An article by David S. Yeago, First Things, March 1996,
p. 37 was interesting to summarize for our purposes of enlightenment.
".. A careful examination of what Luther actually
wrote and said,.. suggests very different conclusions
that may surprise Protestants and Roman Catholics alike..
Luther's "Reformation Breakthrough" is implicitly
construed as a refounding of Christianity.. Luther is said
to have "rediscovered the gospel," which surely implies
that the gospel somehow got lost.. present[ing]
Luther as a radical, .. makes the present division
of the Church seem normal and inevitable to us.
The reading of Luther.. tells quite a different
story. While something important for Luther's theological development
did occur in 1518, it was not a "Reformation
turn" away from the catholic tradition. On the contrary,
it is better described as a "catholic turn"
that anchored Luther's work much more solidly within the framework
of catholic Christianity.
Luther's theology was deeply shaped by his scholastic, monastic,
and patristic predecessors.. The driving issue in Luther's early
theology was not, on the face of it, the problem of the assurance
of forgiveness or the certitude of salvation.. Young Luther
did almost certainly suffer from a "troubled
conscience" in some form, but it
did not cause his theological work to be dominated by the
question, "How can I get a gracious God?"
The driving question in Luther's early theology is, in fact, "Where
can I find the real God?".. The problem of the "pure
love of God" and the problem of identifying and
turning to the real God turn out to be
same problem.. How can we tell that we are really
clinging to God and not to an idol of our own?
Luther answers that the gracious presence of the true God
is so excruciatingly painful and distastefully unpalatable
to our own nature that we can have no
imaginable self-interest motivation for enduring it.
"Therefore the excellent God, after He has justified and
given His spiritual gifts, lest that ungodly nature rush upon
them to enjoy them.. immediately brings tribulation, exercises,
and examines, lest the person perish eternally by such ignorance.
For thus a person learns to love and worship God purely, when
one worships God not for the sake of His grace and
gifts, but for Himself alone." The problem is
that we do not want to come into God's presence for
God's sake, but for the sake of the good
things He can do for us: we want to use God. And Luther answers:
"If it is really God, then He will crucify and torture you
as He did Christ, your pattern, and thus leave you no reason
to cling to Him for His own sweet sake.. Luther
seems to have found it comforting.. it nonetheless
allows the sinner yearning for God under the cross
a sort of paradoxical assurance, a sense of being at least in
the appropriate place before God, which sustains the heart
and enables it to endure to the end.
[Luther's] pastoral worry about the sale of indulgences was
that simple people were being misled into confusing the external
remission of penalties with the crucifying inner
grace that drives out self-seeking. "And so let
us diligently take care lest indulgences.. become for us a cause
of security and indolence and loss of interior grace. But let
us take action carefully in order that the sickness of our
nature may be perfectly healed and we thirst to come
to God out of love for Him and hatred of this life and disgust
with ourselves; that is, let us assiduously seek His healing
grace.. What finally emerged in the summer of 1518 from
his frantic rethinking - recall that Luther was trying to
work through the theological issue while at the same
time explaining to the world why he shouldn't be burned at the
stake for heresy - seems to have been shaped primarily by
reflection on texts such as Matthew 16:19 "..
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be
loosed in heaven."
To the question of the sacraments Luther finally responds
that the concrete, external, public sacramental act in the Church
is the act of Jesus Christ. When we come to the sacrament,
we come to Jesus: his word, his act, his authority..
From one of Luther's later sermons: "We
have a definite Lord, one we can grasp."
.. It's the God who makes Himself
available as He chooses, in the flesh
born of Mary and the Church's sacramental practice, not
in our religious speculation and self-interest.
Luther's early theology was "mystical" in the sense
that it was a theology focused on the transformation of
human persons by the union with God.
On Luther's side, the final break with the Church authorities
came in the wake of Leo X's bull of November 1518; in that
document, as Luther saw it, Leo arrogated to himself the power
of defining Church teaching without accountability to Scripture,
the Fathers, or the ancient cannons. This led Luther eventually
to conclude that the Roman Church was irrevocably
committed to the claim that the authority of the Pope stood
even above Holy Scripture and it was in this
context that he came, over the next several years
to believe that the papacy was the prophesied
Antichrist of the last days, a conviction he then
held to his dying day with a literalistic fervor that
this modern interpreters have rarely been willing to take
as seriously as he did.
When Luther became convinced that the papacy was Antichrist, all
the energy of his theological vision was harnessed
to the forces already working to dissolve the Church's
unity; this more than anything else made schism inevitable.
There is blame enough to go around to this tragic
and pointless outcome.. Luther's impatience
and anger, his inability to take stupid and inappropriate
papal teaching at all calmly (perhaps because
his own early view of the papal office was unrealistically
high), as well as his tendency to dramatize his own
situation in apocalyptic terms. (summary
from First Things, David S Yeago, March 1996, p. 37)