Sunday, November 12, 2017

A Quick Study: Reformation, Part 14, November 12, 2017

This quick study on Reformation History was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on November 12, 2017. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.




Luther left Worms, a condemned man, a declared heretic, and he had 20 days to turn himself in or he was fair game for anyone.  He made his way back to Wittenberg, but he would never reach it.  As his coach crested a hill, five brigands jumped out, aimed a crossbow at Luther’s coachman, and pulled Luther out of the cart and off into the darkness.  Luther’s friends were screaming after him, but there would be no answer.
A few days later, some 150 miles away, at a rundown, ramshackle castle called Wartburg, a man arrived there calling himself Junker Jörg, Knight George.  The man came with letters of introduction from Frederick the Wise, and so the few castle guards and few servants opened up to him and were ready to serve him as they would their master, but Jörg only wanted basic meals, a room in a tower, and someone to run his correspondence back and forth.  It was easy enough, so the staff obeyed.  Over the next year, this Jörg never really left the castle, but stayed alone in his room.
With everyone thinking Luther dead, what had happened in his absence was a theological vacuum.  His mind was so sharp, his personality so calculating, that, with all that gone, just about anything got sucked into the void.  So when three men calling themselves the Zwickau Prophets appeared, people were willing to give them a listen.  These men were no prophets, but made up their own theologies.  They preached a type of spirituality that placed their authority on direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, as opposed to Luther’s call to return to the Scriptures as authoritative.
Melanchthon, seen as Luther’s colonel before he disappeared, didn’t know what to do.  Melanchthon, in reality, was a weak leader and often, when he was in charge, made the wrong decision and messed everything up.  He had let the Prophets speak too much, apparently, and the people, stirred up by them and Luther’s old acquaintance, Karlstadt, began to lead charges across the region to destroy the last vestiges of Rome in their churches.  These churches lost their windows, their art, their statues through was was called the Iconoclastic Revolt, iconoclasm meaning a rejection of images, especially of God and God in Christ.  Karlstadt forced changes to the liturgy that the Church had never seen before.  Karlstadt even took a 15-year old girl as his bride, 20 years her senior.  The church in Wittenberg began to lose its way, lose what it had gained through Luther’s work, and, if it continued like this, everyone knew that the emperor would have to come down hard on the people and it wouldn’t be pretty.
News of the forced reforms reached the Wartburg, and Jörg, a year after his arrival, with his beard and hair grown very long, left the tower, left behind his books, his letters, and almost everything else, and set out for Wittenberg.
Jörg arrived on the scene March 6, 1522, and found political and ecclesiastical, churchly, chaos.  When he arrived, you can seem him riding right to the Black Cloister, the large dormitory that the Augustinian monks all shared, barging in, finding a pair of scissors and cutting all of his hair off.  From Junker Jörg emerged Martin Luther, friend, reformer, wanted man, Roman heretic.  He had been hidden away by Frederick the Wise over the last year, but returned when the Reformation needed him the most, and, with him, possibly the most important thing he ever did.
During his time in the castle, even suffering from the damp, the cold, the attacks from the devil, from not being able to be active and free, suffering over his captivity, Martin Luther prevailed over all of these through the help of the Lord and had translated the entire New Testament from Greek into the common German tongue.  This wasn’t the first translation into a common language, it was the best, and it set the stage for everything to follow.  It gave the people the responsibility, never again should they blindly hear a priest with an open mind, never should they blindly trust, but now compare all things to the Word of God.  They would begin doing this the very next week, when Luther began to preach back in the pulpit against the Prophets and the Radical Reformation.  We’ll talk more about that next time.

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