My Conscience is Captive to the Word of God (Luther)

(This is a repost from September, 2011.)

Heiko Oberman’s Luther: Man Between God and the Devil is one of those books that I’ll never forget reading.  I first read it around 10 years ago; I could not set this book down.  In fact, it led me to enjoy and appreciate church history in general, and Reformation history more specifically.  In my opinion, it is even better than Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand (although that may be an apples/oranges comparison, and I do really like Here I Stand).

Here’s a little snippet from Oberman’s book.  It has to do with Luther’s famous answer while he was on trial for his writings: “…My conscience is captive to the Word of God.  Thus I cannot and will not recant, for going against my conscience is neither safe nor salutary….”

“Luther’s appeal to conscience as the highest authority made an extraordinary impression on later generations.  Out of the understandable desire to declare Luther as the forerunner of the Enlightenment, the statement ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’ was reinterpreted as the principle of freedom of conscience.”

“But that is missing the whole point.  Appealing to conscience was common medieval practice; appealing to a ‘free’ conscience that had liberated itself from all bonds would never have occurred to Luther.  Nor did he regard ‘conscience’ as identical with the inescapable voice of God in man.  Conscience is neither neutral nor autonomous: hotly contested by God and the Devil, it is not the autonomous center of man’s personality, it is always guided and is free only once God has freed and ‘captured’ it.  What is new in Luther is the notion of absolute obedience to the Scriptures against any authorities; be they popes or councils….”

“Luther liberated the Christian conscience, liberated it from papal decree and canon law.  But he also took it captive through the Word of God and imposed on it the responsibility to render service to the world.”

Well said.  In Reformation terms, we say that “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (WCF 20.2).  The Lutheran Confessions (I’m thinking primarily of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession) also explain clearly and frequently that humans or human traditions cannot bind the conscience – only God can by his Word.  Commenting on Acts 15:10 and Galatians 5:1, the Apology says,

“Just as Alexander solved the Gordian knot once for all by cutting it with his sword when he could not disentangle it, so the apostles free consciences from traditions once for all, especially if they are taught to merit justification” (Apology XV).

The above Oberman quote is found on pages 203-204 of Luther: Man Between God and the Devil.

rev shane lems

sunnyside wa

The Pope’s Second Hand Junk

 The following are words from the last few minutes of an address R. C. Sproul gave to the 2008 graduating class of Westminster Seminary California. 

“[In a sermon late in his life, Luther] wondered, why is it that [despite gospel preaching] people are still spending their money on indulgences and on what Luther called the Pope’s second-hand junk [i.e. relics].  He said, the Pope is like a decoy duck, sitting on a pond with a great bag of tricks, seducing people with this nonsense.  He wondered why it is that people ignore the Word of God and exchange it for Joseph’s pants.”

“…What relevance does that have for us today?  We don’t see the evangelical church of our day rushing to depositories of sacred relics.  Nobody’s looking for Joseph’s pants.  Rather we have invested our time, our energy, and our money in more contemporary ways to improve the gospel.  We look to programs, to Madison Avenue methodologies, to entertainment, to pop psychology, even to the establishment of Starbucks in the church to improve the gospel.”

“Why do we do this?  I think people in the church today are looking for exactly what they were looking for in sixteenth-century Germany.  They went to Trier, they went to Aachen, they went to these relics because they believed the relics had power.  Every pastor wants to have a powerful ministry.  And so we look to the latest program, to the latest method to give us a powerful ministry, forgetting where the Lord God omnipotent has put the power the in the first place.”

“In the first chapter of Romans, Paul introduces himself as a slave of God, one who’s called to be an apostle, and for what mission is he set apart?  For the gospel of God.  IF we look at that text carefully, we will see that what Paul says is that he has not been consecrated to preach a gospel about God, but rather the text means that it is the gospel that belongs to God.  It’s God’s gospel.”

“We will inevitably be tempted by decoy ducks on the pond to seduce us into thinking that we can improve upon the power that is in the gospel.  It is, however, our task to diligently and faithfully preach the Word of God, which Word he has empowered and has promised will never return unto him void.  We don’t need anything more.  We can’t improve on that in any manner.”

This excellent address can be found on pages 188-191 of Always Reformed.

shane lems

A Reformation Parody

According to Roland Bainton (Here I Stand), before Luther went to Worms for the famous trial (April 1521), one tract was floating around as a parody of the Apostle’s Creed.  It gives us a flavor of the “air” surrounding Luther in the early years of the Reformation.  Here is the text of it.  Imagine thousands of these floating around Germany as Luther made his way to the Diet!

I believe in the pope, binder and looser in heaven, earth, and hell, and in Simony, his only son our lord, who was conceived by the canon law and born of the Romish church. Under his power truth suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, and through the ban descended to hell, rose again through the gospel and Paul and was brought to Charles, sitting at his right hand, who in future is to rule over spiritual and worldly things. I believe in the canon law, in the Romish church, in the destruction of faith and of the communion of saints, in indulgences both for the remission of guilt and penalty in purgatory, in the resurrection of the flesh in an Epicurean life, because given to us by the Holy Father, the pope. Amen.”

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Pope Visits US Christian Leaders: Will Your Church Be There?

I always find it interesting to find out who is going to see the Pope when he’s around. This year, as he’s in the US right now (DC and NY), I saw the following churches (among others) will be representing their denominations in an *ecumenical* prayer service: the RCA, ELCA, UMC, Pentecostal Holiness, the CRC, the NAE president, and more. Go here, here, and here if you want to read up on this.

What is the proper term for this? Undoing the Reformation? Abandoning the Reformed faith? Burning Calvin’s Institutes, Luther’s Works, the Westminster Standards, the Three Forms of Unity? Obviously you can’t have a copy of the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Confession in your back pocket as you pray with the Pope! Can you imagine!? I’m interested to see the readers of the Reformed Reader’s take on this!

shane Lems

sunnyside wa