Why should pastors listen to Luther?
Luther was a university professor of theology throughout his professional life, raising the question of whether this can really serve as a model for pastors, or even understand what pastors face in our kind of ministry, but that would be a mistake. At least three things connect Luther to our vocation.
- Luther knew the weight and pressure of weekly preaching.
- There were two churches in Wittenberg.
- The city church and the castle church.
- Luther was a regular preacher in the city church.
- He said.
- “If I could become king or emperor today.
- Would I?Don’t give up my preacher position? (39).
- He was driven by a passion for God’s exaltation in the Word.
- In one of his prayers.
- He said.
- “Dear Lord God.
- I desire to preach that you may be glorified I want to speak of you.
- Praise you.
- And praise your name.
- Although I probably can’t do it right.
- Won’t you do it right?(Meuser.
- 51).
To feel the strength of this commitment, you must realize that in the church of Wittenberg at the time, there were no programs, only worship and preaching. On Sunday at 5 a. m. , there was a cult with a sermon based on an epistle; at 10 a. m. , a sermon based on a gospel; in the afternoon, a message in the Old Testament or catechism. The sermons on Mondays and Tuesdays were based on catechism; Wednesday in Mateus; Thursday and Friday in apostolic letters; and Saturday in Joo (Meuser, 37-38).
Luther was not the pastor of the city church; his friend, Johannes Bugenhagen, was pastor from 1520 to 1558, but Luther shared the preaching almost every week he was in the city; He preached because the inhabitants of the city wanted to hear it and because he and his contemporaries understood their doctorate in theology as a call to teach the Word of God to the whole Church. Thus, Luther always preached twice on Sundays and once during the week. Walther von Loewenich said in his biography: “Luther was one of the greatest preachers in the history of Christianity?Between 1510 and 1546, Luther preached some 3,000 sermons. Did he preach frequently several times a week, often two or more a day?(353).
For example, in 1522 he preached 117 sermons in Wittenberg and 137 sermons the following year; in 1528 he preached almost 200 times and from 1529 we had 121 sermons; thus, the average of these four years was a sermon every other day and a half. As Fred Meuser says in his book on Luther’s preaching: “Never a weekend without preaching?He knows everything. He didn’t even stop preaching on a working day. Has there ever been a pause in preaching, teaching, private studies, production, writing and counselling?(27) This is the first bond with our shepherds, he knows the weight of preaching.
Luther knew the pressure and suffering of having, raising and losing children. Katie gave him six children in quick succession: Joo (1526), Elisabete (1527), Madalena (1529), Martinho (1531), Paulo (1533) and Margarete. (1534). Do a little analysis on that, the year between Elizabete and Madalena was the year in which he preached 200 times (more than once every other day); to that is added that Elizabete died that year at the age of eight months, and he continued under this pain.
And not to think that Luther neglected his children, consider that on Sunday afternoons, often after preaching twice, Luther directed domestic devotions, which were practically another cult for an hour, including guests and children (Meuser, 38). be a busy, public family man.
Not only was he part of almost all the controversies and conferences of his time, but he was also generally the leader: the Heidelberg dispute (1518), the meeting with Cardinal Cayetano in Augsburg (1518), Leipzig’s dispute with John Eck and Andrew Karlstadt (1519) and the Augsburg regime, although he was not there personally (1513).
In addition to personal and active participation in church conferences, there was an incredible flow of publications related to church orientation. For example, in 1520 he wrote 133 books; 1522, 130; 1523, 183 (one every other day!), And many 1524 (Meuser). He was a kind of lightning rod for all the critics against the Reformation. “They all turn to him, round his door every hour, citizens, doctors and princes. Should diplomatic enigmas be solved, complicated theological questions clarified, and the ethics of the Reformation established? social life? (Martyn, 473).
With the breakdown of the medieval system of church life, a new way of thinking had to be developed for the church and the Christian life. And in Germany, much of the work was in Martin Luther. It’s amazing how much he devoted himself to the earthly, matters of parish life. For example, when was that decided? Visitors to the state and university would be sent to each parish to assess the state of the church and make suggestions for church life, Luther agreed to write the guidelines: “Instructions for visitors to pastors of the parish of the electorate of Saxony. “It referred to a wide range of practical issues. As for parenting, he then determined how children’s classes should be divided into three groups: readers, advanced readers, and readers, then made suggestions on how to teach them.
Children should first learn to read the booklet containing the alphabet, the Lord’s prayer, the creed, and other prayers. When they find out, they’ll receive Donatus and Cato to read Donato and expose Cato. The teacher must explain one or two sentences in a moment, and the children must repeat them later, to build a vocabulary (Conrad Bergendoff, Editor-in-Chief, Church and Ministry II, Vol. 40, Works by Luther, (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), 315-316).
I mention it only to show that this university professor was intensely involved in solving the most practical problems of the ministry, from the cradle to the grave. He did not study during an uninterrupted leisure period during the long summer sabbaticals. I was constantly on demand and working constantly.
So I conclude that even though he was a university professor, are there reasons why pastors should look at his work and listen to his words to learn and draw inspiration from the ministry of the Word?The “outer word, ” the book.
Luther under study: the difference marked by the book
For Luther, the importance of study was so closely tied to his discovery of the true gospel that he could never approach study as anything other than absolutely crucial, vital, and history-shaping. For him, study had been the door to the gospel. , the Reformation and God. Today we assume so much in the Word that we can hardly imagine what it cost Luther to fight for the truth and defend access to the Word. For Luther, study is important. His life and the life of the Church depended on it; we must ask ourselves if all the ground conquered by Luther and other reformers can be lost over time if we lose this passion for study, assuming that the truth will remain obvious and available.
To see this entanglement between study and the gospel, let us return to the early years of Wittenberg, Luther dated the great discovery of the gospel in 1518 during his series of studies on the Psalms (Dillenberger, xvii). He tells the story in his preface to the full edition of Luther’s Latin writings. This description of the discovery is taken from the preface written on March 5, 1545, the year before his death. Observe references to your Bible studies (in italics).
I was really captivated by an extraordinary zeal to understand Paul in the letter to the Romans. But until then, was it?only a word in chapter 1 [. 17]: “For there you discover the righteousness of God”, which has been left in my way. Well, I hated that expression of “justice of God,” which according to the use and custom of all teachers, taught me to understand philosophically formal or active justice, as they called it, with which God is just and punishes the sinner. Unfair.
Although as a monk I had an irreproachable life, I felt a sin before God and had an extremely disturbed conscience. He couldn’t believe that God was appeased by the satisfactions He had given him. I didn’t like it, but hated the justice of God that punishes sinners and secretly, if not out of blasphemy, surely whispering a lot, I got angry with God and said: “As if it was not enough that the miserable sinners, eternally lost Because of the original sinner, being crushed by all kinds of calamities by the Decalogue, God had to add pain over pain for the gospel, and also with the gospel threatening us with its just wrath! a furious and troubled conscience. struck this passage from Paul, eager to understand what he meant by “the righteousness of God. “
Finally, by The Mercy of God, meditating day and night, I observed the context of words, namely: “For in it is discovered the righteousness of God of faith in faith, as it is written: But the righteous by faith will live ?. There, I began to understand that God’s righteousness is what the righteous live through a gift from God, that is, through faith. And that is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, that is, the passive justice with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “the righteous by faith shall live”. “I felt I was born again and entered paradise itself through the open doors. In this passage, a totally different face to all of the scriptures were revealed to me. So, by heart, have I read the scriptures?
And I considered the word very kind with a love as great as the hatred I had before when I hated the phrase “Justice of God. “Then this visit to Paulo was really the gate of paradise for me (Dillenberger, n. 11).
Notice how God brought Luther into the light of the gospel of justification. The following six sentences reveal the intensity of the study and the struggle with the biblical text:
The seeds of all Luther’s study habits are here or clearly implied. So what distinguished Luther’s man in the studio?
This was not the conclusion drawn from laziness. Melancthon, Luther’s friend and colleague in Wittenberg, said Luther knew his dogmatics so well in the early days that he could quote all the pages of Gabriel Biel (the standard text of the Dogmatics, published in 1488) by heart (Oberman, 138). It was not a lack of interest in parents and philosophers; was a primary passion for the superiority of the biblical text itself.
He wrote in 1533: “For several years I have read the Bible twice a year. If the Bible was a tall, powerful tree and all its words were small branches, did it touch all the branches, wanting to know what was there and what?every branch had to offer? (Plass, 83) Oberman says Luther maintained this practice for at least ten years (173). The Bible became more important to Luther than all parents and commentators.
“He who knows the scripture well,” Luther said in 1538, “is a distinguished theologian. Is a biblical passage or text more valuable than the comments of four authors?(Plass, 1355). In his open letter to the Christian Nobility, Luther explained his concern:
The writings of all holy fathers should be read only for a period of time, so that we may be brought to the Holy Scriptures; In this case, however, we read them only to be absorbed by them and never to access the scriptures. They’re like men who study these road signs and never travel on the road. Dear parents, through their writings, they wanted us to be taken to the scriptures, but we use them to turn away from the scriptures, although only the scriptures are our vineyard where we must work and fight (Kerr, n. 13).
The Bible is the shepherd’s vineyard, where he must work and fight. But Luther complained in 1539: “The Bible is buried by the abundance of comments, and the text is neglected, though in every branch of knowledge, the best are the ones who know. the text?” (Plass, 97). For Luther, it is not only about purity and fidelity to sources, it is the testimony of a man who found life in the source of the mountain, not in the secondary stream of the valley, for Luther it was a matter of life and death. whether one has studied the scripture text or spent most of his time reading commentary and secondary literature. Recalling the early days of his scripture study, he said:
When I was young I read the Bible several times, and I knew it so well that in an instant I could point out any verse mentioned, then I read the commentators, but I quickly left them, for I found in them things that my conscience could not approve of, because they were contrary to the sacred text. It is always better to see with one’s own eyes than with others (Kerr, n. 16).
Luther did not mean that there was no place to read other books; after all, he wrote books. But he advises us to make them secondary and consider them little. For me, as a slow reader, I find this advice very encouraging.
A student who does not want to lose his effort must read and reread a good writer so that the author can integrate, so to speak, into his flesh and blood, because a wide variety of readings confuses and does not teach, this makes the student similar to a man who lives everywhere and therefore nowhere. Just as we do not appreciate daily communion with all our friends, but only with a few special friends, this should be in our studies (Plass, 112).
How many theology books should be reduced and a selection of the best should be made?because many books and many readings do not make men very wise; But reading something good and reading often, however small, is the practice that makes men wise in the scriptures and also makes them pious (113).
Instead of turn to comments and parents, he said, “I constantly stick to this passage from Paulo, eager to understand what he meant. “It wasn’t an isolated fact.
He told his students that the exegeta should treat a difficult passage in the same way moses did with the stone in the wilderness, wounding him with his rod until the water sprouted into the thirsty people (Oberman, 224). text. ” I’ve constantly hit this passage from Paulo. ” There is a great motivation in this struggle with the text:?The Bible is an impressive source: the more water and drink you get out of it, the more thirst stimulates your thirst?( Plass, 67).
In the summer and autumn of 1526, Luther accepted the challenge of exposing the Ecclesiastes to the small group of students who remained in Wittenberg during the plague. “Solomon, the preacher,” wrote to a friend, “it causes me trouble, because if I were bothering someone who reads about him. “But do you have to give up? (Heinrich Bornkamm, translated by E. Theodore Bachmann, Luther in Mid-Career, 1521-1530, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983, original 1979), 564. ).
Was this Luther’s studio? Take a text in which Jacob took the angel of the Lord and says, “He must surrender. I will listen and know the Word of God in this text for my soul and for the church!This is how he understood what “justice of God” means?
Once again, the reason and conviction here are not academic commitments to high-level research, but spiritual commitments to proclaim and preserve a pure gospel.
Luther spoke out against a thousand years of darkness in the church without the Word, when he boldly declared, “Certainly, unless the languages remain, will the gospel ultimately perish?”(Kerr, 17). He asks, “What do you ask what language learning is for?You say, “We can read the Bible in German very well. “And he says:
Without the languages we would not have received the gospel. Languages are the sheath that contains the sword of the Spirit; they are the box containing the invaluable jewels of ancient thought; are the container containing the wine; and as the gospel says, these are the baskets in which bread and fish are kept to feed the multitude.
If we neglect literature, will we end up losing the gospel? As soon as the men stopped cultivating the languages, Christianity decayed into undisputed rule of the Pope. pleasant darkness In the past, parents were often wrong because they did not know languages, and today some people, such as the Valdenses, do not believe that languages are useful; But while their doctrine is good, they are often wrong about the true meaning of the sacred text; they are unarmed against mistakes and I fear that their faith will remain pure (Martyn, 474).
The main problem was the preservation and purity of faith, where languages are not appreciated and sought after, concern for biblical observation and biblical thinking, and concern for truth diminish, this is because tools for thinking differently are not present. real possibility for Luther because he knew it.
If languages did not make me trust in the true meaning of the Word, I could still be a chained monk, committed to silently preaching Romanist mistakes in the darkness of a cloister; the pope, the sophists and the anti-Christian empire would have remained unwavering (Martyn, 474).
In other words, it attributes the progress of the Reformation to the penetrating power of the original languages. The great linguistic event of Luther’s time was the appearance of the Greek New Testament edited by Desiderius Erasmo, as soon as this Greek version appeared in the middle. from the summer of 1516, Luther obtained it and began studying it and using it in his courses on Romans 9. He did so even though Erasmo was a theological adversary. Having the original languages was a treasure for Luther; if that were the case, I would have gone to school with the same devil to learn them.
He was convinced that there would be many obstacles in the study without the help of the original languages. “St. Augustine,” he said, “is obliged to confess, when he writes in De Doctrina Christiana, that a Christian teacher who must expose the Scriptures also need the Greek and Hebrew languages, in addition to Latin; If not, is it impossible not to face obstacles everywhere?(Plass, 95).
And he was convinced that language knowledge would bring freshness and strength to preaching. Said:
Although faith and the gospel can be proclaimed by mere preachers without the original languages, such preaching is superficial and weak; at least men get bored and bored, and this preaching ends up falling to the ground, but when the preacher is versed in languages, his discourse is fresh and strong, all Scripture is considered, and faith is constantly renewed by a continuous variety of words (Kerr, 148).
However, it is a daunting statement for many pastors who have neglected Greek and Hebrew. What would I say is that knowledge of the original languages can make any devoted preacher a better preacher?Is it possible to preach faithfully without them? At least for a while. The proof of our fidelity to the Word, if we have neglected languages, is this: do we have a great interest in the Church of Christ in promoting its widespread preservation, teaching, and use in churches?Or, by self-protection, would minimizing its importance because doing otherwise would be bad?I suspect that for many of us today, Luther’s strong words about our negligence and indifference are accurate when he says:
It is a sin and a shame not to know our own book or not to understand the discourse and words of our God; It is an even greater sin and loss that we do not study the original languages, especially in these days when God gives us men, books, and all the facilities and incentives for this study, and He wants the Bible to be an open book. Ah, how happy the dear parents would be if they had the opportunity to study languages and thus arrive prepared for the Holy Scriptures!What great work and effort did it take them to pick up some crumbs, when we, with half the work?yes, almost out of work?We can have all the bread! Ah, how his effort shames our indolence (Meuser, 43).
This reference to “indolence” leads us to Luther’s next characteristic in the study.
By: John Piper. © Desiring God Foundation. Website: desiringGod. org. Translated with permission. Source: Martin Luther: lessons from his life and work.
Original: Martin Luther: lessons from his life and his work. © Faithful Of the Department. Website: MinistryFiel. com. br. All rights reserved. Translation: Camila Rebeca Teixeira. Revision: William Teixeira.