Monday, October 30, 2017
572 - Performance Anxiety, Part 1
Spirituality Column #572
October 31, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Performance Anxiety,
Part 1
By Bob Walters
Oh, how we Christians stupidly worry if we are good enough
for God’s redemption.
How can we
prove our faith? Earn His love? Glorify His name? Get into heaven? Repent of our sin? Avoid His wrath? Live a perfect life?
“What
am I supposed to do to be redeemed?”
Well, if it
makes you feel any better, Martin Luther was worried about all those same
things 500 years ago. His answer? There’s
not much we can do; the heavy lifting
of human redemption is up to God. How
did Luther know? The Bible told him
so.
Unless one vigorously avoids all
contact with church history – and there are people I know and love who think
“church history” was a Billy Graham Crusade that came through town 20 years ago
– we might be aware that today, October 31, 2017, is the 500th anniversary
observance of the game-changing Protestant Reformation spurred
by Luther’s plea for Roman Catholic doctrinal clarification in 1517.
The humble but quirky German monk
unintentionally turned the Christian world upside down by simply inviting an
academic and theological dialog to delineate church, individual, and divine
redemptive roles in “working out our
salvation” (Philippians 2:12).
And no, it wasn’t an “Occupy
Wittenberg” hissy-fit style protest when Luther’s succinct proposal for discussion
–his much-heralded Ninety-Five Theses – appeared on the church door at
Wittenberg Castle in Germany. The door
was the school’s “bulletin board,” and most likely the notice was pasted, not
nailed, to the door by the custodian.
Luther was
Wittenberg University’s professor of theology as well as the local pastor and
also overseer of several parishes in that region of Saxony. At issue was the Church’s practice of
“indulgences” whereby one could purchase for oneself or one’s deceased
relatives – either with money or by visiting collections of holy relics –
relief from time in purgatory, the Catholic traditional doctrine of where souls
go after death to atone for earthly sins before, leading to redemption and then
proceeding on to heaven.
Luther – a clergical
rarity in his era in that he actually studied the Bible – had vast theological
doubts about this Church interference with God’s plan of redemption. Luther also knew, having visited Rome just a
few years earlier, that the spiritual state of the church was in near shambles
due to six consecutive 15th-16th century Popes – Leo X
being the latest and last – who had scandalously misled the Church of St. Peter.
While in Rome, Luther also
discerned that the central priesthood had descended into a cynical, works-oriented,
theologically vacant, biblically empty, say-the-Mass-as-fast-as-you-can-to-get-it-over-with pastoral morass. It was an awful era in western
Church history.
Deeply
pious and deeply concerned with his own repentance and redemption, Luther was an
academic prodigy and biblical scholar with questions, not a rebel with a torch.
Next week we’ll cover a few salient takeaways of how this humble monk’s sincere
desire to please God shook and revived the deepest foundations of Christianity.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) sides with Luther and the Reformation, but notes the tremendous
service the revolt provided in restoring the dignity of the Catholic Church.