ROUGHLY EDITED TEXT CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 02-CH2 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> PAUL: Thanks. That was very helpful, and I look forward to sharing much of that with my confirmation class. But could you elaborate and one thing? In your answer, you said Luther refers to himself as an Augustinian monk. Why did he become a monk? And why an Augustinian monk, specifically? And how did he go from being a monk to being a professor at Wittenberg? >> DR. CAMERON MCKENZIE: Well, Paul, to answer that, we should back up even a little farther from the posting of the 95 Theses and talk about Luther's childhood and youth. Martin Luther was born in 1483. To put that in perspective, Columbus sails about 9 years later. So Luther is living at a time that we now recognize as a transition from Middle Ages to early modernity. Of course, nobody at the time thought of it in those terms, and Luther had a typical medieval upbringing by some pious German parents. What that meant was he was very conscious of his own sinfulness. And his thoughts about God were largely thoughts about a righteous judge. Even when he thought about Christ, he thought about Christ's return at the end of all things in judgment. So that when we think of Luther becoming a monk, of course, everybody knows his famous story about the thunderstorm. He was on his way back to school from being at home, caught outside in a thunderstorm, and in his terror as the lightning struck around him, said, help me, St. Anne, I'll become a monk. He prayed to St. Anne, the popular saint at the time, and promised that he would become a monk if he was saved from the storm. Well, Luther had probably been thinking about becoming a monk before that. It wasn't just the storm. And the reason that makes sense is in the Middle Ages, if you're concerned about your sin and you want to be sure of your salvation, everybody knows the best thing to do is become a monk because monks are the holiest people. Monks get to pray and worry about their salvation all day, unlike normal people. So that's what Luther decided to do. Once in the monastery, though, Luther's problems weren�t over. He still had this question about whether he was doing enough good things. He was still concerned about his sinfulness. Now this in spite of the fact that he had probably chosen to join the Augustinian order because this was the strictest monastic house in Erfurt. The monks in Erfurt, the Augustinians, really tried to live very closely to the rule. They were much stricter than some of the other monks. And so in spite of being a monk, now Luther is still concerned about his sinfulness. In fact, he was chided by his superiors for spending far too much time in the confessional. They couldn't believe he had actually committed that many sins. The concern remained and so Luther's superiors and especially, Johann von Staupitz, whom Luther really came to see as a father figure. Staupitz decided one thing that might help Luther is to give him more to do. And to that end, Martin Luther was assigned by the order to become a priest, to be ordained as a priest, and also study theology at Erfurt. Luther learned a lot in his career as a student at Erfurt, and it led him to understandings that began to help him deal with this issue of his own sinfulness. So he's interested in learning more. Well, about the same time, there's a problem in the Augustinian order, and without going into too much detail, there's a clash between the observants who wanted to observe the rules strictly and other monks who weren�t quite as concerned with that. Staupitz who, by this time, was general of the order had been trying to combine these two different wings of the Augustinians. Luther's house was one of those who objected to being united with their more lax brethren. And some Martin was part of a delegation to Rome to appeal this decision to combine the two wings of the Augustinian order To make a long story short in that regard, the appeal was a failure. Luther went back to Erfurt and then took Staupitz�s side in the debate. A lot of the other monks in Erfurt weren�t happy about that so in an effort to get him out of that situation and probably give him still more work to do, Staupitz sent Luther to Wittenberg as professor. The monastery in Erfurt had agreed to supply a professor to Wittenberg, and so Martin Luther became that person. At Wittenberg, as we mentioned a little bit already, he began really to think very seriously about this issue of how people are saved. And he does it in a very personal way thinking about himself and his own feelings of sinfulness and his feeling that God is judging him. All of this against the backdrop of a medieval church that's widely considered to be riddled with abuses. And Luther saw some of these on his trip to Rome. There was a lot of piety, people going on their knees up Pilot�s Stairs and praying an Our Father on each step. Luther himself did that hoping to get the soul of his grandfather out of hell. But along with this piety, there was a lot of luxurious living and concern for money, priests saying mass as quickly as they could because they got paid for Mass and things like that. So against that backdrop, Luther goes back to Wittenberg. He's talking to his students. He�s reading and studying the Bible and thinking about all this and what it has to do with salvation. And now you can see how he would go from that situation, being a monk, being a professor, his concern for his own salvation to be very concerned about this issue of indulgences and want to deal with that and make sure people understood salvation correctly.