine of the two kingdoms. It is, however, easy to show in Luther's writings how radical he could be in political issues and how active he was many times in his involvements and his preaching on the burning social problems of his time.

Another abuse of Luther is that he has been taken to be the spokesman for a consistent state-church system by many who have wanted to defend that system in the Nordic countries. But he himself fought decidedly and at times vehemently for the freedom of the church, both from despotic princes and from the authoritarian Roman Catholic Church of his time. He wanted to take the church out of "Babylonian Captivity," as he wrote already in 1520.

He also has been charged with being quite fundamentalistic in his view of the Bible, even though the contrary is true, especially in the way he applied the biblical texts in an almost modern historical critical manner. Furthermore, he was accused of representing a very pessimistic understanding of what it means to be a human being, born in sin and full of damnation, as if this sad expression of the human predicament were the only thing to be said in his anthropology, in spite of all his sermons on God's beautiful creation and our calling to serve each other in love in our daily lives.

And he certainly did not want to be called a "Lutheran"! He wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church, and he actually had a much more basic ecumenical view of the church. He was far from wanting to start a new church, worst of all named Lutheran. He found that both senseless and ridiculous.

The worst abuses of Luther are probably to be found among his successors and most devoted friends. Often they interpreted Luther's ideas in a very limited or narrow-minded way, though they no doubt meant well and wanted to preserve their great Reformer at his very best. But, as the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?