Martin Luther Wasn’t Living His Truth

“Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”

Martin Luther uttered these infamous words in 1521 before a special assembly of powerful clergy and political leaders in Worms, Germany. The assembly met to put Luther and his writings on trial. The eccentric monk had been reading his Bible and publishing his findings for all the world to see—findings critical of the Catholic Church. Luther had come to believe that the Church had departed from the true gospel of grace revealed in God’s word. At Worms, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V demanded that Luther recant his writings, and Luther, after sleeping on it for a night, came back with the above statement.

In the five hundred years since it got underway, the Protestant Reformation has sparked no shortage of discussion and debate, and Luther’s words provide a helpful snapshot of what generally was at stake. The Reformation was ultimately about authority. For Luther and the Protestants who followed, Scripture alone is the sole infallible source for Christian doctrine and practice. For Catholics, the Church and tradition stand alongside Scripture.

Two well-known historians recently weighed in on the Reformation. Tom Holland (not Spiderman) and Dominic Sandbrook are world class historians who host my favorite history podcast, The Rest Is History. Sandbrook’s research focuses primarily on twentieth century political history while Holland writes mainly about the ancient world. While neither historian professes faith, Holland is the rare nonreligious historian who takes religion seriously and endeavors to understand its nuances. His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, argues that Christianity is the single most transformative influence in Western history. So, naturally, Holland took the lead on the podcast’s recent five-episode study of the life of Martin Luther.

The series is worth checking out, for it features many of the reasons I so enjoy the show. The hosts don’t merely understand history deeply, they also model historical thinking. They approach their subjects with wisdom that takes into account context, causation, complexity, contingency, and change over time, and they do it in a jovial manner that makes the podcast a lot of fun. However, when they get to the subject of Luther’s statement at the Diet of Worms, the hosts’ typical careful historical analysis noticeably vanishes.

According to Holland and Sandbrook, this moment initiated the modern turn toward individualism in Western civilization. Holland even equates Luther’s statement with the contemporary cliché, “living my truth.” Can you picture Luther standing anxiously before the most powerful man in the world and uttering, “I think I’ll just choose to live my truth, man”? If that picture seems utterly ridiculous to you, it’s because it is.

Martin Luther does not represent a turn toward autonomy, where the individual is the authority; he instead represents a turn back to the word of God in the face of a system that had exalted the pope and church tradition above it. Luther’s appeal to his conscience was an appeal to conscience “captive to the word of God.” The modern notion of “living my truth” presents the individual will untethered to any higher authority. It represents what Carl Trueman and others have called “expressive individualism” or the notion that a person’s identity hinges on nothing higher than how that person feels. In the modern notion of the self, in other words, how I feel is who I am.

Luther did not believe he had the power to make his own truth, nor was his decision to publish his disputation against the Catholic Church an early attempt to reinvent himself.  In fact, Matthew Barrett has recently argued, convincingly in my opinion, that “the Reformers did not think the Reformation was primarily a revolution for new, modern ideas, but a retrieval and renewal of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” In other words, Luther did not see himself as a modern trendsetter, but as a reformer seeking to lead the church away from erroneous innovations and back to the authority of the prophets, apostles, and early church fathers.

The shift to the modern individualistic self, where it makes sense for a biological male to claim to be woman because he feels like woman, did not originate with Martin Luther. We are where we are today because, through a series of powerful intellectual and cultural movements, modern man has slowly detached his human identity from its foundations. When we reject the Creator-God, we erroneously believe we can create ourselves. The story of how we got to this point is long and complex, but it originates more in Darwin, Marx, and Freud than in Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli.

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