Lecture 1.docx

It is great to be with you this week. A few housekeeping things before we actually hit the church history part of it. I think you've got the syllabus. If you have any questions about the syllabus, feel free to ask them during the week. The way I teach typically is, well, first of all, I love, I alwa...

It is great to be with you this week. A few housekeeping things before we actually hit the church history part of it. I think you've got the syllabus. If you have any questions about the syllabus, feel free to ask them during the week. The way I teach typically is, well, first of all, I love, I always teach from a bar stall at Westminster. I like to sit down when I teach, so this is great that I've got this chair. I was worried how my legs would hold out for the week. I tend to teach in 45, 50-minute blocks and then take 10-minute breaks. Remember that the breaks are for my benefit, not for yours. So I like to rush off to the restroom or just shut down for a couple of seconds. If you really urgently want to ask me a question, do. But do remember the breaks. I don't care about you guys. The breaks are for me. I'm happy to take questions during the class. Stick your hand up in the air. Couple of caveats on that. I reserve the right not to take your question at that particular point in time. If I'm in mid-flow and I want to complete a point. If your question is, I used to say there's no such thing as a bad question, only a bad answer. That has been disproved to me on a number of occasions. There are bad questions. More often than not, there are good questions, but they're not directly relevant to the point in hand. If that's the case, I also reserve the right to say that's a great question. I'm going to come back to that in 10 minutes or next class or something like this when we address it in order to try to keep the flow of the class going. For the guys joining us from a distance, my guess is that my instincts will not be to look up at you to see whether your hands are in the air. You may have to make a noise or something to get my attention. Feel free to do that. Again, I may choose to ignore you or not take your question at that moment in time, but I'll register it and try to take the question as I can. I typically teach my classes, although there is a schedule, and that is the way you pronounce the word by the way, it's schedule not schedule. Though there is a schedule, I typically run at the pace that the class seems to go at. Hopefully, we'll cover everything during the week, but if not, we'll cover all that we can. I also tend to take... The class tends to go in directions that seem appropriate at times. I don't lecture from full manuscripts. I lecture from notes. The class might go in different directions at different points. If some question is asked that triggers some interesting line of thought or discussion in the class, we'll be happy to go there. Those are all the sort of the housekeeping comments. Anybody have any questions on that thus far? Great. That's good. We've got the first section of the class done, and it's all clear. Second thing I want to mention is really the way I do church history. I'm going to talk in more depth about this this afternoon to the D Min class. I don't think that many people come to seminary to study church history. That's not the impression I get. That means that the church history professor has to work, I think, I would say, twice as hard as his colleagues in order to get people interested. Also, I think that's a function of the fact that history is often badly taught at high school. I gave up. I only took up history again in the final years of my university degree. I gave up history at high school, just didn't like it, didn't get what it was about. Too often history is just taught as just one thing after another. It's just a kind of chronology. That's not how I teach church history. For me, church history has a number of functions. One of them is very common one, of course, that Christians have is they do church history for sort of inspiration. You're looking in church history for inspirational stories. That's not really what I'm interested in either. I'm interested in learning from the past. I call it critical history. Niall Ferguson, the British modern historian, does a similar thing and he calls it applied history. What I want to do is dig into the past in order to try to learn why particular people acted in particular ways at particular points in time. I'm really looking to try to understand something, if you like, of the human condition at particular points in time. I'm also interested in understanding why the church thinks the way she does. Again, I'll use an example. One of the things, it's not exactly a trick, but maybe it's a trick with a purpose. Typically, when students arrive at Westminster, the first church history course they will do is ancient church. One of the things I like to just drop on a student at random in the first class is I'll ask them, okay, so how many wills does Christ have? And almost certainly the answer will come back, one will, to which the response is, actually that's heretical. And if you believe that, you can't really have a full-orbed Christology and incarnation. That is not an answer that drops off the pages of Scripture for you. That is an answer that the church works to over four or five centuries. And it's only through working through that history that you come to understand why that's actually quite an important point. And one of the dangers, I think, in a lot of Protestant, particularly evangelical theology, is people love their Bibles, and they want the Bible to be supremely authoritative. And often that translates into just reading and thinking about the Bible and nothing else. The Lord gave the church. The church is a historical entity. There are men and women who've thought about these things throughout the centuries and wrestled with problems that we wrestle with today. And we can learn from reading what they wrote. We can learn from seeing the struggles they had. I would also add to that that another danger of the, what I call the inspired example way of reading history, and again, there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with reading history in order to be encouraged or inspired. One of the problems can be that we tend to remake history in our own image. We just look back and see ourselves reflected back at us. One of the great things, particularly about Luther, is this. You know, for most Protestants, he's a hero. I was interested last week, a friend of mine emailed me wanting to get some reformed, 16th, 17th century reformed criticisms of Luther. There are very few, because Luther was such a hero, the reformed generally criticized Lutherans. They didn't criticize Luther. Luther was too much of a hero to go after. But the great thing about Luther is he is very different to modern evangelicals. And therefore, we can actually learn a lot from seeing how he thought. One of the issues we're going to look at this week is his view of the Lord's Supper. And his view of the Lord's Supper, he's prepared to split Protestantism down the middle on the issue of the Lord's Supper. That is a strange thing for many modern Protestants. So we're telling you, is Luther just, is it, is he just going to be in his bonnet? Is he trivializing things here? Well, if you actually get into Luther and understand how he's thinking, it makes sense. One can disagree with his position, but you can realize that actually he was making, or he was raising a very, very important issue. And I love that bit in Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, where he makes the comment about it's a tragedy that Luther and Zwingli split over the Lord's Supper at the Reformation. But it would have been even more of a tragedy if they hadn't realized that the issue was worth splitting over. It's this sort of, you know, it's a classic Machen contrarian way of putting it, but it contains a lot of truth in that this is an important issue. And it's important to have strong convictions on it. I think there's nothing worse than Christians who don't have strong convictions on things. I would rather be wrong about something that's important than not think that that thing is important in the first place. I'm guessing that I disagree with probably everybody in this room on baptism. It is important that we disagree, because baptism is an important issue upon which one cannot simply agree to differ, if I could put it that way. It's what always amazes me when people get upset when Presbyterians and Baptists talk like Presbyterians and Baptists. They say, but that's what they're meant to do. If they don't talk that way, then they're not really Presbyterians, or they're not really Baptists. Have you noticed how people get shocked when the Pope says something that's Catholic? I like it when the Pope says, I mean this current Pope doesn't say too much actually that's Catholic, but I like it when the Pope says something that's Catholic, because that's what he's paid to do. And you realize that yes, we may disagree, but he gets it. He gets that these issues are important. So what I want to do then, at the back, really at the back of my mind when I go into history is this. Why is this particular person speaking or acting in this particular way, in this particular historical context? Notice that doesn't first and foremost prioritize the question of truth. There's a sense in which when I go into history, my first question about Luther is not is he right or is he wrong, it's why. Historians are really interested in the why question first and foremost. And there's a sense in which sometimes it's best to set the truth question aside, because the truth question can tempt us, can tempt us to jump in too quickly to our conclusions without actually doing the hard work of understanding the person in the first place. So that's what I want to do this week. And when I teach Luther, I try to teach him as I try to teach everybody I teach, as sympathetically as I can, because in order to critique somebody, you first have to understand exactly what they're saying. So that's just a general comment then about the way I do history. You know, whatever period of history I was in, that's the way I'd approach character, whether I'm looking at Ignatius Loyola, St. Augustine, doesn't matter. That's what I'm going to be asking, why, why, why? Why does it look like this at this particular point in time? Interestingly, specifics of this course, obviously, we're going to focus on Protestantism. And in focusing on Protestantism, I'm going to spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at Martin Luther for reasons that I hope will become obvious during the course. Luther is a singularly important Protestant figure, even at those points where we disagree with him. That's not to say there aren't other great figures in the 16th century. It's not to say that in this course, even with the other figures we touch on, that it's in any way an exhaustive account of the 16th century. Not at all. But I want to focus on Luther because I think he can be singularly useful to us in a number of ways. I also hope that in looking at Luther, what we'll be doing is learning how to look at historical figures. The best way, students often say to me, you know, what's the best way to become good at history? The answer is read history. And not just Christian history. I think reading good history, period, is excellent. Flying on the plane yesterday, I was reading a book on 20th century German history. I love history. And the more widely you read in history, the better historian you become. And the great thing about history is because it deals with generally everything that's happened in the past, which is generally speaking everything, there are all kinds of history out there. And the more history you read and the more different kinds of history you read, the better you become at doing history. And I actually think it helps you to become a better biblical exegete as well. It's amazing to me how often when I'm at the moment, I'm at my church preaching through First Samuel. It's historical text. And my first instinct, of course, is to read it as a historian. Yes, I know this is sacred history and that the Bible is an inspired and infallible text. But it's also history written by a historian. And so when I'm reading it, I'm reading it to some extent like a historical text. I'm seeing the story of David and Saul playing out against foreign policy, the issue of the Philistines. We didn't do it with the Philistines. There are all kinds of questions that I think when you do a lot of history, they enrich your reading of the biblical text. And if you read a lot of literature, it enriches your reading of the biblical text as well. So what I want to do this week when we look at Luther is I'm not just going to look at what he said. I want to look at the context in which he lived. I want to see how economics plays into this. I want to see how politics plays into it. Not because I want to reduce the reformation to economics or politics, but because we have to acknowledge that economics and politics actually play a significant role in how people live and behave. The example I often use in class at Westminster is this. Think of the quiet time. How many of you here have a quiet time, private time when you read the Bible and pray by yourself? Maybe 20 percent of the class by the looks of it. That's not good. We need a 99 percent return on that question. But just think about that. That means the central part of your practical daily piety is something that would have been impossible for most Christians throughout most of history. Why? Well, if you have a quiet time, that's where there's a phrase I use in class at Westminster. Certain social and economic conditions must apply. If you're having a quiet time, certain social and economic conditions must apply. Now, let's move on. Obviously, if you live in a culture where the quiet time is regarded as pretty important for all Christians, you're living in a culture where almost all Christians can read, which means you're also living in a culture where almost all Christians will have access to reasonable education. That tells me something about the world in which you live. Probably if you have a quiet time, it also tells me something about your ability to find a private space. My mom lives in an old weaver's cottage in the west of England. If you've ever read the book Silas Marner by George Eliot, it's a Silas Marner-type cottage. There's an extension on the side of it now. But 150 years ago, it would just have been two rooms, an upstairs room and a downstairs room. There was no private space in this house. And that would have been typical for how a lot of people lived. If you went to the city, it would have been even worse. Twenty, thirty, forty people in a single house, not uncommon in the slums of the Industrial Revolution. They don't have private space. They can't have a quiet time. So if you have a quiet time, you have to live in a certain kind of world. And I'm not relativizing the quiet time by making that point. In some ways, once you've heard that point, I'm simply stating the obvious. Same applies to the Reformation. Why does the Reformation happen at the point in history it happens? Well, certain socioeconomic conditions must apply. Reformation could not have happened 150 years previously. No printing press. No printing press, no Reformation. It really is as simple as that. That's not to reduce the Reformation to the printing press, but it is to say that the printing press is absolutely vital to what goes on at the Reformation. And it's broader than that as well. There are other conditions that have to apply as well. But again, as we come to look at Martin Luther, I'm not going to be looking at him as the sort of, you know, Martin Luther, contremundum, this man who comes out of nowhere and defies the church. Nobody ever comes out of nowhere. There's always a background. So one of the great problems of history is wherever you begin, there's always something before the beginning. If you read Lawrence Stern's book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which is his most infuriating book, begins with Tristram Shandy's birth and it ends 15 minutes before he was born because he keeps having to go back to tell you other stuff that happened in order to make sense of what's happening. It's a bit like that in the Reformation. Where do we start with the Reformation? Do we start with the Apostle Paul? Do we start with Augustine? Do we start with the early Middle Ages or the late Middle Ages? Wherever we start, there's going to be a back story that we can't deal with. Why study Martin Luther? In particular, why am I going to spend so much time on this? Students back at Westminster joke and they say that my Reformation course should be renamed Martin Luther and a couple of other guys. Why spend so much time on Martin Luther? Particularly when, I'm guessing there are no Lutherans here. Everybody here is a Lutheran. Why spend time on Luther when there are no Lutherans in the room? Well, I think a number of reasons. One, he is, for better or worse, the focal point of the initiation of the Reformation. Would there have been a Reformation without Luther? Certainly something was going to blow in Europe in the early half of the 16th century. There are too many tensions to be easily resolved. Something's going to blow. It happens that it's Luther that lights the fuse. Could have been a number of other guys. Could have been a number of other nations or cities. France, ironically, although France becomes a very reactionary Catholic country, France would have been one of the best candidates for the start of the Reformation in the 16th century. It's going to happen, but it did happen to happen, focused around Luther. Luther does become, in many ways, the measure for all other Reformations. He's also the founder of one of the two Protestant traditions, the two great Protestant traditions, the Lutheran and the Reformed. The Anabaptist tradition, I do not regard as a great Protestant tradition, but don't panic because I don't regard Baptists, either Southern Baptist variety or Reform Baptist variety, as tracing their roots to the Anabaptists. The modern heirs of the Anabaptists are really the Amish, the Mennonites, groups like that, more radical groups. By and large, Orthodox Baptist groups are a kind of break off in some ways from the magisterial Reformers. Luther was the founder of one of the two great Protestant traditions of the 16th century. Key debates of the Reformation had their terms set by him. I don't think there's anybody else who quite sets the debates up in the way that Luther does, particularly on the Lord's Supper. Again, because modern evangelical sensibilities have tended to downplay the importance of the Lord's Supper, by and large. We miss the fact that more ink is spilled, and I think more lives lost in the 16th century on the issue of the Lord's Supper than on any other doctrine. In some ways, the Lord's Supper is the big issue of the 16th century. That's an important one to let's see here, and that's part of what I sort of outlined earlier when I said part of what history is meant to do is to make the past less familiar to us so that we can learn from it. Justification, also central to the Reformation, Luther sets the terms of that. Doctrine of Christ, Christology, closely connected of course to the Lord's Supper. Luther really does set the terms of the Christological debate. Issues of church and state. One of the most difficult and vexed issues in the 16th century is church and state. I'm going to return to this point again and again in the class, but just imagine. You were born in, say, 1495. Say you're born in 1495. By the time you reach the age of 20, it's 15, 15, you would not be able even to conceive in the abstract of the church being divided. You wouldn't have any way even of thinking that thought, and yet five years down the line the church will be divided. Imagine, imagine the intellectual and conceptual catastrophe that that involves and the number of questions that throws up, which had not simply never been asked before, but could not have been asked before. We are very familiar with church division. Church division is very cheap in the West. If somebody doesn't like the fact the pastor does wear a tie or the pastor doesn't wear a tie, they'll just leave and go to the church down the road. The world where the church is one is utterly alien to us. In fact, it's as hard for us to conceptualize as our world would have been for the man or the woman born in 1495 would have been able to conceptualize. The one place I found a sort of vestige of this is sometimes chatting to Catholic friends when a friend in Princeton recently and the local Catholic priest preached a pro-choice sermon. Can't get my head around why a Catholic priest would be able to do that, but he did. My friend was in Agonies because he's supposed to go to the church in the parish where he lives and yet he didn't feel he could attend anymore. He was putting him through psychological and emotional Agonies to think about going to church. I was thinking, no Protestant, no Protestant would ever struggle like that. Then I thought, you know, and that's something Protestantism's lost. It's actually a positive for Catholicism there, that people do take the unity of the church seriously in a way that is completely alien to us and is much more akin, I think, to what you get in the 16th century. Don't get me wrong, a lot of problems with Catholicism. I'm not commending Catholicism to you here, but I'm saying that was an interesting, interesting conversation I had with him. It was not one that I think I would ever have with a Protestant. And that I think is a black mark against Protestantism at that point, that we leave churches. The only Agony we feel is we don't see our friends that we connected with Sunday by Sunday. There's no Agony of feeling that we're actually tearing the church up at this point. That's the world of Luther. Imagine the questions that generates. And again, it's a reminder, we have to make the past strange before we can really learn from it. And the great danger in Christian circles is we just assume the past was like us, and we jump back and we find the points of contact that we like, and we make them central. And the bits that we don't like or can't understand, we assume they were marginal. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes it's the bits that we want to make marginal are actually the critical things in the day and age which we're studying. We'd also add, and this is a bit more difficult to quantify, but I think Luther had a profound effect on evangelical experience in a way that I think would have been incomprehensible to him. Many of you will have read the famous Tower experience where Luther describes wrestling with Romans chapter 1 and then coming to this amazing breakthrough. And it's as if the gates of paradise were opened, he says. It's a great passage. Problem is it probably never happened. And it certainly never happened the way he described it because the passage itself doesn't make sense of what we know about his development. But he is writing it in 1545. This is nearly 30 years, 30 jam-packed, action-filled years after the events that he's describing. I find it hard to describe events that happened two weeks ago with any degree of accuracy. You know, and I'll say to my wife, do you remember this happened? And she'll say, no, it didn't happen like that. And I'll say, yeah, it did. And she'll, you know, one of my sons next time you're home, she'll say, your dad said it. No, no, it didn't happen like that, dad. You know, you got things in the wrong order. Quite often what we do when we sort of write our own autobiographies in our mind is we find an order in events that actually wasn't there in the first place. You know, lives tend to be lived, was it Kierkegaard who said we live lives forward and remember them backwards? We live our lives forward. And generally speaking, most lives are pretty chaotic. Yes, I know there's a providential pattern. But to be honest, it's not really discernible at the time, is it? You know, you live your life forward. And I think Luther is looking back 30 years on and he's trying to make sense of all of the chaos that's happened in his life. Yeah, there was some kind of breakthrough, but we know it didn't happen instantaneously because we can actually trace the developments through his writings. There was no immediate break. There might have been a moment when everything sort of snapped into focus. But it certainly didn't happen as and when he said it is because the chronology is all wrong as well. But of course the tower experience has gone down in evangelical folklore as Luther's conversion and has become one of the great paradigmatic conversion stories. Luther, I think, really is building on Augustine there. He himself is using Augustine's account of Augustine's garden experience to make sense of his own experience. And Luther's work really refracted through people like John Bunyan and then picked up by people like John Wesley, has become a paradigm of evangelical conversion. There's one big problem. When did Luther think he was converted? You're going to hate the answer. When he was baptized, yes. When did Luther become a Christian? When he was baptized. He says, when the devil comes in Tempe. Well, there are a couple of techniques he recommends for dealing with the devil. One of them is breaking wind in the devil's face. I tell you what, it's a slightly off-color story. When I was writing my book on Luther, I emailed Crossway and I said, can I use the word fart in a Crossway book? And the editor emailed back and he said, no, no, but why don't you do F star star star? And then I got another email about five minutes later saying, no, no, that definitely won't work. Just tell him he broke wind or something. But Luther says, if the devil comes and tempts you, break wind in his face. Though he goes on to say that, be careful when you do that because he says there was a woman in Magdeburg who did that and the devil was so angry, he picked up a big stick and beat her nearly to death with it. But more typically, more typically, when Luther is confronted by the devil, and again, we're talking about the devil, Luther's really confronted by the devil. He's a medieval man. If you've never walked through the woods at night and been worried that the goblins will get you, you never lived in Luther's world. One of the points I'm going to make is Luther's a medieval man. He's not a modern man like we are here. My GPS broke down last night. I'm away from the airport and I was worried that I wouldn't find my hotel, but I wasn't worried the goblins would get me because I don't live in Luther's world. The devil is like a physical presence for Luther. When the devil comes and tempts him, he says, I've been baptized. You cannot have me, for I've been baptized. Again, it reminds us of just how alien this man is to our way of thinking, even as a Presbyterian, I don't think, in those kind of terms. So he had a profound effect on evangelical experience, and one of the things I want to do this week to some extent is to say that involves something of a misreading of Luther and a misappropriation of Luther. Luther's view of the Christian life is much more sacramental than we like to think. Word and sacrament, word, baptism, and the Lord's Supper are central to Luther. And I put my own cards on the table at this point. As a pastor, I find Luther incredibly liberating on that front because what Luther does thereby, one of the things he does is he actually makes pastoral ministry very easy, that I don't have to keep up with the latest trendy stuff. My task is to do what? My task is to, well, I baptize babies, but you baptize people on professional faith. What is my task as pastor? It's to baptize, it's to administer the Lord's Supper, and it's to preach the word. And it's to marry and bury people as well. That's all it is. There is no arcane science to the pastoral ministry. And it's one of the things I learned from Luther, actually. Luther takes tremendous pressure off, I think, of pastor because you realize, no, I haven't got to be the world's greatest social worker. No, I haven't got to be up to date. It's helpful to be up to date on how the world thinks in a lot of things. These things are all helpful, but I'm not a failure if I'm not there. My task is to preach and administer the sacrament. And that's really what Luther, if I've gained anything from Luther practically over the years, that more than anything else, that more than anything else. I'm going to quote it again, but I actually quoted it when I spoke here two years ago. I got into a bit of trouble with somebody who's watching online. When I quoted that bit from Luther about it, he says, you know, what did I do? I just preached the word or sat in the pub drinking beer. And God's word was out there doing it all. And a young lady, a high school senior, emailed me for desecrating Dr. MacArthur's pulpit by mentioning beer in a positive context. I sent her a very nice—I apologize. I sent a very gentle email back, but not meaning to desecrate the classrooms of Master Semery. My point is this. What Luther's saying there is not it's great to drink beer rather than be a minister. He's saying the great thing is that the agent in ministry is God. The agent in ministry is God, and therefore what the minister needs to do is find out what are the tools God uses and, as the secondary agent, do them. And Luther would say the secondary tools are where Christ is present and where is Christ present. He's present in the word proclaimed. He's present in baptism, and he's present in the Lord's Supper. And I think probably all of us, we may not agree with exactly what Luther means by that relative to baptism and the Lord's Supper, but I think all of us can agree that in principle that's essentially where it is. So we'll come later in the course to talk about Luther's pastoral stuff, but I wanted to—I think Luther is much less helpful as the paradigm of evangelical experience and much more helpful as the one who lays out for us what Christian ministry should look like. How do we approach Luther? You know, Luther is one of those, particularly 2017, I think there's just—it's a great year for me in terms of stuff being published. There's just a whole slew of books coming out. I love reading about Luther. I do recommend to you, if you've got the money, it's a little bit pricier than the one volume, but if you can buy the Annotated Luther series, it's five volumes, four already published, you can get a deal on it on Amazon. If you want one set of Luther, a nice set of Luther in your pastoral library, the Annotated Luther, all of Luther's basic texts on key themes. Sacraments, justification, work, church and state are gathered in those five volumes. Nice translations and very, very good helpful notes in the margins. It's a great series that will be completed in 2017. It's just a slew of stuff coming out of them. How do we deal with Luther after, you know, 500 years of prolific writing about him, pro, con and all points in between? And there are a number of models out there. One of them is the Luther's hero or Luther's antihero. From the moment Luther started writing, there were those who lionized him as the great champion a kind of Saxon Hercules standing against the corruption of the church. And just as we have that, we also have the Roman Catholic response, Luther as the agent of the Antichrist. I don't know, it's not on the syllabus, but normally on my syllabuses at Westminster, I have a nice etching of Luther as the devil's bagpipes. If you look up Luther, Devil and Bagpipes online, you'll find this great etching of him where the devil is playing the bagpipes and the bag is in the shape of Luther's head. And the point is being made that Luther is merely a mouthpiece for the devil. So right from the get-go in treatments of Luther, you have him as almost like the fourth member of the Trinity or the Antichrist. And commentaries on revelation and dealing with treatment of revelation, it follows that sort of pattern. I've got a lovely, they've just reprinted the Luther Bible, I think, in 1545 with the original woodcuts. And if you look at the book, I had some Catholic friends over at the weekend and they said, you know what, what's this? And I said, oh, it's the Luther Bible. And I said, you probably don't want to look at the book of Revelation. Book of Revelation, the woodcuts are full of the Pope as the Antichrist. And as we shall see in the story of Luther, certain of Luther's own fans start to identify him with figures in the book of Revelation, good figures. And what's interesting is Luther, while he never identifies himself with a figure of, in the book of Revelation, that would be unbecoming, I think, of a Christian minister, he never denies these identifications either. I think in the back of his mind, the possibility is open. The jest, the revelation does predict the reformation and therefore predict him. So there's a strong tradition of presenting Luther in very black and white terms. That's not the way I'm going to do it in this class. I think that's typical of everything I sort of despise in church history, where it becomes just a tale of goodies and baddies. And the only task of this story is to look back and see who's wearing the white hat and who's wearing the black hat. Job done. No, you learn nothing about history that way. All you do is you look back, I think it was somebody said about the quest of the historical Jesus. It's like looking down a well and seeing your own reflection dimly looking back up at you. That's not how we're going to do Luther this week. Second approach, the psychological approach, and this fascinates me. Always been interested in psychology. Man called Eric Erickson wrote a book called Young Man Luther. And as we shall see when we come to look at Luther, Luther had a somewhat vexed relationship at points with his father. And Erickson, influenced by the theories of Freud and particularly Jung, I think, in the early 20th century, Erickson wrote a book in which he argues that Luther's theological problems, his struggles with God, are really projections of his struggles with his father. That it's because Luther had this disrupted and broken relationship at points with his dad that he projected that onto God. And so when he's talking about being justified before God, he's really talking about being right before his earthly father. It's a very influential theory, very interesting theory. And typically you find in conservative Protestant circles, it's dismissed out of hand. Remember a few years ago, teaching history, I'd never come across this phrase, it's an American phrase before. One of the students put his hand up in class and he said, so can I say this, Truman? He said, the way you teach history, can we say that history is all about sticking it to the man? And I got him to explain what the phrase meant. I said, yeah, that's it actually. History is about sticking it to the man. It's about finding a complacent consensus and showing that the answer is actually not that easy. I think there's more to Erickson's theory than a lot of people allow. As I say, we're very quick as conservative Protestants. I think because we rightly fear reducing the Reformation to some human phenomenon and missing the important spiritual and theological aspects of it, that we tend to go very, very quickly to dismiss anything that hints of that. I think human beings are complicated. We never act for a single reason. And I think of all Christian groups, Calvinists should understand that. We should understand that every action is tainted by sin and selfishness at some point. You know, if I'm walking out today and I see some old lady wandering into the road and about to be hit by a truck and I run and grab her and pull her in, I've acted altruistically, but I'm sure I'm going to take some pride in that action and I'm probably going to tell somebody about it at some point. As Calvinists, we know that human beings are complicated. And also think this, and I never really realized this until my own father died. Fathers, for good or for ill, have a very powerful influence on children. I remember my father died while I was desperately trying to get back to the UK to see him. He died while I was in air, so I arrived at Paddington Station to get the train west, called my sister to say, be there in like three hours, and she said, it's too late, Dad died. And it was very interesting to me the emotions I had on the train journey, the two-hour train journey. In the, you know, there was the sadness, there was the life will never be the same again, but one of them struck me as very interesting, that was, I don't have to succeed at anything anymore. And I suddenly realized how much of my life had been spent trying to do good stuff to make my dad proud of me. It was not a bad thing, my dad was a great dad, but I never realized that was a dynamic of my life until it wasn't there anymore. And I think that if we think that Luther's upsetting his father had no effect on Luther, then we don't understand that Luther's a human being. So I'm inclined to say, I'm not going to buy into the more speculative aspects of Erickson's theory, and I'm certainly not going to reduce Luther's problem with his own sin to a struggle with his relationship with his father. But I'm also not going to say that his relationship with his father had no effect on him. Beg his belief that that's the case. Love your father, hate your father, don't know your father. That's going to shape how you live to some extent, because fathers are very, very important. My parents, my dad was not a Christian as far as I know. The other thing I always say to class, I say, what was it like growing up in a non-Christian home? And I would say, well, it was a very loving home. And I say this as a warning to Christian parents, really. The one positive, really positive thing about growing up in a non-Christian home is this, whatever has screwed me up is not the Christianity of my parents, because so many children get screwed up by the Christianity of their parents. And I think Luther was to an extent screwed up by his parents. And therefore, we have to take the father-son relationship seriously. But that's the great thing about history. I don't have to make an either-or choice, because I know that human action is always complex and is inflected by various elements in somebody's background and life. The approach that I'm going to draw on by and large in this class is the approach that has been advocated by the great Reformation historian Heiko Obermann. Obermann wrote one of the great biographies of Luther. It came out about 25 years ago. Luther, Man Between God and Devil. Obermann was an interesting figure in that, well, interesting thing happens in Luther research after, well, during the 1930s, really. A man called Joseph Lortz. A man called Joseph Lortz, a German Jesuit scholar, wrote a book called The Reformation in Germany. And Lortz makes one of the major breakthroughs in Reformation studies. There's a sense in which things will never be the same again after Lortz. Lortz certainly had no brief for Luther. He wanted to present Luther as a decadent and highly defective theologian. So what Lortz did was he demonstrated how Luther's theology was positively connected to developments in late medieval Catholicism. The typical way of Protestants and Catholics looking at Luther had been this. Luther was seen as a dramatic and deviant break with what had gone before. Was that a positive thing? Well, if you're a Protestant, it was a positive thing. He was breaking with this terribly corrupt church. If you're a Catholic, it was a bad thing. He was breaking with the church, which yes, everybody acknowledged was administratively and morally corrupt, but was theologically fundamentally sound. And the way you explained Luther was, you know, he wanted to sleep around. The sexual argument is quite strong often in the 16th century. Luther wanted a break with celibacy. It's not a very good argument because we know that a lot of priests did break with celibacy anyway. There was no need to break with the church to break with celibacy. You simply had to make sure that nobody noticed what you were doing, essentially. It was sort of tolerated by the church. But that was the old model. Lortz, though, changes that. Lortz says, no, there are some fundamental continuities between late medieval theology and Martin Luther. What Lortz does then is say that late medieval theology was fundamentally rotten. So he's not making a case for Luther. He's making a case for the rottenness of his own church in the late medieval period, to which Luther was warned, response, and a badly incorrect response. What Lortz does, though, that is so helpful is he brings out the fact that, yes, there are continuities between Luther and late medieval theology. It's not a dramatic break in the way we often think. Obermann, in the late 1950s and 60s, Obermann picks up on Lortz's idea. And Obermann does one important thing. He sets aside this idea of decadence. He's not interested in, are things improving or getting worse? Obermann is simply interested in tracing out the points of continuity and discontinuity. So what Obermann does, I think, is he moves Reformation history and the study of Luther into a framework that isn't partisan anymore. And that opens up a whole world, a whole world of understanding the relationship between Protestantism and medieval theology. It's not my brief to talk about it in this class, but it's revolutionized things. My own work on John Owen is in some ways an extension, trying to extend what Obermann did for the 16th century to the 17th century. So when you read John Owen, have you ever noticed how many times he quotes Thomas Aquinas? And how many times he quotes Thomas Aquinas positively? Why is he doing that? Because these were men who saw themselves standing in a lot of continuity with what had gone before them. Doctrine of the Trinity, doctrine of divine simplicity, doctrine of the Incarnation, much of the doctrine of grace. I've got a little book coming out, the five solar serisms on the event on grace alone, and I've got a chapter in there on Thomas Aquinas and grace alone. Thomas Aquinas is one of the clearest presentations of election and predestination you'll find in the history of the church. And guys like Luther and beyond were conscious of drawing on their past. Luther doesn't suddenly change in 1517. Luther changes some things, but what Luther does is he builds, I would put it this way, he builds on difficulties in late medieval theology and pushes late medieval theology to the point where its ecclesiology collapses. If I could put it that way. I think Lortz is absolutely right that Luther is a medieval figure. He's not a modern figure. In so many ways, he's not a modern figure. What he does is he takes medieval theology and he presses it so hard that the church, the doctrine of the church essentially collapses and has to be rebuilt in a new form. Luther doesn't even know what he's doing. I mean, Luther does not know the significance of what he's doing as he does it. But by pressing home certain problems in late medieval theology, he's bringing about the death of late medieval Christendom. And that I think is a dramatic, it has two advantages over earlier models. One, it's true and it's always an advantage to have a true model over a false model of what's going on. And two, I think it has great payoff for us today. One of the things that I think this way of approaching the Reformation does is it gives us a more truly Catholic sensibility. One of the big issues for Protestants of course is where's the church before the Reformation? And a standard way of approaching that is, well, we look for the Trail of Blood. Foxe's Book of Martyrs is in some ways one extended attempt to establish the legitimacy of the Protestant Church, particularly the English Protestant Church, by tracing back the martyrs through history because the false church always persecutes the true church. One of the problems with Foxe's Book of Martyrs of course is when you investigate some of the people that he's got in the Trail of Blood, well, the Protestants would have been persecuting him too. You know, they weren't particularly great guys and girls, some of these people, not that anyone should be persecuted or martyred. But some of those groups in the Middle Ages decidedly dubious and would not have fared well under Protestants in the 16th century. A much better way, I think, of tracing the true church is to do it theologically and to see it, I think, in terms of Augustinian or Pauline Augustinian views of grace and Trinitarian and incarnational theology. And what that does for me as a Protestant is this, it allows me actually to say, you know, the whole of church history belongs to me. Thomas Aquinas has some excellent stuff and I can claim it as my own, my own tradition built directly upon much of what he did on the doctrine of God. Augustine belongs to me, belongs to my tradition because I can look back to his writings and say, yes, we're building, I can trace my tradition back to building on some of the insights of Augustine. So I think this model has much to commend it historically, it's basically correct, I think, from an intellectual perspective, and much to commend it Christian-wise. It allows us to retrieve the tradition as our own. So, we'll go for just, there are a couple of other things that I will, one other thing that I will mention right at the start, I'll put it up front because one of the things I've noticed is that whenever I'm visiting a church to preach and they'll say to me, can you do a Sunday school without any advance warning or could you do adult Sunday school this morning? I typically do it on Martin Luther, I think every pastor should have one sermon and one Sunday school in his back pocket that he can pull out at a moment's notice in a crisis kind of thing. So I typically teach on Martin Luther and I noticed a pattern would emerge, I'd talk for half an hour and then throw it over for questions. The first question was always, but didn't Luther cause the Holocaust? Or didn't Luther hate Jews? Or wasn't Luther a racist? Some version of that. We'll talk about Luther and the Jews in this class, not today. There is a complicated answer to that question which I will give you in some detail at some point during this week. But be aware for all of my, I'm going to talk generally speaking positive terms about Luther because I think he was generally a positive force. But there is a dark side to him. I would frame it this way, I would say that when you look at your own life or at any great historical figure, generally speaking their strength and their weakness are functions of the same character trait. And those who achieve great things, often the character trait that allows them to do that is perhaps a certain rhetorical talent or a certain headstrong bullheadedness. I would say that the risk you take when you have a Luther who can stand almost single-handed at the Diet of Worms or even more so as we shall see early 1522 in Wittenberg, when you have somebody who can stand by themselves and face down a very powerful opposition, the risk is always that when they get the wrong end of the stick it's going to go horribly wrong. And it does with Luther. For more mediocre people, the damage, the achievements they have are more mediocre and the damage they do is often less. But the risk with the Luther figure is that somebody of that volcanic personality can do a lot of damage when they're on the wrong side of a discussion. So I would just throw that out there and say I am very aware of the situation relative to Luther and the Jews and we will come to speak at that once we've given some more background to Luther. Thank you.