The Enduring Word of God, in Wittenberg

“I would just love not to have to return to Wittenberg. My heart has grown cold, so that I just do not like to be there.” So wrote Martin Luther to his wife Katharina while on a visit to Zeitz July 28, 1545. He complained of the public nature of the inhabitants’ sexual indiscretions, the lack of discipline in the town, and the mockery that God’s Word suffered at the hands of those who had heard his preaching and that of his colleagues. “I am sick and tired of this town and never want to return if God will help me.”¹ His friend, the court physician, Matthias Ratzeburger, fetched him back to Wittenberg for the last months of his life,² but this incident should be sufficient in itself to constrain the view that Luther had a totally different vision of societal life than John Calvin when he attempted to make Geneva a shining city on the hill. The older Luther may have been more pessimistic about the possibilities of a city that responded to the gospel, but a perceptible improvement in public and personal behavior had been his expectation at the beginning of his ministry. In 1529 he deplored the fact that the people were living “like simple cattle or irrational pigs.” He attributed the lifestyle he and his colleagues had encountered on the visitation of electoral Saxon congregations in 1528 to the fact that they did “not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments,” the summary of God’s Word in the catechism that Luther regarded as fundamental to Christian living.³

Luther’s Redefinition of Being Christian

Some recent scholarship has suggested that Calvin was closer to Luther on the nature of the law and its functioning in the world and the church than to the many Calvinists who claimed his name in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their own attempts to create a Christian society.⁴ Whatever the case with Calvin’s views of the nature of God’s law and human society, it is clear from the Large Catechism and many other writings that Luther expected that his redefinition of being Christian would make a significant impact on both individual lives and society. In 1531 he believed it had, writing “it has, praise God, come so far that men and women, young and old, know the catechism and how they should believe, live, pray, suffer, and die.”⁵ He designed the Small Catechism as a handbook for Christian living, bringing the impact of law and gospel to fruit in a life of prayer and service to the neighbor, as the “Table of Christian Callings” laid the foundation for community life in family and economic life, in the sphere of the larger society, and in the midst of the congregation of Christ’s people. Such fruitful lives could only spring, Luther believed, from the transforming power of the promise of new life in Christ that gives peace and certainty through the forgiveness of sins. This forgiveness liberates those who trust in him to live truly human lives, without being curved in upon themselves to create shalom for themselves. Trusting the promise of new life through and with Christ transforms the consciousness of the believer, who delights in God’s love and acts accordingly.

Luther’s redefinition of being Christian characterized the believer’s life as a life initiated by God’s address to rebellious sinners and conducted under the power and direction of God’s speaking to the faithful through oral, written, and sacramental forms of the Word, which he had set forth in Scripture. But Luther also recognized that the assaults of the devil, the world, and sinful desire within every individual never cease. He experienced both the progress in living according to God’s will and regress into deviations from trust in God and obedience to him that necessitated both the daily repentance that kills the sinful identity that even believers try daily to reclaim and the forgiveness of sins and renewal of trust in God’s promise.

Luther’s convictions regarding...