The monk who couldn't find peace
Luther's early spiritual crisis
Martin Luther is the son of a copper miner who scraped and saved to send his brilliant boy to law school, and the boy is on track to deliver everything his father dreamed: a lawyer's career, a respectable marriage, security.
And then Luther reads the late medieval Catholic theology he was trained in and takes it seriously — more seriously, perhaps, than it was meant to be taken.
The theology told him: God is just. God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. Do your best, cooperate with grace, perform the sacraments, do penance — and God's mercy will meet your effort.
Luther tries this. He fasts more than required. He confesses more than required — spending hours with his confessor cataloguing sins so minor that the confessor eventually loses patience. He does vigils. He flagellates himself. He goes to Rome and climbs Pilate's Staircase on his knees, kissing each step.
Nothing works. The peace never comes. The more carefully he examines his conscience, the more sin he finds. The more sin he finds, the more terrified he becomes of the God who will judge it. He is not performing piety — he is genuinely desperate, genuinely afraid, genuinely unable to find the assurance the system promises.
His confessor and superior, Johann von Staupitz, sends him to study the Bible — hoping the work will give him something to do besides excavate his conscience. He sends him to Wittenberg to lecture on scripture.
Luther obeys. He opens his Bible. He begins with the Psalms.
The answer he is looking for is in there. It will take him a decade to find it.
“I was a good monk, and kept the rules of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by monkish life, I would also have gotten there.”
— Martin Luther, Table Talk, c. 1530s AD
“for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God;”
Luther's crisis is the crisis of anyone who takes the standard human bargain with God seriously and finds it doesn't hold.
The standard bargain is: I will be good enough, and God will be satisfied. I will do my best, and the gap will be covered. I will perform the required acts, and the anxiety will go away.
Luther performed every required act with extraordinary thoroughness and the anxiety only deepened. Because the anxiety was the correct response to an accurate assessment of the situation — the situation being that no amount of human effort can bridge the gap between what God requires and what human beings can produce.
He was not broken. He was right. And being right about that, without yet knowing the answer, is the most painful place to stand.
Where is your version of Luther's monastery — the place where you are working hardest at something that is not working? And is it possible that the not-working is telling you something true?