Here I Stand

First of all, gotta apologise (to who? I wonder) for not being consistent in my blogging.
Anyways now that I’ve got a bit more time on my hands I’m finally writing down what I’ve learnt.
These days on the MRT and on buses travelling around our beloved Singapore I’ve occupied myself with a copy of Here I Stand – A life of Martin Luther given to me quite a long time ago by a well-meaning Sunday school teacher of mine. So after the As I thought I should really get at that book and learn about the Reformation and the guy who started the Protestant movement going.
Luther, from what I’ve known through references to ‘the great sage who started the Reformation’ (the movement always being spoken as though the person thought highly of him) in church or whatever teachings or sermons of an ecclesiastical nature I’ve attended; or as the ‘enemy of reason’ in my History of Philosophy and, strangely, from much the same guy who thought highly of him, an acknowledgement that his biblical knowledge was somewhat erroneous in spite of his contributions, seemed to be a highly controversial figure: at one end the church reveres him, but he doesn’t score points with the secular folk. So with this in mind I started the book on Luther, having some kind of doubt as to the reliability of such a source in being reasonable in its treatment of Luther the man whilst also thinking I was letting the secularist mode of thinking get at me.
Well I’m pleased to say that, save for a few areas in which I found Bainton to be rather more patronising than I wished with regards the subject matter, it seems overall to be a rather fair treatment of Luther. He acknowledges Luther’s inadequacies in some areas, but also gives praise where praise is due.
Now after the crap I doled out, my two cents’ worth, let me now finally start on what I was going to do: a summary of what I’ve learnt so far. Inertia keeps setting in, by now I’m way past the 95 theses and have so far stopped at Luther’s not being able to ‘relinquish either the individualism of the eucharistic cup or the corporateness of the baptismal front’. So pardon me if my summary is but skimming the surface. I am really not up to going through the whole front part of the book again. The tiny font and Bainton’s rather trying narration proves too much of a challenge to re-read.
Luther, I was given to know, was a pretty bright student in his youth and expected by his parents to be a lawyer (oh dear). Somehow he must have been pretty devout even at that tender age, nevertheless his devotion to the Lord was intermingled with a somewhat erroneous view of God and Christianity. He ended up in a monastery as a monk after a day when, witnessing a storm about him that threatened his life, he swore an oath to Saint Anne (read: not Christ) to save him, promising to be a monk in return for the favour. And dear child, that was exactly what he did after the ordeal.
Life at medieval monasteries was austere, for lack of a better word, and that is an understatement. Unless the reader thinks prayers at 1 or 2 in the morning isn’t too bad. Luther digged it. To quote: ‘Brother Martin was sure that he was walking in the path the saints had trod. The occasion of his profession filled him with joy’.
Well a turning point in the monastery (who would have thought) was the saying of his first mass. Luther was terrified of God’s glory and standing as a mere human being before the all-holy (I just wished some of us would think more like him when we swear.) An interesting point to note: he declared the experience Anfechtung, which has no English equivalent, according to Bainton. ‘It is all the doubt, turmoil, pang, tremor, panic, despair, desolation, and desparation which invade the spirit of man’.
Knowing himself but ‘dust and ashes’, Luther sought a way to reconcile himself with God. And he hit upon the medieval idea of borrowing from the saints’ merits when he was assigned on Rome on a mission, where he took care to spend the time viewing Holy Relics and kissing the steps of the Scala Sancta, 28 stairs that supposedly stood in front of Pilate’s palace, saying a Pater Noster at each one (it was supposed to be some way of releasing a soul from purgatory.) An interesting fact to note was that Luther regretted that his parents were not dead yet so that he could do this service for them; in lieu of that he tried to release his Grandpa. A moment of enlightenment at the top flight of stairs: Luther uttered, ‘Who knows whether it is so?’
Thus began a quest for other ways, one being, confession. He so angered Staupitz, the vicar of the Augustinian order at Wittenburg, the (district? city? town?) where he was with his incessant confessions (Luther sought to remember EVERY sin and confess them all, from the time of his youth onwards) that Staupitz declared, “Man, God is not angry with you. You are angry with God.” Staupitz gave Luther that mystic influence, namely, that salvation was not so much a question of individual ways and means of obtaining it, but that, since man was weak and flawed, he should rather cease to strive and trust in the love and grace of God for salvation. Luther’s trying was a form of assertiveness; no, he should rather surrender to the Lord and become as ‘a drop in the Ocean’, for the ‘end of the mystic way is the absorption of the created in the creator’.
Luther’s problem was that the distance between the all-holy and the sinful man was too great to even countenance such a union, and consequently encountered alienation, when the sense of exaltation disappeared. To which his mentor Staupitz told him to ‘love God’ and not make religion that difficult. His distress culminated in a blasphemous “Love God? I hated him!” – for Luther’s conception of God then was the almighty horror. His God was one who was ‘angry, judging and damning’, someone who consigned people to hell, the God of predestination who seemed unjust for the fact that ‘God is too absolute to be conditioned by considerations of human justice’, for ‘God is so unconditioned that he is bound by no rules save those of his own making’.
Perhaps what really stood out here (for me that is), is the prevailing agony of Luther shown through the following words: (Bainton’s, not Luther’s)
“The lost are lost, do what they can; the saved are saved, do what they may. To those who think they are saved this is an unspeakable comfort, but to those who think they are damned it is a hideous torment.”
Something that gets at me now and then.
Staupitz’s solution? The darling vicar decided that Luther needed to follow the following advice: Physician, cure thyself by curing others. He recommended Luther to study for his Dr’s degree, then assume the chair of Bible at the university. Luther, tormented soul, inadequate and quaking at his self-knowledge of that before the all-mighty God, was to ‘wrestle with the source book of his religion’. Back to basics, as it were.
Unfortunately it’s too late for me to go on. I retire to Dreamland, and hopefully can continue posting tomorrow.