Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 69 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Between the pre-reformers and the Ninety-five Theses stands a movement most people misjudge from its name: humanism, the recovery of the ancient languages that put the Greek New Testament back into scholars' hands. Listen for why Erasmus never left Rome despite mocking it in print, and for the decade of self-torture behind Luther's testimony that he felt born again through open gates.
The lecture opens with the professor's own corrections from the previous session: Wycliffe was condemned at Constance in 1415, but it was Pope Martin V who finally had his bones exhumed and burned in 1428, and the Waldensian title barba means uncle in a Piedmontese dialect, not in standard Italian, where it means beard. The habit on display is the point: church history claims must be verified, not repeated.
Humanism at the dawn of the Reformation was not the secular humanism of the new atheists but a recovery of the humanities, the great texts of antiquity, and with them the biblical languages. Johann Reuchlin, a German, recovered the study of Old Testament Hebrew, over against a contentment with Latin and the Septuagint that reached back to Augustine, whom Jerome had already chided on the point. John Colet, an Englishman, decisively shaped Erasmus. And Jacques Lefevre helped translate the Bible into French and personally influenced John Calvin in the early 1530s, just before the first edition of the Institutes.
A student's question draws out the relationship between the reformers: Zwingli, in a Reformation sense, is the father of reformed theology, identifying key tenets that later appear in Calvin. Calvin, a second-generation reformer arriving about twenty years after Luther and Zwingli, systematized and articulated those truths so accessibly that history attached his name to them. Busenitz adds, given character issues in Zwingli's story to come, that he is glad the system is called Calvinism.
Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch prince of the humanists, studied Greek under Colet and mastered the Greek New Testament at Cambridge. In 1516 he published a critical Greek New Testament, gathering the available manuscripts, exposing errors in the Vulgate, and giving scholars a textual foundation. That text became the basis of Luther's German New Testament of 1522 and Tyndale's English New Testament of 1525. The Reformation's engine, the word of God in the languages of the people, ran on Erasmus's scholarship.
Eight years before the Ninety-five Theses, Erasmus published a satire that became the bestseller of 1509. Monks despise one another over the color of a habit while fearing money as poison yet not forbearing wine and women; cardinals, were they truly successors of the apostles, would see themselves as dispensers of spiritual things who must give account, not lords; and if popes imitated Christ's poverty, labor, and cross, who would buy that chair with a fortune or defend it with swords and poisons? The whole entourage of the Roman see, Erasmus jokes, would have to beg its bread. Yet Erasmus never left the Catholic Church, and so was never branded a heretic.
Luther benefited from Erasmus and then grew exasperated with him: a man who sounded Protestant in his critiques but would not join the protest. The deeper break was theological. Erasmus pictured salvation like an apple on a tree that man must fetch a ladder to reach, a semi-Pelagian synergism. Luther answered with The Bondage of the Will, arguing that the sinner's will is bound to sin and would never desire salvation on its own. If Erasmus was an Arminian before Arminius, Luther was a Calvinist before Calvin.
The debate is ancient. Pelagius, shocked by worldly living in Christian Rome, so exalted good works that he made them saving, teaching that man is basically good and can choose righteousness. Augustine recognized works salvation and refuted it: the will survives, but so contaminated by sin that left to itself it always rejects God, so salvation must be God's monergistic work of quickening dead hearts. Later centuries softened this into semi-Pelagianism, a cooperation of God's grace and man's works, and that synergism became the working theology of the medieval sacramental system the Reformation rejected.
Martin Luther was born in November 1483, seven weeks before his Swiss contemporary Ulrich Zwingli. His father was a successful miner of the rising middle class, and Luther was highly educated, trained in the scholastic trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, then in law at the University of Erfurt through a master's degree and into doctoral study. He was born in Eisleben, left it as a toddler, and by providential coincidence died in the same town six decades later.
On July 2, 1505, walking back to law school, Luther was caught in a violent storm and, certain he would die, cried out to the patron saint of miners: Saint Anne, save me and I will become a monk. Fifteen days later he kept the vow, entering the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, to his father's fury at the wasted law education. Erasmus elsewhere mocked shipwrecked Catholics who promised the saints everything and delivered nothing once ashore; Luther's follow-through says something about the weight of guilt he carried.
No monk outdid Luther in penance. He slept blanketless on freezing floors, whipped himself, and fasted until his health was permanently damaged, and he confessed to Johann von Staupitz, the monastery's head, at such length that he would wake the man at night to keep confessing. Ordained in 1507, teaching theology at Wittenberg by 1508 at age twenty-five, a doctor by 1512, he remained consumed by the holiness of God and the guilt of his own sin, and his 1510 trip to Rome only deepened the despair: the system that was supposed to hold the answers was rotten to the core.
Lecturing through Psalms, Romans, and Galatians at Wittenberg, Luther collided with the phrase in Romans 1 that he confessed he had hated: the righteousness of God, which he could read only as the standard that condemned him. Around 1515 he came to see that the righteousness revealed in the gospel is also God's provision, a passive, alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ imputed to the sinner who lives by faith. His testimony: he felt altogether born again and entered paradise itself through open gates, and the whole face of Scripture changed. Against Rome's scheme of infused righteousness completed by penance and purgatory, justification is God's single declarative act. In his own words about the monastery years: if ever a monk could have gotten to heaven by monkery, he would have.
Rome was building St. Peter's Basilica and needed money. Cardinal Albert of Hohenzollern commissioned the monk Johann Tetzel to sell indulgences, certificates drawing on the pope's treasury of grace, good for less purgatory time for yourself or your dead relatives, with a sales jingle that really does rhyme in German: as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. Watching his own Wittenberg flock hand over bread money to a sham enraged Luther. He wrote ninety-five theses in Latin for scholarly debate; translated and printed, they blanketed Germany within about a month. In 1517 Luther still gave the pope occasional benefit of the doubt; by 1522, after Leipzig, excommunication, and Worms, that was over.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What was humanism at the dawn of the Reformation?
2. What was Johann Reuchlin's chief contribution?
3. Whom does Busenitz call, in a Reformation sense, the father of reformed theology?
4. What did Erasmus publish in 1516 that fueled the Reformation?
5. Which translations were built on Erasmus's Greek text?
6. Why was Erasmus never executed as a heretic despite mocking Rome in print?
7. How did Erasmus picture salvation, in the image Busenitz uses?
8. What book did Luther write against Erasmus's view of the will?
9. What was Augustine's answer to Pelagius?
10. What vow did Luther make in the thunderstorm of July 1505?
11. What effect did Luther's monastic rigor have on him?
12. What did Luther come to see in the phrase the righteousness of God in Romans 1?
13. Why did Tetzel's indulgence sales so enrage Luther?
14. What was the original form and audience of the Ninety-five Theses?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 3 is complete.
Erasmus saw the corruption clearly, wrote about it brilliantly, and never left. What separates critique from conviction, and where are you tempted to settle for the first?
Luther did everything his system offered, penance, fasting, confession, pilgrimage, and found no peace. Where do people today try to quiet a guilty conscience by performance, and what does his discovery in Romans 1 say to them?
Busenitz notes that God providentially had Luther lecturing through Psalms, Romans, and Galatians. How has the particular portion of Scripture you were studying at a given season shaped what God did in you?
The text that opened paradise to Luther, from Romans 1: in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, and the one who is righteous by faith shall live.
The lecture's own trail: read Luther's The Bondage of the Will, which Busenitz calls a great book once you wade past the diatribes against Erasmus, and sample Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, the 1509 satire the class read aloud, to hear how openly Rome's corruption was discussed eight years before the Ninety-five Theses.