Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas

Author:Eric Metaxas [Metaxas, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-02T22:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, Back in Wittenberg

Now that Luther was far away in “the land of the birds”19 atop the fabled Wartburg, life would go on in the valleys below. Luther’s writings had over the course of the last months unlatched a number of theological barn doors, and they had done so with such persuasiveness that others had been emboldened to pull or push these doors open. A number of horses seem to have gotten out. Many things about which Luther had written in Babylonian Captivity were now beginning to be put into practice by those he had left in charge back in Wittenberg, but Luther was not there to oversee any of it.

For example, Justus Jonas, who had so disappointed Erasmus by leaving Erfurt to join Luther’s party, had in June 1521 decided he would no longer lecture on church law, although this was precisely what he had been hired to do by the All Saints’ chapter of Wittenberg. But Justus Jonas had seen the new light, and it shone wholly from the sacred Word of God, and not at all from the musty books of canon law or the fusty Sentences of Peter Lombard or Aristotle’s god-awful Ethics.

But there were more central issues than this. What Luther had written about priestly vows and about celibacy and about the Mass and so many other things would now suddenly be put into actual practice in Wittenberg. But in almost all cases these practical leaps forward were made by people who were generally not as thoughtful and careful as Luther himself would have been.

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